In memorium

I am nothing if not sarcastic and derivative.

About once a week, we get an email on our school system saying that somebody has passed away.  Some former principal, the wife of a coworker, the third cousin of a former lunch lady at a school that doesn't exist anymore but with whom some people still around may have worked.

For most of these, I just glance to make sure it's not anybody I know - most of whom wouldn't tell the PR folks in the district anyway - and hit delete.  For one a couple of weeks ago, however, I was impressed with the sheer volume of things said about the departed, the husband of a woman who apparently works at our alternative school (an entirely computer-based school of last chance for our more challenging youths).

In the honor of this passing, I offer my own, entirely fabricated, thoroughly plagiarized version of his write-up in the Cincinnati Enquirer...

We have learned of the passing of Mr. Lonnie Dusch, husband of Karlen (redacted) (Heritage Elementary, but not the Heritage in the Princeton district).

The Cincinnati Enquirer write-up is shown below:

DUSCH Robert L, husband of Karlen (redacted) who wouldn’t take his last name because it’s Dusch. Owner of LeRoy, Harlan, and Aylah. Son of Robert (Little Bob) Dusch and (redacted) who actually took the name Dusch and then gave it back even though they didn’t get divorced or anything. Brother of Amellia Dusch. Grandson of Robert (Big Bob) Dusch – not Sr because the middle name changed from Frederick to Fred – and Gertie Dusch, Helen Goehe and Lorenz Henry Goehe (pronounced gay which isn’t really much better than Dusch). Also survived by additional family, friends, and brothers and sisters in Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Visitation will be held in room 519 at Princeton High School from 4-8pm on Thursday, November 19, where Lonnie will be arranged as though he were still teaching and you can rest in desks where thousands of his students slept. Nondenominational services will be held at Miami University on the first hole of the disc golf course on Saturday, November 21 at 8am so no one has to miss school but everyone has to get up early and get the day started. Discs will be available to all attendees for after the services.

Lonnie Dusch was anything but the usual teacher.

He loved to blow stuff up but actually tried to make sure his students knew what was happening and why. He commissioned the building of a big spinner wheel, a lazy susan tornado of fire, and other things that he didn’t have the skills to build himself. He really just hated to get his hands dirty.

“He was the best hire I ever made. His mere presence elevated the science department to a place where we could consistently almost meet state minimum competency,” said Rebecca Heckman. “Plus, he could be cuttingly sarcastic and immature, yet people would constantly look to him for guidance and trust his ideas and untitled leadership.”

Mr. Dusch, 44, became ill after leading a spelunking expedition through recently discovered caves below the future site of Princeton High School’s new campus. He contracted man-bird-cavepig-flu which developed into walking pneumonia, sitting pneumonia, lying down pneumonia, and eventually into curling on his side wheezing pneumonia. Mr. Dusch spent 43 days at school since the contraction of his illness, continuing to say that he “didn’t feel too bad” before succumbing to the disease during a staff meeting.

Mr. Dusch met his future bride, Karlen, when both were members of Mrs VanOsdol’s honors English class in seventh grade where she mocked him for his white tube socks pulled up to above his husky calves. Mr. Dusch enjoyed playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons at the time.

But it was his love of playing around on the internet his sister remembers.

“He was always on,” she said.

He founded a blog on Blogger, she said, and then got involved in posting the most inane observations and banal commentary.

“What people will remember Lonnie by is sarcasm…sarcasm and devastating good looks. The two things people will remember Lonnie by are sarcasm, devastating good looks, and a fanatical devotion to Princeton High School, always willing to go in on a Sunday to grade notebooks after putting them off for a week, attending soccer games and high school musicals so he could post thousands of almost in-focus, marginally framed photos on the school website,” she said.

“He was always wanting to put his touch on things.”

This included editing coworkers’ presentations – whether they asked or not, commenting on blog posts from former students and overseeing the redesign of the Princeton High School website, especially when he had students to do the actual work for him, his favorite method of working.

Mr. Dusch was not the senior chemistry instructor – having been beaten to Princeton by his long-time neighbor, Doug Studer. Before that, he was the chemistry instructor at Mount Healthy High School and at Terre Haute South Vigo High School in Indiana.

His sister, Amellia, saw the teacher potential in her brother when they were children.

“He just talked and talked. He wanted people to do things his way and to always tell them what he knew,” she said. “He was an absolute know-it-all.”

Mr. Dusch is survived by Karlen, his wife of 19 years, dogs Harlan and LeRoy, cat Aylah, and a rosemary bush that he was really proud of.

Visitation is 4-8pm Thursday in room 519 of Princeton High School, 11080 Chester Rd, Cincinnati. The scattering of his ashes is at 8am Saturday at Miami University disc golf course’s first tee.

So, here's the dealio, yo

Because I know you want to know every little thing that happened to me over these past couple of weeks that I've been absently posting for you...

And if you don't care, you can just come back tomorrow...when the real posts will resume...

On the way out, we broke in to stayed out The Girl's aunt's house in Edmond, OK - a 'burb of OKC. Nothing thrilling there other than some pointless driving around trying to find a Panera so we could use their free wi-fi and pick up some dinner.

There was a lunch stop in Amarillo so we could get the first of many fresh tortillas - and green-chile-cooked-pork - on the trip, then onward to Albuquerque for dinner at the Frontier.


Very tasty, cheap dinner complete with more green chiles. We wandered the Nob Hill section of Albuquerque and stopped in the next morning at the farmer's market - no chile powder or cumin just yet, however, so onward to Flagstaff after a stop at Earl's in Gallup.

Yes, food was a bit of a constant on the trip. It's the southwest, and, as Bowling for Soup says, "the Mexican food sucks north of [there] anyway".

From Albuquerquequeque, we headed on to Flagstaff to camp for a night in the hills outside town, in the shadown of Sunset Crater that thankfully hasn't erupted since around 1065. Good times in Flag as we really dug the climate and the whole vibe of the college town meshed with the hiker/biker groove.

--- warning, the next part is a fairly detailed summary of our Canyon hike...if you want less detail, skip down to when you see this kind of note again... ---

Camped the next night at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and set the alarm for 3:30am so we could be on the trail at first light (4:30am). We loaded up the packs and headed over a very windy rim of the Canyon and down the South Kaibab (click here for a well-done virtual hike)...



The Girl set off at a pace a little faster than mine, and I let her take the lead as the chilly winds blew us down from the 6000-ft-high South Rim down to the 2000-ft-high Colorado River in the Granite Gorge. By the first rest stop, our paces were about in step, and we'd been passed a couple of number of times by speedier hikers, and my right knee was starting to feel a bit pained. Luckily, I remembered to switch up which foot you step down with, and the pain disappeared pretty quickly.

By the second rest-stop (4.4 miles to Tip Off) it was about 8:00am, and the 60-degree temperatures we'd started the hike with were now up to about 90, and we each had forty or so pounds on our back. We were eager for any shade that we could find, and we had reversed our paces as I now set off in lead.

The trail is amazingly well marked, having been built from old miners' trails by the CCC in the 1930's, but the constant downward march can be hard on every part of your legs. After another mile or two, The Girl was lagging seriously behind, and I was stopping pretty frequently to make sure that she was still back there. As we rounded into the sun time and time again, she was flagging badly, and finally admitted such when we could see the first suspension bridge across the river.


She was talking about leaving her pack behind and coming back for it after she felt better, and she later admitted to me that she'd been getting dizzy and nauseous and had stopped sweating - in spite of the fact that we'd both headed over the Rim with about four liters of water and gatorade and plenty of snacks for the full hike.

We took more frequent breaks, and I kept trying to make sure she was okay, and once we made it across the bridge...


...she went another few hundred yards and set down to drop her pack. We were by then about half a mile from the campground, and she was clearly in a bad way. I picked up her pack and lead her into the campground, guiding her directly into the cold stream to regain her senses.

In all honesty, I knew she wasn't too far gone because she was still lucid, but she clearly was in no shape to do any more hiking that day - or as I was starting to understand, to complete the rest of the six-day rim-to-rim-and-back trip we had planned. So I left her in the chilly water of Bright Angel creek - the most wonderful part of the Bright Angel campground, honestly - and went to get things set for the day's and night's camping. It was, by that point, 10am, and the thermometer at the campgrounds was already registering triple digits. By mid-afternoon, the same thermometer - admittedly in the sun - was reading 130, and the one just behind the bulletin board in the shade was 110.

Good times.

Oh, and the water main bringing water to the campground from near the North Rim had broken the day before, so fresh water was being limited.

I'm glad The Girl had remembered to bring her Aqua Mira drops, because we spent the day drinking creek water and chilling our legs in the water.

It's admittedly, a little sparse at the bottom of the Canyon with about twenty-five camping sites - all filled for most of the summer - and Phantom Ranch with its canteen selling cold drinks and a bit of time under the swamp cooler, but it's an amazing place, a gorgeous, lush, green oasis in the middle of a Canyon that is amazingly hot all summer long.

After The Girl had recovered herself a bit, we went to speak to the rangers about modifying our trip, changing our reservation plans from five more days across (with three more camping nights) to one more night and a broken-up trip back to the South Rim. Once we explained that we hadn't been trying to do a rim-to-rim-and-back in a day (something that apparently crazy people do really attempt to do in one day - the ranger spoke of a man who knocked on his door at 2am the previous morning 3/4 of the way done with the 44-miles in 24-hours, rim-to-rim-and-back insanity), he helped us out by getting our reservations switched to Indian Garden for the next night meaning that the six days of hiking (7, 7, 7, 7, 7, and 9 miles each day) would become three days of hiking (7, 4.6, 4.5 miles, instead).

At the crack of dawn the next day, we set out again, headed this time up the Bright Angel trail (the same guy does a great virtual tour of this trail, too) toward Indian Garden. Most of the day's 4.5 miles was spent in shade as the deep Canyon doesn't get the full brunt of the sun until after we'd stopped hiking
for the day, and the trail crosses a small creek a half dozen times before the campground, giving us ample opportunity to dunk our hats and bandanas to cool off.




The girl and I got into Indian Garden sometime around 10am again - heading up always takes longer than heading down and much of the first part of the trail is nothing but beach sand - and looked around for a similar creek to the one at Bright Angel campground. The creek at Indian Garden, however, was fairly well dried up, and we had to find a way to entertain ourselves among the dry, still Canyon air - at least only up to about 95 degrees in the shade this time as we were partway back up to the South Rim.

The girl took a fitful nap, worked a few of her Sudokus, and read a bit. I started and finished a book (review forthcoming another day), worked some Sodokus, played solitaire, and won nine of our eleven hands of Gin.

Time was passed, an early evening was turned in - the sun goes down in the Canyon around 8:30, but I was mostly sacked out around 7 or so, trying to get some shut eye in spite of stillness and heat.

Up before the crack of dawn again, we headed up the last four and a half miles to the South Rim (still following the virtual tour, of course - including amazing photo of the trail from above, a view we never got to see as we didn't head out to another vantage point once we crested the Rim again)






Started in shade again, but we quickly found the sun and headed up the longest, hardest set of switchbacks that I know of on in the Canyon (or anywhere else, though my experiences are somewhat limited). Once the sun hits, it beats down upon you, and the mules pass by kicking up the dust. It's a rough finish to the hike, but there are some impressive views and sights along the way, including a fairly close encounter (probably about thirty feet away) with a condor sitting along the ledge...


Apparently the California Condor was reintroduced into the Canyon a decade and a half ago. The site of the huge bird sitting there and - even more impressively - soaring in the final red rocked climb up the trail was a nice reward for all our hard work.

By the time we finally made it through the tunnel and back to the South Rim, we were whupped though our calves had finally loosened up. We had been doing the hiker shuffle our last couple of mornings before the legs loosened up.

Just before the tunnel, we managed to see an NPR reporter carrying a recorder and boom mike on a mule taping a story. No luck in finding the




We ambled our way back to the rental car and drove to Mather Campground for a warm shower ($2 for eight minutes - can't be beaten after the long hike), a visit to the gift shop, a stop for q-tips and ibuprofin at the general store, and a lunch of chicken pot pie and lemon cake (on my part).

--- Quick summary...Karlen didn't do well in the heat...we hiked down in one day and changed the six-day hike into a three day hike, taking two days to get back up to the South Rim... ---

Ten miles from the South Rim Village to the North Rim Lodge as the crow flies...twenty-one miles of hiking...or the route that we ended up taking that afternoon - 215 miles and five hours of driving around to see the North Rim which is amazingly gorgeous.

Along the way, we stopped off at Grandview Point...and Desert View...


...and saw the old Navajo Bridge, the only driveable crossing of the Colorado River - just down from Lee's Ferry - for hundreds of miles...


We hung out at the North Rim for a night, staying just outside the park at the Kaibab Lodge where we managed a phenomenal dinner of raindbow trout with grilled shrimp, maple glazed carrots, and cheese tortellini (I know, three days of granola bars, beef jerky, ramen, and instant spuds made me hungry), and the sunset from the back porch of the North Rim Lodge.





It's amazing how much different the North and South Rims feel, the North being so much less travelled, so much calmer, absolutely wonderful. If ever you get the chance to head out to the Canyon, make sure to get around and enjoy the North Rim. Well worth the extra drive.


Okay, quick hitters for the rest of the way homeward - 'cause it's late, and I'm about to run out of the day.

One night in Flagstaff where we realized that a town of 50K isn't quite as lively as we had previously imagined and where we got kind of annoyed that the hotel was going to charge an extra $50 a night on top of their weekend rate because the Pride in the Pines festival was in town...spent the last part of the evening in their library looking up places to stay and eat in Santa Fe...

Two nights and most of three days in Santa Fe...stayed at the St Francis a block or so off of the Plaza...pretty much just walked around for the few days and enjoyed the heck out of being clean and back in civilization with a real bed again...ate amazing food (Maria's NM Kitchen, Tortilla Flats, Railyard) and some decent food (Cafe Paris, Cafe Pasqual's, Zia's)...





Back to Albequirky to spend a night with The Girl's cousin and his reasonably new wife...

Back to Edmond where The Girl's aunt and uncle were in town this time...they took us down to see the Oklahoma City Federal Building memorial at sunset...



And thirteen final hours of driving back to the Queen City...

More for later...we listened to Middlesex, War of the Worlds, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union...

For now, though, I'm thinking that's long enough...

The Title of the Blog - Part 13

No matter what you're doing, there's a time when you have to stop. This, the thirteenth column of my time writing for The Bachelor was that time because it was time for me to graduate and head out into the world of teaching.

Nuts...now I'm gonna have to find something else to do with my Saturday posts...

You can’t kill an idea… - Bob Dylan

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
-Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

When the Bard’s Puck reads these lines, he asks his audience not to take any affront from the words that have been sounded upon his stage in the past while. He then asks for the audience to “Give me your hands, if we be friends,” so that he will know their true feelings before he departs. For me, these lines could be a very easy, very conciliatory opening to a close. I, however, choose not to let them be that.

I am not in the mood to apologize to those whom I have offended. In my previous bakers dozen of articles, I have attacked and chastised, poked and prodded, but have always tried to say my piece and get out. If you have taken the time to read my articles – from rant to rage to manifesto – then I thank you. If, even more rarely it seems, you took the time to formulate an intelligent response to that article, then I and the rest of our campus are forever in your debt, for you have helped me carry my torch. For the rest of you – those who quit on me or who chose to call my voice mail to leave obscene and idiotic messages, I wish we could have talked face to face.

I say that because face-to-face is the truest choice of those of us who wish to engage in open, honest debate. If you have a grievance with me, then I invite you to call me or to stop by the Lambda Chi house and talk to me in person. Or, if you don’t want to do that, then please pick up a pen and take my column’s space for next year. Lord knows they’ll need the space filled up.

If you do choose this last manner, then I shall charge you with a great duty. You will be a writer. True, your job will not demand the same objectivity that perhaps a good news writer must have, but you have responsibilities none the less. You must search your heart and the world around you, for the truest words come from both of them together. Rarely can you carry the shield or the sword for a cause in which you have no faith. Rarely will your words ever strike true in the hearts of your enemies if you do not wield them with the weight of conviction. And never will you convince someone else if you have not convinced yourself.

Having said this, I also charge you to choose your topics well. Some battles are lost before they are even begun. You may never convert a single soul if you choose only the fight on a battleground of faith. If you argue a side that some consider morally wrong – be it abortion, religion, or the Indy Star – your words will have to be more then perfect to win, and that is a very difficult thing to muster.

Thirdly and finally, I charge you to fight in the manner prescribed by Basil Henry Liddell Hart. I know nothing of the man other than his name and these few words, but I love what I know…

Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save his face. Put yourself in his shoes - so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil – nothing is so self– blinding.

I will not try to improve upon his words, they are far better than mine could be.

I also know that I have no moral high ground when any of these charges are considered. I have called people names, have chosen religious battle grounds, and have contradicted myself in the same article. I am about to do that last again, for I do not think I was wrong in breaking these charges that I give for you. My articles, you see, fall under the opinion section, and that is assuredly where they belonged. These are not to be taken as gospel, accepted without challenge. Nor are they to be attacked because they were wrong in some way. They never have been wrong, for the opinions expressed herein have been right for me – no more, no less.

And, if am lucky, they have sparked something in you. Perhaps you have never thought of that point in quite that light. Maybe you have never realized that someone else was unsure of his place in the world. Possible you saw an issue never before raised to you – whether you agreed with it or not. And certainly, some of you felt confident enough to challenge me on my opinions. Thanks, I hope I did the same for you. Hell, sometimes we just need somebody to say something difference so we can reaffirm our faith in a cause. If I’ve even done that, I leave this space happy.

But please, do not stop challenging the writers in the paper, the professors in your classes, the politicians in your government. If we stop checking them, then we should start being afraid, for then we have given up our power over ourselves and have handed it over to them. Don’t do that…ever…
~ ~ ~
Oh, as it seems I’m usually given free reign, I’m gonna thank a couple of folks before signing off completely. Thanks, JJ, for asking. You may not have expected what you got, but you sure got it anyways. And thanks also to Burr, Smack, Karlen, Keith, and Eric for being wonderful proof-readers, great sounding boards, and occasional inspirations…

Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead. – Scottish Proverb

Reading and watching and screwing around

So much media, so little time...

These first few came from a visit to Barnes & Noble. Thanks, as always, folks.

I started with Ultimate Fantastic Four - Vol 6, and this continues the gorgeous and impressive work from the Ultimate line of Marvel's comics. I'm starting to think that the Ultimate line might be the best thing to happen to Marvel - and comic books in general - in the past decade or two. It's given me a chance to follow Marvel's greatest characters and teams without having to know every possible thing that's come in the past. Marvel, in particular, had gotten to a point where every storyline (X-Men's being the worst) required a reader to know the past twenty or forty years of the character's lives before any possible understanding or joy was possible.

In all honesty, the Ultimate lines are somewhat along that same line, but they only require a backlog of five or six years reading to understand where things are, and all of those backlogs are readily available in trade paperbacks from the libraries and bookstores in every city 'round the country. I don't feel like an outsider coming into the movie halfway through. I feel like I've been on things from the beginning.

This Fantastic Four trade sees the team cleaning up a few loose ends that had come before - Momma Storm's work with Victor von Doom and the Frightful Four still hanging around the offices. The twists and turns of the storyline, and the tale ends with a twist that left my jaw dropped and me thoroughly impressed.

Then there's the second storyline in which a time-travelling Reed Richards heads back in time to make sure that the accident that created the Ultimate Fantastic Four never took place. Instead, the world becomes filled with superheroes thanks to an amicable meeting with the Skrulls. By the end, of course, the status quo is reset, but it's an entertaining ride along the way.

The artwork on this entire run has been gorgeous. The writing is tight and well-crafted. And the fun just pretty much never stops on this Ultimate line.

---

Another entry in the fine Ultimate universe was Ultimate Spider-Man Vol 16 - Deadpool which opens with Spidey and Kitty Pryde (of the Ultimate X-Men, you know) swinging around town trying to find out how to have their normal identities date without revealing Peter's secret identity to the world. It's a nice continuation of Peter's relationship with Kitty and a really nice addition to the most teen-themed Ultimate series.

The meat of the trade, however, comes in a rumble on the mutant-hunting reality show that the Ultimate X-Men broke up a couple of trades ago. It's a pretty entertaining fight that gives the writers a chance to introduce a number of other Ultimate characters - Deadpool, the foremost among them - as well as to rant back and forth about the discrimination that the mutants are seem with.

All in all, a the touch of preachy isn't badly done. While this trade isn't up to the high quality of the Ultimate Fantastic Four, Ultimate Spider-Man is a consistently fun read, and would be a perfect introduction for any teen comics reader.

---

The rest of these are part of a backlog that's been building to such an extent that I can't manage to give every one of these a thorough review like these first few. So, short reviews are now forthcoming...

---

Superman/Batman Vengance - I love the artwork in this series, and I love the huge, dopey, almost cartoony feel of their graphic novel collections, but sometimes the storylines leave me a bit cold. They're not bad (I especially like the parody of Marvel's Avengers in this edition) - and some are in fact quite good, but this one's just okay.

The artwork is fun, though, and the ride isn't a bad one. But it's prettier than it is moving by at least half and likely by more.

Skip this volume of the struggle. The first couple are of higher quality.

---

Mirrormask - I'd been waiting to see Mirrormask for some time now, and finally found it at the Sharonville branch.

The film didn't, in the least, disappoint me. It was a stunning visual spectacle. The computer-generated effects that create the Dave McKean-designed dream world are phenomenal. The picture is amazingly gorgeous. The storyline is a little less phenomenal, but it certainly ain't bad. The story is a fairly typical tale of a girl slipping into a dream world and then trying to find her way back.

Pay attention to the story or not, but see the flick. Watch it, drink it in.

---

HBO's series Deadwood had Karlen and me absolutely hooked from the very first few minutes of the very first episode that we checked out from the library. We're only two episodes in, but the acting and storylines are thrilling. It's a fascinating tale of a totally lawless Western town where the local saloon owner rules the town like a combination warlord and loanshark and where two of the newest men in town - come to make their fortune in the hardware business - are just a little too straight and narrow for that saloon owner's tastes.

We get a taste of the historic - with Wild Bill and Calamity Jane - and a whole heaping helping of vulgarity (swearing and swearing and swearing) and violence. People die - typically in very hard ways, but each death - each fight - each foul word - each moment - they all seem to knit this viewer in more and more tightly to the show.

It's a damn fine series, but it's definitely not one for the faint of heart.

---

To Catch a Thief is an old-school classic, a Hitchcock tale of a retired jewel thief whose name comes up in suspicion of some new crimes committed in his trademark style. As could only happen in the movies, the theif decides to pretend to be a thief again in order to - ahem - catch the thief.

For some reason, I find myself having more and more difficulties watching older films. In comparison to modern films, many of the older ones - this one included - lack subtelties that I enjoy and that make for a richer experience. The story was a little flat and plain, a little too linear for me.

It does have Grace Kelly, a beautiful woman, but even her presence is little more than that of a wooden manequin.

Hitchcock had better films, and many of those have aged more gracefully.

---

Apparently, Superman: Our Worlds at War was an absolutely massive cross-over event. It must've covered a fifty-plus issues of a half dozen comic series. I, being a wait-for-trader of the purest ranks, so I didn't read any of those issues until they made their way into the trades - this one being the collection of the two first attempts.

I imagine that the event that was Our Worlds at War was a huge undertaking - for writers as well as for readers, both attempting to grasp the entire storyline, and even in collecting that storyline into one volume seems to be impossible, because DC has left vast gaps and holes in what is being told. Characters act and vow to never act in another means for one issue , and then by the next time we see them, something has changed (invariably something unseen by our eyes, something the editors felt was less than necessary to our enjoyment of the tale) and that same character is acting in the very opposite of ways. Alliances are made and broken with no explanation in front of the scenes. If we're lucky, the next issue might provide some recap of the events we missed - or perhaps there's been a page of story saying "while you were away".

Admittedly, the story has enough interesting parts to keep me reading my way through, but there are too many holes putting this one closer to Swiss cheese rather than to a slice of Kraft American. It might be worth reading from tip to tale, but it'll have to be done by way of the back issues than the trades.

---

I like JLA: Strength in Numbers grabs another couple of Grant Morrison's strong story arcs - the introduction of Prometheus and a second story about the loss of probability 'round the world. Plus we get an extra one-shot with Starro and Daniel, the successor to Neil Gaiman's Dream of the Endless.

The Prometheus story brought an excellent new villian to the DC universe, a solo individual who nearly takes down the Justice League at the height of their powers and fame. His defeat of each of the individuals is creative and well-crafted, and his eventual defeat - while inevitible - is also well done.

Morrison's run on JLA was an excellent one, and this is a solid middle stretch in that run.

Common courtesy dies at the altar of constant contact

We are not a nice people any more.

Friday night, the wife and I stopped at PF Chang's to grab some take-out fare. We placed our order, dropped a few bucks into the Chang coffers, and headed down the strip to browse while our dan dan noodles were fixed up, chop chop.

When we got back - after sampling Coldstone's pumpkin ice cream (a favorite flavor of mine but not the best pumpkin around, honestly) - we had to wait for another patron to pay for her take-out before we could grab our stuff and head home for a night of watching Deadwood on library-procured DVD.

Ah, and waiting for that woman was a true pleasure.

She was texting on her Razor phone the whole time, never once speaking to the Chang's employee, slapping her credit card down on the counter instead of handing it across or even sliding it close to the employee. The woman then continued to stand in the food waiting area texting on her phone, partially blocking the server door into the kitchen.

On the way out, I asked Karlen whether she thought that our generation is/would be viewed as rude by the generation that came before us, whether we have lost some of the social graces that older folks might've had. She pointed out that the woman in line before us wasn't of our generation - being probably ten to fifteen years older than we.

My question, however, was a more general one: are we less curtious than the generations before us?

For example, I was in PF Chang's wearing a sweatshirt and baseball cap because it's my typical weekend outfit. I certainly wasn't dressed for a sit-down dinner in the restaurant, but I was just dropping off an order and picking up food. I wouldn't even have considered sitting down in the restaurant wearing a ballcap nor in the sweatshirt that I was wearing (my oldest, trashiest Wabash one). Someone from my grandfather's generation, however, likely wouldn't have considered even stepping into the restaurant with a hat on head, but I kept it on while I ordered and picked up the food.

Are we less curtious? Have times changed?

Sure, both are true, and it gets to the heart of the matter, I guess, in that it's a difficult thing to attempt to judge other people. Each of them - whether they're someone as lke us as was the woman in PF Chang's with me or a Borneo native who has never seen a restaurant much less a Chang's. How am I to judge someone from another culture - be they from another nation or simply from another era or generation? Am I to give them a free pass with the disclaimer that they're not wrong, they're just from a different culture or do I have some ability to say that my culture is somehow better and that their actions are, in light of my cultural background, somehow wrong or bad or at least less correct?

If I don't have that ability - if cultural relativism truly is the rule of the day, then what rights do I have to tell the student in the hallway outside of my door to not tell his friend to shut the f*&^ up? How do I explain the distinction between an appropriate action within the school culture without somehow also saying that his action is not ok? without devaluing his culture?

And why didn't I say something to the woman on the cell phone if I do have the right to judge someone else?

Why did I, instead, simply discuss the issue with Karlen, not even doing as I had initially planned and apologizing to the PF Chang employee on the rude woman's behalf?

The last is the easiest to answer: because when she took our money and gave us our order, she immediately had to answer a call-in order on the phone right next to her.

If you do feel like juding, feel free to first check out these links about cell phone etiquette...from LetsTalk.com...from Microsoft's website...from Road & Travel Magazine

Ah, cats...

I think of myself as a dog person. My family always had a dog when I was growing up, and Karlen and I got a dog within a month or so of us moving into our first house. We're a two-dog family now, and they're beautiful boys.

But we're also a cat family. She came to me with a cat - the only one still with us to this day, Aylah. She's a loving cat who is social to a fault, coming back again and again to be petted no matter how much you mess with her. Many people comment that she's one of the friendliest cats they've met - almost always being around when strangers are here.

We've had as many as three cats at any one time - both the others came from friends or family whose situations changed and who couldn't take the cats with them.

It's probable that once Aylah leaves us, we'll stick to being a dog family, but I will admit to really digging the one cat that I've really come to know. She's a cutey...

Dig the randomness

What a cool idea. It's called a camera toss. You set your camera for a one-second exposure and chuck it to a sure-handed friend. Neat imagry abounds.

Also random is the random picture search using Google and some sort of random generator to grab pictures at, well, random from the interweb.

Or there's the random Homer Simpson quote generator.

And while we're speaking of random beauty, another random ten from the iTunes...

• "Rudie Can't Fail" by the Clash - great album The Clash...this isn't the best song on there, but it's quality birth of pop punk
• "Habit" by Pearl Jam - No Code is my favorite PJ album, and this one's okay...lil' more anger than I typically like from the boys, but it's a part of their personality that I'm okay with - just not the side I prefer
• "Over the Rainbow" by Harry Nilsson - so underappreciated by the modern music listener, Harry Nilsson was a master...an absolute master...his double CD Personal Best should be required listening by anybody who claims to like music in nearly any form...perfect pop with touches of nearly every genre - singer-songwriter, old standards, rock, angry young man, Beatles, Elton, Billy Joel...wonderful
• "A Change of Sex" by David Motion & Sally Potter - from the Orlando soundtrack - great movie, neat music - especially the song "Coming"...this one's an stmospheric track that works mostly because of the movie
• "Slow and Low" by the Beastie Boys - one of my absolute favorite bands...from the classic Licensed to Ill debut cd...very indicative of where they'd be heading from this one
• "Casey Jones" by Carl Sandberg - a shock from the Beastie Boys, but I love the old recordings that Carl Sandberg did and that have been collected on Songs for America, mostly because Mom played them for me growing up...she played many of them on the guitar as my lullabies
• "Only Son" by Liz Phair - love her first three albums...hate the last two more popish albums...her choice to change styles, and I recognize her choice, but it's just not one I'm willing to take with her
• "Towards the Within" by Dead Can Dance - I know almost nothing about this group or their music other than the one album that Karlen had from college...but I like that album - very atmospheric and moody...world music and new age-ish stuff with gorgeous, strange stuff thrown into the mix...great for a Halloween chill out...
• "7/29/04 The Day Of" by David Holmes - from the Ocean's Twelve soundtrack - much better as music than as movie...I keep quoting that the movie was no fun but at least the actors seemed to be having fun...I'll probably end up seeing the third movie because I dig the actors involved, but it'll hopefully be more the Eleven than Twelve
• "Something in the Way" by Nirvana - I didn't and still don't get Nirvana...too angry, too annoying, too offensive for me...but their MTv Unplugged is a classic..."In the Pines" is a perfect cover...and so many of their songs worked in this stripped down setting...

Dropping it like it's cold

Loads of media that's been building up for a while... just sort of a catch-all... enjoy

Now there's something I didn't expect. I'd been looking forawrd to seeing Brick since the spring when I first saw the trailer, and it finally got around to Cincy in early August with the DVD coming out the next week - such is life in the Midwest, I guess.

