This is the greatest thing that has ever happened in Cobb County. Ever. Del Taco has come back.

In today’s chapter, Marie writes about rain and about flat tires, but more importantly, she writes about Klingler's Cafe just outside the Birmingham city limits, where they’ve been serving up a dessert so rich and decadent that the state of Alabama insists that you must eat it before you die.

As we finish up chapters from our trip to Memphis, we visit a 45 year-old doughnut palace, Gibson's Donuts. It is always open, it is gloriously retro with old-fashioned neon and a rotating sign, and their treats are just wonderful. But first, a few paragraphs in praise of children’s museums.

While my daughter and I were exploring the city and eating barbecue, Marie and her family were spending the time eating considerably less than us, but eating well all the same. When we all met for a light supper, we found a coffee shop kind enough to accommodate us and let them spread out a giant board game.

Today's Thrillpowered Thursday looks at the debut of Kingdom (by Abnett/Elson) and Stickleback (by Edginton/D'Israeli)!

We finished up our Memphis barbecue tour at the very popular Central BBQ. Happily, for those frustrated by the small parking lot and the long line at the store’s original location, there’s a huge second location on Summer Avenue that very rarely gets packed.

The motto at the eclectic and silly Beauty Shop in Memphis's Cooper-Young neighborhood is “Look good, eat good.” My daughter and I believe that they should add “…and drink goofy.”

Today's short review at my Bookshelf blog: You Never Give Me Your Money, Peter Doggett's fascinating insight into the Beatles' post-breakup legal battles.

A & R Bar-B-Que is located in a pretty bleak area of town, but it is well-known among barbecue lovers as one of the great Memphis shacks. My daughter and I visited this place on a hot spring day and agree that their reputation is well-deserved.

Today's short review at my Bookshelf blog: Death Comes to Pemberley, detective fiction by P.D. James.

On the second day of the trip to Memphis, my daughter and I recused ourselves from family activities to spend the day shopping, sightseeing, and visiting some of the city’s legendary barbecue joints, starting with Leonard's.

We took a road trip to Memphis, and on the way up we detoured through the quite wonderful college town of Oxtord, Mississippi. There, we joined quite a mob of locals for lunch at the popular Ajax Diner, an eclectic and fun meat-and-two.

Returning to the restaurant trade after a few years away, the only evident “folly” in Tom Richardson’s bar and grill on Howell Mill, Tom's Folly, is probably the choice to allow smoking, because everything else here is just super.

There’s a neat old sandwich place on Collier, Patrick's, that doesn’t really know a lot about its own history. Fortunately, we’re here to help.

Attempting to visit an old favorite on its final days, I instead ended up at Mustard Seed, another Atlanta barbecue joint south of I-20, where, without any fanfare, they’re grilling up what might be the best ribs in the city.

Today's short review at my Bookshelf blog: a new, complete collection of Milk & Cheese, gleefully malevolent and fun comics by Evan Dorkin.

We were invited to visit the Starlight Cafe on the Marietta Square, and found a local take on a curious midwestern specialty that I’d only ever read about before.

A couple of weeks ago, we met up with several of our friends in the hobby and visited Double Zero Napoletana, a popular new restaurant in Sandy Springs, for pizza, pasta, and food blogger gossip. Our lips are not sealed when it comes to telling you about good food!

For the final stop on this road trip, we visited a barbecue place, Miller Brothers Rib Shack, in the northwest Georgia town of Dalton. All the times driving through this town back and forth between here and Tennessee, it’s about time we finally stopped, I guess.

It's our first contest! After you've read my chapter on R Rice Wok Grill Sushi in Sandy Springs, drop a line to the email address in the story and enter to win a $25 gift certificate to this restaurant.

Today's short review at my Bookshelf blog, Cynicalman, a collection of Matt Feazell's influential minicomic from the 1980s.

Marie had suggested that we should enjoy our child-free evening with a nice meal at an upscale restaurant, and Athens is home to a perfect place. Chef Hugh Acheson’s Five & Ten has been wowing diners for more than a decade with his “neo-retro” take on Southern cooking.

In this week's chapter, I talk about The Red Seas by Ian Edginton and Steve Yeowell, and London Falling by Si Spurrier and Lee Garbett. Actually, I talk a fair amount in this longer-than-typical entry!

Today's short review at my Bookshelf blog: Rip it Up and Start Again, a chronicle of postpunk music in the UK from 1977-1984.

