Public Service Announcement: This coming Saturday, May 10, is National Train Day. So if you get the chance, try and board one. But if you can’t, you can always run a train at home with your friends.

That is, assuming you have a model train set.

What?

Galley Friend B.W. sends along this WaPost piece on Iron Man. It’s as much about the property as it is the movie. A couple thoughts:

The reporter makes the case that Iron Man is a second-tier hero, closer to Thor than Spider-Man. I’m not sure I buy that. In recent years, Iron Man has assumed a larger and larger role in the Marvel universe; being one of the two main protagonists in Civil War, being the center (we think) of Secret Invasion; being the center of the very popular Ultimates and having his own very well regarded Ultimate Iron Man. If anything, I’d argue that Iron Man has become Marvel’s ubiquitous hero, sort of their Batman and Superman rolled into one.

I’m not quite sure why this is. In part, I think it’s because the internet and nanotechnology have, as plot devices, radically transformed the character’s powers in the comics. Iron Man can now have whatever powers or abilities a writer needs him to have in any given situation. This makes him easier to write and quite useful as a plot center. But I’d also argue that it makes him a little boring. Heroes need well-defined limits of their abilities in order to maintain dramatic tension.

(Of course, maybe this was all long-range planning on Marvel’s part to puff the character up leading to the debut of their first solo movie effort as a studio?)

Elsewhere I’ve posted a little analysis of Obama as a basketball player. I imagine that if the press ever gets around to it, they’ll label him the second coming of Lebron. Which would be ridiculous. But he does seem like a nice player who knows how to handle himself. If I was on the playground picking teams, I’d want him running with me because he seems like a nice fluid player who knows how to stay within himself. And given his general temperament, I’d guess that he’s not one of these 40-year-old Y-warriors who thinks every rec run to 11 is Game 7 of the Finals. In other words, I bet he’s a lot of fun to play with, a guy who takes the game just seriously enough but understands that the only reason to be playing sports in middle age is to have a good time.

Watching Idol last night it occurred to me: Has anyone ever seen these two in a room at the same time?

This can’t possibly be for reals, can it? Quake that you control by tilting the iPhone?

The Jeffrey Goldberg has been thrust into the role of blogger. This strikes me as a not very good idea, since blogging has a habit of occasionally ruining fine journalists. (Don’t make me name names. You already know.) But the idea of Goldberg blogging reminds me of an old George Will joke about the addition of a wild card to the baseball playoffs: On the one hand, all change is bad. On the other hand, more baseball is always good.

Ultimately, I think the wild card has worked out pretty well. So while blogging is bad, more Goldberg is good and I’m open to the idea that this could work out okay. Certainly his first post is encouraging:

Friends tell me that I will take naturally to blogging because I am in possession of many poorly considered opinions about issues I understand only marginally. I am dubious, however. My day job is to produce overlong narrative stories for the magazine that sponsors and funds his website. These stories are meant to be exhaustively researched, carefully constructed and closely edited. Whether they justify the effort is for the reader to decide. In my opinion, they occasionally do, but I don’t like most writing, including my own. For what it’s worth, I’ve been writing now for about twenty years. I joined the Atlantic last year, from the New Yorker. Before writing for the New Yorker, I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, and before that, for New York Magazine. I have nearly run out of magazines. I will undoubtedly be ending my career at Cat Fancy.

I came late to American Idol as I do to almost everything in the culture these days and in truth, I’m not even really into it as a piece of entertainment. But I am pretty interested in it as a concept. I don’t know that I’d go so far as Jeff Zucker and call it the most important show in the history of television, but it’s certainly in the top 10. (Would you put Survivor and Real World in that list too? I might.)

In any case, I watch Idol non-religiously more to see how the format works and what sort of decisions the audience makes. And I’ve come up with only two iron laws that the show seems to hold to:

(1) Simon must always be honest and sincere. It isn’t meanness that makes him such a great character, it’s the unpredictability of someone who will say what he thinks even though he’s on television. We’re so used to TV sanding down everyone’s rough edges, that it makes Simon kind of dangerous. People like that. I’ve argued before that Idol places Simon in insincere positions (like with “Idol Gives Back”) at its own peril.

(2) But the second law actually abridges the first. It’s that: The judges must never disagree with the great tribune of the American people. Maybe there have been cases when a contestant is voted off the island and the judges have stood up on their behalf and disagreed in the audience, but I haven’t seen them in the last few seasons. Even when the judges clearly believe a deserving contestant is given the boot while a lesser contestant is spared, they never tell the home audience that they’ve chosen poorly. If anything, all three judges–even Simon–go to some contortions to explain the decision and legitimize it.

I’m sure there are other format rules working in the background that I haven’t picked up on. Feel free to point them out. Also, if you know of anyone who’s written more seriously about Idol as a format, I’d be grateful for a link.

Words fail.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FARtH00CcMo&hl=en]

Courtesy V.D’O.