And another hangover.  Not a surprise, but never something to look forward to. 

I’m using my wife’s laptop computer at the moment.  The archaic Dell that I usually use was getting fixed but never quite did.  We were able to rescue all the data from it, but it’s barely functional otherwise.  Oh well. 

Thank goodness all the data got rescued at least.  I’ll never finish any of the projects that are on there, but at least I have the comfort of saying they’re still in process. 

The Democratic National Convention is over.  Obama, Biden, yadda yadda yadda.  The Republican National Convention is coming up.  McCain, Whats-her-name, yadda yadda yadda.  I hate the campaign season. 

Birthdays coming up in a couple of days, but Amy and I exchanged gifts early so we could put them to use over the long weekend.  I gave her a printer/scanner/copier, since her old printer is . . . well, old.  Very old.  I think it was an HP PapyrusJet 1A.  It had a 1 page/per/week printing rate.  It ran on coal.  Ink refills had to be purchased through the Smithsonian’s department on Egyptology.  The original instructions were engraved on clay tablets in Phoenician. 

The new one is pretty nice.

She gave me a videogame, GTA IV.  She made me promise that I’d come up for air occasionally. 

Heh.

I don’t like John McCain.  I used to like him.  I used to respect the hell out of him.  But now I don’t like him and I don’t respect him.

I respect his military record.  I respect his genuine support for those who serve and have served in the military.  For example, while Bush & Co give lip service to ’support the troops’ but then try to cut veteran’s healthcare benefits, McCain fought to save those benefits. 

But McCain has had  his eyes on the Oval Office long enough that he can’t see around it.  Whoever he was in 2000, he’s not that anymore.  The Straight Talk Express runs on bullshit. 

He favors overturning Roe v. Wade.  However, he won’t say that openly, because he can’t afford to lose centrist voters to Obama. 

He talks tough about earmarks and pork-barrel spending.  Yet his tenure as chairman of the Appropriations Committee set a high-water mark for such spending. 

He criticized the efforts and impact of the Religious Right and evangelicals.  Now he’s openly kissing their ass so he can get the endorsements.

He loudly decries the influence of lobbyists in Washington.  He doesn’t kick them out of his campaign, however, until their presence makes headlines.  And he doesn’t even bother to get rid of ALL of them, since he keeps on Charlie Black as a senior political advisor.  Black’s client list has included Ahmed Chalabi, Ferdinand Marcos, Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and Nigerian Dictator Ibrahim Babangida (this list lifted from a Slate article). 

He opposed off-shore drilling and drilling in protected areas, because it would have virtually no real effect on oil supply and petroleum prices.  A recent GAO report backs this up.  But now that gasoline is hitting the $4 per gallon mark, he’s all in favor of drilling anywhere the oil companies want to.  Never mind that the old companies have never even touched half the land on which they hold drilling leases. 

Most aggregious to me is the torture issue. 

He opposed the use of torture on detainees, standing strong in the face of the White House’s condemnation of Congressional action that would prohibit “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  Then he caved like a wet paper bag, endorsing a bill that allowed the administration to do whatever it felt necessary for national security (i.e. whatever it wanted to do). 

This is particularly shameful because his campaign presents his war record as a touchstone of his integrity.  A key part of that record is that he spent five years as a POW suffering torture.  Excuse me, I mean, suffering “enhanced interrogation techniques”.  I can only presume that someone reminded him that he’d eventually need Bush’s support for a 2008 election bid.

At this point, I can only respect McCain for his willingness to whore himself for political gains.  Because, damn, he’s doing a good job of it.

Dead computer.  Well, not quite dead, just mostly dead.  I’ve handed it off to Miracle Max, an IT guy I know, and hopefully it will be back up and running.  It happened last week, so I have an excuse for not posting since then. 

Okay, his name’s actually Rod, not Miracle Max.  So sue me.

Anyway, I’m planning to get more of the backposts up, and get a few general comments on pop culture posted as well.  Depends on whether I run out of beer money earlier or later.

