Posted 5:34 PM by Angie Schultz

Parts: The Remake Horror

So the other night Niles and I were watching TV, and on comes a preview for the movie The Island. It shows a standard-issue antiseptic future with jumbotron TVs. People gather to see who is chosen by lottery to go to "the island". But it turns out that anyone who goes to the island is killed. The trailer says something about everyone being a clone, and there are many exciting scenes, and a man and a beautiful blonde, and that's about it.

So Niles and I said, wait a minute, that's pretty much the plot to Parts: The Clonus Horror, a 1979 movie that was so bad it was an MST3K episode.

In that movie, attractive young people are kept in some sort of perpetual summer camp, where they spend their days in sporting contests, kindergarten-level lectures, and being ministered to by "guides". They're all really dumb, except for one of the least attractive young men, who's just plain dumb. He gets together with an attractive young woman who's also just plain dumb, and they wonder dumbly about why things are.

Actually, the real purpose of the camp is to grow clones for replacement body parts. At some mysterious moment the clones are mature (or maybe just needed), and are frozen for future use. The chosen clone is given a party to send him on his way to sigh America!, which is where the departed clones are said to have gone. The lectures and guides constantly remind the clones that they're preparing themselves for sigh America!, "where good friends live".

One day our hero finds a beer can in a river, and has an epiphany. He questions everything he knows. Finally, he breaks into the OFF-LIMITS building of this TOP-SECRET operation, and makes his way to the Department of Backstory. There, despite having about a second-grade education, he finds a tape on the history of the CLANDESTINE outfit, figures out what to do with it, and comprehends the concepts of cloning and organ replacement. (We are left to speculate that the HIGHLY-ILLEGAL and S00PER-SEKRIT Clonus Corp. keeps these things lying around in their offices in case they need to show them to visiting VIPs, or put out a press release.)

Remembering to take the tape and some documents, he escapes from the HIGH-SECURITY Clonus compound (because the guards aren't very good shots, although he does get hit), and very shortly finds himself on a hill overlooking Los Angeles.

He flounders into the backyard of Keenan Wynn, who plays a washed-up muck-raking journalist named Jake Noble (subtle, eh?). Now in Seventies LA, having a grubby, bullet-riddled young man come crashing through your back fence, muttering about being cloned and needing desperately to "find my other part" has got to be at least a weekly occurrence. But Noble decides that, no, dagnabbit, there's something fishy going on here!

And so he helps our hero track down the man from whom he was cloned, a college professor who lives with his hairy, creepy son and writes speeches for his brother (played by Peter Graves, in a cameo lasting maybe five minutes, total), a senator running for President. Noble and the clone (New, this fall, on NBC!) have no trouble getting themselves a hearing, presumably because the professor recognizes his younger self in our pallid, lipless hero. The professor, who is presented as having great integrity, goes to ask his senator-brother about all this.

The senator tells him that the whole thing's out of his hands, and, hey, don't you want to live forever, and besides clones aren't real people anyway, so screw 'em. Professor Integrity swallows this with no effort whatsoever.

He goes back home and tells his dim, oily son that, naaah, they're not gonna help the clone, and in fact some people will be by to take him off their hands. The son, dull-witted though he is, objects to this, and drives the clone off in his bitchin' Charger to some remote point where he can break back in to the high-security operation (because, you see, he's worried about his girlfriend).
Unfortunately, when the clone ranger arrives back at Clonus he finds that his sweetie has been lobotomized for someone else's protection, which doesn't change her one bit. The last we see of him is his Sad Clown face in a giant-sized freezer baggie. This is a bit pointless, since we also see that his original, the professor, has been killed by Clonus minions, along with his son. So there's really no need to keep the parts anymore.

Jake Noble and his wife (who resemble the Lockhorns) are killed in mid-bicker by an explosion designed to eliminate all evidence of Clonus. But wily old Jake has made a copy and given it to a crusading journalist pal (Brown, from the Sun; no, really) who pops up to bedevil the Senator's next press conference. The End.

If you go to the movie connections, you do indeed see that the movie is a remake of Parts: The Clonus Horror. I don't see any common writing credits between them, however.

From the look of the trailer, it'll be a lot more exciting than Clonus.

I was briefly annoyed that this was going to be yet another remake. Can't Hollywood do an original movie anymore? And then I was embarrassed when Niles reminded me that I had recently said that if they wanted to remake something, why didn't they remake one of the MST movies that was worth salvaging. And this was the only MST movie where (at the beginning), I kind of wished Mike and the Bots would just shut up and let me watch.

