Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) - 21st Annual GLAAD Media Awards - New York:

Awards Presented on Stage
Outstanding Drama Series: Brothers and Sisters (ABC)
Outstanding TV Movie or Mini-Series: Prayers for Bobby (Lifetime)
Outstanding TV Journalism Segment: "Why Will Won't Pledge Allegiance", American Morning (CNN)
Outstanding Digital Journalism Article - Two-Way Tie:
- "'We Love You, This Won't Change a Thing'" by John Buccigross (ESPN.com)
- "Why Can't You Just Butch Up? Gay Men, Effeminacy, and Our War with Ourselves" by Brent Hartinger (AfterElton.com)

Other English-Language Awards Announced in New York

* Outstanding Film-Limited Release: Little Ashes (Regent Releasing)
* Outstanding Individual Episode: "Pawnee Zoo" Parks and Recreation (NBC)
* Outstanding Daily Drama: One Life to Live (ABC)
* Outstanding Talk Show Episode: "Ellen DeGeneres and Her Wife, Portia de Rossi" The Oprah Winfrey Show (syndicated)
* Outstanding TV Journalism – Newsmagazine: "Uganda Be Kidding Me" (series) The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC)
* Outstanding Newspaper Article: "Kept From a Dying Partner's Bedside" by Tara Parker-Pope (The New York Times)
* Outstanding Newspaper Columnist: Frank Rich (The New York Times)
* Outstanding Newspaper Overall Coverage: The New York Times
* Outstanding Magazine Article: "Coming Out in Middle School" by Benoit Denizet-Lewis (The New York Times Magazine)
* Outstanding Magazine Overall Coverage: The Advocate
* Outstanding Comic Book: Detective Comics by Greg Rucka (DC Comics)
* Outstanding New York Theater: Broadway & Off–Broadway: A Boy and His Soul by Colman Domingo
* Outstanding New York Theater: Off–Off Broadway: She Like Girls by Chisa Hutchinson

Benoit Denizet-Lewis' story was fascinating, if vaguely inconceivable back in my day. And, in one of those moments of clanging irony, One Life to Live had its award announced a couple of days after the producers announced that the gay storyline for which it won was being phased out. Apparently, they thought that the storyline had harmed the ratings. (The fact that they also dragged out the wretched and annoying Mitch Laurence storyline from mothballs at exactly the same time somehow doesn't get blamed. Only the gay guys in what was clearly a subsidiary storyline. Yes. Quite.)

And you know what? I'm not even going to snark about that comics award. Yes, Detective Comics comes from one of their beloved four mainstream publishers (DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse). Yes, Greg Rucka is, you know, a straight guy. It's also a superhero comic starring two lesbian leads, with gripping storylines. And it's bloody flippin' gorgeous to look at. (It's a bit of a pity that this seems to be only a writers award; I think that artist JH Williams III has had as much to do with the series' success as Rucka, frankly.) Doesn't mean that I don't think there were other titles out there worthy of consideration; just that, even allowing for GLAAD's relentlessly narrow parameters for consideration, this is a pretty good choice.

Spanish-Language Awards Announced in New York

* Outstanding Novela: Más Sabe el Diablo (Telemundo)
* Outstanding Daytime Talk Show Episode: "Adopción gay: un tema muy controversial" Paparazzi TV Sensacional (MegaTV)
* Outstanding Talk Show Interview: "Realidades de ser gay en la tercera edad" El Show de Cristina (Univision)
* Outstanding TV Journalism – Newsmagazine: TIE: "En el cuerpo equivocado" Primer Impacto (Univision) & "Damas gracias: Entrevista con Eva Leivas-Andino" Al Rojo Vivo (Telemundo)
* Outstanding Newspaper Article: "Mas familias de dos papás o dos mamas" by Pilar Marrero (La Opinión)
* Outstanding Magazine Article: "Del odio a la justicia" by Lena Hansen (People en Español)
* Outstanding Digital Journalism Article: "Saliendo del clóset: Cómo enfrentarlo en familia" by Fernanda Martínez (Univision.com)

What the hell was Leno thinking? There's being a good sport, and then there's being a total idiot, and this pretty clearly crossed the line. By the end, Leno was clearly not a happy camper. And he set it up! After it became obvious where this was headed, wouldn't you change a question or two on the fly, do something so that you didn't turn yourself into the comedic equivalent of a volleyball? (Serve, lob, set, SPIKE!) I mean, jeez, guy, do something.

And yet another shoe drops as NBC announces its forthcoming post-Olympics schedule, also known as Life After The Great Failed Experiment.

Mondays kind of make sense. Kind of. On the one hand, "Trauma" -- which has been yanked from the jaws of cancellation but not necessarily back into production, as NBC still had six episodes of the series to burn off -- would seem a terrible fit for "Chuck", albeit a better fit with "Law and Order". You'd think that maybe they'd want something more transitional between Chuck and L&O, like, say, "Parenthood". But then, that's the one so-far-unaired series that's been getting a certain amount of critical respect, even with the last minute recasting of a central role forced by Maura Tierney's breast cancer. So putting it after "Biggest Loser" on Tuesdays makes sense, as BL has been their consistently highest-rated non-football primetime series. So, perforce, Tuesday's schedule is perfectly understandable.

Wednesday's schedule, on the other hand ... that one has a certain head-scratching quality. "Mercy" is profoundly unsuited for the early evening timeslot. And if you're going to do that, why wouldn't you have the one new drama you managed to save lead into new episodes of SVU, rather than into an encore SVU episode that then leads to a new episode of the same show? The only thing I can think is that they decided to simply suicide the second hour against of "American Idol" and "24" ... but then, why would you suicide "Mercy" as well?

Thursdays are pretty much the same schedule NBC's had all year, with the exception of "The Marriage Ref" -- which sounds like an utter abomination before the programming gods.

