I seem to be out of righteous dudgeon today. So please breathe a sigh of relief, then grit your teeth as I get boring again.
First things first: Lisa’s follow-up appointment is today. We’ll see what good and bad comes of that.
I’ve re-started my project to read the complete Cerebus series; I had reached a more-or-less natural stopping point after Volume 10/issue #200, and took the opportunity to decompress a bit. I just checked, and the Cereblog, the site that got me onto this kick, hasn’t updated in a year. I’m not going into it on such a magnifying-glass manner as they (for one thing, I spent a lot on these phone books – several of them autographed – and don’t want to set them on fire, har de har), but I will be talking about them soon. So those of you who get all huffy when I talk about comics, sorry, but they’re at least as big a part of my life as movies.
In the meantime I read a whatchacallit, actual book, you know, one without pictures. I don’t know why I went years and years without a library card, since I live in a county with a county-wide library system that has access to thousands upon thousands of books, and that’s without even accessing Interlibrary loans. I’d wanted to read Gene Wolfe’s latest book, An Evil Guest, for some time, but hadn’t really had the opportunity until now.
Wolfe doesn’t write your typical genre-related novels, and this one was no exception. Set a hundred years in the future, it concerns an actress named Cassie Casey who finds herself an ofttimes willing pawn in an undefined power struggle between two men who appear to be sorcerers. The story, though, is largely told from the point of view of Cassie, who gets so overwhelmed by the floodtide of events that analysis is defied. The last quarter of the book takes a radical turn in tone, and Lovecraftian elements come to the fore. If Cloverfield was a daikaiju flick told from the point of view of a member of those nameless crowds fleeing Godzilla, An Evil Guest becomes, at the end, a complicated pulp story related by Margo Lane, who never had time at the end of the adventure to be debriefed by the Shadow. I’m going to be mulling this one for a while, which is a good way to feel about a novel.
I’ve also been slowly draining the Fort Bend Library system of all their comic content, which is, gladly, going to take a while. I’m gleeful to discover they have the E.C. Segar Popeye collections, which I’ve lusted after forever and a day, and now I can at least read them, if not own them – at least as soon as they travel from their far-flung branches. I’m currently plowing through The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen, reprinting some of the batshit crazy stories from Jimmy’s book, Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, in which the ginger chump is turned into a genie, a giant turtle (“What is on his huge,twisted turtle mind?” wonders Superman), and horror of horrors, a fat person. Since, as we all know, fat people are hideous freaks.
Also in my possession for a few weeks is DC Universe – The Stories of Alan Moore, which contains some Moore stories I actually hadn’t read (I had not thought that possible). But one of the first books I checked out was also by Moore, a story I hadn’t read but only heard about: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
Whatever Happened -? was the coda to umpteen years of continuity, before the John Byrne-penned Man of Steel reboot (which, frankly, I never liked). It takes place in the the-near future of 1997, as a reporter interviews a retired Lois Lane on the 10th anniversary of Superman’s disappearance. Leading up to Superman’s vanishing act is an all-out war with his old foes, all of which have turned from relatively harmless bank robbers and schemers to outright murderous lunatics, leading up to a climax with a bunch of cast members dead and Superman walking into a room with gold kryptonite (which destroys his super-powers) after he’s committed the unforgivable – to him – sin of destroying the being responsible for all the mayhem before it can kill himself or Lois.
And this is one of the more sedate moments from Rise of Arsenal
Finally reading this story after all these years – a quarter-century after it appeared, apparently – something occurred to me. Moore is one of the people who changed comic book superheroes forever with Watchmen, and judging from what I’ve read of modern offerings from DC, Whatever Happened-? is more or less providing the blueprint for the currently slaughterrific state of affairs there. Every DC comic I read these days seems to have at least one horrific murder (often more) in what seems to be a race to out-grit Marvel, and which I suspect is going to lead to another Seduction of the Innocents-type social backlash.
