You Can't Not Smile

I found the squishy stress toy horse pictured above under a table at a pizza parlor where I used to work. At first I felt bad for the poor kid that had lost it, but when I saw that the ears had been chewed off I realized that the horse was lucky to have escaped from its previous owner. I named him Happy (drag out the "h" when you say it) because I couldn't help but smile whenever I looked at him. I started hiding him around the restaurant and when my coworkers would always laugh when they stumbled upon him. I took Happy with me to college and I was always on the lookout for a companion horse so he wouldn't be alone. Years later I was in a coffee shop that had toys for little kids and there she was, a shiny Lego or Playmobil girl horse that was just the right size. I'm almost afraid to admit, but I shoplifted that day my friends (or toynapped or horseganked or whatever you want to call it). Now everyone's happy (pun intended) though, except for the other day when my two year-old son was playing with the horses and he started saying "broken, broken, broken." He pointed out the chewed-off ears and said "Daddy, fix it" and I smiled again, but certainly not for the last time.

Another knickknack that has followed me for years is this Spider-Man drinking mug/pen jar. If I can't clean some sticky ink out of the inside I might have to throw it away, but not before telling you about me and Spider-Man. Like most people, I saw him in the jazzy 1967 animated series long before I ever saw him in a comic book or strip. I liked how without the mask he was an unpopular guy, always sneezing and getting picked on but when he put the mask on, he could be anybody. And Spider-Man really can be anybody underneath that mask, that's what's so great about it - he could be white, black, young, old, me or maybe even you. My first superhero comic book was Amazing Spider-Man #327. It featured my favorite villain (Magneto) going up against a cosmic-powered Spider-Man who could fly and mentally rearrange molecules. I bought it more for the artwork than the story. I mean, granted, everyone wishes they could fly but as a kid you never saw me pretending to fly. What you would see is me slapping my hands against the wall and jumping from foot to foot pretending to be "wall-crawling." As a teenager, when friends would ask what to get me for gifts, I used to say "anything Spider-Man." But that all changed around the time a friend bought me this mug. They've sinced returned to the original swooping logo but during the '90s they switched to a straight logo with what appeared to be dripping letters. I hated it. And this mug was the last Spider-Man merchandise I got until after my son was born. Maybe I should hold on to it in case they tweak the logo again.

What Would You Grab in Case of a Fire?

If our place burns down, my wife has said she'll grab my teddy bear while I grab our son. When her sister first saw my teddy bear she said, "oh I like him." Most people have this reaction because he's just so darned perfect. Even my son prefers him over my wife's or his own stuffed animals but he's never asked for him in his crib, he just likes looking at him. Who wouldn't? See his perfectly round head, his big Muppet eyes, his Tweedledee belly, his banana-shaped arms and elephant-stump legs. After my wife brought up the possibility of losing Teddy (that's his name), I suggested that we take him for a photo shoot at Glamour Shots or Wal-Mart, to preserve his memory. My wife said she could see the photographer letting us pose WITH him but she couldn't imagine anyone allowing us to spend money on professional-quality pictures of just the bear. It's just as well because I don't think they'd do close-ups either and I need some clear shots of his hollow pouch tail where I used to store gumballs. That reminds me, last time I inspected him closely I noticed that one of his armpits was coming unstitched. I should have my mom take a look at that when she comes to visit next weekend.

So the story goes that my parents tried to give our first dog Heidi this squeaky chew toy for Christmas but I kept it for myself. Boy did I ever. I kept it on my headboard in its own little bed made from a donut box lined with a pillowcase. I think he's a monkey but I named him Goosey Man because, if you look closely, he has feathers rather than fur. Have you ever seen anything like him? Orange feathers, red clown nose, white fur face and belly, sitting cross-legged with his prehensile hands and feet. I'm making up that last part but it could be true. The bottom line is that so much detail and imagination went into this doggie chew toy - a chew toy! I had to rescue it from slobbery snouts everywhere, it's just too much craftsmanship to get buried in the backyard, or worse, sunbleached and covered in dust. If you can't tell by now, I believed in treating toys as good as people long before I ever saw the movie Toy Story.

Louis L'Amour Versus What I Own

"Each author had the text of all his books committed to memory and would dictate when a book was needed. Druid priests and storytellers everywhere had fabulous memories, for there was no other way . . . Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all you have read, and I believe there is much truth in that." (Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, 1982)

Every week a coworker gives me her copy of the New York Times Book Review and every week I add a few titles here on the list of "Books I Might Read" down to the right. Another coworker has been bringing in a series of DVDs for me to watch. Then my neighbor shares his latest read (from which I copied the above quote) or musical interest. If you only read or watched or listened to what was worth memorizing, how many books and movies and music or TV shows would have to fall by the wayside? Below is a picture of books I own but have not yet read. Some my wife bought, one my mom passed along, most I found years ago in used book stores and two come from authors I follow. I took the pile to work so I might finally get to them on a lunch break or something. Imagine if I had to memorize them - would I have bought even a single book?

Rat Fink and Wacky Baseball Cards

A few years ago at San Diego Comic-Con, I watched a documentary on Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, custom car builder and creator of the anti-Mickey Mouse character, Rat Fink. An interesting bit of trivia that I learned from the movie is that Ed Roth converted to Mormonism in the '70s and he settled in the same quaint farm town where I got married. My wife didn't get as much as I did from the movie, and that's okay, it may just be a guy thing. I'm adding this DVD (pictured) to my wish list on the right sidebar below. As kids, my middle brother and I owned T-shirts and model kits with Rat Fink on them. In the '80s, this counterculture art was probably an influence for the posters which covered my bedroom wall, skateboarders wearing gas masks over green spiky hair with nuclear warning symbols on their clothes. Of course, it was all to bother parents but I personally liked the cartoonish look mixed with hot rod detailing and monster mania - animated yet refined yet horrific. I've referred to Rat Fink before (see my 9/17/08 post) to make a connection between my first comic book purchase and a recent book I saw called The Original Art of Basil Wolverton. It turns out there's also a connection between that comic and the monster card pictured below. Not only were they released the same year, which I never realized until now, but their style and content are similar as well.