...Yeah. So there's that. Because watching real life couples fight and get comedic zings launched at them is going to be so entertaining! In any event, "The Marriage Ref" as an end to the evening doesn't seem exactly calculated to improve NBC's fortunes on that night; wasn't the one thing that came out of the Leno experiment a fairly clear indication that people don't quite want that sort of comedy heading into their evening newscasts? But then, it's not as though NBC has a lot of product on their shelves to stick into that slot.

Fridays are very meh, with "Who do you think you are?", a celebrities' origin story reality series which sounds like a less sensationalistic take on "E! True Hollywood Story", only it's possible that some of the celebrities won't have died tragically or stupidly or have done something lunatic to warrant being profiled. (Which ... honestly, sounds like it could be a bit dull.) Saturdays, along with every other network, are a very traditional "lay down and die" schedule. (Once upon a time, Saturdays were the second most watched night on television. True story. CBS had the killer lineup of Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and the Carol Burnett Show. Oh, for the good old days. But one digresses.)

Sundays are kind of eyecrossing, featuring NBC taking direct aim at CBS ... by counterprogramming with more or less exactly the same type of shows that CBS is airing for the early part of the evening. Sending "Dateline" up against "60 Minutes" again? I mean, Dateline sometimes does ... OK on those nights, but by and large, it never seems to win that sort of thing. And they're sending "Minute to Win It", a game show formerly called "Perfect 10" hosted by Guy Fieri, up against "The Amazing Race", ABC's "Extreme Home Makeover", and Fox's animation block. (Interestingly enough, Fox has ordered a US version of Britain's "The Cube", which uses a similar concept, giving people a very limited amount of time to complete otherwise very simple tasks for a startlingly large amount of money. The Cube adds in the concept of a sort of physical restraint -- contestants are contained inside a plexiglass cube Fox apparently sent the order straight to series, but it's not clear when the series will air -- my own guess would be as a summer replacement series, depending on cost, given the relative success of ABC's "Wipeout!" as a summer series. But i digress.) Guy Fieri, the second winner of the Food Network's "Next Food Network Star", can be a very ... acquired taste, let's say. Though, honestly, game show host seems like the sort of thing that would suit his expansive personality to a T. "Celebrity Apprentice" goes up against ABC's "Desperate Housewives" and "Brothers and Sisters" and CBS' procedurals, offering a genuine alternative and a proven show that should do OK in that time slot. (Though, seriously, two hours a night of that every week? Well ... OK.)

Really, the best thing you can say of NBC's winter/spring schedule is, given the utter lack of notice and time they had to construct it is that they're clearly making the best effort they can. It'll be interesting to see how it all works out.

It's worth noting that they're a day behind at this point. Last night, Conan got truly vicious and mean about the whole thing in a way that I hadn't thought he had in him, including taking a direct shot at Jay Leno.

I have to admit, I hope this is the last time he does something like that. As long as he can direct his shots at NBC, and not Leno, I think he'll get a lot more support. Once he starts going after Jay ... well, honestly, at least in his public persona, Jay is a bit meaner and a bit sharper with the personal attacks, and I kind of don't think Conan can win that way anyway.

Moreover, in order to maintain any sort of respect from its own employees and from the business at large, NBC has to put a stop to this public sniping on its own airwaves, and soon. In any other business, an employee who went after their employer like this would at the least be suspended, if not fired outright. Of course, they're in a difficult position there, as well; Leno's also been sniping at the network, and he's the one they want to keep the most. Differential treatment for substantially the same activity might put NBC in an even more difficult legal position. The one thing they've got to work with is that Conan seems to have now specifically said in public that NBC breached his contract, which is something their lawyers can go after.

On the other hand, there's this interesting aspect: NBC is actually kind of benefiting from the late night follies. Kind of. "The Tonight Show" ratings are up 42% in key demographics this week. You'd think that might be enough of a "win", if that's quite the right word, for NBC to let things continue. However, ratings for the Leno show have dropped 10% during the same time period, which means they're feeding even fewer viewers to the affiliates' late night newscasts, which was the key that set all these dominoes in motion in the first place.(That said, Leno's lead-in was off substantially as well. Sort of points out the benefits of a strong lead-in, doesn't it?)

The whole mess will probably end, or at least disappear from public view, fairly soon. Enhanced ratings for Tonight aside, NBC simply cannot tolerate things going on like this for much longer.

So presumably, when NBC moves Jay Leno back to the 10:30 Central time slot, he will actually get to be hosting the Tonight show again. I can't imagine that NBC will want the name to go away after all these many years, and it'll be available.

Except ...

The question is just how much NBC wants to screw over Conan at this point. Considering the rather epochal reaming they've been giving him the past week or so, the idea that they don't "have the stomach" for a long legal battle seems kind of improbable. They may decide to shelve the Tonight show name for a couple of years -- ending something like a continuous 50-odd year run -- purely to keep from having to make a massive payout. After all, part of this whole mess was about NBC wanting to save money at the corporate level, even though they were told and told and TOLD that the Leno show would be ruinous for their affiliates.

That Conan may not have the stomach for a long legal battle I can imagine -- his public persona, at least, is the sort of person who really woudln't like that. And, hey, he's been getting paid a few million a year for a while now. Even with the downturn in the stock market, he surely has enough stored by to decide, What the heck, I'm going to take a couple years off, let my contract expire, maybe go back and do a lot more standup to sharpen those skills again, and then come back to late night with Fox or whoever. And that said, as the article notes, the Fox affiliates are for the most part not at all happy about Fox wanting a late night show and having to give up the lucrative (and unshared) advertising spots that come with the syndicated shows in that timeslot. That's apart from the rather hefty expenses to the network itself that come with starting the show in the first place. Given that their affiliates are going through "a challenging business cycle", it might also suit Fox to back off for a couple of years until things settle down a bit.

