"Your detective skills are impeccable, Samson. You have succeeded in exposing my sinister plan to lock myself in a dungeon, chained to an albino."

It took 8 weeks, but I finally managed to go a perfect 3-0 for the week's Fantasy Football matchups, thanks to me playing Drew Brees in the Cincy league and Jay choosing not to play Brees in the Dayton league (my rosters are so convoluted that I'm always rooting for at least a few players that I'm also playing against - it's an eternal struggle).

I'm in a sorta good mood because of the Fantasy sweep, and because I managed to get all of the GSW papers edited by the start of class this morning (only 35 group analysis papers left!).

Plus, the Something Awful Comedy Goldmine for today was pure genius - the goons set up a flash-based contest to see who was the best at flirting. Here are some of the responses to random questions:

Q: What would you make me for breakfast?
A: Pregnant.

Q: How did you get over your last broken heart?
A: I ate her, stealing her power for my own.

Q: What will you be wearing on our first date?
A: The f***ing Darkman costume. You know, from Darkman.

Q: Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?
A: Because I'm a 12th level Druid and can cast summon nature's
ally at will.

Nerds - is there anything they can't do?

Teaching an Old Sidekick New Tricks

[The following is my abstract for the 2008 PCA/ACA conference]



In 2007, Ed Brubaker and artist Steve Epting made national news headlines when the character Captain America was assassinated within the pages of the critically and popularly successful Captain America series. The death of Marvel Comics’s flagship character quickly became a topic of debate between television news pundits and newspaper columnists, with cynicism over the trend of ‘killing’ characters as a marketing gimmick mixing with critical questions about what Cap’s death meant to American culture.

Overshadowed by the media attention was Brubaker and Epting’s series itself, which had skillfully managed to revitalize the title character in the 24 issues before Captain America was shot. As the fifth ‘re-launch’ of the ongoing series since the character’s creation in 1941,Brubaker and Epting’s Captain America struggled to find new, innovative ways to show a superhero with over a half-century of history and continuity.

Perhaps the most noteworthy change to the familiar Captain America narrative prior to the character’s death came when Brubaker and Epting reintroduced the character of James “Bucky” Barnes into the series. Bucky, who was originally Cap’s kid sidekick during the World War II Timely Comics Captain America Comics series, was most familiar to Marvel Comics readers as a corpse – the Marvel Captain America, after being ‘reborn’ in the 1960s, was continually plagued by guilt over the death of his former sidekick. Whereas most comics characters suffer ‘temporary deaths,’ and are quickly revived after news of their death has sufficiently boosted sales, Bucky Barnes was one of the few characters who ‘stayed dead.’


Yet, in bringing Bucky back to life, Brubaker and Epting also significantly changed the familiar Captain America narrative by literally re-writing the history of James “Bucky” Barnes. Flashbacks within Captain America reveal that Bucky Barnes was not just a kid sidekick, but a highly trained covert agent and government assassin who had been placed with the superhero by the U.S. government as a means of infiltration; the bright red, white, and blue colors of Captain America’s costuming and shield served as a distraction for the true weapon: Bucky Barnes.

This ‘rebirth’ of Bucky Barnes forces us to reconsider not only our conception of the sidekick in the comic book superhero narrative, but also the basic nature of the superhero. How does Brubaker and Epting’s Captain America series rewrite the history of other familiar heroes? With such a significant change to the character’s history, can we even consider this new Bucky to be a part of the pre-existing Captain America narrative continuity? How does this redefinition of the roles of Cap and Bucky affect America’s understanding of our own military?

Roll Call

Screw Joe Addai for delivering the Hemlock of No-End-Zone-osity! (although I think that's Kevin Faulk in the picture)

In an attempt to cheer myself up, I was desperately hoping for a response from my dedicated audience. Stealing a page from my nerd-crush Geoff Klock's playbook, I'm using this post as a request - let me know you're reading this and tell me how awesome I am.

"Why is it every time I need to get somewhere, we get waylaid by jackassery?"

My two-hour commute took me 3+ this morning, as I got stuck on the highway in downtown Dayton, where I-75 was shut down because of a fuel spill 2 hours earlier. I'm no engineer, but you're telling me that over the course of 120 minutes, you can't at least open up one lane of a three-lane interstate highway? Or at least get some warning signs and detours set up? I know it's 3:00 AM, but shouldn't that actually make it easier to clean up, since there's less traffic?

Once I got out of Dayton, after passing 2 different fiery car crashes in the opposite lane and almost getting lost in Harrison Township, the piss-poor weather kept me at a fairly low speed the rest of the way.

On the plus side...hmmm...not coming up with anything at the moment. But here's a bit of dialogue from Venture Brothers that makes me believe in the worth of human creativity:

Henchman 21 [attacking Dr. Killenger]: Semper fidelis tyrannosaurus!
Dr. Killenger [speaking in Henry Kissenger accent]: You mean 'Sic semper tyrannus.'
Henchman 21: What did I say?
Dr. Killesnger: You said, 'Always faithful terrible lizard.'
Henchman 21: Really? Sweet!

Oh, the humanity

According to Wikipedia, a parking lot is “a dedicated area that has been provided with a durable or semi-durable surface.”

This was the opening sentence of one of my student's drafts. I've tried very hard to not post their work before (for a variety of ethical and legal reasons), but I just can't represent how miserable I'm feeling right now without providing a frame of reference.

C'est moi, tout les temps...

(Consider this a 'filler' post until I have the chance to actually deliver on my promises from last week of awesomeness-thanks to The Wife, I really didn't get much accomplished this weekend, other than learning how to throw the long ball to Tab Perry)

"Grab a shovel. I'm one skull short of a Mouseketeer reunion."

