Your judges are the usual four.

Amanda and Denys: salsa. A pretty strong routine from Gustavo MOTHERFUCKING Vargas, but he goes for the triple leg lift and Denys blows it a bit. Pity; that’s a really difficult move (and one that I don’t think blends well into a routine generally; it’s just too stunty) and it was a icky ending to an otherwise stellar bit of salsa, complete with an absolutely brilliant stunt at the beginning (a giant lift which then had Denys doing his salsa basic while lifting Amanda, which – kudos, CTV camera team, for deciding to not film that, once again demonstrating why Canadian TV is Canadian TV).

Jeff’s solo: He goes Ukrainian again, but this time with slightly more dramatic costume (pants, boots, no shirt, very King and I) and works in a bunch of his contemporary acrobatic tricks. Best solo he’s done all season.

Janick and Denys: contemporary. WIND MACHINE! I liked the choreo’s first two-thirds and then it devolved into a lot of running around, which is a shame because there were some really neat bits in it up until that point – Nico and Wynn have done better. Janick and Denys danced this quite well and I have no complaints on that front. Also, WIND MACHINE. I mention it twice because it was cheesy AND kind of awesome.

Amanda’s solo: Felt like an end-of-the-season solo: this looked really tired, and sloppy. Falling out of that pirouette was especially not so much with the thereness.

Janick and Jeff: jazz/fusion. You know, I’ve been waiting all season for a season-defining routine and it finally showed up tonight. This… thingy from CHEESEMAN~! was spectacular: weird and well-conceived (I mean, dressing up the dancers as King and Queen – or Queen and prince-consort, whatever) and danced absolutely perfectly. Simply a brilliant bit of work here.

Denys’ solo: Exactly as strong as you would expect.

Amanda and Jeff: contemporary. And we get our Very Serious Routine of the night about domestic violence, which I felt was very meh; it didn’t feel sufficiently violent or malevolent to me, not in the movements for the most part (other than Jeff grabbing Amanda’s wrist right at the beginning). Very good acting, certainly, and the dancing was exactly as strong as you would expect, but… not convincing for me as a piece. YMMV.

Janick’s solo: A decent hip-hop/contemporary blend as per usual with good performance quality.

Top four: contemporary. Wait, what? No same-sex partner dances? An entire final show without a single hip-hop number and only one ballroom routine? Janick and Jeff didn’t even have to dance out-of-genre all night when dancing three times, for crissake. Fuck you, show. No, really. Fuck you; this isn’t even a time thing forced on you by CTV because in previous years you’ve always managed to cram in six partner dances plus four solos in one hour. I’m not even reviewing this because it’s a group number and I just can’t be bothered to care. Whatever.

Final order should be: 1.) Denys 2.) Jeff 3.) Janick 4.) Amanda
Final order will be: 1.) Denys 2.) Janick 3.) Jeff 4.) Amanda

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist. Find the extra bonus Youtube link for double points!

As you may or may not be aware, DC Comics is getting ready to launch their foray into the world of MMORPGs with an online game that’s coming out sometime next year. (As with pretty much every MMO, “sometime next year” was “sometime this year” until they decided that it needed more work. You definitely don’t want to plan your life around the launch of an MMO, is all I’m saying.) The hope of the developers…well, the hope of the developers is that it’s going to be a spectacular success that will dethrone “Worlds of Warcraft”, be universally hailed by gamers everywhere, and make them all so much money that they can buy their own giant robot made out of smaller robots. But the realistic hope is that it will knock over “City of Heroes” as king of the much smaller “superhero MMO” mountain.

My guess is that it won’t. This is not the same thing as saying it’ll fail; I want to stress right off the bat that I think it’ll make money. It’s actually pretty easy to make money on an MMO, because you’re charging people $10-15 a month to play a game you’ve already paid the development costs for. You’d have to make a spectacularly bad game in order to fail to cover the costs of server maintenance and QA with a subscription-based model, and very few people have made spectacularly bad games. (That said, it is theoretically possible for the game to fail, long-term, if the game gets enough negative reviews that DC decides to pull their license with Sony when it comes up for renewal. But that’s pretty unlikely.)

