Apparently I am — once again — way behind the net-meme curve on this, but Jonathan Coulton rocks. Musically, he’s just your average folk/pop singer, but his lyrics are like a grownup Weird Al. (Except for “Mandelbrot Set,” which sounds like Fountains of Wayne covering They Might Be Giants.)

If you only sample a few of his songs, I recommend the mad scientist ditty “Skullcrusher Mountain,” an ode to exhibitionism called “First of May,” and a cover of “Baby Got Back” that’s even better than the Richard Cheese lounge version.

Meanwhile, I just ordered Coulton’s full-length CD Smoking Monkey from CDBaby.

…for year-end top ten lists in major media publications, because it’s easier than finding something real to write about. Thankfully, I’m not a major media publication, so I don’t care. Here are my picks for the best TV shows of 2005, in alphabetical order:

Arrested Development – Now cancelled, but may return on Showtime

Battlestar Galactica – What crappy 70s series?

The Colbert Report – After a predictably shaky start, Colbert has been knocking it out of the park almost every night

The Daily Show – Still the king, if currently overshadowed by its spinoff

Deadwood – Al Swearengen is a fucking hero, and let no cocksucker tell you otherwise

Doctor Who – Sometimes clunky and childish, but so joyously weird that I can’t stop watching

House – Hugh Laurie’s sarcastic bastard doctor is worth watching now that the storylines have broken free of season 1′s formula

My Name is Earl – Immediately supplanted Arrested Development as the best sitcom on TV

The Office – Has escaped comparisons with the brilliant British original by finding its own uniquely American tone

Veronica Mars – Season 2′s mystery is as strong as season 1′s, so far…

Today on lunch break from my Seattle web development job, I went to a sushi restaurant in the International District, where I read a book by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net while wearing my Creative Commons t-shirt. Sweet Jebus, I’m a living, breathing William Gibson cliche.

And yes, now I’m blogging about it.

Mike Nelson’s Death Rat! doesn’t work terribly well as a novel. For the last few days, I’ve been mulling over why that is.

First, I should note that this is the first novel I’ve read almost entirely on the bus to and from work. I found I could get through 20 pages per 30-minute ride. This means two things: 1) at 325 pages, Death Rat! is about eight hours of entertainment, and 2) I spend way too much fucking time on the bus.

It’s not an awful book — it’s a quick enough read, and the plot at least makes sense. Most of the laughs are in the first half of the book, before the storyline runs out of gas.

Nelson’s sense of humor requires something to push against that is lacking here. A lot of MST3K’s laughs were mined from oppositional humor: the riffs were darkest when during overly-happy films or shorts, and shifted towards innocence when presented with disturbing or sexual moments. If the movie featured the fantastic, the jokes focused on the mundane.

Nelson’s story is about average people and places — a wishy-washy failed history author named Pontius Feeb and a small town in rural Minnesota. With no exterior work to play against, Nelson’s comedy of the mundane tends to sink, and the rest of the humor relies on obvious satires of Minneapolis celebrities (Garrison Keillor, Prince, Jesse Ventura).

The bigger problem is the lack of memorable characterization. The only character who comes close to being fully realized is Pontius, and Nelson spends most of the novel mocking him. Another protagonist, Jack Ryback, never becomes more than a name and occupation. The citizens of Holey, MN, are stereotypes. The Keillor analog is solely a snarling yet dorky villain.

The lesson from Death Rat!: no matter how sarcastic the tone, a comedic novel without memorable characters won’t work either as a comedy or as a story. That, and Danish people are not automatically funny.

Got:

MST3K, vol. 8
Veronica Mars: Season 1
Mr. Show: Season 3
TWO copies of the Firefly soundtrack (I should be able to return one of them to Barnes & Noble)
Tremors on DVD
Jack Daniels 1954 Gold Medal edition
Crown Royal whiskey

Television and alcohol. That’s me in a nutshell.

Gave:

a three-month subscription to Netflix
a t-shirt that says “Ballard University: Semper Lutefisk”
MST3K, vol. 3
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Baudolino by Umberto Eco
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Pirate pillowcases from sininlinen.com
Clarity by Jimmy Eat World
My Fair Lady on DVD
Frangelico liqueur

I’m sort of proud of a couple of those gift ideas.

Would you be distrurbed to learn that an American millionaire, someone with substantial power and resources in our society, had written this?

