Goodbye, Loran's Best. We hardly knew ya!!
Thanks.

Last night, I sent the Hipster Daughter to have a shower at five after six. She had a brainstorm and took what is, for her, a very short shower, so's that she could rummage through her room in a hurry before Marie got home at 6.40 with supper that we could inhale and get out of the house quickly to see Where the Wild Things Are. She decided to cosplay at the movies as Max, and while she didn't quite have the right materials, for a spur-of-the-moment decision, she did all right with tan pants, a white shirt and that ridiculous wig that somebody decided to buy in Nashville last month. So cute!

As for the movie, well, it's technically quite amazing and objectively a really good film, but it was very sad and I didn't enjoy the feelings of discomfort it brought. Oh, the girlchild bawled. She cried her guts out. I haven't seen a kid bawl over a movie so much since her brother saw Twilight of the Cockroaches. So while I can't deny it's a good film - we always expect great things of Spike Jonze - it's not one I'll be in a hurry to revisit. Oh, that "war" was wonderful, though. We had the theatre to ourselves and I laughed so much during that scene that I hurt.

Use of this icon reminds me that I have been sketching out an anniversary road trip next year for the four of us to take, and we will probably - hopefully - be getting to see the Mud Hens at home in Toledo in the summer. If I play my cards right, we might even get to see them hosting the Gwinnett Braves! Won't that be fun?

I finally got fed up with fighting with the slow-but-quiet Compaq and set some money aside some weeks ago for a new laptop. Last night, we got a new HP Notebook for about one-half of what I had budgeted. Apparently, the increased competition in RAM chips has driven the cost of laptops down quite remarkably. (I realize this might come across as a bit cold if you're in Texas and had yer home broken into yesterday. I'm so sorry, Dan and Ed!!)

Anyway, so now I've got a more powerful machine than the last one that I bought, for about 60% of the price. Technology and economics, I tell ya.

We're going to see Where the Wild Things Are tonight. And I'm going to continue setting up the new machine and stuff. Can't wait to get home, really!

#1
Why did Dr. Manhattan cross the road?
It is May 18, 1979. I am crossing a road.

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#2
Chicken is crossing the road. Audience wants to know why. Turns out, chicken wants to get to the other side. Good joke. Audience laughs. Curtain falls.

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#3
(50,000 word dissertation on the road-crossing habits of various owl species goes here.)

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#4
Delirious, I saw that hell-bound chicken's black wings against the gray pavement, and knew again the stench of powder and men's brains and war. The heads nailed to its beak looked down, those with eyes, gull-eaten, salt-caked, liplessly mouthing "No use! All is lost!" The road about me was scarlet, foaming, horribly warm, yet still the chicken's hideous crew called out, "Other side! Other side!"

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#5
You think this is some kind of joke?

I crossed the road 20 minutes ago.

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#6
Once you realize what a joke everything is, crossing the road is the only thing that makes sense.

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-- from various posters on The V

Well, we had a blast at the hockey game last night. My work had a block of tickets and I was fortunate enough to win a pair, so Marie got to meet several of my co-workers. By a lucky li'l bit of serendipity, the Hipster Daughter's school was also giving away seats, and so adc622 was able to join us and sit with her. In much, much better seats than us. Ahem.

It really was something to see. After a scoreless first period, the Thrashers proceeded to take the Kings out behind the woodshed and whip them something stupid, scoring four goals in a five-minute flurry, leading to a remarkable melee in which the Kings let their frustration get away with them and everybody on the ice but the goalies grabbed a partner and went swinging. It was beautiful. When it was finished, we'd shut 'em out 7-0, and Afinogenov, Kovalchuk and Kane had each scored two. We were achingly, heartbreakingly close to seeing Afinogenov score a hat trick with about three seconds left in the game before the Kings' Erik Ersberg pulled the most insanely miraculous save I can remember seeing.

