This only a test.

This only a test.

Hey anyone out there, I monkeyed with my template a bit in hopes of making it a little spiffier. Input appreciated. Would like to make sure it looks OK on all varieties of browsers and/or if it just looks godawful. If you're reading and have a second please let me know if it looks all right, and what computer type/browser you're using, as I'm only looking from a OSX iMac using Firefox or IE. Muchas gracias.

BOOKS: What I Read, October

BOOKS: What I Read, October

Hey, the month ain't even over, but I'm ready to go with my Books I Read, part the tenth, one dogged attempt to detail one wide-eyed young boy's yearly reading. Still slowed down a bit in October, reading only 6 books -- although one of them was a massive, slow read. That brings the year's total to 72 books,* or an average of 7.2 per month. You may call me bookworm.

October's books:
“Killing Yourself To Live: 85% Of A True Story,” by Chuck Klosterman. Reviewed right here.

“The Colorado Kid” by Stephen King. A thin-as-piano-wire thread of plot animates this bloated-up short story about a mysterious death on the Maine Coast, part of the "True Crime" series. It's really just a 10-page tale strettttttched into 150-something pages by King's meandering, and it's one of his least impressive books, I have to say. Some interesting bits but an anticlimactic ending and general "I'm just screwing around" feel to the whole enterprise leads me to say this is for King's fanatic fans only. King tries to write it all off in a semi-apologetic afterword, but he's done mystery better in many of his other books.

“Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men And Mountains” by Jon Krakauer. I like to read about things I'll probably never do. Hence my interest in mountain-climbing literature by folks like Tim Cahill and Krakauer. I'll never climb Mount Everest, but Krakuer's "Into Thin Air," his breathtaking account of a doomed Everest expedition, made me feel like I was there. This one is a collection of several earlier magazine pieces, and most of them are amazing glimpses into extreme people in extreme environments. A piece about a "zen" bouldering expert, a harrowing ice-climbing adventure and a trek up Alaska's Mt. McKinley were highlights in this great breezy read.

“The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,” by Thomas Friedman. This was the 800-pound gorilla of the month, a hefty tome on global economic theory of all things, which sounds like the last book I'd find myself reading. But this buzzword book by New York Times columnist Friedman is actually a pretty fascinating discussion on our world and how quickly technology has changed it. I get this feeling sometimes when I'm at work busily using Google to research facts that would've taken hours to uncover a decade ago. History rarely is so immediate when you're living it, but Friedman steps back a bit to show us how quickly commerce and exchange has changed just since 2000.
What's interesting about it is that it ISN'T the U.S. that's really been affected so much as places like India and China, which Friedman convincingly shows us are rapidly catching up to and even exceeding the U.S. in both brainpower and willpower. Globalization isn't something that can be ignored or even really stopped, he writes, and too many folks in the U.S. seem to think harping about it will change the way technology is making everyone level players in a flat world. Instead he focuses on how to make globilization fair, humane and effective for all. He also offers a firm call for Americans to not coast on the success they had in the 20th century, because future progress isn't a guarantee.
Friedman takes a refreshingly non-political road for the most part, although he deservedly lashes the Bush administration several times, and notes how the U.S. has been so consumed by "the War on Terror' the past five years that it's missed a lot of how the rest of the world is changing. Now, you can quibble with a lot of Friedman's reasoning – and I have to admit the entire globe becoming Wal-Marts and Starbucks is an image I don't want to see from globilization – but overall it's a very thoughtful treatise that does what few books can do – make you think about the "big picture." The biggest flaw is that it's just about 100 pages too long, and after a while, Friedman's point feels redundant (drinking game: every time he says the world is flat, take a shot. Pass out at page 78). Still, it's recommended reading if only to provide you something to mull over.

"Writers on Comic Scriptwriting, Vol. 2" by Andrew Kardon and Tom Root. A fun collection of in-depth interviews with comic writers like Brian Bendis, Dave Sim, Bill Willingham and many more in this second volume of great inside-the-biz interviews by Titan Books.

"1968: The Year That Rocked The World" by Mark Kurlansky. I'm still in the middle of reading this one. It's a history of the year 1968, a political firestorm both in the U.S. and overseas. So far, it's quite a good read, taking all the varying players in protests and wars from Poland to the U.S. to Vietnam and weaving a tale about one of the more fiery years in recent times. Kurlansky admits he's not really objective about these times, having lived through them, so it has a fairly left-leaning slant, but so far it's still solid reporting and an interesting primer of recent history.

*[Fine print: The year to date posts: January, February, March, April, May , June, July, August and at long last, September.]

COMICS: Going 'Solo' with Mike Allred

COMICS: Going 'Solo' with Mike Allred

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blogging to tell you about the best $5 you can spend on comics this week: Michael Allred's SOLO #7 from DC Comics. Holy smokes, this is great fun. "Solo" is a bi-monthly book from DC that features one artist's work every issue, doing whatever they feel like doing. This is the first issue of the book I've picked up, because I'm a big fan of Allred's work, from his "X-Statix" for Marvel to his great classic "Madman" and "Atomics." He's got a crisp, retro style that's sharp and writes witty, quirky scripts full of pop culture love. With his brother Lee, Allred spins this "Solo" issue into one of the best comics of the year.

And here's something about Allred you probably didn't know - he's actually from right here in Roseburg, Oregon, of all places. He grew up here and still lives in the area, over on the Oregon Coast. There's a few nice little tributes to "Robu" that my comic shop guy Brett pointed out to me yesterday. The short wordless story "Comic Book Clubhouse" features Allred's reminiscences of growing up here back in the '70s and many familiar local locations, as well as a nice tribute to the power of comic books as an imaginative spark in a young fella's life.

There's also several other fine tales in this packed 48-page comic — a kooky 2-page "Mister Miracle" tale, an utterly hilarious story reimagining Golden Age hero Hourman (who pops a pill to get superpowers for an hour) as a kind of do-gooding speed freak, and "Doom Patrol Vs. Teen Titans," which is a warped comic blast as the Teen Titans have a wacky party at Bruce Wayne's penthouse, only to draw the ire of the Doom Patrol who happen to be staying downstairs. This free-wheeling story is funny as heck, a parody and a winking tribute ("Queen Arrow"?).

But the issue's highlight is "Batman A-Go-Go," which is utterly insane, psychedelic journey with the Caped Crusader that's unlike any Batman story you'll read this year. Set in the Batman era of the 1960s, loosely based on the TV show, Allred sends the "bam pow sock" Bats on a strange journey as he sees himself viewed as an irrelevant oddball relic in the face of grim real crimes, Robin gets involved with a crazed cult, and The Riddler becomes a kind of shaman. It's a hard story to describe, and it evokes a lot of Allred's best work by being set in a light-hearted, candy-colored world, yet with a dark edge. (Batman quotes Nietzsche?!) It's ultimately optimistic, and it also says more real about the Batman character than nearly any of the recent comics featuring Batman as ultra-grim, dark nearly psychotic madman.

"Solo" #7 just a dizzy blast, a must for anyone who loves Silver Age comics and any fan of Allred's. Check it out. Grade: A

LIFE: Open up and say ahhh

LIFE: Open up and say ahhh

I think in my 34 years of life, I must've spent at least one entire year of it at the dentist's office. Went to the dentist yesterday for the second time in two weeks, one visit for the regular checkup and another to repair a filling that was going out. When I'm in that chair, it feels like I've been staring at the ceiling and that funky little light they use that looks like the head of some droid from "Star Wars" for an eternity. I float off to some magical place, vaguely aware of the buzz of the drill and the acrid smell that comes when your own teeth are burning. I go zen.

I'm very used to having people mess with my teeth... I had braces for what seemed like decades as a kid, from third grade to eighth grade, five years that felt like a freakin' infinity when you're young. I had pretty snaggly teeth as I recall, so they took a bit of straightening. (I also happen to think our orthodontist really needed a new car, but that's another theory.) I wore that damned metal garbage from the time I was playing with action figures until when I was playing with girls. For the first year or so of that treatment, I even had to wear that humiliating headgear that makes you look like something out of "A Clockwork Orange" (and if there were justice, the United Nations would pass a law making it a crime against humanity to ever make any kids wear that stuff in public).

After the braces were finally off, I had this awkward little metal brace put on the inside of my mouth along my bottom front teeth. It was meant to "keep them in place." But sometime in college it broke, I had it removed and never thought about it again. Which of course means my teeth are very slowly going crooked again, two teeth coming together in the front, barely noticeable to anyone but me. Thousands of dollars of orthodontia and this is what you get. Egad.

The weird thing is, despite it all, I do have pretty good teeth. I had a lot of cavities as a kid (too much Pepsi) but have barely had any in the past 10 years, mostly just problems with old ones coming back. I have the risk of periodontal problems in my family so the last several years I've had to be a lot more dilligent about flossing and all that nonsense. According to my dentists, I'm gifted with extraordinarily large teeth that don't have a lot of space between them. Guess I'm part horse.

