Reading Matters

I was awakened by a spirited round of cat rugby in the hallway outside my bedroom at 3am this morning. Being rudely awakened by  sounds remarkably similar to burglars rampaging through your house is not conducive of settling back down to sleep. It doesn’t matter if the sound was caused by the adult cat finally getting tired of the younger cat’s antics and slamming its head repeatedly into your door, and not a band of ne’er-do-wells looking to try out their new zip guns and gravity knives or whatever it is the hooligans are carrying these days. Sharpened thumb drives, I don’t know.

Going back to sleep being out of the question, it was time to enumerate what options were open. Ideally, I’d go back to sleep and simply come into work in the afternoon, my schedule is currently flexible enough for that; but no, big staff meeting in the morning. Oh, well. Might as well go in incredibly early.

This is going to be a very long day.

Got some reading done over the suddenly-free weekend. First of all, I finally found the Peanuts strip I was looking for. In The Complete Peanuts, 1950-1952, there it is, on Sunday, November 16, 1952. Lucy – who has gone, in less than a year, from wearing footie pajamas in a crib to totally jacking with people’s karma – for the first time jerks away a football, causing Charlie Brown to fly through the air and land on his back. In the very same strip, she then holds the ball so tightly that he trips over it. The dailies for the week following involve Charlie Brown losing at checkers to Lucy over and over again, until, when he finally wins, Lucy tells him that she let him win because she felt sorry for him.

And there it is. With an almost audible sound of shattering crystal, Charlie Brown’s spirit breaks. Oh, there’s still the Christmas strips, but it’s obvious he’s just going through the motions so no one will suspect, or they will fall upon him like jackals upon a wounded wildebeest. He’s just delaying the inevitable, of course. He will spend the next few decades in Hell.

No, weisenheimer, reading comics isn’t the only thing I do. It’s just a very large part of what I do. Compilations of comic strips present me with an incredible amount of content – it took me well over a month to get through Peanuts 1950-52. I was excited to find my branch also had the first volume of the Bloom County archives, but I’ve still got two volumes of Popeye to get through. It’s a damned nice problem to have.

But. Non-comic related stuff. Sort of.

I am currently enjoying the heck out of Seth Grahame-Smith’s How to Survive a Horror Movie. I’m pretty sure this material has been covered before, but Grahame-Smith covers it in a snappy, hilarious, yet extremely knowledgeable manner.  As the cover reminds us, he is, after all, the best-selling author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He even goes so far as to give pointers on how to tell if you’re in a sequel, and the “stop, drop and roll” of horror movie survival: C.R.A.V.E.N.: which stands for  Cover, Reconnaissance, Arsenal, Vehicle, Escape, and North – apparently the horror lessens the northier you go.

Here’s one of my favorite bits:

10 PLACES TO NEVER, EVER GO UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

1.   Rooms lit by a single hanging lightbulb
2.   Rooms lit by nothing
3.   Any graveyard that isn’t Arlington National Cemetery
4.   Summer camps whose annual counselor murder rate exceeds 10 per cent
5.   Maine
6.   “The old ________”
7.   Hotels/motels that aren’t part of giant international chains
8.   Upstairs
9.   Downstairs
10. Any log cabin anywhere on the face of the earth.

Every page is drenched in stuff like that which keeps me nodding in agreement and grinning with recognition.

The other non-comic book is 101 Sci-Fi Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Now, I dislike Top 10 lists and that sort of thing, but something like this I find irresistible, if only to find out if I can pass on with a clear conscience or not. It’s a fat little book, with an emphasis on the “little” –  it measures an almost square 6 x 5 inches. It affords each movie only four pages, and two of those pages are photos – usually a poster and a publicity shot. It’s dandy junk food reading, since in-depth analysis is impossible at two small pages, and it becomes an orgy of “oh, yeah, I’ve seen that“, which allows you to feel like you’re one of the in-crowd.

Well, up to a point. I like that the authors have made a point of finding movies throughout the history of cinema, and across international lines. It has so far nudged me that I haven’t yet seen the original Solaris or Stalker (aaaaa! Commie movies!), but exactly how I’m supposed to track down copies of obscurities like Paris Asleep and Who Killed Jessie? is beyond me. I guess that means I’m functionally immortal.

