Lawnmower Boy

Brother Twelve: "There's nothing worse than egotists hijacking communal fun. We should do something before social solidarity is undermined." Maid of Gold: "Oh, don't be such a stick in the mud!" Queen's Fist: "You're good with these Boomer maniacs? Are you even the real Dora?" Maid of Gold: "What? No! I'm disagreeing with Twelve! It's fun!" (Elbows Twelve in a way that brings her in under his shoulder. Looks expectant; speculative glance at the group from Twelve; Charlotte rolls her eyes.) Rush: "They're going to ruin the parade. I'm with Twelve --Brother Twelve. Have I mentioned you need a better codename in the last minute and a half?" Brother Twelve: "It's been forty-five seconds. Which I know is a long time for you. Codenames are for the bougies. Parades are for everyone. With the cartoon animals and everything. They must be weird where you come from, though." [Rush smiles; It's nice of Twelve to feed her a straight line]: "In dark, post-apocalyptic future, all cartoons are Heathcliff. It's hard to enjoy a parade in an underground city. There's no sightlines. Sometimes I think people don't appreciate just how much not-fun it is to grow up in an underground shelter. Anyway, there won't be any sightlines for these guys, either, when they get thrown in Clown Jail." [Scout appears out of nowhere]: "Have y'all considered the value of some toomfoolery and harmless pranks, a bit of turnin' reality on its head, some mistaken identity shenanigans? Ah know sometimes Ah just want to light things up!" Queen's Fist: "Pranks aren't harmless if you're always the target, Hick Boy." Scout: "Like, who's the hick now? Ah been to Hope once!" Queen's Fist: "Seeing it in a movie doesn't count. Say, have you seen Bruce? It's not like we're going to be able to do anything in New York without the Goblinjet." Scout [Nervous]: "Heh. Well, I--Ah-- guess that settles it. It's a New York problem an' New Yorkers can fix it."

See? I knew you were going to have some fun with Pinprick and all that nutsy-cuckoo archer stuff!

Pardon me, I have a note from Slime, who was unaware that human dermal collagen accretions accumulate approximately uniformly and that the observed variation is due to "grooming," a practice explained with heavy reference to human-style assisted mitosis, a subject that Slime frankly wishes had never been brought up. Slime assures us that although they involuntarily inverted and released the contents of their digestive vacuoles on learning all this, they are fine now, and there is no reason for alarm. Although they are embarrassed for not noticing this themselves, considering that they rely heavily on the accretions to tell their human friends apart in the first place.

Actually, it's "X" now.

Three? Three? THREE? I have to think one, two, three times for this? Hermit, old buddy, old pal, you owe me forever. So, Pogo, obvs. Next up, Pinprick, not because I like the annoying little dude (archers, sheesh), but because clearly he's your favourite and I expect to see you fly free when you're channeling his voice. Finally, Slime, because their perspective is going to be the weirdest and hardest to communicate and I am an evil person. If it helps, I was trying to put myself in the mind of an amoeboid functioning in a solid world, and I suddenly found myself imagining a Hanna Barbara world. For an amoeboid, real humans and their built environment blends into their visual comic art to an uncanny extent. "As usual, especially since he started secreting his upper octant down-oriented vertex dermal collagen structure, seeing Caleb burst into the room left me wondering why no gawky, oversized Great Dane came skittering in after him." Anyway, that's what I think, so it must be true.

Pogo! As I get older, young women increasingly remind me if my nieces: But Pogo us all nieces everywhere.

This is not a new thing. The thought process is that if you want to do something, and you lack the resources to do it and some other thing, than that other thing doesn't need to be done. Your enemies will either not notice that you can't do the other thing, or will give you a pass on it because they're just dumb/corrupt/racially inferior. Anyone warning that you are trying to do the impossible is just a negative nelly. Any evidence that the enemy isn't going to cooperate is discounted, since you already know what the enemy will do. It happens all the time. You have your Pearl Harbour, your fall of Singapore, your BARBAROSSA, and that's just a sample collection from WWII.

With all due respect to the troublemakers of the GOP, no parliamentary party can govern with a majority as slim as the Congressional Republican Party enjoys. It is asking more than is human for the whole membership of the caucus to conform to a self-denying ordinance to not use the power this situation gives them. Since there is a Speaker right now, any dysfunction in the House is the consequence of a collective decision that the "9/11 Speaker" isn't a real Speaker. Ignore that qualm, and things are fine. Failing that, the traditional solution is a Grand Coalition, and what's holding that up is the very traditional argument over which party the Speaker should come from. It's not as much fun as it is in a legislature with more than two political parties, but it's right there to be had. I'd be a lot more worried about the Supreme Court, if I were an American.

