Too mean, Keith, too mean! I could see it if the guy was heckling, or being a douche, but he couldn’t have been more respectful.

While Olbermann’s treatment of the young man was uncharitable, at best, it’s fair to note that a similar question from a liberal probably would not have gotten a better response from, say, Ann Coulter. What’s interesting, though, is the contrast between Olbermann’s treatment of the young man, and that of a liberal questioner who filibustered for several minutes on the subject of “fracking” (without making a single Battlestar Galactica reference, I might add), before switching gears to a somewhat hysterical critique of the media’s attention to Libya over the situation in Japan:

Really? I could understand it if the media were killing Japan stories to cover Rebecca Black‘s next video (Lunchtime?), but we shouldn’t be focusing on Libya?

Now, I’m not saying Olbermann should have destroyed the “fracking” lady, but rather, that he should have found a way to be kinder, gentler, and wittier with the conservative fellow, and maybe even have answered his question. I mean, they’re not all stupid.

Later in the show, though (after another conservative audience member loosened the jar), Olbermann got a shot at redemption, as another young  conservative asked a similar question to close out the night. He handled this one with considerable more grace, and hopefully, the warm result will encourage him to do so  in the future:

Elsewhere in the Q&A session, Olbermann reveals how, at an MSNBC that was a “right-wing operation” in the early aughts, he smoked out the right-wing tools at NBC News, but he doesn’t name names. Later, he reveals that one advantage of Current TV over, say, NBC News is the fact that Current is less likely to have the conflicts of interest that a larger network has. He also introduces a novel electoral belwether at about 31 minutes in, relating how the things baseball players tell him can be predictive of electoral outcomes. Apparently, the Wisconsin-led anti-union movement has gotten their attention.

He also commits an amusing gaffe at about the ten-minute mark, referring to a young woman as “sir.”

The attendees who paid to see “An Evening with Keith Olbermann” certainly got their money’s worth. In addition to the hourlong speech, Olbermann’s Q&A clocked in at just over 42 minutes, which is Grateful Dead-long for a political media lecture. You can see the entire session, plus the speech, at Olbermann’s FOK News website.

In Drudge’s defense, I am certain that, had the same thing happened to President George W. Bush, there would have been an equally short countdown before someone on the left called it karma for the Iraq War. I also give him credit for using the plural “Gods,” perhaps a nod to Battlestar Galactica.

He also might be referring, more broadly, to the current state of our oil-sullied, economically challenged, war-embroiled nation, but that’s an even odder premise.

I’m inclined to agree that this entire meme amounts to a sickening politicization of a solemn occasion. One of the more high-profile purveyors of this crap, CNN’s Erick Erickson, has an interesting rationale for why it’s OK for a gang of GOP presidents to skip the Arlington National Cemetery ceremony, but not President Obama:

The problem for Barack Obama is simple.

The troops don’t like him no matter how much the White House propaganda machine tries to gin up staged pictures of Obama voting soldiers fawning all over him. But see the tepid response from cadets at West Point or talk privately with lots of soldiers and sailors and you get something else — they fundamentally do not respect their Commander in Chief.

Well, if Erick Erickson says it, it must be true, right? He probably spends a lot of time at West Point, shooting the breeze with cadets and such. Never mind the fact that, despite being misled by the McCain campaign regarding Obama’s support for the military, then-Senator Obama outdrew McCain 6 to 1 in donations from troops overseas. Never mind the fact that the soldiers who fight and die for this country deserve to be honored without political distraction, no matter who they voted for.

Still, since we’re crassly passing judgement on how people choose to spend their Memorial Day, I wondered what effort Erickson made to honor the fallen. I checked out his Twitter feed, and the face of the conservative movement seems to have spent his day tooling up for an appearance on Hannity.

Surely, he must have posted something on Redstate, though, right? I mean, he expended 500 words on what a shitheel Obama is, so his deep thoughts on our fallen heroes must’ve been epic. Actually, he copied and pasted the US Army General Order governing Memorial Day, and didn’t even throw them a link. Words written by Erick Erickson: ZERO. Hell, even people who phone it in have to hit 7 keys.

Why does Erick Erickson get a pass, but Obama doesn’t? You tell me. What are the key differences between Barack Obama, who honored our fallen heroes at a National Cemetery, and Erick Erickson, who all but ignored them? Make a list, get back to me.

