Get Out the Vote!

Hey, Americans!

It's DEMOCRACY TIME!

I've already early voted (thanks, local grocery store, for hosting), but if you haven't voted yet, get out there and have your say!

No matter who wins this election, let us hope that our president somehow doesn't have to just spend four years as the chewtoy for people who make their living making us hate each other rather than, you know, helping.

And try not to get into unnecessary, unwinnable arguments with people who matter.

By late Tuesday night we'll (probably) know the results, so take a breath, remain calm, and be glad that your government is not being dictated at swordpoint as it pretty much was everywhere on Earth for most of humanity's history.

How great is it that we don't just shrug and get along with our lot in lives, but expect ideas can be represented in a person and in a government?  That the extremism that took over our country was the idea that the people should get to have a voice?

I am a deeply cynical voter, but that's because my dream of a Mr. Smith going to Washington is dead and buried - and I've come to accept that no matter how smart or clever, a person is really just a person, and reality catches up with all of us sooner or later.  But I believe in the process, and I hope for the best with every vote I cast.

Also, locally, vote Prop 3.  Prop 4 doesn't make any sense.

Obviously, I don't need to tell you about the horrible storm and its aftermath

Holy cats, y'all.  I confess that I thought the storm, Hurricane Sandy, was going to be the bajillionth false alarm the 24-hour news cycle mutants had thrown at us in the past few years.  Keep in mind, I'm the guy who refused to leave the house for most of a Saturday because I thought I was going to see a tsunami hit Hawaii and then it was just some mildly choppy waves.  That was a tremendous let down.

In retrospect, that probably doesn't make me sound like a good person, and I probably could have kept that to myself.

But Sandy was and is all too real.  I don't need to tell you that.

I am a little disappointed that somehow Disney buying Star Wars seems like bigger news than the potential weather-related damage to our economy, infrastructure and political system, but: priorities, I guess.

Felix Baumgartner Space Jumps into the History Books

I had tried to watch this guy, Felix Baumgartner, jump several times, and he kept getting delayed.  So I was quite pleased when PalMatt posted to Facebook that Felix was about to jump yesterday.  I tuned in just as he was about to exit the capsule.

Holy @#$%

In case you missed it, Austrian Felix Baumgartner attached a capsule to some balloons, went up 24 miles above Roswell, New Mexico, and then tossed himself out and over the side of the capsule with naught but a parachute between himself and the record for largest crater formed by a human body.

It was AMAZING.

Reminder: Register to VOTE (in the U.S. of A.)

It's National Voter Registration Day!

No matter your political stripe, if you live in the U.S., you've had your 18th birthday, and you aren't in prison, it's time to put on your Civic Duty pants and get to the polls.

Seriously, people.  For most of humanity's history, "democracy" hasn't really been an option.  It's been mostly thugs assuring you that the state or some deity has instilled them with magical wisdom and to question that wisdom is a pretty good reason to cut off your head before you become a problem child.

Not so in America!  Here, we just yell at each other in all caps in the comment sections of newspaper articles or post disagreeable comments to one another's facebook walls.

We may forego the right to private political opinions at seemingly every juncture, but in Rome you had to publicly cast your vote.  Which sometimes ended very badly for the guy getting beaten up or murdered as he left the polling location.  That @#$% was CRAZY.

So.  The election is coming.  Time is short.  You have to be registered a full month ahead of the election, which is November 6th, by the way.

So get registered.

On Lance Armstrong and Pyrrhic Victory

Well done, anti-doping agency.  

You know, its too bad if Lance Armsotrong did dope.  It certainly left a lot of questions around his 7 Tour victories.  But here's kind of what I think:

It's a bicycle race.

Curiosity Mars Rover is Making Tracks!

Way to go, SCIENCE!!!!

We're making tracks on Mars.

Hello, Mars.  We R on U.

Here for many more pics

Go ahead and ask, David...