Today's short review at my Bookshelf blog: ABC Warriors - The Volgan War, science fiction comics by Pat Mills and Clint Langley.

A classmate from high school was killed in a traffic accident this weekend. We lost touch many, many years ago, but I'll always tell the stories of he and I being busted by Mr. Ash for covering a banner with "duck feet," and him taking Blake's rock from my hands and throwing it away, prompting Blake to tackle him and the two rolling away down an embankment at Piedmont Park, arms and legs and leather and trenchcoat flailing away, and Blake screaming something incoherent about how Daniel had thrown away the world.

Goodbye, Daniel.
Thanks.

One of the best, truest songs ever written is "My Perfect Cousin" by the Undertones, which, over the course of the last thirteen installments of Thrillpowered Thursday, I've mentioned twice. That jealousy that kids feel about older friends and family can be really aggravating. I was always incredibly envious of Blake, who was my best friend from about the third through the ninth grades. He seemed to have everything! He was a year older, and had an older brother, and they had so many neat old toys, and remarkable luck in finding new acquisitions at garage sales and things, and lots - LOTS - more pocket money, and he always seemed to jump in head-first when I found something new to enjoy.

For a few weeks, after I discovered Doctor Who, he wasn't able to watch it, because his mother strictly enforced a 10 pm bedtime on Saturday nights. Hindsight showed soon that perhaps I shouldn't have always been so envious. But anyway, I told him about this amazing show that I'd found on Saturday nights. I told him about the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Zygons and the Anti-Man and Sutekh and the Kraals and Morbius and he agreed that it sounded incredible. Then I missed a week, and then I told him about the Cult of Demnos in medieval Italy and Eldrad and then, oh. I told him about the melting skeleton man. The Master, as played in the 1976 serial "The Deadly Assassin" by Peter Pratt, was a skeletal form in tattered blue robes.

It was a very good costume, and thanks to some fine direction and lighting, this absolutely convinced me that the Master was one of television's coolest villains. I drew this guy on notebook paper for months, killing people. He's described, in episode guides and such, as emaciated, the result of a failed attempt at regenerating a thirteenth time, which Time Lords are not supposed to try to do. Fanon suggests that the Master ran through most of his Time Lord bodies being killed time and again in failed bids of villainy, and that the character played by Roger Delgado in the early 1970s was the Thirteenth Master. Insistent on regenerating again after this body died in an offscreen adventure, he ended up horribly deformed and disfigured, his skull-like face barely holding on to melting skin.

Of course, "The Deadly Assassin" was Doctor Who's first spectacular retcon. "Genesis of the Daleks" had fiddled with the facts presented about those villains in 1963-64, but nothing like what this did. Prior to Philip Hinchcliffe's run as producer, the Doctor was thousands of years old and could live forever, barring accidents. "Pyramids of Mars" nailed down his age to 743, and this story emphatically stated that Time Lords could only regenerate twelve times. This meant that the Doctor, as played by Tom Baker, was the I-forgot-how-many-but-at-least Tenth Doctor (turned out to be the Twelfth), as shown in "The Brain of Morbius" just a month previously on WGTV. This wouldn't be retconned, formally, until 1982 and "Mawdryn Undead," with the first formal note, in the text, that the Doctor was firmly on his fifth body. The other eight actors seen in "Brain of Morbius" (production crew in fancy dress) have never been explained in the show. Fanon suggests those could be handwaved away as Morbius's earlier lives (or some really complicated and convoluted Gallifreyan mythology crap that nobody understands), but that is emphatically not what the show wanted the audience to think at the time. They wanted there to be several Doctors prior to the show's beginning.

It also massively changed the look and design of the Time Lords, and altered them from godlike beings to squabbling, hateful, petty politicians. It also should have been the last time Gallifrey ever appeared in Doctor Who. Every subsequent story set on the Time Lords' planet was lousy.

But back in 1984, I took all this as new. The Master had ALWAYS been a skeletal bad guy; when the Doctor and the other characters discussed him, I didn't understand that he had once been a suave, bearded dude in black suits. When the Doctor tells another character that he'd had "several" face lifts, I knew that he'd indeed had something like a dozen. I knew that humans were forbidden from ever going to the Time Lords' planet, and never, ever would.