On the IMDB comment boards for this movie, people have (rather stupidly) cried "Ripoff!", comparing The Island to The Matrix or Logan's Run. The thing which makes The Island *very* much like Clonus is the whole "island" thing, in which the lucky individuals get to go to the idyllic island.

Of course, one guy has it figured out:

Of course it sounds like a ripoff. That's because every single science fiction movie ever made has the exact same plot. In the future, society sucks and there's always a cute guy and a cute girl who find out the truth and then team up to either save society or escape from it.

Yeah, that's it.

Posted 11:17 PM by Angie Schultz

The Prodigal Returns

Reeking of tequila, jalapenos, and cheap hookers, and on the run from the TSA, jkrank has returned to feed upon the souls of the living once more. Go and berate him for his presence, and rejoice in his absence. No, wait, I have that backwards. Don't I?

And get him to reimburse me for those damned umbrellas.

Posted 9:47 PM by Angie Schultz

The Huffer Zone

Holy Mother of Mental Illness. You know what's really freaking me out? It's getting harder to tell Arianna Huffington's real blog from the parody site, Huffington's Toast.

I offer in evidence this post by revered old washed-up blowhard Norman Mailer, on the whole Newsweek/Koran thing. His premise is that the White House set up Newsweek for a fall. They arranged those riots in Pakistan, too. Behold the master's words:

At present, I have a few thoughts I can certainly not prove, but the gaffe over the Michael Isikoff story in Newsweek concerning the Koran and the toilet is redolent with bad odor...

There still resides, however, under my aging novelist's pate a volunteer intelligence agent, sadly manque. He does suggest that the outcome was too neat.

The Republic teeters, for the little man who lives in Mailer's skull is suspicious.

Is the real Mailer any less loony than the fictional Hunter S. Thompson? Or, hell, than the real Thompson?

Steve H. of Hog on Ice is doing most of the Thompson posts, and they're a hoot. I've never read any Thompson before, but I am seized with the desire to run out and buy some, if they're half as crazy as this. Some samples:

Have you ever smoked a page from the Book of Revelation, amigo? Great stuff in there. Marvelous cure for writer’s block.

“Twenty grains?,” I asked my Samoan attorney, “What kind of pansy-ass load is that? That won’t go through both doors of a Crown Vic and light up a G-man crouching on the other side with a laser microphone in his hand.”

I wonder if George W. Bush ever ate a Jimson weed...Maybe he comes across them while clearing brush down in Crawford. Madness in his eyes as his hungry fingers grasp the fleshy stalk...Cheney nearby, nude, sunning himself on a Navajo blanket, egging him on. “I ate two this morning. Catch up before I peak...” Bush’s chimplike digits clasping the stem as he chews. “...I ought to kill you for tripping naked in front of the twins. Ah, yes. I see the colors now. Someone gather my clothes and bring me a dozen ripe watermelons and some shoulder-fired Stinger missiles.”

Then out comes Condi Rice, bare to the waist, carrying a tray of Jell-O shots,but not inclined to mention that one of them is laced with synthetic pineal gland extract, fresh from the kitchens at Langley. With an extra acetyl group tacked to the end of every molecule, just to see if anything kooky happens.

See this post from two years ago(!) on Mailer's theory that George Bush invaded Iraq in order to enslave the technologically-superior Chinese by singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at baseball games. No, really. Pass me that mezcal, man. I got dibs on the worm. They're hallucinogenic, you know.

Posted 1:06 PM by Angie Schultz

Unpleasantly Like Being Drunk

Went to see the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie last night, and here's my review.

Firstly, though: the previews. What the hell is up with the kids' movies? We saw three previews in a row for kids' sports movies: The Bad News Bears (baseball -- it's a remake, starring Billy Bob Thornton), Rebound (basketball), and something whose title I don't remember that was about soccer. (Ah, via the miracle of IMDB, I see that the title was Kicking and Screaming. I found this only because I remembered that Mike Ditka was in the movie, as is, inexplicably, Robert Duvall.) These are all the same movie: coach turns loser-ass kids' team into champions. Just how many of these movies does one civilization need during a single summer, anyway?

There was also an animated movie titled Valiant, about British pigeons in WWII. It looked pretty good, although since we don't go to movies we almost certainly won't be seeing this one in the theaters.