Well, at least we can’t blame Whatever Happened -? for the rash of DC rapes and near-rapes in the last few years. For that we have to go to The Killing Joke, also by Moore, also in the DC Universe collection.
Too bad that so few people working in comics today took something else from Moore’s work: quality writing.
Hurm. Didn’t mean for yesterday’s post to turn into a mini-rant, but it did. Which leads to an analysis of why it did. What I meant to be an amusing anecdote became a full-blown complaint, and you know who I blame? Internet comments.
To put it in purely geek terms, conversations are the internet comments you can’t ignore, and you should always ignore internet comments. Yet, like that extremely vocal argument taking place across the street, you just can’t resist glancing over, can you? Taking just one peek. Maybe something interesting will happen; but no, like comments threads, it is usually merely tawdry and depressing.
If you want your nose rubbed in exactly how stupid, crass and uninspiring the bulk of the human race can be, all you need to do is look underneath any YouTube video. The most saintly among us would be rationalizing euthanasia within five comments.
To digress slightly – yeah, I know, big surprise – I made the mistake a few times of clicking “Everyone Near You” on UberTwitter, my Crackberry’s Twitter app, and, to quote Goering, that’s when I reach for my revolver. Using Trending Topics is equally horrifying. I think it was Kevin Church who had the bright idea to change the Trending Topic locale to Brazil – at least now I can’t understand them, and they can’t hurt me.
Now. To get back to what I was bloviating about: A few months ago, I was looking at some Internet video, or possibly some incredibly complex Lego creation, or… well, it wasn’t this video, but it was something like it:
I think you can imagine what the comments ran to, and I am going to admit that I have been guilty of trotting this one out far too often: “Somebody had way too much time on their hands.”
The difference is – and here is one of those instances when, like the argument across the street, I looked and something interesting did happen – this time somebody had a good rejoinder, to the effect of “Why do people say things like that, and always when something creative is involved?”
And they’re right. Alex Varanese didn’t do that animation in just a few minutes. It took time, and the patience of a thousand monks. Were I my former, relentlessly negative self, I would opine that a better reply would be, “That’s right, he had time on his hands, and he didn’t use it watching American Idol or sitting on his fat ass staring at a computer monitor and taking pointless evil potshots under cover of anonymity like you, you worthless piece of—”
Well, as I say, I’m not like that anymore (though I can certainly fantasize about it. Just like I fantasize tracking every idiot down on “Everyone Near You” and smashing their smartphones to dust with a ballpeen hammer. I’m not that guy anymore). But that one comment, that was truth. Every time I had said “Somebody had way too much time on their hands,” I was probably motivated by jealousy, in one way or another. And it was just plain wrong to be so dismissive of someone else’s work, to trivialize it as something some idiot did while they were bored.
So I’ve been working to remove that phrase from my vocabulary, and for what it’s worth, I think that’s where my sturm and my drang over “I gave up on that <arbitrary amount of time> ago” came from yesterday.
At the very least, I found my wristwatch and wedding ring.
Attempts to return to a normal life continue; I’m back to trying to get through to the media relations folks at the Houston Zoo to shoot the footage I need for the second half of my July story. My hair did not get miraculously shorter (just thinner and grayer) over the weekend, so I need to take care of that. Yes, various utilities, I know you require my attention and money but I’ve been busy.
The oddest thing: despite, well, massive indifference among my peers, I’ve been itching to get back to my project of reading the entire run of Cerebus. It’s not so much indifference as Tweets to effect of “I gave up on it about (name of story arc)”. I know, I know, so did I. The exact point is kind of problematic for me, as I kept trying to get back into it. I’m about to start volume 11, Guys, and I know I’ve read parts of it, I can remember at least one bit with fair clarity, yet most of the stuff in the preceding two volumes were news to me.
