Monday, November 11, 2002

Wow, what a weird, crazy weekend this turned out to be.

In the aftermath of the LSU/Kentucky debacle, there was the unbelievable Atlanta Falcons-Pittsburgh Steelers game , which ended in a tie (the first NFL tie in five years!) and almost ended with another miraculous, no-time-left-on-the-clock desperation TD pass by the other team! Fortunately, the Steelers receiver never got the ball in the end zone, instead catching it with his feet in but not the ball, and the tie was preserved. A tie is frustrating, but if you had told me on Saturday that Pittsburgh QB Tommy Maddox would pass for 4 TDs and over 450 yards and WR Plaxico Burriss would have over 250 receiving yards, I would have thought that Atlanta would have been beaten by 40 points. Instead, they got down but not out and really showed me something, and I'm as proud if them as I've been since that miracle '98 season.

Then there was the weather around here. Storms, tornadoes, hail, torrential rain, wind, warm temps...anything but the sort of weather one expects in November. Fortunately, most of the bad stuff was to the north and south of us, but we still had some nastiness. My daughter and I went to get pizza last night and got caught in a hailstorm...had to pull off the road, and failing to find an overhang to get under, pulled in next to a building figuring that getting pummeled on three sides was better than getting pummeled on four, full on! Fortunately, the hail didn't get bigger than marble size, so I avoided a repeat of the hailstorm of 1998 in which my (and everyone else's) vehicle, sitting in the factory parking lot, got beat all to hell by golf ball size ice chunks as we all watched helplessly. At any rate, another gloomy weekend, and no, the pizza wasn't worth it. Today's a bit better, though...mostly sunny and a bit cooler.

Lotsa comics news on Sunday, most of it DC oriented...you can read about it here. Vertigo has a couple of interesting projects coming up, a revamp of the Losers and something called the Wintermen, and I'm delighted that it finally occurred to someone to get Kyle Baker to do Plastic Man. Also, Kurt Busiek has finally gotten around to doing Astro City again, which is long overdue good news in my book.

Watched the Justice League:The Savage Time event Saturday, and though it was overall pretty good, and often clever...but the same complaints I have had about the series as a whole were still present, like the incredibly inconsistent depiction of the powers of the League itself. Superman, for example, is shown to be able to move mountains or stop giant War Wheels in their tracks with a minimum of effort, and sometimes all it takes to knock him out of the air is a simple rocket shot. Wonder Woman is often unbelieveably powerful, more so than Superman even, and the "bullets and bracelets" thing is a heck of a lot more convincing when one or two people are firing at her than if an entire battalion of soldiers or airplanes is doing so. Apparently being able to vibrate between molecules is not in Flash's power description, and why would anybody who could become intangible submit to electrical torture like J'onn did? I know, he overpowered his torturer eventually but as soon as he regained consciousness I would think he'd be phasing out of there! And I didn't think that Green Lanterns needed to recharge their rings anymore. I don't know about that one, since I'm not a GL reader. Still, quibbling aside, this one didn't seem nearly as long as it was, always a good sign, and I enjoyed the appearances of Easy Company and especially the Blackhawks. I wouldn't mind seeing a Blackhawks animated series, but I won't hold my breath. So JL:TST could have been better, but all in all the effort that Dini and Co. seemed to bring to it showed this time out.

Also, on Saturday night I watched the Michael Douglas film Don't Say A Word. It's nice to know that the tradition of crafting good looking thrillers without letting little things like internal consistency or logic get in the way continues. That being said, it still had some good things going for it, like the underrated Oliver Platt in a thankless role and a far fetched but snazzy ending, as well as the gorgeous Brittany Murphy (of course, you wouldn't know it from this flick, in which she spends all her time looking like a zombie). Rent this if you get a discount or a three-for-one deal.

That's all I can think of for now, perhaps more later.

Music today so far: Semisonic-All About Chemistry and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by some group called the Beatles or something.

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