A brief note....

For some reason, a bunch of comments that I approved either yesterday or earlier today didn't go through after I approved them the first time, so I've just approved them the second time. If that's one of yours, sorry! It happens from time to time.

The Ball of the Foot

Football rules! A couple of notes on Saturday's NFL playoff action:

:: Aaron Rodgers's line in Green Bay's blowout victory over the top-seeded Falcons: 31 of 36, 366 yards, 3 TDs, 0 INTs. That's about as good a performance you'll ever see in a playoff win. There might be a new postseason legend being born, up there in Green Bay. He did that without a bye week, on the road, in a dome, against the conference's top seeded team. Wow.

:: Depressing thought that I try not to remember every time Aaron Rodgers plays, and yet I end up remembering it anyway: The Bills could have drafted him, had they not traded up the year before for JP Losman.



:: I'm starting to think that all future editions of Webster's English Dictionary should just put a picture of the Pittsburgh Steelers' logo next to their entry for "consistency". They are going to their eighth AFC Championship Game since the 1994 season, and they have in that span never gone more than four years without reaching the conference title match. That is amazing.

And I recall, when Bill Cowher stepped down as Steelers coach, some people said that he wasn't really that great of a winner, as he only managed to produce a single Super Bowl win in his fifteen seasons there. Setting aside a troublingly-growing tendency among sports fans and writers to equate "winning" with "winning the Super Bowl", this still strikes me as a very odd thing to say. Before Cowher had Ben Roethlisberger, he was regularly reaching the AFC Championship with the likes of Neil O'Donnell, Kordell Stewart, and Tommy Maddox as his quarterbacks. Don't tell me that guy wasn't a winner.

:: I hope John Cole doesn't mind me stealing his photo, but this is too great not to share:



Tomorrow, of course, brings us the Patriots hosting the Jets...which means that the Evilest Team in the NFL will host the Annoyingest Team in the NFL. I don't even know who to root for in this one; I suppose I should root for the Jets, because I don't think they can beat the Steelers again, and it would be nice to see Saint Tom Brady (Most Overrated Guy In Sports!) take a hit to the reputation again. But I don't see it happening; I think the Pats win this one fairly convincingly. By a score of, say, 49-10. Oh well.

:: Seahawks at Bears? Who cares?

Pay to Play (or not play)

I rarely enter writing contests -- in fact, the only one I recall entering was the Buffalo News's once-annual short story contest, which they held three or four years in a row. Why not? Because if and when I get published and embark on a life of writerly riches and fame (heh!), I want to do it the old fashioned way: because an editor says, "Hey, not bad. I'd like to pay you for this."

Contests like this, which reek of being run by folks who would make off with the coins from a dead man's eyes, are a big reason why. To boil it down: you pay an entrance fee of $149, after which the people running the contest own all rights to your work, whether you win the contest or not. And if they decide that not enough people entered, then no prize is offered...but they keep your $149, and the rights to your work. So basically, they expect you to pay them to take the rights to your work.

Don't fall for this, folks. Please oh please.

Here's another response to the contest, where the person actually running it shows up to defend herself. This made me laugh:

So to post our rules and a link telling people that this is a contest to avoid is both self-serving and misleading. Are there issues with the rules, yes. But I think you should wait until the contest officially launches on Feb. 11, 2011, before you tell people to not join it. That's the fair thing to do.

Er...ummm...if it's not fair for someone else to call people's attention to a contest that hasn't started yet, then why did they post the information about the contest already themselves? "We're going to post our contest rules! But it's not fair for anyone else to call attention to us!" Yeah, right.

There's a rule that often gets cited on Websites and discussion fora and anywhere else where such things are discussed: Money should always flow TO the writer. If anyone tells you that you need to pay prior to being published, go deal with someone else. And don't bother with contests like this.

Saturday Centus

My second week of participation! This week, Jenny Matlock gives a normal writing prompt -- but this week, she cranks down the word count to a mere 25 words, not the usual 100. Aieee!

