Rating

Believe it or not, this rating is totally the result of talking about zombies. I guess I have to try harder.



Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

Furthermore: Booger.

More later,

Out of the Office

I very rarely talk about work and the people AT work, but this one it TOO GOOD to pass up.

So its the stuff of a bad sitcom - you call in sick, go to the ball game instead, you catch a home-run ball in the stands and your picture is on the front page of the local newspaper. Then you spend the next day trying to hide copies of the paper from your boss.

And sometimes the situation is reversed. Here's a picture of the line outside the Apple Store up in the U-District of people camped out for the new Iphones, from the front page of the Seattle Times site.



The guy in the center, in the green shirt, is one of my bosses, Jeff Strain, who is currently on paternity leave. I will note that he IS working on a laptop, probably has WiFi, and even as this picture is snapped was reconfiguring our Wiki.

(But I am going to be in SUCH trouble for this).

Update: Bonus! Then they give Jeff the lead quote in the article from the OTHER daily paper in town (Heheheh).

Leave of Absence

So, its been a week already?

I just looked at the journal, and it has been a week since the last posting, and that a snarky political one-shot. Have I grown beyond public displays of my crankiness, or are blogs just too, too 2004?

Truth of the matter is several things. One of them is a heavy day-job schedule as we surge forward on Guild Wars: Eye of the North. Another is work on The Settlers 6. And also there's the fact that the weather has been very, very nice out here of late, and what time I do have free I choose to spend on the back porch, reading the latest translation of The Three Musketeers and drinking a frozen rum punch.

Oh, and incipient alcoholism from all those rum punches. That's been slowing me down as well.

More later,

This Just In:

As it stands at the moment, the leading Democrat contender for President is a New Yorker. The leading Republican contender is also a New Yorker.

And if you don't like either of them, there is now a huggamugga of a sudden potential bid of ... another New Yorker.

The media really needs to get out of town more often.

More later,

When the Going Gets Tough ...

... the Tough go Clamming.

Yep, clamming. I've spent the past two days out on the Hood Canal (which is not a canal, but rather a fjord, but never mind), engaged in clamming.

It was a rest well-needed. We've been a little spotty on the postings of late, mainly because the workload has been a bit intense recently. Both the day-job and the freelance job are at critical junctures which need a lot of immediate attention to make sure everything works. As a result, there has been precious little time for anything else in my life.

But not for the past couple days. I took Friday off in my first vacation that did not involve bringing along a computer in over a year, and the Lovely Bride and I bundled into the hybrid, crossed to Bainbridge on the ferry (part-way escorted by Coast Guard craft with machine guns on the bows), crossed Bremerton Peninsula, across the Hood Canal Bride and down the other side to the beaches at Quilcene and Dosewallips.

Friday Quilcene was mostly empty, and it is a rich beach for manila steamers. Pick a spot, dig down an couple inches, and you come up with a handful. Saturday, when the low tide hit around noon, it was a zoo - everyone was clamming, including a lot of first-timers (you can tell they're first-timers - I'm giving clamming advice).

Doswallips was where the geoduck hunters hung out. We went there for horse clams, but were not successful (of course, our strategy was 'dig in a random location and hope for the best'). The geoduck hunters here are akin the deer hunters back in Wisconsin - good old boys that are heavily kitted out, packing post-hole-diggers as opposed to rifles, and clamming buckets with padded lids that can double as camp seats.

Civilization, such at it is on the canal, is clutched tight to the seashore, along a thing band between the high tide line and the National Forest. We ended up walking a lot in the national forest, down Falls Creek Canyon and into the murky wilds around Murhut Falls. They were strange hikes - beautiful, but oddly silent. I don't know if it because of the habitat, the season, or the recently-reported plummeting of bird populations, but the woods were strangely silent with only the occasional call.

But the clamming worked out (at least as far as the manilas). We're allowed to pull off 40 clams per person per day, so that means I have had around 80 clams over the weekend. The first batch we steamed over a primitive propane stove. The second batch made it home and were thrown into the pasta.

But I'm all clammed up for the moment, and ready to go back into the fray.

More later,

Huh?

What was THAT all about?

