Your "Who Watches the Watchmen?" Quizo Update

I saw Watchmen this weekend, and I've got to be honest: I kinda wish I hadn't.

Now don't misunderstand this as some sort of misplaced nerd rage at the thought of someone making alterations to my beloved Watchmen. It's not particularly my beloved Watchmen to begin with.  The comic book cognoscenti (if such things can be said to exist) have long since anointed the original The Official Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, and I've never much agreed with that point in the first place (also I don't see what's so great about sliced bread). While I can certainly see and admire the skill with which it was crafted I can easily think of about two dozen comics I would rather read than Watchmen.

If you aren't of a particularly comic-booky stripe, look at it this way: anyone who talks about how much they love Watchmen, like really LOVE it, should be greeted with the same wary circumspection as someone who talks about how much they love, like really LOVE, the collected works of William Faulkner or Stanley Kubrick; i.e. as a preening, self-important intellectual jerkoff. The former because Alan Moore makes William Faulkner's lifelong attempt to create dense and impenetrable literature look like a Mister Rogers lesson about the joys of sharing, and the latter because Watchmen in particular is a quintessentially Kubrickian work, a piece of literature that is so far detached from human emotion you wonder if its creator actually possesses any. Watchmen is a comic book about comic books, as skillful a bit of deconstruction as you will find outside of Derrida himself, and anyone who professes to "LOVE" something like that is not to be trusted, for they have clockwork where their heart should be and a soul emptier than the vast reaches of outer space.

But we're not talking about my problems with the original or how much I hate a certain woman I briefly had a thing with years ago.

Actually, in terms of the film's direct relationship to the book –i.e. the script – I was very pleasantly surprised. I thought the cut was excellent; I never sat there wondering why a certain scene was missing or why certain other scenes were shuffled about in the way they were. Alex Tse and Solid Snake did, frankly, an excellent job taking an extraordinarily long and complex book and translating it into a coherent story of movie length, even if it was a little overlong. That's okay, we endorse long movies (c.f. places in the All-Time Top Five for Gladiator, The English Patient, and Lord of the Rings). No, there is no quibble to be had as regards the script.

In fact, and I said this coming out of the theatre, the things the movie gets right it gets exceptionally right. The Comedian, Rorshach, Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan: all dead solid perfect, both in casting and performance. They are great. They are super-great. (Well, they only got Dr. Manhattan half perfect, a little bit on that later.) The "look" of the film is also exactly right; though the movie's apparent need to exactly replicate certain panels from the book becomes increasingly annoying (especially after, like, the HUNDREDTH TIME) it does an excellent job rendering the world Dave Gibbons painstakingly created. And the change made to the ending, which out of a spoiler sense I will not reveal, is fantastic. Really, it's the best thing in the movie. The original ending to the book is INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID and the way the movie changes it is better (and improves the overall story) in about ten thousand different ways.

However, while the movie gets the right stuff very right, unfortunately, the things it gets wrong it gets REALLY fucking wrong, and those things vastly outnumber the things it gets right.

The wrong things in the movie are, to an extent, a death by a thousand cuts, but there are three that pretty much define it:

First: Dr. Manhattan looks stupid. I mean the EFFECT looks stupid, which is frankly amazing. Spend the fucking money, for god's sake. The most important character in your movie looks like he stepped out of a Playstation 2 game. In a world where we had Gollum seven years ago there is absolutely no excuse for this.

Second: bad casting will quickly ruin your day. I can almost forgive casting Malin Akerman (ALMOST). Laurie doesn't do a whole lot other than bitch about Dr. Manhattan and get her kit off anyway, and if that's your game, well, Malin Akerman is a good choice (for the getting her kit off part, at least). You can learn to grit your teeth and get through the parts when she talks. However, when your main villain, your antagonist, your Blofeld, your Colonel Kurtz, your Hannibal Lecter, is not only terribly portrayed (complete with wandering accent!) but is actually wimpy and slight and effeminate, your movie is undermined beyond a recoverable point. Imagine if you were watching Star Wars and Darth Vader suddenly turned into a prissy, whiny little bitch. All right, fine, imagine Lucas didn't already fucking DO that, and now imagine he was like that from the start. Would you think Star Wars was that great anymore? Of course you wouldn't. The lessons are, respectively: actresses famous for getting naked aren't usually that good (bar Kate Winslet, of course), and just hire Jude Law already.

