Tom Delay to Appear on Dancing with the Stars

Respect.


Presumably dancing to La Cucaracha will be deemed a little too inside baseball.

Whatever, SUGAR LAND PRIDE Y'ALL!!!!!!111!11

Also, Baylor pride.

Full disclosure: Tom Delay was an exterminator in Sugar Land and I grew up in Sugar Land and later went to Baylor and Tom Delay is whatever you call the cancer that cancer gets.

Crisis in Infinite Riverdales

(I don’t know how much background is necessary for me to explain why something I saw on the Internet is funny to me, so feel free to skip the first 1,010 words of this.)

And but so I think this is common knowledge, but: if you’re a fellow of a certain age, then when you were a kid there was understood to be a Line in the Sand (Colonel Travis stizz)¹ separating DC Comics and Marvel Comics. I stood on what is generally considered to be the Correct Side of the Line, unless you are Completely Retarded. So did, I believe, Jonathan Lethem², but por el otro mano as good as Michael Chabon can be sometimes, I believe he made the wrong choice and I will never be able to get fully behind him: I believe him to be a DC Man. (I think it’s all that talk of capes; capes are sooo DC.)

The reason this was the right choice circa 1978 is because the Marvel take on a “superhero” as a dysfunctional person whose superpower is an amplified distillation of some imperfect human trait was totally appealing to someone who was, say, waaay into dragons (and/or dungeons? yes.), while DC’s überhuman angle was totally remote and alien and repellant [to that person]. But on top of that, during this period, DC had no idea what it was doing³ (this page comprises like, 95% DC comics: this is what I think of when I think of DC).

So: This thing in The Lede⁴ was pointed out to me a few months ago: it turns out Largely Pointless to Me DC Character The Flash had died! But actually not really!⁵ And I said in my head: DC Comics! You are maddening! For: in my head, the whole endless alternate universes / infinite parallel earths / lazy retcon thing where multiple storylines branch off for multiple versions of the same character was totally a DC thing. So in order for my head to prove my head right (doing this is 93% of my day) I googled it and my head was wrong. Wrong in italics.

Marvel is actually much, much worse than DC. Wikipedia lists 61 Universes for DC, while Marvel clocks in at a frankly headsnapping 340 (not including “pocket universes” which I don’t want to know about), one of which is Jack Kirby’s inane Dinosaur World, and another of which is actually the DC Universe, so let’s round that up to an even 400 (Source: Start Menu>All Programs>Applications>Calculator).

I don’t think this can totally be chalked up to: “Marvel has more fanboys”; I think some of that has to be chalked up to: “Everything is Ridiculous”. What the hell happened?
This piece in The High Hat has a good summary of what the hell happened (and includes The Flash as an example, bringing this all full circle) (for fans of bringing things full circle, this is for you) (but hey also Said Fans, also check out the Warlock chapter in Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics referenced below in Footnote 3: Holy crap are things ever brought full circle there oh my god it’s TOTALLY NUTS) and does it more succinctly than I could, so you are encouraged to click.

But anyway, perhaps you are now thinking: isn’t this whole thing crying out for some sort of obsessive fanboy unintentional metaparody? OK, so: All of that was so I could say this:

Hey look at this funny thing I saw on the Internet:
A List of Alternate Universes in Archie Comics.

OK, thanks!

¹ I just spent a week in Texas! Carl’s Corner is not looking too great. I wanted to get to West to buy kolaches, so I did not even check to see if they were still selling BioWillie. CARL’S CORNER WE ARE ROOTING FOR YOU.

² (his story about the kid that dressed up as Avengers team member The Vision = breaks my heart because: The Vision!?; Lethem’s superheroes generally seem to be the second tier ones and generally fail)

³ But maybe it never knew what it was doing? This goofy cover from Showcase #4 depicting The Flash breaking out of a filmstrip was correctly deconstructed in Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics:
The cover’s text and art reveal fumbling confusion over what exactly it is advertising. Is this comic a showcase for art, as in a museum? A series of frozen representations of something so unreal that a body moving at high speed leaves parallel lines of ink behind it? A movie that isn’t really a movie, made out of individual images that the eye can see in or out of sequence at the same time?

