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Legacy Heroes

If you are not a fanboy, you probably do not know this.

The comic book superheroes you know and love?  Not always the same people under the mask.  Sometimes there's a death, a retirement or a disappearance, and someone else is inspired to take up the mantle of the recently departed hero.  If you saw Watchmen, you saw this in the cases of Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre.  DC's the king of this, with more Flashes than you can supersonically shake a stick at, and 7200 (no, really) Green Lanterns.  Even Batman's someone new under the cowl these days, and half of the JSA is made up of what we call "legacy heroes," people like Dr. Mid-Nite, Mr. Terrific, Johnny Thunder, & Hourman, who incidentally, has one of the best porn names in comics, falling just under Iron Fist on the big list.

For a lot of characters, this doesn't work.  No one else is Superman, for instance.  You can have Supergirl and Power Girl and Krypto the Super-Dog, but Superman is Kal-el, the last survivor of Krypton, raised by simple Kansas farmers, and with a boy scout attitude, for the most part.  No one else is Thor, the God of Thunder, for obvious reasons.  No one else is the Hulk, though you can see the messy raw meat train wreck of what happens when someone tries that one currently in Jeph Loeb's Hulk, which makes most of us remember when Loeb used to be consistent.  No one else is the Punisher...unless they have a near-identical backstory, which is how they're making this work currently with Batman and Captain America.  Batman was recently apparently killed during DC's latest universe-changing Summer crossover, which I did not follow.  They are already intimating that he might not really be dead (duh) and in the interim, Dick Grayson, the original Robin and up-until-recently-current Nightwing, is functioning as Batman, thanks to the capable stylings of Grant Morrison, who is a plotting genius.  This works.  Why?  Near-identical backstory.

Batman's parents were murdered randomly, and he dedicated his life to protecting others from his fate.  You know all of this.  Grayson's parents are similarly somewhat randomly murdered by criminals, and he is adopted thereafter by Batman.  So - same training (obviously), same motivations, same (shared) experiences.  Grayson can be Batman, though not permanently.  Wayne does have a personality, after all, and people will miss it.  I don't know how long they'll do this thing; I don't read Batman religiously like I do Captain America.

Two years ago, Marvel killed off Cap in a courthouse steps, orchestrated by the Red Skull, in front of a big crowd, assassination on TV.  Since then, they've had Cap's former partner from the war, Bucky, growing into and filling the role of Cap.  And he's good, he does a good job.  Again, this works because of the background thing - both saw WWII, both are patriots up to a point, both come from a background of work and perseverance.  However, one of the reasons this is interesting and will continue to be is because of the difference - Buck saw action as the Winter Soldier, and his ethic in terms of force has always been a bit different.  Also - he doesn't seem to have the natural leader thing going for him that Steve Rogers did.  So this preps you for what they're doing now; Captain America Reborn, wherein we find out that Rogers was made to become "unstuck in time" and still lives, passing between his past selves.  If this sounds dicey to you, well - I'm waiting to see if they'll be able to pull it off.

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

Legacy

Michael Jackson is dead, and I'm already tired of having conversations about it.  Now that Jesse Jackson has gotten involved though, you can bet this shit will go on forever.  He always seems to bring a bit of class into any major social upheaval, be it an assassination or simply a long-ranging fight over basic human rights.  Also, it looks as though after Michael is laid in state at Neverland, there will be some Anna Nicole-esque legal wrangling over the custody of his probably vat-grown children, and the disposition of his $300 million dollar debt.  Apparently, ticket holders of the shows which now will not go on unless Michael is hooked up to some sort of Tesla galvanic device and electrified around the stage to the beat of his songs, (probably not too much more bizarre than some of Mike's other activities) are being given the consolation prize of keeping the tickets as souvenirs, since they are the last link to Jackson that will be available.  Also, they have Mike-designed & inspired graphics on them.