Third: Zack Snyder is an idiot man-child. I have gone on at length about the complexity of the source material, and suffice it to say that Snyder may not be the best person to shepherd difficult material through the filmmaking process as he seems to believe that film is not so much an entertainment medium as it is a way to physically assault the audience. Snyder's sensibilities (such as they are) are actually very well suited to something like 300, where both book and movie basically boil down to "KILL THAT FUCKING GUY RIGHT NOW! Okay, you're done? Good. Now KILL THAT OTHER FUCKING GUY RIGHT NOW!" If you're Zack Snyder that kind of material is right up your loud, obvious, subtlety of a 20-pound-sledgehammer, did I mention loud and obvious alley.

If that's what's up your alley, however, an intricate examination of Cold War socio-political theory, the essential nature of morality, and the insidious ways in which power corrupts may not be the movie you should be making. So instead of a complex and thoughtful adaptation of a complex and thoughtful book we get a movie whose narrative plunges forward so fast it blows past itself then comes to a dead screeching halt, all the while covering up the action with songs that are either wildly inappropriate or painfully clichéd, and are all excessively loud, and goes on to repeat that cycle for THREE GODDAMN HOURS.

(Here's a hint, Zack: when your movie is already pushing the 150-minute mark, slow motion is NOT YOUR FRIEND. Seriously, fucking stop with the slow motion. Christ.)

After the movie I was trying to think of another example of such a legitimately great book that got turned into such a terrible movie, and at the time I couldn't come up with anything. The next day my father suggested Starship Troopers and Dune, and they're good examples of that specifically. (I am open to more suggestions, by the way.) Thing is, though, they aren't as disappointing as Watchmen because, unlike Watchmen, they have zero redeeming value. Every single aspect of them is completely and utterly terrible.

At the end of the day the real shame of Watchmen is not that it's dreadful – because, oh sweet zombie Jesus it is buckets of dreadful – but that with literally three personnel changes the movie could have been fantastic. Get yourself Jude Law, get a director who can do big stupid action stuff AND at least look up the word "nuance" in the dictionary, someone like Chris Nolan or Gore Verbinksi or Paul Greengrass or SOMEONE, and hire an actress who can both act AND look good naked, throw them in with everyone and everything else you've already got and BANG! You have your next Dark Knight. You have a legitimately outstanding movie.

The shame of it is that this thing, this wretched, misbegotten, twelve-fingered bastard of a movie is now and forever THE cinematic version of Watchmen, and it could have been so much better.

JLK

Your Out of Control Quizo Update

WARNING: LENGTH! Though this is still a pretty good story, I think. Definitely worth reading, but at 1800 words I’ll understand if you aren’t up for it, so:

TLDR version: This week’s clue is “Jaws!” Comic conventions are fun! 80’s music is nice! Hipsters should all be killed!

JLK

The full version follows:

As I said at one point this weekend: there is my scene, there is not my scene, and then there is the anti-matter equivalent of my scene, which, should it ever intersect with my scene, would cause the total annihilation of everything in the vicinity.

I spent most of this past weekend at Wizard World Philadelphia, a situation which can comfortably be labeled “my scene.”

Now, if you’ve never been, understand that generally speaking there are four things you can do at a decent comic convention:

1) Meet professionals/talk to professionals/express your undying quasi-sexual love for professionals.

