Acquired Tastes: The Onion Dispatch

I have to admit. This made me laugh out loud.

Heroic Secret Service Agent Takes Question Intended For Bush

WASHINGTON, DC—Agent Anthony Panucci dives in between the president and a hostile reporter.

The blurb, which is complemented by that fantastic picture you see to your right, is classic The Onion. And in that vein, it gets better, almost as if this were some throwback article from the early 21st century:

WASHINGTON, DC—White House Secret Service Agent Anthony Panucci is being called a hero after intercepting what could have been a critically damaging question aimed directly at President Bush during a press conference in the Rose Garden Tuesday.

According to eyewitnesses, the press conference began with Bush fielding routine questions about March Madness and the dedication of a World War II memorial near his home in Crawford, TX. However, approximately seven minutes into the event, a lone reporter somehow managed to maneuver to the front of the press corps group and fire off a loaded, highly charged question concerning Bush's role in the controversial dismissal of eight federal attorneys last year.

"I just followed my training and did what I was supposed to do—put myself between the president and irreparable harm," said Panucci, who is credited with safely deflecting the attack away from Bush, as well as acting before the reporter had a chance to get off a follow-up question at close range."

Enjoy the rest of the article by clicking at the beginning of this entry, and while you're at it, have fun sending the entire article to friends in the States. Hey, there's got to be some drawbacks to being in one of the richest, most powerful nations in the world, right? Peace!

Picture comes courtesy of America's Finest News Source.

Acquired Tastes: Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere

My mother-in-law has an absolute passion for literature and learning, which is why I wasn't even mildly surprised when I spied, next to her copy of Elie Wiesel's Messengers of God, the graphic adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a distinct combination of eclectic intelligentsia that merely confirms that Mama Dodie is a nerd of the highest order. Still, I borrowed her copy of Mike Carey's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's first full length novel with trepidation. Given my critical misgivings (and wholehearted, gleeful appreciation) of the cinematic adaptation of Frank Miller's 300, I understood all too clearly the dangers of adaptation.

Fortunately, we're in good hands with Mike Carey. In his introduction to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (a clunky title which is probably a source of profound embarrassment to Mr. Gaiman), Carey writes:

I was asked in an interview recently what I thought of the Constantine movie, and I said that it was very enjoyable as long as you didn't go into it expecting "the film of the book." What that glib comment conceals is the extent--the enormous extent--to which any adaptation splits itself off from its source and becomes its own journey: its own answer to a set of questions that only formulate themselves as you set to work. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, Brecht and Weil's Threepenny Opera, the stage versions of The Producers and His Dark Materials, they're all straight jazz riffs on their wonderful originals rather than straight translations. Because straight translation from one medium to another is both impossible and undesirable.

It is this understanding of the problems involved in adaptation, as well as the gorgeous art by Glenn Fabry, that probably accounts for my enjoyment of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. I heartily recommend it, even if you aren't slogging through less than triumphant adaptations of scholastic thought that my students have been submitting lately. It's one way to get through the painstaking task of walking the fine line between constructive criticism and the utter annihilation that shoddy academic work deserves.

Oh well. One has to be several kinds of madman to even want to teach, really. To borrow liberally from Mr. Gaiman's insight into the character of Emperor Joshua Norton in "Three Septembers and a January", my madness keeps me sane.

Picture of Neverwhere comes courtesy of Amazon.

The I.C.C. Cricket World Cup, via "The Wanker!"

Ever since Sports Guy penned his entertaining, and ultimately misguided guide to the English Premiere League, I've been a Michael Davies fan due, oddly enough, to Simmons'preview of Chelsea:

Celebrity Fans: Michael Caine and fellow Page 2 columnist Michael Davies. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to find a different team than Davies so we could have heated e-mail exchanges and use insulting words like "wanker."

After hurriedly googling (which, according to Wikipedia's entry on google is an acceptable term to refer to "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet"), I discovered that Michael Davis is not only charmingly funny, in that particularly deprecating British sort of way, but he is remarkably astute about what makes distinctly European sports worth following. Check out the mercenary work he did for ESPN, for starters.

He has another column on the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports (which, if you've been paying attention, I've mentioned a second time without directly linking to) which helps demystify the wonderful world of cricket for us ignoramuses so thoroughly Americanized that we hardly know that the sport exists, much less, means so much to people worldwide. Enjoy the link, but not ESPN!

Picture of Michael Davies comes courtesy of (sigh) that which must be acknowledged, but not enjoyed. Damn my enslavement to proper citation, even to sports organizations dedicated to thoroughly homogenizing sports news content!