I’ve been on Twitter now — @BrianLamken — for almost exactly six months. My reason for joining was as much to connect to folks with whom I’d fallen out of touch as to share my particular brand of pith. Honestly, I’ve wrestled with how to incorporate Twitter into a daily life that isn’t nearly as productive as I would like and that is far from conducive to participation in a site or app built around quick churn of neverending content. The same explanation holds at least in part for why it took me until the other day to finally join Facebook.
Further Adventures in Maybe Twitting
I’ve been on Twitter now — @BrianLamken — for almost exactly six months. My reason for joining was as much to connect to folks with whom I’d fallen out of touch as to share my particular brand of pith. Honestly, I’ve wrestled with how to incorporate Twitter into a daily life that isn’t nearly as productive as I would like and that is far from conducive to participation in a site or app built around quick churn of neverending content. The same explanation holds at least in part for why it took me until the other day to finally join Facebook.
See You Next B'ak'tun!
I got the above from the blog of a friend who doesn't know the source. Google image searches aren't turning up anything. Of course I realize that the world is not ending and that in fact all the apocalyptic frenzy is actually misinterpretation of the Mayan Long-Count Calendar, but just in c
Happy Feet
This post's title is not a reference to the old jazz number, the recent animated-penguin franchise, nor even (my own immediate, favorite association with the term) the sudden exclamation in Steve Martin's classic stand-up routine.
No, I bring you, as you can see above, a pitch for The Charlie Brown School of Dance. Like good ol' Mark Evanier — on whose cornucopian blog News from Me I first saw the link — said, "Just watch it...". I hope you'll pass it on.
Paging Xander Harris!
Meaning Less
Yesterday the can of Campbell’s soup went up in the sidebar to signify that posts
are backed up and slow with the going. I’ve been under the weather and less productive than usual lately, perhaps as a cosmic reminder not to make grand plans. On top of that, my Internet connection turned equally lethargic today.
So while things will hopefully get up to speed again soon I wanted to at least publish this note as preamble to a batch of word-verification definitions. Faithful readers are familiar with the exercise; anyone who isn’t can find an explanation in a page on the blog collecting all such entries to date.
As suggested by my title, I’m running out of content for these posts, largely because of Blogger’s switch earlier this year to a different verification mechanism that prompts fewer imagined definitions from me. The next installment in this series will probably
be the last.
• assfu — [ass foo] n. Martial art based on literally kicking your opponent’s butt.
• bininsic — [bin in sik] phr. Quick explanation for lack of activity outside the home.
• compery — [kom puh ree] n. Rackin’ up freebies.
• dectus — [dek tuss] n. A catcus as big as ten normal cacti.
• Essencei™ — [eh sen say] The cologne for hard-working dojo masters. “You chop the sandalwood in half. We combine its fragrant oil with hints of strawberry and musk. Essencei.”
42 Favorites: #11
Until my post on The Iron Giant, this here fits-’n’-starts
had run in alphanumeric order — from 1980s superhero-team comics to Airplane! on through crossword puzzles. I’ll probably keep with that order for the most part, but occasionally circumstances will suggest breaking it. Now, for instance, is a great time
to talk about seeing movies in a theater.
While year’s end is a period of reflection in general, certain aspects of life (school)
and pop culture in particular (the TV season, traditionally) don’t fit neatly with the Gregorian calendar. Movies do, partly insofar as — not being a largely serial medium like television is — the end of a Year in Film could fall anywhere. It’s easy enough to make a list of the best movies or books or music releases in the 365 days prior to Date X. But it also works out nicely that we get a volley of would-be blockbusters in the spring and summer months, when days are long and the air-conditioned multiplex beckons, followed by a smaller batch of commercial tentpoles amidst more serious, more intimate fare in the wintertime, as packed theaters offer a respite from the dreariness and cold. In truth many of the Oscar hopefuls don’t even hit the majority of markets until late December at the earliest, bridging one year to the next, and this season will be no different unless the folks misinterpreting the Mayan Long Count calendar turn out to be onto something.
There’s nothing like settling into an auditorium with stadium seating as one swatch
in a patchwork quilt made up of various bunches of a couple or a dozen friends.
What’s in a Name
I recently and somewhat randomly came across the poster below for the 1966
film Maya.
There’s a Maya in my family, and I know some other Mayas too. But that was only
the first name that jumped at me.
Head Space
I had a neat dream last night. Since content might be light here for a spell, I’ve
written it up along with a couple more I scribbled down from earlier this year.
The one from last night involved the work of Nikki Stafford, author of books about Lost and other cult TV, whose blog was among my select re-entry points to online activity when I finally got a working computer a handful of years ago now. Co-starring in the older dreams were actor/filmmaker Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO series Girls, whom I’ve never met, and comics scribe Kurt Busiek, creator of Astro City, whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with online and in person a fair amount over the past couple of decades.
In the snippet of last night’s dream that left an impression, I was mostly running around from table to table in a large dining room with a gravy boat of salad dressing.
