Briane Pagel's Blog: Thinking The Lions, page 37

10 Minutes About When You Should Quit Writing (And Other Things Websites and Blogs Made Me Think About)

I started "10 Minutes About" a while back when I couldn't find any good book podcasts or websites on the Internet, and decided that rather than be part of the solution I'd make it somebody else's problem. (That's how that saying goes, I'm sure.)

Since then I've actually found a couple of good sites/podcasts that talk about writing, books, and literary stuff in general in a way that's neither boring nor pretentious.

First the podcasts.  I actually tried my hand at podcasting a couple years back. How hard could it be? I thought. I had a digital recorder on my phone, and a voice.  Only the results were terrible, and I decided that unless and until I could actually do it right I wouldn't bother doing it all.

"Right" in terms of podcasting, at least for me, is hard to describe. Some podcasts are technically proficient but annoying to me.  Snap Judgmente and The Moth are very popular podcasts that I can't stand.  They seem like they're trying to hard.  I don't know how else to explain it.  There's a certain tone to people who try to hard to be entertaining, and both of those podcasts have it. Overly produced with hosts and speakers doing voices and the stories arranged just so.  They're what would happen if Wes Anderson made a movie about Wes Anderson doing a podcast about Wes Anderson movies.

At the other end of the spectrum are the podcasts that are more like mine was: terrible and lo-fi.  People seem to think (about blogs, books, podcasts, etc.) that if they can think/type/talk -- communicate in general -- that their communications are inherently interesting.  I don't know how many times I've struggled to read a post or listen to a podcast while thinking make it interesting!  It's not that the story has to be inherently interesting.  David Sedaris writes articles about looking at a turtle as he stands on a bridge, and it's interesting.  The Pop Culture Happy Hour people at NPR, who I used to listen to, also talk about nothing, and it's interesting.

So you can do nothing, or just sit and talk, and be interesting.  But most people aren't, at least in the podcasts I listened to.  They were just people talking, people with unoriginal, uncompelling thoughts presented in a blah way.  I listened to about 10 different podcasts, each of which ended with my thinking you sitting around talking about stuff isn't interesting.

With that, I did find two podcasts of people sitting around talking about books 'n' stuff that were worth listening to.  The first is the Book Riot podcast.  There are three people on the podcast (the website has their names; don't ask me what they are.) I've only listened to two episodes of it so far, but both of them were pretty entertaining.  The latest one had the three discussing for most of the time their reactions to Go Set A Watchman, and while I don't intend to read the book (and find the story of how it got published way more interesting than the story in the book), the discussion of the book and its circumstances and how they reacted to it was pretty interesting.

The other podcast is All The Books!, and it's from Book Riot, too. Of the two, I so far like this one better.  It's just two women, discussing a bunch of books they've read or which are being released, or both. But they do so in an interesting and fun and intelligent way, so it's worth listening to.

The website, finally, is "Literary Hub," and I've only just discovered it.  I can't tell yet if it's a site that collects writing about books and writing from other sites, or if it has its own writers, or both, but it's been interesting so far.  There are articles on 'weird' fiction (like Vandermeer and Lovecraft and Gaiman), unappreciated authors, and things like the one I read today, "The Unemployed Life Of A Professional Writer," in which a poet/novelist/children's book author describes how she's trying to make a living doing that (she's been published, traditionally) while also trying to find full-time jobs to pay the bills.  Spoiler alert: it ends with her selling copies of her books at yard sales.

The writer, Shelley Leedahl, talks about wondering whether she should stop writing:

I was at a launch in Victoria recently where an author read in a T-shirt printed with his book cover image. Writers are making book trailers. I’ve read in an organic food market, with fruit flies buzzing around my head, and was damn glad to have the opportunity. Time to go where the people are—not just to libraries, and bookstores. It’s the hour for new audiences, and new sales’ strategies.
We try and we try. It’s exhausting. Honestly, I feel that if this book doesn’t make even alittle stir—and frankly, earn me even a modicum of income—it might just be time to stop scribbling.

My first thought on reading that was why? Why would you ever stop writing? But the more I pondered her actual situation: trying to land a job at Home Depot and get public assistance to buy steel-toed boots for that job, while also booking her own readings at friends' houses, the more I understood why she might, finally, decide to not write for a living.

