DUZ!

Duz 1946, originally uploaded by autumnsensation.

I saw this ad on Flickr and it cracked me up. I'd never heard of "DUZ" before; obviously its heyday as a product was well before my time. I found the picture funny, though, because of that guy strutting around in the overalls, without a shirt underneath. I mean, I know they're comfy and they keep most everything covered, but you still gotta wear a shirt under those things. And a bowler hat? Huh? And that's a Sunday outfit?!

In fact, fans of Firefly might think, as I did, that this guy looks a bit like Badger, the bowler-hat wearing small-time crook on Persephone who aspires to being a less small-time crook.

Anyway, I wish I could still find DUZ on the shelves, because by all appearances, DUZ did everything!

A news headline I'd like to see

TONYA HARDING WHACKS LEBRON JAMES ON THE KNEE

JAMES OUT FOR SEASON, CAREER IN JEOPARDY

CLEVELAND GIVES HARDING KEY TO CITY

You know, I've seen a lot of athletes do asshole things. I've seen Barry Bonds and Rafael Palmeiro stonewall that they didn't do steroids. I've seen Mark McGwire go to Congress and say, "I'm not here to talk about the past." I've seen Pete Rose refuse to admit he gambled. I've seen Brett Favre's insanely annoying "Will I play or won't I?" nonsense every year for the last, oh, eighteen years or so. And it goes the other way, too, into ownership and management. I've seen the Buffalo Sabres completely bungle their efforts to hold onto their star players. I've seen the Bills release Thurman Thomas and Andre Reed without calling them first. I've seen Dan Snyder throw money at every player with a pulse, I've seen Jerry Jones decide that he just can't live with the coach who had just won him two Super Bowls, I've seen Art Modell move the Browns without warning, I've seen the Irsay family do the same thing with the Colts. And I've read about collusion, union busting, racism, hard drinking, drug abuse, sexual harassment, and even murder.

But damned if Lebron James didn't manage to put a unique spin on what he did. He may not be the biggest asshole in sports history, but in the words of sports talk radio hosts who do "Is [Name] the [biggest/best/greatest/worst/etc.] in sports history" topics, Lebron has "got to be in the conversation".

I just can't believe this all unfolded the way it did. I can't believe that Lebron James was almost literally holding court for prospective NBA owners. I can't believe he decided to announce his decision on a prime-time teevee special. I can't believe ESPN went along with it. And I can't believe that Lebron James didn't even have the decency to tell the Cleveland Cavaliers what his decision was before he announced it to everyone else.

I've heard some people defending James on various unconvincing bases. I've heard the "It's a free country!" defense, as if the fact that it's not illegal to be an asshole somehow renders it OK to be an asshole. Then there are folks scoffing at the idea that Cleveland fans should be upset at all; "He doesn't owe Cleveland anything!" goes the refrain here.

But in my view, he owes Cleveland a great deal. He's lived in that region his entire life, and he got to play for his hometown fans. He helped make that team into one of the best in the NBA, even if they didn't win a championship. I find the defenses of James very odd, because they come from people who will almost certainly sing Kobe Bryant's praises, when he eventually retires, for having played his entire career with one team.

James's behavior through this entire annoying ordeal has displayed some of the most breathtaking narcissism I've ever seen by a public figure. It really was astonishing to behold. I find his reasons, his excuses, nonsensical -- "It's about winning", he says, even though his Cleveland teams have been among the best in the NBA. It's not as if he's just made his dramatic escape from the LA Clippers. And while I am no expert on the NBA, people who are seem to be less than convinced that a juggernaut of multiple titles has just been forged in Miami, because so much of the Heat's space under the NBA salary cap will be devoted to just three players that the team is unlikely to be able to really fill out their roster with the kinds of non-superstar, but still excellent, talent that championship clubs in all sports need.

Lebron James did owe Cleveland something. He owed them respect and honesty. He gave them neither. I hope he never wins a title at all -- which is a result that has a lot more chance of happening than some might believe -- and if he comes down on the court at an awkward angle and his ACL just happens to rip asunder in the first five minutes of his first regular season in front of his new beloved fans, well, I won't feel a lot of sympathy for him.

A few links: Jason Whitlock of FOX Sports; Ethan Sherwood Strauss of Salon.com; Mr. Trend at Alterdestiny.

Something for Thursday

I've long had something of a love-hate relationship with Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera.

The show came out sometime in the late 1980s, and ten years would pass before I'd see it on stage myself. But for a time, the songs of Phantom were...how to put this...ubiquitous. That music was everywhere, and after a short while, I was Phantom'd out.

Late in my senior year of high school, an amateur chorus in a neighboring town was looking for brass players for a concert they were doing...of Phantom songs. Then, at my summer music camp, we played an arrangement of Phantom's songs in the band, and then the very next year, in the chorus, we did a choral arrangement of the same Phantom songs. In college, my orchestra did yet another arrangement of Phantom songs.

Every year, my college had a music competition/festival thing in which high school students from all over Iowa and vicinity would come to play with college musicians and compete for scholarships. Those students vying for vocal scholarships would perform solos at the main concert. One year, no fewer than three young baritones did "The Music of the Night".

And nearly every student at school had Phantom in their CD collections. Most had the single-disc "highlights" record, but the hard-cores had the "Complete show" double-CD edition. And you'd often hear those discs blasting out windows and open doors, during that pounding motif on the organ -- you know the one -- that practically demanded to be played at Max Volume.

For two to three years of my life, it was Phantom, Phantom, Phantom. I got sick of the whole damned thing without ever seeing it. (And I wasn't disposed to dislike Andrew Lloyd Webber on principle, either -- I'd seen Cats with my family and loved it.)

Phantom fever finally died off a bit, as all things do, and I pretty much forgot about it, until 1999, when Shea's Buffalo Theater underwent some major refurbishment, the focus of which was expanding the stage so the theater could host the major touring productions of the day. This meant that Phantom of the Opera could finally play in Buffalo. Naturally, The Wife and I went. It was May 18, 1999; I remember that date because the next day we went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on its opening day. We've always referred to that as "Phantom Weekend" ever since.

Seeing the show was quite the production, and it was nice to at last hear all those songs I'd been sick of for years in their proper context, as well as others that I did not know so well. In 2004, a movie version came out, and as I recall, it was reviewed pretty harshly, and we didn't see it -- until last week, that is, when I saw the DVD at the library and thought, "Well, why not? How bad can it be?"

And it turned out, not very bad at all. In fact, I thought it a fine production overall, well-sung and well-acted. The voice of Gerard Butler, who played the Phantom himself, took a small bit of getting used to, but I thought he was generally excellent, and the film puts the gorgeous spectacle of the stage show front and center, with lots of sweeping camera shots through that magnificent Parisian opera house. (Although I did think that the Phantom's lair, deep in the sewers and catacombs beneath the Opera, looked a bit too clean.) What was really cool, though, was the degree to which The Daughter loved the movie. She's watched it a couple additional times since, asked me to track down the music for her MP3 player, and, when she thinks no one is listening, she's been singing songs from the show. I find that awesome.

