Some Excellent News

A) It sounds like The League's own CBG is packing up her belongings and returning to the Capital City. Read her announcement here.

That's excellent news for The League who is quite fond of CBG, and was pleased to find he enjoyed the company of CBG's husband as well. Let's all hope baby Xander doesn't spoil it for everyone with an anti-Texas stance.

We're glad to hear that you're coming back, CB! We'll leave a light on for you.

Oh, and there's no reason for Xander to know he was born anywhere but Texas. We'll cover for you.


B) It seems The League's own Peabo knows not just the day, but the time of his soon to be arrived child's, uhm... arrival? Birth. Yes, birth.

So this Friday everything changes for Peabo as he transforms from irresponsible purveyor of hare-brained schemes to irresponsible purveyor of hare-brained schemes involving children. Huzzah!

I need to get that kid a present.

Ah, who am I kidding? That kid is going to be a baby and won't know if I've picked it out a present until it's at least four. And it's not like Peabo will be keeping track...



Big doings here among Loyal Leaguers...

Some Links

1) To nobody's surprise, there shall be a toyline associated with the upcoming Transformers movie. I will not buy any of these toys as I like to keep my Transformers classic. Here is "Barricade" from the upcoming film, in toy form.

Thanks to Jamie for the link.


2) Maxim magazine (the magazine for guys too chicken to ask for the magazines behind the counter at 7-11) has rated the top ten comic "babes".

I do not know who did their rankings, but I guarantee you, any real fanboys' rankings would shake out much differently. Not that we keep a laminated list of our favorite comic leading ladies in our pocket, but if we did... you know, the list would be different.

There's really no arguing this one without going into some deep, dark places I really don't want to explore.

Thanks to Randy "This Doesn't Seem Weird to Me" T. for the link.


3) Jim D. sends along this link from "Ask" about Superman's costume. Specifically, why does Superman wear his underwear outside of his clothes? The person who answers rambles a bit, but then fails to answer the question.

The answer is that Shuster designed the costume based upon a recognizable symbol for strength in 1938, the circus strongman, who often would wear a leotard with some sort of briefs over the top (for reasons which should be fairly obvious). In the first issues of Action Comics, Superman also wore circus-style lace-up boots, and the cape appears to have been added as a bit of flourish and after-thought.

This isn't really any different from why Dracula is dressed as a carnival magician in the movie Dracula from 1933 (Do you really think nobility ever dressed in big capes with pointy collars?) or why Bettie Boop has an enormous head (Flappers' heads were believed to grow to gigantic size due to their consumption of bathtub gin and cheap Canadian whiskey*).

Why does Superman still wear his drawers outside his tights? Because a single blue outfit with red boots looks silly. Also, he needs a pocket for his wallet.

4) As Jim D. was heard to remark "It would be a far, far better thing to go to that amusement park than I have ever done before." Coming Soon: Dickens Land!


5) CNN finally proves itself a reliable news source.

According to CNN, somebody in Serbia discovered a compound with the same chemical properties as Kryptonite...

CNN's not-so-in-depth report which focuses on the many types of Kryptonite. God bless you Mort Weisinger.

Uhm. I'm a pretty big Superman nerd, and I have NO idea what they're talking about... There was a mention in Superman III of the chemical make-up of Kryptonite, and again in Superman Returns (on a label at the museum where Lex obtained his Kryptonite).

But, honestly, the whole point of Kryptonite was that it was composed of elements which were formed in the destruction of Krypton... and thusly could not be duplicated, per se, on Earth...

Well, CNN is owned by Time Warner, as is Superman and DC Comics, so this reporting must all be accurate.


6) Say it ain't so, Cap! (link courtesy JimD)

7) And... this. Which makes me both ashamed and jealous.









Plus a reminder that the original is still the best.









*this is a lie.

...because I love Bully's comic reviews...

Dog Tired

1) I have not made a peep regarding the massacre at Virginia Tech. I've kept mum partially because any words I've tried to summon on the topic have felt woefully inadequate.

This evening the South Mall at UT (which lies in the shadow of the UT Tower) was filled with thousands of students, alumni and folks from the Austin community for a candle ceremony to commemorate the victims. If any school understands the long memory of such a tragedy, it's the UT community.

Best hopes go out to the families of the victims and the Virginia Tech community.

2) Our dogs are attempting to bankrupt us. Last week Lucy managed to wind up at the vet almost every day, and will need to be continually monitored for a while at home. She's been having odd GI problems which are not providing us with any obvious diagnoses or solution. Things culminated in a 30 hour stay at the animal hospital over Saturday and Sunday. She seems fine now, but...