All these of course came from my local library. After years of not using it, I have taken to using the library system with a vengenace. Fort Bend County opened up a very nice, very fancy and very modern new branch a few months ago, a ballsy thing to do in a recession, even if it was partnered with my employers, the Houston Community College System. Then again, the city passed a bond issue that paid for the library quite handily, so the public support was definitely there.

So it gets a bit discouraging when you hear that Chicago’s Fox station did a story claiming that public libraries in this Internet age were a waste of tax dollars. But it gets heartening when Chicago’s Public Library Commissioners skillfully rebuts the story, and in fact – to use the Internetese – completely pwns it – and, moreover, the Fox station has the guts and professionalism to actually publish that rebuttal. Good for them, and good for the Commissioner. I’d send her flowers if I could afford it.

July 6, 2010
Categories: Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

You’re kidding, right? It IS the heat.

I made the mistake of going out this morning to get the boxes I needed for my re-org project, the theory being if I hit the stores as they opened, before it got hot, I would be ahead of the game. The flaw in that theory is in the “before it got hot” clause.

Had an acquaintance almost two decades ago, who theorized in another twenty years it would be impossible to sustain life in Houston during the summer. She may have had something there. When I went out at 9am, the heat index was already 96, and it’s only going to go up from there.

So I’ve already sweat through my clothes, gone through a liter of water, and am looking at my re-org project and groaning. It’ll get done. After I dry off. If I crank the fan up another notch, that may only take an hour or so.

Every time I see this cover, I am struck by the metaphor for what happens whenever I open my front door in the summer:

Yeah, the gun works about as well on humidity, too.

July 5, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Happy 4th, please don’t blow yourself up

I normally don’t blog on weekends, outside a possible small update from my Crackberry, but I find myself oddly healthy today.

I had really expected to be comatose and near-crippled today, after covering the city’s 4th of July parade, which held last night. But after two days of heavy rain – by my highly scientific trashcan-without-a-lid method, seven inches – the field we would have set up in was soaked, and would have proved hazardous to run power across to the equipment. And there would have been well over a million dollars worth of equipment (and I’m being conservative) put at risk in a still-unstable weather picture.

So it was decided to pitch the six-camera setup and go with a much smaller production, one that could be more easily hustled to cover should the weather demand it. This was the proper decision, as it rained twice more between our 11am crew call and the parade’s eventual go-time of 7pm. I lost out on a fair chunk of overtime, but my body’s happier for it. Also, we would have been breaking down equipment and packing it away after sundown, and I was eyeballing the fresh new fire ant mounds in that field, thinking how nice it would be to blunder into them in the dark.

The only real downside… okay the financial downside is terribly real also, but you know what I mean… is that the parade coverage was the only reason I didn’t accompany my wife and son to West Texas for the weekend, and Monday and Tuesday at San Antonio’s River Walk. So waaah and boo hoo. I’m making some brave attempts at organization, but (as usual) this means having a couple of boxes I do not possess. So I can either drag my ponderous ass out into the humidity to get them, or I can sit here and type at you.

On the subject of patriotism: when I look at this a year from now, this is going to be a quite obvious molehill, but most people are probably aware that DC announced i nthe last week that Wonder Woman was going through a revamp, with a new costume.  There was the usual firestorm of geek boy and girl mouth-running at this, and I think DC must be fairly tummeling at the response, since the mainstream media has picked it up and run with it, probably farther than they would have if DC had, as the practice has become, killed her and then brought her back in a year. (which has become such standard operating procedure that it really isn’t news anymore).

The most remarkable thing about this is – and smarter, better writers than myself have already said this – is:

  1. If all these people had just bought Wonder Woman comics these last few years, DC wouldn’t have felt a need to stir things up in hopes of boosting circulation;
  2. The astounding quantity of people decrying it as an anti-patriotic move miss the fact that Wonder Woman is not an American. In fact, if she were truly patriotic, she would have come in on the Amazon’s side when they attacked DC a few years ago. (Now that I think on it, that’s a statement that works on many levels)
  3. It was apparently a slow news weeks if pundits are reduced to foaming over a comic book. Or you can interpret that as, Look How Far Comics Have Come.
  4. …Naaaaaaaaah.