Anyway, as this is a Something for Thursday post, I need to put something musical here, to wrap up. I know that Michael Crawford is generally seen as the canonical Phantom, but I always found something slightly "off" about his voice, so I've never had the problem of comparing Phantoms to Crawford in my head. Colm Wilkinson's voice is much more to my liking, and it's his I'll feature now. Here's Colm Wilkinson, singing "The Music of the Night".

I think it's crap, Chef!

Time for this week's griping and kvetching about Hell's Kitchen!

:: Holli's hair is so cute. Holli is so cute.

:: Ah, the blind taste test! The results are about what they always are, with the chefs only naming a handful of the ingredients they are fed whilst blindfolded and wearing headphones. Frankly, I'd love to see Chef Ramsay do this one sometime.

:: I still hate Benjamin. I can't get over how quiet and reserved he was when he was with the men, but now that he's with the women, he's the arrogant ass steamrolling over everybody. I hate that kind of chauvinistic crap. It reminds me of when I worked in restaurants, and if I was on duty with another manager who happened to be female, and the other manager went off to talk to a customer with a problem, every once in a while you'd get that customer who would refuse to believe the female they were talking to was a "real" manager.

:: Dinner service: Benjamin is shitting the bed from the outset, and Chef Ramsay is calling him out. Good. Hate this guy. Have I mentioned that? I'm sure it will come up again.

:: Fran's falling apart. Will this be her last hurrah?

:: Wow, everybody's stinking except for Holli, who is so cute and competent.

:: Elimination: Fran out, Autumn back to the Red team. Who cares?

:: Second episode! Preview shows fireworks! Huzzah!!!

:: Holy crap, those are some awesome looking lobsters. I'm already hungry. But naming them for departed chefs? How rude!

:: I always wonder about the dishes in tasting challenges like this. They sit around getting cold for a few minutes while the tasting chefs are introduced and whatnot.

:: Holli always seems to do well at these challenges, doesn't she? My small crush on her aside (can we see her in overalls again, please?), she really shows serious skill. Her dishes at these challenges are always well-received, and she's only had a couple of hiccups in the services. She could be this season's Christina (the eventual winner of Season Four).

:: And Holli's dish is so good that Chef Ramsay awards her an extra point to break the tie! Holli's awesome. And since her team wins, she'll get to wear normal clothes.

:: OK, those dorms are disgusting. There's something like three weeks' worth of cigarette butts in that big ashtray! I wonder if there's a rule that no one is to do any incidental cleaning at all, so that the cleaning can be held out as a punishment.

:: Ohhhhhhh wow...Holli...(I promise I'll stop this eventually.)

:: Hoo boy, throwing a time factor on the dinner service? I'm sure this will go swimmingly!

:: Oh wait, no, it won't. And Nilka, who has been pretty good until now, has just fallen apart completely. This was like watching the Titanic steam full-speed right into the iceberg. While its hold was full of explosives.

:: Wow, this is the tantrum that keeps on giving. It was a pretty wild moment. But you know what? It would have been astonishing teevee if FOX had not plastered this event all over its promos for this episode. I really wish networks would let the shocking moments be shocking moments.

:: Classy exit after all the screaming for Nilka. And they still have to put people up for elimination! Wow.

:: Ramsay specifically praises Jason's performance...so the team was seriously discussing nominating him? Duh. Actual nominees: Autumn and Ed. Ed's first nomination, Autumn's third? I think? I'm guessing he doesn't eliminate anybody this time, given Nilka's exit.

:: And I call it! Time for the black uniforms. Final six! Go Holli!!!

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Should Lebron James stay in Cleveland, or sign wherever the money is best?

Won't someone please think of the children!

I always think it's funny when someone thinks that they're making a profound point, whilst remaining utterly oblivious to the fact that the only point they're actually making is, "I am an asshole!".

A Book Quiz

Sheila did this, and as I cannot resist a good quiz, I shall do it too.

Worst Books Ever, or Five Hours of My Life I’ll Never Get Back

Five hours? I wish. I lost several days of my life, altogether, to crap like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, The Celestine Prophecy, Twilight, and others. As I get older, though, I get a lot less tolerant of bad books. I used to believe that I couldn't really frame a full opinion of something fairly unless I read the whole thing. Now, if I think it sucks after a hundred pages, I'm only too glad to set it aside and say "It sucks."

Books I Have Lied About Reading

Well, there were readings I was supposed to do in school that I never did, and only bluffed my way through in the discussions. Sometimes I was successful. Other times, less so.

Books I Have Lied About Liking

I don't really do this. If I hate it, I hate it. Why not say so?

Book-to-Movie Adaptations Where, Frankly, the Movie Was Better

The Bridges of Madison County is a bizarre little book, but the movie is really, really, really good. And Goldfinger the movie is better than the book (even if it's not my favorite Bond movie).

Books I Used to Love, of Which I Am Now Ashamed

"Shame" isn't the right word, but there are books that were once meaningful to me which I've now moved beyond. Much of Richard Bach's output falls in this category. (More on my once-thriving relationship with Bach's work here.)

Best Book Titles of All Time

The Lord of the Rings; They Shoot Horses, Don't They?; The Once and Future King; Lamb, or, the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal; The Stars My Destination.

I love a good title.

Books That I Expected to Be Dirtier

Ummmm...I never really expect dirt in my books, so I have no idea.

My Real Guilty-Pleasure Reads, and Not the Decoys I Talk About Openly

Geez, why so much guilt? I feel no guilt about reading. I do keep dreaming about reading some book, and having some stranger squeal with delight as they see someone else reading their favorite book. This has never happened yet.

Books You Must Read Before You Die, but Would Rather Die Than Read

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: One day, I am going into the woods with The Brothers Karamazov, and only one of us is coming back alive.

Books I Refused to Read for a Long Time Because too Many (or the Wrong) People Recommended Them

Hmmmmm. Not really sure. I'm not one to avoid the popular thing because it's popular; I will explore something popular out of curiosity, but since I tend to read stuff when I want, I might wait for years before reading something that was popular a while back. Harry Potter was up to Prisoner of Azkaban before I read him, for example.

Books I Read Only After Seeing the Movie

2001: A Space Odyssey; The Hobbit (referring to the animated version of the 1970s). I'm sure there are others, but none are leaping to mind right now.

Books I Most Often Try to Persuade Other People to Read

Anything by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Authors I Wish Had Written More Books Already

There was a writer named John J. Robinson who wrote a couple of terrific history books, Dungeon, Fire and Sword and Born in Blood, which deal with the Knights Templar and the Crusades and the formations of Freemasonry, respectively. He had a wonderful voice to his writing that I loved.

I also wonder why Caleb Carr has never done anything in his 1900s New York City after The Alienist and Angel of Darkness; I loved those books.

Overused Plot Points That Drive Me Nuts

I can't think of any, really.

Books in Which I Liked the Secondary Characters Better Than the Main Character, or Books in Which I Wanted to Beat the Main Character Senseless with a Tire Iron

Well, I certainly wanted to beat each and every one of the principles in Twilight to death!

Books I Lied About Reading and Then Wrote an A+ Term Paper On

I never did this. I never got an A+ on a paper, that is. I did get a couple of B's.

Books I Lied About Reading/Liking Solely to Look Smart/Pretentious

Nope, I've never done this.

Books I Wish I Hadn’t Finished, or Worst. Ending. Ever.

