To taste the flesh not yet deceased

Over at Kung Fu Monkey, they're talking about the new Blue Beetle character scheduled to debut in his own series after INFINITY CRISIS wraps up. The blogger over there, John Rogers, is understandably excited about it, because he's scripting the book over Keith Giffen's plots.

Me, I wouldn't trust Giffen with a nickel I found at the bottom of a pay toilet; he is, to my mind, one of the most egregiously untalented 'talents' who has ever disgraced every title he's been entrusted with. I'd have to go all the way back to Marvel's WOODGOD to find some Giffen artwork I liked, and as far as I can tell, the man has never once had a single good idea as a plotter or scripter. So as far as the new Blue Beetle comic goes, I'm pretty much out.


However, I'm in the minority. As with most blogs done by professionals, the majority of commenters on Kung Fu Monkey tend to be somewhat sycophantic. Being a professional in a geek business confers instant validity in the eyes of most geeks, so the vast majority of Rogers' regular commenters tend to fawn all over him. It's a natural reaction... Here We Are, Talking With Someone Actually Working Behind The Scenes! The urge to kiss ass is nearly insurmountable. Those who can resist it are either personal friends of Rogers, or fellow pros... and all of them, naturally, like the new Blue Beetle, too.

However, besides me, there is one other guy who is not particularly happy with the new concept. Styling himself 'the ghost of Ted Kord' (Ted Kord was the recently murdered Blue Beetle's secret identity), this fellow will have nothing of a new Blue Beetle... he wants Ted Kord back, he wants him back NOW, and like Rick Jones lecturing Dr. Strange on the meaninglessness of death in the Marvel Universe, he can't see any reason why, if Fill In The Blank With Countless Once Dead Now Resurrected Characters can't be brought back, his particular beloved dead character can't be revived, too... and toot fucking sweet.

Meanwhile, over at HCRealms, I've been trying to hold some kind of textual line against a swarm of Modern Age loving gnats, all of whom are convinced that Geoff Johns should be crucified with giant splinters through his naughty bits for having the temerity to take a bunch of the most obnoxious slacker juvenile cretin sidekick characters that ever existed, and investing them with a little maturity. These guys constant refrain, other than wailing about how Impulse and Superboy just aren't any FUN any more now that they're behaving, you know, in a slightly adult fashion, is to sob and sob and sob that, yeah, it's okay that they brought back Geezer Lantern Hal Jordan, but gosh, couldn't they have given him a shawl and a chair by the fire with some milk and cookies, and let glorious godlike mule dicked male model Kyle Rayner continue to be The One True Green Lantern?

It's fortunate none of these people try comparing the Silver Age Aquaman unfavorably with the various horrifying Modern Age versions of the character, or I would honestly have to go out and buy a high powered rifle.

But as to, specifically, the anguished cries of 'the ghost of Ted Kord'...

Jeez. The pain in the posts of a ghost.


I want to laugh... Moore's Nite Owl (from WATCHMEN) means more, emotionally, to me than the walking talking fat joke that DC's BLUE BEETLE mostly was... and asking us to trust that the author of the fat jokes is going to give us a better version of the fat joke is way too big a stretch for me, too, parenthetically without parentheses... but I can't. I can't laugh at the ghost. His pain is very real to me.

I invested enormous childhood love... is there a more intense kind?... into dozens-hundreds-thousands of Silver Age characters at both Marvel and DC, and that love was rewarded by DC back in the mid 80s with the contemptible circulation stunt we all call CRISIS, and the reprehensible series of incomprehensibly awful reboots that rolled out senselessly and relentlessly for years afterwards.


So I know how he feels. I felt it for Hal Jordan, and Barry Allen, and Katar Hol, and Kal El, and Kara El, and pretty much the entire Legion of Superheroes, and Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, and dozens/hundreds/maybe thousands more.

"But DC was about to go under, they had to do SOMETHING," harrumphs Mr. Comics Is A Business Too You Fucking Fanboy, as I saw the top of his head off and prepare to start sticking toothpicks with little colored ribbons into his shriveled, feeble brain.

"But all that Silver Age stuff was Plan 9 From Outer Space stupid, we needed to make the heroes more re-uh-LISS-tick," gibbers Captain I Would Have My Tongue Up Frank Miller's Ass Right Now If Only I Could Find Him Somewhere On This Wretched Mortal Coil, as I fasten the electrodes to his Bronze/Platinum/Diamond/Modern/Shite Age loving testicles and prepare to flip the switch.

Blue Beetle got shot. Apparently, Maxwell Lord did some time with Johnny Caspar, and learned Caspar's maxim... "Always put one in the brain". Is it possible Ted Kord could come back from having his brains blown all over four different comics panels? Sure. With Keith Giffen plotting him, it's not like he NEEDS a brain... he could be the new Ambush Bug!

For all that, all I can say about Ted Kord is this... I never liked him until Geoff Johns wrote him, and then I liked him, and then they killed him.


On the other hand, I loved a lot of other characters deeply for most of my childhood and into my early adulthood, and DC killed all them, too, and replaced them with strutting grim n' gritty poseurs in black costumes with laser autocannons and I don't know what the frick all else, and it took twenty years to even start putting that right, and now all the Modern Age crybabies are sobbing and wailing "But Impulse and Superboy used to sit around and play videogames and jerk each other off in Young Justice and NOW they're acting all grown up and mature and weeeeeee don't LIKE it WAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!"

You can't please everybody.


I'm just happy that finally, DC has a writer who seems to want to please me, about some things, at least.


On a completely unrelated tangent, I just reread Busiek and Perez's JLA/Avengers crossover, and it STILL FRICKIN ROCKS. Best. Superhero. Story. Ever.

I walk the line

Well, yesterday I had a very bad day. In combination with a typical Monday at work -- a nightmare of epic proportions as we wind down the claim year and everyone tries to get their one yearly claim in and processed so they can have money for Christmas -- I well and truly pissed SuperGirlfriend off, to the point where she sent me an email forbidding me to call her during the day, saying she'd talk to me about things when she picked me up that night... and I spent the day wondering if I'd have a place to sleep that night (yeah, what I did was that bad).

We talked in the car, and managed to salvage things, but I put a big ding in her trust for me yesterday, and gave us both an absolutely miserable day, and I regret it abjectly, but I have no Wayback Machine, and I'm just going to have to buckle down and do what we non-cartoon mortals have to do when we screw up righteously and are lucky enough to get another chance... make it right. It's going to take some pretty serious work on my part, but, well, without SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids I really have no life, and anyway, if this thing fails because of me, I'll be letting them down terribly, and I can't stand that. So I have to make it work. And I will.

Anyway... a little housekeeping blogging for the morning. SuperGirlfriend and I did go see the title movie last weekend, and I kept meaning to blog about it, and not getting around to it, so I'll say here that, given that the film represents a reality tunnel I have very nearly no interest in, it still impressed me deeply. It's one of those films where the lead actors do not seem to so much portray their characters as channel them from beyond the grave... you just can't look at Joaquin Phoenix in this movie and see or hear anyone besides Johnny Cash. I grant you, the whole 'pill popping pop star' thing has become such a cliche these days that much of the movie's storyline seems hackneyed (a terrible thing to say about a man's life, I guess) but it's important to realize that Cash was one of the generation (along with Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley) who first brought that cliche to life, at least, as far as mass perception was concerned.

It's a beautifully made movie. Even if you're not wild about country and western music (and I'm certainly not), I'd say it's still worth watching. Think of it as kind of like Tender Mercies, but about real people.



A minor disappointment for me over the last week was watching the cartoon adaptation of Alan Moore's now classic Superman story "For The Man Who Has Everything". SuperGirlfriend and I were shopping for SuperDependable Teen's birthday (which, as she constantly reminds us in sing song cadence, is tomorrow) and I spotted a DVD with three episodes of JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED on it. I've kind of enjoyed the odd, parallel continuity that this cartoon series has established on the few occasions I've managed to catch it in the past, and when I saw that the first episode on the disc was an adaption of that Moore story, I had to have it. But if they'd only put actual credits on the DVD jacket, I'd have known better, since the actual script was written by J.M. deMatteis.

deMatteis seems to have landed a comfy job writing a lot of these things, and it just sickens me, since out of everybody who has ever handled the Justice League concept in the comics, he's the one I would least like to see entrusted with any other aspect of the franchise. And giving a hack like him the job of reinterpreting Alan Moore for a different medium... this is kind of like letting Jack the Ripper do an ice sculpture of Michaelangelo's David.

deMatteis rewrote the story fairly extensively, dropping out the near-essential Robin part in order to focus on just the three adult heroes. He also vastly simplifies the various dream sequences, turning Superman's 'happy fantasy' of a life on a Krypton that never exploded into, well, little more than just an idle daydream with none of the more interesting (if ultimately more cynical and deconstructive than I've ever believed the Man of Steel could truly dream up in such a scenario) details Moore fleshed out the original story with.

Batman's brief dream state never progresses beyond the point where his parents get mugged and his father steps up, grabs Joe Chill's gun, and just starts beating the crap out of Chill over and over again... and while Superman's rather more simplistic and Utopian 'I'm living on a Kryptonian farm with a beautiful redheaded wife who throws me surprise parties for my birthday and I have a lovely son named Van' fantasy does, admittedly, seem more in character for the rather idealistic Kal El (if considerably more boring than the original, darker vision of a still extant Krypton that Moore presented us with), Batman's incredibly simply fantasy would seem to mark the Dark Knight out as being rather unimaginative and, well, brutal.

