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.

Now ... not so much, no.

And, really, who would expect it? I knew the news content of the show would collapse as soon as they named Martin Bashir as the anchor, a few years back. After all, the man was a personality journalist. "Serious News" was not his middle name. And I actually hadn't seen an episode of Nightline since he took over. But for some strange reason, I wound up watching an episode tonight. And it was just ... odd. I mean, odd.

The concept behind today's show was Aspects of Recession, more or less. (Less. Really ... less.) The main story was about Obama's economic speech today, complete with dueling economists about whether it would be good or bad for the country. Very traditionally Nightline, although the presentation was considerably lighter and slicker than the Nightline of auld. Nonetheless, a very Nightline sort of thing to do. Framing that story, however....

The opening story dealt with the effect of recession on the restaurant business, more or less. (...much, much less.) To wit: "Hamburger Helper: Is 2009 the Year of the Burger?" Apparently, in times of trouble, Americans en masse turn to The National Comfort Food, so much so that not only are high-end restaurants adding on things that somehow remotely resemble burgers, but some of them are even grinding up high-end meats that otherwise are now not selling and making burgers out of those. We got to watch a reporter go through New York, eating one burger after another, talking to various and sundry about the joys of ground beef. It was very very strange, really. (I will just tell you right now that the online text piece linked above is FAR more seriously presented than the television story was.)

The closing story dealt with the effect of recession on grooming. To wit: chest hair is back. (Somehow, Nightline failed to notice that, aside from a brief and slightly bemused infatuation with the Bodygroom, chest hair has been back for at least a few years, but ... whatever.) Apparently, in times of trouble, Women Want Real Men. And they interviewed one whole woman to determine this! To be sure, the story wasn't intended to be taken entirely seriously. The bit about the chest hair transplants was quite serious, however. Men are really doing that.

The show then ended with a Closing Argument, which was no such thing. Basically, Bashir sent everyone to the website to state their opinion on whether or not the UN resolution will bring peace to Gaza. Which is such a mindnumbingly stupid question, I can't believe they even posed it seriously.

I realize this is just an old man sort of viewpoint. And it's entirely possible that this is a seriously atypical Nightline episode ... though, looking at the other stuff on the Nightline subsite, kind of not thinking so. But it is kind of sad that a show that was once genuinely informative has slid quite so far.

Questions? Comments? Cheeseburgers? Merkins?

I will admit, apart from being surprised that this happened so soon after the Monitor went online-only, my only curiosity is about what, precisely, the Freep and News plan to offer in those subscription online editions, and what that will mean for the current freep.com and detnews.com sites. After all, you can't reasonably charge for online delivery of the same content that you're largely delivering online for free if the only major difference is format. And whatever the market may be for the NY Times and Wall Street Journal online PDF replica editions -- which, frankly, always seemed like a way of marrying the most inconvenience to a profound lack of need -- I can't imagine that either of the Detroit papers would have the same proportion of users.

I wonder if the Chicago Tribune/Red Eye might not be the next metropolitan daily to follow. After all, Tribune has filed for bankruptcy. Still, I would think that at this point, it would disrupt their advertising model so badly that, even though ad revenue is declining sharply, it's really not yet worth it for something like that.

I also now really wonder if USA Today might now be the next national daily to follow in the Monitor's footsteps. As I mentioned last time, I haven't seen anyone actually reading a paper version of the paper in donkey's years, and I'm pretty sure that the online edition is substantially identical (and likely a bit easier to read, physically) to the paper edition.

The information above aside, I still don't quite get why, of all possible things, he's running a dating site (WARNING: Loud and somewhat annoying Flash video interface) off his web presence. Nonetheless, I think I could just kiss Bjorn Borg.

The below plays when you get to the website (the second link above) and click on the "We're getting married..." invitation:

I can't imagine, say, chemistry.com running an ad like that, especially in a way that seems so ... sweet.

Also from the news release linked above:

...OK, now I really could kiss him, silly scruffy beard (if he's still wearing one) and all.

Right. The DVR is the problem with serialized television. If you can't or don't watch it during its original on air broadcast, you're "saps and dipshits." So all those people who started watching Lost again when, you know, it stopped sucking, and the many of them who no doubt record it for later viewing, they're saps. The many people who record daytime soaps for later viewing because they're out doing frivolous things like, you know, earning a living or going to school or useless stuff like that -- and Heroes has nothing on serialization when compared to a daytime soap -- they're clearly all saps and dipshits. I mean, seriously, DVRs have made watching serialized dramas so much easier.

