Crisis On Earth Prime Part 2: Crises On Earth Prime?

1985.
The year seems to hold some sort of special significance, at least in the minds of Bowling For Soup, comic book writer Mark Millar, and in the mind of a certain blogger.
I became a teenager in 1985, and, to a very real extent, 1985 was when my identity and sense of self – for good or ill – really started to firm up, and I became something that could recognizably be called Jon As We Know Him.
I can’t really say why 1985 was significant to those others, but I know that, for me, for a lot of reasons, most of which I won’t get into, even at the time, 1985 seemed important.
For one thing, my sister Kim graduated from high school and moved out, and with my brother Stuart heading off to Northern to get his auto body certificate, that meant that for the first time in 13 years, I was the only one of my siblings still living at home.
With no disrespect intended towards my brothers and sisters, I have to say that life at home became a lot quieter and more peaceful.  I mean, how could it not?
My school life improved, thanks to the presence of a new Principal who served as something of a mentor, and proved to be someone I could actually talk to about the things I was interested in (science fiction, art), and while my interpersonal relationships with my fellow students weren’t exactly ideal, they were, at least, no longer calling me names and willing to just leave me alone most of the time.
Beyond any of that, however, for me, there were two things that made 1985 so significant:  Who’s Who and Crisis on Infinite Earths.Contrary to what the people in charge at DC thought, I really enjoyed the fact that DC had a 50-year history of stories and continuity.  Rather than finding the challenge of sifting through 5 decades’ worth of information a daunting, forbidding task, I relished the challenge of learning as much as I could.  In that regard, both comics – Who’s Who in particular – proved invaluable.
I loved being able to look through an issue of Crisis and see some obscure character lurking in the background and know who he or she was, thanks to his or her entry in Who’s Who.
Of course, as things wore on, and Crisis began having a major impact on the DCU – the deaths of Supergirl and Barry Allen chief among them – I began to develop a sense of just how significant this story was going to prove to be for the fictional universe I loved so well.
After all, at the time, I had no idea about the idea that Wolfman and Perez had pitched, so I went into it thinking that, sure, some exciting stuff would happen, but it wouldn’t mean anything.  When it was all over, a couple minor characters would be gone, some new characters would be introduced, their comics would get cancelled eventually, and then everything would go back to being the way it was.
By the time I’d gotten through the back-to-back deaths of those major characters, however, I lost a lot of that certainty.  Worlds will live, worlds will die, and nothing will ever be the same…
Being an “event” comic, Crisis, in addition to having its own monthly issues, crossed over with every title that DC published.  To a greater and lesser extent with each and every issue that came out from the spring through the fall of 1985, every comic featured stories that intersected with the events depicted in the main Crisis storyline.
It was, if you read DC Comics, unavoidable.
One such crossover occurred in the Superman titles, where we found the Man of Steel transported to another world, a world that was familiar not only to the Last Son of Krypton, but to the readers as well:  Earth Prime.
The Crisis, it seemed, did not discriminate, and when they said all Earths were in danger, they meant it.  But if the combined might of heroes and villains alike couldn’t save those other worlds, what chance did our Earth, lacking as it did anyone with even a hint of super powers – the best we’ve got is a guy who can possibly (though definitely not) bend spoons with his mind – have against this multiversal wave of destruction?
As it turned out, we weren’t quite so lacking as we’d always assumed, as there was a teenager living in a small town on Earth Prime who had, cruelly, been given an all-too familiar name:  Clark Kent.
Clark had been a foundling, and though they knew it was cruel, his adoptive parents, the Kents, decided to give him that fateful name. While he had spent his life living like any normal kid on Earth Prime, the passing of Halley’s Comet somehow activated his latent Kryptonian abilities – conveniently, on a night on which young Clark, embracing the joke that was his name, was attending a costume party dressed as his super hero namesake – and Earth Prime got its first super hero:  Superboy!

Look!  Up in the sky!  It's...actually, it really is just a bird.  Darn.

Unfortunately, even the combined efforts of Man and Boy were not super enough to save us, and Earth Prime – where we keep all of our stuff – was consumed by the unstoppable and insatiable wall of antimatter.  At the end of that story, Superboy disappeared into a vortex, only to reappear sometime later in the pages of Crisis, lending his power to its ultimate resolution.
It’s important to mention that while the first issue of Crisis was released at the start of 1985, the events depicted therein were actually said to be taking place in July of that year.
So Earth Prime – along with all of us – was fated to be destroyed.
This is where the anecdote that inspired these lengthy posts finally comes in.
One of the harbingers of every Earth’s ultimate destruction in Crisis is strange weather, exemplified by an oddly copper-colored sky.  Limitations of the color reproduction process of the time meant that on the printed page the skies simply appeared to be red, but the word “copper” was frequently used to describe the color.
So.
It’s 1985.  While I’ve just recently made the transition from child to teen, and the basic components of what we would later know as Jon were all properly assembled, I was prone to flights of fancy that frequently turned into a kind of existential dread as I followed them through to their terrifying conclusion….well…I guess I still do that.
In any case, it’s 1985 and I’ve seen how the stakes have been rising in Crisis, and while I know that we aren’t really Earth Prime, and there is no multiverse – at least, no multiverse as described in the comics; we won’t get into M-theory here – there is that nagging question of “What if it’s true?”
July 4th, 1985.  For some reason, even though it’s unlike me to do so, I wake up early in the morning, not long after sunrise.  I’m not sure why, exactly, but I feel like something is amiss, something beyond the fact that it’s way too damned early to be getting up on a summer day.  Something just doesn’t seem right.  It’s the light coming in through the windows.  It’s…off, somehow.
Uneasily, I get out of bed, approach the window, and look outside and up at the sky.
It’s a color that I’d never seen before, one that can only be described as copper.
Copper skies.
It’s July, 1985, I live on Earth Prime, and the sky is copper.
”Fuck.”
It’s a momentary thought – honestly, I don’t believe that we’re really about to be destroyed by a wave of antimatter – but, all things considered, how could I not have that thought?
Still, knowing that there’s nothing that I can do but await the end, and, given that it’s way too damned early to be up on a summer day, I shrug my shoulders and climb back into bed.
I wake up some hours later to a bright, sunny day, though I’m vaguely aware that we’d had some severe storms while I slept.
Even so, it seems that we weren’t destroyed by a wave of antimatter, and while I’m pleased that is the case, I can’t help but be a little disappointed to have it confirmed that the answer to “What if it’s true?” is that there’s no point in wondering, because it very clearly isn’t.
Except…
Twenty years later, Infinite Crisis comes along.  Written by Geoff Johns, who is roughly my age, and would have been reading the same comics I was reading, IC follows the story of some of the refugees of CoIE.
Events in CoIE unfolded in such a way that history was retroactively changed at the beginning of time, preventing the creation of the multiverse, and leading to one unified universe that was, at its core, the universe of Earth 1, with certain elements of the other Earths added into its history.  Not only was Earth Prime destroyed, it was now the case that it never existed in the first place.
So not only did we not have a place to keep all of our stuff, we no longer had any stuff and we never had.  In fact, we didn’t even have a we.
In this new, unified history, there were several anomalous beings, people from the previous history who had managed to stick around in the new one, such as Kal-L of Earth 2, and young Clark Kent from Earth Prime.  They had no home and no history, and as the rewritten history of the new universe wove itself into the memories of those who had survived the Crisis, they would eventually be completely forgotten, and would remember worlds that never existed.
So, in the end, they went off to greener pastures, another reality completely disconnected from the reality that no longer had a place for them, and they would live in this paradise dimension forever.
Or until Geoff Johns came along.
I won’t get into the details of IC here (mercifully), but the end result was that history was changed once more, and while it was no longer infinite, the multiverse was reborn in a massive undelete that restored much of its previous history.
Included in that undelete command?  Earth Prime.
So to go back to that question from July 4, 1985, “What if it’s true?
What if, while I slept that morning, we all really were consumed by a wall of antimatter, retroactively erased from existence, and then, in a manner that was seamless from our perspective, retroactively added back into existence?  What if there really had been Crises on Earth Prime?

I Wonder If She Wants The Cereal?

As mentioned in earlier posts, I filed my taxes about two weeks ago, and had, in under a week, already gotten – and spent – my VA refund, and I was eagerly awaiting my Federal refund.
Given that I’ve found that it typically takes a week at most for me to get it, I was anticipating its arrival shortly after the VA refund.
Unfortunately, I got an e-mail informing me that the IRS was reporting a delay in processing of refunds, so it would take slightly longer than usual.  When I checked the “Where’s my refund?” page on the IRS site, it informed me that I would get my refund “by the 7th.”
It had been my intention to take a day off from work once I had the money in order to make a Costco run and stock up on those things which Costco is useful to me for stocking up on, which, honestly, isn’t a lot, but still ends up costing considerably more than a standard trip to the grocery store does.
So, in the parlance of the Internet, I was disappoint.
After all, I had hoped to schedule my day off in such a way as to give myself a long weekend by taking either a Friday or a Monday off.
That wouldn’t work, without additional waiting, if I wasn’t going to have the money until Tuesday.
With hope in my heart, I checked the IRS page again yesterday afternoon and found that the date had become more specific, stating that it was scheduled to be deposited in my account on February 6th.
Hooray!  I could take Monday off!
However, there still remained a problem in the form of my spending my entire VA refund so long before getting my Federal, which left me with a minimal amount of available funds until then unless I moved some scheduled bill payments around a little.  Which isn’t to say that I’d be paying bills late, just later than originally planned, which would give me some breathing room until Monday.
On any other weekend I would have been fine just waiting to do my shopping on Monday, but…well, the Super Bowl is tomorrow, and it’s become something of an annual tradition for me to do my grocery shopping while everyone else in the world is watching the big sweaty mens playing with a ball on their TVs and I can move through the aisles of the stores as though I’m living in a post-Rapture world free of crying children and slow-moving old people.
It is, quite frankly, one of my favorite days of the year.  It’s like I’m living in the world of Night of the Comet or I Am Legend, only without the homicidal zombie mutants chasing after me.  (The zombie mutants are what I contend with every other day of the year.)
So I couldn’t not go shopping on Sunday night.  The whole experience means more to me than Christmas.
So I shuffled things around and had to hope that the IRS was as good as its word and that the money would be there on Monday, or, barring that, no later than Wednesday.
I got up this morning intending to do my usual Saturday stuff, with the nagging question of “What if the money doesn’t come in until, say, Friday?  I should just hold off on buying anything until I know for sure that it’s there.”
With that in mind, for the sheer hell of it, I logged into my bank’s mobile site on my phone to check my balance.  The tiny text on the screen was hard to read, but it was immediately apparent that the first number in my balance wasn’t the same as it was yesterday, or the number that I was actually expecting.  A quick zoom showed that it was, however, the number it would be if my refund had been deposited.  Checking recent transactions confirmed that this was the case.
Yay!
So, unburdened by any financial concerns, I headed out to pick up my comics and a few other things to tide me over until I could do the serious, no hordes of mutant zombies shopping on Sunday and Monday.
Some time back I discovered that, ironically enough, the best price for cigarettes can be found at CVS Pharmacy.  Unfortunately, others have discovered that as well, so they’re frequently out of stock of my cigarettes.  Today, when I went, as I do every week, to the CVS in the same plaza as the comic shop I found that their cigarette shelves had been heavily raided, so I decided that I’d stop somewhere and get a pack or two and then pick up more tomorrow or Monday.
After that I stopped at Best Buy to look at Bluetooth keyboards for my slate, as I had been mistaken when I read that the slate came with the dock and the keyboard, and to pick up a MicroSD card to add to the slate’s overall storage.
I ended up buying neither, opting instead to just order the actual Samsung keyboard for it online at some point, and finding that they didn’t have any 32 GB MicroSD cards, which is what I was looking for.  I did pick up a cheap, low-profile flash drive for it, however.
In any case, I went from Best Buy over to the nearby Giant (a grocery store) and picked up a few things, then stopped at the unattended service counter – I’ve never seen service counters at stores unattended as often as I do in VA in any of the other places I’ve lived – and waited for someone to show up to sell me cigarettes.
While I was waiting, I could hear some woman at the registers very loudly repeating, “How much is the cereal?  I want the cereal.  How much is the cereal?  I want the cereal.”
She was stuck on that loop for a solid two minutes, before moving on to asking how much the Coke was, and stating that she wanted that as well, periodically reiterating that she wanted the cereal.
From what I could gather, based on her loud, undirected rant, her EBT card (the 21st Century version of food stamps) had not been activated/loaded on February 1st, as it was supposed to have been.
”It was supposed to be activated on February 1st!  It’s February 4th!  That’s terrible!  It was supposed to be activated on February 1st!  It’s February 4th!  Well, I got the cereal.  I wanted the cereal.  And the Coke.  But it was supposed to be activated on February 1st!  It’s February 4th!”
I’m not kidding.  She went on like this non-stop, to, apparently, no one, or to the uncaring Universe.
Or possibly to all of her fellow shoppers within earshot – which covered a fair distance, honestly – who were equally uncaring, or at the very least were completely incapable of doing anything to resolve her issue.  Even if we did care, or were able to do something about it, we pretty much would have gotten the message after the first twenty repetitions.
I will not deny that it must be frustrating to discover that you don’t have the ability to buy the things you need after you’ve walked into a store and made it all the way to the checkout fully expecting to be able to do so – after all, I had been, more or less, in the same boat earlier in the day – and I sympathize, particularly given that she was accompanied by someone in a wheelchair (I assume the EBT card, if that’s what was supposed to have been activated on February 1st – bearing in mind that today is February 4th, in case you forgot – was part of her companion’s disability benefits) but it was pretty seriously annoying, and is a good representative example of why I enjoy my Super Bowl shopping experience so very much.
Still, at least she got the cereal.
I’m just not sure she really wanted it.

