When my brother was young, he used to really enjoy stuffed animals. He had hundreds of 'em. Now he owns a Maltese/Pomeranean dog. Really, I guess I should have seen it coming.
Professional painter Robert Stackhouse once told me that the way to make a career out of selling paintings was to discover what other painters were not providing in a given market, then produce those paintings for that market. Until I find that niche, expect something a little different with each painting.
As you may or may not know, I've begun selling paintings on eBay (under the clever eBay id "wriphe"). I started this last year off and on, but now that I've got a little more space around the house to work on several canvases at a time, I'm listing again a little more aggressively. I'll post here when I've got a new painting up for sale (like today, though the painting that I listed today is not the painting pictured below).
The above picture (Batmobiles are awesome) is about actual size on a 1024 x 768 monitor. Nifty, huh?
In the Star Trek episode "Operation: Annihilate!", Mr. Spock is infected with a mind-controlling parasite. As an experiment to remove the parasite, Spock is exposed to the full spectrum of light at high intensity. However, when Spock is blinded by the experiment and lab reports show that the parasite is vulnerable to spectra of light invisible to humans, Kirk blames McCoy for blinding Spock. Note the following:
Captain Kirk rejects the "logical" proposal by Mr. Spock that the infected inhabitants of Denev be destroyed to prevent the spread of the parasite. Apparently concerned about his legacy, Captain Kirk refuses to be the man who killed a million people to save a billion.
The "expose the space aliens to light" plan was based on Captain Kirk's own suggestion that the parasite may be vulnerable to light. None of the science or medical officers on board the Enterprise's "best in the galaxy" labs have come up with or endorsed this apparently desperate plan of action.
The experiment was rushed on the orders of an emotional Captain Kirk so that he may save his nephew, who has also been infected. Kirk's earlier plan of interrogating his sister-in-law for information about the parasite and its weaknesses resulted in her death.
Captain Kirk orders Mr. Spock to participate despite Dr. McCoy's objections. Though Spock is willing to participate (as the logical participant), McCoy is concerned that Spock should have eye protection, a concern that Kirk immediately and unreasonably overrides.
The moral to this story: If you're going to be a dick, be a Captain.
On a side note, immediately after ridding the planet Denev of the parasitic invaders, Captain Kirk orders the Enterprise out of orbit. This is despite the fact that he has just left his only nephew, Peter, an orphan on the planet's surface. Nice show of compassion, Captain Dick.
I just returned from Philadelphia, where my brother and I watched the Philadelphia Eagles defeat the Miami Dolphins. Despite the scattered rain, bitter cold, and Dolphins' tenth loss of the season (0 for 10: we're still prefect!), I had a great time.
Philadelphia fans have a reputation as real assholes. And I can now tell you first hand that everything that you hear about them is all true. Though most of the fans were good natured before and during the game (a father pointed me out to his toddler as "the enemy," the security guard frisking me upon entering harassed me for wearing Dolphins' gear to the game, and the attendant who announced the discontinuation of alcohol service at halftime urged the crowd to yell at me instead of her), by the fourth quarter, with the Eagles' firmly in control of the game, the fans had worked up enough courage to devolve into a surly bunch of jerks. One fellow continued to taunt me until the final second ticked off the clock for supporting a "bunch of losers," and another that I encountered in line for the bathroom told me that "the Dolphins' fucking suck" and he hoped that I personally would die a slow and painful death.
My brother repeatedly pointed out that insulting me for being a Dolphins' fan during this winless season was the equivalent of abusing a helpless puppy. Well, now I know how Philadelphians treat puppies: they must be Michael Vick fans.
As you may have heard, Georgia is in the midst of a drought. Yesterday, our Governor, Sonny Perdue, led a public prayer for rain on the grounds of the state capital. Amusingly enough, the prayer was protested.
Sure, I might have problems with state sponsored prayer. But I've really got better things to do than to protest against people praying for rain. I mean, where's the up side in that protest? If you're right, and faith shouldn't be invoked to solve the drought, how do you propose that we force the atmosphere to deliver us precipitation? If you're wrong, and appeasing a higher power is what is required to make it rain, you've doomed us all. In either case, by raining on this parade, you're not helping to make it any more wet around here.
Now that it's raining a day later, clearly proving that prayer works (sorry all you people who lost loved ones to disease, God doesn't love you as much as he loves Sonny Perdue), those same protesters are no doubt worried that solutions to other local problems will be sought with prayer instead of legislation. Maybe God can prevent a recurrence of the perfect storm that led to Genarlow Wilson becoming national news at Georgia's expense. Or maybe God can decide what to do about the pesky problems with Atlanta traffic jams. Or potential construction costs and controversial plans for the Hartsfield-Jackson airport expansion. Or what to do about putting too much salt on a police officer's complementary hamburger. (Or even police officers who arrest people for putting too much salt on their complementary hamburgers.)
Hell, why don't we just go ahead and put God to the ultimate test: see if he can make the Atlanta Falcons football team have two consecutive winning seasons for the first time in franchise history. (That's asking for just 18 wins over two seasons.) Or what if we pray that the Atlanta Thrashers hockey team wins a game in the playoffs? (They were the best team in the regular season last year. How hard can it be to win one post season game?) Or, if we're looking for a real challenge, how about giving the Atlanta Hawks basketball team a .500 or better season. (Not only hasn't this happened this century, the Hawks' playoff record makes the Thrashers appear to be over-achievers.)
I'm not asking for miracles here. I'm just looking for Atlanta professional sports to not suck. That doesn't seem nearly as hard as making it rain, does it?
Now back to football: UGA 45, Auburn 20. (Satisfying. Oh, so satisfying. It was the most points anyone had scored on Auburn since we hung 56 on them over a decade ago. And this is the first time that UGA has scored 40 or more points in a game in 3 consecutive games since the 1940s.)
This was the last UGA game of the season that I will be attending. I'll be missing next week's game so that I can travel to the Dolphins vs. Eagles contest in Philadelphia. Fitting, I suppose, that the fans all wore black to the game this week to mark my passing.
A friend of mine has been complaining that too many of my recent blog postings have had to do with football. So, to honor the wishes of my dear friend, this posting has nothing to do with football.
Dogs win for homecoming! Bulldogs 44, Troy 34. I think this game had just about everything that you could've asked for in a football game. An F-14 flyover, an enthusiastic crowd, and an alumni band and cheerleader squad. Not to mention that for the better part of 4 quarters, it was anybody's game.
But it shouldn't pass without controversy. Down 10 points and losing yards to penalties and a suddenly swarming Bulldog defense, Troy's coach, Larry Blakeney, seemed to give up late in the fourth quarter when his team chose not to attempt to convert a 3rd and 29 from their own 16 yard line, instead opting for a short yardage run up the middle to set up the punt. Invigorated by Troy's decision to give up the game, the Bulldogs returned the punt to Troy's 2 yard line, from which they easily scored their final touchdown to drive the victory margin up to 17 points.
Troy's next possession was a quick 4 and out. No attempt to punt, but it certainly appeared that since the coach had given up on the team, the team didn't care to play anymore. And why should they? What was the point if the coach had already thrown in the towel on the game? Taking advantage of the situation, the Bulldogs ate another about half the remaining time off the clock and gave the ball back to Troy with more than 2 minutes remaining. That's when things got weird.
For their final drive, Troy put in their second string. And drove the ball down the field. When they reached the UGA 35 yard line, they took a timeout with 34 seconds remaining. Two plays later, having reached the UGA 4 yard line, they took their second timeout with 18 seconds remaining. Failing to score, they took their final timeout with a mere 11 seconds remaining. That's right: eleven seconds in the game. Down 17 points. With the second team in the game. Troy called their third timeout. Sure, on the next play they scored. But with so little time remaining, the game was over.
The question becomes why Troy's coach called those last two timeouts on consecutive plays with less than 18 seconds in the game. The likely answer was to ensure that he scored another touchdown to keep the margin of victory at 10 points. He called those timeouts not to win the game, which with a mere 11 seconds remaining is essentially impossible, but to ensure the scoring of the touchdown. (Note that after the score, with 5 seconds on the clock, he chose not to onside kick, but rather to kick a regular kickoff 40 yards deep to kill the remaining clock.) In the Coach's own words to ESPN following the game:
"The crowd that stayed booed us for trying to execute, which was funny," Blakeney said. "I think we certainly had the potential to win, and I doubt we'll get any quick invites back here."
Sir, we didn't boo you for trying to execute, we booed you for wasting our time.
"The potential to win"? Down 17 points with only 18 seconds left, victory is all but impossible. Certainly, I am completely unaware of any time when such a large margin was overcome so late in a football game. In an earlier game today, Clemson scored 16 points in 39 seconds (two touchdowns separated by a safety), a rare and amazing scoring pace that is one fewer point than what Troy needed in more than twice the time. Clemson running back Cullin Harper said of Clemson's performance, "that's the fastest I've ever seen 16 points scored." By comparison, Clemson's all-time fastest back-to-back touchdowns were scored just 14 seconds apart. But two touchdowns is still fewer points than Troy needed at that point in the game. Seventeen points is at least three scores.
Since the coach had all but given up the game two possessions earlier, and he had replaced his starting players with second-stringers, there are only three possibilities. One is that he intended to give his second-string players some experience. This possibility is a necessary evil of football and would not require a lie to cover it up. Another possibility is that he wished to ensure that the record books didn't include such a lopsided score. Unpleasant and selfish, but understandable. But the worst of all is the possibility that the coach was gambling on his team. Or at least encouraging it.
After the game I checked and found that at most Las Vegas casinos, the spread on the game was between 14 or 15 points in the Bulldog's favor. By struggling to score that last touchdown, Coach Blakeney was ensuring that his team would beat the spread. This no doubt won money for gamblers backing Troy and the spread. However, beating the spread serves no purpose on the field of play and should never be the concern of a coach or a team of players. It's an embarrassing day when the head coach of a highly touted (reigning Sun-Belt Conference champion) Division-IA football team is more concerned about beating a gambling spread than winning his game. Embarrassing and disgraceful.
There is at least one thing that I agree with Coach Blakeney about. I also certainly doubt that UGA will extend any more invites to have Troy back, either.
While doing some work in front of the television, I watched Match Game 75 on the Game Show Network. A little old lady played for two rounds wherein she gave some of the worst answers ever. Originally, I had planned to just list them here. Instead, I've embedded them in the following game simulation. The contestant got zero correct in the episode. See if you can't do better. (My apologies to Joyce Bulifant. I gave her the answers that the idiot contestant gave to make the game more playable. In this episode, for a change, Joyce gave reasonable answers.)
If you've been paying attention this week, you've gotten the message: the Dolphins suck. The lingering question is "why?" Dolphins' owner Wayne Huizenga has been on the offensive this week, meeting with the Miami Herald and making a few interesting statements:
''Is Cam [Cameron, Dolphins Head Coach] a mistake? I don't think so, but it's too soon to tell. I don't think you can blame everything that's happening now on Cam.''
''It's tough because Randy's been here two years and when Randy [Mueller, Dolphins General Manager] was here, Nick [Saban, previous Dolphins Head Coach] made all the decisions.''
Looks like we're going to blame Nick Saban for our current mess. Sure, Saban was a piece-of-shit who lied about a few things and broke his undeserved megabucks-contract to flee the NFL for the comfy confines of a megabucks-contract Alabama. Sure, Saban's personnel decisions were questionable. (And that's a generous evaluation.) And worst of all, Saban was a lousy coach, unable to motivate or game-plan on an NFL level.
But should we be crucifying Saban, who has had nothing to do with the team since January for our winless record this year? Is it Saban's fault that we drafted a wide-out with a history of injury when that was far from our weakest position? Is it Saban's fault that returning Defensive Coordinator Dom Caper's defense (YPG) has fallen from 4th last year to 27th this year? Is it Saban's fault that the Dolphins have started going through coaches (Johnson, Wannastadt, Bates, Saban, Cameron) like some teams go through tear-away jerseys?
Don't get me wrong. I don't like Saban. That guy started to piss me off during his first month on the job. But the Dolphins have been on the wrong road for awhile now. Hmmm. Since about 1993, when the Dolphins loaded up on expensive free agent talent in a season that was bound to prove only that you can't win by loading up only on expensive free agent talent. The team also renamed Joe Robbie Stadium (named for the late Dolphins owner) Pro Player Park in an effort to generate more cash. Really, nothing much but downhill from there. What else happened that year? Oh, that's right: Wayne Huizenga took full ownership of the team. Coincidence? Or was that Nick Saban's fault as well?
