Have been befriended of late by Len Wein, whose name will ring so many bells with comic book readers that some of you may think the Rapture has begun.  In fact Team Pudu recently visited the glamorous Wein Ranch and Pop Culture Repository, and so gratitude here for what a fine shindig it was.

If you scroll down either this blog or his, you’ll see how we crossed paths.  You may even notice some similarities in writing style, not least the frequent apologies for not updating the blog more often under various deadlines.

Anyhow, if you’re a true baseball fan, you appreciate Greg Maddux.  If you’re into banjo, you probably dig Bela Fleck.  And if you love comics, you’ve probably already read Len for years.  And now you can go read more.

Currently dubbing over some old VHS tapes onto DVD; if you’ve read Trebekistan, you know that I need to fit my life into far fewer boxes.

I was a fan of Walker when I first saw it about 15 years ago, and I couldn’t help but stop and watch it again while it was dubbing tonight. I like it even better now. It’s British director Alex Cox (the same guy who did the classic Repo Man) allegorically making a point about modern US foreign policy by retelling the true story of a brilliant American nutjob named William Walker, who 150 years ago was financed by shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt to "stabilize" Nicaragua — which is to say, protect Vanderbilt’s profitable pre-Panama Canal land/sea transport route through the country.

Walker not only "stabilized" things, he took over completely, declaring himself President of Nicaragua; the US government shortly recognized him as such. In the process, however, Walker betrayed everything his expedition claimed to stand for — democracy, liberation, freedom, etc. — eventually even instituting slavery and aspiring to subjugate all of Central America. Walker betrayed Vanderbilt, too, however; that was his undoing. The master cut the puppet’s strings, and Walker’s regime quickly ended.

Unhip to the game and more desperate than ever to believe that he still had a special god-chosen purpose, Walker kept trying to invade the region until he was finally executed by the Honduran government in 1860. He was famous across the US by this time, popular among the same crowd who would today learn their decency, history, and reasoning skills from talk radio. Now long-forgotten in the US (where his story is embarrassing at best), he’s still fairly and bitterly well-remembered in Central America.

Cox’s film was made in Nicaragua in 1987, while the Contra war was still raging. It’s an angry film, obviously, but what strikes me on a midlife viewing is the surprising degree of compassion that Walker actually shows to its subject, despite using him as an occasionally heavy-handed object lesson. Walker is never once seen as less than sincere in his madness, and it’s precisely that appearance of honesty amid utter self-delusion that attracts a cult of followers who can never allow themselves to see the grotesque horrors which result.

The parallels are so clear — not just to one side in one war, but to damn near any rationalization of violence as part of a better, higher good, anywhere — and the brilliant black comedy of it all is so relentlessly drawn, that I’m surprised the film hasn’t become more of a cult favorite among the current antiwar crowd. Ed Harris is a joy to watch (and occasionally presages his Oscar-nominated turn in Pollock) as the inspired madman, Cox’s intentional anachronisms (Walker, for example, is named Time magazine’s Man of the Year) are somehow both over-the-top and perfect, and Joe Strummer’s haunting soundtrack may still be the best work he has ever done.

It’s a hard find on DVD; I’m not sure it was ever even released in the US in that format. Amazon only carries the European DVD, which won’t work on most North American players, but they still have the VHS here. Meanwhile, Alex Cox’s website has more info if you’re curious.

Other stuff I’m dubbing today: a reel of Nixon campaign TV ads from 1968, when the Vietnam war was about as old as the Iraq war is now. The level of sophistication (which is to say, sheer facile nonsense) of Nixon’s claim that he could do a better job than LBJ, without being clear on details at the time, and without any basis in retrospect, would be depressingly familiar to most of us, I think.

But Walker moves that depressing realization back over 150 years, with moments of some of the darkest humor you will ever see.

PS — I should add that there’s also a little more about the historic Walker in the next book, about which you will soon hear much. Stay tuned.

This week, another entry courtesy the unbelievably cool private tour given Team Pudu by the Los Angeles Zoodu: the exceedingly rare (in fact, it’s classified as "Completely Imaginary") English Zebudu:

The Zebudu is a cross between a horse, a pedestrian walkway, two pudus, and a UPC scanner. Sometimes there is another Zebudu involved, but not always.

You really don’t want to know the mechanics of mating, but it should not be attempted at rush hour. Also, everyone always winds up on the other side of the road, with no idea how they got there.

Fortunately, the upside comes when you try to buy a Zebudu in a convenience store. Through a miracle of nature, the stripes are already encoded to come up as "Zebudu" in most checkout systems. (Unless the store has recently upgraded to Vista. Then all bets are off, and the store probably has bigger problems anyway. I hear that Microsoft’s next OS upgrade will even ship with a small fire extinguisher, just in case.)

The only real question, then, is how to get your Zebudu up onto the checkout counter in the first place. The ancient Greeks developed several acceptable techniques involving the five basic machines, and Archimedes was fond of floating his Zebudu up onto the counter, which offered the side benefit of a gentle cleansing action. The only shortcoming, for the Greeks, was needing to wait another 2000 years for the laser to be invented, a puzzle they only recently got around.

Fortunately, modern zoologists have discovered a much simpler approach: just put another Zebudu on the other side of the cash register, a horse in the pedestrian crossing, and two pudus across the street. Ten minutes later, there will be a receipt in your hand, a Zebudu in your car, and two confused-looking pudus riding a horse into the sunset, holding hands and looking for something to eat.

