Since season 2 of The Walking Dead started, I’ve compared it to a soap opera. After watching Sunday’s mid-season premiere, I finally realized what it really reminded me of and that’s Star Trek: Voyager. That is not a compliment. I can only assume that the writers of The Walking Dead learned their craft by watching Voyager creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga decide that melodrama was an acceptable substitute for action and adventure. If you’ve ever read The Elements of Style, you know about a rule called “Show, Don’t Tell”. Instead of having your characters simply tell you what they’re thinking and feeling, those thoughts and feelings should be expressed through action. Berman and Braga, however, must have run out of toilet paper one day and used The Elements of Style to wipe their asses before reading it because when they took over the Star Trek franchise, no thought went unexpressed and no feeling went unexplained. More proof that they never read Elements of Style is that it also says to use simple words and not fancy ones yet solutions on Star Trek always involved things  like chronoton particles.

Walking Dead season 2 has seen characters who live in a world infested with flesh eating zombies spend the majority of their time arguing over property rights, keeping vigil at a sick boy’s bedside and, worst of all, participating in a “Who’s the daddy” storyline. While all this has been going on, they’ve been ruminating on the grand importance of everything they’re doing and How It All Means So Much. One of the best moments from last year was when Shane shot Otis and left him to die so Shane could get away. The best part after that is that Shane could NOT talk about what he had done. Instead, the writers have had to SHOW us the aftermath of those events which is Shane becoming increasingly selfish and belligerent as he tries to deal with his conscience instead of having Shane TELL us what he’s doing and why over and over again.

If you watched the fan oriented talk show The Talking Dead that airs at midnight on AMC, you saw musician Dave Navarro struggling to remain friendly and polite as he berated the show’s producer to add some more damn zombies to this zombie show. I never thought I would find myself encouraging people to base their lives on the teachings and philosophy of the Jane’s Addiction guy but he was absolutely right. People who watch The Walking Dead should be terrified during much of it and tense during the downtime between action scenes knowing that peaceful times could end at any moment and three minutes of zombie action plus a few badass Daryl moments out of a whole hour don’t do that. I’m still watching The Walking Dead because I know it could and hope that it will get better.

But I won’t wait around forever.

I honestly, truly believe it’s entirely possible that critics basically wrote their reviews before they even saw this under the assumption that this Katherine Heigl film would be like, well, every other Katherine Heigl film. Still, as I said when this happened to Jack and Jill, getting zero percent is as rare and impressive as getting 100%.

Oscar nominations are just weird this year. Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen movies that deserved Best Picture nominations and didn’t get them and can think of three that wouldn’t deserve to be on that list even if you expanded it to 20 movies. I would, quite seriously, nominate Fast and Furious 5 over The Help, War Horse and Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close.

There are few people in the last ten years who’ve deserved a Best Supporting Actor nomination more than Albert Brooks did in Drive so, naturally, he didn’t get one. On the other hand, Glenn Close got nominated for Albert Nobbs, a situation that caused the world to simultaneously cry out, “What the hell is Albert Nobbs?” My main hobby is seeing and reading about movies and I had never heard of Albert Nobbs.

I’m happy the voters recognized that Cars 2 sucked and didn’t give Pixar a Best Animated Feature even though that category was pretty much invented so they could stop being embarrassed for failing to nominate Pixar films.

And wow, only two original songs rated being nominated in the Best Original Song category. Given that there’s only one song from last year that I can even remember, I predict Man or Muppet from The Muppets will win. It’s kind of nice knowing my chances of being wrong are only 50%. I feel like a weather man.

I’m sure they’ve learned from past mistakes and that this one won’t be rock stupid. At the very least, I hope Milla Jovovich’s personal trainer gets the recognition he or she she deserves come Oscar time.

So yeah, MichaelClear.com is blocked for the day. Well, not really. I wasn’t going to post anything today anyway. I’m not sure why I’m doing this. Something about censorship being bad or some shit like that. Have a nice day.

Anyone want to cyber?

Here’s a link to my latest Examiner.com article, a review of Young Adult.

I was live tweeting the moment on Saturday when Herman Cain figuratively grabbed the head of the media and forced it into his crotch. For the sake of future historians, I have collected those tweets here.

I will now and always present as the ultimate evidence that Herman Cain is a horrible politician is that he quoted Pokemon in a situation that clearly called for a quote from Dragonball Z. Pokemon. Jesus H. Christ, Pokemon. And this asshole was once taken seriously as a candidate for President.

How did the show The X-Files end?

Mulder and Scully made it all the way to the final four before Simon Cowell strongly criticized them for being boring and sounding like a lounge act. They got voted off after that.

Amazon refused to publish my five star review of the new novel written by the Kardashian sisters. I notice they had no problem posting all the one star reviews which means Amazon serves the all powerful anti-Kardashian forces that keep the sisters down and prevent them from spreading their message of peace and fashion to the world. However, they do not yet control Tumblr so I can post it here instead. Hopefully, you will read this and discover, as I have, that the greatest novel of all time has now been written and all the other writers may as well fuck off and die.

I laughed at first when I saw that the book was written by the Kardashian sisters but that was before I read it and found myself shedding tears of joy over the beauty of their prose. Every one of their incredible words is like an angel ejaculated on the page. I’m happy now that I never took drugs. If I had, I may have died of an overdose before getting to read the unparalleled literary stylings of the Kardashian sisters. This book is like the Holocaust only completely different. My only problem is that Amazon limits you to just a five star rating. Then again, no number of stars would be enough so I give it infinity+1 stars. This book should forever serve as an inspiration to anyone who ever got videotaped taking it up the ass and being urinated on by a rapper.