Your Comfortable Shoes Quizo Update

This past weekend saw Wizard World Philadelphia - aka a comic book convention, aka "Nerdi Gras" (as one friend of mine calls such things) - and to I'm quite sure no one's surprise I attended.

Now for considerable percentages of those who go these events are an exercise in counter-social behavior ranging from quiet-yet-dignified protest against the oppressive regime of the Cool Kids (wearing a Green Lantern t-shirt) to out-and-out incitement of open rebellious warfare against our evil mainstream overlords (wearing a homemade Spider-Man costume). The latter, especially, can get very unfortunate as the vast majority of people wearing such outfits are, shall we say, shaped a lot more like yours truly than Spider-Man necessarily. Note that I would make an official exception for the folks dressed like stormtroopers, Darth Vader and the like, as since attending my first convention years ago I have learned that those folks are members of a group called the 501st Legion who a) make all that shit by hand - handmade movie-quality stormtrooper armor deserves no small amount of credit in the first place - and b) do tons of charity appearances for children's hospitals, museums, and the like. You want to snicker at the guy in the Thor outfit that's one thing, but never laugh at the stormtroopers.

The defining feature of events like this, however, is the fact that it means I essentially spend an entire weekend standing and walking around, which was a serious consideration even before I turned my lower spine and left leg into useless mush. As I said after my first convention years ago: the most important thing is to WEAR THE RIGHT SHOES.

Due to various ridiculous circumstances, this year of course I did not do that, and spent the rest of the weekend (and well into this morning) paying the price. A word of advice: when given a choice between doing something you KNOW is both stupid and will cause you considerable pain in the long run or getting to a three-day event ten minutes later than you planned on getting there, take the extra ten minutes and find your fucking sneakers.

My inability to walk led to the unlikely event of me watching the movie Rising Sun on television on Saturday night - primarily because going out would have meant that someone would have not only had to drive me wherever we were going but would have had to assist me, linebacker-with-a-sprained-ankle-style, from my front door to their car and no one seemed to be up for that. Rising Sun, aside from managing to be at once both quietly understated and hilariously overwrought, also has the distinction of being one of only two movies I can think of in which Sean Connery says the word "fuck," which is just really, really weird (the other being The Rock). For that alone it deserves commemoration.

Finally, my dad and I celebrated Father's Day by watching Oakmont Country Club win the US Open. As a golfer you don't really "win" the US Open so much as you just lose better than everyone else and pray the course does not literally swallow you whole and slowly digest you for a thousand years ( c.f. Boba Fett and the Sarlacc, Phil Mickelson and Winged Foot).

JLK