It's worth looking at this Guardian article about that film, from two years ago. The main attraction, for them, seems to be the possibility that a British film effort might just knock the Yanks down a peg or two. But there's also this:

Bob Godfrey frets that the premise behind Valiant is old-fashioned and potentially jingoistic. "Depicting Germans as hawks and British as pigeons is something I would stomp on. Germans must be terribly fed up with being shown as the bad guys. I think it's a mistake."

Who's Bob Godfrey, and what does he have to do with the film? Damned if I know. The article just says that he's an Oscar-winning animator, and I think he was asked just to provide de rigeur sneers. 'Cause he also says:

He is equally blunt about Aardman's five-film deal (or "Faustian pact" as he calls it) with DreamWorks. "In this country, we have a Rolls-Royce mentality. In America, they have a Model T Ford mentality...

Aardman, children, is the studio that did Chicken Run, which is not doing Valiant -- Ealing Studios is. I therefore assume its mention is another opportunity for sneering.

And since we're talking cars, kids: which of these car companies is currently a world-girdling behemoth and which is, uh, not?

But I was going to talk about Hitchhiker's, wasn't I?

I have never understood the passion for the Hitchhiker's books. They seemed to me to be made up of tiny sparkling gems of genius in a matrix of, well, nothin'. There's no discernable plot, that I can recall, just a million brilliant funny bits in search of a plot. And that would be perfectly OK, if the books didn't subtly hint at Deep Meaning. Specifically, the Deep Meaning the books hint at is that there is no Deep Meaning.

Thanks, but I came to that conclusion when I was about fourteen. Got anything else? No, huh?

Still, one plotless book half-filled with genius is a lot better than I'm ever going to do, so yay for Douglas Adams. But, like eating salted peanuts or stolen biscuits, Adams just couldn't stop at one. I think there were five books, at least one radio series, a TV show (or two), and a videoholograph in which twenty artificially-induced supernovae will provide the input photons (coming to a galaxy near you in the year 9595).

Oh, and a movie, in the year 2005. I keep forgetting.

The movie followed the first book (near as I can remember), up until about the time that Arthur and Ford arrive on the Heart of Gold. After that, things get kind of fuzzy. There's a quest for the Ultimate Question (since, of course, they already have the Ultimate Answer), and the movie takes you places that the book sure didn't go---don't know about the other versions. This gives the movie more of a plot than I remember the book having, but that's not necessarily a good thing. It's a rather trite and simplistic plot, and not at all convincing, based on the thin characters. In fact, in places I kept trying to speed them up through the actual "plot" moments, they were so dull.

And we end with a sequel set up.

Nevertheless it does look great, especially the world of Deep Thought (I've forgotten the name) and Vogsphere, home of the Vogons. And as for the Heart of Gold: when you want that stark white, sterile, soul-sucking look for your future, you can't go wrong with a British art director. For some reason they do soul-sucking better than anyone else.

The Guide itself, voiced by Stephen Fry, has a few moments, but I found them rather intrusive.

One of the joys of Hitchhiker's is the amount of information which you read right over and don't process until three seconds later. Jokes are funnier, I think, when you don't get the punchline until you've started the next joke (this works well for stand-up comics, at any rate). The movie doesn't do this well at all. The Guide is one of those elements in the book which is funnier for not being immediately funny, and I don't think this translates to the screen.

I was on the verge of arguing that Hitchhiker's Guide is just one of those works that just doesn't port well to other media, because you can't absorb all the jokes fast enough in real time, and you can't go back and re-read them again. Then again, there's The Simpsons, which never seems to have a problem with that.

For other views, see Murray Hill, who hated it, and scary Hitchhiker's Guide fanatic Emily Jones, who loved it.

Boyfriend Niles says, "I had really low expectations, and it was better than that, so I'm happy." We saw this movie, by the way, at 5:30pm on a Wednesday, and there were only three other people in the theater. I don't know what that says, but it doesn't sound good.

Posted 2:56 PM by Angie Schultz

To Boldly Go Away

For the first time in almost twenty years, there will be no Star Trek series in production. I loved the original series, used to have the episodes almost memorized. In later years I found better uses for the brain storage space. And while I liked the subsequent series all right, I thought they never came close to capturing the sense of wonder of the original.

(Remember: the Golden Age of science fiction is twelve.)

