Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 6

PC Comic Books

There’s Korean Hulk now, but you probably knew that.

I have a piece over at Acculturated arguing that there’s a difference between replacing/reimagining a character for multi-cultural purposes (Spider-Man, Thor, Ms. Marvel, just about every stunt-casting done in the last five years) and creating new characters (Jessica Jones). My ur-example of a great character replacement which has nothing to do with political correctness: Ellen Yindel.

Nerd Style Points

In which I attack PC multiculturalism in comic books by championing Ellen Yindel.

Odds and Ends

(1) Matt Continetti goes yard writing about the Zuckerberg-baby-charity-bonanza:

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be structured not as a nonprofit but as an LLC, allowing it to invest in start-ups, make money as well as hand it out, and engage in “philanthropic, public advocacy, and other activities for the public good.” Only someone worth $45 billion could pass off a lobbying campaign—excuse me, “public advocacy”—as charity. And if Zuckerberg doesn’t follow through on his pledge, if he decides 3 or 10 or 20 years from now that Max (not to mention her potential siblings) needs more than $450 million in walking around money after he has departed for the big server farm in the sky, what happens then?

(2) Santino’s chapter from Christmas Virtues is up and it’s great.

(3) Last chance to RSVP for Christmas Virtues at AEI. Hope you can make it if you’re in town.

Gilmore Girls Trutherism

Galley Friend and all-around-awesome-guy Gabriel Rossman had a funny/interesting thought about who the real villain was in Gilmore Girls:

 

Rewatching Gilmore Girls and tempted to write up a @JVLast/@SonnyBunch-esque piece on how Lorelei is the villain

— Gabriel Rossman (@GabrielRossman) November 27, 2015

.@JVLast@SonnyBunch And much like Emperor Palpatine, Emily just wants to establish an essentially benevolent order in Connecticut

— Gabriel Rossman (@GabrielRossman) November 27, 2015

Since this is kind of my move, and because I was on the Gilmore Girls beat literally from episode one (because I was writing about it for a now-quasi-defunct religious website called Beliefnet.com) I have a couple thoughts on this.

(1) I agree, whole-heartedly with GR’s view of Emily Gilmore. Further, I suspect that any parent over the age of 40 sees Emily at the hero of the series. This grande dame does nothing but suffer: She has a headstrong, willful daughter who gets herself knocked up in high school by a guy (Christopher) who we subsequently learn really is an ass-hat–both as a teenager and an adult. Then, Emily’s daughter somehow blames her for the mess she’s gotten herself into. The daughter packs herself and her baby off across the state and refuses to have contact with Emily. She has a truly-awful mother-in-law. She eventually loses her husband. And though it all, all she really wants is to create family ties between herself, her daughter, and her granddaughter. Is Emily perfect? No. But she’s a grandmother you can do business with.

(2) I disagree with Rossman’s proposed view of Lorelai as the villain. I view her as a noble, but tragic, figure who makes a great deal of mistakes, but who tries, hard, to get parenthood right.

(3) Which means that the real villain of Gilmore Girls is . . . Rory?

I think so. And she’s a tragic villain. Certainly, Rory begins the series as the most sympathetic character and we root for her the whole way. But as she grows up she becomes less and less sympathetic. By the time she’s running around at Yale with her dashingly handsome, 0.0001 percent, Skull-and-Bones boyfriend, you’re basically hoping she gets syphilis and has to finish her degree at UConn because she’s so insufferable.

Put it this way, an alt-title for the series could have been Rory Gilmore: The First Millennial.

Boo.

By-the-by, if I was at Marvel, I would totally take a flyer on asking Amy Sherman-Palladino to write a script. I’m not even sure what property I’d give her–Runaways? Spider-Gwen? Guardians of the Galaxy 3? Maybe it wouldn’t work. But maybe it would.

Come Hang Out on December 7

AEI is being kind enough to host one last Virtues panel for The Christmas Virtues. It’s at the AEI mothership on Monday, December 7, at 6:00 pm. There will be free booze and then an amusing discussion about Christmas featuring Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, P. J. O’Rourke, James Lileks, Rob Long, and Mollie Hemingway. It’ll be great.

You can RSVP here.

Let the Whoring Begin!

The War on Christmas has begun. Sort of.

Shorter Ross Douthat

Douthat’s response to the Jesuit heretics fifth column academics is amazingly hot. Highly recommended. By the end, he’s pretty much straight channeling DGeneration X:

Tesla Watch

Tesla is a ridiculous company.

Consumer Reports gave the Model S the highest rating it’s ever given an automobile. Because Tesla is such a hype monster that even CR can’t resist them. Then last week, suddenly, CR downgrades Tesla to “worse than expected” because–surprise!–the cars have reliability issues. Who could possibly have guessed that a tiny company making several thousand cars a year wouldn’t have the resources for rigorous reliability testing?

What makes Tesla really ridiculous? It’s market valuation is currently $27B. That’s exactly half of GM’s market cap. Half! You know how many cars GM sold last year? 9.9M. You know how many Tesla sold? 31,665. Let’s write out those numbers:

GM: 9,900,000 vehicles sold

Tesla: 31,665 vehicles sold

GM market cap = 2 x Tesla market cap

Actually, it’s a good thing Tesla didn’t sell too many units because they still lose $4,000 on every car.

Bob Lutz is still on the case, God love him. His appraisal is even more devastating.

Just a reminder: Your tax dollars subsidize the sale of every single Tesla so that the rich envirobros only have to spend $100k, and not $107k, on their electric luxury sports cars.

Update: Here’s an example of why the cult of Tesla is so insufferable:

Bob Lutz has an eternity of experience in the car industry and I have none so, of course, I could be wrong. But after about 20 years (a good chunk of those years in Japan) of covering products/technologies that have failed and succeeded, my gut feeling is pretty refined.  (And no one should discount the cult phenomenon. See “The Cult of Tesla Motors.”)

That’s Brooke Crothers at Forbes.com. Want to know how data-free this guy is? Later in his piece he muses on how sales are going for both Tesla and the Chevy Volt in Los Angeles and on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia. Where does his sales data come from? His eyeballs:

I just hope that General Motors does a better job of marketing the Volt in some of the under-performing areas like suburban Philadelphia’s Main Line.  The Model S is becoming an increasingly common site on the Main Line — which wasn’t the case a year ago. If the much (much) more expensive Model S can build a market on the Main Line, there’s no reason the Volt can’t too. But that is in fact the case: it’s a shock to come from Los Angeles where there’s a very healthy population of Volts to essentially zero population on the Main Line. I would be more worried about the Volt than Tesla if I were Bob Lutz.

Just for giggles: As of April 2015, GM had sold 70,000 Volts lifetime. Best guess how many vehicles there are in Los Angeles? 5.8 million. That’s healthy? ayfk?

The Student Has Become the Master

Sonny Bunch is just amazing. A national treasure. I mean, the level of troll game here is so strong that there’s just nothing more to be said.

 

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