It was a blast. I was sayin' that pretty much the only perk I miss from my previous job was the club seats at Philips, which I got to enjoy two or three times a year, so we don't get to see the Thrashers or Hawks anywhere as much as I'd prefer. This was a really nice little treat, and I was glad of the chance to spend a few minutes with my boss before she takes a month-long sabbatical.

Well, before the game, the Hipster Daughter and Mandy and I went ahead and got a table at Max's Coal Oven Pizza and ordered a big meat special that arrived about two minutes before Marie did. (Timed that well!) It was pretty good, but no Varasano's or LaBella's or Everybody's. It was good to catch up on gossip with Mandy.

I've very little other to report now. We're going to have a pretty quiet weekend, I think. We're dropping some old VCRs and stuff at the recycling fair and getting lunch with chetbakerfan and going to some bookstores and then just planning to kick back and watch football. Marie's going to Athens to game tomorrow, and we're looking forward to another road trip next weekend.

And no, I dunno what I'm doing up this early. Wish I could go back to sleep!

Who took this? Kimberly? I love it!!

Some of you may recall that last month, the Hipster Daughter made some deeply poor decisions at Anime Weekend Atlanta, abusing the wafer-thin layer of authority that she thought she had, and an awful lot of trust. There were tears, there were recriminations, but were any lessons learned?

I signed on to work a late event last night and, schedules being confused, asked whether my daughter could come to work with me for a bit. It was suggested that she might try being a junior volunteer. I'm pleased to say that no fewer than four people came to me last night and this morning to say how awesome and helpful she was, and she has been invited to come back and volunteer next month. Hooray for the Hipster Daughter!

Today I have resolved to treat myself to my one lunch out of the week, but cannot decide between Bone Garden and the Real Chow Baby. Decisions, decisions!!

By now, I think everybody knows about DC's line of big, black-and-white reprints, Showcase Presents. By taking a warts-and-all approach to archiving the company's Silver- and Bronze-age material, they've made great chunks of their past available in a convenient format for the first time ever. In doing so, they've allowed audiences to reevaluate hidden treasures (both Bat Lash and Enemy Ace turned out to be even better than hoped), while also showing that certain blasts from the past really weren't worth the effort (try the third, overwrought, volume of Justice League of America if you must, or the insanely repetitive War That Time Forgot).

Unfortunately, one of the company's recent releases, Eclipso, falls in the latter category. This collection is only about 300 pages long and I still couldn't finish it. The series, created by Bob Haney and Lee Elias, originally ran in the anthology title House of Secrets from 1963-66. It has some notoriety for a handful of episodes drawn by Alex Toth, but even those can't elevate the material. It concerns a peace-loving friend of humanity, scientist Dr. Bruce Gordon, who got into a fight with a witch doctor in the Pacific and was scratched by a black diamond. Now, whenever there's an eclipse, Gordon dons a ridiculous leotard and funny hat and becomes Mr. Hyde, or, I mean, the Incredible Hulk, that is, Eclipso. It's an unbearably simplistic and repetitive adventure story, with by-the-numbers plots that wouldn't pass muster on a Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon from the period. Toth's episodes at least look the best, but the bulk of the book is drawn by Jack Sparling, and it is some pretty ugly work. These are comics which can very safely be avoided.

Well, even though Eclipso isn't to my taste, DC has done a terrific job in packaging his exploits. While most of the Showcase line brings you about 500 pages of comics for around $17, this is the second in a little sub-line that has been termed "Skinny Showcases." These are ideal for shorter-run characters like Eclipso, who do not have as much material as the A-list stars, but maintain a following nonetheless. These have a smaller page count - around 300 pages - for just ten bucks. Even though I didn't care for the material myself, the package and the price point makes it a great bargain, and I'm pleased that DC will be using it again in the spring with the release of Dial H for Hero, a 1966-68 adventure series by Dave Wood and Jim Mooney.