The only issue then would be whether or not people were still interested in watching Conan at all -- a very real issue, given how easy people seem to bounce from show to show these days.

And all of this coverage came from people noticing that NBC had ordered a startling 18 pilots for next season, including an even more startling 10 one-hour dramas, and unless the Leno show went away, NBC had nowhere for those shows to go, even if they cancelled the rest of their lineup.

Here's the question I'd like to see answered: if NBC really does plan to effectively cancel Leno's show as of the end of the Winter Olympics ... what do they do with the rest of this season? They didn't order drama pilots for this season in large enough numbers to cover the space. They don't have enough comedy shows in reserve to shove back their dramas into the late primetime slot. They let Southland go to TNT -- and I would argue, myself, that it should have been either there or at FX in the first place, but that's neither here nor there. They let Medium go to CBS. So far this season, they let Trauma go, period. That's three shows that they no longer have to plug holes with. The question remains: what does NBC do with that last hour of coverage from the beginning of March through the end of August? (And make no mistake: NBC will need to do something to prevent the normal summer viewing doldrums from absolutely killing any momentum they might build up for next fall.)

They may be able to expand Dateline to take over some of the space. It has the virtues of being relatively well-respected and, you know, cheap. And its ratings couldn't possibly do much worse than Leno. But even Dateline would need some prep time to get stories filmed, edited, ready to air. And the last time NBC tried to overload its nightly lineup with too much of that sort of thing, viewers, again, deserted in droves. People only want just so much news coverage, alas. Apparently, they do have some reality shows in reserve, and as noted in The Wrap's article, they can always pull over some USA, SyFy and Bravo shows for a short-term fix. (That said, they tried doing exactly that the past two summers. Turns out that people really don't want to watch USA shows on NBC. Cable penetration seems to have finally gotten deep enough that most people who want to see those shows actually do watch them on their original broadcast.) Depending on how the contract reads, they may also be able to pull "Friday Night Lights" onto the rotation a bit earlier -- though I'd think that DirectTV would object most strenuously to shortening their exclusive window.

It's likely that whatever sort of short-term solution NBC comes up with, it will involve doing something with the earlier slots as much as the later ones. Those previously mentioned reality shows without air dates will almost certainly be better suited for earlier in the evening rather than later. Perhaps they can come up with some sort of game shows on the fly or perhaps expand existing ones -- two hours of Biggest Loser that night, maybe, instead of one? except that's already been taped, of course, and that would probably be much too major an edit and would likely damage that show very badly. Regardless, doing something earlier would allow them to set the schedule back to the slightly more sane state it was in last season. "Heroes", the mostly-departed "Trauma", "Mercy", "Law and Order" and "Law and Order SVU" are all clearly in timeslots too early for the material -- the "Law and Order" shows most notably. Seriously, who on earth thought it was a good idea to lead Fridays with that material?

NBC has done this sort of rebuilding act before, of course. They were in a terrible state back in the 1980s, before they built their line-ups of doom with the Cosby Show, LA Law, ER, and other shows that pulled them out of the pit. The landscape now, however, is dramatically different. That television viewership has become heavily fractured since then may, oddly enough, help a bit; it means that in order for something to work well, it doesn't need the same sort of huge audiences that you needed back then. (A side note: One of NBC's notable decisions back in the day was cancelling an excellent comedy called "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd" because it was damaging their powerhouse Thursday night lineup. At the time, Molly Dodd was something like the 13th highest rated show of the season, and LA Law, which followed, was top ten. They replaced Molly Dodd with, I believe, Family Ties or Night Court. The next season, LA Law was the top rated show on television.) That said, the one thing that NBC had at the time, which they don't have now, is time and stability. They could afford to let shows that didn't do well initially have some time to find their audience. They had people who got to hang around long enough to tinker with lineups until they worked. None of that seems to be true today; if whatever they do to make things work doesn't work fairly quickly, those people may not get a chance to try again.

Basically, NBC has a six-week to two-month window in which to figure out what the hell they do now, as well as a summer to figure out what they do next. The network's certainly going to be looking at some interesting decisions ahead. Possibly -- even probably -- in the Chinese curse sense of "interesting".

In last night's episode of Glee, they made the students pair up with each other to sing ballads to each other, as it would be required at sectionals. Fine and dandy. And the students were paired randomly by picking names out of a hat, which allowed for people to be paired in hi-larious ways. The club has an interesting yet very Hollywood mix of apparent ethnicities -- a black boy and girl, Matt and Mercedes, and an Asian boy and girl, Tina and .... They have, interestingly enough, resisted the temptation to pair everyone up romantically along ethnic lines. So far, so good. For last night's episode, the black guy, Matt, was supposedly out sick, leaving Mr Schuester, the teacher, to pair off with the student who he discovered had a crush on him. Larf riot! And then Tina pulled a piece of paper out of the hat, and she said: "Other Asian."

Ha.

Ha.

Ha.

Here's the thing: Glee club only has 12 students. They've been going for several weeks in the show's time. Mr Schu is practically neurotic about trying to be a good mentor to his students. You're telling me that after all this time, he wouldn't know the student's name? Moreover, he wouldn't know how humiliating it would be for that student to have it stated in public that the teacher couldn't remember the guy's name? Mind, it's also possible -- perhaps even probable -- that Tina said that on her own, as an insult to someone who might well have been one of her persecutors. Which ... OK, but in that case, the teacher should have said something. It shouldn't have passed unnoticed. And in either case, quite honestly, it feels vaguely like the powers that be were trying to avoid giving him a name because once he has a name, he'd actually maybe get lines, and the speaking cast is quite crowded already.