And that made me wonder if I could just stop writing.  I have slowed down my writing a lot, especially this summer. I used to maintain several blogs plus write books and short stories.  This summer, I have written one short story.  Since May.  And I blog more, but nowhere near the level I used to.

In part, I feel as though I am written out.  I wrote a story a day for the past year, and I have been (slowly) editing that, and I did that while editing my book Codes AND starting a new firm back in January, and so this summer I've let myself slide a bit and done more reading at night instead of writing.

But even with that, I'm constantly thinking up ideas and jotting them down and thinking about what my next project might be, when I begin it.  I'm not sure I ever could give up writing, which of course is a silly thing to think because for years and years I never was a writer.

I wrote my first couple of stories in grade school, and then through high school I didn't write much at all, aside from some poems.  I didn't write until I was about 21 or 22 and took a creative writing class, and I don't even really remember why I took that.  After that, I wrote a bunch of short stories and two novels, and then didn't do anything again until probably 2005 or so.  Since then, the past 10 years, I've been pretty prolific.

But that's only 10 years, really, out of 46.  So to think I could never stop writing is to freeze myself in time, because the me that loves to write is the me that used to focus on learning musical instruments, or the me that spent an entire summer teaching himself card tricks, or the me that organized softball teams for a few years, and so on.

I'm not like the lady in the story; I'm not thinking about giving up writing, and when I don't write these days it's not because I find it too hard to make a living at.  But having read the story and spent the day wondering whether I could quit writing, I realized that I could. 

I worried, for a bit, tonight, whether realizing that I could quit was the first step in actually not writing anymore.  Sometimes I'm like that. I used to be way way more in shape than I am now.  When I lost a hundred pounds in six months back in 1993, I started on a fitness regimen that I stuck with for years.  Every other day I worked out, rain or shine, for at least 30-60 minutes.  I ran, mostly, running 5, 6, 7 miles even when I wasn't feeling that great.  (I once ran 6 miles and felt terrible the whole time.  The next day I went to the campus nurse and she said I had a terrible case of pneumonia. I nearly had to be hospitalized.)

One day, in law school, some friends called me up and asked if I wanted to go get a couple beers at the Memorial Union Terrace on Lake Mendota.  I said I had to go running first and might meet them later.  Then I was tying my shoes and getting ready to go and I thought Wait, why don't I just go? What am I in training for? Nothing.

That was the beginning of the end: it was a long slow slide to where I am now, helped by heart attacks and bees and asthma, but now I've put a lot of the weight back on and my idea of exercise is getting up to get the remote.  The realization that I didn't have to do something ended up with me not doing it as often.

On the other hand, knowing that I can quit at any time makes it easy to go on.  The last time I ever went running was about 4 months after my heart attack.  I went to the health club and just started jogging around the track, to see how far I could go.  I'd been walking and lightly jogging for four months and wanted to see how healthy I was.  Each lap I thought I could quit now but I guess I'll keep going.  I did lap after lap after lap, and got to 8 miles before I had to quit because the playroom was closing and I had to go get Mr Bunches and Mr F.  Otherwise, I might never have stopped running.

So I guess I could quit writing anytime I want, and it's too early to see how that knowledge might ultimately affect me.

That's way more than 10 minutes, but I was on a roll so I kept going. After all, I didn't have to stop.

I'm pretty much the best scientist I know, except for the part where I'm not actually a scientist and don't really know very much about science. Have I said "science" enough in this title? Science. SCIENCESCIENCESCIENCE enough.

There's a story on Geekologie this week about a 3-D printed house, which looks like this when it's almost finished:



According to Geekologie,

The company says it takes about 9 days to produce the modules. That is pretty impressive. Even more impressive considering the home is capable of withstanding a magnitude-9 earthquake and is constructed using a proprietary new building material that is "sourced from industrial and agricultural waste, is fireproof and waterproof, and is free from harmful substances such as formaldehyde, ammonia, and radon."

Now, I'm not going to do what I usually do and claim that someone stole my idea (they did) and that obviously those home-printers read my blog (they do). Instead, I'm going to point out why the existence of this house makes me a better scientist than pretty much every actual scientist, including Neil DeBuzzkill Tyson. The reason is this:

SCIENTISTS ARE STUPID.

