Gleiberman's article in EW on Pop Culture and The Dissipation of Empathy

NathanC posted a link to an Owen Gleiberman editorial on the Entertainment Weekly website in which Gleiberman, a longtime film critic/ reviewer for EW discusses his perceptions of the obsessions of pop culture and how they come back in mutated form in incidents like the one in Aurora, Colorado.

It's not a huge secret around our house that I don't hold Gleiberman's taste in very high regard, and you can pretty much count on his befuddlement when it comes to genre pictures (Jamie has had a subscription to EW since around 1995, so we've had opportunity to discuss the man's writing).

I won't say I don't echo some of Gleiberman's thoughts, but the more I thought about the article and it's constant accusations, backtracking on the accusations with a "I'm just saying" statement - the more I found it a bit disturbing.

I encourage you to pop over and read the article on your own.  It's free.

Let me clear the decks first and roll my eyes at Gleiberman's creeping assertions about fanboy culture and his ability to finally have a way to express his discomfort with the phenomena.  Exasperation with sci-fi/ comics/ fantasy and the culture around them has been an ongoing theme in his reviews for a decade.  He basically is both aware of and flustered by the fact that these people will not listen to reason when he can demonstrably prove his favorite Meryl Streep movie is of more value than Serenity.  So, in a way, I'm not all that surprised by the path he goes down here.  I'm more surprised that he bothered to point out so many other examples of media-influenced killers, basically only identified Holmes, and went on with the charge of associating fan culture with a breeding ground for mass killers.

That said, his definition of "fanboy" extends to "pretty much anybody with an obsessive interest in a bit of media".  Of course, he mentions local nightmare Charles Whitman in making the case, a person with no particular interest linked to any media, but who also killed a lot of people.  He dismisses the long history of disturbing, mass or serial killings (Devil in the White City, Lizzy Borden, the fact that modern police work, a lack of records and immediate communication meant people just used to disappear and nobody noticed, etc... et al....  anybody?  anybody?) believing that only Jack the Ripper ever got more than one person before 1950.

On the events in Colorado at the screening of "The Dark Knight Rises"

You see the phrase "we are saddened" expressed by PR wings when a tragedy strikes.  We can read between the lines and know that in many cases, the employees of the company may well be saddened, but the need to create a quick press release that admits participation while denying culpability is at the core of the statement.

But today, I am actually and truly saddened by the events at the screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Auroroa, Colorado.  As of this writing, what information I have found states that 12 to 13 people are dead, and many more wounded.  A gunman took the opportunity presented by a darkened theater and a room full of people with their attention elsewhere, and he took it upon himself to unleash horror.  Words fail me.

I arrived at work in a Batman t-shirt today and had not checked the news aside from the weather report.  Jim, the manager at the coffee shop, is a former comic geek (and now a barista by day and a reservist soldier on the weekend.  Great guy.) asked me if I was wearing the shirt "because of Colorado".  And then he saw my blank stare.  "You haven't heard..."  And he explained what he knew to me.

I'm not buttoning up the sport shirt I'm wearing over the bat symbol.  Batman didn't kill these people.  And despite my misgivings about some of the messaging about Batman and taking the law into one's owns hands that I expressed yesterday, part of why I think I can continue to embrace Batman as symbol is that Batman is , at the end of the day, a statement of defiance against cruelty and terror.  I haven't seen the final installment of the trilogy, but I can say that in mining the Batman mythos of the past 70 years, what Christopher Nolan dug up was the ability of a man to confront fear and let it pass over him and through him and let it become nothing.  In Dark Knight, we saw what seeming chaos looks like as a man wants to watch the world burn, and the choices we can make, even supposedly the worst of us, in those moments where we're put to the test - whether we give in to fear - those moments matter for all of us.

So, I put on the shirt with a smile on my face when I got dressed today, but now I'm wearing the shirt in mourning.  And, if I'm allowed to use the word, in defiance.

Be prepared for American politics to go crazy today talking about how the other side made this possible.  But those are cowards seeking an opportunity.  Nobody made this crazy person pick up guns or smoke bombs.  This was a person looking for an excuse and an opportunity.  This is when we decide how we'll react, and how we choose to respond shows who we really are.

Today we should be looking to Colorado not for answers, nor for blame, but out of respect for the dead and wounded.  I am very truly saddened, and I am very truly sorry.

No News is Good News?

You know what I'm a sucker for?  The news.

You know what I haven't seen in the past 10 years?

There's an article on Yahoo! News (your place for breaking info on the Olsen Twins' fashion faux pas) about CNN as a Zombie news network.  

The conclusion:

And it may be that CNN's legendary objectivity is part of the problem. The network has always prided itself on covering the news with an even hand, but more partisan networks like Fox News and MSNBC have stolen away viewers by taking sides in the growing culture war and offering strong opinions with a conservative or liberal slant. CNN may win on journalistic integrity, but they're losing on passion.