I suppose I shouldn't be terribly surprised. They screwed the pooch rather badly the last time they brought up anything like ethnic issues played for comedy, in the episode "Throwdown", but that was easier to get past, since they were trying to make a point -- albeit badly, and the point was actually quite quite wrong -- and the good intentions were practically glittering on their sleeves. (And, in fact, in light of later revelations about Sue Sylvester, the episode makes a great deal more sense ... though the point Schu makes is still quite quite wrong.) In "Ballad", this was just a small moment played straight up for comedy ... and they should have known better. Anyone thinking about it for a tenth of a second would have known better. It's not true to the characters as they've built them, it's not true to the situation, and it's wrong on its face. Plus, it's just plain not funny.

To be sure, last night's episode was wildly uneven. One thing they did right was showing other parents, finally, and how they react to the news that their children are going to have an untimely baby, which the entire school including faculty already knew. Finn's mother was hurt, but supportive; Quinn's parents threw her out. There's also the gay kid Kurt with a crush on Finn, and Finn having the brains of a flea (and, to be fair, being a teenager) has not the slightest idea how to handle it. And the actual crush plot with the teacher and student was handled fairly well, and done in one, which is good. And we will not speak of Mercedes' advice to Puck, which was not only wrongheaded, but possibly also wrong for the character as we've seen her built to date. (She seems to have very firm ideas about what's right and wrong, and to tell someone that they should just shut up about what's right in order to make life easier for someone else doesn't seem in character.) It wasn't, overall, a bad episode, and it had some very good moments in it.

But that "Other Asian" crack ... it still nags, for some reason. It's a tiny, small thing. I know this, I absolutely know it. It just ... vexes me.

It vexes me, you hear?

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Commendations? Brickbats?

No, really.

No ... really.

"Acquire voices" ... well, whatever.

Most likely, to the extent that gay romances get published, they're going to be M/M romance rather than gay -- that is, aimed and oriented at their women readers, rather than at the gay market. Developing a new client base would be massively difficult, after all, and they've had Torquere and Samhain and Dreamspinner and Ravenous Romance and (somewhat accidentally) Cleis Press to show them that yes, there are lots and lots of women out there who will read stories of men in love and/or gettin' it on. And Carina, as long as people know that it's a Harlequin imprint, would be a desperately hard sell to gay bookstores and gay male readers. After all, we've long been conditioned to run screaming into the woods at the very sight of a Harlequin romance, because gooshy books that women like are icky! Icky icky icky! (We men are delicate flowers that wilt at the mere mention of women's literature and/or romance. Be gentle with us.)

(For the record, I have, somewhat accidentally, wound up with three Harlequin audiobooks. One was actually pretty enjoyable, although the pace of the reading kept the wacky hijinks from coming off quite the way the author probably intended. The other two, I must admit, were rather dreadful. Not because they were romances -- strangely enough, I like a good romance, meself -- but because the authors didn't seem to trust the characters or the story they were telling. They kept introducing extraneous obstacles, because if the characters actually just, you know, talked to each other, the stories would have been about half the required word length. It was very frustrating. But one digresses. For the record, I've also quite deliberately bought some from Ravenous Romance, including some gay(ish) and a couple of straight ones. Overall, not bad, although I do have Issues with some of the writers. But that's fodder for another entry.)

It really will be interesting to see what writers and what types of stories wind up getting published by Carina. The no-advance policy may deter some people from even trying to sell to them; it depends, in part, on what the royalty rate actually is. Judging from ravenousromance.com and Amazon's Kindle books, the price of your average e-book will be noticeably lower than that of a paperback, so it might wind up that you get a smaller amount of royalty moneys than you would from a traditionally published book, with or without advances, anyway.

The other interesting point, from a purely business perspective, is Harlequin deciding to make their books DRM-free. If they also pick one of the more open formats -- which, if they're not using DRM, they might as well do -- that will enable their books to be used on the Kindle, the nook (Barnes and Noble insists on the lower-case "n", and I'm certainly in no position to kvetch), netbooks and laptops or most PDAs and smart phones. There should be the potential for a surprisingly large market. It is, however, a highly unusual business decision; most of the current e-book publishers are pretty solidly in the "DRM! DRM! Oh, dear gawd, do not put something out without DRM lest we die! die! Die right here and now! Aieeee!" camp. Harlequin may be one of the few major publishers to decide not to copy-protect their works. This will, of course, lead to a certain amount of piracy, but it may also lead to slightly higher sales, as well, assuming that the model for the music industry is somewhat valid.

I have to admit, I am rather curious as to how Harlequin's M/M books will turn out. My main issue with the M/M romances that I've read is that the men frequently aren't particularly realistic, but then, I'm never quite sure how realistic romances are supposed to be. After all, they're a fantastical sort of literature, entirely by design. It seems rather pointless to harp at fantasies for not being real. I suppose my particular taste in romantical literature would be for more real men, though. Somehow, that seems to make for a story that works better.

But that's an entry for another day.

Questions? Comments? Brickbats?

Hmm.

Well, assuming that they not only want to deal with relevance, but also to connect the films with something more than just the existence of the characters, I'd think that a painful politicized war with the Romulans was somewhat more likely and reasonable. For that matter, although they were at odds for years and years in the outer space version of cold war -- speaking of allegory and relevance -- the Federation never, I believe, actually went to war with the Klingons. They just yelled at each other a lot. And then the Klingons had the odd civil war or two which the Federation both tried to keep out of and wound up helping particular factions therein, because nobody gets to be completely disinterested in a civil war on your borders. The other reason that the Romulans would make slightly more sense than the Klingons is that, according to the story of the first film, Nero's Narada devastated the Klingon space fleet -- something like 40-60 warbirds destroyed. Add to that the destruction of a fairly hefty chunk of the Federation fleet at Vulcan, and the chance to take out two of their rivals could look terribly tempting to the Romulans. THAT said ... if the Klingons think that Narada was a Federation weapon, if they don't know about the destruction of the fleet or Vulcan, then some sort of retaliatory strike that leads to war might make sense. (How they would not know about all that fairly quickly, I leave as an exercise for the screenwriters. Hey, maybe we can get the Golden Gate Bridge all destroyed again!)