But just because it doesn’t fail, doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed. And I do think that DCUO is going to wind up in that same shadowy limbo of “making enough to keep going” that Champions Online wound up in, instead of making the push to topple CoH. (Full disclosure: I have a 72-month veteran’s badge in CoH. I don’t know that I’d call myself a raving fanboy, but I’m not unbiased and I know that the hardest thing about bias to recognize is how much of it you have.) DCUO has a lot of the same problems CO did–it’s much easier for CoH to zip in and copy their relatively small innovations than it is for a new company to design an entire game from the ground up that does everything CoH does and does it better and then add new things on top of that. CoH might have an older game engine, but it’s also got the benefit of six years of additional content and depth of development. (Although thankfully, DCUO is not making the colossal mistake CO did of not having villains available at launch. That right there was a deal-breaker for many.)

But DCUO has the DC superstars! That’s got to count for something, right? Well, it does and it doesn’t. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, honestly; on the one hand, it does have a brand recognition that CoH doesn’t. Superman is more exciting than Statesman, Batman is more exciting than Manticore, and so on. But on the other hand…let me put it this way. Imagine buying a game called, “DC Universe Online”. Imagine getting home, spending the half-hour to an hour that it takes to install the game, jumping through all the hoops to get registered, logging in…and finding out that you can’t play as Superman. Or Batman. Or Robin, or Wonder Woman, or Elongated Man, or even frickin’ Turtle Boy. Instead, you help those characters. That’s right, you’re the DC Universe’s newest sidekick! (Or, for those of you who would rather play a villain, you’re the Joker’s newest henchman. The strict continuity-correct version of the game has you getting shot in the face by your own boss at level five.)

The interesting thing about this is just how small a mountain we’re talking about, by the way; CoH probably has about 125,000 subscribers (although it’s gotten something of a bump from its recent expansion) while WoW, king of the MMO market, has about ten times that. It really shouldn’t be all that difficult to set your sights higher than CoH, and yet the first game to go head-to-head with it failed. Part of it might simply be the “sunk costs” factor; for me to go to a new super-hero MMO means giving up six years of character development, perks, and time, and DCUO is simply not convincing me that it’s worth that right now. That might change, of course; part of the “fun” of blogging is being forced to eat your words in a year’s time. But my guess is that DCUO is going to be a modest success, which will be a failure by the standards it has set for itself. Only time will tell if I am correct.

Space Cowboys minus the outer space plus a whole lot of guns (including the extra half hour the movie really doesn’t need).

Hello! This is Karen back for another round of guest blogging So You Think You Can Dance Canada!

Alright, so it’s Top 8 Week and instead of doing two pairs dances, the dancers are doing one pairs dance, one solo, and one group number. WTF, CTV?

Your guest judges are Sexy Rexy, Canada’s ballet heartthrob, and Sergio Trujillo, who is a Broadway choreographer from Toronto. Jean-Marc is growing out his hair and it’s still in an awkward phase.

Leah Miller Dress Report: it looks like one of those toilet paper dresses that women make at bachelorette parties or to enter Charmin crowd-sourcing contests. B-

Awkward Commercial Promotion Report: Thanks to Degree clinical-grade deodorant for profuse sweaters, a viewer will win an exotic vacation!

Mackenzie and Janick (hip hop): Great Luther Brown number; ten times more interesting than half the hip hop numbers on the American show, blah blah blah. Mackenzie and Janick definitely hit this, but I don’t think they sold the swagger that Luther wanted them to sell. Jean-Marc suggests that Luther should run in the Toronto mayoral race, which is an awkward thing to say but not the worst idea he’s ever had. The costumes reminded me of World of Goo, or maybe a sexy oil spill.