Anyway, the prompt is "the lottery ticket...". Here's what I did with it.

The scraggly 7-11 guy
takes my dollar,
hands me the lottery ticket.

Next day I check the numbers.

New life, here I come!

...or not.

And there we have it.

BTW, working at The Store, I have come to loathe the lottery in all its forms. The scratch-off ones are annoying as all hell, because there are a couple of spots where people like to scratch them off, leaving that gray powdery crap all over the place, and for some reason, lots of folks don't bother throwing them out when they're done. They just leave their worthless, non-winning scratchoffs sitting in the exact place where they were when they scratched them off to reveal their non-winning glory, so it falls to the employees to throw them out. Back when I was the guy who had to clean the bathrooms, I would frequently find stacks of worthless scratch-off tickets in the bathroom stalls, left on the toilet paper dispensers, this despite the fact that if just exiting the bathroom and returning to the sales floor of The Store took you past at least two garbage cans. Some people even threw them in the toilet.

And there are few sights as generically depressing as watching old ladies in threadbare coats standing in line to put five or ten of their limited-income dollars into a damned lottery ticket dispensing machine. That, in its way, is even more depressing than watching young people buying cigarettes.

Yeah, I don't like the lottery very much.

If I were doing a quiz-thing, I'd be doing this one!

Stolen from SamuraiFrog:

If I were a month, I’d be October.
If I were a day of the week, I’d be Thursday.
If I were a time of day, I'd be late "prime time" -- late enough to feel energized by the night, but not so late that the bed's siren call is summoning me home.
If I were a planet, I’d be Mars.
If I were a sea animal, I’d be an orca.
If I were a direction, I’d be north by northwest.
If I were a piece of furniture, I'd be a well-worn chair surrounded by bookshelves.
If I were a liquid, I’d be the water in a mountain stream.
If I were a gemstone, I’d be sapphire.
If I were a tree, I’d be a maple.
If I were a tool, I’d be a Japanese-style handsaw that cuts on the pull-stroke.
If I were a flower, I’d be a rose of any color.
If I were a kind of weather, I would be the cool, crisp air of October that makes everything seem brighter.
If I were a musical instrument, I’d be the entire orchestra. (A conductor is a musician whose instrument is the orchestra.)
If I were a color, I’d be red on the days that I'm not blue or purple or green or yellow or orange.
If I were an emotion, I’d be melancholy laughter.
If I were a fruit, I’d be a white peach.
If I were a sound, I’d be a purring cat. (Or a lightsaber igniting.)
If I were an element, I’d be one of the noble gases. Stable and reliable.
If I were a car, I’d be a Subaru Outback.
If I were a food, I’d be a Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.
If I were a place, I’d be the Serenity.
If I were a material, I’d be nicely-worn blue denim.
If I were a taste, I’d be cinnamon.
If I were a scent, I’d be the scent of baking pizza.
If I were an object, I’d be a drinking vessel of some sort.
If I were a body part, I'd be the eye. (Seriously, I have no idea how to answer this.)
If I were a facial expression, it would be laughing.
If I were a song, I’d be "People Get Ready".
If I were a pair of shoes, I would be a pair of Birkenstocks.

Something for Thursday

I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have posted this before, but I'm not wading through two or three years' worth of Something for Thursdays* to find out. I've always loved the music of Richard Wagner. Always, always, always. As long as I've been aware of Richard Wagner I've loved his music. So it's a bit of Wagner today.

The thing with Wagner is that, if he's a food, he is a very, very heavy bread, the kind of bread that's an inch thick and sits in your stomach like a brick after you swallow it. Oh, and it's dark bread. Almost black, really. Thick, dark, heavy bread. The kind of bread that, when you make a sandwich with it, you have to use spicy mustard and thick cuts of ham just to taste anything other than bread. The kind of bread where...well, that's enough. There's such a thing as overkneading a metaphor.

