I'm famous.

So my top 5 list of Movies About Money made it on Cinecast Episode #97, which means I'm done. I'll never have to work another day in my life. And all I had to do was make a list of five semi-related movies.

Listen here.

In all honesty, the Cinecast guys are pretty darn good film reviewers, if for no other reason than that they admit if they're underexposed to a genre, and are willing to give anything a shot. They're also big enough men to admit when they're wrong.

Eat it Ebert. Eat it right up.

Why am I so pissed off?

Because I can't get a house in Sacramento. Ever.

Sure, there are houses in the "lower-class" neighborhoods. My buddy got one a year ago. He's had people jump his fence. He's had people try to steal his car (in broad daylight, in the gated driveway). He's had a drunk driver smash through his fence. This is within a six month period.

Average home price for Sacramento is $480,000. - MLS statistics

Average salary for Sacramento is $38,000. - IRS statistics

So the Price to Income ratio for a normal home is 12.6.

Conventional wisdom for the last 30 years has recommended a Price to Income ratio between 3 and 4.

My coworker moved from Sacramento to Houston. He sold his house and got a job there. He fixes things, like cars and conveyors. He's not going house-hunting. He's going mansion-hunting.

What am I doing here again?

I'm moving to Kansas or Alaska. Screw California.

Because I Have A Two-Year-Old Daughter...

I am guaranteed the following inalienable rights:

FATHER OF TWO-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER BILL OF RIGHTS

1. The right to use the phrase "Oh, so cute!" without anyone questioning my masculinity.

2. The right to carry around a pink Cinderella handbag with no resulting raised eyebrows.

3. The right to wear ribbons, bows, barrettes, etc. in my hair at any hour of the day. Behind closed doors, of course.

4. The right to memorize every song from "The Little Mermaid" by heart, and sing them under my breath when I'm not paying attention to what I'm doing.

5. The right to play My Little Ponies anytime, anywhere.

6. The right to dance like a ballerina, given appropriate music.

I will defend these rights to death, by use of firearms, if necessary.

Don't Tread On Me.

Okay, okay, everybody calm down.

Let's just pretend this weekend didn't happen. I slept a lot and fixed broken things. And gave my son a bath. Got a haircut. Purchased new speakers and headphones, both of which died on me.

Does my list of accomplishments look huge? Nope. I'll try to get some comic reviews up, as I did in fact hit the store on Friday.

Oh, one other accomplishment. I have decided that I am going to really like the Decemberists from here on out. And as an offering of True Friendship, I offer you the lyrics of "The Bagman's Gambit," the love song of a jilted traitor which I find sublime.

The Bagman's Gambit - Words and Music by The Decemberists

On the lam from the law, on the steps of the capitol,
you shot a plain-clothes cop on the ten o'clock.
And I saw, momentarily, they flashed a photograph.
It couldn't be you.

You'd been abused so horribly,
but you were there in some anonymous room.

And I recall that fall--I was working for the government--
and in a bathroom stall off the national mall
how we kissed so sweetly! How could I refuse a favor or two?
And for a tryst in the greenery, I gave you documents and microfilm too.

From my ten-floor tenement, where once our bodies lay,
how I long to hear you say:
"No they'll never catch me now.
No, they'll never catch me, no
they cannot catch me now.
We will escape somehow. Somehow."

It was late one night, I was awoken by the telephone.
I heard a strangled cry on the end of the line.
Purloined in Petrograd, they were suspicious of where your loyalties lay.
So I paid off a bureaucrat
to convince your captors there to secret you away.

And at the gate of the embassy
our hands met through the bars
as your whisper stilled my heart:
"No they'll never catch me now.
No, they'll never catch me, no
they cannot catch me now.
We will escape somehow. Somehow."

And I dreamt one night you were there in court.
Head held high in uniform.

It was ten years on
when you resurfaced in a motor car.
And with a wave of an arm, you were there and gone.

Neat.

Now that the Roswell secret is out, can I have my Max Headroom DVD boxed set?

PROBLEM SOLVED, SUCKA.

So, yeah. I haven't posted in a bit. Maybe it has to do with the fact that

I DON'T F#$%ING SLEEP ANYMORE.

But it's okay, because my problem is now solved.

Last night I ingested a bottle of this:

I think I'm ready to have more kids now. Four or five. Or twelve.

Don't matter now, because I've got my beloved Liquid Kryptonite. My breath is minty fresh. My driving skills are fabled, I'm switching careers to Heavy Machinery Operator. And I sleep 12-18 hours a night. When I'm sleeping with my "Happy Juice," as I like to call it, you can detonate a live hand grenade on my chest, and not only will I not wake up, but my bed, PJs, and body will remain completely unharmed and unsinged.

