From the Desk of Bone Daddy

However you choose to celebrate this harvest season, I send best wishes for a fun time. My San Francisco sojourn will take me off the grid, as it were, and I'll return next week with what will doubtless be a mighty tale of celebrating Halloween and Dia de los Muertos. Tidings of good cheer from the desk of my sole decoration this year, Bone Daddy!

Kitchen Heroics

Comic book scribes hail from a variety of backgrounds, yet I doubt any can match Gail Simone for pure mojo: the former hairdresser challenged the mistreatment of female comic book characters with her website, Women in Refrigerators, and used its popularity to start a career in comics. She writes with wit and style, often portraying traditional heroes doing non-traditional things, like the following scene, written by Simone and illustrated by the great Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez:

She might have baked for her Justice League friends in the past, but I doubt Wonder Woman evinced such funny and logical reactions before. "I'm afraid to try it," says Flash, "and I'm afraid not to try it." Batman and Martian Manhunter (don't you love superhero names?) don't hesitate diving right in. She's saved the world countless times, how bad can her cookies be? No, it's safe to say they must be tasty. It also appears that Superman was in the kitchen with her and for all we know he helped bake the cookies with his heat vision: if that isn't teamwork, nothing is.

Weekend Wonders

How was your weekend? This is a shout-out to the San Francisco Giants for making mine when they took the National League pennant, as well as to Battlestar Galactica, a delicious dinner, and one strange, obscure 70's sci-fi film. The Giants haven't played at Candlestick Park since the turn of the century, perhaps most memorably in 1989 during the Loma Prieta earthquake, and admittedly I've not followed them as closely since childhood days when we would watch them at the 'stick in the freezing fog or under blue skies. Be that as it may, I'm thrilled that they'll be at the World Series this year.

Friday night I was gifted with a member's-only pass to the Science Fiction Museum for a world premiere of Battlestar Galactica: The Exhibition. It was a dream come true, as I had the privilege of attending a Q&A session with the main movers and shakers of the show (Mary McDonnell, who played President Laura Roslin, was sadly absent). Michael Hogan (Colonel Tigh) sat at the far left, with Richard Hatch (Apollo on the 1978 show, Tom Zarek on the new one), Glen Larson (creator of BSG), Kate Vernon (Ellen Tigh), Ronald Moore (driving creative force behind the re-imagined version), and Edward James Olmos (Admiral Bill Adama). Anybody who adores this show like me can understand that this was simply awesome; everyone else, your patience is appreciated!

I mentioned a delicious dinner. The gal was up to her usual kitchen antics when she created a feast for me and a friend, and let me tell you it was hog heaven. Nothing complicated, as the gal herself can testify: Chicken thighs for cheapness, pounded flat, wrapped around cheese and chutney, 350 degrees for an hour. The stuffing will leak all over the pan but it makes sort of a gravy so that's okay. Nice to put a pan of little white potatoes in at the same time. Hear that rumbling? That's my stomach, the old sentimental fool.

For dessert the oddball confection Z.P.G. envisions an over-populated world choked by smog, thus the meaning of the title: zero population growth. That's Charlie Chaplin's daughter, Geraldine, clutching her infant on the right. Though breaking the law of the land by bearing a child, she and Oliver Reed seem quite unaware of their crimes against fashion. Such a desultory tale populated with screeching dolls and Ringo Starr hairstyles is understandably and deservedly obscure. I'm surprised it even made it to dvd, unless a 3D remake is around the corner. I'm seeing Joaquin Phoenix and Lindsay Lohan.

The Boon of Entrecard

http://www.chethstudios.net/2009/01/social-media-wallpaper-pack-entrecard.html

Entrecard has been good to me, creating access to great blogs that I might otherwise have missed in the teeming multitude of the online community. Dropping on these sites enables me to see the latest (if any) posts by writers whose work I admire and enjoy. Though it might appear a bit hinky to acknowledge others' work by dropping on it, this form of currency is not meant to compete with pigeons but to establish an exchange rate of real value, which is to say established by the quality of the work. I've really come to appreciate this unique aspect of Entrecard.

Forums are something I miss, a bygone aspect of Entrecard that seems now like part of a distant and simpler past. They provided direct contact with the network on a variety of topics, the kinds of things you don't often discuss in personal messages with people you've never a met but enjoy conversing with on intelligent and stimulating subjects. Now I fall back on comments, which are even more impersonal. I would like to see the forums return. It would also be good to see better diligence on buggy sites. Not that it happens often, but every once in awhile there is a run of bad blogs that make me question Entrecards' due diligence. I've come to realize the value of connections with "good" blogs sufficiently to keep me dropping; by the same token, the slightest increase of viral sites in this community could easily drive me away.

Overall, Entrecard has been a positive experience and I expect to continue dropping for the foreseeable future.

http://entrecard.com/blog/?p=1593

Witchy O'Donnell

Is she or isn't she? This is the question across the nation as Christine O'Donnell, Tea Party challenger to Delaware Democrat Chris Coons' Senate seat, equivocates and contradicts her way out of teenage dabblings in witchcraft. Quite a quandary. At first she admitted to the dabbling. Soon after emerged the now-notorious campaign ad in which she said into the camera, "I'm not a witch. I'm nothing you've heard. I'm you." (Are these the two options, she's a magic user or mirror?) The novelty of a politician taking a stand whether they are or aren't they a broom-carrying member of the local coven wore off quickly -or seemed to: this week O'Donnell is back on topic and saying that not only does she regret the ad but, yes, she did dabble. Doesn't mean she'll be dressing up for Halloween, except maybe as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Ha. That's cute, but the joke's on us: airhead politics, sadly not a novelty, is keeping O'Donnell's name in the media and makes very real the possibility that she will unseat the incumbent. That's sad.

Campaigning in 2008, Barack Obama had a name for this kind of thing: silly season. He was referring to ridiculous attempts by his opponents to focus on superficial details of his background, but the idea here is the same: make enough noise and your recognition factor goes up, regardless of the quality of the racket. Too often voters go with name recognition rather than any true understanding of candidates. Thus the ongoing saturation parade of the likes of O'Donnell will likely prove more effective than Chris Coons' strategy of sitting by. You would almost think he wants to lose his job and be remembered as old what's-his-name. Maybe it's not too late for him to come out as a warlock.

Wayback Wednesday

Mesmerizing footage shot from the nose of a San Francisco cable car days before the 1906 earthquake leveled most of the city. This is so wonderful I had to share it:



And here is chilling footage taken after the devastating quake: