I'm lucky in that my county library has a rather extensive graphic novel collection. One of the reasons I'm lucky is that, even though I'm getting more into the habit of buying comix, there are still lots of books I would probably never buy and therefore probably never read, except for the library.
One such is Kurt Busiek's Astro City: Tarnished Angel, a noir thriller set in a city, and a world, where superheroes are basically taken for granted. The first book, Astro City: Life In The Big City was enjoyable enough but suffered from a highly repetitive and episodic structure: introduction of super hero; super hero wishes for an easier life; super hero saves the day; super hero slouches off to the horizon; repeat. The drawing is vibrant and amazing, though, and I do recommend it.
Which is sort of a problem for Tarnished Angel. While we do get a few of the huge pages of splashy color and action, this being a noir tale, is mostly set in the cramped shadows of AC's Kiefer Square and environs. The muted color and tight spaces leads to a few somewhat unfortunate page layouts, for instance when our hero and his crusty non-super sidekick are interrogating various residents of the square.
But what a hero! Recently paroled supervillain Carl "Steeljack" Donewicz is simply unforgettable: a metal man, created in a lab (ok, his origin story is quite perfunctory, as is the finale) who has still managed to age into a sad-eyed Robert Mitchum lookalike. He is definitely worth the price of admission as he tries to come to terms with his criminal past and his unwilling role as present-day hero.
So I give it a mild thumbs-up for well-drawn and occasionally thrilling comic-book action. Just don't look for another Watchmen. (Yeah, they can't all be Watchmen. And it's at least 100 times better than the pathetic Plastic Man: On The Lam which I also checked out last week.)
Lileks goes off the deep end just a bit over a Simpsons gag today:
Simon Crowell [sic] is the admissions director! She scores high. “Meet Maggie Simpson,” he says to another school official. “IQ, 167.”“One sixty seven!” says the other official. “That’s amazing for a Christian!”
Wha?
Huh?
Rewind. Context? Anyone wearing a cross? Anyone holding a Bible, or daubing red paint on their palms? Did Homer announce he’d seen the Virgin Mary in the grease of a Krusty Burger wrapper? No: totally gratuitous. [...] I’m not surprised that the Simpsons takes a poke at Christianity[...]
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it seems obvious to me that the guy who's amazed is the one being poked at: the snotty elite type who thinks that he's got the IQ market cornered.
This guy says a lot about the phenomenon I pointed out before, minus my joking-around. He says it a lot better.
(Tellingly, the first comment on the post is a perfectly-preserved exemplar of the phenomenon he describes. Who would have guessed it?)
What's your personality type?
Wackiness: 176/100 Rationality: 86/100 Constructiveness: 84/100 Leadership: 100/100You are a WRCL--Wacky Rational Constructive Leader. This makes you a Golden God.
You think fast and have a smart mouth, and you are a hoot to your friends and razorwire to your enemies. You hold a grudge like a brass ring. You crackle.
Although you have a leader's personality, you often choose not to lead, as leaders stray too far from their audience. You probably weren't very popular in high school--the joke's on them!
You may be a rock star.
Of the 81374 people who have taken this quiz since tracking began (8/17/2004), 7 % are this type.
I ask you - is a little condescension too much to bear from such a paragon? I think not!
(Link via Jim)
Listened to the Bob Edwards Show on my XM radio this morning. Bob lobbed David Broder a big, fat, hanging fast ball which Broder utterly failed to knock out of the park. Edwards mentioned the number of times that Bush said the word "Freedom" during his inaugural (why, oh why, couldn't it have been 42 so that somebody besides a leftist with a dismissive swipe to take at the administration could remember it?) and Broder, a columnist for a national newspaper, no less, utterly failed to point out that it was a 47 (or WHATEVER)-headed codeword for power and wealth, man! He's a tool of the man, man!
Just joking around. Here comes the condescending part: See, saying that every word out of Bush's mouth is a clumsy lie just relieves one of having to engage with anything he says. My contention is that not every word out of Bush's mouth is a clumsy lie. In some eyes, I suppose, that translates into "devotion to Bush." Ho-hum. It's my own fault, I guess.
Condescension (n): 1. When the right-wing lunatic you're arguing with fails to realize how wrong he is, and, furthermore, dares to offer follow-up points. 2. When the right-wing lunatic you're arguing with fails to lose his temper or, worse sin, displays a sense of humor while stating his point of view.
Fact (n): When deployed by a leftist, irrefutable proof of whatever point you're trying to make, regardless of whether germane to the point or not. When deployed by a right-wing lunatic, undeniable evidence of the right-wing lunatic's rigidity and closed-mindedness.
Haw! (#3 with a bullet, baby!)
In an effort to keep Boviosity! and its readers less than 10 months behind the latest crazes, I present to you: Numa Numa!
Word has it that this is spreading like wildfire.
My BlogGodFather (he set up the Movable Type program that permits me to run Boviosity!.) has a new baby! Run by and congratulate him, won't you?
Dude, we're all programmers here. You can just say, "The program reads and writes until it runs out of data." We run out of patience with you when you say, "If there's four entries in the input, it reads, writes, reads, writes, reads, writes, reads, writes and then stops because it's out of data."
1000 Drums for Peace at Lake Ella 12:00 Noon (Tallahassee, FL)We are gathering at Lake Ella a little before Noon on January 20, Inauguration Day, to join drummers around the country drumming for peace as Bush takes his oath of office.
[...]
(You'll thank me -- Ed.)
The event will be Jan. 20 as Bush starts his Oath of Office. He will begin with the word "I". That is when the drumming starts. The beat we will play is the heart-beat. Put your head on the chest of some one you love and play their heartbeat. We play our loved ones heart beat for peace.
If you and your circle would like to join in Please e-mail me and I will keep you up dated.
Peace, love and Majick
People of Peace
Talk-Action=Nothing (Emphasis added)
This lesson in radical algebra is nice, but I'm not sure it goes far enough. May I propose:
(Truth be told, this seems a nice enough protest. Simple, harms none, etc. I might even have considered taking part in something similar if I could be sure I wouldn't have to put up with a bunch of lunatics.)
When I'm playing, I sound to myself like this.
But when I listen to my tapes, I sound like this.
Urrrgh. Very similar riffs, very, very different songs.
I'll be buying a comic book (wish I could find a copy of V for Vendetta - maybe I'll just go ahead and buy it online) and Tasha will buy shoes for our son to wear to his band concert tonight.
Not to get all lectury or anything, but I've always thought of a boycott as an extended effort to force a specific change through a demonstration of will and focused attention on a moral stance.
Stamping your widdle foot in anger isn't exactly a "moral stance."
Oh, well. Two can play at that game.
In honor of the Inaugural today, I report that, at the Ronald Reagan dog park with Bailey on Monday, we met a little black labrador mix puppy named...are you ready for this?..."W".
Oh, my, yes. Long may he wag.
This article describes Americans who make it a practice to place calls to software help centers known to be located in India, and therefore "outsourced," and abuse the workers there.
If you disagree with the kind of treatment these call center people are getting, maybe you should call and say something nice to them. I know I will.
This looks like a job for sorryeverybody.com! (Not gonna link 'em.)
It's ironic - these are apparently tech support types who have lost their jobs who are doing this. I've long believed that tech support types can be the biggest assholes on the planet. Not all of them or even most of them have asshole tendencies, obviously, but some of the biggest superiority complexes I've ever seen, coupled with massive chips on the shoulders, have combined in many of the tech support types I've known or, heaven preserve me, gotten help from. And how does the creep who boasts of "mak[ing] an Indian girl cry" describe his victims?
I get the impression these are not the brightest bulbs in India's chandeliers.
'k, maybe not, dude. But they're in YOUR CHOSEN FIELD and they're doing just as good a job as you ever could. In a second language. Where does that put you in relation to India's decorative lighting fixtures?
P.S. I'm not entirely innocent of making a little joke at the expense of the outsourcing ones. But calling them and abusing them from thousands of miles away? Just lovely.
UPDATE: What the hell do I know about who's an asshole or not? I mean, besides the people who are calling Mumbai tech support types. Sorry, I was just angry at them. I didn't mean that other, not really.
OK, since you asked.
When my brother & I were boys in Battle Creek, Michigan, Dad used to drive us to nearby ski lodges Cannonsburg and Timber Ridge. These are by far the best memories of a sketchily-remembered childhood, and looking at these slope maps induces a powerful nostalgic revery. I don't know what it was about skiing culture back then, but the strongest memory is of the music that was piped onto the slopes at Cannonsburg (I think it was Cannonsburg that had the music - can anyone confirm? Or was it both?): Top 20 Country/Pop.
That's where I learned to love "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden," "Knock Three Times," among many others.
And we would listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the way home! Talk about exciting: pulling in a Chicago station that was playing a live broadcast from Nashville, TN. And the music was good too.
Anyway, we used to stop at McDonald's on the way up to the lodge and buy a sack full of hamburgers, which we placed in the trunk. Then, after a couple hours of skiing, we would meet back up at the car for a nearly-frozen-through snack. Trunkburgers! A rare delicacy, beats the hell out of paying exorbitant lodge food prices, and some of my favorite meal memories.