Both characterizations are spot on for the Modern Age versions of Batman and Superman, and I've made the point before that Moore, in his original story, seems to have mixed up his dramatis persona, giving Superman a grim n' gritty, very cynical vision of a still surviving Krypton that is the sort of thing we'd expect Batman to come up with, while he gave Batman a very pleasantly idyllic normal life on Earth, in which he was married to Kathy Kane and had children, which we'd really expect to be the kind of sweet fantasy Superman would dream up for himself. deMatteis seems to have corrected this, but his corrections are, honestly, just plain goddam boring, which is always a sin when you're writing to entertain.

Beyond all that, deMatteis occasionally lets some of the original Moore dialogue survive, but every time a snatch of it surfaces, all the emotional subtext Moore has carefully laid is gone, so the dialogue itself is little more than meaningless noise. And, well, if you've read the story, you really have to miss the presence of the now missing (and in the DC Universe, now long dead) Jason Todd.

All in all, well, it was a fair let down, watching this cartoon. The other two on the DVD, though, "The Return" and "The Greatest Story Never Told", were pretty entertaining.



I'm getting towards the end of the the GREEN LANTERN SHOWCASE edition SuperGirlfriend got me for my birthday, and it's been a delightful trip so far. A few of these very earliest issues of the Silver Age Green Lantern are so painfully poorly plotted you just have to dismiss them as 'bad reporting' (to use Mike Norton's wonderful phrase for comic book stories about our favorite characters we simply cannot accept as 'real', no matter how hard we try). But most of them are a lot of fun to read. As someone who has always wanted to write comics, I cannot help but be struck by the significance of what John Broome was doing in these early stories... inventing not only the entirety of Green Lantern's future continuity from one issue to the next, but very nearly making up all of DC's outer space terrain as he went, too.

The Gil Kane art is fabulous, especially when he's inked by Murphy Anderson. Kane isn't a particularly good graphic designer, however, which is one reason why the Weaponers of Qward still look pretty retarded even to this day. Still, this artwork is beautiful and clear, something that is absolutely necessary when you are drawing a character like Green Lantern, who can literally do anything he can imagine at any instant.

There's a lot of nonsense physics in this comic, especially the stuff about the color yellow, which is the one thing GL's power ring cannot affect. This was always a bad idea because color is largely dependent on surrounding conditions, and if GL had had half a brain in his head, he would have simply created lightproof containers around every threatening yellow object he encountered. Without light, there is no color, so once GL put whatever yellow maguffin was messing with him this issue into a total blackout, he could have done anything he wanted to it.

This point is especially underscored by a story in which the Weaponers of Qward shoot a 'red' missile at Green Lantern. Naturally, he tries to stop it with his power ring because, you know, it's not yellow... but his power ring won't do anything with it, so he has to dodge it instead (hey, that was hard). After it blows up some poor guy's barn, GL gives the pieces the fishy eye and discovers that the goddam thing was yellow all along... it just had red lights radiating a red aura around it through its transparent casing. Those wiley, wiley Weaponers! Geez! And to think, he almost didn't bother dodging the darned thing! Boy, the joke would have been on him then!

Honestly, the brain boggles at this nonsense. The frickin' weapon has a transparent casing, with red bulbs underneath it radiating a red aura... and yet, somehow, it's really yellow! I'd ask what John Broome was smoking when he wrote this crap up, but, well, all us old Silver Age comics fans already know...

In your heart you know it's right

My crazy Uncle Fred, the one who makes all his money from some third rate Amway knock off pyramid sales company, sent me some email this morning.

Generally, when my crazy Uncle Fred sends me email, I just delete it unread, because crazy Uncle Fred has, somewhere along the line, changed from being the cool Uncle Rick who used to let me read his Superman and Captain America comics when I was little to being, well, a Limbaugh and Hannity reiterating pinhead.

However, every once in a while I sigh and open one of Fred's emails, because it's a little painful for me to think that my cool Uncle Rick really is gone forever. I keep hoping he may send me something that actually, at some point, displays a vestigial shred of coolness, or, if that's too much to hope for, at least, a tiny bit of sanity.

This is what he sent me this morning:


The lady that wrote this letter is Pam Foster of Pamela Foster and Associates in Atlanta. She's been in business since 1980 doing interior design and home planning. She recently wrote a letter to a family member serving in Iraq. Read it!

WHAT'S ALL THE FUSS?

Are we fighting a war on terror or aren't we? Was it or was it not started by Islamic people who brought it to our shores on September 11, 2001? Were people from all over the world, mostly Americans, not brutally murdered that day, in downtown Manhattan, across the Potomac from our nation's capitol and in a field in Pennsylvania? Did nearly three thousand men, women and children die a horrible, burning or crushing death that day, or didn't they?

And I'm supposed to care that a copy of the Koran was "desecrated" when an
overworked American soldier kicked it or got it wet? Well, I don't. I don't care at all.

I'll start caring when Osama bin Laden turns himself in and repents for incinerating all those innocent people on 9/11.

I'll care about the Koran when the fanatics in the Middle East start caring
about the Holy Bible, the mere possession of which is a crime in Saudi Arabia.

I'll care when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tells the world he is sorry for hacking
off Nick Berg's head while Berg screamed through his gurgling, slashed throat.

I'll care when the cowardly so-called "insurgents" in Iraq come out and
fight like men instead of disrespecting their own religion by hiding in mosques.

I'll care when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of
nirvana care about the innocent children within range of their suicide bombs.

I'll care when the American media stops pretending that their First Amendment liberties are somehow derived from international law instead of the United States Constitution's Bill of Rights.

In the meantime, when I hear a story about a brave marine roughing up an
Iraqi terrorist to obtain information, know this: I don't care.

When I see a fuzzy photo of a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners who have been
humiliated in what amounts to a college hazing incident, rest assured that I
don't care.

When I see a wounded terrorist get shot in the head when he is told not to move because he might be booby-trapped, you can take it to the bank that I don't care.

When I hear that a prisoner, who was issued a Koran and a prayer mat, and
fed "special" food that is paid for by my tax dollars, is complaining that his holy book is being "mishandled," you can absolutely believe in your heart of hearts that I don't care.

And oh, by the way, I've noticed that sometimes it's spelled "Koran" and other times "Quran." Well, Jimmy Crack Corn and --you guessed it, I could not have said this any better myself!

If you agree with this view point, pass this on to all your e-mail friends.
Sooner or later, it'll get to the people responsible for this ridiculous behavior! If you don't agree, then by all means hit the delete button. Should you choose the latter, then please don't complain when more atrocities committed by radical Muslims happen here in our great country,like are happening in France now.

So, what the hell, here are some random thoughts I had while I was scanning through this thing:

* * * 9/11 gave Americans everywhere a blank check to do anything we want, as long as we are 'fighting terror' when we do it. That's really cool.

* * * Islamic suicide bombers are not seeking nirvana. Buddhists seek nirvana. Islamic suicide bombers seek instant translation to Allah's Paradise by martyring themselves in an act of self immolation meant to take out many of the enemy, as well. Buddhists, on the other hand, crouch in really uncomfortable positions and chant a lot. I guess, if you're a moron, it would be hard to tell the difference between the two groups, but here's a hint: the Islamic terrorists are the ones that explode.

* * * How do you tell the difference between a 'brave marine' and a cowardly piece of shit? Well, again, here's a hint: if you're hitting a handcuffed prisoner repeatedly in the nads with a billy club, you're not a brave anything.

* * * Similarly, how do you tell the difference between humiliating torture of illegally imprisoned human beings and a college hazing incident? Well, generally there are fewer snarling Dobermans on leashes at the college hazing incident, for one thing. For another, most of the participants in the college hazing incident aren't being held at gun point in handcuffs. Finally, the illegally imprisoned people who are being humiliated and tortured would, if they were allowed to, leave.

* * * It amazes me that there are, apparently, no innocent, illegally held prisoners anywhere in the American occupied Middle East. No, it seems (at least, according to Pamela Foster of Atlanta, Georgia, and my Uncle Fred who enthusiastically forwards her email to everyone he knows) that everyone locked up in an American military prison is, in fact, a tried and convicted Iraqi terrorist. Apparently, tried and convicted Iraqi terrorists are not protected by international law pertaining to the treatment of prisoners... but, of course, I'm forgetting; 9/11 gave every American a blank check to do anything at all to fight the War on Terror.

Finally... Christ! Those goddam radical Muslims and their wave of terror in France! You just know something like that is about to happen here in America, any minute now, and when it does, it will be because of us no good lazy godless whining left wing egghead liberals who encouraged the little fuckers to do it, too! Jesus! How any decent right thinking American Christian can be expected to tolerate us for one more minute I cannot comprehend. In fact, it is the duty of every hard working God fearing patriotic American to shoot every fucking liberal they see, before we bring this country to its knees and surrender our way of life to be crushed beneath the iron heel of our towelheaded Islamic masters.

Please. For the love of God. Put The Bullet Here.

Having a really rotten Friday...

...and YOU people, not reading my blog, not leaving any comments, not sending me ANY DAMN EMAIL, aren't helping. NOT ONE LITTLE BIT.

Okay, having gotten that out of my system, here's why today has sucked, other than the rest of the world's complete and unacceptable failure to provide me with any positive attention to offset the negative attention I've been getting all day from pissed off participants --

Many of the people who have flexible spending accounts that my employer administers have a benny card attached to their account. People love benny cards, they think benny cards are just the cat's ass, because instead of going through the long, tedious procedure of filling out a claim form and attaching all their supporting documentation and sending it in and maybe getting it denied two or three times and having to jump through a lot of hoops to get reimbursed, they can just swipe the card like a debit or a charge card when they pay for their health care expenses, and that's MUCH easier.

But, what these people do not know is that there is a department somewhere that looks over all the charges they put on this card, and if they see something they don't understand, they send out what we call an adjudication letter, which basically says "we don't know what this charge is, please submit your explanation of benefits or your itemized receipt to validate this expense, otherwise it will be assessed as an overpayment to your account".

