Feeling A Little Down
It's been a while since I've felt kind of down for no particular reason, but I've been a little glum tonight. I think I'm still trying to cope with the changes at work that I mentioned several days ago. Or maybe it's just been a long and kind of tedious week and I'm looking forward to the weekend. I dunno.
Still, considering how down I was the first four months of the year, all-in-all I'd have to say this is a big improvement.
I approach these things rather dispassionately; I don't have any sense of loyalty to the Packers (if I were going to be a serious fan of some team, it would probably be the Patriots), and I genuinely thought that the Lions had a good chance of beating the Packers tonight. Of course, I didn't predict that their rookie quarterback would tie or break a few NFL and team records during the night, or that Brett Favre would continue his ongoing implosion. The Packers weren't destroyed and embarrassed in the same way as when they played the Vikings a week and a half ago, but it wasn't pretty.
I think I'm the only person in the pool to pick the Lions to win tonight, so I'll head into the weekend with a 5-to-13 point lead over the other people in the pool. Will it be enough to win the week? Who knows.
On reading these early Stan Lee/Steve Ditko stories, it occurs to me that there's never been anything quite like them before or since.
Incidentally, Marvel Comics is "rebooting" Spider-Man in the present day, going back to re-telling his origin and writing new stories about him from scratch. The weight of his present continuity has rendered his stories basically incomprehensible. (I've thumbed through the Spidey titles from time-to-time in between the occasional periods when I buy them regularly for a year or so.)
Which is too bad. Unlike some series, there wasn't really anything here that couldn't be fixed. Spider-Man had just devolved into a dark, brooding, depressing action strip, but a good writer could have pulled him out of that without much trouble. Jettison the silly villains and focus on Peter and his wife Mary-Jane. Give Peter a job where he has real day-to-day problems, but don't play up the silly melodrama. Have him use his physics background. Heck, turn the original premise around and make him a distinguished scientist. "Oh, no, Doc Ock's robbing a bank, but I have to give my talk on this research paper! What'll I do?" I could be amused by that.
I also picked up the collection of the first Hellboy series by Mike Mignola. Mignola has done an awful lot of quirky stuff in comics, and his art is very stylized. This book, Seed of Destruction, is basically a horror story in the Lovecraft tradition. Hellboy himself is (perhaps) a demon who was summoned in the 1940s, but he doesn't remember anything before his summoning. He and his partners basically investigate paranormal events. It's entertaining, and I plan to pick up the other two collections.
Unfortunately, they're not showing anything this weekend I want to see: A Clockwork Orange, which I hate, and Blazing Saddles, which is okay, but I only saw it a few years ago and I don't really want to see it again. I'll probably go see Dog Day Afternoon next week. But they've got a lot of good stuff showing over the next couple of months. I'm sure I'll miss a lot of good ones, due to lack of time or energy to see more movies, but I'll also see a lot of stuff I've never seen before. (Plus, I'll finally see Blade Runner on the big screen.)
It should be a good series. I'm glad the hated Yankees have to fly across the fricking continent, too.
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