But anyway, of all of Wagner's music, this is the piece of his that works its magic on me more than any other. The overture may be my favorite form of shorter orchestral work, but in Wagner's hand, the overture -- or Prelude -- reached heights that no one else has reached since. Fifteen minutes of a great musical journey...here is the overture to Tannhauser.





When that famous chorale theme recurs at the overture's end (the 1:49 mark of the second video), the effect is astonishing, with those shimmering strings that weren't there the first time we heard this same theme. And when the entire orchestra takes up the theme, with those magnificent trombones leading the way, it's nearly overwhelming...and then Wagner tops it off, at the very end, with the brass in a slow arpeggio that to me sounds like the Heavens opening. I never listen to Wagner unless I'm willing to go somewhere, emotionally. To listen to Wagner is to listen to the most purely proud musical arrogance -- in the best sense of the word -- that has ever been written. Wagner is not a composer who for one second even considers that his listener may not wish to follow him where he wants to go.

Oh, two final notes: Check out the 3:24 mark, when you can see the trumpets and the trombones. I don't know if it's still the case, but for many years, the Chicago Symphony was regarded as having the greatest brass section in the world. That trumpet player sitting there, next the trombones, is Adolph Herseth, who was likewise for years regarded as the greatest symphonic trumpet player in the world (as well as one of my personal musical heroes, especially when I was a trumpet player in college -- let other trumpet players lust after Wynton Marsalis's skill, what I wanted was the ability to completely dominate an orchestra the way Herseth could). And check out what Sir Georg Solti -- one of the greatest Wagnerian conductors of all time -- has his horns do at 4:04 and 4:30. He directs them to lift their instruments up so the bells are pointed, not into their own laps as is normally the case with the French horn, but at the back wall, to make their counterfigure heard brightly.

What a wondrous, magnificent overture. This is one of the most perfect pieces of symphonic music I know.

* Or would that be "Somethings for Thursday"? Hmmmm....

X-Files Case Report: "Conduit"

"I want to believe."

At this point in the series, we've already seen the poster in Mulder's office that would become one of the iconic props of The X-Files, the one with the flying saucer on it and the slogan in big letters at the top. That poster always struck me as slightly odd, in the context of Mulder's office: it states "I want to believe", but as is very clear from the outset of the series, Mulder already does believe. But it turns out there's one thing that Mulder isn't sure he believes or not, a thing which is one of the most important aspects of his character. It is whether or not his sister is still alive and will one day come back to him.

"Conduit", our fourth episode, is the second to deal with alien abduction as its subject. Here, though – quite strikingly, as in comparison with the pilot – it's not nearly as clear, from the way the episode frames its events for the viewer, that abduction is really what's happened. There are odd things that happen, to be sure, things that probably can't be explained without resorting to alien abduction hypotheses, but at the same time, we don't see strange beings carrying out abductions, as we do in the pilot. The evidence is much more circumstantial, which makes for a generally creepier episode.

The story takes place in Iowa, where a family is camping beside a lake when there are bright lights, loud sounds, and sudden enormous heat. When the effects subside, the teenage daughter is missing, and the young son has started to show some very strange signs of having been, well, messed with a bit. For one thing, he is spending hours in front of a teevee that is tuned to no channel, claiming to be receiving signals from the television, which he is translating as sheet after sheet after sheet of paper of 1s and 0s. It turns out that the 1s and 0s encapsulate almost totally random pieces of data and information – bits of music, detail from Da Vinci drawings, and the like – and the sheets of binary also turn out to be something else, in one of the episode's best "surprise" moments. All this leads Mulder to suppose that the boy is a "conduit", being used by aliens for some purpose.

Of course, Mulder believes that the girl has been abducted by aliens, and of course Scully is unwilling to commit to that hypothesis with the evidence at hand. The missing girl is a juvenile delinquent, and she has been known to hang out with a local biker gang, leading most people to suppose that she has simply run off with them. Things take a dark turn, however, when the girl's boyfriend's body turns up, and when NSA agents turn up, claiming that the boy has somehow gotten hold of classified information.