The “I gave up on that” meme has been floating around in my life a lot lately. Most notably during the final season of Lost, when every mention I made of the show was almost inevitably followed by a sniff and a vaguely superior “Oh, I gave up on that years ago.” Well, (to channel Paul Lynde, who has also been in my life a bit much of late) good fer you. I guess you cured cancer in the time you saved.
What really brings it to a head was just before our last crapfest, when Dave had, prior to our arrival, been watching some box set or other of ‘Allo, ‘Allo, and I mentioned that ever since seeing Inglourious Basterds, it was impossible for me to watch a scene in the cafe without expecting it to degenerate into a bloody firefight. This gave rise to a universal, “Yeah, I haven’t seen it, I gave up on Tarantino a long time ago” chorus.
Okay, folks are entitled to their opinion. No, wait, folks are entitled to their informed opinions. “I gave up on that years ago” is not an informed opinion. My movie watching is full of instances of giving directors, actors, writers another chance, and it pays off. Brian DePalma usually gives me a rash, but The Untouchables is one of my favorite movies. So I think that ignoring an Academy Award-winning movie because you somehow associate the director with Pogs or Push Pops or similar embarrassing crap that you left behind when you grew up is just plain stupid.
Yeah, I expect this to bite me on the ass sometime in the future, when I get high and mighty about something in some media or other. Probably when someone tries to get me to watch a Brian DePalma movie. And it will serve me right.
…and more tiring, but I didn’t live through those.
As you know if you follow me on Twitter (and if you don’t, why not? I’m not that annoying), on Saturday, the hospital made Lisa a deal: if she could keep her lunch down, she could go home. She was intensely excited to get a choice of soft foods for her lunch, instead of the usual nourishing chicken gruel (“it looks like bad gravy”), and chose beef stew, which she did, indeed, keep down. The fact that they shot her full of something that put her to sleep afterward may have helped.
Eventually, though there had been a spike in her sugars in the morning, she was given the okay to go home. After waiting a couple of hours for paperwork and someone to pilot the wheelchair to get her downstairs. Okay, waiting for the wheelchair was my fault, but after supporting her in the brief walk to the bathroom, I knew there was no way she was making it to the elevator, much less all the way down to the lobby and front doors.
Which resulted in my pulling up to the pharmacy five minutes after it closed (6pm on Saturdays. Really?). Walk her into the house, get her settled, then head back out to a 24-hour pharmacy to get the new prescriptions filled. While they worked on that, buy some groceries in a scattered, unfocused way. Then stop at Chili’s to get a cheeseburger, because the invalid demands one, and I cannot say I blame her. It’s not like I’m up for cooking.
I get all that done, and it’s my turn to collapse. The cheeseburger is wolfed down, which is quite heartening (my wife does not wolf – that’s my job).
It’s astounding how behind I had gotten on a lot of stuff. Okay, not astounding, it’s only to be expected – but astounding to me… it somehow still felt like Thursday. I had been reading Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest and always went to the hospital with it, but rarely got more than a paragraph or two read. To no one’s surprise, I was up until 2am that night, catching up on reading.
And awakened at 7am by the sounds of cat rugby in the hall. The smaller cat reminds me of the kid in the movie Parenthood who likes to hit things with his head. Except that the cat does not put a bucket on its head. I get up and feed the damned things, then shoo them away from the dog’s food until she comes down to protect her food herself. One of life’s injustices: we moved the cat food bowls up onto a table so the dog couldn’t eat their food, and now they feel entitled to eat hers at will. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I’ll leave it up to the pundits to craft it.
After an hour of playing Lone Ranger over the dog food, I climbed back into bed, thankful it was Sunday and such things were possible. Like an idiot, I hadn’t put my phone on silent, and people starting calling to check on Lisa. Like a freaking idiot, I didn’t put it on silent after the first person called.