“You are a selfish, pathetic excuse for an American, and you can take your big fat ass over to Iraq and get your pig head cut off and stuck on a pig pole. Then, you can have your equally as fat wife make a documentary about how loudly you squealed while terrorists were cutting through all the blubber and chins to get that 40 pound head off of you.”

That was Anna Benson, wife of $5M/yr NY Mets pitcher Kris Benson, about Michael Moore. Anna is a former stripper who used her husband’s semi-fame to catapult herself into a Maxim spread.

She’s not the only bloodthirsty pro-war nut with decapitation fantasies. As James Wolcott points out, the anti-peace crowd loves to imagine liberals under the swords of “Islamofascists” who, strangely, never seem to go after conservatives in their fevered imaginations.

Unless I’m visiting the wrong leftist web sites, this is an affliction specific to the far right — I can’t remember a liberal ever wishing for Dick Cheney’s head to be lopped off by, say, George Soros.

But I digress. I really want to talk about baseball.

I love baseball. I’ve been a Cardinals fan since before I knew the rules of the game. Ozzie Smith is still my favorite player. When I was seven, the Cards won the 1982 World Series over the Brewers, featuring the likes of Ozzie, Willie McGee, Tommy Herr, Darrell Porter, and other players lost to the fog of memory. It’s hard to watch baseball on TV, but there’s nothing like seeing a live game. In person, it beats even the NFL.

However, it’s getting more and more difficult to bring myself to cheer for people I know are at best rabid Bush supporters and at worst violent thugs. Mike Piazza sang the praises of Rush Limbaugh. Curt Schilling tried to use his brand new Series ring to campaign for Bush. Todd Jones pre-emptively threatened gay teammates from coming out of the closet. I don’t know of any examples of Cardinals players making similar comments, but that’s probably only because St. Louis isn’t a terribly media-intensive city.

On one hand, baseball players supporting Bush makes sense: historically, the GOP has been very kind to millionaires, and no administration moreso than Bush’s. But this goes beyond the simple desire for lower taxes and into social platforms and foreign policy.

How do I keep being a baseball fan knowing most of the players stand against everything I believe in? How do I separate the game from its personalities? Should I even bother, knowing that Sport has very little meaning in the grand scheme of things?

Christopher Moore posted a Christmas present for his fans last night: chapter one of A Dirty Job, his new novel due out in late March.

I’m not religious, and I don’t believe in God. That sounds like atheism, doesn’t it?

And yet I usually call myself an agnostic — one who doesn’t know whether God exists or not — rather than an atheist. Why? Because I’m a giant pussy, quite frankly. If I call myself an atheist, 95% of America will confront me with either one of two arguments.

In this blog entry, Majikthise shoots down one of them:

Most atheists lack religious beliefs for the same reason they lack other beliefs — insufficient evidence.

I’m an atheist. I can’t prove there isn’t a God. [...]

I can’t prove that the phone company didn’t kill Kennedy, either. But if someone asks me whether I believe that the phone company whacked JFK, I say no. When I do, nobody asks me to supply proof of the phone company’s innocence, or accuses me of taking the phone company’s innocence as an article of faith.

People often like to play “gotcha” with self-professed atheists. If you say that you don’t believe in God, they counter with “Well, isn’t that just like a religion, then?” These people are twisting the normal vocabulary of knowledge and belief. If we talk about belief in God the same way we talk about belief in other propositions, then it’s perfectly natural to call yourself a non-believer.

The other argument is one I get even more often: every human being requires some kind of spiritual fulfillment to be happy. Therefore atheists are miserable.

Unfortunately, most people seem to define “spirituality” as “belief in the supernatural.” In which case, no, I’m not spiritual.

But occasionally, I like to read and think and talk about the Big Questions: why are we here? how should we behave? and so on. The study of such questions is known as Philosophy.

Although I’ve never really studied philosophy and couldn’t hold my own in a real debate, I believe that this sort of inquiry is a form of spirituality for those grounded in empirical thought.

So in lieu of Christmas, Yule, and all the rest, I wish you a Merry Philosophy and a Happy Calendar Change!

A link making the rounds: a hardcore rap video about eating cupcakes and seeing a matinee of The Chronicles of Narnia that aired on SNL this weekend. Like Mr. Pibb and Red Vines, it’s crazy delicious.

I’m probably several years behind the curve on this, but I just discovered Flickr’s page of Most Interesting Photos from the last 7 days, and I’m kind of addicted to it. It’s visual refreshment for a boring day.