The Yearling. I only read that book because it was required by my seventh grade teacher, who was utterly stunned when I wrote a caustic paper on how much I hated it. The whole "Young boy grows up when he must kill his beloved pet" mini-genre sickens me. (In other words, F*** Old Yeller.)

Books I Read after Oprah Recommended Them

I don't pay any attention to Oprah's book recommendations. At all. Not because I'm anti-Oprah, but because I don't really care about her one way or the other. I know she's a force of nature and all that, but she's not really on my radar. (I did hear once that she said that she "doesn't read science fiction", which irritated me. But I wouldn't ignore her on that basis.)

Books I Will Never Read Precisely Because Oprah Recommends Them

Yeah, what I just said.

Literary Characters I’ve Developed Crushes On

Princess Eilonwy in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles; Jehane bet Ishak in GGK's Lions of Al-Rassan; Lady Guinevere as portrayed in Gillian May's Arthurian trilogy.

Books I Only Read to Impress Other People

Haven't we covered this? I read what I want to read. If you're not impressed, then sod off already.

Best Books Not to Read from Start to Finish, or Best Bathroom Books

Ahhhh! Get Fuzzy compendiums. (Hmmmm...is the right plural there "compendia"? Look that up, self.) Comics of all stripes. Books of nature photography. And cookbooks! I've planned entire weeks' worth of meals in the bathroom. And I haven't bought a copy in years, but Roger Ebert's yearly collection of movie reviews always made great bathroom reading.

Books I Shouldn’t Admit Made Me Cry Like a Baby

Why shouldn't I admit it? GGK's Fionavar Tapestry hits me on the sweet spot every damn time I read it. I had to resort to lots of strategic throat-clearing when I was reading The High King aloud to The Daughter, especially in that final chapter.

Books I Only Read for the Title

I'm not really sure what this means. Titles catch my eye and pique my interest, to be certain. Many books I choose because the title caught me first.

Books I Re-Read When I Have Nothing Else to Read

I don't do full re-reads all that often, but I do dip into favorite books a lot. Lord of the Rings, GGK, favorite scenes from Stephen King, et cetera. Any book I have read and enjoyed is fodder for dipping.

Books People Keep Recommending That, Frankly, Sucked Ass

I may sound like the proverbial broken record, but Jeez Louise, how could Twilight have been that awful? And don't tell me "It's a guy thing", or "Well, you were never a teenage girl in love so you won't know." It was Stephenie Meyer's job to make me understand that, not mine. I've read a lot of popular stuff that I didn't like all that much, but few that I've loathed to that degree.

Books My Teacher Made Me Read That I Really, Really Liked

To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Johnny Tremain, The Scarlet Letter. Some others that I don't recall.

Books My Teacher Made Me read That Made Me Question the Value of My Education

I didn't care for Ordinary People. And the afore-mentioned The Yearling.

Here's a true story: as we neared completion of The Yearling, we each had to write a paper in which we either recommended the book or didn't. I didn't, primarily because I found the book awfully boring, and I didn't buy the central moral lesson. So I didn't recommend it, and got something like a B- on my report. The kid next to me said the same things in his report, but at the end, he said, "I'd recommend the book anyway." He actually asked the teacher, in class, why he got a higher grade when he too said the book was boring and the "Man up and kill your pet!" lesson was crap. The teacher sagely spread her hands and said, "You recommended it. There's no problem there."

So I probably could have said, "This book is complete shit, but I recommend it!", and she'd have given me an A-.

I didn't like that teacher very much.

Books That Made Me Want to Have Sex with at Least One Character

I was all set to say "As if I'd ever think such a thing!"...and then I remember the wonderfully sensual Kushiel's Dart. Sigh...and add Kushiel to my list of literary crushes up above. Can't wait to resume this series in the fall.

Books I Actually Read but Got a Poorer Grade on the Paper I Wrote on the Subject Than My Best Friend Who Did Not Read the Book

This never happened, but see above on The Yearling.

Books I Read Because the Author Looked Hot

Huh?!

Books I’ve Read Aloud

Many with The Daughter! The Prydain Chronicles, the Dark is Rising Sequence, et cetera.

Sadly, The Daughter has reached the point where she likes to read her own stuff at bedtime, so Reading Aloud time has come to an end at Casa Jaquandor. Those will always be some of my fondest memories of this whole parenting gig.

Books I Love Even Though the Last Twenty Pages Made No Damn Sense

The Neal Stephenson novels I've read fall into this category. His endings just come out of nowhere, really. Most times, though, the endings "make sense" in that I understand what happens.

Books I Have Written a Prequel/Sequel to in My Own Head

I don't think I've ever done this, really!

Books I Keep Meaning to Read, but Then I See Something Shiny

Well, my reading is all over the map. I could make a list of books I mean to read that would be hundreds of titles long. I rarely plan my reading; I just pick whatever looks like it may suit my mood from one book to the next.

Books I Will Go to the Mattresses for, Even Though I Hate the Writer

I can't think of one, really. Maybe Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which really is an awfully good summation of the pitfalls of writing both genres, even though I think Card is sufficiently loathsome that I can reasonably guarantee that I will never read any of his fiction, no matter how many people tell me how good Ender's Game is. Way I see it, I'll never have time to read all the books I want to read anyway, so if I don't read Ender because Card is a homophobic lout, I don't think my literary life will suffer.

Books You Must Read Because You Must Mock

I don't do this. I never read anything because I expect to dislike it. That really seems like a cynical thing to do, and like a terrible waste of time. I even read Twilight hoping to like it -- I love a well-written teen romance, and I love a good vampire story, after all.

Worst How-To Books Ever

Anything by Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

Books That Were on the ‘To Be Read’ List the Longest

Brothers K, maybe. I've been meaning to re-read David Copperfield for years, too. (Read it in ninth grade and didn't like it, but I was in ninth grade and likely had difficultly, speaking in literary terms, of distinguishing between my arse and a hole in the ground.)

Books I Hated Having to Read in School, But Love Now

Shakespeare. I hated him at first. But then, I've always questioned the way we went about it: barely a month into ninth grade, and we're handed Romeo and Juliet. We barely know anything about poetry, much less all that iambic pentameter, and none of it seems to make any sense. I warmed up to Shakespeare a little more each successive year.

(This is part of my half-baked hypothesis that maybe teaching literature should start with contemporary stuff and work backwards, getting to Shakespeare at the end of the year, rather than doing the forwards-chronologically thing which puts the Bard in the leadoff position.)

Books Whose References Have Worked Their Way into My Household Lexicon

Ummmm...I'm not sure on this.

Books I’ve Read Because I Liked Their Cover Design/Font

Lots of them! As I note above, it's the covers that catch my eyes when I'm book shopping. Not every pretty cover I buy, but I do like to pick up books based on covers and look them over.

Books Which, When It Comes Right Down to It, I Would Have No Problem Burning

I'm still ripping on Twilight. But I can't burn it; I sent it to SamuraiFrog. But who am I kidding? I would never burn a book, except for, possibly, old phone books that I might use for kindling.

Books Which I Read Only for the Sex Scenes

The Call of Cthulhu. I was misinformed.

