Local Hero Officer Dorfski Prevents Antique Mall Incident
by Aymee Stephenson
Ashmenomegon Bay Picayune Star Press Tribune

ASHMENOMEGON BAY, WI – Authorities were called early yesterday afternoon when several customers leaving the Old Treasures Antique Mall reported an area man sitting in the driver’s seat of an abandoned blue Hyundai Sonata.

“He looked real cold, and I heard screaming,” Good Samaritan Gladys Johnson told reporters. “The Christian thing to do is to try to help, so I’m glad someone called the police.”

Authorities arrived on the scene to find Hank Stilton in the car. He was shivering and listening to local talk radio personality “High-Fly” Baltovski animatedly complain about last season’s Milwaukee Brewer draft picks. Stilton, however, seemed fine, and waived off police.

“She’s in there with her sister,” Stilton told Officer Bill Dorfski. “Five more minutes and I’ll either turn on the car or go in and see what the hell is taking so long.”

Sensing a domestic disturbance in the making, Officer Dorfski went inside and searched for the whereabouts of Helen Stilton and her sister Luanne Gunderson. He found the pair admiring an old Steiff teddy bear in mint condition and reasonably priced, given the age of the stuffed animal.

“He could have stayed home,” Helen reportedly told Officer Dorfski when he confronted her with the news of her cold husband waiting in the parking lot, “but he said he wanted to get out of the house.”

As he is known to do, Officer Dorfski used his clear blue eyes to peer into the woman’s soul, and she then added, “I may not have told him about my plans to pick up Luanne and go antiquing.”

The women hurriedly left the antique mall, promising their next stop would be Sally’s Diner, where they would procure a bowl of hot beer cheese soup for Hank, just to make sure there was no danger of him catching hypothermia.

This marks the fifth incident this month where Officer Dorfski has responded to an anonymous tip and taken steps to prevent a serious crime. It’s no wonder that many in the press have come to think of Dorfski as not just a police officer, but a hero.

(Note: I could find a fat sweaty image of Petra’s lead singer, but trust me, this “Petra” is prettier.)

It probably wasn’t possible for a Christian kid growing up when I did in the environment that I was in to not have a Petra phase. Petra was kind of THE pop rock band of Christian music. They won lots of Christian music awards. They even won a Grammy or two for “best music performed in the Christian music ghetto” or something like that.

I’d like to take you back 15 years to the heady days of 1995. I was over Petra by that point. Heck, Petra should have been over Petra by that point. Aging musicians who played the same tired riffs, music and lyrics that didn’t really have anything to say that hadn’t already been said by the band – these were my critiques at the time and if you start having these feelings about a band, you’re not exactly eager for their next release.

Anyway, it was at my first music Cornerstone music festival in 1995 when I came upon the promo tape for the then-upcoming release for Petra’s “No Doubt” album. Just a handful of minutes long, the tape was asked to accomplish a lot in not a lot of time. Making these new Petra tunes seem exciting when they sounded exactly like songs that Petra had already released multiple times was not an easy task. Even more difficult? Pump people up for the first single off the album, a cheesy, over-sung ballad with rhymes only as questionable as the theology behind the lyrics. (Your faith will be tested until you stop doubting. Well, I think that’s what he’s saying.)

I have held on to this tape for 15 years. But no longer. Today I converted it to an mp3. I have stripped out all the music (trust me, you’ll still get the idea) but I kept all the promo speak at the beginning and end of the tape, as well as the haunting whisper-yelling of “Petra” that was used to transition between the different song samples. I give you the only one minute and thirty-two seconds of Petra you will ever need to hear: PetraPromo.mp3

You’re welcome.

If there’s one thing I’ve been as a fan of Lost, it’s fickle. I admit it. I loved and raved about the first two seasons, then bitterly complained about the feet-dragging of Season 3. Every time we had a Kate episode, I hoped it would end in her death, but then as soon as we got a Ben or Locke episode, everything was forgiven. I liked Hurley, except when it was an always-boring Hurley episode. This season has felt like nothing but moving chess pieces around the island, but then we got our one and only Richard episode and I raved about the stellar acting and writing on the show.