People rarely understand what this means, but they know it sounds bad, so they call me. And many of them are pissed, because, you know, they got the benny card (benefit card, sorry) because it was much much more convenient and they didn't have to do any paperwork and now they have to do paperwork? Well, fuck that noise!

The ones who are the maddest, of course, are the ones who, because they have the card, didn't bother to save their receipts, and now they are being asked for receipts, and they are like "Oh shit". So, naturally, they are taking this out on me.

Today, around three o'clock, I got a call from just about the meanest bitch in the universe, and she was just not going to let go. She was mad as hell. We were accusing her of fraud. She only got the card because it made it easier and now we wanted receipts? Plus she sent us her receipts, and it wasn't her fault they weren't legible! What was she supposed to do? This was way too much trouble and she wanted something done about it, now she had this huge headache at the end of the year and she wanted to know what I was going to do about it!

When I'd finally gotten her calmed down enough that she was willing to hang up in disgust, after she'd refused to take the customer service survey we offer at the end of every call, I wished her, in a monotone, a Happy Holidays... and THAT pissed her off. Then she WANTED to take the damn customer service survey, just so she could complain about how rude and sarcastic I had just been.

So I hung up on her, because, honestly, it was hang up on her or just go totally off on her, and the latter would have certainly gotten me fired.

So, then, 6 pm rolls around, it's fifteen minutes from my break, we've been slammed with calls non stop since 5 pm, which is when the day shift that works here goes home, but the day shift of desperate lunatic people who just have to call my employer hasn't punched out yet, which means that the same number of people who have been calling us steadily all day are still calling, but suddenly we only have half as many people working here taking the calls.

And I get this lunatic woman again.

And she goes into her tirade all over again, and now she wants to talk to whoever it is that looks over the charges on the accounts, and she wants a supervisor, and we have no supervisors because they were all smart enough to get the hell out of here at 5 or 5:30, and keeps me on the phone for twenty minutes of nonstop bitching.

And then she hangs up on me without warning, so I don't get a chance to hit the BREAK button, and BING, I'm right into another call.

And this guy? THIS guy says "I got this letter today, saying I need to send in some paperwork for some charges on my card, and I don't understand this..."

Hit MUTE button.

SHRIEK like a lunch whistle in hell.

Beat head on desk four times THUNK thud THUNK thud.

Repeat several times.

So I finally went on my 6:15 break about, I don't know, 6:45.

And that's just a sample. The whole day has been, more or less, just like that, just with different types of calls.

And YOU PEOPLE OUT THERE AREN'T HELPING.

Especially those of you who in addition to not reading my blog, sending me email, or posting comments, are CALLING ME UP AND ASKING ME STUPID QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR GODDAM FLEXIBLE SPENDING ACCOUNTS.

Post script to SuperGirlfriend -- none of this is to YOUR address, you've been the only good thing in my life today. So you never mind this.

But the rest of you are on notice: Send me email, post comments on this blog, and stop calling my job about your fucking FSAs.

I mean it.

Don't make me come over there.

A secret plan to fight... something

From here:

WASHINGTON - By creating a federal agency shielded from public scrutiny, some lawmakers think they can speed the development and testing of new drugs and vaccines needed to respond to a bioterrorist attack or super-flu pandemic.

The proposed Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency, or BARDA, would be exempt from long-standing open records and meetings laws that apply to most government departments, according to legislation approved Oct. 18 by the Senate health committee.
In other words, drug companies would have a safe haven where they would be able to do any kind of medical research whatsoever, free from any kind of oversight or public scrutiny. Better yet --

The agency would provide the funding for development of treatments and vaccines to protect the United States from natural pandemics as well as chemical, biological and radiological agents.
That's right... you and I would be writing a blank check to the drug companies for this super secret, unaccountable, undocumented research.

Then there's this:

The bill does provide for limited compensation. However, another provision would grant drug companies immunity unless "willful misconduct" can be shown.
Which, you know, would be a very easy legal burden to meet, given that all the records of the agency would be classified and nobody from the public could ever get access to them.

The National Vaccine Information Center, an advocacy group, called the legislation "a drug company stockholder's dream and a consumer's worst nightmare."
See, if I were paranoid, I might just think that with a top secret national security research haven like this available, drug companies might be tempted to just stop doing anything at all on their own hook and do it ALL on the public tit. Then ANYthing they create, any product at all that comes out of this, will be protected against any kind of legal repercussions that might ensue, unless "willful misconduct" can be proved, which of course it can't, because nobody will have any access to any of the records involved.

Geez. It's a good thing my government doesn't do stuff like create secret military bases all over the world to illegally detail and torture people in. It's a good thing there is no obvious, inherently corrupt and steadily, horrifically increasing bias in our government towards wealthy, influential corporations, especially the drug companies. I mean, otherwise, I might think this could be a really really BAD thing.

What strikes me as oddest about this is, well... it seems to me that, essentially, if the government sets up this agency, it will basically end up socializing drug research and production in this country. And socialism is a bad thing, according to the Republicans who are pushing this bill... right?

Ah, but wait:

Frist spokeswoman Amy Call said drug company concerns about liability are real.

"There's really no financial incentive for them to get into the market, sell to the government at a reduced rate and then open themselves up to losses that could potentially bankrupt them," Call said.
And then:

"We must ensure the federal government acts as a partner with the private sector, providing the incentives and protections necessary to bring more and better drugs and vaccines to market faster," Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said when the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions approved the bill.
See? It's not socialism at all! In socialism, the government controls certain essential processes and industries, presumably for the public good. But with this new agency, the government would just FUND the research, and PROTECT the research (from... um... us, I guess). They wouldn't CONTROL anything! So that makes it better!

"So... I'm sorry, doctor, I don't mean to be unpatriotic, but just what ARE you injecting me, my wife, my children, and my dog with?"

"That's classified data, citizen. But rest assured it's for the good of the nation."

"Ah. So you don't know what's in the hypo either, eh...?"

Personally, I think they should put Michael Brown in charge of the whole thing. Because we all know that couldn't possibly go wrong.

Bush, Cheney seek one armed man

WASHINGTON - An embattled, unshaven, apparently somewhat hungover Scott McClellan today admitted that both President and Vice President have initiated an internal investigation probing the source of the various scandals plaguing the Administration.

"They're looking for a one armed man," McClellan muttered, eyes cast down, face suffused with a look of utter self loathing chagrin.

In response to follow up questions, McClellan admitted surlily, "The President and Vice President both now seem to remember seeing a one armed man lurking around the White House hallways whenever any of these questionable incidents was about to occur. The President believes he was dressed as a maintenance man; the Vice President says he might have been a gardener. Whatever the case, both of them are pretty sure this one armed man was probably in a position to overhear certain conversations, such as entirely internal discussions of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA operative."

McClellan, under further prodding from an admittedly incredulous press corps, added, "Vice President Cheney is fairly certain this one armed man might also have had access to pre-war intelligence, and may have doctored it extensively before it came to the attention of him or the President."

When asked how a one armed maintenance worker, or gardener, could possibly have gotten access to such highly classified material, McClellan rolled his eyes, shuffled several index cards in his hands, then, in a monotone, said "There is reason to believe this one armed man was a terrorist spy equipped with sophisticated Soviet electronic surveillance equipment." He then stopped, peered closely at the card, took out a pencil, and vigorously scratched something out on it, penciling in something else. "I'm sorry. North Korean electronic surveillance equipment," he tacked on tonelessly.

He then announced that the FBI is conducting a search for the one armed man. "Also," he added, seeming rather weary of the whole thing, "President Bush told me today that he had personally contacted Aquaman of the Justice League, and the JLA is also on the case." McClellan gave an odd, shrill little chuckle at that point and wiped a fleck of spittle from the corner of his mouth. "I guess he's going to come here and interview all the goldfish in the offices, or something..."

McClellan ended the briefing at that moment, saying he really needed a drink.

Is there no help for the Son of a Widow?

This is new:

From: "richard morris"
Subject: The Freemason society of Bournemouth 2005 Grant.
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 13:51:02 +0000


The Freemason society of Bournemouth under the jurisdiction
of the all Seeing Eye, Master Nicholas Brenner has after series
of secret deliberations selected you to be a beneficiary of our
2005 foundation laying grants and also an optional opening at
the round table of the Freemason society.

These grants are issued every year around the world in
accordance with the objective of the Freemasons as stated by
Thomas Paine in 1810 which is to ensure the continuous freedom
of man and to enhance mans living conditions.We will also advice
that these funds which amount to USD2.5million be used to better
the lot of man through your own initiative and also we will go
further to inform that the open slot to become a Freemason is
optional, you can decline the offer.In order to claim your grant,
contact the Grand Lodge Office secretary Mark Anderson
Grand Lodge Office Secretary's email:mk_anders001@yahoo.co.uk

Richard Morris,
PRO Freemason Society of holdenhurst road,
Bournemouth.
London.

See, now, if this was just some shabby former African minister's dependent trying to hoax me into letting them deposit $12 million in offshore funds in my American bank account for a 10% finder's fee, well, I'd have none of it, sir. Clearly, those emails are fraudulent. But the Freemasons...! My GOD! They're on the square and on the level! And I've read From Hell, so I even know that Jack the Ripper was a Freemason! What more authority do I need?

I'm totally going for it. If it's good enough for ol' Springheels, well, it's good enough for me. Maybe I'll even get super powers!

Crisis? What Crisis?

The members of the Justice League looked around their satellite warily. Dozens of other super characters were crowded in to the place, spilling out of the central meeting hall, packed into the various access corridors, milling around in the trophy room, eating canapes and swilling non-alcoholic margaritas.

"How are we fitting this many people in here?" the ever logical Batman wondered aloud.

