I have a stone in my kidney a.k.a. a kidney stone...

The doctor tells me that it's just a little bit larger than a grain of rice. This photo demonstrates the size it feels like from my point of view.

Curse you, IMDB! Curse you to hell!

It happened again and you all know how much I hate when it happens!

I love watching movies on TMC. They’re uncut, no commercials, and letterboxed when at all possible. Plus, they play a lot of old timey classic movies from before I was born.

A film had just started playing and it’s a movie that I knew nothing about. It’s called Between Two Worlds and features an interesting cast that includes John Garfield (the Robert Blake of his time—or the other way around, I guess), Sydney Greenstreet, and Edmund Gwenn. The dialogue is snappy and it’s set on a boat. Count me in!

Temporary amnesia fogs my brain, because I really should know better by now, as I grab my trusty iBook and go to imdb.com to get the plot of the movie and try and figure out what I missed. The first thing I read, with no sign of a spoiler alert anywhere in sight, is the major plot twist to the movie. The big reveal.

Well, fuck-you-very-much, as we used to say in Wednesday afternoon catechism class.

I have no interest in watching the movie now. Perhaps another day, when the phenylalanine in my Diet Squirt has boiled the events of today from my mind.

Writing Comics = ?

I guess I’ve written four or five dozen comic books during my stay in comics. Not that many, compared to some writers. Some of the books were kind of crappy but a few of them were pretty damn good.

But it seems like the one comic that people always seem to connect me with is the Amazing Spider-Man Annual #20. People seem to really remember that issue and they have nothing but good to say about it. So it really kind of sucks that working on that book was one of the most horrific experiences of my life.

In the early 1980s I decided I wanted to write comic books. I had never written anything more ambitious than a grocery list, but Jim Shooter had announced in the back pages of Marvel Fanfare that Marvel Comics was looking for new talent. He said Marvel needed people to write, pencil and ink comic books. I knew that I couldn’t pencil or ink, but when Shooter reprinted a portion of a ‘Marvel style’ plot I had a funny kind of feeling that I could do something like that. How hard could it be?

I borrowed my friend Dale’s typewriter and pecked out three stories.

The first one featured Spider-Man fighting Electro in Chicago. It was an ambitious story that was packed with all sorts of action and it culminated with Electro being drawn into the power source of the television antennas atop the Sears tower in Chicago. In a flash Electro’s ‘essence’ is broadcast to every television in the Chicago land area. So whenever you turned your television to channel thirteen you’d see Electro. He’d be kind of like Max Headroom and he would swear at you, demand that you release him, and curse Spider-Man.

The second story featured Marvel’s CB-slingin’ mother-truckin’ superstar US1. If memory serves me, the character had a metal plate in his skull that enabled him to receive and broadcast CB radio transmissions. My story had something to do with US1 pulling his big rig into a small town where nothing is what it seems. Most of the houses and storefronts were props. It wasn’t a real town at all. I think I had some villain/villains taking advantage of lost travelers who happened to pull into the phony town. I have no idea if the bad guys ate the tourists or sold them into slavery. Whatever the deal way, US1 busted up the racket and used his CB skull radio to alert the authorities.

The third story I wrote puzzles me even to this day. It was crystal clear that Jim Shooter wanted to see stories featuring Marvel characters, but for some reason I wrote a story that featured Harry Harrison’s sci-fi hero, the Stainless Steel Rat. The story took place in the spaceport of some distant planet and there was lots of action in the exhaust tubes from a nearby launch pad. It was a pretty good story. I don’t know what possessed me to write it and send it to Marvel. But I did.

I sent the bundle of goodness off with a zingy cover letter and tried my best to forget about it. I was working at the time as a graphic artist. During the day I did paste-up and darkroom duties at a print shop, and at night I did package design for Sears—mostly kitchen and bathroom goods.

Four or five weeks later my SASE arrived back from New York. Jim Shooter (or some editor posing as him) wrote a bunch of encouraging notes on my Spider-Man and US1 stories. The only note written on the Stainless Steel Rat adaptation was GOOD—BUT WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS?

The encouraging notes on my other two stories from Shooter, or whatever editor or intern wrote them (when I worked at Stan Lee Media I wrote enough notes and letters in Stan’s “voice” to know that what you see is seldom what you get) piqued my interest enough to sit down and write a few more stories. More encouraging notes came back.

Somehow during all this I decided that I really wanted to be a comic book writer and it had to be at Marvel. Subconsciously I had created a reasonably unrealistic goal for myself. I had decided deep down that WRITING FOR MARVEL = SUCCESS + HAPPINESS. Nothing less would do.

By this time a local comic book shop owner had introduced me to Tom Morgan, a talented penciller and inker who was also trying to break into Marvel from the friendly confines of the Midwest.

###################################

Flash cut to a couple of years later and Tom and I have moved to the east coast. We’re living in Bridgeport, Connecticut. New York City and Marvel are only a quick train ride away.

We’ve done our share of networking and have befriended a handful of comic professionals. We get out first break doing comics for a new company called Spectrum Comics. We become so involved with Spectrum that we move to the town where they are located. An investor in the company has just bought a big house in Bristol, which is roughly in the center of Connecticut, and we are lured there by the prospect of free housing. New York and Marvel are still reachable; it’s just a longer train ride.

Tom Morgan finally gets a toehold into Marvel. Mike Carlin hires him to do draw a Dazzler inventory story. I accompany Tom when he goes to Marvel, just in case an editor screams out that he needs a writer.

Mike Carlin and his assistant Mike Higgins are saints. They know we are scrambling to get anything that we can. I pitch some Dazzler stories to Carlin, which are atrocious. He compliments me on how neat my typing and pages are.

Things were starting to get ugly where Tom and I were living. Spectrum was suffering a meltdown and it was getting uncomfortable living in the basement of one of the investors. But we were broke and pretty much out of options.

Good fortune came to the rescue. A few years earlier, when I was still living in the Midwest, I was in a pinball arcade with a friend of mine, Rob Dahlberg. The place was dark, lit only by the pinball machines and video games. I tripped over a power cord that was snaked out where it shouldn’t have been. I fall face first into pinball game, I think it was 8-Ball Deluxe, and wound up on the floor not able to feel my hands or feet. Cool, eh?

After the whiplash wears off everything is back to normal. My doctor, who was trying to soak the insurance company for every penny he could, kept me in the hospital for a week. I was sharing the room with a guy who got totally wrecked in a motorcycle accident. He was on a morphine drip and we spent our days watching soap operas. I read a lot of Phillip K. Dick.

So after I get out of the hospital I go to the arcade owner and ask him to pay for my hospital bill and pony up for my lost wages. I didn’t go after any pain or suffering because my insurance had already paid the hospital, so if I could soak him for that I’d call it even. But for reasons I don’t understand, the guy turns into a complete dick. He says he’s not giving me penny one. I’m flabbergasted for the first time in my life. He tells me that if I want anything from him I’m going to have to take him and his insurance company to court. Can you believe that?

I lawyered up with a local firm who sent me to a bigger outfit in Chicago. Lots of paperwork and several months later I get called into give my deposition. I’m living on the east coast at the time but the deposition date coincides with a wedding I have to attend, so I make the train ride back. My friend Rob and I show up at a really fancy lawyer’s office to give our story. My lawyer coaches me and I tell it like it happened. The other guy’s lawyer asks some questions and I can tell by the look on his face that he thinks I’m some sort of scam artist. I finish up and then it’s my friend Rob’s turn. He has to give his statement because he was present when it happened. The other guy’s lawyer is snotty with Rob as well. Rob tells them the same story I just told. For the record they get Rob’s name and address and occupation. That’s when the other shoe drops. Rob informs them that he is an Illinois State Police Trooper. The snotty lawyer visibly pales. He may have even blanched. Everyone in the room that is with the opposing lawyer quickly closes up things. That’s all for now, boys.

Outside on the street my lawyer hoots with delight. And why wouldn’t he? A cop as my witness? He tells me that we’ll certainly win in court, but that the insurance company for the arcade with offer cash settlement a day or two before the actual court date. Good for me, I think, until I learn that the courts are so clogged up that my case is scheduled for eleven or twelve months from then.

I return to the east coast as poor as when I left, and more or less forget about the matter. There are comic stories to write and landlords to dodge and such.

So there Tom and I are living in this fellow’s basement. We don’t want to be there and we’re getting the distinct impression that he doesn’t want us there either.

Then I hear from my lawyer. The case is scheduled or on the docket or some such thing and the insurance company wants to settle. The problem is that I am suffering no ill effects from the incident. I’m not paralyzed or stuck in a wheelchair. What I suffered is known as a soft tissue injury. No broken bones. No apparent damage. They want to settle for eight or nine thousand dollars. The lawyer tells me that if I limp into the courtroom and tell tales of suffering that I might get more from the judge, but the lawyer says he doesn’t think it’s worth the effort. Besides, I’m currently a thousand miles away without a dime to spare for transportation to Chicago. I take the settlement and after the lawyer takes his chunk and assorted bills and liens are taken out, and I share a little with my family, I wind up with a couple thousand bucks, which is exactly the amount of money Tom and I need to get out of uncomfortable guy’s basement.

I don’t know the reasoning for us staying in Bristol. We really should have returned to Bridgeport or closer to New York, but we didn’t. We stayed in Bristol. Tom and I found a woman who owned an apartment building and we charmed her into letting us live there. Neither of us had any sort of steady income. I think we wound up cinching the deal by paying a couple of months rent in advance.