But on the ... well, not so much an upside as a "gee, wonder if they were paying attention" side, it looks like they're going to be reinventing the better years of Deep Space Nine -- only with characters that weren't quite developed for any story that dark, and putting it in a terribly compressed storyline. After all, one can but assume that they're not going to make war with the Klingons/Romulans any kind of long-running theme through the next and succeeding films; that would hamstring their ability to tell stories that didn't have to do with the wars of the worlds. Any war is likely to be a one-and-done story, maybe with enough time passing between the films to say, "So, right after Nero, the Romulans/Klingons did this thing, and then the Federation finally retaliated, and then we had this war, see?" Starting more or less like Star Trek: First Contact, in the middle of a battle that gets explained as things move along. (Though it's worth nothing that First Contact is a very "inside baseball" film; it fails completely if you never saw Next Generation, since you wouldn't know who the Borg were, and if you never saw the Zephram Cochrane episode of the original series, since you wouldn't know who he was either.)

I wonder if Section 31 is known to exist in this new, darker version of the Federation that the new timeline contains, or if it's still called Section 31. It would certainly exist -- Starfleet is much more military, judging from the size of Enterprise and the fact that a huge chunk of the fleet was off doing military exercises, and any organization that military will have some sort of black ops group.

Sounds like the new film is going to be all about defining the parameters and ethics of the new Federation. We knew what it was, what it aspired to be, back in the days of auld. What we don't know, because the first film was concerned with reintroducing the characters and showing us that things were different now, is what it is. And now we get to find out.

One suspects that the Federation's version of Abu Ghraib, Baghram, and extraordinary rendition will be very nasty indeed.

And Playgirl vs Unzipped is only the tip of the hot throbbing iceberg, as it were. Other gay porn outlets have been offering him money to pose naked, and possibly do a bit more. Mr. Johnston does not, it appears, seem to be taking those offers even remotely seriously. No, it's narrowed down to two -- (1) Playgirl, which, apart from the fact that the magazine portion of the title has died and the online version is perfectly well aware that perhaps 60% or more of its readership is actually gay males, and (2) Unzipped, which is unabashedly all gay! all the time! (but which is perfectly well aware, if you read the articles -- really, there are some! -- that a certain smallish portion of its readership is actually straight women. (The article on strap-on sex from a few months back could only ever have been aimed at women. After all, absent illness or injury, we do come pre-equipped, as it were. But I digress.)

Apart from the issue of whether it's going to be Playgirl or Unzipped -- and, seriously, judging from the admittedly very little I've heard/seen Mr Johnston say in various places, I really do think that Unzipped might be a tad further than he's willing to go, even though they'd be perfectly willing to allow him to protect his manly modesty, as it were -- there's also been a veritable feeding frenzy over the shirtless photos of him changing his kid's diaper. (Scroll to the bottom of the Advocate article for a sample.) Is he a good looking guy? Well, yes, I suppose. Needs some chest hair. But yes, he's perfectly decent looking. Is there perhaps a touch of the schadenfreude in having the baby daddy of Sarah Palin's daughter's child doing something of which former Gov. Palin and her social conservative set would strongly disapprove? Oh, hell, yes! Does all that account for all the unseemly feeding frenzy in wanting more, more, MORE of him? Well ... not really, no.

Sometimes, I just don't understand the gays.

Disney keeps growing and growing and growing. One wonders what the debt load of this company is these days. (And there's something that people never thought about before recent years. I wonder if it's possible for a media company like this to hit the official "too big to fail" point. But I digress.)

The puzzling thing about this transaction is that Disney just licensed several of its characters to Boom Studios. You'd think that if this was in process for a while -- and given the sheer size of the transaction, it must have been -- that they'd have held off and given the license to Marvel. Though, that said, the puzzling thing about giving the license to Boom in the first place is that Gemstone Publishing has long held the rights to most of the Disney characters. Given Gemstone's recent struggles, Disney may have been thinking of pulling the licenses, or at least was understandably reluctant to give them new business. Even on Gemstone's own site, there's an ad for an all-ages title that Disney gave to Dark Horse.

In any event, as the story notes, this is going to allow Disney access to expertise to reconnect with the young male market. In theory, at least. It is interesting to see that Marvel's movies -- as opposed to their comics -- really do connect to that young audience, while the superhero comics audience is aging and shrinking. You'd think that the film success would indicate that Marvel could connect with the younger audience in its comics, but strangely, that doesn't happen. The youth audience seems profoundly disinterested in the source material for the films.

It's worth noting that the Times is a bit ... well, behind the times in noting that Disney can use the characters in animated shows on Disney XD, a channel designed to appeal to younger males. Old Marvel cartoons are already running on XD -- albeit mostly at hours where, unless they're older teens, the desired youth audience won't be able to stay up to watch them. (And older teen males might not be caught dead watching something called "Disney", a brand associated in their mind not only with girls, but with kiddies, at that.) "X-Men Evolution", the last incarnation of the Spiderman cartoon -- the one originated on MTV -- old Incredible Hulk and Fantastic Four cartaoons can be seen there at odd hours. They lost the newest Fantastic Four cartoon to Nickelodeon's Nicktoons, but now that they're responsible for producing it, if it does well, they can always yank it away. It depends, I suppose, on whether the combination of expenditures and incomes works better with it farmed out to another channel.

