Found today’s Day By Day cartoon to be particularly on the mark:

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, is obsessed with real life, and also with movies, but we like to nurture a gritty and healthy determination to keep those two things separate.

Well part of understanding how things are separate is understanding how and why they overlap. So this entry, linked by venerable blogger friend Gerard, immediately appealed to us:

[An] ending is like a punch line. It is a thing that pulls the story together in such a way as to make the experience satisfying. Usually, an ending is the moment just after the victory when all is concluded. (Unless you’re me, and you write two full chapters of post-victory-missing-father-answers-questions stuff. But I don’t recommend that approach! So, in this case, you might want to do as I say, rather than as I do.) Normally, endings are more like the old romance guidelines which said: end the story the very moment that the couple gets together.

Basically, you write your story. You write your climax. You write what happens next. Then go back and cut everything after whatever the final sum-up moment of the climax was, ending at the very moment when the story is complete.

Again…do as I say, not as I do. Got that? Okay…

Overall, there are three basic endings. Everything turns out the same as the beginning—the sit-com ending used by all non-serial TV shows. Everything turns out worse than it started—a tragedy. Or everything turns out better than when it started—what used to be called a comedy, but now is just called a story.

There is another ending, however, that many of the bestsellers use. It is the unexpected twist ending. In his book Writing the Breakout Novel, Donald Maass describes this kind of ending as: The main character fails to get what he was striving for during the book (sad), but instead he gets something else, which turns out to be good or better (happy or at least kind of happy.)

This kind of ending often has a bittersweet quality, because of the loss of the desired goal brings a note of sadness, even if the unexpected good that comes the character’s way once they see what is left for them after their failure brings some joy with it.

An example of this last ending is Gone With The Wind. Scarlett fails to get Rhett or Ashley, but she does go home to Tara with a hope of starting again. An even better example of this kind of ending is Casablanca. In fact, while whole books could be written on why Casablanca stands out so much among its contemporaries, one of the reasons is the way in which the end so perfectly meets Maass’s criteria.

Gerard asks the provocative question, “How might ‘The Barack Obama Story’ End?” Brett_McS answers:

Barry and Michele hit the media circuit (after a short pause to allow the media to re-write the four year nightmare as the second third coming of Camelot) becoming regular commentators in every venue and on every subject from foreign affairs to healthy eating. They never go away. Ever. For youth is on their side. They will be still preaching to us via our bedside 3D holographic TV as we take our dying breaths and are too weak to change the channel. Light and sound slowly fade. The end.

It occurs to me, there is another type of ending worthy of inclusion in such a list, not satisfactorily captured by any of the other examples: We could call this the “Animated Monster” ending, which makes it clear to the audience that all of the events of the story are merely antecedent to the adventures to come, all distilling into a complex character, and the story itself is simply a unique medium for defining in comprehensive detail all the important attributes of that character. Great works in movies and literature can develop from such an ending, like this one, for example…or just creepy, haunting ones, like this. We may make it all the way to the end, not fully conscious of the fact that all we’re seeing is an “origins” story.

I think the Obama nightmare falls into that. We’re witnessing not a presidency, but a gestation, the culmination of which will be a denizen of the lucrative lecture circuit. An extraordinarily tedious and tiresome one. He’ll hop from podium to podium, talking some smack about the policies of President Palin, just like the classless Carter talked smack about President Bush. He will be nursing an intense but silent seething anger that His entire existence, from the very start, was destined to devolve into nothing more than an endless loop of “Make No Mistake” and “Let Me Be Clear.”

And one day, just like Jesse Jackson, He’ll see Himself displaced by someone younger, hipper, and more fun to watch. Which will pose a problem He’ll seek to solve by exposing Himself more, thus bringing down the market value of His name…and the endless loop will be energized with the frenzied, irrational and escalating drive of the vicious cycle.

Hmmm…maybe “tragedy” does cover it.

An ancient Internet meme that’s been around since before there was an Internet, has been evolving. This version seems to be a 2008 vintage with some parts left in from the 1990’s…

Why DID the Chicken cross the road? Inquiring minds want to know.

COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?

…than a lot of people do awake.