Frickin’ finally, Joss Whedon’s follow-up story to the Brian K. Vaughan-created Runaways run has finally hit the shelves in trade paperback… wait, what? TPB? All my previous Runaways volumes are in digest format. Dammit Marvel you make me wait nearly 2 years and now it doesn’t even get to sit properly on the shelf with the other books in the series. Hulking out now. No, wait, that’s just a bulging chip-filled belly. Need to loose some fanboy rampage weight.
Anywho, Whedon and artist Michael Ryan don’t really miss a beat from Vaughan’s run, and I think even the wife would argue that the Buffy creator lets go of his usual Whedon-istic patois in favour of keeping things more in character. It’s a delightful ride, six chapters long that takes the kids to New York where they encounter the Kingpin, the Punisher and get sent back in time 100 years, where we get to meet a whole host of turn-of-the-century superheroes, or “wonders” as they so gleefully called them back then.
That Terry Moore’s run which follows hasn’t been well received is a real downer as this is one of comics’ sparkling jewels, a really different kind of superhero fable… one where a ten-year-old girl with super strength slugs that dickhead Punisher in the gut. My kind of book.
With last year’s “Buy Nothing Year” I managed to scale back my desire to buy DVDs, to the point where I didn’t actually buy myself any DVDs. What I realized was that just because I enjoyed a movie in the theatre doesn’t mean I’d repeatedly enjoy it at home. What would happen is on new release Tuesday I’d go to the store, I’d see the new DVDs for films I did like in theatre and I’d want them, for a long long time, until I acquired them in fact… and then they’d sit on the shelf. So now I know that I really have to want to watch a film again before I’d be willing to buy it (and not just that, but it’d have to be a film I know I could watch repeatedly…)
This year, I encountered six films that met that criteria:
1) Iron Man; 2) Forgetting Sarah Marshall; 3) Wall-E 4) The Dark Knight; 5) Tropic Thunder; 6) Synechdoche, New York.
This… is number 5. See. Says so right there.
Of the six, four of them have joined the Kent household DVD collection, (the first two Aden bought for herself for her birthday, Wall-E and Tropic Thunder were birthday presents, Synecdoche hasn’t come out on DVD yet, and I can’t bring myself to watch Dark Knight on the small screen yet…word is they’re re-releasing it for Oscar season).
Anyway, Tropic Thunder. Love it. It’s not just goddamn funny, but exciting, action-packed and it elicited a respectable performance out of Tom Cruise. From the fake out trailers that open it to Cruise’s gansta dance over the end credits, this movie is damn near flawless from start to finish. It’s one of few films that’s instantly worth of its plentiful special features… which I’ll talk about at a later date because I needed to watch the movie first… I needed to.
The Fox and Firkin is the pub of choice downtown where the wife and I work, generally attended with Aden’s coworkers (past and current). Today, after spending time with the lawyer, we visited the Fox alone, for the first time, where Aden enjoyed her traditional beef dip while I embarked on the daily special adventure of the Lumberjack Sandwich, which was presented as “chicken, bacon and cheese”, and turned out to be chicken, bacon and cheese, with pickle, onion, lettuce and tomato on a hamburger bun. No frills, but damn tasty.
When i eat potato chips it’s almost compulsive that i have to look for my next chip. Usually i look for a folded chip or a bubble chip and will sort of rummage through the bag or shake the bowl to find them. I get this from my mother.
Not quite sure i got the hang of it yet, but being able to send a text
message or email means i can blog mobil-ly…even though using my
phone’s non-keyboard is very slow, annoying, and hard on the thumbs.
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Sent from my mobile device