Thoughts

Today is the second day back from our nightmare day. Between the time at the ER and my time of revelation in the Indian styled sweat lodge, I had much time to think. I am turning over a new stone. My plans for the day are as follows:

Get up around 5:30 and run and extra half-mile more than I normally do (so that's .75 miles to all of you out there keeping score at home). I will take Lucy and Mel with me, so it may take a while longer than usual.

When I get home, I will make breakfast for Jamie, possibly french toast or eggs benedict. I will also make my own lunch, in a Target bag, of course, consisting solely of ants on a log. 13 logs, exactly.

After I get done making breakfast, i will do the dishes, and head off to work. At work, I will go out of my way to be kind and courteous to all my co-workers, and to share a log of ants with each of them. Should they decline my ants on a log, I will throw it at them in a fit of rage. Afterwards, I will apologize and blame the whole incident on "my inner demons."

After work, I will come home and clean the entire house. Since lately I have come to realize how Superman comics are ultimately pointless, due to his invincibility, I will begin my phase out of Superman figurines from the house. I won't get rid of all of them, and they won't be thrown away, (they will be meticulously wrapped and stored in one of the closets). I will begin to replace my Super-Man memorabilia with that of Spider-man and Batman, whose mortality make
them much more interesting anyway.

I will work some more on training Lucy, and play with Mel, since she feels a little neglected with Lucy around.

During my hiatus, I had some time to think as well as read (and misplace) books. I am going to make the following amends as well. I will apologize to my parents for the many many shenanigans I pulled (including the Clyde and Roundball incidents). I will apologize to
Steanso for the beatings I passed out to him over the years, both emotional and physical. I will apologize for calling his bands "jam bands," and will attempt to appreciate those bands on a new level.

Finally, I will take Jamie out to Barcelona for dinner, as she is the best wife in the world. Any woman willing to put up with my crazy comic obsession deserves no less. (I'm sure you comic collectors out there know as well as I do that collecting comics is really a very small form of Peter Pan syndrome, grasping to hold on to our youth, and attempting to glamorize that youth by confusing it with super heroic actions. I am trying to get away from that and face my
reality. )

Thus will end my day. Wish me luck Leaguers. Change is often hard, but well worth it in the end.

THEY WILL REMEMBER ME AS AN IDIOT

Jim D., I guess, sent my link to comic geek website Dave's Long Box.

Normally I wouldn't have thought too much about it, but I guess people really read Dave's Long Box. I know this because my old roommate Kevin B. saw me and e-mailed me.

For good or ill, Dave's Long Box misidentified me as Jim.

I am beginning to rethink this whole "ha ha, I like Superman" thing.

Hello to MySpace people. I think you might see Michael and a few other people pop by. Welcome them.

Melbotis Store update. Since Natalie thinks I should make money off the store, I jacked the prices up by a dollar or a dollar fifty or something on the items in the store.

I do plan to swap out items in the near future, so if you really, really liked something on the page, order soon.

We got our shirts in today, and the quality of the images is pretty good. I was pleasantly surprised.

That's it for today for updates. I'm a little tired.

living la vida loca

(editor's note: this is not written to illicit sympathy. Rather, Jamie and I sort of just had a bad day, and I thought I'd share.)

Man.

Last night Jamie and I spoke on the phone before I got home about how all we were going to do was watch TV and and read.

When I walked in the door, Jamie was already working on some fajita ingredients. "Do you hear that?" she asked. There was a loud hissing sound coming from outside the sink window. Not a snake hissing, like compressed air escaping.

Sure enough, when I stepped outside the sound was coming from the direction of the air conditioner. Immediately we called an air conditioning repair service, hoping that, at best, we could make it through the night and the air wouldn't fail until the temperatures fell outside.

The first company informed me that they weren't even taking on any new customers, thanks to the busy, busy season. Luckily the next company was able to send out a repair person (the next morning). With Jamie scheduled for dialysis in the morning and myself scheduled for meetings in the morning, we had to put off the repair until any time between 10 and 1.

