If I should die in a wombat zone

Jar Jar Binks and the Crisis in American Democracy I’m not planning to vote for Donald Trump, but I can understand his appeal, and not just to racists and idiots. To help me explain this, I’m going to draw upon the most intellectually rigorous source material I can: the Star Wars movies. I’ve seen so many folks on the internet draw parallels between Trump and Senator Palpatine, and if you’re going to do that, I think you need to extend the metaphor to cover the entire setting of the films. Let’s examine the lead-up to that fateful moment when everyone’s favorite gungan, Jar Jar Binks, singlehandedly destroys the Republic by calling for the emergency powers vote. Examine, if you will, the state of the Republic prior to that moment: It was a freaking mess. There was so much political logjam in the Galactic Senate that when one member world actually launched a full-scale invasion and conquest of another, partisans in the Senate blocked the Chancellor’s attempt to even b...

How can I describe STRANGER THINGS? Attempt#1: Imagine John Carpenter and John Hughes decided to join forces to write a TV series, then called up Steven King for editorial supervision. Attempt #2: Premise: the Goonies, the kids from Stand By Me, and half the characters from the Breakfast Club team up, eventually enlisting the help of Chief Martin Brody and Carrie….and they go off to stop the Thing, as well as the gov’t scientists from E.T., not to mention to rescue Carol Anne from the ghost realm. Attempt#3: Put “Scary Movie” and “Not another Teen Movie” into a centrifuge, suck out the comic goofiness, and blend the rest. STRANGER THINGS, a Netflix original show, is the meta-scifi-series of meta-scifi-series, a postmodern patchwork quilt of 1980s nostalgia that somehow manages to take itself, and be taken, entirely seriously -- even as 90% of what it does is rehash and re-spin 1980s movie tropes. The show has simultaneously the most derivative and most original plot ...