Let the Science Begin! Olympics. Mars. Tomorrow! This Moment in History

Let's get this party started!

Man.  It wasn't enough that I got to watch Usain Bolt win the 100m again, but UT alum Sonya Richards-Ross won the Gold in the Women's 400m.

I also watched a man with prosthetic limbs race in an Olympic foot race.

But after watching the Twitter Feed for the Mars Curiosity Rover the past couple of months, Curiosity came down successfully on the surface of our sister planet, Mars.

You guys, we live in the future.

I haven't gotten teary during the Olympics.  I've done my fair share of yelling and cheering and chanting "go go go go go go go" while watching races.

But I admit I got a little choked up watching the JPL crew high-fiving after the news that Curiosity had landed and we received the first images back from the rover.

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.

Sally Ride Merges With The Infinite

I am very sad to say that Sally Ride has passed at the age of 61 after fighting pancreatic cancer.

Sally Ride was not the first name of an astronaut I knew or heard (the first name I really remember is John Glenn.  I think the KareBear liked the cut of his jib or something).  But something about Ride stuck with me not just because she was the first woman in space, but because she felt always seemed like the embodiment The Modern Space Program.  She rode shuttles, not capsules.  She wore the blue jumpsuit.  She was a pilot, a space jockey and a scientist.  She was the Shuttle era and the promise it held.

We all grew up proud of the name Sally Ride, but it wasn't until I was older that I appreciated how amazing Ride must have been to actually win that seat on Challenger and the pressure on her to not just be as capable of her male colleagues, but much more capable lest anyone seize the opportunity to hold her up as an example of why giving her a chance was a mistake.  I cannot begin to imagine.

And Ride pulled it off.

She succeeded not just at NASA, but went on to teach at UC-San Diego, formed a company to create educational materials for young scientists, and served as a consultant in aerospace and defense arenas.

Here's to one of the real pioneers of the era in which I was raised.  You will be missed.

Godspeed.

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.

Happy 70th Birthday to Mr. Harrison Ford

Happy B-Day to my imaginary friend from at least three movie franchises, Mr. Harrison Ford.  On Friday the 13th he turned 70.  

Far be it from us at The Signal Watch to ignore the birthday of the Greatest Living American.

On the Announcement of MonkeyBrain Comics and the New Digital Model

You guys will have to forgive me.  My brain has been on vacation mode for several days, so while I was able to participate in the MonkeyBrain Comics kick-off press call (I KNOW.  Look at me all acting like a legitimate news source.), I was unable to muster an intelligent question during the MonkeyBrain Q&A.

The basic idea behind MonkeyBrain is as follows:

MonkeyBrain will be your middleman and promotions arm if you're a creator-owned comic that wants to start off in the digital world.  That said, this isn't for just any schmo off the street to submit their work.  MonkeyBrain is Chris Roberson and Allison Baker's effort to develop a direct-to-digital channel for creator-owned work.  It sounds like a non-exclusive, digital-print-rights contract that will enable creators to show up on Comixology on Wednesdays alongside players like DC, Marvel, IDW, and more.

You can read the press release here.

In short, it seems Team Roberson/ Baker looked at what was going on and saw a way to support independent creators by creating a channel for them to get into the same "newsstand" as the big boys.

The effort is the logical outcome of the past several years of (a) the big players not adjusting their model to take advantage of the ability for distribution of chancier works the internet truly provided (b) the infinite newsstand of the internet - but placing the comics where they'll be seen.

Ray Bradbury Merges with The Infinite

Like many of us English-speaking Westerners, one of the great moments of my youth was having a Ray Bradbury book put in my hand.  Oddly, it was Fahrenheit 451 and I was in fifth grade.  Most certainly I had an ambitious teacher, one who did not mind much if she shattered our cozy suburban world with a picture of dissolute marriage in an ossifying culture that was just our culture carrying on from our current trajectory.