I say that because I originally envisioned using printers to build houses back in about 2009, when I wrote Santa, Godzilla & Jesus Walk Into A Bar.  That story (which you should read) told the origins of Xmas, which came about when Wenceslas built his "Xmas" machine.  The "Xmas Machine" was a version of a 'Santa Claus machine,' and either way is a machine that scientists hypothesize could be created which would take raw materials and convert it into finished products.

A 3D printer, although they didn't call it that back in 2009, when I listened to a "Stuff To Blow Your Mind" podcast about Santa Claus Machines, and learned that scientists feared Santa Claus machines, because not only were they worried they would simply replicate themselves (huh?) but also the podcast people said it would be "the end of design," that once we had machines that could make anything from simple raw materials everything would be homogenized and identical.

I thought exactly the opposite.  In an afterword to my book, I talked about Santa Claus machines and noted that once such machines existed, there would no doubt be apps that would let us print things in different styles:

Apps for our Machines would be huge, of course: You’d need an app for a ham sandwich, and an app for a car, and an app for a house, and machines of different sizes. Your average person, for example, would probably have a machine no larger than their refrigerator – for making household goods like clothes and meals and such. 

And then I said:

Contractors would have the big machines, to pre-form houses.

*sigh*

I love what I do.  And I love my life all the time and have almost no regrets.  But sometimes I think back on how little attention I paid in science and math classes, and wonder whether, if I could have foreseen how much I would love that stuff, how amazing it is, and I realize I might well have become a scientist if I'd done that.

For a while I seriously considered it, senior year in college.  I took an astronomy class and loved it so much I thought about changing my major and getting a degree in what would now be astrophysics.  But I was four years into a political science degree and already 26 and applying to law schools, so I didn't follow up on that.

I'm a pretty awesome lawyer.  But I think I would've been a pretty awesome scientist or engineer, too.

Here's a shot of inside the house.


There are a lot more pictures of it if you're interested; click here. Also, go buy my book. It's the only Xmas book ever to feature a sexy cop, Godzilla, homicidal elves, handsome angels, and the Secret Army Under The Bed.  You could have Xmas in July!
   

Friday Five: Five Bands I Loved When I Was Younger (That I Still Sorta Like I Think?)

I suppose YOU'VE never worn Darth Vader socks
as gloves? LA DI DA Mr High and Mighty.Last week, Laws Of Gravity Liz threat-promised (it's a thing) not to inundate me with the bands she liked as a kid, apparently in retaliation for my talking about superheroes. Joke's on her: I have NO PROBLEM stealing people's ideas, hence this week's post, which is also inspired by my hearing the song Day By Day on the radio last week.  Or hearing about 15 seconds of the song before Mr Bunches turned the radio off.

"Why'd you do that?" I asked him.

"We don't sing along with songs," he said. "Only people on the radio sing." That is one of his many rules about singing, whistling, dancing, rhythmically tapping your thumbs on the steering wheel to the beat of Radar Love, etc etc.: These things are only done by professionals, on the radio or on stage. They ARE NOT DONE by Daddy.  It will dishonor him, something he learned by watching Mulan: when you do something he doesn't like, he says you have dishonored him, pronouncing the h in the word. Dis HAHN erd.

"Pronouncing The H" I think would make a good name for a band.  Anyway, here's the five:

1. The Hooters.  I have two distinct, and distinctly different, memories related to The Hooters.

One is listening to the song Satellite as I stood and waited for the bus outside my dorm room in November, 1987, my first semester in college.  It was very early, and I had to get to work at JCPenney, a job I wouldn't hold much longer after I dropped out the next semester.  But I remember that morning because the air was crisp and nobody was around and it seemed like Madison was entirely empty except for me. That semester was a tough one for me to adjust to, and the feeling of being entirely alone left me feeling peaceful.



The other memory is going to a Hooters concert a few years later, in the years during which I was a wastrel working nights at a gas station and generally hanging out doing almost nothing with my life.  We had gotten some tickets to the Hooters concert for free, I don't remember how, and I had gone with two of my friends, Mark and Rob, and also two girls.  One of the girls I really liked and had wanted to ask out.

