Scramblings

-- According to this item at CBR, the creators of Amazon's version of Garth Ennis's sorry blood-and-sex superhero deconstruction The Boys are being bothered by all of the people asking them when Season 3 of the show will debut. I'll take a Gen-X neener-neener moment to point out that we always knew when the new seasons of TV shows started: In the fall. But my real note is how the showrunners responded, by telling fans that every time someone asks when Season 3 starts they push the start back one day. I unsure of my next step: To happily pay no attention to the show and continue not asking when it starts, or take the tweet seriously and ask at least once a day from now until I die.

-- In a not "Okay fine" development, actor Frank Bonner passed on Wednesday at the age of 79. Bonner was best known as the hapless ad salesman for the mythical Cincinnati radio station WKRP on the television show of that name and he would frequently respond to situations well and foul with the aforementioned two-word statement. His signature feature was his endless wardrobe of the loudest suits and ties the 1970s could offer, and he assisted Arthur Carlson's "Turkey Drop" from the helicopter, shoving turkeys into the air even though they could not fly.

-- Cultural studies have a hard time drawing the lines between the so-called generations that they study. The basic names and major characteristics are clearly known: The Greatest Generation saved the world from Hitler and Tojo, but then brought their average waaaay down by creating the Baby Boomers. Millennials are much maligned as snowflakes unable to handle reality, when in truth that's a better description of Gen Z. And Gen-X, mentioned above, would be happy to be left out of all this anyway. But when did these generations start and end? While it's easy to set the arrival of the Boomers as beginning about nine months or so after V-E Day in 1945, when did they finish? Some writers use a 20-year frame, ending the Boomers at 1960 and beginning the X'ers at 1961. Some keep the duration but extend it to a more logical finish date and begin X'ers in 1965. Since that last one sorts your humble correspondent with the Boomers he rejects it utterly, buries it upside down and salts the earth over its cursed coffin. Others use a number of shared cultural experiences and also consider the generation of the parents having the children, but that involves work and generational theorists hate work when stereotyping shorthand will do.

Blogger Brian Noggle has come up with a much simpler and, I think, potentially more useful metric: Which actor do people picture when they hear the name "Spider-Man?" Boomers and some older X'ers will remember television's Nicholas Hammond (and some Adam West-quality wall-climbing sequences). The main group of X'ers is likely to recall Tobey McGuire (and Kirsten Dunst looking particularly lovely). Millennials and Gen Z will probably think of Tom Holland (and their Gen-X dads will gaze fondly upon Marisa Tomei as a whole new kind of Aunt May). Noggle suggests, and I concur, that if the name "Spider-Man" brings to your mind Andrew Garfield you may very well be one of Vlad Putin's sleeper agents, awaiting your chance to destroy America from within while cackling maniacally over the ruins of our weak Western civilization. I may have dressed that last sentence up a little bit.

I think he's on to something, though, and recommend he submit it to a university cultural studies department forthwith.