That was about this, an attempt to Blog like it was the end of the world. Sort of a Blogging flash mob Several of my companions chose more realistic (and depressing) approaches to challenge, but I had to be a smartass.

Congratulations to all who participated.

More later,

On The Road Again: Zombiepocalypse

As God is my witness, I never realized that zombies could drive.

I mean, it makes sense. Zombification strips out the upper brain functions, leaving only automatic responses - shuffling, biting, chewing, clawing, digging the gooey parts of the brain out with a forefinger, that sort of thing. And for a lot of people, driving is pretty much automatic, without a lot of attention from the higher brain.

Don't believe me? Tell me about your commute, yesterday, before the restless dead rose up to slay the living. Tell me about one other vehicle you saw on the road. Unless you've seen something out of the ordinary, it has just passed by you without a second thought. Yah see, automatic functions.

So when the world slipped into its present undead state, it really should not have surprised me that hundreds of zombie commuters rose up, lurched to their cars, and drove to work. At the same time I had to make my own commute. Just my luck.

And I know you're asking - with the living dead heralding the end of the world as we know it, why am I going to work? Because my company doesn't have a Zombie Day plan. Sure, I could stay home, but then it's a sick day, which is also a vacation day. I swear that this one business practice was more responsible than anything for the Zombiepocalypse. You get up, and you're feeling a little undead, not so undead that you want to spend one of your precious vacation days on it, so you go to work and before you know it, the front desk staff has killed everyone in accounting and is feasting on their entrails.

Anyway, you know those "slow zombies"? The Night-of-the-Living-Dead shamblers? Well, they drive just as slowly. No lie. So the 405 is a literal crawl. I pass one talking on his cell phone. Who does a zombie talk to on his cell? His broker?

Pulling out into the HOV lane was just as bad. And yes, it is breaking the law since I was alone, but the only cops I saw were lunching on an SUV filled with nuns, so the social order was a bit tattered at this point. No slow zombies here, but only those passive/aggressive fast zombies. One of whom decided by the Frye's exit to suddenly let go of the wheel and consume her car-pool buddy's eyes. So that tied up the HOV, and I'm back in the slow lanes with the shuffling corpses in their Detroit coffins.

The upshot was that by the Newcastle exit I gave up and turned around, with stop and go traffic through Renton. And since EVERYONE is moving like a zombie in their cars, there was no real prob with the undead looking for fresh meat. Got home, patched in remotely to the job, and am taking a vacation day (there will be a stiffly-worded memo coming out of THIS, I can tell you). The Internets are still up (insert IT/Zombie joke here), and the Lovely Bride is out getting something for dinner. So it is not like it is horrible.

But I tell you, if this keeps up, I'm going to consider going freelance again.

More later,

UPDATE: The Lovely Bride just got home:
Me: Hey honey, what's for dinner?
LB: Braaaaaainssssss!

So it looks like its another evening of experimental cuisine. End of a perfect day.

More later,

Update

Still busy, but in addition bummed out about the death of Hansa the elephant, age 6 and a half, at the Woodland Park Zoo.

More later. Really.

Busy

Dear Internet,

It is not that I don't love you anymore, nor do I love you any less. I have just been very, very busy for the past couple weeks. So busy I haven't had a chance to soak in my hot tub. So busy I haven't had a chance to play LotRO. So busy that the last deep discussion I've had involves whether rum punch can be considered in the "Fruits and Vegetables" part of a balanced meal.

More later,

Church and State

So here's where I shear myself away from some of my fellows. A lot of them (in mailing lists and in journals) are comfortable with the idea that science and religions are opposites. Black and white. On and off. Thinking and feeling. Up and down. One cannot exist in the presence of the other.

Actually, I think of them as salt and pepper, which can be combined (in various amounts) but really two completely different things, and have completely different paths to your kitchen table. Salt is a mineral, an edible rock that appeals to certain parts of your tastes, while pepper is a plant (a dried fruit of a flowering vine, actually), which appeals to other regions of one's taste buds. To say that the two are polar opposites is kinda silly, and in the same fashion I think the science/religion split is a false dichotomy as well.