At a certain point that scene, which I vaguely associated with a college dining hall, transitioned to me teaching a class on Buffy the Vampire Slayer that drew from Nikki’s work as well as my own blogposts. The real-world irony of the latter is that I’d hoped to publish a series of relevant posts during Nikki’s year-long rewatch of that show but I had to suspend that plan. (I did earlier share thoughts on my first exposure to Buffy
on television and review the original movie.)
Emerald Sit-In
The Voice paired up Cee-Lo Green and The Muppets’ Kermit the Frog last night for a very appropriate tune.
Screencap © 2011 NBCUniversal Media.
I’m a sucker for the Muppets in general and in particular for that song, the melancholy Joe Raposo standard “Bein’ Green”, which dates to a 1970 performance by Jim Henson as Kermit on Sesame Street.
“Bein’ Green” has been recorded many times — solo and/or as a duet with Kermit —
by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Diana Ross. Tuesday’s rendition, available for now immediately on The Voice’s home page and archived at the above link with a 15-second ad in front, is a worthy entry in the pantheon. Other Muppets showing up for the segment include Gonzo, Fozzie Bear, Animal, Janis, Statler & Waldorf, and one briefly glimpsed, laugh-out-loud ringer.
Given that Disney owns the Muppets and rival broadcast network ABC, I was quite surprised to see the Muppets pop up on NBC, especially once a taped behind-the-scenes intro for the Voice performance hyped another Cee-Lo/Muppets collaboration on NBC’s upcoming Christmas in Rockefeller Center special. I suppose that cross-promotional convenience trumps strict corporate synergy, but it seemed strange because ABC surely has its own holiday special in the pipeline and, things being equal, megalithic entities tend to like to keep things in the family.
Related: Muppet Monday (Dec. 19th) • Mup’ Tempo • Muppet Monday (Nov. 28th)
Up in the Sky
A home movie of the Superman balloon’s first appearance in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from 1940 was uploaded to YouTube in November of last year, but I got word of it too late to post it in time for the holiday then. My thanks to Rodrigo Baeza, who blogs occasionally at Comics Commentary, for sharing the link on the Grand Comics Database chat list. The Man of Helium shows up at the 1:30 mark.
Spider-Man, Spider-Man /
Use His Face in a Frying Pan
Williams-Sonoma is selling a Marvel Spider-Man Flexible Spatula.
How freaking awesome is that?
I just recently got one as a gift, along with a Spider-Man Cupcake-Decorating Kit. The latter is no longer available from the Williams-Sonoma website; neither is the Marvel Heroes Cupcake-Decorating Kit featuring Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. I’m
Après le Déluge
Bryan Walsh contributed a good piece on Hurricane Sandy to last week’s issue of Time.
He details Sandy’s effects but also suggests how to prepare as storms like Sandy — a hurricane turned post-tropical cyclone after merging with the Arctic jet stream to form a hybrid nor’easter that some dubbed “Frankenstorm” — become a fact of life in what (most rational minds now agree) is an era of consequential climate change.
I’ve felt a bit of survivor’s guilt over Sandy, to be honest.
My home in the Philadelphia suburbs lost power for maybe 30 seconds total on the night the storm hit — going dark just long enough the final time to convince me that several days without electricity lay ahead, since it would take so long for crews to work safely and get to everybody, only to pop back on with nary a complication thereafter. Lots of areas nearby had it much worse. I got to watch news coverage on a television
in a lit room while checking E-mail.
The Jersey shore, especially to the north, and New York City got hit worst of all. NJ Governor Chris Christie — whose politics I don’t always agree with but whose attitude I can’t help appreciate — was right to evacuate the barrier islands; residents ignored him, and Mayor Bloomberg in NYC, at their peril. Hurricane Irene not wreaking the havoc that was feared last year was no excuse for failing to take Sandy seriously this time around.
Sandy ended up making the “hard left” (i.e., pivoting West) that meteorologists predicted — despite never having seen a storm act that way before — a mite sooner than earlier estimates. Its center made landfall between Cape May, the southernmost point in New Jersey, and Atlantic City. The Wildwoods, a 5-mile island above Cape May where I used to live, were along with immediate neighbors largely spared because it’s the northern walls of Eastern Seaboard hurricanes that are harshest due to counter-clockwise motion pulling water in from the ocean. My stepmother teaches in North Wildwood and was back at work by the end of last week. Atlantic City, by contrast, lost sections of its boardwalk, and northern areas up to Long Beach Island — vacation spots for New Yorkers rather than Philadelphians (as well as, of course, home to plenty of year-round residents) — were absolutely devastated. Heavy rain during high tides is always a problem for the barrier islands because the ground is so easily saturated. Flooding is inevitable with a storm far less massive than Sandy was, and when the ocean meets the western bays there’s nowhere left for the water to go.
To recap, then, where I live now we lost no power, unlike my cousins just a few miles away; places that I love like family — those of you with strong geographical ties know what I mean — were hit much harder yet still relatively unscathed. I not only survived the storm fine in practical terms but dodged a real psychic bullet when the beach and boardwalk that are my favorite spots on Earth weren’t wrecked like their brethren further up the coastline.
I donated much less than I wish I could to relief efforts. The Red Cross and Operation USA can use whatever you can afford.