I’ve added a few backposts from the Held Hostage series:  Day 49, Day 58, and Day 65, in which are discussed coffee, Amy, parents, pets, lessons for adulthood, internet radio, and a fictional gay pirate dj. 

Enjoy!  Or don’t.

Actually, I have plenty of things I need to do. As I’ve mentioned, I’m a lazy bastard, so I’m going to mess around on the blog, although I’m not going to write anything useful or instructive.  I’m hoping to pretty up the links page a bit, add a few things, maybe add some more backposts from the Held Hostage and Dispatches.  I’ll add the links when I do that. 

Part of the problem is that the last couple weeks have been really crappy, so I haven’t been motivated to do anything useful.  My workplace just changed from one location to another, in one of the sloppiest moves to which I’ve ever been subjected.  Sick pets, Amy’s job issues, tourist traffic, visiting relatives, it’s all just more notches on the stress-o-meter. 

But at least I don’t work for Jews!

That’s a joke.  Go watch “Monty Python’s Meaning Of Life”.  Or don’t, see if I care.

Amy and I went to see Hellboy II last Sunday.  We didn’t leave happy.

Wow, did it suck.  On so many levels. 

If you never saw the first movie but like goofy beat-em-ups, you might enjoy this one.  Indeed, with the continuity issues, this probably should have been the first movie.

If you liked the first movie or the comic, you should hate this one.   Unless you like crappy movies, too. 

Let me start with the comic. 

Hellboy was one of the first comics to which I introduced Amy, way back in 2002 or so.  In those days, it was great.  Then Mignola got widely popular and Hellboy became a cottage industry.  Mignola started expanding the storylines and titles, moved Hellboy from centerstage, and farmed out art duties to other people.  Thus began the Great Suck.  Hellboy stories became rare and the BPRD became the main title.  The writing started to go downhill, and the art started to go to Guy Davis. 

I’ve liked Guy Davis in some things.  BPRD is not one of them. 

At this point, I read Mignola’s various collaborations with Duncan Fegredo, Joshua Dysart, Jason Shawn Alexander, or Paul Azaceta, which are usually worthwhile.  And his stuff with Richard Corben is great.  But most of his stuff is done with Guy Davis, and so most of his stuff is crap.  I’ve also read a couple of the novelizations, which are mediocre at best. 

Christopher Golden’s “The Lost Army” was far less than mediocre.  I would venture to describe it as shit on burnt toast.  (One example:  I don’t see guys in TANKS being overly threatened by zombies with spears.  Don’t even bother with the guns.  Fire up the engines, put the transmission in drive, and your biggest problem becomes zombie pancakes.)  So I was not terribly thrilled to see that the second Hellboy movie would be based on Christopher Golden’s “The Golden Army”. 

Still, Guillermo del Toro was directing.  He’d done the first Hellboy movie, with I liked.  A few unnecessary liberties had been taken with the source material (Abe was psychic, Liz and Hellboy were romantically linked, Kroenen was a Nazi ninja), but otherwise it was a fun movie that kept to the spirit of the material.  I’d also loved “Pan’s Labyrinth”, del Toro’s movie set in the countryside of fascist Spain.  So I was looking forward to Hellboy II. 

Watching “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” was like watching a good friend who gets drunk at a party and tries to tell a funny story but screws up the details.  The acting was clumsy, the key characters were inconsistent from the previous movies, the plot twists were thuddingly obvious, the writing was contrived and wooden, and continuity was a laugh.  The story felt like it was written by a complete stranger, who’d only scanned a summary of the first one. 

Ahem.  *SPOILERS*

The biggest, most obvious problem was the enemy’s fatal (so to speak) flaw:  the twins’ connection.  Which was a pretty big, obvious flaw.  Prince Nuada and Princess Nuala are twins with some kind of mystical link, so that each can sense the other’s presence and knowledge.  Very early on, Nuada fights their father’s royal guards and cuts them down pretty easily.  So easily, in fact, that Nuada doesn’t take a single wound from the guards’ big black swords.  One guard DOES manage to punch him in the face, however.  Nuada wins the fight with only bloody nose.  Cut to Princess Nuala, and . . . wow, she has a bloody nose too! 