Anyway, famed science fiction writer Orson Scott Card weighs in on the loss in the LA Times.

So they've gone and killed "Star Trek." And it's about time.

Sigh.

The original "Star Trek," created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad.

Surely there speaks a man who's never seen Lost in Space, where they headed toward the nearest star and somehow managed to visit a new planet every week or so, without ever getting to Alpha Centauri, and whose idea of cool aliens was space cowboys, space Vikings, space pirates, space Arabs, space royalty, space department stores, talking vegetables, and Satan.

This was in the days before series characters were allowed to grow and change, before episodic television was allowed to have a through line. So it didn't matter which episode you might be watching, from which year -- the characters were exactly the same.

Now this is a good point. It's tough to remember how it was in those days. I remember being thrilled by the brand new thing that was a Next Gen story arc. So when you think about all those chicks that Kirk had, remember that they wouldn't let him have the same chick more than once, or fondly remember a woman who'd already been on the show. For "Shore Leave" they had to dredge up the youthful memory of "Ruth" (who looked, in the way of women of the Sixties, about 45).

As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s -- a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. It was sci-fi as seen by Hollywood: all spectacle, no substance.

This makes me sad, because I like that kind of science fiction. Not too many people write it these days, people like James H. Schmitz or H. Beam Piper.

But besides that, it simply wasn't true. Here's a sampling of the "deeper ideas" in the original Star Trek, in chronological order:

• "The Man Trap": A man knowingly lives with a creature who impersonates his dead wife. Is there any relevant difference between the copy, and the original? Between fantasy and reality? (See also "What Are Little Girls Made of?", "The Menagerie", "Shore Leave")
  
  
• "Charlie X": A human acquires superhuman power. Can he remain uncorrupted? Answer: no. (A common theme. See also "Where No Man Has Gone Before", "Dagger of the Mind", "Shore Leave", "The Squire of Gothos" -- not a human in that instance, "Space Seed")
  
  
• "The Enemy Within": A really stupid episode asking the interesting question: Do the darker aspects of humanity have a positive use?
  
  
• "Mudd's Women": An early foray into the powers of self-esteem.
  
  
• "The Corbomite Maneuver": An enemy alien turns out to be misunderstood. (Not used very often in TOS, but ridden into the ground throughout subsequent series. See also "The Squire of Gothos", "The Devil in the Dark".)
  
  
• "The Galileo Seven": Are intellect and logic complete in themselves? Or do intuition and emotion have a place as well? (An incredibly tedious theme, touched upon in many, many episodes. Even at the time I wondered where this came from, because frankly I think we need a lot more exhortation to use our intellects than we do to use our emotions, but maybe that's just me.)
  
  
• "Arena": "Primitive" humans refrain from killing. (Touched upon in "A Taste of Armageddon", used in later seasons.)
  
  
• "The Return of the Archons": If a human society were rendered peaceful by some outside force, would it still be human? Would it grow, and change, and produce? (Possibly the single most common theme in the series. See also "This Side of Paradise".)
  
  
• "A Taste of Armageddon": If we could remove the ugliness of war, would that make war easier to wage?
  
  
• "Errand of Mercy": I think the theme of this episode is supposed to be that people can be so intent on waging war that they lose sight of what goals the war is supposed to serve. But I don't think it's presented very well.
  
  
• "The City on the Edge of Forever": The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Sometimes good people must die to prevent a greater evil. A lesson completely lost on the episode's creator, I'll wager.
  

Whew! And that's just the first season! I could've gone on (and on). There are also plain old sensawunda episodes which explore questions like, "What if there were an alternate universe in which we were all really different?" ("Mirror, Mirror", 2nd season), "What would a 20th century Roman Empire be like?" ("Bread and Circuses", 2nd season), "What would it be like to be the only immortal?" ("Requiem for Methuselah", 3rd season). (Note: Check this site for all your Star Trek episode needs.)

It would have been difficult to explore some of these themes in an episode of, say, Bonanza, or Dragnet.

Lurching on:

Which was a shame, because science fiction writing was incredibly fertile at the time, with writers like Harlan Ellison and Ursula LeGuin, Robert Silverberg and Larry Niven, Brian W. Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke creating so many different kinds of excellent science fiction that no one reader could keep track of it all.

Little of this seeped into the original "Star Trek."