So maybe all the fans like me should get what we really deserve: A great big flipping off from the show’s writers. It seems unlikely, but perhaps the whole point of that extra half hour that’s just been added to the finale might be to allow the writers to get their revenge on all the things fans have ranted about over the past six years. And here’s the thing: I’d respect them a lot more if they did any one of these things rather than give us something boring and predictable. Here are a few ways I’d suggest they fill up that extra half an hour.

1. Riding with Freckles. Evangeline Lilly’s rumored retirement from acting was a smokescreen to throw fans off the scent. This season’s worst episode featured Kate driving around in a taxi, and I was immediately suspicious. Smells like a spin-off. The extra half hour of Lost? A shoehorned-in pilot for Riding with Freckles, a show about literally moving characters from one place to another. Season 6 has certainly shown us the writers know how to do that.

2. Razzle Dazzle. For the most part, Lost has deftly handled a constantly-growing cast during its run, with one notable exception. Nikki and Paolo immediately sent fans like me into a tizzy about how terrible the characters were and how clumsily they were inserted into the show. So in the finale, not only is it revealed that Nikki and Paolo are central to the mythology, but the final words of the final episode of Lost are, in fact, “Razzle Dazzle.”

3. “Way-ah’s ma buy-bee!” If there are two characters more annoying than Kate, it’s Season 2′s versions of Claire and Michael. Stick Claire and the ghost of Michael in Room 23 and have nothing but a half hour of the two of them screaming “Walt!” and “Way-ah’s ma buy-bee!” at the camera while a video of Fonzie jumping the shark plays in brainwash-o-vision in the background. Bonus if the room is decked out with the red curtains and black-and-white checkerboard floor from the Twin Peaks finale and Michael and Claire are screaming their lines backwards.

4. It WAS all a dream, and it WAS about purgatory. The earliest fan speculation for how to explain Lost was that all the characters were in purgatory (hence all those early deaths that seemed to come immediately on the heel of characters making some kind of peace with themselves) or that the show was all a dream from Hurley’s head. After years of denying those rumors, it turns out they’re both true. Start the show with fifteen minutes of Hurley eating a burrito and watching a documentary on the history channel about the Catholic Church’s view on purgatory. End it with drawings of all the Lost characters scrolling over his snoring dome, a la Super Mario Bros. 2.

5. Tattoo. Turns out the ultimate point of the show is to not get tattoos because you might regret them some day. 30 minutes of Jack Shepherd getting laser tattoo removal while Bai Ling yells at him in un-subtitled Thai.

1. I’m tired of being told to care about Jack and Kate and Sawyer and Kate and Jack and Sawyer caring about Kate when the only one of those three that I remotely care about is Sawyer. Here in Season 6, it’s becoming painfully obvious that a big crack in this show’s armor is that the size of the cast is just too large. But getting back to Kate, there was opportunity last night for Claire to go batcrap crazy and shoot Kate in the face. Why the heck didn’t she? I’ll tell you why:

2. I’m tired of nothing interesting happening. Nothing interesting has been happening, or will happen, or may ever happen. And by nothing interesting, I mean nothing consistently interesting that serves to ramp up the week-to-week tension. Remember when Lost used to have you hanging from week to week? Not anymore. Tossing out a few breadcrumbs doesn’t count. Where are the shocks and revelations? My two favorite episodes this season were Richard’s and Ben’s, but these episodes were great only because they were well-written character studies featuring great actors, not because anything particularly shocking happened, and that’s how this season has been, at best. And at its worst?

3. I’m tired of shuffling chess pieces. Characters A, B, C, and D are at location W. Characters E, F, G and H are at location X. Characters I, J, K and L are at location Y. Characters M, N, O and P are at location Z. Now let’s move characters A and D to location Q. And then kill off everyone except A and B at location W and have A and B have to go to location S. Then character J will go to location X, and character E will go to location Y, and then those characters will both end up at Z, but Characters M, N and P will go to location Y, as will Characters A and B, after they run into character F in the jungle who tells them everyone at Location W is dead. And then…And then…And then…

There. I’ve just summed up about 13 episodes of what’s happened on the island, but it’s been even less compelling to watch than it was to read, because it took a minute to read that, but it took 546 minutes to watch it happen.

