I spent most of the NYC ComicCon lurching in circles with my mouth half-open, hunting for a copy of Detective Comics # 587 and spending way too much money on plastic bullshit that reminds me of my childhood. The experience was spectacular.

I haven’t been to a comic book convention since 1991, in Virginia Beach — the whole enterprise was dusty, pasty and pungent. Not now, baby. Now that comics, computers and sci-fi are billion dollar businesses, nerds are out of the basement and blinking in the klieg lights. Pop culture’s always been a byproduct of marketing campaigns, but we are now in a golden age of hype and shiny bullshit.

Today’s thirtysomethings were the target audience back in the ’70s and ’80s when Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other pop mythologies did the first Triple Lindy into the collective consciousness. Now we’re just old enough to have kids who get just as pumped about Star Wars as we did, and fetishizing fictional universes is a family affair.

Whenever alien archaeologists unearth whatever temples we leave behind, they’re gonna think that Spiderman was our God and stormtroopers were some kind of high priests. Frankly, I’m thrilled. Digging through comic boxes and buckets of chipped action figures gets me all stoked and unstuck in time and I get the same sense of wow, cool wonder that I got when my dad took me to see Star Wars for the first time.

But this thing was for everybody. Really, it was just like the Mermaid Parade except indoors and marginally less sexualized. The people-watching and the costumes were spectacular and totally worth the admission price.

This is my favorite photo from this weekend’s NYC ComicCon, but there’s a lot more after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

Here it is, half-past 2 pm on a workday and my fly is ALL the way down. Again. I can’t even remember the last time I went to the bathroom here at the office, but it was definitely before lunch. I can, however, remember the last time this happened.

Yesterday.

And definitely a time or two last week, too. It happens to the best of us, but still. At least twice a week since I started this job, I’ve looked down midway through the afternoon to see the zipper on my suit pants gaping open like a grey and hungry Venus Flytrap.

I have absolutely no explanation for this. I’ve been zipping up my pants for thirty-some years now, so it’s not likely that I’ve started forgetting that particular task. I’m not sure that it’s the pants, either. Honestly, I don’t know what it is. I’ve got two suits, one grey and one black — one for laundry days and Fridays, one for the other times — and zipper lightning strikes them both right in the crotch without honor or pity.

Still, it could be worse.

I was in the cafeteria yesterday assembling my lunch at the salad bar when I switched directions unexpectedly, mistaking tofu for chicken cubes and fixing it when I bumped into a woman in line behind me. I’d guess she was just past her first promotion in the marketing department for one of my company’s cooler media properties. She wore brilliant white pants, pants that perfectly matched two rows of blinding shiny Chiclets in her smile.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it,” she said. “I made the same mistake yesterday. Enjoy your lunch!” she said, smiling, and turned to walk away, stopping to wave at some friends on her way to the elevators.

When she turned, I saw the copper-colored streak creeping up the back of her perfect white pants. It spread slowly, a Rorshach blot that every lady reads as her worst nightmare.

I was able to grab her just before she got on the elevator. “Uh, I think you’ve sat in something,” I said. “It’s urgent.”

She blushed and said “Oh God. Thank you so much,” backed her way onto the elevator and vanished. Then I noticed my zipper, right as a crowd of people came around the corner.

That’s how it goes. You think you’re so cool, so put together with your unassailable public armor on. Then it turns out you’re the king of a crumbled castle and everyone knows it but you.

There’s this guy in my neighborhood. He’s an older guy, maybe in his sixties — always dressed sharp in creased slacks, a guyabera and a fedora. He stands as tall as his posture will allow. Age is creeping in, but he’s ramrod-straight, always looks you in the eye when he says “hello.” And he always says “hello.” He’s got a really, really large fatty tumour on the side of his face.

Like this, but much bigger. I’d say the side of his face is at least a C-cup. But there he is, walking upright, looking people in the eye, taking that walk all the same.

We’ve all got flaws. Big ones, most of us. They’re like scars for the soul, the spirals that give our personalities their fingerprints. So what’s better, really … primping and preening up a big lie about how slick you are and having everyone else see the truth? Or just getting that tumour out in the sunshine and tanning that thing until you’re laughing in your coffin?

