Blue Money

Today, I went to Rome to spend the day with Dad. I'm helping him maintain his checkbook, take care of his bills, etc.--but I've gotten that fairly automated, so we don't really have to spend all that much time working on financial matters. Instead, the visits give us a time to talk, to run errands, to go to the mall and walk around idly... whatever Dad feels like doing.

Today, when we were wandering through the mall commenting curmudgeonly on the prices of clothes that we weren't willing to buy at 40% off, Dad stopped to look at some summer-weight slacks while I perused a pair of jeans.

"I don't think I've ever seen you wear a pair of jeans," I said to Dad.

"No, I don't think I ever have," he replied.

"How come?"

"I wanted jeans when I was a kid, but we couldn't afford them," he said. Turns out that it was much cheaper to buy a regular pair of pants than to buy a pair of denim jeans, which tended to be made of a heavier-weight fabric for durability... and thus were more expensive.

Today, in a world where everyone presumably wears jeans and they are among the cheapest clothes to be found at most big-box retailers, it's hard to imagine a time when jeans were actually too pricy. But that's the world in which Dad grew up--a time and a place when money was scarce and jeans were too expensive for a young boy.

Time After Time

NBC did it again. Tonight, Heroes ran 2 or 3 minutes overtime... but of course, the network didn't bother to schedule that ahead of time so that various DVR devices could record the entire show.

I certainly wish that someone would replace the boneheads at NBC with programmers who actually want to make viewers happy. Susan and I were watching at the time, so we were able to catch the last minute or two... but I know a lot of folks are going to be very unhappy when they sit down to watch Heroes and discover that they didn't get the climax.

I really don't get it. NBC is tanking in the ratings--even their "Must See TV" on Thursday nights has lost so many viewers that some are describing it as "Must Flee TV"--but they go out of their way to alienate the viewers they have and give them a convenient "jumping off point" to abandon NBC shows. (I know two people who decided, after missing the climactic moments of an overly long and erroneously scheduled Scrubs a few weeks ago, that they could live without seeing any more Scrubs at all... and that show is bleeding viewers so badly that they don't need to lose anyone else.)

A Four-Color Farewell?

I've talked about trimming away some of the ephemera that has attached itself to me over five-and-a-third decades; I've trimmed back on some of my books, I've jettisoned a large number of laserdiscs, I've given away some CD's, I've disposed of some VHS tapes, I've abandoned my Beta tapes once my final Beta player quit working reliably... and now, I'm looking at a hundred-plus boxes of comics and considering sending them on their way as well.

I have a comic shop, but I don't know that I'll try to sell my comics through the store. Instead, I may see if I can find another buyer who'll take them all at once. That may sound odd, but there are financial considerations behind it; if I sell to the store, I have to worry about paying myself a fair sum without overpaying myself, I have to consider how I'll sell them there, and the books don't really go away--they just get relocated from a room in my house to a room in the store.

Haven't made the decision yet, but I'm more inclined to part with the comics with each passing day. I love the nostalgia that goes with the comics... but the real truth is, I don't get them out of their boxes any longer, and the only reason I know I still have them is (a) I have to work around the boxes when I go in that room, and (b) I have a little blue notebook with titles and numbers. Thanks to DC Archives and Marvel Masterworks, I can enjoy most of those remarkable stories whenever I want--and now, with Marvel's Omnibus format hardcovers including letters columns and pinups and other related items, I have everything but the ads.

There are some comics that will likely never be reprinted--I have large numbers of pre-hero Marvels, a lot of Sugar and Spike, and other such things that I may never see again. But the truth is, I'm not seeing them now... and even if I got a real urge to read them, I don't know that I could lay hands on them in anything approximating a reasonable amount of time, due to the chaotic disorder of the boxes (I tended to simply box comics as I acquired them at cons, so the bulk of the collection is in no order whatsoever).

I got rid of my science fiction magazines and pulps because I wasn't enjoying them any more, and I thought it best that they go to someone who would appreciate them more. I'm thinking that it might be about time for the comics to follow the same path...

Time, See What's Become of Me...

