Spring Break

I haven't been posting stuff over here like before for months now. Not quite shocking, I imagine.

This is the week of spring break in Los Angeles, if not Long Beach. Last weekend our tiny neighborhood was overrun with under-21 coeds fresh in from Arizona looking for a drunken good time. Timing issues...

In any case, I have been writing things for this, but upon getting three-fourths of the way through, I stop myself. I wouldn't call it a crisis of confidence, but it's in the same ballpark.

I always told myself that I like to write and post the kinds of things I would like to read, in general. So, in the middle of trying to plan how to make bad medicine tasty and desirable, I find myself fully distracted and interested in something else, and start to write a post about said topic.

But, as I sit on my couch, slumped over my computer, no longer making my medicinal powerpoints, I start to trip: Who gives a shit about the differences between gelato and ice cream? Does anyone care that "sherbert" is not a thing and the correct spelling is "sherbet", and maybe it should be pronounced like "sorbet"?

This week I planned to write a few of the longer form posts I've been tinkering with in my head until either I feel good enough about them (good luck with that) or feel like I have enough time to get them written properly. Or written at all. That's the main problem: time. I wait for a hot minute, then the post meanders in my head and becomes something else, something--to my idea's credit--that is better than the first, something more connected and cozy with the human condition. But then, while not having enough time to work on it, the post/story/piece is shattered by real events. Fun and exciting things get overshadowed by precarious reality. Se la vie.

While going through old comics to choose as prizes for kids, I learned that Valiant Comics has returned, phoenix-like to the market. This happened back in 2012, and they're part of a renaissance that may or may not be happening now in the comic industry. Valiant was one of the major non-DC/non-Marvel comic companies when I collected back before the speculative bubble burst and nearly sunk the industry. They gave up-and-comers like Joe Quesada their first taste of freedom. He now runs Marvel. Turok was a title of theirs I enjoyed, as was Ninjak and X-O Manowar.

The initial investors in Valiant Comic sold at the height of the bubble to Acclaim, the video game makers. Acclaim got in just at the worst time, watched the collapse, tried to re-configure the characters to better resemble properties they could make video games about, and eventually shuttered the publishing business.

Now Valiant is back.

That's the kind of post I would have been hatching in my head years ago. Not only hatching, but finishing with much more research.

A comic book post is something I've been working on for a while, tinkering with, but it isn't one of the posts I plan on getting done during spring break. It's even bigger and longer than that. This Valiant development could be an end-cap type of segment, and it beautifully exemplifies what I was talking about earlier: the longer I wait to get to a piece, the more it can shift and change and either cease to be or change dramatically.

I even spent some money on grocery-store-checkout-aisle Archie comics to get a sense what that shit is all about.

So...

Ice cream uses a base of cream, milk, and yolk, among the other dry ingredients (re: sugar). It gets somewhere between 15% and 85% of it's volume from air being whipped in, and can thus be served very cold. Gelato is the Italian word for ice cream, but traditionally, it uses nearly no cream and all milk, with yolks and sugar, and then has very little air whipped in. This means that at the normal temperatures that we eat ice cream, traditional gelato is too dense to eat. It needs to be served warmer, so it is a little more velvety and gooey. Because there is less fat, the flavors come through richer. You can't really eat it in a cone, though.

Sorbet is generally considered fruit, sugar, and water in some combination, while sherbet is a frozen dessert that has less dairy than ice cream but more that sorbet, which usually has none. And here I always thought that sherbet was dairy free...

The other major mid-market comic companies in the 90s were Image (Spawn!)(Still around...) and Dark Horse (Sin City! and many others; predated both Image and Valiant by many years)(Still around...)

See, even now, or maybe, especially now, I'm all over the place. Desserts and comics, and nothing too interesting.

I did reach 60k+ views on this site, which can't all really be myself and my mother and Norm, can it?

Sprink Breag!

March Madness, March Sadness, March Badness

I don't follow college basketball in any real form outside of the occasional glance towards a story or two on a news website during the regular season. I did know that Kentucky, who's on CBS at this moment, has made it through this entire season undefeated, and looks to close out the tournament as such, the first undefeated champion since Bobby Knight and Indiana in the '70s.

This is the time of the year that bettors and television hounds call "March Madness", when the field of now 68 college basketball teams get set up into a bracket and then duke it out in single elimination to eventually find a winner. This is the road to the Final Four.

Anyway, last night, a Friday night, after getting back home after dinner, we put the one game on that was on free television. They go by fast, and we don't have a real rooting interest, besides keeping an eye on the brackets we filled out. The game was an 8-seed versus a 9-seed: San Diego State versus St. Johns University.

SDSU is in the same conference as Cal Poly and Long Beach State, so if we feel a twinge of proximity-rooting, as happens from time to time, we'd be rooting for the Aztecs. St. Johns is in Queens, and, like with LIU-Brooklyn, we also root for New York City teams.

