Matt Fraction posted this without comment (more or less) on Twitter earlier today and I can’t help but say my piece.

There’s a whole host of things wrong with this video and song, but I’m going to stick to the one basic question that keeps running through my head: If you look at every girl as somebody’s daughter, and that negates your carnal desires, then how do you have a healthy relationship with your wife?

My other gripe is that it just makes me want to watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High, specifically the scene that features a similar, but much better tune, by Jackson Browne.

Surf Nazis, dude.

As you may know from reading previous posts, I’ve been rereading Chris Claremont’s epic run on X-Men (which became Uncanny X-Men and spawned the entire of X-family titles we now know and love… or hate), so it’s been a fine time for Claremont’s X-Men Forever to premiere. For the uninitiated, X-Men Forever is Claremont’s attempt to write an X-Men comic which disregards current continuity and picks up where he left off. X-Men Forever #1 is, in effect, (adjective-less) X-Men #4.

Many people are justifiably skeptical of this title. For one thing, Claremont’s return to Marvel 10 years ago met with only moderate success. A lot of fans respond to his work as being a bit too wordy for modern comics, and, let’s face it, his vision of the X-Men harkins back to the dawn of 90’s comics, a period now regarded as the industry’s worst hour.

I’m going to take the ride on this one, though, if for no better reason than the fact that I just like Chris Claremont. Ignoring the fact that The X-Men was one of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s least successful titles, which Claremont turned into the company’s flagship franchise, I’ve always found Claremont to be a genuinely friendly individual. I was 17 when I saw him in the gift shop of the Hyatt at Dragon Con, back when he was writing a respectable run on Fantastic Four. I approached him (which took a lot of effort at the time) and said, “I really like what you’re doing on the Fantastic Four.”

He said, “Thanks. Are you coming to the panel?”

“What panel,” I asked.

“It’s going on downstairs in about 10 minutes. You should drop by.”

Of course I did and really enjoyed his discussions of how he saw the Fantastic Four. Keep in mind this was around the time he introduced the character of Valeria Von Doom. During the Q & A, I asked him if he had foreseen during his run on X-Men that all of the X-prophesies, the alternate time lines and such, which were obviously giving editorial a headache at the time would cause so many problems. At first he just said, “What problems?” Which was met by sparse laughter. Then after a moment of reflection he said, “I didn’t really think they would cause any problems because I never thought I would stop writing the book.” The room exploded with applause.

Anyway, I found an interview which Claremont gave to Wizard Magazine right around the time X-Men #1 with it’s Jim Lee pencils and five variant covers was coming out. He has a clear vision of where the comic should go, and you can tell from the interview that he’s optimistic about the future of the franchise, however he quit before the interview saw print.

What can I say? I love the X-men and can’t wait to see what happens with this title. I think us X-fans owe Claremont at least a first-issue courtesy read.

As we took pictures in front of the Red Pyramid, Rania decided to readdress the taxi issue. Nancy felt that the waiting fee was reasonable. I agreed, but said the drivers should give us some kind of discount for the time they spent getting lost. Rania wanted the waiting fee and the lost time wiped off the meter, and since she was the only one among us who spoke fluent Arabic, I told her she had my full support to, “Make a fuss.”

We foreigners stood back and conversed while Rania went to talk to the drivers, but our conversation was soon interrupted by the sound of shouting in Arabic. Rania was letting the driver who drove Maggie and me have it with both barrels while the other driver seemed to be trying to calm the situation. We came over to see if we could help, but Rania was storming over to the nice driver’s car and ordering “Maggie, you and Jamie are riding with us!”

At this point the argument had attracted a crowd including Ustez Muhammad, two uniformed tourist police and one plainclothes officer. Maggie asked had happened and Rania told us that the rude driver said that Maggie and I should have been more polite to him. At first I thought he was offended that I fell asleep on the way to Dahshur, but apparently at some point Maggie had put her head on my shoulder or held my hand and offended the driver’s delicate conservative sensibilities. He was also demanding that we pay him for the return trip to Zamalek even if we didn’t ride with him.

Ultimately Maggie and I found ourselves in Ustez Muhammad’s car, followed by Rania, Nancy and Allison in the good taxi and the offended driver alone in his taxi on the way to the tourist police station. Rania asked me to come into the station with her to lend credibility to her argument. Maggie followed as well, mainly because she just didn’t want to stand in the sun outside while we plead our case in front of the local law enforcement.

By the time Rania, Ustez Muhammad, the plainclothes officer and the offended driver had filed into the captain’s cozy office, there was only enough room for me to stand in the doorway, arms crossed and wearing a stern gaze. The captain was typical for a high-ranking officer in Egypt, overweight but authoritative, parked in the most comfortable chair in the room. He kept a passive demeanor as Rania and the driver plead their respective cases.