I don’t really do this. Over the years you may have noticed that I am not the most outgoing person on Earth and talking to strangers, even strangers whose work I admire, does not exactly float my boat. In point of fact it rather sinks my boat. When it comes to social interaction, I am the Orca and talking to strangers is Jaws. The boat is clearly of insufficient size. Besides which it’s really somewhat impossible to have a meaningful conversation with someone in a loud, hot, hangar-sized room with 15,000 other people milling about, so actual face time isn’t really a consideration for me. I spend maybe 5-10% of my time at these things doing this. It does, however, lead into #2, which is...

2) Get sketches/autographs.

This is the big one for me. I just started the sketchbook two years ago and I tend to get sketches from guys who spend inordinate amounts of time on them so there isn’t a whole lot in there - I’ll bring it tonight if you want a look-see - but I have a collection of autographed books going back a LONG ways.

Upon reflection I’m really not sure why I do this, let alone spend so much of my time at conventions (roughly 75% of it) pursuing them. My pursuit of sketches and autographs is the direct cause of the one major downside of comic conventions: the intense, severe pain going to them creates. I am not making this up. As we are aware a back injury from the ancient mists of forgotten time (i.e. high school) has turned my lower back and left leg into largely-useless slush.

The problem comes from the fact that in a strictly technical sense I don’t buy “comic books” any more. The flimsy little things that cost 3 bucks (THREE DOLLARS!) and can be rolled up and used to lightly whack people in the head? Yeah, I get maybe 10 of those a year. What I do buy TONS of, however, are what we in the business call “trades,” i.e. trade paperbacks, which are permanently-bound collections of several comic books that are far sturdier and can go on a bookshelf. I have lots of these. LOTS.

Most people bring individual comics to conventions to get autographed. I bring trades. Lots of them. Basically the obsessive-compulsive part of my brain - which is almost all of it - has decided that IF a writer or artist is going to be at Wizard World I MUST bring EVERY SINGLE TRADE OF THEIRS THAT I OWN to get autographed. And, in recent years, due to some kind of strange economic quirk, more and more trades are being published in hardcover and I am an absolute whore for a hardcover book.

They are quite heavy.

Lugging around a bag full of hardcover books for 8 hours will do a number on a normal back, let alone the jellyfish that is the spine of yours truly. So, every day when I come back from the convention floor I pop a giant handful of painkillers, which tends to make me a little unbalanced mental-wise, and continue to slowly turn more and more into House every day.

Still, I do have a giant collection of autographed trades, and a book full of pretty sketches. What do you have? A family who loves you? HA! Fucking loser.

3) Socialize with other fans.

I have a handful of friends, maybe a half-dozen, who I only see at Wizard World Philadelphia anymore. Guys I knew in college, guys I worked with at old jobs years ago, stuff like that. And the best part is that not only do we KNOW we’ll see each other we don’t even PLAN it. Every year we just randomly run into one another at the convention center. EVERY GODDAMN YEAR. It’s pretty funny. This is basically how I spend the remainder of my time.

I do also occasionally break out of my introverted shell and talk to other fans, usually when I’m standing in line waiting for something and the pain in my legs and feet and back is crossing the wires in my brain. At one point on Saturday I was waiting in line to have Ethan Van Sciver autograph my copy of the Sinestro Corps War - which came out FREAKING AWESOME, I’ll bring that tonight too - and I hear this girl behind me going through her sketchbook with a guy I later learned was her (much) older brother.

All I hear from behind me is this little girl saying, “here’s Lee Weeks... Walt Simonson... Neal Adams... John Romita Senior... Jim Lee... John Romita Junior... Art Adams... Frank Miller... Matt Wagner...”

I turned around and said to the brother, “oh my god HOW OLD IS THIS GIRL?”

She looked up at me and said, angrily, “I’m ten!”

If you’re not a comics person understand that sitting there hearing this litany of artists who contributed to the sketchbook of a ten-year-old girl is roughly the equivalent of on the first day of your senior year of high school meeting this kid in your class who talked about how he spent the summer time-travelling back and forth between different eras in Hollywood having wild sex with Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren and Jane Fonda and Grace Kelly and Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe and, yeah, that scene with Sean Young in No Way Out, she got the idea after we did it fourteen times in the back seat of my car.