This game was back and forth, and San Diego State won. The teams are stationed in the South region, for reasons I'll be hard-pressed to understand, in an arena in Charlotte, North Carolina.

San Diego versus Queens in Charlotte.

The arena was nearly empty. I've been hearing that there are many arenas this year where guys can't give tickets away. They're also saying that the fans of college basketball are starting to align closely with two other sports' fans: golf and baseball: trending older and white.

There was a sports score tracker updating the other games going on on other channels. One game was 15-9 with six minutes left in the first half. This year the talk has also been about how bad the basketball product has been, how boring and brick-filled the games really are. First team to 55 wins? Even Obama mentioned the, er, "pace" of the college games.

Big tournament of occasionally bad product being played in sad, nearly empty arenas.

The Final Four and Final will be full and exciting, we're all pretty sure.

Happy St. Paddy's 2015

I've got a brisket at home corning, and it may need to be cut in half to be boiled. The weather has finally cooled off, down to the mid 70s at least, so the prospect of boiling cauldrons of water isn't such a bad idea.

In the past on this Irish Day I've oscillated between wishing someone would pinch me to toasting an animated mutant clone.

Finally got a bowler, and got my lappy to work for this host at the J-O-B. Also, on a bit of a day-cation for the day, having been ousted from Sherweeziland for a colleague's need (hence the periodic table in the background):

First time I've been sick in a while, and it came on strong this past Sunday. At least the corned brisket is large enough that it should be able to last until I'm better...

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Happy Pi Day

Why not?

March 14th is becoming known as Pi Day, and not in the nerdy circles I run. I posted a Happy Pi Day post on the first Pi Day I had on this blog (3/14/2010), but now my mom is explaining it people she meets at the blood bank.

The ignorant blood bank worker had mentioned that my mom was the third person who'd wished her a "Happy Pi Day".

That seems more significant---ladies on a Saturday running errands mentioning in passing a mathematical/calendar oddity---than math nerds spreading the math-gospel to each other a dozen years ago.

The "cool" people beat the "squares" in the 50s-60s-70s era and the "nerds" have beat the "jocks" in the 80s-90s-00s era.

I'll let Dan lobby for the May 4th Star Wars Day recognition.

Also,

Happy Pi Day 2011
Happy Pi Day 2012
Happy Pi Day 2013
Happy Pi Day 2014

Lousy Smarch Weather

The weather may be hellacious around the country, but down here, in the confines of los Diez Sur, it's been between the sixties and the eighties for months. Ryan Talyat, an old running mate, was visiting and reminded us of the perfect Simpsons line, "Lousy Smarch Weather," with a photograph of the thermometer of his automobile's center console: 91. It was March 7th and he was in northern San Diego county.

Anyway, in another sense, this has been a lousy Smarch, in that we lost Sam Simon:

(Not my picture; thanks photographer!)

Sam Simon was one of the three forces behind the cultural phenomenon and comedy institution we call The Simpsons. 

Cartoonist Matt Groening sold a pitch he made up at the last minute while waiting for his meeting with the Fox executives, James L. Brooks used his storytelling savvy to find the emotional heart of any episode he was asked to participate in the production of, and Sam Simon was the leader that flushed out the other characters, the town, and was instrumental in hiring the original staff that gave the show that edge from the start. 

Oh, and Sam Simon used his own cartoonist background to smooth out Groening's sketches into the more recognizable characters we have today.

His relationship with Groening was, eh, "strained". He never felt like he got enough credit. In a paraphrase of an anecdote from a fantastic oral history of the origin of the show, somebody was trying to give Simon some perspective. They told him that Groening's story was better, and who's to argue that? One one side you have talented and successful rich-kid television writer and producer who scores another hit; but the other side? Smarty cartoonist goes from searching the couch for change to buy burgers to King of Television. That's America, baby!

Anyway, after the fourth season, in 1993, Simon was out, but was given a piece of the lucrative syndication, VHS, and DVD  rights. He'd been making in the ballpark of $10 million a year from the Simpsons. From 1993 until this March when he died. 

Cancer.

He'd spent plenty of time finding charities to donate his Simpsons cash to. Near the very end he was making plans to get rid of it all. Very public plans. He has vegan food plans for inner city kids and he supports PETA and anti-whaling organizations among very many other things.

Anyway, during an interview conversation near the end, he discussed his life. To paraphrase, he said he never felt cheated by cancer, that he'd spent the last thirty years doing whatever he wanted wherever he wanted while being supplied with a nearly endless supply of money.

Not too bad.

On the The Simpsons "138th Episode Spectacular", a clipshow episode from season 7, there is a scene where they show fakey photos of the three co-creators: Groening, Brooks, and Simon. Groening was shown as a skinny eye-patch-wearing gun-holstered whacko saluting some unseen thing; Brooks was a portly mustachioed man in a top had, smiling and clenching bags of cash. 

The producers, many of whom had been hired by Simon and had remained close, told him they were going to put a slide in for him saying "File Lost" or some other joke in that vein.

He sent them the drawing they used in the episode: