As you wish, this is Nerd Alert, the Weekly Volcano's recurring events calendar devoted to all things nerdy. I myself am a Star Wars fan, mathlete, and spelling bee champion of long standing, so trust me: I grok whereof I speak.

FRIDAY, MARCH 28

There's something inherently goofy about the story of Noah's Ark. For geeks of a certain age, it calls to mind Bill Cosby making "voopah" sawing noises and wondering, "What's a cubit?" You may be more familiar with Ricky Gervais reading a children's picture-book summary of the Great Deluge. Either way, it's likely nothing about that story made you think, "Hey! Y'know who'd be great at directing the movie version of this? Darren Aronofsky! Yeah, something about Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan just screams Biblical epic to me." And yet here we are. For good measure, let's have Hermione Granger play Noah's daughter. Righteous. Early reviews are mixed, but at least Russell Crowe doesn't sing.

And of course there's Emerald City Comicon, running all this weekend in Seattle's Washington State Convention Center. While San Diego's fable con slides more into the realm of movies and TV, this is one gathering that keeps its primary focus on the comics. Featured writers include Mike Allred, Kurt Busiek, Erik Larsen, Jim Lee (Friday only), Mark Miller and Jeff Smith. Star Wars novelists Kevin J. Anderson and Dave Wolverton will be on hand, as will John Scalzi, whose Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas won the Hugo last year. It's about a security officer aboard the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, Ensign Andrew Dahl, who suddenly realizes his colleagues don't fare well on away missions. Think 320 pages of "Guy" from Galaxy Quest, and if that doesn't make you desperate for a copy then I don't know what.

Have no fear, TV and movie geeks, you haven't been exiled into the Phantom Zone. Celebrity guests include Richard Dean Anderson (who'll fashion a crude Orion vehicle from two paper clips and a Hot Pocket), Michael Biehn (who'll claim to be from the future, then impregnate a coffee shop waitress), John de Lancie (Q who?), Michael Dorn, Eliza Dushku, Cary Elwes, Kelly Hu, Nichelle Nichols, Ron Perlman, Lance Reddick, Alan Tudyk and Karl Urban. I'm tellin' ya, you put those people around a mic for two hours, and you've got a pretty good LEGO Movie sequel. Did LEGO ever make a Hellboy set? Because that'd be awesome.

SUNDAY, MARCH 30

After last week's history-heavy installment, Cosmos explores "A Sky Full of Ghosts." Patrick Stewart voices astronomer William Herschel, best known for his catchphrase "You go, business pro." Also, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson's Ship of the Imagination buzzes the event horizon of a black hole, beating Disney's reboot department by years.

Meanwhile, in the improbably walker-ful woods around Atlanta, Sheriff Rick is in for an even less happy installment than usual in the season-four finale of The Walking Dead. Shortly thereafter, Nerdist Chris Hardwick will admit even he's not sure what's going on with this show anymore.

Next week, of course, it's back to Westeros for season four of Game of Thrones.

Tuesday, April 1

Avoid obnoxious April Fools' Day pranks by hiding in your living room with a fresh supply of cinematic brain candy. New on Blu-ray and DVD this week: 47 Ronin, Anchorman 2 and Knights of Badassdom.

Until next week, may the Force be with you, may the odds be ever in your favor, and may we all be reunited in Terminus.

March 21-27: Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?

This is precisely the type of movie that is built to kill at an art house, but would go unseen at any other theater. Here's the elevator pitch: Restlessly inventive French Director Michel Gondry animates a conversation with linguist and logician Noam Chomsky. Fun, right?

Gondry has always been a curious director, but an inefficient writer. His adaptations of Charlie Kaufman screenplays (Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) were low and high points for the writer, respectively. While one film hinged on the burgeoning feature director's abilities (paired with a middling story), the other found writer and director enhancing one another. Meanwhile, Gondry's own excursions into writing and directing-with the ruthlessly prickly relationship drama of The Science of Sleep and the cartoonish broad comedy of Be Kind Rewind - were decidedly uneven.