DC releases about one Showcase Presents volume a month, most recently the second collection of The House of Secrets, focussing on the early 1970s incarnation of the book as a horror anthology. Upcoming in the line are DC Comics Presents: The Superman Team-Ups, a third collection of Wonder Woman, the early 1970s Secrets of Sinister House, a third volume of World's Finest and the Dial H for Hero book mentioned above. The long-overdue Suicide Squad, originally solicited two years ago, has re-emerged on Amazon with a June 2010 release date.

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Read more of what I've written about the DC Universe at A Journal of Zarjaz Things.

Read other reviews of Showcase Presents Eclipso:

RKB at Pigs of the Industry
Jon the Crime Spree Guy at Central Comic Zone

These are the only reviews I've seen for this book. If you've reviewed it, let me know and I will link to it here!

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In other news from the last month, DC has a pair of interesting projects coming in the spring. They're doing a collected edition of their incredibly fun oversized Wednesday Comics, with the pages shrunk to a little more manageable 11x17, and with the pages arranged so that each storyline will become its own 12-part chapter. They're also repackaging the first twelve issues of the excellent Losers series by Andy Diggle and Jock into a single collection - they had previously been released as two trade paperbacks - in anticipation of the feature film adaptation. That will be in theaters in March, and the new collection on shelves in February.

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DC's also been publishing these pretty nice omnibus collections of Jack Kirby's work for the company, work that's probably due one of those nice little updates like I did for the Showcase line above, to be honest. Anyway, if I've counted right, there are eight out there now, and the ninth, reprinting a big chunk of the 1940s Newsboy Legion series, is due out in March.

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Speaking of Kirby, of course you know his biographer and friend Mark Evanier is, with Sergio Aragonés, one-half of the team behind the delightful Groo the Wanderer. Back in June, I mentioned a Groo Treasury, which was planned for October from Dark Horse. Well, October came and went without it. Mark confirmed, at the Marvel Masterworks Message Board, that Dark Horse has been sourcing better-quality films of some of the earlier material. The book has been postponed and will be resolicited when it is ready to go.

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IDW has tentatively scheduled the first three of their Archie reprint books for next summer. As we've mentioned before, these are not the same as the near-monthly line of hardcover, chronological archives that Dark Horse is starting up. These include a "Best of Dan DeCarlo" collection in May, followed by a look at the 1946-48 period of the newspaper strip in June, and least promisingly, a run of the mid-1960s Pureheart the Powerful superhero material in July.

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Fantagraphics has announced that they'll be releasing a series of Golden Age anthologies edited by Greg Sadowski. There are six books in the series, and they'll presumably be scheduled from 2010 through at least 2012. They include collections of Alex Toth, Basil Wolverton, Jack Cole and Dick Briefer, along with anthologies of forgotten horror comics and rare work from the EC Comics regulars.

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Over at Down the Tubes, John Freeman has posted details about the third in Reynolds & Hearn's Century 21 collections of classic Gerry Anderson strips. Seems I was mistaken in assuming this book, entitled Escape from Aquatraz, is a Stingray-only collection. Like its predecessors, it collects work from several different series by Ron Embleton, Frank Bellamy, Ron Turner and others. It's due in British stores later this month, and a fourth book, which Steve Holland reports as being titled Above and Beyond, is planned for the spring.

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Lastly this time, well, I got my hopes up that Rebellion and Diamond would have stopped butting heads, since the comic shop supplier is, as mentioned last month, planning to distribute both of the British company's December offerings to the American direct market. Unfortunately, fans interested in the two January releases will have to buy them from other sources, because Diamond's skipping them again. They both sound very much worth it: the second in a series of four hardback collections of the massive ABC Warriors "Volgan War" epic (the first of which was reviewed last month over at my review blog) and the most recent set of Strontium Dog stories, "Blood Moon." Wherever you track them down, they're sure to set all your thrill-circuits buzzing!

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That's all for this month! See you in December!

If you missed Jon Stewart's parody of Glenn Beck last night, here it is again:

Click me to see.