Dolphins' outside linebacker Channing Crowder made news today by admitting that he couldn't find London on a world map. While many suspect that the affable Crowder was likely kidding, many others have taken the opportunity to ridicule him. Crowder is an Atlanta native who played college ball for >shudder< Florida where he majored in "Social and Behavioral Sciences" before abandoning education for the NFL as a Junior. So long as Crowder can find the ball on Sunday, I'm prefectly willing to ignore his checkered past and dubious education. (Especially if the Bulldogs can pull out an upset win against his Gators in the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party this Saturday. Go Dawgs!)
Two days ago, I mentioned that there were 6 Miami Dolphins players highlighted on the NFLLondon.com website. I mentioned the first 5, including the fact that 3 of them would not be playing in London. Now it seems that number six won't be making the trip, either.
Player number 6 is Zach Thomas. Earlier this season, Zach missed 2 games due to lingering effects from a concussion. But it's not any on-the-field injury or team intrigue that will keep Thomas from playing this Sunday. No, he was hit by a car following the game last week. More accurately, his car was hit by another car. (That's right: after suffering an embarrassing beating, losing 49-28 to the rival New England Patriots, Zach Thomas' truck was rear-ended. That's a great conclusion to a great day, eh?) It is the whiplash from that accident that has kept Thomas out of practice this week and off the plane when the Dolphins fly to London today.
Just in time for a trip to London, defensive end Quentin Moses signed with the Miami Dolphins. Moses, a native of Athens, Georgia, played college ball for the University of Georgia (where he majored in -- I'm not kidding -- "Recreation and Leisure Studies") and was oft-bestowed lauded All-American honors. The highly-decorated collegian was the 65th pick overall and the highest draft pick of 2007 who did not make the cut for his drafting team, the Oakland Raiders, aka the 2006 Worst Team in the NFL. He has since been signed and released by the Arizona Cardinals, the All-Time Worst Team in the NFL. Now that he is on the roster for the team tied for the title of 2007 Worst Team in the NFL, I'm sure his fortunes will not improve.
Moses is a defensive end, one of the few positions that the Dolphins don't really need much help with. The team has now picked-up 5 defensive linemen in the past week. This is just another sign that the Dolphins are looking for young, inexpensive talent to replace their few remaining stars. In this case, Jason Taylor. Moses is made in the same mold as Taylor, and many around the League think he could mature into a great player with proper training and patience, two things he won't likely be getting in Miami, if recent history is any guide.
As for Taylor, despite being talented and popular enough to be the model for a giant robot stalking the streets of London, he's not good enough to remain a Dolphin. Rumors circulate that Taylor will be traded in the off-season to open up more room for young talent. It's good to know that's how the Dolphins these days reward their most talented and fan-favorite players: ship them off to the highest bidder. Taylor was publicly mulling over retirement after last season. I don't image that he'll have much incentive to stay in the League now. So no matter how it plays out, the Dolphins lose: either we trade Jason Taylor and lose a still-productive star, or Taylor, insulted by the Dolphins' trade-talks retires (a la Jake Plummer) and we lose the trade value. After the way the team mishandled the Daunte Culpepper situation last year, why should we expect any better treatment for Taylor?
As I mentioned 2 days ago, the Miami Dolphins will be playing the New York Giants in London this weekend. I just took a look at NFLLondon2007.com, the official website of the game. The first three of six players highlighted to introduce the Dolphins to an unfamiliar British crowd are, in order, Trent Green, Ronnie Brown, and Chris Chambers, none of whom will be playing for the Dolphins come Sunday. (Green and Brown are out for the season with injuries and Chambers was traded last week.) Number four on the list is Ted Ginn, Jr, who has only 6 catches (and zero touchdowns) through the first seven weeks of the season. Wait'll they get a load of us!
On the upside, the 5th name on the list is Jason Taylor, the 2006 NFL Defensive Player of the Year and NFL's all-time leader in touchdowns scored by a defensive lineman. To promote the game in London, the NFL has constructed a 26-feet tall animatronic Jason Taylor -- "the worlds largest ever animatronic human" -- dubbed "Big JT." It looks TOTALLY BADASS. No doubt it will be shown on TV this weekend. You can see a brief video of Big JT in action on NFLUK.com. (Note that in the video, when asked to predict the game's winning team, Christian Slater, star of Kuffs, says, "Well, I grew up in New York so, uh, I've always been, uh, uh, a huge Giants and Jets fan, so, uh, I'm just excited to be here." Eloquent. And pointless, just like Slater's career.) The NFL's official pics are available in a slideshow at MiamiDolphins.com. If you'd prefer a longer, more boring video of the robot in action (but without Christian Slater), check out YouTube. Or, if you're into this sort of thing (as I am), check out the website of the SFX company that made the titan, Artem, LTD.
Yesterday, backup QB Sage Rosenfels replaced the starting quarterback for the Houston Texans followng an injury. Should Rosenfels start for the team next week, he will be the 6th ex-Dolphin quarterback to start for a team other than the Dolphins this season. (Daunte Culpepper for the Raiders; Gus Frerotte, Rams; Brian Griese, Bears; Joey Harrington, Falcons; Damon Huard, Chiefs; and Rosenfels.) Since Dan Marino retired following the 1999 season, the Dolphins have had 11 different starting quarterbacks in 8 seasons. Of those eleven, 2 remain on the Dolphins' roster (Trent Green on Injured Reserve and Cleo Lemon, our starter) and 2 have retired (Jay Fiedler and Ray Lucas). That leaves only 1 ex-starting Dolphin in a position to start for another team this season: A.J. Feeley, benchwarmer for Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles. (Before Feeley was a starting quarterback for the Dolphins, he was the back-up to Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles.) With Feeley riding pine behind an injury-prone McNabb, could I dare to dream that every active ex-starting Dolphin quarterback could start a game during the 2007 season?
The Miami Dolphins: spreading bad quarterbacking throughout the National Football League since 2000.
On a side note, Jason Garrett, one of the backup quarterbacks that appeared on a Dolphins roster in 2004 but who never took a snap for the team in a game, is now the Offensive Coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys, which has one of the best offenses in the League right now. So our starting quarterbacks weren't good enough to start for us, but they are good enough to start for everyone else, and our backup quarterbacks weren't good enough to take a snap for us but are good enough to engineer winning teams for other organizations. So the question becomes: why does everyone suck when they are a Dolphin? I'm not really sure I'm ready for the answer to that question.
The word "nikhedonia" is defined as the pleasure of the anticipation of victory. Now that the Miami Dolphins have extended their season losing streak to 7 games, the worst start in franchise history (>sigh<), my pleasure at watching the Fins play decreases as I anticipate very few victories. Next week we will be traveling very far from home to play the New York Giants in London. Where we, currently tied for the title of Worst Team in the NFL, will no doubt shock and awe the Brits into never watching American football again. Sorry, gov.
In case you're wondering, I discovered the word "nikhedonia" while reading the book There's a Word For It, in which I discovered that the particular disorder of my friend, who I will call Jason in the interest of maintaining his anonymity (he knows who he is), is called "haptodysphoria." Essentially, that means that Jason can't touch raw cotton because it feels icky to him. Other than that, Jason happens to be a pretty normal guy. For a haptodysphoriac, that is. You the man, Jason!
I have now seen Transformers, and it sucks. I mean really, really sucks. For many, many reasons. For example, in all promotional advertising Dreamworks presents Optimus Prime's head with a mask over the mouth just as his movie-inspiring toy version has traditionally appeared. However, in the film, Prime has a visible mouth at all times. Why would Dreamworks promote the film showcasing a design that doesn't appear within the film? Answer: because they know that the masked toy-design is much, much better than the design that they actually used. I only mention this because this proves that the in-house marketing department at Dreamworks knows that their film actually sucks. As I previously posted on May 30, even director Michael Bay publicly stated that he thought the movie sucked. So who the hell paid to see this thing in the theater enough times to make it the 3rd highest grossing movie of 2007 to date? That person is the reason that we have capital punishment in America.
But since I think that so many of my recent posts have been so negative as late, instead of a long post about the abundant things about Transformers that make it very, very horrible, instead may I present two things worth watching instead:
1. Bleach on Cartoon Network. Sure, it's animated anime fantasy about super powers and dead samurai sword fights, but isn't that exactly the genre of thing that you'd go to see Transformers for? Great characterization always produces great entertainment. And this show's got it (whether the pronoun "it" here refers to either "characterization" or "entertainment") AND super powered sword fights set to Japanese pop-music. Sweet.
2. Pushing Daisies on ABC. This is the wonderfully narrated fairy tale of one man who has the power to return the dead to life. Naturally, he uses this power to solve murders and complicate his own love life. This show looks like nothing else I've ever seen on TV. It's getting great reviews, but must have a truly staggering production budget (and rumors circulate that director/producer Barry Sonnenfield has gone waaaay over-budget and angered studio execs), so I suspect that it will get the axe as soon as ratings slip even a little. See it while you can.
It suddenly occurs to me that both of those shows circulate around the concept of death. But then, so do CSI (and most other crime dramas), House (and most other medical dramas), and Law & Order (and most other detective shows). So let's not get carried away with calling me a goth, okay?
Two years ago, my father decided that he wanted to start keeping bees. So he invested in a hive, a suit, and a starter swarm. This week, he finally collected his first honey, which he put into those familiar little bear-shaped squeeze bottles.
He gave me a bottle and let me sample it. The locally produced honey does indeed taste fantastic. Then he revealed that after dividing the cost of the enterprise by the number of bottles that he was able to produce, he figures that each bottle was worth about $85.
It doesn't taste that fantastic.
Maybe I'll be able to afford a bottle when costs come down. In about 5 years.
I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere in time the Nobel Peace Prize lost its way. How, exactly, have Al Gore and the IPCC "done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses"?
Sure, maybe Global Warming, the boogeyman-under-the-bed of the 21st century, is a potentially dangerous thing threatening the world, but what has Al Gore done to foster peace and prevent future war over it? Thrown a concert? Started a cable television channel? Made a very profitable movie? Invented the Internet?
If Global Warming existed before Gore championed it's opponents, then he is more similar to AIDS activist Ryan White than Polio vaccinator Jonas Salk. Should you give someone an award for suffering from a medical condition? Especially a condition that that someone is profiting heavily from?
Seems to me that the much-lauded Peace Prize has become about as relevant as Britney Spears' panties (or lack thereof) when all it does is promote the current cause celebrite. What's next? Awarding terrorists?
Last night, in the game between the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers, it was challenged whether there were too many men on the field for Chicago. After several minutes, referee Larry Nemmers came back to say that there weren't. Of course, by that time, John Madden had twice proven that there were 12 men visibly on the field, not 11. Why did it take the officials so long to count TO THE WRONG NUMBER?
Later, when packers coach Mike McCarthy challenged the spot of the ball on an apparent Bears' first down, after several minutes of staring at tape, Nemmers placed the ball about a foot backwards. This is not at all the full yard or more difference in the spot of the ball that the replay had shown. Though spotting the ball has always been a largely arbitrary action, why, when you have ample time to look at it, do you get it so wrong? To add insult to injury, the Packers lost a timeout over the "failed" challenge of the spot of the ball (because the re-spot following the replay review resulted in a first down anyway) despite the fact that the replay proved that the coach was correct in challenging and should not have resulted in a Bears first down.
Note, please, that when Nemmers placed the ball about a foot backwards, he was well aware that the Bears would still have the necessary yardage for a first down. He had just brought out the chains to measure the gain before the challenge. After moving the ball, he ordered the chains on the field and measured again. Since he had just measured, knowing full well the location of the first down marker, this second measurement was only for dramatic purposes as he revealed that the Bears still had a first down.
Two failed instant replay calls in favor of the Bears while playing a game in Green Bay? Unheard of!
After several years of provisional implementation, so-called "instant" replay was made a permanent part of the NFL game earlier this year. That's a travesty. It's one thing to get a call wrong on the field. Officials are human and prone to making mistakes. It's another thing altogether to stop a game and extend its length by minutes in order to get a call wrong while staring at a recording of a play. That's just inhumane and inexcusable.