Fun trivia fact: I have a copy of Reading Comics because I won it for writing this story, which is only 100 words more than this post. It needed a better editor! (the book, not this post) But it is still pretty good! And it fills in a lot of gaps for people like me who haven’t been paying attention. Especially the chapter on “Warlock”: it is kind of mind blowing. If I ever hold a contest on this blog and you win the contest, I will totally send this book to you.

⁴ “An Unexpected Comic Book Resurrection”? In what “multiverse” was it unexpected? OBVIOUSLY he was going to be resurrected: he’s a dude.

For what it’s worth, the reason I was thinking about all of this again months after I saw the Lede piece was this Twitter post (sorry, “tweet”?) from Defective Yeti: Tonight I’m going to have to add “Read entire history of Green Lantern on Wikipedia” to my to-do list just so I can cross something off. I TOTALLY GET THAT, except for the part where it’s Green Lantern. (I was still sad when Martin Nodell died! I’m not made of stone.)

FAKE CONVERSATION WITH GREEN LANTERN I JUST HAD IN MY HEAD:
ME: Your insignia is a rotated theta.
GL: I’ve rotated a few thetas in my day, if you know what I mean.
ME: Do you mean you went Insert>Picture>Word Art>Symbol Font>“Q”; Rotate 90°?
GL: ……yes.

EXEUNT

⁵
CAST:
Should Have Stayed at the Bus Station......Barry Allen

Drive Friendly

I had never seen this anti-crack PSA featuring Van Silk & Melle Mel because I am from suburban Texas where we had neither crack nor rap.

But that is not to say that suburban Texas is without problems (you may be surprised to learn), and in fact we did have indiginous problems + our own musicians fighting those problems: Witness the Murderer's Row of Texas singers (and Matthew McConaughey) (and Shamu) who desire that Texas, the messing of with, you don't.

And yet, if you are looking at this list and you were in suburban Texas during the 80s, then right now you are saying, "Where are Johnny Dee and the Rocket 88s and the impossible-to-judge-the-ironic-distance-with-which-to-view/listen-to-them-that-follows-them-around?"

And the sad answer is that the Ceti Alpha V Ceti Eel Larvae in your ear that is Johnny Dee and the Rocket 88s' take on the Don't Litter campaign is not really anywhere on the site that is clickable (I mean, I guess you can click but nothing happens) (metaphor for life in suburban Texas in the 80s? INVESTIGATE), but thankfully JD&tR88s themselves have come to everyone's rescue; here is the video on the band's own website that will make you not litter in Texas... on the beach. But also don't litter anywhere.


Except it's OK to litter in Lady Bird Lake as long as you are littering pieces of paper that say, "Lady Bird Johnson didn't want you to name this lake after her, so I'm just letting you know that I'm still going to call it Town Lake."

(Lady Bird Johnson loved her ironies.)

Next Year: Deep-Fried Acrylamide

(on a stick)

Hot on the heels of last year's Deep Fried Coke, this fall's Texas State Fair is offering up Deep Fried Latte. (via, via)

Interestingly, the mixing of "Deep Fried" and "Latte" does not create particle annihilation yielding high energy gamma rays equal to the difference of the rest mass of the products of the annihilation and the rest mass of the original ingredients.



See also: Snook, TX Favorite Son Frank Sodolak's chicken fried bacon (with cream gravy!).


You know, I was going to say if next year's fair has deep fried Charles Portis novels, I would move back to Texas (I could buy, like, three houses there!).

But: Texas is a trick; if you read too many stories about it (I'm not (necessarily) speaking of the deep fried comestibles stories), it starts to feel like Dostoevsky is in charge of event planning down there, but the allure of Aggressively Eccentric Mythic Existential Outlaw Texas is only actualized if you move way the fuck off the Grid, and even then I don't know if it really exists.

I lived there for twenty years, and I only got to see Townes Van Zandt once before he died and I've never seen the Marfa lights; the Cadillac Ranch is just kind of silly and the "Largest Cross in the Western Hemisphere" isn't exactly the good kind of eccentric.
On the other hand, it's totally possible that the main problem is that I'm lame (evidence supporting this might be: I didn't learn to pronounce "museum" correctly until I moved out-of-state; I probably have to take some of the blame there).

In conclusion, I would describe my attitude toward the new Coen Brothers movie as "guardedly excited".
Please don't let me down, Aggressively Eccentric Mythic Existential Outlaw Texas!