What it is is that I’m on vacation! Happy Pesach!
You, Sir, Are Bad-Ass: With a Bullitt
Steve McQueen’s 80th birthday was this week. Go check out some pictures.
Photo courtesy Life Magazine.
Unrequired Reading: March 26, 2010
Happy weekend, dear readers! Have some Unrequired Reading links! Go ahead! I don’t mind!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: March 26, 2010”
Well, my arm’s pretty Thor
I’m having a not-so-good reaction to a tetanus shot I had on Tuesday at my annual physical. My arm & shoulder hurt like a mo’fo’, and I’ve got chills & exhaustion that comes and goes. I’m particularly wiped out in the evening, so I spent last night and this early evening reading Essential Thor, Vol. 1
I don’t think I remember how hilariously bad these comics were. Sure, things got pretty insanely cosmic a few years into its run, but the first bunch of stories are just bizarre. It all starts with the wacky premise of an American doctor wandering through the Norwegian countryside. Oh, it’s not bizarre that a doctor goes traveling, but Dr. Blake is lame and walks with a cane, so it’s a bit weird that he’d go meandering through a foreign countryside on his own. Lucky for him, he finds a cane that turns out to be the hammer of Thor, just in time for him to fight off an invasion of aliens from Saturn. It was 1962; that stuff happened.
The collection is all kinds of awesome, even though Thor hasn’t quite started speaking in the mock-Shakespearean mode that Stan Lee would decide makes perfect sense for a Norse god’s speech. Oh, and it’s never quite clear as to whether Dr. Blake and Thor are two different people. If they’re not, then Blake doesn’t seem to have any recollection of, um, being Thor. The thunder god is treated just like any other super-hero with a secret identity. But that’s neither here nor there.
One issue’s plot — mobster wounded during getaway, henchmen kidnap Dr. Blake to fix him up — gets recycled three issues later. In another, mega-powerful shape-changing aliens invade earth and do puzzling things, like paint polka-dots on streets, to confuse mankind and leave us susceptible to invasion. But beyond the awful stories, there are some tremendous passages. At one point, Dr. Blake’s nurse Jane fantasizes about domestic life with Thor. This includes giving him a haircut for summer, ironing his cape, and — I’m not making this up — polishing his hammer.
My favorite moment so far, however, is from the subtly titled, “PRISONER OF THE REDS!” See, American scientists are suddenly defecting to the Soviets, and Dr. Blake suspects something is up. So he pretends to be developing a new biological warfare thing, and gets kidnapped. He goes into his lab to not really do anything and then we see . . .
A photographer reading a newspaper article about Blake’s supposed breakthrough! His thought balloon reads, “HMMMM… THIS DOCTOR BLAKE COULD BE ANOTHER USEFUL SCIENTIST FOR OUR CAUSE!”
The caption above it?
That’s right: FINALLY, AFTER DAYS OF FAKE SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTATION…
I’m starting to think Roy Lichtenstein was on to something.
What I think about when I’m walking the dogs at 5:30 a.m.
Three of the last four Republican nominees for president got blown up in wartime: Bush I, Dole and McCain.
You’d think they’d smarten up and look for luckier candidates.
You, Sir, Are Bad-Ass: The Newest X-Man
I ordered some takeout Chinese food for lunch today. Rather than wait in the “restaurant” for five minutes (I decided on the fly and didn’t call ahead), I walked a few doors over to the somewhat upscale / not significantly downscale liquor store to check out the gin selection. I’m working on a big gin project that I’ll be breaking out for your edification soon. Or “my big gin project” is just a euphemism for my alcoholism. You decide.
I found what I was looking for and headed to the register. On the way, I had to step aside for a guy walking in the other direction. He was a few inches taller than I am, white, bald-pated, late 40’s or early 50’s, and wearing a black Xavier sweatshirt. While I waited for the guys ahead of me to finish their purchase, the fella returned to the front of the store. He put his bottle on the counter with a thud. I looked over and noticed IT WAS A 40 OF KING COBRA.
At 12:30 p.m.
On a Monday.
Sure, I was buying two bottles of high-class gin (Citadelle and D.H. Krahn, if you must know), but no one was looking at me and thinking, “That guy’s gonna start drinking in 5 minutes.”
The X-Man on the other hand? From the Chinese restaurant, I saw him walk across the parking lot, keys in hand, and thought, “You, sir, are bad-ass.”