Books I Pretend to Like So People Won’t Think I’m a Snob, or Books I Pretend to Like So I Won’t Hurt Your Feelings

Oh, come on. That's just dumb. I'll admit to having had a passing fascination with Nicholas Sparks a while back (but I think that's worn off, since I've come to realize that he's basically the Funky Winkerbean of romance novels). And since a lot of the time I'm reading a space opera novel with exploding spaceships on the cover, or fantasy novels with sword-wielding strongmen on the cover, being thought a snob is the least of my worries!

Books with Covers So Embarrassing You Can’t Read Them in Public

None, really, although Christopher Moore's You Suck has a fun cover to hold up whilst reading in public!

Books You Are Sorry You Didn’t Read Decades Ago

Any that were written decades ago!

Wow, that was a long quiz....

"I am Darth Vader. From the planet Vulcan."

I haven't talked about writing in a while, so here's a brief note about it. My main energy lately has been going to the space opera project I've had in my head for seven or eight years now; it's an idea that's been kicking around and kicking around and kicking around, until I finally decided that hell, it was just time to start writing the thing. The entire long-form story involves two princesses from some planet who leave their world to take their first trip to the Galactic Capital, or something like that. But on the way, their starship experiences some [ahem] technical difficulties and they end up on a strange planet they've never heard of before.

All the set-up and such took me through eight chapters, all well and good. All the while I've maintained two files, in which I keep lists of my characters as I introduce them (or merely mention them), and lists of the locations I either use or mention. This way I'm not scrounging about later, wondering what star systems I needed names for, or who lives where, that sort of thing. I'm not one to make big encyclopedia-type profiles for my characters -- my theory is that if the character's favorite movie or preferred sleepwear comes up in the course of the story, my character will fill in the blanks when we get to that point -- but I do want to be able to keep things straight.

So anyway, my two princesses have just arrived on Planet Whosis, which is ruled by A Guy, who has A Son.

And I don't have names for any of them. Not the Planet, not the Guy, not the Son (actually, I do have a name for the Son), not the Possibly Evil Councillor, not the Leader of the Rebel Faction, and certainly not the Odd Looking But Extremely Lethal Weapon They Use On This Planet.

Why don't I have the names? Well, I figured they'd come to me, sooner or later. That's part of the problem. The other part is that I'm actually recycling a plot that I had started to use in an old Star Wars fanfic project years and years ago, and in that fanfic, I had the habit of just stealing names outright from anywhere I could get my hands on, seeing as how I was just writing it "for the love" and nobody aside from a certain co-conspirator was ever gonna read that stuff. So, in my fanfic, the world where this weird stuff takes place was called Veridian III -- which is the name of the ill-fated planet in Star Trek Generations. I stole a raft of other names, too; only a handful of names in that whole thing were ones I coined myself.

For my purposes, I want names that sound a bit more fantasy than science fiction, if that makes sense. Lately I've been reading some of the short fiction of Leigh Brackett -- why the hell isn't she ever in print, by the way? -- and that woman had a wonderful way with names. Her Mars and Venus abound with places and people with beautiful names: Shandakor! Astellar! Shuruun. Sinharat. Llyrdis. Her names are evocative and fit in with her worlds of adventure. That's the kind of thing I want...and it's the hardest thing in the world for me to come up with.

Enter, then, this Fantasy Name Generator. I'm not going to lie, folks -- I spent a chunk of today generating lists of names and copying down the ones I like. Some I'll use, some I may not; and some I like as "starter" names but will undoubtedly tweak a bit here and there. (In the book, I've already tweaked the names of two of my three major characters.) Hey, you have to start somewhere.

Naming is not a trivial thing. It's not a matter of just making up some random name, assigning it to a character, and moving on. I'm not one to believe that names necessarily define people, but there are limits to that. It would take a pretty good writer indeed to turn a character named "Dudley Bose" into a heroic figure, but luckily for Dudley, Peter F. Hamilton is a good writer. But then, as we get to know characters, names kind of take on the qualities of the characters, don't they? Ian Fleming was looking for a boring name for the secret agent he wanted to write about, since his original notion was that the agent was a boring guy to whom exciting things happened, and when he spotted the name "James Bond" on the cover of a book on birdwatching in the Caribbean, he thought, "Wow, there's a boring name! Giddyup!" Only now, years later, the name "James Bond" has connotations that are anything but boring. You can use names that connote something about a character -- Fleming did this a lot, actually -- but I like to go a middle road: names that don't define anything literally about a character, but maybe suggest something. A little.

Anyway, yes, I'm using a randomizer to name characters and planets and who knows what else. Sue me!

Sentential Links #211

Linkage....

:: And of course, shallowly, I want to have erudite amazing dinners like that. But really, I prefer my world to theirs. Even with all the badness in it--1981 was not a bad-free year. Even with everything, I do not want their sixties, or their world.

:: I don't live near the ocean, but I do live just a few blocks away from a Great Lake which sure as heck looks like an ocean because it goes on forever. Well, at least to Cleveland. (New blog to me, yay!)

:: There's something about this quote that I find encouraging. Be you, with your own distinctive dash, with every step you take. That, in a nutshell, is your life's work. Go forth.

:: So that's my only real complaint about the costume--you've taken one of the more colorful characters in one of the more colorful universes, and turned her into--

--a woman all in black fighting a bunch of guys in gray suits against a gray background.

Woo. Hoo. (I don't hate the new Wonder Woman costume, but this is an interesting objection.)

:: I reproduce here this panel in isolation because I thought you’d all want to see, in as much detail as possible, the moment when the good drugs kicked in. See how Jenna’s eyes are bugging out?

:: Got me thinking though. What was the first movie I saw that didn’t have a happy ending?

:: I’m not ashamed of much when it comes to reading. And while I submit to the current usage of the term ‘guilty pleasure’ and use it myself, it doesn’t really fit. (I love this attitude and subscribe to it myself. Why should I feel quilty about liking something? That said...I'm not sure how Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs" got on my MP3 player. I should delete that...sometime....)

More next week!

Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Here's a really weird story. It's so weird, I'm not sure the historians didn't make it up out of whole cloth. It seems that around 235 years ago or so, some folks living in a place under the rule of a King decided that they didn't much like the way that King was ruling them. At all. They pretty much decided, en masse, that their King was behaving, to use a current term, like a douche.

Now, over the many centuries before these folks came along, lots of other folks in other lands have decided that their Kings and Queens were being douchey, so they came up with ways to replace them. They'd organize revolts, usually behind the banner of some obscure relative of the monarch's so they could say that their person has a better claim to the throne, and off they'd go. So you'd expect that the folks we're talking about here would have just said, "You know what? Our King is a douche. Let's replace him with a new King."

But these folks didn't say that. What they said was, "Not only does our King suck, but he sucks so much that we're now thinking maybe we won't even have any more Kings. We'll do it all ourselves."

Over a year or so, there were some battles and skirmishes between these folks and the troops sent by the King to put down the pesky rebels, but it didn't work, and that notion -- "No more Kings and Queens!" -- took hold. It became a really popular idea, so finally, these folks appointed some representatives to gather in one of their cities and talk these issues over. The conversation went like this:

GUY #1: So, we're all agreed then? Kings suck?

GUY #2: Yes, Verily, they suck.

GUY #1: OK, so what do we do?

GUY #3: Well, we're already fighting, so we just keep fighting. But we should probably tell the King that we're being serious and we're not just a bunch of rabble-rousers here.

