Holy crap! I haven't posted on here in just under a year... I didn't even remember I had an account until I posted to a friend's blogspot. So, I'm about to be a father, live in Oklahoma City again, and the West Coast Avengers are effectively dissolved. I'm The Antihero flying solo again, but I live with my girlfriend who has superpowers while she's pregnant - that's right, she's a super smeller! Me powers of rage cannot exist in this environment so not too many super feats lately by those talents. I guess if I am super anymore, it's that I can enter Dr. Strange-like realms in my mind and make things happen on immaterial planes that influence this reality. I don't think my contemporaries would believe this possible without years of training on my part, but still it seems to work.

Things I've Wiki-ed revently.

Lisa Wilcox – HOT! Was in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and then in Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

Dobie Gillis – I used to watch this show on Nick at Nite.

Tuesday Weld – Not only in episodes of Dobie Gillis, but also on the cover of Matthew Sweet’s album “Girlfriend”.

The Philadelphia Experiment – Never saw the movies , but I wanted to know how people could be fused with the metal hull of a seagoing vessel.

Dido Armstrong – When are we going to get another album?

The Minibosses – I’ve been listening to instrumental renderings of Castlevania music again.

The Legend of Zelda – I saw a great, fake trailer for a Zelda movie and suddenly wanted to know what was up with that game. I never got to play it.

Lee Arenberg – played a Ferengi a couple of times, and was the bald surly pirate in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Red Dawn – I just got the new DVD release and I pretty much look up this movie every couple of months.

General Public – a New Wave band in the 80s who were recently mixed with Rhianna’s “Umbrella” leading to “Tender Umbrella”.

Still Hating on the Ticketmaster

I detest Ticketmaster. I always have. They buy every single ticket for a concert event as soon as they are available, then jack up the price to the consumer, additionally charging 'convenience fees' and other crap.

Every time I use them I have to reset my password because it just doesn't seem to work from one attempt to the next. I changed it the other day for one attempt at buying tickets and today I can't use it. Makes no sense. I have no intelligent discourse for working with this organization. They are a sick sham and an infuriating element to the concert industry.

We don't even need them. Is it any more convenient to go to one resource for tickets to a show when the internet exists and I can go to a band website to get tickets? I think I'm savvy enough to figure out how to do that, I don't need a monopolizing force to control my music destiny. I, unfortunately, have to live with it though.

I can get away with waiting until the last minute and buying tickets off of people who can't make it to a show, however. Crasigslist offers me that at least and at discount prices usually. This is not the case in smaller communities sometimes. Craigslist doesn't actually exist in all places yet, but they are doing better. So I've gone from one internet resource to another.

Maybe my perspective doesn't hold water, I don't know. I just know I've rarely been pissed off by another website more frequently than I am at the Ticketmaster organization.

"New" Classic Monsters

In the newest issue of "Entertainment Weekly", Neil Gaiman drops his Ten New Classic Monsters.

I particularly like #10, the ghostly villain of Joe Hill's "The Heart-Shaped Box", which was genuinely one of the most frightening books I've read of late, and most frightening early on. In fact, it kicks into high gear so early I wasn't even ready to be scared.

So, then, what are your ten "new classic" monsters?

I'll submit mine:

1. D'anna/Number Three - The defacto leader of the Cylon's, she's a modern day Bride of Frankenstein, only with all the wit, courage, and determination expected of a genocidal madwoman. Oh, yeah, she's pretty sexy too.
2. Cloverfield - Yeah, I'm still trumpeting this movie. It was what so many critics mistakenly call other films: a roller-coaster ride. The mini-creatures were terrifying, the main creature itself, origins shrouded in mystery, was perfect to me.
3. Sutter Cane/The Town of Hobb's End - From John Carpenter's terribly underrated film In the Mouth of Madness, where poor Sam Neil goes looking for the Stephen King-esque novelist Sutter Cane. He tracks the missing writer to the fictional town of Cane's stories, where literally all hell breaks lose. The movie is one of the single scariest movies I've ever seen... Much like the books it's supposedly based upon.
4. The Cigarette Smoking Man - Besides being the chief adversary to Agents Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, CSM also assassinated President Kennedy, was responsible for the aliens kidnapping Mulder's sister, and took part in the plot for the self-same aliens to colonize Earth. And he propagated cancer.
5. Venom - Sure, Carnage was meaner and nastier, but Venom was the original, and remains the best. Able to hide in plain sight, possessing all of Spider-Man's abilities PLUS superior strength, and an evil alien symbiote who hated Spidey as much as Eddie Brock. His action figure screamed "I WANT TO EAT YOUR BRAINS." And he had that suit...
6. Freddy Kruger - I don't care who you are, the gloved-knife hand, the face, the hat, the sweater... It's terrifying.
7. Velociraptors - Yes, the T-Rex was scary awesome, but the Raptors changed what and how we perceive dinosaurs. No longer large and lumbering, the Raptors are cold, calculating hunters who could click-click-click their talons and claws along the kitchen floor before disemboweling you...and you'd never even know it.
8. Serpentor - A true Frankenstein, made up of the greatest warlords history has ever known. And that snake he wore on his shoulders that he could straighten and then throw into your chest... Also, he rode a hover board. And he had a cape.
9. G'Mork - The wolf from Never-Ending Story. This is the single-scariest creature from my childhood, as I would have nightmares about the wolf's glowing red eyes in lurking in my closet, in the hallway...wherever. That it talked made it even scarier.
10. Joe Quesada - the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, he's responsible for some of the laziest, most damning story lines in all of comic history, such as last fall's Spider-Man opus "One More Day", which saw Peter Parker make a deal with The Devil to disavow his marriage to MJ. This is the one monster who should be chased with pitchforks and torches.