Mulder is particularly driven in this episode, insisting on continuing the investigation into the girl's disappearance when all evidence seems to have run dry. His motivation is quickly made clear, as this episode begins to flesh out the great driving force behind Mulder's work: the abduction of his sister when he was a child. The episode ends with Scully listening to a tape of a hypnotic therapy session Mulder once underwent, which concludes with the interviewer asking Mulder if he believes that his sister, Samantha, is alive and will come back; Mulder replies, as the final credits begin, "I want to believe."

This episode is very well written and directed – the production values of even the early episodes of The X-Files are superb – but I did find the episode marred by something that probably wasn't its fault. The first five seasons of The X-Files were filmed in the Vancouver, with locales around that city doubling for whatever locale the episodes were set in. Usually this worked out fine, but there were times when it really didn't. Now, I don't expect that Lake Okoboji will be familiar to anyone who doesn't have some kind of connection to Iowa, but it amused me – and, unfortunately, undermined the episode a bit for me – to see Iowa's Lake Okoboji stood in for by a Vancouver-area lake, surrounded by very tall pines and hills higher than you'll find pretty much anywhere in Corn-belt Iowa. This had the effect of ejecting me from the story a bit, but I'm not sure what the producers really should have done – made up a different locale, perhaps.

The next episode will be the first of a bunch from Season One that I have never seen before. We'll see what happens. I, too, want to believe!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

What is your favorite cheese? And what is your preferred method of eating your favorite cheese? (i.e., how do you serve it...or what do you cook it in...and so on. Basically, talk to me about cheese.)

A hundred words for....

One enduring urban legend that's nicely poetic even though everybody knows it's nonsense is the old "The Eskimos had eight hundred words for snow" chestnut. However, even if this was true, I'm not sure how much of a linguistic amazement this would be. I mean, I hear lots of different ways of referring to snow all the time:

Snow
Sleet
Squall precipitation
Lake-effect flurry
Snowy shit
F***ing snow
That white shit
The shit that's all dirty and muddy on the side of the roads in February
"Oh shit, when did this start?" (uttered when you walk outside into a flurry after being inside a while)

It goes on.

One of my Facebook friends, who lives in New York City, seemed less than excited that she's about to experience a second Nor'easter in three weeks. The first one dumped a lot of snow in her region, and the second isn't supposed to be as bad...but that's small consolation when you're barely dug out of the last one. Anyway, she opined about how sick she is of hearing the word "Snowpocalypse". I was going to suggest the obvious "Snowmageddon", but she had already declared her antipathy for that one, too.

My suggestions?

Snowfest
Snow-a-rama

And my favorite:

SNOWLAPALOOZA!

Man, if there's not already some kind of winter festival called SNOWLAPALOOZA, there needs to be. And it must be held right here, in Buffalo. So come on, Organizers of Buffalo's Social Scene! Start the planning now for SNOWLAPALOOZA 2012!

Tippecanoe and....

Well, I have no idea what the hell to blog about right now. I could babble about football a bit, but the Bills' season is done and there's only so much gabbing I can do about the NFL Draft that's not for four months anyway and I don't really care about any of the college bowl games, so football's out. And I said all I had to say felt I should say about the shootings in Arizona the other day, so forget about that, too. I've got some books I could blog about, but I still need to write the posts. I keep meaning to start my Fixing the Prequels series on Revenge of the Sith, but that's not ready to go yet. Teevee shows have mostly been in reruns, and I haven't seen too many movies lately. So what else is there?

Well, there's this guy.



That's John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States. Tyler ascended to the Presidency because he was the Vice President when the ninth President, William Henry Harrison, died one month into his term of office. There was actually quite a lot of confusion over this, as the Constitution wasn't actually clear about what happened upon the death of a President. The problem was one of wording. What the Constitution actually says, in Article II Section 1, is this:

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.

Basically, no one was sure if Harrison's death meant that Tyler actually assumed the Presidency, or if he just stayed Vice President but with the powers and duties of an actual President. Even though the Congress eventually passed resolutions declaring that Tyler was, in fact, the President in fact as well as in duty, this was a point of contention for his opponents, who would refer to him as "Acting President" or "His Ascendency".