It'd difficult to say how much of an impact the book had on me, and continues to have on me, as I've returned to it a half-dozen times, seen the movie a handful of times, and even consumed it in comic form (one of the few forms of print Bradbury would suggest would survive the end of books.  The end of ideas.*).

Just a year before Fahrenheit 451, my parents, knowing I had a thing for that red dot in the sky, took me to see a play of The Martian Chronicles, and the honesty of what it had to say about us shook my ten year old little self.  

Throw in Something Wicked This Way Comes and re-reading the Martian Chronicles two or three times and you've got the literature that left an indelible impression on a worldview.  It's completely fair to say that these books had a huge hand in shaping my perceptions, and absolutely they posed the questions that helped to lay the rail for the long haul of developing a moral perspective.  And that's the value of fiction, I think, when you're coming of age.

And, really, how many millions of us are there who understood where Mr. Bradbury was going with all this?  How many of us clenched paperbacks on the school bus or leaning up against the wall while we sat on our twin -sized beds and learned something about us that sounded perhaps deadly accurate even when wrapped up in spacesuits or demon carnivals or watching old women die in a pyre of novels?

Westward, Ho! Allison B and Chris Roberson flee Austin

In a day or two Allison B and Chris Roberson pack up and depart Austin for the untamed wilderness that is Portland, Oregon, where they will most certainly be eaten by a bear.

I shall miss their hospitality, and Austin in poorer for their departure.  It is an odd thing to find oneself in the company of a writer you truly enjoy and respect first, and then get to make their acquaintance as a family unit living in the same town.

Here's to a great family as they set off on an all new adventure.

Portland, be nice to these folks.   They're all right.   And please find them decent tacos.

Everyone congratulate my brother. He is engaged.

I'm going to forego a bit of our usual programming to raise a social media glass to my brother and Amy, who is now his fiancé.  That's right, my brother is engaged.  To a person.

so much more about this now makes sense

I would have a cocktail to celebrate, but I think I've had enough cocktails for a few days.  We'll have plenty of time to celebrate later and plenty to celebrate about.  Right now, I am just very happy for them both, and I hope their bliss can survive the knowledge that Amy will now be loosely related to me.  God help her.

We all thought Amy was probably a little too good for Jason, but whatever.  She will soon be good enough to get half his stuff.

I love my brother, and our family has come to love Amy as we've gotten to know her.  We could not be happier that she'll be, legally, one of us.  Gooble Gobble.

Strange days as we plunge toward the future, but I am thrilled for them both.  Y'all congratulate them.  They deserve the absolute best.

Signal Watch Post No. 1000

Can you believe it?  1000 posts.

I am sure all five of you readers out there cannot believe it, either.  Heck, some of you may have read upwards of 6-7% of what I've written here.

While he doesn't comment, I've come to learn that my most avid reader may actually be The Admiral (my dad).  Go figure.  The man doesn't care about comics, Superman, John Carter, Myrna Loy, or most of the rest of my content (well, maybe Cyd Charisse), but he still checks in every day to see what The Boy is doing.

Thanks, Pop!

As of 3/13/2012 at 11:30 PM:

• 998 posts (I'm pre-writing this to publish in a couple of days)
• 2487 comments
• 9538 tweets
• lord knows how many Facebook messages and comments (you're welcome, Zuckerberg, you and your $%#@ing IPO)
• 136,363 total hits
• My number one post -  "I'm Headed for Waco, also Some Lawyers are Pigs"  has over 4200 hits.  Between getting hits because of the cute pig pictures, and as people find Austin's "anti-some-lawyers I've-dressed-as-a-pig guy" interesting, the post continues to get emailed around a bit
• The second most favored post - "The Giant Eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg", I assume high school students keep Googling the phrase when reading their Spark Notes (4000 hits and climbing)
• My top five topics are:  
• Movies (207)
• Comics (185)
• Superman (147)
• DCU (141)
• Reviews (115)
• My "About" page has received 483 views
• By far the most popular thing I've placed on Tumblr. has been the Batman themed "sound advice" post with 1387 notes after 4 weeks
• Since starting this blog I have thought about the following dames this many times
• Gloria Grahame:  3428
• Cyd Charisse:  3267
• Nichelle Nichols: 5299 
• Myrna Loy:  4823
• Lynda Carter:  3212
• Flo from the Progressive commercials - ubiquitous.  She's in an ad somewhere right now, you cannot avoid her.
• Christina Hendricks: 34,943
• Jamie Steans: 3,789,221,071
• Apollonia: 3
• I have made this much money from doing this:  $0