Honestly, I had lost my shit long before the "Purity of Essence" gag, which then left me completely incoherent. Bravo, Jon, this is the funniest thing ever.

Of course y'all know I've always been a huge Cure fan, but my favorite era of the band was the incredibly busy 1983-84 era, where Smiff was also a Banshee and part of The Glove, whose album, Blue Sunshine, I promise I like more than you do. He was hugely productive during this period, which saw two classic Cure singles, "The Walk" and "The Lovecats," two Banshees albums, the Glove record, and The Top. And he was flying high on industrial-strength doses of mind-altering chemicals.

One of his appearances at the time was in the Banshees' Play at Home special, which was shown once, on Britain's Channel 4 in September of '84. He and Severin mimed to the Glove's "A Blues in Drag," which is interesting in itself, and he also directed this business below, wherein he is interrogated by... somebody.



It probably goes without saying that had I actually seen this in 1988, my own personal consumption of mind-altering chemicals would probably have also hit "industrial strength" level.

Ladies and gentlemen, I link for your reading pleasure, the finest fuck-you letter ever written.

ABC's V is indeed pretty terrible, but as long as Cougar Town is around, this network is okay with me.

It struck me that last week, we were being a little unfair to ABC's new remake of V. sprocketship had found the first eight minutes posted somewhere, watched 'em, found it lacking and said so, and several of us asked him what the heck he was expecting. It's V, which was ridiculous and stupid in 1983, and hardly worth remaking.

Then it occurred to me (you couldn't be bad, Magneto was mad, Titanium tooooo...) that we were wrong. We all agree with Roger Ebert that Hollywood shouldn't waste time and money remaking good films. If anything's to be remade, it's the bad ones. Well, V was pretty awful, so why not remake it? Good for ABC for trying, right? I still didn't have any intention of watching it. Having already calculated that I've sat through 65 ads for the stupid thing this season - add another four during Monday night's Castle, which was terrific - I'd seen all I wanted to see. But everybody at my daughter's school is talking about it, so she asked whether she could watch it. I told her to knock herself out and looked at a little bit myself.

Well, my attention peaked when Alan Tudyk showed up, and thirty minutes later, I was done. What a turgid, one-note, boring dirge that show is. My daughter didn't finish it; she gave up shortly before the climax. I left when the two young fellas took a shuttle ride to the mother ship and were more wowed by the view of NYC than the spaceship they were in, and then got to the mothership and went WOW at the CGI Epcot inside - you remember how they revealed that first big room in Willy Wonka while he sang "Pure Imagination?" - and then some blonde cutie came up to the two young fellas and welcomed them, and you just know she'll be the one who'll end up asking them to explain this Earth thing we call "kissing." It's dry, humorless, totally in love with itself and doesn't even have the decency to be over-the-top and ridiculous. Why anybody, other than Firefly fans supporting their favorite actors, would watch this when they've toenails to clean, I have no idea. And if you fit the above category, you should be watching Castle anyway, because Nathan Fillion is fantastic in that, and it's funny, and you'll see plenty of Morena Baccarin from all the hotdamned ads they run during it.

I've got no interest in the original V or a remake of V. A MAD Magazine parody of V, well, that I might look at. I don't think the girlchild would even care for that.

Meeting today, brother-in-law in town tonight, barbecue to be eaten. Good times, y'all.

So Saturday night, after stomping and shopping and sightseeing in the mountains, we made our way across from Alto through Gainesville, across the lake to the north end of what is somehow still, technically, Cumming. We had supper at a little place called Mestizo which was really good - they absolutely load you down with food for a good price and their salsas were yummy. sprocketship and his brother were hosting their Halloween party at Dan's house, and they did their exemplary job of mixing lots of crazy props and a big light and sound show to dress the place up and unnerve all the neighborhood children. Kids were grumbling and fretting about the scary house for a couple of hours! I broke out my gas mask for my Wesley Dobbs Sandman costume, mpceccato and Dr. K came by and had fun, and Kimberly and I recused ourselves to take the Hipster Daughter trick-or-treating. It was a good time - shame I had to go to work early the next day!