****

Despite the influx of funds, I didn’t really end up spending any more money than usual today.  Actually, I spent a bit less, since I didn’t buy a carton of cigarettes.  Even the extra purchase of the flash drive for the slate didn’t amount to much, as it was relatively inexpensive.
Monday, however, will be a different matter entirely, since I never walk out of Costco without having spent, at a minimum, $100.

****

(Note: Our boss refers to my co-worker and I as brothers.)
Boss:  I’m worried about your brother.
Me:  Why?
Boss:  He’s getting jaded.
Me:  Tell him to join the club.
Boss:  I know.  That’s the problem.  You’re jaded, and I’m jaded…I can’t deal with all of us being jaded.
****
Boss:  So I’m getting one of the high school interns dumped on me.
Me:  You mean I’m getting one of the high school interns dumped on me.
Boss:  …yeah.
Me:  I knew that was going to happen as soon as I heard there were going to be interns, because I’m fucking psychic.
Boss:  Well, I thought about giving him to your brother…
Me:  What’s he going to do with an intern?
Boss:  I don’t know.  Stop being mean to me.  You’re going to make me cry.
Me:  No I’m not.
Boss:  Yes you are.
Me:  No, you’re going to make you cry.
Me:  *Sigh*  Fine, I’ll try to to think of something for him to do.  When does he start.
Boss:  He started already, but he’s already working on some other stuff.  You probably won’t have to do anything with him until next week, so you’ve got time to come up with some projects for him.

****

(The next day)
Boss:  So here’s the intern.  Find something for him to do.

****

Me:  I thought I had time to come up with something for the intern to do, but he got dumped on me this morning.  So I spent an hour and a half explaining what our team does and watching him struggle to stay awake.
Scott:  Well, he’ll take away one thing from the internship:  the knowledge of what he doesn’t want to do with his life.

****

Me:  I didn’t realize I was getting him today.
Boss:  Yeah, sorry.
Me:  He’s so young.
Boss:  I know!  It’s crazy.
Me:  He’s not even a baby.  He’s a…pre-baby.  He’s a zygote.

****

I’m currently reading Criminal:  The Last of the Innocent by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.  I now understand why it made so many “Best of” lists last year.
Not that this comes as any surprise to me, because Ed Brubaker.  And even more to the point, because Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

Brain, I Am Disappoint.

I spent most of last week in a PMP Exam Prep “Boot Camp.”

What does any of that mean?  It doesn’t really matter, but the point is that Monday through Thursday found me in one of the big conference rooms at work, surrounded by several of my fellow employees – some of them visiting from other locations specifically for this class – from 8 AM to 6 PM.

For my part, as I’m a creature of habit, that meant putting in four twelve-hour days, as I kept going in to work at the usual time (between 6 and 6:30 AM), and staying a bit after the class ended to wrap up some work things.

It was pretty brutal, and did not make for a happy Jon.  I will get into some of the specifics of my unhappiness a bit later, but the biggest issue I ran into was further evidence of the overall deterioration of my brain.

Most of the class focused on test-taking strategies and mnemonic devices and tricks for being able to pass the exam without requiring the twelve to eighteen months of preparation that most people put into taking it.  Ideally, I would have had the exam scheduled on Friday (again, more on that in a bit), but things didn’t work out that way.  Even so, once I take the exam, and if I pass it, I will have done so much more rapidly than most people.

In any case, the problem for me was that, in general, my test-taking “strategy” has always been pretty simple:  I just walk in knowing whatever it is I’m being tested on.  It’s a strategy that has served me well over the years.

Or at least it did before my brain turned into some sort of mush that is no longer capable of retaining information.

The only “information” that my brain seems to be able to hold onto with any consistency these days is the words to crappy pop songs that I’ve heard once or twice (if they’re recent), or that I haven’t heard in 20+ years.  That and Simpsons quotes.

Because I never had any need for them, I’ve never been big on using mnemonic devices or any other sort of memory tricks, so I’m not terribly adept at using them now.  Besides, how am I supposed to remember the information that a given mnemonic device represents when my memory is so shot that I can’t even remember the mnemonic device itself?  “Let’s see, there’s a mnemonic device for remembering the names of the Great Lakes.  ….what was it again?  HOUSES?  APARTMENTS?  Dammit, brain!”

(I’m kidding with that specific example, btw.)

I’m not looking back on my past academic performance through rose-colored glasses, either.  The fact is, my brain used to be amazing.  It was like a sponge.  Often it seemed like I learned things through osmosis.  Its ability to absorb and retain information with minimal effort dovetailed nicely with my laziness.

But now it just…wait, what was I talking about again?

Anyway, the whole class was about “leading with strategy” rather than “leading with knowledge,” which was problematic, because leading with knowledge has always been my strategy.

Still, setting aside my brain’s former glories, the fact of the matter was that I did, in fact, develop test-taking strategies that I used to complement my knowledge base over the years, and most of the strategy stuff that the instructor talked about was the kind of stuff I already do when it comes to taking tests.  So where I was running into trouble on the practice exams wasn’t with getting caught up in all of the test-taking traps he was trying to teach us to avoid, it was just plain failing to remember the material at all.  I mean, the strategy can only go so far.  You have to have some basic amount of knowledge retained in your melon in order to do anything beyond simply guessing.

By the end of the boot camp, I did bring my practice scores up to a point where there’s a slim chance that I could pass the exam, proving that my brain isn’t entirely useless, particularly given that, for a variety of reasons, I got a pretty late start on actually preparing for the class.  So not all hope is lost.  Just most of it, since apparently, I if I want to actually pass the exam, I’ll have to engage in that whole thing where you go over the material over and over again in an effort to retain information the way I used to be able to do with minimal effort.  That thing that other people did in order to be able to score well on tests.  What’s it called?  Studying?

Something like that.  All I know is that the whole thing reeks of effort.

The one promising thing to note was that, regardless of how I actually end up performing, I’m still very quick when it comes to taking tests, because I read fast and don’t agonize.  I know the material or I don’t.  I don’t waste time when I know that all I can do is make a guess.

Beyond spending the time wishing that I still had the brain I had when I was a full-time student, I just plain did not like the class.  Part of it was ridiculous hours, a big part of it was an instant personal dislike of the instructor, part of it was the fact that it was a brutal week following on the heels of the two previous brutal weeks at work, but the biggest part was the entire methodology of the class, which drew heavily on classic cult techniques.

People laughed when I would encounter them around the building on our rare – and brief – breaks from class and I would tell them, in response to their questions about how the class  was going, that it was like a cult, but while I was seeing the humor in it, I wasn’t joking.

Seriously, if they had been trying to indoctrinate me into a system of belief based on the idea that there’s a spaceship hiding behind a comet rather than trying to prepare me to take a professional certification exam, they would have used the exact same techniques.

