Year: 2010

What “Driving Carefully in the Rain” Means to Me

Here’s what I do when driving in bad weather like this week’s rainstorms:

  • Drop my usual speed 10-15 MPH, maybe more if conditions are really bad.
  • Don’t use cruise control.
  • Leave more space between me and the car in front of me. Be prepared to slow down if someone merges between us.
  • Turn on my headlights.
  • Keep an eye out for standing water on the road. Try to avoid large puddles if possible, slow down (but not too quickly) if not.
  • Stay in the rightmost lane if I’m one of the slower cars on the road.

I actually always drive with my lights on, day and night, good weather and bad. This is because years ago our local traffic newspaper columnist Mr. Roadshow had columns which noted two things: First, that driving with your lights on all the time runs only about $3 per year (probably all the way up to $6 with higher gas prices), and second, a trucker who said he found it much easier to see cars on the road in all conditions because nothing else really looks like a car headlight. I decided if it made it easier for truckers to see me, then it’s well worth the minuscule cost.

Epic Rainstorm

The Bay Area is having an epic series of rainstorms this week, with the heaviest downfall hitting today. While we had thunder Tuesday morning (and our DSL had gone out, though rebooting the modem fixed it), it’s just been pouring, pouring, pouring this morning. When I got up this morning, Blackjack was hiding in the closet. He’s come out and been social this morning, but he doesn’t like this weather. I think this is the most rain we’ve gotten in such a short span of time since I moved here. (I wasn’t here for the El Niño storms and mudslides of the 90s.)

Naturally there have been plenty of traffic accidents, including this impressive story about three men pulling an unconscious driver out of his burning car.

I’ve been delayed getting out this morning by spending time trying to improve the drainage routes in my back yard, since I noticed there was half an inch of standing water on my patio. The thing just wasn’t built for this amount of rain. I unclogged the main artery for the patio to drain, which routes the water into my pond. The pond is a pretty good place to send the rain, since it’s away from the building, and I can also grab a bucket and bail it if necessary. I bailed 10 bucketfuls (20 gallons, maybe?) into the sink this morning, to provide some more space for the water. Perhaps I should invest in 50 feet of hose to use the pond’s pup to just pump the water steadily out of the pond and into the sink. Hopefully it won’t come to that.

The rain’s picking up again, and it’s time for me to head out. I’ll drive carefully, you can bet on that.

Birthday Party

The birthday party last night went off without a hitch. In fact, it might have been the best one I’ve thrown. I’m not quite sure why, but everyone who came stayed until the end, and everyone was talking with everyone else, which seems like a sure sign of a good party. A little oddly, everyone suddenly decided to leave around 10:30 (the party started at 7:00) – it’s only odd because literally everyone left at the same time (save for a couple of folks who left slightly earlier).

Shortly before the party Debbi and I debated who would be the first to show up. I put my proverbial money on Josh, who’s usually pretty punctual, but I should have put my money on Chris, who only lives a block away and who arrived just a little after 7! I think Josh was fourth.

I always tell people they don’t need to bring gifts to my party, but Chris brought one anyway – sort of. He gave me five packs of arguably the worst Magic expansion ever made, Homelands. He said he’ll have won if any of the cards ever show up in my decks at his Monday night Magic sessions. There were actually a couple of not-too-sucky cards in the packs (Abbey Gargoyles could be useful in our metagame), but yeah, it was a pretty weak set of cards. I told him I might be more likely to put the note he included with the packs in one of my decks!

I don’t throw many parties – pretty much just my birthday party once a year – and I always worry that we’ll try to cram too many people into our relatively-little house. There are always a few people I’d like to invite but I’m wary of going overboard (there are also always a few people I don’t think of until the day of the party, so my apologies if I left you out!). In fact, we managed to fill all our chairs and still have a few people standing or sitting on the floor, but we weren’t quite packed together, which was good. Getting through the living room without stepping on someone was a feat, though. I believe we had 13 people show up, plus me and Debbi.

As usual I picked up cakes from the Prolific Oven, and ice cream from Rick’s, and it all went over well. Rick’s is one of the best-kept-secrets in the south bay, it often seems, and I’m always happy to introduce new people to their yummy treats.

The cats retreated upstairs when the first people showed up, as usual, but three of them came downstairs to check people out. Newton in particular examined everyone’s shoes, getting a good sniff since they were all laid out in front of the hall closet. Jefferson needed a little encouragement to come down, but eventually sat and watched from the stairs. Blackjack is becoming our social cat, as he made the rounds several times.

My friend Cliff showed up about 10 minutes after the party ended – he’d had another commitment not too far from us, but it didn’t wrap up until after we did. But he hung out for a bit and we caught up on his holiday adventures and vice versa.

All-in-all, a very fun party.