“You move so well, gosh!” says Leah Miller, who has presumably graduated from middle school.

Jeff’s Solo: the dancers are asked about their favourite thing about their hometown. Jeff says he loves the spontaneity of Alberta thunderstorms and dances to Radiohead with those lovely legs, so I’m sold.

Natalie’s Solo: Am I going to comment on all these solos? Oh, okay. Watching people dance to Alicia Keys is uncomfortable. It’s Natalie’s birthday, yaaaaaaaay.

Danielle and Denys (contemporary): Sabrina Matthews of the icky suicide-attempt dance from several weeks ago does “A Tribute to Our Fallen Soldiers.” It’s pretty okay. Sergio calls Denys, “a true little Baryshnikov,” which is a decent comparison. Denys is hands down the best dancer in this competition and I love him for it, but I don’t usually love-love him if you know what I’m saying. Nevertheless, he’s looking reeeeeeeeeal good in this hot Communist soldier, Joseph Fiennes in Enemy at the Gates-kinda way and it’s doing it for me.

If Denys is Baryshnikov/Joseph Fiennes, then Danielle is the Winona Ryder of dance. Like Winona Ryder, I can’t really picture spooky-sweet Danielle as a grieving soldier’s wife. If there were a God, he’d give me Reality Bites: The Musical. Or maybe Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Musical. Denys could play Gary Oldman. That would be believable.

Amanda’s Solo: Amanda is from Mississauga. What is there to love about Mississauga? Amanda says the Port Credit Harbour. Good save, Legs McGee! Her solo is eclectic and fierce.

Sebastian’s Solo: Sebastian is a Toronto boy who loves diversity and dances to Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” so I have to like him, but this solo is kind of a mess. Good musicality.

Group Number: a sexy pilot and flight attendant jazz number by Sean Cheeseman. I’m not into it. The guys are all over the place, but Denys is flawless. He is the Captain OF MY PANTS.

Amanda and Jeff (contemporary): Mandy Moore choreographs a piece about early-onset Alzheimers. Two contemporary tearjerkers in one night, eh? Looks like a Sabrina Matthews-Mandy Moore throwdown!

Amanda and Jeff both have the most incredible legs and this dance does everything to showcase them, so it’s beautiful. Jean-Marc cries for the second time this evening, but it seems more genuine than his tears for The Troops. Point goes to Mandy Moore.

Leah Miller says something like, “Gee golly, that dance there shore was purty, you guys!” and continues to be grating.

Denys’ Solo: My ladyboner diminishes as Denys dances his effeminate solo. He has suddenly transformed from Joseph Fiennes into Chris Kattan as Mango. And, of course, I love Mango, but for very different reasons.

Janick’s Solo: Jannick is from New Brunswick and likes nature and dancing good solos.

Sebastian and Natalie (cha cha cha): superfail for Sebastian, who is dancing through a hip injury and is wayyyy outside of his comfort zone. But man, does he ever try. Natalie is great, as usual, but has a very unmemorable personality, as usual.

Danielle’s Solo: Lovely solo.

Mackenzie’s Solo: Couldn’t care less about this guy.

Verdict? Sebastian is toast.