So... about twenty minutes after dinner and dishes, I was reading a book when I realized "gee, it's getting pretty warm in here..." The blower was still on, but the air was no longer cool.

It was getting pretty warm pretty fast, and as we're often a little overly cautious with Jamie, I started calling hotels to find Jamie a place to sleep. My gameplan was to get her a hotel near her dialysis location (where she has to be at 5:15 MWF), and then I'd get up with her, shower at the house, feed the dogs (who would spend the night outside), and go to work as early as possible. Jamie would be able to wait for the air conditioner guy for a while, and when I was done with my meetings, we'd tag team, and I would send her back to the hotel.

It took me four hotels to find a room. And checking into a hotel (without vibrating beds) the same night you call is an expensive proposition.

We ended up at a very nice Holiday Inn just South and West of the house. I watched the Mercury on TV, read a few pages and went to sleep.

At 2:00 in the morning Jamie was yelling for me from the bathroom with the complaint that "I need to throw up and I can't. And I can't breathe."

For those of you who haven't had a silent heart-attack, these symptoms may indicate that Jamie was doing some wicked after-hours partying. As far as I know, that wasn't the case. She was more than a little weirded out, and for maybe the first time in our adventures, she requested EMS help.

The front desk was pretty helpful, and within, literally, five or ten minutes four burly firemen/ emergency responders were standing in our hotel room. Now, I've spent a lot of time in ER's, and the stuff you see on TV is mostly horse-hockey. These guys, however, had the coolest system of testing and report-out that I've seen, with two guys checking things on the wife, one guy doing all the questioning, and one guy overseeing the operation to check for mistakes.

For good or ill, in that five minutes between placing the call and the burly firemen showing up, Jamie threw-up. A lot. Her fajita dinner came back for all to see.

We immediately theorized that a recent chnage in her meds was probably the culprit, but once you set the wheels of Emergency Medical Services in motion, it's best to just them do their thing.

In the middle of all the medical fiddle-faddle, I sort of had a 2:15AM out of body experience. There were four strange men in my hotel room, the room that I really shouldn't have been in, and one of them was wearing his baggy fire fighter pants.

Because Jamie had a heart-attack in 98 or so, her EKG's are always a little off. We had to promise the firemen that we would be headed to the ER, so off we went.

The ER had some folks waiting around who had obviously been there for a while, so I was beginning to wonder exactly how long we would be stuck watching re-runs of "Cheaters" on late night TV. One gentleman who had a hurty elbow was yelling at the nurses that he had been there for a long time.

Note to people who go to the ER: Hurty elbows will not get you seen quickly. Today we learned that a possible silent heart attack gets you the Gold Member Treatment. Jamie was seen almost immediately, and we got a room within half an hour. Unfortunately, the room was in the "Crash" area, where you're almost guaranteed to see a dead person or two before the end of the visit.

And, sure enough, I was sitting there for all of five minutes before some poor soul under a sheet was wheeled by.

Meanwhile, the guy in the next room was "crashing", which understandably draws the attention away from the non-crashing patients. Such as Jamie, who was feeling much better at this point, and me, who was trying to immerse myself in my "JLA: Greatest Stories Vol. 1".

Here's another important life-lesson, Leaguers... yes, you went to the ER because you felt poorly. But when someone just died and someone else is working on it, it is NOT the time to cause a scene because your discharge paperwork is taking a few extra minutes.

One charmer in our ER, who was decidedly not ill enough to actually be in the ER, started walking down the hallway shouting about "Where's my nurse? They said they was coming back in five minutes, and it's been fifteen!" When a nurse tried to explain that they were having a critical situation, she, being well trained as an American to expect instant gratifcation at the expense of everyone else, began shouting about how she "didn't care". And how she was "going outside for a smoke and they needed to come find" her.

When it was expalined that a patient had just died, and could she please lower her voice for the families that were around, she suggested "get him a body bag" loud enough for the entire ER to hear. At this point security was called, which made her grab her items and head for the exit. I'm not really sure what happened after that.