Through all this mess Tom continued to hone his skills and he was starting to get some real notice. I couldn’t get arrested, but I really wasn’t doing my best work at the time.

Then Mike Carlin came through again. He let me know that Jim Owsley had taken over the Spider-Man books and was looking for some new talent.

I pestered Owsley politely but persistently. I went up to Marvel to meet with him for what I guess turned out to be pitch meetings. Other writers would be in his office and the stories they were pitching were insanely horrible. Owsley liked some of my ideas and I would go back to Bristol to flesh them out. He said my stories had good nuts and bolts and that I should really work for DC.

Around this time Tom Morgan hit gold. John Romita senior offered him a staff job in the art department doing corrections and such. Tom and I both knew that it would be insane for him to turn down the job because he lived almost three hours away. He found someone in New York who needed a roommate so we parted ways. I missed him but I was very happy for him. So there I was alone in this massive two-bedroom apartment, two months late with the rent.

I hit on an idea that Owsley really liked. It involved Spider-man battling a mega-terrorist who builds a mega bomb that is capable of leveling Manhattan. The terrorist triggers the bomb with his retina pattern and in twelve hours New York will be no more. Spider-man does something stupid and accidentally kills the guy and burns his face off. Now there’s no way to deactivate the bomb. Spidey does his research and learns that the reclusive terrorist was last seen in public when he was just a boy. Spidey convinces Ben Grimm to let him use Dr. Doom’s time machine so he can go back in time and grab the infant terrorist-to-be long enough to scan his retina pattern so he can come back to the future to deactivate the bomb.

There was more, but that was the gist of it.

Owsley suggested that we could really soup up the story by incorporating the character of Iron Man 2020. Owsley had been Larry Hama’s assistant editor when they produced the Machine Man series that introduced Iron Man 2020. Owsley figured that since we were playing with traveling around in time, we could incorporate the character of Arno Stark, the man inside the armor. Maybe figure out what turned him into the extreme badass he was in the Machine Man series. Anybody who knows me knows I love Iron Man, so I jumped at the chance. The only problem was that I was running out of time. And money. And to make matters worse, Owsley was having troubles of his own, so he’d tell me to come in for a meeting, which was an all day affair for me and twenty or thirty bucks that I didn’t have for a train trip, and I’d get there and he would tell me that he was too busy to meet with me, that I should come back tomorrow. Most of the time I could count on Mike Carlin or Higgins to come out and escort me into the bullpen. I would hang out in their office until Owsley’s door would open and then I’d try to talk to him.

Another problem was that the telephone company finally got wise that I wasn’t going to be paying my bill anytime soon, so they saw fit to shut off my service. This meant that I had to go to the Bristol library and call Owsley from the pay phone. He would want to give me extensive notes on my story and I would be popping in quarters until I’d run out. Then I’d have to ask him to call me back. Of course there was nowhere to sit or nothing to set my notebook on. It was not an optimal situation.

Near the end Owsley said that enough was enough and we needed to put this story to bed. Finish it up and get it drawn. I was all for that. We set up a meeting. I was poorer than poor at this time. The only thing I owned that was worth anything was an old Honda 350 motorcycle I had bought at a yard sale for fifty bucks. I used it to scoot around and run errands. It leaked gasoline but the guy I bought it from told me where to buy the gasket set to fix it. I bought the gasket but I never had the tools to do the task and I wound up returning the gasket set to get the cash in order to buy Tom Morgan a birthday cake. Pathetic, right? The cake had green frosting on it and I had them write HULKY BIRTHDAY on it. I left it in the car when I was running an errand and some bastard actually stole it right off the front seat. Can you believe that? Sure, I left the car unlocked, but still, who steals a birthday cake? Honestly!

So anyway, all I had that was worth anything was the motorcycle. I still had Tom’s car, which he couldn’t use in New York, but he would have been sore it I’d sold it. So I go to the local motorcycle shop in town and they laugh at me when I ask if anyone wants to buy my ride. Finally I convince a mechanic to buy it. He says his grandmother wants to learn to ride. I get forty bucks out of him and a ride home. I have just enough to get into Manhattan. I show up and Owsley says he’s too busy to see me.

I’m almost in tears. I think one of the Mikes happened to walk by and they let me into the bullpen. Inside his office Mike Carlin is furious. He is such a nice guy he refuses to see me treated this way. He goes over to Owsley’s office and tears into him.

Things get blurry from her on. Owsley is having some serious problems and realizes that I’m getting screwed and says he’ll find the time for me. I recall spending a night or two at Tom Morgan’s apartment. His roommate is a royal prick. I think I spent a few nights there, typing away revisions on the roommate’s typewriter. What I’m writing is crap. The story has been so twisted around that nothing makes sense. I meet with Owsley and he plays with a Transformer toy that turns into a gun. He keeps pointing it at me. I don’t know if he’s doing this consciously. He’s put red film over the overhead lights so the office takes on the appearance of some sort of fiery den. I meet and talk with him but he’s not focused on the story. I’m so broke and busted that I’m far from focused myself.

I return home to Bristol, Connecticut a wreck. The mailbox is full of notes from the landlord. I sit in the living room silently as she comes by each day and knocks on the door. She wiggles the doorknob. Somehow she doesn’t have a key to the apartment; otherwise she would have barged in by now. I can’t sleep and I suddenly get it in my head that perhaps a former tenant had been one of those skinflint packrats who doesn’t trust banks. I open the light switch and electrical power outlet covers, looking for wads of hidden cash. Thinking perhaps there might be something hidden away in the ceiling tiles I pile furniture up to precariously check for loose tiles. It dawns on me if I fall it might snap my neck and this would be a ridiculous way to die. I spend a few more hours searching nooks and crannies in closets and the bathroom and come up dry.

I go to the grocery store down the block and use the pay phone to call home. I talk to my sister Marcia and she hears the defeat in my voice. She suggests that I come back home. I tell her that I probably would, but I’d have to hitchhike. It turns out that I don’t have to. Back when that lawsuit with the arcade was settled I gave my dad and my sister a chunk of money. Marcia still had hers and she sent it to me via Western Union.

I packed my clothes, brought all my books to the library to donate them, and left everything else I had for the landlord (who would later track me down in Chicago and try to sue me for lost rent. She would have won but she never showed up in court. The judge told me that there was a good chance that she was never intending to show up—that the very threat of a lawsuit would have convinced me to pay her out of court) and hitched a ride into Manhattan with my friend Bob Lewis, a friend from my Spectrum days. I spent a night or two sleeping on the floor in Karl Kesel’s apartment before I hopped a train to Chicago. Bob was a friend of Karl’s and I think they were inking some project together,

I left without saying goodbye to Tom Morgan. Which I regret doing. I think a part of me was mad at him for getting all successful and leaving me behind. Who knows? But it still bugs me that I left without getting together for him. By this time Tom was a full-fledged Romita Raider and he was picking up all sorts of odd jobs from editors, which lead to him having a fantastic career at Marvel.

Back home it took me a while to sit back down at a typewriter, but I did and not too much after that my friend Paul Mounts yanked me into the world of Now Comics.

A couple of months after I was home something weird showed up in the mail. It was an envelope from Marvel Comics. A No Prize, perhaps? No, it was a check for like three or four hundred dollars. Owsley and Marvel had paid me for the story I had written. I have no idea how they got my home address. Maybe from Tom Morgan. I don’t know. I cashed the check and bought a really good pair of boots.

Four or five months later Tom Morgan calls me and tells me that my story is going to actually see print. It was going to be featured in the Amazing Spider-Man Annual #20. All these years later my jaw is still sore from it hitting the floor.

Not long after that I picked up a copy of said comic in my local shop. The cover was astonishing. I believe it was drawn and inked by Bob Wiacek. I paged through it and it looked stunning. It was reworked, but I could recognize entire chunks of my original story. After five or six pages I didn’t see any credits. I felt a little heartbroken. Finally I got to the last page and the typeset credits were there, looking almost like an afterthought. The penciller was Mark Beachum and the inker was Bob Wiacek. There’s a writing credit for Ken McDonald, but from what I’ve heard the book was scripted by Owsley and Jim Shooter. Finally there’s me: Original Story by Fred Schiller.

I made it. I had the comic in my hands and the boots on my feet. I’d made it at Marvel, which had been my dream and aspiration. So why wasn’t I happy? I had done what I set out to do—in sort of a backhanded way.

Years later it happened again. This time there was nothing backhanded about it. I was hired to launch a new X-Men comic. I was the writer of Professor Xavier and the X-Men, part of Marvel’s ninety-nine cent comic line. I should have been as happy as a clam---a really happy clam. WRITING FOR MARVEL = SUCCESS + HAPPINESS, right?

Nope.

I’m not certain what does equal success and happiness, but it sure isn’t writing for Marvel. What an ass I was.

I’m lots smarter now, though.

P.S. Toward the end of my employment at DC Comics, Jim Owsley came on board as an editor. We talked about the whole train wreck that was my story and he apologized. It seems he was getting grief from every possible direction once he took over the Spider-Man books. He acknowledged that he probably passed along some of that grief to others. It was nice to have that closure. After Owsley left DC he changed his name to Christopher Priest and has been writing some fantastic comics. I wish him continued success.

Tom Morgan is no longer drawing pictures of the Hulk slugging Thor, although he may do that in his free time. Tom has made the transition from drawing comics to working in animation. That makes sense. He’s a pretty animated guy.

This girl needs either a long nap or a sammich...or maybe both...

Am I the only one that's slightly creeped out by the Cingular Wireless girl?