Put it in perspective: Frodo made it all the way across freaking Middle Earth and back in 9 hours, and Lost spends the equivalent amount of time to move the characters around Hawaii? Simply put: despite everything interesting that’s happened the past five years, with only one season left to go, the writers have been stalling. Which leads to…

4. I’m (growing) tired of throw-away answers. Take the big secrets you’ve been teasing us with for six seasons and give us underwhelming reveals, almost like you’re annoyed that the fans demand answers and maybe you realize you don’t actually have any. So the island is purgatory, after all – at least for people who have done something bad. Which explains all the dead people we’ve seen, like Michael and Mr. Ecko’s brother Remi or whatever he was called. And I guess that makes sense if the island is a cork keeping hell contained, because if the cork keeps hell in, maybe it also keeps the damned out. And that wraps up that entire mystery. Except it doesn’t, because sometimes the dead people are the Smoke Monster impersonating dead people to help the living people…or to hang out in a cabin? Or was that Purgatory Christian who did something bad and not Smoke Monster Christian? Because Cabin Christian said he wasn’t Jacob, but then Locke saw someone who may have been Jacob who looked like John Locke in a weird beard or something and didn’t look anything like the actor who ended up playing Jacob, and the Smoke Monster is the one who’s trapped so maybe that was the Smoke Monster in the rocking chair in Jacob’s cabin, but then Cabin Christian would have been Purgatory Christian not Smoke Monster Christian and…Well, here’s the thing: What if you spent five years writing whatever random stuff you wanted based solely on what you thought would be cool at that moment, thus creating a spiraling entangled mess that had no hope of being untangled, and then you suddenly realized you had to try to make sense of all of it when there was little sense to be made? You’d play answers like they weren’t a big deal, postponing anything significant until the very end when it was too late to piss off all your fans with an underwhelming, self-contradictory finale. Welcome to Season 6. Sigh.

But fine. Assume we know that the dead people who we see acting less than dead on the island are either 1. The Smoke Monster in disguise or 2. The dead people trapped in purgatory. That leads me to this question: What exactly did Kate’s horse do to deserve being trapped in purgatory? Oh, is that a question that “isn’t important” so you won’t be answering it?

5. I’m tired of Smokey. Smokey AKA The Man in Black AKA Flocke AKA The Island’s Security System is imprisoned on the island and wants to leave, but he was once a man with a screwed up mother. He apparently judges people, like he did Ecko. And at one point he told Ben to stop trying to kill John Locke, even though it served Smokey to have John Locke killed and brought back to the island so he could take over Locke’s body. So what, that was reverse psychology? Smokey is also supposed to be the ultimate evil, at least according to those aligned against Smokey. You know, for someone so evil, all we’ve really seen him do that’s evil is manipulate someone to kill Smokey’s captor and then take out the rest of the nameless extras who were keeping him imprisoned. Maybe Mr. Ultimate Evil should be doing things that are, you know, evil? Things that might be…interesting?

I will say this for Season 6 of Lost. It has completely prepared me to be let down, disappointed, and otherwise underwhelmed with next month’s finale. Good job?

Note: If you aren’t caught up on the show, you probably don’t want to keep reading, assuming you still care about Lost.

A week ago we were shown a teaser for this week’s episode of Lost. It was so dramatic, so answer-filled, so unbelievable that they couldn’t even put together a 30-second teaser for the episode without spoiling it.

Yes, my bullshit-detecting senses immediately began to tingle. We’ve been down this road before. After seeing the non-promo promo, I tweeted, “If you think next week’s episode of Lost is really going to be full of answers, you don’t understand how this show works.”

And yet, it’s difficult to not drink the Kool-Aid. To quote one of my all-time favorite shows: “I want to believe.” I want to believe that answers will be revealed, that the episode will be amazing, that I will once again care about Sayid, because I haven’t for the last couple seasons.

Did last night’s episode deliver? I again refer you to my tweet from last week.

Is Sayid ultimately a good guy or a bad guy? That’s really the only question we received an answer to last night, and I don’t even trust the show enough to believe we have the ultimate answer to that question. Sayid seems pretty badass at the end of the episode when Ben finds him at the pool with a bloody knife in his hand. Maybe this is Lost saying that Sayid no longer has regrets for his past, that he’s embraced it. He’s killed Dogen Wan Kenobi and his journey to the dark side is complete, I guess. Maybe.

So if you’ve been wondering if Sayid is a good guy or a bad guy, if that’s been the reason you’ve been watching Lost for six years, well, I guess last night was your episode. And to his credit, Naveen Andrews is a good actor and I liked his performance last night. It’s just that this concern about Sayid is not what is driving my interest in the show.