What cannot be denied, even if we decry Gondry's command over ideas, is his command over deceptively simple visuals. The solution to this problem of visuals lacking meaning? Combine Noam Chomsky's fascinating and maddening philosophy with Gondry's imaginative animation to create something of a mashing together of art and ideas that amounts to more than these two men can do, individually. Seems intriguing. The Grand Cinema, Friday 2 p.m., Saturday 8:45 p.m., Monday 6:30 p.m., Tuesday 8:45 p.m., Thursday, March 27 4:15 p.m., 606 S. Fawcett Ave., Tacoma, 253.593.4474

Saturday, March 22: Hellboy Day

I will never get over the disappointment of Guillermo Del Toro bailing on directing The Hobbit. Here is a director that made his mark by putting way more effort than necessary into Hollywood fluff. This is a trend that started with Blade II, which had no right being as good as it was. After that, we found ourselves looking at the Hellboy (soon-to-be) trilogy, which managed to take a bunch of goofy characters and imbue them with a sort of surreal majesty. Del Toro is an absolute master of monster creation, and Peter Jackson is more or less a hack of his own creating. A Hobbit trilogy under Del Toro's rule would've been a punk rock ode to everything that fantasy could be, if it could just let go of the orcs and move on the batshit Cthulhu parade.

This is all a long way of letting all you nerds know that Mike Mignola's Hellboy comic book series is turning a cool 20 this week. What amounted to the quintessential '90s comic book - self-aware, stylized, coolly violent - has come of age in a time that has largely failed at adapting comics of the kind. Punisher, Spawn and The Crow have all been blessedly forgotten failures as adaptations. Come rejoice at the victory of the comic form as Olympic Cards & Comics celebrates with a sampler comic of new Mignola stories. Olympic Cards & Comics, 10 a.m., 4230 Pacific Ave., Lacey, 360.459.7721

Standing up in the Milky Way, this is Nerd Alert, the Weekly Volcano's recurring events calendar devoted to all things nerdy. I myself am a Star Wars fan, mathlete, and spelling bee champion of long standing, so trust me: I grok whereof I speak.

FRIDAY, MAR. 14

Theater geeks have plenty to keep them busy this weekend, as Neil's Simon's dramedy Chapter Two treads the boards at Tacoma Little Theatre, while The Man of La Mancha (a musical retelling of Don Quixote) tilts at windmills for Tacoma Musical Playhouse. I'm seeing both, between performances of 12 Angry Men at Lakewood Playhouse, so expect reviews soon. Meanwhile, a beautifully acted production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof continues at Harlequin Productions. This is the time of year when local troupes announce their upcoming seasons, so I look forward to passing that on to you in an upcoming summary.

TUESDAY, MAR. 18

It's a fine day for Blu-ray and DVD shoppers, with American Hustle, Frozen and Saving Mr. Banks all hitting shelves the same day. Each is fantastic, but only one stars the lovely and talented Adele Dazeem. If you're a Terry Pratchett fan, his new Discworld novel Raising Steam is in stores, as is William Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back, a faux-Elizabethan sequel by Ian Doescher. You could also give Pierce Brown's debut adventure Red Rising a try. It's been marketed as a YA novel, but it's a straight-up SF novel for adults. I'm enjoying it and look forward to its inevitable sequels.

Now let's talk Cosmos. You did watch that first episode, right? I mean, I practically begged on my knees. I was able to procure a screener of the pilot, but I saw it too late to review it for Nerd Alert. (Instead, my glowing endorsement is posted on "Carv's Thinky Blog," www.ChristianCarvajal.com.) This week's episode, airing on Fox Sunday, March 16 at 9 p.m., is called "Some of the Things That Molecules Do." If you miss it, it airs the next night on Nat Geo and lots of other Fox-affiliated cable networks. Is it about chemistry? Yes. I imagine. I don't know. No one else does, either, because critics got the first hour only.

Incidentally, that colorful nebula in Cosmos's opening titles is a retouched view of the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a cloud of dusty gas lit by the ultraviolet emanations of a dying star 650 light-years from us. It's an awesome phenomenon, really - a star very much like our own sun has burned through its store of hydrogen, and now it's collapsing into a dense ball the size of the earth. How dense, you ask? (Pretend you asked.) Think tons per teaspoon. It'll burn through its helium soon, before moving on to heavier atoms such as carbon and nitrogen. Eventually it'll sputter into white dwarf status, then fade away entirely. An ignominious fate, don't you think? It'll happen to our own sun some five billion years from now. The brighter they burn, folks, the harder they fall. Sigh ...

Until next week, may the Force be with you, may the odds be ever in your favor, and may your Cosmic Calendar always be full.

FRIDAY, MARCH 7

As a child, I was raised on the delightfully slapdash cartoons of old, via VHS and LaserDisc. Stuff like Beany and Cecil, Popeye, Gumby, and Rocky & Bullwinkle were huge foundational entertainments for me. Sandwiched in the middle of my Rocky & Bullwinkle tapes were these odd little shorts about a genius dog and his boy Sherman. Peabody's Improbable History followed the titular dog and his companion as they traversed through time and space in the WABAC machine.

Now, sadly, we've come to the point where Hollywood shrugs and says, "I dunno, what if Mr. Peabody planks and plays Dance Dance Revolution? Is that anything?"

Mr. Peabody and Sherman is now a Dreamworks 3D animated film, coming 14 years after its flagship program, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, came limping onto the big screen. Playing Mr. Peabody, without the nasally know-it-all bite of the original, is Ty Burrell of Modern Family. There is autotune, there is skateboarding, there are numerous fart jokes. This is all a way of saying that Mr. Peabody is the coolest dog this side of Poochie. Think he'll die on the way to his home planet?

Really, who is this for? Are there children who grew up on DVDs of Peabody's Improbably History? Are there any baby boomers with kids young enough to take to see this movie? I'd like to get in the WABAC machine and go back a few years to convince some producers to finally make the Beany and Cecil movie. The live-action story of a sock-puppet sea serpent and his child-in-peril best friend would be straight-up terrifying.

>>> The Visitor

ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

Speaking of psychedelic mind-fucks, this week sees the release of a long-lost bit of Italian batshit insanity called The Visitor. Released in 1979, the film now finds its re-release thanks to the geniuses at Drafthouse Films, those cinematic dumpster-divers. Starring an utterly bizarre assembly of celebrities such as filmmakers John Huston and Sam Peckinpah (!), Lance Henriksen, Shelly Winters, Glenn Ford and Libertarian talk show host Neal Boortz, The Visitor has been breathlessly described as "the Mount Everest of insane Italian '70s movies."

Briefly: an 8-year-old girl named Katy with telekinetic powers must carry on her magical genes by mating with her brother before a shadow agent can sleep with Katy's mother. Thankfully, a space Jesus known as Jerzy (John Huston) is there to intervene with the help of his child army.

Everyone on the same page? I know I sound like I had a psychotic episode while I was writing that, but that is legit what happens in The Visitor - that, and deliciously overblown visuals that are fraught with symbolic meaning. There's a reason why The Room is so much fun to watch, but stuff such as 3 Days to Kill is just unbearable. Blind, raging ambition is always fascinating, regardless of how successful it is.

The Visitor is like staring directly into the hot, glowing sun of ambition. A midnight screening is surely in order.

Dreaming of the '90s, this is Nerd Alert, the Weekly Volcano's recurring events calendar devoted to all things nerdy. I myself am a Star Wars fan, mathlete, and spelling bee champion of long standing, so trust me: I grok whereof I speak.

THURSDAY, FEB. 27

Portlandia's fourth season of gentle sketch satire at the expense of the PNW begins on IFC at 10. They should totally put a bird on that.

Read more...