FLAPJACKS: We totally need to set up a D&D game.
ME: There is never a time when that sentence is true.
FLAPJACKS: But I wanna be a paramander!
ME: That sounds dirty.
FLAPJACKS: No, seriously! They’re a variant class from first edition AD&D.
ME: …this is out of an old copy of Dragon magazine, isn’t it.
FLAPJACKS: Possibly. Why?
ME: You do realize some of the variant classes in Dragon were… stupid, right? Jesters? Timelords? Courtesans? Accountants?
FLAPJACKS: Wait, “timelords”? Does that mean Doctor Who shows up in Dungeons and Dragons Land to fight dragons?
ME: First off, “the Doctor.” Second off, he wouldn’t fight the dragons. He would just have tea with them and maybe a bit of a chitchat. Until the red dragons would try something stupid and genocidal, at which point he would have to unleash something bad upon them.
FLAPJACKS: I was kidding. Doctor Who isn’t in Dungeons and Dragons.
ME: The Doctor is in everything. Except Noddy.
FLAPJACKS: Anyway I forgot why we were talking about Doctor Who when I want to play a paramander.
ME: You still haven’t told me what the fuck a paramander is.
FLAPJACKS: It’s like a paladin, but it’s true neutral.
ME: So they charge into battle yelling “for the glory of… everybody equally!”
FLAPJACKS: You know true neutral doesn’t work like that.
ME: True neutral doesn’t work at all. It’s a stupid alignment. Most of the alignments are stupid. That’s why they’re fun.
FLAPJACKS: You’re ruining this.
ME: Wait, so lemme get this straight. First they made paladins. Then, because D&D nerds like Frank Frazetta artwork a lot, they made anti-paladins, because anti-paladins couldn’t think of a better name.
FLAPJACKS: “Anti-paladin” is cool. Like antimatter.
ME: It’s a word for people who couldn’t invent words. I admit that “paramander” sounds neat. I’m not sure what it has to do with being true neutral, in between the lawful good paladin and the chaotic evil anti…
FLAPJACKS: What?
ME: I’m just guessing here, but I’m willing to bet whatever terrible Dragon magazine article that had the paramander in it had a paladin equivalent for every other alignment, didn’t it.
FLAPJACKS: Well. Yes.
ME: Like?
FLAPJACKS: There’s the chaotic good garath…
ME: So basically they’re saying that chaotic good paladins are all Scottish.
FLAPJACKS: I don’t – actually that kind of works.
ME: Of course it does. Next?
FLAPJACKS: The lyan, which is lawful neutral.
ME: Uh huh.
FLAPJACKS: The illrigger, which is lawful evil.
ME: He sounds piratey.
FLAPJACKS: Well, he wears platemail.
ME: That’s not very piratey. Illriggers have a very bad name. And not just because they’re evil. You’re an evil warlord, you need some pirates, somebody tells you “oh there’s this ninth level illrigger” and you’re all “well, I’m set” and then this knighty-guy shows up and you’re all “wait, where’s the illrigger I sent for?” And he’s all “I’m here” and you’re all “whaaaaaaaa?”
FLAPJACKS: You’re taking all the fun out of this.
ME: It’s first edition AD&D. It’s entirely likely that I’m injecting fun into it. What else?
FLAPJACKS: There’s the myrikhan and the arrikhan, which are the neutral good and neutral evil ones.
ME: Those sound like very “ninth-grader doodling on back of notebook” types of names.
FLAPJACKS: In the original Creation Argots their names mean “godservant” and “beastservant.”
ME: In the original what now?
FLAPJACKS: It says it in the article. Dragon magazine would not lie to me.
ME: Unless it was saying “hey, ‘baatezu’ is WAY cooler than ‘devil’ is. And ‘tanar’ri’ is much more awesome than ‘demon.’”
FLAPJACKS: Point.
ME: Wait, we haven’t done chaotic neutral yet.
FLAPJACKS: …I don’t want to.
ME: Come on. How bad could it be?
FLAPJACKS: …the fantra.
ME: The “fantra.”
FLAPJACKS: Yes.
ME: Wow.
FLAPJACKS: I know.
ME: Why do you want to play a paramander again?
FLAPJACKS: Because they get lots of cool powers.
ME: Neutral powers.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, I’ll just go play World of Warcraft instead.
ME: Fine.
FLAPJACKS: Can I borrow twenty dollars to renew my account?
ME: No.
FLAPJACKS: Can I borrow thirty dollars to not sit here and talk to you about paramanders?
ME: Done.

…is this article suggesting that the natural home of hippies is the Tea Party.