When we were at the concert, we noted that the security seemed a little bit lax.  Rob said it would be 'totally easy' for someone to get on stage -- and we were in like the fifth row.  Then the girl said it would be totally cool if someone got on stage.

So I did it.  I edged my way up to the front row, and then to the side of the stage, and then got up on stage and walked towards the lead singer, who looked surprised but shook my hand before bouncers came out and led me off and then out the side door of the theater, leaving me to wait about a half-hour before my friends came out at the end of the concert.

I was feeling pretty cool, and I didn't (and don't) like concerts anyway, and I figured maybe I'd made some inroads with the girl.  She sat in back with me and Rob on the way home while Mark and the other girl were up front.  And about halfway home she started making out with Rob.

That's The Hooters for you.

2. Supertramp.  This was one of the first rock groups I ever liked, and I was only 10 when their album Breakfast In America came out.  I had that album on vinyl, and listened to it over and over as a kid, before moving on to their live double album Paris, which featured one of my all-time favorite songs, the Fool's Overture.



Nowadays I think they're only okay.  I don't know what the fascination was for me as a 10-year-old, but I listened to their music for hours.

I looked on Wikipedia and apparently most of the band is still together and touring. They don't seem to really have a pop culture presence, though.  I only ever had the two albums, but I remember liking It's Raining Again a lot, too.  Now that song's used (again per Wikipedia) during NASCAR rain delays.

3. The Cure. Another band that would almost be  an obsession, music-wise, and then almost entirely fade away was The Cure.  When I first heard In Between Days it was almost revelatory; there was something in the music's somehow wistful-yet-driving sound combined with the somewhat inscrutable lyrics that seemed to just grab me.  The Cure was music for kids who felt like they should be disconnected and surly but who couldn't really, because they were too comfortable and everyone around them was pretty nice.  What good is being a teen if you can't rebel against something? Teens need to rebel and if your life is a pretty okay one, your rebellions feel a little forced.

I was never a hardcore Cure fan; I got their greatest hits album , plus The Head On The Door, but that was about it. Still, I listened the beejeebers out of those songs.

My alltime favorite song by them: Close To Me:




4. Orchestral Manoeuvers In The Dark (OMD):  Sure, everyone (of my age or so) knows them because they sang If You Leave for the movie Pretty In Pink but I liked them before that: Junk Culture was the first album I'd gotten by them, and I bought the next two before drifting away from their music.  Last year out of the blue I suddenly thought of them again and began listening to a bunch of their older stuff on Youtube. I thought about maybe getting the album Junk Culture again but then I thought eh maybe not now and then I browsed around on Amazon for other stuff and then I went to bed so that was that.



I think my reluctance to buy the music is a combination of factors.  First, I'm cheap.  Second, I've been going through a nostalgic period lately, and I figure it's because the last 2+ years have been so challenging, getting extremely tough and stressful at times.  I probably have been feeling nostalgic not just for my teen years (which, while not terrible were not all that great either) but for any earlier times because the good times are fun to remember and the bad times help me remember that I've gone through rough patches before.  So while I like to listen to some of the music from earlier times (and re-read books, and re-watch movies with Sweetie) during times like this, I don't want to make the music a permanent part of my life now -- if only because it can serve as a relief valve now and in the future, by remaining linked to earlier times rather than soaking into tough times.

5. Men Without Hats This one sort of isn't quite the same as the others because really I don't care about the group at all, and know almost nothing about them, other than they made The Safety Dance which of course I loved because: the 80s, and also and more importantly I know about them that they made the album Pop Goes The World! which is one of the greatest albums ever made, hands down, an album so great as to make me listen to it enough that now, almost three decades after it came out, and a good 20 years since I owned the album (I have it on a cassette tape somewhere in the box in my garage), I can still remember nearly all the lyrics to all the songs in order.  And this is me! I'm the guy who can't remember if he ate breakfast this morning. (I checked: I did.)

So really I didn't care about the group and I still like the song, and it doesn't fit in with the title of this post at all but who cares? The rules is there ain't no rules. *snarls, gets into car ready to race for pinks*.