A couple of weeks after this episode aired in its omnibus form on WGTV, Blake was finally allowed to watch it. He started with the movie version of "The Robots of Death," the title of which horrified his mother, and was also hooked. He even got to see the two "episodes" that I missed because my family went out of town, so he told me about the killer ventriloquist doll and the return trip to Gallifrey, and gave me the really shocking news that Leela, the companion who replaced Sarah Jane, had stayed behind to marry a Time Lord! He wanted me to go over everything that he missed again. I was completely emphatic about the particular awesomeness of three villains in particular: the seven foot-tall guns-in-head Cybermen, the weird pink outline monster that merged with a human and created the new bad guy Anti-Man, and the melting skeleton dude, the Master.

Over the next three weeks, we watched the new co-star, Romana, join the Doctor for the first three episodes of tracking down the Key to Time. We would talk on the phone Sunday afternoon and relish the awesomeness and lament the subpar special effects. Some other school friends who tried it out on my recommendation were particularly unsympathetic about the special effects. "I can't believe you watch that," a good friend in the seventh grade told me. "It's SO FAKE!!"

And then, on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening, Blake called me with the most mindblowing news that I'd ever heard. He asked "Didn't you tell me the Master was a melting skeleton dude? Well, you're wrong, he's a guy with a beard. And there are only six Doctors, not ten or eleven. The new guy, the sixth, apparently starts in new episodes they haven't even filmed yet. Oh, and that Anti-Man thing is incredibly fake. It's just a big silver blanket! It's stupid."

What that asshole did was somehow find the American edition of the Radio Times 20th Anniversary special magazine, distributed in the US by Starlog. For a time, this was the ur-text of American fandom. Finally, we had an actual episode guide and lots of photos. The reason I can pinpoint the week he got it was that there was a photo of Mary Tamm in the purple outfit that we would see her wearing just a few days later in "The Androids of Tara."

I looked through this magazine with utter horror. Firstly, the revelation that the Master was once some boring human was a blow. They didn't even have a picture of the amazingly cool melting skeleton man, but I did draw Blake's attention to a sentence that explained Peter Pratt played him as emaciated. Worse still, the magazine spoiled that the Master would soon be returning to the show as another boring bearded human played by Anthony Ainley.

Oh, and what these idiots did to poor Anti-Man was just criminal. See, here's what that monster looked like onscreen:



This was a visual effect caused by mixing and superimposing a treated, high-contrast video recording of this costume onto the action:



For some reason, the STOOPID BRAIN-DEAD MORONS at Starlog - it had to be their fault, I was thirteen - put an UNFINISHED PICTURE in their magazine.

Some of these other old monsters in this magazine looked really cool. Some did not. The Axons: YES. The Chronovore: NO.

I really, really resented this magazine for a while. My hatred of spoilers comes straight from this experience. It spoiled Doctor Who's future and its past for me. As much as I love this fiction and its universe, I think those few months in 1984 when I did not know a darn thing more than what was on the screen were the very best of them. I knew that the show was old, but I also, somehow, knew that it was still running. Suddenly, I could see the limits and I could count the episodes. I knew how many more weeks we would have until the Doctor changed into this blond guy with the silly pants, and while I was briefly excited to count down how many more episodes until the Cybermen came back, something magical really was spoiled by reading it.

I don't know whether it was specifically this magazine that did it, or just Blake, in general, finding something that I enjoyed and one-upping me by buying the living hell out of it, but I started getting even with him. Seriously, I told him about Doctor Who and suddenly he knew more than me. I said I liked some comic, he'd buy more back issues than I could find. I started collecting Superman II bubble gum cards a pack a time from the B&W Grocery, he'd complete a set. What I started doing was buying one issue of a comic, praising it, and throwing it away. (Well, metaphorically. One NEVER threw away comics.) I would say, for example, that I bought an issue of Jim Starlin's Dreadstar and really liked it, and he would mow some guy's lawn for twenty bucks just to blow it all on Dreadstar comics, in which I had no interest whatsoever. Eventually, I started lying. I'd say that I read somebody's issue of Power Man and Iron Fist at school, just so he would throw good money after bad buying as many issues as he could find.

Thirteen year-old boys are hateful, hateful people. But for putting limits on what was magic, he might well have had that coming to him.

