Film. Comics. Sci-Fi. Superheroes. Pulp. Noir. History. Superman. 20th Century Archaeology.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Superman (and I) wish you a Merry Christmas Eve!
Merry Christmas, Signal Corps!
I can think of no finer sentiment to share on this Christmas Eve than the words of the Man of Steel.
Tonight, let's be grateful for those with whom we spend the holiday, loved ones or otherwise. And I hope you were able to help out your neighbors and fellow humans here on Planet Earth.
Here at Signal Watch, we're raising a glass to you! May your Christmas Day be merry and bright!
If you're out and about, come home safely. Tell your family I said "howdy", and let's look forward to 2012 as the year where we figure it all out.
MERRY CHRISTMAS! God bless us, every one.
SW Advent Calendar Day 24
Merry Christmas Eve, Signal Corps!
I hope you've had a chance to get out and enjoy the sights and sounds of the Holidays, however you celebrate them and however they look in your town.
Like Superman, here, I get to spend Christmas Eve with the lady for whom I'd make the world spin backward. That's all I need for Christmas this year.
Have a lovely silent night.
I hope you've had a chance to get out and enjoy the sights and sounds of the Holidays, however you celebrate them and however they look in your town.
Like Superman, here, I get to spend Christmas Eve with the lady for whom I'd make the world spin backward. That's all I need for Christmas this year.
Have a lovely silent night.
Friday, December 23, 2011
SW Advent Calendar: December 23
Sometimes Christmas is all about having it out with the extended family.
I have very warm memories of watching this movie as a child. Donald's coat is still one of my favorite visuals in cartoons or live action comedy. This may inform much of what I find funny.
For Christmas, I look like a villain
So, I've been off work since Wednesday at 5:00. Thus, the last time I shaved was early Wednesday morning.
Before heading out to the gym today, I decided to do some shaving. If I don't shave, and I sweat, my face can really start to break out.
I use an electric razor. Something about real razors that close to my jugular has always freaked me out, so I spend money every couple of years on a Norelco or Braun electric razor. Of late, I've used a foil razor. It sort of does the trick. But with a foil razor, if you wait too long between shaves, it can actually hurt a bit as you scrape your face. But, of course aside from redness which immediately goes away, no big deal.
Today while I was shaving, I noticed the usual slight discomfort was a bit amplified and of a different, sharper character. I looked at the razor and noticed nothing out of the ordinary, so I went back to shaving, and it seemed to get worse. And then I noticed I was actually bleeding a little.
This is what I did to myself:
So I scratched the living hell out of myself, and now - I look like a villain in a 90's movie. Just in time for Christmas.
The scratches should be part of a cautionary tale, like: oh, you can tell he fought a bear. But in my case, it looks like I lost a fight to a cat. Which isn't as cool.
Apparently Jamie noticed my razor fell over and put it back. What neither or us noticed was that the foil was damaged. Because my razor was sitting where it always sits, I couldn't figure out what changed between Wednesday morning and today, and just assumed I was a bigger wimp today than in every other preceding day. Until the blood.
See, this is how I know I'm going to die in a completely preventable manner. "Oh, you mean you shouldn't just wake up with your pillow soaked in your own blood every morning? I just thought that was part of getting older."
I am an idiot.
Before heading out to the gym today, I decided to do some shaving. If I don't shave, and I sweat, my face can really start to break out.
I use an electric razor. Something about real razors that close to my jugular has always freaked me out, so I spend money every couple of years on a Norelco or Braun electric razor. Of late, I've used a foil razor. It sort of does the trick. But with a foil razor, if you wait too long between shaves, it can actually hurt a bit as you scrape your face. But, of course aside from redness which immediately goes away, no big deal.
Today while I was shaving, I noticed the usual slight discomfort was a bit amplified and of a different, sharper character. I looked at the razor and noticed nothing out of the ordinary, so I went back to shaving, and it seemed to get worse. And then I noticed I was actually bleeding a little.
This is what I did to myself:
 |
| the red in my eye if just from an overabundance of Yuletide Spirit |
The scratches should be part of a cautionary tale, like: oh, you can tell he fought a bear. But in my case, it looks like I lost a fight to a cat. Which isn't as cool.