Today we had a quiet day mostly at home, although I did go out to get my hair cut. Debbi kind of wanted to go out and do something, mainly because although she feels okay she’s dealing with an annoying cough and she’s just plain tired of being sick. After our very busy weekend last weekend, I was happy to have a day at home, and she didn’t push very hard since it’s my birthday weekend. We watched football, did some reading, and I came upstairs to pay bills and build some new Magic decks this evening. 🙂

This has been a pretty low key birthday, but I actually feel really good about it. It’s been a fun weekend all around, except maybe for the complex fire alarm we had to deal with yesterday (but it turned out to be nothing). I hope next year’s is just as good!

Forty-One

Age 41 doesn’t feel very different from the day before age 41, other than that my birthday falls on a weekend this year. None of the angst that accompanied turning forty (not that I was crying in my beer, you understand). The most awkward thing about 41 is coming up with a witty title for the Evite invitation for my party tonight; I expect next year will be easier.

Other than preparing for the party, today will be a pretty normal day. I actually have a couple of chores to work on outside today, because I want to get them done (or at least make some headway) before the rains set in tomorrow (we’re expected to get 8 inches of rain in the next week). Debbi baked scones (from Iveta) for me this morning, and I talked to my Dad for 45 minutes. But, well, for the most part birthdays aren’t very different from other days, at least, not at my age.

And that’s fine.

This Week’s Haul

A.K.A., last week’s haul, desperately late.

I thumbed through Marvel’s The Siege in the store and decided – as I do for nearly every Marvel event comic – to skip it. Chad Nevitt at Comics Should Be Good sums it up pretty well: The “Dark Avengers” (villains acting as the Avengers since the real Avengers have been ousted by the powers that be) attack Thor and Asgard. My fundamental problem with Marvel’s events – and the way their comics have gone generally in recent years – is that the heroes aren’t very heroic. J. Michael Straczynski’s Thor was bland and dull, and having a bunch of villains attack a group of gods who really aren’t very heroic themselves is just not interesting to me. Sure, I like Thor a lot better than I like the villains, so I’d prefer him to “win”, but I don’t care enough to get engaged with the story.

  • Suicide Squad #67, by Gail Simone, John Ostrander & Jim Calafiore (DC)
  • Echo #18, by Terry Moore (Abstract)
  • B.P.R.D.: King of Fear #1 of 5, by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Guy Davis (Dark Horse)
  • Gigantic #5 of 5, by Rick Remender & Eric Nguyen (Dark Horse)
  • The Boys #38, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Dynamite)
Suicide Squad #67 Part of DC’s Blackest Night event involves resurrecting some cancelled comics series of years past for one more issue. One of the more unusual comics of the late 80s/early 90s was John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad, which Gail Simone’s Secret Six bears some resemblance to: The Squad were villains who were recruited for high-risk government-sanctioned missions, with the promise of a pardon afterwards. The Six are a small organization of criminals. The Six are sort of the darker version of the Squad.

So in this one-issue revival of Suicide Squad, there’s a little of the usual rigamarole regarding dead Squad members being revived as black lanterns, but mainly it’s about Amanda Waller of the Squad deciding she needs Deadshot for a mission, and staging a trap for the Six to both put them out of business and capture Deadshot to force him to rejoin. It’s a good set-up for the next Secret Six story arc, and Ostrander and Simone co-write it. It ought to be good, as long as the black lanterns don’t play too big a role.

Gigantic #5 Rick Remender and Eric Nguyen’s Gigantic comes to an end, the last issue being extremely late (issue #4 came out last May), and unfortunately it wasn’t worth the wait. The trappings are those of big monsters smashing each other, but the story itself is rather depressing, and the upbeat ending in this issue not only doesn’t really put a brave face on the earlier events, but it feels very out-of-place next to the rest of the story. Greg Burgas found it disappointing, too, and he touches on some of the series’ other flaws: The lead character is unsympathetic, the story is hard to follow despite not being very complicated.

Nguyen’s art doesn’t work for me at all: It’s too sketchy, which doesn’t do justice to the designs of the characters. I didn’t care for it in Sandman Mystery Theatre a few years ago, either.

For a similar premise – a young man leaves with aliens, and comes back years later to find he can’t go home again – I’d recommend Dan Vado’s graphic novel The Griffin instead. It has its flaws too, but the story is far more satisfying than Gigantic.

Monsters of Webcomics

Saturday we went up to the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, mainly because I wanted to see their Monsters of Webcomics exhibition before it departs later this month.

If you’ve never been to the Cartoon Art Museum, it’s definitely worth a trip. Admission is reasonable (currently $6 for adults), and you get a lot for your money: The museum consists of 5 rooms, each with a different exhibit. If you’re afraid that it’s full of superhero comics art, nothing could be further from the truth: I features all sorts of sequential art, and usually there are only a few pages of superhero comics. For example, we saw a collection of concept art, color test art, and animation cels from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, many from the collection of one of the artists, Ron Dias. Another is an exhibition of an underground cartoonist from San Francisco, Spain Rodriguez. While underground comics aren’t my thing, there’s something for everyone (well, most people) here. The museum also has a bookstore in front with an eclectic selection.