OK, hold on a damn minute here. Ellison through Moorcock were entirely different types of writers than Bradbury through Clarke. The latter four (not so much Clarke, maybe) were much more into those nasty old 1930s type stories. And while the first six produced many fine works, the nature of some of those works was such that they would not be palatable to a wider audience. (In fact, you can argue that this was the very purpose of "New Wave" science fiction, much of which frankly strikes me as being created expressely to epater le bourgeoisie. Oh, how original.)

Besides which, the original Star Trek had episodes by actual science fiction writers, like Norman Spinrad, Ted Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, and (oopsie!) Harlan Ellison.

So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long?

Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by.

Er, possibly. I, personally, was still in grade school when the original Star Trek was dewy fresh, and so would not have been reading The Left Hand of Darkness and its exploration of human sexual roles, thanks very much. (I will confess to you that I was embarrassed enough by the exploration of sexuality in "Amok Time". I was eleven, I think.) Most of Star Trek's fans weren't much older than I (up to college age, say). They probably hadn't had much of a chance to experience the "science fiction revolution".

By the way: eventually, Star Trek led me to Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, et al. But even after I was reading much better writers, I kept watching Star Trek, hoping to recapture the Golden Age (remember: 12). I have to say, none of the subsequent series caught my imagination in the same way as the first one. Next Generation patrolled a galaxy gone too civilized, with the focus on our crew members kicking themselves in the ass to venerate the culture-of-the-week.

Lileks (see below) has oft-praised Deep Space Nine for being gritty, but frankly I get my RDA of grit from daily life, and don't really need any in my Star Trek. TOS promised us that Star Fleet was going to be an organization of bright-eyed explorers, noble soldiers, and dedicated scientists; and the Federation free of the sort of dark governmental machinations that delight the X-Files types. DS9 not only broke that promise, it kicked it to shards and stomped on the remains, laughing maniacally.

I was one of the few who liked Voyager; sometimes it looked as if the sense of wonder from TOS was back. But it was very uneven, and the series lurched from episode to episode without really getting a grip.

Enterprise has been OK, but a bit hampered by having to stay within the history of TOS. Some of the Xindi-chasing episodes were good, and this last season has been darned good.

Now, speaking of Lileks, here he is on the same subject. He gives a capsule reviews of the series (plural), of which the best is:

The Original Series. The gold standard. It was a perfect sixties show--New Frontier optimism, Klingons as Commie analogues, go-go boots, undiluted Shatner in his prime, pointy-sideburn manliness...Overall grade: A. To say otherwise would be like critiquing the Old Testament for narrative flow.

He concludes with:

Give it rest...let it come back when all the accreted expectations have been forgotten and the story feels fresh again. I watched the first "Star Trek" episode as it was broadcast, sitting in my grandfather's living room in Harwood, North Dakota. I will watch the last one in my own home and feel a sense of relief: I don't have to worry whether it's good or bad. Now it's just done.

For the moment. The Enterprise is dry-docked, but that can't last; the show is America itself, and we make Captain Kirks like no one else. It's not "The Scarlet Pimpernel in Space" that has lasted for four decades, after all. It's "Star Trek." Space is still the final frontier, and it'll be waiting when we're ready for it again.

Card's conclusion, on the other hand:

Screen sci-fi has finally caught up with written science fiction. We're in college now. High school is over. There's just no need for "Star Trek" anymore.

This, really, is laughable, as any glance at the Sci-Fi Channel's schedule will tell you. Especially the godawful original movies.

But it's also an awfully dumb mistake for a smart man to make. Something like Star Trek will always be around. It's a retelling of a myth, one that was old when Homer was a pup.

On the other hand, I suspect Lileks is wrong as well. Some of our technology (cell phones, as he points out) has already caught up to Roddenberry's original vision of the 23rd century. As it advances farther, our myths are going to need to be upgraded along with it. What will this myth look like in the 23rd century? Will interstellar travel be possible, or will we still be dreaming of it?

Despite Card, I hope people keep writing space operas until we get there.

And if they don't, I will. And we wouldn't want that, would we? No.

(Card article via Rand Simberg (although it was also in the Houston Chronicle's editorial pages yesterday). Be sure and read the comments.)

Posted 9:55 AM by Angie Schultz

Not Bananas for Pajamas

By now you've probably all heard about Pajamas Media, a new blogging...something...formed by Roger L. Simon, Charles Johnson, and Marc Danziger (now posting over at Winds of Change), with an assist from Glenn Reynolds and a cast, apparently, of thousands.