I don’t think it will last. The story arc will play out, we’ll eventually see a return to the status quo, and Diana will once again be kicking evil’s ass in a one-piece bathing suit. Which, when you think about it, has to be about the most demoralizing thing possible for a thug. “You got your butt handed to you by a chick in a swimsuit? Dude. You suck.”

Enough on that. I could go on, but there’s so much digital ink being sprayed over the subject, why add more? I’ll just leave you with a lot more stuff you’re seeing elsewhere:

Nick’s Fireworks Emporium does not allow embedding, so Communism must be afoot.

July 4, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Under the Hood

Well, yesterday and today we’ve finally been getting the torrential rains promised us early in the week. Alas, there is no longer a hurricane to threaten us with, so we must now live in fear of flash floods. But that’s a rational fear, so you just don’t hear as much about it.

A little over a week ago, I found a copy of the Watchmen adjunct DVD, Tales of the Black Freighter/Under the Hood had washed up at Half-Price Books for cheap, and picked it up. (I also stopped listening to the rational side of my brain and also picked up the Asylum Sherlock Holmes mockbuster for equally cheap). Last night I watched Under the Hood, and I rather liked it. There are currently no plans to watch Tales of the Black Freighter, because motion comics are an abomination before God.

Under the Hood was the title of the autobiography of Hollis Mason, the original 1940s Night Owl, one of the first of the costumed heroes in Watchmen‘s continuity. It was one of Alan Moore’s brilliant touches in an already brilliant book, text pieces in the back of each issue which filled us in on the alternate history, the world of the series.

To make this work in a video context, the material is presented in the form of a TV show, The Culpeper Minute, in which host Barry Culpeper, circa 1985 (the time of the Watchmen movie and book), presents a re-broadcast of a 1975 episode marking the publication of said book.

Much of the information in the text pieces is covered in an interview with Mason; where the piece goes beyond the call of duty is to establish the world further by adding more interviews past Mason’s, and the best part of that is we get to see more of Carla Gugino as Sally Jupiter, which is a good thing.

And we get to see even more of Carla Gugino in 1940s drag, which is a very good thing:

An odd thing – well not so odd, I suppose, given the DC imprint slathered all over – is a jettisoning of one of Moore’s most interesting social culture extrapolations: given that super heroes already actually existed, that particular comic book genre never took off – instead, pirate comics became all the rage (hence Tales of the Black Freighter). Instead, the first appearance of Superman is specifically mentioned, then a few more make their appearance as inspirations to Hollis Mason, alongside the pulp heroes Moore referenced. And so it goes.

We get more screen time with incidental characters who received short shrift in the movie, notably Matt Frewer’s Moloch, Dr. Manhattan’s Pal, Wally Weaver, and Bernie the newsvendor, who was the book’s everyman-on-the-street greek chorus, and virtually nonexistant in the film. And so it goes.

Expanding past the text pieces gives Under the Hood a chance to say interesting things about the necessity of heroes, costumed or not, and does continue the book’s examination of what real-world pressures would be brought to bear on people wearing fetish gear beating up thugs on the street – and if nothing else, makes use of all that Golden Age material they shot for the movie proper that never made it in (except, I suppose, for that Ultimate Edition that came out last Christmas, that I could not afford, nor asked for).

Overall, I still feel there was absolutely no reason to make Watchmen into a movie, except that hey, them other funnybook movies made money, and the geekboys love this’un! It’s like printing money! Looking at other attempts to turn comic books into movies, this one could have been a lot, lot worse. A lot. A bit too faithful to the original material, until that final, disastrous changing of the ending that I still feel damages the movie irreparably – which I should probably go into more detail about, but we’ll leave that for another time. Under the Hood reminded me that although I didn’t care for the movie itself, its casting and production design was absolutely spot-on.

July 2, 2010
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Bah, Hembeck!

Paging through the old stuff, I found a book I had almost completely forgotten: The Fantastic Four Roast, written, laid out, and to a degree drawn by, Fred Hembeck. Every now and then, it’s a genuine shock to me that I don’t recall Fred Hembeck as a matter if course. He was very big in fandom in the late 70s, early 80s, and even among the Big Two, as seen here. He’s still around, even if Jim Shooter is no longer in charge and allowing him to destroy the Marvel Universe, willy-nilly (and that link is quite a read, in and of itself).