Maybe Larry Nemmers, who has been an official in the NFL since 1985 and a referee since 1991 has just gotten so old that he can't see well anymore. But I suspect that it's more than that. Every year, the NFL delegates that their best (i.e. "fewest blown calls") officiating staff be on the field for the Super Bowl. Despite being a referee for 16 years, Nemmers has never been on the field at the end of January. By the way, before joining the NFL's part-time officiating staff, Nemmers was a high school principal in Elgin, Illinois, a suburb of -- guess where? -- Chicago! (The Chicago Bears, loser of last year's Super Bowl, came into the game with a 1-4 record, desperately needing a win to stay alive in the divisional rankings. They got it, thanks in no small part to you, Larry!)
Another Batman and Football month draws to a close with another Georgia Bulldogs victory. This win was a little odd because it seemed that we were able to draw together and defeat Mississippi 45-17 only because of Knowshon Moreno's dancing to a calypso beat during one of those forever long official time outs. After Knowshon got the stadium crowd worked up, Thomas Brown became Superman, tearing through defenders as he ran downfield at will for the following quarter. Why couldn't we beat an inferior team like Old Miss without a couple of players providing motivation very late in the game? (Dancing with the stars, indeed.) That's UGA for you.
We won't have another home game until November. We've got to play Tennessee and Florida on the road first. I'll decide if I'm going to the Troy State game based on our performance in October.
As I said earlier this month, I was re-reading A Lonely Place of Dying, which essentially launched the third Robin, Tim Drake. Drake's first appearance as Robin was in Batman #465. Norm Breyfogle's cover of Batman and the new Robin caught in a spotlight pays homage to a long standing tradition of images of Batman (and occasionally Robin) caught in a spotlight.
Now, by "homage," I mean "lazy rip-off of." It's much easier for an artist to duplicate something he's looking at than to create something on his own. Especially in the break-neck paced comic book artist's demanding schedule. I mean, Alex Ross must put out a work a day; he doesn't have time for original composition. And who can blame him when he can simply spit out a "re-imagining" of a previously-composed image for reproduction on a limited edition collector's plate, pick up his check, and add another Shazam! Mego to his personal Captain Marvel collection.
Not that I'm knocking Ross' work, mind you. Comic artists, even the talented ones like Breyfogle and Ross, have been recycling poses and covers since they learned to draw. Heck, that is exactly how they learned to draw. Take a look at the following 2 covers. On the left, the original inspiration for spotlight images to follow, Batman #9. On the right, a book published one year later, Batman #16, recycles the original art, merely flipping it horizontally. (Note the failure to colorize Robin's cape underneath the flashlight. I suppose we should be thankful that they re-drew the "R" on Robin's chest.) You simply don't get lazier than that.
All these covers make me wonder why Batman and Robin always seem so afraid of the light. Seems symbolic, somehow, doesn't it? Granted, if in the middle of the night I was hanging around with a minor while we were wearing capes and underwear, I probably wouldn't want to be seen either.
It was just brought to my attention that the Miami Dolphins, the NFL team with the best overall record since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger, is on pace to lose that distinction by the end of this year. After being barely .500 since the loss of Marino (the Greatest Quarterback to Ever Live), the Dolphins will be supplanted in the record books by the Pittsburgh Steelers should they win 9 games more than us from this point forward. Though that seems unlikely, with the Steelers sitting at 3-0, and the Dolphins starting an abysmal 0-3, it could happen in week 12, when the two teams play one another.
I've just returned from the Newnan High School homecoming football game against Lithonia High School. We left at halftime, as the NHS Cougars were beating the LHS Bulldogs 35-0 and I simply didn't care to see any more, especially if I was going to have to sit through the halftime Homecoming Court presentation. (I'd've stayed if the LHS band was going to take the field. Their drum corps was much, much better than their football team.)
As we left the stadium, I realized that I did not have my wallet on me, and I was convinced that it had fallen out of my pocket in the stadium. My brother patiently explained that my wallet must still be on my bed. Since my slightly-paranoid neurotic nature would have alerted me to the wallet's absence during the game if it had been present and then disappeared, he explained, my realizing it only after my departure was because enough time (and football) had passed for me to forget that I hadn't brought it in the first place. Therefore, I was fretting only because I had forgotten that I had not brought it to the game.
He was, it turns out, quite right. My wallet was right where I had left it, on my bed. I dropped it there before we left the game because I was excited upon putting on a pair of pants and finding $6 in the pocket. (Yes, I am so broke that $6 is a huge find.)
So now I'm the worst of both worlds: a paranoid with a memory short enough to be suspicious of my own behavior and motivations. And finding $6 is enough to get me too excited to pay attention to anything for about an hour. Great. What's that they say that's the first thing to go, again? Cause I'm pretty sure that's already gone.
Don't forget: today is National Talk Like a Pirate Day. (I admit. I forgot. I went to a website where they had replaced every instance of the word "you" with the word "ye." Then I remembered.)
Despite the above evidence, I'm pretty sure that neither Batman nor Two-Face participates.
Saturday's final score: UGA 45, Western Carolina 16. Western Carolina's mascot is a Catamount. That's a fancy word for "wildcat." If cartoons have taught me anything, it's that dogs trump cats.
Not much of a competition, as expected. Since the on-field action was sub-par, I became distracted by the use of hand-held fans in the crowd. In the afternoon heat, the cardboard fans used by attendees to keep their faces cool appeared like thousands of butterflies fluttering their wings throughout the crowd. It was just as fascinating as the flash-bulbs that you typically see on kickoffs in the night games.
Re-reading the Batman storyline A Lonely Place of Dying, I found this panel:
The narrator means Dick Grayson, the first Robin. I swear.
The narrator in this case is Alfred Pennyworth, Batman's trusty manservant. If anyone would be privy to Batman's enjoyment of, um, Dick, Alfred would be the one to know.
By the way, what exactly is Batman supposed to be holding up that Robin is so happy about? It looks like, well, something someone who is happier with Dick would be holding, if you know what I mean.
My friend (who I usually call Chris, but for the sake of protecting his anonymity, for the rest of this blog posting, I'll refer to him as Otto, because, well, he calls himself Otto) has just completed a painting of Adam West as Batman and listed it on eBay. He's got an image of the painting as well as a "making of" video on his blog here.
(Don't worry. Robin throws a batarang through the canvas to prevent Batman from revealing his identity. Hey, that's what sidekicks are for, right? And that should definitely teach Batman not to host oil painting classes for the Associated Press again.)
I'm back, and I have some catching up to do, don't I?
First game of the UGA season: victory! Dawgs win, 35-14, over the Oklahoma State University Cowboys. Word on the street was that the Cowboys sold out every seat that we offered them. Quite an impressive display of fan loyalty, there.
I know it was the first game and all, but I was surprised that the lady who owns the season tickets in the row in front of me didn't recognize me. She recognized my brother, and remembered my mother and father, but not me. I must have gained a lot of weight since last year.
Second game of the UGA season: defeat! Dawgs lose, 16-12, to the University of South Carolina Gamecocks. The Bulldogs performance was utterly uninspired, and the generally low expectations for this year's squad were proven uncannily appropriate awfully early in the season.
The crowd was barely involved in the game. I don't know if we were too shocked or if we had resigned ourselves to the loss early. In last year's SEC home losses, the fans were behind the team until the final second. But this time we seemed to be as stunned as the players on the field that South Carolina, who most of us had written off as beneath us, was having their way with us. Damn you, Spurrier! >shakes fist in rage<
Of course, the NFL season kicked off this weekend, and my team, the Miami Dolphins, lost. The teams of my couch-mates, my brother and his girlfriend, respectively cheering for the Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Giants, also lost.
So far, this does not have the makings of a very good Batman and Football Month.
My beloved poodle, Chere, died today at approximately 2PM. Though the cause of death will never be known for sure, my father, Chere's caretaker and best friend, believes that Chere suffered a heart attack. [Updated Sept. 3] At least she avoided one of the most common fears of humanity: she died not alone, but in my father's arms.
Today I celebrate the second annual Batman and Football Month with something that has nothing to do with Batman or Football! (It's exactly this sort of misdirection that both Batman and Football Offenses thrive on!)
I'll be unable to blog for the next week or so (busy, busy!), so let the following digital toy amuse you until I've had a chance to attend to the situation. Two notes:
The squares at the top, left, and bottom of the screen are buttons. Press them to turn them on/off. They do various things. For example, the one furthest down on the left is the reset button. You're smart; you can figure out the rest.
By holding the mouse down, you can drag the individual squares to new locations to change the design for your own pleasure.
Now go, play with yourself. I'm pretty sure you'll have fun.
Well, the finalists are in for the Heinz commercials, and I'm not one of them. >pout<
A brief review of the finalists (visible at TopThisTV.com) shows that Trey & I really didn't have a chance at all. A professional level of polish is visible on at least 10 of the 15. Only 5 of the 15 contain animation. Four of those are stop motion and the fifth is a very impressive dancing ketchup bottle that I couldn't have rendered on my home computer. Trey suspected that a commercial would have to feature children to win, but only 5 of the commercials have kids (and one of those has America's favorite slapstick comedic moment: a blow to the family jewels, so it's probably the winner).
The most notable thing about the commercials is that all but 2 or 3 spent some real time and money on either locations, sets, actors, animation, or ketchup bottles. Heinz must have made a fortune from the contestants alone last quarter. I guess you have to spend money to make commercials.
As of late, I've been a little obsessed with the animatronic animals that performed as The Rockafire Explosion at Showbiz Pizza place throughout the 1980s. I think that adding robot performers to a pizza joint designed mainly to encourage children to play coin-operated video games is perhaps among the greatest restaurant concepts of the 20th century. Showbiz had lousy pizza but spectacular entertainment. I mean, who cares about your low-quality goat cheese pizzas when a robot bear is emceeing your birthday party celebration?
(Don't remember Showbiz? Thankfully, to the rescue comes YouTube! Someone has been uploading training videos from Showbiz Pizza to YouTube. I guess everyone has a hobby.)
Sadly, with the practical demise of arcade gaming thanks to the home console gaming revolution, the concept died a slow death, replaced by Chuck E. Cheeses using not stage robots but television sets. Though I'm sure that today's kids would prefer robot vaudevillians over televised variety shows led by an animated rat, they don't know that they used to have the option. To the kids of today, it's lost information, like how to build a pyramid. (That's right, I've just essentially compared the disappearance of Showbiz Pizza parlors with the fire that destroyed the Library of Alexandria.)
In the late 80s, I watched Marc Summers as the host of Nickelodeon's Double Dare. By the turn of the millennium, I was watching Marc Summers as the host of the History Channel's History IQ. Now I watch Marc Summers as the host of Food Network's Unwrapped. This progression pretty much sums up the aging process: messy childhood, know-it-all teenager, forced-to-cook-for-yourself adulthood.
(Note that I never watched Marc Summers as the co-host of Lifetime's Biggers and Summers. I simply refuse to watch anything on Lifetime. It's a channel devoted to the equivalent of after-school specials for housewives.)
You watch most television personalities play characters. Usually poorly. I enjoyed David Hasselhoff for his "portrayals" of Michael Knight and Mitch Buchannon. I'm fond of William Shatner for playing Captain Kirk and about one hundred guest star appearances, all of them equally way over-the-top. And don't get me started on My Favorite Martian / The Magician / The Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby. (I'd recognize Bix before some members of my family.) But Marc Summers always plays Marc Summers.
I'm pretty sure that in another 25 years, I'll be flipping channels and still see Marc Summers, looking none the worse for time, hosting a show deep into my cable dial (maybe hosting the show You've Fallen: Can You Get Up?). It's a comforting thought, really. Some things don't change.
Think about this: today, most coffins are made in an assembly line fashion by robots. Robots weld the lining, paint the exterior, and embroider the interior. That's right, your eternal resting place will in all likelihood be created for you by an inanimate object that will never need to use the same product.
The phrase "robots making coffins" is about the scariest indicator of the future of the human race that I have yet encountered. (Just like in The Matrix!) Yet there is one ray of hope: since they don't use the products themselves, at least those robots need humans for long-term job security. (Just like in The Matrix!)
But, of course, there is the down side of the internet: incessant junk mail. The following is an actual message that I received today:
From: Eliza M. Eddy To: Elma Q. Fournier Subject: My boyfriend's shaft keeps slipping out.
Dames always giggled at me and even gars did in the open toilet! Well, now I sriek at them, because I took Mega. Dik for 5 months and now my pecker is indeed bigger than average. shop for [link removed] --------------------------
This guerilla advertising is supposed to make me dash to the address provided and shop for "Mega Dik"? I worry slightly, because it must be working on someone (presumably either "dames" or "gars") for some bastard to take the time to send this email out.