Well, not for me and certainly not for anyone I talk to.  I may slant left, but I won't watch MSNBC because I don't need the news spun to me so that I'll nod like a muppet meeting the celebrity guest when Rachel Maddow comes on to tell me how smart we all are for agreeing with her.  


No, I quit watching CNN because they quit airing the news.  We all know that.

A round-up of things (Cap Soldier Dad, UT political cartoon, Batman in his Lambo)

Hi guys!

Over the past few days I've received a few links from you guys, and I guess its appropriate to comment.

Cap Homecoming

If you haven't seen the video of the little boy receiving a visit from Captain America for his birthday, and then learning that the unmasked Cap is the dad he thought was in Afghanistan where he's serving, then you really need to watch it.



An amazing and poignant moment, and a reminder that the US military is a volunteer military of men and women who are also fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. Here's to all of our Captain Americas coming home.


Yes, I saw the Gawker article and cartoon.  Yes, that's The Daily Texan.

Yes, The Daily Texan is the student paper at UT Austin where I went to school and currently work.  Yes, its embarrassing.

I have literally no idea what the cartoonist was thinking, but contextually, just the use of the word "colored", which is only used in Texas in a weird, gallows humor sort of way to suggest backwards thinking, tells me that this cartoonist was trying to make a point which never quite made it into the strip, and instead just made UT's daily student paper look backward and racist.

If the cartoonist was trying to make a point about how the matronly and condescending media is telling the story by framing the story to a child-like audience to scare them, then...  okay.  I guess I get it even if I don't buy necessarily buy that interpretation.  You'd pretty much need to be handed a few sign posts to get you there.

From looking at the rest of the cartoonist's work on the Texan website, all of her strips (if you want to call them that) are terribly inept and seem to fail to actually convey anything other than a general sense of "I watched CNN last night" and a bit of anger at someone running for student government*.  Frankly, political cartooning is hard.  The skill to create icons and symbolism to convey your opinion or some greater truth with a 2 second glance is hard to come by.  Even among comic nerds, political cartooning gets a certain level of respect for the difficult task it represents.  This student gets an F in cartooning.

But, pulling Eisner's work would mean The Daily Texan would then need to either fill that space with another cartoon (and lord knows how hard that would be to find), or run an ad for Forbidden Fruit or Tom's Tabooley or something.  I just wish the editor or faculty advisor had been able to make a better decision before letting this see print.

Update:  Eisner more or less admitted she screwed up the cartoon.  


Yes, I saw that a guy who owns a Lamborghini apparently likes to dress up as Batman

And I saw that the cops pulled him over for having a bat-symbol, I believe, as his license plate.

Several comics sites talked about the guy, and who can blame them?  A dude who owns a completely amazing black Lamborghini dressed himself up as Batman and drove around in the car (with the top down), pretty much doing what every single person in the world has always wanted to do.

Some were saying this guy does this for kids or a charity or something.  Really, I don't know why he does it, but he's okay in my book.


Speaking of Batman

Here's every window cameo on the 1960's Batman program with Adam West and Burt Ward.

And how can you go wrong hiring Andy Devine to play Santa?  I will tell you:  You cannot.


My Personal Bug-a-Boo of the Day

Mixing historical figures with genre tropes is getting played out.  Especially when you can tell that neither the artist nor the person writing the article (a) realizes this, or (b) realizes that this one in particular was done a long time ago and better as "Tales from the Bully Pulpit".

No, I don't care about the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter movie.


Thanks to everyone for thinking of me and sending me links!  Keep them coming.


*dear students:  these elections will never matter anywhere, to anyone but to sad people reading grad school applications in basements

Superman Custody Feud

The story surrounding the Superman legal custody battle is fairly complicated stuff, and there are actual legal minds out there in the blogosphere and in my own readership who can tackle the topic with better accuracy and understanding.

In case you don't know:  Two young men in 1938 signed away the rights to Superman to National Comics for under $200.  The idea was that they'd then work on this strip in this relatively new medium of comics.  Then it became a smash success, eventually bitter feelings grew between Siegel & Shuster and National Comics.  Since the 1950's, its been something of an ongoing legal feud, and its been in litigation again since, oh, I'd say 2005.  By this point Siegel & Shuster have died, only Siegel leaving any heirs.  National Comics became part of Time Warner in the 70's and its a big ol' mess.

The Siegel's likely now own "dude freaking out in left-hand corner"

It seems that Warner Bros., who owns my cable and phone line, Bugs Bunny, Time Magazine, CNN, Entertainment Weekly, The Wizard of Oz and small sections of our brains, presumably, has basically asked the courts to step up and resolve the issue of legal ownership of the Superman character once and for all.  I would guess that at some point the company looks at the ledgers and needs to ensure they don't spend more on lawyers' fees than they stand to make by owning the character.  I also don't blame them, nor would I blame the Seigels for wanting to get this settled.