There seems to be a lot of legacy spin control going on, which only surprises me because everyone who's even remotely affected by the fact that Michael Jackson has died has been around long enough to remember, pretty much, all the shit that's being pseudo-minimized.  Had a chimp named Bubbles, bought the Beatles, tried to purchase the Elephant Man's bones, sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber, movie with Joe Pesci,  has his own theme park out in the yard, diddles kids, has porn, keeps chopping off his face, dated Brooke Shields, married Elvis' daughter, repeated crotch grabbing as a dance move, dangles kids from balconies, interviewed about diddling, showed penis in closed legal session, Elizabeth Taylor, caught fire, pissed off McCartney.  Some of this was found out to be lies spread by Jackson himself, and some of it was never proven in courts, but all of it will be part and parcel of his legacy, whether his family & fans like it or not.  It's inescapable.

No one ever forgets the outlandish shit you get up to, and you cannot control your legacy.  The Bush White House was trying really hard to have him remembered as a patriotic regular guy statesman who just did the job that needed to be done during a difficult time in American history.  Good luck with that.  People will remember the gaffes and the dumbassery, the tanking economy, the rampant greed, the quagmire war, and the rest of the world hating us.  The fact that Osama bin Laden has outlived Michael Jackson should piss you off.  Know now the fault of the Monkeyface.  Back to music - Kurt Cobain and shotguns and heroin, Jim Morrison and vampire sex, Elvis and drugs and food and drugs and food and dying on the toilet, Hendrix and burning guitars & vomit.  Celebrity death gets tied up with random shit they did while alive, and the circumstances of their visit from the reaper.  David Carradine's unusual sex stuff's gonna stay with him for a while.  That's just how it is.

This was unexpected though; in doing Internet "research" about Michael for this blog entry, I happened across this - Michael the inventor.  This is his patent, US #5,255,452, for the shoes that allowed him to do the anti-gravity lean thing seen here at about 7:17.  So - either you just had one of Mike's tricks ruined for you, or you're kind of impressed at his ingenuity.  Or, if you're me - both.  I found this, which made me scream internally, and I also found out that Michael deliberately lied to the press about the hyperbaric chamber (sleeping in it, anyway) and the Elephant Man thing, so I wonder this: could this all be an elaborate hoax to set up Jackson coming "back from the dead" in a zombie-like state to record Thriller 2, capitlizing on the success of the re-issue from last year and the fervor whipped up by his supposed "death?"

Mr. Price, take us out.

Fear the Fush

ABBY:  "Run!  There's a Fush, and it's coming to get you!"

ME:  "A what?"

ABBY:  "A Fush!  It's up in the sky, and, and It looks like a cookie, and, and a hot dog in a bun, and there's a big bad wolf, and a monster inside, and it's coming to get you!  Run!"

ME:  "The Fush looks like a cookie?"

ABBY:  "And a hot dog!  In a bun!"  (runs into kitchen)  "Mom!  There's a Fush, and it's coming to get you!"

MOM:  "What?"

ABBY:  "And, and, there's a monster, and a big bad wolf inside!  Up in the sky!"  (runs off down the hall)

Yeah, I don't really know if Abby ate anything special today or anything, no mushrooms that I noticed.  We pronounced "fush" a few times later, and that's really what she was saying.  Anyway, watch the skies, I guess.

25 Question Quiz

What color socks are you wearing?
I have skin socks over my feet bones.

If you could get away scot-free, would you kill someone?
No one ever gets away scot-free.

If aliens were attacking the Earth, would you run or make friends?
Play frisbee with Gort. (TUNK!  "Shit.  Come on, man...Klatuu Barada catch the damn frisbee already.")

What job do you see yourself at 20 years from now?
Industrial solvent flavor testing.

When was the last time you burst into song for no reason?
Tonight, about three hours ago.

What song was it?
I have a goofy made-up song I sing to my kids when they're getting out of the bath.

Have you ever finger-painted?
Only with bodily substances.

When you die, where do you want to be buried?
My ashes are to be blown into the eyes of my enemies.

Do you consider a giant atom-smasher a threat to humanity?
Depends.  Competent help is hard to find.

Do you want pigs to fly?
Who wants to be shat upon by an airborne pig?