Who is Jacob? Who is the Man in Black? What do these character want? What is the island? These seem to be the show’s core questions. (I still want to know what was really up with the Dharma Initiative, but I’m no longer convinced we’re going to find out.) The main problem with Lost in its final season is that it is withholding the answer to a question that desperately needs to be answered: What are the stakes?

There are ten episodes left, and we still don’t know what is at stake. I defy anyone out there to give me a solid answer to this question: Why is any of this important? All we know right now is that there is some indeterminate evil force that was being held at bay by some indeterminate good force. Wow. That’s compelling.

Lost in its final season is like a person on the side of the road screaming and shouting for help, but refusing to tell anyone what’s wrong. Does she need immediate medical attention? Has her child been kidnapped? Is she suicidal? Is she just a lunatic screaming for no reason? We don’t know. We have no idea what’s at stake.

Also, she’s been screaming for six years, and it’s starting to get old.

Zot! tells the story of a superhero from an alternate Earth where it’s 1965 and everything looks like Tomorrowland at Disneyworld. It’s a great bright beautiful tomorrow, where cars fly, everyone has a robot butler, and world peace exists. In this world, however, there are still a few supervillains, and teenage Zot serves as the world’s principle guardian against these mostly comic villains. Zot discovers our world and meets Jenny, a typical teenage girl. The first 400 or so pages of Zot! don’t really do much for me. The stories read like throwback comics from the 50s and 60s, so I felt like they were written to appeal to something for which I don’t really have any sense of nostalgia.

And then at about the 400 page mark, the book pulls a sharp 180. Zot gets stranded on our Earth, side characters become principle characters, and the book starts taking on serious issues like teen sexuality, and it does so in a surprisingly poignant and realistic style. One of those stories won an Eisner award, and the writer himself notes that when people think of Zot!, it’s these last 200 pages that they remember.

I don’t know if you could just read those last 200 pages and get who the characters are, but I’d cautiously recommend doing just that, because those last stories are brilliant, but those first 400 pages or so are pretty rough.

I took a break from the less-traditional comics I’ve been reading lately to return to the comic with which I’m most familiar, but I decided to check out Batman in a slightly altered form in Batman: Child of Dreams. This graphic novel is a translation from an originally Japanese manga, and yes, that means the female characters all have sharp small noses and big glassy eyes. Batman, however, fares quite well in Child of Dreams, at least when it comes to how he is drawn. This Batman, batmobile, and Gotham City most closely resemble that of the Burton films. Child of Dreams features wonderfully drawn, detailed and iconic imagery of these subjects. When the action inevitably moves to Tokyo, there’s a clever change in architecture and lighting, with the action taking place in a glimmering city during daylight – sharp contrast for Batman’s typical gothic world of shadow. Would that the story have fared so well. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the premise – a designer drug allows people to take on the various persona of Batman’s rogues gallery, and Batman must get to the bottom of what’s going on – but the pacing feels off throughout most of the book. Perhaps it’s a cultural difference, but Child of Dreams fails to engage despite the often strong visuals. Child of Dreams was a fine little diversion from some of the heavier reading I’ve been doing lately, and diehard Batfans could certainly do worse, but there are so many better Batman books out there that I could only really recommend Child of Dreams to those who’ve already read A-list Batbooks like The Killing Joke, The Dark Knight Returns, The Long Halloween, and Year One. It’s good second-string Batman, but second-string Batman nonetheless.

Box Office Poison is a 600-page graphic novel that reads like a book but plays to the strength of a format that includes a visual component.

There are no superheros (well, not really), no monsters, no zombies, and no world crisis. Instead, Box Office Poison follows a group of 20-something friends living in New York. Their friendships, romances, jobs and social circles expand and contract with a surprising degree of realism as Box Office Poison explores the years between college and settling in to adult life. (Here’s where I feel obliged to assure you this is nothing like “Friends”.)

The art style is solid, at times even brilliant, but it’s always in service of the words and the story. I fell in love with these characters and their stories, though there are a few pages with visuals so strong I doubt I will ever forget them.