ERMAHGERD! There's going to be a Goosebumps movie, you guys!

Continuing the exhausting phase of mining every little bit of nostalgia for the increasingly apathetic eyes of '90s children, the once-beloved book series of cheesy lite horror for kids is coming roaring to the big screen.

The audience for such an adaptation has got to be vanishingly low, right? We're talking adults in their mid-20s to early 30s (because I doubt children are still reading them, and adults back then didn't read them) who fondly remember reading the Goosebumps series (I read them, but can't remember a single thing about them) and who care so deeply that they'll jump at the opportunity to see some interpretation of it in a movie theater.

While the project has been in works for some time, it was recently announced that Jack Black will star as R.L. Stine, the author of the series, which lends a level of unwelcome meta commentary, for me. Remember when the book The Time Machine also existed in the universe of the movie The Time Machine? Or when Bo and Luke Duke in the movie version of The Dukes of Hazzard can be seen watching the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard? No? Neither of those? Well, it was infuriating.

If there's one ray of positivity surrounding the Goosebumps movie, it's that idiosyncratic screenwriter Mike White (School of Rock, Chuck & Buck) had a hand in penning the script. After his run with the criminally overlooked HBO series, Enlightened, this will be White's first return to movies since his disappointing Year of the Dog in 2007. If anyone can inject an off-kilter earnestness into what is essentially a nostalgia-exploiting cash grab, it's Mike White.

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 26: C.L.A.W. OPEN SWIM

C.L.A.W. sounds like a sinister cartoon shadow organization, but that's only partly true. The Cartoonist's League of Absurd Washingtonians is a collective of artists - including Tacomic creator and all around provocateur RR Anderson - who meet up to share their work and create new works together. Their Open Swim event is an opportunity for non-members to come around and participate in the mad cartooning.

Artists will collect a word from a mystical fez, and will then be expected to incorporate that concept into their drawing, in addition to general commiserating. It's geeky fun for creative types who want to share their work with likeminded weirdos - sort of like the Internet, but with real live people for you to not make eye contact with. Fun! 7:30 p.m., King's Books, 218 Saint Helens Ave., Tacoma, 253.272.8801

Until next time, super perfundo on the early eve of your day! 

GRAB A CUP AN DREAD THE MORNING REPORT FOR 2.13.14 >>>

Series of prison breakouts across Iraq have freed hundreds of militants who have joined radical Sunni groups operating in neighboring Syria and in Iraq itself.

Afghanistan released 65 detainees despite evidence that they killed or wounded Afghan and coalition troops, the U.S. military command there announced.

Senior US officials and lawmakers are sending new signals that a fledgling cadre of military spies is a done deal, despite no real substantive public debate.

The top commander in Afghanistan is being asked to explain why his staff attempted to diminish the findings of the government watchdog overseeing billions in construction projects there.

Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James shared her observations from her visit with airmen across the ICBM community following revelations of a proficiency-test cheating scandal at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont.

Google's robot army will live in a military hangar.

Odierno pushed back against the idea of downsizing the military because the wars of the past decade were ending, saying it's hard to predict future conflicts.

The federal government may have shut its doors due to weather conditions - but the guards tasked to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier aren't so quick to abandon their posts.

Video of crashed drone hit with rocks by Afghan villagers.

Can you spot the sniper hiding with camouflage in this picture?

Nuclear fusion breakthrough: More energy out than in.

The new movie Mirage Men‘s subtitle is: "How the US government created a myth that took over the world."

The final season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars will debut on Netflix.

Speaking of ... Star Wars dresses.

Watch the trailer for Melissa McCarthy's new movie, Tammy.

America's best dine-in movie theaters

Aaaahhhhh...

Courtesy of your friends at Omni Consumer Products, this is Nerd Alert, the Weekly Volcano's recurring events calendar devoted to all things nerdy. I myself am a Star Wars fan, mathlete, and spelling bee champion of long standing, so trust me: I grok whereof I speak.

