I've mentioned before that 2011 is the Year of the Suck. Unfortunately, it's not over yet.

As some of my 12 readers probably know, I've always preferred Wendy's hamburgers. There isn't really a Wendy's nearby my house, but I'm always willing to drive out of my way for their burgers. Their 1/4-lb Single is a very tasty treat that can make even the worst day a slight bit better. Or at least it used to.

Late last month, Wendy's rolled out it's reinvented hamburger, "Dave's Hot 'N Juicy," in a media blitz. It's advertised as a better burger made with "premium" ingredients. And it's significantly more expensive than before. Too bad it doesn't taste any better.

I tried my first one yesterday, picking up a pair for my father and me to enjoy while watching the latest Dolphins' loss. Before I could even take my second bite to confirm that the first bite was as bad as I thought it was, my father turned up his nose and said, "didn't these used to be good?" Yikes.

The burger may be juicier, but it is also more bland. The buttered bun tasted thick and unpleasantly heavy. The tomato slice I had on my sandwich still had the stem on it. The burger had enough cheese on it to glue the whole thing together, but it failed to provide any extra taste. There were all bad signs, and do not encourage me to ever have another.

Like everything else this year, it sucks. I'd say that at least they still have tasty chicken sandwiches, but rumor has it that they will be changing that recipe in 2012. I guess at least from now on I'll be saving gas.

[UPDATE 10/05/11: I decided to give Wendy's the benefit of the doubt, and ordered a Single combo at the location different from the one I ate at on Sunday. This burger was better, much better, than the last one. It tasted more similar to the Wendy's hamburgers that I loved in the past. Maybe that crappy burger was a one-time aberration. Perhaps this crisis has been averted. For now.]

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Earlier this week, three years to the day since I ran a blog post substituting him as the comic book hero Sub-Mariner, Alex Trebek injured both of his legs -- including a torn Achilles tendon -- while running down a burgler. Coincidence? (It was also 5 days after his 71st birthday.)

There are two ways to approach this story. Either heroic Alex Trebek was foiled during his valiant attempt to apprehend a crafty purloiner, or septuagenarian Alex Trebek was injured during a bungled try at catching a petty crook. I'm pretty sure you know where I stand on this issue.

I pity the poor contestants in next year's Jeopardy! episodes. "Oh, you ran a marathon? Well, I was in a footrace last year to catch criminals." "Bone marrow transplant, you say? During the surgery to repair my torn ACL, I distracted myself from the pain by giving the surgeon French elocution lessons." "You solved the national debt crisis? When I was in court for burglery, not only was I the expert witness, I was also the arresting officer, bailiff, and court stenographer."

That burgler must not have know from whom she was stealing. Alex Trebek is a national treasure.

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Superman/Batman: Apocalypse has its Los Angeles today and its New York City theatrical debut Thursday, a week in advance of it's DVD release. Of course, this keeps the movie from being a "straight-to-DVD" release. Perhaps Warner hopes the movie will find a more forgiving audience on the big screen than their last comic-book inspired movie, Jonah Hex.

The Warner Brothers press release bills the movies as the latest in "the ongoing series of DC Universe Animated Original PG-13 Movies." What, exactly, does Warner Brother consider so "original" about a cartoon based on a sucky 2004 comic book which was itself based largely on stories that had been published 40 years before it? Also from the press release:

Based on the DC Comics series/graphic novel "Superman/Batman: Supergirl" by Jeph Loeb, Michael Turner & Peter Steigerwald, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse is produced by animation legend Bruce Timm and directed by Lauren Montgomery (Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths) from a script by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Tab Murphy (Gorillas in the Mist).

Does the artist of the "graphic novel" even matter now that it's a movie? And since when is Gorillas in the Mist a selling point for an audience of comic book fans? More to the point, Murphy receives only "story" credit for Gorillas, whereas Anna Hamilton Phelan was credited "screenwriter/story." I'm no expert on WGA rules, but I'm pretty sure that if you brag on someone as an "Academy Award-nominated" something, that someone should probably have gotten equal or better credits than everyone else credited. (No offense to Mr. Murphy. He has a credible career writing scripts for several big-time Disney movies, like Atlantis and Tarzan, both of which would probably be a better press release tease than Gorillas.)