The tone of this review thus far hasn’t really captured my degree of enthusiasm for Box Office Poison. So let me be a little more blatant. Watchmen is probably the greatest superhero comic of all time. The Walking Dead is hard to beat for post-apocalptic horror. Box Office Poison’s setting, plotting and characters are removed from those types of fantasy worlds, but the characters are as memorable. I found myself ready to be done with Watchmen when it was over, and in dire need of a break from the world of The Walking Dead after the first massive compendium. But with Box Office Poison, I find myself missing some of those people, because after 600 pages, they felt like real, believable people inhabiting our real world.

Box Office Poison is the strongest argument I’ve yet experienced for the ability of the graphic novel to tell compelling stories that fall outside any of the common comic book genres.

Highly recommended.

Dear fans of Lost,

So tonight was the big premiere of the last season of Lost. Hard to believe that in a few short months it’ll all be over. When that time comes, you’ll begin looking for a new show as complex, well acted, and interesting as Lost. I can wholeheartedly recommend a show that some of you haven’t watched, but you’re going to resist taking my advice, so let’s go over a few things up front.

Lost is sci-fi. Some of you maybe just threw up in your throat – you’re that resistant to the genre. You maybe didn’t realize it, at least not at first, because the show cleverly spent most of its first two seasons focused on being a mystery and hiding it’s science fiction heart. Now that we’re on Season 6, if you’re still watching, you’ve been exposed to time travel and alternate timeliness, some of the headiest scifi topics out there. Not to mention Smokey. The show has a monster, for Pete’s sake.

Yet you like Lost. Why? Allow me to make a few guesses.

1. You like the mystery: What is the island? Who are these people (one of the key questions from the first couple seasons)? What’s really going on here? Is this all part of some big plan?

There is another show that has similar elements.

2. You like the characters. Because at its heart and often at its best, Lost is a character study. Despite it’s scifi trappings, Lost features complex characters in complex situations portrayed by solid actors.

Check there, too.

3. You like the complexity. You’ve managed to stick with a show that doesn’t insult your intelligence, that nags at the back of your mind between episodes, that rewards and encourages lots of thought and theorizing.

Once again, another show does that, too.

Here’s the recommendation: Battlestar Galactica. WARNING: you will likely be unimpressed with the opening miniseries. It did very little for me, and Jaime gave up on the show. But after the first few regular episodes, and my convincing Jaime she HAD to give it a couple more hours, we were hooked through the show’s full run.

Because here’s the thing: the show isn’t actually about spaceships and robots any more than Lost is really about a smoke monster and a strange island. It’s window dressing. Similar to Lost, Battlestar Galactica really is about bigger issues and mysteries like identity, what it means to be human, what it means to be alive. Like Lost, there are compelling mysteries that last up until the final episode, and maybe even beyond. Like Lost, there is a group of “others” whose motivations are nebulous. And like Lost, there is some darn good acting and storytelling along the way (and yes, a couple minor stumbles on par with the Jack’s tattoos episode).

Hey, it’s not like I get paid for you to watch Battlestar Galactica. Go ahead and pass on it if you insist. But if you still like Lost after all these years and you’re desperate for something to watch in its place, I really think you might love Galactica. I promise you it’s nothing like Star Trek or other nerdy scifi you might still be reluctant to watch.

And when all is said and done, you just might find you end up sharing my opinion that while Lost is a great show, Battlestar Galactica is even better.

Inventory is a book of lists put together by the AV Club folks, who are affiliated with The Onion. The AV Club folks, however, are a more serious bunch. Yes, the book has some pretty goofy lists (songs nearly ruined by saxophone solos, movie magic pixie dream girls, disturbing foods, etc.), but the content of these lists is taken seriously. When you see a list with the things Kurt Vonnegut said better than anyone else, you’re going to get a list (with supporting narrative – few of these lists are simply just lists) that seems pretty danger authoritative.

Subjects are fairly broad, though if you know anything about the AV Club, it shouldn’t be too surprising that most of the lists somehow relate to movies, television, music or books. Inventory has solid writing, but there are lists that likely won’t interest you, and the writing isn’t so stellar that every list must be read.

This kind of books also lends itself to short reading sessions. Most lists are in the 3-page range, and I ended up spending around a month reading the book five minutes here, ten minutes there. Longer sessions seemed less enjoyable.

Within those parameters, I found the book enjoyable, and sometimes even informative. Recommended.