"And where the hell is the chow coming from?" the ever pragmatic Green Arrow muttered, munching on a Ritz cracker.


"That Monitor guy took care of it," the Atom said, waving vaguely. "The food, I mean. The time and space thing I think is magic, or something."

Superman took his chin off his fist and sat upright abruptly. "Okay, I'm outta here," he declared, starting to get up.

"Don't be such a BABY, Clark," Wonder Woman advised him dryly. "This whole mess is going to turn out MUCH worse for me than for you."

Green Lantern shuddered. "I don't want to hear a word from either of you," he warned.

At the edge of the observation platform, a humanoid heap of rotting moss and muck appeared, alongside a dapper, trenchcoated fellow with upswept blond hair.

"Isn't that Sting?" Hawkman said, peering through the crowd at the new arrivals.

"No, that's Swamp Thing," Green Arrow said dryly. "Sting has a little less fungus on his chest."

Hawkman glared at the Emerald Archer. "I meant the one in the trenchcoat. Isn't HE Sting?"

"Indeed not," came a deep, enigmatic voice from the shadows nearest the Leaguers. The Phantom Stranger stepped forward, adjusting his fedora. "That is John Constantine, and oh, is his life going to suck as soon as he gets his own title."

Hawkman folded his arms stubbornly. "I think he looks like Sting, " he said, to no one in particular.

Supergirl made her way through the crowd, waving hi absently to most of the Leaguers. Upon reaching Superman, she bent down and gave him a very affectionate kiss hello on the mouth.

After a minute or so, Batman cleared his throat. "Hellooooo... Earth to Krypton... even 23,000 miles over Star City, I think that sort of thing is still illegal..."

Superman looked around, eyes somewhat glazed. "What? WHAT? It's... it's a House of El thing. Jeez. You guys have dirty minds." He paused. "Look, don't tell Lois, she'd, like, freak."

Supergirl folded her arms and regarded the rest of the heroes coolly, one miniskirted hip perched possessively on her cousin's broad right shoulder.

"Hi, Uncle Bruce, and by the way," the Girl of Steel asked sweetly, "just which one of you Gene Police was going to actually, you know... arrest us?"

"Damn you guys got cocky after that 'kryptonite turns into iron' thing," Green Arrow muttered.

"It's just WRONG," Batman said flatly, teeth clenched. "Alien chromosomes or NOT."

Overhearing this, the Wonder Twins surreptitiously disentwined their fingers. Jade and Obsidian quietly moved a few inches apart. Jan and Jase, after stealing a glance at Space Ghost, slipped off into the empty power plant chamber. After loitering for a moment to seem inconspicuous, Blip quietly followed them.

"I wouldn't be too judgmental there if I were you," the Atom squeaked. "I mean, you know, Mr. I Adopt Ten Year Old Acrobats And Dress Them Up In Scaly Green Swim Trunks."

"Hey!" Green Arrow, Aquaman, the Flash, and Wonder Woman all chimed in at once.

"NO sidekick cracks, Palmer," Wonder Woman snapped. "Just because kids don't like YOU..."

"Your teen partner certainly seems to like YOU," the Atom retorted in his high, piping voice. "And I've got the videotape to prove it."

"Tiptoeing around in people's air conditioning shafts," the Princess of the Amazons muttered darkly. "Sneaky little CREEP..."

Abruptly, a cheerful voice broke in above the babble. "All right, everybody. My name is the Monitor. If we could just get started..."

Five subjective minutes later...

"Kara is dead," wept a heartbroken, inconsolable Man of Steel. "Oh, my cousin, my COUSIN..."

"You'll get over it," Green Lantern sighed, patting the Last Son of Krypton on one massive shoulder.

"Are you kidding?" demanded the sobbing Man of Tomorrow. "For God's SAKE, Hal, I blow the back of Earth women's HEADS OFF when I..."

"Oh GROSS." GL clamped his hands over his ears. "I can't HEEEAR you Mary had a little lamb little lamb little lamb..."

Ignoring her sex crazed teammates, Wonder Woman regarded herself in the mirror. "Well, I look about fifteen years younger, that can't be BAD," she mused.

Green Arrow regarded a boxing glove arrow he had just drawn out of his quiver with distaste. "How in the name of God do these things even FIT in there?" he muttered. "Nope, nope, I'm just gonna start using barbed hunting heads. Screw 'em if they can't take a joke."

"Didn't I used to have some kind of... I don't know... Canary cry thing?" Black Canary mused to herself, clearing her throat and once more giving a high little chirp, to no discernable effect at all. "This is going to SUCK if I get kidnapped and tortured in a warehouse or something..."

"Come on, what are the odds?" the Atom said cheerfully, sharpening his sword as he looked around. "Right, Hawkman?"

The Thanagarian quickly put his miniaturized spy camera back into his belt. "Right, little buddy! I'm the son of the Golden Age Hawkman, you know! Not any sort of Thanagarian spy sent to ferret out the secrets of Earth's super community! Oh no! Not at all!"

"Right," the Atom said, looking at Hawkman in puzzlement. "Are you... feeling okay there, pal?"

Superman looked up. "Um... say, everybody... I was wondering... who's Kara?"

Green Lantern folded his arms. "TOLD you you'd get over it."

Wonder Woman chewed her much younger looking lip thoughtfully. "Um... you know, doesn't the Golden Age Hawkman HAVE a son? In Infinity Inc? I'm pretty sure?"

"Ixnay on the ommonkay ensay," Green Lantern said to her quietly. " Just, you know, smile and nod."

Batman looked around grimly. "Well, at least I haven't changed," he said. "Although... didn't I used to be able to figure things... I mean... out? Whaddya call that... analysis, and such like? Something that starts with a 'd'. Didactive? Something..."

Red Tornado walked up, beaming amiably. "Say, Batman, there are some looters in the trophy room stealing everything, and I was not certain if it would be appropriate..."

"GOONS!" the former Darknight Detective howled. "COOL!" Whirling, he hurled himself down the hall and into the trophy room in two or three incredibly above Olympian level bounds. Awful sounds of carnage immediately ensued.

"Those 'goons' are, I believe, all escaped Phantom Zone prisoners," Red Tornado said worriedly. "Perhaps we.... er... that is... some of you.... should assist the Gotham Guardian."

"Nah," Aquaman said apathetically from where he had his feet up on the conference table, regarding the harpoon that had somehow replaced his right hand morosely. "No need."

"You see," Green Lantern explained, "this is the new post Crisis, Frank Miller inspired, scary as hell bad ass psycho Batman. Couldn't detect who farted while trapped in an elevator with the Kingpin eating bean dip and four skeletons."

"BUT," Green Arrow added, "leave him off panel for five minutes, maybe throw in a few gruesome sound effects..."

From down the hall: THUD! "BY RAO, NOOOO!" KRUNCH! "Help us help us HELP US -" WHAM! "AUUUUUUUuuuugggghhhh...."

"...and then, bingo," Green Arrow finished, "You walk in the room and find, like, Galactus, beaten unconscious and hanging from the rafters in handcuffs."

"Wow," Red Tornado said, seeming impressed. "Is that true, Flash?"

Everyone looked around. "Ah, Barry?" the Atom asked tentatively.

There was no answer.

"Oh, THIS sucks," Green Lantern groaned.

"What sucks?" a cheerful voice said from off panel. Looking over, the League saw a maniacally grinning guy in a blue on blue costume walking up.

"Nice goggles," Aquaman said. "Who are you? Oh, wait. Let me read your mind." The King of the Seven Seas furrowed his brow. "Blue Beetle? What kind of dorky name is that?"

"Oh, get used to the dorky names," Green Lantern murmured, too quietly for anyone else to hear. "Listen everybody, I'm taking off. My new alien girlfriend should be just about legal by now, and God knows I should enjoy something before my life goes in the toilet." With a wave, GL turned himself intangible with his ring and flew off through the satellite wall.

The Atom turned back to Hawkman. "Well, at least someone has a healthy..." The Tiny Titan stopped, regarding the leather-clad figure before him dubiously. "Katar? You weren't, like, just wearing that, were you?"

Hawkman looked around through his yellowish eye-shields. "Okay, this place is weird," he muttered. "What the hell am I doing here?"

"Lot of that going around," Black Canary remarked dryly. Green Arrow, busy shaving his head, looked up at her in puzzlement. "Hmmmm?"

Batman wandered back out, a contented expression on his face. "You know, those guys in there were Daxamites? Apparently, everyone in the Phantom Zone is a Daxamite now. It's kinda nice because, you know, Kryptonite is hard to find, but LEAD..."

A lithe, athletic young adult male in a strange looking black, blue and yellow costume strode up to Batman. "Quick, Batman, the H.I.V.E is invading Gotham City..."

Batman regarded him owlishly. "Do I know you?"

The young man stared at Batman incredulously. "I'm Nightwing. Formerly your sidekick, Robin. Leader of the New Teen Titans. Remember me?"

Batman scratched his head. "Um... oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Right. I remember now. This time travel stuff sucks."

The Atom sighed. "It's not the time travel, it's the oversight free revisions and reboots that are killin' me." He promptly stabbed himself in the foot as he tried to sheathe his sword and missed.

Superman frowned. "Nightwing... Jimmy was Nightwing. I was Flamebird! We were the Batman and Robin of Kandor!"

Batman regarded Superman doubtfully and slipped an arm around Nightwing's waist. "You'd have blown the back of Olsen's head off, Clark." Nightwing smiled in fond reminiscence.

"Not in Kandor!" Superman cried. "In Kandor I had no superpowers! In Kandor all the women looked like Lois Lane, and worshipped me as a GOD! In Kandor Jimmy could... could... Oh RAO! I was... so... HAPPY... in Kandor...." Burying his head in his arms, the pre MAN OF STEEL, post Crisis Superman wept for everything that a cruelly revised universe had robbed him of.