Sometimes life is funny all by itself...

The Weirdness is back!

If anyone is interested, there is a batch of new O’Grady episodes slowly creeping onto The N (which is what they call Noggin at night, apparently).

I enjoy watching O’Grady, even though the episodes can be hugely hit or miss. I’ve tried turning a lot of people on to the show and found that either people love it from the start or they think it stinks on ice. There seems to be no middle ground.

O’Grady is produced by the same braintrust that gave us the far more entertaining series, Home Movies. One day if my lotto numbers ever come in, or an old lady runs over my foot in the parking lot of Wal-Mart and I get me some insurance money, I intend to buy the series on DVD. Rumor has it that one of the boxed sets comes complete with a commemorative Coach McGuirk whistle.


Speaking of boxed sets, my amazing wife bought me the first two seasons of Titus. We greatly enjoyed that series when it was briefly on Fox.

So much to watch, so little time. What’s a body to do?

Jack Bauer is safe for another 72 Hours

Watching television was a lot more fun back before I could tell time and I understood the concept of what a reoccurring character was.

Back when I was a kid (after I’d come in from playing with my dog Rags out in the alfalfa fields) there was a time when I faithfully and effortlessly slipped into the reality of television. There was no second-guessing what was happening—it was all about being in moment, baby—and it was great!

I would be squatting on the floor, enthralled in an episode of the Wild Wild West and shout out, “Jeepers, Rags! There’s no way Jim West and Artemus Gordon are going to be able to defeat Miguelito Loveless’ mechanical shark! They’re goners for sure!” I would sit there shocked and dismayed by the inevitable fate of Jim and Artie, but then after the commercial break I’d see my heroes miraculously escape (with the help of a miniature gramophone Jim had in a hollow boot heel and a diamond-tipped nose picker Artie had up his sleeve).

I’m pretty certain that by the end of the first season of the show I’d figured out that Jim and Artie were always going to somehow escape. If James T. West died, they would have to change the name of the show and everything. So from that point on if I watched an episode of Mannix, or any show that was named after the lead character, there was a reasonably good chance that they were going to survive whatever threat they faced. The same held true for shows like Lost in Space or Land of the Giants. If a character had been on the show for the past eight or nine episodes, it was more than likely they were going to survive the current episode.

Another nail in the coffin of my television watching innocence was learning to tell time, and utilizing this new skill while watching a show. This was a horrible thing. Say for example I was watching an episode of Mission: IMPOSSIBLE. I watch as the team is in motion and the mission that had been thoughtfully planned out is nearly complete. That’s cool. But then I look at the clock and see there’s still twenty minutes until the show is over. Well, now I know that something is going to go wrong and the mission is going to start to fall apart. The team will have to think fast and pull together to stop the evil monarch from plundering the hidden treasure buried under the church tower. The episode is still enjoyable, but imagine how much better it would have been if I didn’t see the bump in the road coming along. There I am saying, “They’ve done it again, Rags. Another successful mission under their belts for the gang…hey, wait! That wasn’t supposed to happen! What’s going on, Rags? I never saw that twist coming, did you boy?”

We’re big fans of the television series 24 in this household. Early on, during the first or second season, there was talk that Kiefer Sutherland thought doing the show and actually having a career was too demanding, so he was only going to do a certain number of seasons. Ever since then there’s always been industry chatter that the producers might end the show by actually killing Jack Bauer off. He dies saving the world. Something big like that. It would be a ballsy way to end things and there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.

But now the official word is that Kiefer has agreed to be on the show for three more seasons. Seventy-two hours of action for a cool forty million bucks, plus a production deal. Good for him, of course. Nice work if you can get it, and all that, but at the same it means we know for a fact that Jack will survive any and all situations he gets himself into for the next three years.

I complain, yet I’ll be there every Monday night. I have to be. Chloe is tracking my movements on satellite. She’d downloading my coordinates to your Palm Pilot even as you read this.

E for Entertainment

Valarie and I finally got around to seeing V for Vendetta this weekend and we were both alarmed by how much we enjoyed it. We were both half-expecting it to suck like a Dyson.

In the ten years or so since I last read it, I somehow managed to forget huge portions of the comic story (Years of diet soda have left my brain is stewing in cocktail of Saccharien and Aspertine). This didn’t prove to be detrimental to my enjoying the movie.

I guess if you’re a diehard fan of the Alan Moore/David Lloyd comic and can’t stand to see it defaced in any way, you should keep as far from it away as you can, but if you’re looking for a stylized movie with a point of view it’s a fun way to waste two and a half hours.

Just like the filmed version of the Constantine comic, I enjoyed V for Vendetta for what it was and the story it told. I don’t feel compelled to hold the movies up to the original source material for comparison. One doesn’t impact the other, in my mind. I still enjoy reading Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comics, and I saw BOTH of the movies.

(And please, someone remind me of how open-minded I am when the Iron Man movie finally makes it onto the big screen, because-as-God-as-my-witness if they don’t develop the live action/animation technology needed to bring the Gene Colon comics to life, or if the helmet comes off and Tom Cruise’s head is inside it, there will be all kinds of hell to pay!)

It takes a Thief...

I just finished watching the first two episodes of the new FX series Thief. I will watch them again with my wife and I think I will enjoy them again, as much if not more than the first time.

Someone slipped something good into the water up at the FX Channel. Shield, Rescue Me, and now Thief. These shows make what the major networks are doing look silly.

Do yourself a major favor and get on the bandwagon. FX is generous with their repeats, so it won’t take you long to catch up. It will be more than worth the effort. New episodes air on Tuesday nights.

Do you want franchise with that?

Just a few minutes ago while I finished my lunch I caught the last ten minutes of Shrek 2 on HBO. I chuckled knowingly at the ‘adult’ jokes and cringed as I always do at the Fat Bastard brogue Mike Myers used for Shrek. I always wondered if the movie and the franchise that blossomed from it would have been nearly as popular if the producers had used the original Chris Farley voice track. I greatly dislike Myers as Shrek but I’m certainly in the minority.

I read somewhere that Antonio Banderas said he was headed into the studio to record his dialogue for Shrek 3 and possibly for a Puss In Boots spin-off. Do we need a Shrek 3? I didn’t think we needed an Ice Age 2, but I didn’t anticipate last weekend’s 70 million dollar opening. Is there a team of story people and artists cooking up Ice Age 3 even as I type this? Undoubtably.

It’s easy to chuff churlishly at the studios, but they’re only doing what they’ve been taught by Disney, Schulz, Lucas and the others.

Last night I read myself to sleep with Chip Kidd’s ‘Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz’ book and was reminded what a talented designer Kidd is and what a whore Schultz was.

Krikey! Was there anything that the man didn’t agree to put Snoopy and the gang on? The Peanuts strip itself remains a marvel and was almost always entertaining. In my mind it stands alone and is above reproach, if you don’t count Schulz’s periodic lapses into churchliness, but it wouldn’t shock me if Charles M. wasn’t making money under the table on Peanuts Tijuana bibles and piñatas.

From what I’ve read of the man he didn’t have a heroin problem or like to play the ponies, so why the compulsion to be such a major sell-out? Of course I could see the reasoning behind the reprint books, but did he really think a Charlie Brown inflatable Bop-em punching bag, or a Woodstock pencil eraser was going to bring that much joy into the hearts of children?

I haven’t gotten to the part in the book where Kidd explains that it was all United Features Syndicate’s fault, that Charles M. Schulz had just as much moral fortitude as Bill Watterson, and that Schulz signed a sucker contract as was forced to sell-out. I hope I get to that part.

The pay off to all of this is that if I had major print success with a project or if a film studio optioned something, I would be soaking up the money as fast as they could throw it at me. I’d license my characters to anything they’d stick to. (Except for rectal thermometers. That would be just plain tacky.)

So, as always, I’m not complaining about the problem—I just want to get in on it.

This is how we get around where I live...

Anatomy 101

A few posts earlier I talked about my rediscovery of 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder. Business dragged me away before I could finish the film.

Several minutes ago I finished watching The Great White Hope and flicked over to Anatomy and was lucky enough to land on a part of the movie I had missed.

Damn, Lee Remick was red hot in this movie, and Jimmy Stewart was a pistol. There was a great courtroom scene between the judge and all the attorneys involved. The discussion concerned the use of the world ‘panties’, which made sense because the trial involved an alleged rape.

A few minutes later the doctor who examined Lee Remick was called on the stand to testify. The actor who played the doctor was Howard McNear, a.k.a. Floyd the Barber on the Andy Griffith Show. It was funny to hear Floyd the Barber talking about examining Lee Remick for sperm samples. The image of him poking around between her taunt thighs is one that will remain in my head for years to come.

I really need to watch this movie from start to finish. I should schedule the DVR to grab it the next time it’s on. I seem to remember a fun Saul Bass opening sequence.

He's no Cinderella Man, but he ain't too bad...

Sleep eludes me again. Truth be told, I haven’t pursued it with much effort.

I’m watching The Great White Hope on the Fox Movie Channel. What a fantastic movie. I didn’t see it when it first came out, in 1970, but I remember it caused quite a ruckus because of all the interracial nastiness that was going on between James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander’s characters.

I’m a big fan of the Fox Movie Channel because it shows great classics and it shows them letterboxed, like they ought to be.

James Earl Jones is at the top of his form in this movie. If he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, he was robbed.

Speaking of Jones, if you’ve never seen it, you should check him out as Looking Glass General Alice, in 1990’s By Dawn’s Early Light. It’s a brink-of-Armageddon movie with a brain. Perhaps it will show up on the Fox Movie Channel one evening.

