*UPDATED — Now with more women! And vitamins!

I found Joss Whedon’s list of the best tv characters ever, and I thought it would make a great meme. He gave twenty-five, but I’m sticking to ten.

1. Pa Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie - Didn’t every little girl want to be his half-pint? The best daddy ever. Strong and kind and honest, but able to get all threatening when he had to.

2. Ken Titus from Titus - Obnoxiously real, cruel and abrasive, while managing to make us love him at the same time. If you haven’t seen the show Titus, be warned: it’s a little dark, but hilarious.

3. Bart Simpson from The Simpsons - The evil in us all. Though Homer may be just as bad in many ways, Bart is creative about it. The episode where he sold his soul? Or the Halloween episode where we learn of his evil twin? Genius.

4. Bob Newhart as Dick Loudon on Newhart - I may be the only person who actually enjoyed him more as a hotel owner than a therapist. Understated, wry, deadly funny, a man making his peace with an irritating world. (And did you see him as an action hero in The Librarian? I encourage you to see it just for the scene where he says “Semper Fi.”)

5. House from House MD - I am absolutely with Whedon on this one. Hugh Laurie does an amazing job with that character. And when is the last time you heard a Brit pull off an American accent that well? It ain’t common.

6. CatWoman from Batman - (as played by both Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt) She made being bad look so good. She challenged Batman, and pulled off a little depth in a show that was all camp.

7. Columbo - There are layers to the man. Layers.

8. Dr. Perry Cox from Scrubs - I have had this teacher over and over again in my life, the crotchety curmudgeon with compassion and convictions that declare themselves even as he tries to keep them hidden. I would like the character even if I didn’t recognize the man.

9. I have to pick a character from Buffy/Angel. I love the shows so much. But just one? Angel is too easy. I guess Wesley. I loved the way he developed and tested his own convictions and loved Winifred. That scene where he read Frances Hodgson Burnett to her while she was dying? Amazing.

10. Okay, one more. Here I will reveal myself for the sci-fi dork I really am. I choose Nick Knight from Forever Knight, another vampire show. I loved the guy. I would wait till midnight on Fridays to watch it in syndication, and still be riveted when all he did was lie on his floor and muse silently to music.

So if you feel like joining me in this meme, just leave a link in the comments. Everybody’s welcome. I tag Pieces and Riley.

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You may notice that all the above characters share a certain unapologetic quality. They are who they are, and they are not craven. Even Dick Loudon is stubborn in his own way. And I think that’s why I had so few women. There aren’t a lot of strong women in TV who refuse to pander or simper. But here are a few I forgot.

Jean Pargetter from As Time Goes By. She’s a successful businesswoman whose employees call her “Iron Drawers.” She finds love on her own terms, and if she gets a little flighty sometimes, she still pulls dignity out of it.

Geraldine Granger in The Vicar of Dibley. I love Geraldine. She speaks her mind and she manages to love her parishioners while seeing how ridiculous they are. And anyone who has ever sat on a church council/session of elders/board of deacons must respect the way she manages hers.

I’ve already mentioned the show Scrubs, but I should have included Carla Espinosa. She’s strong, she’s competent, and she runs things her way. The only stronger woman on the show is Nurse Laverne Roberts, who scares everybody. There are few sweeter moments in tv than when Nurse Roberts makes the doctors quail by saying, “You don’t have to apologize to me. But you will have to answer to Jesus.”

Dr. Katherine Pulaski from Star Trek The Next Generation. Strong, unapologetic woman of conviction and accomplishment. She did not stay long on the show, but she was memorable.

And one more from Angel? Cordelia Chase was always the most interesting woman from the Buffy world. Whether she was the snob you loved to hate, or the magical mother to a crowd of misfits, she drew the eye and kept the attention.

Sarah Caudwell wrote four mystery novels before she died, and everyone who has read them wishes she had lived to write more. Her formal, almost Dickensian style is full of humor and wit. If you can get through the first ten pages, you will enjoy the rest of the book. Consider her prologue, after her narrator insists that the story contained herein is a true one:

Some of my readers, perhaps many, having expected to find in these pages diversion rather than instruction, will now hasten back to their booksellers to demand indignantly, it may be with threats of legal action, reimbursement of the sum so ill-advisedly expended. So be it: such readers will give me credit, I hope, for having enabled them by my prompt confession to return the volume unread and in almost pristine condition; and I for my part (for publisher and bookseller I cannot speak) would rather forgo the modest sum which would accrue to me from the sale - very modest, meager would be a better word, one might even say paltry - would infinitely rather forgo that sum than think it obtained by deception.”

If that intrigued you, you will enjoy The Shortest Way to Hades. If you skipped down after the first fifteen words, then this book is not for you. It just goes on like that.

