From an interview with then-state rep Barack Obama in 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, and before Obama was anybody on the national level:
Even with his “lack of experience,” Obama was more knowledgable about foreign policy than many of the Dems who voted for the authorization of force, including Kerry, Hillary, and Edwards. I’m still not a huge Obama supporter (I’m a Richardson guy at this early stage), but this boosts him quite a bit in my estimation.
You know what the world needed? A grim-n-gritty comic book version of cartoon cereal mascots. Thankfully, Brendan Douglas Jones is here to provide us with Breakfast of the Gods. The first page is here, or read the latest page here. Enjoy it until General Mills issues a cease-and-desist order.
James and Dennis took photos at the 24 Hour race this weekend, and CyclingNews.com published their shots.
Shaenon K. Garrity: “Trick Your Woman Into Liking What You Like.” The debate over how to get your girlfriend into comics has been going on for YEARS and Shaenon points out that it’s still a silly, wrongheaded exercise.
I meant to post a blog or two from my hotel room in Riverside this weekend. The reason I didn’t was because a whole lot of things that could have gone wrong did go wrong. To wit:
The Riverside Comfort Inn, chosen because the nicer hotel next door was booked up, turned out to be kind of divey and noisy, and the advertised internet access didn’t work.
Kristie felt sick on Sunday due to allergies. We skipped driving to LA in favor of staying in, watching movies, and wandering the culture-free mallzone that is Riverside.
An evil ATM may have stolen $160 from Kristie, pending a phone call to the bank. (UPDATE: It looks like her account was not charged after all, thankfully.)
My flight home via Las Vegas was delayed two hours due to a combination of rain and traffic from the NBA All-Star Game.
And that’s not even counting the smaller indignities like having housekeeping steal fruit from us, or being served a drink box because apparently only small children should have a taste for apple juice in the morning.
Despite all of this, I still had a pleasant enough time with Kristie. Even the airport delays on Monday just meant I had a chance to get through 250 pages of Christopher Moore’s You Suck.
Actually, my airport adventures might deserve a blog entry of their own. I’ll try to hit the high points…
I had a small hand in the creation of this new blog, American Caesar, in an advisory role. I might help with the look and feel a little bit, maybe after this weekend. Otherwise, the content is all Gonzo MacArthur.
With my life busier these days and my interest turning to other activities, I’ve been deleting series off my DVR. Studio 60 was the first to go, as it’s been a massive disappointment (and now it’s “on haitus” anyway). Next was House, which is just sort of boring these days.
The latest purged series is 24 — which is funny, given my post from a week ago.
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with 24, partly because of the politics. It’s a fascist cartoon, a right-winger’s wet-dream version of reality: torture always works; that nice Arab family down the street really IS a terrorist sleeper cell; etc. Any relation between the 24verse and the real world is purely coincidental.
But if you take the series on the same level as the Jack Bauer Facts site, it can be massively enjoyable.
Last season took its trademark ultraviolence and plot twists to new heights. It was a ton of fun — so much so that the series earned Emmy awards for Best Drama and Best Actor. Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, this season has been a letdown so far.
On top of that comes this analysis from the New Yorker, in which two West Point instructors say the current group of cadets — who will soon be commanding soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere — think 24 is a documentary.
That’s not necessarily a good reason to give up on a show (every series has its idiot fans who can’t tell fiction from reality), but it’s disturbing. I’ve enjoyed the show figuring that it inflicted no harm on the real world, and that may not be the case.
Between that and the letdown in quality, the show’s become a chore to watch. Sorry, Jack.
The ironic thing about having a life that’s busy and interesting enough to blog about is that you no longer have time to do so.
See the girl in this photo? That’s Kristie. We have quite a bit in common.
I snapped that cameraphone pic when she was in Tucson last weekend, at a party at Ron & Vern’s house. And with a surprise three-day weekend coming up, I decided at the last minute to visit Kristie in Riverside, CA, where she is pursuing a PhD in Psychology.
Between the two visits, we’ll have spent eight out of twelve days with each other. Not bad, considering we live in different states.
And that’s most of my story in recent days. I have Narbonic, vol. 4 away at the printers now, with a reprint of vol. 1 to follow soon. I haven’t had much time for reading, writing, gaming, or visits to Drinking Liberally lately. In fact, I’ve barely been able to keep up with my TV viewing, which I’ll ramble about in my next entry.
Hotel registration for San Diego Comic-Con opened this morning at 10am local time. I skipped last year due to life-in-ruins issues, so I’m making sure to attend this one. There are so many friends I haven’t seen since 2005…
Naturally, with 100,000 attendees swarming for a few thousand available hotel rooms, Comic-Con’s reservation site started crashing at roughly 9:55am, and their phone line was busy all five times I tried it. Finally, after 20 minutes of refreshing the page, I was able to access the system and begin my painfully slow way through the booking process.
By 10:45, to my delight, I scored nice, reasonably-priced (for downtown San Diego) accommodations.
Before noon, the entire city was booked up for all four days of the convention. ALL of downtown.
This is ridiculous. My only attendance choices shouldn’t be “spend 45 minutes of work time frantically trying to reserve a room” or “stay in the suburbs.” It wasn’t this way when I started going to SDCC a few years ago. But since then, attendance has doubled, and the con became a premiere event to showcase big-budget media (films, TV, video games) — while actual comics and their creators were more or less cast to the wayside.
Sigh. Sometimes I miss the days before it was trendy to be a nerd.
Renamed because I was tired of “Bits & Pieces.” Some links while I watch the Super Bowl:
Occasionally, I regret leaving Seattle to return to Tucson, even though I swore I would not. This is one of those times: on Feb. 24, Jonathan Coulton is playing a gig at the Tractor Tavern, which was within walking distance of my apartment. The chances of him playing Tucson, or even Phoenix: slim to none.
Following up the the Obama post, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi thinks the Dems should lawyer up when this sort of thing happens. I’m not convinced, but I do love Taibbi’s writing style.
While everybody else anticipates the new Spider-Man, I think the movie I’m most looking forward to this summer is Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up. That’s the mainstream trailer, which isn’t all that great. This second trailer shows a key scene and gives you a better idea of the film’s humor. The cast looks like a cross-section of Freaks & Geeks and 40 Year Old Virgin, which both featured Seth Rogen.