I don't know how they got the word Awesome into a bottle, but they did it.

I'm going to go save the world now. Right the hell now.

But, but... I don't want to play games anymore!

Just when I think I'm out, they drag me back in!

Seriously, this is trouble. In case you don't know, I was a Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory fiend, for longer than I care to admit. And when I played a Field Officer, for either Axis or Allied forces, I was a Machine Of Death. My Engineering 5k!11z were fabled. My Medical abilities were precognitive, with health packs arriving at my teammates' bodies split-seconds before the MG42 rounds did. My Heavy Weapons caused immeasureable amounts of suffering.

And if I was a Covert Ops...

Well, basically I just died a lot. Other than that, I was pretty darn good.

ET, like Natural Selection, hit that sweet spot between FPS and RTS, only with a lot more polish. We now have ET set in the Quake universe, sixty years in the future. Multiplayer only. Squad-based, objective-based, shootyness. With character advancement. In the future. With vehicles, like this...

In the future.

Please, PLEASE let this game suck...

I really, really don't want to play anymore. I'm supposed to be very busy.

Conner is Home

We finally got to bring our son home Wednesday. What a relief.

He sleeps and eats. He only cries when we change his diaper.

His big sister thinks he's cute, so far, and likes to stroke his hand. We'll see how long that lasts.

Very, very relieved. No more driving to the hospital in the middle of the night.

Consume: Nextwave #3

Crooked cops! Distorted cyborg cats that burrow into your chest! Car-Eating robot-guys! Exploding stuff!

So, I added Nextwave to the pull list. Because I was an adolescent boy, in years past. Is it funny? Oh, yes, oh, yes. The plot (plot?) is moderately amusing, but it's the dialogue/one-liners which are hilarious. More Ellis being witty and non-topical.

I'm a little sad though, because this is a humor-action book. And sadly, since it's a humor-action book, I must compare it to the humor-action book yardstick: SCUD: The Disposable Assassin. Nextwave made me chuckle. Scud made me laugh until I passed out, only to wake up with a nosebleed and ringing in my ears, wondering what happened. I know, comparing books is so unfair. But this is just a freaking blog.

It's all so very sad. I miss me some Scud.


I guess I'm not in love with Stuart Immonen like the rest of the world, but maybe that's just because I don't recall reading anything else he's drawn. But Dave McCaig's coloring is bright and shiny. The panel with the Cat-Aberration just seized my eye and ran off with it, optic nerve dangling. It just looked cool.

Is this book going to save comics? No, hell no. The last thing we need is another superhero book. But we can at least wring some funny out of the genre while we beat it to death.

It made it to the pull-pile. What do you want from me?

So this is what happens when I leave the country...

Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD

Two questions:

1. How did this happen?

2. How could you let it?

1998. I'm dying in the blazing Mexican sun, and what's going on back home? This Monstrosity. Why am I only finding out about this now? And why were the Marvel offices not immediately bulldozed to the ground?

At least now I know not to ever, ever watch it. Thank heaven I'm not curious in the least.

Consume: The Keep #1

This cover kept jumping out at me, but I never got around to picking it up until now. There's a few of these issues looking lonely on the rack.

So this Saturday, I was moping around the comics store, lamenting my absence from the festivities down at APE. New baby = No Cons for Daddy for a while. Which is cool. Cool about the baby part, not cool about the no cons part.

So I was in a different mood than usual, and grabbed this.

Evidently F. Paul Wilson has written a couple of things. Hopefully I won't come across as a complete troglodyte when I say I haven't read any of them.

The Keep is the first book of his Repairman Jack: Adversary series, written in 1981. In it, a platoon of Nazi commandos holes up in a semi-deserted castle. And get eaten... by... something.

I wasn't aware of these facts, or else I wouldn't have been mildly miffed that this book looked like a Hellboy ripoff. I'm glad I've corrected my error rather than have suffered the embarrassment of someone doing the correction for me. Boy, would that have looked stupid.

Back to our comic.

I liked it! Nazis get eaten and killed and stuff. And like the Sphinx in Mystery Men it's all "very mysterious." The dialogue is properly sparse and militaristic. The pacing is just right, not too fast or too slow for a horror title. Just enough creepy distance between shocking panels to keep things flowing smoothly.

On the topic of panel layout, I'm really impressed. Most pages were blocked out in a fairly complicated fashion, shying away from the standard 6 panel or 9 panel grid motifs. Each page is laid out differently, with no space wasted. It's not a Jock issue of Losers, but it works.

The art is moody and well inked. There's definitely a Mike Mignola influence, but it's okay. It's three color (black, white, and blue) which does help with the spookiness. That extra color does actually add a surprising amount of depth, more than you'd think.