Hembeck’s cartoons about comics and their characters were something I looked forward to in those halcyon days, and the fact that DC and Marvel were publishing them were no small source of pride to comic fandom. So it’s always a bit of a shock when I find some Hembeck rattling around my collection and go, “Oh yeah! Him!”

Especially since The Fantastic Four Roast happens to include one of my favorite versions of Doctor Doom.  This may seem odd coming from a guy who prefers the 1994 low-budget Fantastic Four movie over its 21st century big budget siblings simply because it got Vic right; why would I then like a joke Dr. Doom? Because Hembeck’s heart is in the right place, and… he gets it right. (I suppose the fact that I could hoot “One of us! One of us!” at Hembeck and he wouldn’t be offended or call the cops is also a factor)

The set-up is simple: upon their 20th anniversary, the FF have come to what they assumed was a tribute dinner, but is actually a celebrity roast, hosted by Hembeck. (“Dean Martin was unavailable… and too expensive.”) The jokes roll from there, but somebody is (of course) trying to kill the FF, planting deadly devices in their dinner courses (most of these are disposed of by having the Thing eat them. “Good work, Ben!”). This of course, leads to the Thing accusing Dr. Doom of being the culprit, causing Doom to take the podium:

Dr. Doom yelling after the Fantastic Four, “I hope you lose!” is one of my very favorite images.

In case you might have trouble sleeping tonight, wondering who the Shadowy Figure might be, it’s the FF’s mailman, Willy Lumpkin (played by Stan Lee in the much-reviled 2005 movie), but he’s under the control of the Brain Skull, a reference so obscure it thwarts Google. Which brings me to the conclusion of this nerdish dissertation: Fred Hembeck is the Grant Morrison of humor comics, and he should be let loose in this toy box again, as soon as humanly possible.

July 1, 2010
Categories: Hey Kids! Comics! . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Fearmongering. Again. Must be Hurricane Season.

We had our pre-Parade meeting yesterday. This Saturday the City of Stafford will be holding their annual 4th of July Parade (which is, I realize, not the 4th at all, but that’s just the way it goes). Work assignments were hashed out, crew calls, that sort of thing. Like most large enterprises, this thing starting eating its own tail fairly quickly, as things were repeated and confirmed, and then repeated; but the worst thing for me that kept getting repeated was, “But what about the hurricane?”

In case you’re not in Texas or Mexico: Hurricane Alex will be making landfall sometime early tomorrow morning in Mexico, or what cartographers (and people who can read maps) refer to as NOT HOUSTON (sometimes “Nowhere Even F@#king Close”). This has not stopped local news media from addressing the storm’s approach with all the excitement and rapturous verbiage of a cheeseburger commercial. My friend Rick pointed out that local weathermen are relying more and more on infra-red photos of the storm complex because they make it look BIGGER and even MORE MENACING. According to those, we got hit with outlying bands of heavy rain last night, because we’re on “the dirty side of the storm”.

SPOILER ALERT: We didn’t.

DEAR GOD THIS IS OBVIOUSLY US ON SATURDAY AAAAAAAAAAA

This hasn’t stopped normally sane people from being tipped over into panic by breathless pronunciations. There is a chance that the Parade will be rained out, and I will lose out on some of my overtime. But there are precisely two chances of it being called on account of Hurricane Alex: slim, and nil. As ever, when somebody starts babbling to me about the approaching watery doom, I click on The Central Florida Hurricane Center and, if necessary, click over to their awesome array of maps and forecasts. This is what hurricane tracking should be: sane and scientific. I have found you can no longer rely on getting either from the news media.

In short, to paraphrase the emperor Caligula, I wish the creature the news media has become had a single throat, and I had my hands around it. Some idiot made the decision years ago that the news had to operate as a profit center, and desperate outlets rely on reporting rumors, unfounded attacks, mere surmise and outright fearmongering as news in order to get ratings and page views. It’s not a game I am even remotely interested in playing anymore – if in fact I ever was. Having been told the last ten years how afraid I am supposed to be, I am apparently going to spend the next ten years wondering how disgusted I’m going to be.

Oh, and safety tip? If you start grunting to me about the “lamestream media” expecting me to nod in approval, I am going to punch you in the neck. That’s something you picked up from said media, and you’re part of the problem.