My fly’s still down, and it’s staying down. And when I get bored I’m going to feed that hungry flytrap bits of burger meat, just to see what happens.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I was buying a Spongebob Squarepants-themed rectal thermometer for my uncle online this afternoon (his Shrek one is broken) when I noticed something really, really weird. Yes, weirder than a Spongebob Squarepants rectal thermometer that ACTUALLY PLAYS THE THEME SONG when it’s done reading one’s temperature.

And just relax about my uncle, okay? He collects these sorts of things. Spongebob paraphernalia, I mean. My uncle does not, to the best of my knowledge, have a collection of musical rectal thermometers.

But look. I was buying the thing from a website called America RX, and filling in my shipping information when I noticed a really weird caveat. See if you can spot it in this screencap:

See? Isn’t that weird? According to that website, UPS has trademarked the color BROWN. That can’t be true, can it? I checked the UPS site myself, and sure enough, under trademarks:

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

Like any decent American, I am ashamed and embarrassed by my country.I spent decades thinking we were the good guys until Bush and crew came and ruined us, turned us into a bunch of heavy-handed fratboys with no consciences or consequences.

Except maybe not. I wasn’t around for Vietnam, but Kurt Vonngut, Jr. sure was, and his words on American torture in Vietnam are as true and heartbreaking today as they were when he wrote them 36 years ago. I first read the following piece in “Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons,” a marvelous collection of Vonnegut’s essays and speeches.

Originally published in the New York Times in 1971, “Torture and Blubber” mirrors my disgust with our country and a sadness for the entire human race — a disappointment I thought was new and mildly fashionable.

The piece is short and well worth your time — in its entirety after the jump …

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

This is from my notebook, written on the subway this morning:

There is a man standing next to me reading a paperback. One of his hands is gripping a pole and the other is holding the book with the cover and pages folded back, the front and back covers mashed together in a horrific forced kiss.

This constitutes abuse in my book. It’s the book equivalent of a mother yanking a child’s arm outside a bus station bathroom.

It is all that I can do not to snatch the book out of this guy’s hands and show him the correct way to hold it: With one cover and chunk of pages per hand, the subway pole crooked in an elbow. Alternately, he could hold the book with ring, middle and index fingers along the spine for support, his thumb and pinkie holding the pages open.

But instead he does neither. He is a fat man riding a gasping sway-backed pony towards a great Golden Corral on the horizon, blindly bending the tool that takes him where he wants to be and screw the consequences.

Now he’s sitting next to me, this intellectual barbarian, still bending his book without even needing a free hand for the pole. What an asshole. This is a man who wipes his hands on the curtains, who hawks and spits into empty lockers and plucks roses made of frosting off uncut wedding cakes with his bare and grubby fingers.

Books are not to be treated this way. It’s an abuse. Some of you out there may be closet book-benders — and you may be thinking “Simmer down, Simmermon, paperbacks are meant to be folded. They can take it.”

You people better stay in your grotty little closet around me, is all I have to say. Is it right throw a cat across the room repeatedly just because he’ll probably land on his feet? Is it right to repeatedly tie an octopus’s arms in knots just because they’re soft and flexible?

A book is more than a content delivery mechanism. It’s not a single-use syringe that you just uncork, squeeze once and ditch. It’s more than a CD, more than the plastic fork that carries your lunch to your mouth. Maybe it’s just me, but I have fixations on certain editions, certain printings of my favorite books. And while I’m far from a book collector — I’m really, really hard on physical objects, actually — I think that books ought to be treated with a little dignity, regardless of how many hands you have free.

Popularity: 2% [?]

A good friend of mine sent me this writing gig post from Craigslist in L.A. As if dating, online and off, weren’t hard and strange enough:

ghost writer

Very busy executive would like to hire a writer to send emails on his behalf on personal dating websites. And do a few enails back and forth to get the ball rolling..

This person needs to know how to write in a masculine, but romantic way and at the same time create a challenge for the reader of the email

I’m from the South and I live in New York, so I’m not sure how y’all work it out there in Los Angeles. On the one hand, it seems like this dude runs the risk of getting his ass found out as soon as he does some ill-advised Blackberry thumb-stumbling of his own. But on the other hand, I’m not sure that this guy’s target audience would be smart enough to notice or deep enough to care.