Teeth are a pain, when you get down to it. If there's intelligent design, then the designer who decided all these tiny little bits of bone with gaps between them — hard to clean, harder to maintain, and at the risk of a thousand different complications – was a good idea, he needs to be let go. Teeth are inefficient.

*Ten Blogpoints* to whoever identifies the source of my photo above first. Blogpoints invalid in the 50 United States and Guam, but they are accepted for most household goods in Belgium. *Term Blogpoints™ David Hitt now and forever in the known galaxy. You happy now, NASA boy?

MOVIES: Zombie-Rama Part 4, the grand finale - "Land of the Dead"

MOVIES: Zombie-Rama Part 4, the grand finale -
"Land of the Dead"

And so, appropriately enough just in time for Halloween, we come to the conclusion of our Zombie-Rama! To recap, a few months back I, a humble zombie virgin, embarked on a noble quest to see all of George Romero's classic "Living Dead" movies, one by one, and blog my novice's thoughts on them. First, I went back to the starting board, 1968's influential "Night of the Living Dead." Then I woke up for 1978's "Dawn of the Dead." Next, I had a fine old visit to 1985's "Day of the Dead.". Now, it's time to wrap it all up with "Land of the Dead"!

It has been an education. I have learned that being bitten by a zombie is unpleasant, that the human body can be torn into all kinds of gruesome pieces, what happens when a zombie meets a helicopter blade, and that a zombie with a machine gun is really not someone you want to encounter.

But all good brains must come to an end, and so this weekend I checked out the DVD of last spring's fourth and final (for now?) chapter, "Land of the Dead." Coming 20 years after the previous installment was released, it's a very different movie than the previous three -- a much higher budget, with actual Hollywood stars like Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo in featured roles. At the same time, it carries through on the social themes Romero has explored in the previous movies, with some interesting new twists.

It's some time after the "undead plague" broke out, and society as we know it is gone. The dead rule the Earth, except for isolated, barricaded refuges for normal humans. One of these societies is Fiddler's Green, a city where a rich businessman (Hopper) and fellow well-off folks live in privilege, safe and protected from the zombie menace. People will pay a great deal of money to get in Fiddler's Green, and there's a lot of tension between the rich, the poor scrounging on the outsides, and the military men who do the dirty work. Meanwhile, the zombies are starting to evolve, under the leadership of "Big Daddy," a zombie who has the disturbing ability to learn and even use tools.

"Dead" rushes by a bit fast, and while it's a fun zombie flick, it doesn't quite measure up to the 20-year gap -- I kind of wish Romero had gone all out, widened his canvas and really told an epic tale. There's glimpses of that epic here, but it's still a bit small (half the movie is about the chase for a truck, for cryin' out loud), and kind of a conventional action movie, lacking the darker edges of the previous three.

The evolution of the zombies may have offended some fans. Yet it's one of the things I admire about Romero, is that his zombie films aren't content to just stand still, that he's not merely interested in freaking us out and grossing us out. He keeps from rooting for either the humans or the zombies, showing us how warped both are. (Humans caging up zombies for amusement, or using them for "target practice," for instance.) The zombies here pine for and dimly remember their "normal lives," making their degrading feeding that much more forlorn an ending to come to.

The characters in "Land," as in most of the movies, are all fairly generic stereotypes, with Leguizamo probably giving the best performance. (But you have to love oddball Dennis Hopper, intoning lines like "Zombies, man. They give me the creeps.") The actor playing "Big Daddy," Eugene Clark, overacts a lot, but heck, it works for me (no man will ever win an Academy Award for playing a zombie, anyway).

Still, I have to admit, I liked a lot of "Land of the Dead" – I'd actually rate it as my second favorite of the group, after "Dawn of the Dead." It's fast-moving and delivers on the brain-chomping action with an apocalyptic finale as the dead have their vengeance on Fiddler's Green. As returns go, "Land" isn't a terrible sequel. If Romero ever makes a fifth "Dead" visit, I'm down for checking it out.

MUSIC: Nik's first iPod

MUSIC: Nik's first iPod

Oh yeah, baby. I am now part of the iPod generation. My shiny new iPod video 30GB arrived last night, and I have been playing with it ever since trying to figure out how it works. (The "click wheel" baffled this iPod novice for a couple minutes; of course, being a man I didn't read the instructions or anything.)

