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Things I learned today:

- Books are not printed and bound by cheerful orphans who mix their occasional tears into the glue, but by bored and low-paid workers in large and noisy warehouses

- The smell of acetone can be enough to bring on a tic

- Printing and binding is really quite dull

- The rooftop beer garden at the Corner Hotel is really quite nice, especially when it's empty

- Getting a bus from Richmond to Clifton Hill at peak hour fucking sucks

I feel embiggened by all this knowledge. I may have to lose some other knowledge to fit everything in. Fortunately that's why God invented beer.

A picture of Jack:

You can't really tell, but the shirt says "I Defy Gravity".

I choose to believe that this shirt (along with his love of "Johnny and the Sprites") will serve as a gateway drug for a lifelong love affair with American musical theatre.

What the hell?

http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2008/05/14/what-the-hell/

So I just saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and it’s good and funny and everybody in it is good and funny, but what the hell is up with Mila Kunis - Mila fucking Kunis of all people - being the single best thing about it?

THE WORLD DOES NOT MAKE SENSE ANY MORE!

Tweets

09:17 Thinking there's another attempt at moving IJ going on. Ah, spinning beach ball, how I love thee. #
11:27 Leaf blower, leaf blower, good thing I don't have a gun. #
13:07 Enjoying the afterburn from a Texas Schlotzky's. Mmmm jalapeño. #
13:43 12 bumper stickers is too many. #
14:06 Unsurprisingly, I scored 95% on the New Wave 80s music quiz. The scary part is how many of the songs in the quiz I owned. #

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Topsy Turvy World
Today it was 52 and raining. Friday they're predicting record highs, 89-90 degrees. The teachers at my daughter's school briefed them on "appropriate dress" which included lots of warnings about tank tops, muscle shirts, and shorts that are "too short" (more than one inch above the knee). Yow.

Meanwhile a friend of mine was telling me about a situation that had cropped up with a foreign exchange student that is staying with her. This nice German boy was called into the principle's office because a girl had complained about him. He had tapped her on the shoulder (to get her attention, as people do) and this apparently violates some "no touching EVER" rules at the school. I was stunned that there are such rules. I know schools have rules against fighting, and rules against "sexual" contact (including boys and girls holding hands in the hall) but NO touching, EVER? Yep, and not only at that school but all over the country. Another mom I know then told me that her 12-year-old son was warned that he'd be sent to the office because he and his friend high-fived about something. NO HIGH FIVES! NO tapping someone on the shoulder to get their attention. No showing legs, arms, collarbones, or wearing clothes appropriate to the heat on a record-breaking hot day.

What the hell?

I find myself looking around at this kind of thing and feeling sick and fatigued by it all. Is it possible to find myself one of those exclusive communities made of people who hare MY beliefs and aren't, uh, C-R-A-Z-Y? Somewhere where the future doesn't look like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and the Prison Industrial Complex isn't eagerly rolling out new and better ways to tase us, bro?

Probably should just keep this sort of stuff to myself these days but hey, I haven't been blogging much lately so it was either this little rant or another day of no content.

Current Mood: cynical

Parenting Advice Needed
Please read my post on Jack's blog, and, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, make some, either here or there.
Thank you!
http://chittisterchildren.wordpress.com/

Current Mood: frazzled
Current Music: Baltimore, Tori Amos

Elvis Costello and The Police
"Every breath you take
Every cake you bake
Every lawn you rake
Every dog you wake
I'll be watching you."
-Opus

The concert was great. It would've been cooler if The Police had performed "Synchronicity", but I can't complain, they did a bunch of standards.

rougewench wrote a good review of the evening, so instead of repeating it, I'll just link to it.

Wow, that was the whitest, most middle-aged audience I've ever seen at a concert.

rougewench pointed out to me the insane ratio of cougars in the audience, many of whom probably went through high school or junior high when The Police first toured. I just wish the jackass behind us would've done something other than scream (and I do mean scream) out the name of whichever band member was on the big screen for that thirty seconds. He did this over and over again, as if he expected them to point to him and wave or something.

I also enjoyed Elvis Costello, but I have a confession to make: I had never actually heard any of his music before. I know, I know. I understood that he was talented because people like

legendofwool,

the_lunchbox,

digibri and

roguewench have all spoken highly of him. I'd seen him before (with Burt Bacharach in the Austin Powers movies (I know, I know, shutup) and maybe with Elton John somewhere(?)), but I wasn't really ever into New Wave music, so it was interesting hearing him for the first time live in concert. And you gotta respect that his new album is a vinyl LP.

Things that make me :)
This American Life DVD
The Watchmen Graphic Novel
Digital ElfQuest

Things that make me :(
Everything else.

Comics Time: Batman #664-669, 672-675

http://www.alltooflat.com/about/personal/sean/2008/05/comics_time_batman_664669_6726.html

Batman #664-669, 672-675
Grant Morrison, writer
Andy Kubert, J.H. Williams III, Tony Daniel, Ryan Benjamin, artists
DC Comics, April 2007-April 2008 or so
22 pages each
$2.99 each

Grant Morrison is my favorite superhero comics writer, one of the very few writers in comics I'll read anything by. Batman is my favorite superhero, the only character I feel an attachment to as an entity rather than as a character in a story that may or may not be good by artists and writers who may or may not be good. Put Morrison and Batman together and you should have a recipe for Sean T. Collins Nirvana, but for some reason that hasn't been the case. What I seem to recall being the standard Kubert Bros.-related scheduling difficulties early on; Morrison working in a deliberately choppy, almost disjointed narrative style both within individual issues and from issue to issue and short arc to short arc; sketchy, sloppy art from Kubert and unremarkable '90s-style art from Daniel and Benjamin jarringly interrupted by a bona-fide star turn from the great J.H. Williams III; that awkwardly inserted Ra's al-Ghul-centric crossover with all the other Bat-titles; my job at Wizard coming to an end and with it my weekly free access to superhero comics...put it all together and you have a book tailor-made for me that I wasn't even following.

I was recently loaned a more or less complete run of Morrison's tenure on the title--sans the initial "Batman & Son" arc that introduced Batman and Talia al-Ghul's enfant terrible son Damian and the issues pertaining to the Ra's al-Ghul crossover in which the old villain attempts rebirth in the body of his grandson--and I was pleased to discover I liked the whole thing a lot.

Like so many of Morrison's long runs it's badly hampered by the art he's saddled with, perhaps moreso here than in other cases since so much of Morrison's staccato scripting depends on nuances of body language, facial expression, and mise en scène. Meanwhile, that pow-pow-pow pacing and those brief, three- or two- or even one-issue story arcs give the illusion of a lack of continuity within the run overall. But taken in one sitting these problems are easily smoothed over, and what reveals itself is a dual project.

First, and credit here goes to my friend Kiel Phegley for pointing this out, Morrison foregrounding Batman as the main point of interest in every story. Whereas normally the character plays a particularly badass brand of straightman to the more glamorous villains and horrifying murder-mysteries he's up against, Morrison's emphasis is on the hero himself, and on establishing him as every bit as weird, exciting, scary, and memorable as his antagonists. This is reflected in Morrison's choice of antagonists itself: as with All Star Superman, he's trotting out a parade of baddies who in one way or another serve as his flawed doppelgangers. The peak-human-specimen al-Ghul family, the crimefighting Batmen of Many Nations and their billionaire benefactor, three crazed Batman-impersonating policemen, even Bat-Mite--they all throw what makes Batman Batman into sharper relief via contrast, demonstrating that while he is indeed weird, exciting, scary, and memorable, he's also a fundamentally good person who never loses sight of the values that matter to him and by which he's chosen to define himself.

Second, Morrison is slowly advancing a novel and vastly more enjoyable take on the shopworn "shadowy villain manipulating things behind the scenes" mega-storyline in the person of the Black Glove, a figure of unknown provenance behind many of the story's events. Morrison has basically avoided those annoying scenes where the shadowy figure literally appears as a figure in shadows once or twice per issue, making ominous statements and showing us just enough of his silhouette that we can start guessing whether he's Mysterio or Hush or whoever. Instead, Batman arranges his recent cases into a pattern at the center of which is a hole in the shape of something that's more of an idea rather than a person--a "king of crime" figure so brilliantly evil that even Batman had no idea he existed and had been pulling strings for nearly Batman's entirely career. It's all coming out in this kind of slow, unnerving fashion, more identifiable as something feeling weird about the stories rather than as a story element in and of itself. Hopefully the central revelation will be as satisfying as that of, say, New X-Men. At any rate, while I can see why people (myself included) may have gotten a bit lost in the shuffle, I'm now reading some of the book's more oblique storytelling choices as just that--choices--rather than lapses, and I'm firmly back on board.

snurched from miintikwa
( Name 22 things... )

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: "Dead Skunk" by Steve Rosenhaus

BEHOLD! My new favorite suparr hero!!
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Current Music: NIN - Ghost I - IV

The Twits.
These are the twits I twitted.

15:21 @ sometimes the meetings eat my brain. #
15:46 And then I just got sick of it. All of it. In one brief, shining moment I had absolutely no affection left in my soul, save for Weds. #

Beechen Interviewed About Batgirl Miniseries
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Tuesday's dead
Today, one of

terri_osborne's coworkers had surgery. She has no family in the area, so Terri volunteered to pick her up from the hospital and take her home, and I went along, too, as I know the neighborhood she lives in, and there was no guarantee she'd be in any condition to direct the cabbie home (she lives in Inwood, which is off the usual yellow cab's beaten path).

She was supposed to get out of recover at 1.30, so of course, she got out at 4.15. *laughs* Luckily, I had a book to read and my Treo (though I finished the book and the battery on my Treo was almost dead ere long). But it was worth it, as Terri's coworker really needed someone to get her home.

As I said to Terri, what's the good of being freelance if you can't do stuff like this? Hell, what's the good of being human if you can't do stuff like this?

After a 30-minute nap, I went to karate and fighting class. The latter felt better, though I still need to train myself to get my arms up when there's a kick toward my head. I keep ducking, which is entirely the wrong thing to do. *sigh* And in regular class, I still need to work on the part of Pinan kata #5 where you jump in the air and land in a hook stance. There's an adult tournament the last week in June that I intend to participate in, and I'll likely be competing against two advanced brown belts (Dorian and Liza) who are really good. (There's only one other brown belt in the dojo right now, and his attendance is sufficiently sporadic that I doubt he'll enter the tournament.)

Also found out in class that the son of one of the black belts is going to be (along with his writing partner) the show-runner on Life on Mars, which was their consolation prize for October Road being cancelled. *laughs*

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: "The Rattlesnake Trail" by Jethro Tull

Now available - an album of Tom Waits covers, performed by... Scarlett Johansson.

In the interest of full disclosure, my exposure to Mr. Waits is mainly from Frank's Wild Years, and I see that she didn't cover Telephone Call From Istanbul, so I can't really speak about this with any knowledge. Perhaps someone out there might enlighten me...

So, that's what they do up there when Black Canary's not around...
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what's what
Got my car back from the body shop. WOOT! (Comparison: driving the rental was like when I'd go camping in Boy Scouts, wearing my sturdyhiking boots -- unwieldy, but able to be adjusted to. However, when I'd get home and put on my sneaks, I felt like I could fly. Same thing here between the boat-like Pontiac Grand Prix and my awez Toyota Matrix.)

Spent some time hanging with awez gf

ka_crow, and admired her new tats.

Forced aforesaid awez gf to watch some Justice League: specifically, the 3-part pilot and "This Little Piggy."

BTW --

kingofbreakfast, I do not know if you actually read me, but YOU WARPED HER MIND!

"TLP" is possibly my fave JLU ep; I am happy to inflict it on others. HOWEVER, given Misty, I believe you, sir, are hacking the Matrix. ;)

No dresden-work tonight, oh my droogies. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, after day-job work is handled, the laundry is in the machino, and the cats' ass sand has been scooped.

Ren Faire and more
Getting ready to go to the Renaissance Fair this coming Saturday. Should be lots of fun. I'll make sure to take pictures...'cause everyone knows how much I love to have pictures taken of me. I was thinking about shaving my head. Completely. I probably won't, but it's a thought.

On a police procedural kick right now. Reading the Jefferson Bass novel Carved in Bone, which is billed as "A Body Farm Novel," so you know it got my attention really quick.

Not sure if I posted this, but I turned in my first draft of SSP #2. Should be getting redlines back on SSP #1 soon. Will get to work formulating my outline for SSP #3 in the coming days. Also working on PP #1 a bit, so that's a good thing.

Now, I am getting sleepy, so I think I'm gonna finish up Carved in Bone, take a shower and call it a night. It's been a mostly good day.

Current Mood: good
Current Music: Jerry Goldsmith's score to THE HAUNTING

Today's Tweets

21:32 Piano Phase live @ Shepherd School of Music, courtesy of Foundation of Modern Music. #

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Peter has bad news for Aunt May...
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