Her brother informed me that she knew who all those guys were, that even at her age she was a big fan, and that I shouldn’t feel too bad about it since little kids will always have better sketchbooks than grownups.

You think going to a comic convention is sad? Well, if you think that you’re a gigantic douchebag, but try going to a comic convention and envying a ten-year-old girl.

4) Attend panels.

I don’t do this at all; in the past I didn’t go because the 60-90 minutes I spent in the big conference room listening to people ask the STUPIDEST FUCKING QUESTIONS you’ve EVER HEARD was time I could have spent getting sketches and autographs, and the actual information content of the panels could be gotten on the internet the second I got home. Now that I am in possession of the super-phone I can actually get the same information off the tubes 2 minutes after the panel ends while I’m waiting in line for sketches or autographs. Panels at comic conventions are not an efficient use of your time. Do not go to them.

That’s pretty much everything important; there are activities I haven’t mentioned but if you indulge in those... oy.

There are, of course, things to do outside the convention. I have almost never done such things, but this year I broke the mold and, for the first time, went to an official “after-party.” This is where the scene-difficulty begins. When I was first invited to this “party” I was told it would be at a bar in Olde City.

Strike One.

As it got closer to it I was told that, in addition to being hosted by friends of mine, an independent comic company who I shall not name but whose books are across-the-board absolute trash would be co-hosting, and that they would be bringing their “booth girls.” If you don’t know, “booth girls” are a step up from prostitutes the way that Penthouse is a step up from Hustler.

Strike Two.

When I arrived I found a club roughly twice the size of the main bar at the DH with precisely two functioning light bulbs full of barely-legal children drinking Red Bull and vodka - or, as I call it, THE DUMBEST THING IN THE FUCKING WORLD YOU CAN DRINK - listlessly swaying to bad techno music spun by a prematurely-balding 20-something deejay wearing a Japanese baseball jersey and sporting oversize thick-framed hipster glasses that I realized, after inspecting closely, were not prescription. I ordered myself a ginger ale and the bartender gave me a dirty look.

Ooh, just missed the edge of the plate with that slider, Ball One.

I only stayed after the encounter with the bartender because I caught Alex Maleev walking around, looking about as happy to be there as I was, and we headed outside where I smoked and we talked about the upcoming European championship. Alex is a great guy. He hooks me up every year with a painting because I wear a Chelsea kit to the con.

After Alex headed back in I finished my smoke and started back inside. When I opened the door I heard that the current song was Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” only with a really, really, REALLY bad techno beat tossed under it. As I stood there the DJ scratched the hell out of the track - why I cannot fathom - and it transitioned into the Outfield’s “Your Love,” again with a bad beat under it.

Understand that I am a person who LIKES techno music. I do not, however, like BAD techno music, and I really don’t like the combination of bad techno with classic 80s anthems.

Strike Fucking Three.

I can’t imagine I would have enjoyed a night like this even when I was as young as these people. This is so not my scene it isn’t even funny. I headed from there to the other after-party at the actual comic shop, which was much more my scene - i.e. a smaller-ish bunch of people hanging out, talking instead of shouting, mellowly drinking a beer or two - and had a hell of a great time there until an incredibly-drunk Mike Oeming decided to take everyone to Sugar Mom’s for shots and I decided that was my cue to go home.

It’s true - watching people drink in a comic shop IS more fun than watching them drink in a club.

I think it’s time to wrap this one up, and as a reward for reading this whole thing, one of the questions tonight will be, “what is AT&T’s symbol on the New York Stock Exchange?”

See you tonight, with my cool stuff in tow.

JLK

Your Year in Review Quizo Update

Hello, good morning, and a hearty first-email-of-2008-how-the-fuck-are-ya to all the folks out there in Quizo land. I hope everyone's holiday - pick and choose whichever you may or may not have celebrated - was as filled with awesomeness as mine was. We're back tonight for the first time in three weeks and I hope y'all are rested up and ready to game it up - I came up with the speed round on Friday night and it is fan-freaking-tastic. I've been threatening to do this one for a long time and now I'm finally pulling the trigger. It's going to be great.