At any price, it's a steal...

Sleep eludes me once again. I’m watching 1959’s ‘Anatomy of a Murder’. It’s a smart and sometimes funny movie that was released the year I was born. I always like using my birth year as a point of reference. Had my mother seen a particular movie or heard a particular song while she was carrying me?

I saw another smart and funny movie earlier this evening with my wife. It’s called ‘The Inside Man’ and one of the stars was the man who everyone (including myself) thinks would’ve made a dandy James Bond, Clive Owen. From the first time I saw him, in 1998’s The Croupier, I knew Owen was a pip. The guy oozes charisma and sex appeal like a sieve, even in black and white, like last year’s Sin City.

I knew from the very first preview that I wanted/needed to see The Inside Man. Denzel Washington, another featured player, never fails to deliver, and Jodie Foster looked interesting. I’ve never been the biggest fan of Spike Lee’s movies, but then again I haven’t seen too many of them.

The driving force for my wanting to see The Inside Man was that it was a heist flick. Not being a career criminal myself, it’s fun to live vicariously through those I see on television and the movies. (I’ve got high hopes for Andre Braugher’s new series ‘Thief’) This weekend was the first chance we had to go to the movies. Both Valarie and I want to see ‘V for Vendetta’ but I’ve been doing my best to keep a blind eye to reviews and television interviews about The Inside Man because I wanted to know as little as possible.

I had a funny kind of feeling that The Inside Man would be a puzzler that would have me guessing from frame one, which turned out to be the case, and if I’d seen Denzel Washington on Jay Leno and he showed a clip of him hanging to the roof of a runaway bulldozer, I knew the whole time I was in the theater I’d be setting there waiting for the bulldozer scene.

Clive Owen owns the movie from start to finish. Denzel Washington plays his role with an easy comfort, and Christopher Plummer turns in a great performance. Jodie Foster was good, but I’m still recovering from the sting of having recently seen Flightplan. Plus, I’m always nervous that Foster is going to take her clothes off. All told I don’t she’s appeared naked all that many of her films, but I think I’ve seen them all. I don’t think that Jodie Foster is an ugly woman, not by any stretch, but there’s this element of familiarity with her, so I always feel like I’m seeing my sister or cousin naked.

The Inside Man was not what I was expecting but everything I want in a movie, with a bare minimum of credibility gaps. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys an intelligent heist flick.

Prior to the movie I saw the first preview for The DaVinci Code that made me interested in the movie. I thought the book was pretty damn silly, but it could make for a fun thriller. Director Ron Howard has managed to polish a few turds into gems, so time will tell.

Leggo my pancake!

Progress is a wonderful thing, especially when it comes to breakfast foods. It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Eggo frozen waffles. They certainly don’t compare to a freshly prepared waffle, hot from the griddle, but they’re a good, versatile staple to have in the freezer. If you’re in a rush you can pop a couple in the toaster and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to eat in the car. If you have the time they taste mighty fine with a little butter and maple syrup. And if you’re my wife, you use a couple to make a sandwich out of a fried egg. My daughter has never been big on breakfast but I could usually get her eat the better part of one on her way to school.

The Eggo folks have tried marketing a variety of different variations on a theme, making them with whole grains and buttermilk or adding fruit or chocolate chips, but the original flavor is just fine by me.

A while back Eggo came out with a line of frozen pancakes that you popped into your toaster. It was good in theory but horrible in practice. They always came out of the toaster with the same consistency of the cardboard backing from a frozen pizza. I love a good pancake, but if you’re making them at home, especially just for yourself, the amount of work and mess you wound up never equaled the results, no matter how yummy.

Now we have a new option, and it’s a tasty one. The friendly folks at Kellogg’s have come out with a frozen microwave pancake that is to die for. Or maybe to kill for. Either way,, they’re oh-so good.

Growing up in Chicago my family was on the back end of the curve when it came to microwave ovens. My mother and father came from big families and had lots of brothers and sisters to exchange urban legends with. Back then urban legends had another name—the truth. And the truth about microwave ovens was that they leaked more radiation than a bucket full of plutonium.

My Uncle Paul and Aunt Marge were the first ones in our family to get a microwave oven. My Uncle Paul was a mountain of a man who wasn’t afraid of anything, but I do seem to recall that they kept the oven in the basement, and you weren’t allowed to be in the same room with it while it was on.

We didn’t get one in our immediate family until the early 1980s. It was pretty amazing. You could cook a scrambled egg in a cup in only three minutes. It tasted like crap, but it only took three minutes to cook. It only took three or four minutes to bake a potato. I don’t recall ever being in that big of a hurry to make a potato, but I guess if you were, this was a great thing. Besides, you didn’t have to fire up the conventional oven if you just wanted to make a single potato.

I was never that big a fan of the microwave oven until the day I discovered microwaveable French fries. Now this was something to get excited about! I forget the product name, but they came in a red box about the size of today’s juice boxes and after a few minutes in the oven you have yourself a box full of sweaty, soggy French fries. The gods of science were smiling down upon us.

I don’t know if microwavable French fries still exist, but pancakes do—so get ‘em while they’re hot!

A matter of convenience…

For an embarrassing number of years I avoided using the word ‘convenience’ in my writing because I could never remember how to spell it. I used to have the same problem with the word ‘restaurant’ but I overcame that one way back—three or four years ago.

Some words elude me. This goes back to the olden day, before the miracle of Spell Check, when your only choices for writing were a typewriter or a stone tablet and chisel. Perhaps my mama sniffed too much glue whilst carrying me in her belly, or it could be that a vast chunk of the ‘spelling’ portion of my brain was trampled flat by storage containers filled with the knowledge of every conceivable way Iron Man can defend himself against all ten of the Mandarin’s power rings.

I have the cable box tuned to the ‘70s music channel and Manfred Mann is singing Springsteen’s ‘Blinded by the Light’ and the lyrics defy comprehension. Case in point; “Madman drummers bummers, Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat.” Someone please run this through Reed Richard’s universal translator and have a copy on my desk in the morning.

But back to the topic bubbling in my brain at the moment--convenience. Are you ever embarrassed by the wealth of convenience s available to us? I used to complain about how good my daughter has it. She can listen to music online on her computer, on CDs, her MP3 player, on the cable t.v. music channels, or on her cell phone. But I really can’t blame her for not appreciating how great she has it. She’s grown up with technology. I’m the one who should be embarrassed.

This morning I used the toilet and flushed it away. It was there looking at me one moment, and the next it was gone. See ya—write if you get work. Sunday nights I haul a big plastic container filled with my trash to the curb and Monday when I wake up it’s gone. Anything that I don’t like or want is taken away from me and my house, without question, for thirty dollars a month. I don’t know where it goes and don’t especially care. There could be anything in that container and no one would ever know or judge me. (Or trash collection is a one-person operation here in super-advanced California. Someone drives a truck up and a mechanical arm grabs our can and hoists it to dump it inside.)

Back in the old days when the trash containers were emptied into the back of the truck by hand, you were still somewhat accountable for what was inside, if things weren’t properly wrapped. But now it’s totally anonymous so anything goes. Your trash could consist of thirty birthday cakes, Dutch pornography, your left leg (from the knee down—which you felt compelled to self-amputate because it just never felt ‘right’ down there), or sawed up chunks of a dead pony.

We can flush away our bodily waste; have a thirty-gallon container of whatever we consider to be ‘trash’ hauled away from our homes, have the dirtiest of dirty movies streamed onto our computers, set our DVR to record every episode of American Idol and then burn them onto DVD to send them to our cousin in Finland. We never have to get lost again because our car tells us how to get where we’re going. The kids don’t have to be bored during the drive there because of they have the option of listening to music, playing GTA on the PlayStation, or watching Saw II on DVD. If we crash into a telephone pole while driving we don’t have to be troubled to find our cell phone to call for help because OnStar has our back.

I love convenience. I crave the latest technology like old women crave cats. The computer has allowed me to become a better writer. The laptop computer has made it convenient for me to become a better writer. But isn’t there something fundamentally wrong about all of it? I can’t be the only one who sees that no one ever seems to survive renewal.

As the folks over at Fark.com are fond of saying, “Sony unveils new 80” plasma television. Still no cure for cancer.” Last week my wife and I upgraded to a pair of swinging new cell phones. Not to be a downer, but I wonder how many people in the world died that day from lack of food or clean water or simple medical care. Forget the world—how many people go to bed hungry in our own country every night? Screw the country—how many of them are here in California.

Would the problem be solved if instead of buying new iPods and TiVos this year we poured a big chunk of our disposable income into caring for the poor? Solve, probably not. Help, probably. Will it ever happen, not in my lifetime, not a chance. People today are far too hung up over what the world owes them and what they’re convinced they deserve. Myself included. Besides, the starving people don’t live in my neighborhood. They’re on the television in commercials with that bearded fellow. I can change the channel and they’re gone. (By the way, after that bearded fellow films his commericals, does he go back to his house and eat Skippy peanut butter straight from the jar? Give what's left of his hamburger to his dog?)