This is the second Superman/Batman movie in as many years based on the comic book of the same name. When is Warner Brothers going to start making "original" animated movies based on good comic books? There really shouldn't be any shortage. After all, DC has only been publishing comics for 75 years. With that sort of back-catalogue, you wouldn't think a good "original" story based on something not written by Jeph Loeb would be all that hard to find.

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Welcome back, those of you who avoided Superman Month. You're just in time for a slide show of my summer vacation!

Wait, come back! I can't afford to lose any more readers! Fine, no slides! How about if I just post some pictures I took of Cedar Point instead? You can pretend that they are postcards! Ok? Whew. Crisis averted.

In case you are unaware, Cedar Point is an amusement park on the Ohio shore of Lake Erie. Cedar Point is the second oldest existing amusement park in America, and it is home to more roller coasters than any other amusement park in the world. This year's semi-annual pilgrimage marked the 10-year anniversary of my first trip to the park for the unveiling of Millennium Force, at the time the tallest and fastest coaster in the world. I would like to hope that I have aged as well as that coaster.

Giant Wheel and Wicked Twister define the shore of Lake Erie as seen from Space Spiral.

Millennium Force crests its second-tallest hill as seen from the Cedar Point & Lake Erie Railroad.
(Footnote: This image was taken by my friend Michael Foster, though it was my camera so I am taking credit for it.)

Max Air proves that good parks don't need 6 flags.

View of Dodgem bumper car pavilion with inset of sign lit for night.

Sky Ride passes by Raptor as seen from the Midway at dusk.

Composite view of Wildcat, the greatest little coaster in the park.

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The end is near! When I revised the Wriphe.com blog from an all-Flash format in 2002, I created gifs for the dates for the blog through 2010. That means that today begins the final year for the original date graphics of Wriphe.com before new dates must be created for the blog for 2011. Think of this coming crisis as the WRIPHE2K11 bug, which I assure you is every bit as dire in consequence as the pending end of the Mayan calendar though with a much worse agent. (As of yet, I have no movie deal.)

Facing such a potentially disastrous future, I think it may help sooth those fraying nerves with some encouraging words by the immortal David Coverdale:

I don't know where I'm going,
but I sure know where I've been.
Hanging on the promises in songs of yesterday.
And I've made up my mind.
I ain't wasting no more time.
Here I go again, here I go again.

Though I keep searching for an answer,
I never seem to find what I'm looking for.
Oh, Lord, I pray you give me strength to carry on.
Cause I know what it means
to walk along the lonely street of dreams.

Here I go again on my own,
going down the only road I've ever known.
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.
I've made up my mind.
I ain't wasting no more time.

As we all face uncertain future, let us waste no more time hanging on the empty promises in songs of yesterday and move on with our lives. Truly words to live by.

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Tis the season for poodles.

My aunt gifted me two rescued standard poodles this week. The black bitch is named July and is quite a playful handful. The light apricot bitch is named Victoria and is skittish and reserved. They came as a pair, previously owned by a woman who became unable to care for them following an injury. Despite the fact that they are both adults (2+ years old), they've kept me very, very busy.

Meanwhile, my father bought a new standard poodle puppy descended from a line including show champions. Though at this point the puppy remains unnamed, I'm sure that it can't help but do well considering that it's dam was named for Joanna Cameron's title character in television's The Secrets of Isis.

[UPDATE: For the record, Victoria isn't an apricot. She's just a really, really dirty white. Silly girl.]

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If your knowledge of super hero comic books is limited to what you've seen at the movies, then you've never heard of the Grey Gargoyle. And your life is probably the better for it. The Grey Gargoyle is a middling Marvel Comics villain with the "uncanny" ability to turn anything he touches into stone. For an hour. Unless it's magical. (Which would make his foe of choice, Thor, a piss-poor choice for a nemesis. But then, the Grey Gargoyle is a piss-poor villain.)