You don't often see ER staff that angry, but, man, yeah... they were all pissed after that. But they LOVED us, for not screaming in the hallway.

Jamie was released at 4:45, so we dashed to get her to dialysis. I drove back to the hotel, slept for a few hours, picked her up, and went to drop her off and grab the free breakfast at the hotel. Apparently, the breakfast wasn't free, we learned, when we were handed a bill.

Returning to the room, the phone immediately rang and the front desk called.
"Did you call for emergency services."
"Yes."
"And what was this regarding?"
"My wife wasn't feeling well, but she's been to the ER and stuff, and she's okay now."
"...you just called for Emergency Services."
"No, I called at 2:00 this morning."
"I have emergency services on the line, and you just called for assistance. I have them on the line."
"No. I called at 2:00 this morning."
"Let me put them on."
"Sir, do you need assistance?"
"No, we're okay. Your people already came out here at 2:00."
There was sort of a bit of dicussion going on at the front desk that I could hear on the line. "We have the wrong room."
"Okay then," I said. "I'm going to hang up. Thanks."

By 9:50 I went to sit in the house and wait for the air conditioner repairman (from 10 - 1, if you're checking facts). So, anyway, I waited. And waited and waited. It was pretty hot, but I brought in a fan and sat pretty still and watched "The Roaring Twenties."

At 1:15 the company cut me off at the pass and called to let me know my repairman was en route. He showed up about twenty minutes later, sweaty and disheleveled, and honestly, looking pretty tired. He got cracking, located a freon leak (that hissing), told me he was going to gauge me, I agreed, and he went to work.

Being the smart guy I am, I went out to his truck with a glass of water, neglecting to put on shoes in the 110 degree heat, burned my feat, handed off the water and went to clean up the plotch of cat barf Jeff the Cat had deposited in by the bedroom door.

Jamie called and announced "My car won't start. I tried to go get some lunch, but my car won't start."
"Of course it won't," I replied.

The gentleman was done fairly quickly, ran through the bill with me, I paid, and changed my air filter (helpful league tip: don't use the solid, nice 3M air filters. Apparently they're too good and make your air conditioners work overtime, shortening the life of your air conditioner).

I drove back to the hotel, started Jamie's car on the first try, retrieved Jamie and checked out. And they didn't even bill us for a second night when they well could have.

Anyway, I'm a little pooped. And poor.

Jamie's feeling better and, in fact, is playing with Lucy right now. We have AC, and things are, for better or worse, back to normal.

But in the past several weeks, Jamie's car has had some minor problems, my tires and radiator needed to be replaced, Lucy was in the doggie ER, Mel had some very minor problems from his surgery, Jamie's been in and out of teh ER three times, and the AC died on the house. I'm just waiting to be diagnosed with a brain cloud.

At this point, you sort of have to be optimistic. I figure we're due for things to balance out.

Post-Hiatus Post 2


It was a nice, quiet week away from blogging. Here at League HQ, peace and quiet is a welcome thing, and rarely gives way to actual boredom. That may change quickly as temperatures have already crested 110 F, and will just get worse through August. These days we're getting up early on weekends so we can get errands done before it hits 100.

I'm reading too many books, which usually means I won't finish any of them. I finally started reading "In Cold Blood" after having seen the film two or three times and having seen Capote. At some point, I need to see what the fuss is about. I started (and then misplaced) Augusten Burroughs second memoir "Dry". Jamie got me started reading ANOTHER memoir called "The Glass Castle", which I then misplaced. Plus, I picked up a non-fiction book about Pirates. There's never enough time to read, and my books always seem to disappear.

Finished "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck", and I'm now officially a Scrooge McDuck fan. The Walt Disney comics are a weird comic-reading subculture as the stories are not simple "funny animal" strips, but rather fairly detailed adventure stories incorporating painstakingly researched real-life historical details. No, seriously. It's sort of like "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles", only less stilted and with talking ducks and dogs.