There was another trip to the grocery store – this time a list was involved – and an eventual nap. (PS. the alarm on a Blackberry is CHRISTALMIGHTY LOUD) Now, on Monday morning, I think I detect a few more gray hairs on the rapidly thinning thatch atop my head, and strange leftovers litter my life. The towels that never got folded, the laundry merely tossed on the floor. I have daily taken off my wristwatch and my wedding ring and placed them in the same place for years, and today I have no idea where they might be.
There have been rougher weekends, but I didn’t live through them.
My new favorite image, above, is from BoingBoing, and the story is here.
There is a slight possibility Lisa will be coming home today, but it’s much more likely to be tomorrow. Her blood sugars were still hovering around 300 yesterday, and I’m told by other acquaintances who have been longtime diabetics that when they get so high, it takes several days to get them back under control.
I helped her to the bathroom so she could brush her hair and teeth, and both made her feel better, but the effort completely wiped her out. She hasn’t even turned on the TV, which is probably the most worrisome thing. They finally allowed her to have food, but she’s also quite nauseous, so Jell-O 1, Lisa 0.
Still haven’t gotten my 12 hours sleep, bourbon, or pony. Did remember to take my vitamins this morning, however. Nico the Mutant Cat is constantly yelling at me that his favorite blond pillow has gone missing. Also: pug-dog banging on my door to tell me my alarm clock was going to go off in five minutes. My morning. Very tired.
LATER-THAT-DAY UPDATE: She’s still not keeping any food down, so they’re keeping her for another night.
So here I am, working away, and texting my wife – yes, we text each other a lot, so I guess we’re still teenagers in that respect – and she had been feeling poorly of late. I’d been asking her to call her doctor to little avail, but the two ladies who work under her double-teamed her and took her to the doctor’s office. It was a little dismaying to, shortly thereafter, get a text that simply said, “Come take me to the ER.”
She’s a diabetic, and has been dealing with erratic, often high blood sugars for a while. This time, it was so high the glucometers at both the doctor’s office and the ER couldn’t measure it.
She was barely lucid by the time we got her through triage and into a room. The bloodwork later revealed the sugars were at 690, and, along with the fluids they were pumping into her, they administered a large dose of insulin, which got it down to 314, Her color slowly improved, her humor returned. She wasn’t allowed to drink or eat, so we tried to keep her in ice chips.
It was finally determined that she was to be admitted to the hospital – her pancreas was inflamed from the elevated sugar situation. Finally, after nine hours in the ER, they put her in a room. I was sent home and gratefully surrendered myself to bed – and then an extremely vocal thunderstorm blew through at 1am, so the universe wasn’t finished screwing with me. This morning, her fasting sugars were at 276, which the medical profession refers to as Too Damn High. Still waiting for a Doctor’s opinion.
I guess I do brave and strong very well. People keep looking toward me for it. So I managed to keep it together until I got in the car to drive home, and took a few minutes to lose it completely in the privacy of the driver’s seat. Sorry, guy who parked next to me without my noticing, if that discomfited you in any way.
Yeah, before you ask, there is still no health insurance involved. That is a problem for another day. Right now, all I want is my wife, and the mother of my child, back. And about 12 hours of sleep. And a stiff bourbon and coke. And a pony.
In order to keep up my streak of handing over entire paychecks to corporations, I did that very thing last Friday with Verizon, attempting to get my phone and Internet turned back on. (For those that are confused: during the Recent Troubles, both were shut off so those monies could instead be funneled to the mortgage company and keep a roof over heads, so that it can be blown off by this year’s Killer Hurricanes, or so the media tells me. As ever, for sanity in hurricane reporting, I rely on the Central Florida Hurricane Center.)
Where was I before this spiralled into pointless bitching (now there’s a cogent blog title…)? Oh yes. I was setting up some pointless bitching. Well, our account had been inactive for so long, our old number had been released, blahblah blah, and after about 45 minutes I had arranged for a new account which I was told “will be up on Tuesday the 1st, because there’s a holiday, you know.” As I am attempting to be a more positive person, I did not snarl, “Yes, I know, because I am going to be home alone all day in a very quiet house!” No, there was no need for that. I had books to read. Laundry to do. It’s cool, man, it’s cool.