We had lots of fun Saturday morning and afternoon in the mountains. The weather was occasionally cooperative, but not so much that we felt like being an hour's walk from the car on the other side of the gorge should it open up again, and enjoyed getting some barbecue up in Clayton and visiting three farms, shopping, catching just a little hint of bluegrass - they finished up before we were ready to sit n'listen! - taking a short hike and visiting some barnyard critters, most amusingly a really grouchy donkey who threw a remarkable tantrum about not being fed. Anyway, we stopped by farms in Clayton, Tiger and Alto, and also visited the Tallulah Gorge overlook, so we could at least marvel at the pretty trees so far below us. Here are some pictures:











Have a great day!

Reprint This! is a periodic feature where I talk about some out-of-print comic book gems that are not available in collected form for readers to enjoy. This is hoping to let rights owners know that, yes, readers are out here, and we'd like to buy the things we can't get at this time!

Despite such an enormous variety of books available these days, and genuine efforts to present the material in reasonably-priced, archival volumes, there are still countless fabulous series from the US, Britain and Japan which are overdue for new editions. I've selected several titles which should be on bookshelves, but at this time are not.

When it comes to British comics, here at Reprint This! we normally talk about individual features, rather than entire anthologies where the material was first seen. However, there are so many missing gems from the entire run of the 1984 comic SCREAM! that, to be blunt, the whole enterprise deserves to be seen again. For fifteen issues, host "Ghastly McNasty" gave kids some genuinely memorable little frights in a horror comic the likes of which Britain never saw again.



Scream!, which warned readers that it was "not for the nervous!," was an anthology comic from IPC that used much of the talent from the publisher's stablemates 2000 AD and Eagle. Each issue presented a new installment of five regular features, along with one-off frighteners and a reprint of Graham Allen's silly comedy "Fiends and Neighbors," which originally appeared in Cor!! in the early seventies.

Many big names from the period were regular contributors. Apart from one-off stories brought to you by the likes of Steve Parkhouse, Barrie Tomlinson, Jim Watson, Cam Kennedy, Simon Furman, Steve Dillon, Look-In veteran Angus Allen and the late Jose Casanovas, every issue started with a really great Dracula serial, where the villain moved to England and carried on a war with vampire hunters. The Dracula File was written by Rogue Trooper's Gerry Finley-Day, and illustrated by Cursitor Doom's Eric Bradbury. The artwork was just gorgeous, and the story was a really entertaining rollercoaster of ancient curses, last-minute escapes and implausible shocks, huge fun from start to finish.



You also had paranormal investigation with The Nightcomers by Tom Tully and John Richardson, in which a brother and sister reunite twenty years after their parents died looking into a haunted house, and Terror of the Cats, written by John Agee and by Simon Furman, in which a small village is under siege by maddened housepets and feral strays. But the ones that everybody remembers are Monster and the gleefully malevolent Thirteenth Floor.

Monster has a little more notoreity, thanks to its odd, footnote appearance in Alan Moore's bibliography. Apparently, he was given the first episode to script, setting up a strange, really creepy tale of suburban horror. The first installment is told in flashback, as a young kid - twelve year-old Ken Corman - buries his cruel father, who was killed by an unseen resident of a locked upstairs room. The artwork, credited to "Heinzl," is a little pedestrian, but it's one heck of a great setup, and one of Moore's unheralded triumphs. The story proper begins in episode two, as John Wagner and Alan Grant take over, with much better artwork by Jesus Redondo. What follows is a little more conventional than what Moore promised, but still darn entertaining. In the attic, Ken finds his hideously deformed, superhumanly strong uncle Terry, locked away from prying eyes. The two of them go on the run, for an extended chase epic that lasted several months after Scream!'s untimely demise.