A couple of times on Facebook, I've recommended TARDIS Eruditorum, which is probably the best writing on Doctor Who that I've ever seen. Well, mostly. His "Three Doctors" article was, intentionally, an impenetrable wall of deliberately provocative and pretentious cod-academic gobbledygook, and I have a serious quibble with his new writeup on "Revenge of the Cybermen." If you've not visited this blog and you enjoy Who, then you really should. It is extremely clever analysis, put into a framework that details contemporary music and events, and other media that was either inspired by Who, or trying to steal its thunder, or rip it off in some fashion, or, sometimes, the media that was inspiring Doctor Who. Seriously, out of 119 chapters, 117 are really terrific reading.

As for "Revenge of the Cybermen," he gets it two-thirds right. He's correct in suggesting that it is easily the worst of the three years of stories produced by Philip Hinchcliffe. He's also very insightful in noting how the script editor, Robert Holmes, turned the storyline into a post-modern treatise on how ridiculous and pathetic the Cybermen of the 1960s could be, and how Doctor Who was going to grow up and away from their ilk. He was right; over the next four years and 104 episodes, villains from the series' past would only feature in six of them. Four of these were a serial that featured the Master, who looked and acted nothing at all like he used to. Imagine that in modern Doctor Who: it couldn't happen.

But he misses something so vital in discussing "Revenge," and that's its impact on one of the show's target audiences: thirteen year-old boys. Hindsight has certainly proved this to be a pretty awful story, but this serial is the one that made me a Doctor Who fan. I don't doubt for a minute that, nine years after it was broadcast, a vote or straw poll at the 1983 Longleat "convention" led the BBC to release this story as their very first VHS home video. If you were 19 or 20 when you went to Longleat, then regardless of your relationship to or involvement in fandom, you were a preteen when this story aired, you had not seen it since, and 1982's "Earthshock" probably reminded you of how amazing you thought "Revenge" was when you were an impressionable kid. If the BBC got votes for a 1960s Cyberman story, then the voter would have to be in their late twenties, and while I'm sure there were plenty of those present, everything I've heard about Longleat - it was sort of the Woodstock for British geeks of the day - indicates that the crowd had a big chunk of people their late teens or early twenties. Every one of them started a fanzine within a month. Of course they'd want "Revenge" on video.

My first exposure to Doctor Who came in 1982, when a local UHF station played the feature film Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD with Peter Cushing. They played it in their Sunday morning creature feature slot, when I was used to watching Godzilla movies. I gave up after about half an hour; there was no Godzilla in this.

About a year and a half later, I tuned into the omnibus edition - Wikipedia suggests that American fans called these movie versions "Whovies," which is bullshit; I was active in American fandom for years and years and never heard such a dumb word - of "Genesis of the Daleks" on WGTV after seeing the listing and, misremembering what an author who might have been Daniel Cohen had said in some library book about science fiction monsters, thinking that Doctor Who was kind of a British version of The Outer Limits. I enjoyed the heck out of it, despite connecting those stupid Daleks to that stupid movie I saw 18 months earlier. I didn't believe in the Daleks at all; of all the silly special effects and production woes, those things were clearly just wood and plastic, and impossible to take seriously. Doctor Who, Sarah Jane and Harry, though, they were wicked cool.

(Also: giant clam. Fandom has mocked that giant clam as the dumb moment in "Genesis." Fandom is wrong. Do you have any idea how many godawful, stupid episodes of Lost in Space and brain-dead movies about journeys to the Earth's core we watched as little kids to see shit as awesome as that giant clam?)

The Cybermen, despite being men in silver wet suits with plastic helmets, those guys I took seriously. For me, and, I suggest, for most people who encountered them at my age, they were not "half-assed replacements for the Daleks." I'd further suggest that British kids in 1974 who suffered through the misbegotten "Death to the Daleks" at that age were probably finding these villains pretty overrated as well. But, to young eyes, the Cybermen had nothing but great promise.

Now, a lot of this falls down to watching Doctor Who as omnibus editions rather than as a four-week serial as intended, but this is one of the very few cases where the show is actually improved by viewing it this way. As a serial, the script's main problem is easy to note: the Cybermen have nothing but dumb, desperate ideas that the Doctor defeats and defuses week after week. But as a single, ninety-minute "episode" in the eyes of somebody who does not understand how the show was supposed to be seen, it makes the Cybermen look like incredibly resourceful villains who keep coming up with new and superior plans every time the Doctor foils them. They follow up the plague and the Cybermats and storming the base and planning to blow up the small planet of Voga with whacking great bombs strapped to our heroes with - not a last act of desperation to pad an arguable three episodes of plot into four - a master plan just in case anything else goes wrong, just smashing the base (Nerva Beacon) into the planet.