It's going to be interesting to see what Disney does with Marvel. The House of Mouse is not generally known for letting its subdivisions go on their merry ways without a very firm guiding hand. That said, Pixar does seem to have a relatively free rein with Disney's animation division -- which, after all, had been wildly inconsistent in recent years, despite being the original core of Disney's business -- so maybe it's possible that Marvel will get to do what it wants. Though, frankly, I just have this feeling that Disney will look askance at Icon, Marvel's creator-owned division. The idea that there are characters to which it does not own the rights and which it cannot exploit as it chooses may make it terribly twitchy, never mind the explicitly adult (as in grownups, not as in porn) orientation of Icon and Max, Marvel's own adult-content label. They did, after all, decide to pull back on the Touchstone and Hollywood film labels, created explicitly so that they could produce more adult content not on the Disney label.

Disney's acquisition of Marvel is probably not going to make a lot of difference overall in what people see on the Marvel label itself. I do suspect that there will eventually be a Marvel Kids label, with the Pixar/Muppets license eventually pulled from Boom and possibly the Marvel Adventures line consolidated therein. And I think that Icon, at least, is low performing enough that there may be some pressure to let it go.

Marvel is in for some interesting times ahead.

Questions? Comments? Cigars, cigarettes, Cigarillos?

For this first part, we have the honorable mentions, or, Stuff that didn't make the main final list, but is still worth a look:

Adam and Andy by James Asal:

As the title states, it's about Adam and Andy, long time partners (... Who may have last names, but I don't have the slightest idea what they are.) They have a house in the suburbs (...I think), and seem to be living the gay American Dream. We see them at work, at home, at play, their friends and neighbors. We see how they've been changing -- one of the running jokes is about how they're no longer the hardbodies they used to be, despite the workout equipment in the basement. It's a sweet, gentle story.

Structurally, more or less a weekly gag strip. Asal's been expanding the strip in different directions over the past year, so the story has been flexing and changing quite a lot. Updated weekly, the continuing storylines move veeeerrrry sloooooowly. It's fun and it's a good read, it just takes a while to get where it's going. It's not terribly difficult to keep track, in part because Asal has relatively few characters and keeps the focus on an individual storyline until it's run its course. (That said, long-running storylines per se are a fairly new thing to this particular strip.)

The Alcoholic (Jonathan Ames/Dean Haspiel; DC/Vertigo)

In which we learn about the life and times of Jonathan A, who may or may not be Ames. It's basically the story of A's life in alcoholic fits and starts. We start in 2001, where A comes out of an alcohol blackout in a car with a much older woman, with whom he may or may not have had sex. We then flash back to the beginning of his drinking days as a teenager, when he used to hang out with his best friend Sal. They loved each other, in that intense and romantic way that adolescents do, and eventually more or less accidentally have sex with each other. Unfortunately, it seems to throw both of them off balance; Sal reacts by pushing A to the margins of his life, and A reacts by drinking to bury the pain of being pushed away from his closest friend. And somehow ... he just never really stops drinking. He goes into rehab, but that doesn't quite stick. He has some spectacularly disastrous relationships with women -- there was never any particular doubt that he's more or less straight, after a certain amount of understandable early floundering. And eventually -- far too late -- he meets Sal again, under some very changed circumstances. But this isn't a story about that meeting, particularly; that's just one event in a very appallingly eventful life. It's really the story of A and his addiction to alcohol -- and later, other drugs -- and how that wreaks havoc on the rest of his life.

I really love Haspiel's art. It's a bit less angular, I think, than his style for his Billy Dogma stories, and a bit more detailed. There are places where I'm not entirely sure it's a fit for the story as a whole -- frankly, there are several times where it seems more interesting and dynamic than the story it's helping to tell.

As a whole, The Alcoholic is an interesting story of a life gone out of balance. It does leave you wondering if A can ever permanently dig himself out of the morass he's made for himself ... and if A is really Ames, how much of all of that really happened.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Various writers and artists; Dark Horse)

I actually thought the storyline in which Buffy winds up sleeping with Satsu was pretty well handled. Buffy tried to avoid her, knowing that Satsu was quietly in love with her and that she couldn't return Satsu's feelings, but then winds up falling into bed with her mostly because she's desperately lonely, and Satsu cares. Given that she got involved with Spike, who should have been staked seasons ago, and with Riley who got himself involved with vampires, a one-night stand with Satsu really barely registers on Buffy's bad romantic/sexual decisions index. And the part where they decide not to tell anyone, followed almost immediately by a parade of people with urgent business coming into Buffy's bedroom, was well-done comedy. The part where Willow grilled Satsu on Buffy's bedroom skills, not so much. Satsu eventually -- eventually -- winds up coming out of the relationship just fine, once she accepts that she and Buffy Will Never Be.

In more fun tales of lesbians elsewhere, we discover that we haven't seen Kennedy because Willow's been trying to keep her out of the way, someplace where she won't get captured or killed ... well, on the one hand, given Willow's romantic history, it's understandable. On the other, given that Kennedy's a slayer who was in on the last apocalypse, it's kind of unbelievable, as well, both that Willow would do that, and that Kennedy would tolerate it as long as she does. So something good, something not so good, but as a whole, still noteworthy.

Kyle's Bed and Breakfast by Greg Fox:

basically a soap opera, telling us of the lives of the many people who flow in and out of Kyle's Bed and Breakfast. I really like this strip. It has a fairly diverse cast, and the artwork is generally very good -- though the art can get a bit strange. (Seriously, this strip just looks odd. Breyer's not-really-sleeping position looks weirdly stiff -- though I think that may be deliberate -- and in the final frame, his head looks like it's about to come right off. I'd also note that the entire strip is about an argument that we never saw, which is awkward storytelling for characters you don't see that often.)

