All along the watchtower!

No, not that one.

Good grief! It's WATCHMEN! Seriously! I don't think there's anything (other than some of the particulars of the costume design, and even then it's close!) that isn't a frame out of the comic book. They're even keeping the logo the same. I would think that this is the sort of trailer that if you didn't know the comic you'd say "Um. Ok. That looks... Busy." But if you DO know the book, every frame sets you tingling. Especially Osterman in the disintegration chamber. That got me more than the crystal city on Mars. Oh, and of course the Comedian getting tossed out the window. Yowza.

(For the unwashed, look here.)

p.s. Googling for the image at the top of this post led me to this. Small world, eh?

Dave Stevens 1955-2008

Dave Stevens, creator of the Rocketeer, passed away on March 10th. *sigh*

Best Sheldon EVER

Ok, not ever. But it's up there. Anything that makes fun of Tom freaking Bombadil is good in my book. There is a reason that he has NEVER been in ANY form of adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Radio. Movies. Comics. Lot of time on NOTHING.

Sad Sparky

Yeah, I'm way behind. Two episodes of Firefly, couple of Heroes (it's slow, but it's good). Been playing Half Life 2.2 / Portals ("...and then there will be cake!") and working on Star Trek: Of Gods and Men (December, we mean it this time!).

But this article caught my eye. And I have to say, Sparky's "life of misery" wasn't so secret to anyone who actually READ Peanuts, not just read the greeting cards. Heck, go watch "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" or "A Charlie Brown Christmas". I'm not saying Schultz was Stephan Pastis or anything. (For one thing, his puns weren't as bad.) But all of the best Peanuts cartoons had a strong undertow of melancholy. And we loved them. I don't know what the book is really like (I still need to get Clarence Thomas' book), but the headline doesn't surprise me in the slightest. "Happiness is a sad song" sounds just about right.

Sheldon! Dune!

Sheldon does more Dune jokes. Here. And here.

Sheldon makes me laugh more than PvP these days. And that's saying something. (It's ok Mr. Kurtz, I still love PvP.)

And in case I never mentioned, here.

(Heroes is still cool. Review up later. I'll try to have this week's Firefly up on time. No, really.)

The Ultimate Tallguy and Wife Comic Strip

Ahhh, Dave Kellett comes through, big time. BTW, if you're not reading Sheldon, you ought to be. Funny funny funny.

Scarecrow and Mrs. King, STILL not on DVD. I try and tell She Who is My Wife that we can just watch Charlie's Angels and Babylon 5 back to back. She's not buying it. (Kidding. Please don't make me watch Charlie's Angels. Six Million Dollar man probably isn't as good of an idea as I might think either. Just saying.)

The Hero of Metropolis, the man they call JAAAYYYYYNE!

Good News: Bruce Timm is doing more animated Superman.

Bad News: It's The Death of Superman.

Bad: Clancy Brown isn't doing Lex

Good: James "Spike" Marsters is!

Bad: Dana Delany isn't Lois

Still Bad: Um, Anne Heche is.

Really Bad: Tim Daly isn't Superman.

Great: Adam "The Man They Call Jayne" IS!

That's right, it's Jayne vs. Spike! Whooo! (And Drive is still cancled. Grrr. Arrgh.)

Frank Miller on the State of America

Frank Miller, writer of the best issues of Daredevil, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, and lots of great stuff was on NPR. Here's what he had to say.

HT: Koly

Less Trot from the Fox

Well this is kind of sad news. Not dead guy sad news, but still... I wish I were in a position to decide to only work once a week.

Trot still Foxy

Nice to see that Foxtrot is still high-larious after 20 years (ok, 18).

Not Making Me Feel Better

From Over the Hedge today...

With Great Power...

You know the rest. Well, the trailer looks great. Looks like Tobey is still really good a being Peter Parker and that's always a good thing. I'm still a little skitish, I guess because I own Spidey 2 on DVD and I've never watched it all the way through. (I have since watched Spidey 1 a couple of times.) But maybe they'll get it back for this one.

Duck's Quack

For those of you that read Non-Sequitur I offer this. So it's about as accurate as Wiley's political commentary. (Too bad, he's a really funny guy otherwise.)

70's Kidvid

Ok, this site is just alarming. I'd say I remember about 75% of these shows. Even Run, Joe, Run. I think this was one of Scott's favorites. Shazam! is a treasured part of my childhood I hope never to revisit (although I'm still a huge Captain Marvel fan - they need to make a movie pronto while Adam Balwin gets too old). Ark II was the ultimate in Saturday Morning "We're destroying the environment" (back then it was just "the world") indoctrination. Land of the Lost, of course, is a classic. (For those of you that are afraid of the Sleestak, I direct you here.)

Holdit

Lileks still has it going on. Pretty much the whole Bleat is good today. I identify with the winter sun part, even in Phoenix, with no DST. But the X-3 part: Oh yeah.

Movies: I watched X-Men 3. Might as well have called it X-Men: Let’s Just Kill Off Everyone, Then. I liked the second one, but never really loved the franchise, to use that horrid word. The entire mutant-as-a-metaphor was insulting, anyway –if you know anything about kids you know that a teen with the ability to shoot fire out of his ears would not be shunned as a weirdo freak but elected class president on general principle: dude! Awesome! I can understand parents getting upset if their kid was blue and covered with hairy nodules, but the idea that parents would consider their kid “sick” if she had the telekinetic ability to raise every car in the neighborhood nine feet in the air – please. We have parents who will go across the ocean to adopt a Down’s Syndrome baby; are we to believe that the majority of American parents reject their kids because they can levitate or cough up gold by the quart or exude perfectly formed Neapolitan Ice Cream bricks from their hindquarters? Far from persecuting them, they’d get their own reality shows. Storm would be a TV meteorologist in New York. As for your morning commute, I’ll see what I can do. Stay classy, Manhattan.

And then there’s Wolverine - he’s Troubled and Frowny and Haunted, even though he appears to be a 35 year old man living in a high school with no job, surrounded by good-looking women, and able to kill whoever he wants without any sort of legal repercussions. You almost want some mutant to confront him in the kitchen some night: what you so mad about, anyway? You can heal from a gunshot to the head in six seconds and you got spikes coming out of your hands. Yeah, well, it hurts when the spikes come out. Oh really? I shoot liquid nitrogen everytime I pee. That’s my mutation. I go by the name of Holdit. Wanna switch?

I'll never look at Wolvie the same way again.

Math Humor

This is my wife's fault, otherwise I wouldn't bother you with this. (Hee. Yeah, right.) She has asked me to bring to her attention all stupid math jokes. I, of course, think it's HIGH-LARIOUS.

Comic is, of course, from Rockwood.

Not Addis Ababa?

C'mon, tell me you weren't thinking kryptonite.

Happy Birthday, Bub

Good heavens. I'm only 3 months younger than Wolverine! THAT can't be right...

(And I'm still a year younger than James Bond. So I guess that's still ok.)

The Blorg!

It's Friday. So I leave you with this week's Brewster Rockit.