The webcomics exhibit was pretty good, featuring ten webcomics, most of which I’d heard of, but only one of which (Girl Genius) I read. Though I probably should be reading Dicebox and Templar, Arizona (I’d never heard of the former, I’d come across the latter but not gotten into it). The other seven arguably have more in common with the underground comics I’m not fond of than with traditional cartoons or comic art, so I’m not sure any of them will be my thing (the art styles aren’t generally to my taste, and surrealistic stories and jokes aren’t for me). Still, it’s always good to see what’s out there.

The museum’s exhibits always feature copious notes, and this exhibit contained descriptions by the strip creators of how they got into webcomics, and how they produce their comics. The Dicebox exhibit contained a step-by-step illustration of how the creator produces a page, using both paper and digital techniques.

It’s been several years since I’d last visited the museum. I should wander by their web page more often and try to go once a year or so, because I always enjoy it. Plus, it’s an excuse to get up to the city, which us South Bay dwellers can be reluctant to do.

A Strange Week

This has been a strange week.

For one thing, I learned this week that one of my friends at work has decided to leave, another decided to get married – today (he told us yesterday and invited some of us to dinner to celebrate), and a third is expecting a child. Quite a bit of change for the first week of the new year!

In addition to that, I was home from work sick on Tuesday. I woke up with a queasy stomach and just couldn’t get going. Once I realized I didn’t feel up to driving, I decided to call it in. I wasn’t sure if I hadn’t recovered enough from my cold from last week to have been up playing Magic ’til 11 on Monday, or if it was just flaring up again. On further reflection, I think I might have gotten some low-grade food poisoning, or otherwise just ate something that didn’t agree with me and it just laid me low for a day. Wednesday, after a good night’s sleep, I felt much better.

But then at my friend’s bachelor dinner last night I ate too much, and this morning I still felt full, so I skipped breakfast. Bad idea; I was zoned out all morning, and even after lunch I was pretty sleepy for the afternoon until I got coffee, after which I felt much better. Hard to believe I used to never eat breakfast in the morning, and now I feel like I should never skip it. Which I probably shouldn’t.

On the one hand, I feel like this week deserves a do-over. On the other hand, illness aside, it hasn’t been a bad week. I even kicked a little ass at Magic on Monday!

This Week’s Haul

Due to the unfortunate timing of the Christmas holiday this year, there was only one comic published this week. My local store threw a sale this week, too, so it was actually quite busy when I went in Wednesday afternoon. Sounds like a win for them.

By the way, you can also read what their top-sellers were for 2009; no huge surprises, although Irredeemable vol 1 being their 10th-best-selling graphic novel was interesting. It’s well worth checking out, too.

  • Blackest Night #6 of 8, by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis, Oclair Albert & Joe Prado (DC)
Blackest Night #6 Has Blackest Night been a smash hit for DC comics? Commercially, there’s no question, it’s been a huge success, building on top of the growing readership of Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern run, and trying to use that to build interest in other DC titles. To put it cynically, that’s basically the point of comics “events”: Get people to pick up some books they wouldn’t otherwise read, and hope a few of them stick around to keep reading them. While I think they could have executed the crossover aspect better (I’ve griped that the free ring promotion was undercut by the issues promoted by the rings didn’t make much effort to explain to new readers what was going on or why we should care), overall DC certainly deserves credit for their marketing of the event.

But is the story any good?

To compare it to other recent events, it doesn’t have a high bar to cross. Of DC’s recent events, Identity Crisis was a collection of continuity navel-gazing mixed with a vile rewriting of some characters’ actions and motivations; Infinite Crisis had a plot that made no sense whatsoever and which introduced one of the least-welcome villains in recent years in Superboy Prime; and Final Crisis was no more comprehensible while additionally being pretentious and focusing on a lot of third- and fourth-string characters. Marvel’s events have been better-executed, although the stories haven’t been much good either; Civil War mucked up characters’ motivations in unbelievable ways, and Secret Invasion (Marvel’s equivalent of DC’s awful late-80s event Millennium) had an unbelievable plot.

By contrast, Blackest Night is fairly comprehensible, and rather than working with long-forgotten details of continuity, it grows out of Geoff Johns’ current storylines in Green Lantern, in which he’s introduced a full spectrum of magic-ring-wielding organizations, each tied to a different emotion. While perhaps a bit cute, Johns has established that he’s more interested in moving his story forward than in making everything line up perfectly with all the GL history from the past, and these days that seems almost novel.