At that point, I leaned over to Amy and said, “He’ll be on the verge of victory, and  Nuala will kill herself to stop him.”  Turns out that I was wrong.  Prince Nuada is defeated by Hellboy in a big mano-a-mano duel.  And THEN Nuala kills herself to stop him.  Huh?  Wow, what a pathetically stupid turn of events.

Actually, let me go over some of the characters, then return to the Corsican Brothers’ plot contrivance of the mystically connected twins. 

Manning. 

In the first movie, Manning was the BPRD staffer who handled cover-ups and went on tv to explain that the BPRD didn’t exist.  He was a bit blustery and was resentful and fearful of Hellboy, but he did have a backbone and some skills at what he did.  Towards the end of the movie, Manning steps up and puts himself in danger, confronting Kroenen, so that Hellboy has a chance to recover.  Manning saved Hellboy’s life, then Hellboy saved Manning’s life.  In the momentary pause afterwards, they bond over a cigar and clearly they’ve buried hatchets. 

In the second, Manning is a whiney and rather snivelling suck-up who desperately seeks approval.  He barks orders that he knows will be ignored, he tries to bribe Hellboy into staying undercover, he sucks up to Kraus, and he’s largely indifferent to the team.  Instead of handling high-level denials, he’s the guy on the rainy street, stammering in front of reporters about how the FBI is looking into a gas leak upstairs and how nothing weird is going on, etc.  He’s a pathetic loser and, by the end of the movie, everyone openly holds him in contempt.

Abe Sapien. 

Abe mostly comes out okay.  His look is different, which is an unnecessary and distracting change.  He’s also a bit of a schoolboy, hoping to impress Johann and mooning after Princess Nuala.  He still has the psychic powers, but only so he can do the Vulcan mindmeld with Nuala.  In the first movie, he does psychometry to see what happened at a crime scene, but he doesn’t do that here . . . of course, if he HAD done it here, he could’ve saved the lives of four BPRD agents.  And that’s one of the key problems with del Toro’s movie:  everyone has these great powers that are NOT USED when they could be useful.

Liz Sherman.

Liz mostly comes out okay too.  No real changes from the first one, but she spends all her time in this one moping around.    She’s really not very interesting here.  And she has a haircut that doesn’t suit her.

Johann Kraus.

Johann looks like one of the spacesuits from “Alien” and talks like a German vaudeville performer.  His ectoplasmic abilities are way over what the original character could do in the comics, to the point of taking over inanimate machinery.  Here, he’s Mr. I’m In Charge, barking orders and apparently being a senior operative with command authority.  Huh?  Hellboy is the adopted son of the man who FOUNDED the BPRD, and it’s hard to see someone as being a senior operative to him.  Only the other hand, Johann the ONLY one who makes timely and effective use of his abilities, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.  But I will anyway. 

Myers.

Agent Myers was the human element of the first movie, an FBI agent newly assigned to the BPRD.  He served to show how weird the paranormal operatives were in appearance, but then humanized them through extended interation.  In the second movie, Myers is . . . completely absent.  Apparently he was reassigned to Antarctica.  So much for the whole ‘humanizing’ thing.  Here, the paranormal operatives are mostly humanized by whining a lot. 

Hellboy.

In the first movie, Hellboy is gruff and brusque, but he has a good heart.  He has a bit of a temper, but he is not driven by anger.  He is hostile to Manning because Manning is hostile to him, but clearly never held a grudge against him.  He’s a bit of a slob, but he’s not indifferent to his surroundings or associates.  He is extraordinarily durable, taking tremendous amounts of physical trauma with mostly a pained grunt. 