I once had an argument with Archie Goodwin (while he was still alive) about a Batman Elsewhere story I had submitted. Do they still publish Elsewhere stories? We were talking about degrees of reality in comics. I brought up the old argument that there was no way that Superman should have taken on the persona of Clark Kent to work at the Daily Planet and sniff around Lois Lane. From day one he should have been using his powers to feed the hungry, damn rivers, build hospitals, research medical discoveries, sew up a hole in the ozone level, clean up the mess from oil spills, develop alternate forms of energy. I mean, how dare he go home at night to his modest apartment, put on his pajamas, and lay in his bed and pretend to sleep (after first thinking nasty thoughts about Lois and rubbing one off that results in yet another hole in ceiling. There’s simply no way he’s going to get his security deposit back). During his eight hours of pretend sleeping he could have built thirteen schools, created a pill that prevents heart attacks, plowed fields and planted crops and built irrigation systems for an entire starving country, and developed a cure for pink eye.

Archie Goodwin called me stupid. During all my years as a fanboy I had/have never heard a single bad thing said about Archie Goodwin. He was almost a saint and the bee’s knees. Everyone loved him and he always had a smile on his mustached face for everyone. Except me. He never seemed to like me. Maybe because he was small and I was big and fat. I was working on staff at DC at the time doing production work and checking printer’s films. It was no secret that I really wanted to write comics but I was never a pest. I did no pestering. Every couple of weeks when I was dropping off something to a particular editor I would chat them up and ask if they needed any fill-in issues or anything else written. Most of the editors and assistants were fairly affable. I guess they figured if they were editing books that required talent, that having talent offering them their services sort of came with the job. I got the cold shoulder from Archie the first couple of times and then stopped asking, until one day someone mentioned that Archie had made it known that he was interested in Batman Elsewhere pitches. I handed him several springboards and he expressed interest in one. I wrote up a proper pitch (which I’ll post here once I finally get all my floppy discs transferred over to CD) and he liked a lot of it, but then the conversation took a left turn and we got into the discussion I mentioned above.

I told Archie that Superman should be saving the world night and day and he called me stupid. I remember how hot my face got. It was like I’d been slapped. When I asked him why it was so stupid he said, “Because that would be boring and nobody would buy the comics.” I sensed that our story conference was done so I got up and stumbled back to my cubicle.

Wow. That happened over ten years ago but my face is still hot. A year or two later he passed away. Perhaps he was sick at the time. I’d walk through fire for my daughter but when my back hurts I sometimes yell at her.

Gosh, I’ve gone and forgotten my point. I think what I was circling around was that if we stopped buying DVDs and plasma screens and iPods and focused all our resources on caring for those who are in desperate need, our greedy little brains would explode. When slicing the cake we take the bigger of the two halves because we feel like we somehow deserve it. We eek through yellow traffic lights because we feel like we deserve to get through and not have to wait. We download music that we didn’t pay for because the musicians that made it have already gotten paid a ton of money for it and we’re really only ripping off the music companies and not the Black Eyed Peas specifically.

I don’t think we can save the world because we’re ultimately too greedy. I guess that’s sums it up.

How do I sleep at night, knowing that hundreds and thousands are starving to s slow death? Sometimes on my left side, but mostly on my back.

I’m a gonna go to hell when I die, I’m a gonna go to hell.

Old friends...

It's a windy Sunday morning here on California's central coast. The sun is electric and the birdies are hopping from branch to branch in the trees and the cats are sitting on the window ledges soaking it up like Kitty TV. All six of our cats have lived their lives indoors. One or two of them long to go outside, but most are content to stay inside. We have a lot of rooms and stairs for them to race around and up and down for exercise.

My darling wife Valarie is off to work already. Her department is in the midst of a deadline crunch of titanic magnitude. They have a show in Anaheim on Tuesday and they have a ton of display stuff to get designed and printed and mounted and stuff. It feels like the pre comic book convention crunch from the old days.

Gosh, I don't miss setting up for conventions at all. Especially San Diego. I hate large crowds, for starters. The only good thing about going was seeing old friends I hadn’t seen since the year before.

The year we went with Majestic Comics wasn’t too bad. We were pretty well received and the signings and meet-and-greets were fun. I didn’t have to work the booth very much because Val and I brought Dakota with. She was around one or so and we bought a cool backpack baby carrier so I could carry her around up on my shoulders. With precious cargo on my back I had zero guilt in shoving stinky fanboys out of my way.

Years later when Val helped Glenn Danzig start up Verotik, San Diego was kind of fun because she had produced a big book of new pencil art by Frank Frazetta. No one had seen anything new from Frazetta for years, but Danzig had coaxed him out of hiding and produced a line of comics based on some of his characters like the Death Dealer. This was the first year for Verotik and Val and Danzig fought like cats and dogs over what to do for the booth. We were living outside of Sacramento at the time and there was a great little company that made convention displays, but Danzig wanted to do something different.

Val’s brother Mike was living near us at the time, and working with Val and Verotik, so it came down to him building a big wooden framework wall that could be broken down into manageable components. What Danzig wanted was for us to drape a massive black tarp that someone had made for one of his music videos over the wooden frame. The tarp turned out to be pretty cool. It had some big skulls airbrushed on it and a lot of mist and goth crap.

Valarie and Dakota flew down to San Diego while Mike and I rented a truck and drove the wooden framework and other convention stuff down. It was a great drive and we wound up getting a pretty nice tour of Hollywood and the surrounding communities while trying to find Danzig’s house. Meeting him was a hoot. I’d only seen him before in his videos, and he was this big bodybuilder guy with a tangle of black hair and he looked like he could bite your head off if you pissed him off. It turned out that he guy is only four feet tall, or so. I guess they always shot him I his videos with the camera down low looking up. In person he was this meek little shrimp with a buttload of muscles. So we get the tarp from him, shoot down to San Diego and set up. Goth was nowhere near as popular back then as it is now, so Val and I had a hard time finding cool stuff to decorate the booth with. We did find a medical supply house that had really cool resin skulls. We bought a bunch to decorate the table with.

With the framework up and the tarp draped over it, the booth looked a little hinky, but it did the job. Besides, people were a whole lot more interested in what we had for sale. The Frazetta sketch books arrived just in the nick of time, and at only twenty bucks a pop they sold as fast as we could get them out of the boxes. One memorable moment happened when Val’s brother called me over and told me that he had a customer that wanted to buy a couple of the books but he wanted to pay with a Visa card. Verotik was so new that we weren’t set up to accept plastic. The guy wanting to buy the books had a likeable demeanor. He was a thin fellow with white hair and beard, and was wearing a fair amount of turquoise jewelry. I started to apologize and hand his card back, but I happened to look at the name on it. It read, Boris Vallego. How cool was that? It was like Bill Sienkiewicz buying a book of artwork by Bob Peak. I handed Boris his credit card back along with the two Frazetta sketch books and told him it would be my pleasure for him to accept them as a gift. He thanked me with a warm smile and a hearty handshake.

I think the absolutely best time I had at a San Diego convention was back in the very early 90s when I went with Eclipse Comics. Val and I had left First Comics in Chicago about a month before they closed their doors and fired everyone. Val took a job editing at Eclipse, and I came along just to keep her company. This was back when we were just roommates. By day I worked in the Eclipse warehouse, doing a lot of mail order fulfillment, and at night I wrote stories and scripts that I couldn’t sell. When the convention came up we filled a truck and a van with as many comics as they would hold, packed in as many people as would fit, and made the drive. I piloted the van on the way down. We climbed the grapevine and had to make a number of stops because the van kept overheating.

We probably had a dozen tables at the convention and probably a hundred long boxes of comics. Some comic shops simply didn’t carry Eclipse comics so the fans were always glad to be able to load up on books at conventions. We sold hundreds and hundreds of issues of Miracleman (I wish I’d bought a bundle back when they were going for a buck a piece) and the Hobbit books were selling fast as well. Bob Kane came by the table for a signing and he turned out to be a bit of a jackass. Our big guest of the show was Clive Barker. Eclipse was adapting a lot of his work and we had lines of fans wrapped around the tables to meet him and get autographs. Barker was an outstanding man. He was patient, funny as hell, and really gracious under pressure.

The Eclipse booth was busy nonstop, but Dean Mullaney was very cool about making sure that everyone had enough time to cool down and eat and walk around the show. He wasn’t stingy with money, making sure that everyone had enough cash to buy food and drinks. Cat and Dean were very trustworthy. I remember taking a bathroom break, sitting in a stall, and realizing that I had three or four hundred dollars of Eclipse money in my jeans pockets. But you couldn’t steal from someone like Dean Mullaney. He was just too cool of a guy. After the convention was over, it was an Eclipse tradition to stop at Disneyland on the way home. Cat and Dean paid our way in and made sure we had enough spending money to buy all the Mickey Burgers and Carnation ice cream we could hold. If you knew them, and saw their quasi bohemian, hippy-like day-to-day existence, you wouldn’t think they’d be a fan of Disneyland, but I think they enjoyed themselves more than us kids did.

So here it is a windy Sunday morning. My wife is at work, my daughter was up all night drawing her latest comic book, so she’s sleeping in, and my back and hip are hurting me like a sun of a bitch. Luckily I have a couple of old friends to keep me company.

Val had to work yesterday (Saturday), so Dakota and I drove her in to keep her company and attempt to help her. Dakota wound up drawing and going online, and I helped Val find a little bit of reference before I wound up taking a nap on the couch. On the way home we stopped at the bookstore so Val could hunt up some photo reference she needed, and I was lucky enough to find two new paperbacks (I only buy hardcovers when I’m flush—which I’m not at the moment) by two of my favorite authors.


If you enjoy reading good crime suspense drama, you’re doing yourself a great disservice if you don’t read Lawrence Block and Robert B. Parker. These guys are two of the best. Don’t be put off by Parker because of the Spenser television series. The t.v. show never came anywhere near the core of what and who Spenser really is. Trust me.