As it is the beginning of a new year, I am going to fully embrace the zeitgeist and present a quick "Best Of" for 2007. All entries are entirely subjective. In the event that you should disagree with any of my choices, please refer to the Palestra Jon Rule.

VIDEO GAME OF THE YEAR: A lot of choices, to be sure. Bioshock is creepy and beautiful; Rock Band is, well, it's goddamn Rock Band; Halo 3 I played once and regarded as just as phenomenally stupid as its predecessors but sure is pretty; in the end, though, the choice is fairly obvious: Portal. Why? Any game that has a psychotic, pathological liar artificial intelligence telling you "any contact will result in an unsatisfactory mark on your official testing record, followed by death" has to be it. Absolutely the most fun thirty bucks can buy. Remember: the cake is a lie.

BOOK OF THE YEAR: I read so many goddamn books in a given calendar year - and limiting ourselves to strictly regular books here, not comics, we're talking about a hundred-something on average - it's tough to narrow down a list, much less remember everything I actually read. In trying to compile even a top ten list one book kept jumping to the front of my mind, which more than anything I think means it probably should rank at the top: William Gibson's "Spook Country." Over his last few books the mad prophet of the future has matured into a deliberative surgeon cutting into the present, stripping away the outer layer of meaningless crap that covers everything to show you what the world is really like. Plus Gibson is one of the few writers who actually makes ME feel inadequate; his prose is so pristine and delicate it will - to steal a phrase of his - make your teeth hurt. That has to count for something.

ALBUM OF THE YEAR: This one is less tough since in the entirety of 2007 I bought precisely two new albums, and as much as I love Kylie Minogue "X" is certainly not her strongest effort. "Magic," Bruce Springsteen, der.

TV SHOW OF THE YEAR: Fuck you, David Chase. Fuck you sideways. Combine that gigantic Charlie Foxtrot with 24 going completely off the rails almost from the beginning, Lost bungling its first 6-8 episodes, the inexplicably-popular Heroes continuing to be one of the worst television shows I've ever seen; and 30 Rock, despite it's constant hilarity, being sort of all over the map, the straight-up best show on television was - and still is - Battlestar Galactica. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you are stupid for not watching it. Weeks or months or years from now you will watch it and say, "oh my god, this show is incredible, I can't believe how stupid I was for not watching it," and I will agree that yes, it was pretty fucking stupid of you. WATCH THIS GODDAMN SHOW.

COMIC BOOK OF THE YEAR: Dear Mr. Lucas - please read The Sinestro Corps War to learn how to make space opera awesome. It has everything your crappy Star Wars prequels lack: interesting characters, great dialogue, a compelling villain (several of them, in fact), and a plot you don't have to excavate out of a Mayan ruin to understand. Basically it will knock your socks off for every page from beginning to end. Short of reading this fantastic story - basically the only good comic published in what was a shockingly dismal year for the medium across the board - please never make anything ever again. Signed, The World.

MOVIE OF THE YEAR: Seeing a lot of great movies over the last year makes this a tough choice, but the problem is I still haven't seen a whole bunch of the big "prestige" movies yet. In terms of provisional choices, though, I actually ended up with a tie between Gone Baby Gone and, in what came as a shock even to me, Eastern Promises. Odds are you haven't seen either of these movies yet (few people have). I've talked about Gone Baby Gone before, which you'll now probably have to wait for the DVD (February 12) to see if you haven't already, but I got the Eastern Promises DVD over the holidays and holy shit it's incredible. I mean, WOW. I don't know when David Cronenberg became an actual mature filmmaker but Jesus Christ on a flaming pogo stick this is an absolutely flawless film. It is top to bottom perfect. You will not be disappointed.

All are of course welcome to discuss any surely-farcical deviations from the above, but remember the rule.

I'll see you tonight, then.