Back before my middle brother and I got paper routes, the only money we could scrape together came from doing odd jobs around the house for nickels and dimes. The only things we could buy with that change were individually wrapped candies and maybe some baseball cards. I marvel to think that our parents trusted us to walk roughly five or six blocks to buy junk at the nearest little gas station, by ourselves, at the tender age of seven or eight. Granted, it was a different era, but I can't imagine my son even walking across the street to our neighborhood grocery store alone. I'm babbling here, but my point is that this gas station carried Awesome! All-Stars Stickers & Bubble Gum (pictured) and Baseball's Greatest Grossouts (both 1988 by Leaf). It was a natural extension from Rat Fink and it preceded my brother's foray into real baseball card collecting.

I never really got into sports cards, but a year after the monster baseball cards, I got Topps Batman Series 2 movie cards and then a year after that I got the Dick Tracy set. The Topps company made another line of cards that rivaled sports cards, movie cards and even Garbage Pail Kids - Wacky Packages, which parody the packaging of different consumer products like you'd find in a grocery store. They were kinda Pop Art, albeit with a grotesque twist. Who knows what Andy Warhol thought of them? Last year I bought a hardcover book collecting pictures of all the Series 1 through Series 7 (from 1973 and 1974) cards and celebrating the 35th anniversary of Wacky Packages. Up until then, I had always assumed that Wacky Packages were first introduced along with Garbage Pail Kids, but it turns out that the latter was only possible because of the success of the former from the decade prior. Another bit of trivia that I learned from the book is that the creators of Wacky Packages were devotees of MAD magazine (so the comic-card connection comes full circle). In 2004 they started them up again (pictured) and there have been six series since then. I have card sleeves in "the box" (see my 9/11/08 post) protecting all the cards I've managed to save from each of the series mentioned here.

In My Own Little World

Some kids have imaginary friends. All kids play pretend. They may dream of being star athletes, scientific geniuses, or respected everyday heroes (doctors, lawyers, politicians... oh wait, I think I meant firemen). Thanks to video games, I'm not sure if kids still join the adult world of tea parties, Monopoly, or Risk. When I was in 4th grade, I designed an entire planet with different continents, countries and cultures. I drew extensive maps and spent all my school recess time writing the history but also planning the future of this planet. I put myself into it - I may have been leader of the world, because I was the creator, but I was a fellow citizen too.

It all started with G.I. Joe. In 3rd grade, I ran into a classmate after school who was riding his bike past my block to go play G.I. Joes with an upperclassman (4th grade) at our school playground. Up to this point, I had never considered that kids would return to schoolgrounds after class ended for the day. I followed him over and met this "upperclassman" who I should have known through my church, and he had more action figures than anyone I'd known before. He introduced me to another kid (in my same grade but from another class), who was also into G.I. Joe, but even more than that, he was into author J.R.R. Tolkien.

This other kid was always talking about how Tolkien invented languages and drew his own maps when he created his fictional worlds. This kid had some pretty advanced ideas for his own world-building, stuff that incorporated everything from King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table to anime-style robot suits. He prompted me to invent my own world, more contemporary than his and far less mythological. We were in the same class in 4th grade, and we spent both our recesses walking the perimeter of the playground discussing new ideas we had for our "worlds." We would have sleepovers on the weekends and talk nonstop for most of the night. Other times, we would get together to trade comic books and not say a word for hours while reading.

In 5th grade, my friend transferred to private school. He got into conservative talk radio and Christian heavy metal and we talked less about imaginary things. In junior high, I scaled back on my world and it became nothing more than a tropical island with a medieval European-style castle, invisible to passersby, tangible only to those I teleported onto it. It became less a world unto itself and more an escape from the real world which seemed to be taking over my previously contained and controllable existence. My new world (or imaginary place, since it was no longer a full-scale world) was all about slowing things down - a minute in the real world was an hour on mine, an hour in the real world was a couple days on mine, and so forth. When I got into skating, I included skate parks in my castle.

Eventually my friend moved to another town and I only saw him once after that. I tried to get him to talk about the stuff we were into as kids, but he kept bringing the conversation back to girls and driving. Eventually my world disappeared altogether, replaced by a superficial fantasy where I took a dozen or so of my high school friends to Disney World and we would make out on roller coasters and stuff like that. I started collecting annual updates of travel agency brochures to Disney World and I familiarized myself with all the hotels, which came in handy almost a decade later when my wife and I honeymooned there. One childhood dream down, a whole planet of dreams to go.

My Favorite Childhood Book

Did you know that my family was picked as "library family of the year" by our town's public library when I was growing up? We got to choose a book that would be dedicated to us and we chose The Phantom Tollbooth. But the book I actually checked out the most was the one pictured below. I got it everytime I went to the library, and then I would renew it as often as I could on top of that. Years ago I started looking for it on Amazon and eBay, but without any luck. I finally remembered to look again for it last month and it will be my newest, and one of my proudest additions to "the box" (for more on that, see my 9/11/08 post).



It's probably not the most comprehensive bestiary out there, but for a children's book it's awesome. I like the way it covers both folklore from around the world and modern science fiction in the same place. Before I heard of Tolkien or Universal Studios, I had read this book. It is what got me into mythology and monster movies. This book goes through the entire plots for Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolfman. When I saw the Monstrous Compendiums for Dungeons & Dragons, they immediately reminded me of this book and I wanted them all to add to my encyclopedic knowlege of useless trivia. Here's my A-Z index of the creatures contained therein:

Abominable Snowman (Tibetan)
Anubis (Egyptian)
Atheleni (British)
Banshees (British)
Basilisk/Cockatrice (British)
Blob (American)
Boobrie (British)
Buraq (Arabian)
Carcadann (Arabian)
Catoblepas (Ethiopian)
Centaurs (Greek)
Cerberus (Greek)
Cetus (Greek)
Chimera (Greek)
Cyclops (Greek)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (British)
Dr. Moreau (British)
Dragons (Universal)
Dwarfs (Germanic)
Echidna (Greek)
Elves (Germanic)
Fachan (British)
Frankenstein’s monster (British)
Goblins (British)
Golem (Hebrew)
Griffin (Arabian)
Hameh (Arabian)
Harpies (Greek)
Hydra (Greek)
Kelpie (British)
King Kong (American)
Kotos (Greek)
Kraken (Scandanavian)
Lamia (Greek)
Leprechauns (British)
Loch Ness Monster (British)
Manticore (Persian)
Martians (British)
Medusa (Greek)
Mermaids (Assyrian)
Minotaur (Greek)
Morlocks (British)
Mummies (Egyptian)
Nāga (Indian)
Newts (Czech)
Ogopogo (American)
Pegasus (Greek)
Phoenix (Egyptian)
Phooka (British)
Puck (British)
Questing Beast (British)
Robots (Czech)
Roc (Arabian)
Sahkmet (Egyptian)
Salamander (Hebrew)
Sasquatch (American)
Satyrs (Greek)
Scylla (Greek)
Sea Monk (Norse)
Sea Serpents (Universal)
Selenites (British)
Selkies (British)
Sphinx (Greek)
Tars Tarkas (American)
Tralfamadorians (American)
Triffids (British)
Trolls (Norse)
Unicorn (Hebrew)
Vampire (Universal)
Werewolf (Universal)
Yahoos (British)
Zombies (Caribbean)

Unsolicited Advice

"For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? . . . How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless." (George Orwell, 1984, 1949)

My brothers and I received hardcover journals for Christmas one year as kids, so my first-ever entry probably didn't amount to more than a list of the other presents I got that day. I kept a pretty good journal through junior high, then in high school I switched to calendar pages. I would write just a few words describing the most interesting thing I did for each day inside the little box on the calendar page. In college, I switched from big, wall-hanging calendars to day planner calendars. I keep those calendar pages in my three-ring photo album binders. While looking at photos for my recent review of the 2000s, I noticed that my calendar entries stopped the year I moved to San Diego. Before I stopped doing them though, I apparently added a new feature in the notes column at the end of each week on the planner calendar. I included a few words on a superficial lesson I had learned that week, like unsolicited advice for future generations flipping through my photo albums. Here is my advice to myself from the first full month I lived in San Diego:

August 1-7, 2004 "Send postcards to old friends to inform them of the move."

August 8-14, 2004 "Don't buy anything you can check out at the library."

August 15-21, 2004 "The point of living near the beach is to hang out at the beach."

August 22-28, 2004 "Going #2 every morning counts on Sundays too."

August 29-September 4, 2004 "Remember people's names."

My advice for this week? Don't wear pants with holes in the crotch because if you pass out or have a heart attack, everyone will see.

My History with Plaid Shirts

People who went to school with me may recognize the plaid shirt I'm wearing in this picture. It kick started my thing for plaid, and set the bar for at least five colors in every pattern I own. It all goes back to the CCS free catalogs I used to get in the mail in junior high. They featured a lot of flannel button-downs for skaters who were either riffing on the preppy look or being influenced by SoCal cholos (lowriders). I tried to cop the style without buying the brand names. I went to K-Mart for cheap plaid shirts and khaki pants, but when I wore them to school, people told me I was dressed like an old man. Maybe I should have gone baggier, but it was obvious I didn't look like a skater, a prep, or a cholo. Rather than start over shopping for clothes, I decided to run with it - my new "old man style." I started wearing plaid shirts everyday, I raided my dad's closet for jackets, and I asked for thick, wool, plaid ties as gifts. Later on, I started wearing mismatched socks with brown saddle shoes and flat/paddy caps. To this day, people at work still expect to see me come in every day in a plaid shirt, and when I deviate, I hear about it immediately. I could be known best as the guy with two different-colored eyes, but I prefer to be known for something that I have some say in.

I Apologize for Promoting Snark

"That Weinberg could make a rebuke seem like a compliment is testament to his sociological position . . . Truthtelling is easier from a position of cultural distance." (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, Nov. 10, 2008)

"Anyone who speaks of grace - so spiritual a word - in conjunction with our raucous culture risks sounding like a genteel idiot, so I had better say right away that I'm all in favor of nasty comedy, incessant profanity, trash talk, any kind of satire, and certain kinds of invective . . . I don't want to get caught in a thicket of definitions, so let me lay about quickly and brutally. Satire is always critical, directly or indirectly, of manners, vices, attitudes, persons, social types, or conditions. The satirist is enraged by what others accept. At its greatest, most powerful, and most dangerous, satire makes use of a double edged sword - the devious and aggressive weapon of irony. The satirist practicing irony appears to praise the very thing he loathes. He exaggerates its features, and the terms of his praise give the show away. He tells truths in the form of lies . . . In an earlier period, we though that in the free market of ideas and language, the best and most truthful expression would win out and the rest would be forgotten. Now, I'm not so sure." (David Denby, Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits, pgs. 1, 29, & 88)

Exactly one month ago, I posted that I had a forthcoming review of the book that the second quote above comes from. I just barely got to it this week and I kept a list of every word the author used to describe snark (here are the first 50): "nasty, knowing, low, teasing, snide, condescending, ridicule, ill will, prejudice, lazy, group mentality, contempt, bullying, easy, parasitic, referential, insinuating, debilitating, sarcastic, hostile, mediocrity, conformity, malice, natural, bilious, snarling, resentful, annihilating, anonymity, gossipy, desperate, limited, creepy, biting, trivial, cynicism, cruelty, sinister, destructive, dismissal, smearing, derisive, insolent, sneaky, unpleasant, crass, spiteful, negative, undermining, (and to sum it all up, an) insult." NONE of those things are what I intended my blog's name to mean, and I would hope that none of these descriptions apply (save for the one in bold). If you ever find my blog to be any of these 50 words, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

In my header, I used to include the Urban Dictionary definition of the word snark, which is simply "a combination of the words snide and remark." One of Webster's definitions for snide is "unworthy of esteem," and that matches my original understanding of snark as throwaway criticism or "nitpicking," which was the popular meaning during the late 19th century. Even less offensive is Lewis Carroll's definition from his 1876 poem, "The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony, in Eight Fits," where it's just a nonsense word from "the comination of snail and shark." Imagine such an animal - slow-moving, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, all fangs but no flippers. I never meant "I Wear My Snark Upon My Sleeve" to mean anything more than "I make fun of the things I love the most." And here's why:

The first time I consciously remember coming across the term snark was on the Comics Worth Reading website. The author of that used to do what was essentially a monthly blog post on new comics as presented in the Previews catalog. On the left column she included pictures of the books she reviewed. The middle column included the books she was spotlighting with praise. The right column was entitled "Snarky Comments" directed mostly at bad marketing moves, since the nagging referred just to the ads in the Previews catalog and not the books themselves. She never directly criticized the creators that I can remember. It was in all good taste and primarily to vent about mismanagement of an industry THAT SHE LOVES. I printed some of her "Snarky Comments" (which technically would be a redundant term, like "snide remark remark") from October 2004 and I keep them in my "Comics" file folder in "the box" (see my 9/11/08 post). Here are some of her examples:

Regarding the indie press
"ADV films is plugging More Starlight to Your Heart as "finally, a manga for girls!" Where have they been over the past year? There's plenty of manga for girls out there. Or are they referring to fixing a gap in their product line? . . . I like their quick genre descriptions - this book's "action horror," that one is "light-hearted fantasy" - but someone go a little weird at some point. Are there really so many titles in the category that "robot super maids" should be considered a genre? How many examples of "wacky Satanic comedy" can there be?"

Regarding DC Comics
"During the Batman crossover "War Games," I quickly determined that I could easily and enjoyably skip all of the associated books. Now the event is over... and browsing through the creators, characters, and descriptions, it looks like I'll be happier continuing in that fashion. Thanks for saving me time and money, DC! . . . How's this for promotion? "It's the beginning of a year of hell for Hawkman." It sounds as though they've decided that no one really likes the character, so maybe the book will sell better if they go for the sadistic sales pitch. "Watch us put our character through the wringer!"

Regarding Marvel Comics
"Marvel's getting into the old argument, "Any true X-fan will enjoy" the three issues of Exiles they're putting out this month. So if you don't like seeing mutants play swords and sorcery, you're not a REAL fan. Marvel says so . . . And I haven't even mentioned the aborted "take half your Ultimates 2 issues in black and white" marketing stunt yet. All of this adds up to a paternalistic attitude towards retailers and customers that grates. It's old-fashioned to believe that the publisher really has anyone's best interests at heart but its own. Look at how they're trying to flood the market with unwanted X-books and supposed Avengers tie-ins that aren't and office scrapings published as Director's Cut editions. Now they're even selling unfinished marketing material as the $4 Young Guns 2004 Sketchbook."

Too "insidery?" I will grant that most snark is, but I don't think the quotes above are purposefully exclusive to comic book "outsiders." Passionate, yes. Conservative, no. Hopeful for change, yes. Jealous of those in power, no. My mom used to ask my brothers and I if we were "builders or bashers." If author David Denby is right about snark never building anything, then I'm changing my blog's name to "Wear Your Weight Well" (which is my favorite compliment that isn't really a compliment, but also refers to puffed up opinions like my own). I just removed the "worst" lists I used to have at the bottom right. I'm going to try to focus on the positive.

What Ever Happened to Disney Read-Along?

I'm reaching the end of interesting posts I can base on items from "the box" (see my 9/11/08 post for details). In front of all the file folders containing old drawings, magazines, and printouts, and underneath my favorite t-shirts and toys, I keep a small sampling of my children's books. Most I bought from school book fairs. Others were from my parents or family friends. As mentioned in my title, my favorites were Disney Read-Along book-and-cassettes, although my first ones came with the little records. There is a list of titles on Wikipedia, of which I owned The Hobbit, Return of the Jedi, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Gremlins, and The Story of the Goonies (as narrated by Chunk). I owned these books before I saw any of these movies, so I had the odd experience of imagining everything (same as you do reading any book) but already having a few pictures of what the characters looked like and some settings. I have to say the movies were always better in my head compared to the real thing. From the Wikipedia list I learned that Disney's been doing book-and-CD titles since 2000. Upon clicking on the link to the official page, my heart was warmed by the re-release of E.T., which is my all-time favorite movie.

Many of my other favorites seem to share a single author, Stephen Cosgrove. Apparently he's written over 350 children's books and he has an inspiring self-publishing story on his website. Perhaps you owned something from one of his many series:

Serendipity
Treasure Trolls
DreamMaker
Bugg (I still have Snugg in "the box")
The Song of the Sea
Earth Angels
The Barely There
Favorite Fairy Tales
The Whimsies (I still have Gobble and Gulp)
Snuffin Chronicles
The Simple Folk
Bear and Bunny Boards
FlutterByes
T. Wheedle
My Angel Baby

The Horses of the Tapestry

Moby Books did "Illustrated Classic Editions" of various classics. I first saw them in, and I can't believe I've never blogged about this before, the Sears catalog. Later I saw them at Wal-Mart, but let's go back to the Sears catalog, which was one of the icons of my childhood. Every year before Christmas, our family received a phone book-sized edition that I would pore over for hours. Every new and upcoming toy or clothing style I knew of, I learned about in the Sears catalog. Anyway, Moby Books were my first exposure to classic literature. They had alternating pages of text and illustrations. As far as I can tell, their adaptations were the most faithful of I've seen for children's books. The Man in the Iron Mask is the most horrific story in all of classic literature but reading this book helped me make at least a bit of sense out of it. A few other books that I've saved in "the box" are from the 12 All-time Best Fairy Tales: Rumpelstiltskin, The Three Little Pigs, Hansel & Gretel, Goldilocks & the Three Bears, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, Jack & the Beanstalk, Snow White, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Ruth Ainsworth. They are beautiful watercolor retellings with lots of expressive faces and mushrooms (yes, even magical mushrooms).

Comics Segue into Gaming

In my last Wednesday post, I referred to my first New England Comics catalog. After flipping through it again, I realized it not only explains a lot of my comics interests, it's probably responsible for getting me into gaming a little bit as well. Granted, many of the comics I found at my parents' house last weekend had ads for the Rifts role-playing game, but then I noticed that the catalog page pictured above calls it "Palladium's newest . . . (and) best-selling game!" I remember that being one of the first games I ever bought, and since that time I've bought nearly all the other games mentioned above. Just to break it down, my actual first game was TSR's Marvel Superheroes Basic Set, followed by the Swamp Thing Sourcebook for Mayfair's DC Heroes role-playing game (both pictured below). Both owe a lot to comic books. In fact, I'm sure no serious gamer has ever played either game. They were made with simple comic fans in mind. When a former roommate and my wife got me back into gaming in college, one of the first games I bought was a superhero system that was compatible with my wife's Sailor Moon adaptation, but mostly I bought it because it had a history of comic books in the preface (it was the Guardians of Order Silver Age Sentinels, pictured below).