And they had guns in their heads. Seven foot tall silver robots WITH GUNS IN THEIR HEADS. This was the finest thing ever made for television.



A couple of unusual things happened as a result of this. Part of me remembered, the week previously, staying up until 12.30 in the morning to finish watching "Genesis of the Daleks." This episode finished up at 11.30 pm. I concluded that Doctor Who was a 90-minute show, and the previous week's story, because it was apparently a big deal, telling the "secret origin" of the Daleks, was a special two-and-a-half hour episode, sort of like those occasional "big event" episodes of The Bionic Woman or Battlestar Galactica. Now, while I tried to watch Doctor Who religiously, I did occasionally miss episodes when my family went on overnight weekend trips. I later looked it up and realized that I missed, on the first broadcast in 1984, every single omnibus edition of a six-part serial. Since I did not see "The Seeds of Doom, " "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" or "The Invasion of Time" when they were first shown, and was not confronted with any more "two-and-a-half-hour episodes," my theory was sound. More about this maybe Thursday.

The other thing is that I completely misread Doctor Who as being a show built around recurring bad guys, just like Batman, and so I viewed the next several monsters as the Doctor's rogues gallery, expecting each and every one of them to show up again soon. The Daleks and the Cybermen were each, in these first two stories, explained as villains whom the Doctor had met before, and so I imagined that the Zygons, the Anti-Man, Sutekh and the Kraals were all lining up for rematches. Yes, I saw the nebulous anti-matter energy entity from "Planet of Evil" as a conventional bad guy, because I misunderstood a brief scene where the Doctor says that the Professor Sorenson character's anti-matter infected tissue is turning him into something inhuman, something anti-man, as the secret origin of a weird new supervillain named Anti-Man. I understood that Doctor Who villains did not rob banks or museums - "City of Death" being some months away - but I still saw them as villains, and that's how villains and heroes interacted, by constantly returning to fight each other.

It was Batman, on other planets, with much higher stakes, where people got killed. Now, most people I've met go through a phase in their early teens when the Adam West Batman suddenly becomes something embarrassing, because you took it seriously as a kid, and when you're a teen, you understand that it's really stupid, but you lack the maturity to understand that its stupidity is part of its brilliance. I remember, once, expressing some exasperation about the cliffhanger to a Joker episode where they're about to be electrocuted, resolved the next day by a power outtage. "That's just STUPID," twelve year-old me bellowed. "Why didn't the Joker just SHOOT THEM?" This disparity is made worse for comic book geeks who want their Batman serious. You can still spot the sad bastards who never got over it, and refuse to enjoy one of the most charming and entertaining programs of the 1960s. But in one fell swoop, Doctor Who did more damage to Batman's credibility than hormones and maturing eyes ever could. The superhero of this show also had no powers, and not even a utility belt, but he managed to beat much more dangerous supervillains. Who would want to watch Batman anymore when THIS was available?

Without the ability to rewatch "Revenge of the Cybermen" - not even having access yet to an episode guide to see when and where we were in the show and whether I would get to see the Cybermen's previous appearance - I was left to replay it in my mind, letting my pumped-up-on-Coca-Cola late-Saturday-night imagination draw them on notebook paper, head-guns blazing and punching holes through walls, through tanks, through soldiers' bodies. (Thirteen year-old boys. Who'd have one?) When time eventually showed this story to be a pretty underwhelming mess, I was disappointed, but by then, I was hooked for life.

That's what TARDIS Eruditorum leaves out, and why this entry disappoints me: the golden age of Doctor Who, ALWAYS, is "when you're twelve." This was one of the serials that, in analysis, would have benefitted the most from starting with that viewpoint and working towards the inevitable disappointment of learning what a silly little flop it is. When you're twelve, however, it's pretty much the absolute greatest Doctor Who story ever, at least until the one with the melting skeleton man. MELTING SKELETON MAN.

Next time: "That's not what Anti-Man looks like! That's stupid! How could they get that wrong?!"

I was asked to expand on something that I posted at the Bookshelf blog, and on my Facebook, on Tuesday.