Wonder Woman leaned over to Green Lantern and whispered behind her hand, "Taking a while for the Byrne reboot to hit him, isn't it? I mean, wasn't he the FIRST to go?"

Hal shrugged. "He's pretty tough, Di. He might hold out for a few more minutes before he goes under."

"HE'll get over it," the young, teenage Green Arrow said in a spritely fashion. "I'VE been rebooted two or three times and I'm just fine!"

The Martian Manhunter regarded Batman and Nightwing doubtfully. "If you adopted Dick when he was 10, Bruce... and he's... 21 now... and you're... 29... that means that when you adopted him, you were..."

"Ixnay on the ogiclay," Wonder Woman whispered. "Just smile and nod."

Still weeping, Superman looked up again, then stood up "Everybody wants a piece of me," he whimpered. "They ALL want a piece of me, Ma..." Turning, he fled down the hall.

"His cape wasn't ALWAYS that torn up, was it?" Aquaman wondered aloud, watching the Metropolis Marvel retreat.

"Once he rides out the rough spots and gets to the Roger Stern run, he'll be fine," Green Arrow reassured everyone.

Wonder Woman frowned. "So the part where he gets a split personality, becomes a sociopathic vigilante by night, and exiles himself from Earth for a year... these aren't rough spots?"

Green Arrow shrugged. "Compared to being temporarily beaten to death by a mindless spiked alien that, on a day when Superman's frontal lobes weren't utterly paralyzed by marketing scheme necessity, he would have just picked up by the brow ridges and booted back into space... nah, I wouldn't call them rough spots."

"Good point," a near seven foot tall Hawkman said. "I myself wonder why I won't suggest, at that point, that we assemble a teleportation screen directly in front of the big purple goon... Whichever me I am at that point, I mean..." He trailed off, looking confused.

At the conference table, Vibe, Gypsy, and Steel were deep in conversation with the Elongated Man.

"Who the hell are you three freaks?" the Atom demanded, drawing his sword again.

"Don't ask," a nervous looking Green Lantern asked, apparently having returned when no one was looking. "They'll be gone in a minute or two."

"We're the NEW JUSTICE LEAGUE!" the Elongated Man shouted.

"Jesus wept," Batman said, appalled.

"It gets worse," Green Lantern said with a long suffering sigh.

"Impossible," Batman snapped grimly.

"Please, Bruce," GL said as he massaged his temples wearily with his hands. "Never say that. NEVER SAY THAT."

Batman got up. "Well, I'll have NO part of it," he announced. "Anything worse than THAT... no way."

"That's what YOU think," Hal said. "Still, you can consider your appearances over the next couple of years out of continuity if you like."

Batman scowled. "What the HELL are you talking about?" Abruptly, he was hit in the face by a pie thrown from off panel. He turned. "Why youse guys! I'll moiderize youse!" He leapt away.

From off panel: "BWA HA HA!"

"Nyuck nyuck nyuck! Hey Batman! Lookit this!"

Things came and went. At some point when Green Lantern wasn't watching, the Atom got a new costume and modified powers, then vanished again. Hawkman disappeared completely and was apparently forgotten by everyone. Over in one corner, Animal Man, Captain Atom, Guy Gardner, a fat Blue Beetle, the Crimson Fox, Fire, Ice, and Metamorpho were eating popcorn and watching the movie INDEPENDENCE DAY, which they all seemed to agree was the most comprehensively intelligent science fiction film that had ever been made.

Batman stumbled up to Hal's chair, weeping. "Hal... Hal! Superman is DEAD! Kal El, the Man of Steel, last survivor of Krypton... is DEAD! Not a hoax, not a dream, not an Imaginary Story!" The Dark Knight broke down and sobbed on GL's shoulder.

Green Lantern patted Batman's back absently. "It's okay, Bruce. He'll get better."

After a while, Batman wandered off again. To Green Lantern's bemusement, the room below seemed to fill with various weird humanoids in Superman-variant costumes. "It's a veritable RAIN of the Supermen," Hal mused to himself.

After a while, they faded away, and Batman came over once more. "Hal, Superman is alive again! He's alive!"

Hal sighed. "Told you."

Batman looked puzzled. "But... he needs a haircut."

Wonder Woman came over and sat down at the table with them. "Hal, are you still up here? You have you own title, you know. Plots and storylines. People are depending on you. You should get back down there... out there... whatever."

Green Lantern shuddered. "Oh, PLEASE, Diana. You know who's writing me right now? Mr. 'Hank Pym Was Only Interesting When He Was Beating His Wife'. Captain 'Let's Turn Wonder Man into a superpowerful psychopath'. Senator 'The Zenith of Good Melodrama Is A Pie In Batman's Face'. Prince 'Let's write a history of comics and give more space to THE TROUBLE WITH GIRLS than we give to Steve Engelhart, Steve Gerber, Cary Bates, Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, and John Buscema COMBINED'. HIM. That... JONES... freak." Hal shuddered again. "No thank you VERY much, I'll just stay right here and watch the reboots roll out."

Wonder Woman squinted at him doubtfully. "My GOD, Hal, are you AFRAID?"

Green Lantern jumped to his feet and roared "Of COURSE I'm afraid! The first thing Peter David DID to me post-Crisis - besides forcing me to make out with a Rich Howell drawn Arisia -"

There Wonder Woman and Batman shuddered, as well.

"- was make me AFRAID! Ohhhhhh, a person without FEAR is sociopathic, Hal! Ohhhhh, it's the Guardians messing with your HEAD, Hal! Oh, let's give you a normal survival instinct, Hal! CHRIST!" The Emerald Gladiator was tugging his hair and rolling his eyes frantically now. "Well, guess what, Skippy? I've GOT a damned survival instinct now and it's telling me to STAY THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY IN THIS RIDICULOUS UNIVERSE!"

Batman frowned. "You were a lot cooler... before, Hal," he said.

"DUH!" Hal practically shrieked. "Not that YOU should talk, Mr. Couldn't Deduce Who Bane Was With His Rap Sheet, Lexcorp Personnel File, and 14 Page Playboy Interview In Front Of Me!"

Wonder Woman got up. "Well, Hal, all I can say is, I'd trade you Gerard Jones for John Byrne any day." She shivered. "He's going to replace me with my mother. I mean, please."

Batman got up as well. "Seems like... we ALL used to be kind of cooler," he muttered, and moved away.

Green Lantern sat forgotten at the table, chin resting on his hands, mind numb.

Finally, after a long, seemingly timeless interval, he looked around.

"You know your life sucks," he mused, "when you're just sitting around WAITING for..."

Someone tapped on his shoulder. He turned and saw a little blue Guardian standing there, along side an apparent male model, with black hair, a good build, and an utterly vacant look in his eyes. "Dude," the extremely good looking black haired fellow said. "Hey, dude, like this bald guy says you have to give, like, a power ring to me. Like, kewl, huh?"

Hal regarded the two numbly. "It's like that McDonald's commercial with the little Mongoloid kid," he muttered. "Oa institutes a hire the handicapped program."

The Guardian sighed testily. "Well, if you're going to sit up here and mope, Hal Jordan of Earth, then... he'll have to do."

Hal stood up and surrendered the ring in disgust. "Take it," he said. "I'm just about fed up with this post Crisis crap anyway."

Super Christmas with SuperGirlfriend

Who's the luckiest man alive? I'll give you a hint; it isn't you. No, it's me, the only man privileged to live with the greatest girlfriend in the world, as well as the SuperKids.

The pic to the left is an unfortunately blurry image of what awaited me last night when SuperGirlfriend brought me home from work... an early Christmas present, in the form of a Christmas tree set up in the section of the apartment where my comics bookshelves and HeroClix case are. As you can see, the tree is entirely bedecked with superhero themed decorations, from an amazing looking running Flash through Wonder Woman, Clark Kent in a phone booth, Spider Man, the Green Goblin, a few X-Men (including my favorite, Cyclops, and my least favorite, Wolverine, with an 'ehhhhh who cares' Storm rounding out the set), Hellboy, a miniature SuperFriends lunch box, Captain America, and a string of Hulk-head Christmas lights!

What's weird is that just the other day, while we were decorating a small tree in the two older SuperKids' room (which is otherwise given over to a superhero theme, and is in fact exactly the room I wanted when I was a kid, and now I can't have it, wahhhh), I said something like "You know, we should totally decorate this tree in a superhero motif". SuperGirlfriend laughed maniacally, and then promptly had to run off and email Mike Norton about some secret Christmas surprise she'd been working on for me (whenever I asked her about it, she'd shake her fist at me and tell me I'd better "dummy up"), and she just chortled non stop about it all weekend. So, finally I know what's so funny.

It's an amazing present, and if you look hard at that pic, you'll realize that at probably something averaging $5 an ornament, a pretty expensive one, too.

There are no words for how delighted I was when I saw the tree, or how big and dopey a grin I get on my face every time I walk past it.

I can't wait 'til Christmas when I can see what else I got! :)

Bane bulletin

As SuperGirlfriend alluded to in the comments threads of I've got your number on the wall, down below, I got hold of Bane's mother briefly at work today. Bane was, at that moment, getting ready to head off to the doctor's and couldn't get to the phone.

According to Bane's mother, they never answer the phone if they don't recognize the name in the caller ID box. This would be fine if they had voicemail or an answering machine, but as they don't, I'm thinking their system lacks vision. Or something.

Bane's a pretty sharp guy; I'm coming to be of the opinion that his intelligence is the result of a mutation.

Anyway, apparently the big lug was okay this afternoon. I'll try and call him again tomorrow and see what happened with the doc today.

