Brady Tries Defying Gravity

Photograph by Christian Dionne.

I just closed out my 67,424-word journal for 2016, and thought I’d need an uplifting image at the top of the 2017 journal, since I’ll see it every day. So I posted this image of a friend, actor and dancer Brady Miller, which I call "Defying Gravity."

"Rogue One:' Flat Characters Find a Fiery Finish

The blind warrior-monk Chirrut Îmwe is played by Donnie Yen.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story minuses — I found none of the characters really engaging until the droid arrived on the screen, which says something. The blind samurai was also likeable, but the others were flat and colorless. 

Rogue One pluses: the film does finally build to a fairly powerful climax which hammers home, again and again, the idea that the resistance to a totalitarian regime requires self-sacrifice. Though “long ago and far away,” that’s a theme that could hardly be more timely.

Why the Democratic Party Lost in 2016

The Democrats lost for many reasons — the party’s failure to address the slow, painful demise of the American middle class, a damaged candidate who was unappealing to many, relentless corporate media propaganda, successful voter suppression and others, including the fact that the election in this “democratic republic” doesn’t actually go to the person who wins the most votes.

The Democrats should have seen GOP fascism coming for decades, and boldly attempted to stop it from the bully pulpit. Instead, they whistled past the graveyard and tried to pretend it wasn’t there while giving happy talk interviews to the fascist propagandists at Fox News.

And now, my friends, we pay the bill.

Never Seen Mad Men? Here's Why You Should

Mad Men was a stylishly executed, sprawling and sophisticated novel of a show about the historic illusions of American society — the facade of postwar suburban perfection, the ignored injustice of 1960s attitudes toward blacks, gays and women in a society “with justice for all,” and a man who successfully sells lies in a backstabbing profession of lies on Madison Avenue. 

The series’ underlying joke is that the man himself is a lie, and its running theme is the characters’ confused groping toward truth.

More Giant Turtle Men Than One Would Expect

You can thank — or blame — Mort Weisinger for all the giant turtle men who used to wander around tearing up highway bridges.

The first was cover-featured in the July 1940 issue of the Weisinger-edited pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories, an illustration for Out Of The Depths by H.L. Gold.

In 1941, Weisinger moved from Standard Magazines to National Periodicals as editor of the Superman and Batman titles. That’s why Superman’s pal became a giant turtle man in Jimmy Olsen 53 (June 1961).

Superman might have had a sense of déjà vu, because he had also confronted a giant turtle man in Superboy 30 (Jan. 1954).

As the Curt Swan/Bill Finger story The Giant Who Came to Smallville! opens, a turtle the size of a Volkswagen clamps onto the Smallville mayor’s car, prompting Superboy to sort things out. The Boy of Steel returns the turtle to its owner, a local scientist named Willis, who complains that no one in Smallville takes his growth serum seriously.

“They all think my giant turtle is just a freak — an accident!” he says. “And they call me a crazy scientist!”

Can’t imagine why. It’s not like he would leave his growth formula in a temptingly shiny test tube next to the baby crib where his infant son could drink it.

Oh wait. He did.

It would prove to be Willis’ last mistake. While the baby was drinking the stuff, his parents were being killed by a volcanic eruption at the remote location to which they’d moved.

The baby, now grown to giant turtle manhood, wanders off to Metropolis, where he plays with an ocean liner as if it were a toy boat. Superboy has his hands full trying to protect the innocent child from being killed by military planes while shielding the public from the giant and finding a way to corral it. With characteristic compassion, he does so by finding a way to befriend the giant boy, not by frightening him.

Superboy develops an antidote to shrink the creature back to normal and arranges for the Smallville mayor to adopt the orphan, while keeping him in the dark about any colossal reptilian incidents in the boy’s past.

Cross-index this one under Monster Toddlers, a category that includes the Fantastic Four’s Infant Terrible and Captain James T. Kirk’s Squire of Gothos.

The story worked a little better here than when it was retooled for Jimmy Olsen. After all, Jimmy had to be not merely expanded into a giant turtle man but also “babyfied” in the brain.

It’s also easier for readers to accept the idea that a toddler might drink a dangerous super-scientific freakish-transformation serum than that Superman’s friends Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Lana Lang and Perry White would do so.

Repeatedly.

And, of course, delightfully. 

Breakfast with Bond

“James Bond’s favorite meal of the day was breakfast,” Tom Weiss wrote. “It was also the favorite meal of Ian Fleming, 007’s creator. Fleming made breakfast not only ‘Bond’s favorite meal of the day,’ but also ‘an important part of Bond’s day.’ This was not mere rhetoric. Among the five hundred meals mentioned in the entire Bond oeuvre, 115 were breakfasts, eighty of them described in appetizing detail.

“When Bond was at home, breakfast consisted of a single perfectly boiled egg, toast with jam, and coffee. It ‘was always the same’ (From Russia with Love). Of course, as a gourmand, Bond could not have an ordinary egg, or just any old jam or coffee — he had exacting standards. The egg came from a French Marans hen, was speckled brown, and boiled for three and one-third minutes. The toast was whole wheat, usually two thick slices with Jersey butter, and there would be three confitures available: Tiptree “Little Scarlet” strawberry jam, Coopers Vintage Oxford marmalade, and Norwegian honey. When in London, the coffee had to come from De Bry on New Oxford Street, and was served only in Menton china…”

“When faced with death, what did Bond eat for breakfast? In Live and Let Die, desperately trying to stay out of the clutches of Mr. Big and his henchmen, Bond ordered room service at the St. Regis in New York: pineapple juice, cornflakes, shirred eggs and bacon, toast with marmalade, and a double espresso. When it arrived, it dawned on him that he had ordered the hearty breakfast of a condemned man. This marked one of the only times Bond had cereal, and the only time he ate shirred eggs. Most of the time, he preferred his eggs scrambled, not shirred.”

By the way, I can see why James Bond stayed in shape. By American standards, Bond’s typical breakfast in his plane-tree’d flat off the King’s Road is nothing much. By postwar English standards, it was lavish.

James Bond Meets Synchronicity

James Bond encounters synchronicity in Ian Fleming’s novel Moonraker:

“Startled at the great crimson words, Bond pulled in to the curb, got out of the car and crossed to the other side of the street to get a better view of the big skysign.

“Ah! That was it. Some of the letters had been hidden by a neighbouring building. It was only one of those Shell advertisements. ‘SUMMER SHELL is HERE’ was what it said.

“Bond smiled to himself and walked back to his car and drove on.

“When he had first seen the sign, half-hidden by the building, great crimson letters across the evening sky had flashed a different message.

“They had said: ‘HELL is HERE… HELL is HERE… HELL is HERE.’”

What Bond didn’t know was that Sir Hugo Drax was at that moment preparing the clandestine launch of a nuclear missile at London.