It seems like just yesterday that I was relaunching this foolish blogging enterprise after 4 months on ice.  At the time, I was excited about watching production on a Green Lantern feature film and the direction of DC Comics.  Oh, how young and foolish we all were.

That was less than two years ago.

As these things go, at some point it will be interesting to go back and read the subtext and be able to chart what was going on outside of reading comics, watching movies, etc... at the time.  At this blog I talk far less about my day-to-day than I did at League of Melbotis, Volume 1, but I'll likely still know.

If you'd told me two years ago that I'd see the wholesale rebooting of the DCU and a gradual but certain reduction in my interest in understanding and reading ALL the comics, I'd have burned you for a witch.  But here we are.  The truth is, I don't really feel that most of what's out there is for me anymore.  It was bound to happen sooner or later, I suppose.

We plan to keep doing this at least until December 31, 2012, so we hope the both of you will stick with us.

Happy 1000 posts to me here at League of Melbotis, Volume 2:  The Signal Watch

I appreciate all of you who read the site, follow the tumblr., follow the tweets, follow facebook...  however you participate, vocal or silent...  you guys make this fun.  A 1000 thank-you's on the day of our 1000th post!

Now let's see who feels like celebrating.

that'll work

Lack of posting is like a SOPA Blackout Sympathy thing

So it seems we are going for a bit of a blackout to draw attention to the SOPA Bill.  If you don't know what this is about, Google it, check it out on Wikipedia, or read up on it at BoingBoing.

In Blackest Night, people.

You're on your own til Thursday.  Contact your representatives.

6 Years Ago the UT Longhorns won the Rose Bowl

it seems impossible, but I don't own a copy of this cover, and I don't think I've ever seen it before

Six years ago I was living in the wilds of Chandler, Arizona.  It is safe to say now that 2005 was the roughest year I've experienced, and its got to be up there for Jamie, too.

We had moved to Arizona in 2002.  I had lived in Texas since age 4, and had been in Austin most of my life.   And while we loved Austin, I also knew that I needed to try something different.  So, when Jamie's job evaporated in 2001, we began looking outside of Texas, eventually winding up in Arizona.

For a multitude of reasons, we never felt comfortable in Chandler (where we lived) or Tempe (where we worked), and found it exceedingly difficult to find anyone with whom we could socialize.  I will always entertain the notion that I'm a deeply unpleasant person to have to deal with unless your paycheck requires you talk to me, but I think out there, we were just fish out of water in many ways.  And, of course, Jamie's health was always an issue.

By the summer of 2005, Jamie's health deteriorated considerably.  From late spring until November, we were on an hour-by-hour watch for changes.  And, unfortunately, I had fallen into horrendous eating and sleeping patterns.  

But in the Fall of 2005, the UT Longhorn football team was on fire.  Our quarterback was Vince Young, and you could just tell...  we were going to win a hell of a lot of games.  The odd part of watching such a season is that I think you kind of know early on that this could be the year, that this could really happen.  But then you watch every game wondering "is this where we blow it?"

I hadn't watched much UT football when I was actually at UT.  The team hadn't been great for a while, and while I liked some sports (particularly NBA basketball), I was also doing other things in my life than watching football on a Saturday, even when I was watching the NFL on Sundays as a way to defer the inevitable homework.

