K-Squared Ramblings

Super-Hero Weddings

Over the past few weeks I’ve been going through the Silver Age Flash series, cataloging character appearances. I’m almost done - only 25 issues left - but it reminded me of something:

Why is it that super-hero weddings are almost always interrupted by super-villains - even when the hero’s identity is secret?

Is it just that readers expect a story with some sort of fight in it, and if it’s just a wedding they’ll be disappointed?

Consider these examples:

• Flash II (Barry Allen) and Iris West: the wedding is interrupted when Professor Zoom disguises himself as the groom, and the Flash has to get rid of him and then make it to the wedding himself.
• Flash II (Barry Allen) and Fiona Webb (after Iris’ death): Zoom returns, Flash spends the whole day chasing him around the globe, and eventually Fiona gives up and runs out of the chapel, just in time for Zoom to try to kill her. (Flash stops him with a last-second choke-hold which breaks his neck, leading to a manslaughter trial, the disappearance of Barry Allen, and finally the cancellation of the series.)
• Flash III (Wally West) and Linda Park: at the moment the rings are exchanged, Abra Kadabra kidnaps Linda, sends everyone home, and casts a massive forget spell, erasing all memory and records of her back to the point she met Wally. Eventually she escapes, Kadabra is tricked into reversing the spell, and they hold a new wedding - 18 issues later.

And it’s not just the main characters who get this treatment: Read the rest of this entry »

Audio-video evil

When I lived with my family, we used to have just the right type of TV/cable box connection for a really neat trick. My sister and I discovered by accident that, by leaving the TV on channel 4 instead of 3 when switching to cable, we could get the picture from whatever channel was on the cable box (fuzzy, but identifiable) with the audio from channel 4. Combining a dignified-looking lawyer’s speech on the predecessor of Court TV with the audio from a commercial for Pull-Ups was truly quality television. Unfortunately, now my parents have a Dish, which isn’t cooperative.

Meanwhile, our current TV/stereo system is intertwined. The TV audio comes through the stereo speakers, and the DVD and VCR are hooked up to the TV. At the Presidents’ Day BBQ with the usual gang of suspects, we put Star Wars in the VCR for some background entertainment. Enter Jakob Luebke, age 17 months. Displaying remarkable electronics aptitude, he hit the TUNER button and switched the radio from classical to Star, thereby turning the movie into one long music video. It was the strangest way any of us have ever watched A New Hope. Highlights include a Robbins Brothers commercial saying “Dial 1-800-555-RING” just as a ring of debris explodes from Alderaan, Macy Gray performing in the Mos Eisley Cantina, and a used car commercial warning against lemons (”You’ll regret it!”) as a Y-wing blows up. There’s also a bunch of stuff I can’t remember. (Guys?)

So now I’m thinking about other ways to mess with audio and video. We have a large collection of stage-musical soundtracks that include chunks of libretto for better pacing. But darn it, Fellowship still isn’t fast enough to work with Rent……

Lines that didn’t make the cut

PRINCIPAL WOOD: Nice coat. Where’d you get it?
SPIKE: Your mama.

Rain poem (untitled)

If I stepped out into untamed water
If I were to melt–
All this worldly spray paint
Swirling in bright whirlpools over the tiles–
If the sugar, the sweetness dripped off the light
Would the rain wash away in forty minutes
All I have left of self and greed?

Crazy Ideas

Have you ever realized that an elegant solution to an age-old question was sitting right in front of you? Or rather, had just left town for an undisclosed reason? My point: I think I know how the proverbial “Slayer army” can come into being.

Here’s the problem: Buffy is, for all intents and purposes, the Slayer, but as we’ve seen, when she dies, no new Slayer gets called. The line goes through Faith, who as far as we know is currently in jail. So, barring prison riots, getting any new Slayers by killing off Faith seems problematic at best, especially when you take into account that she’s slated to appear on both shows sometime this season. Doing what some people have suggested is possible, and creating a “Slayer army” by deliberately flatlining and then reviving Faith and each subsequently called Slayer, seems more plausible at this juncture than ever before, given the crowd of potentials hanging out in Sunnydale. But how to accomplish this?

Enter Gwen. We’ve seen her shock Gunn to death and then back to life, and she’s not contractually bound to appear on only one of the two shows. It wouldn’t take much for her to show up, not know anything about Faith, and kill her, then revive her when someone in the hotel goes berserk upon walking in a few seconds later. (Or any other scenario you can come up with, it doesn’t really matter.) Then you get a phone call from Sunnydale saying that one of the potentials just über-whupped a teammate in a practice session, and does Angel know anything? and Faith and Gwen eventually hightail it off to the Summers residence. Presto: Slayer army.