House of the Rising Moon
NBC ran the pilot for Mockingbird Lane, Bryan Fuller’s revamp of The Munsters, last Friday. At this writing you can still watch it via that link.
I took in the hour-long episode as a Halloween treat after hearing positive word. The premise and talent involved definitely had me curious, despite rebooting or reimagining a familiar property for TV being a dicey prospect (Battlestar Galactica at one recent extreme, Wonder Woman at the other). Even after it was passed over for this season, Lane apparently had an outside shot at being picked up for 2013 if it turned out to be an October surprise. I’m not sure that a 1.5 rating/5 share in the 18-49 demo, 5.47 million viewers overall, is enough to do the trick but this was a Friday on a tentatively resurgent network.
Anyway, I’d like to see more.
While the original 1964-66 Munsters was a childhood staple in reruns, I’ve never watched the various spinoffs or revivals. Mockingbird Lane not only recast the parts; unlike the 1988-91 sequel series The Munsters Today it reworked the nuances within the familiar broad strokes of the concept. Its pilot introduces the Munster family as if for the first time, with Marilyn finding the perfect residence for herself, cousin Eddie, his mom Lily, his father Herman, and Grandpa in the form of a condemned mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in Mockingbird Heights, California (I think). The Munsters need to relocate thanks to the unfortunate side effects of Eddie, unaware that he’s a werewolf, going through puberty: During the full moon he wreaks havoc on a scout-troop camping trip.
Grandpa is slightly desiccated thanks to no longer “drinking” — a habit that he threatens to resume — and Herman does have visible scars, yet the family otherwise nearly looks as normal as Marilyn, the non-supernatural black sheep. Mason Cook’s Eddie doesn’t have the fangs, pointed ears, or widow’s peak of jet-black hair sported by Butch Patrick; Jerry O’Connell’s Herman lacks the flat head and neck bolts worn by Fred Gwynne in parody of the creature played by Boris Karloff in Universal’s Frankenstein movies.
I found O’Connell as Herman to be the pilot’s weak link. Perhaps due to O’Connell’s passing resemblance to Jason Bateman and the presence of the divine Portia de Rossi (so perfect a foil of Bateman’s in Arrested Development) gone brunette as Lily Munster, I kept expecting O’Connell to have Bateman’s subtle charisma and bite. The show would’ve done better to cast the pilot’s pivotal guest star Cheyenne Jackson as Herman and retain a smidgen of the galumphing puppy-dog feel that Gwynne brought to the original Munsters. Eddie Izzard as Grandpa was similarly poles apart from the beloved Al Lewis, but in ways that worked. For me the big surprise was a certain indescribable tartness brought to the role of Marilyn by unknown Charity Wakefield.
Mockingbird Lane came with a pedigree that frankly outclassed its source material. Bryan Fuller, who developed it and wrote the pilot, is the creator of Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies as well as the co-creator of the too-short-lived Wonderfalls. This pilot was directed by Bryan Singer, famous for The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men films, infamous for Superman Returns. Guillermo Navarro, frequent collaborator of Guillermo del Toro (including on Pan’s Labyrinth, a personal favorite), served as the pilot’s cinematographer. I wish that I could say that the pilot was at least the sum of its impressive parts, but honestly I was underwhelmed. And yet the pilot did its job, because I genuinely want to see where the series would go from here and I’m sorry
that I probably won’t get to.
Did you watch Mockingbird Lane, and if so, what did you think?
Related: A Curious Case of Bedrooms and Buttons •
We Got a Live One Here • Bedtimes and Broomsticks
Keitel Records
You think you’re done with “Call Me Maybe”? You cringe when your car radio lands on it for even a moment? You swear that no cover, mashup, or parody could ever get you to listen to that song again?
I’m here to sympathize but also to tell you that you must hear it one more time, at least if you haven’t yet seen the Night of Too Many Stars duet between Harvey Keitel and Carly Rae Jepsen. Keitel pulls a William Shatner by doing his part as a spoken-word performance exactly as you’d imagine Harvey Keitel would.
Night of Too Many Stars is the biennial variety-show founded by Robert Smigel and hosted by Jon Stewart to benefit autism programs. This year’s edition aired last Sunday on Comedy Central as a live telethon with clips from a show held the previous Sunday at New York City’s Beacon Theatre. Other standout moments included Katy Perry singing “Firework” with 11-year-old Jodi DiPiazza and Louis CK auctioning off a holiday-card photo with Al Pacino.
[Update: My links have unfortunately all gone bad, although if you find and enjoy the material elsewhere online you can hopefully likewise find a way to donate.]
Related: Gift Rap • Muppet Monday • Crazy Talk
The Garlicks Is Cookin’
Lea Hernandez has less than 48 hours to go in the campaign to raise money for her project The Garlicks on Indiegogo.
Images © 2012 and characters TM Lea Hernandez.
So yeah, I’m putting up this post kind-of late, but that’s no reflection on my enthusiasm; I also figured, maybe wrongly, that promoting the project towards the end rather than towards the beginning might be better. Anyway...
The Garlicks is the tale of young Pandora Garlick and her family. Pan’s mom is a human who runs a butcher shop. Pan’s dad is a vampire barista. Pan’s baby sister, Ham, turns into a fishbat — that’s right: a fishbat — while Pan can’t turn into anything at all. But she can and does make comics inspired by her crazy life.