Or, to put it in MySpace terms – Today’s Mood: Acrimonious.

June 30, 2010
Categories: Seething Impotent Rage . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

Batman’s Body Count Mounts

Not much time to read last night; my wife finally got a netbook and I spent some time cleaning out all the “free trial” and “buy me”
garbage, and getting updates, virus protection and the like worked out. Nonetheless got a little more read in Batman Chronicles;  that first Joker story really is one of the best of the Golden Age stories, and I really forget how striking it is when the character doesn’t smile. A 20 page deep search on Google Image shows that nobody seems to have scanned or posted that remarkable first image. Perhaps I will see what I can do.

The Joker, just as I had recalled, had an impressive body count, but I hadn’t expected Batman to try to top it in the next story. Hugo Strange breaks out of prison, liberates five very insane dudes from an asylum, then uses his weird science and growth hormones to turn them into fifteen foot-tall monsters. Batman punches Strange out a window and over a cliff (though, to be frank, even at this early point in the series, Batman might as well have stuffed him into a blast furnace and cheerfully waved, “See you later!”), strafes a truck carrying a monster with the Batplane’s machine guns, then plays King Kong with the last monster as he climbs the highest building in Gotham.

In any case, I’m a few minutes away from a meeting in which we will plan out how exactly my job will attempt to kill me this Saturday at our coverage of the city’s 4th of July parade. As we’re looking at a 50% chance of rain currently, it may not even happen. Talk about mixed emotions – the overtime would be very nice. We can but wait and see what the universe holds for us.

Meantime, here’s the 1943 Batman dealing with ne’er-do-wells:

June 29, 2010
Categories: Hey Kids! Comics! . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Robin, the Boy Psycho

Yeah, I just did a few hundred words on Jose Mojica Marins in an e-mail to some friends. Sorry kids, I’m movied out. So I guess I’ll talk about some comics today.

And there is the sound of a thousand computer mice clicking elsewhere.

(A thousand? Talk about hubris.)

As both of my regular readers know, I’ve been ransacking my county library system for the comics collections I haven’t been able to afford over the years, and what should crop up from my maddeningly long list of requests than the first volume of The Batman Chronicles, which promises to be “every Batman story in exact chronological order”. That’s a damn tall order, but you go, DC. You keep crankin’ em out and I’ll keep whining to my county board to keep buying them. Unless of course either the Aladdin’s Lamp or Lottery fantasies come true, in which case these sonsabitches are all going in my new mahogany-paneled personal library.

I wake myself from that particular pleasant dream to continue: I’ve had a fascination for the Golden Age stuff since I was a kid, and all we really got by way of a taste was the annual team-up of the Justice League with the aging Justice Society of Earth-2, and those were just enough to tickle a craving into existence. There was an occasional reprint as a bonus, the odd book like All in Color for a Dime, but unless you had the money to pony up for plastic-wrapped pulp, you didn’t see much in the way of Golden Age material.

More and more reprints came to the mass market when it was determined there actually was a mass market for this stuff, and that’s great. I don’t necessarily need to own it, but I do want to experience it. And I don’t need to own it because, um, it’s not that good.

Yeah, it’s really unproductive to judge a medium in its infancy by the standards of three-quarters of a century later, but they’re the only standards I’ve got. The best descriptor for most Golden Age comics is quaint. Watching creators of the period struggle with what Scott McCloud calls “the unseen art” is fascinating, the art of telling stories in a series of sequential panels. Also courtesy of the library, I’m reading Sandman by Kirby and Simon and the improvement in storytelling dynamics made in only a couple of years is dramatic.

A  flatness in the emotional contact with the story aside, the stories in Batman Chronicles 1 are interesting for what was allowed in those days, or what was lost over the years as opposed to what was eventually gained. There are, of course, the infamous shots of Batman actually using a gun, a nod to the inspiration of the Shadow, if nothing else. Those are pretty minimal, though, and the only incident outside a splash page is Batman shooting some supernatural creatures with silver bullets – a forgivable lapse, much like the modern Batman mortally wounding the evil god Darkseid by shooting him with a quantum bullet because it was necessary.