Wagner and Grant, working with Jose Ortiz, were also responsible for The Thirteenth Floor, in which a malicious supercomputer installed in a tower block "protects" its residents by using a hidden "virtual reality" holodeck thingy on its secret thirteenth floor to "put the frighteners" on anybody from the outside who's bothering them. Unfortunately, Max the computer, whom everybody secretly rooted for no matter how nasty he was, turned out to be really good at his job, and so loan sharks and vandals kept turning up dead from heart attacks. Max's next step was to hypnotize a resident into dumping the bodies somewhere away from the building, but both his programmer and the police guessed that there was something strange going on...

While Max himself, the cold, silky-voiced devilish anti-hero, was clearly inspired by HAL 9000, his strip was very much a product of its time, and hit that cultural milepost where films like Superman III, War Games and Electric Dreams were playing on the era's fears of early PCs taking over the world. In time, Max the computer moved on to other assignments, including watchdogging a department store and working for Her Majesty's Secret Service, and his bodycount dropped sadly, but it was still great fun. In all, the series ran for about four years.

While The Thirteenth Floor was a long-running hit, Scream! itself was not. A combination of low sales, upset mothers and industrial action at IPC saw the weekly comic killed in under four months, one of the shortest lifespans of any of these newspaper anthologies. Sadly, this wasn't a case like Thunder or Tornado, where the lackluster contents explained away the short run; every issue of Scream! just oozed quality. Officially, Scream! was merged with Eagle, but only Monster and The Thirteenth Floor made the transition. Max's adventures lasted into 1987, and Ken and Uncle Terry's continued for a few more months.

In 2007, a small outfit called Hibernia published a little short-run reprint of the first eleven episodes of The Thirteenth Floor, and that seemed to get a little talk about the strip for the first time in a while. What's really needed, however, is a straight reprint of Scream! in its entirety. The whole fifteen issue run could easily fit in one bumper volume. Even with advertisements, the package would be a little slimmer than a Marvel Essential. Do it up on nice paper and keep the original dimensions, and I think this is a worthwhile project. If somebody like Titan gets going with this, why, we could see it on shelves in time for next Halloween! Doesn't that sound wonderful?

Special thanks to Malcolm Kirk for helping out with some credits for this entry. Also, the Scream! fan site, Back from the Depths, is huge fun and includes a few samples of these episodes. Check it out, and tell 'im your old pal the Hipster Dad sent you!

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The Reprint This! features:

Ambassador Magma
Angel and the Ape
The Angry Planet
Armitage
Axa
Axel Pressbutton
Black Jack
Black Orchid
Cat's Eye
Cobra
Steve Ditko
Doctor Who Adventures
Doonesbury
Flex Mentallo
Grimly Feendish
The Inferior Five
Johnny Red
Judge Dredd in the Daily Star
Jungle Emperor
Major Eazy
Marvelman
Missionary Man
The New Adventures of Hitler
Oh, Wicked Wanda!
Pussycat
Rat Pack
Robot Archie
Sapphire & Steel
Scream!
Shade the Changing Man
The Stainless Steel Rat
Steed & Mrs. Peel
Sugar and Spike
Tales from Beyond Science: The Rian Hughes Collection
Third World War
Thunderbirds
Tippy Teen
UFO Robo Gurendaiza
Urusei Yatsura
Gahan Wilson
The World's Greatest Superheroes
Zenith

On Saturday, john666 told us about this service he uses called Swap-a-DVD, where you eliminate the middleman and post the names of disks you don't want anymore. Your list is matched against the wish lists of thousands of other members. When there's a match, the other party is notified and they can request it from you.

Next, you print off a label and mail away your stuff. When the other party receives it, they log it in the system and you earn a credit. For each credit you receive, you're able to request something that the system has matched from your own wish list.

