• I’ve only seen the first three episodes of Jessica Jones so far. It’s not a spoiler to explain that the premise involves a super-powered villain who can exert control over the minds of others. This is a device I’ve seen in dozens, maybe hundreds, of stories before — so many times that it has become almost a cliché. Set all of those aside. Here is what that really would mean, and it is deeply unsettling and terrifying in a way that none of those many, many other versions of that story have been.
This is storytelling that requires a trigger warning. I mean that seriously, and also as a high compliment to everything I’ve seen so far from Melissa Rosenberg, Krysten Ritter and David Tennant.
• Ruth Krall: “I know what it means to trust the violence one knows more than the calm one wants to know.”
• The Slacktivixen decorates our porch with pumpkins every fall, which we usually leave there until after Thanksgiving when I toss them into the woods out back for the deer before I put up the Christmas lights. This year the deer were impatient.
Pulled into the driveway yesterday morning and took that photo through the car window from about 10 feet away. She seemed torn between “Human! Run!” and “Pumpkin. Delicious.” And opted for the latter.
This is also why last year’s experiment with a lovely autumnal flint corn wreath on the front door ended badly.
• Katie Barnes traces the dynastic line from Molly Ringwald to Julia Stiles and calls for a restoration of the empty throne. Yes, please.
• The Jar-Jar Binks theory that explains it all. Brilliant. Mad. Semi-plausible.
• Is Vic Berger being uncharitable here by editing The Jim Bakker Show to make the doomsday televangelist appear even more ridiculous? Maybe, but that’s only possible because Bakker has given him so very much material to work with:
Bakker’s latest scheme involves peddling survivalist-prepper bulk food supplies to his fearful and gullible followers. This is the work of a predatory, exploitative con-artist. But on another level, it at least involves a consistent logic based on the End Times, “Tribulation Saints” nonsense of his psychedelic eschatological belief system. It makes a kind of perverse sense to anyone who’s read the Left Behind books, believing them to be gospel, while still wondering why Buck and Rayford and the rest of the idiots in the “Tribulation Force” never bother stockpiling food.
• “You have to admit: That’s a great euphemism for a collection of future Christian donors.” Yep. Just as the telephone created the “prayer chain” as a vehicle for sanctioned, sanctimonious gossip, so too did the rise of direct-mail database ecclesiology turn “prayer” into a fundraising machine.
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