Watery, itchy eyes; sinus drainage; sneezing/coughing. I either have the worst allergies of my life, or I have a cold. If I'm having bad allergies, how did they get this bad? Is it time for me to consider moving to the desert? If I have a cold, "Friend" Ken gave it to me. I told him two weeks ago when he was coughing in my car that if he got me sick I was going to be very angry at him, and I am a man of my word. Better hope it's allergies, Ken.

UPDATE: Good news! Ken has kindly apologized for any role he may have played in my illness. Better news! After adding parosmia to my list of symptoms, I gave myself an OTC COVID test, and it came out negative. So probably just run-of-the-mill sinusitis, then. Great. I feel better already.

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I was eating lunch while reading the latest Consumer Reports magazine when I suddenly realized that I wasn't reading the Consumer Reports anymore. I was reading the same line over and over because the sentences had stopped making any sense. My first thought was that the article's author must have been having a terrible day because the words were all wrong for constructing a complete thought. But on closer inspection, the words weren't wrong, my ability to recognize them was.

Naturally, I assumed this sudden onset aphasia was a symptom that I was having a stroke. Mom, however, was pretty certain that it was just an oncoming migraine. Mom is usually right about such things, so I did not call 911.

My migraines usually start with tunnel vision and limb numbness, and sure enough, they both came along eventually. After a long rest in front of the TV (playing Olivia Newton-John's Xandau and the final round of a terrible U.S. Open), I awoke feeling, well, "better" isn't the right word, but maybe "relieved" at having moved firmly into the acute headache stage of migraine progression. (As if "relieved" and "acute headache" ever belong in the same sentence.)

The worst part of a migraine is the fact that when one strikes, I have no choice but to do literally nothing for many hours except lie still and wait for it to pass. Sometimes I can sleep through them. Sometimes not. In today's case, it has been 9 hours, and I'm still not 100% (nausea is always among the longest-lingering symptoms for me), but at least I'm mostly functional again. (I'm typing all this, so evidently my brain's Wernicke's area and other language centers are back online. Hooray! I mean, I am typing real words, right? You can read this? Please say you can read this.)

Just to be on the safe side, I'll wait until tomorrow to try reading any more Consumer Reports. That magazine is dangerous.

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About a week ago, I took the boys for our usual walkies. It was unusually blustery, and I stopped to check the weather radar on my phone. At exactly that moment, a golf carts drove by.

Despite the fact that we live just across the highway from our local country club, golf carts used to be rare in my neighborhood. Back when I started walking the girls, there were only two carts on my street. The gas-powered one belonged to the people who teach horseback riding and use the cart to ride along the street and collect the horse droppings, like a motorized version of the street sweeper at the end of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. I only saw the batter-powered one occasionally when the kids got bored and took it for joyrides, doing donuts in their yard.

(Side note: I personally don't think golf carts are more fun than watching Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I doubt those kids have ever seen it. Back in the day, there really wasn't that much to watch or that many channels to watch them on, so everyone knew everything on television, making pop culture references the coin of the realm. You made friends in school by quoting reruns of shows that had been first runs for our parents' generation: Leave it to Beaver or Gilligan's Island or Monty Python's Flying Circus. I have no idea what tweens watch these days after school, but if I threatened a kid today with a loaded banana, they'd think I was brain damaged.)

There are lots of golf carts in the 'hood now. The boys love 'em. They go crazy when they see one. I don't know why. So long as I've had the boys, they've never been within five feet of a golf cart. A golf cart has never brought them a treat. But I guess they do drive by slower than cars, making them easier to chase, and the ones in my neighborhood often have other dogs on board, making the chase worthwhile.

Anyway, as I was saying, the golf cart drove by while I was half paying attention, and Henry and Louis went berserk, and their leashes damn near pulled off the fingernail on my left index finger. Not totally. It just bent it back halfway. It hurt a lot the first few days, but it's gotten better. Or at least I thought it was getting better. I showed it to Mom earlier today, and she nearly swooned. So maybe not all better. I'm just taking it one day at a time. (Boy, that Schneider was a card.)

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Welcome to June, the 18th annual Wriphe.com Superman Month!

I'm typing this without my left index finger, which I cut while washing my car. (I'll never make that mistake again. Stay dirty, car!) My injury made me wonder when was the first time in comics we actually see Superman bleeding. So I went looking.

As you can see in the above panel from his two-page origin story published in Superman #1, Summer 1939, Superman's skin was essentially impenetrable from the get-go, so the opportunities for him to visibly bleed have always been few and far between.

If those aforementioned bursting shells led to any bloodshed, it was always hidden by smoke and debris. When Superman needed to give blood to save Lois Lane's life in 1940's Superman #6, he had to give the doctor a hand. Literally.

But that wasn't technically an injury, so I kept looking for something that could hurt Superman that wasn't Superman.

Magic was an early weakness (bloodlessly stealing Superman's powers multiple times in 1942), but Kryptonite wasn't introduced into the comics until 1949 in Superman #61. (Like many elements of the Superman mythos, Kryptonite first appeared in 1943 on the Adventures of Superman radio show.) It usually just made Superman weak and fall down. He doesn't even scrape his knees.

March 1960's Action Comics #262 would introduce Superman's immediate weakness under a red sun. In that issue Clark Kent gets stung by a bee for the first time. Two years later, a bare-knuckle boxing match against Lex Luthor on the planet Lexor under a red sun would give Superman a face full of bruises, but still no visible blood. This might be because beginning in 1954, the Comics Code Authority strictly forbid showing, among many other things, "All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism." Bloodless injuries were no longer optional.