JLK

Your Misbegotten Adventures Quizo Update

Firstly, an important safety tip: if you burn the roof of your mouth - say, on a piece of pizza at dinner some August Tuesday - do not repeat not use mouthwash when you brush your teeth that night. I cannot stress this enough. If given a choice between using mouthwash after burning the roof of my mouth or having blind 8-year-olds whack me about the head and heck with baseball bats, I would have to seriously consider the question of just HOW blind the 8-year-olds are and whether the bats are wood or metal. It is the worst pain ever. Avoid it if you possibly can.

Secondly, an important travel tip: if you are traveling to or from Atlantic City and you need gas, do not get off the AC Expressway at the Hammonton exit. There isn't any gas there. There is not, in fact, gas anywhere NEAR there. Exit 28 is, as near as I can figure, the only exit on the entirety of the Atlantic City Expressway that does not have a gas station within, say, 40 miles of the exit ramp. Driving (my father's car, as mine is still busted and he is on vacation) down yesterday, the "Check Gauge" light came on at about exit 31and for some reason I determined that I would not make it all the way to Farley to fill up and - in what was surprisingly NOT my biggest mistake of the day - decided to get off the Expressway at the Hammonton exit.

Understand that my sphere of geographic knowledge - within which I am basically infallible when it comes to finding/knowing the location of/getting to places - does not extend south of the White Horse Pike until you get fairly fair east, basically until you get to the Parkway, though it does have a sort of peninsula connecting the Hamilton Mall to Somers Point (me and my crew down there like to go to the Borders in Mays Landing, so I need to know how to get to and from it and people's houses). So I was essentially flying blind once I hit the bottom of the exit ramp, and the only thing I had to guide me to a filling station was my keen intellect and an educated guess. Now, at the bottom of the ramp there was a sign saying that I should turn right to go to Vineland and left to go to Hammonton.

Here's my thinking at this point:

1) I remembered from my short time working at the Death Star that there was a Best Buy in Vineland.

2) I figured a Best Buy was a reasonable barometer of civilization so there would probably be a gas station near one.

3) I knew that Hammonton was about 2 miles north of my position (aka "left").

4) I knew that Hammonton did not, in fact, have a gas station once I got to it, and for some distance thereafter, at least not on the White Horse Pike.

From this knowledge I concluded:

5) If I turn right here, I will hit a gas station in Vineland after about 2 miles.

It turns out that from that spot it is, in fact, twenty-one miles to Vineland. Putting a sign at the bottom of that exit ramp saying "Vineland ----->>" is the equivalent - quite literally - of putting a sign out in front of the Dark Horse reading "King of Prussia Mall ----->> ."

That is one deceptive goddamn sign.

(That comparison, believe it or not, is actually accurate to about 900 feet.)

So I turned right at the bottom of the ramp. After five or six minutes of passing vast swaths of farmland, farmhouses, and other farm-related geography I realized that not only was I probably not getting gas any time soon I had no fucking clue where I was. I flipped a quick u-turn and started burning rubber northbound, remembering my old football coach's advice of "when you're lost, drive fast, because that way you aren't lost as long." (Note: actual advice. I am not making this up.) I passed back under the Expressway and started to see the rudiments of civilization - pizza places, a shopping center, and something called "El Rodeo Musical," but no gas station for several agonizing minutes.

Finally, as I start to feel the car shudder and buck at the pedal and realize that for the first time in my life I am going to run out of gas on the road and shit I don't know where I am there's nothing here but farms where the hell am I OH MY GOD I KNEW I WAS GOING TO DIE IN NEW JERSEY I see glowing red letters ahead on my right. A Citgo. Salvation!

All the dashboard lights flared on and the car finally sputtered it's last and shut itself off as I was pulling into the station. I literally coasted the last 30 feet up to the pump. Once I was there the attendant walked up to my window and actually smiled at me and laughed a little.

"Cut that one pretty close, didn't you?" he said.

I just said, "brother, you got no idea."

As I said, though, that was not even my biggest mistake of the day.