I’m wondering here – what’s the real goal? Is it to meet someone of quality? Or just get laid? What’s the backup plan when this guy gets found out? I mean, if the ghostwriter succeeds, then they’re able to do something that the poster himself cannot do. This just won’t last.

I’m curious, too: what kind of responses did he get? How does one land this job, and what’s the time commitment?

One thing’s for sure though: whoever takes this job and takes it seriously is a putz, big-time. It sucks needing work and it sucks needing money, but I’d imagine what really sucks is looking in the mirror and knowing that you’re Cyrano de Bergerac with a dick for a nose.

Popularity: 4% [?]

SF Bay Guardian Screencap
Originally uploaded by chinese_fashion.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian has covered the Virginia Tech shooting with minimal thought and maximum bullshit in a move that is making me re-think my whole situation as a knee-jerk liberal.

This post by Tim Redmond blames the massacre on the availability of handguns in the USA, particularly Virginia. It goes on to say that George Bush is partially responsible — quite a deductive leap. I’m from Virginia, and I’m no Bush fan. And it’s true that Virginia has no real gun laws of note. They’re really more like implied rules of thumb. Many of my good friends in Richmond own enough weaponry to stave off a zombie uprising. I’m morally opposed to that and will be until the first zombie bite makes the news.

Another hard-hitting post relates the killing to Virginia gun laws (again), then pirouettes like a hippo on roller skates to reveal the real shocker: Virginia’s pretty ass-backward when it come to gay rights, too! Next, Redmond might reveal that Virginia openly condoned slavery less than 200 years ago.

If you read between the lines here, you’d think that Virginia itself ordered Cho Seung Hui to shoot those kids. Thompson’s points are essentially: Bush sucks and Virginia has its priorities backwards when it comes to guns and civil rights. While this is all true, it’s hardly news. The Weekly freaking Reader shows more insight.

If a Bizarro George Bush had outlawed the sale of all handguns when he was first elected, there would still be enough in homes, barns and attics all over the country to cause some serious problems. This country is full of people who think that they have a God-given right to own weaponry. Like it or not, most Americans associate available weaponry with freedom. I think those people are wrong, but I am outnumbered in my home state … and my opponents are armed.

And even if there were no guns, the killer could have built a fertilizer bomb, driven his car over folks on the way to class or used an ax. Affordable, available guns are a big problem in America, but they’re far from the only factor in this week’s shooting. Timothy McVeigh didn’t use guns, and neither did Lizzie Borden. The Unabomber hand-made his bomb parts. Something about our culture breeds people sick enough to kill at random, and when Americans are that desperate and driven, we’ll figure something out. Always have and always will. I daresay that’s the real problem here.

Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil have already blamed video games for this massacre, and some assmouthed blogger is using the situation to bash Richard Dawkins.. Just because I agree politically with the SFBG doesnt mean they get a free pass: using our nations’ latest tragedy to score cheap political points less than 24 hours later is just wrong.

It’s gross enough watching TV pundits ask shellshocked students “why do you think this happened?” or “who do you blame,” desperately fanning any spark of emotion into something good for the camera. And don’t even get me started on that maggot-filled gasbag Nancy Grace.

Adequacy.org summarizes the rapid politicizing of tragedy pretty well:

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

Blogging is hard — even if you’re not good at it. If it’s easy, it’s not worth doing. It can be a grind, just grunting posts out to stay relevant and keep your audience. Every blogger knows how important it is to jump on a story and be a part of the conversation — but in this case, the Guardian’s serving up some pretty thin gruel. There’s no news here on either side, no insight – just the same old song.

For now, this situation isn’t about politics. It’s about compassion, understanding, support and regret. Any media that is not expressly news-related that comments on this situation should show gravity, depth, and copious emotional intelligence … or enough sense to shut the fuck up. We’re close enough to a major election and the spin will come soon enough, followed by the lawsuits. Right now, we’re all shocked and stunned and hurt. The only thing we can do as media and human beings is to tell the stories and let the tears flow.

Popularity: 2% [?]