GUY #1: Right! How do we do that?

GUY #4: How 'bout a letter? I've got some nice parchment, quills, and a new bottle of ink.

GUY #2: Good idea! But you're about as eloquent as my cow. You'll just write "Hey King, sod off" and be done with it. We should be a bit more poetic about it.

GUY #4: How about Tom? He's pretty poetic.

GUY #1: Good idea! Let Tom do it. Now where's that Adams guy with the beer?

So a guy named Tom wrote the King a sternly-worded letter. It was pretty wordy, given the standards of the time, so here's a paraphrase:

Dear King,

We the undersigned, being representatives of the people of your colonies, have collectively decided that you are a douche and we don't want to live under your rule anymore. Furthermore, we're going to come up with a government of our own that won't even have a King. Now, we've just called you a douche, so you're probably thinking that we should be kind enough to at least tell you all the reasons we have for thinking you're a douche, so there's a list of those reasons later on. For now, suffice it to say that we believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you don't. And since we like the whole Life and Liberty thing a lot more than we like you, we're gonna take those and let you do whatever it is you do with your time in that Palace of yours.

So, here's the list of ways you've pissed us off. Note how long it is. You don't have to be a douche, you know.

...

See? Really, dude. There's no reason for some of that stuff, right? So anyway, have a good life and all. You've still got your island, and Canada seems pretty happy with you for some reason (but really, they're weird folks to begin with, what with that odd game they like to play on ice). But we're out of here.

Signed,
All the guys present

PS: Could you make sure your soldiers always wear those bright red coats? It makes it really easy to see 'em in the forests. KTHXBAI.

And so it came to pass that after some years of war, and some further years of cruddy government, they all got together again and figured out how they wanted to set up their new, "No Kings!" government. Their notion was to spread power out amongst a bunch of folks who were accountable to the people, and to further make sure that their government was required to respect certain rights that couldn't be taken away. It was a really weird idea...and yet, these folks worked hard to make it work, and their children kept working hard to make it work, and their children kept at it, and so on and so on and son on, until today.

Does it still work? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But we're still here, and we're still working at it.

So Happy Birthday, United States of America! You're a wonderful, weird, beautiful, maddening, and awesome country.



(Hey! Uncle George is in there!)

"That's what I'm trying to tell you, Miles. You never said anything."

I've wanted to read Empire Falls by Richard Russo for several years now, and when I saw a copy at the library book sale a few weeks ago, I snatched it up. Last week I plowed through it. With just a couple of misgivings, my main reaction is, "What a book."

Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for 2001, and the award is well deserved. The book doesn't tell a single story, but instead gives a picture of life in a small town in Maine – the Empire Falls of the title – which continues to struggle on even though its economy is barely on life support after all of its local industries have packed up and moved away. The point of view switches between a number of characters, but the main one we follow is Miles Roby, a lifelong resident of the town who runs the local diner (the Empire Grill), is divorcing his wife, and is trying to raise a daughter through the tough times of adolescence.

Empire Falls's story meanders a great deal, as well it should; life, real life, never really seems to have any actual direction, as much as we might wish otherwise, and any momentum tends to be more a matter of perception than reality. Russo's novel, then, is more tapestry than plot-driven story, following the logical results of a group of quirky people interacting with one another over the years.

Russo demonstrates a keen understanding of the dynamics of a small town like Empire Falls: how everything is dominated by the rich person who still owns everything in town (or seems to), how the people who remain in the town in which they grew up find themselves continually reliving the social interactions they had in high school, which tend to be the same social interactions as the ones their parents endured in their high school years, and so on. The dream, for so many, becomes to simply to break the cycle by leaving town. Some make it, some don't, and some leave town only to come back.

The town's social life seems to revolve around two establishments, Miles's Empire Grill and the bar run by his soon-to-be-former mother-in-law. Through it all, Miles tends to be deeply stoic, almost maddeningly accepting of his lot in life, no matter how many people tell him that he needs to stand up, fight for what he wants, or just leave the town entirely. His younger brother David is constantly lecturing Miles on the shortcomings of his approach to life; David is the person who is always asking, "Hey, did you do the thing we talked about yet", only to be told by Miles in reply, "It wasn't a good time" or "It was really awkward" or, just plain, "No, I didn't get to it yet."

One of the regulars of Miles's diner is the loudmouth jerk who is set to marry his soon-to-be-ex, Janine, and Miles just stoically endures the continued presence of the guy who stole his wife. Miles even somehow manages to possibly lead on the crippled daughter of the rich woman who owns most of the town, a woman who happens to have been in love with Miles since high school.

And then there's Miles's father, Max, a ne'er-do-well who makes his way through life doing odd jobs and sponging off nearly everyone around him. Max is wise in his own way, but his wisdom is extremely hard to find underneath his constant stream of BS. It turns out, via flashbacks, that Max's wife – Miles's mother – had cheated on him once, while on a trip to Martha's Vineyard with her son along for the ride. The identity of the man she cheated with turns out to be one of the book's main secrets and revelations, which suddenly clarifies a lot of the dynamics between the various characters.

Russo's women are also all sharply drawn: Janine Roby, who is divorcing Miles and remarrying a man she clearly doesn't like, simply because he isn't Miles; their daughter Tick (a nickname, obviously), who is shy and awkward in high school and yet somehow has caught the eye of the star football player (who happens to be the son of the town cop); Janine's mother Bea, who runs the local tavern and who is constantly giving Janine very blunt advice about all the ways she is going wrong in her life. And above it all is Mrs. Whiting, the rich woman who dominates life in Empire Falls.

My only real problem with Empire Falls is that, while the first 400 pages or so of the book meander slowly through the life in this small town, in the last 100 momentum starts to build as the hand of plot starts to push things along. Through most of the book, it seems like a portrait of a town that we're only getting to see for a short time, but at the end, Russo starts tying up plotlines. Most of these revelations are satisfactory, but I was never sure I even wanted resolutions to some of those threads. And I flat-out did not like the novel's closing paragraphs, where one final character's story is tied up in a way that I found at odds with the tone of the entire book to that point. It feels like the punchline to a black humor joke, and I definitely did not like it.

But the rest of the book is awfully good.

Something for Thursday

Alex North's score to the film Spartacus is considered one of the greatest of all film scores, and in film music fan circles, a nearly mythical quality has accrued around it, owing partly to the score's lack of a great recording. In this day and age of nearly every great score being remastered and released, Spartacus has stubbornly remained unavailable except in a single-disc, truncated CD release or a bootleg recording.

Until now, that is. Varese Sarabande is releasing Spartacus on CD, via an incredibly elaborate release that involves 6 CDs, one DVD, and a hardcover book. The package is massive, and it commands a hefty price tag (it's over $100), so I doubt I'll be buying this. But it's amazing news that it's coming out at last.

In honor of that, here's one of the finest love themes in all film music, Alex North's love theme from Spartacus.

Bring him Ice

SamuraiFrog comments favorably on Sean Bean's casting as Lord Eddard Stark in the forthcoming HBO series A Game of Thrones, adapting the first book in George RR Martin's pretty good, but I suspect doomed to eternal incompletion, Song of Ice and Fire series. Bean looks really good in this photo:



Looking at this pic, I have a new thought: [SPOILER, highlight to read]Maybe after this, Bean can play Uther Pendragon in a filmed adaptation of Mary Stewart's Arthurian books, so he can keep up his newfound habit of playing guys who die in the first books of the series whose filmed adaptation he's starring in.