P.S. Isn't it a bigger problem if your boyfriend's shaft never "slips out"?
I don't consider myself a deep thinker. (Unless, of course, I'm trying to figure whether the immorally apathetic Comedian, the unyielding vigilante Rorschach, or the mad machinations of Ozymandius represents a greater threat to the crumbling, stagnant civilization in Watchmen.) And while I'm far too shallow for frequent introspection, I do constantly marvel at modern technology. How often do you stop and think about how your life has changed since the onslaught of the World Wide Web? Can you even remember a time when you had to buy a magazine to see naked girls? Thank you, Al Gore, for inventing the internet!
I live in a town that has a penchant for combining business models for maximum marketability. There is a graphic design sign shop/Taekwondo dojo, a dry cleaners/baptist church, a hot dogs and oysters restaurant, and (my personal favorite) a toy store/lawnmower repair shop. I figure it's only a matter of time before I hear someone ask "you want fries to go with that car title pawn?"
I'm making up for my total lack of pictures during July with two YouTube videos today. These are both my brother's and mine 30-second submissions in the Heinz Top This TV commercial contest.
Mine first:
And Trey's:
Watch them. Enjoy them. And be assured that should either one of these videos make it into the 15 semi finalists (of a field of well over 2,000), you're going to be voting on one of them as your favorite over at YouTube.
Earlier this month, the Roman Catholic Church paid a staggering $660 million to settle child molestation charges against their priests in Los Angeles, California alone. According to the CIA, there are more than 2 dozen countries in the world that do not have a Gross Domestic Product of at least $660 million.
Last Thanksgiving, my brother and I were trying to think of the most offensive potential video game concept ever. In the end, our number one choice was that the gamer would play as Jesus Christ and the goal of the game would be to rape children. After recent events, I'm beginning to think that our game idea might have a market.
There was a time, not so long ago, that I wanted to go to Comic-Con in San Diego. Once upon a time, it was a great place to revel in comic book fandom with the artists and publishers themselves. That time has past. Goodbye, Superman in Action Comics, hello Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man, the Movie. Now the event is just another hype factory for Hollywood. If months and months of incessant, repetitive commercials for toys and bedspreads at Wal-Mart, fast-food tie-in "premiums," and soft news stories covering the actors' personal lives isn't enough to sate America's desire for overblown marketing, well, now there's Comic-Con, where the price of admission is just $65 and your soul.
You know, Rosco P. Coltrane was really a pretty good driver. Sure, those Duke boys made him look the fool, but they spent an entire season on the NASCAR circuit, after all. Think about it this way: in all those car chases that ended in the Dukes' escape and Coltrane's collisions, how many times was Coltrane injured? As pilots always say, any crash you can walk away from is a good one.
It almost seems a requirement to follow a blog posting about choking with an entry about chickens.
It was brought to my attention that chickens are gaining ground on dogs and cats in the pecking order of pets in America. You can now order your own pet chicks via the internet at sites such as mypetchicken.com. (I think it's amusing that they have a shopping cart that lets me put items in a "basket." It reminds me that I should not buy all of my chicken related supplies from them alone. Think of the consequences should they make a mistake and lay an egg with my order. Boy, would they have egg on their faces!)
I don't understand this upswing in poultry popularity. Even my father is now raising chickens in his backyard. He spends half his day running around like a... well, you know, tending to his peep, which is apparently the word for a group of chickens. What does he get for it in the end? Nothing but aches and pains. (After all, he's no spring chicken.) It's hardly a cheep hobby either.
Personally, I think this trend is for the birds. I blame this cuckoo fad on advertising, which places a premium on the sex appeal of chicks in our society, especially the size of their breasts and thighs. It raises my hackles to think that someone might prefer a fowl hen over an impeccable puppy as a best friend. Chicken soup for the soul morally can't be made from a processed pet! If this trend isn't reversed mid-flight, we could have entire generations counting on chickens before they're hatched. And that's a recipe for disaster.
Yes, it's true. I've been playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 on the Wii, and I can't beat CGI-Tiger. Oh, I can take a commanding lead through the front nine holes. But then I lose, lose, lose on the back nine and watch impotently as CGI-Tiger hosts his own trophy.
I know that CGI-Tiger is beatable. My brother did it in his first try. Easily. Me? On the front nine, I've scored birdies. I've scored eagles. I've even scored aces! And CGI-Tiger chips his way to victory despite my best efforts. Three strikes, and I'm down and out.
Maybe the game is constructed to make CGI-Tiger nearly invincible on the back nine. Maybe this is what the game considers to be the "Tiger Challenge," and I'm supposed to struggle through it. But most likely, I just can't maintain my focus and concentration through 18 holes when I know that CGI-Tiger is standing on the opposite side of the fairway staring at me, biding his time so that he can make his third chip-in in a row for his fourth eagle in five holes.
This game has convinced me that when the chips are down, I'll drop the ball. If the first step to recovery is admitting that I have a problem, consider me already on step two. Because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, I used to be good at video games.
I made the mistake of looking for info on the next Batman movie on the internet. I don't know why I did it. It was like some sort of compulsion. And what did I discover? People are excited about the Bat-cycle. Don't ask me why; I completely don't understand it. Maybe Bruce can't afford fuel for that police-killing, gas-guzzling Bat-Hummer any more. Good riddance
I tried to watch the last movie on TV the other day, and I simply couldn't do it. It's even worse on a small screen than it was in the theater. I swear, you don't see a single punch land on anyone during the movie. If I'm supposed to imagine what happens between the cuts in a fight scene, why don't I just go buy another Batman comic book? It's a lot cheaper than a movie ticket, and the acting's less wooden. (I'm talking to you, Katie Holmes.)
Who is more dangerous: Michael Moore or Al Gore? Both are politically-minded liberals who use technology, one-sided propaganda, and scare tactics to much remarkable success, convincing a large number of people that the status-quo is dangerous to their future. Is Moore's masterful manipulation of the mass media any less deceiving than Gore's ingenious beguiling of the genuinely guileless?
I have friends who are completely in the camps of one or both, and, although even a jaded fellow such as myself has to admit that they do have their points, I am sincerely wary of their means and motives. Is it acceptable to follow a idealistic fool (Moore) or an compulsive liar (Gore), even if they're right? Is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons acceptable?
Once upon a time, Optimus Prime would have told me, "No, it isn't." But my Optimus Prime is dead, replaced by some Michael Bay zombie of CGI scrap metal. And I can't turn to Yoda for answers, because he was recently revealed to be a procrastinating quitter. Even Superman, as of late, has begun to waffle like an anguished X-Man after fathering a child then leaving the woman that he supposedly loves to raise their child on her own so that he can selfishly sow his own wild Kryptonian-oats. I'm rapidly running out of role models here, people.
At long last, I've launched my tribute site to Booster Gold, DC Comic's second greatest super hero. You can browse the site (10 months in the making!) at your leisure here: www.boosterrific.com. There you can marvel at my mad skillz.
Yesterday I found myself wondering whatever became of Scott Baio. Mainly this was because I was thinking about the theme song to Baio's "Charles in Charge" television show. I've always thought that Shandi Sinnamon's vocals gave the song a strongly sexual overtone which was mostly inappropriate, seeing as Baio's Charles character was supposed to be supervising minors, including Nicole Eggert (better known as T.J. Hooker's daughter. Or maybe not.).
And tonight I see a commercial for "Scott Baio is 45... and Single," a new reality show coming to VH1. Thank you, VH1, for reminding me that old celebrities never die, they just agree to appear on your celeb-reality programming.
I just read that the Justice League movie rumored to be in the works at Warner Brothers has a script and may pre-empt the sequel to Superman Returns. This totally falls into the good news/bad news category.
Good news: the Justice League of America on the big screen. I just messed my pants thinking about it. Superman, Batman, Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman... maybe even Aquaman. (Every team needs a water boy.) Together. Fight an armageddon-inducing foe that only the combined might of all can stop. Suu-weet.
Bad news: the Justice League of America on the big screen. Entertain yourselves: think about just how Hollywood is going to screw this up. Not "if," mind you, but "how." Black leather costumes? Bastard children? Hollywood "It Girl" love interests? Richard Pryor? Oh, it's set my head spinning.
In a rather unexpected footnote to my blog entry earlier this month on June 11, it was reported late yesterday that a 13 year-old girl had her legs severed on the Superman Tower of Power ride at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom.
No, wait, don't bother scrolling down. See, here, I'll me quote myself:
"You can forget about those Superman rides in Six Flags parks across America. Six Flags is the worst theme park chain by far, and their run-down, cramped attractions that like Kryptonite sap the life from the Man of Steel can hardly be called Super-parks."
Now Six Flags has cost some poor girl her legs, and she'll never walk again. And unlike that Adventures of Superman episode "Around the World with Superman," I don't think Superman is going to be able to repair the situation by carrying the crippled girl around the world.
(Yes, I am taking the opportunity of some girl's debilitating accident to say, "I told you so." That's just how I roll.)
I tell you, by not building one great super-park, we're just dooming more children to wheelchair-bound lives. Do you really want that on your conscience, amusement park builders of America? Remember, if you don't build it, you're letting the terrorists win.
I just returned from watching the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer movie. The first thing that struck me about the film was that the title for the movie was on screen for about 5 seconds, barely giving me enough time to really look at it. Maybe I'm spoiled after all of those Batman films that really lingered on the bat symbol, but it seemed very quick. My brother pointed out that if I didn't know what film I was there to see, the brief view of the title was the least of my problems.
I wholeheartedly endorse the latest FF movie, by the way. It's all light action with spectacular jovial and often heartfelt interplay between the four teammates. It's exactly what has made the Four so popular in comic books. And the movie is drastically different from most other super hero films, except the TMNT feature released a few months back. Which, when you stop to consider that the heart of that movie is the interaction of the four ninja turtles, perhaps shouldn't be so surprising. In fact, this is likely the answer to the giant flaw in the recent Superman movie: more interaction with characters, fewer brooding loners. The old television Adventures of Superman is great fun to watch because of the actions of Clark, Lois, and Jimmy, with a touch of infallible, god-like Superman to save the day, not rain on their parade.
So make note, movie producers: we -- or at least I -- want to see enjoyable character interaction in my power-packed, comic-inspired films, not boring retreads of told-to-death origin stories where the heroes only obstacles are self-doubt, terribly poor self-discipline, lack of morality, and Kryptonite.
My brother has taught my mother's Boston Terrier, Mister, a trick. When he lifts the dog over his head and gives the command "Superman," Mister pushes his front legs forward and his rear legs back, holding them roughly parallel to the ground in a pose similar to that always used by Krypto in flight. Mister is a lot smaller than Krypto, and like all Boston's, he wears a black cowl, so he looks more like a flying canine sidekick for the Hamburglar than anything else. But its a swell trick nonetheless.
Wait just a darn minute. How come Harry Potter gets 20-acres of theme park before Superman? Just because Potter has sold more than 325 million books in his short, six-book publishing career, making J.K. Rowling reportedly the first author-turned-billionaire, he gets the run of a Florida theme park? Why, if Superman and Action Comics are conservatively estimated to have sold a mere 40,000 copies per issue (which is not bad for a modern comic, but laughable compared to the titanic numbers of even 10 years ago), Superman has moved almost 25% of Harry's haul with two comic book titles alone. Where's his theme park?
You can forget about those Superman rides in Six Flags parks across America. Six Flags is the worst theme park chain by far, and their run-down, cramped attractions that like Kryptonite sap the life from the Man of Steel can hardly be called Super-parks.
Roller Coaster Database tells me that there are 12 active Superman themed coasters worldwide. Think about how awesome it would be to ride a dozen Superman themed rides through a single park divided into areas representing Krypton, Smallville, Metropolis, and the Fortress of Solitude. Coasters simulating flight, cyclotrons demonstrating Superman's ability to drill through solid rock, shooting ranges with heat vision, and, of course, a few carnival games testing your strength, speed, reflexes, and mental dexterity, among other comparisons to Superman's many, many powers. I can hear the barkers now: "How many people can you hear yelling for help?" "See a man blow on this cup of water until it turns to ice!" "I challenge you to hold your breath during a brief trip around the moon!" "Guess the number of people trapped inside the burning building!" Why, even the metal detectors checking guests for weapons as they come in the door could be turned into a comical demonstration of Superman's X-Ray Vision!
