Pop Culture Quick Hits

[UPDATED]
I know you've all been worried, but the weather forecasters were wrong, and we had a lovely day, and I actually got some surf time (by which I mean, I got to play and swim in the surf--I don't do surf boards). I'm so off balance and off my schedule that I even though I held a Sunday New York Times in my hands, it didn't even occur to me to check out Frank Rich's column. Not that it mattered, though, because Rich has the day off. Not directly in place of his column, though, is a lovely remembrance of Jack Kirby. It doesn't actually say a whole lot, but the recognition itself is nice to see. Anyway, without Frank Rich to plunder for a post, I've got some room for a few quick hits.

• Through a free association that started with the Prez's comparison of Iraq to Vietnam, passed through someone's suggestion that he'd next bring a Yossarian comparison into the picture (unfortunately, I can't remember precisely who, and there were 12,600 hits when I googled yossarian bush iraq vietnam), and ended up with Joseph Heller's changing the name of his novel to Catch-22 to avoid confusion with Leon Uris's Mila 18, it occurred to me that novels have very little power these days to affect the culture. What's the last novel that's really made a difference to our national culture? Yes, Harry Potter sells boatloads of copies, and The Da Vinci Code sold untold millions, too, but did they enter our national dialogue? They're familiar, certainly, but they don't really have the depth to change the way we think about things. At one time, movies replaced novels for making such social comments, and they still try to, but the industry has changed to put such a stress on opening weekend that even the best movies often don't amount to much more than a flash in the pan. I'm not the first person to point this out, but cable series have jumped into that position of influence today. We don't spring for cable at Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk headquarters, so we've been doing a lot of catching up this week. We're too late for The Sopranos, of course, but I've been going to parties lately and noticing that I can't really fully participate in conversations without a better working knowledge of Entourage, Rescue Me, and Nip/Tuck. Maybe it's getting about time to spring.

• I've also been catching up on a few videos that I hadn't seen yet. Did anybody else think that the video for Lily Allen's "Smile" is the first two acts of Brian Wood and Steve Rolston's comic Pounded? Does this mean that we should expect an answer video from someone else in which Lily Allen's spurned boyfriend comes back with a baseball bat?

• This is a very minor issue, but we started to watch Thunderbird 6 late last night, and we were planning to watch until we saw some of the delightful Gerry Anderson Supermarionation walking. We watched for half an hour, though, and none of the puppets walked! Every time they needed to move from one place to another, the scene cut, and they were already there. After Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray, had they finally figured out that these puppets couldn't walk very well? If there are any Gerry Anderson buffs out there reading this, is there a point when the puppets just stopped moving around very much? Any information would be helpful.

UPDATED--I've added a link to the Lily Allen video on YouTube.