First impressions of this fancy new bit of Mac hip technology - man, it's small! I knew the new iPods were compact, but I was still surprised at how tiny it is; and even so, it's still got about 5x the storage of my creaky old home 1999 iMac. I can't even imagine having one of the even smaller iPod nanos, because my gorilla-like fingers could probably barely use it. The sound quality is remarkable, better than some of my regular CD players sound with headphones. I love the shiny black look of mine, and I fondle it like a grateful teenage lover would his older mistress. (Er... was that too much detail?) It does look real easy to scratch though so I'll pick up an iSkin soon. The menu, etc. are all great to use, and the capacity looks amazing -- I downloaded about 6 albums yesterday and a video and I've used something like less than 1% of the iPod's holdings. I should be able to get 1/2 to 2/3 of my CD collection on here eventually.

The video capacity on this model is brand-new, and I dropped $1.99 for Fatboy Slim's classic "Weapon of Choice" video starring a dancing Christopher Walken from iTunes to try it out. (You might be able to make it out on the photo above some.) The screen isn't gigantic, and I have trouble imaginging watching an hour-long TV show without straining my eyes, but for a 3-minute video it's pretty perfect, great quality.

I'm diggin' it. If you need my attention this weekend, you'll have to tap me on the shoulder first.

Oh, and playing on shuffle while writing this blogpost: "In the Cold Cold Night," The White Stripes; "Theologians," Wilco; "Heroes," David Bowie; "Black Tongue" by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

BOOKS: 'Go, Dog, Go!'

BOOKS: 'Go, Dog, Go!'

Now that Peter's 20 months old, he's been really into us reading him stories and "buchs" as he calls them. It's cool to see your kid getting into the same books you read when you were a lad – "Cat in the Hat," "Ten Apples Up On Top," "Curious George," etc.

Peter's favorite book, lately, is a classic:
You can't go wrong with 'Go, Dog, Go!', which combines two of Peter's favorite things in life – cars and dogs! We'll read it to him several times a week. It's been fascinating to watch as he develops more and more interest in books, seeing them less as chew toys and more as objects full of ideas. He loves pointing out things he recognizes - he bleats "caaaaahhhhhhhh" whenever he sees an auto, plus "buh" (bird), "li" (light), " 'nighnigh" (bed) and more every day.

But "Go, Dog, Go!" is cool because it was also one of my favorite books when I was a wee sprat. There's something that puts P.D. Eastman's book above many others -- the colorful cast of cavorting dogs, who run around driving their cars, skiing, on houseboats and more. I used to read this book over and over again as a lad.


My favorite part of course, is the huge old dog party that closes out the book. All the dogs pile in their cars and speed off to an enormous tree out in the middle of nowhere. Once they're there, they climb up to the top of the tree and erupt in a Bacchanalian celebration that always kind of blew my mind. Check out all the action at this gig!

I used to stare at this activity-filled page for long minutes as a kid. There's so much going on in it it's amazing. Why did the dogs climb the tree and have a party up there? What's the hullabaloo all about? You could look close and see all kinds of wacky details.

They're launching dogs out of CANNONS, for crying out loud! This is why "Go, Dog, Go!" rocks.

In his spare time, Toddler Peter imagines becoming a male model.

LINKAGE: Go read this stuff

LINKAGE: Go read this stuff

I have nothing to say, but that won't stop me from posting. Let me be your guide, and point you toward some other fine readin' in the Internets:

• Rampage, we hardly knew ye. I don't consider myself a full-time comics blogger, but the ninth art is one of the tasty pop culture things I like to write about, and my personal favorite comics blog was Grim's Fanboy Rampage, which combined nuggets of comics news with snark a'plenty, excerpting info from dozens of comics Web sites out there and giving us the weird, the witty and the just plain sad. Particularly awesome were the posts about some comic message boards, and the sad, lost souls you'll find on them (they make "The Simpsons" Comic Book Guy look like James Bond). The comments threads and their zillions of contributors often turned into a wonderful free-for-all. It was a great forum, which of course means it couldn't last. Graeme hung up his blogging hat Monday, and will be sorely missed as a one-stop site for comics insanity. Rampage on, excellent one.

• With Graeme gone, I have to crown a new champion -- my revised favorite comics blog has to be Dave's Long Box, which combines snarky with serious criticism to create one of the funniest blogs I read, as one man analyzes the dogs and the gems of his comic book collection, one book at a time. If you want a fine sample post, go check out this evisceration of Batman #268 from 1975. And now that I've plugged Dave, he'll quit too. (Sad face)

• I really don't watch a ton of TV, but Tom the Dog does. His ongoing review of EVERY SINGLE new TV show this fall (well, except a reality show or two - he's not an idiot) has been great fun to read. Go check out his final wrap-up post for an in-depth analysis of why most TV shows, well, blow chunks, and why a couple don't.