If you’re already a Spenser fan and you’re looking for someone new to read, try Robert Crais. He started out as a bit of a Robert Parker clone, but he’s continued to grow. His latest book, The Two Minute Rule, shows that he’s getting better and better. Give one of his Elvis Cole mysteries a spin.

Hey! I’m going to put on my reading spectacles and get busy. I hope everyone enjoys their Sunday.

It could be worse. It could be raining.

Sometimes I scare myself...

I keep churning around an idea for a story that I’m certain has to have been told already. It’s an idea that scares the earwax out of me. Someone must have written it already.

I didn’t pay very much attention while trudging my way through the Chicago Public School system. I spent more time and energy on getting out of assignments than it would have taken me to actually do them. I’m especially deficient in the department of world history. I bring this up because I have only passing knowledge of the great leaders of the world. Those who rose up to control huge portions of the globe and the lives of millions.

The story that I’ve been chewing on for the past few weeks doesn’t involve someone who wants to control the world, or cleanse the genetic pool, or anything like that. I’m interested in someone who wants to destroy the world. Not so much crack the planet in half, but rather exterminate as much of mankind as possible in one fell swoop. (I will never tire of the phrase ‘one fell swoop’)

I’m a bit behind on my comic book reading, but for the sake of argument let’s take Lex Luthor. He’s mad as a hatter, right? But he’s also a genius. Somehow Superboy made him bald when they were kids, so he focuses a lot of his energy on killing Supes. But what if he didn’t have Superman to fixate on. What if this criminal genius set his sights on destroying life on Earth as we know it. This being a comic book he might need to have an ulterior motive, like wanting to create a new race of man from the ashes of the fallen. Perhaps he has a bit of lint from Superman’s bellybutton and he’s going to exterminate all of mankind and create a new race that will bow down to him without question, but which also have a hint of Superman’s DNA twisted within their own. Whatever.

People have done some pretty heinous things, but what if there walked among us someone with a superior intelligent, who decided, for some reason or another, to focus all of his energies on destroying his fellow man.

The way I figure it, he’s a scholastic genius. He’s got a handful of degrees in the genetic sciences. Either he’s a trust fund baby or he’s committed some unspeakable acts to insure that his mission is well funded.

He would use his academic credentials to secure a position at a research facility that either manufactures what he needs, or serves as a stepping-stone to achieve the security clearance he’ll eventually need.

The type of individual we’re looking at here has zero respect for humanity. He has no conscience for his actions. Nothing will stand in the way of him achieving his goal.

After considerable research he’s determined that a virus created by a Russian wunderkind in the 1970s will do the ticket. If released in an airborne form it kills instantly, either through skin contact or by inhaling. An added bonus is that the victims, who have vomited up a lot of soft tissue, including their lungs, become a breeding ground for the virus.

The other way to expose a maximum number of people to the virus is through the water system. The results are much slower compared to those exposed to the virus in the airborne form, but at the same time the results are much more insidious. Anyone who digests the infected water or even comes into physical contact with the water, becomes breeders. The virus incubates inside of them, any anyone in the same room with them or that comes in contact with them, suffer the immediate effects and start coughing their lungs out. The lifetime of the virus when released into a fresh water supply is only 36 hours.

The virus is potent enough that a scuba tank-sized container hidden in a water treatment plant could affect millions. Our crazed villain calculates that as few as ten treatment plants will need to be infiltrated.

He decides to put his plan into action on New Years Eve. There will be plenty of crowds to affect with airborne bombs. Simultaneously, via radio control, he will release the virus into the water supply. Within hours, thousands will be dead. In 24 hours it will be millions. The scientists capable of recognizing the virus and concocting the cure will be long dead.

Within 30 days the virus will have done its damage. Major cities have been obliterated. People are rotting in the streets. HAZMAT teams confirm that the virus is no longer a threat. Help comes from all around the world, from areas not affected by the New Years Eve slaughter. The dead are buried, the streets are cleared, order is somewhat restored.

The volunteers return home, not realizing that they are carrying a sleeper virus; one so sophisticated that the HAZMAT idiots couldn’t find it with a flashlight and a map. Six months later stage two of the genocide begins. Everyone that the carriers have come into contact with, and everyone that the people they’ve come into contact with, suddenly come down with a mild cold. A week later they develop a severe fever that tops out at 120 degrees, more than enough to cook the brains of everyone infected. Even more die during stage two.

Is our villain sitting on a mountaintop, next to his well-stocked cave, laughing at all that he’s done? I don’t think so. That’s not what this guy is all about. This is what he was born to do. Surviving the slaughter was never a consideration for him. All he cared about was getting the job done. I picture him inside the countdown ball that drops in Times Square. He’s got a tank on his back and he’s releasing the virus in all directions, with a determined look on his face. Minutes later he dies with no regret, hoping only that his plan succeeds.

*************

So that’s the idea that’s been bouncing around inside my head. Has there ever been anything like this done before? Please let me know.

Sleep eludes me...

It’s 3:00 and I can’t sleep. For past half hour I’ve been watching an old favorite movie of mine. It’s not a blockbuster. It’s a low-key affair called the Friends of Eddie Coyle. It stars Robert Mitchum (an actor who has never been afraid to play his age—you have to give him credit for that. It also stars Peter Boyle, an actor who has never been afraid to be bald. Again, credit where it’s due. Another great supporting player is Robert Jordon. He’s always been one of my favorite B or C-list players. I first noticed him as Logan’s pal Francis 7 in 1976’s Logan Run. He also had a great role in 1985’s The Mean Season.

Yesterday I was paging through a magazine and came across a crossword puzzle. I don’t watch a lot of new shows, especially shows like Dawson’s’ Creek or the OC or shows like that. I could rock on a puzzle set in the 70s. Anyway, one of the questions was the name of the robot in Logan’s Run. I know the robot was modeled after and the voice was provided by Roscoe Lee Brown, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall the name. Until now. It was Box. I’ve heard for a few years that Brian Singer wants to remake Logan’s run. I would like that. I would pay nine bucks to see that.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the story of a bottom rung crook who must have screwed up his parole or something, and tries to stay out of prison by providing info to the cops. It was shot in and around Boston, probably on a shoestring budget, with lots of local flavor. It probably never won any awards, but it tells a good story and gets the job done.

The movie is over now and I’ve switched over to 1988’s The Lady in White. This is a movie that I’ve always wanted to watch. I still remember reading Roger Ebert’s review in the Chicago Sun times and checking the show times. The premise is that a little kid, played by Lukas Haas (who held his own against Harrison Ford in 1985’s Witness) sees the ghosts of kids molested and killed twenty years earlier. I guess he tries to find out who did the nasty deeds. I’m going to change channels. I want to eventually see it from the start.

I switched over to 1987’s Someone to Watch Over Me. It stars Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers and was directed by Ridley Scott. I always thought this was a weird choice for Scott. I mean, the guy directs Alien, Blade Runner, Legend and then this?

Back in 1987 I decided to give it a go anyway. Besides, Tom Berenger was up and coming and he reminded me of a young Paul Newman. Plus, there was the Mimi Rogers factor in the equation. At time I hadn’t seen her in anything before, but even so, she had the ‘it’ factor, the factor that both intrigued me and made me feel fancy in my pants.

I always wondered about Tom Berenger. It was in a lot of high profile films in the 80s and I think he was poised to become someone big, but that never happened.

In 1988 I went to see a Tom Berenger movie called Betrayed, with my friend Jim Higgins. It was in a dumpy little theater in Staten Island. Debra Winger co-starred in the film, which happily took me by surprise and turned out to be something that I wasn’t expecting it to be. I’m surprised that it never turns up on cable, but if you ever see it, I suggest that you do.

Years earlier when I worked at a commercial print shop in Chicago I used to walk three or four blocks over to the bank to cash my check on payday. I forget the name of the bank, but it was a relic from the 1930s and it was a beauty. At one point in the movie The Betrayed, a bank robbery goes down in a familiar looking bank. It was my bank! I don’t know what came over me, but I actually stood up and shouted, “Hey, I know that bank! That’s my bank!” Jim Higgins pulled me back down to my seat and shushed me. Luckily the theater was mostly empty.

Anyway, I should try and get some sleep. I don’t think Mimi is going to be getting named anytime soon. She did that plenty in other movies, in later years. I think it must be in her contract to be naked in every movie she makes—except for Lost in Space. She wasn’t nude it that but here were plenty of robots, so that makes up for it.

And hey, don’t judge me because I like seeing attractive movie stars naked. Don’t you judge me.

Holy Batman!

The first Batman movie is on cable right now and I’m stuck by how beautiful the design of the film is. I know that the fellow who inspired a lot of the cityscapes and buildings is long dead, but if they ever do a Watchman movie it should look like this movie.

Speaking of Alan Moore and the movies, we’re finally going to see V for Vendetta this weekend. Last weekend I was on deadline. We also going to try and see the stick-up movie with Clive Owen and Denzel Washington. I want to see it before the big twist/reveal becomes common knowledge.

People I know are a bit iffy about fitting all of V for Vendetta into two hours, but as I recall, the comic was a bit chatty. It was good chatty, back when Alan still had some good stuff to say, but I don’t think a lot of it will be missed from the movie. The Watchmen comic series was pretty chatty/fat, with a lot of stuff that was non crucial to the storyline going on, but the fans would have six or seven heart attacks each if anything is left out. I true representation of the comic can never be made into a movie because if you have Dr. Manhattan’s big blue dong swinging around that long it’ll drive the rating through the ceiling. My wife Valarie thinks that one of the cable networks might be able to pull it off. I think she’s dead right.

