Today I am 38

"Champagne Year"
by St. Vincent


So I thought I'd learned my lesson
But I secretly expected
A choir at the shore
And confetti through the fall night air

I'll make a living telling people what they want to hear
It's not a killing, but it's enough to keep the cobwebs clear

Cause it's not a perfect plan
It's not a perfect plan
But it's the one we've got

It's not a perfect plan
But it's the one we've got

Cause I make a living telling people what they want to hear
But I tell ya, it's gonna be a champagne year

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer: Myrna Loy

more Myrna...

Jamie Guest Post in honor of my b-day

Well, indeed.  Jamie has sent me this to post for my birthday, which is tomorrow.  

I wasn't sure anyone had noticed these posts over the years, but I've done them pretty routinely.  I guess you can download the songs and make yourself a "decade in the life of" playlist.

From Jamie:


While combing through League archives in search of posts for the 10th Anniversary Spectacular, I kept coming across the special birthday entries where Ryan would post the lyrics to a song each year on his birthday.  I found it fascinating to go back and discover which songs he had chosen, so I decided to collect them all and share them with you in honor of the League's birthday.  Happy Birthday, Ryan!


A League of Melbotis/ The Signal Watch Retrospective: Special Birthday Edition: The League's Birthday Playlist



Year: 2004
Age: 29
Song: Streets of Laredo

End of a Revolution: Today is the Day Before My Birthday

That's my way of saying, "I'm taking a few days off.  It's my birthday".

I will be 38.  I will be approaching middle-age soon.  Before I know it, Jamie and I will be celebrating our 40th birthdays, which is weird...

At 38, given my lack of a post-secondary education and perpensity for distraction, I'm doing okay professionally.  Especially when you consider I'm in an institution of higher education, a place were degrees and spending decades focusing on one thing are sort of the norm.  Nobody has fired me yet, but there's always tomorrow.

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer: Carrie Fisher

A few Richard Stark Books - The Dame, The Black Ice Score and The Sour Lemon Score

I've been plowing through more of the Parker and Allan Grofield novels by Richard Stark.  As much as I write here, I can't imagine how much time that guy must have spent in front of the typewriter.  Keep in mind, Richard Stark was just one pen name of Donald Westlake, who was usually out writing kind of wacky crime and mystery stories.  The three books I just finished, originally pulpy paperbacks, all came out between 1968 and 1969, and the next one I'm going to pick up also was released in 1969.

But in writing that much, it's interesting to see Stark second guess himself, realize maybe he went a little off formula and come back to correct himself, especially with Parker.  It makes me wonder if he'd gone back and re-read the first Parker novels and seen how far afield The Black Ice Score truly was from The Hunter and The Man with the Getaway Face (still a great book title), and that, maybe The Black Ice Score felt a little, almost, cozy for Parker.

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer (fictional human edition): Lois Lane

Over the past 75 years, a lot of women have played Superman's love interest, Lois Lane.  Yes, I have my favorites, but all of them brought something to the character.  Traditionally, Lois was the grounding wire from Superman to some semblance of a normal human, his romance and interaction with Lois gave him both someone he cared about individually and especially, but also alienated him with his dual roles as meek Clark Kent and the alien powerhouse, Superman.  But what kind of person would be interesting enough to draw the attention of a Superman?

You can't be a wallflower.  You've got to have spunk, speak your mind, be a risk-taker, and not because you're a dope, but because you're smart and you've got backbone...  and Lois did all that in spades, whether she was flying off to investigate a mad scientist and his death ray or clinging to the bottom of an elevator going up to the top of the Eiffel Tower where terrorists had an atomic bomb.  She didn't count on Superman to be there to save her skin, and she still flung herself headlong into trouble.

Of course, it's hard to remain forever between your mid-20's and late 30's, and so we've had a lot of women fill Lois's shoes over the years.

Let's take a walk through them, shall we?

Joan Alexander: Superman serial cartoons, radio show

Noel Neill:  Superman serials, Adventures of Superman, seasons 2-6

Some artists I think handle Wonder Woman really pretty well

As a comic strip character, Wonder Woman is a tall order. Especially for the many comic artists who have, more or less, one or two styles of women they can draw, and then mix it up with clothes and color. We know what Wonder Woman might look like in our mind's eye, but, like Superman, mostly we know when its wrong.

The comics describe Wonder Woman as:

Beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swifter than Hermes, and stronger than Hercules

How do you draw that?

If you're many artists, you chuck the icon and start drawing a swimsuit model in a "sexy" pose.

As an example, DC took some ribbing thanks to the "variant" cover for JLA #2, which featured the usually tough-looking male members of the JLA, and then a kind of youngish, kittenish version of Wonder Woman. I don't know that there was a better way to make the point that WW needs to be portrayed as a peer to her JLA colleagues and not as the resident cheesecake, but in response fans created the "what if male superheroes posed like Wonder Woman" meme.  You sort of hope DC brass hears about these things and applies changes as they go along.

I wasn't a Wonder Woman reader until way late in the game.  I was vaguely embarrassed then (and now) to pick up "sexy" covers on comics, and during the 90's, when I was curious about the character, DC was in the middle of experimenting with both good girl and bad girl art on the title.  But when Phil Jimenez came on Wonder Woman,  I couldn't help but notice the covers weren't cheesecake, the stories were different from everything else I was reading, and when I flipped through the comics, the art was absolutely stunning.  I became a fan of the character thanks to the work of Jimenez, and then had a lot of work to do catching up.

Your Daily Dose of Good Cheer: Nichelle Nichols

Uhura tricords the heck out of this alien landscape

more Nichelle Nichols...

Annette Funicello Merges with The Infinite

It seems that original Mouseketeer, beach movie fixture and boomer icon, Annette Funicello, has passed.

 I knew Annette from her 80's-era TV appearances and also as the girl that, apparently, men of my Dad's generation all grew up having a crush on.  Annette Funicello was going through a sort of nostalgia-tour renaissance when I was a kid, in peanut butter commercials, guest appearances, etc.. at a time when we also happened to have the Disney Channel, which would rerun the old Mickey Mouse Club episodes (but not in order, because that would be nuts).  And I was just the kind of kid who was cool enough to think a good afternoon included Mr. Ed and Mickey Mouse Club re-runs.