I have read with interest the commentary by artist Steve Bissette on the recent loss, by Jack Kirby's heirs, in their lawsuit against Marvel Comics. (You might enjoy reading it, too, along with the subsequent follow-ups.) I'm going to have to agree with John Byrne, though. It's an awfully naive position for somebody who's been around as long as Bissette to take. Unfortunately. I hope that can change.

Bissette's not wrong, though. You know what the good Marvel Comics are? 70% of them are the ones that King Kirby drew. Not "based on characters that Kirby created," no, the original comics themselves. I'll grant you that there have been pretty damn good follow-ups. Steve Englehart Cap, Walt Simonson Thor, etc.

I think that when readers step back and start paying real attention to the actual creators instead of the characters, they come up with similar opinions. However, and this is what Bissette is missing, they do this at precisely the point that they get bored and impatient with Marvel Comics and stop buying them anyway. But the people who are buying Marvel Comics right now? They really, really don't care who writes or draws them. They might enjoy one fellow's work a little more than some other fellow's, but "Ed Brubaker on Captain America" doesn't result in any genuine change in that title's performance. It doesn't bring in many people who weren't already reading Cap's story in The Avengers or Civil War.

Marvel fans love the characters. I was a Ghost Rider fan in middle school. I always wished that Don Perlin would not have drawn it so damn long, but I bought it anyway.

Marvel fans are Marvel fans because the creators are next to anonymous to them. If a reader is interested in a creator, or cares about his welfare in later life when money is tight and medical bills are high, they're not a Marvel fan anymore. Talking about an effective boycott is, sadly, sickly, pipedreaming because the only people who care about Marvel's treatment of Jack Kirby spend so little money on modern Marvel Comics that it doesn't matter at all. Not to Marvel's bottom line. When Bissette calls for a boycott, the only people who are going to agree are the ones who don't buy any Marvel Comics anyway, and most of them aren't agreeing out of making their political point, but because they've lost interest in what happens to the characters.

I mean, seriously, who among us honestly said "I'm about done with Marvel" because we didn't like how Marvel treated Marv Wolfman or Gary Friedrich in court? Didn't we say that because Marvel was publishing giant stacks of incredibly shitty, boring, derivative, downright stupid-ass unreadable comics, and anyway, we'd rather have our pocket money go to our cars and our record collections and our wardrobe than find out what dumbass thing was going to happen to happen to the Defenders this month? Surely it wasn't just me. And yet we found excuses when they treated Steve Gerber like dirt, or ignored Dave Cockrum when his medical bills were so high, because there was something NEW! we wanted to see.

Seriously, Marvel fans care about fictional characters more than real people.

Bissette's right. I was very glad to see that Seth has also publicly joined him. But I also see The Beat and the other comic news sites, who are on one hand posting news about the boycott, at the same time also posting big, stupid, OMG! stories about Cyclops and Storm kissing, and Fantastic Four # 600. LOOK! WE MUST PUBLICIZE WHAT FICTIONAL CHARACTERS WILL DO IN A FORTHCOMING COMIC BOOK! Because that's more important.

It would be very, very nice if the same outlets that are reporting creator boycotts would join those boycotts. That would make a difference.

It would be very, very nice if retailers join the boycott and quit carrying all Marvel Comics. That would make a difference.

Me, I can't make a difference. But until this situation is made right, there will be no further mention of Marvel in any of my blogs, for any reason. I freely admit that I haven't actually bought any new Marvel books since Dan Slott was writing She-Hulk, but I'm not going to buy reprints or collected editions of anything old and good, which I do buy, and I will not be promoting any Marvel products through reviews or mentions. I can do that at least. I'll read what I own and enjoy, but not a line more.

If you are in the business of "talking about funnybooks on the internet," I sincerely hope you'll do the same, and share the reason with your readers. Collectively, we've been turning a blind eye to Marvel and finding shallow excuses for them doing the wrong thing long enough. It's time to do the right thing. It's time to do right by Jack Kirby. Long past time.

Over the last week, I made a few changes to my LJ. I deleted a pile of userpics and left just a few behind, each keyed to what sort of entry I've written, and I also deleted a big ole pile of old entries that were nothing more than links to posts at my other blogs. Sorta drives home the point that I haven't written anything of great substance here in two years.