This is clearly someone who hasn't spent much time with early jet age aeronautics.

This isn't quite what is going on with Zerstroiten. To remind myself of Powerhouse's name rather than to rehearse my case, I spent an arduous minute and a half with my copy of Book of the Destroyer, and confirmed that Long says that he has serious mental issues, which are identified as sociopathy and delusions of grandeur. He has also had anger management issues from childhood, which are not given a diagnosis in the text, but which I take as evidence of mania. The depression, and thus bipolar diagnosis is a bit more of a stretch, I admit. He is also clearly not quite right in terms of sexuality, although here there's a lot of possible explanations. So how do we understand this man? As someone who had his first, overwhelming, sexual experience, no doubt having sternly repressed early homoerotic stirrings, watching Powerhouse tear his laboratory apart. "It's the moment I knew I was gay," is the way they frame it over on the LGBTQ+ internet. Depending on one's background, these kinds of stirrings can be repressed for a long time. Zerstroiten's response was to shoot Powerhouse in the head with his pistol and then vivisect the man. We know that Zerstroiten did not get sexual release from his actions because he has never repeated them. The question, which therapists wrestle with in the rare cases they are invited to work with a victim of NPD, is how aware the patient is of the nature of their own reactions. We instinctively imagine that the memory of vivisecting one's first crush in a fit of homophobic denial would be intensely traumatising, but Zerstroiten is still functional. On the other hand, Narcissistic Personality Disorder seems to be a defence mechanism gone malignant, a way to constantly wall off unacceptable parts of the self and deal with trauma by denial. The adult Zerstroiten loves to arrange encounters with flying bricks in which he can perform "Dr. Destroyer" for him --the elegant, honourable, brilliant European man of culture, with his wines and his chess and his classical music, the potential benefactor of all mankind who is just waiting to step into that role when his genius is properly acknowledged. To put it bluntly, he gets off on it. And every moment that he is doing it, he is repressing the thought that if only he had done this with Powerhouse . . . It's that internal turmoil that drives his insane cycles of manic overaction and his elaborate attempts to commit "suicide by cop." Zerstroiten causes mass destruction and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people when he decompensates at the traumatic recall of that time when he vivisected a fellow human being so that he could deny his sexuality to himself. Zerstroiten is not a good person; but there's a social tragedy here, too.

Dr. Destroyer as created is boring and formulaic, to be sure. Dr. Destroyer as Steve Long and the late Scott Bennie, have portrayed him is a more interesting case. Long has a clear picture of the man as a clinical victim of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The question, to me, is where this disorder, classically a pattern of defensive deflection gone malignant, originates. It is often a dual diagnosis, reflecting an underlying bipolar condition, with the deflection aimed at rationalising and justifying manic and major depressive episodes as reasonable responses to external stimuli. Long's Destroyer is characterised by long periods of inactivity, and in particular his period of obscurity during the Dark Destroyer's ascendancy sounds a lot like a depressive episode, while others sound like episodes of suicidal ideation or manic breaks, once we get past the explanations for them in Long's text, which might be read against the grain as Zerstroiten's own rationalisations. NPD can also arise from a lack of insight, in particular into aspects of the personality that the individual is unwilling to acknowledge. The late Scott Bennie in particular presented Zerstroiten's relationship with various "brick" superheroes in homoerotic terms, which to me sounds like a good explanation of the underlying pathologies involved in some of his more heinous crimes. Zerstroiten is gay, is attracted to big, strong, "dumb" men, and is in denial about it, likely to the extent that he is still a virgin. He is bipolar, cycling between manic episodes in which he tries to "take over the world," or simply beat up the Sentinels, and depressive ones in which he launches schemes intended to bring about his own death. He is nuts, and dangerous, but, also, if you can somehow divorce yourself from his horrifying crimes, a sad victim of the social mores of his time. Anyway, that's my Zerstroiten.

But but but if Michigan State has to buy out the contract, how will it be able to afford to pay its next football coach $10 million a year?

Hey! We're not all strange here! Brad in Burnaby is actually pretty refreshingly normal.

Says Maui Laser Man . . .