No, really. Among the article’s highlights:

- taking an anti-war poster with “Great Society” on it, the point of which was that Johnson’s rhetoric about the Great Society were belied by his actions in Vietnam, and arguing that posters like this meant that hippies actually hated government anti-poverty programs and civil rights

- arguing that conservatives believe that humans are inherently flawed and selfish, just like hippies do

- saying that hippies rejected “artificially constructed collectivist utopias,” which is about as a good a four-word definition of the commune movement as one could manage

- suggesting that the reason Democrats lost in 1968 is because hippies all voted for Richard Nixon

- further arguing that Democrats protesting the 1968 Democratic convention and not the Republican convention is proof of this (conveniently ignoring that in 1972 hippies protested the Republican convention, but whatever, that’s four whole years later)

- glossing over the fact that although both hippies and Tea Partiers believe in “accepting the natural order of things,” that their respective definitions of what that might actually be are wildly divergent

- and, of course, a political spectrum diagram that tells us exactly where “bums” and “trustafarian anarchists” lie on the political spectrum (although it does leave out “those damn kids listening to their Black Eyed Peas” and “my neighbor whose dog keeps digging up my azaleas” on the author’s list of personal bugbears, although I am sure they are both evil commies)

Seriously, folks. This thing is a work of art.

Like most people, when I saw the Youtube video of Grover parodying the Old Spice Man, I thought it was wonderful: cute and hilarious and a bit educational all at once. But it made me think about how, back in my second year of university, a girl in one of my classes insisted that Sesame Street was a bad thing because it trained children to watch television. By making children familiar with the form of the thing, she said, it indoctrinated them into passively accepting different elements in the same form. One of her favorite arguments in this regard was the presence of Guy Smiley as a tool to help kids learn how to watch game shows.

At the time I thought the idea ridiculous. I grew up with Sesame Street longer than most because I was the oldest of four siblings, so if they were watching Sesame Street while I did older-kid play in the background, I was watching Sesame Street as well. The reason I thought the idea ridiculous was that I knew full well that Sesame Street challenged authority on a regular basis. I mean, Bert and Ernie alone should be enough to make that point; every Bert and Ernie sketch is basically Ernie being a bit of an asshole to poor old Bert. But see also the treatment of Herry Monster as a sensitive, gentle giant who likes playing with dollies; Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster in toto; the realistic treatment of Mr. Hooper’s death, which went against every children’s TV convention in the book.

But of late I grow less sure. Part of it, of course, is probably just things-were-better-when-I-was-a-kid-itis. There is no innate need for Herry Monster on Sesame Street as compared to other monsters. Bert and Ernie still do the same schtick, which is the best thing you can hope for. Cookie Monster is still Cookie Monster. (Although Grover is superior to Elmo. I will not concede this point. Ever.)

But of late, the trend in the show seems to be one of parodying not just the general form of culture (as Guy Smiley did) but of specifics: 30 Rock, Mad Men, Law and Order. Although Sesame Street has never been too complex for kids, these sketches seem even simpler. They don’t seem as designed to teach kids; they seem instead designed to reinforce the brand for adults, and to allow kids to understand the cultural references their parents make. (The Law and Order sketch is the best example of this – there’s no reason to make fun of the CHUNG CHUNG noise because the CHUNG CHUNG jokes really only make sense if you understand what the CHUNG CHUNG noise’s significance is.)

Or maybe I’m just kvetching. One thing of which I am more sure, though: Feist’s re-writing of 1234, cute as it may be, is no Lena Horne singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” I can’t help but think that there is something to that point.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

During the course of the comments thread on my post last week (and by the way, I’m just going to take half a second and digress to thank everyone who comments. Seriously, blogging is a writing gig that provides absolutely no financial recompense for most of the people who do it, but getting to hear so many people provide you with intelligent feedback on your work makes it all worth it. You’re all wonderful people, thanks!)