But how to get Faith out of jail? That one’s easy. L.A. has descended into eternal darkness, and vampire armies are looking for recruits. What better place to find people already turned to the dark side than a prison? And imagine their surprise when one of their candidates starts slaying her way out. Now there’s a teaser sequence I’d like to see.

To the stars…

Well, the critics have started coming out, claiming that manned space flight isn’t worth the risk and space exploration (at least with human crews) should be written off as a bad idea.

How can you look up at the night sky and not think it’s worth it?

Or is it because so many of use live in cities where you can’t see the stars for the lights and smog?

Are we so afraid to dream?

Are we so afraid to fly?

I’m reminded of a slogan I’ve seen at science-fiction conventions:

The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us will go to the stars.

Earth to the self-righteous….come in, people….

<RANT>

Okay. For all you holier-than-thou smarty-pantses out there, here’s a question. If an average-sized couch cushion were to hit a brick wall at 15 mph, would you think at first glance that the brick wall might be damaged?

I thought not.

So leave me the FUCK alone with your judgmental snippetiness about how YOU would have aborted the launch (let alone how you would have even seen the insulation incident they only saw on video LATER) and how could I even THINK that maybe Mission Control didn’t think they had sufficient reason to effectively waste a large chunk of what little funding they had because “human life was on the line.” Human life is on the line every time you get in your car, but that doesn’t stop normal people from driving to work. (No, I’m not normal. Thanks for asking.) Human life is on the line every time a new medication gets sold to any demographic outside who it was originally tested with, and it’s a hell of a lot more people at risk, with a lot less knowledge of what they’re getting into, than the seven people on board the shuttle. Yes, it was a tragedy. Yes, it was technically preventable. And yes, hindsight is 20/20. So, as I said, get off your high horse. There’s too many of those around lately and it’s getting hard for a good objective fact-finding scientist to breathe.

</RANT>

Columbia

It’s taken me two days to collect my thoughts enough to write about this. The loss of the orbiter and its crew hit me as a complete shock on Saturday, and I immediately started checking CNN and press releases. On the web. Not on TV. I remembered watching the Challenger footage over and over, and I remembered watching the World Trade Center footage over and over, but I couldn’t bring myself to look this time.

Barely a week ago I had been looking at mission photographs on NASA’s website. I knew the faces of the crewmembers. I had been looking for a photograph they had taken of a rare atmospheric phenomenon which was described in a newspaper article, but which hadn’t been included with the article. I never found it, and figured it would be posted later. Now I wonder if it was actually transmitted.

In the summer of 1992 my family went to Florida. We spent several days at Disney World and several days at Cape Canaveral. Two things that struck me the most were how much the old Mission Control looked like classic Star Trek, and the Astronaut Memorial. On Saturday I pulled out my photo album from that trip, and wondered where the next 7 names would be added.

Once the shock started to wear off, I started wondering about the future of space flight. And that’s when the fear and anger set in. Fear that we might abandon space flight entirely. Anger at a public that no longer cared, at a government that steadily cut support for space exploration.

The shuttle is our only ticket into space right now. The fleet was intended to last a decade or so, but all of the proposed replacements have been shut down as too costly. Can you imagine what would happen if all commercial airplanes were the same model, and an accident could ground the entire fleet for up to two years?

We’re like sailors who only know how to make one kind of boat, and after a few trips to a far-off island have decided not to stray far from shore. We haven’t been to the moon in 30 years. Think about it: 30 years. I’m nearly 27 and no one has set foot on the moon since before I was born.

The one bright spot in all this is that there is talk of renewing our commitment to space. And with that news I’m encouraged to hope that the problem that caused the disaster may be found and resolved in months, not years, that the space station crew may be able to remain on board with new supplies, or at least come home in a more comfortable ship than a Soyuz capsule. This hope may turn out to be in vain, perhaps even on both counts, but I prefer it to the fear.

The Columbia crew has one over on the Challenger crew: they made it into space. Heck, they have two: they completed their mission. I don’t know how much of their data was transmitted back and how much was going to be collected in person. But if I had to choose between dying just before getting into space or just after spending two weeks up there, I know I’d choose the latter.