Action Comics #49, June 1942

The code would relax beginning in 1971, and by the time Superman was beaten to "death" by Doomsday in 1993's Superman #75, blood was everywhere. (The 90s were a violent time.) Unfortunately for Superman, the Code was nowhere to be found on the cover of 1978's All New Collectors' Edition #C-56, better known as "Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali." In that issue, following a different boxing match under a red sun, Superman gets beaten so badly by Ali that he bleeds all over his pillow. If there's a lesson here, it's probably that Superman should give up boxing.

For whatever reason, that bloody pillow was removed in a re-colored 2010 reprinting. But that's okay. I'm sure it wasn't the first time Superman unwillingly bled on panel anyway. Because after four (delightful) hours of looking through comics and comics websites, I found this sequence in 1976's Superman #297:

Ouch! Be careful where you put those fingers, Superman.

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Adding to my list started on March 8, once again I have damaged my scalp, this time while cleaning limbs that had fallen into my father's yard on Memorial Day during the most recent tornado-generating weather to rumble through my town. Tornadoes have always been the most common natural disaster around these parts, but now they are stating to be annual occurrences. Isn't living in the future great? Also starting to become common occurrences: scalp injuries. The future's so bright, I gotta start wearing a hard hat.

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A timely excerpt from Mark Twain's
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
Chapter VI, "The Eclipse"

As the soldiers assisted me across the court the stillness was so profound that if I had been blindfold I should have supposed I was in a solitude instead of walled in by four thousand people. There was not a movement perceptible in those masses of humanity; they were as rigid as stone images, and as pale; and dread sat upon every countenance. This hush continued while I was being chained to the stake; it still continued while the fagots were carefully and tediously piled about my ankles, my knees, my thighs, my body.

Then there was a pause, and a deeper hush, if possible, and a man knelt down at my feet with a blazing torch; the multitude strained forward, gazing, and parting slightly from their seats without knowing it; the monk raised his hands above my head, and his eyes toward the blue sky, and began some words in Latin; in this attitude he droned on and on, a little while, and then stopped. I waited two or three moments; then looked up; he was standing there petrified.

With a common impulse the multitude rose slowly up and stared into the sky. I followed their eyes, as sure as guns, there was my eclipse beginning! The life went boiling through my veins; I was a new man! The rim of black spread slowly into the sun’s disk, my heart beat higher and higher, and still the assemblage and the priest stared into the sky, motionless. I knew that this gaze would be turned upon me, next. When it was, I was ready. I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. You could see the shudder sweep the mass like a wave. Two shouts rang out, one close upon the heels of the other:

"Apply the torch!"

"I forbid it!"

The one was from Merlin, the other from the king. Merlin started from his place—to apply the torch himself, I judged. I said:

"Stay where you are. If any man moves—even the king—before I give him leave, I will blast him with thunder, I will consume him with lightnings!"

The multitude sank meekly into their seats, and I was just expecting they would. Merlin hesitated a moment or two, and I was on pins and needles during that little while. Then he sat down, and I took a good breath; for I knew I was master of the situation now. The king said:

"Be merciful, fair sir, and essay no further in this perilous matter, lest disaster follow. It was reported to us that your powers could not attain unto their full strength until the morrow; but—"

"Your Majesty thinks the report may have been a lie? It was a lie."

That made an immense effect; up went appealing hands everywhere, and the king was assailed with a storm of supplications that I might be bought off at any price, and the calamity stayed. The king was eager to comply. He said:

"Name any terms, reverend sir, even to the halving of my kingdom; but banish this calamity, spare the sun!"

My fortune was made. I would have taken him up in a minute, but I couldn’t stop an eclipse; the thing was out of the question. So I asked time to consider. The king said:

"Ah, too bad. Oh, well, if'n we can't have the sun, we can at least have a barbecue. Light 'im up, lads."

Reaching up one sleeve, Merlin produced a wand. Reaching into the other, the magician revealed a bag of marshmallows. Piercing one with the other, he asked:

"S'mores, anyone?"

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For reasons I won't go into (mainly: vanity), I've recently been re-reading old blog posts. What stands out the most to me is not how damn clever I am (I already knew that) but how I have a real problem typing the word "it's" when I mean "its" and vice versa.

For the record, "its" (no apostrophe) is the possessive form of the traditional gender-neutral singular pronoun, used to demonstrate ownership, as in:

The battle station is heavily shielded and carries a firepower greater than half the star fleet. Its defenses are designed around a direct large-scale assault.

Meanwhile, "it's" (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of the unpossessive, laissez-faire "it" and the present tense third-person singular being verb "is," as in:

The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port.

As you can see, despite the its/it's pair being one of the most common confusions in the world of English grammar, I obviously know they're two different words, and I know how they should be used in a sentence (and I've known ever since Star Wars). So why do I so often type one when I mean the other? Is it a birth defect? A mental illness? Keyboard gremlins? I wish I had a better answer than "I'm too lazy to proofread my own posts," but here we are.

Now let's blow this thing and go home.

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When it's quiet, I hear a ringing that doesn't seem to exist. I'm pretty sure that tinnitus is just a sign of my ears gradually ossifying. My solution to that is to turn on the radio. I still hear the static, but at least then I can pretend there's a source.

That's not the only time I hear things. Sometimes I think I hear someone call my name or dogs barking when there can't be anyone around to call my name or my dogs are sleeping beside me. This has to be my mind playing tricks on me, right?

I probably shouldn't be typing any of this. Everyone knows that hearing voices is a bad sign. A little over a decade ago, my then across-the-street neighbor told her friends that she could hear people having conversations in the basement when no one else was there. They put her in a home.

She was nearly 100. I'm only half that age. I'm too young to be put in a home. But at least in a home there would be other people who could be calling my name. I have to admit that, technically, that solves the problem.

In the meantime, if you call my name and I don't answer you, know that I probably did hear you; I'm just in denial.

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