[I've got a fancier post scheduled for tomorrow, but since The Wife is out-posting me so far this week, here's some comic-book-nerd-related fluff...]



As I am wont to do every few weeks, I spent my Wednesday afternoon reading comics. Today, I read DC's Identity Crisis limited series, the pseudo-event that led to the most recent Massive Universe-wide Crossover Events (tm). The general plot is about a new threat to heroes that targets not just them, but their families and friends - a villain who knows their Identities (remember, in the ever-realistic world of comics, nobody can see through the clever disguise of Clark Kent's eyeglasses).


On one hand, I enjoyed the way that the series author, Brad Metzler, explicitly wrestled with continuity and history of the DC universe. This is what most of my current research is about - how current writers manage to write unique and innovative stories about characters that have existed in series form for decades (some characters, like Superman, have been in more-or-less continuous print since 1939).

In this series, there was a concerted focus on characters and stories from the 1970s and 1980s, as Metzler attempted to explain the 'familar' plots and behaviors in a clearly modern context, filling in the gaps between past issues, taking great pains to show what happens to the superheroes and supervillains after the spectacular fighting is finished.


What bothers me about Identity Crisis is, for lack of a better word, its intensity. Metzler's not just re-writing the old stories, he's making them a lot less fun - not only is there an average of one brutal murder per issue (there's 6 issues), but the plot pivots on the 1970s Justice League (the classic "League of Heroes," just before J.M. DeMatties transformed the league into a sitcom-style grouping of extremely quirky personalities) essentially lobotomizing one villain and erasing the memories of several others (as well as Batman, who was the sole dissenting voice in the whole magic-brain-messing stuff). The 'lobotomy' is how Metzler explains the chronic inefficiency and foolishness of most of the great supervillains. What's worse is the reason for the lobotomizing: the graphic rape of a League member's wife.


Other comics authors have famously used graphic violence in the process of criticizing mainstream comics - Alan Moore has several sequences involving rape, assaults, and violent beatings in most books, starting with Watchmen, and Grant Morrison's run on The Authority had a nausea-inducing scene where the Batman-analogue sodomizes a defeated villain [let's see how many Google hits that phrasing gets me]. In these other cases, violence takes place outside of dominant continuity - both Moore and Morrison are clearly using archetypes of well-known characters to 'safely' develop criticisms.


What makes Identity Crisis different is that now the violence has been established as part of dominant superhero continuity - worse, narrative history has been rewritten (literally), so that violence has always been part of the superhero story.


[If you've read this far, thanks - I'm on a rant-friendly mood on this topic, as I'm developing a similar reading of Ed Brubaker's Captain America series for next March's PCA conference.]

"With win-win-win, we all win. Me too."

So after posting yesterday I was tasked with familiarizing myself with the awesomest company ever, Applied Minds, Inc. This company is amazing (click the picture below to link to an article about them). Their business is innovation. Seriously. Many companies say their business is innovation, but this company really is in the business of innovation. It actually makes me want to be an engineer or scientist of some sort because it just seems like the coolest place to work ever.

But to my point, I'm reading this article about AMI and in it they discuss one of their inventions, Babble. It is the solution to my loud phone-talker problem.

“Here was the paradox: sometimes the clatter of voices is soothing or energizing but other times it's grating. The difference, Hillis concluded, was when you could figure out what's being said. ‘It's the meaning that's distracting and obnoxious,’ he says. ‘Not the sound’…The result of this is Babble, a shiny black box the size of a paperback that plugs into the phone and has two speakers you put on top of the cubicle. As promised, when the speakers play a scrambled version of your voice, your real conversation can't be understood by someone standing even four feet away.”

So there you go! For only $395 I can stop beating my head against my desk every time her phone rings!

Don't mess with a man who owns a WayBack machine, I can make it so you were never born...

Today's glimmer of hope: learning that the jar of loose change I've been saving since Senior year at UD was worth $75!

Today's soul-crushing despair: as always, my composition students...

"Is that for me, or for my gown?"

So I work down the hall from the worlds loudest phone-talker. I'm not exaggerating here. She is really, really LOUD! Her office is about 20 feet down the hall from me and I feel like she's sitting in my office when she's on the phone. I often close my door to dampen the noise, but her voice still carries down 20 feet of hallway and through my heavy wooden door. To make matters worse, she is the membership director for the non-profit trade organization that resides down the hall from my office. Meaning, she is like the salesman of their organization. Meaning, she is on the phone A LOT! It's really too bad that loud phone-talking is not a talent recognized by the pageant circuit or she would be a shoe-in for a crown.

On another topic, Thursday is husband's birthday. Anyone who has been around him for five minutes in the last week knows that Thursday is his birthday and knows exactly what he wants for his birthday present, a Wii. The boy has become positively obssessed with the Wii. There is not a conversation that is started or ended without a comment about the Wii. It is driving him crazy knowing that I already bought his birthday gift, but not knowing if it is a Wii or some other unacceptable gift. Lucky for him (and me) the wait will be over in 48 hours. Then he can decide if I'm the best wife ever or if he will be divorcing me over a gaming system.

"And, because we've got soccer highlights, the sheer pointlessness of a zero-zero tie..."

When I went to sleep last night, I was all sorts of excited. The Bengals were losing 34-13 with only 3 minutes, which sucks, but Randy Moss had caught 2 TDs for 1oo yds and change, which topped Houshmanzadeh's 1 TD and 82 yds - giving me the astonishing come-from-behind (zing!) win over Dr. Paul.

I wake up and check the box score, and find that apparently Carson Palmer is a douche, and decided to pass to TJ again, giving him just enough yards to break 100 and end up with a tie. Damn.