So the internet might be dead by the end of the day today

Hey, all four of you who read this site.  

If SOPA passes today, that may be the end of this blog.  Just FYI.  If it does pass, I'd have to likely not just stop posting, but may need to pull this blog and the archives of League of Melbotis offline.  And forget tumblr.

Basically, its going to make 95% of what I do and talk about here not just a risk to me (of a felony, not just a law suit), but to any of you who might link back to me.

I've written to my congress people, but they're from Texas, so if anyone is waving a $20 bill their direction, they'll be insisting Jesus pre-ordained SOPA and anyone who doesn't love the bill hates America.

So, you know, now would be a good time to write your local congressperson and see if you can't shake the tree a little.  

Funny.  This really wasn't how I was expecting to end this blog (I assumed one of us would die while saving orphans from a submarine fire), but The League is not going to jail for posting pictures of Superman online without the express written consent of the NFL or whomever.

I think the good folks at Get Your Censor On can help fill in some of the blanks.

Enjoy your internet full of nothing but Kim Kardashian updates.  

@#$%

We're not crazy about the SOPA Bill

I've censored the following, in protest of a bill that gives any corporation and the US government the power to censor the internet--a bill that could pass THIS WEEK. To see the uncensored text, and to stop internet censorship, visit: http://americancensorship.org/posts/6377/uncensor

I don't ████████████ ████ it in for the ████ or the ████. ████ █████ █████ ████████. But ████ I do ████ a ███████ ████ is the ████ █████ ██████ ████████ ████ █████ ████ █████ 95% of the ████████ on the ████████ a █████ █████.

No, you ███████'t be █████████ ███████████ ██████ or ██████, you █████. But ████'s █████████ now is ████ a ████ has ████ ███████ ████ █████ an ████████ ██████ of ███████ ██████ ██████ ████████████ █████, █████████ ████████ █████████. If you ████, ███████████, a ██████████ ██████████ ████████, go █████ and ███████ ████.

I ██████ █████████ ████ ███████.

This Moment in History: Qaddafi dead

Today I saw reports that Libyan leader/ dictator/ state-funded-terrorist-supporting quack Muammar el-Qaddafi (I'm going with the NYT's spelling) had been killed in a clash in Libya between Qaddafi's dwindling forces and the uprising against his regime.  On the elliptical at the gym, I watched Anderson Cooper trying to make sense of video footage he'd received of a bloody-faced Qaddafi, apparently just before his death.  And here's an article on the whole, ugly, final day of Qaddafi's life.  

Our younger readers will not necessarily remember Qaddafi as the bogeyman to the US that he was back in the 1980's.  But his participation in bombings of airline flights inform a bit of why it seemed logical to the US populace in 2003 that perhaps Saddam Hussein was supporting terrorist action.  Many of us remember Qaddafi in association with bombings such as the one at Lockerbie.

I also recall our repeated attempts to bomb Qaddafi, which eventually led to his retreat from the world stage as the US sent sorties of F-111's over Tripoli, strategically placing bombs into the bedrooms of his various homes.

I was in history class when we discussed how and why we'd bombed Libya.

I won't mourn the man, but just as I am uncertain that I was uncomfortable with the festival atmosphere that followed the death of Bin Laden, it doesn't feel like anything to celebrate.  It just feels like is something that never should have happened to begin with.  I dunno.  I guess we'll just have to differ on that.

Steve Jobs Merges with Infinite - Makes Shinier and More User Friendly

A lot of ink will get spilled over the passing of Steve Jobs over the next 72 hours.  And it'll all be deserved.

The man was as near an Edison as we were likely to see in our lifetimes, the personality and face which didn't necessarily do the heavy lifting back at the lab, but whose clear vision and ability to reach people where they lived made it possible for Jobs to push technology in bold and daring new directions, and ask the competition to keep up.  Like Edison, I'm sure Jobs had his Teslas, but I don't have any interest today in dwelling on the man's foibles or issues.

What I can remember is standing in a strip mall store with my parents and brother and then bringing home an Apple IIe that changed our household and within a couple of years, the classroom full of Apples in middle school.  And then the first Macs with the flying toasters.  But let's not kid ourselves.  It was the sleek Macs that came after the candy colored iMacs, those wildly powerful things in white and black casings.  Then the Scandanavian design of Mac product circa 2001.

The iPod suddenly made those piles of cheap discsman players you were constantly battling with utterly obsolete when it landed, and then Apple changed the media distribution model from the scummy BS of Napster to the legal and oh-so-Apple world of iTunes.  The iPhone stretching out your capabilities beyond the tri-corder and communicators of Star Trek with their sleek faces, and "Jesus, how did they do that?" interfaces and designs that you couldn't believe, and as if they knew how your mind sifted through information better than you, yourself.

So, those guys were hiking the Iranian/ Iraqi border?

