Some may consider it cruelty to animal companions, some the ultimate tribute. As Hallowe’en approaches once more, Good Housekeeping, of all places, considers pets dressed as Star Wars characters. Sundance here is probably my favorite:
"I find your lack of cheezburger disturbing…"
If you’re a Doctor Who fan given to long drives half-way across the continent (well, hey, I am), here’s a way to pass the time that’s a lot more entertaining that counting cars on the New Jersey turnpike.
Next week, the BBC’s audiobooks division will be releasing a box set of six audiobooks based upon recent novels starring the 10th and current Doctor.
Three of the six were read by David Tennant himself: The Feast of the Drowned by Stephen Cole, The Stone Rose by Jacqueline Rayner, and The Resurrection Casket by Justin Richards. Buffy’s Anthony Head (himself a frequent performer on Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas) reads The Nightmare of Black Island by Mike Tucker. Rounding out the set, The Price of Paradise by Colin Brake and The Art of Destruction by Stephen Cole are read by Doctor Who actors Shaun Dingwall (Pete Tyler) and Don Warrington (The President in The Age of Steel), respectively.
According to the BBC, each adaptation will run approximately two hours. The set will cost about $100.00 U.S., plus shipping from your favorite neighborhood science fiction or comics importer. Amazon.com usually gets these things… eventually.
Is there anything more wonderful than a super-pet? A companion who can do anything you can do, and more. When I was a kid, there was nothing I wanted more than a super-pet to call my own.
Actually, what I wanted was Krypto. I lived in a relatively small Ohio town, with a backyard, and I really wanted a dog. My parents decided I could have one for my tenth birthday, so throughout elementary school I daydreamed about what kind of dog I would get. If I had Krypto, we could go for romps in space (not that I would have named “romp” as one of my favorite activities at the time, since no one I knew ever had one. Still, they looked like fun in the comics). We could play the greatest games of fetch ever. Krypto could help me hide my toys from my sister. Krypto could help me in my never-ending efforts to dig a hole to China.
On the other hand, there were leash laws in my neighborhood, and I wasn’t sure that I was strong enough to take Krypto for a walk. And what did a Kryptonian dog eat? In the comics, sometimes we’d see him with a massive bone from a dinosaur. There weren’t a lot of those at Loblaws Supermarket.
Ace, the Bathound, was not as cool. I couldn’t understand why Batman needed an animal companion. I didn’t understand how Ace could communicate any information from clues he’d sniffed. And I didn’t understand how the mask was a fool-proof disguise.
When Supergirl got Streaky, the supercat, I wasn’t as interested. Streaky didn’t have much of a character. No one I knew had a cat. I didn’t understand what the big deal was about an animal that wouldn’t do tricks and wouldn’t play with you in the back yard. It was only when I moved to college and lived in a dorm room that I understood feline appeal. A cat may not fetch, but is a good study-mate, keeping to itself or purring in your lap while you got your work done.
Supergirl also had Comet, the super-horse. The intent, I think, was to appeal to girls who are said to be especially drawn to horses for all kinds of psychosexual reasons. I like horses okay, but not enough to clean out stalls or braid their tails. Later, when it was revealed that Comet was sometimes a centaur and sometimes an enchanted man, it got too icky for me. Still, a flying horse would be big fun.
The thing about superhero costumes is, you can get away with a lot of cheating. Costumes appear to stay attached by magic (particularly to areas featuring naughty bits), usually contain no wrinkles or folds, pretty much be painted on what would otherwise be nude bodies, because the characters wearing them aren’t real people who actually move and have bodies which feature internal organs and such.
It’s much trickier designing a streamlined, stylish superhero outfit to be worn by a living, breathing human being in motion.
But the folks at the superhero fashion site Project Rooftop have announced their second annual costume contest, entitled Fights, Flights and Tights. All you have to do, say editors Dean Trippe and Chris Arrant, "is wow us with a cool, original costume that redesigns a classic superhero or villain. Take some photos and send them to us along with your name, age, and website (if any) by October 21st, 2007." Winning entries will, as always, be featured on the site, with the grand priize being an original sketch of the winning design drawn by Trippe.
Presumably, Trippe and Arrant are counting on entrants not violating the spirit of the contest via photo manipulation programs.
I know, I know, no fanboy out there in the land of Heroes, Star Wars, Star Trek and the like even watches soaps on daytime television.
Sure you don’t.
Well I do and I have done so for over 20 years. That among other reasons is why I, fanboy, have a lovely Asian goddess in my life while you identify at 30 with the kids from Superbad.
So make fun of me all you want, I don’t have to visit the “Love You Long Time” website to get my kicks. Part of that is because I watch soaps and I am sensitive.
Yes, sensitive.
I know that mostly women watch soaps but I have learned a great deal about women from watching soaps. What have I learned? Well that’s another column which I’m writing (called The Fanboy Guide To Girls) but I will give you one example of what I have learned about women from watching soaps. If you are on the phone they will pick up the extension and listen…guaranteed.
The one and only soap I watch is All My Children. I LOVE THAT SHOW!
Or I did…
What follows is an open letter to the head of ABC Daytime or the Executive Producer of All My Children who ever is responsible for turning the best show on TV into the reason I am thinking about joining a cult. For all you readers who don’t watch the show (sure you don’t) I will try and explain some of the goings on by way of AMC facts*
Dear Sir/Madam or Satan,
I am a black man born and raised in the mean streets and housing projects of New York City. I have seen people shot, been shot at, been beat up, robbed etc. In fact just about any thing your writers can come up with on the show that happened to Jessie (You remember Jessie don’t you? No? Well Jessie was that black street kid that Jackson Montgomery adopted who simply disappeared from the show.) Well, I’m the real life Jessie.