• Near-total isolation from the outside world
• An insistence that they had all the answers that I was looking for and that their way was the best way
• Only those who are properly initiated into the mystery may be privy to the secret knowledge
• Special “relaxation techniques”
• An unrelenting effort to wear down your resistance through things like repetition and a rigid structure
• A special diet (lunches and snacks were provided)

Even little things like having two instructors – one male, one female – came straight from the cult brainwashing playbook.

To be fair – and I don’t say this to denigrate the military – it was supposed to be a “boot camp,” and there is more than a little overlap between the techniques used in cults and those used in military boot camps, but while there was no obviously nefarious intent, it was still more than a little disconcerting once I made the realization.

And it did make sense; after all, the idea was to “program” you into a different way of thinking in an effort to maximize your ability to pass the exam.  Still, it was troubling.  And annoying.  Particularly the isolation aspect, which was managed through the very short (five minutes) breaks.

Other than that, I was annoyed by the fact that even with ten hours to work with – and sometimes more, as we ran late more than once – they couldn’t manage to cover the complete daily agenda.

I was also annoyed by a lot of the standard training techniques that were presented as being somehow revolutionary.  “This is an unconventional training class,” the male lead instructor asserted on day one.  I found myself thinking, “Hmm…I already hate it and you.  Seems pretty conventional to me.”

After all, this wasn’t my first rodeo.  In the five years I worked in the NOC at AOL, I took a lot of training classes, as they represented easy overtime opportunities.  I’ve encountered pretty much every “unconventional” training technique there is.

For example, on Tuesday morning I thought, “I’ll bet they’re going to pull some stupid horseshit like making us switch seats today.”

Yep.

Of course, it doesn’t help matters any that I have a bad attitude in general, I suppose, and it especially didn’t help that I think that the whole exam thing is rather asinine, as there are a lot of hoops you have to jump through just to be able to sign up – and pay for – taking the damn test.

Said hoops represented the only thing that actually was unconventional about the class.  Most exam prep “boot camps” that I’ve taken, such as the one I just did back in December, end with you taking the actual test on the last day, on-site.  Because of the way the exam is administered, that wasn’t possible with this one.  Ideally, you would have scheduled your exam, at an off-site testing center, for the Friday right after the class, but that’s dependent on you jumping through the aforementioned hoops in advance of actually taking the class.

I have since jumped through all* of the hoops, and will be able to schedule the exam at some point, but, again, it’s apparent that, thanks to my non-functioning brain, I will have to engage in a lot of additional preparation for it.

I ended up taking Friday off anyway, and also Monday, as, after a string of long, brutal weeks, I needed a break.

The title of this post, by the way is, appropriately enough, a variation on an Internet meme.

*Assuming my application for eligibility to take the exam isn’t subjected to a random audit.  Seriously, that can, and does, happen.

Filling In The Empty Space Or Why Don't I Own That?

I always hate making the transition from extra time off to regular time off.
It’s especially annoying when a good portion of the extra time off was spent feeling miserable.
On that score, though, I’m pretty much back to normal today. No more turbulent rumblings in my stomach, though my throat is still a little raw from the stomach acid, and my ribs and abs are a bit sore from all the heaving.
Beyond simply not venturing out into the dangerous world of mad consumerism that is Black Friday, I seriously didn’t do anything today.
I got up around 10, had some pumpkin pie, sat around for a while, had more pumpkin pie, sat around for many more hours, had some dinner, ate the last of the pumpkin pie, and now here I am writing this.
Given that there’s been nothing of note to write about today, I think I’ll get around to finally writing a post that’s been sitting in the 99 Cent Bargain Bin of Ideas for years.
So I present to you Why Don’t I Own These Movies?

I can’t really call myself a movie buff. I mean, I like movies, but not in the sort of general, universal way that someone who really likes movies and all things movie-related does.
A movie buff, to me, is someone whose feelings about the medium of motion pictures are analogous to my feelings about the medium of comic books.
I love comics. There are specific comics that I love more than others, of course, and there are a lot of comics that I view to be utter trash, but beyond my feelings for specific comics, I have an overarching love for the medium itself. Sure, I have plenty of gripes about the medium, but the fact that there are aspects that bother me so much is a result of how strongly I feel about them.
And as it is for me and comics, so it is with movie buffs and movies.
Okay, that being – pointlessly, I suppose – said, I suppose I should get on with it.
There are a lot of movies that I love, movies I could happily watch over and over again, yet, for reasons that escape me, they aren’t part of my DVD or Blu-ray collection.
Army of Darkness and The Princess Bride are two examples of movies that have raised the question “Why Don’t I Own That Movie?” in the past, which ultimately led me to acquire them. Below is a list of movies that raise that question but have yet to be added to my collection.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
In the summer and fall of 1984, there were two things that utterly consumed my imagination. Buckaroo Banzai was one of them. I was obsessed with this movie. I’d read the comic book adaptation. I’d read the novelization. Hell, I even dressed as Buckaroo for Halloween. I clearly remember the day that it – finally – arrived at the local theater. It was better than Christmas.
There’s really no way to even begin to explain the movie’s appeal, though I have to give a lot of the credit to the novelization, which, I’ll be honest, served as a better execution of the bat-shit insane concept than the movie did. Still, the movie was undeniably awesome, and remains one of my all-time favorites.
So what’s it about? Well, the titular Buckaroo – played by Peter Weller – was a crime-fighting Adventurer/Physicist/Neurosurgeon/Rock Star who – hell, does it even matter? He was a crime-fighting Adventurer/Physicist/Neurosurgeon/Rock Star. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
Throw in John Lithgow as a crazy scientist possessed by an evil alien from the 8th Dimension (with an outrageous Italian accent) and there’s nothing more you could possibly ask for.
So why don’t I own this movie?

The Last Starfighter
What was the second thing that utterly consumed my imagination in the summer and fall of 1984? This movie.
Also, its female lead, Catherine Mary Stewart. Man I loved her. I can’t even tell you how many shitty movies I’ve seen over the years simply because she was in them. Well, actually, I can. Just look at her filmography; I’ve seen damn near all of them, and, with one notable exception – this movie – they were almost all shitty.
(Night of the Comet is another exception, and is a movie that would have been on this list at one point if I hadn’t decided to buy it a while back.)
Again, read the comic book adaptation and the novelization, and even bought one of those cheesy picture book dealies. Do they still make those? They’re sort of a condensed version of the story with stills from the movie.
Anyway, beyond Ms. Stewart, there’s so much to love about this movie. It tells the story of Alex, a bright young man trapped in a life he desperately wants to escape from, who learns that the video game that has served has his only means of escape from his life really is his escape; the game is a test designed by an alien to find someone who has the skill and talent needed to fight in a war light years away from Earth.
I saw the movie again a couple of years ago, and while the special effects – this was the first movie to make use of computers for almost all of its effects – were extremely dated, they held up surprisingly well.
Love this movie.
So why don’t I own it?