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 12: ROBOCOP

My colleague the Rev. Adam McKinney saw fit to neglect Wednesday's reboot of RoboCop in last week's Nerd Alert column, and I imagine it's because - like me - he doesn't think it'll be any good. Some movies don't need to be remade. The trailers make this new version look like a borderline-competent, dare I say interchangeable, action movie, but they don't show a hint of satirical wit. That was what made the '87 original stand out. God knows it wasn't all those obscenely gory squib hits; it was the worldview that demanded them. Director Paul Verhoeven, as subtle as a brick in the eye, reveled in violence and amorality with a wink so obvious even teenagers could tell he was kidding. I know the difference between violence and ironic violence is a subtle one, but the problem here is, it might be so subtle the reboot's director, José Padilha, didn't realize it was there. On the other hand, he did study English literature at Oxford, so maybe I'm selling him short. In other words, perhaps I'd buy his movie for a dollar after all. I mean, it's not like any of us thought The LEGO Movie would be worth a flip.

TUESDAY, FEB. 18: DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF D&D

Because I don't have HBO and I'm not a shameless scofflaw, today's Blu-ray and DVD release marks my first opportunity to watch Season 3 of Game of Thrones. I have successfully, one might say miraculously, avoided all spoilers. Ergo, all I know is some people will be killed, red is not the luckiest color in Westeros and nameless wenches will bare their breasts. Like, a lot of them. All the damn time.

If you're a geek of a certain age, chances are you spent many if not most Friday nights tossing 20-sided dice, absorbing Domino's pizza, and pretending to be a 10th-level Elf Druid with your friends. Yes, I'm talking about Dungeons & Dragons, the role-playing fantasy game you came to know and love as D&D. Unfortunately, I was a Jehovah's Witness at the time, and we were forbidden from playing the game. (Apparently it opened our minds to demonic attack by making us want to be thieves or assassins for a living. I know. That didn't work out, largely because it's hard to major in assassination and/or thievery in college. Phoenix online college doesn't count.) Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered the game's co-creator, Gary Gygax, self-identified as one of Jehovah's Witnesses.

That's just one of many thousands of interesting factoids in Playing at the World, a book by game enthusiast Jon Peterson - and it's buried in a footnote, no less! This nautical anchor of a tome offers the definitive history of D&D and its wargaming forebears, then contextualizes it by recounting the study of game simulations since chess.

I'm not a book critic. I'm a theater critic. I don't want to be a book critic. I write books myself, so the last thing I want is to unload the uric acid of skepticism into yet another pool in which I myself am swimming. (That's called a metaphor, lads.) But when the publisher of this August 2012 release offered me a copy to peruse, I was too big a nerd to say no. The fact is it's like reading a doctoral dissertation. On the minus side that means it has the mass and density of a neutron star. Not a detail is missed. But on the plus side, not a detail is missed!

This guy really does know his stuff. After three weeks of intense effort I'm about 100 pages into his 630-page book, plus appendices. It won't make you or anyone else a better RPG player. It won't teach you strategy - though it does touch ever so briefly on modern game theory - but it will fascinate you for hours on end. It includes, for example, a thorough retelling of the early history of published science fiction and fantasy, during which Peterson makes a compelling case for the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island on early genre fiction (by way of H. Rider Haggard). But I digress! Bottom line: if you're an RPG fan, Playing at the World will be an indispensable addition to your nonfiction library.

Until next week, may the Force be with you, may the odds be ever in your favor, and may the Rite of Rebirth bestow blessings of Bahamut upon you. I have a plus-seven against dragons and wyverns!

SATURDAY, FEB. 8: CHRIS PERONDI'S STUNT DOG EXPERIENCE

OK, dear reader, there's no use in beating around the bush with this one. We'd just be fooling ourselves. The notion of the stunt animal live show is absolutely ridiculous. Dogs being made to dress in silly costumes and perform little sketches is such an old-timey bit of entertainment that has stretched so deeply into utter nerd-dom that it's miraculously come back around into something that I'm surprised has yet to be co-opted by irony.