In fact, the two work together better than working apart. Over the course of my lifetime, there have been Biblical stories that have benefited from scientific support. As a lad, the Great Flood was a "bible story", a religious tall tale with a moral ("Don't cheese off the Lord"). Yet over the years archaeological thought has moved from "was there a Great Flood?" to "Was there a single flood or a series of localized floods?") Indeed, discovery of previous legends, like that of Deucalion, act to support the existence of a biblical flood, not diminish it.

Similarly, faith has supported science over the years. Gregor Mendel (genetics), Roger Bacon (scientific method), and Copernicus (astronomy) were all men of the cloth and received encouragement from their church. There are the monks in Ireland who kept knowledge alive in the wake of the fall of Rome, and the flowering of Islam brought new concepts, even new words (Algebra, Algorithm, Alchol) into European thought.

I think that both science and religion are spectrums as opposed to absolutes, and when we have a hard orthodoxy in control in either case, there difficulty for the rest of us. In religion we currently seem to be under the sway of the orthodox forces, but not too many years ago we were in the porgressive grips of Vatican II and the Ecumenical Movement. In science we have seen where the hide-bound individuals who control the mechanisms twisting vital research for their own ends (Gallo and the HIV virus comes to mind). Yet in both cases it is moving across a spectrum (of course, in both cases, the installed orthodoxy wants to KEEP their power, and to that end seeks to exclude others who might disagree. The spectrum becomes a single wavelength).

There is pseudo-religion and there is psuedo-science. Both science and religion can have bad ideas, false leads and dead ends. The Catholic Church, seeking to answer the question - what happens to the unbaptized innocent? - ended up with the concept of Limbo, which was recently abandoned. Science similarly has a long history of mechanisms created to make the theory work - Ether (if light is a wave, how does it travel through a vacuum?) orphlogiston (what is that makes stuff burn?). Now dark matter and superstring theory are similar constructs. Both science and religion have a tendency to pick stuff up, examine it, and discard it if it does not work. In both cases, problems show up when the thought process becomes rigid and rejecting (Papal infallibility, corporate-paid research think tanks), seeking to exert temporal power as opposed to seeking knowledge, comprehension, and understanding.

Science and religion are playing fields, where conservative and progressive forces move back and forth. Orthodox forces in both seem to limit both what is going out (in the way of sharing understanding) and what is coming in (as far as believers or theorists who may hold contrary views). While it is very easy to identify an established extreme as an enemy, it is not representative of the entire spectrum. Indeed, calling all scientists heretics and all faithful people ignorant supports those orthodoxies by restricting the number of participants that need to be controlled, exiling those non-, un-, and wrong believers into some sort of darkness where they may be ignored.

The answer for both spectrums is "more light". More thought, more discussion, more examination of both science and faith. Because only then can either sphere move forward.

More later,

Memorial Day

From the Arlington West project in Santa Monica.

More later

A World Without Warcraft

So I made a peon cry the other day.

OK, it was an orcish peon, and a virtual orcish peon at that, so I shouldn't feel too badly. You see, I canceled my World of Warcraft account. My reasons were three-fold - I didn't have any time, what time I did have I wanted to use to explore new games, and while I was in a half-dozen worlds with various friends, I never got to play at the same time, and they eventually all leveled past me, created new characters, and those new characters leveled past me.

And all for fifteen bucks a month. I hadn't been able to really get going with anything for three months, so I figured it was time.

But when you cancel your WoW account, they first recommend you call their toll-free number so a human being can try to convince you otherwise. I passed on that option, downloaded the latest patch (yeah, I PATCHED in order to drop the game), and went to the site to cancel. And met the weeping orcish peon there.

The peon was despondent, and would not let me leave without a reason why. It had a pull-down menu, and experimenting with a few of them, found that when you chose one, the weeping orc would pop up with another box, arguing with me about why I was wrong.

And interesting approach. Of the three reasons I just mentioned, I couldn't find one for "no time" or "friends much better than I am", so I finally settled on "leaving for another game". And the weeping orc, a spurned, jealous lover, wanted to know "what game?" and I put down Guild Wars (though LOTRO and the beta of a Korean game I keep calling Grando Espresso were also there). And it informed me that other games may have their "shiny baubles" but only WoW strive to presenting the best and most varied game experience.