And tomorrow Melbotis will be visiting the vet to have a lumpectomy. The lump is not believed to be malignant, but the vet wants to remove it before it does become a problem. Poor Mel.

Poor Lucy.

Jeff the Cat is fine.

3) I am hopelessly behind on Comic Fodder work.

4) I am hopelessly behind on providing questions to Steven G. Harms for The Mellies.

5) I am hopelessly behind on keeping up with Steven and Lauren since their move northward. I warned them that once you pass the river, you are dead to me...

6) I need to call Cousin Susan and explain what happened with the weekend.

7) I minorly screwed up at work today. My first @#$% up! Hurray!

8) I now own "Star Spangled War Stories #139" featuring the origin of Enemy Ace. If you are me, you think that is totally rad.

9) On a related note, Jamie won herself a suitor on Sunday at Austin Books. I had wandered off to price back-issues of "New Gods", and Jamie was sort of standing there with a copy of the latest American Splendor collection in her hand when a young gentleman took the opportunity to break the ice by declaring his admiration for Harvey Pekar. He just kept talking. And talking. Clearly not picking up on Jamie's "please go away..." vibes.

Because The League is a curious sort of fellow, we decided to let the events unfold naturally, with no intervention despite Jamie's telepathic cries for rescue. (a) I wanted to see how Jamie would handle it, (b) there's a chance jamie's just looking for the right opportunity to jump ship, and (c) did I really want to be the guy who puffs his chest and goes all monkey crazy because some dude is talking to his lady?

I think Jamie let the chap down rather easily, properly showing zero interest and letting him verbally paint himself into a corner from which the only escape was to feign interest in some nearby comics and wander off. This was after he talked a bit too much about how his ex-girlfriend just didn't get Harvey, even though she tried for his benefit.

At this point I re-entered the scene, excited to know that this gentleman would then tell his friends "And then she left with some dork who was looking for back issues of 'New Gods'! Who reads 'New Gods'? NERD!"

Being a girl in a comic shop is a frightening, frightening proposition. Still, I hope Jamie was at least a little flattered.

In reviewing the scene, I suspect that were The League flying a solo mission, we'd fair no better in trying to break the ice.

10) It. Just. Keeps. Raining.

Well, better than 110 days of continuous sunshine, I guess.

11) As soon as my membership to Hollywood video begins, I end it. I still am physically incapable of watching rented movies or returning them.

12) Today I bought these mints. How many mints come with a warning not to eat them if you have high blood pressure? Not too many. But my Mogo Mints sure as @#$% did. Scroll to the bottom left here to see the many, many health warnings associated with enjoying a Mogo Mint.

I'm working near campus which is why I think I'm discovering caffeine supplements again (I had Jolt Mints last week). I've been told a Quix near campus sells caffeine that, my co-worker informs me "you can mainline". I guess you can buy small tubes of powdered caffeine now.

If those items had been available in 1993-1998, I shudder to think of what a short, jittery life I might have led.

11) I shall not be viewing "Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School". Take the craziest girls from the first two seasons of Flavor of Love, remove Flav, give the girls semi-sociopathic advice that makes no sense... it's like watching someone disturb bee's nests for an hour.

What concerned me most was that the girl kicked off on the first episode clearly had rage issues, if not downright issues with her mental health, and she reached out to show host comedienne Mo'Nique. She was subsequently kicked off the show for showing weakness.

Apparently I missed the part of where becoming a better person means being a cut-throat jerk and refusing to see a shrink when you clearly need one.

I wanted to like the show. I really did. I was honestly shocked at the criteria the judges used in the elimination round.

12) Even more surprising for sheer evil is the new VH1 documentary show about the making of "The Jerry Springer Show" entitled "The Springer Hustle". Free of anything resembling scruples, the producers on Springer don't hide a thing as they work to get their guests into a fighting mood prior to releasing them onto the stage. Totally amazing to see folks who've so clearly lost sight of (or never had) basic human empathy as they try to outdo their fellow producers on a show that, ultimately, has absolutely no redeeming value.

13) I've also beenw atching Dogfights on History Channel. For some reason I find the show completely fascinating.

GRINDHOUSE

I am not a child of the 70's, nor was I raised in Southern California or any of the other places where "Grindhouses" may have once existed. I'm a child of the 80's, and multiplex theaters built into shopping malls. (For reason I cannot fathom, I always associate the Willowbrook Mall theater with my first viewings of Jurassic Park and Freejack, although I saw literally dozens of movies at that theater. And why Freejack, for God's sake?).