No, I’m talking about Batman’s cavalier attitude toward his secret identity. He tells two people who Bruce Wayne has decided to help, “Let me change,” and steps into the next room to put on the Batman suit; he keeps dropping little hints to criminals while he’s pummeling them that he was the man who bought a pound of sugar earlier, at their grocery store front. In one instance, he’s in France, and the people could be expected to not know Bruce Wayne, and in the second, the bad guys are going to be more concerned about their nasal septum getting kicked back into their brains than picking up clues, but jeez, Bruce!

There’s also a lot of Disney villain deaths. You know, environmental hazards. The very first Batman villain, upon getting punched by the caped crusader, falls into an acid vat. One falls onto a sword he threw at the hero. These are the sort of things the modern day Batman would go to (obviously) heroic, and athletic, lengths to avoid. The Golden Age Bats is more of the “Ha! He deserved that!” school.

The other surprise was how relatively few stories it took for Robin to show up.

Let me be clear: I hate Robin. I hate kid sidekicks in general, but Robin gets some special ire because he’s a flashpoint. I always know I can never discuss my love of comics with a person when they say something along the lines of “Batman keeping company with an underage boy, hurr hurr.” In fact, conversation usually gets shut down altogether with my usual rejoinder, “Would you be any more comfortable if he was hanging around with an underage girl?”. Which is good, because then I don’t have to get to the “THEN SHUT THE F@#K UP!” stage.

Intriguingly, I don’t mind Robin apart from Batman. Well, apart from that stupid circus-inspired costume. Then, I suppose it depends on the writer, as I’m thinking quite warmly of the Marv Wolfman New Teen Titans or anything Grant Morrison has done.

But, theoretically we’re talking The Batman Chronicles 1, and the last story I read, which is Robin’s origin story.  I had forgotten that Boss Zucco was behind the death of the parents of Dick Grayson, which ups my respect for the movies that reference him. Batman’s training of his new aide seems to go very quickly, but then, the kids is a trained aerialist. But what is most remarkable, is how much Batman and Robin are smiling once the action gets going. Bats has been pretty grim up to this point, but these two working together are displaying a hell of a lot of enamel while they’re extracting justice.

The climax of the story takes place at the top of a skyscraper under construction. Robin jumps the gun on attacking Zucco and his thugs and there’s quite a donnybrook betwixt Robin and the bad guys, and there’s at least one – and I’m going to say more likely four – guys who plunge to their doom as a result of the fight. At least one more is thrown off by Zucco after the quisling signs a confession to sabotaging the Grayson’s trapeze, which turns out to be set up by Batman, so Robin could snap a picture of Zucco himself killing the traitor. Which is another notch in Batman’s personal kill list.

After this is Batman #1, and the first appearance of the Joker, who will in time eclipse Batman’s body count and make us forget all about it.

I’d like to say we’re better than that now, and our heroes are better than that, but I know that neither is the case. I’m going to have to settle for the writers and artists being much better, and that is cause for celebration. I am still looking forward to going through the rest of this series, to track the mellowing of the characters, and discover exactly when the Joker goes from being a homicidal maniac to the Clown Prince of Crime.

I realize it sounds like I’m hating on the Golden Age comics, but that would be like hating on Walt Whitman poetry. Not all that great, but it’s the first. Quaint, charming, and… hey, according to Amazon, not all that expensive. Hmmmmmmm…

June 28, 2010
Categories: Hey Kids! Comics! . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

7 Bizarre Ways Google Chrome Can Kill You Instantly

First, let me quickly point out that the post title was created by the Linkbait Generator, providing some of the best laughs I’ve had since, basically, ever.

I didn’t have much luck with Google Chrome when it first hit the Web. I’m willing to take the blame for that. I’d been using Firefox for a long, long time, even after people I trust had warned me that it had turned into a real resource hog. It was familiar, it was comfortable, it was serviceable. The bookmarks folders were bloated, hideous things, like long-ignored crisper drawers, in dire need of trashing and steam-cleaning.

So. I’ve been moving toward an Android phone (a process rendered much more gradual lately), and in the process I’ve been exploring a lot more of Google’s offerings. I don’t know how long Google Calendar has been staring at me from the iGoogle page, but I do know I’ve been pining for a calendar as effortlessly and elegantly simple as iCal on my work computer for over a year. And there it was, begorrah, right on me home page. Fancy that.

