A little perspective As there was no corner sufficiently remote to avoid all of the angst concerning the euthanizing of Barbaro I couldn't help but wonder what the news would be like if the same attention were to have been given to each of even just the U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq . And what of police officers and firefighters? This could become a 'round the clock affair. I like horses, too, but imagine how the insane degree of coverage has appeared to the families of those told this past weekend that loved ones had been killed in what was at least nominally the service of their country? Whether or not one believes in the wretched travesty being compounded daily in blood and tears these are people who received the ultimate extension of their military service -- separated from their families for the forever it only feels like to the rest.
Posts
A Quick 'un Nothing urgent, pressing or particularly worthwhile to convey, this is mostly here because I'm trying to post something each day. A little snow overnight gave us a blanket of white this morning. Not even a nuisance amount, quickly cleared and any residual, tenacious, frosty snow on the walk quickly treated with some wild birdseed. It's good for interim traction, is dark enough to absorb the sunlight and melt through the ice, the birds have something to eat once the ice is gone and the cats get to sit in the window and watch the fantasy buffet. The roads were well-treated and clear and by luck or timing most of the idjits didn't happen to be on the road so the ride to work was smooth and reasonably swift. The kids had a 2-hour delay, though -- likely a guilty response to two Fridays past when an unexpected, overnight glazing made for a treacherous commute for everyone -- which gave them a more leisurely start and a string of time-starved classes that w...
Clix Pix Scans of part of the new Hawkman, along with the Question, Shazam and Booster Gold, all from an ad for March's Origin set. (Click on each for a larger view) First, we have this pair: A new Hawkman (#s 58-60) in what appears to be classic '60s gear, and a somewhat stylized (the themed backdrop) Question (#s 34-36.) The Hawkman is nicely detailed, though the pose appears a little odd from this angle. The wings look impressive, reminding me of the KC Hawkman from the Legacy set, and have led to speculation that like that piece the wings may be packed separately from the figure and plug/snap into his back. The Question... appears reasonably nice. I wouldn't expect a more dramatic pose from him, so I'm not complaining. It looks fairly good, and experience is that it'll look much better in person. What's done with the dial will be much more important. Next there's an Alex Ross-inspired Shazam (Captain Marvel) (#s 79-81) and a new Booster Gold (#s 43-45...
A message from Sheriff Taylor... ...for the Bush Administration and the sheep who've knuckled under to them on issues of privacy, engaging in the cowardly rhetoric of a "post-9/11" era and in what I can only refer to as moral relativism. I'm tempted to run the screen here, but will instead direct you to Tony Collett's post . It was wrong to do then and it's wrong to do now. Thanks for the voice of reason across three decades, Andy. Certainly, some will point out that in the clip the conversation in question is referred to as one between client and lawyer, but in an age when we have an administration that has set up "legal" proceedings wherein the accused doesn't even necessarily have a right to details of the evidence against them, I doubt the distinction is keeping some in this administration awake at night. I wonder how much this was a shot at the Hoover era of the FBI at the time? Tags : item , wiretapping
At the Movies! Well, the less said about Epic Movie the better. It was a morning matinee. Mistakes were made. I'm better now. Really. Rather than belabor that, instead I'll queue off the movie checklist Mark Gibson linked to as a measure of one's movie buffdom, branching eventually off to the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest Movies list, which I'd seen before but hadn't run through. Me? I was a little surprised to find that I'd seen so many of them over the years. I've marked them as follows: * = Those I've seen X = Those I'm unlikely to ever watch, including ones I've already seen and have no desire to watch again. M = The few I actually saw in a theater. ! = Those I've watched more than once for various reasons. 1. CITIZEN KANE (1941) * 2. CASABLANCA (1942) * ! 3. THE GODFATHER (1972) * ! 4. GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) * X 5. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) * ! 6. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) * ! 7. THE GRADUATE (1967) * ! 8. ON THE WA...