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It's no wonder the guy has an identity crisis. (There's a reason he always uses the word "the" before his name even though no one else would be caught dead impersonating a loser like him.) The Grey Gargoyle is French, so he'd probably refer to himself as "Le Gargouille Grise." However, Gargoyle spends almost all of his time in American comic books fighting American heroes, where you'd expect that he'd be referenced as "The Gray Gargoyle." But for some reason he inexplicably prefers the Queen's English to American. Usually.

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Like I said, the guy has an identity crisis. Even the writers and editors at Marvel Comics apparently don't care enough to consistently get his name right. They can't even keep his name straight for an entire issue. Sometimes they don't even try at all. (And why should they? I don't think the schmuck has ever won a fight. In the comic above right, he is defeated when the loose end of a chain accidentally gets wrapped around his foot. Unfortunately for him, the chain was attached to a rocket. What fool would wrap a chain around a rocket in the first place? He did. Fail to plan, plan to fail.)

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And when they do get it right, they tend to over-compensate a bit. His name appears on the cover above twice. In all caps. And he's shown holding his own against the entire Avenger's team! If you've never seen him before, you'd be thinking that he must be a bad-ass, right? That is, until you learn that he's French.

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While it's one thing to disrespect a villain enough to forget his name, it's another thing entirely to forget his powers. Notice on that cover above left, it looks like Gargoyle is turning someone to stone, yes? That's his power, right? Turns out, no, not when he's using the wrong hand, it isn't. Gargoyle is only able to turn someone to stone with his right hand, not his left. And last time I checked, things made of granite fly about as well as a..., well, as well as a stone.

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He wears blue socks with claws, a cape made of stone, and has a pencil mustache. Once you get to know him, you begin to understand why a man made of stone would wear a domino mask to hide his identity. The more you learn about this guy, the more you suspect that Darwin was full of shit: "natural selection" would never let something this retarded live long enough to learn to learn to walk. Ah, but the world of super villains needs janitors, too. Therefore, I present to you... The Gray Grey Gargoyle!

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I swear, DC is trying to drive me away from comic books altogether.

Honestly, the only reason that I still buy comic books is because I've been collecting Batman and Detective Comics for as long as I can remember. I didn't start at birth, so I've had to do some catching up. But I now certainly own every issue that has been published in my lifetime. It's that sort of loyalty to the adventures of a stupid fictional character who dresses like a bat that has me shelling out however much cash DC Comics charges me on a monthly basis. (I'm not old enough for 10¢ comics, yet I do distinctly remember when "Still only 75¢" stopped meaning anything.)

Once upon a time, heroes were jovial fellows who did the right things for the right reasons. Back then, might didn't make right, but it could make things better. But things began to change; the heroes began to have doubts and flaws. Gradually, the heroes became humans. Soon there came a Crisis on Infinite Earths, and things changed. In the world that survived the Crisis, only the annual ritual sacrifice of some former hero could save the Universe from total destruction. Morbid? Maybe. But it was still better than things to come.

A few years ago, DC published Identity Crisis, a surprisingly dark tale springing from a rape, murder, and slavery for the sake of pure shock value that began the slippery slope away from moral superheroics into the morass of psychological despair that now seems to drive modern comic books. Soon characters were being slaughtered left and right to keep the shock and awe campaign going. Before long, there was Infinite Crisis, in which Wonder Woman was painted as a common murderer and Batman's paranoia had created the most dangerous weapon since the atomic bomb. By the end of that series, the heroes of a previous generation were revealed to be the villains of today: one Superboy murdered another while multiple Supermen were reduced to squabbling over territory like feral dogs.

Now there's been a Final Crisis, a truly unreadable pile of shit (sorry, but there's no way to sugarcoat it) whose encyclopedia of minor characters is targeted at longtime fanboys while ignoring the conventions of storytelling, heroics, morality, and defined character that those fanboys would theoretically hold dear. True to form, DC killed off several major characters simply for "wow" factor. As you may have guessed by now among those characters is Batman.