When they finished, the driver stormed out of the office, and the people in the office invited me to come sit by the captain. Maggie came inside and sat next to Rania, who took my phone to call City Cab and speak with customer service. Ustez Muhammad and the plainclothes officer started passing around cigarettes, which I accepted if for no other reason than to identify myself with the gang. I was too hot and thirsty to actually want to smoke.

While Rania shouted into the phone, the captain and I discussed the difference in prices for American luxury automobiles between the States and Egypt. Finally Rania handed the phone to the captain, and I looked for a way to discretely dispose of my cigarette. Once the captain finished on the phone, Rania told us we would have to give the offended driver 100 LE ($18.19).

After thanking the authorities, we all packed into the good driver’s car and took off for Lucille’s, my favorite restaurant in Maadi. On the way, Rania told us that City Cab had assured us that the rude driver would be losing his job, which wasn’t what we wanted to see, but he probably doesn’t need to be working with a foreign clientele anymore. If you spend enough time in Egypt, you’ll hear plenty of foreigners say that these people are all in league to cheat tourists at every turn, but I can say in this instance that they did the right thing.

Oh, and I saw this in Maadi and feel it needs to be shared with the world:

Define irony: local paper misspells the word “best” in the headline for an article praising the test scores of the local schools. I took a screen shot just in case they get around to fixing it, but they even repeated the error in their Twitter feed.

Take a look at the New York Times article I linked to the picture above and tell me that society hasn’t gotten a bit too panicky for your tastes. Big news of the conversion of television signals from analog to digital has been around for well over two years now. During its last year, the Bush administration broke off a sizable chunk of change (sizable for you and me, not compared to the rest of the federal budget) so you could get a $40 coupon from the government to buy a little box which would convert signals for your TV if it was unprepared to receive a digital signal. The Obama administration pushed back the change for fear that too many people were unprepared for the switch, but the deal finally went down yesterday.

Here’s the problem: if you bought your TV in the last 10-15 years, it’s ready to receive a digital signal. Nielsen claims 2.8 million homes were completely unprepared for this change and another 9.5 million were only partly ready. I don’t know if there’s one American left outside of the advertising industry who actually believes Nielsen’s ratings anymore, but these 11 million Americans (.33% of the population) have to live like that Australian family on the Simpsons episode where Bart calls Australia to find out if the water goes counter-clockwise when they flush the toilet, and they must look like that family from The Hills Have Eyes.

More thought and planning went into preparing for the digital conversion than FEMA has ever put into hurricane relief, and this is only television. Most importantly, this is making sure that people who haven’t bought a TV in the last 15 years and don’t have cable keep watching television. Have we considered that maybe these people aren’t worth the effort? How much money do you think people who are tuning in Idol every week on a pair of rabbit ears contribute to the economy?

Meanwhile, all that panic which the affiliates worked overtime to curb? The busiest outlets got about 600 calls. For once, we can say a lot of time and money was wasted counting on the ignorance of the American people, because when it comes to watching our stories, we don’t mess around.

PS - To my girlfriend’s parents: Even though you haven’t bought a television in the last 10 years and don’t get cable, I still heart you.

I promise I’ll lay off Stanhope for a while after this, but I think this one bit may contain the meaning of life. Keep in mind this meaning of life applies only to men, and you have no business listening to this if you or the people in earshot are offended by obscene language or explicit situations. Now that only my friends are here, listen to this:

On the ride to the Red Pyramid I noticed the meter had gone from 120 LE ($21.82) to 140 LE ($25.46). Considering how long we had left the cabs waiting, I was relieved to see the waiting fee was so low, but I made a mental note to complain to City Cab’s customer service if this driver charged us full price for getting lost earlier.

As we ascended the much more attractive paved path leading to the Red Pyramid’s entrance, Rania told Maggie how displeased she had been to see we were charged a 2-hour waiting fee even though we had only been gone for a little more than an hour. I tried not to think about it as I marveled that the Red Pyramid is in every way as impressive as the Pyramids at Giza, even though the individual blocks from which the structure is constructed are smaller.

Descending the shaft was much easier, since it came equipped with luxuries like steps and light. At the bottom, I crawled through the typical 1m x 1m x 10m shaft into the antechamber. There I noticed that this pyramid contained the familiar pyramid musk from airborne moisture, topped with a smell that became increasingly identifiable as urine. I tried to ignore it, focusing instead on the stepped ceilings which are like a smaller version of the grand hall in the Great Pyramid.

The last antechamber was a vast room with a huge wooden staircase leading to the burial chamber. The urine smell became even more intense, so I resolved to breathe through my mouth and get a look at the burial room as fast as possible.

Unlike the burial rooms of Khufu and Khafre’s pyramids, Sneferu’s is a relatively small room. You’re confined to one side by a railed wooden platform, as the floor is covered in rubble and lacks any sarcophagus that I could identify.

