Kafkaesque Thoughts Between "Terminator" and Easter

My Arkansas state representative pal Dan Greenberg mentioned looking forward to the show Parks and Recreation, which (thank goodness!) mocks local-government bureaucracy — and speaking of bureaucracy, he also noted this Onion piece about a Kafka-inspired, globally-confusing airport (noted on the NYT blog due to the Onion’s interesting, lines-blurring recruitment of a veteran CNN anchor).

Kafka also famously wrote about a man who awakes to find himself metamorphosed into a cockroach, a tale no weirder, I suppose, than:

•songs about, for instance, a man made out of balloons — by odd rocker Robyn Hitchcock, who Helen, Francis Heaney, Rose White, and I will see in concert tonight;

•God becoming a human becoming a resurrected human, a purported event Helen and some of my other acquaintances will celebrate tomorrow;

•animals becoming the moral near-equals of humans, as they have in some people’s eyes (though until humans transform into cockroaches, even the pro-animal people at our upcoming May 6 Debate at Lolita Bar on animal welfare will likely keep killing bugs);

•and the likely-dead Terminator series about robots becoming humanoid, which had its season finale last night (with the hoped-for teaser for next month’s film — a potential blockbuster that I would think might inspire Fox to want an associated TV show again after all).

A recent ComicBookResources.com interview with Josh Friedman, Brown alum and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles producer, didn’t clarify whether the show is officially canceled — but it did contain this amusing quote from Friedman about his envy of the Terminator movie’s far larger budget:

They spend more on a day of re-shoots than we do on a whole episode of our show. They did some re-shoots on our lot and we had our set where we had built a nuclear submarine. I was pretty proud of it until one of our writers called me out and showed me a huge Terminator-type stealth bomber that they had for the film. It was just some pick-up shots that they were doing for the movie. There was a big helicopter crash in the parking lot and that was just like one day of [Terminator Salvation director] McG doing what he does. It’s like when you were a kid and you go over to your friend’s house and they have better snacks. Unless you’re going to take a box of Oreos home with you, you’re just screwed. You’re just left wishing that your parents were that cool.