In other Game of Thrones casting news, the part of Hodor has been cast. Talk about having it easy! (Hodor is a mentally-challenged character who only ever says his own name. That's it. His dialogue will consist of him doing nothing but saying "Hodor". In fact, I have a hope that in the unlikely event GRRM ever actually does finish the series, the book ends with "Hodor," said Hodor.)

I've had ENOUGH!

Ahhh, the tortures of Hell's Kitchen continue!

:: Sandwich day at Hell's Kitchen. Oy. I love sandwiches. Watching this show was painful, it made me so hungry! But interesting that Ramsay takes them to a place so they can eat French Dip sandwiches, and then criticizes Fran's sandwich because of a bit of soggy bread, saying that "You never want to see soggy bread in a sandwich." Except, apparently, the sandwiches that are dipped in broth at the place you took them to, Chef?

:: The 50th wedding anniversary hosted by Hell's Kitchen was kind of cool, although I'd never heard of "Steak Diane" before. No idea what that is. Chicken Kiev, though? Ewwww! Never been a big fan of the stuff.

:: Salvatore is gone. I had a feeling.

:: Siobhan is gone. Again, I had a feeling.

:: Remaining contestants: Holli got yelled at for the first time, I think. She's still safe, though. I expect Fran to go soon. Autumn had a low-key week in which she did not annoy me. The others on the Blue team -- Jason, Jay, and Ed -- all had rough weeks, though, probably because they got really drunk the night before service and were hung over. Oops!

:: Until this week, the main impression we'd been given of Benjamin was of a quiet and talented cook who just performed consistently and didn't speak up much. Well, all that was out of the water this week, as he revealed himself to be a Grade A ass. Yes, Siobhan deserved to go, but his arrogant and condescending vendetta towards her was disgusting to behold -- especially when he insisted that in his professional opinion, the sandwich she'd made was terrible even after Chef Ramsay himself pronounced it fine. I won't be rooting for Benjamin now. At all. I want him to lose, badly. He's an ugly little man, and I have to wonder if his new-found arrogance and outspokenness, now that he's gone from the all-male Blue Team to the all-female Red Team, is based just a bit in good old-fashioned male chauvinism.

Next week brings the ever-popular "Taste the ingredient and tell me what it is" challenge, which is always a devious one as Ramsay mixes prosaic ingredients like ham and onion with "gourmet", obscure stuff like watercress and...other stuff, which causes contestants to overthink and identify, say, bologna as "coconut".

A cautionary tale

So, like most kids, The Daughter is a fan o...The Twinkie. That snack cake of questionable worth, which is at once utterly insubstantial and heavy as a rock when one consumes it, and filled with a substance that is to whipped cream as...well, I'm struggling to come up with an analogy, so wildly inferior to the wonder of whipped cream is the stuff in the middle of a Twinkie.

Long story short, one weekend a couple of weeks back I bought a six-pack of Twinkies for The Kid's desserts for the week. Funny thing, though -- she still hasn't eaten them all. Not to worry, of course, as Twinkies are rumored to have a shelf-life best measured in terms reserved for the half-life of Plutonium.

But...I got to thinking about it, and I realized, maybe I've been unfair to the poor Twinkie. Maybe it's OK. I mean, yeah, it's mass-produced crap, but not all mass-produced crap is, well, crap, you know? And really, their "shelf life" is said to really be only twenty-five days, although what that means is open to debate -- is the twenty-five day for "best results", or is it a point beyond which consuming the little devils may give you food poisoning? Who's to say!

Back to the point, though: maybe I was unfair. Maybe the Twinkie isn't as bad as I remember it being from the last time I had one, well over twenty years ago. Only one way to find out, right? So I ate one.

First, one has to confront the beast.



Truth to tell, I'm already questioning the wisdom of this exercise. I mean, the Twinkie is small, but it's disturbingly heavy for something that's basically yellow cake and cream filling. It looks like food, in some way, but in another way, it looks like one of those odd foods you see in the Japanese section of a big supermarket: "They eat this? Really?"



The Twinkie: International food of mystery!

Of course, investigation time is done. It's now time to commit ourselves to the Path of Inquiry on which we have set ourselves. In other words, it's time to open the wrapper.



The temptation to shrink away from the open wrapper, in the event that the souls of the Damned come streaming out of that plastic, their agonized screams echoing through your home, is nearly irresistible. But nothing comes out.

Not even an aroma. To open a sealed package containing a food and smell nothing is pretty odd, isn't it?

So now I open the wrapper far enough to allow the Twinkie to slide out nicely, into my hand. Except....



It doesn't slide out. It doesn't budge. The Twinkie has adhesive properties that are reminiscent of construction adhesive. I remember, when I had Twinkies as a kid, that I always shredded the wrapper whilst opening it. I figured that was because I didn't have the finger dexterity to simply open the wrapper and slide the little bugger out; turns out that you can't simply open the wrapper and slide the little bugger out. You have to shred the wrapper to finally extract the Twinkie from its plastic prison.

Confronted with such an odd food item, I smell it first, and find that its aroma is very weak in the first place, and vaguely industrial in the second. The Twinkie's aroma is not any aroma that occurs in nature in any way.

I turn it over in my hand, noting again its surprising weight and noticing that the bloody tosser is really oily. Not only does the Twinkie itself shine a bit, but it leaves bits of that shine upon my fingertips as I hold it. Weird...but I can't dwell anymore on its physical characteristics. The time has come....



The tasting of the Twinkie is, at its heart, a moment of pure, abject terror. I wondered, for the briefest of seconds, if I was playing the food equivalent of Russian Roulette, or if I was re-enacting the last moments of Socrates, as he lifted the cup of hemlock to his lips. (Well, not really, if you believe Plato's version of events, in which Socrates basically says, "Oh, it's time? OK, gimme the cup. Stop crying, you bunch of pansies!" before he quaffs the poison. But then, Socrates never had to contend with the Twinkie.)

Finally, though, I decided to invoke the old adage "No guts, no glory", and took a nice, big bite of the Twinkie. The texture was some kind of odd hybrid of cake and cork, as I could feel my jaw rebounding a bit as my teeth clove through the cake and into the cream filling. How to describe that stuff? It tastes like...penance. Mixed with a bunch of sugar and whipped up.

Ultimately, the taste is...well, it's....



It's not utterly awful -- the Twinkie has many levels of Hell to descend through before it approaches the awesome awfulness of broccoli -- but still, as I feel the bite of Twinkie sinking through my esophagus to descend into my digestive tract, I can feel something...the destruction of some small part of my soul, perhaps. Destroyed in an unholy encounter with The Twinkie.

A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Pacific or Atlantic?

I'd like to see the sugar packet

I hate that phone pole., originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I was driving home the other day from my weekly grocery shopping, and I noticed that a car a few vehicles ahead seemed to be carrying a big box on its hatch or something like that. Nothing terribly unusual; you see this kind of thing reasonably often, when people buy refrigerators or whatnot and decide to drive it home themselves rather than opt for delivery. But as other cars left and I got closer to this one, I realized that it was not a box, but rather a big mock-up of a coffee cup.