My friend Esme and her friends visit the Touchdown Jesus off I-75 in Ohio.

You can get yourself free, you can have a good meal, you can do whatevah you feel…

I’m not even sure why, but this makes me feel happy every time I look at it.

ERRATUM: I got a nice email from the guy on the right, whom we will henceforth refer to mysteriously as Reader A.  Photo credit belongs primarily to someone named Tory from Prague.  So thank you, Tory.

Reader A also informs us that there is a giant Hustler store on the other side of the freeway and a large anatomically correct horse statue nearby.

This place must be one-stop shopping for any passing televangelist.

Returning now to the Gratitude SummerFest:

I spent most of this last Saturday hanging out at the Game Show Congress and a party thrown by the former Game Show Network, both of which meant spending some quality time with the one and only Ken Jennings, winningest contestant in the history of Jeopardy!, author of Brainiac, and damn fine blogger.

We even did a joint signing of our books; I’m proud to say that despite our competitive instincts, we did not race to see who could sign fastest.

We did, however, compete to see who could have the reddest eye-flash.

Neither one of us can muster a laser thing quite yet. But we’re working on it.

If you’ve read Prisoner of Trebekistan, you know that there’s sort of an informal fraternity among many former contestants. Since our books came out within about a week of each other, Ken and I have struck up an increasingly friendly correspondence, and I’ve come to learn that one of the oddest things about Ken’s Jeopardy! experience must have been his lack of opportunity to get to know any of his opponents the way that tournament competitors frequently do. Instead, it was apparently day after day of "welcome everyone, here’s the 58-day champ about to terminate your hopes and dreams and take all the money, say hi" and then it was over.

Not a lot of emails exchanged with new friends, I imagine.

But here’s the thing about Ken: he’s taller than me, younger than me, richer than me, he already has a loving and happy family started, he’s very possibly also nicer, smarter, and funnier than I am, and the guy even has better hair. And yet I actually still like him somehow. Apparently one of us is some kind of freaking saint. (And even that probably isn’t me. Well, hell.)

Anyhow, despite it all, in person, the Creature from the Great Salt Lake has the ability to make me laugh until milk comes out of my nose, even when I’m not drinking milk. (I should probably see a doctor about that.) So I’ll put up with his general excellence, the way friends always put up with each other’s worst qualities. And the rest of the frat seems to have welcomed Ken just as eagerly. This is good to see all around.

Still, we did have a chance to play a game strongly resembling Jeopardy! and yet enough not like Jeopardy! to avoid any drive-by gunfire from Sony attorneys. For a few moments, I had thoughts of at least being able to claim I beat Ken at Schmeopardy! or whatever it is.

Unfortunately, Schmeopardy! is not a two-person game. The man on the right is Ed Toutant, whom Trebekistan readers will recognize as the fellow who beats me in Game Show Congress exhibitions every single year, usually by a ridiculously narrow margin seemingly contrived to torture my soul. (Before winning almost $2 million on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, Ed worked for IBM. Possibly as a supercomputer.)

What you’re looking at, then, is a showdown between players with a total of over $5 million in quiz show winnings. Pretty cool, huh? Of course, that sentence would still be true whether or not I’m standing at the table.

Eventually, Ed thrashed both Ken and me on the buzzer. (This surprised me, actually; the one time I’d ever played Ed in a Schmeopardy! format, I’d actually won fairly handily. So the big guy is just getting better. Eek.) Our final scores, in the end, were roughly proportional to our heights.

So much for the grand battle of the Jeopardy! memoirists. Still, Ken and I did manage to surprise each other during the game, as I outscored the Mormon in The Old Testament, but Ken replied with an outlandishly hip "what is crunk?" So you never know.

For next year’s competition, the organizers have announced that Ed will be divided into four equal teams. I will probably still lose by one dollar to his left leg.

After my annual defeat by Ed, we all headed down to the Beverly Hilton, which Trebekistan readers will instantly recognize as the hotel (a) once owned by the Merv himself, and (b) where I spent a nigh-delirious night trying to remember all the vice presidents while suffering through a raging fever. (It’s an intertwined world, this Trebekistan.) On arrival, we were all shuffled off to a fabulous Hollywood party inside, complete with a terrific live band, gymnasts cavorting inside giant inflatable balls, and various attractive young people reluctant to make eye contact with the likes of you. Plus, booze.

We contestants pretty much hung out in the back near the poker tables and watched it all with a mixture of cool-kid amused distance and utter geekdom. A splendid time, all in all.

Ultimately, gratitude is owed here: to Bill Schantz, king of the Schmeopardy! simulator; to Ed, for keeping my ego in check for another year; to Ken, for being so cool that he even insisted on splitting the gas and parking money for the drive to the convention; to Paul Bailey, organizer of the Game Show Congress; to a half-dozen other former contestants I got to hang out, laugh, and catch up with; and to megaproducer Michael Davies, responsible for the existence of Grand Slam, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, and a party where a curvaceous girl in tights spun twenty feet in the air from a giant towel for no reason in particular. Hollywood, man.

My hearty thanks to all.

UPDATE: On Wednesday evening, I was on Main St. in Santa Monica, and I am 99% certain that I saw the exact same young lady riding by on a bicycle. My god, what a small town L.A. is sometimes. I didn’t realize where I’d seen her before until she was half a block past me.

Gymnast miss, should you ever read this: if you want people to recognize you more quickly, please ride your bicycle upside down, twenty feet in the air, with a live band accompanying you. This will be a big help.