That would come later at the casino where the Little League World Series was showing on the TV over my table. At the moment in question I was fairly pissy - actually I was exceptionally pissy, as angry as I can remember being for quite some time - about something that had happened the hand before. One of the other players pointed at the screen and said "hey, at least we tied it up," to which I replied, fairly spitting venom, "yeah, you know, you'd think the Japanese would know not to fuck with us by now."

This is already the most offensive thing I have ever said. However, I continued, and at this point I turn around and start pointing at the screen. "Yeah, you oughta fucking know better! God dammit! You wanna mess with us? Fucking dumbasses! Remember what happened the last time? Huh? Huh?" I cap off this stream of invective with the unfortunate coup de grace of a muttered "BOOM!" while making a mushroom-cloud-motion with my hands.

This is when I turn back around to find that an elderly Japanese gentlemen is being seated at the table.

I have never wanted to crawl into a hole and die more than I did in that moment, and thus was my humiliation complete.

You have to admit, folks, I don't do anything small.

Thirdly, an important shopping tip: if you are of the comic book persuasion and you are in the Olde City/Penns Landing/Liberties/down that way area, the guys who run the store I shop at out in Willow Grove have opened up a new location on 2nd Street across from the Arden (45 N. 2nd Street, to be exact). It's quite nice. The folks who run it are good friends of mine and are outstanding people who run a hell of a store. If you go and tell Rob you heard about the place from me he'll probably laugh at you, but you never know. The importance of the comic store I shop at opening a location a scant five blocks from the pub cannot be overstated. The ability to make one trip on Saturday mornings to both watch Chelsea and get comics not only saves me the weekly jaunt out to Willow Grove but also gives me another conveniently-located place to waste time at and insures that I will basically never be productive on a Saturday again in any remote way.

Finally, on a personal, more positive note, today, August 27, marks eight years to the day since I stopped drinking, and I can't think of a better bunch of people to spend such a milestone with. The irony of spending such a milestone in a bar is of course not lost on me, but no one ever said my life didn't labor under an excess of irony.

JLK

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

Your Clueless Quizo Update

So I was going to do a thing telling the story of how last week I met the author of the #1 book on the New York Times bestseller list, thus bringing my total of authors I've met who were #1 on the bestseller list when I met them to two. Then I looked today and the book dropped to #2. Since I'm not about to ask a question about who's #2 on the bestseller list at this moment, that rules that out. For the record, it was Brad Meltzer last week. He's a hell of a guy. And, also for the record, it took Meltzer six books to reach the top spot, whereas the other guy got there his second try. I still think it's funny that people who write comic books can sell 8 zillion regular books and none of the reviews or anything ever seem to mention comics. Bastards.

Then I was thinking about doing a thing on, I dunno, local sports generalness, but I think everyone knows the Eagles won convincingly yesterday, and I'm assuming that the Phillies' half-game wild card lead will explode at some point in the next seven hours, possibly due to a plague in the locker room, or the stadium catching fire, or a plague in the locker room catching fire. This is the Phillies we're talking about, after all. No lead, no matter who it's against, is safe.

Then I saw a story about how the sequel to the Fantastic Four movie - which was pretty awful to begin with - is going to have the Silver Surfer in it. Is, in fact, going to be ABOUT the Silver Surfer. This brought to mind the thought that, like Ghost Rider, the SIlver Surfer is one of those things that looks cool when someone draws it but looks pretty fucking stupid walking around on a movie screen (or surfing, as the case may be).

Then I remembered last week when Nick (of runaway winners I Did Zidane's Sister) thought that the subject line of the e-mail was a clue and went and memorized all kinds of crap about Guns 'n Roses (who I am listening to as I type this, in fact, in a completely random occurrence). I decided that putting clues in the subject line as a regular thing was far too ridiculous, and that this week there would not only be no clues in the subject line, but that there would be none in the e-mail whatsoever.

And then I decided I'm a big liar. Well, not so much decided as remembered.

Enjoy.

JLK