Uh-HUH. You know, these guys charge 45 bucks every three months whether I play or not. Their dedication to my participation would be more sincere if it showed up before I decided to turn off the cash flow. So a couple button punches later, along the lines "but are you SURE?", this shows up:

"If you choose to deactivate your subscription‚ you will still be able to play until your currently paid for time expires on June XX, 2007 X:XX AM PDT. The peon is full-on weeping now. We hope you're happy. Are you positive you want to deactivate your subscription?"

Am I happy? Absolutely. I made virtual orc marketing peon cry. More people should take advantage of that opportunity.

More later,

SoBo

So occasionally you hear an idea that just drops neatly into place and you say "Dayem! That makes sense!" And in this case the idea involves the ongoing huggamugga about the Seattle Sonics basketball team.

Now, I'm not a big Sonics fan, but I have friends here who are, and I'm good with the idea of keeping the Sonics in town. But the big problem is that I'm NOT a fan of looting the public funds to do so, and the various concepts that have been pitched have been along the lines of "This is the most expensive stadium in history AND if you don't pony up, we're moving to Oklahoma City". Its extortion that would ruffle the feathers even if the Sonics even if they, say, made it playoffs with any regularity.

But a lesser prob is that the locations that have been suggested have been ... suboptimal. You can revise Key Arena as much as you like, but it still involves getting off the Mercer Exit and shlepping overland through the new construction in South Union to get there. And the backup plan, down near the new mall in Renton, adds traffic load to an already stressed chunk of 405.

And then this idea balloon floats up. and I blink, and say "Dayem! etc....". It all makes a modicum of sense. If there is a more accessible location than the south end of Boeing Field, I'm not sure of it. The new Light Rail is coming through it. Major highway nearby - more importantly, major highway that isn't ALREADY a parking lot. Land that is undergoing a development change. It sounds like a plan. We have SoDo (South of Downtown). Now we can get SoBo (South of Boeing Field)

And if you can do it without cracking open the piggy bank, I say we go for it.

More later,

Polonium

Oh, here's a fun fact that I forgot to mention earlier - I'm not radioactive.

I'm sure that's a relief to many, but the question of why it would be important that I declare it is a story that I have been witholding from the blogosphere at large.

Back in early November, I was in Germany working with Blue Byte on their game - The Settlers: Rise of an Empire (which is looking real cool, by the way). Flew into Heathrow, smaller plane to Dusseldorf, and then back. Partial story of the trip is here. But about the same time as I was jetting about, former KBG agent Alexander Litvenenko was poisoned by a massive dose of Polonium-210

Time passes, as does Litvenenko. I'm back in Seattle and it is early December, and I get an urgent email from Blue Byte to contact them. The Brits had found trace amounts of PO-210 on four planes, including the one I was on for the Dusseldorf/Heathrow hop. There was no immediate danger, but everyone on board was encouraged to see their physician, just in case. Now.

Oh, joy.

So I call my GP, was told that things were kinda full, explained to them that there was an outside chance of my being radioactive, and was given an immediate appointment. There was a general determinance of my good health (no surprise - in the mean time, the LB and I had the great Thanksgiving disaster, which resulted in us walking four miles uphill in the snow) and a recommendation that I see the staff radiologist. He was in turn interested (I was his first Litvenenko-related case), ran a radiation counter/tricorder/studfinder over me, and declared me OK.

Mind you, Polonium-210 is a heavy particle that can be stopped by clothing or skin. The only prob is if it is injested (which is how Litvinenko got it - through a teapot). Since I didn't lick the pull-down seat tray on that flight, I was pretty sure I was good. Plus the fact that if I had pulled up even a mild dose, I would have showed some definite signs (like keeling over dead) in the month between by fateful flight and the warning.

I was concerned, though, and took it with some gallows humor. And my co-workers were amused. One of them said "The symptoms of Polonium poisoning are similar to those of being stabbed through a curtain." That made me laugh. Even in our darkest hour - Shakespeare humor!

