CSotD: You and your pussycat nose
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Start with a fun one, from Piranha Club, where Bud Grace has been expounding on the pleasures of cruise ship vacations. For my part, you don't have to exaggerate to make me not want to take one of these trips, though I'd be willing to book passage on a freighter, which is a thing you can do.
Yes, Hell is other people. And karaoke and costume parties and fun.
Especially fun. I hate fun.
Today's episode brought to mind a landlocked version, which happened a few months after my divorce. I was helping tend a convention booth for a real estate magazine I wrote for, and Mark, our studly young Sam Malone-ish ad salesman, was flirting with a boothful of babes down the aisle during the breakout sessions when the vendors were left on their own.
I realize "boothful of babes" is not the most enlightened expression, but the vendor was an apartment complex that catered to extended stays by relocated executives waiting to buy a house, and so had rounded up a half dozen really, really cute girls to attract Realtors to the booth.
Apparently not aware that the majority of Realtors are women.
There was a shindig one night with dinner, music, booze, etc., and Mark decided (A) that I should break out of my post-marital shell and (B) we should share a table with the young women from that booth.
It was Hawaiian themed, for reasons that eluded me even then, so they had a "hula contest" in which one of our new friends competed.
As did a 78-year-old Realtor.
You can guess who looked more like a real hula girl.
And you can also probably guess who won the contest, given that it was decided by audience applause.
The payoff being that the tall and tan and young and lovely contestant from our table was pissed.
Not "disappointed." P-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ssed.
Actively furious.
Claiming she'd been cheated.
It was all anyone could do to get her to sit down and shut up. We at least got her to sit down.
That was the highlight, not some anomaly in an otherwise pleasant encounter. I spent the evening remembering how much I hated the fun of being single.
And it was only five hours. I cannot imagine 10 days of that much fun, especially that far from shore.
'Cause I'm not that good a swimmer and I'm pretty sure I'd try.
(Hey, I said a freighter would be okay.)
Mercy killing
Tom Spurgeon points to Bob Temuka's ruminations on the end of the Fantastic Four comics.
I remember FF's early days, though not the first issue, which, according to Wikipedia, came out in November, 1961. I did comics at summer camp, so I'd have been 12 that next season, a good age to begin the transition from DC into a more complex universe.
But Spidey launched that summer, and Hulk had come along in the spring, so that, in the summer of 1962, there were already more dynamic storylines than FF, and while it was still better than tired old Superman and Batman, even in those pre-feminist days, I wondered what the hell Sue Storm really added to the team.
She could make things be in a bubble, but she almost invariably shifted from Superhero to Damsel in Distress and even a 12-year-old could do the cost/benefit calculation on leaving her at home.
Temuka writes:
After running non-stop for years, the entire Fantastic Four concept is looking a bit tired. Attempts to refresh the idea for a whole new millennium have been greeted with general apathy, right up to the point of the most recent movie, which managed to make adventurous exploration of an alien dimension look gritty and boring.
No, Bob, it was born tired. They launched their superhero titles with a safe, only marginally original idea.
I'm surprised it lasted this long. Though, I suppose in a world where people can accept Jessica Alba as a blue-eyed blonde, it's hard to find anything they won't.
Speaking of things I'm not sure I buy
Meanwhile, over at Comics Worth Reading, Johanna Draper Carlson reports that Margaret Atwood has penned a three-book graphic novel series about a superhero called "Angel Catbird," whom Atwood explains thusly: "Due to some spilled genetic Super-Splicer, our hero got tangled up with both a cat and an owl; hence his fur and feathers, and his identity problems.”
The forces of "Yay!" and of "Whaaaa?" are considerably at odds here, since, first of all, Margaret Atwood is such a beloved Canadian that expressing negativity towards her is like dumping on Captain Kangaroo, if Captain Kangaroo wrote novels that some feminists adored and others despised and appeared on talk shows whenever they needed a beloved, articulate person to talk about stuff.
Very much like that.
Also, it makes me wonder if this is going to be like children's books, where everyone with enough celebrity status to get invited to the right cocktail parties will be handed a publishing contract.
Or it could be brilliant. She's a very bright, personable, literate person and some of those celeb-written kids books don't entirely suck.
Here's more: The Dark Horse press release says, "The project is being published in tandem with Keep Cats Safe and Save Bird Lives, an initiative led by Nature Canada, the oldest conservation charity in the country."
Which you may take as an endorsement or a warning, depending on how you feel about such things.
Not that I'm against keeping cats safe and protecting birds, mind you.
There's a movement to put orange collars on indoor cats so that people who see them out and about will know they are escapees, though I'm not sure what happens next, since, if the cat is Houdini enough to get out in the first place, I'm betting the well-intentioned attempt to recapture it will be more likely to result in a YouTube sensation than a recovered feline.
However, there is this development in the effort to spare our songbirds from an invasive species: The Bird-Be-Safe collar, which, as explained there, provides a flash to startle birds in time for them to escape.
Assuming any alley-cat wannabe would leave the house with that around his neck in the first place.
Now here's your moment of utterly bizarre lyrics
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