They Live
“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum.”
What more needs to be said, other than, “Why don’t I own this movie?”

Real Genius
Who can hear the song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” without thinking of this movie? I mean, apart from people who haven’t seen this movie?
When I lived in Tucson I had all of the movie channels, and every day, on one channel or another, this movie was on. And I would watch it every time I saw it on.
So why don’t I own it?

The Crow
This is one of my all-time favorite movies, and in fact, held the number one spot for years.
It’s the rare example of a movie actually being superior to the source material (not that the comic is exactly chopped liver; it’s just that the movie is that good).
To be fair, I used to own this, but a lack of money necessitated selling it to a used book store for some much-needed cash.
Cash isn’t nearly as much of an issue anymore, though, so why don’t I own it?

Strange Days
This is another movie that I will sit down and watch whenever I see that it’s on.
Love this movie.
So why don’t I own it?

I know there are more movies I could add to this list, but I can’t think of them right now. And I think that actually answers the question as to why I don’t own them; unless something reminds me of them, it never occurs to me to buy them.
I mean, yeah, I could go onto Amazon right now and go on a spending spree while they’re on my mind, but I don’t feel like shelling out that much money in one shot. Besides, if I’m going to go on a spending spree, I’m probably going to buy comics, since, while I love these movies, I am, as I mentioned, not really a movie buff, so I prioritize things differently.
In any case, that certainly filled up some blog space, didn’t it?

Keyword Kraziness: Kill Fish Edition

It’s time once again to take a look at some of the traffic drivers for this blog and find out just what search strings are bringing visitors here for a 0-5 second stay, or as I like to call it, Keyword Kraziness.

how tall if kirsten kemp of hgtv
I’m assuming you meant “is,” not “if.” Even allowing for that, you still got things wrong: she’s on TLC, not HGTV. As for her height, I recently watched an episode of Property Ladder in which someone stated that he was six feet tall, and when standing next to him Kirsten appeared to be as tall, and possibly taller.

superhorse fucks superwoman
Okay, let me say up front that yes, if we read between the Comics Code Authority-approved lines, back in the Silver Age, Comet the Super Horse, did want to fuck Supergirl. That is to say that he had romantic feelings towards her, and, though it never happened on-panel in comics when those stories were told, the standard culmination of romantic attraction usually involves some form of sex.
The whole thing a little (but only a little) less creepy than it seems on the surface in that Comet was not technically a horse, but rather a Centaur who had been inadvertently transformed into a horse by the witch Circe. He’d gone to Circe in the hopes of being turned into a human, as he’d fallen in love with a human woman. Circe screwed things up and pushed him in the opposite direction, turning him into a horse. I don’t remember why she couldn’t reverse the change, but to make up for it, she granted him immortality and super powers (In Silver Age Superman/Supergirl stories, gaining super powers meant, by default, gaining super powers similar to those of Superman. The exception to this was when the point of the story was to have someone be able to do something that even Superman couldn’t.). Thus, he lived on from the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece and was around in the mid-20th Century and living in the town of Midvale, home of Supergirl.
But yeah, so far as I know, Supergirl never got into any overtly freaky Kryptonian/Equine action, though he did, of course, get to spend a lot of time between her legs.
As for Superwoman – a villainous member of the Crime Syndicate of Earth 3 – I have no doubt that kinky bitch got it on with a horse at some point.
In any case, you might try checking out alt.binaries.erotica.cartoons to see if there is any fan/pervert out there who’s whipped up an image of the sort you’re looking for.

kari ann peniche brink of peeing
Years ago I did this (Just Barely Safe for Work) picture of Ms. Peniche (or at least part of her) from her appearance in Playboy. It’s possible that she’s on the brink of peeing, but I can’t really say for sure, and am not particularly interested in knowing. I’m not into the whole chicks peeing thing, and seriously don’t understand the appeal.

little shavers dicks
Am I correct in assuming that you are looking for the penises of young boys? None to be found here. I’d say “keep looking,” but I’d prefer that you just stop. No, not looking: breathing.

quesada creators
I’m assuming that would be Mr. and Mrs. Quesada.

hot chicks shooting heroin
They probably won’t be hot for long if they keep shooting heroin.

nudity vouyers
There’s a guy working in the porn business as actor, director, and producer, who goes by the name Vince Vouyer. I assume that, like him, you don’t know how to spell voyeur.

cute chick safeway
Which Safeway?

fish automatic doors
I see variations on this one fairly often, usually with the word “kill” also present. Is there some sort of urban myth floating around that automatic doors somehow kill fish?

my first day in porn
How did it go? Did you happen to work with Vince Vouyer?

watch bikini cavegirl free
Even that’s too expensive.

Well, that does it for this edition of Keyword Kraziness. Keep that Kraziness koming!
(Oh, and speaking of traffic drivers, given that they so frequently post links to me, I’ve added a link to When Fangirls Attack! over on the right.)

What Does Early To Bed And Late To Rise Make You?

Yesterday, for reasons that are beyond me, I slept until after 10. I woke up surprised at the lateness of the hour, considering that I’d gone to bed around midnight, and by the fact that my mother hadn’t called yet.
(The latter was resolved within about five minutes when my mother called and said that she’d been waiting for me to call.)
Still not sure why I slept so late, though it’s hardly as if it matters, considering that I, once again, totally wasted the day.
I did watch the Night of the Comet DVD, though, and found that my recollection wasn’t too colored by nostalgia and that it was as entertaining as I remembered it to be (and Catherine Mary Stewart was just as hot).
I actually specifically recall going to see the movie at the theater. It would have been early 1985, and I went to see it with Greg Leppanen. I would have been in 7th grade and Greg in 8th.
This was the period that had followed two solid years of pretty much non-stop abuse from everyone I knew at which we had reached a sort of détente in which I generally avoided everyone and in exchange they didn’t call me names or throw stuff at me and on occasion I engaged in some semi-friendly activities with some of them, though I was always mentally prepared to retreat and had learned not to share too many of my thoughts with them for fear of having them used against me. Nowadays my defense mechanisms consist mostly of just not giving a shit what anyone thinks or says, though there are still some things that I actually hold back (Believe it or not.).
In any case, I recall that the goodness didn’t stop after seeing the movie, as a storm came in that night and school was cancelled the next day.
Today has been about as eventful as yesterday, though I did wake up earlier (despite going to bed later).
Once I got up I did the requisite amount of sitting around, then went to Super Target to pick up a few groceries and one of those automatic shower cleaner dealies, as they now come with a shower caddy (the lack of which was the main reason I had not previously purchased one).
Add in cooking a pork loin for dinner and having Absolute Watchmen arrive in the mail – the thing is HUGE – and you’ve got pretty much my whole day neatly summarized.