I had never heard the phrase "Bucket List" until that movie came out, now every jackass in media is using it.

Rather like "Pain at the Pump". STFU. I am so sick of that phrase. Stop using it.

Effin' media. Why don't these clowns who come up with these clever clips start copywriting them or something. Because that would suggest some real cleverness. Then every dickhole outlet that uses them over and over would have to pay the clown what shot this forth onto America would have to pay said clown a nickel every time they used it. If I had a nickel for every time some screwbot uttered "Ground Zero" I could fund the US armed forces for a year.

Remembering Stan Winston

I had the great honor of meeting Stan Winston in the summer of 2001.

It was my first Comic-Convention, Wizard World Chicago, and Stan Winston was there to celebrate the impending launch of a new line of Stan Winston comics, and then action figures based on those comics.

Though the Stan Winston comics failed to take off, it might be one of the only things Stan was in that did.





Stan Winston created my childhood.

The Aliens of Aliens, the Predator of Predator, the Terminator of Terminator... The triptych of my youth when it came to movies and movie "monsters".

And then Stan lent his immeasurable talents to create the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park, my all-time favorite movie adapted from my all-time favorite book.

To say I was into dinosaurs as a child is to say that Bugs Bunny liked carrots. I grew up wanting to be a paleontologist, and even started college thinking that's what I'd do.

So to see every dream I ever had, ever fantasy, every nightmare brought to life by Stan's skills in Jurassic Park...



And almost a decade after he did that, I met him. I had been nervous about talking to him. Chicago was a small show (compared to San Diego Comic-Con), and Stan would just hang around his booth talking to fans.

Finally, I went up to him. We talked. He autographed my DVD copies of Jurassic Park, The Lost World and Pumpkinhead, which Stan himself directed.

I can't recall the exact words or conversation we had, and I saw him several times over the three days of the show. But I remember him being considerably nice, humble, and full of magic. He crafted conversations and thanks to fans the same way he crafted the stuff our dreams are made of.

To think of a world without Stan Winston is to think of a world without creativity, imagination, and, ultimately, without life itself. Stan created life out of the extraordinary. He made fake things real, he made imagination reality.

It's not a sadder world without Stan Winston, it's also one that's a little less creative, imaginative, and a little less real.

Because to live in Stan's world was to live in, yes, a scarier world, but a world more fanciful, more lucid, and ultimately more enjoyable than to live in reality.

Things I Wiki-ed this Week:

Patrick Swayze - needed to see how he is doing with the cancer treatments.
Red Dawn - Recalled the excellent, poignant quote at the end of the movie.
John Milius - Director of Red Dawn
Holodomor - a strange drought that occurred in the Ukraine which caused a famine from 1932-33 to which there are only estimates at the actual number of casualties.
John Register - A favored modernist-realist artist whose work was realized in the music video for "Turn My Head" by Live!
Beagle's - "Porthos" the beagle was portrayed by 'Breezy' in episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise
Michael Mann - a favored director whose "Manhunter" scared the hell out of me as a kid for some reason. Need to see it again.

A Potter Prequel?

Not to make this an "all JK Rowling, all the time" blog, but a very interesting bit of Harry Potter news today.

JK Rowling took part in a recent charity auction, wherein various authors were asked to write an original story on a single post card. The cards would then be sold at auction, and later collected in a book.

Rowling submitted a card which serves as a Harry Potter prequel of sorts.

The card is readable here. (Click on the "authors" section.)

My thoughts? It was fun to read, and when the reveal happened, I must admit to getting fairly giddy. There is something about that world, those characters, that is just so... exciting.

Should she do a series of prequels, focusing on the former generation of Hogwarts students?

The possibilities are endless for anything dealing with the Harry Potter world. A Hogwarts series, a series about various other wizarding schools...

Yet it's reading about young James and Sirius that just...takes you there.

(The Neil Gaiman card is a pretty fun read, as well.)

The Crucial Importance of Imagination

J.K. Rowling, who authored the Harry Potter texts, recently gave the commencement address at Harvard for the Class of '08.
Here's an excerpt, and the full text at this link:

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

I can't begin to tell you who gave my commencement address when I graduated from OU in December of '04, mainly because I didn't go to graduation. I instead went to Vegas. Where I learned firsthand the benefits of failure at the roulette tables, and extolled the crucial importance of draining my ATM card dry. A good run of bad luck, indeed.

Wisdom Teeth?

I should probably go to the dentist. I haven't been in years, nothing is bothering me, I just feel like going. I saw an ad for 1-800-DENTIST this morning and they claimed that everyone has a different set of teeth and if going by word of mouth got you a dentist then you may not be finding the right one for you. Then they said that by using their service they can find you the right dentist for your situation. However, since fewer than 5% of all dentists were members of 1-800-DENTIST it struck me as odd that statistically there was no way for them to find exactly the right dentist for my situation.