So that's my brush with international espionage. Why didn't I mention it sooner? Well, two days BEFORE I got the call to check myself for radiation poisoning, I was talking to my Mom on the phone, and she was worried (as Moms worried) that the Brits were checking flights and since I was on a flight in Europe, I was at risk. And of course I said that there were a lot of flights in Europe, and it was unlikely I was affected.

And of course I was wrong, but I didn't want to then CALL her back and make her worry, so I resolved to mention it in person when I was back in Pgh this past month, when I could demonstrate I was in good health and ... well, not dead.

And I've been mum on the blog as well, but the sudden meme-tagging made me realize that I haven't shared THIS particular fact. But now I have. So there you have it.

How am I? Not Radioactive! Thank You!

More later,

Tag Meme

So Bruce Cordell tagged me with this:

Here are the rules: Each person tagged blogs 7 random facts about themselves, as well as the rules of the game. You need to tag seven others and list their names on your blog. You have to leave those you plan on tagging a note in their comments so they know that they have been tagged and to read your blog.

(Now, this is interesting, since I tend to share a lot of what happens in my world, and while there is private stuff, I'm pretty much an open book. So here goes.)

Seven Random Facts about Jeff:

1) I sing in the car when I'm alone.
2) Unless I'm listening to the Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey books on tape. I just finished Letter of Marque. Next up is The Thirteen Gun Salute, followed by my all-time favorite name for a book: The Nutmeg of Consolation.
3) I was once stepped on by a bear.
4) One of my front teeth is false. I caught a hard-hat in the face during a caving expedition.
5) My favorite bands in college were Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Jethro Tull. Be afraid.
6) My favorite performer when I was in high school was John Denver. Be very afraid.
7) The first time I voted in a presidential election, I voted for the Republican.

So chain-lettering this onward, I hearby tag the following poor souls (emails will be arriving separately).

Janna
Steve Schend
Colin
Jason
Stan! (I will accept seven doodles instead)
Frabjous Dave
Scooter

Chain letters away!

More later,

Wild, Wild Life

So, a bunch of animal stories:

- Last night I was working in the lower floor and heard what sounded like a large mouse thundering through the space above my head, between the floors. Due to the way the house is constructed (a tri-level with an additional fourth level added), sometimes wild things get into that space. I resigned myself to searching for obvious entrances and mayhaps investing in a trap.

- However, when I got up this morning, there was a dead mouse at the doorway to my office, presented by Harley and Vicky, who probably pummeled it to death (lacking front claws). The Iron Cats get full marks for presentation and plating, though I refused to judge them on taste.

- Yesterday went down to the Des Moines beach for very low tides, which meant a beach walk with the Sierra Club. Many of the usual suspects were unearthed (rock crabs and dungeoness, moon snails, sea stars and sea cucumbers), but saw some chitens and nudibranchs as well. Also a visit to the new fish ladder up the stream.

- In addition, I got back to the Black River a few weeks back to check on the herons, first mentioned in the journal way back here.
It was after the peak of the season, and the trees were starting to come it, but while there are still nests present, the colony is not as large as it was previous years. This may be due to the bone-headed development Renton allowed to be installed right next door, or it may be due to a pair of bald eagles setting up shop at the far end of the lake. That's the problem with nature - never gives you the easy answer.

- And speaking of eagles, we have one up on Panther Lake as well now. Neighbor across the street has a nest in his fir trees. On one hand I'm pleased to see the noble birds make a comeback from the 70s, when there was a risk of losing them entirely in the lower 48. On the other hand, they are getting to be almost a bit TOO common up here. Look for news reports on missing pets in the near future.

- And you've heard about the bee hive crash, likely - honeybees leaving home and not coming back, with potentially dire consequences. The thing that actually worries me is a sudden lack of ducklings and goslings at my place of work. Last year this time we were hip-deep in them, such that warning signs were posted at the buildings. This year, a definite reduction in population. I guess we could blame this on bald eagles as well, but it seems a little .... sinister.

More later,

UPDATE: Add to the other stories the sudden appearance of a barred owl outside our office. Like right outside, perched in one of the fir trees, eating a baby bunny. Barred owls are mostly nocturnal but can be found active during the day, particularly if they are feeding fledgelings.