In the second movie, Hellboy is an asshole.  He’s touchy, jealous, angry, violent, and self-absorbed.  He goes out of his way to antagonize and humiliate Manning.  He barely notices when BPRD agents are being torn to pieces around him.  He had Myers transferred to Antarctica, which could only be an issue of jealousy.  He resents Johann because Johann gets respect.  He deliberately seeks publicity, then is surprised that some people react with fear.  He resorts to violence because it simply doesn’t occur to him that he has other options.  His knowledge of the occult seems oddly curtailed, so that he’s always the least informed person in the room.  And his physical durability is inconsistent; in one shot he easily recovers from being knocked thirty feet by a punch, but in another shot he’s stunned by a swinging locker door.   

Prince Nuada is your stock villain.  Princess Nuala is a little more interesting, but she’s rushed headlong into an infatuation with Abe.  Then Nuada kidnaps her, at which point she’s abruptly reduced to hostage and ceases to be interesting. 

Okay, that’s our cast of characters.  Then there’s the plot, which involved gaining control of three pieces which form a crown, which grants the wearer control of 4,900 faerie war automata.  Nuada wants to get the crown and destroy mankind.  Along the way, he taunts Hellboy about how Humanity doesn’t appreciate him, and how Hellboy should join with Nuada because they have more in common. 

Indeed, at one point, Hellboy is fighting a massive plant elemental and has to consider that if he kill it, he will have killed the last of its kind.  Cue guilt and angst.  Except that while Hellboy may kill the elemental, it’s NUADA who is responsible for its death.  It’s Nuada who sends it into battle against Hellboy, and therefore it’s Nuada who bears responsibility for the consequences.  If Nuada were concerned about the last elemental’s death, he wouldn’t have sent it into a deadly battle.  Additionally, if Hellboy doesn’t stop Nuada, then Nuada will wipe out ALL of Humanity.  Hellboy may not be human, but he’s not Faerie either, so it makes more sense for him to throw in his lot with his friends and adopted family. 

As an aside, why does no one bring up Prof. Bruttenholm?  Hellboy was raised by the Professor.  Why does no one mention that Nuada would wipe out all that Prof. Bruttenholm ever worked for?  Oh, because that would be obvious and would keep Hellboy from being a mopey jerk.  We certainly shouldn’t let a little thing like character or continuity get in the way of the story. 

Then there’s Liz.  She’s apparently gained a much better control over her power since the first movie.  On the other hand, she now has not much sense in using them.  See, the Golden Army is a bunch of Faerie robots.  You can beat them up and tear them apart, but they just rebuild themselves, with even the smallest components dragging themselves across the floor to rejoin back into an asskicking whole.  Of course, these robots are made of metal . . . gee, if only they had some source of intense heat, or some kind of powerful fire . . . hmm . . . if only they had someone in the group who was, maybe, pyrokinetic or something  . . . y’know, so they could MELT the robots and their components, so the robot components couldn’t reform themselves . . . darn.  Oh, wait, what about Liz?  Guess she’s too busy being mopey.

The BPRD is generally pretty incompetent.  Their agents carry guns.  Nothing else, really.  No other equipment.  Guns are never effective against their enemies, yet that’s all they carry.  How about some tear gas?  Wouldv’e been useful against all those bitey little guys from the auction.  And they know they’ll be running into a metal army, so how about thermite grenades?  Or even a FUCKING WELDING TORCH?!?

It’s a baaaaad sign when everyone has to be incompetent and stupid for the movie to work. 

And then there’s the Nuada-Nuala twin connection.  Hellboy has a one-on-one fight with Nuada in the BPRD headquarters but is constantly constrained by concern for Nuala.  He can’t kill Nuada without killing Nuala too, so Nuada kicks his ass while he’s trying to figure it out.  My solution:  one of the BPRD agents kneecaps Nuala.  You can’t shoot Nuada without violating the rules of the fight with Hellboy, but Nuala is a bystander and thereby a valid target . . . and as a side effect, Nuada won’t be able to fight effectively because he’ll have just lost a knee.    