I first heard the song Pop Goes The World sitting in a hotel room in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1987.  My friend Fred, from high school, had enlisted in the Army right after graduation, and had gone into basic training.  The weekend we went to visit him was his first break from basic, so me and two other friends (Bob and Flan, short for Flanagan, his last name) got into Bob's Camaro-- Bob owned a Camaro! -- and drove to Kentucky to visit him.  I don't remember much about that weekend other than how tired I was.  At the end of the trip, it was my turn to drive and we were going through Illinois in the middle of the night and I began to hallucinate, as I'd been awake for about 48 hours.  I thought there was a giant rock in the road and swerved to avoid it, steering us onto the shoulder before coming to my senses.  I woke up Bob and had him drive while I slept in the car the rest of the way.

But I do remember being in the hotel room and eating pizza and watching TV; I don't remember if we could drink in Kentucky or why we hadn't gone out on the town (or maybe we did and I've forgotten?). We were watching MTV and the song Pop Goes The World came on and the next day, after I was back home and rested, I went out and bought it. It's probably my second favorite album of all time. The only reason I haven't gone to buy/download it now is I can listen to it for free anytime I want online.

I know you probably won't listen to it but here's the whole album anyway:



You should listen to it, though. It's awesome.

Picture Of The Day

Taken at "Little Park On The Mountain," last week.

This guy has really thought a lot about BTO and Ace Frehley

I usually steer clear of reading comments on most websites because I hate people and they're stupid, but every now and then one catches my eye, like this one that I read when I listened to New York Groove on Youtube last night.

This is the comment:

Sky Marshall 1 week agoGood album. Even some of the lesser songs still had potential. Call me crazy, but with a bit of song writing tinkering, Speedin Back to My Baby sounds like it could've been a halfway decent BTO song. Never mind the fact that BTO hadn't made a decent record since Four Wheel Drive, back in 1975 and by 1978, they were already a Greatest Hits act, after only 4 albums. But, maybe if Ace had sold that song to BTO in 1978, they could have used it as a B-side and it would've inspired them to write a few more, classic BTO style hits, before they slid completely off the record charts. Anything would have been better than the crap they were putting out after 1975. But that's history. We will never know what MIGHT have been.

That is 100% the first ever BTO/Ace Frehley fanfiction I've ever read.
Also New York Groove is an awesome song that I used to roller-skate to and you should listen to it.

10 (More) Minutes About "Footfall," by Larry Niven

I think one of the things I like best about Footfall is the sheer scope of the story.  It's fitting, I think, for an end-of-the-world story to have a giant cast and a universal reach -- in this case, outside of the galaxy and spanning 15+ years between when the story starts and when the invasion of Earth begins.

I like big sprawling books that you can really sink into.  People talk about "world building" and I vaguely understand/care about what they say, but world building like Larry Niven does in Footfall is rare.  There are characters and interrelationships and sidebars and dead-ends and all of it, somehow, serves the novel.

That's really a testament to the writing.  Take two side characters, John Fox and Marty something-or-other.  Originally, John is introduced when one of the characters, Roger, a reporter, is looking for someone to interview at the time the spaceship that ultimately invades Earth has been discovered.  Fox talks to the reporter about his concerns over a dam or something that threatens the Death Valley area, and the reporter listens more out of politeness than interest; he even says as much, given that the big story is An Alien Ship Is Headed To Earth.

That's kind of a throwaway moment, almost, except that later on John Fox shows with Marty. Marty  is first introduced as a dog-show breeder who is on the fringes of a survivalist group that ends up making their shelter right outside of the town located [SPOILER ALERT!] in the same place the US decides to pick to build its spaceship to fight back against the invaders. Marty drifts back into the story later on, leaving some friends in Los Angeles to go hide in the desert with John Fox.  This all leads to a scene where [SERIOUS SPOILER ALERT] Fox and Marty drive up to a ridge right after the invaders drop a 'dinosaur killer' asteroid that causes a salt water downpour in Death Valley. They watch the rain fill in what used to a be a sea bed and Fox makes a brief speech about how he fought nuclear power and was a fool, because had he allowed science to progress then the humans might have been able to fight back against the invaders, and he wouldn't be watching all the fragile, perfectly-adapted creatures of Death Valley drowning.