Too good to be true? (A special thanks to fellow Legendaire Dwight Williams for pointing this out.) Could there be an already generic-ready drug which kills most cancers ? (Click on the graphic for a larger view.) The article is written in layman's terms and is straightforward. (I'm reprinting it below, along with the explanatory graphic I used in the header, in case New Scientist archives the piece for its paid subscription base.) This is all extremely preliminary information, but it's too promising to simply ignore and as no one stands to make a fortune off it (and, indeed, makers of current drugs for treating cancer along with drugs for treating the side-effects of the treatments themselves stand to lose a great deal of money if any of the promise of DCA rings true) we can't trust that it will simply be followed through on because it's the right thing to do. The desperately sad fact is that quarterly reports and stock prices will feature prominently in the de...
(left to right) Lt. Colonel Edward Higgins White (USAF), Lt. Colonel Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom (USAF) and Lt. Commander Roger Bruce Chaffee (USN) In Memorium Forty years ago today - January 27, 1967 - the men of Apollo 1 died in a tragic fire during a grounded test . In a what in hindsight was an amazing series of oversights, NASA learned the in the worst possible terms the cost of placing so many flammable items -- primarily plastics -- in an enclosed, pressurized, oxygen rich environment with partially exposed wiring, and moreover with inadequate means of escape for the crew. A needless waste of human life in the specifics of the incident, though the aims of the space program were noble and necessary to both the human spirit and that of the nation. In many ways what they were engaged in helped to make the 1960s perhaps the finest peacetime decade for the United States of America. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were each driven to greatness - and, yes, to the occasional tragedy -...
The Secret of 52 I'll be getting to a new comics post - covering such comics that have come out this past week and the week before that I've ordered - later this weekend, but I've read some of them now and in last week's (10 days ago) DC Nation column by Dan DiDio he revealed the secret of the 52 event in a fairly simple letter code. I'm sure that if I were to take a minute to hit the main comics boards or even other comics blogs I would find it all disclosed and discussed in posts 9 or 10 days old, but I didn't see the comic until now. So, if you know already, or if you don't care about spoiling the story, read on. Take the first letter of the first word and that of every third word to reveal: "The secret of fifty-two is that the multiverse still exists." I don't immediately know quite what to say about that. On the one hand, anyone who's read a range of DC titles knows that almost from the conclusion of 1986's Crisis On Infinite...
Okay, so now she's from Krypton again... Like clockwork -- agonizingly slow clockwork, but predictable nonetheless -- Wizkids hit another Friday and so another Origin sneak peek. This week it's Supergirl . Honestly, everything immediately surrounding Superman has seldom excited me, so I have rarely followed the development and re-development of the character over the years. He's essential to the world of superhero-dom as an iconic concept, but as a character who's still hanging around the feel I have is one of a living legend with all of its complications. Legends are best off dead and idealized, as grim and sad as that might seem. Still, he's likely beloved by millions on some level, and it's likely comforting to know he's still out there, somewhere, in some form. As a corporate property, of course, he's as immortal as the will of the shareholders can make him so he's safer than any of us. Anyway, this isn't about him directly, though it defini...
A new (if small) assortment of comics will be arriving tomorrow from Westfield , so it's time to take a few minutes and take a look. I haven't done this in a while so I'll start with some of the ones I already have on-hand from roughly the past month or so and see if the momentum carries me into those just-arrived later this weekend. FYI -- either to see if there's anything covered here you're interested in, or if there's something here you haven't read as yet and don't want to spoil -- this entry covers: Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis (trade), All-New Atom #7, Justice Society of America #2. and B.P.R.D.: The Universal Machine trade edition. On a whim I ordered the trade edition of Kurt Busiek's new take on an Aquaman series: Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis. Kurt was just coming off a successful run writing Dark Horse's Conan character, and Aquaman was once more on the chopping block due to low sales... so Kurt pitched a new concept hook and DC to...