If you could be invisible for one day, what would you do?
Steal from the ridiculously wealthy.  Enact petty revenge.  Watch people naked.  Eavesdrop.  Shit - what would you do?

Would you rather fist-fight a badger or a koala?
Both.  At the same time.  And I hope there's money on it.

What would the theme song of your life be?
Shouldn't others pick these for you?

You have 70 seconds to live. What do you DO?!
Make the most of IT!

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
None.  I step on that hairy fucker before he gets to my woodpile.

Where was the last place you swore you'd never go to again?
Pensacola.  Went back in April.

Does the Taco Bell dog scare you?
How old is this quiz?

Jedis or ninjas?
Jedi Ninja Goodtime Fortune Birthday Party!  Who secretly ate the dip?  Yoda secretly ate the dip!

Would you trust a polar bear with your life?
Hell, no.  Who knows a fucking polar bear's agenda?

Would you rather eat moldy meat or drink rotten milk?
Moldy meat.  I bet that's a delicacy somewhere.

Do you wish Pokemon were real?
No - my house would be full of them.

Have you ever played chicken with cars just for the hell of it?
Yep.  Isn't that pretty much the only reason to play chicken?  Stupid goddamned quiz...

Would you take advice from a talking McDonalds sandwich?
Depends on the sandwich.  Big Mac's got street cred, but that Filet-O-Fish is one crazy-ass mick bastard.  McChicken gives bullshit advise due to his being a cowardly bitch, and Quarter Pounder - we cool.

What would you rather blow up: a puppy or a kitty?
Inflatable Shark.

Do you understand what "e=mc2" means?
The energy of a thing equals its mass times the speed of light (in a vacuum), squared.  With the Internet at your disposal, I'm sure you can do better, but that's as far as I'm going.

Sleeping In

I have two kids and a fairly busy schedule most of the time (you can tell by the reduced blogging) but this week I'm on vacation (to be said like a threat; I'M ON FUCKING VACATION) so this morning, I got to sleep in.  For me.  It was 7:46 when I got up, and it was good that I did, because my brain was starting to just dick around, for whatever reason.  The first indication of this was when I rolled over in the wee morning hours, got up for a piss, fell back into bed, looked at the clock and it was 3:78 in the morning.  Then I actually woke up and padded into the bathroom.  I checked when I got back, time outside my head: 4:42.

When I finally got up for real, it was because my dream had begun to bore me.  I was having some kind of involved, cinematic, third-person experiential dream about gender and class struggles in China, and how divisions between these economic classes were reinforced through the teaching and withholding of certain skills like calligraphy, glass blowing, and specific kinds of food prep.  One of the main characters was very Westernized, and preferred to be called Stacy.  He was an obviously gay man with bleached blonde hair and earrings.  Chinese.  The main woman in the dream had an equally obvious to you now unrequited crush on Stacy, and her name was Suan Chin Lo.  Or Chin Lo Suan, I had trouble following this, due to the fact that whatever my brain made up for Chinese was being spoken the whole time.  Her father was dubiously wealthy, with some kind of nebulous connection to organized crime.  He might also have been an elected official.  Stacy's dad was a butcher, and there was much of the interiors of Chinese grocery stores.  There was a point when their hands touched while preparing broth, and I woke up, bleary and amused/annoyed.

I would point out that I know next to nothing about Chinese societal structures as pertaining to class & gender equity.  This is probably apparent.  It's like someone else broadcast their dream into my head.

Family

It is said, often, that we do not choose our family, that we are chosen by it.  That familial bonds & obligations trump all others and that betrayal in family systems is among the worst imaginable.  That blood is thicker than water, and by inference, the drinks shared between good friends.  I call bullshit on the concept entire.  The very idea that we, as an organized (kind of) and civilized (for the most part) society that's nearly a decade into the 21st century would allow so much of our fates to be (pre)determined by what are essentially accidents of biology, is ludicrous in the extreme.  To place so much more emphasis on nature, leaving nurture coughing in the dust kicked up by the family reunion conga line (no) is irresponsible, unscientific, unhealthy, short-sighted, poorly thought out and dumb.  While it is completely possible that every human birth is Dr. Manhattan's "thermodynamic miracle" writ large, there is no logical reason that this qualified revelation of questionable magnitude should dictate future relationships between people.  Don't get me wrong; I'm glad he and Laurie came back to Earth, I just don't think I should have to buy a lot more Hallmark cards because of it.