Anyhow, I don't think the "Grindhouse" idea was ever as prevalent in the US as Mssr's Tarantino and Rodriguez would have us believe. At least seeing a series of crappy movies on a single bill wasn't as fondly remembered.

But if you're going to see two movies on a single bill, Alamo Drafthouse is the place to go. We intentionally broke up our orders into appetizers and a main course over the two movies and managed to really settle in. And, prior to the movie, the Alamo showed trailers from classic "Grindhouse" movies such as "Vanishing Point", "The Thing with Two Heads" and "Dracula Meets the Seven Brothers (and their one Sister)".

So how was the actual movie?

It's possible that the entire movie might have been better off as nothing but a series of trailers. After all, trailers always show the best parts of movies, and in some ways the directors seem to know that trailers are more fun than what you actually get in a movie.

So, yes, the "trailers" between the two movies are almost more fun than the two features.

"Planet Terror" is a fun zombie movie. Flat out. I would have gladly paid to see this movie without any of the additional Grindhouse baggage. It's gross, it's an action movie, it casts Freddy Rodriguez as a bad-ass, and someone finally makes good use of Rose McGowan for the first time I can think of since the first "Scream" film. In fact, I predict that "Cherry Darling" will become one of those staples of fanboyish-ness that will lead to a new cult following for McGowan. Michael Biehn gets his best role since, possibly, The Abyss, and everyone, including Bruce Willis seems to behaving a grand time.


one more item to add to the list of "What The League Looks for in a Woman"

In a way, "Planet Terror" is critic proof as it never tries to do more than be a really fun movie (albeit not for kids or the squeamish), and I can't really think of anything that bugged me about the movie. It sets out to be an over-the-top zombie movie, and from that perspective, I think they knocked it over the fence. Winding subplots, hokey call-backs and catch phrases. A good bad movie.

Prior to "Planet Terror", Rodriguez had tacked on a trailer for what I can only refer to as an Hispanic-Sploitation action movie called "Machete". And, man, yes... I would probably go see Machete.

Between the films, Rob Zombie's trailer for "Werewolf Women of the SS" was absolutely wrong, and, yes... I would totally see that movie. Perhaps less so Eli Roth's "Thanksgiving", but in keeping with the bad-movie tradition of turning seemingly innocent Holidays in a small town into a bloodbath... sure. I could absolutely see where Roth was coming from. He had me at the turkey mascot decapitation.

I was less enthusiastic about Tarantino's "Death Proof", which surprised me. I do enjoy the purity of a good car chase, although I don't know that I've ever even seen any of the films that's comprised of almost nothing but car chases (unless you count "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Empire Strikes Back" - oh, come on! "Empire's" entire Han Solo sequence was pretty much Smokey and the Bandit in space).

The problem with "Death Proof" was two-fold:

a) A lot of the Grindhouse movies that Tarantino professes such a love for were pretty dull, when you get down to it. There's a lot of talking and standing around because that's a lot cheaper to film than action sequences. This wasn't unique to car-chase featuring C-movies of the 70's. Go back to the black and white sci-fi cheapies and serials, and you'll find endless, pointless discussion between scientists speaking in utter gibberish.

b) Tarantino writes like a 20 year old film student. He's hopelessly in love with his own dialog and the minutia of what people say to each other when sitting in cafes and bars, believing these conversations (and characters) to be far, far more compelling than they actually are.

For some reason, Tarantino decided to give a mad shout out to Austin in "Death Proof", which is sort of cute. His characters name drop and go to eat at Guero's and the Texas Chili Parlor. Two of the stars of "Rollergirls" who wait tables at the Texas Chili Parlor play themselves. The odd "Jungle Julia" billboards that were up the week I moved back to town finally receive an explanation. They were props for the movie. Apparently Mr. Tarantino is unaware that in Austin, for whatever reason, DJ's don't really splash their mugs on billboards. But it does solve the mystery Doug and I tried to solve of why a radio station would advertise their DJ and then fail to note the actual frequency of the station.

Anyhow, it seems Tarantino has a school-boy crush on Waterloo.

SPOILERS
I suppose it's possible Tarantino is presenting an homage to Hitchcock's set-up of Janet Leigh as the heroine in Psycho with his extensive set-up of four female friends at the beginning of "Death Proof", but the problem is that this ISN'T Psycho, and he ISN'T Hitch. In fact, as a 70's style horror flick, the audience expects for all but one of the female leads to die. So establishing all of the characters just doesn't seem like such a neat narrative trick when the game plan is to kill them all off.
SPOILERS END

Longtime readers will know that The League is a big fan of narrative economy, and here we get the polar opposite. The middle of "Death Proof" is essentially a fifteen minute conversation between four gal pals in a coffee shop (possibly Jo's, which I've never actually been in). Then a lengthy, lengthy conversation about driving a car and who can come.