I have been watching All My Children for over 20 years. I have been a fan for that long. I own All My Children trading cards, Erica Kane Barbie dolls, and hard cover books on the series. Let me tell you something, when you are a 6’2” black man with a Erica Kane Barbie on your mantel, that’s a fan. No matter what happened to me during my day on the street I could always look forward to coming home grabbing a Cherry Coke and losing myself in the lives and loves of the citizens of Pine Valley.
There is no better way to end a week than a little trip to the local bar – and in comics the bar "local" to EVERYwhere happens to be Munden‘s! For about 70 issues of GrimJack, Munden’s Bar was a fan favorite and now its coming back – and FREE – to ComicMix on Friday, October 5th. The Big ComicMix Broadcast sneaks you in the back door for a peek at the bar’s Grand Reopening as we talk with writer/co-creator John Ostrander and ComicMix rabble-rouser and editor-in-chief Mike Gold, plus offers a wake-up call for 24 Hour Comic Day, tells you how Nancy Drew (!) solves the DS (?), what Paul Dini’s up to, where Death Note is going, and how Daredevil sells out!
Pour us a cold one and PRESS THE BUTTON!
Yesterday, retailers received the following e-mail from Diamond, DC Comics’ exclusive distributors to comic shops:
TRICK ‘R TREAT MINISERIES TO BE RESOLICITED AT A LATER DATE
TRICK ‘R TREAT, the four-issue weekly shipping mini-series from WildStorm, has been postponed and will be resolicited at a later date. All orders placed under the item codes AUG070318, AUG070319, AUG070320 and AUG070321 are cancelled.
This begs the question: are they going to change all the evil pumpkins into happy Santas? I can see it now:
DARK RUDOLPH!
WON’T YOU PULL SOME SLAY TONIGHT??
It also makes me wonder what I’m going to give the little kiddies this Halloween. Their parents won’t accept apples…
A videogame has set the all-time record for most revenue earned in a single day by any entertainment property. Any property. Ever.
That game, for anyone hiding under a rock, is Halo 3 by Bungie, a subsidiary of Microsoft. Who knew there were so many Xboxes out there?
CNet notes that the game "netted $170 million in sales in the U.S. in its first day. If true, that would top previous records set by the motion pictures Spider Man 3 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Although you really have to divide the $170 million by $60 per, rather than by the cost of a movie ticket which, I’m informed, is considerably less.
Also, over a million players have logged on to Xbox Live to play the multiplayer version, Your news editor is not one of them.
I’ve got something nibbling at my mind and perhaps the only way for me to sort it out is to put it into words. It has to do with our adventure in nation-building, a.k.a. the Iraq debacle.
I’ll start by saying that I was for the invasion of Afghanistan. Then and now, it seemed to me the necessary response to 9/11. Al Quaeda appeared responsible; they had their camps in Afghanistan with the full knowledge and support of the Afghan government, the Taliban. You get hit, you hit back at the ones who hit you. Hard. As Al Capone said, “That’s the Chicago way.”
On the other hand, I was not for the invasion of Iraq from the beginning and I said so. I didn’t buy the “imminent danger” from the “weapons of mass destruction,” especially since there were UN weapons inspection teams on the ground inside the country. The fact that the Bush Administration was so stridently insistent made me ask “What else is going on here?” At first I thought it was about the oil (and now Alan Greenspan says it was); I came to believe that it was a NeoCon vision of transforming the MidEast by creating a functioning democracy in the middle of it. Now I think it’s about the oil, about the NeoCon vision, and certain select Bush-friendly companies making a bucket of money there.
I believe that the NeoCons thought that the Iraqis in exile would just step in, set up a new government, we would be hailed as liberators, and it would all be done in six months. I believe it was on the agenda to do before 9/11 happened; that tragedy just enabled the Bushies to push the plan through without thinking it through. The only plan the current administration seems to have for dealing with the mess is to leave it for the next administration to clean up. Instead of nation building, we seem to have created a geographical area of chaos. It’s a constant drain on both our military and our national finances; Iraq seems like an open wound.
My disgust with all of this is long standing. We had no business going into Iraq in the first place. The WMDs were a lie and the Administration knew it or, at very least, should have known it. The Dems were elected to Congress on the promise to end the war and the low low low approval rating of Congress at the moment stems on their failure to even staunch the flow. Since I didn’t believe we should be there in the first place, it stands to reason that I think we should get out at first opportunity.
BUT. . .
Colin Powell is purported to have said to Bush about Iraq before the invasion that “If you break it, you’ve bought it.” And there’s my problem. I think there’s truth to that. Before we invaded, Iraq was a functioning country: it had electricity, people had jobs. Yes, it also had a murderous dictator in charge; lots of places around the globe do and we don’t seem to have bothered ourselves about them.
So now what have we got? Sect fights sect and sects fight internally and they all hate us. It’s chaos and we brought it. We, the People. This country. You, an individual, may have, like me, been against the whole misbegotten enterprise from the start but I’m talking about the collective We. The We that elected not only the President but the members of Congress that sustained him, as well as the Democratic Party that has no spine. (more…)
A little mini-browsing around the internets the last few days has come up with the following:
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
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