The comic updates once every two weeks, more or less, and it's got a cast far too large for its update frequency. (Understand that I am not saying, "Oh, woe is we! Why doesn't he do that five days a week? Then we could have all the comic goodness we want!" Seriously, the guy's got a life, and this don't pay the bills. I get that, really.) The cast page doesn't include most of the characters and the older archives were taken offline to put into the book, so you have no real way of figuring out who people are in context, no way to quickly remember, "Oh, yeah, that's how the guy in the wheelchair came into the story." Especially given that it does take place in a bed and breakfast -- you have both a certain amount of regular cast, but also a reasonably high rate of turnover, because that's what a B&B does -- it can be very difficult to figure out who's connected to who, who's permanent and who's a guest, what the heck is going on, and who is that guy in the green sweater on the far right, anyway?

Punch an' Pie by Aeire and Chris Daily:

I wanted to include this one on the main list, so, so much. I really like this series, primarily about a young woman learning to be on her own and her varied and sundry friends and their lives. But ... but there really wasn't any technically appropriate content in 2008. In 2007, yes. That year, Angela and Heather had a relationship that eventually came a-cropper over Angela's persistent and unwarranted jealousy issues. In 2008, however, while neither of them was precisely over the relationship, they didn't really gotten involved with anyone else, either; the storyline focused on friends and jobs and other things. They're just getting on with the rest of their lives. Plus, to the extent that anything seems to be happening, Heather's had a couple of apparent rebound flings with Aiden, which is, you know, all heterosexual and stuff.

Shortpacked by David Willis:

fun and wacky hijinx of a retail toy store, featuring a gay guy who only figured that out a couple of years ago, the virgin and "my lesbian", and an apparently bisexual asshole. Oh, and Faz. It's fun to read, it's just ... well. One could send the "Mike sleeps with everyone for revenge over uncommitted slights" storyline to GLAAD and watch their heads explode. (Oh, the temptation...) And yet ... it does have its weirdly sweet moments, every now and again. Of course, they never end well...

Sleazy Pizza (Ryan Roman; act-i-vate.com; adult and NSFW due to depictions of sex and nudity)

Originally, I was going to put this on the main list. I really do think it's a facinating, trippy, well-drawn comic. That said, it's hard to get around the author's assertion that it became "chaotic and disjointed" near the end. (I liked it anyway. In part because I just plain like Roman's artwork, but in part because I wanted to see where he was going to take it next, and how it could possibly work.)

Sleazy Pizza tells the story of Nolan and Jon, starcrossed lovers if ever there were any. Though it doesn't seem that way at first. They find each other, they start a relationship ... and then it goes bad, and they break up. Nolan realizes that he's made a horrible mistake and tries to find J.J. again, but all of J.J's friends are hiding him from Nolan. Eventually, Nolan gets someone to tell him where to find J.J. -- at a certain cost to Nolan and the other guy both -- and their relationship begins again. And then it suddenly veers and turns into a sort of sequel to Roman's earlier comic "Kid Zero". ("Kid Zero" has the most fascinatingly grand guignol ending -- and middling and occasional other goriness -- of a superhero comic that I've ever seen. I'd link to the ending, but unfortunately, it's on act-i-vate's livejournal site, and act-i-vate's LJ archive is a mess. This is the last part I can find, with links to all the earlier parts, but I'm not sure it's the actual end, as I remember it. But I digress.)

Seriously, though, some of the places where you can see it kind of heading into odd territory are really interesting and well-done. You even got occational outbreaks of Meat Loaf, sort of. Any road, Roman seems to be reeling the comic back in -- sort of -- with the current volume, and, weirdly, has maintained the fascinatingly trippy tone even though the story is more grounded so far. The current volume seems to be about actions that have consequences, even though you may not have been in full control of your actions at the time. It'll be interesting to see where it goes.

Coming up next: the main list! (Do not even think about asking when "next" is.)

Questions? Comments? Cigars, cigarettes, Cigarillos?

I am deeply amused. This makes me suspect that they were likely trying something out with Amazonfail that went very badly indeed. (So all the protesting about the "rogue cataloger in France"? Probably not so much of one, no.) At a guess, there was probably some erroneous programming, yes, and the switch got tripped far too soon -- possibly a test that was meant to be done on a backup copy of the system, and not the main public catalog. That said ... even if they were doing it for the Logo store and video content, the metadata on the items was, and remains, far too broad. But I digress.

On the whole, it looks like it's just a subsection of the Amazon catalog -- albeit a strangely invisible one. If you know the front page, you can go straight to it. If you do a search within the main Amazon catalog for a Logo-branded item -- Noah's Arc, for example -- it appears in the catalog without any mention of the Logo store. You'd think that anything that appeared in the Logo store would have something attached to the record that said, "Hey, we've got an entire store of stuff Just For You! Anything that has ever been anywhere in the vague vicinity of Logo! All together in one place! Really! Have a look!" You know, something like that. Amazon is not, after all, known to be terribly subtle about such things, and normally it works for them just fine.

As long as the stuff isn't being separated out of the main catalog, I suppose there's nothing bad about this. Given the implementation, it's hard to see how it benefits anyone besides Logo -- it gives them a way of directing deep links off of their site, and possibly gets them out of the vendor business, if that's what they want. Eh. We'll see how it goes.

The Los Angeles they're showing us is overwhelmingly black and Latino, with occasional moments of relatively well off and working class whites. (NB: According to the LA Almanac, Los Angeles is roughly 30% white, 9% black, 13% Asian, 46% Hispanic, and the rest assorted other.) The LAPD they're showing us is overwhelmingly white. (According to Wikipedia, which got the stats from the US Department of Justice, "the LAPD was 82% male in 2000. 46% of the department was white, 33% of the department was Hispanic/Latino, 14% was African American, and 7% was Asian.") As far as we can tell, Southland seems to contain several white cops, one Latino, two blacks and two women (with overlap between the last two). Granted, it's only one precinct. And granted, the black woman and Glynn Turman's occasional chief of police are blacks in a position of authority. And granted, television has only just so much obligation to have its fictions resemble reality even a little.