What didn't work?

The price tag. $4.99 for 22 pages of story. Oof. That said, I did like the heavier paper that the comic was printed on. It's not shiny; it's solid and has heft for a pamphlet, like a book you'd find in a thrift store. I liked that.

Overall, pretty good book with no superheroes in it. I really don't know where the story's going, for which I am glad. I'm genuinely looking forward to being surprised.

Am I going to go back and pick up the next issue? Yeah, I think I am.

Today's installment of Indescribable Awesomeness is brought to you by the letters P and A.

Was I a Warhammer nerd?

No.

Was I a tabletop gaming nerd?

Maybe.

I won't be picking up Warhammer Online, but I've always had a smirking respect for Games Workshop. Their models were so cartoony and goofy, but undeniably fun/cool.

And expensive. Very, very expensive.

It was always fun to walk into a game store and see a foot long tank filled with intricately hand-painted Space marines lying on the game table. I didn't have the money the buy them, the patience to paint them, or the friends to play with them. For those three gaping holes in my adolescence, I am eternally grateful.

I miss tabletop gaming. Electronic gaming seems so sterile by comparison. How do you get pizza stains and spilled Mountain Dew into your MMO? I doubt Games Workshop will ever work the same vibe into the online evironment.

(Although Dawn of War is solid shooty RTS fun, with sharp sticks poking out of it.)

Aaaaand I think I'll end this post right here before they take my Learner's Permit away and the gym class beatings re-commence...

I'm gonna find my baby, woo! Before that sun goes down...

Still no baby. He remains trapped in that fortress of bedding and IV tubes, with smiley scrub-bedecked nurses as his captors.

Maybe in a couple days.

This is a drag.

Currency for Paper: DMZ #4

Okay, I'm sold.
I've been back and forth about DMZ. I haven't wanted to commit to it either way and say "Yeah, I need to buy this book."

Issue 4 sealed the deal.

Recap: New York City is at war. Matty is a journalist who has been ditched in the warzone. He's the only correspondent in the DMZ. He has no support, no camera crew, just a press pass and a laptop.

Issue four details Matty's investigation of a legend floating around the DMZ about a group of "ghosts" haunting Central Park. Matty finds them.

The story is about vision, environmental preservation, and sacrifice for a common goal. No solutions are offered, but thought-provoking, heady questions are.

Honest opinion? The cover alone is worth the price. These DMZ covers just keep jumping off the rack at me.

It's on my pull list now.

Currency for Paper: Planetary #24

Things are starting to make sense in Planetary. Not that they haven't during the rest of the series, but everything's being tied up into one tidy little package.

A quiet stretch of explicatory dialogue, followed by a scene of unimagineable violence.

I don't even know why I'm reviewing this book, because everything is going to be very clear next issue at the series conclusion. Or completely disorienting and confusing.

Either way, it is going to be so freaking cool, I promise.

Great art, punchy words filled with meaty plot links. Can't wait for the next issue.

NO DEAL! NO, WAIT!

No, I don't watch that masterpiece of modern television. The adverts are enough to make me want to force myself to sit down and actually watch the show, so I could die.

Because stupid gameshows, yes, make me die.

On to more important matters in the life-bubble I call my world.

Conner-boy is progressing nicely and we're hoping he can come home by the end of the week. Eating well, breathing better, off the IV. Very, very great news, but we're pretending that he can't come home for another month so we can be thrilled when he comes home on Friday.

And he better be home by Friday. Or we'll be devastated.

Until a few moments ago, I didn't know what day this was. Everything since last Wednesday has been a distorted sleepless blur.

I really ought to get something done other than my Michael Keaton/Mr. Mom impersonation. Dishes/diapers/laundry/cleaning I'm on top of.

Cooking? You can't make me talk.

Put the alligator clips down.

We're all doing fine, much better than usual, because we're happy that there's more of us. Our plurality has increased. That we're currently split into two factions (Hospital faction vs. Home faction) is immaterial. We're all going to be fine. We'll just be happier when we're all under the same roof.

By the way, my son is a snuggle machine. He would be a foolproof interrogation device, as physical contact with him immediately saps your will to resist his snuggly cuteness. No pain, no begging for mercy, just an immediate descent into mushiness.

I'm doing all I can to make sure he doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

You have my word, Mr. President.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him...

Here's Daddy's little 6-Million-Dollar Man.

Sure, the IV and oxygen make it look like he's having a hard time, but I just like to think he's a cyborg.

Breathing better and eating like a starved wolverine at the moment. Uh, badger.

Yes, he looks like me! Why would you say he doesn't look like me?