• I do love The New Yorker, Oregon elitist that I am, and I think subscribing makes my mail carrier think I'm smart. But the most recent issue had a godawful article on graphic novels by Peter Schjeldahl, another one of those sneering rambles where some stiff academic deigns to inspect the graphic novel. Here's an actual excerpt:
"Like life-changing poetry of yore, graphic novels are a young person's art, demanding and rewarding mental flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them - toggling for hours between the incommensurable functions of reading and looking - is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potential audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but that is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism."
Egad. The New Yorker is usually better than this -- heck, they've got Art Spiegelman on staff! Comics are hard to read? Tell that to kids like me that partially learned to read from them.
I was considering writing a lengthy take-down of this blather - which basically asserts the great but critically overlauded Chris Ware is the only decent cartoonist the medium has ever produced, but Beaucoup Kevin beat me to it, and with more and better words than I would've used. Go read the original NY piece if you can, then read Kevin's cutting response to why Schjeldahl knows not of what he speaks. I swear, pomposity like this nearly makes me long for a condescending ol' "bam! bang! pow! comics aren't for kids!" type puff piece.

• I often wonder what offends the artistic sensibilities of reclusive retired "Calvin & Hobbes" auteur Bill Watterson more – the illegal car stickers that feature Calvin peeing on Ford or Chevy logos, or the illegal "response" stickers that feature Calvin on his knees praying to a cross? No wonder the man gave up. Discuss.

MOVIES: Thoughts on 'Elizabethtown'

MOVIES: Thoughts on 'Elizabethtown'

Well, I liked "Elizabethtown." For some reason Cameron Crowe's latest movie is the designated critical whipping boy of the month, getting some really terrible reviews, but this longtime Crowe fan for one doesn't get it. I had a fine time with this movie — a son's farewell to his dad, an oddball love story and ode to the South. Perhaps it isn't Crowe's best work, but it's certainly not as bad as you might have heard. Orlando Bloom acquits himself nicely, and Kirsten Dunst was cute as a junebug. It features Crowe's patented mix of wit and insight, bitter pills laced with sugar much like his idol, the late great Billy Wilder.

Bloom, out of his elf ears, is really solid as the hapless Drew Baylor, who manages to lose his Oregon-based shoe company (read: Nike) nearly a billion dollars and has his father die all in the space of a few days. He's got to go to Kentucky to arrange his father's funeral, and deal with all his unfamiliar Southern relatives. Of course, he also meets a girl along the way, a forthright and chipper flight attendant played by Dunst. Bloom has got this deadpan, wide-eyed shock going on which works well for his character, yet he's more empathetic than Zach Braff was in the similiarly themed "Garden State." (Which I feel "Elizabethtown" is superior to, but that's another story.) And Dunst I found was tremendously endearing as yet another of those only-in-movies "quirky girls," and she puts her own stamp on a character that could've been obnoxious in another actress's hands.

How much you like "Elizabethtown" probably depends on your tolerance for sentiment — because it is a very sentimental movie. Yet I rarely found it to be manipulative, and that to me is a critical difference. Sentimental means the movie makes you feel a certain way; manipulative means you can feel it forcing you to feel that way.

Crowe's movies have always danced on that line between sentiment and manipulative, and almost always fall on the right side of it … Lloyd Dobler with his boombox from "Say Anything" has become an icon for romance, or "Jerry Maguire" and the whole "You complete me" speech. "Almost Famous" - his finest work to date - is riddled with moments that draw up the lump in your throat, unbidden.

Unless, of course, you're just not into that kind of sentimentalism, which is fine -– and that I think was kind of the kneejerk reaction of some critics to "Elizabethtown." It also does have its flaws -- it's shapeless, somehow, lacking a tight structure. It feels like it still needed a little editing. I didn't mind too much – if you enjoy a movie, it can rarely feel too long. Crowe's tendency to tack a rock song onto every scene also verges on overdone here (still a great Southern rock-tinged soundtrack, though). Susan Sarandon's character of Drew's mother never quite works, and a dialogue by her toward the end of the film is really awkward.

But y'know, it's still the Cameron Crowe I know, the one whose every movie I've enjoyed (even the experimental and dark "Vanilla Sky"). In the end, "Elizabethtown" is also optimistic, and maybe that turned some critics away. Optimism isn't hip anymore, perhaps. Yet it's the truest thing we've got sometimes. "Elizabethtown" is sentimental, yeah, and it even choked me up a bit in a few scenes. (Just a little - I am a manly man, after all.) Give it a chance.