Even my first Palladium game, before I got Rifts, was Heroes Unlimited and that was just so I could invent my own superheroes, and perhaps play out adventures that could then be translated to the comic page. Next I got Ninjas and Superspies (all these games are listed on the catalog pages above) to pad my Heroes Unlimited characters. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Down Under was still an extension of my comic book reading. Either Rifts or Robotech II: The Sentinels could be considered my first break from strictly comic-related games to serious adventuring. Continuing on the right page of the catalog above, I got the 4th edition of Shadowrun in college, along with 3rd edition GURPS in junior high and its version of Cyberpunk . I never got into Star Wars or Aliens gaming, but I did get into the role-playing version of Battletech, called Mechwarrior, at a Boy Scouts aquatics camp that I went to for a couple of summers. Last but definitely not least, I never played Dungeons and Dragons until after I learned the D20 system in college. I then waited until after the animated series was released on DVD (Christmas 2006) to go back and buy the 3.5 edition starter set of the game.

Happy New Year

A few years ago I actually picked this special issue of People up while waiting in line at the grocery store. Now I keep it in "the box" (for more details, see my 9/11/08 post). Just think, around five years from now, there will probably be a "Celebrate the '00s!" Right now there are already 2008 retrospectives being written or on grocery store shelves. This post is my own little list of highlights:

My Favorite Blog Post I Wrote - "Scarier Than Scary" (10/16/08)

My Least Favorite - "My Webcomics" (9/10/08)

My Blogging Resolution - shorter, more personal posts

My Favorite Single Issue Comic Book I Read - X-Men Origins: Jean Grey (Oct. 2008)

My Least Favorite - Final Crisis #4 (Nov. 2008)

My Comic-Reading Resolution - switching to online

My Least Favorite Cheesy Trend - Guitar Hero/Rock Band video games

My Favorite Movie I Saw - The Dark Knight (7/18/08)

My Least Favorite - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (5/22/08)

My Movie-Watching Resolution - taking my time with just classics from Blockbuster Online

My Favorite Music Discovery - Daedelus or MURS

My Least Favorite (don't believe the hype) - TV on the Radio

My Music-Listening Resolution - to return to Coachella music festival

My Least Favorite News Item - Cyd Charisse's obituary; she's one of my favorite actresses and my wife and I agreed long ago that if we ever have a girl, her middle name will be Charisse

My Favorite TV Show I Actually Watched - 30 Rock

My Least Favorite - Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

My TV-Viewing Resolution - avoiding ever-worsening Showtime series like Dexter and Weeds (I guess that includes next week's Confessions of a Call Girl on DVD)

In case you're interested, here are the things highlighted in "the '90s" magazine:

Books - Stop the Insanity!, Men Are from Mars, Bridges of Madison County, Bridget Jones' Diary, The Celestine Prophecy

Fashion - Hammer pants, the Wonder Bra, Snapple, Magic Eye, Tickle Me Elmo, Pokémon, scrunchies, fanny packs, and Rollerblades

Movies - Clueless, Forrest Gump, Pretty Woman, Scream, Pulp Fiction, American Pie, Jurassic Park

Music - *NSYNC, The Backstreet Boys, Salt-N-Pepa, The Fugees, Dr. Dre, Garth Brooks, Alanis Morissette, Hootie and the Blowfish, Boyz II Men

News - Princess Diana, JonBenét Patricia Ramsey, Heidi Fleiss, Oklahoma City bombing, Monicagate, Amy Fisher, the Menendez brothers

Sports - Michael Jordan, John Elway, Monica Sales, Mark McGuire, Kristi Yamaguchi, Magic Johson

TV - Northern Exposure, Beverly Hills 90210, Ally McBeal, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire, Twin Peaks, Roseanne

I just realized that since my son and I were both born toward the end of a decade, his experience and nostalgia for different decades might mirror my own. In other words, the same way that I disregard the '70s might be the way he will diregard the '00s, and the same kind of affection I have for the '80s, he might have for the '10s. It's crazy for me to think that his adolescence in the '20s might be like my adolescence in the '90s.

High School in Spain

Most people have a dream vacation, I had a dream education when I was in high school. You see, I was born with two different-colored eyes and aside from the constant comments, it hasn't ever done much for me. If anything, it's a bad thing, as one of the side effects in my case is a lazy eye which could not be fixed in childhood. I think there's even a horror movie out now where having two different-colored eyes means you have a twin that died in utero that will haunt you for simply being born. But I digress. My point is, I used to have a fantasy daydream where my eyes would win me something, and the thing I wanted most in high school was to get out of high school, or at least public school, and see the world. I imagined up a wealthy Spaniard who would search the world, or just the U.S., for a kid to grant a private education, to be located at his villa outside Barcelona. His only criteria would be a boy, age 14, with, you guessed it, two different-colored eyes, and I would be the lucky recipient to meet that criteria. If there were other 14 year-old boys with different-colored eyes, I could have specified that the eyes be brown and green like mine, or narrowed the search pool to the state of New Mexico, as I'm pretty sure I was the only match in my area. In 30 years, I've only ever met one other person with eyes like mine in person, and that was getting off a bus in Brazil. I said to her, "you have two different-colored eyes!" and she responded, "yeah, so?" Anyway, it's supposedly a one-in-a-million trait.

