This Holiday, Put A Connery On Your Table

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and the best thing about it—really the only good thing, frankly—is that it affords an opportunity to stuff your face with gravy and stuff your eyes with James Bond.

Christmas comes with all sorts of cultural prescriptions. Watch It’s A Wonderful Life. Drink egg nog. Read something adorable that’s features bountiful rolls of bouncing Santafat. From the start of the advent, your free time will be accounted for. But nog aside, Christmas demands much less in the way of menu planning. It’s Christmas—eat a turkey, maybe? A goose? Each year, my mom makes a big salty country ham. It’s goddamned beautiful.
Compare that to Thanksgiving, which has an endless list of culinary commands, but not much culturally to suggest. Watch football, maybe? Play Monopoly with your weird cousin? Sit?
It’s that laxness that makes what passes for Thanksgiving culture much more interesting, the same way that a Christmas menu is almost certainly going to be more palatable than its gravy-doused cousin. The fact is that there are Thanksgiving movies—they just might not have anything to do with Thanksgiving.
Because James Bond movies are typically released around this time of year, I associate the November holiday with a protracted gorging on the finer works of Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton and—yes god damn it, George Lazenby. (Seriously—best Bond theme, best Bond chase scene—On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.) Bond movies are a near-perfect analogue for Thanksgiving. Even the best of them are overrated, overblown and incoherent. Those of us who have already finished our cooking for the week could probably, if we were bored enough, track which Bond is which component of a classic Thanksgiving spread. Let’s go there now!

You want to read more? Oh yes. Oh yes you do.

Smart Beard, Smart Name, Very Dumb Guy

Anyone forced to suffer through CNN's coverage of last night's election may have noticed something interesting—Wolf Blitzer is a dim bulb. If that observation isn't convincing enough for you, I go into it in some detail today at Bullett. 

CNN is a funny thing. Ever since MSNBC abandoned the mushy center, transforming itself into a liberal fantasy land, CNN has stood alone at the intersection of cable news and vaguely serious reporting. Because it employs anchors who are more than crackpot ideologues, CNN has won the moral high ground by default. Rather than rise to the occasion and transform themselves into something authoritative and real, the network has floundered. CNN isn’t the New York Times of cable news. It’s something you watch in the airport.
No one embodies this bland style of journalism more than the network’s senior anchor, Wolf Blitzer. A man with a wonderful name, a trustworthy face, and a voice you could follow through a pea-soup fog, he looks every bit the part of a Serious Newsman. But really, he’s a moron.

And so on and so on. Stay out of the snow, kiddies, and enjoy the next four years of Obamination.

To Work A Miracle, Look To The Stars

Here's to you, workers of ConEd.

Here's to you, workers of ConEd.

Scotty was a miracle worker. Everyone in Starfleet knows it. Engines at max capacity, but you need a little more juice? He'll squeeze a little life out of the old girl. Half his staff blown to bits by an explosion? He'll keep the engines humming and oversee triage. Warp core on the fritz, with the Romulans bearing down? It's a twelve hour task, but if you want it today, he'll do it in six. He's the oppositve of every mechanic you've ever met in real life. 

Long after he and Kirk's five year jaunt, Scotty came to visit the Enterprise-D. Now a captain, he takes advantage of his rank to seriously irritate Geordi LaForge—the chief engineer on the modern new ship. But at one point he gives a piece of advice that explains how he was always able to execute the impossible.

Lie.

Advice from Scotty to all engineers

Pad your estimates of how long or how difficult every important task will take. Your captain may need something right now, but if you tell him it will take a month and get it done in an hour, everybody's happy. 

Yesterday, ConEd did the Scotty trick. Knowing that nothing would enrage blacked-out residents more than missing a deadline for power restoration, they offered nothing but vagueness. Through the week, they kept mum about when power might return. By Thursday, they said that downtown Manhattan might be bright again Saturday. By Friday—late tonight, maybe. And then at seven o'clock last night, the lights came on nearly everywhere that had been dark.

The Scotty Trick. They learned from the best.