I understand that Metropolis, Illinois, has pursued a Superman themed attraction for years, but I'm sure it would end up more like South of the Border than Cedar Point. (No offense to South of the Border, but it's not really all that Super, unless third-world truck stops are your thing.)
Oh well. I guess I'll just have to keep wearing my Superman underoos while leaping off my roof. At least the admission price is right.
Today is the first day of the 29th annual Superman Celebration in Metropolis, Il.
I think it's amusing that for the past week, national media outlets have been strongly promoting the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars franchises, while in the heartland of America, the die-hards will be continuing a relatively quiet annual tradition of celebrations that have been going on for just as long. The first Star Wars film was released in 1977, and Superman: the Movie saw theaters a year later. That means that the Superman Celebration has been celebrated annually since the movie was released. With the 4th Star Wars Celebration being celebrated last month, Star Wars fans have some catching up to do.
On an almost related side-note, the Man of Steel cannot be cut by a lightsaber, so don't even bother trying.
Don't you hate watching a really great movie only to have the ending make NO sense? (Fight Club, Matrix Revolutions, and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith all spring to mind.) I do. I really, really do. And so do these people.
In honor of Action Comics #1's June 1938 cover date, I'm declaring June "Superman Month"! (No, I don't need a better reason than that. It's my blog, dammit.)
Don't miss the annual Superman Celebration in Metropolis, Illinois June 7-10. Even though Erica Durance cancelled, Noel Neil is still scheduled to be there. Maybe you can have too many Loises in the same place at the same time.
Even Michael Bay, director of the highly-anticipated Transformers, thinks that his upcoming film will suck. He was recently quoted in Maxim magazine saying, "we had a test screening in Arizona, and I’m thinking ‘This movie fucking sucks. It’s stupid.’ But then we get our highest numbers ever.” That's the first good thing that I've heard about the Transformers movie. If Michael Bay thinks it sucks, it just might have some merit.
Granted, Bay has previously said that he wants the Transformers movie to be as realistic as possible, which would make it a dramatic departure from his previous films such as Bad Boys and Armageddon. But who wants to see realistically displayed transforming robots, anyway? I want to go to the movies and relive my childhood, not investigate the inherent fallacy of gigantic, nearly invulnerable alien robots who feel the need to disguise themselves as automobiles and dinosaurs. I'm sure that if Bay made a G.I. Joe film, he'd be investigating the economically oppressive political climate that could give rise to a depth of hatred powerful enough to inspire a man with a severe speech impediment to don a mask and attack the same group of international soldiers again and again as an exercise in self-loathing.
Michael, I want characters that look and act like the toys that are still on my mantlepiece. If I wanted gritty realism, I'd get Eastwood to direct, alright?
This weekend, my father taught my poodle how to climb under fences on his ranch. My poodle immediately took that newfound knowledge and climbed under the fence protecting the chickens and ate one. Though father was very, very angry with Chere, I still think he should reward her. I mean, applied knowledge is a clear sign of intelligence.
On the up side, dad won't have to bother feeding her any more. After all, if you give a dog a bone, she eats for a night. Teach her to climb under a fence, however, and she'll eat forever!
The New World of Coca-Cola® is set to open in Atlanta on Thursday. My mother is very excited about the opportunity to pay $15 to enter a glorified gift shop, but I am considerably more skeptical. Note the following entertainment possibilities that Coke advertises on their website:
Thrilling 4-D Theater
World's largest collection of Coke memorabilia
Fully functioning bottling line that produces commemorative 8-ounce bottles of CocaCola®
Tasting experience with over 70 different products to sample
Pop Culture Gallery featuring works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, and Steve Penley
World-famous CocaCola® Polar Bear
And so much more!
So, the place is a museum where you can taste and buy Coke products, meet its advertising icons, buy its advertising icons, and then..., um, "so much more," whatever that may be. Wheee! I sure hope that they don't spray Coke on you inside the 4D theater. (There can be too much of a good thing, you know.)
I mean, didn't Coke learn a long time ago to keep the words "New" and "Coke" as far away from each other as possible? I think if you blindfold me, I might not be able to tell the difference from the original (and in all likelyhood superior) World of Coca-Cola®. And I'm certainly not interested in paying $15 (plus an additional $10 for the priveledge of parking in the adjoining Pemberton Place® Parking Deck) for more Coca-Cola® advertsing than I can see during 9 hours of televised football. This is not a wave that I'm in any hurry to catch.
Those zany Silver Age stories are even better when you have no idea what the dialogue is.
This panel came from a licensed Mexican reprint of Worlds Finest #186. The events in this issue (inspired by Superman's super-ability to repair a statue broken into hundreds of pieces in seconds) is about Batman and Superman's travels back in time (via Superman's super-speed travel through the time barrier), where Batman (wearing a costume super-sewn by Superman from some curtains) falls in love with a woman accused of being a witch in Salem, Massachusetts while Superman uses his powers (including super-invisibility and super-ventriloquism) to make the locals think that Batman is the witch so that they can meet Benjamin Franklin (who flies a kite that is struck by lightning that Superman deflects in time to save the life of Franklin and Batman). Believe me when I say, "they don't make them like this anymore."
The one thing that Superman does in this issue that is clearly benevolent is holding his super-breath while using his super-bite to super-chew through a block of wood so that the puritans will think that the woman they are trying to drown is not a witch and was saved by animals. And does anyone think that the picture of Superman flying on a broomstick while impersonating Batman looks a little too sexually suggestive? For a man who can fly, Superman is grabbing that long broomstick pretty tightly with both hands, isn't he? Really, Superman, try not to show off quite so much. "Man of Steel" indeed.
Why does Batman hang around Superman if Metropolis Marvel is going to do all the work just to ruin his relationships? Ostensibly, this book is supposed to be about the teamwork of the "World's Finest" super heroes, Batman and Superman, but it reads (in Mexican) more like a Martin and Lewis story, where Batman is the bumbling fool who falls in love, and Superman is the straight man with talent who bails him out after making him look like a dick. Thanks, Superman. Friends like you we don't need. Don't you have a child to abandon somewhere?
Today's medical fact: "Internal Decapitation" is the condition in which the skull becomes separated from the spine but remains attached to the undamaged muscle and skin. It's a FACT!
For the first time in a year, I drop in at Newsarama.com to see if I can find any information on the rumored upcoming Booster Gold comic book series, and I immediately stumble into a major spoiler for the final issue of 52. I'm so pissed off right now. Who the hell posts major spoilers the week after a book comes out without alerting the reader that there are spoilers ahead? What kind of world do we live in where the endings of all stories have to be given away at all times? Well, screw you, Newsarama. Hank Hall is Monarch! Soylent Green is people! Maggie Simpson shot Mr. Burns! And Darth Vader is Luke's father, you jerks. Take that!
Ah ha! After months of wondering, I've finally found it. "It" is the name and location of a statue that has been looming large in recent months on my television: an orange, double-helix fountain sculpture.
I first noticed the sculpture late last year in a Sprint Mobile Broadband television commercial. It was background set decoration. Big and bright orange, it stands out from a typical back drop. Because it appears in a commercial, I assumed that it must be in Los Angeles, where most commercials are shot. Yet within days, I spotted a Dockers television commercial when a man in business slacks runs in front of it. The Dockers' ad prominently featured San Francisco landmarks.
Now I HAD to know where that statue was, featured as it was in two television commercials running simultaneously, apparently featuring two different locations. I was especially curious as to this statue's location, perhaps even because such a large, noticeable object was completely unnecessary for the products' sales pitches. (Though let's face it: I don't have a laptop computer, and I'm not wearing slacks. I've been paying too much attention to these commercials. come to think of it, I probably pay too much attention to all commercials. But that's why they run them, right?) Google searches on "orange fountain sculpture" in "LA" and "San Francisco" turned up nothing. That statue could have been anywhere.
But tonight I caught a break! The statue was featured prominently as "Kirby Plaza" in New York City during tonight's "Heroes" episode, "The Hard Part." (I fully endorse NBC's "Heroes," by the way. It's great television.) As I suspected, the name "Kirby Plaza" was fictitious, an homage to Jack "King" Kirby, the man most responsible for the look of modern comic books. (He's so important, he has his own museum.) Thank goodness for obsessive fans. One show fansite mentioned that ARCO Plaza was a planned shooting location for the episode. A few clicks later and eureka! (That's "eureka" as in, "I found it," not "Eureka" as in the also Wriphe-endorsed show on the NBC-owned Sci-Fi Channel.)
Summarizing from publicartinla.com: the steel statue, titled "Double Ascension," was installed in 1973 in ARCO Plaza in Los Angeles. The statue was designed by Bauhaus professor Herbert Bayer as the first in a series of Los Angeles public art pieces aimed at helping to revitalize downtown LA. Bayer originally named the piece "Stairway to Nowhere," but ARCO executives didn't much like that title (for obvious reasons), so it was changed.
The plaza, a virtual city-within-a-city, has since been renamed City National Plaza after City National Bank bought the buildings after they were vacated by ARCO following ARCOs assimilation by BP. There seems to have been some concern that with new corporate owners would come changes to the site. Instead, the sculpture, seen from several angles here at arcitectfad.com, has been embraced by City National and become something of a motif for the new owners' decorations, serving as a pattern for the surrounding tables as well as the logo for the building's website. I also discovered that in addition to the recent commercials and television appearances, the piece was in the movie Pretty Woman.
The plaza are managed by Thomas Properties Group (TPG), which also manages LA's Universal City, home of and General Electric's NBC Universal Studios. Filmed at Universal City is a television show called "Heroes." (Did I mention how good that show is?) Does this make "Double Ascension"'s recent media exposure coincidence or conspiracy? You be the judge. Meanwhile, I'll keep my eyes out for an appearance of the statue on "Eureka" just in case it shows up there.
Driving down the highway, I came up with something really clever that I wanted to put here today. This is not it. (I can't for the life of me remember what it was. Oh, well.)
Yesterday a friend asked me to explain the following joke to him:
"There are 10 types of people in the world: those who speak binary and those who don't."
I'm still not sure which is worse: that I was able to explain it to him, or that I thought that it was so extremely funny. Maybe it's a good thing that I don't get out much.
Have you ever played the Milton Bradley board game Aggravation? Fundamentally, it's the same "race around a track game" as Parcheesi, Sorry! or Trouble, but without any of the fun associated with those other games. (Granted, Trouble's fun stems entirely from it's addictive Pop-O-Matic Bubble and television jingle. The bubble itself would always bounce the dice without actually turning them over, but chanting "Trouble, Trouble" somehow made it entertaining.) I had once sworn never to play Aggravation again, but I had forgotten why. Well, I played it and I remembered.
Fortunately, the game doesn't quite live up to its name, producing very little actual aggravation. Really, the game fails to summon any emotion at all. After playing it again for the first time in over a decade, my brother and I agreed that it is the least exciting board game ever. The only thing aggravating about it was that it was still in our game closet after all of these years. So I threw it away. Now, thanks to me, there is one less Aggravation in the world.
I just ran across an internet news item that reported that Japanese citizens were being scammed by companies selling sheep to people who believed that they were poodles. My usual fact checking (because my mama always told me to believe none of what I read) unearthed another report that said that the sheep-as-poodles story was a hoax. Should I be more disappointed that people can't tell the difference between poodles and sheep, or that most people don't have difficulty believing that people can't tell the difference between poodles and sheep? Is this a slur against people or poodles? (One would irritate me; the other wouldn't. I'm sure that you can guess which is which.)
The Natural History Museum in London has announced the discovery of kryptonite deep in a mine in Jadar, Serbia. In the words of British geologist Dr. Chris Stanley, "the new mineral does not contain fluorine [which the green kryptonite in Superman Returns contains] and is white rather than green, but in all other respects the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite. We will have to be careful with it -- we wouldn't want to deprive Earth of its most famous superhero!" Dr. Stanley may have more to worry about than just the life of Superman. That rock could result in the destruction of Earth as we know it.
Most people are aware of the existence of green kryptonite, the one thing that can hurt the Man of Steel. But just as dangerous are the other colorful fragments of the planet Krypton, including the little-known white kryptonite!