Luckily, I wasn't disappointed. As I said, I was a little surprised, however, at what an outstanding job the film did in aping the old, hard-boiled detective style of the Phillip Marlowe / Dashiell Hammett films. Everything from the at-first-hard-to-understand quick patter of the dialogue, full of the sort of slang that - in years past - would have seen two jakes gabbering about dames with gams, hard cases packing heaters, all while tipping back whiskey in highballs while keeping their fedoras just slightly askew. Here, however, the entire noir world has been transported almost perfectly intact into the world of California high school students who are much more worldly wise than any real high school students I've known, been, or taught.

The characters involved - from the main character whose ex- turns up dead in a culvert in scene one to the femme fatale who just might not be as bad as she's presented, or who just might be the death of our lead - do an outstanding job of keeping the mood note perfect throughout, clearly combing the second-hand stores for vintage clothing and managing a massive under-culture that operates on levels that only barely pay any attention to the adults who are almost entirely absent from this film - except for one hilarious scene with one of the character's mom offering apple juice to his guest.

The only sour note is rung by a scene late in the film where our lead character shows a fair bit more vulnerablitity and humanity than his older echoes would ever have considered. This scene doesn't in any way ruin the film, however, as we're not exactly sure of which side everybody falls on until the denouement.
The film is outstanding, and the acting of Joseph Gordon-Levitt is excellent. Throughout the film, I kept trying to figure out if he was or wasn't Tommy from 3rd Rock, and it is a compliment to him that he so nearly changed himself that he was nearly unrecognizable.

Reviews of Brick have been mixed but on the positive side of things and tended to focus on whether the transfer of the older ideas into the modern setting was pastiche or homage and how successful that transfer was.

I enjoyed the film but do warn that attention will have to be paid as the writer does not make things easy and clear, and the character's dialogue is clearly that of insiders who have no shame in shortening things up so as to make their language impenetrable for anyone who isn't an initiate in their culture.

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The Island, on the total otherhand is about as deep a a kiddie pool. It's pure explosions, chases, and pretty people running a lot.

There's some sort of plot, but it's nothing you wouldn't be able to understand from the first ten minutes of the film: bad people make clones - keep clones stupid - kill clones to harvest organs - oh, no - clones escape and become aware.

Ooh.

Luckily, it did have Scarlett Johansson who is really pretty.

Seriously, if you thought Speed was too confusing and had too much character development, then The Island is for you.

In all honesty, it doesn't pretend to be anything more than a popcorn flick and it does at least deliver some nice explosions and chase scenes, but it'd thoroughly and totally disposable.

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Love among the old folks tends to make me a little icked out. I'll admit that.

It might be a things that's been trained into me by the media or something, but it doesn't really matter, because the thoughts of Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton bumping uglies - especially Jack, for some reason - just icks me out.

Luckily, Something's Gotta Give has a lot more to recommend it other than just that nasty thought.

The film is somewhat predictable with a protagonist whose schtick is that he's an old man dating nothing but beautiful young women (and Amanda Peet who has more than a passing resemblance to Julia Roberts). Then, along comes a woman his age (or ten years his junior, really). Amazingly, something clicks with Jack, and he starts to maybe appreciate a model with a few more miles under the hood.

Shocking.

Luckily, the entire cast - even Keanu Reeves - are solid enough performers that they turn what could be a rather pedestrian flick into an enjoyable little journey. The lead gets his comeupance and changes his stripes. The female lead comes out of her shell and gets to turn the tables a bit. But they end up together.

Not bad.

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Enough with the flicks, might as well read something. This trip to the library brought me into a couple of decent trades (and two crappy ones - yes, I'm talking about you, Nightwing - it really is a crime that DC keeps putting out such crappy product for such a great character. They might as well have gone ahead and killed him in the recent Infinite Crisis).

The first good was is pictured to the right and is Teen Titans: The Future is Now and just left me drooling to get my hands on an Infinite Crisis trade - even though I know that trying to catch everything in order is going to be nearly impossible. In this volume, we get two storylines - the first has the Titans headed into the future to help the Legion of Super Heroes in a battle againt the Fatal Five. They then jump back into the "present" but find themselves battling a future version of themselves - a team that has split in half and divided the nation because of something disastrous that came about in "The Crisis" - which isn't explained here.

DC has done a masterful job leading everything up to the Crisis, truly masterful. The distrust from Identity Crisis and then all of the hints at a coming Crisis. Serious drool dropping on the keybord now, I tell you.

The Titans return to the present, of course, but with a number of warning from their future selves. They then get a new member - Speedy - and face a murderous and renewed foe in Dr. Light who lets loose the secret that the Justice League had engaged in a few mind games, referencing Identity Crisis again and sewing serious seeds of doubt in the Titans long-ongoing hero worship of the JLA.

The artwork is consistently solid throughout the volume, and the feeling of the Titans as a family - their most important and consistent trait - is played up brilliantly, particularly in light of the dissolution of the Justice League that is playing out at the same time.

This is an absolute must read for any DC fan, but I do warn everybody that there are spoilers galore here (and probably in my review), so check the guide to the Infinite Crisis trade paperbacks before reading this.

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More Infinite Crisis ground work is laid in the trade Power Girl which collects the various origins of Power Girl - Superman's cousin, Atlantean daughter, exhibitionist . And then comes the meat of the trade in the collection of JSA: Classified, the Power Trip arc.