Now, wait a minute, Chester, you might say in an inexplicable fit of Band quotation, you have a Crackberry – why haven’t you been using Outlook Express? Sorry, mate, I come from a generation that regards Outlook and Outlook Express to be horrible cesspools of virus and hack bait, oscillating its hips on a street corner of the Information Superhighway, and saying Oo-la, sailor, fancy a butcher’s at me user’s contact list?

I have no idea where all this strange dialect stuff is coming from. It may be time to explore medication.

ANYWAY. This has led me to explore other Googlesque offerings, and as I am sure you know, there are many.  Poking around the “Labs” tab on many of the apps brings up even more chimerae lurking in the menagerie. I’ve been using Gmail for years, but I’ve now unlocked functionalities within it I had only dreamed of, previously.

So obviously, it was time to revisit the Chrome Plunge, which should really be the name of a techno pop group.  My first encounter with it was marred by the fact thatit was just different enough to put me off my stride, and, remarkably, the Scott McCloud comic that accompanied its launch didn’t help – in fact, I may have been suffering from sensory overload, much like the first time I read Understanding Comics.  McCloud’s a smart guy, and unfortunately, I think he believes I am just as smart. No, don’t be put off by my blitherings, this is good stuff. I can’t read philosophy texts either, I’ll read the same paragraph three times and then wake up covered with brightly colored scraps of paper and a slightly inebriated pug-dog.

Man, all this just to turn on a light switch. (Ah, Rube Goldberg, you are the gift that keeps on giving!)

So I eschewed McCloud’s illustrated tract, uninstalled the old version of Chrome lying fallow on my hard drive,  installed a new one, and found the process unexceptional and friendly. That was two days ago, and I have not yet turned into some sort of cyber-zombie or suffered any other sort of doom normally associated with mucking about with alien technologies one does not fully comprehend.

So what we’re really getting at here is, as a geek, I am sadly lacking. I continue to poke at Chrome, and I am finding it a slightly different beast on my work computer (which is a Mac) than I am at home (a PC). Wrestling it into a form on the Mac similar to what I was using at home was more involved than I had assumed, but the dust has settled, I’m still standing.  I’m looking at an extension list quite different from what I use at home, because I use Chrome for different things at home, and that is one of the best things I’m finding about the browser – I am loving the customization. There have been a few times I’ve been surprised by what it won’t do – with an unspoken “yet!”  lurking somewhere in the background – but overall, I guess I’m ready to be welcomed into the fabulous world of  2008.

And I’m going to take another crack at that Scott McCloud comic. Maybe I got smarter.

June 25, 2010
Categories: Technical Garbage . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

The Axis of Evil Insists on The Star Wars Holiday Special

There has been a small, but vocal contingent of our little movie group that is demanding the Star Wars Holiday Special. I have been putting them off for most of a year. Occasionally they listen to me, but they seem uninterested in reason this time. Fortune may be with us, as our usual host and Master of the Projector Dave and his long-suffering wife are closing on their first house Tuesday, so they’re going to be more concerned with moving than with hosting a bunch of film masochists.

I keep referencing this classic XKCD strip. though again, this could be losing its efficacy through repeated exposure:

Honestly, Randall Munroe is one of the few cartoonists who can make stick figures look suicidal.

The real problem with the Star Wars Holiday Special is that, unlike The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, the entertainment factor is precisely zero. Paul Lynde’s was hoot-worthy in its every aspect, from the cameos to KISS lip-synching to their albums to the cornball humor. Star Wars Holiday on the other hand, is merely tedious, which is not only the kiss of death for any enterprise that aspires to entertainment, but also means that it lacks the gusto which can transform bad into tacky enjoyment, which is what drives most Bad Movie Nights.

For instance: take in this, which pulls your favorite Star Wars character through ten layers of unbelievable shame, but still manages to be fun, because it looks like the actors are having some fun:

And then compare it with this, which simply screams – no, screaming takes too much effort – it moans with “contractual obligation”:

Although… I was alerted by Mike Sterling, the proprietor of Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin, that apparently Bea Arthur’s character in the Star Wars Holiday Special is a character in a new Star Wars novel, Fate of the Jedi: Allies, and you know what that means. THASS RIGHT, BITCHES! IT MEANS THE HOLIDAY SPECIAL IS NOW CANON!!!!!!

June 24, 2010
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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