Just a tad rough perhaps, but Nuala gets to live.  She knows what’s at stake and would surely be willing to sacrifice one leg in order to stop her brother from wiping out all Humanity.  After all, that’s why she kills herself at the end, stabbing herself in the heart.  Oh, wait, she could have just stabbed herself in the leg, crippling her brother rather than killing him. 

Of course, she doesn’t do any of this until AFTER Nuada is defeated.  Hellboy has just knocked the crap out of him and taken the crown.  He’s walking away, and Nuada tries to jump him from behind.  Then Nuala stabs herself, killing them both.  Huh?  It’s not like it’s a surprise attack, since Hellboy would more or less be expecting it.  It’s not like Nuada would suddenly have beaten Hellboy now.  So what’s the point?  Well, maybe it’s because Nuada had said that he wouldn’t stop, that he coudn’t stop . . . but then she could just lose a leg or hand so he‘d be crippled as a fighter. 

More to the point, her death lets Abe be tragic, resolving his subplot. 

Everyone has to be incompetent and stupid for the movie to work. 

What frustrates me most is that the screenplay was written by del Toro and Mignola.  You’d think they’d at least be familiar with the source material.  Apparently not. 

Oh, and Ron Perlman sucked too.

Not much in the brain at the moment.  Still getting the hang of blogging, frankly.  I spent several years sending a series of letters to a standing group of people, but a letter has a different rhythm than a blog entry.  Letters can ramble more, but a blog entry generally seems to need some sort of moderate focus. 

Of course, there are plenty of blogs out there that do the rambling “I woke up and ate spaghetti for breakfast and went to work and traffic sucked and I sharpened my pencils, etc. etc. etc.” sort of thing.  I have no interest in subject anyone to the minutiae of of my day.  Bad enough I have to go through my day, I don’t want to make anyone else do it as well. 

Plus, my evening hours are currently split between knitting and BioShock.  In that order.  Which probably bears some explaining . . .

Jesse Helms is dead. 

FINALLY!!!!

He died in Raleigh, NC, at 1:15 am EST of natural causes, said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton.  “He was very comfortable,” Broughton said.

This is proof that there is no God.  If a kind, loving God looked out over the world and saw Jesse Helms, He would have struck him down instantly.  At the very least, He would have had Helms finished off with a chainsaw enema. 

Jesse Helms was a miserable motherfucker, who used race and fear to keep himself in office.  He was proud of fighting the forces of moral decay:  civil rights advocates, AIDS victims, people who thought smoking caused cancer, etc. 

“I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year’s Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day,” Helms wrote in a newspaper column in 1956. 

It speaks volumes about Helms that he would equate the Fourth of July with Confederate Memorial Day.  As a side note, since he opposed desegregation, those school kids would obviously be all white. 

History will recognize that Helms was on the wrong side of virtually every major issue in which he acted.  Truly, I long for the day when Jesse Helms will be publicly recognized for the bigot and asshole that he was.  Sadly, that day is far off. 

“America lost a great public servant and true patriot today,” White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

Fuckers.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down District Of Columbia V. Heller, one of the last decisions of their current term before wrapping up business, sending their robes out for dry-cleaning, forwarding the office phones to voicemail, and sneaking out of town.  Truly, a shameful decision from a shameful court. 

I, for one, am sick of these activist judges who take it upon themselves to legislate from the bench.  A perfectly reasonable law, designed and intended to protect common decent God-fearing Americans, was passed by the elected representatives of the good people of the District of Columbia.  But NO!  A handful of elitist justices, hand-picked to accomplish the political agenda of a small minority, has chosen to overrule the will of the people and the intent of the Founding Fathers.   And in doing so, they have not only substituted their own judgment . . . imposed their own perverted values . . . upon the common people, but they have overturned a century of legal precedent in order to create an imagined “right” where none existed before! 