It's the kind of moment that could be preachy or overdone; it's essentially Larry Niven and his co-author Jerry Pournelle being almost didactic: they're hard-science guys who want people to be pro-scientific advances.  But it doesn't come across that way.  Instead, the message Fox and Marty convey is buried within a story, because it was chapters and chapters ago that Fox was even introduced, and Marty's just there as a sort of avatar of the reader, watching Fox.

That kind of large-scale writing is tough to do.  What Niven and Pournelle do so well here doesn't work as well in other books -- I gave up on Niven's Building Harlequin's Moon, as it was more science lecture than story -- but when it does work it's incredible to read.  The story keeps threading through these new characters and overlapping subplots and winding back, and even for a guy like me who has a hard time keeping track of characters, it's easy to follow.

That's 10 minutes.

Just some pictures from Friday and Saturday

Friday Five: Five Superheroes I Loved (Who I Don't Think Were Very Popular)

Ant Man opens today and I'm sort of confused because I can't tell if (a) the movie is good and everyone thinks it's good (b) the movie is bad but everyone thinks it's good (c) the movie is good but everyone thinks it's bad, or (d) whether I should care at all.  In any event, since we rarely get to the theaters anymore, I'll have to wait until it comes on Netflix and I fall asleep watching it on Xmas Eve, which is how I experience pretty much 99% of the big, non-Avenger, movies nowadays.

I am disappointed that Marvel didn't steal my tagline that I once proposed if they ever  made a movie about The Atom.  I have a whole idea for a movie ad for someone like The Atom, or Ant Man, in which they show you, say, Iron Man, then Thor, then The Hulk, and finally Ant Man, while a voice over says This summer, small is the new big.  THAT WOULD BE AWESOME. And even though Orange Is The New Black and its misplaced sympathy for the author who TOTALLY DIDN'T WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN DRUG-DEALING GUYS -- let's not waste any time rewarding or feeling sorry for poor little rich girls who got involved with bad boys and paid a very minor price for their thrill-seeking and then were 1000% enriched by it.

Let me go off on tangent here.  Piper Kerman is a drug dealer, okay? That's who everybody is making rich/lionizing with this series.  A DRUG DEALER. She was a spoiled rich girl who grew up to have a relationship with a heroin dealer and not just have a relationship: Piper Kerman HELPED DEAL THAT HEROIN and laundered money to make it more possible for more people to deal heroin.

HEROIN.

And since then, Piper Kerman has become some kind of poster child for society, getting awards and being made rich by the sensationalizing of her own downplay-my-wrongdoing-and-shrug-it-off fake memoir.  (Fake memoirs of rich women are all the rage these days, and making up stuff or minimizing the poor behavior of rich women can make you a rich liar yourself, right Wednesday Martin?)

Piper Kerman writes it all off as "I fell in with a bad, hard-partying crowd," and everyone keeps making her rich(er!).  When she was indicted her rich family had an emergency meeting to decide how much of its wealth to devote to defending her. She plead guilty but was allowed to remain free for five years because the federal government wanted her to testify in street clothes, not prison uniforms, at the trial of her drug-lord kingpin boss.  In the end, she got 15 months in prison for her role in the scheme; the bust that led to her arrest involved someone bringing 14 pounds of heroin into the US.  That's about $6,000,000 worth of heroin, on one trip.  I wasn't able to find out how much Piper Kerman got paid for glamorizing and minimizing her major role in a drug ring, apparently because rich white drug dealers are better at hiding personal information about themselves from Google.

"Drug Dealing
Is the New Debutante Ball"
Having made myself good and mad, let's try to blow off some steam with some superheroes that I loved.  As I started out before getting distracted by a drug-dealing rich skank, Ant Man is either a good or bad movie that everyone has weird opinions about. What I was surprised about at first was that Ant Man was being made, at all.  In this brand-conscious era, it's increasingly risky to throw billions of dollars at something people don't know about already.  That's why there'll be another Hunger Games movie even though the (awful, I assume) book series was only three books and there's already four movies. That's why we keep getting Spider-Man and Superman and Batman and The Avengers as superhero movies, with only the rare Guardians Of The Galaxy thrown in for variety.