Unfortunately, the Disney Comics get a lot more play over-seas than they do in the US. Here, those comics are relegated to the juvenile section, when in fact that argument could be applied to a hell of a lot of comics that are marketed for teens and adults. I'll be picking up more of the Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stuff. It's a fun read.

Suns lost in 6, which is about what I'd predicted. What I didn't predict was that the Suns would be unable to hold onto a lead when the Mavs decided to get serious. I can now, at least, respect the Mavs. If Cuban can keep his mouth shut and Dirk can continue to play like he has while simultaneously keep his comments to himself, I can give the Mavs credit where credit is due.

That said, if we can keep the current Suns line-up together and get Amare healthy, next year we may be able to finally win a Western Conference Championship.

With the Suns's loss, at some point CrackBass will be guest blogging here at The League. I don't plan to edit a word he says, so God knows what Wilson will write about. I don't usually open the door for Guest Blogging as I ultimately feel responsible for the content here. It's a bit like having your buddy fill out your diary while you're away on vacation. As you all know, if you really want something posted, for the love of mike, just e-mail it to me and I'll post it in nice italics.

As I often do, I'm reviewing the sort of content I post to the site. Between you, me and the wall, Nanostalgia.com has made me feel a bit split in loyalties as a lot of what once went here now winds up over there. The end result is that I occasionally feel as if I have to post more inane stuff to this site just to ensure I post regularly. I guess it would help if I felt folks were making the jump from here to Nano, but I really don't get that impression. If you are, in fact, reading Nano-based reviews of comics, TV and movies, it would be nice to know. Right now I suspect it's me, RHPT, Jim D. and CrackBass all talking to each other.

On the political front, you can tell it's an election year. The GOPers are making a fuss again over the Gay Marriage Amendment. Voters should be far more offended by the GOP's insistence on dwelling on what is essentially a divisive non-issue instead of the many actual issues of the day. Some folks may not like the fact that two dudes can rent out a reception hall, spend too much on a cake and get health insurance through someone other than themself, but it's hardly as pressing as the massive deficit, NSA wiretaps, Iran's nuclear ambitions, North Korea's nuclear ambitions or the many, many aspects of "the long war."

I've yet to hear a logical reason for including secondary-citizen status for a minority group into the constitution, but it's an election year. People do start acting a little daffy.

...and we're back!



The League enjoyed our time away from the hussle and bussle of the blogging world, but we're also happy to be back.

Of course the week I decide to take off, a lot of things happen.

1) Superman Returns release date is pushed up to Wednesday, June 28th. This will give Warner Bros. the world's longest weekend to try to really hit a home run at the box office. We're travelling Saturday after what was to be teh Friday opening, so I'm pretty pumped about being able to catch the movie opening day and not worrying about missing an early flight.

2) The new Batwoman Post Post Crisis is slated to be a lesbian. And, of course, before anyone's read a word or seen anything more than two drawings, DC went on a media blitz to promote the new character. Yes, I'm embarrassed at the DC PR/marketing machine. Anytime they go hat in hand to the news, pleading for attention, it's a little bit silly. But, that same idea has done wonders for Marvel of late.

Despite the giddiness in the announcement, DC's editorialship and stewardship has been able to handle gay characters for years. In the late 80's/ early 90's, Superman's police captain pal, Maggie Sawyer was gay. The Golden Age Green Lantern's son, Obsidian, is gay. The Vertigo line has been handling gay characters since I was in high school. Green Lantern under Judd Winick had a GLAAD-Award winning storyline.

Can DC avoid tokenism in their Post Post Crisis world as they strive to make the DCU reflect the real world a bit more? The All New Atom is slated to be a Chinese-immigrant academic (which sounds like a stereotype, but I've worked in two Universities. I assure you, we've got our fair share of Chinese-immigrant scientists working in universities). The new Spectre is former Gotham Central cop Cris Allen, an African-American dude. The new Blue Beetle is an Hispanic kid from El Paso (superheroes in El Paso? That's awesome.).

It's kind of nice to have DC giving it the old college try giving roles to folks who aren't just straight, WASPy dudes. The key will be: Will readers give new characters a try? Of late, few new characters of any type have been readily embraced by comic fans.