I've kind of/ sort kept an eye on the story of the three Americans who were held by Iran for the past few years after they, apparently, strayed over the Iranian border whilst out for their morning constitutional.  I, too, had been concerned for the welfare of my fellow Americans caught in a potentially deadly situation playing out on a global scale.  But, I admit, my sympathy for the situation dropped significantly when I figured out today that the three had been hiking the Iranian/ Iraqi border.  To which I say:

...wut?

How has this not been a part of the story?  Why is this buried several paragraphs down in every article where the information actually does appear in some form other than "hiking along the Iranian border"?

I guess I know now why the Iranians thought our friends may have been up to no-good shenanigans.  Hell, I'm not sure I don't believe they were up to something.

This sort of story really drives me nuts (in which we ponder how some people are lousy rats)

This story is making the rounds (thanks to those who sent me the link), and in this world rife with grisly, horrifying examples of man's inhumanity toward man, perhaps its small potatoes.  Maybe.

The news story is about a mentally disabled gentleman in Missouri who has had his Superman collection stolen out from under him, and while, yes, the Superman angle is what got me there, it could have been his teaspoon collection.

Meyer was tricked out of about 1,800 of his favorite Superman comic books, some dating to the 1950s. He also lost many of his favorite collector's items: lunch boxes, an old-time radio, a Monopoly game and television set — all Superman-themed. The loot is worth about $4,000 to $5,000 in total, according to a friend who also collects. 

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_1056e17b-2eb0-5967-a84a-85f35b4338a5.html#ixzz1XEXrCO2m

But, basically, this gentleman, who seems to be able to care for his pets and himself with a less-than-great-paying career has managed to somehow amass a considerable Superman collection.  Running into an old colleague, the colleague came over, cased the place, then returned under the guise of wanting to watch Superman movies with him, then cleaned out his more valuable items.  Its just...  it's just so low, you know?

I think that its just such a first-world bit of evil, and so unnecessary on the part of the perpetrators.  Sure, there are crimes I read about all around the world that I can't get my head around where people come off far worse, but this is just...  so unnecessary and casually cruel.  You have to be a pretty serious rat to pull something like this and still get to sleep at night.

Anonymous Commenting

The New York Times ran an article on anonymous commenting and how its starting to wear a bit thin for news organizations. 

Maybe in 2005 the comment section made some sense.  Maybe.  Frankly, I get nothing out of finishing an article on the local kid's bike race and seeing the latest comment posted was about how Obama is a secret Muslim, that we can blame everything on Big Business, or that things were better back in the past when we all lived in black and white TV shows (apparently).

Really, Estate 4.1 has turned the entire enterprise of reading these comments into an art form. 

There's no doubt that news sites were hoping to build a web 2.0 world where communities thrived on their websites, but its been sort of like putting a bird feeder out to maybe watch some Blue Jays and realizing in a month that the thing is completely full of really stupid but furious hornets, and if you try to spray them, that's just going to make them mad.

Back in March I opined that I thought DC Comics was wise to remove comments from their blog. I've seen a few people call them out on this as recently as Comic-Con, but I have to think those people never actually read the comment section and saw the bubbling cauldron of fear and loathing that the comments had become.

I also have no idea why DC bothers to host its own message board which is an even viler hive of scum and villainy.

Every once in a while, I ponder anonymous comments here at this site. I've been very, very lucky that so few people comment here without leaving a sig on their anonymous comment (thanks, NTT!). And because I don't want anyone to have to post through a service they don't want to use, I keep anonymous comments available. But I don't like it.

Its very hard to have a conversation with someone if you don't know who you're addressing. And, I also know some of you post anonymously when you're being a bit pissy,* and that's just... well, its weird and not something I want to police.  But day in and day out?  Its not a big deal.

For news sites? I think the experiment if over. Letters to the Editor worked fine for a good, long while, and if you're likely to write a letter worth publishing, then its likely you've got something worth saying and you've been a bit thoughtful about what you'd say and hopefully worked out the type-o's.

I'm not even sure why news sites are dragging their feet or finding half-measures to seemingly slowly back away from the comment sections.  And I REALLY don't know why CNN thought a great idea was to have anchors read viewer feedback.  That's not balanced coverage, that's reading two or three anonymous jerks' opinions.**



*yes, I know exactly who that is.
**clearly, the right way to consume an anonymous jerk's opinion is through reading his blog.  amiright?

Netflix Price Hike and Why I'm Totally Okay With It

I saw the internet somewhat explode when NetFlix announced a serious price hike.  I actually received my email today, and it was about $2 more per month than I expected, but... 

In this age of modern technological miracles mostly aimed at instant gratification and self-satisfaction, there's pretty much nothing it seems we can't find to grouse about. Louis CK has a bit on how the world is now an absolutely amazing place, and nobody's happy.



I just want to point out: Netflix is a service that provides an enormous portion of American and International Cinema to either your mailbox or to your laptop for about the cost of two movie tickets per month. The sheer volume of choice and opportunity is... astounding. Its the library of Alexandria for movies. And, its been a semi-experimental operation, breaking old distribution models and assumptions left and right since its inception.