So DC, in the infinite wisdom of Dan Didio (and by infinite, I mean the man is a bottomless pit), will not publish Batman or Detective for the foreseeable future. Sure, they'll be coming back, but so much for a run uninterrupted since 1939. And I find myself asking if should I be thanking them for making it so easy to walk away.

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The Brave and the Bold on the Cartoon Network may just be the best Batman cartoon ever. I love Batman Beyond, but it's always better to have Bruce Wayne under the cowl (hint, hint, DC).

In these new cartoons, Batman is simultaneously courageous, serious, and nearly omnipotent but still quite human. His guest stars, a who's who of mostly obscure DC Universe heroes and villains (Bwana Beast? Gentleman Ghost? Guy Gardner? Kiteman? Kick ass!), often steal the show without detracting from Batman's presence.

There's nothing new about The Brave and the Bold. If you were reading comic books before Crisis on Infinite Earths, it'll all seem pretty familiar. (That panel above where Batman and Flash have defeated Dr. Double X and the Rainbow Raider is from The Brave and the Bold #194, published over 25 years ago in 1983!) Several of the episodes have been lifts from previous comic stories, some even from The Brave and the Bold comic itself. But in a modern world in which every story has to threaten the end of humanity opposed by bickering, fallible heroes, it's refreshing to return to a more optimistic point-of-view in which the heroes always win, even if they sometimes need a little help from their friends.

I'm actually quite pleased that in the modern age, where DC's focus is frequently selling sensational stories to a populace demanding death on an epic scale, there are enough people in the business who remember that super heroes used to dress in bright costumes and dole out terrible puns as they overcame Goldbergian death-traps in order to catch common jewel thieves. All to provide readers with some simple, 4-color escapist fantasy for 22 pages. Realism? No. Fun? Yes.

If even Batman can crack an occasional smile, maybe there's still hope that DC comics can survive this modern ("DiDio") era without sacrificing too much of it's colorful classic roster to the bloodlust of it's current editorial staff.

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I've now seen Superman Returns, and it sucks, just like I expected it would. Though, to be fair, I expect most things to suck, so this indicates no special prediction on my part. However, most of my pre-viewing complaints were proven completely accurate.

Sure, Routh does a fine job of impersonating Christopher Reeve, and Spacey makes a passable Gene Hackman. Too bad they were playing Superman and Lex Luthor instead. The rest of the cast seemed almost carelessly chosen. Bosworth's Lois is way too young and entirely too emotional. (Note to all future actresses who want to portray Lois: see Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy and emulate that. THAT's Lois Lane.) Langella's Perry White and Marsden's Richard White both lacked substance, but it could have just been poor scripting. Everything else was. And that's what tanked this baby.

The producers of the movie would have done well to follow the old entertainment maxim, "give 'em what they want." Superman is nearly 70 years old and has profitably appeared on popular radio, television, and movie programs for decades. Why now did they decide to modify the costume and give him a child? They didn't update Jimmy (other than giving him a digital camera) or Perry, Smallville or Ma Kent. No, the one thing that they shouldn't have changed is the one thing that they messed up. Here's a hint for the next film, Singer: if it ain't broke, keep your damn hands off it.

Stop reading now if you don't want spoilers to the movie.

The universal gripe with the movie is Lois' child. Just as every real human being can tell that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person, every real audience goer can tell that the child is Clark's long before the "big reveal" when the child KILLS SOMEONE. The mere presence of this child completely ruins the story of the film, presenting an insurmountable obstacle to the necessary suspension of disbelief required to enjoy any fictional film, especially one with flying men.

First of all, I refuse to believe that Clark Kent would leave the planet Earth after having unprotected sex with Lois Lane before confirming that she was not pregnant. I don't know one American male who has had unprotected sex who hasn't at least briefly worried about the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. (It's the American Protestant upbringing, I suspect.) Even though he's an alien, I don't think Superman is that different from other Americans in that respect. I know that church-going Pa Kent gave young Clark the Birds-and-the-Bees story at least once, so I'm pretty sure that Clark knew the consequences of a wild night out with Little Superman in the driver's seat.