Damn them!  DAMN THEM TO HELL!!!

As I was saying previously, we gave the bunnies away.  They were cute, they were sweet, but they were high-maintenance.  If you want to read about their arrival in our lives, I’ve back-posted those letters here and here.  Amy tells me that it’s a heart-warming story, and she recommends you read it. 

Bear in mind that she’s insane and has my wedding ring to prove it. 

The bunnies’ names were Monty (the boy) and MurderBunny (the girl).  Take a wild guess which one I named.  Then take a wild guess as to why Amy must be insane to marry me. 

The biggest problem with the bunnies was their interest in chewing.  We have power cables, data cables, etc., all over the place.  Either we had to entirely overhaul the whole house, or sequester them in a particular place.  Fortunately, this house has a small extra bedroom that we never really used, so we cleaned it out and turned it into the bunny room.  Amy, industrious little sweetheart that she is, constructed a spacious home for them out of mesh panels zip-tied together.  And, yes, I means spacious:  5′ by 5′ by 3′, with three levels and ramps.  And, no, it wasn’t simply a cage.  They liked it, they regarded it as their home, and they often slept there even when the cage doors were open (usually for several hours each day).  Indeed, MurderBunny would often run into it to escape me when I entered the room.

MurderBunny didn’t particularly like me.  <cough> bitch <cough> 

So the bunnies had plenty of room.  The problem then became that we could only socialize with them to the exclusion of everything else, because we had to go into that room and stay there.  We already had two cats, three birds, and three aquaria.  It was just an extra step that I wasn’t willing to take every single day of every week.  After a while, Amy came to the same conclusion.  We made sure the bunnies were happy, healthy, and well-fed (and, ahem, fixed), but we just couldn’t spend the time to socialize them as much as we would have liked.  Or, we thought, give them as much attention as they deserved. 

It wasn’t a happy decision, but we decided we needed to give them away.  But to whom?  Most people would have simply put them into a hutch in the backyard and ignored them.  A few were interested in getting them as pets for their kids, which is a *horrible* idea.  Any parents who’ve found themselves raising a child’s begged-for puppy will understand this.  Additionally, people think of bunnies as big gerbils with funny ears, but they’re much smarter than that.  Indeed, they may be as smart as dogs . . . with the concurrent need for companionship and capacity to get into trouble.  

Thus, the vasy majority of adoption candidates were ruled out.  In fact, ALL of the adoption candidates were ruled out.  It took months before any serious options presented themselves.  And it required a long drive.  Amy was reluctant to ask me to do it, but I didn’t really see it as an issue.  We wanted to give the bunnies to a good home, and this was it.  So we borrowed my dad’s light pick-up, herded the bunnies into our biggest carrier (yes, room enough for them to move around), loaded up the truck bed with the cage (broken down), rabbit food, bedding, litterboxes, toys, etc., and set off into the morning. 

Fortunately, Amy and I travel well together.  Some have told me that such a trip with their spouse would be an ordeal, but Amy and I get along so well that it was fun.  Still, it was tiring.

We returned home about 3 a.m.  We’d have been home earlier, but we spent some hours with the adoptive couple as we gave them the rundown on the bunnies.  They already had one of their own, so bringing them up to speed wasn’t difficult.  We also assembled the cage for them, ran through clicker-training technique, showed them how we handled the litterboxes, and so forth.  The litterbox bedding was a revelation.  They had been using the old-school box of hay, but Amy had done plenty of research and so our standard method lasted longer while staying cleaner. 

Amy gets all the credit for that.  Clueless me would have just gone with the traditional box-o-hay. 

We liked the couple and they seemed a good fit for the bunnies.  They even liked the names.  All in all, it was pretty much a best-case scenario, so we were pretty happy as we drove home.  Since then, Amy has been getting some updates on the bunnies and they seem to have adapted well.  In particular, MurderBunny has been friendly and is happy to play with them. 

<cough>bitch<cough>