Joker Lice
Along with my verification-word definitions — like yesterday’s — I’ve made a small running thing out of sharing weird search terms that Blogger’s Stats info says lead people here.
My first such post was in January; the second one, in April, was titled after one of those oddball terms, as is this one. To cut to the chase: I can’t find a record of joker lice being a thing, in Gotham City or anywhere else.
A dozen more strange — or in a couple of cases, strangely mundane — search terms, some of which totally befuddle me not only inherently but in how they led people here:
15-year-old with a fencing sword
action figure rod stewart
business team with laptops in the white cubes
The Meaning of It All
I’ll have legally been 42 for 24 hours at the stroke of midnight. Regular visitors here
will recognize this post’s title as referring not just to my age, per an earlier post today, but fitting the pattern of my occasional volleys of word-verification definitions (collected and explained for the uninitiated at that link). I’ve taken to publishing these when I expect the blog to lie fallow for a spell, as well as simply when the mood strikes, but while I can see some things getting in the way of new posts over the next couple of weeks I confess that I’m not yet sure to which scenario this entry applies.
• androjor — [an dro jor] n. Robot duplicate of Superman’s Kryptonian father.
• bucritas — [buh kree tahss] pl. n. A Mexican dish made from pirate meat.
• cobside — [kob syd] adj. Near an ear of corn.
• dingdoc — [ding dok] n. Popular subgenre in Australian cinema of nature films featuring wild dogs.
• entheist (1) — [en thee ist] n. One who worships the 14th letter of the English alphabet.
42 Is Me
When the dad of a dear friend gave me a copy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 5th grade — for me, obviously, not for him — I’m sure I didn’t think of the cosmically resonant number of 42 in terms of the age I’d be over three decades hence.
And yet here we are. I don’t know if reaching, in human years, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything will impact my existence in any positive way but it’d sure be nice.
Power to the People
I’m afraid that I don’t have much nice to say about...
The episode was a letdown, overall — just sort-of meh, really, as opposed to spectacularly bad in ways that prompt their own kind of commentary. I can’t recall when (if ever) Fringe left me feeling that way before. Has it frustrated me? Yes. Has
it grossed me out? For sure. Has it turned in a lackluster installment that felt like the script needed, minimum, one more pass? Dunno ’bout that.
Which is a particular shame given how, per my choice of Beatles title for this post, “The Recordist” kicks off what appears to be the impetus for at least a good early-to-middle chunk of this final, 13-episode season.
41 Favorites: #7-9
For my 40th birthday, I jotted down a list of some of my favorite things to prompt a series of occasional posts. My aim was to periodically knock out brief entries that cover a variety of subjects, as I’d been retreating from new content due to frustration with the constant gremlins.
That was two years ago. I had to switch the title from 40 Favorites to 41 Favorites in 2011 and I’ve only added three installments since then — including this one. Sunday,
I’ll need to renumber the series again.
Anyhoo; I’d prefer to talk about...
7. coffee
Oh, I loves me the coffee.
To many folks it’s merely a delivery system for a vital dose of caffeine, and I’m not above using it that way myself. While caffeine is a vasoconstrictor that’s often helpful in alleviating migraines, however, I’m among the minority for whom it’s a soporific rather than a stimulant; I could very well get a brief jolt from it neurologically, were you to look at a brain scan, but I’ll begin to get sleepy from a cup of strong coffee in short order. (I’ve gone off of caffeine entirely in the name of eliminating potential rebound or caffeine-withdrawal headaches from the picture, twice, and the tradeoff was not worth it. Migraines still abound. It’s way better to have caffeine in the arsenal even though going too long without caffeine after regular caffeine intake will probably trigger a headache.)
Mother
I was a little concerned about using up “Mother” this soon, as we’ll doubtless get another episode about the Olivia & Etta dynamic before Fringe is over; there are now fewer than a dozen episodes left, however, and I’ve learned not to be too precious
about such things.
Here, partly in honor of Walter’s addled state but largely because it’s all I’m able to put together, are some disjointed musings on...
No Swedish or Portuguese, I promise.
Yellow Submarine
With its fifth and final season, Fringe has entered a new dimension. Or is that descriptor inadvisable, lest the senses of the word be confused? The series has, of course, built much of its mythology on travel to a parallel Earth: Over There, a.k.a. the Other Side, home to doppelgangers of our heroes and villains. Instead, Fringe’s future lies in the actual — well, the fictional actual — future, as viewers had already been made aware through advance promotion and was seen on Friday night in the Season Five opener...
I’ll get back to the future shortly. First I want to welcome any new readers by way of giving these writeups (and their names) some context.
Spamalittlemore
The downside to not sharing my entries in hashtag games here within a day or so of them being a thing on Twitter is that anyone interested in heading over there to see the full range of contributions will turn up zilch.