Travel Stories

So I'm back from a week in Pittsburgh. My family is good, my father celebrated his 80th birthday, and springtime in the Steel City is much, much more appealing then at Thanksgiving. The trees are coming into leaf, the week was without rain, we actually got to see the city, and it was just verging on the summer humidity.

So the only real stories I have to tell are about the trip itself, and both of them stem from the current diminished state of the Greater Pittsburgh International Airport.

For many years, Greater Pittsburgh was the home of first Allegheny Airlines, then US Air, and had a lot of hometown pride for both. Trouble is, US Air started to drift away, its corporate offices first moving to North Carolina, then to Arizona. As a result, there were more and more demands on Greater Pitt, combined with reduced services. The city dropped from a Hub city to a Featured city to "City we go when we feel like it". Most recently, they even dropped the overpriced red-eyes from the West Coast.

So the airport is built for a nice mid-sized airline without a mid-sized airline being present, and its facilities are a little empty (want to film a movie in an airport? This is the place! Dogma did it). So we have to bounce through other hub cities to get to Pgh, and parts of those legs are on smaller craft belonging to the "commuter partners" of the big airlines. But the other services are reduced as well as a result of the lack of a hub.

Case in point, rental cars. Made arrangements with Hertz for an intermediate-sized car. Got there are there were (surprise!) no intermediate sizes (because, you know, why would they have a lot of cars at a secondary airport?). They were willing to bump us up to the next level. An SUV.

And we said no thanks. I've done that drill before, and found it a little boxy expensive and frustrating, particularly when I have a pair of hybrids at home. And the Terrifying Presence behind the counter (you know the one, the clerk that tells you that if you get a scratch on the car, they will have to rebuild it and charge you twice the value of the vehicle AND have to kill your children), informed us that we could spend more money for an even larger vehicle. Or we could take the SUV. And we said no, we asked for a mid-sized, we'd like one. And the Terrifying Presence suddenly seized up, unable to understand why we would not want to drive a Mammoth. And there was much glowering at each other, and the Lovely Bride suggested "Can you downgrade us?"

And the Terrifying Presence blinked and said, "Yes. Yes, I think we can". And we ended up with a perfectly acceptable economy (A cobalt-colored Cobalt). But if the LB had not spoken up, we would STILL be there.

The other travel story also stems from Greater Pitt's fallen status. Because it is no longer a hub, planes have to fly into Pittsburgh before catching an outbound route. As a result, the airport is dependent on getting those planes IN in the first place.

On the day we're leaving, we get to the airport two hours early. We have to catch a flight to Chicago, and from there on to Seattle. I notice that the plane that is supposed to come into our gate is delayed in Chicago. I do the mental math, figure we're OK, and sit down. An hour passes. A second hour. The plane is still on the ground on Chicago. More mental math. We're now just at the edge of "We're going to have to run through the United Terminal to make our connection" status, and the plane we need is STILL in Chicago.

I go to the podium, silent up to now on the matter, to find out what's going on. The airline folk are cordial, friendly, and frustrated. The plane they need is in Chicago (reasons unrevealed - mechanical, thunderstorms, pilot whacked out on mojoritas, I don't know). We're going to miss the flight out. They start checking other ways into Seattle. Anything else out of Chicago (no). Anything out of Dulles (no). Minneapolis (no). The young woman's fingers are flying over the keyboard looking for a solution to the problem. About this time they announce that the flight is going to be horribly, horribly late, and a line starts to back up behind me as this young woman valiantly tries to come up with the answer.

And the answer is - Delta, through Cinncinati, with a half-hour window for the change. And it will be leaving at three in the afternoon, which means we had a seven-hour delay in the Pittsburgh airport.

But (and this is the good thing) it all worked. Delta has a corporate image of "Git-er-done", and we were seated at the front of the commuter flight to get us OFF the airplane as quickly as possible, made the final flight with all of ten minutes to spar, and finally, after about 15 hours, got back to the house.

And I will say that there are worse places to be trapped for seven hours than in the Pittsburgh Airport. Free wi-fi. Comfortable chairs in larger-than-normal waiting areas. Classical music playing in the background. Short lines at the vendors. All signs of a place that once had seen a lot more traffic, and, if there is any justice, should see a real airline come in and make it a hub again.