I hope he gets his ass back to work soon. Nobody else there appreciates the HeroClix I have on top of my monitor.

"Tenser!" said the Tensor

Can't be held responsible
she was touching her face
I won't be held respondible
she fell in love in the first place
For the love of me
I cannot remember why
we thought that we were wise
and we'd never compromise
for the love of me
we did not believe
we'd ever die for these sins
we were merely freshmen

That damn song has been in my head since Saturday. SuperGirlfriend and I were out driving around and it played on one of the local stations. I hadn't heard it, or given it a moment's thought, since whatever summer it was big back in the 1990s... and now I can't get it out of my skull.

Usually I can exorcise these things by going out on the 'net and finding out who recorded it, what album it was on, and when it came out. However, when I do a Google search on the lyrics I remember (see above) all that comes up are a couple of sites where other people have also written down the same lyrics, apparently without having any more information than I do as to who actually recorded the song or when it came out.

Frustrating.

I mean, I like the song, pretentious though it is. I'd just like getting it the hell out of my head more.

Well, shit

(modified late Monday night, after work)

I keep sitting down to do this post, and I've had this constant string of two, three, five minute time wasters keep popping up to drag me away from the keyboard again. It's aggravating because, of course, I'm running under the whip; while my shift at work doesn't start until 11:30, the vagueries of the local mass transit system require me to catch my bus in less than half an hour. So those two, three, five minute time stealers are just PISSING ME OFF.

The last one -- I'd just gone into Blogger to log on when I heard this huge racketing crash come from somewhere behind the apartment.
So I got up, cursing, and went out to the kitchen. Didn't see anything at first, so I laboriously unlocked the back door (it has two locks; opening them from inside is a pain, from outside is nearly impossible, and it's all futile, since the back door is half glass and anyone who wants inside badly enough can do it fairly easily, so we're just frustrating ourselves, but I digress) and stepped out onto our tiny phone booth sized back porch... and still didn't see anything... until I noticed that a large piece of plywood we've had propped up against the left wall was now lying prostrate on the porch floor itself. Well, there's the crash, I thought to myself... and then noticed that the far left panel of SuperGirlfriend's big grill (which hasn't worked for a while now) was smashed into tiny little plastic fragments, apparently by the downward passage of the top edge of the plywood.

The gas tank for the grill is right under that panel. It didn't look damaged. I did what I could to check and see if it might be leaking, but I couldn't hear or smell anything. I guess it's okay.

8:36 am and I have about fifteen minutes...

Mostly, what I wanted to do with this entry was draw attention to the restored link scroll on the right side of this page. When I first jumped from my previous blog A Brown Eyed Handsome Man to this one's first incarnation, I did it specifically to shed a couple of trolls who were aggravating the crap out of me over there. And at first I put up the links scroll, but within a few days one or two people who had been lurking at the old blog without posting showed up and proclaimed how easy it had been to find the new page, simply by using a search engine to look for links I'd had posted to the old one. So, I ditched that link scroll.

I'm on better terms with one of my former trolls now, and the other one recently sent me a note saying he was resigning from the troll business, so I figure, what the hell. It's not like anyone pays a lot of attention to this thing anyway, but I may as well maximize my chances.

If you're a BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER fan, I've got some stuff for you. Slayer's Handbook Part I and Part II are specifically designed for fans who, like me, may have wondered exactly how it is that Spike and Angel can both declare they don't breathe while lighting up cigarettes, or why vampires who can see perfectly in total darkness nonetheless light their underground lairs with torches.

On the other hand, BUFFY fans who believe the seventh and last season was brilliant, flawless and in all ways wonderful should check out my review of that particular season to receive the bitch slapping they so richly deserve.

If you're just looking for a quick laugh, I recommend scrolling all the way down on the right to MISERABLE CARTOONS OF THE EARTH, and checking out the links there. My stuff is always badly drawn, but usually pretty hysterical, especially if you're a superhero comics fan like me.

Anyone interested in seeing any of the stuff I've worked up over the years to try and break into comics writing (back in those heady days before an old college buddy turned pro comics writer libeled me all over the Internet, pretty much torpedoing even the dim, tenebrous, all but nonexistent chances I might have had at one point) should scroll down to Miserable Comics Scripts and Proposals of the Earth, where you can feast your brain on such gems as my Fantastic Four 2099 proposal, which was rejected unread by an editorial staff that had begged its readership for ideas for more 2099 books... apparently, they just didn't want any they might have to pay someone for.

Silver Age superhero fans may well enjoy 16 pages of script for Team Venture, a concept that Mike Norton and I collaborated on long ago and far away.

For grim n' gritty Modern Age fans, here's 7 pages of Amazonia, a concept I created specifically for Nancy Champion and I to work on long ago. There's also a few pages of an alternate draft, , a few more pages of yet another alternate draft, and finally, the Amazonia timeline. Unfortunately, I don't have any of Nancy's lovely pencil sketches or page layouts to share, which would be much more fun to look at than a lot of typing.

Finally, the grimmest, grittiest thing I've ever worked on, Seraphim 66, including not only links to the central timeline and character descriptions, but also ten pages of really badly drawn stick figure page layouts!

And if that hasn't tired you out yet, well, there's MORE. Robert A. Heinlein fans can check out Robert A. Heinlein, Mark Evanier, and Me, or the more straightforwardHeinlein: The Man, The Myth, The Whackjob, or even go straight to Bill of Goods to watch me get the crap smacked out of me by a very articulate Heinlein fan who took great issue with the thesis of the previously mentioned article.

And on the subject of watching people beat the baby jesus out of me in semi-public, you'll rarely find a more unintentionally hilarious comment thread than the one where a bunch of Warren Ellis fans take me to task (behind my back, of course) for dissing their favorite comics stories, and I respond in kind. It's all in JOHN JONES: THREAT OR MENACE, and honestly, it's one of the funniest things I've ever written.

And, on the subject of funny stuff, if you like your humor decidely politically incorrect, you could do worse than read Ask A Bastard, where I make up idiotic questions and then answer them even more so. And, on the other hand, if you're high as a kite on goofballs, or just want to dress that way, you really should check out The Adventures of Father O'Brannigan, an indescribable textual round robin between Yr. Humble Narrator and the Late Great Jeff Webb, guest starring a great many fictional characters we had no right to abuse so strenuously, as well as a certain Eisner Award winning comics writer, who at the time we slapped out this thing was sitting at a computer four feet away from us working on a precis of his own and ignoring our demented chortling, much to his later chagrin.

I'm pleased with everything I wrote under my John Jones, Manhunter from Marathon, IL pseud a few years back. But only a few pieces there make me actually proud. Probably the best of those is Across The Fourth Dimension: The Evolution of the Superhero and the Superheroic Continuum.

And my time for this morning is up; gotta motor.

It's occurring to me that the title for this blog entry may be unfortunately apt...

I've got your number on the wall

Let's see. Briefly, while I wait to see if I'm going to be lucky enough to get the Bucs/Chicago game on my home set today, saving me a trip in the chilly autumn drizzle up to the local sports bar...


SuperGirlfriend's ex father in law died last night. It's a single down note in what has otherwise been an excellent weekend for us. Her former in-laws have little time for her these days, but apparently her ex father in law was a very sweet man who was widely beloved. His death has been coming for a long time, but still, it's hit SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids hard. So she made some food for the SuperKids so her ex won't have to cook for them today, and took over a large home made fruit & cheese tray, along with some suitable clothes for the SuperKids to wear to the funeral. Leaving me here to blog, without really having anything meaningful at all to say. But what else is new?

The one friend I've made to date in Louisville outside SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids is my buddy Bane, from work. He's seven feet tall and has all the normal problems that accompany giantism, including an overstressed heart and an ulcerated spine. Friday before last he slipped on the ice on a friend's porch and went down hard, and whenever he takes a fall he has to take it very slowly for several days to make sure he hasn't done himself a terminal injury. Last time I spoke with him was a call to his house from work on Wednesday. He said he still was flat on his back and if he didn't get better by Friday, his parents were taking him to the hospital for X-rays, to see if anything more critical was needed. I advised him I'd call him again that night when I got home from work. I've called him every day since and no one is picking up the phone... so that can't be good, since, as stated, last I heard he was flat on his back and his parents weren't leaving his side.

I'm very much hoping not to get another bit of bad news this weekend. I don't know Bane well, but he's a very kind, pleasant, smart, funny, warm hearted guy, who also happens to be a fellow comics fan and HeroClix player, and he deeply admires my HeroClix House Rules. I'd hate to lose him. He's only in his early 20s. People as big as he is tend not to last long on this earth, I know. Still, there are few enough people around whose company I enjoy, and most of them refuse to move to River City.

Let's see... since I'm no longer trying to dodge anyone, I've reinstated the old links scroll from my previous blogs. So if you're hankering to check out any of my many many articles on geek nonsense, or my ineptly drawn but still hilarious cartoons, or my unpublished short stories or novels, or even my fan fic (which Julian Perez has described as being "gold plated bat guano"; hey, reviews don't get much betta dan dat), then eyes slideways, spud... it's all on the link bar.

Eventually I'll probably be putting up links to all the blogs I like the best, whether they link to me or not (stuck up bastards).

Oh, at this point, I suspect the Angelfire version of this blog is pretty much dead. I just like this one better. I keep meaning to get over to that one and post a notice of that there. Maybe later today...

ADDENDUM: Sitting here watching the Bucs play from my couch is an odd feeling... one I haven't had since I cleared out of Florida. I can't get used to it, of course... next week we'll doubtless be back up at the sports bar... but it's a nice way to end what has mostly been a lovely four day weekend, full of good food, some early Christmas decorating...