Well. Called the new number early yesterday morning, and it rang, and I got the robotic message from the online voice mail. Didn’t ring at my house, though, which I thought was a bit odd, but within the realm of possibility, different switches to throw, that sort of thing. Until the same thing happened when I got home. A call to the Home Office got me the Repair Service, whose tools said it seemed to be a problem with the wires outside my house, and it would be fixed by 5pm today.
I got up this morning, got a dial tone, and I’m back online. Hell, if I’d known that was all it took, I’d have taken an early nap last night.
So, yay. I am connected again, just in time to go to work and leave my sparkling new connectivity behind. I’ve got a lot of things to square away, such as finally updating the OS on the Crackberry (please let it fix that annoying browser bug, please please please), and… other stuff. I’m sure. First though, since The Boy is out on Summer Vacation, I’m going to have to dynamite him from in front of the computer.
So yeah, I feel a little ashamed of using the photo here to add a little visual pizazz to the ol’ blog entry, when overall I’m pretty satisfied. But then again, I was very, very depressed last night, and feel like lashing out. You don’t want me embedding any more clips from the Paul Lynde Halloween Special, now, do you?
It had been way, way too long since our last get-together. A little over a month ago Rick and I forced the issue and there was a small gathering, a mini-gathering as it were, Dave and Rick and myself; it could not truly be called a crapfest because the movies watched that night were Primer, The Loved One and The Kid With the Golden Arm. These break no one, and in some cases were quality entertainment.
But now host Dave was off his beneficent kick, during which we were watching other movies of a non-painful quality. Shogun Assassin, Marjoe, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Starcrash Okay, Starcrash is actually quite painful, but Caroline Munro soothes a lot of pain.
No, this time Dave was threatening us with “the nuclear option”. He wanted us to hurt, and hurt badly. I personally feel this was his lashing out after the finale of Lost, but there is no solid evidence for this. Except for those discussions in the kitchen where each sentence from Dave began with the words, “So you’re telling me that…”
During the arrival portion of the evening, he put on the 1994 version of Fantastic Four. You know, the version that Roger Corman produced so Fox could keep their hands on the FF movie license. This movie is damn cheap, and damn stupid, but you cannot fault its intentions. Roger Corman probably got a lot of people to work on this dirt cheap, if not for free, simply because it was a Fantastic Four movie. And having watched the two big budget abominations that were eventually released, I now feel much more kindly toward this version. If nothing else, this one got Doctor Doom right, and if you get Doctor Doom right, half the battle is won.
Am I right? is that Battle Beyond the Stars music that I’m hearing? And only the finest Video Toaster graphics? Nice John Byrne era costumes, too.
After that, Dave put on the first few minutes of Dondi, because he is a complete and utter bastard. He was not satisfied until Paul burst into tears, and then he finally felt he could unleash his “nuclear option”: Battlefield Earth.
Well, sort of like Godzilla, I’ve seen the nuclear option up close a few times, and impressively though it may suck, it holds little terror for me. Luckily, I was in a room of Battlefield Earth virgins, so I got to feed off their exquisite agony like some Marvel villain. First, I amused myself by claiming I was going to spend the whole movie tilting my head one way or another, so the picture onscreen would actually appear level. This is, of course, a mug’s game and cannot be won. You will hurt yourself if you try.
So after a while, we just fell to playing my favorite Battlefield Earth game, Laugh With The Psychlos. The Psychlos really enjoy their work. Dave himself had not seen the abomination he had set out before us, but I like to think that if he had, it would have been much like what I saw in the living room: Dave standing in the middle of an empty theater, shaking both fists at the screen and bellowing as if the movie could hear him.. I understand he exhibited the same behavior during the Lost finale.
Laugh with John Travolta – won’t you?