Preferably an airline with direct flights to Seattle.

More later,

Mr. Baggins

Just a quick note, as I have just returned from Pittsburgh (more on that later). But I was delighted to find that my copy of The History of the Hobbit - Part One: Mr. Baggins by my friend John D. Rateliff has arrived from Amazon-dot-co-dot UK.

Color me delighted.

Spidey-Thoughts

So the Lovely Bride and I went to see Spider-Man 3 last night, and it was OK. The LB liked it more than I did, but it still worked on a lot of levels, and was the good, easy-going, action-packed summer blockbuster that media moguls dream of. There are few things I've noted, and I'll warn you about the big freaking SPOILERS right now.

1) Old People are Fonts of Wisdom: Every elder in this movie says the absolutely right thing at the right time, from Aunt May to Uncle Ben's flashback to Peter's landlord to Stan Lee to the Osborne's butler, for god's sake. All of them, wise sages with the perfect advice. Yes, the voice of the elder Osborn is evil and JJJameson is a fool, but while adults they are not in the elder category. With all that good advice on the loose, can NYC be anything less than heaven?

2) And this New York is New York of the sixties. Yeah, I know, they have cell phones and I-Pods, but the way everyone dresses and the demure nature of Times' Square and even Peter's scooter just screams the imaginary NY of 1967. It is the New York of "Breakfast at Tiffany's", "Bridget Loves Bernie", and "That Girl". I mean, I'm expecting to see Marlo Thomas as one of MJ's rivals, not Gwen Stacie.

3) There are a lot of weird time losses in the movie. The alien symbiote is grabs onto Peter's scooter and sneaks into his apartment in the first reel (to use the archaic phrase) then apparently hangs out, living off of cockroaches and old ritz crackers, before joining up with the body of Peter deep into the second act. Similarly, Peter and young Harry have a battle that wrecks Harry's appartment, and, despite having a BUTLER, nobody cleans up for a couple weeks as young Harry heals. At the time, you don't notice the long time jumps, but looking back, you say whathehey?

4) Peter was being a jerk BEFORE he got hooked up with the symbiote. Please note that. Really wrapped up with himself, to the point that he's not even paying attention to MJ's troubles. At the point where reunion is offered, and they reach out for each other, I want to shout "Run, woman, RUN! He's dangerous even when he isn't posessed!"

5) On the other hand, I want to use the alien symbiote excuse the next time the LB catches me eating chocolate ice cream from the container with my fingers.

6) And what's with this letting Sandman go because he didn't MEAN to kill the person he killed? The guy not only pounded the crud out of you, Spidey, and also kept all of NYC at bay while your girlfriend was threatened. I mean, you COULD have forgiven him AND brought him in for his crimes. Even if it is not murder one (and I think the case could have been made, happening as it did during commission of a crime), it WAS manslaughter.

7) Oh yeah, the biggest supervillain? The runaway crane. Out in Bellevue, cranes just fall down ONCE. Here, they whip around, taking huge gashes out of office buildings. Apparently construction cranes really, really, REALLY hate copying machines. (And I got lost in all the confusion and special effects - did Spider-Man ever rescue the Crane Operator in all that?)

8) And you know what I think? I think that May's old engagement ring is cursed. And she knows it. THAT'S the reason she wants to fob it off on Peter and not take it back. And indeed, in the movie, everything goes south for him as soon as he takes the ring.

So the movie has made metric tons of money, so they are going to keep going. The Spider-man villains' gallery has good but not unlimited depth, and with the resolution of the Green Goblin situation, there are still some options before you get to Rocket Racer and the Grizzley. Me, I would like to see JJJ get into his active phase against Spidey - Spider-slayers, creating the Scorpion as a competing hero, and the Jackal (complete with .... dare I say it? ... clones).

More later,

Jesus Has A Blog

Ganked from the Stranger (better resolution, but (often) NSFW):


The sound you hear is the entire Internet jumping the shark.

(Actually, from his blog the Big Guy sounds like the Geico Caveman, only whinier)

More later,