Since this film is built on the stories of Superman and Superman II, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that Superman could have knocked up Lois during the hours when he was powerless during Superman II. And under post-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity, Superman didn't gain his powers until adolescence, saving Lois from any mortal wounds while carrying the super-sired child. This certainly bypasses the potential difficulty of super-sperm as related in Larry Niven's infamous essay. But I still say the Superman that I was weaned on would have checked in on the action in Lois' womb once his powers returned before departing for the remains of Krypton. It would have been the right thing to do. He would simultaneously be easing his own guilty mind while confirming his beloved Lois' state of health before abandoning her on his search for his roots. Anything else would have been cowardly, an adjective that should never be applied to Superman.

Secondly, during the course of the story, Superboy reveals that he has super-powers by killing a man with a piano. Though this action is in defense of his mother, the child should never have had to perform this action. One of the moral tenets that has served Superman well over the years has been the belief in the sacred right to life. Though Superman has had to deal with many crooks, thugs, miscreants, gangsters, criminals, and murderers, he has never killed any of them, thanks to the rigid moral upbringing that he received from his parents. He would be horrified if his progeny used his powers in such a way as to result in someone's death. The manslaughter of the criminal cannot be justified as self-defense for the child or the mother because if the child does have super-human power such as Superman, he had the means to prevent the death though other applications of super-strength. The child's choice to use strength kill was inevitably a failure by the parents, since the child could never be expected to make such a rational use of his power with his limited understanding of the world. He is, after all, a child. Lois' refusal to admit that the child was Superman's and Superman's refusal to live up to his responsibility resulted in the child receiving poor moral guidance for such inevitable situations. (Any child of Lois Lane is going to end up in life-threatening danger. It's in the genes.)

Worse yet, during the movie, Clark Kent is shown in a bar drinking a Budweiser with Jimmy Olsen. Ignoring the question of whether bow-tied Jimmy Olsen is old enough to drink beer, what is this scene supposed to show other than a promotion of an Anheuser-Busch product? Superman doesn't drink beer! Though he's presumably immune to the effects of alcohol (as well as any additional poisons), Clark would never drink booze, especially in front of his impressionable pal, Jimmy.

Superman is paranoid that he might lose control of his powers and harm someone. The theme of irresponsible use of power has been part of Superman's mythos since his radio days. There's a television episode ("Superman in Exile") where he chastises scientists for not knowing what powers they are unleashing from the atom. The Superman I grew up with wouldn't even risk imbibing and damaging his own judgment. He also wouldn't encourage Jimmy to drink by setting a bad example himself. Though it may be acceptable for Jimmy to kick one back and relax after work, Clark shouldn't and wouldn't encourage him. However, if Jimmy wanted to drink chocolate milk, that's a Quik Bunny of a different color. Superman has pitched everything from Kellogg's Frosted Flakes to Radio Shack Computers to American Express Credit Cards. But so far as I'm aware, he's never pitched for anything quite so dangerous or controversial as alcohol before. What's next? Superman handguns? After this movie, it ought to be condoms. Tsk, tsk, Warner Brothers, for handling a product placement in such an irresponsible manner.

It's clear that Singer and company simply don't understand what makes Superman super. More accurately, they probably don't care, preferring to make their fame and fortune by putting their stamp on an American icon. Singer and pals decided to simply tweak a formula established by a previous director in order to jumpstart a cash cow franchise. Nevermind that the 70s movies have a few plot problems and Christopher Reeve is dead. Nevermind that Superman is among the most well-known and cherished of American icons. They figured that they would just push on, changing all of the wrong things, and audiences would love it. It's exactly that sort of arrogance that caused the film to lose $70 million on its domestic release. According to Box Office Mojo, the film cost an estimated $270 million to make. If accurate, that makes it among the most expensive movies in history. But a flop by any other name....

America knows what it likes, and it doesn't much like Superman Returns. And I agree with them.

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