...and FUCKING CHRIS SIMMS FUMBLING ON THE ONE YARD LINE, GIVING THE BEARS A TOUCHDOWN THREE MINUTES INTO THE GAME.

Christly goddam sonofaBITCH.

::sigh::

Well, I was also going to mention that in addition to whipping up an awesome Thanksgiving dinner, and several wonderful breakfasts since then, this morning Tammy made me 'monkey bread'... a dish I'd never previously heard of, in which she cuts up pre made biscuit dough into hunks, dips the hunks in butter, brown sugar, and cinammon, then tosses them all into a Bundt pan and bakes them into a kind of mosaic-cake that you pull pieces off with your fingers and eat. Delicious stuff. And now the whole house smells like cinammon rolls, which is lovely, too.

Now, if the Bucs could just win this damn game, and Bane would just call me and tell me he's okay, life would be pretty sweet.

Dreaming of a white Christmas

Yesterday, briefly, as I was getting out of the car with SuperGirlfriend over at a nearby grocery store, she pointed to a few sparkling flakes in the air and said "Look... snow!"

It was the first time I'd seen snow since 1997, and she knew what it meant to me.

As it turned out, 1997's winter was the last one I was to spend in Syracuse, NY. I'd gone to Syracuse in 1979 to attend the University there, and nearly instantly fallen in love with it. Syracuse is a city that alternates between the strange and the shabby; one of the four mid New York State cities that lie along the Rte 81 corridor, closely paralleling the one time track of the Erie Canal. Where Buffalo is much like Gotham City writ small in its hulking grey concrete facade, and Rochester and Albany are both oddly grimy and small town seeming for all their mid sized city bulk, Syracuse is a weird conglomeration of architectural styles and an even stranger stew of politics, with the far right wing conservative dairy farmers and blue collar workers of central New York mixing headily with the far left wing influence of the dozen or more colleges and campuses that make up so much of the cityscape.

Syracuse had a decent if not thriving economy for the first several decades after WWII; both GM and Chrysler built large auto plants there, and that brought in a pretty solid array of satellite businesses. In the late 80s, though, GM's first wave of plant closings hit Syracuse hard, and Chrysler substantially downsized its operations there as well. Syracuse's economy, for the most part, went belly up and to this day hasn't recovered. The local labor market collapsed, and by the mid 80s, anyone still employed in Central New York was doing their own work, as well as the jobs of two other people no longer with the company... and counting themselves as lucky that they'd survived the cutbacks.

I dropped out of college in 1984, filled with idiocy and ignorance as to exactly what conditions were like in the real world at that point. I'd just been spinning my wheels for the previous two years at SU, and finally reached my nadir of despair one day when I showed up for a Public Affairs class taught by a professor I knew passed out easy A's, and after looking the syllabus over doubtfully, realized I'd taken (and easily passed) the same class in my sophomore year. That nightmarish moment, as I fully realized I really was just going in circles which were gradually becoming narrower, bleaker, and more desolate as all my college friends and acquainances graduated and moved on, while I just stayed and stayed, hit me like a hammer.

So I dropped out and went looking for a job.

With no job search skills, what I ended up with was a position bagging groceries at a local supermarket named Peter's. Stephen King has written eloquently in his wonderful novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" about how there are only very young bag boys or very old bag boys with nothing in between; for much of 1984, I proved him wrong. I was the only bag boy at Peter's, or, I suspect, any grocery store anywhere, in my early 20s, and it was only the fact that I was still living largely within the confines of a college's student's economy that let me get along on the miserable pittance I was making doing it.

Eventually despair, and a very cunning National Guard recruiter, saw me enlisting and heading off to Basic Training in March of 1985. When I got back from that, I got hired at my favorite campus eatery, Hungry Charlie's, for a brief period, before I pissed off one the one manager there that no one else could stand either and got fired. I then landed a gig selling newspaper subscriptions over the phone... something I started out very good at, impressing my new boss inordinately with natural talent for talking people into trying the paper for six weeks free. Over the course of a few months, though, my effectiveness at the job abraded in direct inverse proportion to my growing empathy for the people whose home phones I was abusing and whose privacy I was intruding on every time I placed one of those calls. Eventually I got fired, which was okay because I hadn't been making much money doing it for a while anyway, and I started the temp agency rounds.

I did a lot of lousy stuff at that point... washing dishes in campus dining halls, packing boxes on an assembly line at a local pharmaceuticals warehouse, tossing newspaper bundles onto pallets in the press room of the Syracuse Herald Journal... until it finally dawned on me that I knew how to type, and was actually pretty fast at it. That upgraded the level of temp work I was able to get, and my life became nearly livable... for a brief time, until GM shut down its local plant, and the Syracuse economy pretty much imploded.

After that, it was back to blue collar work for a while. A job agency found me a permanent position at a place called Sunburst Optics, where I started out running a bank of machines that polished plastic lenses, and eventually, over the next three years, worked my way up to running the glass generator, arguably the most difficult and demanding of all jobs in the optics lab. Over the course of that three years I met my second girlfriend, Kristy, and although I hated the blue collar environment I was working in, and loathed most of my co-workers, still, life wasn't all that bad.

In 1989 Sunbust Optics finally laid me off. One of the managers there had taken two good hard swings at getting rid of me prior to that -- I wasn't getting along well with his brother in law, whom everyone else in the lab cordially loathed as well, but I've never been as good at hiding politically incorrect feelings as others are -- and eventually, despite all my efforts to do what turned out to be a pretty excellent job at whatever position he stuck me in hoping for conspicuous failure, he just said 'fuck it' and pink slipped me. Having given up on finding real grounds to term me, he finally just told me he was reorganizing and he just didn't have a place for me any more.

From there I collected Unemployment until the same agency that found me the Sunburst gig managed to place me at Sandy's Secretarial Service, out in East Syracuse. It was a long bus ride to work and back, but it paid better than any job I'd had to date. Unfortunately, times were still hard, and the owner of the company was a fairly loathsome bitch who didn't seem particularly comfortable employing anyone with a penis, so about a year later she laid me off, too. She was wilier in the ways of Unemployment than I was, also, and she managed to fairly effortlessly disqualify me of my benefits a few weeks after she kicked me to the curb. So times were pretty desperate for me and Kristy.

I went back to temping, and for the most part, my ability to type, along with Kristy's part time paycheck from Burlington Coat Factory, kept food on the table and a roof over our heads for the next couple of years. Around 1995, though, things went south for very nearly the final time for me in Syracuse... work dried up even further, and Kristy dumped me for a good friend of mine who had a steady job that made far more money than I'd ever even dreamed about making.

My last two years in Syracuse were an exercise in steadily mounting depression and futility. Had I not had an understanding landlord, I'd have most likely been out on the street very soon after Kristy broke up with me. Intermittent toting and hauling gigs from the lowest day labor temp agencies interspersed with occasional Unemployment checks gave way, over the last spring and early summer I spent in Syracuse, to me simply living off infrequent sales of Magic cards at local tournaments and whatever left overs remained in the fridge from the food my players ordered at our weekly roleplaying sessions. If I hadn't had a computer with an Internet connection and a few good friends (Nate, Kenny, Scott, and, at a distance, Mike Norton) I'd most likely have given up in despair.

Finally, in early July, my landlord kicked me off the cliff I'd been clinging to so precariously for years at that point. He'd made the disastrous mistake of letting the son of a previous tenant move into the building as a personal favor to her, since the kid needed to be able to post a permanent address or he couldn't get parole. I'd thought it was a big red flag that this kid apparently couldn't move back in with his mom, who had so successfully foisted him off on my building instead, but my landlord didn't want to hear that.

This kid had turned out to be as bad as I expected him to be and far worse than our mutual landlord had thought was possible; not only did he instantly resume the same dope slinging lifestyle that had gotten him thrown in the pokey in the first place, but, much more damning in my elderly Italian landlord's eyes, his primary customers/buddies were 20 and 30ish black ghetto hoods... and teenage white girls.

My landlord Mike shrugged off my complaints for several weeks, but when he finally rolled up one mid-week evening and saw the nightly curbside party in full swing in front of his building, with dozens of bling-laden black guys pimpin it up with an even larger number of very scantily clad white high school girls, and his new tenant in the thick of it, he went ballistic. Next day, he papered the doors in the building with eviction notices. I guess he figured, as long as he was down at the Sheriff's office filling out the forms, he might as well get rid of me, too, since I hadn't given him anything like a full rent payment in over a year at that point.

Years before that, as part of my family's never ending campaign to get me to relocate to Florida, my brother Pat had solemnly promised that if I ever decided to migrate southward, he would come up and get me and all my stuff and drive me down himself. So I made a phone call, and a week and a half later, he and my brother Sean showed up in a rented mini van. We crammed it full of books, videotapes, and electronics, left my comic book collection that wouldn't fit to be stored by my buddy Kenny, abandoned several years worth of furniture rescued from various street corners, along with a lovely bookshelf Kristy had given me for our first Christmas together, and the big queen sized wood framed bed she and I had bought together, and headed south.

I'm skipping over a lot of stuff, of course. Kristy's marriage to Gary had come in the months preceding my final exile, and I'm not going into how badly I had to twist their arm to get them to take in Cassie, the adult cat we'd adopted as a kitten based on Kristy's solemn promise that if I ever had to leave Syracuse, she'd take care of her. (I still miss Cassie; raised from a kitten in that second floor apartment, she must have been terrified at being uprooted and taken elsewhere. Kristy finally wound up farming her out to some home for cats out in the country, and my poor kitten is almost certainly dead by now, probably never understanding what had happened to her home or why I let it go down that way. Poor baby.)