We watched the final episode of The Shield earlier this evening. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, let me just say that I thought it ended with more of a whimper than a bang. I was expecting a multi-megaton bombastic close. It was still entertaining as hell.

Ah, back on T.V. I just caught a glimpse of Billy D. Williams as Harvey Dent. He would have made for an interesting Half-Face. He sure couldn’t have done worse than Tommy Lee Jones.

Speaking of comic book movies, there’s been very little buzz on the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300. It’s being directed by Zack Snyder who did a Crackerjack of a job on 1994's Dawn of the Dead. 300 is a period piece and is going to be a hard sell without any big names in the cast. I guess time will tell. It 's too bad Miller had such a bad experience in Hollywood in the early 1990s with the RoboCop films. He could have been doing some fun films. Perhaps his acceptance level will be high enough after the Sin City films wind down for him to do the kinds of movies he’d like to do. It would be a waste if he didn’t.

The way the story goes. The way the earthquake story goes.

Nothing to see here…the earthquake is over.

I was upstairs writing a few things miscellaneous things for Liquid Development, watching the earthquake movie and I dozed off. I’m on a new medication for my back, so I blame the drugs.

So I don’t know what happened during the last hour or so of the movie. I can postulate that: Jennifer Garner and the recently-arrived-from-a-war-torn-unnamed-country cabbie wound up together.

Sharon Lawrence finally got to her son’s school and found him hiding in the bathroom. Before I dozed off I recall seeing a great shot of him finally clearing the rubble from the only door in the room and opening it to see that the remainder of the building he was in had been sheared off. He hung swinging from the door, shocked by what he saw.

***I have the 70s music channel playing right now and they’re spinning Johnny Rivers’ Rockin’ Pneumonia – Boogie Woogie Flu. When’s the last time you heard that? When’s the last time you heard a hit song with the word ‘pneumonia’ in the title.***

Back in the subway tunnel, I think the murderer that Charles S. Dutton’s lawyer daughter freed of all charges showed his true colors and revealed himself to be a calculating and blood-thirsty killer. Everyone will be in peril, but the guy from 24 will step in and be a hero in time and the killer-freed-in-error by the lawyer woman will get a fifty-ton block of cement dropped on his head during a key moment.

And in the end, I think that the gruff mayor, played by Charles S. Dutton will patch things up with Tom Skerritt, who will stay on as the fire chief, provided some concessions are made that no doubt will have something to do with the burn victim he was visiting earlier. Perhaps a bigger budget for fire gear for the city’s fire fighters.

The final shot of the film will be Sharon Stone being reunited with her bathroom-trapped son. They will kiss and hug the very way she should kiss and hug me. Then we would go home and eat some cheese sandwiches or something, because we just survived an earthquake all and that’d make a person hungry. Then she would complain about how dirty she got during the earthquake and say she was going to shower. She would accidentally leave the bathroom door open and I would catch glimpses of her undressing. The shower would come on and steam would cloud up the mirrors and make the room a cloudy paradise. I would finally screw up my courage to go in there. She did leave the door open, after all. Ask Freud, there are no mistakes. So I swallow the last bite of my cheese sandwich and walk into the bathroom. The only problem is that she’s not in the shower yet. She’s sitting on the toilet dropping off the kids into the pool. I don’t know what she had for breakfast that morning, but the smell of whatever it is she’s pushing out of her ass makes me want to vomit, then all of a sudden I do vomit, all over Sharon Lawrence. I expect her to be horrified, but instead she seems to be aroused by the chunks of semi-digested cheese and bile dripping off her body. She reaches a hand out to me, with a sexy look on her face. With her other hand she’s pulling toilet paper off the roll and wiping her butt. I scream. She screams even louder in delight. I’m trapped. I have no choice but to swallow my tongue.

Wow. I still think she’s kind of cute, but I hope I’m nowhere near Sharon Lawrence if there’s an earthquake.

The disaster continues...

There’s still no word from Symantic, I made my deadline for Liquid Development and the boys are off at the Game Developer’s conference in San Jose, so I’m returning to the earthquake movie. My daughter is home and on her computer so I can’t do anything on it.

I’ve learned the Charles S. Dutton is the Mayor of what’s left of New York. Tom Skerritt had been the Chief of Police, but he’d resigned just this morning. There is no love lost between Skerritt and Dutton. Because police headquarters and fire headquarters has been destroyed, that makes Skerritt the head of the police and the fire department. He tells Dutton that he takes his resignation back. Grrr. Lots of teeth grinding on both sides. Skerritt says that he needs the streets clear for fire and rescue. Dutton orders that every privately owned bulldozer in the city will be put in action to do the job.

Jennifer Garner can’t lose her taxi driver. He’s from some war-torn country so he knows how to survive in conditions like these. Garner tries to stop some looters and nearly gets killed. Cab driver stops the violence. She keeps pushing him away but she needs him and she knows she needs him. Romance is on the horizon.

Back in the subway tunnel an asshole that Charles S. Dutton’s lawyer daughter just freed from a murder charge has taken charge of the situation. He’s showing an ugly side that she never saw in the courtroom. He wants to leave the injured behind. They’re mostly dead already, he reasons. Finally he gives in when the crowd turns ugly on him. The lady lawyer has stuck up a friendship with the guy who plays Curtis Manning on 24.

Commercial break. The Geico lizard is talking to another lizard about pie and chips. I don’t understand what the point of the commercial is, but I like it. I already have Geico insurance.

Oooop, the subway tunnel suddenly starts filling up with water. This could be bad.

If I had to compare the two I’d say that this earthquake movie is better than then the movie Earthquake from the early 70s with Charleton Heston. I think that one hit Los Angeles, so that was no major loss.

ChiPs star Eric Estrada is on television hawking a real estate package for Vila Vista village in Arkansas. I could get a free weekend trip there if I call now. Hmmm… Tempting if Jon was there too, and that blonde woman. If the three of them were there I’d go.

The commercial breaks are getting longer. They must be running out of movie. I have to go do some writing. I’ll check in on the earthquake a little later.

Disaster for lunch...

As I type these words I’m watching a disastrous movie on the USA Network. It’s called ‘Aftershock: Earthquake in New York’ and it stars Tom Skerritt and Sharon Lawrence. I’ve only been watching for a few minutes, but the movie has been on for a half hour. There’s still no earthquake. Mostly they’ve been busy introducing characters that I guess we’re going to care about once the quake flattens New York. The movie was made in 1999 and I’m expecting the effects to be horrible.

Oh, a young Jennifer Garner just appeared. She’s a frustrated ballet dancer. She’s having lunch with her father, who played Greg’s wealthy father on Dharma and Greg.

I usually don’t watch movies on USA, but I stopped on this one while eating my lunch, because Sharon Lawrence is in it.

I had such a major crush on her when she was on NYPD Blue. She was also on a sitcom with Doug’s wife Carrie, years before she was cast on King of Queens.

Oh, there’s Charles S. Dutton. He appears to be someone important. He’s talking on the phone with his daughter, but she says she’s going to go ride the subway. That could be bad, what with an earthquake on the way.

Oh, commercial break.

I’ve been struggling all morning long with folks at Symantic. I upgraded the virus protection on my daughter’s computer, and the old Nortons software isn’t recognizing the new Norton’s software. Symantic doesn’t have a toll free number for frustrated customers who need help. You have three choices if you’re in trouble. 1.)Send them an email describing your problem and they’ll get back to you. 2.)Phone them, for a $30.00 charge. 3.)Internet chat with the help desk.

Oh, Tom Skerritt is in a hospital, visiting someone who has half their face burned off. His I.V. bottle is shaking. No one seems to notice.

I tried the third option first with Symantic first, and had the chance to text chat with no less than three helpers. All were in India and none had much of a mastery of the English language.

Oh, the quake has hit. Jennifer Garner’s taxi cab just got creamed by a White Castle sign, but the cabbie got her out first. Oh, the MOMA is crumbling. The effects are fair. Not insulting. A little boy is trapped in a public bathroom. There’s big trouble in the subway. Sharon Lawrence’s refrigerator is open and all the contents are falling out. Her little doggie is running around the apartment, dodging falling tables and lamps. The cabbie has dragged Jennifer Garner under a water delivery truck, thinking it would be a good idea. A sink hole has eaten most of the truck, they get out from under it just in time. Lots of rubble and people are falling from the skies. Hmm, the quake seems to be stopping. Nope, here come the aftershocks. There’s trouble in the hospital room. The burn victim has lost his oxygen mask. The subway car with Charles S. Dutton’s daughter on it is running out of control, and careening at an odd angle. Oh, no…the statue of liberty just fell down in the worst effect shot of the movie. The people at USA probably cut out any scenes of the World Trade center. To protect my sensibilities. Lots of chaos in the streets. Lots of steam or somke shotting up. Now fire. Oh, Jennifer Garner’s cabbie has caught on fire. She puts him out and they huddle in a dooway. People are screaming, children are crying. The burn victim finally gets his mask back. Times square is a wreck. Sorry Disney. Sharon Lawrence’s dog’s name is Low Rider. Maybe Lou Rider. She still looks hot. Her hair’s a mess and she’s all dirty. Maybe she’ll take a steamy shower.

Commerical. So after I gave up on text chatting with people who didn’t have a clue as to how to help me, I went to the second option and sent a detailed email message to Symantic.

