I recently read “The Screwfly Solution” by James Tiptree Jr., although I think it was published under a different psuedonym, Raccoona Sheldon, all pen names for the actual person Alice Sheldon. Identity and gender politics aside, it is gratifying to find another strand in the web of sci-fi concepts – the story has to be a big part of the lineage for Y: The Last Man.

I’m not sure if Brian K. Vaughan has read the story or is aware of it (is that a requirement in sci-fi geneaology?), but there are definitely some shared themes, mainly gender extermination through biological agents. I don’t think that detracts from Y – Vaughan has made these themes his own – just as I think The Outer Limits and Watchmen can coexist without one harming the other.

Some channels quietly switched off their analog signals last month. Maybe one day we will be all digital – but it looks like we will have to wait a little bit longer before the big flip of the switch. A big analog-killer switch. Probably hidden in a cornfield somewhere in Nebraska, along with the nuclear weapons Skynet will one day turn against us as we plunge headlong into the digital age.

So you have to wonder, what will happen with the aliens who are off in a distant galaxy, watching Howdy Doody, My Mother the Car, and the JFK assassination via the TV waves that have washed through space. How will they react when their entertainment fix is cut off? Are we dooming the Earth  to an invasion because our future alien overlords will never get to see the final outcome for Lost (and thus proving the genius of Futurama)? Or perhaps the aliens will arrive to fight the terminators and humanity will squeeze through the cracks of this cataclysmic battle, just as we puny mammals hid under rocks as the dinosaurs faced oblivion many, many, many years ago.

There is a fourth Highway Virus story. Its composition is ongoing – but I hit a stumbling block. About halfway through it, as I was trying to turn my rambling notes into a coherent narrative, I realized it had many of the same themes as Season Four of Battlestar Galactica – mainly androids struggling with their identity.

My notes predated the time I watched  that season. Maybe there is something to this notion of Morphic resonance, and I plucked my thoughts from the Noosphere. Should I really worry about the connections to my own story if it is part of our collective consciousness? Regardless, the similarities were enough to prompt a retreat, a reorganization, a rethinking, on the fourth Highway Virus story. I want to be at least a little interesting, if not somewhat original, in my writing. The BSG writers have a TV show watched by many people – I don’t – so they get dibs on androids. No matter who was “first,” it would look like I was following behind, picking up thematic scraps in their wake.

Of course the creators and writers of BSG regularly channel Philip K. Dick (but hey, who doesn’t?). They cannot be considered wholly “original” in their work either. But is this debate even useful anymore? Is it possible to be original when there’s always someone who comes before you? Perhaps this whole concern with who owns an idea is a remnant of the cultural revolution in the U.S. – one which ended (hopefully) with the election of Obama.

This topic is appropriate on the weekend that Watchmen opens. The original book, the basis for the movie, is a historic, vastly influential work – and rightly so – but it sure has a lot in common with The Outer Limits episode “The Architects of Fear,” which itself is similar to Theodore Sturgeon’s earlier story “Unite and Conquer” (of course everything goes back to Sturgeon). The Watchmen book even acknowledges this connection near the end, with the episode playing on the TV in the background.

Alan Moore says he had not seen the episode when he conceived the book, a claim I have no reason to dispute. The dude is brilliant – so he gets plenty of slack. Maybe he was floating in the Noosphere too. Fortunately the awareness of the similarity with The Outer Limits did not stop him from writing Watchmen. (Unfortunately it did not stop Zack Snyder from making a movie out of Watchmen.) Of course, as Studio 360 rightly points out, the Watchmen book has been so influential, we have been reading and watching the fruits of that work for years now – just as the influence of Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon still reverberates long after people are aware of it.

A devil’s bargain in word processing is the quick-find option. David Lodge foresaw this curse in Small World, when his character Frobisher found, through an old-tyme computer, his unwitting penchant for the world “grease” – greasy, grease-stained, etc. He had used grease-related words over and over again in past writings. And this knowledge crippled him. When he tried to write after that, whenever he needed an adjective, he couldn’t think of anything else. It was all grease. So he stopped writing.

I had a similar experience with the word “even.” I started to notice I use the word “even” a lot. Really … a lot. In one search, I found that word used three times in one paragraph. And twice in one sentence. I don’t remember what that paragraph was about, but apparently it needed a lot of emphasis.