Crazy Money-Spending Fool

I got a call this morning telling me that my taxes were ready to be sent out and that I had to stop in to pay for them and sign some stuff, so I sat around for a bit, showered, dressed, drove over to H&R Block, paid for them ($161…yikes. Good thing I’m getting a lot of money in my refund.), then headed off to Wal-Mart.
While there I randomly saw the DVD for one of my all-time favorite movies, Night of the Comet, for like $10, so I grabbed it.
For those unfamiliar, Comet tells the story of the night the greater part of humanity is whipped out by some substance contained inside the tail of a passing comet. There are a few survivors who came through unscathed, while some others have turned into flesh-eating zombies.
It’s a low-budget, totally 80s cheesefest, but that’s pretty much its charm. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and honestly has some great gags.
(FYI, I just noticed in its IMDb entry that it will be airing on The Movie Channel tomorrow morning at 7:30)
Back when the movie came out I was completely in love with its star, Canadian actress Catherine Mary Stewart.
My love for her, which started with her role in The Last Starfighter – another one of those favorite movies that I ought to own but don’t – has led me to sit through a lot of painfully bad movies just because she was in them, but Comet is not one of those. Not only is CMS hot, the movie is actually enjoyable, so bonus.
Speaking of movies I love but don’t own, while I was there I saw The Princess Bride on DVD for $7.50, so I picked that one up as well, and now it no longer falls into the love but don’t own category.
(Along with the aforementioned Last Starfighter, that category pretty much consists of The Crow – which I once owned – though maybe I should consider adding some of those “powerless to do anything but watch” movies I’ve mentioned, like Strange Days or Real Genius.)
From Wal-Mart I went on to Best Buy, where I was going to pick up Season 1 of Justice League Unlimited. I grabbed it, but then realized that I’d grabbed Season 1 of Justice League, which is different, and which I’ve been reluctant to buy because I thought that buying Justice League would be a big, multi-season purchase, as opposed to JLU, which was just two seasons. In any case, they didn’t have Season 1 of JLU, so I took my leave and headed to the comic books store in Herndon.
Where I dropped $86.
On comic books.
And that’s just comic books. No boxes or bags. No hardcover collections or trades. Just a stack of regular comics.
In fact, it was only 25 comic books.
I remember the first time I ever went to a comic book store, probably like 21 years ago. I spent $20 and bought way more comics than I did today, plus a couple of posters.
For the record, that first trip to a comic book store was a magical experience for young Jon. I mean, I knew that such places existed, but for me they were still sort of semi-mythical, places that only existed in stories.
Atlantis. Avalon. Hy-Brasil. Stores that just sell comic books.
It’s been a long time since I was last in a proper comic book store (or sine I viewed them as being magical places). One thing that struck me as I walked into this one today was the smell. I’d forgotten about the smell.
No, I’m not talking about the sweaty goatlike smell of the overweight and virginal staff and customers, I’m talking about the smell of comics.
For me, it’s a familiar, comforting smell, like the smell of a new car, or the inside of a leather store (I frequently go into Wilsons at the Dulles Town Center to just breathe in the smell of leather, then get out before I become too tempted to spend a lot of money on jackets and coats that I don’t need.).
In a month the store will actually be moving closer to Leesburg, which is excellent timing considering that it coincides with my plans to get back into regular comic book purchasing.
(Sucks for Scott, though. Still, that’s what you get for living in Manassas.)
For any of you wondering what I bought, here’s the list:

The Authority 1-2
Birds of Prey 102-104
The Brave & The Bold 1 -2
Daredevil 92-94
JSA 1-4
The Eternals 1-7
Welcome to Tranquility 1-4

There are some books that I plan to get caught up on by picking up the trades and then I might start buying the monthly books. Books like Fables.
I might also pick my Superman habit back up, but I haven’t been terribly impressed by anything I’ve seen there. I might buy the trade of Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, and then start picking up the regular books as they come out. We’ll see.
Not looking to add much from Marvel. I really can’t see myself getting back into buying X-Men, even with Ed Brubaker writing.
(Note that there were two Gail Simone titles in what I picked up today: Birds of Prey and Welcome to Tranquility. )
After that bit of splurging I stopped at the Best Buy in Leesburg on my way home to see if they had Season one of JLU. They did, and were selling Season 1 and 2 of JL for the same price, so I just said, “Screw it,” and bought those, too.
(Turns out there were only two seasons of JL, so I have the complete JL and JLU now.)
All told, not counting what I paid for getting my taxes done, I dropped around $200 today.
(Of course, that includes non-comics or DVD-related stuff like toilet paper and various other sundries.)
Anyway, that was my big day of spending money. There’s not likely to be a repeat of it anytime soon, as the refund is going straight into my savings account.
That’s too funny; just as I wrote that I got an e-mail from my bank telling me that I should put my refund into my savings account.
In any case, I’ve got some comic reading and DVD watching to do before getting ready for my workweek.

Next Up: The Return Of Bat-Mite...