…in any event, during the course of the comments thread on my post last week, malakim2099 said, “Also, I would suggest this, because frankly the current status of comics bugs me. Let the characters age naturally. Or close to it. See, right now, if comics followed real chronology, Scott Summers should be the Professor of Xavier’s institute, Franklin Richards the grizzled field leader of the X-Men, etc. And that’s just a tiny example. The recent bout of “legacy” characters stepping in is a good thing (Steve Rogers as Director of SHIELD while Bucky is Cap, or Dick and Steph as Batman and Batgirl), but it’s a baby step in the right direction.” (They provided paragraph breaks, by the way. I condensed it slightly.)

And it’s interesting to me, because this is by no means the first time I’ve heard that statement, or some variation on it. The idea that comic book universes should age in real time seems to be a tremendously popular one in fandom, but everyone who espouses it seems to take it as self-evident. I’ve heard the idea dozens of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a justification for it.

The reasons against it are pretty obvious, of course; for one thing, it rests on the false assumption that comics time and real time are actually equivalent, despite the fact that a comics story that can take a year to come out might only cover a week of real time. (Fun comics fact: Uncanny X-Men #164 to Excalibur #24 take place over a single 365-day period, according to Chris Claremont. (Kitty Pryde’s 14th birthday takes place while she’s in space, infected with a Brood embryo, while her 15th birthday takes place right after she returns from the Cross-Time Caper.) This means that everything during that span, including both Secret Wars, Iron Man’s losing his company during his descent into alcoholism and his subsequent return to power as CEO, Spider-Man changing his costume from red-and-blue to black and then back to red-and-blue, Captain America being stripped of his super-heroic identity by the federal government and returned to power, several line-up changes in the Fantastic Four, the entire invasion at the hands of the Dire Wraiths and subsequent war, the destruction of Xavier’s mansion and the seeming death of the entire team of X-Men, the Mutant Massacre, and the temporary conversion of New York into a demonic outpost of the Limbo dimension…all take place in one year. Gives a new definition to “annus horribilis”, doesn’t it?)

For another thing, it’s never going to happen because comics fans (especially casual fans) read a series for more than just the title. When you read “The Fantastic Four”, you’re reading about more than just four people who are pretty damned fantastic. You’re reading for the dynamic between Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny, and their various supporting cast members and villains. The idea that an FF book would be just as good if it was a teenage Franklin Richards battling Kristoff von Doom is strange and alien to me. And you can apply this to any title you’d care to name. I don’t want to read about Ben Reilly, coffee-shop barista and part-time super-hero. I don’t want to read about Grim and Gritty Cyborg Assassin Bucky, and putting him into a Captain America outfit doesn’t make him Captain America. I, like the rest of the world, could care less about Jared Stevens. I’m not saying there haven’t been good legacy books out there–I loved the John Rogers Blue Beetle run, Tom DeFalco did good things with Spider-Girl, and Wally West is pretty much the poster boy for a successful transition from kid sidekick to official hero, at least until Geoff Johns found out he could bring Barry back. But in general, I think that legacy book succeed despite being legacy books, not because of them. The Silver Age DC relaunches were a unique success that everyone assumes can be repeated easily and effortlessly, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

But I’m a good listener, and this is an open-ended comments section. So please, if you want to see a legacy universe, explain your reasons to me. I’d love to know what makes the idea so appealing to so many!

1.) If Cortes had never caused the fall of the Aztec Empire, who would be the best-selling recording artist in history?

2.) If small dogs (up to the size of fox terriers) were currency, what derivative instrument would have caused the 2008 financial collapse?

3.) If guns had never been invented and sling-thrown grenades taken their place in military history, what would be the capital of the United States?

4.) If goat milk rather than cow milk had become the most popular milk in the world circa the mid-1500s, who would be the villain in the Star Wars movies?

5.) If continental drift was nonexistent and we all still lived on Pangaea, what would be the most popular type of house pet?

Show your work.

(yes i watch The Big Bang Theory but only ironically – no YOU shut up)