The Curse of the Weregeek.

One of my jobs at work is to lay out the company’s weekly newsletter, which involves a certain amount of back-and-forth with my co-worker Terry, who is more or less the editor (I say “more or less” because he’s also sort of reporter, publisher, and paperboy – it’s complicated.)

This morning we were debating the sequence of two stories for the Bulletin, and although I didn’t agree with his position, I said, “Well, ultimately, this is your decision.  After all, that’s why we put you in charge of the Daily Planet.”

“Absolutely!” he replied, and pounded his fist on the table.  “I want pictures of Spider-Man, and I want them now.”

Sigh.

“Actually, that would be the Daily Bugle.  The Daily Planet is Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olson – you know, Superman?  However, that was an acceptable imitation of J. K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson Junior.”

“Thank you, thank you.”

“Were you aware that J. Jonah Jameson the Third, J. Jonah Jameson Junior’s son, you know, the astronaut, actually I think his name was John Jameson, became a werewolf after he came back from his trip to the Moon?  There was this alien gem he found on the Moon, lots of alien gems in Marvel Comics for some reason.

"Of course he fought Spider-Man, his father found out and was all embarrassed at having a son with meta-abilities*, but he kept attacking his father when he was a wolf, odd bit of psychology there, and ultimately he went to another dimension where he was a werewolf all the time and it turned out he was actually a god.  He had his own comic for a while**, drawn by George Perez if memory serves, back in the late 70s.”

A brief silence followed.

“Sorry about that, I actually know all this stuff.”

“You know I’m going to have to Google all of that now, or at least the parts I remember.”

Sorry, Terry.  Sometimes I forget that the whole reason I started blogging was to avoid boring people in person.

- Sid

* This is a politically correct euphemism for “super powers”.

** Research revealed this to be incorrect – Man-Wolf did not have his own comic, but he did an extended run in Marvel Premiere, which was a showcase publication that featured a variety of interesting one or two-off pilot projects like Man-Wolf, the 3-D Man, Woodgod, Adam Warlock – Adam Warlock was a great character, although really not at all the standard superhero type, and Jim Starlin did some fabulous work with him when the character had his own comic.  Jim Starlin created Thanos as well, there’s a really brief shot of Thanos at the end of the Avengers movie, with an inside joke about courting Death, because Thanos was in love with Death, the actual personification of Death, who I did not expect to be female, but surprisingly Thanos isn’t in the next Avengers movie, the villain is Ultron, which is odd because there’s been a lot of foreshadowing of the Thanos story line, including a shot of the Infinity Gauntlet in the treasure room in Asgard in the first Thor movie, and a post-credit scene in the second Thor movie featuring the Collector as played by Benecio del Toro, so maybe they’re going to switch that to a Thor sequel, although really, the Infinity Gauntlet sequence was an Avengers storyline, even if it did pull in Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four …

...sorry, doing it again...

"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Today we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Martian rover Opportunity.  Although Curiousity tends to get more press, Opportunity has been steadfastly sending back data from Mars since its landing near Yellowknife Bay on Gale Crater in 2004 - an astonishing record for a probe that was expected to last about 90 days.

Dusty, battered, and starting to suffer a bit from senility due to physical errors in its memory array, it's difficult to avoid anthropomorphizing the little fellow - one pictures a sort of Wall-E fascination with the minutiae of the Martian landscape*, or the kind of wistful dedication shown by the drones in Silent Running, faithful to the wishes of a distant master.  

The ten year landmark offers an interesting opportunity (no pun intended) for NASA's long-term representative on Mars.  According to Canadian law, after ten years the principle of adverse possession - more commonly known as squatter's rights - takes effect, allowing the inhabitant of a piece of property to claim ownership under the right circumstances.  International space law forbids any sovereign nation to make such a claim, but there is no mention of individuals, electronic or otherwise, claiming a planet for themselves.

Personally, I rather like the idea of an American probe declaring independence and claiming Mars on behalf of itself and its fellow cybernetic explorers.  Hopefully the United States government would support the decision - I think it would be mean-spirited of them to deny Opportunity the same chance for self-determination that their ancestors fought for in 1776.

- Sid

* If I was programming the AI for an extraterrestrial probe, I would want to somehow imbue it with the same combination of happiness, excitement, interest and respect that I feel whenever I travel to a foreign country.

"Response: like iPhones, but without the touch screen."

I’ve been casually re-reading ’Salem’s Lot on my iPhone as a fill-in text until I upload some new books, and, as always, it’s a pleasure to watch a professional at work.  In the follow-up to Carrie, his first published novel, Stephen King clearly demonstrates that his great strength is not necessarily his ability to create horror, but the manner with which he evokes the minutiae of day-to-day existence.  Much of his work combines these skills, contrasting sometimes brutally frank depictions of everyday life with the horrors under the bed to make the latter all the more chilling.*

However, as I read through King's gripping story of vampires in small-town Maine, I began to have a sort of subconscious discomfort that had nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.  Finally I realized that, at some undefined point in time, books like ’Salem’s Lot that I had originally read in the 70s had become historical fiction.

The majority of the characters in Salem’s Lot were born in the 1940s and 50s.  The story makes reference to all kinds of anachronistic concepts:  party lines**, peace marches, typewriters, storm windows, and the option of owning a television set without a colour screen. There are no cell phones.  There are no computers.

The joke is that in a less focused narrative, the story wouldn’t seem as outdated – it’s the extreme degree of detail with which King sets his scenes that makes the dated timeline so obvious.

It's interesting to think that contemporary mainstream fiction will eventually suffer a similar fate.  Imagine 50 years from now, when some youthful reader looks up from his virtual holo-text and says, "Weblink, inquiry - what is a 'blackberry'?"

- Sid

* When you think about it, some of Stephen King's most popular work isn't part of the horror genre at all.  Look at the success of his non-horror stories such as The Body or Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (which you may be more familiar with under their titles of their movie adaptations: Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption).  

** For the younger readers in the audience, party lines have nothing to do with queuing up for nightclubs - a party line is a shared phone system where different combinations of long and short rings indicate who should pick up their phone to take a call.