Apparently Jamie noticed my razor fell over and put it back. What neither or us noticed was that the foil was damaged. Because my razor was sitting where it always sits, I couldn't figure out what changed between Wednesday morning and today, and just assumed I was a bigger wimp today than in every other preceding day. Until the blood.
See, this is how I know I'm going to die in a completely preventable manner. "Oh, you mean you shouldn't just wake up with your pillow soaked in your own blood every morning? I just thought that was part of getting older."
I am an idiot.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Blog Spotlight - Down and Out: An Austin Love Story
So, some time this summer PaulT and I headed down to the Alamo Ritz to see Babyface because I was promised lots of Barbara Stanwyck (which it delivered in spades). Prior to the movie, a lovely young woman sat down a couple seats down from PaulT, and because it turns out PaulT, myself and this person are all the sort of person who will talk to just random people, we talked a bit before the show began, and then afterward all wound up at a bar next door for a few drinks.
That lovely young woman was LT. She's fairly new to town, a world traveler, highly educated, and now unemployed and trying to make a go of it here in Waterloo. Turns out she can also turn a phrase, so I encourage you to check out her blog Down and Out: An Austin Love Story.
I think you'll find it an interesting read. I know I do. I'm personally totally rooting for LT, and it wasn't so long ago I was also unemployed in this town under very different circumstances. So if you have a chance, give it a read.
That lovely young woman was LT. She's fairly new to town, a world traveler, highly educated, and now unemployed and trying to make a go of it here in Waterloo. Turns out she can also turn a phrase, so I encourage you to check out her blog Down and Out: An Austin Love Story.
I think you'll find it an interesting read. I know I do. I'm personally totally rooting for LT, and it wasn't so long ago I was also unemployed in this town under very different circumstances. So if you have a chance, give it a read.
SW Advent Calendar December 22
and now, in what's becoming a Christmas tradition, I think, here's my annual posting of The Pogues and Kirsty McColl's "Fairytale of New York"
Some good reads: Memorial #1 and Daredevil #7
If you haven't been past your comic shop yet, or you might be heading back soon, I wanted to pitch two comics to you. One is a brand new series, the other one of Marvel's oldest mainstay characters, and so it gives me two very different things to discuss and recommend for different reasons.
Memorial #1
written by Chris Roberson, art by Rick Ellis and colors by Grace Allison
I have a feeling that if issue #2 continues on from where issue #1 started, and this thing expands the way I think it could, we're going to be looking at one of the "next big things" for comics fans.
In TV and comics, there are ways to lay groundwork while laying out tantalizing bits of "what's really happening" or setting up a mythology, and its difficult to pinpoint how a series on TV like Lost can do this so well, and then the reboot of V comes along, and it has all the fun of solving a big book of word problems.
It has to do, of course, with clearly defined (and new but readily understood) characters, buy-able circumstances for characters that set an internal logic from the beginning, what was presented as hints about what's happening without being unnecessarily oblique.
If this were a TV series, I think we just saw the first half-hour of the 90 minute pilot, and it was very promising. We get a lovely tabula rasa set up for our start, that we know we'll populate with backstory, despotic fairytale queens, and plenty of hints about who our villains are, and the circumstances that led them to villainy. Its a compelling soup of familiar and unfamiliar, and I am very curious to see where it heads.
Mostly, unlike so many #1's I've read in the DCU relaunch, this didn't have me wanting to know more to guess how they would do this, or fix it, or how this compared to my expectations. This was starting fresh, and it felt fresh and absolutely necessary against the backdrop of the state of the industry.
Give it a shot. You can find Memorial #1 from IDW out as of Wednesday, Dec. 21 at your local shop, and online at comixology.
Recommended for fans of Sandman, Fables, Unwritten and Books of Magic.
Daredevil #7
by Mark Waid, Paulo Rivera and Joe Rivera with colorist Javier Rodriguez
The constant push to write for the trade and the industry's devotion to the 6 issue storyline has meant that we've all but lost a vestige of the 80's on most of superherodom in comics. When writers like Claremont were on books like X-Men, as powerful as a multi-issue story-arc could be (and how that was handled differently them plotting out over years sometimes), often it was the stand-alone story between stories that worked as a short story, and revealed character in the way day-in-the-life or short-form stories can.