So that's it. My knees probably won't let me ski any more, unless I lose like 100 pounds. But I might stop by McDonald's on the way home.
I wrote a nice entry yesterday and, during the process, used my Google toolbar's search window to find something. Whatever you last searched for stays displayed in the window until you delete it and I don't like that, so I'm in the habit of deleting it as soon as I'm through with the search.
Unfortunately, sometimes, Internet Explorer interprets my "select backspace" text-deletion combo as a wish to go back to the previous page visited. This happened yesterday and when, with sinking heart, I returned to the entry page, the entry was gone. So most of you will have to remain ignorant of the Trunkburger. I loved writing the piece, but I'm not going to write it again.
So, anyway. How's by you?
Me, I'm worried about this gal. That must be some landmark beer she's looking at, number 13 or so, I'm thinking. I think we need to do an intervention.
If you wish to make an anonymous appearance on Instapundit (see first update), don't use a phrase in your e-mail to him that serves you up as the first Google hit for that phrase.
(Caveat: I don't *know* that it's Bigwig, but it sure sounds a lot like him.)
I have never been a giant Will Eisner fan. I was always grateful for his contributions to the Mad Magazine compilations I used to buy (or am I imagining these? The bio makes no mention of Mad) but that's about it. But please don't read that as a dismissal of the man. To me, it's like a classical music enthusiast who's gotten so much out of Bach, Mozart, and Brahms that he simply hasn't had time to check out Beethoven in any depth. I know the outlines - I can usually pick out an Eisner drawing the way that music fan might recognize the signature V for Victory (or is it 5?) in the 5th. Is the lack of Beethoven a horrible hole in the music fan's life? He's the only judge of that. He might pick up a Beethoven boxed set in 5 years and weep into the night for what he's missed, or the time he's wasted listening to those other hacks. He might also break out into goosebumps in anticipation of the voyage of discovery he's about to take.
But anyway, my heroes have always been cartoonists. My father kept comix around from his own misspent youth - original Peanuts and Pogo collections mostly. I learned to read from them (and, alarmingly, from a Complete Poe collection). Those, along with the Bill Cosby records I grew up listening to, shaped my personality in ways that still astonish me today. (Not to mention confusing others, for instance when I Pogo-fies a turn of phrase.) As an adult, I added George Booth to my list of heroes. Tasha reduced me to tears this Christmas with a gift of Omnibooth, the out-of-print George Booth collection which I had never owned but only read (and reread) my Mom's copy, and which I spoke wistfully of one day last May...Tasha noted it in her Palm Pilot and it went from there to under the tree, a complete and total shock and surprise.
I still love the classics, and I'm also getting more and more into more current stuff. I read Watchmen last year and thought it was amazing; I'm not so impressed with The Sandman yet, but I'm going to keep giving it a chance. I hear from other fans that the book I started out with, Preludes and Nocturnes, is weaker than the rest of the stuff. Oh, and just last week I used a Christmas gift certificate to buy Marvel 1602. I have a feeling I'd enjoy it more if I was more into Marvel in general - I was a DC kid, mostly because of Batman comix, but I've hated the Dark Knight stuff I've read. I can take a little dark, but this stuff just felt like he was rubbing my face in it. We get it, the guy's got to be half crazy - now would you mind getting to the story? While we're young?
Other cartooning heroes of mine:
Don Martin (watching The Sopranos recently reminded me of him, because their funny Italian language words frequently reminded me of his great sound effects)
Jack Davis (an Atlantan!)
Mort Drucker (amazing caricaturist who also does comic mayhem brilliantly)
Sergio Aragones (speaking of comic mayhem; also brilliant lettering)
UPDATE: I still can't find any evidence that Will Eisner drew for Mad. However, some of the entries my fading memory attributed to him were definitely NOT his. I was thinking of Superduperman and Shermlock Shomes from the early Mad days. Those were drawn by Wallace Wood. There was an early Mad artist named Bill Elder - I suspect I'm confusing Elder with the similarly named Eisner.
Oh, and that's the 4th Symphony of Beethoven, not the 5th. Maybe.
PS While I'm updating: if you don't know nothin' about comics, or even if you love them a lot, you need to visit Fantagraphics. I now own two Fantagraphics books and I love them, and I'm developing an unhealthy lust for the new volume of Peanuts.
PPS Oh my God. Before there was Diana Rigg, there was Miz Mam'sell Hepzibah.
That's my time on this puzzle. Kind of embarrassing, I'll admit it, but I'm out of practice.
Post your time in the comments.
I will assume that those who don't post times couldn't beat mine.
What? You say you did better but you haven't got a typekey account and that's why you didn't post a time?
I DON'T BELIEVE YOU.