Chris Perondi's Stunt Dog Experience is such a show. What's made to separate this stunt animal shows from others like it - despite, I suppose, the relative "talent" of the animals on display versus rival stunt animals, which is an argument that I would hate to have but would love to overhear - is that CPSDE (as those in the know like to call it) utilizes the performing abilities of rescue dogs. I imagine their rough-and-tumble upbringings tend to lend a little gravitas and the weight of experience to their performances, just like Danny Trejo.

While we're on the subject, here are some more circus things that hipsters would do well to appropriate: diving board-based physical comedy, unicycles (I mean, appropriate them again), and that thing where you would jump off a high diving board and land in a tiny little kiddie pool. That thing. 3 and 6:30 p.m., $12-$26, Pantages Theater, 901 Broadway, Tacoma, $12-$26, 253.591.5890

THURSDAY, FEB. 13: HOLES AT THE MOORE LIBRARY

I remember seeing Shia LaBeouf years ago on Craig Kilborn's show, talking about how he started his career as a stand-up comedian when he was something like 10 years old. He said that, in order to get the attention of the comedy club crowd, his opener would go like this: "The first time I masturbated, confetti shot out of my penis."

At the time, I was charmed by LaBeouf. Now, I wonder who he stole the joke from.

In case you've been rightly avoiding entertainment news over the past month, LaBeouf has been embroiled in a controversy that began with him completely plagiarizing a Daniel Clowes comic called Justin M. Damiano for a short film he directed. Predictably, LaBeouf was immediately found out once he put the film online, and what has followed has been an exercise in lame, art-school-failure performance art, and acts of privilege and delusion so mind-boggling they'd make Justin Beiber wince.

Apology after apology were released by LaBeouf, each apology eventually being identified as having been plagiarized from other celebrity apologies. Finally, LaBeouf announced his retirement (utilizing stolen retirement speeches, of course), waited a couple weeks, then announced his next project. Daniel Clowes, meanwhile, realized the monster he was dealing with, and has now decided to sue the prick.

Interested in seeing a young, preciously untainted Shia LaBeouf? His adaptation of the beloved Louis Sachar novel, Holes, will be screened at the Moore Library. If you hiss every time his dumb face shows up on screen, though, you'll never make it through the movie. 3 p.m., Moore Public Library, 215 S. 56^th St., Tacoma, free admission, 253.341.4848

Marvel "true believers" grew up thrilling to the adventures of the mighty Thor, a Norse demigod who bashed supervillains from the Nine Realms with his Asgardian war hammer, Mjolnir. Later, millions of young geeks volunteered their services to the American armed forces, but some never lost their childhood love of comic book heroes.

For the last eight years, Marvel Entertainment has given back to the military community by offering limited-edition comic books exclusively to servicemembers through the Army & Air Force Exchange Service. This year, in 32 action-packed pages, writer William Harms and penciler Tom Grummett advance that tradition by launching Thor into battle against the bloodthirsty Frost Giant, Ymir. This special issue, "Deep Freeze," features a cover by Walt Simonson, a legendary artist whose efforts on Star Slammers, Thor, and Fantastic Four have been collector favorites for decades. Its frozen battleground: Stark Tower in New York City. Its all-too-mortal protagonist: former British airman Edwin Jarvis, now employed as a butler by that stalwart band of heroes, the Avengers. Excited yet?

The Army & Air Force Exchange Service offers quality services and merchandise at low prices, while funding operations in support of military morale, recreation, and welfare. "All of us at Marvel owe a debt of gratitude to our real heroes, the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces," Marvel editor Bill Rosemann acknowledges. "(This is) the least we can do for the men and women who bravely fight for the freedoms we all hold so dear." Thor: Deep Freeze is suitable for kids six and older, and available free of charge to service members and their families at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Movie sequel Thor: The Dark World arrives on Blu-ray and DVD Feb. 25.