Super Bowl Sunday

I think this first pass is pretty good. There are some little tweaks that I will probably make in the near future, but I want to mull them over first.

I am not a great Web designer, in my opinion, even putting aside my basic inexperience with graphics programs. I can't 'see' whole layouts at once, and have to think about them for a long time to even approximate the effect I'm interested in. (I'm a little better at, say, comic book page layout, since I spent most of high school developing what art skills I have by drawing superheroes.) But I think my journal pages are turning out fairly well, which is to say, they're not ugly and they fulfill the functional roles they need to play.

And, I basically like my blue-and-purple color scheme.

At any rate, Trish's Web design career is safe - from me, at any rate!

(Suggestions are welcome, of course. You could even use the forum!)

This afternoon I went over to Ben's where he and his roommates were throwing a Super Bowl party. There were about 25 people there, all crowded (well, mostly) in their medium-sized living room! Wow! Most people arrived a little before or just after the game started, around 3:20 pm. There was much junk food (I brought the Hungarian frozen cream recipe which was such a hit at Thanksgiving, and they went really quickly here, too).

We all paid special attention to the commercials, which were better than last year. By acclimation, E*Trade had the best commercials, especially the stupid one which ended with "We just wasted two million dollars." (There were a couple of other companies which tried making "stupid" commercials, but none were anywhere near as funny; they were just stupid.) The other great one was EDS's "herding cats" one, which I would love to get a QuickTime movie of; it was very well done, although it had a tenuous connection to their product.

(Sadly, herdingcats.com is not available as a domain, although it's not being actively used, either.)

The football game itself was also excellent, and showcased the abilities of both teams: Kurt Warner and the Rams had over 400 passing yards (a Super Bowl record), and Steve McNair scrambled around and ran for a Super Bowl record number of yards for a quarterback. The Rams were up 9-0 at halftime in an all-defense game, finally scored a touchdown in the third quarter, and watched as the Titans marched down the field several times to tie it up. Finally Warner threw a long touchdown pass, McNair and the TItans scrambled down the field at the very end, and ended up about a yard and a half short of tying the game when time ran out. The final: Rams 23, Titans 16. A really good game.

After almost everyone left, Becky came over and joined me, Grant, Ben and Subrata for a couple of hours of Bridge, which featured some interesting hands.

Comic book review time.

Marvel: The Lost Generation #12, by Roger Stern and John Byrne (Marvel). This is the first issue of a 12-issue series, which counts backwards from #12. This actually makes some sense, believe it or not. Cassandra Locke, a historian from the 22nd century, comes back to (roughly) 1985 just in time to see Earth's superhuman population stop a Skrull invasion of Earth at great cost. The catch is: Locke isn't familiar with any of these heroes, and neither are we. After watching the battle play out, Locke resolves to go further into the past to find out who these people are, and try to avert the events she's witnessed.

M:TLG exists because it's ridiculous to think that the Fantastic Four and the Avengers were founded in the mid-1960s and are still active as 30-something heroes today. Instead, Stern and Byrne play with the idea that of course the FF have been around for about ten years, but what happened between 1955 (when the 50s Captain America disappeared) and the FF's space flight? Well, there was a whole generation of heroes who were not-so-well-known, as well as a handful of characters we are familiar with who were also still active (Nick Fury, for instance).

This first issue introduces the cast of characters, at the end of their careers (although doubtless there will be a few more whom we haven't yet seen), and presumably while we'll be watching their careers in reverse, we'll see Cassandra Wilson's story (heavy-handed name and all) play out from start to finish, from her point of view.

It's an entertaining story, and Byrne does some nice work on the art (although I guess I have to just resign myself that his art will just never be as nice as it was in the 1970s, when he packed in more information per panel and was being inked by artists with more sensitive lines). I'm looking forward to the rest of this series.