A minute later, I thought, “That’s a much better blog-series than ‘F*** you, you whining f***,'” so let this be the inaugural post in a new series on bad-assery! Happy Monday!
What It Is: 3/22/10
What I’m reading: Finished The Ask
What I’m listening to: Joe Jackson Live 1980-1986
What I’m watching: A little TV (Parks & Rec, 30 Rock, The Ricky Gervais Show, the new South Park), but the only movie was a take-the-bad/weird-with-the-good capitulation to one of Amy’s oddball requests: My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
What I’m drinking: Death’s Door gin & Q-Tonic, and Domaine de L’Hortus grande cuvee 2007.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Enjoying the warm weather with long walks. Well, Otis isn’t enjoying them as much as Ru is, because he has a bit of fur to shed, and has been panting by the last third of a 1.5-mile meander.
Where I’m going: St. Louis, for Passover with my family.
What I’m happy about: Assembling a new dining room table (yes, it was Ikea, but it seems sturdy as heck) and getting some new chairs, to replace the cheap-ass set I bought in the winter of 2002.
What I’m sad about: My NCAA brackets falling apart by the end of the weekend. Despite the fact that I watch zero college hoops and filled them out half an hour before the first game, I’d managed to pick a bunch of the upsets and was actually doing just great on ESPN’s Tournament Challenge through Saturday.
What I’m worried about: Getting the April issue out by the end of the week.
What I’m pondering: The weak link on Born To Run. It’s either She’s the One (a somewhat generic rocker to follow the title track?) or Meeting Across the River, which gets extra demerits for that awful David Sanborn horn. But Meeting does segue into Jungleland better than any other song on the album would, and She’s the One does rock pretty hard, albeit eh. It’s pretty amazing to think that one album contains Thunder Road, 10th Avenue Freeze-Out, Night, Backstreets, Born To Run and Jungleland. And that the artist still managed to make songs like Sprit in the Night, Blinded By the Light, Rosalita, NYC Serenade, Incident on 57h St., Badlands, Prove It All Night, The River, etc.. And don’t let ’em take me to the Cadillac Ranch . . .
Unrequired Reading: March 19, 2010
I know I left those Unrequired Reading links around here somewhere . . .
Really, who WOULDN’T want a Bill Pullman pinball machine — what? A Bill PAXTON machine? Nevermind.
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I’ve only read 1.33 of the books on Tyler Cowen’s top 10 “most influential” list. (And here are more of them!)
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I can name that Jason Statham movie in five notes! Okay, actually I can’t.
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“Why, yes, I live in a grain silo.”
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I’ve started dressing well this year, now that I’ve finally found suits that fit (read: don’t make me look like David Byrne in Stop Making Sense) and picked up some decent shirts. So I no longer look like this.
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I’m enjoying Sam Lipsyte’s novel, The Ask
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Omega the Unmotivated. (Tom S. is the only reader who will laugh at that title, but hey.)
The love that dare not bark its name
I expect to see them spooning soon.
What It Is: 3/15/10
What I’m reading: Ask
What I’m listening to: Night and Day
What I’m watching: Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy, Monsters, Inc.
What I’m drinking: Hendricks & Q-Tonic.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Well, they’re happy that the snow is gone, but they’re bumming over the flood-level rain we got over the weekend. I cheered ’em up by buying ’em some mini-rawhides on Sunday.
Where I’m going: Nowhere, although I was almost press-ganged into a biz trip to Orlando this week when my boss came by my office Friday and told me that one of the other staffers who was supposed to go to the event couldn’t fly because of a stress fracture in her foot. “You wanna go?” he asked. “I got stuff to do,” I told him.
What I’m happy about: Celebrating our fourth wedding anniversary this weekend with some fine dining, some meh dining, and some just-chilling-the-heck-out. It felt so great that I think we even lost an hour by the time the weekend was over! Oh, and I’m happy that I cleared out all those tabs in my RSS reader on Saturday. I know it seems silly, but they were really vexing/mocking me, because I’m insane and feel like I owe The Writing every post I’ve ever half-considered.
What I’m sad about: That I’ll never write those posts.
What I’m worried about: Will Steve Zahn single-handedly bring down Treme?
What I’m pondering: The viability of literature of the modern workplace, courtesy of these essays/articles in the NYTimes, the Boston Globe, and the Telegraph.