Now, every time I use the word “even,” I have to scan the surrounding sentences and paragraphs for other instances. I am keenly, painfully aware of every use of the word … even words that look like it – like “every,” which I have used twice in this paragraph. When I play Scrabble, I don’t know what to do with all my Es – unless I also get the V. What is it about that little word “even” that makes its use so unwittingly infectious? Have I always been so excessive in my use of “even,” going as far back as Adam and Even?

It surprises me how much venom there is specifically for animal-rights activists and in general  for people who advocate for animal rights (and those are two different groups of people…).

One recent example that stuck in my memory – and this is by no means to call him out as this sentiment is hardly new or unique – is in a not-so-recent column from Paul McNamara in Network World. (I know, it’s a bizarre connection – but this is a blog … and I gotta link to something. Besides, who woulda thought you’d get a critique of animal-rights issues in a magazine called Network World?)

The author claims, “No group of advocates … can muster the volume, vehemence and persistence of protest than can the animal-rights lobby.” Maybe that’s true … but I wonder, what would the world look like if animal activists actually won their battles? Or the majority of their battles? Sure, Prop 2 passed in California – but how bad did it have to get before one of the most liberal states in the country took action? Meanwhile, the seal slaughter in Canada is ongoing. Japan and Norway are actively loosening restrictions on whaling. KFC is flourishing. Michael Vick could be back in the NFL within a year.

Measuring social and political efficacy is a soft target, but it seems to me, when you look at the actual impact of lobbying groups, the NRA, the energy companies, agri-business, the ones with money – those are the people writing the laws and ultimately affecting our lives in a meaningful way. By that standard, animal-rights groups seem on the low end of the efficacy scale (has anyone really noticed there is one less commercial on the air?) – and maybe, just maybe, complaints against them and their tactics serve as simple-minded distractions for larger issues.

Granted, one could make the case that the activities of some have marginalized the movement as a whole. But how much ink has Rush gotten lately by saying some pretty divisive things? What’s the lesson there? No one would have known that PETA was at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show without the KKK reference.

I have a sneaking suspicion that lots of these complainants see a headline or two – PETA poses as KKK at dog show; Vick goes to jail (do people really think his fate was unjustified?) – and guess that advocates for animals are rolling over everyone’s rights and rationality. Maybe we should look a little deeper.

I have a tendency, some might call it a sickness, to make lists in my head. It brings order to the chaos – or at least the illusion of order to a series of inchoate thoughts.

One (short) mental list I worked up as of late was of the best whiners in cinema history. Not whiners like Luke Skywalker, who was going through a standard space farmboy phase, but full-on crybabies, where whining isn’t a phase or a state of being but a state of becoming. Where characters with the veneer of cool, confidence, professionalism, or menace disintegrate, quickly, often without warning, into blubbering near-embryos.

James Karen in The Return of the Living Dead sets the standard pretty high. His complete decomposition as people start returning from the dead is awe-inspiring. His performance is all the more laudable because he drives the plot forward at several key points, mostly in the first half of the movie, and in between his girlish cries of “Oh God!” and “Oh Jesus!”

Karen was a nice prototype for Bill Paxton in Aliens, who is the ultimate archetype for cinematic whiners. He strikes the right balance between obnoxious fatalism and self-serving contrariety. And he is eternally quotable. “Maybe you haven’t been paying attention to current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!”

Both these guys redeem themselves in the end. Karen never allows himself to become a flesh-eating zombie. You have to admit, it is a pretty ballsy move to put yourself in an incinerator. And Bill Paxton snaps back into badass mode in his final confrontation with the bugs. James Cameron likes him too much to let him be anything else…

But the third on the list is a special case. Stuntman Mike, played to perfection by Kurt Russell in Death Proof, is beyond redemption, which makes his devolution that much more satisfying. He crumples at the first sign of resistance, when his intended victims break from his script, and he carries that whiny riff all the way to his demise. So while Karen and Paxton show us there is some sliver of redemptive nobility in their whiners, Russell shows the eternal crybaby lurking one bullet wound below the surface of a Hollywood serial killer.

The great thing about these characters – writing them, playing them – is you are scraping at the bottom of a character. The character’s persona drops, real fast, and it feels both genuine and over-the-top at the same time. It is hard to get both those elements at the same time, but when it works, it is golden.