FLIP FLOP FAIRY WITH A FLOY FLOY: I didn't get around to mentioning it yesterday, but I've published a new article on the Reason website, titled "Ten Reasons to Fire George W. Bush" and subtitled "and nine reasons why John Kerry won't be much better." Word got out nonetheless, and I've received an awful lot of mail about it. Some messages have been supportive, some have been mixed, and some have been thoughtfully critical. And then there are the fellows like the one who wrote (in full):

eat shit, sir, and fucking drop dead. Jack Truman by the way I read your tripe and it was foolish, insipid and the basis for idiot leftist rants.

The most poetic piece of hate mail came from one Terry Welch (whose e-mail address identifies him as a "halenfan"):

Thank GOD George W is in the Whitehouse. It took him 2 yrs to clean up that Shithole that Slick Willy left. Great leader!!! Kerry the Fairy is a flip flopper.

"Kerry the Fairy is a flip flopper." That's got a bebop scat quality that I like.

posted by Jesse 9:14 PM

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THE GRAND OLE OPRY ON A SATURDAY NIGHT: I drove my woman to the Opry in a big ole Cadillac. Really -- R. and I were visiting my grandmother in Nashville, and Grandma won't drive after dark, so I ferried the three of us to the Opry last night in her '88 Caddy. It's a real tank of a car, and it doesn't handle very well. Still, it sounds kind of cool to say it: I drove my woman to the Opry in a big ole Cadillac.

It was my second time at the Opry. The first came when I was little: My late grandfather owned (and founded) a local ad agency, and one or more of his clients were advertising at the Opry, so we all got to watch the show from backstage. I was too young to appreciate it: The legendary Roy Acuff played, and I was disappointed that he wasn't Roy Clark. But I still had fun, and my brother got Minnie Pearl's autograph, so a fine evening was had by all.

And last night's show? Of course we enjoyed it. The best set was probably the Whites', but they were hardly the only good act on stage: It was a joy to hear Connie Smith sing "If It Ain't Love (Let's Leave It Alone)," to hear Anita Cochran's spare take on "She's Got You," to see minor legends like Porter Wagoner and Little Jimmy Dickens in the flesh. The organizers conveniently grouped the worst material at the end of the program, with around 20 minutes of "country" schlock-rock by David Lee Murphy and Lee Roy Parnell. I do try to listen to the pop stuff with an open mind; my taste may tend towards the trad and the punk, but I don't want to be trapped in an alt-country ghetto while some new George Jones (or even a new Larry Gatlin) takes the mass public by storm. And sure enough, I found that I really enjoyed the first song Hal Ketchum sang (wish I knew what it was called); and while I could barely stand to sit through Andy Griggs' generic hit "She Thinks She Needs Me," I have to admit I liked the second song he played, which I think was called "If Heaven."

While I only saw the Grand Ole Opry once as a boy, I went many times to Opryland, the theme park adjacent to the auditorium. Apparently the roller coasters and flume zooms didn't bring in enough dough, because at some point in the '90s the owners tore down the park and replaced it with the enormous Opry Mills Mall. My mom didn't believe me when I told her this -- she said it sounded like the sort of thing I'd make up.

posted by Jesse 8:47 PM

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MAN AND SPIDERMAN: Have the pundits started searching for political undertones in Spider-Man 2 yet? Last time around, some columnist (was it Andrew Sullivan?) suggested that Peter Parker's failure to stop the criminal who would later kill his beloved Uncle Ben could be a metaphor for America's moral obligation to act in the world. This time around -- warning: spoilers ahead -- Parker actually retires from crimefighting for a while. Crime jumps, the press that had been denouncing Spider-Man as a criminal starts wailing that he's nowhere to be found, and every hawk in the audience nods his head with recognition. Us doves, meanwhile, can find solace in the tale of Doctor Octopus, whose well-intentioned mucking about nearly destroys New York but who can't face the fact that he's miscalculated, so he plunges back into the same destructive project. If you come to the movie looking for political symbolism, it's hard not to see Doc Ock's fusion generator as a symbol of empire and the mechanical arms that come to control him as a stand-in for the military-industrial complex.