The somewhat dangerous truth, made so because it questions the automatic nature and assumed permanence of our familial relationships (upon which much in our lives is based), is that we choose our families.  You don't get to choose your parents, that much is true.  At the outset.  But you choose to honor them, choose to listen to them, and choose, after your raising up is completed, whether to live because of or in spite of them.  You can choose to continue your association with them, or not.  So, actually then, you do choose your parents.  They certainly chose you.  Religions and societal structures, political belief structures, morals and mores are all chosen, and if that's true, every birth is the result of a choice.  Births are either dictated by circumstances chosen before sex & pregnancy ensued, or they are planned out to a greater degree by those with the resources and focus to do so.  The idea of chalking everything up on the Blackboard of Destiny devalues, in my mind, the importance of the choice.  You choose to love someone, and they choose to love you.  And behave accordingly.  Forced loyalty isn't worth as much as that which is chosen.  A choice can be reversed, and as such, it becomes incumbent upon both parties to keep the scales of respect and love balanced out so that no one decides to bail.  The potential fragility and impermanence of this arrangement is inherent to its basic worth, dictates such, and requires more attention to maintain.  Soap bubbles are cooler than soap.

As a thinking, feeling, evolved human, I make better choices than biology does, anyhow.  We are smart enough to have fused our thought processes and our emotional actions/reactions into something only higher animals can accomplish - why subjugate that to accident, sentiment, and chance?  Bullshit, says I again.  There is no room in life for blood relations who cannot behave as caring, thinking people, and no argument for the feelings of family I have for many who are not related to me in any biological way.  I have family in Tennessee, Madison, Atlanta, Chicago, Florida, Indiana, Vegas, and a half dozen other places.  I may not talk to you or see you as much as I would like, but hey - that's family for you.  And if we don't talk much anymore because it's awkward or because the distance is too big - you're still my family.  I decided.  (Sorry if I didn't mention your specific geography - it's all about population density.)  Now - you could argue that this ersatz family system chose me as I much as I chose it, and that would be true to some extent, but it also contains a level of mutual respect overlooked and undervalued by antiquated familial models.

How much does blood matter?  As much as we allow.  Aside from genetic prediction of disease, I'm not sure there's much there.  Anyone placing a large amount of importance on bloodlines is either in eugenics, horseracing, the Da Vinci Code, or something ending in "dynasty."  Or they are clinging to an outmoded concept.  You can choose your blood relations, or not.  You can marry into a family that means as much, if not more to you, than your birth family.  Action is so much more important than this other shit.  You can meet people, befriend them, share with them, protect them, have fun together, cry together, and bond over shared experiences, and also choose to call them family.  And all of these simply are, as long you treat them as such.

And never stop.

My Kids & TV

We don't watch a lot of TV at my house (compared to what I hear from other people about what they do at their houses), but we do have routines, and when those routines are (thankfully) broken by something like Summer, the TV watching goes up and weird and habits change.  C watches Daily Show and Colbert, and General Hospital.  I watch Friends re-runs and the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes movies from the 80s on PBS whenever I can catch them.  In all honesty, I also almost always have a huge TiVo backlog, too.  Stuff that dates back a couple of months, sometimes, patiently waiting for me to watch again, now that it's gone to all the trouble of watching it through the 1st time for me.  It took me nearly a month to watch the G.I. Joe movie, Resolute, written by Warren Ellis, and broadcast during Adult Swim one night at midnight.  I thought that was excellent.  I think I still have the Mark Twain award ceremony for George Carlin from April, too.  Haven't watched it. C records all these great History Channel and Nova shows about stuff, but I don't end up watching anything, and as a consequence, I don't know anything.  And here you are, reading my stuff.  Ha.  I win again.