Then Dave put on Dondi again, and went outside for a cigarette. “I brought you here to make you suffer!” I could have walked over to his media computer and turned it off, but it’s best not to show weakness in such circumstances.
My turn. First, the only episode of the Japanese TV series Spider-Man that I possess. More appropriately perhaps, Supaidaman. At only about 25 minutes, quite painless, and though people bitched endlessly about the lack of subtitles, there was no need. Supaidaman helps some guy from Interpol fight a bunch of aliens (the faceless cannon fodder dog soldiers distinguished in this series by having duck-like beaks, unlike the faceless cannon fodder dog soldiers in a million other similar Japanese TV series) and their swordfish-headed monster, who spits torpedoes out his mouth.
Supaidaman is out of costume perhaps a minute in this episode, and spends most of rest of the time sticking to walls and kicking bad guys in the beak. Until the monster gets rambunctious (and large) around some fuel tanks and Supaidaman calls in his giant robot.
He’s the Japanese Spider-Man. Of course he has a giant robot.
It was held that the Parker Stevenson American TV version could learn much from the Japanese ratio of kicks to the beak versus talky civilian scenes. I personally like to think of what American comics could learn from this. “Now you will face the wrath of — DOCTOR OCTOPUS!!!” “Now you will face the foot of – my giant robot!” SPLAT!
Here is a clip with subtitles, so it is already apparent I like you more than my movie-watching mates:
Oh, didn’t I mention the subtitles are in French? Foolish man-animals! HAHAHAHAHA
I think it was about this time, during between-movie trips to the snack table, that I was informed Art Linkletter had died too far away from the Gary Coleman epicenter, and could not be considered one of “The Three”, so therefore there was another celebrity death on the way, hopefully one that would be more comfortable sharing a motorcycle with Gary Coleman and Dennis Hopper.
Then it was time to address a certain lacking in our evenings. One that had grown worse, tellingly enough, with the rise of the more *harrumph* quality entertainments, and that… was the lack of boobies.
Yes, these things started with a hideous marathon of movies like Beach Girls and Surf 2: The Movie, leading into Joysticks, H.O.T.S. and Evilspeak. All delights to the adolescent male just discovering cable TV, because of one thing – well, often, two things – boobies.
I was just getting ready to go to college when HBO came to our town. This was the days of the set-top box with one button, the red one for HBO and the black one for regular cable. The young punks I hang with had all sorts of flavors to choose from, Cinemax, Showtime. Punks. I had to make do with drive-ins.
The very first R-rated drive-in booby movie I saw was The Student Teachers, and I had been attempting to get it shown ever since I’d found a copy. Well, tonight was the night. A 1973 movie, I must have seen it in ‘74, and man does it take place in the early 70s. A new teacher at Valley High starts to have “rap sessions” with her kids about sex, which totally riles the squares in charge (Dick Miller included!), especially when some rapist wearing a clown mask starts plying his trade, which is obviously the fault of the sex-ed classes. (Talk about “ripped from today’s headlines”…)
Uh, there’s also some alternative school going on, that needs money, so they’re doing some sort of complicated scam to rip off the local drug ring. It was pointed out that Rube Goldberg would have found the scheme overly complicated, but that it was still more believable than any plan in Battlefield Earth. (“And it makes more sense than the finale of Lost!” Dave complained. “Hush,” said we, “there’s boobies.”)
Besides. The “plot” is merely the mortar that fills the gaps in between topless scenes, and they are plentiful. The movie opens with one, even. There’s only one suspect for the rapist, they don’t even bother with any red herrings. (okay, okay, it’s Dick Miller. You knew that the minute I mentioned him, right?) Look fast in the karate class at the alternative school. That’s Chuck Norris instructing.
The next was mine, too: The Paul Lynde Halloween Special. Man-animals are so simple. All I had to do was say. “KISS is in it.” Well, Alan helped, as he had forced his parents to watch it with him when it was first broadcast, and he assured us that at one point Gene Simmons spit blood or blew fire or balanced his checkbook or something equally awesome.