Maybe a hashtag comes back into fashion or someone joins in late or a totally different group of people hit on the same idea, maybe, but those earlier entries are gone. Twits seem to leave Twitter’s institutional memory pretty quickly, unless there are tricks to its search function I don’t know about (which is very, very possible). You can at least head to my own Favorites on Twitter, scroll down a bit, and see a heaping handful of others’ offerings that I found amusing enough to save. It’s not at all the same, though, as being in the thick of it — and this one, #unpromisingsequels, was a good one.
And so, in roughly the order they were posted, it’s time for my...
Top Twenty-Five Unpromising Sequels
25. The Day After the Day After
24. Hastily-Dressed Lunch
23. Monday in the Park without George
22. Acquaintances on a Train
21. Love in the Time of Cholera Vaccines
20. The Executive Producers
19. Fiddler at the Window
18. Evaporation Man
17. The Well-Scrubbed Dozen
Fight and Flight
I dreamt the other night that someone who’d offered to subsidize my blog to the
tune of about $20,000 wanted to back out.
My blog in the dream wasn’t quite this blog; it focused more heavily on analysis of TV series the way I’d actually like to but don’t have time for, episode by episode, as Nikki Stafford has done most notably with Lost. This benefactor was upset that I wasn’t covering an obscure-to-me British show — I want to say Time Bandits, had there been
a spinoff of the movie, although it might have been something similar that really exists and which only my subconscious remembers. I countered that what I was covering, Fringe and stuff, was the sort of thing, as with Lost and X-Files and Star Trek in past years, that people seriously glommed onto and discussed. We fought a bit, physically, and I told him that I was happy to return his money.
Just then, naturally, Johanna Draper Carlson approached me on behalf of a group of her friends who, based on a movie they’d seen, needed to acquire both a longsword and a dagger hidden far away. She knew that I could fly in my dreams and she wanted me
to fly her to the dagger. I obliged.
Related: HIVE-Minded • Dream a Little Dream of Meep;
or, The Subconscious and the Frog • Of Was and When
Star Trek Too
Last Friday the title of the 2013 sequel to J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek movie was announced. The site at the preceding link and other news outlets report it as Star Trek Into Darkness [sic].
Um... Okay.
I hope that, if the title sticks, someone at Bad Robot or Paramount realizes that it
either has to be Star Trek: Into Darkness or Star Trek into Darkness, with the preposition uncapitalized.
A Gaiman View
In early August, Miss Violet DeVille asked for suggestions on Twitter for the title of a burlesque show based on the work of Neil Gaiman.
Naturally, I threw out a few ideas. They all riffed on Gaiman book titles; at least one of them was redundant to someone quicker on the draw.
While I’ve been thinking about running them on the blog as a Top X list, there are just five — and that’s counting the one that I came up with belatedly for the title of this post. So I decided to monkey with the covers to the books in question to spice things up visually. Comme ça:
You’re not gonna get these if you aren’t familiar with the original books, of course.
Joe Kubert 1926-2012
Art from cover to Joe Kubert Presents #1 © 2012 DC Comics.
Joe Kubert died three weeks ago yesterday, on Aug. 12th, at the age of 85.
Anyone who follows comics knows this already, thanks to news sites, social networks, etc., and has almost surely seen a fuller portrait of the man than I can provide. I’ve been wanting to put up at least a brief post about him, though, for the benefit of readers who come here mostly for the non-comics stuff I muse upon yet still have some curiosity about this strange demimonde that’s begun spawning billion-dollar movies. Jack Kirby, discussed the other day, may have been the King of Comics — to mix metaphors, perhaps part of American comics’ Holy Trinity, with Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman, in terms of establishing its visual language — but Kubert was at least a Great Duke. Joe Kubert art is, to his eternal credit, as unmistakable as it is beautiful.
The Late Posts
I’ll get to the Jack Kirby of it all in a moment.
Splash panel of The Black Racer from The New Gods #3 © 1971
DC Comics. Script, Pencils: Jack Kirby. Inks: Vince Colletta.
Letters: John Costanza. Colors: Unknown.
Decades before The Late Show was the title of David Letterman’s CBS alternative to
Jay Leno, it was the rather generic name of wee-hours broadcasts of old movies on local TV stations. The phrase also came to be used, with morbid punnery, for the Oscars’ familiar montage of industry folks who’d passed away in the previous year.
Ol’ Pointy Ears Is Back
That’s Leonard Nimoy hitting the skins next to Adam West.
I came across this photo from the late 1960s, photographer and location unknown
to me, via one blog link that led to another. You know how it goes. I hit a wall once a Tumblr post led to a Facebook page that I can’t access ’cause I’m not on Facebook.
Hungry Like Marv Wolfman
My old buddy Stefan Blitz, proprietor of Forces of Geek, mused on Twitter several weeks ago that if he opened a restaurant themed around people who created comics the menu would include Joe Quesadilla, Howard Chicken, and Darwyn Cookies.
Which means nothing if you aren’t in the loop and don’t appreciate the puns, but I got
a smile out of it — and the idea to brainstorm my...
Top Eighteen Dishes, Drinks, and Desserts
Served at the Comics-Creators Cafe
18. Karen Burgers
17. Gary Franks
16. Tuna Isabella
15. Veal Adams
14. Clams Robins
13. P. Craig Mussels
12. Marie Severin-Layer Dip
11. Nachos Whedon
Neil Armstrong 1930-2012
We’ve lost Neil Armstrong to the stars at the age of 81.