This is going to become one of those dorm room poster things, isn't it?

Apparently this is a completely unstaged photo that was taken during the riot in Vancouver after Bruins beat Vancouver for the Stanley Cup. In fact, the photographer didn't even know what he had until his editor showed him the picture.

You Canadians. You can't even riot without it turning into something sweet.

Dealing with the truth, journalistic integrity and the world of "choose your own reality"

yesterday I stumbled across a pair of articles that I thought intersected nicely.

First, I came across this article on The Backfire Effect.  I suggest you read it, its food for thought.  The core idea of the article is that presenting conflicting evidence to folks with a belief based upon faulty evidence, heresay, rumor, faith, conspiracy, etc...  doesn't convince the believer otherwise.  It merely reinforces that belief.

This shouldn't be a shock to anyone who has had the pleasure of hanging out with a conspiracy theorist.  Suggesting that 9/11 was not an inside job just makes you a sucker, fool and a patsy (or, in a worst case scenario, ONE OF THEM).  But it doesn't need to be the case that one bring up something as inflammatory as 9/11 conspiracies or as ridiculous as Hitler-UFO-JFK conspiracy theories.  Our everyday politics hinge on this entrenching of our beliefs.

Surely it can't be that all conservative beliefs are statistically and factually correct while all opposing liberal beliefs are wrong.  And surely it cannot be that all liberal beliefs are statistically and factually correct while all conservative beliefs are wrong.  Its not even a question of a "happy medium" somewhere between the two.  Occasionally, someone is going to be wrong.  One policy is going to reduce teen pregnancy and one is not, and statistics can help us figure this stuff out (anecdotes, while moving, are not hugely useful).

I know that I have knee-jerk reactions to all sorts of things.  The article points out that this seemingly innate desire to argue and fight over what we already "know" or are comfortable "knowing" is essentially part of human nature, and our responses likely have their roots in evolutionary biology (see: something I'll readily accept because I don't find the idea that we're fancy apes at all offensive).  But tell me that we've got all kinds of fossil fuel in shale, and I'll raise a skeptical eyebrow and quote you science I vaguely remember from middle school ( I honestly haven't read up on this issue very much).

This is basically how I see you people.  Well, me.  You're more like hobo chimps.

Yes, they printed that short story in which Superman says he's giving up his US citizenship

Sigh.

You can't explain this without giving away the whole thing, so... spoilers ahead.

I was going to cover this in my Part 2 of my Action Comics #900 review, but it seems the media is going coo-coo over this one.

No doubt, DC could have been handled better, but its also the sort of thing that you kind of have to expect will be taken absolutely the wrong way as certain parties re-purpose the one panel for their own means.  And that's too bad.

The upshot is that Superman realizes that he can't actually act on a global scale without being seen as an agent of the US government intruding on foreign soil.  In 2011, with a readership no longer comprised mostly of 13 year-olds with a mystical belief that America = Magic, this move actually makes more sense than Superman just buzzing into any airspace he likes and with no expectation of an international incident bubbling up (by the way, they have played up the "international incident caused by Superman's appearance" angle on numerous occasions).

The story is basically: Superman hears that there are pro-democracy protests going on in Tehran, so he hops over to Iran and stands with the protestors (literally stands and takes no action as any action could go wrong or be taken as the start of hostilities).   For anyone actually reading the paper in our world, unsurprisingly the Iranian government of Superman's world declares Superman's appearance to be undue meddling from the West, and the visit causes an international incident.

With a mix of satisfaction that he did achieve his goal of supporting pro-democracy protesters and concern regarding how his appearance is being used on the international stage, Superman comes to an unhappy decision regarding his stated citizenship.

Mindful of what he thinks he should be doing versus what he thinks will happen if he did this again, he has to tell the US Government "look, you guys are great, but I'm not going to be responsible for starting a war and I need to help people all over this rock you call Earth."  Its not about turning one's back on America, its about a modicum of self-awareness when one is a super-being who sneezes off nuclear weapons.

I've been asked before it bothers me that in Superman Returns the only mention of Truth, Justice and the American Way was shortened to "Truth... Justice... All that stuff".  And I've always said that it doesn't really bother me one way or another.  The entire catchphrase was added during a particularly jingoistic era, and when you consider Superman as a globe-trotting, occasionally space-faring alien for whom borders and local politics are at best an inconvenience, I think it makes sense he likes the American Way, but he can't necessarily be as efficient as possible if he's having to show his Visa every time he crosses a border.

And so this is a bit different from dropping The American Way from the Superman's motto.  While I get what people decide they want to say "The American Way" means (and they aren't necessarily wrong*), that's not what the story is talking about.  Its about whether or not rolling a nuclear missile draped in the Stars and Stripes into Tienanmen Square is or is not going to cause the US some political grief.  Or, in fact, if Superman need really be beholden to the US State Department or any US service.