Kring is probably feeling a mite persecuted right now. He's feeling a bit defensive. I understand, I get it, and to a certain extent, I can't blame him for it; being constantly pilloried in public and the press can't be at all enjoyable, and people are not only picking on him, but on his baby (so to speak). But insulting your audience, and saying terribly terribly stupid things in public aren't likely to get the people coming back in droves, you know?

As far as the show itself goes, making it less serialized will make it easier to write and produce, certainly. It won't by default make it better. And the problem with the show isn't the serial format, it's the storytelling. If you can't tell better and more coherent stories, then de-serializing it won't really help, now will it?

The question is, how likely and how soon will other newspapers switch to this option? The Monitor is in a unique position; not only is it non-profit, but it's also a national daily. There are really only three or four of those published in the US: the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the International Herald-Tribune, and the Monitor are the only ones I can think of offhand -- and the Herald-Tribune is, as the name states, "international"; its primary audience, despite content that comes in large part from the NY Times (when did IHT start billing itself as "the global edition of the New York Times"?), really is almost entirely outside the United States. Of those four, I can't imagine the WSJ shifting to a primarily online delivery method any time soon; too many of its clients are "old business", let's call it, and really want a paper to give them an authoritative view, with online as a supplement for regular updating of certain stories and topics as needed. USA Today ... well, possibly. It does have a certain amount of online-only content, and to be honest, I have only very infrequently touched or even seen a physical copy of the paper in the last few years. I suspect their ad model might not hold up with that shift, however. The one I'm really curious about is the Herald-Tribune. with almost no domestic audience to worry about, depending on what the circulation, subscription and revenue figures are overseas, they're the other one of the four national dailies that can afford to tinker a bit.

Of the non-national dailies, the ones I might expect to go completely online next would be the mid-major sized newspapers, the ones for mid-sized cities, or the ones that are clearly the number two paper in a two paper town. As the article mentions, "the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. went online only, and The Daily Telegram in Superior, Wis., announced it would publish online except for two days a week"; you might expect to see papers like the Albuquerque Journal or the Tulsa Herald -- the only two successful online subscription dailies in the country -- or something like the Philadelphia Daily News or the Chicago Sun-Times to be the next ones to take the leap. For many of them, it's not going to be so much a choice for the bright shining future as a "what else have we got left to try? what else do we have to lose?" gambit.

What intrigues me a bit is one little nugget buried in the article, mentioned only in passing:

That makes me wonder if, perhaps after the Herald Tribune and maybe USA Today, the next major publications to go web-only might not be Time and Newsweek, maybe even Sports Illustrated as well. It depends, of course, on whether or not they could replace circulation and page ad revenue with web ad revenue, plus having some special areas that are subscription only-- for example, the bulk of the ESPN site is free (including, oddly, much of its own magazine section), but the ESPN Insider sits behind a subscription firewall. It's hard to tell what does or would work; magazine publication on the web seems to be littered with models that tell you almost nothing. Nerve has survived as a mixed subscription/free-content site, while Salon has struggled mightily as a mixed site that's primarily subscription. That probably speaks somewhat to their content, and the peculiar effect the web has had on information and commodities -- people may not mind paying for sex, but they expect the news to be free, or close enough for gub'mint work. (Given the organization's desire for the Monitor to give back to it, rather than being subsidized, I somehow don't expec the Monitor magazine to last long.)

Yep, we're headed for the future and the future's ... well, it's someone's anyway. And soon the paperboys and newsprint itself may be consigned to the nonbiodegradable landfill of history.

So, you always wondered what Miss Moneypenny got up to while James Bond was off saving the world, right? After all, she couldn't have been waiting there for James to come back and flirt with her again, no matter how the movies made things look. Well, with The Moneypenny Diaries, we finally get to find out.

The premise is: "Kate Westbrook", Moneypenny's niece, is send a trunk 10 years after her aunt's death in what appears to be an accident at sea. When opened, the trunk reveals the diaries that Jane Moneypenny kept through the 1960s. She kept the diaries as a way of maintaining a sort of contact with her father who died in WWII -- though, it turns out, not quite as they'd always heard. Needless to say, keeping written diaries, in which she discussed the various operations of the Office, was in direct contravention of Britain's Official Secrets Act, and she could easily have been fired and jailed for her offense. She was pefectly well aware of the consequences, and yet kept the diaries. One of the threads of her diaries is what it was like to be in the intelligence services during the time of Philby and other British intelligence failures, and she knows full well that her diaries would be seen in the same light, and could be just as valuable if obtained by Redland (the Soviet Union's code name). It also turns out, however, that there may have been another mole planted in British intelligence, and the diaries are also a record of what Moneypenny and M and others were trying to do to catch that person. Kate Westbrook determines to publish her aunt's diaries, and she winds up waking some sleeping dogs, who are determined to stop her.