That's right, what those miners in Serbia have unleashed could be the doom of us all. And they should have known better. Has anyone ever seen a movie in which something great was found buried deep in the Earth? No, you haven't, because nothing good has ever been found buried deep within the Earth. As we all know, the Earth only contains hibernating aliens (The Thing, Quatermass and the Pit), overgrown lizards (Journey to the Center of the Earth, Rodan), disfigured mutants (The Time Machine, C.H.U.D.), murder-inducing stones and metals (Blood Diamond, Goldfinger), and scene-stealing lava flows (Volcano, Dante's Peak), none of which are very benevolent.
How could this Serbian white kryptonite hurt us? I'll let an expert in kryptonite explain:
"All forms of plant life!" Someone needs to tell Al Gore that a bigger threat to the world's biosphere than global warming has been unearthed on the European continent. Everything from the towering redwood trees to the ocean's plentiful plankton are now endangered by the Serbian chalky white kryptonite. Without the food-chain's essential link, Oxygen-producing plant life, how long could humanity hold on? Could the extinction of the entire world's population be the last laugh of the recently deceased genocidal Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic?
Only time will tell if we will survive this latest threat from beneath the Earth's crust. You'd best be careful with your new mineral, Dr. Stanley. The whole world is counting on you.
Today is the 138th birthday of Lenin. In his honor, we should promote everlasting world peace through cooperation and rejection of capitalist desires in favor of reactionary environmentalism. I think we'll call it... Earth Day.
Bah. I left my car running all day in celebration.
UNPAID ENDORSEMENT: I'm currently reading Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell. (I bought it for my mother for Christmas because I wanted to read it, and she just finished it and gave it to me to read. Mission accomplished!) It's chock full of interesting information about the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Hooray, book!
CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and all the local channels were reporting on the Virginia Tech shooting, so I changed channels and watched Revenge of the Nerds. Things that I noticed:
Breaking into campus housing, a sorority, and leaving cameras behind, the protagonist Nerds committed crimes including but not limited to Breaking and Entering, Criminal Trespass, Disorderly Conduct, Intrusion of Privacy, Unauthorized Videotaping, and Vandalism. No police investigation was depicted. (Granted, the Nerds committed these crimes in retaliation for similar crimes committed upon them, but retaliatory vigilantism is not a defensible stance in the eyes of the law.) Moral: Have fun at others expense; privacy and security are rules made to be broken!
During the Adams University sponsored Homecoming Carnival, one sanctioned event requires tricycle riding participants to drink one12-ounce can of beer for completing each of twenty laps around a short racing track, simulating a dangerous drinking-and-driving scenario. In addition to mocking DUI statutes, this reckless encouragement of binge drinking and excessive consumption can pose a serious health risk to those participating. Moral: Go ahead and drink and drive; trying to stay on both of the roads that you see will make you a better driver in the long run!
After essentially being raped by a man impersonating her boyfriend who has also widely distributed pictures of her in a state of advanced undress (another criminal act altogether, even if proceeds of the crime are going to charity), the head cheerleader, Betty Childs, decides to abandon her previously aggressive anti-Nerd role. Again, no investigation is indicated for the sexual misconduct of the Nerd in question, though since Ms. Childs is an adult and unwilling to press charges, unless someone complains about the indecent pictures, little legal action is necessitated. Moral: Use sex as a weapon, but be good at it!
Seven black fraternity members are threatening enough to the pro-Jock establishment that they cow them into allowing a voice to the Nerd minority. In this case, the African-Americans are actually supporting the previously unenforced rule of law rather than challenging it, but this clear depiction of unequal race relations is still a jarringly clear disparity between factions of the University community. Moral: Black people in fraternity sweaters are especially violent!
In today's newspaper, I saw an advertisement for the new movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters. The ad included this endorsement: "Perversely entertaining,...whups the ass of TMNT!" -- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone.
If you ever make a movie, give Peter Travers a few bucks, and he'll say something good about it for you to put in your promotional advertising. I don't know what Mr. Travers' personal taste in films is, but he seems to have something banal to say about everything, no matter how bad a movie it is. And I'm not alone in noticing this. Travers is oft called a "blurbwhore," and hollwoodbitchslap.com names their annual award to the critic most often quoted in promotional advertising the "Peter Travers Whore of the Year Award."
To get a handle on how many movies Travers shills for, take a look at the five other ads published today that used Travers' comments: 300: "Prepare your eyes for popping -- they just might fly out of their sockets!" Disturbia: "A nail-biter. Cool stuff. Cool movie." Grindhouse: "This tour-de-force gets you high on movies again!" Hoax: "A devilish satire with mischievous wit." Hot Fuzz: "A blast!"
Well, guys, perhaps you shouldn't all chose to quote Travers in the same week. It sort of weakens his endorsement if he endorses everything, doesn't it?
His blurbs tend to be very, um, visceral, clearly tailored for an audience desperate for thrills. His blurbs might not tell you anything about the movies themselves, but at least they're entertaining. Recent favorites of mine include the following: King Kong: "What you will see will spin your head six ways from Sunday." (Ouch. Look away!) Mission Impossible III: "The movie to beat in the race to push your pulse rate past the danger zone." (Past the danger zone? Watching this movie will kill me?) Poseidon: "Hits the action button and never stops!" (Never stops pushing the action button?) Rocky Balboa: "Stallone steps in the ring and every day is Christmas." (Sweet.)
(P.S. Note that Peter Travers has never reviewed the movie TMNT, at least so far as I can tell at Rollingstone.com. Therefore, how would he know if ATHF whups its ass? Sounds good, though, doesn't it, Peter.)
Here's something a little scary for you on this Friday the 13th: more evidence that Dr. Frederick Wertham, author of the industry influencing Seduction of the Innocent, was right arguing against the subtle, damaging influence of comic books on America's youth. These panels are all in sequential order as presented in Superman's Action Comics #20, published in 1940.
Sure, I eliminated some filler panels there, but only to make the subtext clearer for scientific examination. Gay equals good times. Not gay equals bullet in the face. Clearly the message here is that if you are a heterosexual, you shouldn't go to any gay Hollywood parties. They'll kill you. I suppose that this really makes you look at those post-Oscar parties in a whole new light, doesn't it? Note that Superman is not at the party. Why? Because Superman is not gay.
With messages like these buried in super hero comics, it's no wonder that Rock Hudson and Tom Cruise turned out gay. (Personally, I think Rock Hudson would have made a great Superman, by the way. Were he not, you know, dead.)
Now that the White House has weighed in, I can speak up, too. Just what the hell is all this furor over Don Imus' insult of the Rutgers women's basketball team? So he called them "nappy-headed hos." And now everyone is up in arms that he made a racial slur.
Excuse me, people, but perhaps, just perhaps, calling someone "nappy-headed" is not as significant as calling a bunch of women "hos." The first describes kinky hair, which is usually undesirable. The second labels a woman as a whore. What Imus suggested in his statement was that the winning basketball team was made up of prostitutes with unflattering hairstyles. And this is to some degree a true statement given the nature of NCAA exploitation of athletes in profitable venues and the fact that the Rutgers women's basketball team members have unflattering hairstyles.
Now Al Sharpton is screaming about the slight and Don Imus has a two-week vacation. What amuses me about this is wondering if he had just called the team "hos" without mentioning their hairstyles, would he be in this much trouble? (Last time I checked, Al Sharpton doesn't rush to your aid unless you are a member of a minority or a Thanksgiving turkey.)
And I'd advise the Rutgers women's basketball team to stop blaming Don Imus for raining on their moment in the sun. Ladies, no one watches women's basketball. (For example, at the University of Georgia, women's season tickets for our competitive SEC program sell for $25. The horrible, horrible men's team sells season tickets for over 10 times that. Apparently in sports, dicks cost more than tits, which is oddly very contrary to the dating scene.) May I suggest to you, Rutgers, that while you may have provided the sun, Imus and Sharpton provided the moment.
Last week was Spring Break for my brother, the middle school science teacher. He woke me up everyday at 10AM. As a result of rising at that ungodly hour for an entire week, I am now sick as a dog. So far as I'm concerned, this qualifies as empirical evidence that waking up before noon for prolonged periods of time will inevitably kill you. (Just test it yourself and see if I'm not right.)
I know that I said that I wouldn't buy it, I know I said that it was all diminishing returns after Vice City, I know that I said that the PS3 was way too expensive to earn a return on the price paid, but...
That's a roller coaster. Oh well. I did buy a PS2 just to play Vice City. Maybe by October I'll be able to afford this one.
At this weekend's WWE Wrestlemania event ("the Super Bowl of wrestling!"), it has been announced that either WWE Owner/Operator Vince McMahon or Real Estate Tycoon Donald Trump will shear his hair off following a "Battle of the Billionaires" match. Unfortunately, we won't see Trump wrestle. Instead, representatives of each man will wrestle, the loser determining which billionaire's head is "shaved." (I put the word "shaved" in quotes like that because these hair vs. hair matches don't always take the hair down to the scalp. Usually, the winner just cuts off some long hair unevenly, then the loser goes to a proper salon and ends up with a fine looking hairdo. Hardly as dramatic as the billing would suggest. But then isn't that usually the case with wrestling?)
Now, we all know that Donald Trump is not going to lose his hair on a Vince McMahon promotion. (Unless Trump is in chemo or has lice and is looking for a way to profit from it. Which, I suppose, isn't impossible given the man's history, it's just so unlikely that it's practically impossible. Especially since the guest referee will be "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, McMahon's wrestling arch-nemesis.) But the announcement of this match seems to have caught the fancy of many a non-wrestling fan. The Associated Press recently ran a story about the match. CNN's poll question for today is "Would Donald Trump look better with no hair?" Most people say "no," which, when you think about it, sort of answers the question, "who thinks people look good with comb-overs?"
"Battle of the Billionaires," it's called. I looked it up. According to Forbes Magazine, Donald Trump makes the list of the top 100 richest Americans with a net worth nearing $3 billion. McMahon hasn't been worth more than $1 billion since his XFL flopped in 2001. That would make this the "Battle of a Billionaire and a Guy Who Will Lose His Hair." Maybe that's why there's no truth in advertising: truth is just so boring.
Bill Clinton recently lamented the country's fixation on Britney Spears as "wrong." To whom did Bill make this candid assessment? TV Land advertisers and executives. TV Land is owned by MTV Networks/Viacom, and is a sister network to VH1, the all-celebrities-all-the-time channel. Careful, Bill. "Integrity" and "Family Values" have never exactly been in your personal platform, don't start changing sides now. Stick with "feeling her pain," and it will all work out okay: Hillary will head back to the white house and you'll get a second shot at interns.
After a very busy weekend, I finally sat down and watched the new James Bond movie. I know that I promised that I would NEVER watch a Bond movie again after the insultingly awful Die Another Day, but I did get to watch this for free, borrowing a copy from a friend who enjoyed it, thereby giving the producers not a cent from my perusal of their film. And it was worth every penny I paid to see it.
In a word, Casino Royale is boring. (But at least it was long!) The first hour sets up the second hour. The second hour sets up the third. And the third hour is completely unnecessary.
Several people I know championed this film as a return to greatness for the Bond franchise. This is a second-rate action film passing itself off as a pedigree. Coop, if my opinion of your taste in movies needed any more nails, this one sealed the coffin. Don't let pretty eye-candy and some above average stunts distract you from the poor craftsmanship and complete lack of competent visual storytelling.
Sure, it was better than Die Another Day, but that doesn't say anything. So was Catwoman.
As I was waiting for the "Colbert Report," Comedy Central forced the two worst commercials currently being broadcast on me. The culprits? Verizon and Quiznos (again).
In the Verizon ad, some sweaty, air-headed bastard approaches me, the viewer, and puts his sweaty earphones on my head so that I can listen to music that he "gets totally pumped" to. (Fall Out Boy, I think.) First of all, I don't care how big that bastard is, he's not putting his sweaty earphones in my ears. I know where those things have been: in his ears! Secondly, in the commercial, to prove that this asshole isn't gay, he takes his earphones away to talk to "his lady." Yeah, boy, that jerk just put his sweaty earphones in my ears unprovoked, and now he has to go prove that he's not gay for coming on to me? (I'm willing to put myself in the role of a woman here, and I still don't want some sweaty guy putting earphones in my ears. I've never met the chick that liked having man-sweat shoved in her ears.) Sorry, I'm not buying it. Seriously. No Verizon for me. (And yes, I hated the same concept when that ditzy flirt put her music in my ears in the previous version of this commercial. I don't want any stranger to approach me with headphones that were just in their ears. Ever. It's somewhere along the lines of "poo-on-a-stick." Just gross.)