Going back to my dream education, the Spaniard would rescue me from my boring, impersonalized school and fly me out to meet my new exotic, private tutors (as magical as Hogwarts, right? But REAL! And years before Harry Potter without the classroom setting or the mean instructors.) I mapped out four years of seven-hour days with seven AP exams (28 of the 37 total) at each year's end:

Freshman year - English Literature; Environmental Science; Algebra; Human Geography and World History; Psychology; Piano and Music Theory; Soccer and Basketball

Sophomore year - Latin Literature; Biology; Geometry; European and U.S. History; Art History and Studio Art; Trumpet and Jazz History; Tennis and Baseball

Junior year - Spanish Literature; Chemistry; Trigonometry; Macro- and Microeconomics; Computer Science; Classical Guitar and Composition; Hockey and Golf

Senior year - French Literature; Physics; Calculus; Government and Politics; Computer Science; Drums and Sound Engineering; Wrestling and Volleyball

I would also prepare three meals a day alongside a professional chef for all those living and working at the villa. I would train in the swimming pool in the morning and on my very own skate park at night. During the summer I would travel to historic places like the Egyptian pyramids, Athens, Rome, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Berlin, and Moscow. During the winter, I would ski and snowboard the Alps and visit my family for Christmas and my birthday. After four years, I would ace the SAT and ACT tests, and get serious scholarship money for any college of my choice. Needless to say, this fantasy is so far from my reality. Yes, I did graduate from public school. No, I didn't pass any AP exams. Yes, I did graduate from a college of my choice, albeit a smaller pool of choices. No, I didn't get serious scholarship money but I honestly think I would have been able to by writing essays about a unique experience in Spain. Why Spain? It's because growing up in New Mexico, I wanted to learn Spanish (and I did take it in high school), but I guess I thought learning it in Spain would make it somehow cooler. Now I laugh to think that I would have learned to speak with a lisp. One more question before wrapping this up - is a dream vacation the best thing I could come up with in high school? What about space travel, a pro sports stint, lottery money, or a girlfriend that's a celebrity model? Yes, I do think my dream vacation would have rivaled any of those things, and it's definitely more grounded in reality. I think the best dreams are less fantasy and more reality.

Before Comics

Long before I ever read a comic book, I wanted to work for NASA Mission Control Center. All those consoles with the flashing lights and the big screen at the front of the room looked so cool (this was before the Challenger explosion or the Apollo 13 movie). At least, that's what I wanted until first grade. First grade was when I got my first "F" and it was in math. Someone told me you had to be good at math to be a scientist and/or work for NASA, so that was the end of that. Dreams can get crushed at such an early age or else I'm easily crushed.

But don't worry, I soon realized that I was good at storytelling, and that's better than math anyday. I had the same teacher for first and second grade. She encouraged my strengths and would give me writing assignments which she would proofread and correct for extra credit. I liked true stories just as well as fiction and my favorite books to read at this age were biographies. That's how I learned that Walt Disney did more than just make movies and open theme parks. He became my childhood hero because he was an overall showman and I when I grew up, I wanted to be one too. Not just an animator and a voice actor, but a designer and futurist too. In third grade, I made up my own company which I called Magic Productions and I planned its roster of movies, music albums, TV series, all with their own books and merchandising. That's what "Fireball's Magazine" is all about (pictured above to illustrate my early obsession with lists and spreadsheets).

Looking back, I never had any original concepts back then. My logo for "Fireball's" was a near-identical match to the logo for one of my favorite toy lines at the time. Even the idea for a magazine based on a cartoon series probably came from my love of movie souvenir magazines when I was a kid. Part of what got me into comics was Tim Burton's Batman (1989), which was also the first movie magazine I actually bought (pictured below in tattered glory - I must have flipped through it everyday for years). Granted, I was already into newspaper comic strips and classic animation so it was a natural evolution. Aside from that though, I must pose the question, "What comes next for a kid who isn't good at math and science but likes science and fiction and drawing?" Comic books, of course.

I'm skipping ahead because before Batman I was all about Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), which is kinda Disney for grown-ups. I used to do all the voices and sound effects like actor Charles Fleischer and that got me in trouble in class a lot. When I told my family that I was going into movies when I grew up, their only response was that there was a lot of sleeze in Hollywood, and with that, my second dream was crushed. After I got into comics, I realized that they paralleled movies in many ways, but could be created without going to Hollywood. I kept my new career plans to myself, and until now, never mentioned them to another soul. It's funny, I got into comics the first time with the Batman movie, took a break during adolescence, and then got back into comics with the Spider-Man (2002) movie, so I can't ever say I prefer movies or comics more because they owe so much to each other in my mind.

I already addressed the question of which Batman I prefer in a post a month or so ago, but now I want to discuss the Joker. I hear a lot being said about Heath Ledger making Jack Nicholson look as ridiculous as Cesar Romero from the '60s TV series, but I hope the picture to the right refutes that claim. The surgery scene and the mobster burned alive from the '80s movie were just as scary as anything in the The Dark Knight (2008), which I also love.

Pluto Is Not a Planet (Or a Dog For That Matter)

I got into Greek and Roman mythologies the year that Nintendo came out. I played the Street Fighter arcade game around the same time. I must have combined those interests to create a fighting game where gods go up against each other with super-powers in the areas they're known for. I remember making the notes pictured to the left while spending the night at a friend's house. He was the first person I knew with a Nintendo and he would stay up all night conquering Castlevania, Mega Man, and Super Mario Bros. I had another friend who just owned sports games like Duck Hunt, Excitebike, and World Class Track Meet. None of these games were as cool as arcade games to me but I wanted cooler characters than the ones in Street Fighter too. I used the Greek names on these notes. Pluto is (for those who may not know) the Roman name for the god of the underworld, which is Hades to the Greeks. I made invulnerability his power, as he was also the god of metals and minerals, and his body could turn metal to defend against attacks.

Chameleons

I loved chameleons as a kid. I had chameleon pencils that changed colors, chameleon shirts, and subscription to Zoobooks magazine in anticipation of the chameleon issue. My brother had an anole (pronounced with the accent on the first syllable), which is a lizard that also changes colors, but it turns out that they're more closely related to iguanas than they are chameleons. In "the box" (see my 9/11/08 post for details on what that is), I have a page ripped out of my family's first encyclopedia set with the entry for, you guessed it, chameleons. When my wife and I visited the Birch Aquarium at UCSD shortly after moving to San Diego, we were lucky enough to arrive just at feeding time for the big three-horned chameleon on display. They opened a mayonaise-sized jar full of flies and we watched the chameleon pick them all off one by one with his shooting tongue. Perhaps someday I'll own my own, but I hear they get sick easy if your house isn't very warm and our current apartment doesn't even have an active heater. Think of me and chameleons next time you scrape snow or ice off your windshield.