Where Weinberg excels is in wrapping Bond history around actual history, in wonderfully seamless ways. (I thought, for example, that Prenderghast was a real person, and it took a bit of digging to discover that he was only a Bond person.) She uses footnotes to refer you back and forth, but without letting you know whether she's talking about something real or something Bond. Weinberg also evokes the times and the then-traditional role of women very well, as when Moneypenny worries about whether or not she should wear pants into the Savoy.

Weinberg also draws Jane Moneypenny herself very well, showing how she's so very good at her job that she briefly gets seconded as acting head of Jamaica section (the one where Bond keeps getting the section heads killed, yes -- in fact, that 's kind of why she goes out there). And think about it: as the secretary to M, and the person who sees and vets all the 00-agent reports, she has a security clearance probably second only to M himself; certainly a more stringent clearance than any of the 00-agents themselves have, since all of them report through her. She started out in the cipher unit, so she has a very quick and analytical mind. She also winds up on missions of her own, once by accident, twice on purpose, and one sort of self assigned (trying to discover the Sieve, the last mole in British intelligence at the time, and who may or may not even exist). She knows exactly how seriously to take James Bond and his flirting, but they're also real friends. And she has a romantic life of her own, though it comes under severe strain due to her job, and the fact that she can't ever tell the truth about what she does.

Weinberg also illuminates some points of Bond history that either I'd never read in the books or had completely forgotten. For example, it turns out that "James Bond" is a use name for MI6; the most effective agent gets that name on their promotion to the 00- unit. (I wouldn't be surprised if, over time, the 007 call sign winds up permanently linked to the "James Bond" house name.) It also turns out that, very briefly, Bond had a number in addition to 007, because he was administrative head of the 00 unit. It didn't last long; shortly after that promotion, he went to Japan and got involved in the "You Only Live Twice" mess. Fleming's books -- though apparently not the films -- also exist in that reality, as a sort of version of James Bond's diaries transcribed by Fleming. "James Bond", in one of those oddly ironic moments, winds up outliving Moneypenny, and we even meet him as part of the story. Very technically, we aren't meant to know that at the time -- Westbrook certainly doesn't -- but honestly, it feels very anvillicious. That said, I don't know if it was more obvious to me because I read the entire series over two weeks; if I'd read it over three years, as originally released, some of the clues might have been less apparent.

The one part of the series that's less successful is where Weinberg creates a conspiracy of people coming after Westbrook, possibly to prevent publication, or possibly for something more nefarious. It's possible that it could be MI6, of course, but at that point they've demonstrated how very easily they can ruin her life without threatening it, so if it's them, it would have to be some rogue faction within the unit. And in the event, when the conspirators are revealed, they make so little sense that the story even acknowledges that fact. To be sure, I understand why Weinberg might have felt that he story needed something of the sort, if Westbrook's story is going to be as involving as Moneypenny's story; it just doesn't really work as well. And honestly, I'm not sure that it was necessary; the detective story, where she does the research to prove her aunt right, kind of works well enough on its own.

In any event, the Moneypenny Diaries are a fun summer read, and a good Bond story in their own right. Something good to read while we're waiting for Quantum of Solace. And I have to admit, I got a kick out of imagining Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny doing all these things. And back when she first got the renewed Moneypenny role, Samantha Bond would have made an interesting Westbrook.

Highly recommended.

The judges are an interesting motley. Mitch Gaylord is a former Olympic gymnast and actor (if that's quite the right word -- I've seen some of his film work). Aurelia Cats is a circus performer -- contortion and trapeze -- as well as an experienced circus festival competition judge (i.e., the member of the judging panel who actually knows what she's talking about). Louie Spence is a dancer and choreographer, as well as having judged other countries' versions of the show; he's also very very very very gay (believe it or not, this is actually relevant, if not precisely a qualification). The judging appears to be a mix of that from American Idol and that of Dancing with the Stars. Circus has, in fact, completely absorbed the judging model from the first season of "Dancing with the Stars", in which 50% of the score comes from the judges, and 50% comes from the viewers. Presumably, this means that people are simply ranked in order of the total votes received, and also the judges' vote ranking. In theory, this should mean that if you pay attention to the judges' votes, you may be able to tell which people are safe, and which are at risk, at least for the next three weeks. Beyond that, there aren't enough people left to be safe, no matter what the judges do.. Like American Idol, Celebrity Circus at least pretends that the competition has something to do with performance, as well as popularity, barring votes before the broadcast ends, but limiting both phone and online voting to only two hours after the show.

