a little Chester Himes moment on the Colbert Report

In his rant about gender neutral language (let's replace bitchy with teste; he self-described as a whore for his sponsors and wanted slutty to be used for men, too), Colbert says it's not right saying mother-f*er. From now on, he's calling Tucker Carlson a father-f*er.

Of course, in Himes, f*er was replaced by raper, but I've heard that was an editorial decision.

of mice and fuel

Over at miceage.com, there are rumors of a rework of the Magic Kingdom at Disney World. A Little Mermaid ride may be showing up, duplicating one that is about to open at DCA. This caught my eye:

"Having one of the signature rides at DCA duplicated this quickly on the East coast continues a recent tradition of cloning that has been controversial in the fan community. On the one hand, it clearly saves the company money to harvest two rides out of one set of development costs, which is a win for everyone. But on the other hand, a lack of uniqueness on both coasts argues against frequent visits to the more distant park."

I complained about Steiner in $20/Gallon saying the Disney parks would close, because no one could afford the fuel to visit (if he'd said Disney couldn't afford the fuel to _run_ the place, that I might have believed, but that's not what he wrote. At all.) and did a rough calculation about the cost to travel down the entire coast (either one) to Disney in a current technology car for a family of four at the gas price level he said would kill the parks, versus buying 4 plane tickets when air fare was cheap.

But Disney _should_ be thinking about the cost of fuel. In a world in which fuel is super cheap, you want the parks around the world to attract True Disney Fans to go to every one of them. Repeatedly. In a world of expensive fuel, you want people to be able to see everything they might have heard about at a Disney park at their closest park -- that way they'll go to that one often, rather than save up to go to a more distant one less frequently.

If you're interested in the rumors in more detail, they can be found here:

http://miceage.micechat.com/kevinyee/ky072109a.htm

_Destined for an Early Grave_, Jeaniene Frost (kindle)

I think this is #4 in the Night Huntress series, but I could be off by one. Hopefully not by more than one. It would be damn confusing to start the series here.

In earlier entries, we met Catherine/Cat/Kitten, a half-vampire, half-human. Cat's hobby was luring full vampires to their death. Of course, that wasn't what they thought she was luring them to. Bones, a vampire she does not successfully kill, convinces her that her mother was not correct in believing all vampires are Teh Evil, then teaches Cat some more tricks. There was also this thing about faking Bones death and working for teh gov-mint to kill and/or capture the undead and then Bones coming back for her and then, most recently, there was an Epic Battle. There's been stuff about vampire sires and vampire grandsires and vampire politics and vampire marriage and vampire divorce and Cat's mom and Rodney the ghoul and blah, blah, bleeping blah.

In this somewhat odd and unexpected entry, we learn that when Cat was 16 and still Catherine, a different vampire greeneyed her mom into trusting him, kidnapped Cat and forced her to vampire-marry him. Tricky, since there is no divorce. Of course, as anyone who has ever spent a chunk of their life thinking divorce was not an option knows, if you can't divorce someone you don't want to be married to, then the remaining obvious choices are (a) running away and hooking up with someone else and/or (b) murdering the jackass who won't let you go.

On the one hand, the premise of the book makes very little sense. We've heard nothing about Gregor up to this point, and who makes these laws anyway, and she was able to mystically join bloody hands with Bones and whatever. On the other hand, if you're going to have problems like that, you probably shouldn't be reading this particular brand of trashy fiction.

In addition to suffering from the, oh, by the way, years ago blah blah bleeping blah, problem, this entry opens up a whole bunch of new territory for the series. We have Law Guardians. We have a new kind of vampire (Cat) who drinks undead blood and picks up powers through that blood (because we didn't see _that_ coming). We have Marie Leveau in New Orleans. And Mencheres has lost his precognitive visions. Cat and Bones would be the biggest bad of the biggest bad in this new world (subject to some of their buddy big bads), except for those Law Guardians. Not clear whether Frost intends to put this couple to rest or if she's going to keep passing out new problems and new powers to solve them in future entries.

She _is_ spinning off a series involving Denise. And clearly, Don is dying and there will be some kind of subplot associated with that somewhere, altho whether that will happen in the spinoff, or in the Nighthuntress series, or in a short story, I have no idea.

Should you read Frost's Night Huntress series? Well, if you find it twistedly appealing that the One Person Cat decides to talk to right before she's turned from half-human/half-vammpire to Full Vampire With Extra Special Cool Powers and Diet, is The Lord (as in Jesus), maybe. I'll keep reading it, mostly because Frost hasn't done anything to stop me yet.

fundamentalist religions and vampire fantasy

I would not be the first person to note that vampire fantasy novels tie into many of the same drives and ideas as some theology. That whole blood=life, thing, for example, is Not a New Idea. Nor would coming back from the dead, living forever, or having an ethical/moral/legal system in which common sense, economics and any expectable sense of Good and Evil are all unrecognizable.

Some authors take this a good long way into specific theological territory, with marriage for time and all eternity and, once you convert, you have to leave all your old friends and family behind and furthermore you can't tell them any of the details of your new life because they wouldn't understand and/or it would endanger someone. But across the board, there tend to be some obnoxious themes like the Fated Love. I mean, it's one thing for there to be The One. Vampire (and related) fantasies often take this to a whole new level by having unrelated third parties have visions about your One-ed-ness, and complex political shenanigans being enacted to either thwart your One-ed-ness or take advantage of it or whatever.

Some of these series also have the No-Divorce-Commitment. It's a stripped-down ceremony, often hierarchical, usually involving blood, no backsies, no white gowns, no catering, etc. Then there is frequently some wailing about, I didn't get my wedding! And so then they have to have a regular wedding for everyone else.

Jeaniene Frost has pulled something I have _not_ seen previously. She created a no-backsies commitment and put her Fated Love through the ceremony in front of a whole lot of people. Then, in a later book in the series, she revealed that one of the parties to the commitment had _already made_ a no-backsies commitment to someone else. Sure, not knowing what she was doing. Sure, not knowing she had a fated lover out there -- actually, in a weird twist, she'd been convinced that by doing this she'd be able to avoid her Fate of luring vampires to their deaths and avoid her Fated Love, who she had been told she should fear. And _not_ as a full vampire, which made me think hey, we need Vampire Lawyers! Does Vampire Law even cover half-vampires? Does a commitment made as a half-breed apply when you mature? Really?

The solution is really obvious (kill Husband A, duh), and our heroine actually could have done this right from the beginning (nearly does, too, and has to go to a lot of effort to not-quite-kill Husband A) but does not. Instead, the whole thing drags on, she converts, she stops thinking of Vamp Law as nuts (wait, what? the effect of nutty vampire law is to convince people that it is not nutty, but in fact a good alternative to human solutions?), there's a duel, there is cheating (yeah, cause you couldn't see _that_ coming), etc.

I'm betting there is some weird analogy with early marriage, Southern Baptists, going to college, settling down with some Man Ho, discovering that what you _thought_ wasn't a real marriage, or what you _thought_ had been annulled wasn't, and then having to deal with some ridiculous divorce requirements in some ridiculous southern state, compounded by family drama, then compounded by an inheritance (or, say, successfully selling a couple of trashy fiction series) where there's some debate about how marital property works out...