Tyler's biggest accomplishment was the annexation of the former Republic of Texas. I think that's a good thing, even though I tend to not be enamored of all things Texan these days. I suppose we ultimately have Tyler to blame for the Dallas Cowboys, for one thing.

Tyler left office in 1845 but lived another seventeen years. As the nation moved inexorably toward the Civil War, Tyler stood up to be counted...on the Confederate side. In fact, he stood up on the Confederate side to such a degree that he was actually elected to the House of Representatives of the Confederate States of America. He died in 1862 before assuming that office, but it seems to me that John Tyler may well have been the only President who went on to commit an act of treason against the United States. I've often wondered what would have become of him had he lived beyond the end of the Civil War.

Why do I have John Tyler on the brain today, though? Because of something I read on Twitter this morning. I couldn't believe it and had to look it up, but I'm damned if it wasn't true. Follow along with me here: John Tyler was born in 1790 and died in 1862. He was married twice, and with those two wives, Tyler had 15 children. The last of his children was born in 1860, when Tyler was either 69 or 70 years old. But what gets really interesting is his fifth son with his second wife. That would be Lyon Gardiner Tyler.

Lyon Tyler was born in 1853 and died in 1935, at the age of 82. He had something in common with his Presidential father: he was fathering children at a ripe old age himself. He had a son born in 1924 (when he was 71, and when President Tyler had been dead for 62 years), and another in 1928 (when he was 75). Both of these sons are still living today, which means that our tenth President, who was born during the first term of our first President, has two grandchildren who are still with us during the first term of our forty-forth.

Who says that history can't be a bit mindblowing sometimes?

Sentential Links #234

Here we go....

:: Do not - and I repeat, DO NOT (Note within note: This is bolded, Self!) - share this story with anyone, as your klutzy behavior is a tad embarrassing, even to me. Let them all think that last post went flawlessly, and you were off for an exciting, exotic trip in record time.

:: Birds are everywhere in Mount Auburn; this is why I first came here, to watch them. I could barely see the stones for the warblers, vireos and tanagers. Now, having seen a surfeit of birds, I still come here for them, and everything.

:: Now, you'd think that every issue of Wonder Woman would be a "Women's Lib Issue." But this is 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment and "women's lib" is on everybody's tongue, and you just know this story is going to be so monumentally ham-fistedly-topical-yet-not-in-any-way-seriously-challenging-the-status-quo that it would probably make my mind explode.

:: Anyway, Joan is 70 today, and I thought I needed to acknowledge that.

:: There is, I would claim, something almost indescribably profound about this lack of resignation to that which is most inevitable.

:: In 1826 a couple of guys opened a restaurant there. They built a half circle shaped oyster bar. Sitting where we were, in booth #1, I could look at the old bar and imagine Daniel Webster sitting there as he often did, slamming brandy and downing plate after plate of oysters. Up on the second floor is booth #18, John F. Kennedy's favorite spot. (I've been to Boston a bunch of times, but never to this place. Next time....)

:: So I went to the release page for it, and when I saw the distance, I was shocked: that galaxy’s not big, it’s freaking huge.

More next week.

Oh, come on, studios!

I can see why movie studios would want to put the clamps down on people who try to put entire movies up on YouTube, but leveling copyright objections at two-minute clips from movies just seems silly. Those clips, when used in blogs and Facebook-sharings and Twitter feeds, constitute free advertising for their movies. If I had a nickel for every time I've posted a clip from some movie and had someone comment afterwards along the lines of "Hey, I've never seen that but now I think I will!", I could probably buy a dinner at a nice restaurant, like Mendy's.

(Which is my way of saying that Universal needs to stop blocking clips of Love Actually. Wankers!)

Let me get this straight....

This is a political rant, which I'm going to put beneath the fold. Comments are also closed for this post. Don't read the whole thing if you don't like it when I go all political.]