Caudwell’s detective is Hilary Tamar, a professor of law at Oxford who frequently haunts the offices of a group of friends who practice law. Here I will avoid certain terms, because I know so little about the British legal system, and cannot tell the difference between a lawyer and a barrister and a solicitor and so on. Tamar is a busybody whose nosiness is alternately tolerated and enlisted by the friends, who sometimes stumble upon crimes in need of solution.

The first time I read Sarah Caudwell’s novels, I completely missed one of the ongoing gimmicks of her books. In the U.S., Hilary is almost exclusively a female name, so I naturally pictured the protagonist as a woman. But Caudwell deliberately left the sex of her detective ambiguous. The name is androgynous, and the story is told in first person narrative. No one - author or character - ever says in the four novels whether Hilary Tamar is a man or a woman.

This approach is carried out in the relationships her characters carry on. Sexual interest is frequently described, without apparent restrictions of gender, and there seems a general promiscous bonhommie throughout Caudwell’s books. Combined with her refusal to assign a sex to her main character, this works to erode any traditional understanding of sexuality and gender. I suspect Caudwell tried to destroy any perception that sees the world through binary thinking, not only that of male and female, but perhaps even right and wrong . It is all quite deliberate, and sometimes leaves me with the sensation, after I have laid down the book for a half hour or so, that I have forgotten to wipe the slime from my hands.

I enjoy Caudwell’s books in part because I think she failed in her purpose. The mystery genre still maintains too much commitment to a truth/lie dichotomy to completely demolish morality. Tamar’s mocking of a friend’s quotations of Thomas Moore remain unconvincing when Tamar still doggedly pursues the truth of the crime.

I have put off writing this book review because I do not know how to go about it. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel Tarzan of the Apes is a classic adventure story that has been rehashed and reinterpeted many times. If you have not read the book, you may still think you know it. You probably do not. None of the screen versions have been completely true to the story. The novel itself works well as a stand alone book, but continues through many subsequent novels.

I have hesitated to write this review because of all the things Tarzan is. It is racist and sexist. There is a palpable confidence in English racial superiority. The blithe chauvinism of the author about “civilization” against all the non-Europeans of the world is a running theme in the book. In a dozen ways this book is embarrassing to read, and even more embarrassing to enjoy.

Because I did enjoy it. I could not help myself. Despite Burroughs’s gall in writing dialogue like the following, when John Clayton confronts the African jungle where he and his pregnant wife have been abandoned by mutineers:

“Hundreds of thousands of years ago our ancestors of the dim and distant past faced the same problems which we must face, possibly in these same primeval forests. That we are here to-day evidences their victory.”What they did may we not do? And even better, for are we not armed with ages of superior knowledge, and have we not the means of protection, defense, and sustenance which science has given us, but of which they were totally ignorant? What they have accomplished, Alice, with instruments and weapons of stone and bone, surely that we may accomplish also.”

Ah, the triumph of the Englishman over the ignorance of the past. The Englishwomen do not seem to fare so well, however. Civilization seems to have rendered them rather wimpy. Clayton’s wife, unable to mentally withstand the horrors of life in a jungle, goes insane and spends the rest of her short life happily believing she is in her parlour at home. Clayton and she are both killed by savage apes, and their son is adopted by an ape mother recently bereft of her baby.

The superiority af the English genes are shown by the boy’s brilliance and physical prowess. He grows up to be stronger, smarter and more deadly than any of the apes, and outwits the African men and women living in the jungle, too.

The story is, of course, preposterous. The existence of feral children raised by animals has been claimed but never proven, but the children possibly produced by it certainly remained mentally and physically underdeveloped for the rest of their lives. Animals cannot raise healthy human children.

But the appeal of the story is something mythic, something as old as Gilgamesh: a hero, stronger and taller and better than most men, but still a man, faces impossible odds, suffers great heartbreak, but survives. Tarzan is both pitiable and admirable, and I found myself trying to imagine the story as occuring on some other planet so I could enjoy the thrills of his exploits without the racist baggage of history. Because this is a great story, and everything else considered, I still cannot help but like it.

My friend Stacie and I have known each other fifteen years now (insert requisite age acknowledgment here). She has been living and working in Russia ever since college, and recently had the exciting opportunity to take a group of Russian Christians on a mission trip to Greece. They worked with the refugee community there and with women who have been forced into prostitution. You can read more about her trip on her blog Sojourner.

My friend Matthew Litteken is that rare combination of artist and all-around decent guy (seriously, how many artists can you name who are normal, enjoyable people to have a beer with?). He has a blog up to display his art. It’s worth a stop. He has a Blogger site, and, for those of you brave enough to face the wilds of MySpace, he has a site there, too (with a lovely soundtrack).

And here is my friend Russell at The Eagle and Child, with his musings on theology, culture and the latest book he’s been reading. He’s a good guy; even Az the Growly thinks so.

Now why would I have trouble showing my house?

Oh, right.