Neil Armstrong in the Eagle module after the moonwalk.
Photo: Buzz Aldrin for NASA.
An obituary up on the NASA website includes excerpts from and links to statements from the Armstrong family, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, and President Barack Obama. The page also has embedded video of Armstrong and links to information on the historic moon landing of July 20th, 1969.
Game Faces
I’m a few weeks late in bidding aloha to the Flyin’ Hawaiian, Shane Victorino.
Photo: Jeff Robertson for The Associated Press © 2012.
He was traded by the Phillies on July 31st to the LA Dodgers — who drafted him
back in 1999, although his Major League debut came with San Diego. The Padres got him as a Rule 5 selection, just as the Phils did in 2005. In the past seven years the goofy, hardscrabble Victorino was sent to two All-Star Games, rode in one World
Series parade, and got lodged in the hearts of thousands if not millions of fans.
Dragon Tale
I didn’t read any reviews of Rachel Hartman’s delightful fantasy novel, Seraphina, before settling in to enjoy. The little I knew already felt like more than I should. A secret carried by the title character is revealed to the reader fairly early on and, I think, to be suspected well before that; still, even if a good story is often less about the What than about the How and the Why and the consequences of the What, it’s best to let the story unfold on its own terms.
Avoiding chatter about Seraphina was hard because Hartman’s novel is clearly what they call in the book trade a triumphant debut.
Five-Panel Draw
I was quite taken by the following sequence from The Uncanny X-Men #166,
dated Feb. 1983.
Excerpt from The Uncanny X-Men #166 © 1982 and characters TM/® Marvel Comics.
Script: Chris Claremont. Pencils: Paul Smith. Inks: Bob Wiacek. Colors: Glynis
Wein/Oliver. Letters: Tom Orzechowski. Editing: Louise Jones/Simonson.
The set of five panels is at the bottom of Pg. 12 of the issue’s story, “Live Free or Die!”, drawn by Paul Smith in his second issue as penciler of the series.
If you’re unfamiliar with the issue and would like some context, you can head over to my friend Teebore’s post on it — the reason I was rereading the issue in the first place. What I have to say about the panels below is taken from comments I made there, but I thought I’d repost the passage here even though I’m on a bit of a vacation. It seems fitting to be publishing this analysis online from the same library where I did my first historical and critical reading about comics as a kid 35 years ago.
Midsummer’s Meaning
With new posts being sparse here lately and several months having passed since my
last volley of word-verification definitions, I declare it time for another.
The backlog is growing short, as I wrote earlier this year, thanks to Blogger’s switch
in formats yielding less choice material. I’ll probably close the door on this series after
a few more installments, based on current reserves and the sluggish pace at which new entires are added to my stockpile, whereas for quite some time after I began the well was replenished at a strong, steady pace. You are hereby referred to my stand-alone page collecting past entries, where this phenomenon is explained, if it’s unfamiliar to you.
• agamsee — [uh gam see] phr. Edward G. Robinson pointing out some dame’s leg.
• clonyma — [kloh nee mah] n. Your mother’s genetically engineered duplicate.
• counduct — [kown dukt] n. How Dracula behaves.
• daymews — [day myooz] pl.n. My cat’s morning wake-up sounds.
• eReese — n. A peanut-butter cup you can eat in Second Life. (Is that still a thing?)
He Was Not The Joker
Nor was he Batman.
He was (is) a horrifyingly real person, this deranged individual who took a dozen lives during a 12:01 a.m. screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado.
“I don’t want to know this man’s name,” Dan Slott posted early Friday on Twitter. “I don’t want him to gain any kind of notoriety. He should vanish from history.”
Like a lot of people, I’m with Slott, and I won’t be referring to the perpetrator by name here. Even the least sensationalized news of the shooting has to do just that as a matter of factual reporting, of course — the kind of reporting, sadly, that was in short supply early on, leading to erroneous associations on the part of more than one news outlet between the shooter and political movements on both sides of the spectrum.
The Amazing Spider-Man
Minus Andrew Garfield Plus Garfield
![Andrew Garfield in costume as Spider-Man, mask in hand, with his head replaced by that of Garfield the cat and text reading 'With great power there must also come great lasagnability' [sic: luh-zan-ya-bil-it-ee]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSefTwOXCJm50xWFoPohPNd9Rwb4UmD63E-6PwdAOzjnhb2ZYQ8mRKAht0RjPvLwty94NXgN7-_lDmuBbO8-kheQsXh5ZUx9fbyiTCFV-6q3VUrn4Zt6AVxVmuyDDk0Wd5dv0fn3BVEQhU/s1600/SpiderManGarfield-Lasagnability.jpg "''I hate Mondays and also the guy who shot my Uncle Ben.''")
You've heard of Garfield Minus Garfield?
Here's... well, I think the post title says it all. [Update: Now on Tumblr!]
Related: Losing It • Huston, We Have Amalgam • Jawn of
Justice • They’re Magically Suspicious • For Pete's Sake
HIVE Minded
The other night I had a rather strange dream.
