But Randall Munroe’s webcomic xkcd makes an excellent point:

More harm has been done by people panicked over societal decline than societal decline ever did.

By George, he’s got something there. You can click the image to see the complete comic.

Those who aren’t already familiar with xkcd might be startled by the crude stick-figure drawings, or by the crude language sometimes present in the comics. I think those things are simply evidence of society’s decline and inevitable collapse, but I could be wrong.

He might have attended Barack Obama’s inauguration tomorrow in person. As it is, he will be unmistakably present in spirit.

I’ve posted this video before. It seems appropriate now. Martin Luther King in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965:

Stanford has the full text of the speech.

The video is from the film King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis, which was shown in theaters as a “one-time only” event on March 24, 1970, and was later aired just once on network television. A truncated version of the film was once available on home video, and now the full film is being made available on DVD by A Filmed Record, Inc., a non-profit company. The DVD is pretty expensive, but it’s been awaited for a very long time.

Since that time, I have not complained about the weather one single time. I’m glad there is weather. I’ve not complained about traffic. I’m glad there’s people around.

One of the things that I did when I got home, I went down to shopping centers, and I’d just go around there, get an ice cream cone or somethin’, and just watch the people go by, and think: “Boy, we’re lucky to be here. Why do people complain about the earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden.”

(This is from the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon.)

I enjoyed the first two Spider-Man movies. I cringed through both Fantastic Four movies. I’m eager to see Iron Man when it comes out on DVD — probably around Thanksgiving time.

I didn’t know what to make of Ang Lee’s Hulk movie. Frankly, it left me baffled. I didn’t enjoy it, but I thought maybe I could see it five years later and say, “Are you kidding? It’s brilliant!”

Now, five years later, it looks like they’re trying again. Universal is promoting another Hulk movie, scheduled to open June 13th.

Unfortunately, the computer-graphics Hulk still looks like a character from a video game.

Who knows? Maybe in another five years…

People unfamiliar with those old shows will find themselves saying, “That’s a door?”

Update: This must be Dalek day on the prestigious internet. Boing Boing found a voice-changing Dalek helmet. But what if you already sound like a Dalek?

I don’t think anybody in the Daily Show audience has seen The Grapes of Wrath.

Wildly Popular ‘Iron Man’ Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film

Hollywood ruins everything.

I used to watch The Adventures of Robin Hood, a weekly TV show starring Richard Greene. I enjoyed it then, but I was very young, and now I don’t know whether it was any good or not.

We shall see.

Amazon.com is offering the complete first season on DVD for only $5.49. It’s 39 half-hour episodes on three discs. Even if my memories are wrong and the show is terrible, that might be a fair price for three shiny coasters to put under a drink.

Roper: So, now you give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down (and you’re just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

One of the big slam-bang wisdom scenes in the movie occurs when Luke Skywalker tries to levitate his crashed spaceship out of a swamp. Luke grimaces and strains, and manages to raise the ship a few inches, but then he collapses and the ship sinks even deeper into the muck. “It’s too big,” he gasps.

Yoda tells Luke that size doesn’t matter. “My ally is the Force,” he says. It is a field created by all living things. It’s particularly strong in the swamp, which teems with life. “And a powerful ally it is,” collectively much bigger and more powerful than Luke, or Yoda, or the sunken spaceship. Then he raises the ship and moves it to dry land.

Luke failed because he thought he was doing it himself.

In last week’s debate, Hillary Clinton said, “The question that I have been posing is, who can actually change the country?” She says she can.

Remember Hillary’s tongue-in-cheek Christmas campaign ad, where she was wrapping up “universal health care,” “alternative energy,” “bring troops home,” and “middle-class tax breaks” as the gifts she was giving to the American people? It bothered me. I still like to imagine we have government by the people, not by the president.

In a speech last month, she said, “It’s about picking a president who relies not just on words but on work, hard work, to get America back to work.”

Just words? Obama has inspired millions of Americans who were sitting on the sidelines to get involved in building a stronger and better America — an involvement that doesn’t end on Election Day, but only begins then.

If Clinton thinks that doesn’t matter — that his message is “just words” — if she thinks that solutions to the country’s problems can be her gift to us; if she thinks she can grimace and strain and make the change America needs by the force of her will, then I think she is not a Jedi yet.

In fact, it’s good to be alive. It’s exciting.

It was a quiet little town. We would get excited whenever Bellefontaine was mentioned on one of the Dayton or Columbus TV stations — that was the Big Time! — and frustrated if they pronounced it Bell-fon-TAYNE. We pronounced it Bell-FOUN-tin.

We were proud of our little town. We had the first concrete street in America — a test of whether concrete made sense as a paving material — and the shortest street in the world. (Wikipedia says the “shortest street” claim is in dispute.)

Bellefontaine is near the highest point in Ohio — which is also the highest point between the Allegheny and the Rocky Mountains. When I lived there, the two local radio stations were WOHP (Ohio’s Highest Point) and WTOO (Top Of Ohio), so you can tell we were proud of that, too.

The Bellefontaine Opera House opened in 1880, and when I was growing up I was told that, in its time, many prominent performers had played there, including the great W.C. Fields.

But maybe I got that last part wrong.

I just got this collection of W.C. Fields movies and watched The Old Fashioned Way. Except for an early train sequence, the whole movie is set in Bellefontaine, Ohio. Fields is The Great McGonigle, head of a theatrical troupe who perform at the Bellefontaine Opera House. I thought it might be a Bellefontaine in some other state, or a purely imaginary Bellefontaine, but the address on a letter delivered to McGonigle at the end of the movie removed all doubt.

What a surprise! What a thrill! I’m sitting on Top of Ohio! This is the Big Time!

I’m only sorry that, though the whole movie, everybody except one Pullman porter pronounced it Bell-fon-TAYNE.

Drat!

One more reason not to eat sushi.