In fairness to Erickson, an objective observer could easily discern that the subtext of his post is that words cannot adequately express the grief and gratitude that is owed our fallen heroes. More importantly, the handling of grief is intensely personal, and I don’t believe it should be the subject of petty snark and nastiness. That’s really the point. The entire premise of this debate is a sick distraction from a day that has already been overtaken by blowout sales and barbecues. People like Erick Erickson ought to spend their energy on Memorial Day focusing attention where it belongs: the sacrifices made on our behalf, by people who never asked what we had done to deserve them.

1. Lost

Here is the “original” Lost promo. Most interesting is John Locke as the Christ image. Least interesting is that no one is playing the part of Judas, the betrayer of Christ that is looking away in da Vinci’s original.

Next up, The Sopranos

That’s because tonight is the premiere of Stargate Universe, the much-anticipated and hotly-promoted new show from SyFy. You may already know that Stargate Universe is coming — the recently-rebranded network has thrown a lot of weight behind the show, clearly hoping to win over fans searching for a replacement for their beloved Battlestar and sorely missed Stargates SG1 and Atlantis, and who have not been getting their robots-aliens-and-explosions fix from the somewhat lighter fare of Eureka and Warehouse 13.

With Battlestar gone (sort of), Doctor Who and Torchwood both on semi-hiatus for the year (and David Tennant about to regenerate out of the role), and with the sinking of Stargate Atlantis, we are now facing a definite starship deficit. The crib death of Battlestar creator Ron Moore’s follow up FOX series Virtuality, the all but certain cancellation of ABC’s  Defying Gravity (think “Grey’s Anatomy in Space”), and the rampant production problems on ABC’s upcoming “oh, redoing any bad ’80s sci-fi series is clearly going to work” V remake make it plain that network tv still doesn’t get how to do big scale sci-fi right.

But tonight, SyFy is promising to bring back the starships, bigtime.  And that is cause for excitement, because even with the cuter, fuzzier SyFy label, this is the network that knows how to do this genre.  BattleStargate (as people should and will be calling it, if they are not already) is coming.

Stargate Has Been Here for a While, You May Have Just Missed It

Here’s what you may not know: the Stargate franchise, which originated in the high concept 1994 Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow) film of the same name, has already seen more than its share of success on TV.  In fact, Stargate SG1, the property’s first TV incarnation, ran for ten seasons on two networks (not counting a concurrent franchise deal that made it seem like the series was pretty much everywhere all the time), making it the longest-running US sci-fi show of all time.

Add the spin-off’s spin-off, Stargate Atlantis, which began its five-season run concurrently with SG1′s eighth, and between the two closely intertwined shows you have 314 hours of fun, grand, often self-consciously campy hard sci-fi TV.  And that doesn’t even take into account the two direct-to-video spin-off-off-off films that have been made on the back of the franchise, and the at least two more that are forthcoming.

The Stargate universe represents one of the most complete, complex and cohesive efforts in sci-fi worldbuilding.  In the TV realm, only the cumulative weight of the various Star Trek franchises, and perhaps the unintentionally campy Babylon 5, can compare.  So SGU will have broad shoulders to stand on as it launches tonight, even as it tries to distance itself from them.

If you’ve never seen the movie, or caught an episode of SG1 or Atlantis on Showtime or SyFy, or in syndication on Fox or in various other places, here are the basics:  It’s now, we’re us.  Deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, a secret branch of the military operates a big circular device called a Stargate (discovered in Egypt in the 1920s) that can link up with other similar gates on other worlds, allowing instantaneous one-way travel.  Plus there are aliens, and space ships, and enemies and allies. And we have a base in another galaxy, called Atlantis (don’t ask).  And this all goes on behind the backs of most of the Earth’s population.  Out in the galaxy we are a force to be reckoned with, but that doesn’t mean that the government wants the folks at home to know. 

>>>NEXT: “People Are Gonna Die.”

But this year it really seems like something has changed.

It’s no longer news that we have moved past geek-chic to something akin to post-geek, but when people who I wouldn’t expect to know a Viper from a Raptor mused aloud about what to expect from the 39th annual Comic-Con International last week, I realized that this year, you are all paying attention.