My kids are the only ones with "regular" shows now.  Abby gets a lot of PBS recorded for her, but gravitates toward two shows, the abominable Caillou and the refreshingly entertaining Martha Speaks.  No one in my house but Abby likes Caillou.  Max, who is at an age where he will still get drawn in by programming beneath his level, hates Caillou because of the narrator ("Does she have to tell us everything?  We know that, we can see it, it's right there."), and is troubled by the fact that Caillou, who is four, is bald.  I am also troubled by this.  It is indeed, troubling, as Caillou never has a chemotherapy appointment on the show, and does not seem to live near power lines, brownfield, or reactors.  I am assured by the Wikientry & the main site that this absence of follicular development is because when he was introduced he was a much younger character, and thus had no hair.  That is a bullshit answer from lazy creators of children's programming.  Grow him up, grow him some hair.  I am convinced that Abby really only likes Caillou 'cause he's comforting, as she seems to use it more like background entertainment anodyne and does not much engage with the actual show.  Martha's a different story, though.

Martha Speaks is about a talking dog, and is a genuinely funny show.  The characters are engaging, warm, idiosyncratic, and cut from different molds, giving them depth and the illusion of sincerity.  Abby talks back to Martha Speaks, like patrons of an urban cinema.  We like Martha Speaks in our house because it's a vocabulary builder than manages to weave the job it does seamlessly together with being funny and entertaining, and also having a talking dog.  It's well written and falls into the category of shows I would watch even if I had no children.

The other one of those presently is Phineas & Ferb, which is just three shades of completely awesome.  Phineas and his brother Ferb drive their older sister nuts by doing something cool every day of the summer.  They have a pet platypus who is a secret agent, and he fights an evil scientist called Dr. Doofenschmirtz.  Phineas & Ferb's stuff includes rockets to space, water slides down Big Ben, giant monster truck arenas, and robot clones of themselves.  It's always gone by the end of the day, and while formulaic, it's funny and fresh and comfortingly cool all at the same time.  There is often music, and the show has enough street cred - some of the guys used to be on the Simpsons and Family Guy - that you should watch it.  The above pic was taken from this show, and features the part of the roller coaster where they dump snakes on you.

What do you watch in the Summer?

Ordo Abchao

Ordo Abchao by Ras Kass

I spent most of last weekend cleaning my house.  My house is actually a 1300 sq. ft. apartment in the middle of Green Hills, which is itself a pretty chaotic swirl of rich people, shoppers, students, and retired folk.  It's a hub of activity, and our apartments sit right in the middle.  My little cluster of rooms, each valued at a little more than $100/month, had not been really deep cleaned in a long while.  Too long.  The duffel bag I took to Land Between the Lakes?  Put that away last weekend.  The comforter Jimbo used back in April?  Got thrown instead of washed.  Under the sink?  Gross.  Light bulbs, container in the back of the fridge, gift wrap, unbagged comics, Easter eggs, Valentine hearts, even a Christmas bear - all needed to be dealt with properly.  It's mostly done, but my bedroom and closet still need a lot of fucking work.

My head needs work.  Something along the way has done my fucking head in.  I haven't been able to complete a decent, cogent thought in a week.  So, the school year ends, right?  And then my wife's whole school falls under the axe of Title 1 No Child Left Behind nonsense, where we lay everyone off and make them re-interview for their jobs.  After that, we find out that my aformentioned home sweet rental might be razed in the name of progress in less than 18 months, and some family drama hits on top of that, too.  Some emotional tumult of the serious, must-be-dealt-with-NOW variety, and the other kind, my grandmother taking a turn for the worse - she has now forgotten who my mother is.  (We have joked that the upshot of this last thing is that it might ease the contentious nature of their relationship.)  Add that to drama at work and stagnation of certain career-based landmarks, and my brain is chaotic.  Step One: Clean House.  Literally.