New Recruits Recently, while I was hunting around for some items my wife wanted me to look into on eBay, and then waiting for them to come down to the final moments so I could bid, I did some (mostly) LE hunting for inexpensive bits and pieces to add to the Heroclix collection. In one case it snowballed as I ended up buying 10 from one seller, knowing that I was diluting the core shipping charges as I went. I ended up buying from three different people over the past few weeks, and while some of them are less than gems -- more in the line of niche pieces -- new options are good to add. Mos t of these haven't arrived yet, but that won't top me from looking at each of the unhatched chickens. An odd bit from 2003's Indy set that hadn't landed in my collection was Hecate . Finding her for $1.26 made it tempting enough to go for. A grounded, magical creature, it's an interesting sculpt and a potentially useful piece. Definitely an artifact of the game at a much earli...
Upgraded -- At Last! No time to fool around with it this morning, but they finally upgraded my blogs to the new system. So far it's looking spiffy, and I believe I will very much enjoy the labels feature, though I'll be inclined to go overboard with it. I am a big believer in well-developed indices... though, paradoxically, I'm not sure that this post deserves much in the way of a label. Whether I'll ditch the Technorati tags or not remains to be seen -- though I see that I've already decided (on a whim) to not bother with them for this post.
Mid-Weak I missed doing an entry for Tuesday, but such spare energy as I had ended up going into some email to friends. Having found myself worn all week -- catching myself falling asleep, almost falling forward out of my chair, several times Monday and Tuesday -- I tried to get to sleep early Tuesday night. Still, here it is in the wee hours of Wednesday and I'm up again. I took care of the dishes and the bare edge of some kitchen clean-up, and thought I'd do a quick post while trying to wind down again for a few more hours of sleep. While I could not stomach the man sufficiently to watch Bush's State of the Union address live, I would like to direct any interested parties to a video resource the people at ThinkProgress.org have put together: an annotated State of the Union . There one can watch the sickening affair in its entirety, or skip to sections of the speech by selecting from the scroll of facts and rebuttals offered below the inset screen. Probably not the b...
Old Man Winter Craps Out (Again) Well, getting in to work Sunday night did result in my getting the must-do work for Monday out of the way. However, while the local schools decided around 5 this morning to have a two-hour delay (definitely a wise move after Friday's debacle) the extremely light winter "event" and prep by road crews resulted in a morning drive on nothing more than wet roads. No one in the area can claim weather/road conditions as an excuse for not showing up today unless they simply get in an accident. So, once I made sure the kids were up and aware of the extra time this morning, I headed to work again. This way when I leave to take my wife to her appointment I should be done with the workplace for the day. Plenty to do in the meantime, so I'll dive back into it. I took a minute to post this as I'm attempting to post something here each day even if it's utterly prosaic; it isn't as if I'm writing this for some broad audience. Oh, on...
Decisions, Decisions... Messy weather is on the way -- snow, freezing rain, a little more snow. It's 27 degrees out there now, and will be falling farther overnight. No great accumulation predicted, but we had just a little freezing rain this past Friday morning and the road conditions (well, the traffic incidents and accidents at least) were horrendous. Accidents and road closures due to the same, and trips that during normal commute-hour traffic might take 20 minutes taking an hour or more. Not worth it. When it gets that way it's better to head out an hour or more early and bring something along to do in exchange for a smoother, faster, less stressful drive. Or, if it's an option, take the day off. How much heat comes with the wetness is always the tricky bit in these things, but we've been below freezing long enough now that no matter how liquid the fall it's going to freeze on contact, and some people will be driving in a way that screams "we're all g...
Some more for the menagerie While I have serious reservations about Wizkids' recent business decisions - ranging from cutting from 15 distributors for North America to a single one, to an increased emphasis on gaming events and rarity = "collectible" - and am in the midst of making some tough hobbyist decisions concerning how I'll move forward as a collector, I'm nonetheless still interested in upcoming sets. After all, if I wasn't it would all be a non-issue. So, I want to look at what we've seen recently in the way of upcoming clix. Up top is the latest revelation, the colossal figure that will be on sale at select conventions this year: Fin Fang Foom . Here's one more shot of the "most fearsome menace of them all!" ... to which I say "cool." Hardly a piece I was clamoring for, but depending on the mechanics of "the chance" (see the article I've linked to above) to get our hands on it, I won't mind buying this o...