It's even harder to justify spending billions on a movie if the movie is likely to suck; as I was saying to Sweetie last night, and as I say so often, most things suck.  If you look at, say, a library with 10,000 books in it, consider that those books represent the cream of the crop: they are the books that survived all the levels of publishing scrutiny/gatekeeping to actually get put out.  And how many of them are good? Not all of them.  About 10%, I'd say.  The same goes with movies, photographs, restaurants, etc: about 1 in 10 things is good and worth keeping around, by my estimate.

So if I was asked to invest MY billions into a movie, I'd likely not want to take a risk on Ant Man, who is probably beloved by, like, three people. I'd want to try to make Superman or something, where 99% of the people wouldn't say Huh? when the name was mentioned.

So it's good that they're making Ant Man because maybe it means people are entering a phase where we can experiment a bit more and not everything has to cost/make a billion dollars.

There's my second diatribe of the day.  Now for superheroes I liked that I don't think were very popular. In no particular order!

1. Blue Devil. Blue Devil was, according to my memories, a stuntman who got magically trapped in his blue-devil suit and had some powers based on that suit; he had a weird mixture of scifi and demons in the comics back when I read them, and the stories themselves usually had a humorous slant to them.  The one I remember most was one where there were aliens named "Leni" and "Jorj" (get it? Nothing funnier than riffing on one of the saddest stories ever written... I didn't realize that when I first read the comic, though. I thought they were making fun of Bugs Bunny's frequent references to Lenny and George.  I wouldn't fully understand the reference until I actually read Of Mice And Men and now I don't find them funny anymore. I find them sad.)

Apparently, that humor went away after a while -- as it seems to have done with every comic, judging by the few I read in the last 5 years or so.  Green Lantern fighting zombies, crises everywhere, demons: everyone is dark and disturbed now. Here's a sample of where the comic adventures of Blue Devil led, from Wikipedia:

He spends the "missing year" trapped in Riverrock, Wyoming along with the rest of Shadowpact. It is a small city hidden by a blood shield by an assembly of evil magical beings, called the Pentacle. There he meets, or rather meets again, Jack of Fire, a red, muscular demon. The entity is hiding a disfigured, bony face under a black bandanna, claiming to have been turned into a demon by the actions of Daniel. He further explains that the very same moment the demonic Neron granted fame and powers to Cassidy as the Blue Devil, the dead parents and siblings of Patrick were dragged from Heaven to Hell.

 Fun!

2. Ambush Bug: The Ambush Bug was another funny comic, and wasn't always a hero.  He started out as a comic foil/bad guy I think for Superman, before somehow heading into the future to fight with the Legion of Superheroes? That's what I remember, anyway.  He also had his own miniseries in which he battled a sock who was a sort of parody of Dr. Doom.

Hey, I didn't say I had good taste.  Ambush Bug had all sorts of possibilities that sort of got swamped in silliness.  He appeared to understand that he was in a comic book, for one thing, and was supposed to be completely out of touch with reality.  That sometimes made for funny and yet interesting adventures, but more often towards the end was just overwhelmed by 'lunacy' that seemed to try too hard.

3. The Legion of Substitute Heroes: I read the Legion of Superheroes comics regularly, and sometimes they had guest-stars or appearances from the Legion of Substitute Heroes, a group of substandard heroes with odd powers, like Stone Boy, who could turn himself into a statue.  The group was led by Polar Boy, who could make things cold, and who eventually made it into the real Legion.

While I liked funny comics more than the dark ones, as a kid, looking back again I think maybe the boat was missed here.  One thing that a lot of very funny stories have is a sort of twist on something sad that lends the comic antics some zing, like salting caramel only in a literary sense.  Catch 22 is hilarious whenever it's not heartbreaking.  The Hitchhiker and Dirk Gently books involved murders and the destruction of entire planets, and yet were funny while dealing with serious themes of a sort.

Comics seem to go only in two lanes: Supersilly, or superdark.  I'm sure there's a marketing reason for that, but it led to my disinterest in things like the Substitute Heroes when they just went too silly.  There's probably a great story about people who want to be superheroes but aren't quite good enough to do so, waiting to be told.

4. 'Mazing Man: 'Mazing Man wasn't really a superhero at all; the book was about a midget-type guy who found a helmet with a letter M on it and decided to become a superhero; he mostly helped kids around the neighborhood and hanging out with his friend Denton (a 'dog-faced' apparently human guy who wrote a comic book.)