As for the story itself, here’s how it’s developed so far:

  • Blackest Night #0: In this Free Comic Book Day giveaway, Green Lantern (the Hal Jordan version) and Flash (the Barry Allen version) catch up on recent developments in the DC universe, especially characters who have recently died, including Batman, whose grave they’re visiting during their reminiscence. After they leave, a minor GL villain Black Hand shows up to claim Batman’s skull (a good trick, since the last pages of Final Crisis showed that Wayne wasn’t actually dead, even though there was a body, but I suspect Johns is ignoring this detail) and state that by his hand the dead shall rise. Green Lantern #43 goes into detail about the Hand’s background.
  • Blackest Night #1: From the giant black lantern in space sector 666, black power rings emerge and fly across the universe, on the same day that the Earth remembers all his fallen heroes. Meanwhile, a “war of light” erupts among the various lantern corps. The black rings resurrect many of Earth’s dead heroes, and several of them kill and recruit Hawkman and Hawkgirl. In Green Lantern #44, Flash and GL fight the undead Martian Manhunter, learning that the zombie-like creatures cannot be killed.
  • Blackest Night #2: Undead Aquaman kills Aqualad, and the black ring takes over The Spectre. The black rings are unable to recruit Dove, however. In Green Lantern #45, the black lanterns start attacking other ring wielders.
  • Blackest Night #3: The black lantern Justice League fight Flash, GL and the Atom, the tribe of indigo lanterns show up to save them, revealing that a Green Lantern’s ring combined with one of the other colors can sever the black rings’ connections to their hosts. GL is spirited away by the indigo tribe, and the black rings take over Firestorm and claim the villains whose corpses are (oddly) buried below the Justice League’s headquarters.
  • Blackest Night #4: The world’s heroes fight a losing battle against the black lanterns as the black power levels reach 100%. The main black lantern is transported to Earth, and we learn that the entity behind the rings is a minor villain named Nekron. Over in Green Lantern, GL and the indigo lanterns recruit different colored lanterns to fight the black lanterns.
  • Blackest Night #5: The Justice League shows up to help Flash, Atom and Mera fight the black lanterns, and GL’s rainbow corps arrives to fight Nekron, but they don’t have the power to shut down Nekron’s battery. The black rings execute and recruit all the heroes who have died and been resurrected, such as Superman and Wonder Woman.
  • Blackest Night #6: In the latest issue, Flash’s quick thinking saves him and GL from the same fate as the other resurrected heroes. One of the Guardians of the Universe, Ganthet, uses his power to cause the various colored rings to generate new rings and recruit various candidates from Earth, to boost their power against Nekron.

There are still 2 issues to go – plus whatever Johns does over in Green Lantern – and the story feels fairly convoluted. It’s essentially been a running battle between the living and the dead, with the living having little hope of winning unless the lanterns can pull together and somehow destroy Nekron’s battery. The story seems to have taken place over only a couple of days (certainly no one’s caught any sleep or even had a shower during the series), which makes it rather brief for a whole war. But that’s comic books for you.

The motivations in the story are reasonably sensical for superhero comics: Nekron is an avatar of death who wants to eradicate all life to return the universe to a peaceful state (oddly, this detail is explained in an issue of Adventure Comics rather than in the main series). Why he needs to work through Black Hand to do this is not explained, though. The main emotional tension in the story is in the seven different ring-wielders trying to work together, especially since the red and orange lanterns aren’t exactly joiners. But it’s not exactly deep stuff.

And that’s really the series’ flaw: Even though it’s not the usual cynical crossover series, it’s basically just a big slugfest, with desperate situations and some witty dialogue thrown in. Johns has certainly done much better character-oriented drama in Green Lantern and I wonder if Blackest Night would have worked better had it been constrained to just the GL titles rather than roping in every character in the DC universe. The cast of characters has gotten so large that it’s difficult to care much about anyone, because there’s not much room for proper development. (Obviously, this ended up being the case in the grand-daddy of all crossover series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, but back then we didn’t really know what the drawback of such sprawling stories would be. Marv Wolfman, the writer of that crisis, took some interesting approaches to make the story more personal despite its huge scale, too, and Johns only occasionally personalizes things in Blackest Night.)

Could Blackest Night be better? Certainly, although it would probably be a fairly different story. Is it better than other recent DC events? That’s also true. Event comics always have a tendency to go for the lowest common denominator (although Marvel’s tried to avoid that at the cost of making uncomfortable and sometimes implausible changes to their characters and settings), so seeing one rise above that low level is interesting enough. Still, unless Johns has a big surprise up his sleeve, Blackest Night looks like it’s going to end up as just one more sprawling fight, a very nicely drawn one by Ivan Reis and his cast of inkers, but still, not a truly memorable series.

Check back in two months and we’ll see how things turned out.