I didn’t see this the one and only time it aired, October of 1976. That would be my first semester as a Theater Major (Our motto: “Your ass is ours from 2pm until Midnight”). But. It is hard to imagine there was a time when Paul Lynde was a bona fide cultural treasure, doing variety specials every year… then I look at what passes for celebrity today, and suddenly, it’s not so hard.
The plot is almost as lucid as Student Teachers, something about Paul’s housekeeper (Margaret Hamilton) being a witch – fancy that – and witches want Paul to mastermind a way for people to realize that witches are fun people. She is helped in this by Billie Hayes in her Pufnstuf Witchiepoo character, causing the first of many Dave screams of horror.
The witches grant Lynde three wishes, which will result in comedy sketches and songs (yes, Lynde sings), and more screams from Dave, when folks like Betty White and Pinky Tuscadero show up. As Dave also points out, this special is a window to a very narrow period of time; Pinky shows up in Lynde’s first wish, which is to be a trucker with a CB radio and an Elvis jumpsuit. Yes, this is the period in 76-77 when truckers were heroes and people knew who the hell Pinky Tuscadero was.
I realize that’s not her real name, but I defy anyone to tell me her real name without using the Internet. Come on. I dare you. (Alright, it’s Roz “Pinky Tuscadero” Kelly. There.)
Tim Conway gets off the one line, obviously ad-libbed, that makes Dave laugh. Florence Henderson appears (hot as hell in a black sequin dress, I might add) and sings a disco version of “That Old Black Magic”, making Dave scream. And KISS actually do three songs (the last one being Lynde’s last wish). When song #2 appears, it is “Beth”, because it is 1976, and that makes all the KISS fans in the room scream. But I tell you what: you could have heard a pin drop during the other two KISS songs. The Florence Henderson song did not receive such reverence.
Okay, I realize that clip was 85% Pinky Tuscadero and 0% KISS. Here:
Our Paul (not Lynde, but the one sitting on the couch next to me) seemed to truly enjoy the Special just as much as Dave reacted to it like a bulldog chewing on a rabid wasp. I think Dave was more peeved that I had hurt him instead of vice versa, or as I said in my worst Sean Connery, “It’s the Chicago way! They Battlefield Earth one of yours, you Paul Lynde Halloween Special them!” Dave was using words like “kill” “get you”and “you’ll pay for this”, so, yeah… mission accomplished.
The evening wound down with Shriek of the Mutilated, which is a perfect winding-down movie as it plods like a mammoth on its way to bed, enormous nightshirt and cap, with a candle held in its trunk. Where was I? Oh yes. Shriek.
Dave played his old version of it, the one with Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” on the soundtrack. Then he switched to the recent DVD release, with all the gore scenes restored (but the rights to “Popcorn” deemed too expensive). I hadn’t seen this version, I’d only seen the TV print, and their inclusion does aid the movie a bit, if only because their omission was really glaring before, edited out with a cub scout pocketknife and a dull spoon.
Still Shriek of the Mutilated is a movie where the story is advanced by people giving long, detailed speeches about things that have happened offscreen. This is bad enough, but by the time the movie is starting to shamble toward the finish line, people are giving long detailed speeches about stuff that we actually saw happen.
It was a wonderful, wonderful evening though. I hurt Dave more than he hurt me. He was muttering about the Star Wars Holiday Special when I left, which is one Alan always brings up, but that is only because they haven’t seen it. Like having a red-hot wire shoved up your ureter, there is no way to actually know until you have experienced it. Still, I admit that I am amused. I have seen it. It holds no terror for me. But the man-animals think that by showing it, they will hurt me.
This could be fun.
Incidentally, Alan and Paul left right after Shriek started. That might have opened up a couch seat for Rick, but they are total wusses, and that should go on the record.