I'm certainly not going to renew a paid membership to this service, but the bear is going to be editing all of my entries at Thrillpowered Thursday to put the images on Picasa and change all the image tags for something like 140 individual blog posts. Looking forward to that like a hole in the head. On the other hand, hey!, people really seem pleased that I'm writing Thrillpowered Thursday again. I've got a lot of love from online acquaintances about it.

On the home front, the baby is completely wonderful, although I am concerned about how loud and chaotic his day care sometimes is when I pick him up in the evening. He spent the weekend being wonderful and quiet, but last night, when I picked him up, he was cranky and the joint was really noisy. He did not calm down for hours, and seemed so overstimulated and upset. Marie's going to talk to them this morning, and if it's anything like that when I retrieve him tonight, somebody's getting an earful. He's a wonderfully good baby and weighs about eleven pounds now.

My daughter and I are maybe halfway through a major cleaning project downstairs. Also, all of us have a Labor Day deadline for cleaning anything that we wish to keep from the garage. After that day, it is understood that anything whatsoever that remains in the garage will be thrown away before Christmas. It's almost like phase two of that giant decluttering that I began some time ago. The really amazing thing is that, after selling two-thirds of my CDs, I don't even listen to any of the ones that remain, except for occasionally on road trips. There are still far too many things in our house. I'm going to put some old letters and fanzines and things in a single plastic storage tub that'll fit under the bed and weed out all the rest of the things from those beat-up file cabinets where I used to keep all that stuff. 2012 will be a much more streamlined, and far less chaotic year.

Over the next two months, we have some fun things on the agenda, including trips to Asheville and Saint Simons Island and a hopefully neat Bama BBQ tour through the northeast corner of that state. It turns out that the girl who runs the local anime club is a food blogger herself, and she's organized a society for some of us in the hobby, and I understand that we'll be doing a meet-n-greet with some of our fellow bloggers in about a month. For fall road trips, I think that we're doing some eating in Columbus/Phenix City in September and going to Nashville in October.

Actually, we'll probably go through Columbus twice, because we will probably go hiking in Providence Canyon before November. May try to leave the baby with my mom for that one.

Marie finally decided to read Dorothy L. Sayers and she loves them. She's finished seven of the eleven novels in two months, and we're breaking to watch the adaptation of Have His Carcase before she begins the next one.

I've been reading John Mortimer, and watching the Thames Rumpole of the Bailey series. Socially, some of these 1970s episodes are extremely, uncomfortably dated. There was one where a woman accused an MP of rape and Rumpole, defending the man, just tore her apart on the witness stand, making the nastiest insinuations about her character and mental stability and promiscuity. And he's the good guy. Rumpole's daughter-in-law protested his position and was dismissed as one of those silly feminists. Then there's an episode where this asshole stops talking to his wife. For three years. I couldn't believe how that one ended. The really amazing thing is that this show was produced by Irene Shubik and I'm pretty sure that Verity Lambert was a higher-up in its production, but it's routinely the most sexist thing ever.

Also, the DVDs have little introductions by a wheezing, very aged Mortimer, who was wearing this pair of amazingly, comically oversized glasses for some mad reason while gently rocking as he speaks. I saw him and said, "So that's what happened to Brains from Thunderbirds."

In all, it is a pretty darn good time. If we haven't seen you recently, we miss you, and if we have, we miss you anyway. I hope that if you're reading this, you're having a terrific week.

Every three months, I pause to see how we're doing on our goals with the food blog. I'm happy to say that we're going mostly very good indeed!

1. Roadfood.com

Our first goal is to visit every Georgia-reviewed restaurant listed at Roadfood.com, except for two that I've discounted. Since I last reported, Roadfood added two restaurants in Atlanta, each of which - Fat Matt's Rib Shack and Manuel's Tavern - we have visited. I'm very happy to say that we are just four away from a full set. I plan to have these four taken care of before the end of the year. They are:

Buckner's Family Restaurant, Jackson GA
Falls View Restaurant, Jackson GA
Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room, Savannah GA
The Varsity (the main one), Atlanta GA

The tentative plan is to visit the two in Jackson one day in September, with a hike through the state park between them, then catch Mrs. Wilkes on the way to SSI in November, and have a celebratory "we done it!" quasi-party at The Varsity to toast our achievement.