...who turns out to be trans-gendered.
DC Comics is reintroducing the character of Batwoman, a character most known for the fact that she fought crime with the aid of a utility purse.
Batwoman, AKA Kathy Kane, was introduced in the 50s and after sporadic appearances thoughout the years she was killed off in 1979.
As part of the continuity wipe that took place in 1985 history was changed so that Batwoman never even existed, though I believe that it as revealed that Kathy Kane existed in the new continuity, she just never looked at her purse and thought "Hey, I should fight crime with this."
Batwoman was just one of countless continuity casualties, though, and over the years as the people writing the comics have gotten nostalgic for the lame-ass...I mean, treasured, classic characters of comicdom's rich and varied past, many of those characters and concepts have been brought back in some form or another, so it was only a matter of time, I suppose, that Batwoman made her appearance.
This Batwoman will not, apparently, be known for the fact that she carries a purse (nor will she wear that retarded red and yellow costume), as this time around her hook will be that she is a lesbian.
Overall, my reaction to this news is simply, "Meh."
Batwoman was nearly dead by the time I really started reading comics seriously anyway. In fact, I think the first story I ever encountered with Batwoman was the story in which Batman brings her killer to justice, so I don't have any kind of emotional investment in the character one way or another.
Certainly her reintroduction doesn't piss me off the way the reintroduction of Krypto the Super-Dog did (Seriously, jackasses, why bring back the fucking dog? And why stop there? Why no Streaky the Super-Cat, or Beppo, the Super-Monkey? Peter David sort of brought back Comet the Super-Horse during his run on Supergirl [the Kryptonian variant of which has also been reintroduced] and announce the triumphant return of the Legion of Super-Pets. And if you think I made up any of these retarded ideas, think again. Anyway, not everyone remembers the retarded shit from the 60s quite so fondly as some of the assholes writing comics today.), so I don't really see it as that big of a deal.
And I will say that I've been very pleased with the Cassandra Cain Batgirl who was introduced several years ago to take over for Barbara Gordon, so it's always vaguely possible that something worthwhile can come of the reintroduction.
(Nothing worthwhile came out of bringing the damn dog back. Not. One. Goddamn. Thing. If they really wanted to see something done with a super-dog, they should have just contented themselves to read what Alan Moore did over on Rob Liefeld's Superman knock-off Supreme. That whole run was a fitting tribute to the nostalgic days of comicdom's past. Leave it to Alan to show people how things should be done, and leave it to everyone else to do a shitty job of copying him.)
By the way, for trivia buffs, there was actually another Batgirl. Her name was Bette Kane, and she was the niece of Batwoman. After the continuity changes she was reintroduced as a character who went by the name of Flamebird, a name that itself has nostalgic ties to comicdom's past, and which could open up a whole other can of worms and launch me on another rant, so I'll just stop there.
As for the lesbian aspect, in my mind (and most likely in the minds of much of the target audience of most comic books) every super-heroine (and female villain, and female supporting cast member, etc.) is at least bi-curious, so I don't see it as big deal.
What's kind of interesting is that, ostensibly, they made her a lesbian as part of an effort to promote diversity and inclusion, two things that seem to be major buzzwords of late, which I find ironic in a country that's becoming increasingly xenophobic and isolationist (with a dash of imperialism thrown in for that tangy zip).
Still, it's kind of a cop-out. I mean, lesbians are an easy sell, and they're everywhere.
Batwoman is hardly the first prominent lesbian in the DC Universe, though she may be the first super-heroine who is explicitly stated to be one. I honestly can't think of any others.
On the flip side, DC doesn't have any major male homosexual characters (I don't care what you heard about Batman and Robin). They've all been relegated to the background, appearing only in "very special" issues.
What they need to do to be really super-diverse and super-inclusive is to reintroduce (pause while I spellunk the depths of the vast catacomb of obscure and pointless comic book-related information that is my brain to come up with some suitably obscure and retarded character and/or concept) the Green Arrows of Many Nations, as they have built-in diversity, and the Jungle Green Arrow, or whatever the hell he was called, had frickin' lava arrows, so think about how cool that would be.
(I know, I'm disappointed that I didn't come up with something even more lame and obscure. Sorry, there's just too much stuff in my head to sift through it all.)
Anyway, I guess that's it for now.
So until Space Cabby gets busted for helping his passengers procure Space Prostitutes (and worst of all, helping out that Space Pedophile ring), the way Doiby Dickles did here on earth (He had to do something to keep busy while the "Green Lantrin" was off doing his thing), that does it for your latest comics-related update.

Man and Superman

Despite my inability to find a desk that suits my needs/sense of aesthetics, I did finally manage to spend some money this week.
Last year DC Comics launched what they’ve referred to as a “soft reboot” of Superman in the form of a twelve-issue limited series titled “Birthright.”
What this means is that they’ve retroactively altered the character's history. The basic idea is the same, they’ve just altered some of the details.
This is hardly the first time such a thing has been done. The most extreme example occurred in the years that followed 1985’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” in which DC effectively reset the continuity of every character in its stable.
It was hardly a graceful transition, and it took a long time for them to figure out which bits of history they wanted to keep and which ones they wanted to get rid of, but, after about ten years, they finally managed to stabilize things.
For the most part, at least.
But in those earliest days of the post-Crisis DC Universe, there were a lot of major resets of characters, with the most significant being the 1986 reset of Superman.
To understand how the reset came about, you have to understand that at that point Superman had been continuously published for nearly 50 years. There had been a lot of changes over the years, most of which I won’t get into, but essentially after nearly 50 years Superman had become stagnant. There were a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which was, with his ability to fly faster than the speed of light, to travel through time at will, and his being completely and utterly invulnerable, he was just too powerful to be interesting.
Beyond that, his history had become altogether too convoluted, and, well, silly.
Okay, it was completely ridiculous.
There were all the colorful versions of kryptonite, Krypto the Super-Dog, Comet, the Super-Horse, Streaky, the Super-Cat, Beppo, the Super-Monkey, and Bizarro, and a host of other pointlessly stupid characters and ideas.
Also, for someone who was supposed to be the last survivor of a doomed planet, he managed to have a lot of living relatives such as his cousin Supergirl and her parents. And given that the populations of two whole Kryptonian cities had survived Krypton’s destruction, he could hardly lay claim to the title “Last Son of Krypton.”
Sales of “Superman” and “Action Comics,” were sinking like stones. Clearly, something had to be done, as it would be an unacceptable state of affairs for DC to cease publication of its flagship character.
Enter John Byrne.
For several years John Byrne had been the biggest name in comics. He was a genuine superstar. As artist on X-Men, and later writer and artist on Fantastic Four, Byrne had cemented his reputation as a fan favorite. Having Byrne’s name attached to a title was a guaranteed sales boost.
There’s no question that the dominance of Marvel Comics over all of its competitors had a lot to do with the fact that they had John Byrne under contract.
In 1986 that contract came up for renewal.
I can only imagine what it must have been like in the offices of DC Comics when it became known that Byrne was up for grabs, and I can’t imagine what they would have been willing to offer to get their hands on him.
Regardless of whatever else they may have offered him, there was only one thing that Byrne wanted: Superman.
I doubt that DC hesitated for even a second.
With the recent reset of DC Universe continuity, this was the ideal time for Byrne to take over the reins.
The existing creative team had time to wrap up any loose ends on the two Superman titles, and in the summer of 1986 DC published a two-part story split between “Superman” and “Action” entitled “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”
This story was written by Alan Moore, and served as sort of a means of tying up all of the loose ends of the past 48 years, and of providing a fitting ending before the new beginning.
“Superman” and “Action” temporarily ceased publication after this (really, really excellent) storyline, and the late summer of 86 saw the publication of a 6 issue mini-series entitled “The Man of Steel.”
This was Byrne’s retelling (and retooling) of the Supeman legend.
This was a Superman the world had never seen before.
Here’s a list of some of the major changes Byrne introduced:

No more Superboy. Clark Kent did not don his cape (or his glasses, for that matter) until he was well into his adulthood.
The continued existence of Ma and Pa Kent. In the old continuity, the Kents died before Clark moved off to the big city. Byrne decided to keep them alive, with the intention of making them a regular part of Superman’s life.
No more milquetoast. Seeing no real reason to bring it to such an extreme, Byrne decided to dispense with the nerdy, cowardly Clark Kent persona. Much more in keeping with the times, Clark was going to be a dynamic go-getter in his own right. He was, after all, an award-winning investigative journalist, and as such could hardly afford to be squeamish. Far from being a bookish nerd, in high school Clark was a star athlete, using his powers, in a greatly subdued fashion, to almost single-handedly win championships, until Pa finally gave him a talking to and he came to understand the selfishness of his actions and the responsibilities that his powers imposed on him.
Clark was a yuppie. He was also a best-selling author.
He was, truly, the Last Son of Krypton. On a personal note, this bothered me a little. One of the major events of the Crisis was the noble death of Supergirl. It was a very good story, and it was very sad, and it became completely invalidated by this change to continuity, since it now meant that Supergirl had never existed.
His powers were reduced. No more quick trips through time, or interstellar flights made in a matter of moments, or casually juggling planets. Supes was still one of the most powerful beings around, but he was no longer seemingly all-powerful.