Mostly, I don't think DC was wrong to define Superman's citizenship, or a lack thereof.  It wasn't a slam on the US or US policy.  By even trying to answer the question, in a lot of ways, the 9 page story was a bit of fan-wank.  These are the sorts of questions that keep comic geeks awake at night.  "If there was a catastrophe in North Korea, would Superman risk war between the US and North Korea to go in and help people?  Should he be beholden to Homeland Security travel warnings?"  That's the question the Superman of the story was addressing.  Frankly, its the sort of anarchic thing Superman might have done in his earliest, most-free-wheeling days when we didn't think of Superman as Dad/ The World's Oldest Boyscout and/ or the writers weren't worried about being called on the mat by Estes Kefauver trying to drum up some political drama.

I am guessing, however, that certain outlets are having kittens today about a couple of panels in a Superman comic.  Which is kind of hilarious.  Their beloved Superhero (whose comic, I assure you, they will not have read) has turned his back on America!

By the way, these sorts of little homily stories show up all the time as filler in issues with extended page counts.  Likely, the story won't get mentioned again anywhere else. And, no, I didn't think that the story was particularly necessary, and if they were going to do it, it could have been handled much, much better.

Funny thing is:  I think if you heard Batman didn't recognize borders in his quest for justice, you'd say "right on, man.  That guy is a BADASS.  Rock'n'roll!"  Little harder to do that with Superman (one of his co-creators, by the way, was Canadian, so chew on that for a while).

*we can discuss whether the US has a divine destiny or is particularly magically blessed some other time

In which I recommend Schools Let Bigger Kids Beat Up Smaller Kids

A video meme is making the rounds in which a fairly big kid is seemingly just standing there and a smaller kid bounces up to him and within a few seconds goes from annoying twerp to slapping the bigger kid, taunting him while their peers look on.  From the look of the video, it seems the twerpy kid got his friend to record him as he decided to demonstrate his alpha maleness over a target he must have believed would not fight back.  The big kid is heavy-set with red hair, a sort of blank expression...

You can see the video here, although the video has become controversial and keeps getting pulled down.  (So, I apologize in advance for the racy ads on this site, but I was tired of looking for the video).  You can read commentary all over the internet.

The video, which lasts only a few seconds, takes an odd turn when the big kid moves in, picks up the smaller kid, and then slams him into the concrete.  The big kid then wanders out of frame while the smaller kid gets up and hobbles, seemingly shaken (if not injured), toward the camera.

If I don't sound particularly sympathetic to the smaller kid, its because from 5th-8th grade, I was the big kid on infrequent occasions.  And I was witness to many more incidents with other kids who were just trying to avoid trouble, and I can't tell you how many incidents almost exactly like the one in the video played out in hallways and locker rooms when adult supervision wasn't around.

Being a big kid (6'2" by 8th grade) who people think won't hit back leaves you in a weird spot.  Those little kids are counting on the fact that if you DO decide to hit back it will be seen by your peers and adults alike that you took a swing because "you can't take it" - and that's a character flaw.  And even if that kid is hitting, its going to be seen as being somehow unfair to that smaller kid when you do smack him back.  There's this odd balance of "oh, well, the little kid couldn't actually hurt him" that comes into play, and it becomes this unreal set of rules that an alarming number of adults seem more than willing to play along with that if you're big, its your responsibility to just take it.

For example, if you're wondering what happened in the aftermath?:  the big kid got suspended, and may possibly have legal action taken against him.  There's no reported recourse against the smaller kid.

I am certain that in today's atmosphere of litigation and child psychologists the "appropriate" response is to run off to tell a teacher or an adult whenever you're unhappy.  But kids aren't stupid.  They know that getting an adult involved has an effect 100x worse than just standing there and taking it.  That little twerp is just going to be back at school the next day making sure everybody knows the big kid ran to tell the teacher because he was too much of a wimp to defend himself.  Yes, he has terrible parents.

Its unorthodox, and its hard to draw the line, but its hard not to believe that two important lessons couldn't have been drawn from by these two kids had the video never made its way online and this thing had just ended in that breezeway.

1)  The Twerpy kid would have learned exactly what line he crossed and thought twice before shooting his own mouth off
2)  The Big kid would have learned that you can actually stand up for yourself in ugly situations, and that may be one of the most important things you can learn in this life

By punishing that kid for, frankly, not taking it, what does that boy learn?  He learns that (1) he is forbidden from solving his own problems and needs to just deal with the ensuing humiliation, and that (2) he should be paralyzed with fear when challenged - lest he make a move and the consequences become infinitely worse than getting punched in the face.  

Now, of course, you can't advocate student-on-student violence, so don't hang that on me.  But what you can say is that there's video evidence, and anyone who was ever in middle school should be able to understand what they're looking at.

Here's the thing:  I can tell you exactly what happened after the big kid walks out of frame.  He cried like a baby.