I have strange dreams often, as I’ve mentioned here before — you can see all of my dream posts if you’re intrigued by what follows — but the strange thing about this one was how of-the-moment it was. Upon waking it would be the 4th of July and my blogging buddy Teebore’s next installment of his issue-by-issue X-Men analysis would be published; both figured into the dream. Sometimes I’m more surprised by dreams that relate to my actual everyday existence than those in which I’m playing for the Phillies or meeting Queen Elizabeth or hanging out with the Avengers.
When this dream began I was drawing, an activity in which I rarely engage anymore
in waking life as it’s a lot harder physically than it used to be, yet one that I occasionally find myself pursuing in dreams — perhaps to keep those creative muscles limber, if
only inside my head. That drawing, centered on Superman, was getting to be rather intricate, too, I realized as I was inking it (n.b., “inking” = the stage of applying black ink by pen, marker, or brush to finish line artwork for reproduction once it's been drawn in pencil).
The ’Works
At times like this I’m glad that I don’t believe in Hell, ’cause I’d probably send myself there purely by virtue (or actually, vice) of being snarky to the kids in my family.
We’d just started to watch the 4th of July display earlier tonight when I told my cousin’s 9-year-old daughter L that fireworks were made by catching fairies, strapping them to small rockets, and shooting them into the sky.
“Do the fairies get hurt?” (L said this with a sly smile, playing along. She’s a smart cookie — loves reading, has a high BS meter.)
“That’s why we clap so hard during the finale,” I replied. “We have to bring them back, like with Tinkerbell in Peter Pan.”
Adventures in Maybe Twitting
I am now on Twitter.
I’ve just sent the 20 characters above as my first Twit, in fact. (Like I said a couple of posts ago, I can’t accept “tweet” as either a noun or a verb when it comes to Twitter. It’s not called Tweeter. It’s called Twitter and so using the service is “twitting” or Twittering and the messages are Twits or perhaps Twitterings.)
My Twitter handle is @BrianLamken. I found out quite a while back that @blamken
was already taken; I rejected @blamsblog or something else along those lines because that would look weird when people use my handle to refer to me as a person — “still waiting for @BrianLamken to show up” — and @BrianSanerLamken is too long.
I don’t expect to Twitter out many Twits of my own for a while, although enthusiasm may get the better of me. Eventually I’ll be promoting the blog and other stuff when
my online activity increases, fingers crossed, and I’m sure that the more I follow other people on Twitter the more I’ll want to join the conversation. For now, I’ve signed up mostly in the name of checking out the feeds of friends and acquaintances and folks I admire without having to click through from their own websites and such to catch up.
I won’t make any promises but if you follow me I will very possibly follow you.
Related: Twitter-Pated • Spamalittlemore • Uh-Oh
Robert L. Washington III 1964-2012
Digital version of newsstand cover to Static #1 © 1993 Milestone Media.
Pencils: Denys Cowan. Inks: Jimmy Palmiotti. Colors: Noelle Giddings.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
M*S*H
Just few years after the team’s 1963 debut on newsstands, the Avengers leapt from comic books to television in episodes of The Marvel Super-Heroes — a syndicated block of five rotating features produced by Grantray-Lawrence, 13 three-part episodes apiece, that aired in various US markets either on its own or within a locally hosted children’s program.
S Is for...
… Sonja from Sweden — the latest citizen curator of the official @Sweden Twitter account — who last week twitted out some controversial questions and comments on a certain subject that have spurred me to share a short soliloquy about schmutz.
I can’t use the verb (or noun) “tweet” unless we’re talking about birds. Call your
service Tweeter if you want “tweets” to be “tweeted”. If it’s Twitter, the gerund is either “Twittering” or the backwards formation “twitting” and the messages are Twits. Since Twitter and other social-media platforms that encourage short bursts of prose or graphics are considered “microblogging” that would make the entries “microposts”.
All I know is that I just refuse to say “tweet”.
Where was I? Oh, right... This:
This was sent out under the aegis of the actual country of Sweden. It was not any random little Twit from a random little twit. Sweden, in a grand experiment with vox populi democracy or individualism or whatever, has been handing over the official Twitter feed of the nation to a different Swede every week. Sonja is a young Swedish woman who seems to think that Jews as well as a select number of sneaky non-Jew decoys have multiple penises.
Ozy Ozy Ozy
I know that the above pic won’t mean anything to anyone who hasn’t both read Watchmen and seen Game of Thrones, but I’m guessing that a fair percentage of
this blog’s dedicated visitors meet those criteria.
Lead the Wild Rumpus, Stark!
Or Cap. Whomever. I’d have figured Cap, y’know, but Tony has such an ego and he
is carrying Loki’s staff.
You can view the above collision between the mourning of Maurice Sendak’s
passing and the celebration of The Avengers’ success at a larger size — and download it in greater resolution for use as screen “wallpaper” or printing out — at its home post over at the DeviantArt site of its creator.