After Girls, Before Skating

There was a year in junior high, after I became interested in the opposite sex but before bad acne hit and skating took over my free time, that I drew mazes for fun.

I made them during school and passed them around to classmates to see who did them fastest. I impressed one girl with them, which is more than I can say for skating.

Sunday Funnies on Saturday

The comic strip pictured above comes from "the box" (see my 9/11/08). Like most kids, I loved the funny pages before I knew how to read. The words weren't even important to me until FoxTrot came along, and that was a good ten years later. Up to that point, I just liked looking at the various poses for cartoon bodies, buildings, cities, faces, furniture, etc. I used to draw cartoon versions of everything from animals to cars to plants, all to my grandmother's chagrin. She wanted me to draw "real" things in a "natural" way, but I knew all along that the cartooning comes closer to the essence of a thing better than photorealism ever could. Calvin and Hobbes is probably my favorite strip of all time (I've added a top ten list down on the right column) because Bill Watterson switched back and forth between cartoony and very naturalistic (i.e. the daydream entries where Calvin is an adult or an animal).

I've been told I ANALyze things too much. That's just to give you a heads up before continuing with what might appear to be an otherwise funny post. Don't get me wrong, I think I'm a funny guy, but my worst flaw is that I'm too serious. Don't believe me? Then check this out. The San Diego Tribune does an early edition of the Sunday paper and I bought one to determine which comic stips I liked and didn't like, but more importantly, why I liked or disliked them. You see, it's not enough for me to just enjoy something. I have to understand why. I don't simply avoid things I don't like until I've figured out why that's the case. Why do I do this? I don't know, but that is another good question and now I'm going to have to think about that too. In the meantime, try to enjoy my ANALyses of all the 30, current, color, comic strips featured in this weekend's San Diego Tribune, from oldest to youngest (titles in bold were the ones I found funny):

1. Blondie (1930) was the flapper star in the early days; I like her but not the Dagwood character; my pet peeve is strips where the characters just have dots for their whole eyes (in other words, no white circles around the dots which are just pupils); unfortunately the case for 1/3 of the comics listed here

2. Mary Worth (1940) is funny to laugh at just because it's not supposed to be funny; that's a glimpse into my and my brothers' sense of humor

3. Beetle Bailey (1950) has a minimalist look similar to Garfield, but with more colors

4. Peanuts (1950) sucks; it looks like pen scribbles and the characters have stupid, hammer-shaped feet and dots for eyes; I hate Snoopy and Charlie Brown and Linus and especially Lucy; oh how I hate Lucy; the TV show Robot Chicken did an awesome sketch on the Peanuts characters where the Great Pumpkin eats everyone; oh yeah

5. Dennis the Menace (1951) weird color splotches and contrasting thick and thin lines without any apparent reason in the way of emphasis or lighting

6. The Family Circus (1960) something I shouldn't like but do; the dotted line maps could turn a single panel into the equivalent of a page-long treasure hunt

7. Doonesbury (1970) I never appreciated and what's with bags under everyone's eyes?

8. Funky Winkerbean (1972) looks like markers and fancy coloring; detailed backgrounds

9. Hagar the Horrible (1973) has the most atypical faces

10. Garfield (1978) has the thickest, bold lines

11. Sally Forth (1982) has good backgrounds but dots for eyes

12. Adam @ Home (1984) reminds me of Zits

13. Bizarro (1985) is the best thing after The Far Side

14. Luann (1985) had the best dialogue of all the strips this weekend

15. FoxTrot (1988) is a classic

16. Dilbert (1989) has never made me laugh

17. The Fusco Brothers (1989) scare me

18. Baby Blues (1990) uses thin, open-bordered lines which I personally don't like

19. Pickles (1990) is somehow remniscient of Doonesbury

20. Non Sequitur (1992) has lots of lines and cross-
hatching which I prefer

21. The Duplex (1993) juxtaposes cartoony (gotta love those enormous, bulbous noses) people against more realistic-looking backgrounds

22. Mutts (1994) is just scribbles and dots for eyes

23. Zits (1997) is a little jagged for me aesthetically but my mom thinks it's the funniest

24. Get Fuzzy (1999) is the actual funniest and reminds me of Ren & Stimpy

25. Pooch Cafe (2000) is very angular (not my cup of tea)

26. The Other Coast (2001) looks like the animated, Family Guy style

27. Pearls Before Swine (2001) reminds me of Life in Hell

28. La Cucaracha (2002) has the same style as many mini-comic books out now or Groo

29. Family Tree (2008?) looks like The Wizard of Id

30. Knight Life (2008?) had no word balloons and a style somewhere between B.C. and Hagar

Skate (Or Die Alongside the Hula Hoop)

From 8th through at least 11th grade, I probably skated everyday but Sunday. Most people think of skateboarding when they hear the word "skated," but I'm talking about in-line skating, or Rollerblade® (just as people say"JELL-O" for any brand of gelatin dessert). It was an even bigger fad in the '90s than skateboarding was in the '80s because you have to admit that old people never rushed out to buy boards quite like they did wheels in a row. (Now everyone skates from Tony Hawk on Xbox to Lupe Fiasco on Mtv.) The Inline magazine I used to get was always half-filled with pictures of over-the-hill, spandex-wearing racers. I once heard that there were 20 million "bladers" (ew, I hated that word) when I was most into it, probably around '94 or '95. That one number has stayed at the forefront of my mind through all these years and is my baseline I use for calculating how "big" something is. For example, total U.S. population is around 300 million and it turns out the peak for the in-line skating fad was actually 32 million in '98. Therefore, a fad in my mind is somewhere around a tenth of a given country's population (or in this case, the total population of Canada). That's what I consider when I look at box office totals, building capacities, Nielsen TV ratings, and platinum records. The town where I got into skating had a population of around 30,000, so that's a tenth of what it would take to make a fad. Here are some current fads I checked up on:

1. Around 30 million watch American Idol, which is similar to the in-line skating peak.

2. Over 40 million copies of The Da Vinci Code have been sold (conspiracy theories over skating),

3. and over 150 million iPods have been sold also, (think of that as half the U.S. population).