2. SEC cities

We are over halfway through with this goal, having added Tuscaloosa AL and Starkville MS to our list since the last update. Five remain, though I don't believe that we will get any more before I update again. We will visit Gainesville FL, hopefully, in November, and some of the remaining cities - Lexington KY, Oxford MS, Fayetteville AR and Baton Rouge LA - in 2012.

3. Urbanspoon

This one's a little trickier. I have some very general goals with where I hope to see Marie, Let's Eat! logged in cities around the southeast. Obviously, ranking #1 in every city around us would be a lovely thing, albeit completely impractical just now - too many other bloggers have a big headstart on us. We've got a lot of work, consistent work, to catch up on some people.

Urbanspoon is much more popular in the Pacific Northwest than down here, and many southeastern cities have virtually no footprint or use in it yet. The advantage to doing well here is obvious: more views of restaurants on Urbanspoon where a link to our blog can be found leads to more traffic to our blog, and, hopefully, more advertising revenue. This does require a balance of featuring the most popular restaurants with a young, trendy, fad-following intown crowd and the older, more rustic places that appeal to roadfood travelers. Far out of the way barbecue shacks are less likely to receive many hits on Urbanspoon, although they do seem more consistently popular with the BBQ bloggers. With that in mind, here are the markets where I want our blog to be most visible, and where we are currently ranked as of July 17:

1. Atlanta # 11 of 190
2. Athens: # 2 of 20
3. Georgia (outside of the "major metros"): # 1 of 20 (comfortable lead, three times the posts/views of the gentleman in the # 2 slot)
4. Birmingham: # 2 of 34
5. Chattanooga: # 5 of 23
6. Asheville: # 6 of 37 (we'll be back in Asheville in two weeks)

Secondary consideration for these markets:

7. Columbus: # 5 of 10 (we'll be back in Columbus in September and in October)
8. Alabama (outside of the "major metros"): # 14 of 23
9. Dalton: # 1 of 3 (clearly, not many bloggers interested in this region)
10. Knoxville: # 3 of 17
11. Greenville/Spartanburg: # 10 of 19
12. Nashville: # 13 of 57

Also worth mentioning, we have notable, or not, presence in these other markets:

Augusta: We are dead last! # 6 of only six bloggers to list with Augusta restaurants.
Bowling Green: No competition here. Seriously. Our single visit to one doughnut shop nine months ago leaves us ranked # 1 of 1 in this city that does not yet use Urbanspoon very much.
Gainesville: # 1 of 12
Kentucky (outside of the "major metros"): # 1 of 6
Macon: # 2 of 8 (certain to shrink, as only 8 views separate # 2 and 4 on this list)
Memphis: # 18 of 55
Mississippi (outside of the "major metros"): # 3 of 13 (very little use in this market; our single visit to Starkville last month gave us this ranking)

4. Barbecue

I have given myself a small goal of visiting and writing about 100 different barbecue restaurants before the end of the year. My numbers were a little off thanks to a pair of double-up chapter entries with two or more restaurants, but I counted last night and we have 70 already, which I think is pretty impressive, and more than my old BBQ page on Geocities ever had! Mind you, one is a cheat, because Neal wrote it up when he was guest-blogging for us from California. We hope to visit four more on a BBQ tour (with my mom in tow!) of northeast Alabama in a month, and hit some in Columbus and Phenix City the second Saturday in September. Plus there are a good dozen in Atlanta that we have not featured yet. I don't know that we can hit one hundred before the end of the year, but we'll see!

5. Money!

We used our most recent ad payment to finance almost all of our dining on our trip to Starkville and back, which was wonderful. We are over one-third of the way towards our next ad payment, but we are still such a long way off from where I would like to be. Visits to the blog continue to climb (which has allowed me to write fewer book reviews for that other blog, especially with the main source for those visitors taking a vacation and not updating!), but the percentage of visitors who are actually clicking the ad is smaller than I would like. On the other hand, reactivating my Thrillpowered Thursday blog has had a nice effect on the numbers already. The best we can do is hope for more visitors, and hope that Google finds some ads that people are actually interested in. So please, continue to tell your friends about us, and give us suggestions for places within our travel radius.

Most of our comments seem to come many months after we make a post, as we get lots of Google traffic to older entries. We'd love to have more chatter, and Marie and I should both do a better job of actually, you know, replying to comments. Sometimes we drop off that mark.

Thanks so much for reading! I hope that my October report will see us threatening the Atlanta top five, and at a comfortable # 4 in Asheville. Fingers crossed!