Unfortunately, John's recommendation came after I'd already taken all the DVDs that the kids and I didn't want anymore to MovieStop, but I do have piles of CDs and books - perhaps you recall I had a sale list up here about a month ago? - that need new homes, and it turns out that Swap-a-DVD has two sister sites, Paperback Swap (which isn't just for paperbacks) and Swap-a-CD. With the CD site, there is a 49-cent processing fee to keep the site going for every disk that you order from somebody else, but the book page is completely free - all you pay is postage for the books you ship out. Each site gives you a credit in advance so you can order something while you're waiting for the people on the other end to confirm they got their stuff.

I didn't have much luck on eBay, and lugging crates of books and shoe boxes of CDs around can get a little dispiriting, but two of the twelve CDs I offered and six of the 15 books have already been requested. So they're finding new homes and I've already used my advance credits to request things. I realize this doesn't actually do a lot for the overall problem of "I own too much stuff," but given the opportunity to pick up a $40 Jack Kirby hardback collection for the $3 it takes to ship somebody a Starman paperback that I don't need anymore, I don't think the downside is all that steep.

I realize that my love for H.R. Pufnstuf isn't shared by many of you out there, but if you've never seen the feature film that the Kroffts made for Universal, you have missed this absolutely wonderful moment. Things onscreen have gone from nutty to ridiculous and back again, we've been introduced to Martha Raye, with her sidekick Heinrich, Witchiepoo's castle is crowded with hideous harpies, and then the late, great Mama Cass Elliot steals the show out from everybody with this absolutely beautiful song, set to some completely bizarre imagery. It's a shame the song's not better known; it could well have been an anthem for so many people I've known who've wanted to do their own thing.

You know, I understand that when America's Mart hosts those big market expos downtown, parking is at a premium, but seriously, if you insist on parking in marked employee lots for other businesses who have to put up with overflowing streets, you might actually get away with it if (a) you're not driving a whacking huge, incredibly noticeable car, (b) you only take up one space rather than two and (c) you pull all the way into the spaces you've taken and not block the small lane we have, thereby costing us two additional spaces, because the ones opposite you have suddenly turned into our de facto driveway.

I personally do not have authority to have cars towed. But a co-worker of mine does, and she's kind of deliciously mean, and you kind of annoyed lots of people, and I think the inconvenience you're about to suffer and the $150 you're about to spend... well, you had those coming.

Working Sundays, I've gotta tellya, it doesn't feel like much of a weekend, especially when we've stayed so busy lately. Saturday morning, Marie dropped the girlchild and me off in downtown Athens while she ran some errands. We bumped into Devlin, who was on his way outta town, and caught up with him for a little bit. We sold some CDs and bought some comics and played on north campus and eventually met up with Marie and john666 for lunch at The Grill.

We left town a little before 3 and drove down to Decatur. I traded some books to Eagle Eye and left with a great big wonderful Roz Chast collection, and then we got a snack at Jake's, and then we stopped by Book Nook for a little bit. Then we got over to Smyrna. My dad had been craving, of all things, Krystal, but didn't want to drive, so we brought him supper and watched the nailbiting end to the Bama-Tennessee game. Then I think we went home and went to sleep.

Sunday, I worked all day, and was asked by a four year-old whether I was from the circus. I think that is the finest question that I have ever been asked.

Last night, we watched The Rockford Files. Before the house flooded, I bought the first season box set, intending to add it to our rotation, but I was a little annoyed that the set doesn't contain the 90-minute pilot. That, for some odd reason, is added to disc six of the season TWO set. I figured there was no rush, but then I found season two in the same crazy-ass sale at MovieStop as those Thunderbirds episodes. $4.99 for the whole season?! If you'd have told me, twenty years ago, that one day you would stumble, with no real difficulty, into entire TV seasons on a format so far superior to VHS for only five bucks, I'd have made a lot of changes and blown a lot less money on videotape, that's for sure.

