Well, I'm Back from Spring

I drove to Spring, TX yesterday and am back.

This was the aforementioned Drama Club Reunion, sort-of.  Folks who did plays and musicals between 1993 and almost 2000 showed.

It was great to see everyone, and we'll need to do it again.

You guys don't really know these people, so I'll keep it short.

Here's Jared, my director, V (I will never call her "Margaret"), a woman I never identified, and a guy we used to call "Trucker".  It's a long story.

Nathan and Weston.

Meredith, Jared and Julie.

People are doing really well.  Or they're at least smart enough to lie about doing really well.

But the traffic in Spring at 5:00 on a Friday is crazy insane.

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer: Monroe

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer: Kate

Everyone relax. I'm back. Til Tomorrow.

I'm back from Baltimore.

You know, for a town that I think of as being pretty sketchy, I walked around last night in the touristy area after 10:00 PM, and it was actually really nice.  Found an area with a strip of local bars and went in with some A-level beer snobs to try some locals.  Discovered there's something called "sour beer".  As I asked them:  How is it I've lived on this Earth for 37 years and nobody ever mentioned sour beer to me before?

I didn't love it, it was fine, but... seriously, I feel let down by humanity.

The meeting was interesting, but I wouldn't describe it as "fun".  Dinner and then the bar was all right, but maybe less the governance talks regarding a semi-formal open source organization.  Still, I felt like I learned a lot, and that's always a good thing.

Tomorrow I pack it up and head to Spring, TX for roughly 24 hours of seeing former high school classmates at the conspicuously-named-but-no-turns-out-there's-no innuendo-there-after-all, "Bareback Bar".

Ah, Spring, Texas.  You never stop giving who you are, and I wouldn't want it otherwise.

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer: Audrey

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer: Stanwyck

All New Mickey & Friends Cartoons!

Made for web consumption and with semi-limited animation, they still get Mickey (and company) right.

It's all in French, but you'll never notice. Outrage over a delayed pastry works in every language.

DC Comics Leadership - Still Finding it's Way 18 Months into DCNu

These days I'm only reading a few DC Comics, so it's a bit harder to see what's going on in the halls at the company.  Certainly looking at the release of the monthly solicits is an excellent indicator.

The Beat already did a nice breakdown of some things that really stand out.  Todd Allen points out:

• The $2.99 line seems to be getting crossed
• We may not be looking at 52 titles anymore

Batman: One More Time, With Feeling (by Scott Snyder)

This news came on the same day DC announced a storyline called "Batman: Year Zero" to fill in all those gaps you had (right?) about what happened after Batman: Year One.   The story shall be about The Bat-Man, who he is and how he came to be!  Snyder's promise that the series will tell us all the things we've never seen before, like Batman's first run in with a super-villain, is true if you're 20 and just got into comics, abut less true if you dropped all the Batman books but Morrison's because you realized that maybe, in his current comics form, the Bat-fellow is getting pretty repetitive (for first super-villain meetings, we recommend the superlative Batman: Snow by Dan Curtis, JH WIlliams III and the late, terrific Seth Fisher).

I don't know what's more surprising: that Snyder's modus operandi with Batman has been to largely keep digging up the bones of well-loved, well-worn storylines done by some of the name-iest names in comics, or that this seems to be a real draw for the Bat-audience.  I'm old, so I was good with Batman: Year One, A Death in the Family, and every story that wanted to goof on Thomas and Martha Wayne from Hush to Death and the Maidens and was thinking maybe we were ready to move on.  But, short of another gang-war or serial killer story, it seems that all DC has to offer re: Batman these days is another whack at the same worn out Batman origin stuff and tilling about in the same soil of Batman's family history and early years.

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer: Crawford

and, your bonus picture (because everybody loves Joanie)

Baltimore

No, I've never watched The Wire and your references will be lost on me.*  Yes, I'll get to it.

I am headed for Baltimore from Tuesday til Thursday.  I haven't been there since a day trip from DC when I was a kid where I saw an 18th Century Man-o-War and the rest of my family got lost in the projects looking for Edgar Allen Poe's house.

In honor of the trip, here's a cut from the super-depressing Lyle Lovett album, Joshua Judges Ruth



I'm going for work, not pleasure.  But I hope to have fun working, which, you know, weirder things have happened.


*The only characters' names I know from The Wire are Omar and Bubbles and I know what happens to Omar because the internet is full of people who hate narrative payoff, I guess.