I guess it's a waiting game on sales.

Here's an article on CNN.com. This ridiculous bit of trivial minutia sat on the FRONT PAGE of CNN.com for two days. We have a war going on, possible war in Iran, NSA wiretaps on American citizens, a new CIA Chief... and lesbians in batsuits and frikkin' Paris Hilton sat in the headline news section for 48 hours. I think America has officially jumped the shark.

Oh, the new batsuit was designed by Alex Ross and based on the Batman Beyond suit in color scheme. The original Batwoman was also named Kathy Kane, and also a fellow socialite with Bruce Wayne. However, she wore a sort of goofy, brightly colored suit and instead of a utility belt, carried a purse full of high-tech ladies' products (I recall in particular an "expanding hair net" she used to capture crooks). So, yes, she may have needed a bit of a make-over.

Here's a picture of some recent toys of Silver Age Batgirl and Batwoman. Here's a pic of Batwoman from a straight-to-video Batman movie release from a few years ago. Notice any familiar elements?

Oh, Jim, Manhunter was cancelled and then un-cancelled in the past two weeks. That is related to nothing in this issue accept that Obsidian appears sometimes in Manhunter.

3) Alex Toth has passed. Creator of Space Ghost and several other animated legends. Read more here.

4) X-Men 3 made a boatload of money. I mean, a LOT of money. I guess that's one franchise that has really grown on cable and DVD.

I finally saw it this afternoon after getting bumped by a sold-out show last Monday.

It was okay. I think Ratner still can't direct his way out of a bag and certain aspects of the screenplay made no sense. The movie demonstrated one of the flaws of the actual comics. The more the humans throw at mutants, either by enslaving them, experimenting on them or trying to chemically "cure" them the more one starts to wonder if Magneto isn't the realist. While written, perhaps, the most over the top of any of the three films (and making some unbelievable tactical errors) Magneto was given the moral higher ground in this movie about half-way through.

I didn't understand why the movie was so short when so much more could have been done with the newest X-Men (I mean, Colossus got about three lines and was an X-Man)? Jean's ascension to Phoenix sort of just went nowhere, and folks seemed able to travel from San Francisco to suburban New York and back in about twenty minutes.

Luckily, the movie was cut short enough, was loud enough and moved along fast enough that you were never really given much of a chance to think about some of the movie's flaws. Ratner seems like a capable technical director, but he's not winning any extra points for his direction of actors.

The "let's throw everything in the mix" attitude to the film should have been ultimately disappointing to comic fans. It's fine to get a glimpse of established aspects of the comics, but I would rather have seen the storylines touched upon played out for maximum effect. X-Men is unique among comics as the origin of each character is not what defines the character. Thus, the characters tend to develop in a soap-opera method, exposing who they are in their relationships with the other players. Here, we're given black hats and white hats and just sit back and watch events unfold like watching that old magnetic football game.

This was supposed to be the final of a trilogy of X-Films, but if anyone believes that after this movie, I have some beach front property in CHandler, AZ I can sell you. Oh, and for those of you who've never read the comics. Nobody in X-Men is ever dead for long. They'll pop up again one way or another.


5) The Melbotis Store isn't selling too much stuff. I'm a little disappointed.

6) Steven G. Harms is now in Austin. You guys in the Live Music Capital of the World need to invite him to your next cook-out.

7) Lucy was a very sick little girl last weekend, but she's all better now. Today she and Melbotis both got a much needed bath. I no longer feel the need to immediately wash my hands simply because I've touched them.

8) I hope to have a small package sent out to anyone who participated in the 2006 Mellies. If you've updated your address since March, please send me a new mailing address.

9) A special howdy to anybody who has popped in thanks to my recent attempted expansion of my MySpace.com friends list. If you want to be a friend to The League, we're in there. I was delighted to find Amy C. on MySpace, and Esther E. Hello to anybody who pops by.

That's about it for now. We're back.

Random Comments, May 1 - June 1

HIATUS