There were all sorts of other changes, but these were the most significant. In a lot of ways the changes reflected the times. For example, in prior continuity, Supeman’s hair didn’t grow when he was under the rays of a yellow star (which, in case you don’t know, is the source of his powers). Byrne eliminated that notion, since it gave him the opportunity to occasionally present Superman with some Don Johnson-esque five o’clock shadow.
As another example, and by Byrne's own admission, the relationship between Lois and Clark greatly resembled the relationship between Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis on “Moonlighting.”
If you ever saw that godawful “Lois and Clark” TV series with Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain, I should mention that, while it was very poorly executed, the basic ideas of the show were largely based on the changes that Byrne had introduced.
In any case, the way that the “Man of Steel” mini-series worked was that each issue moved forward in time by quite a bit, until finally “catching up” with the current time. It painted the broad strokes of Superman’s history from the moment he revealed himself to the world, up to the present day (which was several years later), and allowed Byrne the freedom to fill in the blanks later.
When “Man of Steel” concluded, DC launched three “new” titles: Superman, Adventures of Superman, and Action Comics.
“Action Comics” continued its numbering from where it left off, “Adventures” picked up the numbering of the previous “Superman” series, and the new “Superman” started fresh at #1.
There is SO much more I could write about this, but there are other things I want to focus on.
The point is that this was NOT a “soft reboot.” It was very much a “hard reboot,” as it completely scrapped the existing history and started fresh.
“Birthright” has not done this. Essentially everything that has happened since 1986 has still happened just as it did, it’s just that the events prior to that occurred slightly differently, according to the new history.
One thing that’s sort of interesting to note is that, in a lot of ways, with “Man of Steel,” Byrne revamped Superman’s history in the comics to more closely resemble the version presented in the Superman movie (No previous career as Superboy; no prior relationship with Lex Luthor, etc.), and with “Birthright,” writer Mark Waid has revamped Superman’s history to more closely resemble that currently being presented on TV’s “Smallville.”
In any case, the point of all of this is that the entire 12-issue run of “Birthright” has been collected in a Hardcover edition that goes on sale this week, and I ordered a copy of it from Amazon.
That was the first thing I spent money on, but while I was at it, I decided to start rebuilding my “Sandman” collection, and so I ordered three of the collected volumes from Amazon.
So that was nearly $90 right there.
Today I picked up an FM transmitter for my MP3 player. This will allow me to listen to my entire collection of MP3s in my car without having to buy some kind of MP3 player for my car or to burn all of the songs onto conventional CDs.
To extend the usefulness of the FM transmitter further, I also bought a cheap bookshelf stereo system to put in my kitchen. When I’m at home, I frequently plug my MP3 player into my home theater system, but because of the layout of my apartment, I have a hard time hearing the music when I’m in the kitchen without really blasting it.
Now I can just keep the bookshelf system in my kitchen and broadcast my MP3s directly to it.
It’s all kind of pointless, I know, but it’s pretty cool.
I think I’m done with spending money, though, at least for a little while. I’m going to muddle through with the desk I have for a while.
In case you’re curious, sometime in 1988 Byrne left the Superman titles, citing “creative differences.” The books floundered for a while, but ultimately they found a good team that made the Superman titles, as “Comic Buyer’s Guide” put it, “the most consistently good mainstream titles on the market.”
By the way, I thought I should mention that actor Brandon Routh, a relative unknown, has been officially cast as the next big-screen Superman. I’ve never seen him in anything, but I don’t really hold out much hope for the Superman movie anyway, so it’s kind of irrelevant. From pictures I’ve seen, he does at least have the right look anyway.
By the way, in case you were wondering, I do watch “Smallville.” I was resistant to the idea at first, as I thought it would be another “Lois and Clark” fiasco, but eventually I began watching it and became impressed with how well they’ve handled it.
For the most part, at least.
This season they introduced the character of Lois Lane, as portrayed by actress Erica Durance, and I have to say that I was just utterly blown away by her.
Her performance as Lois is the very best portrayal of the character I’ve ever seen. She just captures the spirit of Lois perfectly, managing to be strong and aggressive while still having a lot of heart and compassion.
During every scene featuring Lois I can be found with a smile on my face. No one has ever really done this character justice before, and I thank Erica Durance for finally presenting the Lois that I know and love to the world. Her interpretation of Lois Lane is of a woman ideally suited to be the love of Superman’s life.
I honestly can’t stress just how impressed I am by Erica Durance (and how depressed I am by the fact that she’s not a regular cast member, and, in fact, won’t be on tonight’s episode). I actually posted comments to a WB message board to express my appreciation, and my hope that she will return as a recurring character, and I even, briefly, toyed with the notion of putting up a fan page for her, but ultimately decided that I don’t want to be quite that geeky.
Still, I’m of the opinion that Lois Lane was a role that she was born to play, and I was actually having a conversation with Scott at work one day about that in which I suggested that, of all the people who have ever played the part of a comic book character, she was the most ideally suited for her role.
The possible exception I noted was J.K. Simmons as “J. Jonah Jameson” in the “Spider-Man” movies, because that is another excellent example of someone born to play a part. In fact, ultimately I had to agree with Scott and concede that Simmons does edge out Durance in that regard.
In a later conversation with someone else, though, we were forced to admit that there is someone else who edges out even Simmons: Shelley Duvall as “Olive Oyl.”
There is a person who was truly born to play a role.
I concluded that she doesn’t count, though, since she’s nowhere near as entertaining as Simmons as old J.J.J., and Erica Durance is at least a million times hotter than she is.
Hell, in contrast to how hot Erica Durance is, Shelley Duvall can hardly even be said to be a member of the same species.
(I’m sure that Shelley Duvall is a perfectly lovely human being, and, as mentioned, she was ideal for the role of Olive Oyl, and I recognize that the "species" comment was pretty extreme, but the fact remains that she is not an attractive woman.)
By the way, one other person who possibly edges out Erica Durance as Lois is actor Kevin Conroy as the voice of Bruce Wayne/Batman on the various animated incarnations of Batman (Batman: The Animated Series, Batman: Beyond, Justice League, etc.).
For the rest of my life, in my mind, Kevin Conroy will be the voice of Batman.
And of course there’s Patrick Stewart as Professor X, but, even though he is clearly ideal, somehow he just doesn’t approach the level of Simmons, Durance, or Conroy. Maybe it’s because I have a hard time separating him from Picard. Who knows?
More to the point, I guess, who cares? I suppose I should apologize if I’ve bored the pants off of any of you non-comic geeks out there, but I should think by now you’d be used to it…