According to various comments through the show, the celebrities will be rotating through the apparatuses week to week. On the one hand, that's understandable -- you don't want the audience to get bored with seeing too much repetition -- but at the same time, I wonder how wise that was. Presumably, the eight weeks of rehearsal was to allow them to rotate training through each apparatus, and then the week before the show, they concentrate on the one for the upcoming broadcast. I would think that spending so little time on each apparatus would make them more prone to injury, as has already happened, and certain apparatuses will aggravate injuries that have already occurred.

I'm beginning to suspect that Joey Fatone is perhaps the wrong host for the series. He's personable and enthusiastic enough, I suppose, but he seems a bit lost some of the time. And he really seems to have no idea how to handle Louie Spence and his sexual innuendoes at the various celebrities; that would be understandable if Louie were aiming his remarks at Joey, but he really doesn't speak to Joey after the introductions. Really, it needs someone with a certain engaging smarm who can give as good as he gets, like, say, Tom Bergeron.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes through the summer.

In the DVD documentary Show Business, they show the path to Broadway taken by both Wicked and by Avenue Q, as well as the ill-fated Taboo and Caroline, or Change. What they didn't show, and I wish they had because it must have happened, is the increasingly intense discussion between the composers and the producers of Avenue Q, who would have been looking at the final song and thinking, "Are you SURE you want to do this to this weirdly fun musical? Really? REALLY?" Because it really is seriously weird fun, and the moments just before the last song can only be described as Happy Endings Gone Seriously Weird, Yet Still Happy, and then the main character realizes that he hasn't yet found his purpose in life, and the entire cast sings a song that basically says, "Yeah, well, a lot of people never find their purpose, so suck it up and deal and settle like they do." And, well ... that's a freaky weird ending to stick on a show. It leaves you feeling sort of ... "Ha ha ha! Oh, my goodness, that was fun ... and now I never want to think about it again."

It will be interesting to see how this makes a difference to people's careers -- or doesn't make a difference, as the case may be. Like they said, I can't imagine that it could possibly harm either DeGeneres or Takei, and Portia de Rossi's career seems to be ticking along quite nicely as well.

So apparently that whole "all your gay media are belong to us" model didn't work out so well for PlanetOut.

PlanetOut would not seem to have done well by Liberation, one wya and another. Even allowing that Specialty Publications was making most of Liberation's money and wasn't included in the purchase of LPI, I can't imagine that Specialty was doing so well that it would have made up $30 million in the price difference. (I had heard, though I might be mistaken, that Liberation had already sold Specialty's video division to Channel One Releasing, or that they were considering it; that may have been mistaken information.)

I have to admit, I'm surprised that here Networks is buying LPI, or what remains of it. Buying two national magazines in a bear advertising market would not necessarily seem to be a great decision -- though, if you have the money, I can see wanting to keep Advocate and Out alive for historical reasons -- and Alyson seems to have profoundly lost its way in the past few years. (It may just be that the local stores only buy what people want and that's almost all I get to see, but it seems like most of what Alyson publishes these days is porn, and fiction and nonfiction books have moved in surprisingly large part over to Kensington -- the book publishing arm of journal publisher Haworth -- and other small companies, with a few large publishers also poaching a bit on the territory. That may just be perception and not reality, though.)

Something of a side note, but I'd also love to know how here's move to subscription style pricing, rather than their previous on-demand model, has worked for them. (I freely admit that here's change has annoyed the snot out of me; if I'm going to pay subscription prices as though it were a premium channel like HBO or Showtime, I want it to be a channel, something I can find simply by punching in the number. If it's going to be on the on-demand menu no matter what I do, then I want to pay per-item and on-demand. But I digress.)

It's going to be interesting to see how this works out for all concerned. For all that PlanetOut is now concentrating on its core websites, with the sale of its travel business and most of its publication arm ... there's not really a lot left of it, is there? And the web has expanded a lot in even the past few years. I can remember making PlanetOut a daily read, once upon a time, and now ... I can't remember the last time I deliberately went to PlanetOut. There are just other places out there that work better for the types of stuff I used to read on their site.

Anyway, here's hoping it works out well for all concerned.