Whenever Kurt Russell is on screen, the movie is fine. Whenever Kurt Russell is not on the screen, it's like letting air out of an impossibly irritating balloon.

When the cars are rolling, the movie is fun. I won't deny that. But it's also not really anything you haven't seen before. And that's sort of Tarantino, isn't it? He's a master art forger, but without Roger Avary around to move the story along, his movies don't seem to move beyond imitation.

Where Rodriguez seems to have seen that Achilles Heel of the C-Movie was the horrendous sense of pacing, Tarantino demonstrates slavish devotion to the drudgery of those movies and assumes his dialog is hilariousness enough to carry us through vast, vast stretches of inane conversations where, as an audience member, you want to stand up and shout "Okay, I get it! They like cars!"

It is true that Russell hands in a great performance, and I think Jason developed a crush on stuntwoman Zoe Bell (playing herself) during the course of the film. But, yeah... in some ways all "Death Proof" does is remind the audience that these films are usually remembered for brief set pieces rather than for the overall whole of the movie.

Howdy, Leaguers.

Well, this week has been quite busy for The League. The new job has thrown me in head first, but by accident. I was supposed to shadow a producer, but unfortunately her mother took ill, and now I'm filling in for that producer. So I've been dropped in the deep end.

Aside from a constant low level feeling of confusion, and an additional creeping sleepiness that pops up like clockwork at 3:00 each day, I'm liking the new job quite a bit. They are making an effort to make sure I'm properly trained, despite the missing producer, and everyone I talk to takes time to answer my questions. I'm honestly a bit thrown off by not working in a crazy public sector setting and all that that implies.

Last night I had not yet even arrived home when I was informed that Lucy had puked twice. It seems that the allergic reaction from the weekend had some latent effects of the GI-tract variety, and so it was that I made a mid-week return trip to the Doggy ER. They're theorizing that Lucy's troubles were a further portion of her allergic reaction to whatever it was she got into this weekend. I'm happy to say she seems much, much better this evening.

In addition to that, I'm tyring to adjust to a work schedule again, and, honestly, that schedule is a bit deeper to keep than waking up between 9:00 and 10:30 for a big day of watching daytime TV and looking online for job postings. So I'm going to bed a bit earlier and trying to get adjusted. Look for normal blogging to resume in the not-too-distant-future.

Internet: DOWN!!!

Oh, Leaguers...

So this weekend we had some guys doing some stuff in our yard and they cut the coaxial line to the house. So, from about 9:30 AM Sunday to this evening, I've been more or less without an internet connection at home.

here's a quick run down of life in the past few days:

1) Saturday I attended funeral services for Liz Pieper. Liz had a lot of good friends, and she'll be missed.

2) Judy is already home from the hospital and she's doing pretty well. We're waiting for some lab results to come back, but I would describe the mood as cautiously optimistic. Right now things are looking much more promising than they appeared when the surgery was announced.

3) Sunday Lucy was acting as if she was having a bit of an allergy attack, but I thought maybe she'd feel better if I took her to Jason's to play with Cassidy. En route, I noticed her face was a bit puffy. About twenty minutes after arriving, she's developed large welts all over and looked weird and freakish. I didn't want for my dog to die, but I also didn't want to spend $5000 getting her checked out at the Dog ER if she just needed a few Bendaryl and some rest. However, she was getting noticeably worse within an hour, so I took her to the Dog ER where they gave her a shot and I was out around $100. Small price to pay so you don't need to explain to your wife how you let the dog die while she was gone.

4) Jamie got back Sunday night.

5) I've been working. I actually like my job. I like my co-workers so far. I am in a bit of a state of confusion as the place fairly well staffed and my usual mode of "I'll do it" that's always been my survival mode in small, underfunded offices isn't working. I am going to learn that the world is not made up of Octavio, Tom and Eric, all already given too many tasks.

6) The lead on the technical side of my latest project wrote part of his Masters' thesis on Crisis on Infinite Earths. I think I know my DC, but he puts my critical thinking skills to shame. I am in awe.

7) We now have internet again. Did I mention that?

8) It rained all day today. All day.

9) I am going to lose weight. I am not trying, but there's a difference between being home all day and only leaving the couch to eat, and being at work with regular meal times. Plus, part of my job is wrestling ferocious tigers.

10) I still think getting up before 10:00 AM is a sucker's game.