Somehow, even though the amount of attention I have paid to this blog over the years would, were it a child and I a parent, have sent me to jail for abandonment, I have made over 200 posts. Somehow. I know this because I am going through each and every one, repairing links and slapping one of these new-fangled category thingamabobs on ’em. Even nuked a couple of them because they were only there to present YouTube clips, and the forces of Satan had long since removed said clip.
Today was the first paycheck in some time that was not promised in its entirety to the mortgage company; it was instead delivered kicking and screaming into the gaping maw of Verizon, in the hopes of getting my Internet service back before the long weekend. Of course, Things Do Not Work That Way, so it will be Tuesday at the earliest before I can do anything like, you know, blog from the comfort of my home.
Oh yeah, says the reader who has been with us for a while, like that’s going to happen. Well, it could! You big meanies!
This means, at least, I’ll have more enforced reading time, which is a good thing. In all this reviewing and tweaking I’ve run across my original post in which I thought it was a good idea to finally read the entire run of Cerebus, since that sneaky Dave Sim had finished its 300 issue run while I wasn’t looking. I’ve been muttering about that 140 characters at a time on Twitter, but that of course is the sort of thing which fills reams of digital paper and drives people crazy who come here to hear me snark about bad movies .
Speaking of which: we finally have another bad movie night coming up this Sunday. I’ll be livetweeting occasionally, so follow me and avoid the rush. Of course, any plans to embloggen it Memorial Day have now been stunned with a hammer and dragged onto the kill floor, but it might still happen in the usual slow, torturous way.
Now that I’ve gotten the bad movie folks excited, back to comics. I’ve now read 200 of the 300 issues of Cerebus. Some went swimmingly, some of it was like hacking your way through gelatin with a paper machete. We’ll talk. But while I wait to be able to buy the last two books, I’ve set my wandering gaze in other directions, and am now reading the One Volume Edition of Jeff Smith’s Bone. I’d read… well, quite a bit of it in periodical form, before I had to give it up in one of my periodic belt-tightenings. Turns out I had gotten nearly to the halfway mark, and MAN, am I loving it.
The fact that the One Volume Edition could be used as a murder weapon is mere icing upon the cake. It will be finished over the weekend, and then I will be very, very sad.
Such is the power of good writing, and yes dammit, I am talking about a comic book.
I’ve migrated all the old Blogger files, which turned out to be painless… Until I started looking at the posts.
A little more experience would helped, I’m sure. But some of the YouTube embeds have just gone away. I’m coding them back in by hand, but this is a long process.
So don’t read back too far, ‘kay?
LATER: And I should also note that I wrote and submitted that entry on the Crackberry last night, but only found this morning that it hadn’t published. Yeah, I’d say I still have a few things to learn.
I’ve re-started my project to read the complete Cerebus series; I had reached a more-or-less natural stopping point after Volume 10/issue #200, and took the opportunity to decompress a bit. I just checked, and the Cereblog, the site that got me onto this kick, hasn’t updated in a year. I’m not going into it on such a magnifying-glass manner as they (for one thing, I spent a lot on these phone books – several of them autographed – and don’t want to set them on fire, har de har), but I will be talking about them soon. So those of you who get all huffy when I talk about comics, sorry, but they’re at least as big a part of my life as movies.
I’ve also been slowly draining the Fort Bend Library system of all their comic content, which is, gladly, going to take a while. I’m gleeful to discover they have the E.C. Segar Popeye collections, which I’ve lusted after forever and a day, and now I can at least read them, if not own them – at least as soon as they travel from their far-flung branches. I’m currently plowing through The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen, reprinting some of the batshit crazy stories from Jimmy’s book, Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, in which the ginger chump is turned into a genie, a giant turtle (“What is on his huge,twisted turtle mind?” wonders Superman), and horror of horrors, a fat person. Since, as we all know, fat people are hideous freaks.
drfreex.com 