Right as I was about to leave, Allison and Nancy and Maggie arrived, so I hung out to snap a few pictures, then, like the Pharaoh’s soul, I raced out of the burial chamber as fast as possible. Relieved to escape, I asked Maggie what the deal was with that smell. She told me the prevailing opinion at the SCA is that it must be tourists using the burial chamber as a toilet because Egyptians don’t visit Dahshur.

I came across the above-linked article about Thomas Paine while reading BBC News. Apparently there’s a big to-do in the UK about putting up a statue of the man who is short-changed by rarely being mentioned as a founding father of both the American and French Revolutions. The lack of a statue is hardly surprising. Putting up a statue of Paine in London would be like waiting another 150 years and then putting up a statue of Che Guevara in Washington DC.

Regardless, I first came across Thomas Paine when I was assigned to read “Common Sense” for homework in my 10th grade American literature class. While the gravity of the phrase, “All religion is hearsay,” didn’t quite sink in right way, the rhetoric of the revolution was a lot more interesting than the sermons of Puritan settlers. Ultimately the writings of Thomas Paine have become a huge influence on my political and religious opinions, and I highly recommend them. There’s any number of published books of the man’s writing, but I think he’d be proud to know they’re available for free as part of the public domain.

After years of speculation, Futurama finally pulled a Family Guy and got renewed for a 26 episode season. The big difference in this case is that Futurama’s being renewed by Comedy Central and not Fox. Let’s be honest, if you could watch Simpsons, Futurama, and Family Guy within a 2-hour block on a Sunday night, your face would melt off from the awesomeness (even though Simpsons is now Ultimate Simpsons and not nearly as good as it was 15 years ago).

I’ll be honest on this one. Futurama didn’t impress me that much when it first came out, and my freshman roommate in college, Will Phillips, had every episode on VHS (long before Fox figured out how lucrative the DVD market could be). Even then I was a lukewarm fan, but Adult Swim and the Futurama comics eventually convinced me how great this show is. Congratulations, Futurama, you’ve earned it.

By the way… all the Futurama porn out there almost makes me want to turn on the filtered search option.

When I exited the pyramid, I was relieved to know that the bat had only hit me in the chest and my shirt was still intact. The winged rat had brushed Maggie’s arm, but the people at the CDC laughed when she called their hot line and asked if she should be have treatment for rabies. Nancy and the Egyptians, of course, were fine.

As I stood in front of the pyramid telling Allison about the unsecured wooden ladders and bats, I turned to see Rania climbing onto a police camel’s saddle. Maggie gave me a look that I knew meant I would not be leaving Dahshur without taking my first camel ride. I figured we would just take turns sitting on the camel and having our pictures taken, but instead the tourist police marched two camels over for Maggie and me.

Mounting a camel is very different from performing the same task on a horse.  For one thing, the camel has to kneel on all fours, something they seem loathe to do. Maggie’s ride vocally protested, however eventually consented. The saddle, upon objective observation, seems to have been made more for the camel’s comfort than the rider’s. The bottom is padded and contoured to the shape of the animal’s hump. The top, rather, is essentially a wooden box with a blanket. There are wooden blocks at the front and back, the former presumably functions as a handhold while the latter can only be used to keep the rider from tumbling off the back, since it makes for terrible arch support.

As we trod toward the Valley Temple, Maggie took pictures and video, entranced by making images with a camel head poking up from the bottom. Rania chatted in Arabic with the police who were leading the camels and explained to Allison, who was leading Maggie’s camel, what names the camels had. I posed for Maggie’s pictures while thinking about what it must have been like as an Arab conquerer 1300 years ago, riding between these massive stone monuments to “god” kings who were long dead before Islam was first revealed.

Arrival at the temple turned out to be anti-climactic since we stayed on our mounts and let the police take our pictures, then left. On the way back, Maggie and Rania got a big kick out of seeing the rifle hanging out of my camel’s saddle bag. They advised me against picking it up, waving it in the air and ululating for a photo op. As we neared the pyramid, Rania told us that she felt 10 LE ($1.81) for each of us was a fair tip for the accommodating officers.

When we arrived, the police started ordering the camels to kneel. Maggie and Rania’s rides dropped with maximum vocal, but limited physical protest. My ride dropped to his front knees but stubbornly refused to drop his rear. Lacking any educated solution, I blurted “Please?” The camel quickly obliged. I immediately dismounted even more awkwardly than I had mounted, scraping my leg on the gun barrel.

I turned to the oldest-looking officer and palmed him two 20’s ($3.63) as we headed back to the taxis. Another officer stopped me and rubbed his fingers together, but I gestured at his associates and moved on, hoping they’d understand the tip was for everyone. Mark Twain once said every Egyptian’s first word was “Bakshish.”*

*Arabic for “tip.”