It helped, a little.  Step Two: Steal 14th Anniversary Evening Out With Spouse helped more (Thanks, Mer), and if I could get a decent night's sleep and get rid of my ever-present headache, I'd feel a lot more like dealing with shit.  As it is, tomorrow, I'm taking the day off from work - Friday the 12th, I am unavailable.  I am spending the day with my kids, possibly having lunch with a friend, maybe helping someone else out with some last minute stuff.  Doing the books and park thing, not going near a computer.  Trying to quiet out my head - dump the shite, make room for order to begin.

It's that feeling of needing the whole world to shut the fuck up for 24 hours.

Murdering Christians

Yeah, I could have added the word "those" to the beginning of the title and made my meaning crystalline - but it's more inflammatory this way, and thus, more to my liking.

A few weeks ago, at a commencement address, our current President put forth the radical idea that we, as Americans, might - just might - be able to discourse, disagree, and discuss the issue of abortion (my own views are here) without demonizing each other.  Idealistic poppycock, of course, and you'd expect nothing less from the doe-eyed left, those crazy hippies with their ideas about treating one another like people - hogwash!  Bushwah! Of course we're incapable of carrying on anything like a rational argument about something so emotionally charged, and we come from a three-second, bankrupt culture that tells us it's okay to react rather than think, and encourages us to label and denigrate rather than engage in real debate.

One of the biggest impediments, of course, to rational thought, is faith.  Faith is a dangerous prospect in the best of minds - a bit like reading below your grade level.  Once you begin to engage in faith, the logic muscles atrophy, and the brain becomes lazy, engaging in a scattershot method of belief, choosing to believe in things whether or not there's an ounce of evidence to them, and worse, choosing to believe in some things that are patently false. After awhile, the faith-crippled brain can no longer tell the difference.  And those are the easy choices.  When it comes to really complex issues like abortion, where any sane and rational person is capable of seeing both sides of the issue before ultimately landing anywhere, on either side - the truly faithful don't even bother.  Taproots from the faith extend themselves into the soil of self-righteousness, and the otherwise groundless flower of belief is encouraged to grow through a daily shower of rhetoric and by poisoning the weeds of logic that will always want to grow up around an indefensible position.  This is why killing an abortion doctor in church isn't even an invasive or ironic act - it makes deadly, perfect sense.  This monster, born again in the miasma of his own twisted thoughts and beliefs, believed that this is what he should do.  Condeming him as crazy misses the point, (in addtion to being, in my opinion, redundant) and saying that he's only one guy is an evasive act of near-criminal disinformation.  In short, I call bullshit on both arguments.  It could have been as simple as him realizing that, in the final analysis, no one gives two-fifths of a shit what you believe until you kill someone else over it.

Holy people are death fixated by necessity and convention - the primary purpose of most faiths is to provide hope for an afterlife, a sense of solace that after this, at least - there's something.  All through the Bible, there's killing - most of the pivotal events involve murder or senseless death.  It's simplcity itself to turn the words of the Bible - even the words of Christ - into an argument for killing an abortion doctor in church on Sunday morning.  Religion kills not only a vast number of people every day, but also murders pure thought, potential, individuality, and imagination more effectively, and in larger numbers, than any medical procedure.

Murder is illegal.  Abortion is not, for the moment.  Belief is not law, nor does it represent anything larger than itself.  These are things best not forgotten.

"Sea Kittens"

Touched off by another study arguing over whether or not fish are capable of feeling pain in any sense that you and I (assuming you are not a fish) can understand, PETA has this whole section of their site where they attempt to re-brand fish (especially those popularly edible) as "sea kittens," and invites you, in their typical over-the-top fashion, to dress and name one.  So I have.

As the father of two kids, and not someone who is an avid fisherman, I have to ask: wouldn't running Pixar's Finding Nemo over and over again at the site help more than this?  That "swim down" part gets my son every time.

I would also like to take this opportunity to once again assert that the Mohawk is the stupidest haircut ever invented.  You basically have to be Mr. T or an actual Native American to pull it off.  Otherwise, just shave your fucking head.