This Easter you can find faith in Christ. Those Mormons make the best commercials.

So this morning I got an email response, from their help center in India. He told me that he was sorry for my problems and gave me the URL for two help pages on the Symantic site. I went to both and tried everything it suggested. No good. I fiddled around a little on my own and managed to get the new software registered, but again, the old software doesn’t recognize it.

Wow, in the midst of an earthquake, Jennifer Garner managed to find her father under a pile of rubble. He’s dying and he tells her that he’s proud of her and that he loves her. He wants her to be a dancer. The cabbie starts pulling the rings and watch off her dead father, his wallet too. She freaks out but he tells her that she needs to hang onto things that will remind him of her. Back in the subway Charles S. Dutton’s lawyer daughter is shaken, but not stirred. Tom Skerritt is out on the streets now. He helps a little girl find her parents. Lots of people are walking over very neatly stacked piles of rubble. Tom Skerritt stops at a fire station. It turns out he’s a fire chief. He’s trying to get his boys out on the street to help those in need. I wonder if Tom Skerritt could help me with my computer. A girl in a news helicopter is talking to Skerritt, describing what she sees. The Brooklyn Bridge is in the water. City Hall and police central are flattened.

I don’t think Sharon Lawrence is going to get naked anytime soon. My lunch is done so I’d better get back to work.

I wrote back to Symantic. Perhaps they’ve responded. It could be worse, there could be an earthquake.

The original millennium bug...

I saw one hell of a crummy movie back in 1989

One day, back in the mid-1980s I was depressed and I went to the library. I think I was writing for NOW Comics at the time and it might have been when I was working on staff. I would have gone out to a bar or a movie, but my depression was usually always connected with being broke so I spent a lot of time at the library. I would split my time between reading and people watching.

I used to and still do read a lot of fiction, mystery and science fiction. I never too a liking to fantasy. I tried to read The Hobbit at least a dozen times. If it wasn’t for Peter Jackson I probably would have never found out what happened to Bilbo Baggypants.

I like my sci-fi old skool. I’m not sure if the cyber punk movement has started yet back then. Digging through the shelves of books that I’d grown to know so well I came across an author I’d never heard of before. His name was John Varley and the book I was holding was called Millennium.

I’m a sucker for a book or movie with a great concept, and Millennium had a dandy. In short, time travelers from a diseased future earth hop back in time to moments before big disasters, like the crash of an airliner, and they haul the people who are about to die to the future, where they can harvest them for spare parts. They then fill the seats of the doomed aircraft with crude clones whose only purpose is to become charred body parts. Neat idea, eh? An investigator for the airline notices some discrepancies with the crash wreckage, has a run in with some conspiracy nuts, and ultimately meets and falls in love with a troubleshooter who has come back in time from the future to smooth things over.

I read the book in one sitting, and then read it again enjoying the nuances. Varley isn’t the greatest scribe on the planet, but dang, I loved that book.

After things went seriously sour at NOW Comics I headed back east and hooked up with my old roommate, Tom Morgan. With the exception of some books for Byron Preiss, I couldn’t sell a thing. Tom came back from the 1988 San Diego Comic Con with a business card from a new publisher called New Comics Group. I wrote some stories for an anthology they were publishing called Asylum, and helped them develop a comic based on a fun (albeit short lived) animated series called The Bionic Six. My editor at New was Valarie Jones, one of the best editors and nicest people on the planet.

After a couple hundred telephone calls and hanging out during business trips Val made to New York, we were officially BFF (best friends forever, in case you don’t savvy Internet-speak). Things changed a lot for me when Val complained that she was going to be in Europe for an extended vacation and she didn’t have anyone at the New Comics Group office that could get the comics prepped and sent off to the printer. Prior to taking up writing for a living I had paid the rent as a graphic designer, plus I’d picked up a thing or two about getting books ready for print while doing time at NOW Comics, so I offered to help out. Val jumped at the chance.

Since I wasn’t exactly setting New York on fire, I figured I’d give California a spin, so I packed up everything I owned and Tom Morgan drove me to JFK. California was nothing like I’d expected. The New Comics Group offices were in a tiny town called San Mateo, located just south of San Francisco. A couple days after I arrived, Val and her boyfriend took off for Europe. With them gone, I officially didn’t know a soul in California. Val and her publishing partner shared a house with a bunch of people in a quasi commune situation. Nobody got paid but you had a roof over your head and one or two square meals a day.

With Val gone out of the country I was suddenly very lonely.

I didn’t have a car so I rode the bus to a sorry little mall a few miles away. Next to the sorry little mall was an even sorrier little movie theater, but my heart skipped a beat or two when I saw on the marquee that one of the movies playing was Millennium. Suddenly I wasn’t so lonely. Here was my old friend. Back in New York I’d half heard something about them doing a film adaptation, but in the rush of packing up and moving I’d totally forgotten.

Outside the sorry little theater I studied the movie poster and thought at first there had been some sort of mistake. The poster said that the movie starred former Charlie’s Angel angel Cheryl Ladd, and weird semi-country musician Kris Kristofferson.

That couldn’t be right. I was pretty sure I remembered all the major characters from the book and absolutely none of them could have possibly been played by Cheryl Ladd or Kris Kristofferson. No way-no how.

Still, there it was printed on real cardboard and in my face. Maybe I was remembering the book wrong. Whatever was going on, I bought a ticket to the next show. I spent a depressing hour walking around in a nearly deserted Sears store where everyone I made eye contact with seemed on the verge of suicide.

I made it back over to the theater a little early, but I wanted to get a good seat. I shouldn’t have hurried. I could have had any seat I wanted. I was the only person in the theater.

Two hours later I felt like I’d just walked away from a train wreck. I stumbled over to the bus stop shelter and tried to gather my senses about me. To call the movie I’d just witnessed ‘horrible’ would be giving it far too much credit. Whatever movie classification is five or six increments beneath ‘horrible’ would have been closer to the mark.

For a few fleeting moments I thought that perhaps the movie was supposed to be a comedy. Something like a Saturday Night Live skit. But, no. It was astounding how little emotion Kristofferson and Ladd managed to display. It was like they were wooden puppets.

This ordeal happened back in 1989 and to this day I don’t think someone could have made a worse movie if that was their intention from frame one.

Weeks later Valarie returned and live in California started to perk up. Those of you familiar with our history know that in the following years Val and I worked for First Comics in Chicago and Eclipse Comics back in California, and while all this was going on we made the jump from being BFF and roommates, to the happy couple we remain today. Just a few weeks ago we celebrated our fourteenth wedding anniversary.

The moral of this story? Well, there is none, except that Millennium sucked like a Dyson.

I have a pet peeve--wanna see it?

My pet peeve’s name is Snarky. He lives under the stairs and I feed him bits of old cheese.

I’ve had the misfortune over the years to know people who simply couldn’t keep their big fat opinions to themselves. Wait, that’s wrong. Let me rephrase that. I’ve had the misfortune over the years to know people who couldn’t keep their big fat opinions to themselves, and these people seemed to go to great lengths to voice their opinions in the loudest, most absolute manner possible.

Contrary to what you may have read scribbled in marker on the bathroom wall in the men’s room of the Shell gas station at exit 47 of the New Jersey turnpike, I’m not what you’d call an American history aficionado, but, I do know that one of the principals this great country of ours was built on is freedom of speech. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I usually love to hear them, when delivered in a palatable form.

This is what I greatly dislike—
“I heard you talking to Emily about seeing the new Pauly Shore film. I saw it this weekend. Save yourself nine bucks. It was the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Certainly the worst in the Shore’s filmography. Only a complete moron would go to see a movie like that.”

This is what I like—
“I heard you talking to Juan about seeing the new Pauly Shore film. I saw it this weekend and didn’t care for it too much. I don’t think it’s the best movie that Shore has seen. You might be better off waiting for it on cable.”

If someone gives me their opinion, the last thing I want is to have the topic of discussion shaded with absolutes. Ben and Jerry didn’t get rich by selling one flavor of ice cream. Tastes as well as genital size differ from person to person. Plus, when you club someone over the head with an absolute you automatically put them on the offensive. If you tell the person with the opinion that you’re going to have a look see for yourself, or if you run into them a week later and they learn you went and saw the movie anyway, it means that you put absolutely no value on their opinion. It’s worthless. They should have saved their breath and kept their mouth shut.

I know someone who used to be guilty of the absolute opinion thing when it came to food. She fancied herself a chef, and no one’s cooking, and especially their baking, could hold a candle to what came out of her kitchen. I recall one incident in particular that took place at a company where we both worked. It was someone’s birthday, or some occasion where a cake had been brought in. We all were handed a slice and were chewing away, yum-yum-yum, when all of a sudden this person blurts out, “Oh my God! This tastes awful!” and tosses her slice of the cake into the trash. So there the rest of us stood. The cake tasted pretty darn good to me, but a cake would have to be pretty darn awful for me not to finish it, but because of her absolute declaration, the cake was horrible, and if we ate it we must be total idiots. She also put us the position that if we didn’t toss our cake into the trash as well, her opinion was meaningless to us and that we must have thought she was a fool.

I love hearing the opinions of others, especially if it leads to a debate, but iron clad opinions are turn offs for me. I don’t need for things to be candy coated, but please leave me some wiggle room to have my own point of view.

This all comes up because I think I was pretty absolute in my review of the film version of RENT. It may be on your list of the top ten movies of all time, landing right between Bio-Dome and Encino Man.

And that’s one of the reasons I love America so much.