I haven't written anything here in a week or so; I fear that I was so preoccupied that I just couldn't bring myself to write. The horrible events surrounding the death of Jamie Bishop, along with increasing problems with early-stage Alzheimer's with Dad, left me in feeling a bit withdrawn and uncommunicative.

That's a natural tendency of mine that I have to consciously work against: when faced with problems that aren't solvable, I tend to respond to them by cutting myself off from others. Maybe I brood, maybe I just contemplate... whatever you want to call it, it's a lonely and isolating experience, and one that I fall back on regularly.

Jamie's death has bothered me, even though I didn't know him as an adult--but what I learned about him after the shooting made it clear that he was a person I would have liked to have known. He shared interests with me; he had talents I wish I could have appreciated; he accomplished a great deal in his all-too-brief life. And that made me realize that the same could very well have held true for every one of those thirty-two victims, and I'll never know it; I only learned it about Jamie because I knew his parents and wanted to learn more about the son in whom they had instilled their values, to whom they had bestowed their talents.

As for Dad--I worry for him. He's lonely, and has been horribly so since Mom was taken from us in late 2002. The Alzheimer's, even in its early stages, is blurring some of the qualities that defined Dad for so very many years. At times, we can converse and his old sharpness will return; at other times, I see confusion at a world that seems, for him, to be going on without him. He has been a proud, articulate, self-confident, capable, insightful man for as long as I've been alive; now I see him struggling to rediscover some of those same qualities, and it makes me very sad.

No answers. No profound revelations. No sagacious observations here. Just a sort of "I'm back" statement, letting you know why I've been gone.

What Should Never Be

I just got confirmation that one of the victims of the shootings at Virginia Tech was Jamie Bishop, the son of Michael & Jeri Bishop of Pine Mountain, Georgia. I've known Michael since the earliest days of his science fiction career, and Susan and I were lucky enough to spend some time with him and Jeri in Pine Mountain. They are gracious, sensitive, and caring people, and I understand from those who knew Jamie that he inherited all of his parents' good points.

Acts like this seem almost incomprehensible when they're part of a news story; the senseless horror of it is almost unbearable when it touches someone you know.

Fanfare for the Common Man

Just watched Flight 93, the superlative dramatization of the only September 11th, 2001, hijacking that failed to accomplish its goal. It is a powerful and disturbing film--powerful in that conveys the raw, visceral tension of those events, and disturbing in that it underscores how unprepared our country was then and how totally unprepared our country still is for the perfidy of our nation's enemies, whose resolve to commit evil in the name of a religion they have corrupted is unparallelled by any challenge we have seen in modern times.

It's a movie that will leave you angry, and with good reason. And it makes it clear that this is a different kind of war against an enemy whose values are so antithetical to ours that we cannot win against them if we continue to use 20th Century standards and methods of waging war.

An amazing film...

Quitting the Club

Today, I got rid of my golf clubs.

It's not like I gave up a long-standing hobby, mind you. These were clubs that my dad gave me in the early 1980s, when we lived in Kennesaw at our first house. They've moved with me from that house to Milstead Circle to our current address on Carillon Crossing, but they've sat unused through two moves now. Dad loved golf, and I tried it a time or two; I enjoyed it, but I finally admitted that my life is filled with enough entertainment without yet another time-consuming hobby.

Besides, I haven't lived in Kennesaw for twenty years now. If I haven't used 'em in twenty years, I think it's safe to say that I'm not too addicted to golf.

One more space-consuming bit of my past gone. I donated 'em to Goodwill, where I hope someone else will get far more use out of them than I did. Golf clubs are meant to be played, not to be hidden in a basement...

A Crowning Achievement

Today, Dr. Sturn did the root canal I talked about a couple of weeks ago. I assure you, I slept very little last night; instead, I lay there dreading this whole experience (I've never had a root canal procedure before, and I had heard bad things).

Truth is, Dr. Sturn made sure that it was no worse than an extensive cavity filling. He used two shots of novocaine rather than one--one in the gum and, a couple of minutes later, one at the base of the tooth for good measure. Since I had read up on the procedure to get some idea what to expect, I knew more or less what he was doing at each step. The removal of the nerve was totally painless; the cleaning of the root canal rattled my head a little when he did the drilling and filing (and that head-rattling always makes my scalp itch just above the ear on the affected side... weird...), but it never hurt.

