-Or- “Some people just aren’t wrapped tightly enough"

Our erstwhile reader, Kit, has recently brought to my attention an article on CNN (Dot) Com about how Avatar is adversely affecting some people psychologically, and has requested that I stop making fun of obsessive Trekies as a result. Well, obviously *That* ain’t gonna’ happen , but he does make a very valid point about how obsessive genre fans aren’t a Trek-only phenomenon. In some cases, it can be dangerously obsessive.

hi there everyone. sorry for the gregor samsa-styled typing, but i hurt my finger the other day.

The other ‘Bots and I were discussing comics the other day, and we got to discussing the whole “Marvel vs. DC” thing, which is kind of like an even lower-brow version of the old “Ford vs. Chevy” argument. It’s every bit as irrelevant, and yet it strangely does seem to tell you something about the person, based on which one they choose. (I’m a Ford man myself. As a brief aside, I’m quite proud of Ford as a Republican in that they refused the government bail out, *and* they’ve managed to turn a profit recently.

When science fiction wants to be taken seriously its practitioners talk about how sci fi is metaphor for what ever the writer is trying to portray to the reader or watcher in the case of TV. Aliens are minority groups; zombies are chaos or death, etc. The same is true for the alien invasion story since its first famous rendering in H.G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds’ to the current ‘V’ TV series this has been true.

One of the neat things about the new "V" series is how - as Republibot 1.0 pointed out in his initial reivew - the Visitors are no longer Nazis (As they were in the original series), they're the Illuminati: They infiltrate, they sew discord, they usurp power. This is a pretty clever way of tying the show's own version of reality in with our 'zeitgeist' - the spirit of our time. Well, the spirit of crazy people in our time, anyway.

I have found myself mentioning and recommending an anime called ‘Neo Genesis Evangelion’ (NGE for short) on this site almost every time the subject of anime comes up. I have just realized that I should probably write a little article about the show, and why I think some people should watch what's undoubtedly one of my favorite anime series of all time. (I also need to warn people that the subject matter is not for everyone. There is no overt nudity - but there is fan service- the violence is not too over-the-top, but it would be rated PG or PG-13 by our standards.

Two seasons and like four years ago, The Venture Brothers, an adults-only cartoon that has always prided itself on being as hillariously offensive as possible, introduced a transexual character. We met him as a dude, actually, Colonel Hunter Gathers of the OSI, a thinly-veiled parody/hommage to Hunter S. Thompson. (So thinly veiled that I don't know why they bothered, apart from the name "Hunter Gathers" is pretty damn funny). I assume - without being interested enough to look in to it - that this is the first major recurring transexual in a cartoon.