Posts from — March 2008

Erin told me the bad news about Salem MacGourley tonight.

Despite having never met Salem, his curmudgeonly charm and obsession with Doctor Who and poisonous women made him a sort of kindred spirit, and I don’t know that, after the day I’ve had, I have the fortitude to really cope with even a second or third hand loss of this caliber.

I wish someone had noticed the signs a bit sooner. They’re saying that Salem was t-boned by an Oscar-Mayer Weinermobile, and that has to be the most ignoble fate that I can even imagine.

I’m so sorry.

I know he’ll never read it, but I’m going to leave a comment here, and encourage you guys to do the same, like some sort of internet memorial.

So, pal April tells me about Pet rentals.

members can spend from just a few hours to a number of days with each of our dogs.

Listen, as someone who likes animals and works a lot, I can’t even justify it to myself as a good idea. If I suggested it to my wife, who is busier than I am and wants a dog more, she would firebomb their offices.

I mean, really.

Really.

The amazing saga of 31st century ultraviolence draws to a close with this final round of Bahlactus’s current series of Friday Night Fights.

For the finale, I wanted to pull something from one of my favorite LSH stories, the big Legion of Super-Villains confrontation that kicked off the book’s Baxter series.

I thought about the Karate Kid/Nemesis Kid fight, and remembered that KK goes out like a punk.
I thought about Projectra’s execution of Nemesis Kid, but as awesome as it is, the grim work of it happens off-screen.

The good news about this particular story is that every Legionnaire gets a chance to play a little chin music, almost as though they were an orchestra of punching.

But the best of those is by far, this educational tidbit from Ultra Boy:

Thus endeth the lesson.

Recently, someone remarked that I’ve really gone over to the comics blog dark side of late and I haven’t really talked about horror cinema with any real depth in quite some time.

This is true, and I plan to rectify the hell out of it.

I’m about to watch Wedding Slashers. I’ve heard some mildly positive things about it, and the one-sheet has a bloody cake on it. So, right there, that’s worth my time. I love cake.

If the Marvel_B0y fiasco is truly some viral marketing perpetrated by Marvel (and who knows? Maybe it’s a viral from the House of Shamus, but one thing I’m sure it’s not is the legitimate diary of a bottom-rung Marvel employee) then I have to admit it’s an act of brave, insane genius.

If it is Marvel doing it, they’re basically giving fans what they want - spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, and a sense that they know somebody inside the building, someone who will justify their irrational hatred of Brian Bendis and Joe Quesada by agreeing with it. Marvel_B0y is giving them rumors to circulate and mull over, and the best part about internet rumor is the cloud of blog posts and backlinks all talking about how to fix Dr. Strange, for instance, without one dime spent promoting his upcoming book.

The Quesada-led Marvel, for all of the criticisms I could level against it, has always understood one thing - that the industry thrives on showmanship every bit as much as it does on art or story. And Quesada has been more than happy to don a quasi-repugnant PT Barnum persona in front of crowds and cameras; just go to one of his con panels.

After all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

I basically have no willpower. After Sarah’s subtle peer pressure, I too joined the ‘owns a Mighty Muggs Chewbacca‘ club.

It is arrayed amongst the other painfully trendy accouterments that grace my desk. Envy me.

That’s gonna leave a mark.

Gim may be colossal, but ain’t nobody as big as Bahlactus.

So, people are dogpiling on Barack Obama because of racially charged remarks made by his pastor.

Really? I mean, I guess so, because some of the crowd outside of his appearance at Whistle’s Pub in Scranton earlier this week were protesting him because of it. Meanwhile, some Obama supporters at a pro-Hillary rally in Wilkes-Barre had their signs forcibly removed from them, though that’s really neither here nor there.

I think the reason that so many people are upset about this mess is that Rev. Wright is right about at least some of what he’s talking about. Inflammatory? Yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad or wrong; anyone who wants to tell you that ‘he shouldn’t be allowed to say those things’ is far more dangerous.

Just because he’s made some unpopular remarks, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Obama agrees with those remarks. Maybe it’s because I’m too much of a centrist at heart, but I don’t have much of a problem judging a person’s politics separately from their worth as a human being. I can like you just fine if you’re conservative, and I think there are several conservatives who like me just fine even if I am filthy leftist scum.