Afterwards, he did the post and core procedure--the procedure that the charlatan "Dr. Crackers" had billed me for a few years ago when he prepared the original crown for my tooth. Of course, Dr. Crackers had never really installed a post at all... nor, for that matter, had he installed the crown properly, which is why I had to go through all of this today...

The worst part for me wasn't the part that I dreaded, but the three molds that Dr. Sturn made using that awful tasting purple rubber gunk (he wanted to be sure that he got the crown just perfect). I really hate sitting there tasting that awful stuff for the ten or so minutes that it takes to set up.

All done now. My jaw is a little stiff from the length of time that I had to keep my mouth open for all of this, but otherwise all is hunky-dory.

Yay, Dr. Sturn! I don't know how I lucked into such a great dentist, but I'm certainly glad about it!

DSL Downtime

While I primarily use Comcast's superb cable modem service (and I have to say that it has the highest up-time record of any online service I've ever used), I also have BellSouth/ATT's DSL service as a redundant backup (with the need to move data in order to keep Comic Shop News coming out on a schedule, I have to have functional service, so redundancy helps to ensure that). For the past couple of days, my DSL service has been just horrible... it's been down every morning when I got up, coming back on in the afternoons and then intermittently failing during the day. Sometimes all the lights were showing that everything was fine even though it wasn't; other times the DSL line was blinking to indicate that there was a problem.

I called customer support and they had no idea what was going on; there was no problem at all, they said, and everything should be fine. Must be something wrong on my end.

I decided to go out for a walk just to work out the aggravation of my phone call. As I walked out of our neighborhood, I passed the local switching box for our neighborhood... and there was a BellSouth/ATT truck. The technician was standing in front of the opened panel, throwing a switch, which would click off after a second or two, at which point he would throw it again.

"Does that have anything to do with DSL?" I asked.

"Uh huh," he replied.

"Would that cause my DSL to go offline?"

"Yep. When I throw the switch, it's online. When it clicks off, it's offline. Like a circuit breaker."

"Does it affect the whole neighborhood?"

"Nope--just the lines on this switch shelf," he said, pointing to a list of addresses on labels below the affected switches.

And there, below the last switch, was 2770 Carillon... my address.

"Tech support said they didn't know of any problem," I said.

"They don't. Haven't had time to call them. I've been throwing this switch all day."

Can't argue with that, can I?

*sigh*

End of an Era

B.C. creator Johnny Hart passed away on April 7th, one day before the release of what is destined to the final in a controversial series of Christian-themed Easter strips. (Hart is also the co-creator of Wizard of Id, but it's B.C. that is his most personal work, reflecting more of his personal views and values.)

I grew up with B.C., and had felt comfortably at home with its old-school humor, but I have to admit that the strip had begun to show its age in recent years. When Hart wasn't driving home his religious viewpoints with strongly Christian-themed strips (and that always seemed strangely out of place for a strip whose name is an abbreviation for "Before Christ," and whose milieu supposedly takes place long before the establishment of modern society or the Christian faith), he was pretty much going through the motions, relying on tried-and-true jokes and well-established character stereotypes to give the strip its momentum.

B.C. is a gag strip that never relied on continuity, and that made it seem increasingly out of place on a comic strip page where even gag strips frequently have mini-continuity arcs. But Hart, who was 76, delivered a humor strip in which each day's installment could stand on its own. The quality of that humor had declined over the past ten or fifteen years, and the religious elements had begun to appear with such frequency that the strip seem almost proselytizing at times. Still, you have to give Hart credit--he believed in what he said, and he wouldn't back down on religious content regardless of controversy.

Hart died at the age of 76, from a stroke. He leaves behind an enormous body of work that is, unfortunately, largely unavailable. Let's hope that is remedied in the near future.

So long, Johnny. Thanks for the laughs and smiles; I grew up with you, and the comic strip pages will always be a little bit emptier without you.