Saturday Centus

This is a weekly meme-thing that I always want to do on a Saturday, but which I always forget about. I suppose I could do it a day or two later anyway, but for some reason that always feels wrong somehow. Anyway, it's a simple little writing game where Jenny Matlock provides a brief writing prompt, and participants write a 100-word entry using the prompt in some way.

This week's prompt is actually a photo:



My entry:

"When Life Hands You Frozen Oranges"

"Whoa!" said the Cheerful one.

"Yeah," replied the Grumpy one.

"It snowed, eh?"

"Yeah."

"All over our oranges."

"Yeah."

"That's tough."

"Uh-huh."

"We moved from Canada to be orange growers, and look what happens."

"Yeah."

"Sucks, eh?"

"M-hm."

"Snows in Canada, eh?"

"Yeah."

"Not supposed to in Florida."

"Nope."

"Sure a shame."

"Yup."

Silence as two formerly-Canadian would-be farmers look over their snow-covered orchard.

"Back home they crush frozen grapes to make ice wine...." said the Cheerful one.

Beat...

"Yesss...." said the Not-as-grumpy-as-before one.

Thus was born Ice Orangeade. Which was very successful...in Canada.

I hope my liberal use of hyphens -- hyphenated words being counted as one word by OpenOffice's word count tool -- doesn't constitute cheating! (I'm also not sure if the title counts toward the word count, either. If it does, then I'm disqualified.)

Wait, what?

Bill O'Reilly talked to an atheist, and came up with this gem of an argument:

O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You cannot explain why the tide goes in.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O’REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.

If that's the state of scientific literacy on O'Reilly's side of the aisle, it's no wonder that we're pretty much doomed. Wow.

Trust your feelings!

I've been enjoying AICN's "Behind the Scenes Picture of the Day" series, and for obvious reasons, I really dug this one:



I also see that the official release date for the Star Wars films on Blu-ray has been announced. I won't be acquiring these right off the bat, unless the current DVD player at Casa Jaquandor goes belly-up between this day and that. I'm not upgrading to Blu-ray until I absolutely have to; I still don't see any compelling need whatsoever for this new format other than Sony saying, "Holy crap, we need one last physical format to soak everybody with before everything is all-digital-download!"

And I'm amused, of course, by the huge chorus of people shouting "I'm not giving George Lucas any more of my money!", as if he's the one and only filmmaker releasing films successively in one format and then the next and then the next.

Something for Thursday

A movie scene this week, from Steven Spielberg's astonishing Schindler's List.

If you haven't seen the film, Liam Neeson plays Oskar Schindler, a businessman and member of the Nazi party who decides to take advantage of the increasingly punitive measures being taken against the Jewish people of Poland by using Jews as free labor. Over time, his factory gradually shifts into more of a haven, where Jews can find some modicum of protection from the Nazi brutality. This goes on until toward the end of the film, when, as Germany's position in WWII becomes untenable, the order is sent out: Kill them all. Pack them all up and send them to Auschwitz.

This is when Schindler decides that he needs to act to save the thousand Jews who have been working for him -- and this is how he does it. He runs a scam against Amon Goeth (the Nazi commandant, played by Ralph Fiennes) that is breathtaking in its simplicity: Goeth has such rock-solid faith in Schindler's abilities as a businessman that he just assumes that Schindler is making huge money on the deal, when in reality Schindler is literally buying the lives of his workers. The deal struck, Schindler and his main assistant, Itzhak Stern (played by Ben Kingsley), begin the important task of creating the master list of Jews to be spared the trains to Auschwitz and instead sent to Poland to work for Schindler.

This is an amazing scene, from an amazing film.

All things sweet and foamy!