But most people won't come to this movie looking for political symbolism; the most important resonances here are personal, not social. When Lee and Ditko invented Spider-Man, they stumbled on one of the best concepts in comic-book history: What if Charlie Brown had superpowers? The appeal of Spider-Man is the appeal of Peanuts, with only a few minor differences: more action, less theology, and this time the little red-haired girl actually likes the boy with a crush on her. Just about every character gets to play Charlie Brown for a while in this movie: not just Parker, but Mary Jane, Harry Osborn, even Doctor Octopus. Their travails, mind you, are a little more adult. When Parker starts to feel impotent, he loses the ability to shoot webs (!); and Harry (major spoiler coming) finally reaches that day of maturity when the old masks are torn away, you realize that your parents' lives were a lot more complicated than you ever suspected, and you have to confront the fact that your father was a goblin and your best friend is a spider.

The movie has its share of plot holes and loose threads, and Doctor Octopus' behavior doesn't always make sense. (Why did he throw Spider-Man off that train? Wasn't he trying to capture him?) But it's the best superhero movie I've seen (not that I've seen that many), and the best picture Sam Raimi's made since A Simple Plan. The cast, too, is excellent. Everyone says Tobey Maguire is perfect as Parker, and they're right, but as in the first picture I think the most inspired piece of casting is J.K. "Schillinger" Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson, the editor from hell.

For all the sadness and disappointment in the film, the high points are a couple of comic scenes. One is a peculiar segment in which Spider-Man has to ride an elevator. The other is a wink-at-the-audience montage set to "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." These could have been conceived by Quentin Tarantino, or by Raimi's old collaborators the Coen brothers. They're just two of many signs that this is a movie made with more intelligence than your standard summer action romp.

posted by Jesse 12:54 PM

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SELF-PROMOTION: My one, brief piece in the new Reason is about the official arrival of shariah law in Canada. Otherwise, my only contributions to the issue are behind the scenes.

posted by Jesse 8:17 PM

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SAVE PIGTOWN: Night before last we went to a community meeting in the nearby neighborhood of Pigtown. (We live on the other side of Russell Street, in the territory known traditionally as South Baltimore, known to real estate agents as Riverside Park, and known to future generations, if my wife's coinage ever catches on, as SOFA, for "South of Fort Avenue.") It seems the Maryland Stadium Authority is mulling a plan to condemn an enormous swath of land and build a new horsetrack more than twice the size of Raven Stadium and Camden Yards put together. The planners grossly underestimated the number of businesses in the area -- and didn't realize that they'd be knocking down any houses at all. (The targeted land includes 176 homes.) It's such an absurd proposal that I couldn't help suspecting that they were deliberately asking for too much in hopes of getting a favorable compromise -- but then I heard that the original proposal would have destroyed all of Pigtown.

The strangest thing about this -- and the most telling -- is that Baltimore already has a racetrack. You might have heard of it: a place called Pimlico. But the Pimlico people don't want to add slot machines if Gov. Ehrlich ever manages to get his slots bill passed. The developers behind the Pigtown project, on the other hand, are eager to embrace the non-equine varieties of gambling. Indeed, their plan is contingent on Ehrlich's legislation passing. Everyone expects slots to be reintroduced next session, so the locals are on guard.

At least 250 people attended the meeting, a multiracial working-class crowd that would do any proletarian propagandist proud. The chief force behind the project, meanwhile, is the Mobtown face of the corporate state, the Greater Baltimore Committee, "comprised of leading businesses, nonprofits, educational and civic institutions from Baltimore City and Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Harford and Howard counties." If this were a movie, people would accuse the screenwriter of stacking the deck. In real life, alas, the deck might be stacked the wrong way.

posted by Jesse 1:45 PM

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SELF-PROMOTION: You can read a little more about my Irish vacation in my new Reason column, though the piece is actually about President Bush.

posted by Jesse 6:44 PM

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SPACE NEWS: The U.S. launched a new satellite yesterday.

posted by Jesse 12:13 PM

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