But I graduated, UT got a new coach, and I wasn't just reading about the games in the paper.  I actually tuned in.  I knew more than the name of the quarterback.  So by 2005, after the frustration of the Chris Simms era, we had this guy Vince Young step into the QB position (eventually.  We won't discuss poor 'ol Chance Mock too much).

FYI:  slighting either of these men in my presence will insure you receive an immediate and justified thrashing

In many ways, I have a hard time getting my head around the fact that 2005 was both My Very Personal Bad Year and The Year UT won the BCS Championship.  It seems like two completely different timelines.  Somehow we managed to catch almost every game that season, even though that was the fall when Jamie had to go back on dialysis and I recall watching at least one game on Pay-Per-View so I'm sure we missed a game or two.  If it were not for a memory of watching the UT/ A&M game on a TV at the hospital the Thanksgiving when Jamie spent her Turkey Day in a hospital bed (and I ate luke-warm turkey out of a plastic container), I'd never be able to reconcile the two timelines.  

By December, Jamie had begun to stabilize.  Jason came in for Christmas, and I know we talked a lot about UT football.

Living in Arizona, we were in Pac-10 territory, and it seemed that my work colleagues were, at best, humoring me once UT was in the championship.  UT was facing down USC, and the pundits and sportscasters were insisting this game was already decided (I particularly remember Chris Berman seemingly frustrated that they were bothering to even have the game, so certain was he of USC's victory).   But what you could tell was that 1.  the pundits seemed to be working from a certain narrative rather than demonstrating first hand knowledge one would have had they actually watched UT or the Big 12 that year, and 2. sports journalists have no idea what they're talking about (and people believe them.  Its hilarious).

In 2012 I'd Like to See...

Here are some things I'd like to see in 2012:

On Cryptids:

• TV audiences accept that if we ever do catch footage of a ghost, UFO or bigfoot on video (which we won't because, well...), it is not going to show up at 11:43 PM on a Saturday on Animal Planet.  
• The TV audience realizes that the people who are pursuing these things have decided to divorce themselves from reality for reasons that probably have to do with a lack of hugs in their formative years, because they played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons as kids, and/ or they might just not be very bright
• Except for Mothman, which is totally real

On Comics:

• Indie creators look at the marketplace and quit making the same five indie comic books over and over (you are only allowed to do zombies, vampires or were-beasts if your last name is Roberson and/ or you are going to do something entirely new with the concept).  
• On the flipside, I'd like to see DC and Marvel just make solid comics about their major characters (like Waid's Daredevil).  
• Someone, somewhere in comics makes a first issue that does half a good a job as your average TV show at setting up new characters, a setting and a conflict instead of just seemingly throwing genre bits on the page.  This may mean your first issue is more than 20 pages.  I'm sorry.
• Comic readers will realize that Dragon Ball Z and Pro-Wrestling are not the be-all/ end-all of storytelling, and we hit at least YA-levels of narrative in more comics.
• The stuff inside comics will be half as interesting as the stuff happening outside the comics
• Creators will realize they have the power to take things into their own hands if they can work out new models of vertical integration and a few step up to act like business people (Image for 2012)
• Publishers like IDW will realize their real job is to reach an audience outside of the direct market, including pricing models that work for folks on the street
• I have nothing to offer Marvel and DC.  You're both offering me small selections of books I'll pick up, but its clear its time for major changes at both companies.  I am waiting for your corporate bosses to clue in to this fact.
• You would sell more comics if they were 25 pages for $2.  I'm just saying.

On Television:

• My cable service will realize that offering me 200 channels is not something that's cost effective for either of us.  I watch shows, not networks.  If one cent of my money is going towards baking shows, bridal shows, home-shopping shows, pregnant teen shows, etc...  then cable may have quit making any sense for me.  (I really just need local news and TCM, HBO and ESPN at this point.  I believe everything else winds up on Hulu.)
• Someone will come up with a News Network that actually shows me the news and not Nancy Grace and that horrid Jane Velez-Mitchell being
• Another season of Louis would be great.  As would the continuation of Venture Bros.  

