Peeve de jour: Graphic Novel

Comic books is a misnomer. They are seldom comic, and they are not bound well enough nor do they have enough pages to be called books.

Calling them graphic novels is even more ridiculous. While they do contain mostly pictures, there is only enough content to fill a page, at best. And don't give me the "picture is worth a thousand words" line, because these are much simpler pictures than the quote was referring to.

I do admire the art work, I have zero ability to draw anything even remotely recognizable as humanoid. But face it, one doesn't need a high level of literacy to understand (and enjoy) these works. One notch above "ooh! shiny!".

I think we need a brand new word, because Graphic Entertainment Pamphlet just doesn't have much of a ring to it.

Humpday Omnibus

Ted Kennedy. I still think he should have been prosecuted and convicted for felony manslaughter, DWI, leaving the scene of an accident, and failure to report an accident. He should have done jail time and lost his Senate seat. OTOH, it does not make me happy to hear about his brain tumor. This morning on the way to work, a woman with a very child-like voice was reading the news on the Don Bleu show, and the last line in the Kennedy story was "it will probably kill him". She said it cheerfully. She read everything cheerfully. "Star101.3" needs to find someone else to read the news. If they want a young-sounding woman who knows how to match her expression to the content, I'd suggest figmo.

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Kristi Yamaguchi won Dancing With the Stars. This is a woman who has been dancing on ice skates since she was three - are we supposed to be surprised? IMHO, she belonged on the professional dancer side of the aisle, not the star side. Not that I didn't enjoy watching her dance...

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My apartment has 1.5 bathrooms. I have griped about this a lot - I'd rather have the extra space and fewer toilets to clean. But .5 came in handy this morning because last night, as I was replacing the flushing mechanism in the big bathroom's toilet, the outlet pipe melted off in my hand. El cheapo materials were eaten away by the chlorine in the cleaner tablets I've been using. I have the parts to replace it, but it requires unbolting the tank, and I found out the hard way I don't have the tools to do that. They used over-long bolts, and even my deep socket wrench can't get in there. Pliers and pipe wrench don't work because the nuts are in a recess. So commode 1.0 is out of action till I can buy a big screwdriver and a socket wrench extender.

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Bobby Bare has recorded a CD of Shel Silverstein children's songs, called Singing in the Kitchen. When the price drops, I'll get one. You may (or may not) know Bobby from his hit songs of the 80's, She's Doing Qualudes Again and Tequila Sheila. Or maybe his recent Old Dogs CD where he and a bunch of other Nashville greats sing Shel's tunes. Bare does a very touching rendition of Time, which, IMHO, is worth the price of the album. Okay, Still Gonna Die is too.

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Snailmailed a birthday card to Mom. She'll be 85 a week from tomorrow.

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Finished all the prep for the Baycon art show. Bid forms, bid list, labels which give location, date, model, costume creator info. I've decided to display the two photos where I haven't heard back from the models, and mark them NFS. Two more days...

Must remember to grab the light tan pancake makeup and an applicator sponge from my makeup kit tomorrow night at the theater, and hunt up britgeekgrrl, bovil or kproche Friday morning to get those to iamradar for her masq entry.

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All night and most of this morning I kept thinking there was some event tonight I needed/wanted to go to. Turns out it's just the last night I'll have free till Monday, what with the show & Baycon.

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Obama did well in Oregon, 2-to-1 in men's votes. Doesn't surprise me - when I lived in Oregon I saw a lot of "I wouldn't work for a woman" shit, especially in the cattle, lumber and fishing industries, which make up a goodly chunk of the state. And of course there are the internet lemmings in the Portland/Beaverton area. He got whupped in KY, though. His campaign just didn't gel there. Regardless of the rest of the primary results, it ain't over till it's over.

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National Geographic is sponsoring an anthropological human genome project in which you can participate. For a mere $99 plus S&H (about $108 total) they will send you a DNA swab kit and a control number, and will run a scan on your DNA to determine what ethnic groups your ancestors were from. Women can find out their maternal ancestry, men can choose either paternal or maternal (something about men having both chromosomes). Another $90 can get a man both tests. Using your control number, you can check the results online. It's all anonymous, they say. Check it out here.

FacePlant

Last night I punched "Ace hardware" into the GPS and it took me to a tiny hardware store which may at one time in the early Pleistocene have been an Ace affiliate, but is no longer. And it shared a tiny parking lot with a restaurant which was having some kind of function, so no parking even if I'd wanted to shop there.

The faceplant is because I was looking for the nearest hardware store to where I work, and there is a new Lowe's down the block from Fry's and a Home Despot a couple of blocks from that, both on my #1 alternate route home. There's a lumber yard on the corner where I work, but I don't think they will have the tools I need.

What got me going to Ace, odd but true, is their online store has the Mead brand notepads I love, which nobody else seems to be stocking anymore. The brand X I got at Long's has already ripped its front cover off, after less than a week. Made in China, says the back cover.

A La Mancha Moment

The penultimate scene in Man of La Mancha has Aldonza saying to Sancho "Don Quixote is not dead. Believe, Sancho, believe." I'm sitting in my chair in the far upstage right corner, being The Governor and trying to keep from laughing out loud. It's supposed to be a 3-Kleenex moment, but what always pops into my mind is a similar scene from Peter Pan where Peter tells the audience that if only they truly believe in Tinkerbell, she will recover from eating the poison cake. "If you believe, clap your hands". In this case, Tinkerbell is 6'7.5" tall...