Related: The A Team • Maurice Sendak 1928-2012 • Huston, We Have Amalgam
Plumped-Up Lips
I linked to a clip of a genius song parody called “Hunger Games” a while back. Not
only did it mash up the concept of the book and movie of that name with Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games”; it did the job almost too well. The voice and images were eerily spot-on, putting that song back on heavy rotation in my head — along with Foster the People’s “Pumped-Up Kicks”, for the simple if admittedly odd reason that I’d already imagined rewriting its lyrics to skewer Ms. Del Rey (born Elizabeth Woolrich Grant). Like...
Exile in Jayville
Last Thursday Conan O’Brien, now holding court weeknights on TBS’s Conan, stopped by CBS’s The Late Show with David Letterman to chat with Dave about something the hosts rather infamously have in common.
I refer of course to sons playing tee-ball.
They also found time to discuss each man, in his own way, having been screwed out
of the former marquee gig in late-night broadcasting — Johnny Carson’s (and Jack Paar’s and Steve Allen’s) old chair behind the Tonight Show desk — by NBC in favor of Jay Leno. It’s a metaphorical chair, to be sure; Tonight hasn’t been filmed in the studio Carson used, let alone with the same “home base” furniture and props, since Johnny left. And the TV landscape sure isn’t the same as it was when Conan took over the post-Tonight slot at NBC from Dave when Letterman went to CBS to challenge Leno, never mind how different it is from Carson’s heyday.
The A Team
So have you heard about this little movie called The Avengers?
I not only saw it — opening day, which is always fun but for the past dozen or so years not something that I’ve been able to count on doing — I’ve written about it as well; that commentary just hasn’t made its way here yet. My actual review of the Joss Whedon jam will hopefully be along shortly after these musings on its revenue and other impressive statistics.
Sweet 16
The first time I saw her, Pebbles was basically trying to climb into the sky.
She stood atop one of those several-feet-tall posts made not just for scratching but
for perching, known as cat trees, all stretched out — balanced in fact on the very apex
of it. And this lovely, lithe orange Creamsicle of a kitten actually pushed at the ceiling tiles with her paws.
Her name wasn’t Pebbles then. It was Honey, and her brother’s was Ashley. My wife and I were only too happy to get a package deal — there were two of us; two cats made sense — and the shelter was glad to have the siblings go to the same home, even as we got some grief in passing from an aide there about how people always wanted to adopt the youngest cats.
Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, as we named them, were born on May 15th and 8 months old according to their papers. I believe they lived briefly with another family before going to the shelter, but we didn’t really get much info.
Prom Numbers
I came up with a dozen entries for the Late Show with David Letterman website’s current Top Ten contest. You probably know the drill by now but in case you don’t there’s an explanation of how it works in one of my first blogposts — although winners no longer get prizes beyond satisfaction and bragging rights.
Categories are usually either seasonal or keyed to something in the news, and this week’s is no different, being...
My Top Twelve Least-Popular 2012 Prom Themes
12. Let’s All Judge Each Other One Last Time
11. Our Favorite Student/Faculty Romances
10. Party Like We’ll All Have Jobs
9. What Would Jesus Dance?
8. A Night Away from Algebra and In-School Day Care
7. Mimes! Mimes! Mimes!
Maurice Sendak 1928-2012
Even with far more time and attention than I have right now it wouldn’t be possible to do justice to Maurice Sendak with this post.
Sendak passed yesterday, at the age of 83, following a stroke. His career spanned
65 years and nearly 100 books as well as notable work in other media. You can find a timeline of his life and creations at the website of The Rosenbach Museum & Library, whose director also offers a nice remembrance of that Philadelphia institution’s relationship with the Brooklyn-born Sendak. (If you’re ever in town, I recommend a visit to the place — its collection includes a large repository of Lewis Carroll memorabilia, James Joyce’s handwritten manuscript to Ulysses, and “over 10,000 Sendak objects, including original drawings, preliminary sketches, manuscripts, photographs, proofs, and rare prints of Sendak books.” Don’t forget to sample the incunabula!)
Spamabit
I don’t usually have much good to say about the service that hosts this blog. To be
fair and give credit where it’s due, I’ll repeat that in addition to being free — without requiring advertising of any kind, a big plus to me — Blogger’s spam filter works very well. Frankly, I can’t recall a single instance of ’bot messages getting through
since I opted to turn off word verification on comments earlier this year in the wake
of the service’s switch to a much uglier, more onerous CAPTCHA format.
While the blog has in fact been getting more spam than it used to, all of that spam is getting queued up in a virtual folder to await my attention as it should. It seems like more spam comments made it through in the past, too, which leads me to suspect that in a rare instance of foresight Blogger worked to shore up its filtering in anticipation
of users ditching verification after the recent change.
Most of what got through were strings of Chinese hànzì characters that translated to
a vaguely poetic phrase and linked to sites featuring images of scantily-clad women if not outright porn. And porn is, no surprise, still the #1 destination for most of the spam that the filter catches, but for every few “comments” that nakedly hawk pics of nude celebrities there’s one that pretends to be actual conversation with poetry of its own — in English; often broken English to be sure, yet therein lies much of the skewed poetry.
“You can definitely see your expertise within the paintings you write,” one especially lyrical slice of spam read. “The world hopes for more passionate writers like you who are not afraid to mention how they believe. All the time go after your heart.”
I was almost touched.