The real issue, though, is this: If we’re judging people by what their pastors say, then we’re basically all screwed. That’s not anti-religious claptrap, either, because…well, hell, I go to church every week, and I’m fairly religious, and wow, do I not want to be associated with some of the things that my pastor says.

I mean, the guys routinely preaches right-wing politics from the pulpit, and has actually uttered the words “a woman’s place is in the home.” Suffice it to say that the wife and I don’t exactly hold with his views. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to pull up stakes and find another parish, as much as I may want to sometimes. Hey, I’m no fan of the priest who married us, either, but I don’t have to be. On the other hand, I went to a Catholic college, and a Catholic grad school, and I teach at a Catholic college; I’ve met plenty of priests from both sides of the political fence who I get along really well with. One even hustled me at pool.

Short version: if you think that a pastor has any more real influence over an intelligent, self-actualized adult than the milkman or the butcher, you’re fooling yourself.

One of the staple revelations of horror is that everything you know is wrong, a comfortable lie concocted to allow you to carry on with life because the truth would make you break permanently with reality.

And no, I’m not talking about the revelation that one’s world is no bigger than a speck of dust or the revelation that the Supreme Being is a bumbling giant elephant, I’m talking about Katie:

Even before she spouts off talk of rainbow-eating ponies, this thing terrifies me. I mean, I have nightmares.

I’d talk about how I enjoyed the rest of the movie, but I was hiding under my seat for most of its runtime.

Over at Popgeek, Matt graced the Internet with a second installment of his Pop Autopsy series: a scathing dissection of The Fray’s “How To Save A Life.” I had a long comment on Matt’s post completed, and then WordPress errored out when I tried to submit it. Instead of bothering to type the whole thing out again, I figured I may as well try to get an actual post out of it.

“How to Save a Life” is a dangerous song. Dangerous because its catchy piano line and its amenable, airbrushed kind of sound make it listenable. Listen to the song long enough, and you completely forget that it’s terrible.

The main problem? That the perspective shifts near-randomly between 2nd and 1st person, completely occluding any sense of story within the song’s events. Instead of connecting with You and He (and sometimes I), the listener is too busy trying to figure out who they are. The ‘you’ the songwriter keeps using is a trigger to self-identify; when what they’re telling me I’m doing and what I’m doing don’t match, that causes dissonance, and I go, “This song is inane,” while briefly considering a headlong drive into a telephone pole or bridge or the dining area of a Burger King, simply to make it all stop.

The song irritates me because of my students. Not that any of them are big The Fray fans, but the band falls prey to two of the kids’ biggest problems: a reliance on the second person point of view and a damning lack of specificity.

The only places where it’s acceptable to write in the second person are Choose Your Own Adventure books or Dungeons and Dragons adventures. Unfortunately, it happens all the time in student writing. “When your friends betray you,” one might write, “the betrayal you feel is intense.” Some well-meaning high school writing teacher must have told each of their students that the word “I” has no place in academic writing, because I have seen students contort their sentences to nigh-German lengths in order to avoid the word. Far easier is word substitution, like switching in a completely different pronoun.

And while I’m ranting, why not give these people names? A lack of specific detail just puts more distance between the text and the reader, The Fray.

The question that comes to mind the most when I hear “How to Save a Life” is probably, “Who the hell is the narrator?” Is it a creepy stalker, a voice in the protagonist’s head, or perhaps an observing star looking down from the heavens, just like in that one 90210 Christmas episode?

And whose life is at stake here? Unless there’s some cruel subtext buried in the physicality of the songwriter’s word choice, I don’t think anybody dies. Is the chorus some metaphor for broken hearts or some other sophomoric nonsense? The song reminds me a bit of “Brick” by Ben Folds Five. Folds wrote the verses about his girlfriend’s traumatic abortion, but the chorus came from bandmate Darren Jesse and was, at the time, unrelated to the content of the song. Of course, the final product of sober, personal lyrics and an iconic chorus works in a way that ties the two together inextricably. But, of course, that’s not always the case, as we see here.