In the Quiznos commercial, two women discuss how great their new prime rib sandwich is with the following dialogue: "It's not lacking any meat. And that's what real women need. giggle-snort." Damn, if they didn't beat some Enzyte ad to that exact line. It wouldn't be half as bad if they didn't break down giggling after the innuendo. Quiznos, giggling airheads making childish sexual suggestions will not lure me back to your sandwiches. Maybe you should consider reducing the price of your product instead of pumping the airwaves full of stupid, insulting commercials if you really want us all to drop in for a bite.
I thought it fitting that at the end of the "Report," Stephen Colbert asked his guest, political theorist Benjamin Barber, if he was a Subway or Quiznos guy. Barber said he was a Subway guy. That's one more vote against you, Quiznos! (Even if it did come from a Howard Dean supporter.)
My mother brought home two pilsner glasses that each have the phrase "I Guinness" printed on them. She's sweet and I know that she meant well. The only problems with this swell gift is that I don't drink Guinness, and I don't St. Patrick's Day.
And before anyone else gets me any more glasses with stupid slogans on them, let me be clear about this: I don't Canada Day, I don't Cinco De Mayo, and I don't Mardi Gras. Nothing personal, people, but I just don't need that sort of thing taking up space in my kitchen cabinet. I've got too many "I Batman" glasses in there already.
My mother was cleaning out some old scrapbooks today and I found this ad in an issue of an 1967 The Daily Tar Heel newspaper from North Carolina:
Adjusting for inflation, those shoes should cost me over $50 today. Yet I can buy Nike-produced Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star high-tops for under $40 in local department stores now. That's a pretty good deal, really. Thank you, underaged, third-world sweatshop workers!
In the comic book Justice League Quarterly #9, six members of the Justice League are told they are infected with a virus that causes insanity in one in six people exposed to it. Blue Beetle, aka Ted Kord, the League's resident brain at the time, immediately tells the other 5 members (Booster Gold, Flash, Fire, Guy Gardner, and Ice) that one of the group is going insane. He presents it as an absolute certainty. And the others buy that. (Granted, this is probably the reason that these 6 Justice Leaguers were chosen for this story. Not known for their thinking caps, these 6.)
Apparently, the Justice League needs to get Ray Palmer back, because Ted Kord's understanding of probability is a little weak. A disease that maims one in six people is not a certainty to affect exactly one person in any sampling of six people. There is a chance that none of the six will nut up just as there is a chance that all of the six will go off their rocker. Sure, there is a better than average chance that at least one of the six will be affected, but it is hardly a certainty.
I suggest that this complete misunderstanding of probability is the fundamental reason that Beetle was killed a few years back. He probably assumed that since he had been shot at many times before and was never killed, he could not be killed by a bullet shot at him. Sorry, Ted. You're dead.
It is exactly this sort of careless premise and sloppy writing (by industry heavyweight Mark Waid no less) that causes many people to decide that superhero comic books are for children. Only a kid would fall for Beetle's assertion as an absolute, right? No adult would enjoy reading this sort of trash, would they? Let me tell you, I've worked in bookstores, and the answer to that question is "Yes, almost exclusively."
Apparently, in Captain America, Volume 5 (!), #25, released this past Wednesday, Captain America was killed.
The reported death of the good Captain doesn't bother me. Many a hero has survived apparent death, and Captain America has gone through this trauma before. He has been presumed dead on several previous occasions. (I mean, he never really knows how long he'll have to live anyway, right?) I certainly know that if he sells comic books, he'll be back. After all, note that he was killed in Captain America, Volume 5! That means that he has had 4 previously cancelled versions of his own title. (And this volume will make 5.)
No, what bothers me about the death of Captain America is how, suddenly, this represents news. Cap's recent behavior and death are being spun by both sides of the political spectrum as relevant. Suddenly, Captain America's death is politically important.
The LA Times calls Cap's death a sign of "America's current distemper" with the war in Iraq. The Washington Post views Cap's shifts in temperament and goals as a cultural looking-glass in a "battle for American ideals." Fox News' "Fox & Friends" declared that Marvel's decision to kill Captain America was a sign of weakness for terrorists to capitalize on. ("You should not kill Captain America when we're at war.") Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" used Cap's death as a typically sarcastic attack on the government abdication of individuals' rights. ("Fighting to protect civil liberties like free speech and privacy isn't just quaint; it's dangerous. That's what killed Captain America.")
I'm a touch more cynical. Captain America was killed to sell comic books. And, of course, to stir hype for the Captain America movie expected in 2009.
Will the Death of Captain America be the Murphy Brown's Baby of the 2008 election? We could only be so lucky.
(By the way, Marvel: if Winter Soldier becomes the new Captain America, I'll never buy another one of your books ever again. Wait, that's not fair. I'll probably never buy one of your books again anyway, so do whatever you want.)
This ad was in a comic book from 1991. Please note that though Steven Seagal, star of nearly thirty remakes of the same movie, will take your cash, he will not take your American Express card.
I found a game that is Evil. I told myself I'd only play it for a minute, until I saw my name on the high-scoreboard. That was over 8 hours ago. My best score, 5909, qualified me for 75th place out of the top 100 scores. If you play that bastard game and beat my score, tell me how you did it.
Today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an article about a contest between dog groomers, er, "pet stylists" in downtown Atlanta this weekend. The goal of the contest was apparently to dress a dog up like some cheap Party City Halloween costume. To no one's great surprise, most, if not all, of the dogs in the contest were standard poodles. (One was painted to look like Paul Stanley, which I would think both the poodle and Stanley would take as an insult.) As much as I enjoy grooming Chere, I wouldn't dress her up like a tramp for a chance at a $500 prize. A poodle's got to have her pride.
I just don't understand the inclination to make dogs look like people. (Especially people in Halloween costumes.) Every time I don't pay enough attention, my father is painting Chere's claws. Don't ask me; I don't know why. You read stories about people who hold weddings and birthday parties for dogs. Some dogs see psychiatrists. And I'm sure that some dogs are over-medicated by well-intentioned but stupid owners. Try to get it through your thick heads: dogs aren't people, people. If dogs were people, I'd hate them, too.
A friend pointed out that my intro animation is a bit slow loading since the server migration. Though I think this has more to do with some recent changes in the code than the server migration, I'm investigating the situation.
The site has been down for the better part of a week now because of complications resulting from a physical server migration. I'll try to make sure that it doesn't happen again soon. (I'd hate to alienate my 4 readers.)
Yesterday the state of Virginia publicly apologized for its role in slavery. As is the trend these days, it blamed its mistake on the horrible disease of alcoholism and promised to seek help immediately.
Yahoo! News reports today that someone has spotted a beaver in New York City this week. According to the article, it is the first time that beaver has been seen in New York City in around 200 years. No beaver in NYC? Ah, Yahoo, you don't get out much, do you?
I heard today that Billy Ray Cyrus is going to be on the upcoming season of Dancing With The Stars. Billy Ray Cyrus is an extra on his daughter's show now. Does he qualify as a "Star"? Should the show be renamed Dancing With The Recurring Supporting Characters?
I had a dream once where I met Billy Ray Cyrus at a rural county fair. No lie: in the dream, he was begging people to accept his autograph while the very untalented lady at the table across from him was selling her book like Enron stock. I really felt sorry for him. I mean, I'm a big fan of his work on Doc. But I wouldn't take his autograph, either. Hey, it's a cruel dream world out there. (My dreams are frequently specifically bizarre. Last night, I dreamed that I worked in a bookstore in a law school and someone was trying to steal my computer monitor during a riot. The downside was that to save my monitor from theft, I threw it out of a two-story window. The upside was that I was mistakenly graduated from law school.)
After completely schooling me at NCAA Football 2006 on the PS2, my brother made the horrible mistake of trying to teach me to play his favorite card game, Cribbage. (Note, please, that my brother was playing the mighty Georgia Bulldogs, a team boasting two recent Heisman Trophy candidates and a National Championship, and he had given me the lowly Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, a team that couldn't find its ass with three hands and a sliderule. In the first quarter, I tried 4 passes: 3 went to receivers that I DID NOT throw to -- seriously, pressing triangle and watching the ball sail to the R1 or circle receiver gets really, really old very, very fast. Apparently the computer decided that my pressing the triangle button only constituted a suggestion -- and were not caught. The 4th pass was intercepted. I did not attempt another pass until the 4th quarter, when I went an entire drive calling ONLY Hail Marys, 4 of 5 of which were completed, resulting in my only touchdown of the game. In a fit of pique, I ran my linebacker into the offensive line before every future attempted play, preventing my brother from ever running a play again because the game was not programmed to prevent me from repeating the gambit as a real referee would do by ejecting players or ultimately declaring my team forfeit. So, to summarize, NCAA Football 2006, like all the Madden games on which its physics and rules are based, sucks balls.)
Now where was I? Oh, yes. The so-called "game" of Cribbage.
Cribbage, it should be noted, was apparently the invention of a seventeenth century poet named Sir John Suckling. After making up a shitload of completely inane and nonsensical rules, he reportedly passed marked decks out to the English nobility and traveled the country ripping them off for a small fortune. Though at first hearing, that anecdote may seem ridiculously implausible, once you realize that only a truly foolish individual would appreciate a completely random game such as Cribbage, you will recognize the likelihood of such a misadventure.
In case you can't tell, I think Cribbage sucks. But what else should I expect as the offspring of a poet named Suckling?
If you've never played Cribbage, I can sum it up thusly:
The Deal: The dealer deals everyone 6 cards and then everyone throws 2 of those 6 away.
The Play: Take turns turning over the 4 cards that you kept. Every time you turn over a card, yell out a number and then score yourself anywhere between 0 and 12 points.
The Show: Once you all have turned over all 4 of your cards, reveal how many ways you can combine the cards that you turned over plus the top card revealed from the remaining deck to total 15 points or just create some pattern that you find pleasing to your eye. Then give yourself anywhere between 0 and 29 points.
The Crib: Now the dealer gets to look at all the cards that were thrown away and repeat step 3.
I'd like to say that there is some sense to the game, but there simply isn't. A player is rewarded for reaching an odd-numbered 15 points or having pairs which can never add to an odd number. Triples are scored as multiple pairs but runs of cards are scored by the number of cards in a run, thereby rewarding a player holding a three-of-a-kind but comparatively punishing a player for having a much rarer Royal Flush. Playing a run is worth more points than having a run in your hand. You get a point for playing a card that prevents other people from playing, unless the added total of the cards played equals 31, in which case you get 2 points instead. Rhyme? Reason? No, not with Cribbage.
When my brother revealed a Jack of Clubs and with a chuckle said, "I get a point because this card is the same suit as the card that is on top of the deck," I was done playing.
There is a Star Trek episode titled "A Piece of the Action" in which Kirk tries to trick aliens who look and act like Al Capone's gang by luring them into a card game called Fizzbin. As one of my favorite episodes, I've seen Fizzbin played many, many times. Since Kirk's rules for Fizzbin change based on times of the day or days of the week, I always chuckled at the gullibility of the gangster trying to learn the game. Now the poor gangster seems that much more the sap to me; Fizzbin probably sounded like a likely game to him because he was probably a Cribbage player.
Yesterday, I watched TNT's pregame for the NBA Skills Challenge during the NBA All-Star weekend festivities. At one point, Charles Barkley jokingly called David Hasselhoff "Dan Marino." My first reaction was to blow it off as an offhand comment. But then I really thought about it....
And damn if Charles isn't right.
When you put the two side-by-side, they do look very similar. (Both are even the same height -- 6' 4" -- according to the internet. And the internet can't lie.) Of course, the first thing I thought was: are they the same person, or twins separated at birth? Have they ever met or played in a celebrity golf tournament together? Has one ever slept with the other's wife while pretending to actually be her husband?
Why hadn't I noticed this before? I'm a huge fan of Marino (I went to his Hall of Fame induction, for Pete's sake), and I've seen every episode of Knight Rider, Baywatch, the first season of Baywatch Nights, and Nick Fury: Agent of Shield (which is awesome in the same sort of way as The Anna Nicole Show and NASCAR crashes).
I wonder how well Hasselhoff throws a football? (I know how well Marino acts. He's every bit as good as Hasselhoff.)