It is said of the Palestinians that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and that may as well be my motto, too. I'd have it carved on my tombstone, if I planned on having one. I first heard of the Web in the latter half of 1993, and learned to code HTML not too long afterwards. Of course, it was HTML 0.03, or something like that, and there were only about five commands, and Java was still in the future, but it was something not a whole lot of people knew how to do, even in Silicon Valley.

I told Niles that, gosh, I could quit my glamorous but unremunerative day job, and hack together web pages for businesses. But that, I thought, would be wrong, because I didn't really know what I was doing, and it wouldn't be right to charge people for my rudimentary self-taught coding skills.

Not everybody saw it quite the same way. Some of those people are stinking rich now.

That wasn't the first time that kind of thing happened to me, and it wasn't the last. I always end up deciding that my skills really aren't up to a professional standard, so that it would be akin to stealing to get paid for using them. (I'm speaking, of course, of my skills in areas in which I'm not a professional; although it turns out that people think this is also true of my skills in areas in which I am a professional, since I'm not being paid for using them, either.)

Of course, recent events have proven that lack of skills is no barrier to participation in a big media enterprise. Ha ha! I kid the folks in the mainstream media! Oh, wait: I don't.

Now, I might look at this a little differently if I could figure out just what the hell Pajamas Media was supposed to be. It involves some sort of advertising deal, which is fair enough, but there's also another aspect to it about which Roger is being very coy (I gather he's not really clear on the concept himself, which is not reassuring).

Fortunately, we now have an article in the New York Sun explaining the deal:

The idea of Pajamas Media is to use an extensive network of globally affiliated blogs to provide first-person, in-depth coverage of most major news events, including both camera and video footage, Roger Simon said.

Using as an example the tsunami that swept through parts of Asia and Africa in January, Mr. Simon said bloggers managed to post hundreds of updates, first-person accounts, and video clips, often before major press organizations could deploy their staffs.

That's all fine and dandy, but I don't really see being able to cover very many big news items from my post here in suburban Houston (I don't have a car). What would I say?:

News flash: The obnoxious neighbors at [address] have finally drawn the attention of law enforcement. Huzzah.

News flash: There's been a fender bender after Sunday services at [the large church across the street], despite the off-duty cops directing traffic. Decent church-goin' folks sure can come up with a lot of bad words when the occasion demands.

Of course, sometimes I do get out:

News flash: The service at [bagel purveyors] at [location] continues to suck.

Now, if I were still living in Sydney, I might be able to take the bus up to the CBD and cover protests and David Jones Christmas displays. (Bill Ardolino has done an excellent job covering protests in DC, though he puts in a lot more work than I would want to, and I think he's getting kind of tired of it too.)

Better still, at the job before that, I could've issued reports like this:

News flash: Rumors at [well-known government agency] say that [something mildly scandalous] has happened at [W-KGA] headquarters. This will no doubt depress the already-low levels of morale at [agency].

Of course, I would've had to post such a report exactly as it is above, with all the identification elided, if I wanted to keep my job.

I suppose I could still report on my work:

News flash: [Name withheld] is publishing a paper on [topic I don't know that much about, for all I am a co-author] which suggests that [something takes place that's actually kind of interesting, though it would bore the pants off you, but I could easily play it up to make it seem much more certain and important than it really is, just like large science organizations sometimes do, not naming no names].

Again, though, I'd pretty much have to release it in that form, or risk the Wrath of the Colleagues.

Therefore my usefulness as an on-the-scene media correspondent is somewhat limited -- that is to say, nonexistent -- and I don't believe I shall sign up with Roger and Co. (I'm sure this comes as a staggering disappointment to them), though I wish them well. I'll probably end up regretting it.

Back to that Sun article -- I did enjoy this quote from InstantMan:

"I think it is a tired cliche that because there won't be newspaper editors at PJM, that somehow the product will be diminished," Mr. Reynolds said. "We do not need four or five layers of editors to screw this up like they have at the L.A. Times.

At PJM, we can screw this up ourselves, and eliminate the middle man!

Speaking of screwing up, the Sun article notes some advertising difficulties:

There are caveats, however. The first is that blog advertising is unpopular with a large segment of traditional advertisers, such as Proctor & Gamble, who are uncomfortable with the potential of their products' being sold near potentially controversial copy.

I wonder how many layers of editors you need to screw up the company name: it's ProctEr & Gamble.