Morning Report

Two things I ever needed a newspaper for: Op-Eds and For Better or For Worse. No, lackwit, not The Comics. Please. For Better or For Worse! It's a moving-at-the-speed-of-life multi-generational comic strip. People actually grow up in this strip. If you don't know what it is, you don't read the comics and nothing I can say will make you. If you do know, then You Know.

Oh hell, looks like the French ambassador to the US is gonna be on Fox News later this morning. I'm enduring Fox & Friends right now. I like Fox News, but I can't just watch a news channel, and I really can't watch it in an election year.

Stupid morning "news" shows. Sounds like a damn college softball game. Which sounds like a flock of geese.

Read Along

I don't know how many nerds do this. Part of my morning ritual is checking Sci Fi Wire over at the SciFi Channel website. Yes, seriously. It all started quite innocently, then BAM I had to check every morning. It's just part of the ritual. The ritual being an exercise in me not being bored. Bit of a morning person, I am.

Now that that's out of the way, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna read along. I'm just going down the briefs here. Looks like I'm working off the "Updated 1:41pm ET on 27-April-2004". Your results may vary.

• I think SciFi has a stake in Van Helsing.
  
• Who cares about Buffy and Angel? I used to, but Buffy ended a year ago (!) and Angel sucks.
  
• Who cares about Mission: Impossible 3? Say, has Tom Cruise had any other movies go to 2 sequels? Or one?
  
• Hmmmmmmm... Jessica Alba in Sin City. If the movie's gonna be based on the first Sin City yarn (titled simply Sin City), then she would probably end up being... a stripper. I'm on that like white on rice. In the comic, the character was sporting the following: pasties, cowboy hat, g-string, bullwhip.
  
• Watch. Watch. I'm gonna give a damn about Australian science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Watch. Watch. You missed it.
  
• EA's gonna jump the shark on Lord of the Rings games. When is LotR: Oliphaunt Racer coming out?
  
• A "Christian" Harry Potter, huh? We need a Christian Lord of the Rings, too. While we're at it, how about a Johnny Tremain for American consumption? My feelings on Christian media could take up 7 or 8 posts. I have feelings on that that rival my feelings toward education, at least in quantity.
  
• Third X-Men in the works? Oh! They mean a movie! Yeah, that'll be nice. So, now that we know (because we couldn't just assume) that a 3rd X-Men movie is coming, which part of that little post is, you know, news? In that vein, here's news about my next blog entry: I'm going to write another blog entry after this one. I don't know what it's going to be about yet.
  
• "NBC Eyes Van Helsing Spinoff". That is actually interesting! I thought most of network TV was devoting its resources to reality shows!
  
• Mutant X Canceled? I dunno, Scifi Wire, let me read on. Yes, looks like.
  
• Mmmm... Jennifer Garner. She would have been awesome in Daredevil if she had just, you know, not talked.
  
• Ah, that great nerdly Grail, a new Dark Shadows. You know, the first one sucked. The one in the early 90's, well, sucked. It's a good idea for a TV show, consistently poorly written.
  
• If they delay Indy IV (let's show it some respect and call it The Fourth Indiana Jones film) much longer, Harrison Ford is going to have to do it from a retirement castle.
  
• Poor Kate Beckinsale. So very hot, so very British (thus implying class). So very locked into vampire flicks. What's up with that? Is this all her idea? I don't mind it so much, because she's hot and British, but it just seems odd. Her leather/rubber pants in Underworldwere worth the price of admission. Okay, let's be clear: her ass in her leather/rubber pants in Underworld was worth the price of admission.
  

Some May Boast

Click for the big one.

Here's a shot from the Aggie Muster at Camp Victory, Baghdad. I wasn't clear on what the building is there. Yup, those are Aggies. I know some of them. Here's how to be an Aggie:

1. Go here. Read, fill things out, etc.
   
2. Get accepted.
   
3. Attend (at this point you are an Aggie)
   
4. Graduate (at this point you are an Aggie, as well as a Former Student.)
   
5. Bleed Maroon.
   

Now, you've got a group shot, here's what the deal is, for those of you from the lesser universities and states. Aggie Muster is held on April 21st, every year. Aggies all over the world get together, eat stuff, meet-n-greet, and honor that year's dead. It brings tears to your eyes, hearing the friends and family of the deceased answer "Here" for the absent party. And these guys got to do it in Baghdad.

Guilt of Years

Pooh doesn't leave me alone about this crap. No, I don't post often enough, regularly, etc. Here's the deal, see if you can understand this. I work for a company in a pretty specialized field, as a contractor. Thus, I am paid by my company to do work for other people.

It is Frowned Upon to do stuff like this (or manage e-bay auctions or line up match.com ducklings) whilst at work. That is part one of my defense. So I'm not editing blogs during normal business hours. I'm reading them like a mo-fo, though. If I bothered with a blogroll, it'd be pretty long and non-selective. My blogroll is essentially everyone else's blogroll. I'm reading the same stuff as everyone else on the Right, and I'm pretty prolific. I don't do comments; let people start their own blog if they want to argue with me. Let them use e-mail. I don't want to be bothered with it. As previously stated, I Have a Day Job.

So you see where I'm coming from now. I work with computers. Not like those chodes in the ITT Tech ads--I work with a couple thousand of them, generally at the same time. I barely acknowledge the people that use them other than they shouldn't notice the things I do. When I get home, I want to watch the Simpsons. I like to talk about the Simpsons. I'm quite Baptist, but I still find stuff from the Simpsons is much more relatable to my life than the Bible. I don't like to talk about politics, or at least I don't like to just jabber about politics all that much. I like to argue about policy. There's a difference. I like to argue about philosophy. Not deep philosophy, political philosophy. Not strategy, and not even necessarily winning.

So imagine the guilt I've been carrying for nearly a year now after ending my career at Michele Catalano's (Yes, that's her Red Sox cap) Four Color Hell (is it dead?) after 2 posts. Yup, I like to talk about comics. I love talking about comic shops since it's always a wonder to me when one stays in business for a long time. I like talking about my complete run of Marvel's "New Universe" and how I picked up the full run of Power Pack on ebay. And especially how my X-Men collection goes back to 1979. Howe'er, I don't like talking about this stuff with other comic nerds. If there's a guy out there that actually gives a damn about someone's inks, I stand prepared to ignore him. If somebody's going to bitch about lettering, I'm the guy flipping through the trade paperbacks until he's done.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, read a comic website. Let's see, comic books generated maybe, what, a dozen superstar writers and artists before 1991. I'm counting from 1938! I daresay this stuff didn't matter back then, except to the hard core nerdry. There were a few standouts--the superstars. If you don't know who they are, you're not missing anything. If you do know who they are, you probably disagree with my list.

So, much like politics, journalism, space travel, and movies, the nerds ruined it for the rest of us. So busy striving for a perfection endemic to their profession, they forgot the rest of us were watching and or waiting. Yeah, some of this internal frippery is good for the rest of us. A lot of it is tiresome. And a boatload of it annoys away the normal folk that are just looking to enjoy what's going on without getting into the gears. And I won't play that. You will never see me debating the overall "place" of blogs. I know their place and purpose--on the Web, to be read.

I'll keep blogging. I like to bitch. Just had to get that off my chest.

Also, I'm sorry, Mrs Catalano.