I'm also going into no detail on how acrimonious things became between my landlord and myself over that last ten days in Syracuse. Having put the eviction notice on my door, he wanted me out that goddam minute and no later, and wasn't in the mood to wait another week and a half until my ride showed up. We went to court about it, where I learned that under New York State law it is illegal to pile up back rent and hold it over someone's head for longer than two months, among other interesting things. The judge in our case wound up ruling in my favor once he found out that all I wanted was ten days in the place until my brothers showed up to collect me; I doubt my landlord has forgiven me for that to this day.

My involuntary exile to Florida was hard on me. Being near my family was a mixed blessing, and the first four months I spent in Florida, living in my mom's spare bedroom, were a pretty fair facsimile of hell, since my mom had only recently remarried and my new stepfather deeply resented having another male under his roof who had a better relationship with his wife than he did. Once I found a job and moved into Tampa, things got better. Tampa is a pretty city and in many ways a good place to live, and I think it could be an excellent city indeed if it were just not irredeemably mired in the hellish swamp that is Florida, but unfortunately it is. The state of Florida itself is a hateful place for nearly any thinking being, especially one of Yankee stock. Southern accents sound charming on most women (but deeply retarded on most men) and living in a place where the default music in every restaurant is country, and there's a TV or radio tuned to a NASCAR race in nearly every public gathering place, is tough on anyone who has a functional cerebrum.

And I missed snow. Not all the time, but... okay, yeah, all the time, just especially around Christmas. I'm not deluded, and even back then I fully remembered what a pain in the ass the white shit can be, but still... there's something fundamentally unnatural about a place where it never snows, where the shifting of the seasons is mostly marked by a browning of pine needles and a curling at the tips of palm leaves. Celebrating Halloween in a place where most Halloween costumes are too bulky to wear in the 80 degree heat is disorienting and sad; Thanksgiving at 80 degrees is exasperating, and trying to get into the Christmas spirit when there are palm trees everywhere is just too goddam hard for me. It does get cold in Florida, and it often gets cold around Christmas, but a solid hard cold, even when it's down to 20 degrees, even at Christmas, just seems like an uncomfortable hardship if you can't get any damn snow to go with it.

So I missed snow, a lot, nearly always. And SuperGirlfriend understands that, just as she understood that back when we first started talking about me moving to Louisville, a large part of my reluctance was my inability to believe that it could actually snow in any place as Southern seeming as Kentucky.

But yesterday I saw snow in the air for the first time in eight years, and SuperGirlfriend assures me that I'll see more before I see spring again, and, well, I can't wait.

We were planning to break out the Christmas decorations tomorrow. Prior to this year I've always had an easy, casual contempt for those who decorate for Christmas before it's even December, but I've lately realized that Christmas is the best time of the year, and we get too little of it anyway. I still curl my upper lip at those who decorate for it before Thanksgiving is over, but I'm now on board with moving into Christmas as soon as possible after the turkey has been carved. And since we get the SuperKids back for a few hours tonight, we're going to let them help us decorate.

So Christmas starts early this year in the Highlander household, and I can't wait.

Let it snow.

Looking around

Having done the very hard work of sleeping in this morning, taking a shower, and getting dressed, I've rolled up my sleeves to tackle some hard, sweaty blogging while SuperGirlfriend loafs idly out in the kitchen preparing a 12 pound bird and about eight other courses of Thanksgiving goodies. Christ, I spoil that woman.

A scattering of stuff, just from the microscopic section of the blogosphere I normally patrol:

Tom Tomorrow tells us Katrina isn't over by a long shot, despite the fact that the rest of the world seems to have shrugged its shoulders and moved on. Read it all. Remind yourself. Do what you can.

Billmon is one of the best liberal poli-bloggers we have, so it's very disappointing that he's been blogging lightly for the last month. Maybe he's depressed. God knows it's easy to get that way when you try and keep your finger on the American political pulse these days.

Alicublog is always worth checking out.

Bitch Ph.D. has a thread going discussing the best and worst movies of all time, and her lead off entry awards the title of Worst to Howard the Duck. I think she's nuts; the Duck movie is way better than most people give it credit for, or maybe I just think so because it was one of the Late Great Jeff Webb's favorite movies and it always reminds me of him. Whatever the case, you can join the debate over at her blog, if you like. I'm just trying not to get depressed by how many goddam comments she gets.

From Bitch Ph.d I also found this contest. You have to read a brief introduction, after which you can suggest names for an upcoming book studying the bureacracy underlying the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. I threw a few at him, but I doubt any of mine will win. He's offering a $20 Barnes & Noble gift card to the winner, although I'd be happy with a notation in his acknowledgements. Attention is everything, after all.

Bottle of Blog is, according to The Poor Man, the best blog nobody is reading. I think that's patently false, THIS blog is the best blog nobody is reading. But since nobody is reading it, I can hardly expect anyone to call it that.

Kung Fu Monkey is a blog I found recently and generally enjoy, although it's pretty clear that the blogger there, and his regular coterie of sycophants, don't enjoy my comments much, since I seem to be the equivalent of a large can of RAID in any thread I post to. I don't post there any more but I continue to check the place out, as not only can John Rogers write well, but he's an ongoing example to me of how I don't want to start behaving, if I should ever be lucky enough to manage to break into professional writing. Stuck up, self absorbed, whiney, defensive, unwilling to tolerate anything but the most abject toadying from all around me, gloating over my own successes while jeering at everyone who still has their nose pressed against the glass from the out side... I can see those seeds inside me, too, waiting to germinate the minute someone actually buys something I've written. I'd love to be a professional writer, I just hope I don't instantly turn into this big a load should it ever happen. Still, he's a funny and entertaining read.

Mike Norton's blog Miraclo Miles is always a fun and often enlightening read. He can't update it often enough for me, but that's just because I check for new stuff about eighty times a day.

Unqualified Offerings is always a good read, too, although I hate his color scheme. I found a link to a registry site for gamers there last night (you'll have to scroll down if you're looking for it) and will probably use it when SuperGirlfriend and I get seroius about recruiting some other grown ups to play in my RPG. Right now, with the holidays, that's definitely on the back burner, but we'll be looking at that more urgently when 2006 rolls around.

Tom Peyer is one of comic's best writers, and his blog Super Frankenstein is one of the gems of the Internet.

I try not to get depressed as I slip-slide around these various blogs. Wishing for more attention is always at least somewhat childish, if supremely human. Still, it would be nice to wake up one morning and find, like, 15 comments in a thread here from 15 different people. 72, on the other hand, would be a little much... that's TOO much attention. Can't keep up with that.

The secret of contentment is to be fine with what you have, and the secret of happiness is to somehow get SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids to love you. So nobody's got it better than me... and I'm going to go help SuperGirlfriend in the kitchen and stop bitching.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Judge me by my size, do you?

How cool would it be if I could use the Force in day to day life? Well, it would be this cool:

ME: Thank you for calling Monkey Boy’s Call Center From Hell. How can I help you?
CALLER: Well, I sent you a claim two weeks ago and today I got a denial letter and…
ME: No, you didn’t.
CALLER: I… didn’t?
ME: No, you didn’t get anything in the mail today about this account. You are not in any way concerned about this account. You can be about your business.
CALLER: I am not in any way concerned about this account. I can be about my business.
ME: Thank you for calling, have a great day.

Of course, then my phone would immediately ring, and it would be the hateful bitch over in Quality who listens to every call I take because she just loves to catch me doing something bad. That would go like this:

ME: Hello?
HATEFUL QUALITY BITCH: What the hell are you doing? I don’t even know where to begin with that call. That was so terrible! You can’t just…
ME: It was the most wonderful call you have ever monitored.
HATEFUL QUALITY BITCH: It was the most wonderful call I have ever monitored.
ME: It was so wonderful you now realize you will never need to monitor any of my calls again.
HATEFUL QUALITY BITCH: You are correct, I will never need to monitor any of your calls again.
ME: Good. Now go get me a Pepsi.

Then there would be those aggravating feedback meetings with my supervisors.

RHONDA: Well, your adherence isn’t all that great, and your hold time is poor. Plus, you’ve been giving out incorrect information a lot. Honestly, I don’t see how we can hire you permanently.
ME: Your lack of faith… disturbs me. ::making a throttling gesture with one hand::
RHONDA: ::eyes popping out:: ACKK glllggggg URRRGGGG glllkkkkkkk

It would come in handy other times, too. Like when you’re at Wal-mart:

CASHIER: I’m sorry sir, we can’t give you a cash refund for this Season 1 DEADWOOD DVD set.
ME: Why not?
CASHIER: Well, because this is an empty paper bag that someone has scribbled DEADWOOD SEASON 1 on in crayon.
ME: Well, what do you want from me?
CASHIER: Well, sir, we need the actual product you are seeking a refund for.
ME: No, you don't. In fact, this is in such perfect condition you should give me a bonus.
CASHIER: Yes sir these are in such perfect condition I will give you a bonus. Thank you for shopping at Wal-mart.
ME: Oh no, thank YOU.

It would be useful on occasion at home, too.

SUPERGIRLFRIEND: Were you surfing porn sites again after I left this morning? There was a lot of porn URLs in the buffer.
ME: There are no porn URLs in the buffer.
SUPERGIRLFRIEND: What are you talking about, look at this, www.blondeonblonde.com, www.hothousewivesdoingeachother.com, www.soccermomsgonewild.com....
SUPER DRAMA TEEN: Huuh huuh huuh. He’s trying to use an old Jedi mind trick on you, mom.
ME: Quiet! No! I wouldn’t! Never! Search your feelings, Luke! You know it’s true!
SUPERGIRLFRIEND: I know it’s true I’m going to totally kick your ass if you leave porn URLs in the buffer while the kids are here again, mister.

So, okay, when you’re living with four females who are definitely not weak minded, the old Jedi mind trick isn’t going to do you much good. But still, the rest of the time it would be really cool.