It seems to be a thing that happens with police procedurals set in Los Angeles. It was present, though not quite to the same degree, with FX's The Shield. The Shield had much more in the way of both black and Hispanic police around, and just as important, recurring black and Hispanic other characters who had, like, lines. And, to be sure, it's not remotely fair to be judging Southland on its recurring characters; after all, it's only been on a few weeks, and we've barely started to get a handle on all the regular characters. (If I were to give a pure critique, I'd say that the show was perhaps a mite overpopulated; it's difficult to even remember who characters are week to week, and it's got to accommodate so many of them each episode that it can seem a bit cluttered. That said, that aspect seems fairly realistic. At any given time, you're going to have a lot of police in any given precinct, out on the streets, etc. It just makes for busy drama.)

Southland's casting is only really problematic when you have episodes like the one from May 7, where one of the cops gets his gun stolen by some gang members after a traffic accident. In order to find the gun without having to fill out an incident report, the cops roust out something called a "misdemeanor bust", where they basically arrest everyone they can see for any reason whatsoever. In other words, what we see is a bunch of white cops rousting and harrassing, with no real cause, a bunch of blacks and Latinos. In the real world, that would have gotten them, at the least, a blizzard of entirely justified police harrassment complaints and lawsuits, and quite possibly an out-and-out riot. The media would have been covering it much more than they were, and heads would have had to been seen to have rolled.

Quite honestly, I don't think the producers and writers ever thought about how this looks, in that sense. I'm not saying that anyone was at all, to any degree, racist.They got the best actors they could find for the roles they had in mind. Which ... fine, OK, I get that, really I do. But at some level, it seems like they should have thought about how their televised Los Angeles and LAPD would look against the real Los Angeles and LAPD. And beyond that, they should have thought about how casting the way they did would make their LAPD look against their Los Angeles. And I really don't think they did.

I still like the show. I still think it's worth watching, and that it's enjoyable, overall. But it is deeply and sincerely problematic, here and there.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that this will convey to "the fan-boys and -girls who love the genre" the opportunity to relentlessly mock the corporate overlords at NBC Universal. Because, seriously, Syfy? Seriously? Seriously?

NBC Universal has been searching ceaselessly for a way to rebrand SciFi almost since they bought it. The previous name change floated was "BeyondTV". This ran into, most likely, two issues: (1) BeyondTV was probably no more copyrightable than SciFi, and (2) the trademark was already owned by another company, who doesn't seem to have been interested in surrendering it. (By contrast, the former SyFy Portal site has now become Airlock Alpha, suggesting that they were not so loath to surrender a relentlessly silly phonetic name -- and my guess, and it's only a guess, is that they settled on that name because if they tried scifiportal.com as an address, the corporate SciFi leaned over and said "Ahem. We don't think so" (which is also why most people gave them a pass for having such a silly name) -- for hopefully lavish amounts of cash. (More likely, NBC Universal informed SyFy Portal of the planned change, and pointed out that once they'd done it, SyFy Portal would then be in trademark violation, and even though NBC Universal would eventually lose any such suit -- SyFy Portal predates the change, and has for quite some time -- it would cost them time and money they surely didn't have, so they might as well just surrender Dorothy now and get it over with.) In any event, it's clear that SciFi's corporate overlords ardently desired a way to rebrand and trademark the channel for ... well, that's just it. What does having a trademark in a television channel get you, exactly? The right to run around telling the kids to get off your intellectual property lawn? What?

With this name change, NBC Universal manages to inflict upon itself the worst of all possible worlds. First, given that it's phonetically the same as the old moniker, most people really won't notice the difference, even though the Saturn logo is also going away. This also means that the "limiting" features of the name will remain -- just because you're spelling it differently doesn't mean that people will think of SciFi any differently, especially when the content isn't any different. Second, people will be mocking them up and down the town. Third, for a channel interested in allegedly showing out-there, thought-provoking television (and, of course, wrestling), they've shown themselves to be signally out of touch. Mind, I don't think this is a debacle along the lines of the Tropicana package redesign, which is also mentioned in the article. Not because it's not just as big a change; I just don't think people are going to care that much.

Mind, I could be wrong. After all, how many consumers would want to be associated with such a channel that could make as brain-damaged a change as this?

A relatively straightforward presentation of the topic in both the title and brief description. No attempt to sensationalize, or be anything but informative, because the intended audience is other urologists and physicians.

Now, by contrast, take a look at the headlines for general-interest articles about the study:

The fascinating thing to note is how widely the various presentations diverge from the actual study, yet manage to report just enough of it to not be accused of deliberate misinformation. All of the articles say something about the masturbation link, though it varies widely from a sort of low-key approach to something just short of "MASTURBATION WILL MAKE YOUR GENITALS ROT OUT FROM THE CORE!" Only about half the articles manage to get around to noting that masturbation in your 50s is linked with a lower incidence of cancer. It's also interesting to note that most of the articles are reports of reports -- mostly of the BBC News piece. This means that nobody gets around to asking the critical question: "If masturbation provides a protective influence in your later years because it expels hormones and other substances that can be toxic, why wouldn't it be protective in your youth, when you're producing these hormones and substances at a much higher rate?"

As a side note: another fascinating thing about the recent flurry of notice about the Nottingham study is that it went online back in early November. Yet none of these outlets -- many of which are online-only -- actually noticed the article until this month, when it was published in the dead-tree version of BJU International. Apparently, for some things, unless a tree does fall in the forest, get converted into paper, and get printed in bound and widely distributed format, it might as well not make a sound, because nobody will notice that it's there until the dead-tree form arrives.