4. I still want to know how many active blog sites there are,

5. and how many people regularly do Sudoku puzzles?

Last night, I was looking through my old skating magazines that I keep in "the box" (see my 9/11/08 post), and I made some surprising discoveries. The snowy picture above was taken just around the corner from where I lived (seriously less than a block away) and at the same time that the magazine it appeared in was released. That's probably why I kept that particular issue but ironically, I never saw anyone skating in that neighborhood the whole time I lived there. Then I moved to San Diego and lo and behold, most of the pictures in another magazine (from before I moved but that's not why I moved here specifically) are credited as being taken there or nearby: Chula Vista, East County, and Rancho Bernardo. The B&W picture above was taken at Point Loma High, just blocks from where I now live and the irony continues, I have never seen anyone with Rollerblades sliding down a handrail as long as I've lived in San Diego. How have I (at least for the last five years) lived this close to the sweetest skate spots in the country (or at least so close to the pros featured in magazines) and never known about it till now? Anyway, I just want to wrap this up now by saying that the No Fear/extreme sports fad kinda passed a decade ago, but for a while it was everywhere. I include below not one, but two of the Mead folders I keep in "the box" to store my memories. It appears that even "Trapper Keeper" cashed in on the fad when creating their "No Rules!" line:

Scarier Than Scary

DISCLAIMER: I don't believe in aliens, the Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness monster (but maybe sea serpents at the bottom of the ocean), neither magic nor mermaids. I don't worship Mother Nature, historical sorcery just smacks of drugs to me, and possession isn't possible (definitely not in children) unless people allow themselves to be possessed. I'm not especially into dragons, fairies, unicorns, or The Lord of the Rings, and I don't think the movies were that great. I do like vampires (a metaphor for xenophobia), werewolves (a metaphor for mental illness), and zombies (a metaphor for consumerism), but I don't think they're real. The demons I believe in aren't red and they don't have horns (that's all symbolism) and true spirits of the deceased don't hang around to haunt houses or infect videotapes. I tell ghost stories around the campfire, not to invite evil into my mind, but because it's fun feeling scared when you know that there's NOTHING to really fear. Not fiction, not reality, not others, not yourself, and not fear itself.

If I had to be scared of something, it could be nazi, book-burning, holy-roller, soccer moms who hate Harry Potter because they believe their kids could actually learn witchcraft at the public library. My mom used to confiscate any books of horror that I brought into the house the same way her parents confiscated a copy of M*A*S*H from her older sibling and then burned it even though the book belonged to a school friend. One of my favorite things about elementary school were book fairs and that's where I first saw The Scariest Stories You've Ever Heard series. I never bought them myself until a few years ago on ebay, probably for the reason I just mentioned. Now I keep them in "the box" (see my 9/11/08 post). Perhaps they were only available through book fairs, because while they were far superior to the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series, they never gained the same popularity. I've seen the latter series (first published about five years before the former) at Wal-Mart, the grocery store Halloween aisle, and I even saw an anniversary hardcover edition last time I was at Borders. My primary purpose for this post is to inform all who are looking for scary stories, don't believe the hype. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark may have made libraries' Top 100 Most Challenged Books from 1990-2000, but it's lame. Go for the gold, search your used bookstore, and check out the series that really delivers (the titles in bold are my top ten):

The Scariest Stories You've Ever Heard (Mark Mills, 1988)
1. The Horrible Hook* - "hanging on the handle of the car door"
2. Never Walk There at Night - "she had pinned herself to the grave."
3. A Deadly Night at the Dew Drop Inn - "you're not going anywhere."
4. The Hand - "still hung from the string, but now its muscles were strained"
5. The Horror in the Backseat* - "flashing my lights was the only way"
6. The Baby-Sitter - "toying with an electronic voice-changer."
7. Prom Fright! - "his lifeless feet were hitting the hood of the car."
8. The Night of the Sasquatch - "WoooooOOOOOOOOOoooooo."
9. The Night He Came Back - "lovingly tied, was Bridgette's scarf."
10. The Headless Brakeman - "down the tracks on that fateful curve."
11. The Viper - "he rolled up his pant leg and unbuckled his artificial leg."
12. The Incredible Case of Captain Hanson's Leg - "it doesn't rain salt water."
13. The Dog Man - "tearing voraciously at their old master's body."
14. The Terrifying Tale of Taily-Po - "all I want's my taily-po..."

Part II (Katherine Burt, 1989)
1. The Doctor's Visit - "she's been dead for over three years."
2. Brenda's New Dress - "a chemical that stopped her blood from flowing."
3. The Deadly Dare - "bloody from having scratched on the door to get in."
4. The Doggie's Treat - "she was choking on two human fingers."
5. Terror Trip* - "there was the red ribbon she wore around her neck."
6. The Last Initiation - "he was pretending to be hanged."
7. The Rose Garden - "I didn't want the house down here in the valley."
8. The Man on the Dock - "fishing over near the flooded locust grove."
9. The Hitchhiker - "these are special gloves."
10. Trick or Treat - "his awkward walk and his hospital name tag"
11. It Walks at Midnight - "the name on the dog tag was Midnight."

Part III (Tracey E. Dils, 1990)
1. Hide-and-Seek* - "it was the skeleton of Mr. Mackinbecker's bride."
2. Dead Man's Hill - "what's even better than taking the curve solo"
3. The Secret of the Dollhouse - "her grandmother's rocking chair"
4. The Slasher* - "you must get off at the next stop."
5. Horror Weekend - "Mac Tolliver had come back."
6. Midnight - "on top of Midnight's grave, was Thomas' blue baby blanket."
7. The Sea of the Dead - "a fungus, Mr. Gray paused, that only grows..."
8. Killer Cactus - "where the tarantula eggs had come from."
9. The Man with the Skeleton Face - "engine expoded and I guess the captain..."

* Signifies stories that seem to be well-known folktales and urban legends. I think "Taily-Po" is included in both series. I'll have to make all those urban legend websites my next browsing project. One last note: The Scariest Stories series, save for the sasquatch, contains no creatures, just ghosts WITHOUT complex, revenge-from-the-grave plots and your garden variety psychopaths. People are much scarier than monsters anyday. Or night.