The stories were interesting and sort of nostalgically sweet ones that I remember and like to go back and re-read; the comic was canceled after just 12 issues.  I'd say it deserved more, but sometimes things have to end to keep them from going bad.  How much better would our memories of Arrested Development have been without the muddled fourth season?  Or Seinfeld without that terrible last episode?  Like George Costanza, people should learn to leave on a high note.






5. Firestorm.  Finally, a "SERIOUS" superhero.  I liked Firestorm because of how cool his powers were, and because of how weird a superhero he was.  Firestorm was the melding of an athlete's body and mind with the mind of a college professor, through some kind of nuclear accident.  When the two joined to become "Firestorm" they could do something like reconstruct things on an atomic level to change one thing into something else, like a nuclear reactor into 10,000 hamburgers or something.

I'm not really clear on how his power worked, actually: I only learned about Firestorm near the end of my heavy comic-reading days, and so only read a couple issues in which he was a hero.  That's how I remember it, anyway.  (I checked on Wikipedia and learned that he couldn't actually affect organic matter before he became an "elemental" and the storyline got much darker.  Also, there's a new Firestorm now but I don't know anything about that.

Finally a reason to go to Manassas Virginia

Other than to see the birthplace of both Ravi Shankar and George Zimmerman, that is.

The NEW reason to go to Manassas, Virginia, is that my book Codes is available for purchase there, at Prospero's Used Book Store, which is, as their banner says, the home of "Used Books, Maps & Prints" [AND CODES A BRILLIANT SCI FI NOVEL BY BRIANE PAGEL] I'm sure they're going to add that any day now.


At least go click on the link and give them some traffic. Plus, you can order used books online, in case you like to buy used books. Which I do, as I mentioned the other day. It really does look like an awesome place to visit, in person. They have a potbellied stove!



I really think this makes ME the most famous person linked to Manassas, Virginia.  Did Ravi Shankar ever write a poem about clones and evil corporations? Doubtful. Did George Zimmerman ever shoot one? Probably, but it was in Florida so it was totally okay because it kind of looked like the book might maybe be African-American.  Either way, I come out looking pretty good in this comparison.

Here, by the way, is a poem by Ravi Shankar:
BuzzardsBY RAVI SHANKAR
Gregarious in hunger, a flock of twentyturn circles like whorls of barbed wire,no spot below flown over uncanvassed.
The closer to death the closer they come,waiting on wings with keen impatientperseverance, dark blades lying in wake
until age or wound has turned canterinto carcass or near enough for themto swoop scrupulous in benediction,
land hissing, hopping, tearing, gorging.no portion, save bone, too durableto digest. What matters cannot remain.
_________________________________________________
Which, not to brag or anything but I ALSO WROTE ABOUT BUZZARDS ONCE, plus  my story had cowboys.  
The point is though you should definitely get the kids in the car, take a long weekend, and drive to Manassas, Virginia, to buy my book in hardcopy at Prospero's.  Tell them I sent you!  
Also, Manassas' local museum has apparently a collection of bells which I know people will think I'm being sarcastic about but which honestly I would like to see.  Sure there's pictures of them online but that doesn't give you the full experience.

I'm impressed/frightened that my mind works this way.

So there's this road on the way to the grocery store where one day Sweetie had to stop to re-belt in Mr F, who is a regular Houdini even though we have a safety vest, two seatbelts, and two carabiners holding him in.

On this road where Sweetie had to stop was an owl sitting atop a chimney near a house.  Sweetie took a picture of it after Mr Bunches spotted it.  She told me about it that night, and we agreed that was weird but not entirely unheard of, that there would be an owl during the day and in our area. A year or two back a big owl took up residence near us and drew some local media attention.

Then, a couple days later, Sweetie reported they'd driven by it again and the owl was there again. "It's creepy," she said.  "It's like it's looking at me."

The other day, we were in that area again so I pulled onto that road, and it was there, again:




Sweetie again thought it was creepy, and I agreed.  The owl is kind of a creepy bird.  So to help her out, I said:  "Maybe it's not an owl. Maybe it's just a really short guy in an owl suit." But she didn't think that helped at all.