I got in my first fight when I was about 12, and it was terribly odd.  I was sitting on an electric box in front of my house and a kid I knew, one grade beneath me and with whom I'd eaten graham crackers and played soccer, showed up with an older kid at my house.  The older kid must have been watching movies because they quite literally informed us they wanted to "rumble".  We had just been sitting there, and not talked to those kids in a couple days.  After we'd had a good laugh at the word "rumble" (which, I assure you, did not help), the older kid goaded my buddy into starting things off by going after me.  

The rest was just a blur of two chubby kids in glasses slap-fighting.  I distinctly remember the fact that my buddy ran away and I was told I'd won, but I just went into the front door of my house and cried.  It was - as I figured out from watching A Christmas Story, wherein Ralphie finally loses it and beats up the bullying Scoot Farkis he had yellow eyes!) - a pretty common reaction to kids fighting, once the adrenaline wears off. 

I hit middle school shortly thereafter, and sure, I was big, but it wasn't like I was out telling other kids "I'm the fastest gun in the west, and ain't nobody going to knock me off this hill".  I was a goofy 12 year old who liked X-Men comics, Mr. Spock, Batman and robot novels.  I played the tuba, for God's sake. 

If you don't want to get into a fight, and you get drawn in, winning isn't any better than losing.  You have to already know that the minute you take a swing, you're going to be asked to pay for something that you did not start, but which, as they say...  you did finish.  Its bewildering, you've just broken promises to your parents, of codes of conduct for good kids, and seen your attempts to lay low resulted only in extending the inevitable.

The monkeysphere for most people is terribly small, and in middle school it usually consists exclusively of your immediate circle of friends and that one girl in your math class you can't figure out how to talk to.  Likely because I was such an enormous freak of a kid, I never felt like I needed to prove to anyone that I could intimidate somebody, and likely due more to nurture than nature (I had been told since toddler-hood that I could hurt other children my own age were I not careful) I spent more time making sure that swinging an arm to tell a story, or even falling over due to tripping over my own feet, would not mean injury to someone else nearby.*

Fights in middle school have consequences, and those kids who decided to bait me and looked for a fight didn't really get how much more trouble it would be for me at home if I got sent to the office for fighting.  ie - Kid, you may be annoying, but you have nothing on the creative punishment combos of interminable lecturing, grounding, and removing of comics that will last for weeks or months if I wind up in the office.

But, yeah, every once in a while a kid, and often a kid you knew pretty well and had been friendly with right up til that moment, would make this bizarro decision to earn his bones by taking on a much bigger kid.  Upon occasion, that could could sometimes be me.** 

I don't recall ever actually getting any of my classmates clear over my head, but I do remember holding one kid by the top of his head while his short little arms smacked me around the shoulder, and folding another kid in half against a bench in the locker room.  Usually, it just wound up with me pinning the other kid by the throat, which almost never got them to back down.  But, no matter what, it was always awful because it was so confusing.

But I did learn - when there isn't a coach or teacher around:

• decide what your line is
• let them know they're about to cross it, even if it sounds cheesy and they think its funny
• be ready to commit (because if you never do anything, you're all talk, and that's bad, too)
• or:  I found waiting until you're alone and then telling the kid "do it again, and we have a problem" was useful, although it often meant the kid would try to save face for a week by telling everyone you "lost it" and "couldn't take it", in which case a laughing, "oh, he practically wet himself" and alerting the crowd exactly what really happened usually got the final word in

And, frankly, that wound up working pretty well for me.

This all sort of ended before 9th grade, so I was a little surprised to read these kids were 16, an age by which most kids would have had enough trial and error.  By 16, I'd also moved, quit wearing Spock T-shirts (because...  girls) and people generally didn't know me at my school.  By my last two years of school when they did know me, I guess that stuff was all pretty much in the past.

So am I endorsing letting kids just duke it out?  I don't know.  But I also think "zero tolerance" policies are the shelter of cowardly and lazy administrators unwilling to make hard decisions and responsibility.  And as much as I also detest bullying, I'm not sure that the school administrators who decided to punish the bullied kid here aren't also bullying in their own way.

*I attempted physical bullying once, and it went poorly.  I was trying some BS Robert DeNiro stuff and slapped a kid lightly on the cheek, which sent his glasses sailing, and I remember watching in horror as his glasses shattered to bits.  I remember looking at the kid absolutely  horrified and making it worse yelling: "Jesus Christ!  You had GLASS in your glasses?"  My head was full of images of, had my finger caught the glasses going the wrong way, the poor kid with his eyes full of tiny glass shards .

Looking back, I can't believe what a goody-two-shoes I was.  I remember sitting down with the kid (who was just sobbing like crazy) and getting his home phone number so I could figure out how I was going to pay this kid back for his new glasses I figured I'd have to buy.  Well, apparently he was due for new glasses anyway or something and it all worked out.  And I still remember saying, before hanging up the phone, "Man, for god's sake, get plastic lenses.  You're going to lose an eye."