I just learned via a friend on Facebook that today is Whipped Cream Day. I love whipped cream a whole lot -- it's wonderful on coffee drinks and hot chocolate; it's awesome on sundaes and pumpkin pie and it's magnificent to dip strawberries into. And of course, whipped cream is the key ingredient in cream pies, whether eating or throwing. So all hail whipped cream!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

The day before yesterday, this blog crossed 600,000 hits, according to SiteMeter. That's a pittance for some, but a nicely big number for me, and since this blog has been around for almost nine years, that means that I've had a little less than 66,666 hits a year. Cool! So, thanks for looking in, all you regular readers!

So, if you're a regular reader, how did you find this blog? And what on Earth keeps you coming back?

UPDATE: Thanks for all the complements, everyone! I'd actually meant that last question as a MAD Magazine type of rhetorical thing, as if, "What kind of dope reads a publication like this?!", and not actually a "fishing for complements" query, but hey, I'll take the complements. Just as long as none of you say, "Hmmmm, he's right. What on Earth does keep me coming back? Time to delete that dummy from my bookmarks!!!"

"I've never really had a taste for this kind of thing, but I must admit I'm deeply enjoying the suit!"

Iron Man was never my favorite superhero in the Marvel Universe. Nothing against him per se, really; I suspect that this is likely due to the fact that the Iron Man comic wasn't terribly compelling during the years I was an active reader of Marvel comics. I didn't have all the money in the world, so I had to at least be somewhat selective with respect to the comics I was purchasing on a monthly basis, and when I occasionally tried an issue of Iron Man, I wasn't terribly excited by it.

So that's one reason I'm not terribly familiar with the whole backstory behind Iron Man – I know about as little about Tony Stark as one can know. In fact, when I was reading comics, Tony Stark wasn't even Iron Man! For some reason, Stark had given up the suit, and another guy was wearing it. I don't recall any of the background behind that. So I came into seeing Iron Man pretty much blind. All I knew, really, was that the movie is generally very highly regarded in the superhero genre.

I can certainly see why.

Iron Man is – wonder of wonders! -- a superhero movie that is actually fun to watch. It employs a story that is as old as the hills, being a "Self-absorbed jerk learns a better way to live" narrative as Tony Stark realizes that maybe he can't live with being the world's greatest weapons manufacturer and that he has greatly misused his enormous intellectual gifts. What's nice is that the film doesn't dwell on Stark's character growth; it's there, but it doesn't bog down the entire movie as these kinds of superhero lessons often do.

The film opens with Stark touring in Afghanistan with a company of US soldiers, but he is taken prisoner in a vicious attack and forced to build a weapon for the Afghan Taliban soldiers. (At least, I assume they're Taliban. I'm not sure the film was entirely clear on this point.) The leader tells him, in Arabic, "Build the weapon and then I will set you free." Another captive, who serves as translator, relates this to Stark, who mutters, "No, he won't." So Stark takes the raw materials he's been given by the Afghans and builds his means of escape: an armored suit of metal that has rocket thrusters and a whole lot of flamethrowers. In other words, Stark builds his Iron Man prototype.

It's when he returns to the US that Stark discovers that his company is not aligned with the side of the angels, and he begins work on his new, improved Iron Man suit. Thus begins some high adventure as Tony Stark realizes too late just whom he is up against.

As noted above, I give Iron Man high marks for not following along in the Dark Knightization of its superhero story; this is at its heart a light, fun adventure movie to which one can happily apply an adjective like rollicking. I have nothing against dark, grim stories that plumb the depths of human cynicism; but I do like the occasional story where a guy is a hero at least partly because he has fun being a hero.

Acting-wise, the film is top-notch; Robert Downey Jr. captures perfectly the inherent arrogance and brilliance of Tony Stark. Jeff Bridges chews lots of scenery as only he can. I always like to see Gwyneth Paltrow in stuff, flakey as she seems to be in real life. I wasn't as totally thrilled with the Nick Fury cameo in the end credits, because as much as I loved the Marvel Universe when I was a kid reading comics, I'm not sure I'm enthusiastic about "Marvel Universalizing" the various movies they have coming out over the next few years. But that's just me.

I'm told that Iron Man 2 is not as good as the first, but I'll find that out for myself at some point.