Hello Chieftain!

I almost forgot, today is July 31, which we all know to be the birthday of both Joanne Katherine Rowling, and her creation, Harry Potter. JKR turns the big 40 today (and proves that beautiful is beautiful at any age), while, according to scientorfic research, reaches a quarter-century.

Once again, not everyone is all sunshiny about Potter, which is a shame, because I do like Terry Pratchett.

So who's ready to join me in comments to talk about the book? I think Dumbledore..

Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen

Man, you thought DCA had a bad rep before...

Incidentally, did I mention how I spent my birthday? Shelswick's dad has decided to use his week off to dig up and resod the backyard. So far we've had the turf cutter literally fall apart on us, yesterday, ON MY BIRTHDAY, we spent four hours busting up one small corner with the rototiller, digging the dirt up with shovels and running it one wheelbarrow load at a time into a bin in the driveway.

Though we're taking today off, since tomorrow we'll be getting a backhoe to speed up the digging. You best believe I'll be taking a turn on that mofo. Big boys play with Tonka trucks, oh yes.


Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen

And now it all becomes clear.

Birthday today. 35. Hate everything.

Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen

Feel free to post your own!

"This is from Devo, whatever that is."
Woman who was old enough to know better, at the costume display at EMP

"This nigga be beefin' me."
Gang member relating an anecdote to his homies at Pacific Place

"You guys are like, my super best friends, but she's like one level below that."
Airhead to her airhead friends at Urban Outfitter

"Yeah, I would do a Willy Wonka costume to wear to the con, but then everybody would be like, "that's not anime," and there'd be ten people with the same costume, but none of them would look as good as mine, because I pay such close attention to detail."
The annoying cunt sitting behind us at Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, the one Mowrer rightly told to shut up

Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen

Man, I had a lot of Red Dwarf t-shirts, didn't I? I'm considering put these up on eBay.

Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen

This may have been the first Red Dwarf t-shirt made, and I may have been the first person in Tacoma to have one; there was a store called Shipman's Star Props, owned by two women who went to England a couple of times a year for stuff to bring back and sell. This was the first one they got, and I snapped it up. I was the envy of everyone at Rocky Horror, and everywhere I went, people unfamiliar with Red Dwarf would ask "what's a red dwarf smag head?" 

Guys, leave the catchphrases to Grant and Naylor, okay? 

Another rush job, but well-printed, at least. 

You know, with some of these shirts they just didn't seem to be trying very hard. My guess was that when SMAKIBBFB became a catchphrase they rushed this one out, while they were still working on the Ace one. 

I just want to say, I think the Inquisitor's mask was one of the coolest things on the show. 

 

This is, of course, the cover of the second novel. 

 

Once when I wore this, a kid insisted that it was Denis Leary. 

Someone spent a lot of time writing the copy for the back of this shirt. The one at the very bottom surprised me. 

A couple of years ago, it occurred to me that I had amassed a vast collection of T-shirts that I no longer wore, either because they got too worn or I got too fat, but that I didn't want to get rid of, usually for sentimental reasons. Those T-shirts (okay, and a few sweatshirts) have lived in storage, and recently when I was adding to the collection, I decided to document them for easy reference. Here, then, is a beefy-T biography of my status and changing interests over the years, beginning with the high school days.

Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen

We are awesome! We are great! We're the class of 88! 

There I am. Look up and to the left of my name for another one you'll recognize, though hopefully less fondly. 

The back of our gradjamacation t-shirt. That says "88" at the top, not "00" 

Not to be confused with the Drama 3 class, Maskeraders was the somewhat confused name we gave to the Drama Club. 

We did the Crucible my senior year, and it won an award at the state high school drama festival. I had a bit where someone asked me to move (purely stage business) and every night I would ad-lib a different response as I moved. 

Acting, ladies and gentlemen, acting. Drama 3 was the "advanced" drama class, the ones who actually got to go and do stuff around the school. 

From different countries, eras and systems. Includes one that, I'm not ashamed to admit, I used to know by heart and do in voc school to piss off this pretentious ho. Have YOU played Atari today, bitch?

(Since saturday mornings bring out my inner 11-year-old...)

Continuing with the Batman theme, even if you haven't seen recent episodes of Justice League Unlimited, I highly recommend that you watch for the season finale, "Epilogue." It's a standalone story that references both of the earlier Batman series in a very surprising way. No spoilers, but it's very surprising, in that way that makes you wang yourself on the head for not spotting it sooner.

The episode aired two weeks ago in Canada (the one thing I would give Canadian TV over American: we get JLU first, for some reason), which means you still have time to catch it on Cartoon Network. Unfortunately, I can't give you a time or date, since TV.com, the vastly inferior successor to TVtome, only shows a placeholder airdate of 1/1/2006. At least I HOPE it's a placeholder. Oh, if only there was some place on the teh inturwebs where you could find it...

And why the hell HAVEN'T you been watching JLU recently?
Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen

I was commenting on Batman Begins over on Jack's Blog, and something occurred to me, something that's come up more than once over the years that warrants clarification: the word "believable" vs. the word "realistic."

Often, when I use the former, it gets taken to mean the latter; I'll say that, oh, let's say Batman Returns, was believable, and then I get raked for implying that it could happen in real life.

Not even close to what I mean: yes, "realistic" relates to what could or would happen in real life. When we're talking about superheroes, the word can't even begin to apply. The only thing I've seen close to a realistic superhero story was an issue of The Jam, by Bernie Mireault, about Gordon Kirby, a working class married guy who sneaks out of the apartment at night to patrol Montreal in a modified Sears tracksuit. Once in a while he might break up a fight, but mostly he just listens to music on rooftops while eating sandwiches. In the issue in question, protagonist Gordon Kirby learns the location of a bag of money stashed after a bank heist he just happened to witness, and must decide whether to grab it and keep it.

Still not realistic, in that there's nobody who actually puts on a mask and fights crime in the big city (though wouldn't that make the world a more interesting place?), but apart from that one flight of fancy, perfectly believable.

A work is believable when you can see that it's set down a certain set of rules for itself, and follows those rules. Batman, for all his high-tech bat toys, is still just a guy, and while the movie shows him to be a well-trained and agile guy, he doesn't suddenly start flying, or outrunning bullets.

(Which, on a side note, is something I always appreciated on Batman: The Animated Series; Bats would avoid getting shot by jumping around faster than the bad guys could aim, rather than standing stoically as the hail of bullets miraculously missed him)

Couple that with the fact that Gotham City looks real, like a long-established city gone to seed, rather than Joel Schumacher's fantasyland of neon sewer tunnels. That part was neither realistic nor believable.

Okay, got that off my chest. As you were.

Look, seriously, go, before I start in about people who say "crispy."


Copyright 2004 Rich Bowen