I've been watching the Justice League Unlimited cartoons on DVD recently. They really are much better than I used to give them credit for. Their characterization of most characters, no matter how minor, is usually spot-on; ripping comic characters straight from comic books and reproducing them onscreen in vivid detail. Black Canary, Green Arrow, Wildcat... all excellent.
However, there are still several things about their re-imagining of the DC universe that I really don't like. Foremost, I still hate their portrayal of Superman. (He's just not, well, super. Rather than take the Super Friends approach and have Superman be a big idiot, they instead just make him old, weak, and fatigued. That's hardly the approach that the genre-defining character deserves. I think he's the one character that they really get wrong.)
Other nitpicking problems that I have with the show include the premise that their gigantic satellite is run by several hundred regular humans who are treated like nameless grunt employees. (Not only is this not super friendly, it's a logistical nightmare, especially regarding healthcare and insurance.) I regret that Martian Manhunter's role has been reduced to little more than a police shift sergeant. And I also don't care for their inclusion of several redundant, less-than-super heroes. (I mean, what the hell are Vigilante, a sharpshooter with pistols, and Shining Knight, a time lost Arthurian knight with a magic sword, doing on that satellite? What, exactly, do they bring to the team that Batman can't do with Batarangs or Hawkgirl can't do with her Nth metal mace?)
I think most of my complements and complaints can be summed up in one character in particular: the Question.
The character is perfect on the show. Usually while he's onscreen, he's a recreation of the best objectivist/zen aspects granted the character by Ditko & O'Neil, the two writers responsible for the modern character. The JLU breathes life into a philosophically complex, yet uniquely entertaining character. That is the Question!
Yet, the Question is not really a superhero. He is an idealistically philosophical crusader. While he seeks to rout crime, just like his Justice League counterparts, he does it as an exercise to reveal the truth about people, society, and the world-at-large. The Question has an absolute view of the world and the way it is, not the way it should be. Unlike his fellow heroes, he doesn't try to maintain the status quo, he seeks to trim the hypocrisy and corruption of the world and reveal the truth underneath. His radical philosophy (at least in relation to the other heroes in the Justice League) puts him at odds with his teammates and makes him a poor candidate for League membership.
So Justice League Unlimited gets the Question right, but by doing so demonstrates that a lot of its answers are wrong.
Yesterday morning, three schools in Cave Creek, Arizona were locked-down when a student reported seeing Batman rush across the school's lawn and leap over a fence. The eyewitness described Batman as 6' 3" tall and probably male. I wonder if that height description included the bat-ears?
I'm sure that the lock-down was an appropriate response, because Batman has some terribly psychotic and lethal foes that could do some real harm to children. Though, to be fair, I think the Joker would probably take a lock-down situation as a challenge rather than a deterrent.
This situation was reported by the Associated Press and was spread widely throughout international news media, especially on the internet, which is populated 24 hours a day by the sort of geeks who think that is a great story. (AZfamily.com used the headline "Joker Pulls Batman Stunt," by far the most clever of all competition.) Now people who have no idea where Cave Creek is know that Batman was nearby on Valentine's Day. And where there's a Batman sighting, there's a mystery to be solved!
Cave Creek, by the way, is just north of Scottsdale/Phoenix and immediately west of Carefree, home of both the world's largest sundial and the world's largest kachina doll. (Calendar Man or Maxie Zeus on the loose, perhaps?) Giant props? Those are right up Batman's alley. Dick Sprang, legendary artist on the Batman comics in the 1940s and 1950s whose trademark illustrations commonly included giant props, retired to Prescott, Arizona in the 1970s. Prescott is less than two hours north of Carefree. Coincidence? Batman doesn't believe in them.
I hope that the Metropolitan Phoenix area police appreciated the help that they received from the Dark Knight Detective in whatever crime he was in town to prevent or solve. Clearly they are towing the same official line as the Gotham police, denying that Batman was even present. According to the AP, Scottsdale Police Sergeant Mark Clark (if that is his real name!) said, "it's just one of those interesting little stories that we looked into, but we couldn't find anyone." Of course they couldn't find anyone: it's the Batman!
It is worth noting that the school district involved has issued a statement in which they proclaim that the sighting was "the result of a false reporting by a student." The student remains unnamed, and the police decline to comment on whether the student will be disciplined. The perfect cover for a stray Batman sighting!
Ah, again we've reached that day of the year that royally chaps my hide. Perhaps it's because I can't stand to see other people happy. Or maybe it's because I'm so lonely that I become depressed to see couples enjoying each other's company. But I think that I hate Valentine's Day because it never shows up in superhero comic book stories.
There is a long tradition of comic book Christmas stories in both the DC and Marvel Universes. New Years, Halloween, and Thanksgiving are equally well represented. I can even remember St. Patrick's Day and Independence Day themed stories. However, I can't ever recall reading any comic book containing relevance to the events of Valentine's Day (save, of course, for the issue of Long Halloween, which was entirely holiday themed). If it's not important enough for Superman, I won't be bothered celebrating it.
Today I wore a Fantastic Four logo t-shirt with my Superboy leather jacket, and the sales staff at Best Buy, EB Games, and Kroger all gave me grief about wearing Marvel and DC trademarks together. I was impressed by the knowledge that these people had about comic book publishers and copyrights. Though they were admittedly all much, much younger than I am, each property had a movie in the past 2 years, so I shouldn't be too surprised, I suppose. In any event, long live comic books!
The past week has seen three of the most interesting news stories I've ever read.
Guerilla advertising in 10 major US cities generated a bomb scare after they had been in place for several days. Did no one notice them before, or did that one person, out of touch with the product advertised, manage to mobilize the entire country against one innocuous advertiser? The ensuing hoopla is the best thing that could have happened for the advertised product, and it only costs Turner Broadcasting $2 million to the involved city governments, less than the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad. Is there any chance that the person who started the bomb scare was a Turner employee?
A NASA astronaut attempted to torture another woman in order to scare her away from the male astronaut with whom both women were romantically involved. Mind you, she passed NASA screening and qualified to fly in space. Space Cowboys plus Fatal Attraction: someone call Warner Brothers and tell them to get their lawyers working on readying this story for the big screen!
An Italian police officer was killed in a riot outside a soccer game, resulting in Italy's decision to close a majority of its premier league soccer games to the public while stadia security is improved. Note that the spectator sport for mass entertainment will continue to be played, but spectators will be prohibited. Italy's solution to rioting after games is to remove the fans from the game, but hold the game anyway. At least they won't need police officers at the stadia anymore. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: stay away from Italy.
As an FYI, I've spent the better part of the past week (the part not occupied with moving or the Super Bowl) sorting Magic the Gathering cards for my high school friend Randy Fike. Randy and I go way back, and we were once roommates, though never previously were we co-workers. Anyway, Randy keeps bitching that I never mention him here in my blog. (Even though he only rarely visits Wriphe.com, as my pitiful hit statistics can attest.) So this post is to fulfill his request, keep Randy happy, and keep Walter employed. Mission accomplished.
I had the good fortune to obtain Super Bowl tickets this year. This time yesterday, I was sitting in the rain and gusting wind of the coldest, wettest Super Bowl in history. I tell you, there wasn't a dry eye in the house when the contest was over, and it wasn't because the Bears were trampled by the Colts, giving Peyton Manning his first NFL Championship. No, it rained and rained and rained. And then it rained some more. Trey and I briefly lamented not wearing raincoats to the game, but then we realized that those people who were wearing raincoats were just as soaked-to-the-bone as we were. Yet I still saw dozens of people in the fourth quarter who were still wearing torn, useless plastic bags as though they were life preservers and holding seat cushions over their heads like umbrellas. Fortunately for us, there was a stadium employee kindly warning us of a large puddle on the way to our cars. Most of the crowd walked through it anyway, as our shoes and socks had been completely saturated hours earlier.
Trey and I arrived early in anticipation of the day's events. While that meant that we were parked close to the stadium, it also meant that we would have to wait for nearly an hour to leave once the game was over. There is much truth in the cliche, "First In, Last Out." To my disappointment, the $20.00 I spent on a corndog, pretzel, bottle of water, and a Pepsi didn't go towards paying for a quality parking staff. At least they were a very large corndog and bottle of water. Though I hate Pepsi, as the "Official Soft Drink of the NFL," it was the only caffeine that I could get before the game. I'd forgotten how awful it tastes! Thankfully, the rain quenched my remaining, unsatisfied thirst.
As my first visit to Dolphin Stadium (formerly Dolphins Stadium, formerly Pro Player Stadium, formerly Pro Player Park, formerly Joe Robbie Stadium), home of the Miami Dolphins, it was practically a trip to Mecca. We spotted fans wearing gear from 26 of the 32 NFL teams (Bills, Jaguars, Lions, Panthers, Texans, and my hometown Falcons were not seen), but after the Bears and Colts, the team far-and-away best represented was the Dolphins themselves. I even had the opportunity to watch Dan Marino, whom the locals all apparently simply call "Danny," working on the CBS pre-game show with James Brown and Shannon Sharpe. (It was kind of comforting to see how the town still fully embraces him: the stadium is on Dan Marino Boulevard, and the city is peppered with billboards on which he pitches everything from weight-loss systems to used cars.)
I cheered for the Bears, and Trey rooted for the Colts. I'm not much of a Colts fan for the very sound reasons that they have long been over-hyped, they used to be in the AFC East with the Dolphins, and they are quarterbacked by an ex-Tennessee Volunteer. (Sure, Grossman is an ex-Florida Gator, but at least he's incompetent.) By the second quarter, it became apparent that the Bears were horribly outclassed (as expected) and wouldn't be much of a challenge for the Colts. Trey and I had predicted at the start of the playoffs that any AFC team could take any NFC team in the playoffs this year, and after seeing the Bears' miserable performance in the Super Bowl, I still think that's true.
Watching the game with Trey proved insightful, if irritating. He made several excellent points about both teams' strategies and execution. After Devon Hester returned the opening kickoff for a Bears' touchdown, Trey pointed out that an opening return always boded bad things for the scoring team. He reminded me that the same thing happened in last month's NCAA BCS Championship game for Ohio State, who, like the Bears, tanked the rest of the game. Most amusingly, early in the 4th quarter, after Grossman completed 2 passes and was moving the Bears down field, Trey proclaimed, "if [the Bears' coaches] call another pass play here, they are complete idiots." When on the next play, Colt's cornerback Kevin Hayden returned a Grossman interception for a touchdown, icing the game, Trey got the meanest looks from some nearby soggy Bears fans, as though Trey himself had stuck the dagger in the Bears' heart. I laughed and laughed.
I'm resentful of the fact that Peyton Manning secured his Championship ring (and cemented his legacy as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history) in Marino's hometown, but at least it rained on that punk's parade. Now I'm home, and I'm almost dry. It's certainly something that I'll have to do again. Next time, I'll be prepared: I'll take a snorkel.
As I mentioned, I've been relocating to new digs over the past week. What stands out about the misadventure is that less than 2 hours after being laughed at over how diligently I was tying down the tarp on the trailer hauling my furniture, the darn tarp ripped in half on the highway. (As seen below. My brother took the opportunity to chuckle at my expense.) Fortunately for me, the weather waited until after the tarp ripped to begin producing rain. Mother Nature is a woman with a sadistic sense of humor.
At least the move is complete and my computer is now (mostly) installed and running in its new location. After over 7 years, I am physically no longer living in Athens, GA. I don't know what I'll do, living in a town with less than 1 bar/liquor store per citizen.
Now almost all of the things that I have in my apartment are in a box. And I have labeled the boxes. There are at least 8 boxes that feature the word "Batman" in their label. Boxes of dolls, action figures, bedding, clothes, shoes, games, books, playing cards, models, mugs, glasses, bookends, statues, pins, replica movie props, watches, etc. This is after I've already thrown away the things that say Batman that are valueless or damaged, like the aged candy dispensers, empty Coca-Cola cans, Valentine's Day cards, ruined t-shirts, and a toothbrush. No, wait, I kept that toothbrush. And come to think of it, I kept those candy dispensers, too. And... Well, never mind. Eight boxes seems about right.
Guinness" printed on them. She's sweet and I know that she meant well. The only problems with this swell gift is that I don't drink Guinness, and I don't 
St. Patrick's Day. 
Canada Day, I don't 
Cinco De Mayo, and I don't 
Mardi Gras. Nothing personal, people, but I just don't need that sort of thing taking up space in my kitchen cabinet. I've got too many "I 
Batman" glasses in there already.
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