Last year, an estimated 126,000 people attended Comic-Con’s four day San Diego event, and passes were sold out weeks ahead of time; similar numbers were estimated this year.  Compare that to the approximately 445 die hards that attended related events in 1970.  Somehow something that started as a gathering place for a bunch of like-minded oddball outsiders has become, according to the New York Times, “an event that has acquired major importance on the [entertainment] industry’s calendar; major studios promote their biggest coming projects, and television producers for shows like “Lost” and “24” try to stoke interest in their approaching seasons.”  Last year, Comic-Con was our go-to for content related to such (ex)-obscurities as Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; this year, Dr. Horrible is not only nominated for an Emmy, but hosting them. It’s no wonder everybody is talking about Comic-Con.

Note the lack of reference to comics.

Here’s a secret: That was built into the DNA from the start.  Comic-Con became the festival of pure geek joy that it is (and one of the, if not the, defining entertainment industry events of the year) because since day one, name notwithstanding, is it has always been pan-geek.  Sci-fi authors and Star Trek personalities have been there since the start.  Luke Skywalker himself even made a movie set there.

But that is also why, with an entertainment industry that is interested in sequels, franchises and the already-proven value of any new investment in an entertainment property, Comic-Con has become the center of both the entertainment-industrial complex as well as the countless fan-universes that each franchise has created. It is no accident that the first modern blockbuster also provided the protoype for the merchandising and cross-promotion models driving franchises like Transformers to blockbuster status despite the barest critical assessment of their quality. Of course it was. It was custom-built for the Con.

Make no mistake ye cool kids, when it comes to how we spend our entertainment dollars, we are all geeks.  Star Trek, Harry Potter, Twilight and the Dark Knight don’t lie; we all want larger-than-life escapism and a little zombie terror here and there.  We want the other, the strange, the fantastic and the far off, and we vote with the dollars we spend on books, DVDs, downloads, movie tickets, toys, collectibles, miniatures and cosplay props (not to mention the clicks we spend on bittorrent trackers and blog posts). The SciFi Channel has even become the kinder, gentler SyFy, in an acknowledgment of how mainstream geek really is. (3.5 million viewers for the debut of their latest, Warehouse 13, is acknolwedgement too; that’s 1.1 million more than the Battlestar finale. Word spreads, eh geeks?)

Like some alien gestating to life in a slimy pod, geek culture ripened over the years in its (our) own obscure cons, from back when the cancellation of the very first Star Trek spawned modern fandom (and fanaticism).  And you know how that alien springs to life and starts spreading its seed all over the place? Right: cue the modern entertainment franchise of comics, books, films, blogs, series, webisodes, collectibles, podcasts and any other format yet to be dreamed up. So, with that in mind: how could the convention at which you most expect to see somebody wearing fangs without the slightest hint of self-consciousness not become ground zero of the entertainment world?

Because, importantly, it’s also establishing itself as a leader within it. Back to Dr. Horrible: An indie labor-of-love project launched on the side during the writer’s strike, launched on the web, became a critical and financial success — entirely outside the traditional models. In its initial limited run, it got over 2 millions streams in five days (and would have had more had demand not crashed the servers); a year later, its Amazon sales rank is #87 for Bestsellers, Movies & TV; with top five rankings across all its sub-categories. Like Comic-Con, Dr. Horrible is pan-geek: comic-book, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, musical theater (two words for you here: Rocky Horror) — with the heroes, villains, inventors, outsiders, romantics and strivers plus the crucial morality play that underlies the best of each genre. The storylines may be fantastical, but the impulses couldn’t be more visceral.

Which is maybe why it’s all finally catching on. It’s a phrase us geeks know well, from bad zombie movies, from Twilight Zone episodes, from the collective subconscious that geekdom has shared since at least the first Comic-Con in 1970, and that should resonate with anyone that has consumed the smallest morsel of popular media in the past half decade or so: “One of us, one of us, one of us…”

Related:

Comic-Con 2009: The Hero Complex collection [LA Times]
The Winners & Losers of Comic-Con 2009 [Seattle PI]
Who Won Comic-Con’s Buzz Wars? Our 10 Picks [i09]

Ash Kalb is the general counsel of a New York-based telecommunications and technology company and an instrument-rated pilot.  He will be writing a weekly column on geek culture for Mediaite. He wishes he went to Comic-Con.