I love The Rockford Files, and think it's second only to Columbo as the best crime drama of the '70s, even if "drama" is often stretching the point. Of course, it has a lot more in common with James Garner's earlier Maverick than any detective show, with almost every episode a winking, twinkling reaction to the rules of California-based hard-boiled fiction.

It's huge fun from start to finish, loaded with wit and energy. There's a lovely bit in the pilot when Rockford, anticipating a tough following him into the gents' to work him over, pours soap all over the floor and gets a roll of quarters in his fist. When the tough finally comes to, his karate kick having failed spectacularly against the slippery floor, he's been hoisted by his belt and his ankles tied to the stall. "The trouble with karate," Jimbo tells him, "is that it assumes the other fella's gonna fight fair."

Well, this week, apart from a little work - no extra hours this week - is the week Marie and I are supposed to get finished cleaning the upstairs, and making the downstairs at least presentable, if not complete. We'll do the garage next week, and my son's room the next. On Saturday, we're going hiking in the mountains and finding some barbecue a long, long way from home. I hope your week is off to a good start!

I excised the following from a book review:

- and if you're noticing a consistent gap here at the Bookshelf between the purchase of material and its eventual review, then join me, won't you, in wondering how the heck the people at all these other comic review sites manage to find time to actually read anything before they post their reviews the same week of release -

Even though I cut it, I still have to wonder. I'm working a part-time job with a short commute, raising kids, running errands, going to one doctor or another for eye tests and allergy shots and meeting new pediatricians, picking up new glasses for myself and the girlchild, removing my house downstairs after the flood, and while I spent an awful lot of leisure time reading - and I think I have an awful lot, yes - I've still got two dozen books on my nightstand. A consistent two dozen. Those are beside the separate stacks of another two dozen PD James books that I intend to read, and another four or five Laurie Kings, and another four hundred and twelve Rex Stouts, and the last few Sayers - the long ones - that I've been putting off for almost a year, and sixty-odd Doctor Who New Adventures plus about twenty Benny Books that I've been wanting to reread for about three years.

I'm not implying anything untoward about these other folk in the field of "reviewing funnybooks and other stuff," except that either they've got greater time management skills than me, or they read a lot faster than me, or they never take the time to enjoy rereading anything, or they don't have any life whatsoever to have so much hotdamned free time to read every damnblasted funnybook they feel like reading and have a review of it up within two days. Yesterday, between stopping by my son's former middle school to return library books he had not taken back before moving and stopping by the kids' bank, where their old accounts needed to be "claimed" after a takeover rather than risk losing them to some FDIC fund, I sat at traffic lights and tried to get used to these infernal bifocals - I got talked into bifocals (because, you know, just TAKING OFF MY GLASSES TO READ for the last fifteen years has been SUCH a chore) and now my eyes hurt so bad I can't stand it - and I thought, even if I wasn't running errands right then, I should have been working a full-time job's hours, not sitting on my ass reading anything.

Maybe if I didn't spend my weekends trying to watch college football and gallivanting all the fuck over the southeast, I'd have more time to read. I was mentioning to the waitress at Sticky Fingers in Chattanooga last weekend that we were on our second of four trips through that town over a two month period, and she asked whether we travelled on business.

"No, we're just stupid," I replied.

My eyes HURT. I think they're making me cranky.

On the other hand, the wife says I look totally cute in these new frames.

Monster cereals. At Target. Two bucks.

I have recently been buying the heck out of used Thunderbirds box sets at MovieStop. A&E originally released the six-episode sets for $40 apiece, but MovieStop has so many used copies sitting on the shelves, not moving, that they've marked some of them down from their usual $14.99 apiece. Sets 1-2 are now available for ten bucks, and set four an amazing $2.99. The feature films will set you back $3.99 for Thunderbirds are Go and $2.99 for Thunderbird 6.

Even better, MovieStop shelves them in their anime department, and here's the wild thing: they're currently having a massive clearance on used anime, so you can take an additional 40% off those prices. In other words, I got all the above for $18 and change. Eff Ay Bee!