I'm going to weigh in here with maximum dudgeon. What is technology but our practice? We look for a miracle technology, apart from ourselves, a thing, a black box that will do what we need. The Wright brothers fly a few yards in a box, and boom, we're off to a Club Med on the other side of the world in a magic aeroplane. But in reality that plane flies from a runway that is a miracle of civil engineering, from an airport that is a social construct on part with an instant city, burning fuel from refineries that all but build custom molecules. And so it is with fires. We do have an "all-encompassing rapid-response fire suppression technology." It's society, in its firefighting mode If the fires are approaching Yellowknife and they abate for a day, the city works mananger of the city and their crew, and all the support elements brought in to help them, build a firewall and water barrier right across the west end of the city; if the fires come down the sidehill too fast to stop, the Kelowna Fire Department gets in there and attacks and evacuates while the international airport is closed so that fleets of water bombers can rain Okanagan Lake down on the advancing fires. Those who lose homes get evacuated to shelters, where they receive hotel vouchers. The good people at the Alpine Motel in Keremeos, BC (to name a little old roadside motel of which I have fond memories) take care of them until there is a new home ready for them. Technology only gives us miracles when we abstract if from its human context.

I hope evacuation life treats you well, Mr. R. I'd have replied earlier but it turns out that late August isn't a quiet time for local grocery stores when the locals can't vacation in Hawaii, the Okanagan, California, and the steadily growing list of other local apocalypses. Speaking of which, any hope of getting California and Nevada's spare rain? When you're done with it, no rush. (That's a lie. I need it by next weekend, when my Okanagan bike trip starts.)

"Dear Comic book movie producer guys: It has recently come to my attention that you are continuing to not produce movies retelling the Dark Phoenix and Flashpoint stories. Stop that. These are the only comic book storylines which are ever to be produced. Thank you. Moving on, the following characters are cool: Batman, Deadpool, Harlequin and Venom. Put them in all the movies. I like female characters, just not any of the female characters you have ever put in a movie or television show. If you put another female character you haven't put in a movie or television show in a movie or television show, I am sure to like them. Probably. Okay, I'll like them if they're Battle Angel Alita. I like non-White characters, just not asdrno4fgds Ahem. Mom has agreed to give my my keyboard back if I move on. So I will. Whenever I point out super-giant plot holes that contradict established canon from the mid-70s, people imitate Comic Book Guy and laugh at me. Stop it, this is serious! Sergeant Rock and Wildcat and Batman totally teamed up. Killraven is so Kamandi's dad. I did not hallucinate that when I had chicken pox when I was six. Put it in a movie. Either the Flashpoint one or the Dark Phoenix one. I don't care. Superman can totally beat up the Hulk. /signed, a Concerned Comic Fan."

Definitely a fun idea, and reminiscent of Professor Paradigm. Honestly, everyone is probably getting close to "I reject this reality and substitute my own" at this point. Now, I have a sense that much of this is displaced suicidal ideation, but that just adds a tinge of melancholy to the zaniness.

I respectfully disagree. A vaccine which has passed national regulatory approval is a good vaccine. Full Stop. The people who object to them do so as a way of validating their counter-hegemonic narrative. I understand and sympathise with the desire to push back against hegemonic narratives, even when those desires are rooted in transference, as people do not for the most part choose to be psychologically wounded. We should, however, understand that vaccines work at a population level, and extending resistance activities to vaccines is public mischief.

I think I see your point about Facebook.

Oh, $12 million is obviously just a nuisance settlement. Nothing to see here. Everything is fine!

If this casting is correct, I do find it troubling. The creative milieu in the superhero comics field was heavily influenced by the large number of Jewish creatives working in it, and you can see it in themes of belonging, social distance, assimilation, passing, and code-switching. There is a reason that the secret identity is such an enduring trope. Ben Grimm's Jewish identity was the first explicit engagement with the tension between the Jewishness of so many creatives and their public conformity with an equation between American and WASP identities. Unlike female and Black superheroes, who were easily identified as tokens of inclusion, Ben's identity starts out as head canon and is gradually and increasingly acknowledged in text. (Now if only the Ben/Reed pairing were accepted as canon, allowing Namor to finally be with his Camilla . . .) The obvious problem is that the Fantastic Four needs a Black character, and that making one of the Storm siblings Black is, once again, obvious tokenism because of the special pleading required. The obvious implication is that Reed should be Black, and the fact that we're not ready for that in 2023 makes me sad.

Silo, an Apple TV puzzlebox mystery set in the postapocalyptic shelter/prison/city-in-a-bottle of the title. "Silo" started with an award-winning short story in 2011 and somehow blossomed into a nine volume series over the next twelve years. It's kind of like the classic YA dystopian effort, only not, is my understanding of the books. The series is, so far, a whodunnit featuring an outsider detective pit against shadowy forces bent on maintaining order and possibly protecting a sinister secret. (I don't know, I've been trying not to spoil myself.) Anyway, I'm enjoying it and also the sense that I wasn't wasting my money by auto-renewing my AppleTV subscription.

#Metoo

You don't have to read them, just scroll down past the ads.