The car turned out to be a roving advertisement for Dunkin' Donuts. I've never seen such a vehicle before. I grabbed a pic with my phone (unfortunately failing to allow for that damned telephone pole). Now they need to make a truck in the shape of a big donut!

Tanj!

Time for some notes on a bit of recent reading!

:: As much as I love science fiction, I'm the first to admit that my reading history with it is full of holes, and that there are many, many authors who are pillars of the genre whom I have yet to read. I can scratch one off now, because I've finally read some Larry Niven. Specifically, the novel Ringworld.

I really don't know anything about Niven at all, except that he's done lots of work with Jerry Pournelle, and that he's mainly known for a series of books or stories called "Known Space". I'm not even sure if Ringworld is part of "Known Space", but the book does stand on its own, somewhat – although it is clearly intended to establish a ground-floor of sorts for a possible series. And now I see, according to Wikipedia, that Ringworld is certainly part of "Known Space", and boasts a number of direct sequels. It also won the Hugo and Nebula awards.

Ringworld is your archetypal "Team goes to investigate an anomaly" tale, and parts of it reminded me, in terms of mood, of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. The Ringworld is a very strange object indeed: an enormous construct built around a far-off star, that basically looks like an impossibly long band of metal (or something) running completely around the star, with the side of the band facing the star terraformed into something akin to a planet surface. The result is a planetscape that is thousands of times roomier than, say, the surface of the Earth. Circadian cycles on the Ringworld are approximated by enormous black panels that likewise orbit the star farther in, which block out the star's light from points on the surface of Ringworld at regular intervals.

So our expedition quickly forms, consisting of four individuals: humans Louis Wu (a 200-year old man looking for some new solution to his boredom) and Teela Brown (a young woman with no particularly notable qualities, except her extraordinary luck); Nessus (a three-legged alien from a race called the Puppeteers); and Speaker-to-Animals of the warlike kzin race. How these individuals come together, and why, I'll leave to anyone who wants to read the book, but in just about any story like this, the main source of conflict arises from the differences between the main members of our cast. That is certainly true here.

I won't give anything away, except to note that the story unfolds in a lot of expected ways; the landing on Ringworld isn't quite according to plan, and our heroes find a lot on Ringworld that they couldn't have possibly expected. Niven does a good job of creating and sustaining mysteries on this world, and he also does a great job of conveying what the distances must be like on an object that is literally the size of Earth's orbit. The immensity of the Ringworld is its dominant characteristic, and as we internalize how huge the thing is, the more mysterious it becomes – especially its relative lack of inhabitants. The mystery becomes, if some alien race surely built the Ringworld so they would have enough room, then why is there almost no sign of them? Niven's possible answers to this question involve some interesting speculations on the psychology that would result in a species living on such a construct.

The four main characters are fairly interesting, but not tremendously so, and I found the whole notion of the Puppeteers genetically engineering people to select for their luck strained my credulity a bit. The biggest flaw in the book for me, though, was a linguistic tic: since Ringworld dates from an era when characters in SF weren't allowed to use actual swear words, authors had to either resort to just telling us that their characters had sworn, inventing their own new metaphors for expletives, or – as Niven does here – making up his own swear words. Sometimes in a series this can work, but other times it's almost nonsensical. In short, I had a very hard time with the word tanj, which is an acronym for "There ain't no justice". Every time someone would say "Tanj", or "Tanjing", or "Tanjit", or some variant thereof, I found myself momentarily ejected from the book.

Still, this was an entertaining and intriguing read. Will I read further into Niven, the Ringworld, and Known Space? I'm not sure. But I won't rule it out.

:: While I love to read comics, I find that I have almost no appetite for superhero comics anymore. At least, not the ones apparently being produced today, to judge by the collections I get from the library. It seems as though every title now, every hero, and every story about every hero, has to be some kind of depressing descent into the tremendous angst at that hero's heart. And frankly...all that superheroic angst gets a bit boring. I almost want to say, "Yeah, I get it. Loads of pressure on you. You feel responsible for the world but can't tell anyone because your identity is secret. You're terrified of a horrible fate befalling your loved ones when your enemies find out. And since you're a superhero, you're likely to outlive every one you love, anyway. Buck up and get over it! Have fun!" Where the heck is the spirit of fun adventure that used to be the dominant characteristic of superhero comics?

I'm not claiming that some angsty stuff isn't welcome. You can go too far the other way, too, and you need some inner conflict to keep the heroes interesting as characters. That's why Spiderman's always been one of my favorite superheroes: the very best Spidey stories always managed to blend that sense of fun with just the right amount of angst for Peter Parker. There are very dark things in Parker's life story, but they're not dominant and they don't color his view of the entire world and they don't cast his stories themselves into depressing light, as Batman's tend to do.

I think this all started, maybe, with Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which I didn't like nearly as much as I think I was supposed to. Batman, in his current incarnations, tends to be a deeply depressing character. He's the ultimate wet blanket on the superhero party. And I hate it when I read other titles that seem cut from that cloth. Hence, Spiderman: Reign. I was all prepared to be "Meh" on this book, but now I realize...I hated it.

Like Dark Knight Returns, Reign takes us forward in time, to Spiderman's elder years, when he's a white-haired, bearded Peter Parker whose personal life is every bit as much a wreck as it's ever been. For one reason or another, Parker takes on the Spidey suit again, all the while subjecting us to depressing monologue after depressing monologue about how much he misses Mary Jane, his wife, who is now dead. (I assume this was before Marvel's awful "Turning back of the clock" to before their marriage.) Why is she dead? I won't spoil it here, but suffice it to say that it's perfectly in keeping with the notion that the act of knowing Peter Parker is to commit oneself to an awful fate that's supposed to be ironic or something.

In Reign, about the only sense of any fun at all comes from Spiderman's never-ending habit of wisecracking with the people he's fighting. Other than that, the book is dank and depressing. It reads like if the guy who does Funky Winkerbean wrote a superhero comic.

:: I didn't hate Justice League: A League of One; I just found it kind of dull. Which is disappointing, because it's a Wonder Woman story. Sure, the title says "Justice League", but when Wonder Woman receives a prophecy that sounds like it's foretelling the death of whoever fights an ancient evil that has just returned to life, she incapacitates all of her Justice League friends, one by one, until she's left alone to face the threat. It was an interesting conceit, but it kind of illustrates another problem with these kinds of stories: if you want to tell a story about one hero in the DC Universe, you have to at some point explain why the other heroes who are all over the place, including the Man of Steel himself, either can't or won't pitch in to help.

This tale pits Wonder Woman against the most ancient of dragons, who had been slumbering beneath a mountain in Europe for centuries but who has now been awakened by some gnome-like creatures. The whole story feels a bit strange, really – as if Wonder Woman has been shoehorned into a tale from Teutonic myth. It doesn't really work all that well, and in fact, its resolution feels almost perfunctory. The book seems to spend more pages dealing with Wonder Woman's "betrayals" of her teammates than on her battle with the threat in the story.

