Tuesday, November 29, 2022

My Uncle Donald Pearce has Passed


On Thanksgiving night, Thursday the 24th, my uncle, Donald Pearce, passed.  He was 94.  

Donald was married to my mother's sister, Violet.  Violet, seventeen years older than my mother, passed before I was born.  But together Donald and Violet produced my cousin, Susan, who is more a big-sister to me as she lived with us on and off while I was growing up and she's lived in Austin since 2000 or so.   Donald remarried, and so I grew up with an Aunt Vivian, who passed away when I was in college.   

My earliest memories include Donald visiting us when we still lived in Michigan, so I was 3 or 4.   But he was a fixture in my life as we'd visit he Upper Peninsula of Michigan every summer where he and Vivian lived, and they were avid road travelers, so you never knew when they'd roll up in the driveway and we'd get to have them for a while.  He was always quick with a joke and to make observations that hilariously cut to the point with a matter-of-factness that hit just the right note.  

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Thanksgiving


This week we celebrate Thanksgiving in the United States.  It's a Federal holiday established for Americans to take a moment with family and friends and consider what good fortunes they've had over the year.  Or maybe count blessings in a year that wasn't so great.

 As kids we get a "teach the legend" version of Thanksgiving and believe that we're celebrating a feast partaken of by the weird-o's who were so miffed they couldn't comfortably be uptight enough in 17th Century Europe, and so essentially moved to an equivalent of what would be a moon colony for us, just so they could burn women as witches in peace.  They happened to have their asses saved by some locals, and giving Thanks seemed like a keen idea.

That comes loaded with the egregious history of how Europeans would then colonize and wage 300 years of war on the people already living here.  So, understandably, if that was what we were celebrating, I get how one would pause to reflect and wonder how this led to finishing dinner quickly to watch The Dallas Cowboys and/ or seeing how much wine is in the remaining bottles and keeping a slow burn til it's all over.

But that is not what we're celebrating.  This isn't Christmas which has deep roots in Christian history, or Hannukah which refers to a specific moment in Jewish history.  I don't think most Americans really think of Thanksgiving as a specific day to sit down in honor of Pilgrims and Native Americans.  That would be particularly weird.  

From the earliest days of the U.S., Thanksgiving was a tradition in regions, but not universally celebrated.  While some Presidents observed the holiday, as early as Jefferson, the holiday was eschewed as religious and therefore not a National holiday.    

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

The League Goes to Austin FC's first Play-Off Match



Sunday, October 16th, I attended my first Austin FC match at Q2 Stadium here in sunny Austin, Texas.  

This was a somewhat unlikely event.  I've tried many times to get into soccer, but it never really worked for me.  European leagues play on European time, and I don't speak Spanish to keep up with the best soccer in my hemisphere.  And, honestly, cable has usually done a terrible job of covering MLS, the US's soccer equivalent of the NBA or MLB.  Over the years I was more interested in the US Women's National Team - because of the best sports-watching moments of my life is and always will be Brandi Chastain's penalty kick in the 1999 FIFA World Cup (yeah, the one that ended with Chastain whipping off her jersey).  That moment made a 24-year-old me cry.

Anyway, I was astoundingly skeptical of Austin taking on an MLS team.  It was originally pitched very badly by the owners looking to move here,  They made some weird moves along the way - like trying to just say they were going to build their stadium on highly utilized public land in incredibly dense areas of town, something not agreed upon by City Council or anyone else.  It would have created innumerable issues from traffic to environmental, and was kind of ugly and brazen, demonstrating they did not know Austin and did not share the values of Austinites.  

You don't just drop a massive stadium on Town Lake and think no one will notice.

Sunday, August 28, 2022

So. Where were we?

Your blogger and Andre the Dog, New Year 2022



Hi.

How is everyone doing?

It doesn't make much sense to breathe life back into a blog that's sat dormant for thirteen years, but, then again, League of Melbotis never made much sense, anyway.  

We kicked off League of Melbotis in April of 2003, after a move to the greater Phoenix area in early summer of 2002.  We were young, trying a new adventure, and by the time of the start of League of Melbotis, having some serious doubts about the decision to live in a sun-bleached hellscape.  It would take until 2006 for us to extricate ourselves from our desert surroundings and return to Austin.  

In the interim, the blog allowed us to ponder imponderables, engage in discussion of a wide range of topics, share enthusiasm about comics, superheroes and science fiction, and try to make the best of a weird situation.

Initially, the primary function of League of Melbotis, for me - your blogger, was to talk about those bits of then mildly popular cultural ephemera.  But it quickly became a method of keeping in touch with friends who were now spreading across the country in an era so far in the past now that facebook, twitter and social media as we know it did not yet exist.  I believe we were on the edge of Friendster and a few other sites, but they weren't particularly useful except for finding the email address of your friends from college and sharing your awful taste in music.  And, of course, we were five years away from Robert Downey Jr. putting on an Iron Man helmet.  Let alone wrapping up one Superman TV show, the launch of a series of iffy movies and the debut of an all new Superman TV show.

Saturday, August 27, 2022