Power Girl is going bonkers. She's seeing people that nobody else sees, having her powers fade in and out, and fearing a breakdown. Different visions continue to haunt her, each presenting a different possible origin for her - villians pop in and claim to be her parents while long dead heroes appear, claiming to be her sisters.

And then the Psycho Pirate shows up and throws down the Crisis on Infinite Earths refresher. Drool all over the keyboard at this point as, again, DC has nailed - absolutely nailed - characterization of a brilliant character whose entire history was rocked in that decade-old cross-over. Again, it's a gotta read (well, I'll admit that I skipped the first couple of issues and went straight to the Power Trip arc) but in order.

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Music has popped across my media radar of late, as well, including two retries from Jewel. I caught Bill Maher's Amazon Fishbowl with Jewel performing and remembered how much I like her as an artist (please ignore any fanboy leanings). Karlen and I saw her live about ten years ago when she'd first hit big, and she was hilarious and personable on stage. Any time I hear her perform solo, I'm impressed. She's got a great voice and writes some entertaining, intelligent songs.

And then she puts out crappy albums time and time again, none of which sound even remotely like her solo performances that I enjoy. Allmusic.com suggests that her last two albums have been her best albums (4.5 of 5 stars each), but I just can't stand them. Both 0304 - with its synthetic beats, totally unlike anything that Jewel has done before - and Goodbye Alice in Wonderland are over-produced and don't let the simplicity of Jewel's voice and writing come through.

I don't know if she just isn't worried about putting out things that are pure to what I expect her to be or if she thinks that the higher production values flatter her music, but I don't care for her albums. It's her busines. It does mean that I won't be buying any of her music anytime soon.

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Alan Moore's pretty much a pantheon graphic novel guy. He's put out pretty much the finest portfolio of any graphic novel artist of modern times.

His stuff is so spectacular that I was willing to wade through Promethea Book 3 in hopes of another revelation like the final issue of Book 2. Sadly, such a revelation just didn't come through in this one.

Weirdly, exactly four years ago to the day, Weasel Words summed it up pretty well:

Rather than a story with characters and plot, Promethea is now a tutorial on the occult, thinly veiled behind the merest facade of story. I kept paging through this volume, hoping that this bizarre digression would end soon, but it never did.

The story is becoming wordy and meandering as Barbara and Sophie drift along some sort of Kaballic (sp?) path looking to find Barbara's dead husband. All sorts of things happen along the way, but most aren't vlearly real or metaphor or education or, well, much of anything.

There's some neat visual storytelling along the way - gods made of mercury, a mobius strip path (which kind of reminds me of something my work neighbor showed me recently), and an issue entirely in red and black - but it just seems like neat visuals for the sake of neat visuals. There'e no revelation to make up for the wandering.

I will keep working through, however, as I'm desperate to read issue #32.

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A few years ago, I checked out a couple of compilations from the LA radio show Sounds Eclectic - (review here). For some reasons, I went ahead and grabbed them again and gave them another listen.

The first cd - Sounds Eclectic (review here) - is a nice collection of live performances from the radio show, and the collection makes for a pleasent enough listen, but it's without any real excitement. It's a nice, decent album to listen to, and it's not much more than that. The versions of most of the songs (the ones that I know, at least) are barely different from their original album versions, but those minor differences make for a little cleaner listens - "Babylon", in particular, is a really nice live version. The Supreme Beings of Leisure song "Never the Same" is also a nice one. Nothing really special here - luckily the local library had it so I could grab the David Gray song and a couple others.

The second volume - Sounds Eclectic Too (review here) - is more of the same: good but nonessential live performances from a wide spread of artists. On this second volume, I didn't have as many artists that I really enjoyed, so I didn't get quite the same highlights, but that didn't diminish the feeling of the album being a "nice album", not much more.

An adendum - apparently the Sounds Eclectic release series was apparently preceeded by a series called Rare on Air from the same radio station.

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Ah, more Stephen King. Weirdly, this book was published by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman - one that he used for a few years back and which he has apparently abandoned for a decade or so before publishing The Regulators as Bachman and its companion novel Desperation as King.

I came to The Regulators by way of the TheDarkTower.net which suggested that the book fit in with the Dark Tower series, but I didn't see the connections in my read. That didn't mean, however, that it wasn't an enjoyable read (or listen, in my case, honestly).

The basics of the setup are pretty familiar for long-time readers of King's books: a mysterious force latches on to a psychically powerful youngster in an anonymous small town (weirdly in Ohio instead of Maine). That mysterious force then sets about transforming its new home block into a mixture of the youngster's dreams (which come via television westerns and cartoons) and the neighbor's hells. In the end, it's one of those neighbors that has to step forward to hopefully save his friends and his world.

The journey from first glimpses of the weirdness to the final resolution are very much reminiscent of King's earlier Bachman books, tales that tended toward the more violent side of things than his main books did. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that King's writing would have been anything less than abviously his - even when published under another moniker. The standard King techniques are here - introductions for all the characters, even the most minor ones; a scenario that takes place without much explanation as to how it came into being; and a resolution that leaves hints that it might not be an entirely final resolution.

It wasn't until after listening to The Regulators that I found out there was a companion novel. Sadly, my library only has the abridged version of Desperation so my enjoyement of that one might have to wait a bit since school's back in session now, but I'll get to it eventually.

Oh, and since this post was so stinkin' long, enjoy something a little more mindless if you've gotten this far.