:: Somewhat more successful, although still a bit less than the sum of its parts, is Wolverine: The Brotherhood. After Spiderman, Wolverine's probably my second favorite superhero, mainly because he's a bloodthirsty redneck with a sardonic sense of humor. I like that. He's deeply intelligent but nobody realizes it at first, so in addition to his extreme skill at combat and his unbreakable claws, he's got the built-in advantage in always being underestimated. When he's well-written, Wolverine is as entertaining as they come.

This story, apparently from a six-issue run of one of the comics titled Wolverine (I've utterly lost track of the publication history of these titles and where the solo Wolvie stories fit in with X-Men continuity), has Wolverine living in a crappy apartment in Portland, OR, where he spends his days sitting in a local diner, reading and drinking coffee. He makes a connection with his waitress, a seventeen-year-old girl who keeps a journal in which she refers to Wolvie as "Mean man". Before this friendship can blossom, Lucy (the girl) is murdered by a couple of machine-gun wielding hoodlums, who also riddle Wolvie with bullets when he comes out of his apartment to see what's going on. (Lucy had lived next door to Wolvie.) Of course, filling Wolverine with bullets is never a good idea, and now Wolvie's on the hunt.

His journey takes him into a world of illegal gun dealers and then to a compound somewhere in the mountains of Oregon, where a cultish figure is keeping a harem of kidnapped girls. This is all actually pretty intriguing stuff, and I like Wolverine's solo stories like this. It always seems a bit more believable than Wolvie squaring off against supervillains, for some reason. My favorite Wolverine story is the Wolverine limited series from the 1980s, written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Frank Miller, which delves into Wolvie's interactions with the Japanese culture and the idea of Wolvie as fallen Samurai; that tale doesn't even pit Wolvie against any kind of supervillain at all. Same with this one, although it's not as well written as the earlier series. The villain turns out to be simply garden variety, and the story seems to be set-up for a following plotline involving the Federal agent who is tailing Wolverine. The collected graphic novel comprises six issues of the series, of which the last consists of Wolverine sitting in a bar, talking with X-buddy Nightcrawler about...what else...his angsty issues. (With Wolverine, it's his balancing of his human and animal natures.) It's probably a bit unfair to judge this story on the basis that it's simply not a complete story, but the talk-over-a-beer-with-Elf issue pretty much brings the story's forward momentum to a halt. Kind of a shame.

Love was supposed to keep them together

Going to pick up Tennille, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I was leaving the local Target parking lot yesterday, and saw just beside me, this guy. You don't see that kind of hat much these days, do you? I wanted to pull up alongside and request a few bars of "Muskrat Love", but the light turned green and he was gone before I could. So long, Captain!

It's RAWWWW!!!

Ahhhh, Hell's Kitchen, how I love you. I'm enjoying the doubling-up of episodes this year, even if that means that the show will be finished much sooner than usual. Last week's episodes were full of entertainment:

:: One of the theme nights was a "Family Night" at Hell's Kitchen, which led Gordon Ramsay to point out to his charges that the dining room would be full of kids and therefore it would be nice if they didn't make him swear.

So what happened? The Red Team proceeded to muck things up so badly that Ramsay threw all of them out and had his trust sous chefs finish the service. And if you know Gordon Ramsay, you know he didn't break the news to the Reds by saying, "You have all underperformed, and now I would like you all to return to the dorms forthwith". Oh no.

As he would say a minute later, "So much for me not swearing tonight...."

:: It's not uncommon for Hell's Kitchen to make me hungry for a certain food. That said, I want some crab hushpuppies. NOW.

:: Scott, the endless know-it-all with the unimaginably inflated opinion of his own worth, got tossed out on his ear. He kept saying "None of you work in fine dining restaurants!", as though it meant something. It never occurred to him that since his food was constantly being sent back, since Ramsay was constantly having to yell at him for serving up raw food no matter what station he ran, that maybe he's not as good as he thinks. The guy was utterly, utterly delusional. But he talked a good game for a while, even to the point of getting Fran to not nominate him for elimination. (Ramsay saw through this and brought him up anyway, although he eventually sent Maria packing.)

Of the remaining contestants:

:: Siobhan seems ripe to go. I liked her a lot at first, and I still think she's really cute, but she's over her head in each service, and her results are similar to Scott's. The only difference is, Siobhan doesn't think she's God's gift.

:: Salvatore is not long for the show either, I suspect. He's got talent, but he lacks experience and his confidence has all the rigor of a skyscraper made of balsa wood. He can't go much farther than he has already.

:: Fran has gone surprisingly far. I was actually a bit shocked when Ramsay looked her in the eye a few weeks ago and said, "I can't teach an old dog new tricks." I have noticed over the years that he really does gravitate toward youth (such as a few years back when he chose a young woman over an older guy named Petrozza in the finale, when the two were really about equal in performance). I can't see Fran winning, but I can see her at least making it to the Black Jackets.

:: I can really see Nilka winning, although I know -- from the "This season on Hell's Kitchen!" thing that was part of the first episode -- that she appears to have a hell of a tantrum explosion coming up at some point. Of course, that, in itself, need not doom her. Nilka's got some game, though.

:: Benjamin also has some game, although I was disappointed to hear him start to show some ego and arrogance in the last episode. The humble and confident chefs tend to be the ones who excel on this show. Remember Dave from last year? That guy just shut up and cooked, week in and week out. That's what Benjamin had been doing, too, but now he's been appointed "Possible Savior of the Red Team". That's not going to help his chances. Two seasons ago, another strong Blue performer was sent to a disastrous Red Team to help pull them back together; he was gone two weeks later.

:: Ed? I have no impression of the guy. At all. I don't recall him even being yelled at yet. No read on him whatsoever.

:: Jay also seems a bit arrogant, but a bit quieter about it. He could be the type to reach the finale by outlasting everyone else.

:: Jason also seems to have a bit of skill, but I think he's going to fall apart at some point. He just always seems to have a chip on his shoulder, and that's never going to work out well.

:: Autumn? I don't like her at all. Still. She appears to have some skill in the kitchen, but she's a weasel. I didn't like the way she would screw things up on the Red Team and then find a way to avoid the blame that was hers, and I didn't like how, this past week, she tried to set the Red Team up for failure now that she was on the Blue Team. (One night, each team switched off kitchen and dining room service duties, so one team was waiting tables while the other cooked. Autumn was being really suggestive to customers that she could take their food back and have it re-cooked, she really really really could it was no problem at all. Ugh.

:: And then there's my favorite contestant, the beautiful Holli. And she seems to have some skill as well; she has not yet been in Chef Ramsay's line of fire, and she manages to pretty much stay out of the fray on a Red Team that gets more dysfunctional every week.

And she's just...immensely cute.



She even manages to look cute when all the chefs are required to wear butchering costumes for a challenge that doesn't even involve butchering!



Of course, that episode ultimately irritated me a bit. The Blue Team won a challenge involving using pork as an ingredient, so they all got to go to a spa where they got massages and sat in hot tubs and had mud baths, with lots of nicely lingering shots of the Blue Team members in their spa gear. There was a lot less footage of the Red Team's punishment, which involved dressing up appropriately for the job of washing a bunch of muddy pigs.

Which means that the episode featured a number of lingering shots of Autumn in a bikini, and only a couple of fleeting glimpses of wonderful Holli in overalls. Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, Hell's Kitchen!







Sigh!

(Yeah, I'm weird. Your point?)