On the Election Cycle:

• For me not to want to gouge my own eyes out by June and wish for the replacement of our voting system with a monarchy
• For the unbelievable distortions and fantasy/ paranoid fabrications to be covered as such by mainstream news media instead of being looked at as if the complete distortions have a grain of truth
• For voters to actually think about what a candidate is really saying and weigh that against whether or not that's something a @#$%ing lunatic might say

Today - The Admiral Retires

Today isn't just Halloween, its also The Admiral's final day as a working stiff.

For a guy who started working before he was 16, I imagine its time to put up the feet and start relaxing a bit, and maybe coming over and washing my windows.  You know, if he has time.

I tip my hat for the The Old Man.  He's a credit to the sort of thing people talk about when they discuss opportunity, and while he hasn't got a particularly charming story, between he and The KareBear, I always knew where the bar was set, and how easy I'd had it when I put together his story.

My dad didn't actually finish high school.  He got a GED, joined the Air Force and somehow wound up in electronics, where he served a few years working on radios and electronics on the tarmac and in trailers in tropical locales half-way around the world.  He served in Vietnam during the early days of the conflict, and upon returning home wound up at a tiny airbase in Michigan where he met The KareBear.

Upon exiting the Air Force, he returned to Florida, enrolled in junior college while working, then enrolled at The University of Florida, continuing on to receive an MBA.  Somewhere in there, he married my mom.

He worked for companies like Martin-Marietta out of school, and eventually took jobs with Great Lakes Steel and Ford up in Michigan.

In the 1970's, he found work in Texas, and did a stint in Dallas.  In about 1981, he landed a job with a large corporation based out of Houston which made everything from hammers to spark plugs to oil tool equipment.

Eventually he wound up working in the finance arena within oil tool manufacturing, at different shops in Austin and Houston, lasting from 1984 until today.

Between he and KareBear, he managed to put us through school, put clothes on our backs and provide the sort of life you generally want for your kids and family.  And he managed to do it while showing up for games and plays, supporting my mother's extra-curricular activities as well (be that attending elementary school assemblies or the soccer games of kids he couldn't pick out of a line-up) but still managed to remain upwardly mobile within a multi-national corporation and travel the world, making the world safe for financial managers and accountants, I suppose.

The Admiral is a funny guy.  He does all of these things, and all with a sense of modesty utterly sincere and unaffected.  We do not talk about what we accomplish.  We talk about what needs to get done.  And we talk about the good things that happened yesterday and dwell on the mistakes of the past only to tell us how we can do better tomorrow.

Its a high bar, and were we all so lucky to just make it a matter of course.

As I grew up, school, work and geography conspired that it became rare I could visit his office.  However, it wasn't that many years ago that I had a chance to tour his then-office and get introduced to suites of colleagues that I knew reported to him or who were in his chain of command.  It was still great to see not just how he clearly was happy to show us where he spent his days between 8 and 5, and show such great pleasure in the place he worked and the people he worked with.  He'd never trumpet his own horn, but I know he was a VP of something-or-other.  A suit.  But he was still more or less the same guy you might see helping out at the Church bake-sale figuring out a better way to sell the pastries, and the one who merrily led my cub scout troop through making decorative eagles out of clothespins.

Anyway, here's a salute to The Admiral.  Captain of Industry.  Capitalist.  World Traveler.  Colleague.  Friend.  My Old Man.

The thing is - He's not going to slow down.  I know this guy.  Sure, the KareBear will have him running, but he's not one to just sit back.  He's going to have so many plates spinning in six months, I'm just nervous about what tasks I'll have assigned to me, and that's all right.  Its been a while since me and The Old Man were accidentally breaking something together.

Salut, Dad.

We'll see you in Austin.