Waid has always been talented, but of late, the man has been firing on all cylinders on all of his projects. On Daredevil, he's rescued the character from a whirlpool of negativity that started in the 1980's with Miller's work, was used to excellent effect in some of Bendis's run on the character, built upon by Brubaker, but essentially left Matt Murdock with nowhere to go.
Waid continues to play off this problem in this issue, as the mission of this run has been to make Matt Murdock a character whose stories people might want to read for enjoyment, not endure out of duty. Matt Murdock, the character, has reclaimed life, and as readers, we get to enjoy that, too.
This issue follows Murdock in a set of unfortunate circumstances leading kids to safety through a snowstorm. the subject material shouldn't feel like an 80's throwback, but I simply can't point to enough periods in the past 20 years when a writer was offered the opportunity to tell this kind of revealing story in a mainstream book, or saw the potential in such "ordinary" circumstances.
Its a straight up amazing read, and shows not just why Daredevil works as a character, but why Waid's understanding of character and what real drama can look like in a comic about men in tights, keeps the whole thing engaging and reminds readers how this medium and this genre can work on a very good day.
Memorial #1
written by Chris Roberson, art by Rick Ellis and colors by Grace Allison
I have a feeling that if issue #2 continues on from where issue #1 started, and this thing expands the way I think it could, we're going to be looking at one of the "next big things" for comics fans.
In TV and comics, there are ways to lay groundwork while laying out tantalizing bits of "what's really happening" or setting up a mythology, and its difficult to pinpoint how a series on TV like Lost can do this so well, and then the reboot of V comes along, and it has all the fun of solving a big book of word problems.
It has to do, of course, with clearly defined (and new but readily understood) characters, buy-able circumstances for characters that set an internal logic from the beginning, what was presented as hints about what's happening without being unnecessarily oblique.
If this were a TV series, I think we just saw the first half-hour of the 90 minute pilot, and it was very promising. We get a lovely tabula rasa set up for our start, that we know we'll populate with backstory, despotic fairytale queens, and plenty of hints about who our villains are, and the circumstances that led them to villainy. Its a compelling soup of familiar and unfamiliar, and I am very curious to see where it heads.
Mostly, unlike so many #1's I've read in the DCU relaunch, this didn't have me wanting to know more to guess how they would do this, or fix it, or how this compared to my expectations. This was starting fresh, and it felt fresh and absolutely necessary against the backdrop of the state of the industry.
Give it a shot. You can find Memorial #1 from IDW out as of Wednesday, Dec. 21 at your local shop, and online at comixology.
Recommended for fans of Sandman, Fables, Unwritten and Books of Magic.
Daredevil #7
by Mark Waid, Paulo Rivera and Joe Rivera with colorist Javier Rodriguez
The constant push to write for the trade and the industry's devotion to the 6 issue storyline has meant that we've all but lost a vestige of the 80's on most of superherodom in comics. When writers like Claremont were on books like X-Men, as powerful as a multi-issue story-arc could be (and how that was handled differently them plotting out over years sometimes), often it was the stand-alone story between stories that worked as a short story, and revealed character in the way day-in-the-life or short-form stories can.
Waid has always been talented, but of late, the man has been firing on all cylinders on all of his projects. On Daredevil, he's rescued the character from a whirlpool of negativity that started in the 1980's with Miller's work, was used to excellent effect in some of Bendis's run on the character, built upon by Brubaker, but essentially left Matt Murdock with nowhere to go.
Waid continues to play off this problem in this issue, as the mission of this run has been to make Matt Murdock a character whose stories people might want to read for enjoyment, not endure out of duty. Matt Murdock, the character, has reclaimed life, and as readers, we get to enjoy that, too.
This issue follows Murdock in a set of unfortunate circumstances leading kids to safety through a snowstorm. the subject material shouldn't feel like an 80's throwback, but I simply can't point to enough periods in the past 20 years when a writer was offered the opportunity to tell this kind of revealing story in a mainstream book, or saw the potential in such "ordinary" circumstances.
Its a straight up amazing read, and shows not just why Daredevil works as a character, but why Waid's understanding of character and what real drama can look like in a comic about men in tights, keeps the whole thing engaging and reminds readers how this medium and this genre can work on a very good day.
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