**it was also sometimes one of my pals, in which case I often just stepped between them and held the kids apart with firm reminders about detention

So, apparently there's life out there in space

So, apparently NASA is saying that they've found the fossil evidence of alien life in a meteorite.

You can read the article here. 

So, upon realizing what I was reading, my immediate reaction was a sort of weird, physical thing where my body went cold and I felt sort of nauseous.  You get this, right?  I mean, these findings don't just suggest, but they are fairly significant evidence - there is something else out there.  Even single-celled warbly things are something.  Our planet is completely covered in single-celled warbly things, so it makes sense that there are chunks of Earth flying through space with bits of amoeba and flagellates embedded somewhere in the rock.

Now, of course you sort of have to believe in fossils to buy the evidence, and given the current state of things, it seems more likely that someone will cut this guy's funding and/ or burn down his home and office rather than suggest that fossil evidence means anything, but I tend to be completely amazed that scientists (the people who spent their lives dedicated to figuring this stuff out, and not you - the person who saw this thing once on the Discovery Channel), are going to go ahead and put their names in with this review.

Completely amazing.

Christchurch Earthquake

We've been watching the tragedy unfold in Christchurch, New Zealand via news reports and social media. 

While we're also watching events unfold in Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere...  and we're trying to keep up with it all, in the morning please see if you can't send a few dollars to the Red Cross to assist with the situation unfolding in New Zealand.  Right now the NZ wing of the Red Cross site is down, but it may be up by the time you're up in the morning.

Click here

SOTU, Eraser, Fantastic Four

I write to you, a man who has just finished watching the 2011 State of the Union Address in a Courtyard Marriot in Waco, Texas... a man who has eaten some really awful Chinese food at a building that once housed a proud fried chicken joint I liked in middle school... a man who was delighted to realize his mid-range hotel had a full bar with a bartender...

Anyway, I did watch the State of the Union. Whatever. I don't get much fired up about the political game these days, so much as I get fired up about participating in government, and I consider those two separate things. ie: I will always vote, and I work for the state partially because I like the idea of serving something bigger than myself or the needs of shareholders. I am too old and cynical to take the bait when it comes to platitudes regarding education and social infrastructure that, once push comes to shove, won't be funded (even at a fraction of the cost of robot dog missles or whatever we're cooking up this week...) nor do I get excited about what some young congressman from Yahooville reads from a teleprompter, as if these thoughts occurred to him as he sipped a martini and listened to the address on the radio.

I voted this year. I'll vote again next year and the year after that. But enjoying the right to vote is not, for me, the same as engaging in politics as hometown team spectator sport.

You know, I definitely over-romanticize old school corrupt politics, political machines like Tammany Hall and political conventions having more meaning than the Golden Globes. I never lived any of that. And its probably wrong to long for the days when the corruption was mustache-ier and people got stabbed more often during ballot counting. But its not like its hard to guess who is buttering whose bread based on watching who claps for what during these clown shows.

I didn't watch the response because... I can think the words "everything he just said was a damn, dirty lie" to myself. Now, I missed Bachmann's response but the Twittersphere seemed positively incandescent pondering what they were seeing. Sadly, by the time I got over to CNN from the Telenovella I'd tuned to (the hair on those ladies is so SHINY), Bachmann was done using her words and Headline News was literally already back to talking about Jersey Shore.

That's okay. AMC is now showing Eraser, which I made Jason and Jamie go see in the theater during its original release because (a) Arnie, and (B) Vanessa Williams. Mostly B. Man, this movie is everything that went wrong with 90's action movies by the end of the decade. But, you know, it features lots of Point B.

And... right. Today Marvel Comics released their latest issue of Fantastic Four, a comic I like in theory much more than execution unless Mark Waid is writing the book (Sorry, rest of industry). In this story, one of the FF was scheduled to die, a move so routine in comics as an attention grabber, its quite literally true that we now expect the "death" of at least two major character per universe per year, followed by a much less celebrated resurrection.

I only read FF for about two years back in the mid 00's, and during that time, one of the FF died, too. So, you know, it happens.

Ah, wait. Bully has a terrific post on the topic.

I actually did hit a comic shop today after my meeting. Bankston's here in Waco is a sister store to Austin Books and Comics as its owned by the brother of the owner of ABC. Anyhow, they have a terrific selection, its a really fun shop, and I always have to make sure I have a gameplan when I walk in the door, because its a place I could easily go crazy.

Yes, they had the issue of FF by the cash register, all wrapped up in a black bag, a la "Death of Superman". And I looked at it and looked at it... but the thought of actually buying it never crossed my mind. Death of major characters has officially become so commonplace, even a well-marketed and well-placed copy of the comic can't pique my curiosity.

I did, however, grab Superman/ Batman #80, which has been getting some great notices and penned by Chris Roberson (and issue 79 rocked my socks).