Marvellous Christmas! Birch was delighted to see Natalie after a year, just delirious. All the traditions observed. All the traditions tweaked a bit. Folks over for dinner on Christmas. But it's done, and the 26th is back to normal, with the residual glow of happy times. So that's enough of that, and I hope you had as much joy and delight as we did.
I was buying wine at Traders Joe, because it is perfectly fine and the price is good. I know it’s good because the card says it has notes of berries, plums, chocolate. A finish of asbestos, granted, but what do you want for five dollars?
I paid with my watch. One of the clerks said “I remember when watches just used to tell time. Now they’re like, Captain Kirk and Superman.”
I stared at her. “First of all, you mean Dick Tracy. Superman did not have a watch. Second, Captain Kirk had one of these.” I held up my phone.
The other clerk tapped herself on the pectoral muscle, and said “Captain Kirk did this.”
“Captain Picard did that,” I said.
“Okay, nerd,” said the clerk who started it all. I reared back in mock offense.
“Nerd? Ma’am, I suggest you withdraw that remark . . . no, you’re right.”
“We’re all nerds now,” said the other clerk.
“Right, which is why us old nerds have to find something different to set us apart and make us feel like acolytes of some shadowy cult.”
(I was in a good mood and had a lot of coffee before shopping)
It is true, though; nerd culture, geek culture, is dominant, and both are the poorer for it. I watched “LA Confidential” again the other night, because I knew that it’s great, that I loved it, and hadn’t seen it in a long while and hence would find it fresh again. It’s a movie populated with grown-ups. No one can fly and no one can defeat evil by yelling at it and no one is fleeing zombies and no one can be hurled against a cement wall from a distance of 50 feet and shake it off.
Then I watched a sci-fi movie from the 50s, which will be the subject of a TV Tue next year - you think it’s going to be a wheel of cheese, but it wasn’t. Low budget but pretty dang smart. Had a cameo by Forrest Ackerman, and you know the geeks in the audience would’ve grinned at ol’ Forry getting a moment in the spotlight, this oughta be good if he endorses it. There was so little mainstream geek culture you had to take what you got. The pulps, maybe a comic strip, the annual big-bug movie or some crap where they go to Venus and it’s all dames and one guy in a rubber suit.
Three of my favorite movies star Russell Crowe, and not one of them led to better movies in the same genre. Nothing good in the sword-and-sandals genre; don’t even BEGIN to bring up Pompeii to me. No good Neo-noirs, but some mediocre hat-cop flicks. Not even a Master and Commander sequel.
We’ll have 30 episodes of She-Hulk in the end, though.
I assume you’ve been keeping up with these - you subscribed, right? Well, the tale is almost over.
The podcasts are augmented by visual additions, something we did not intend when we started, but seemed a good idea for YouTube. This one was the hardest to do, technically, for reasons too dull to recount. But it also had a wallop. I never imagined when I picked up the phone to call Peg Lynch that I would end up doing this.
I think she’d be pleased.
I’m off this week, sorta kinda. It’s the interregnum week. A period of sustained gaiety, right? We gear up for the New Year’s nonsense, and have one more interval of festivity before we climb into the cold vault of January and hear the dials spin, locking us in.
So the BTFs are out, just to whet your appetite for their return. Updates are ongoing, though, and I'll Bleat daily with something. I’m happy to report that we end the year with surpluses in the four of the five the categories - Matchbook Museum, Comics Obscura, Decades, and Motel American. I have enough banked in each category through 2025. I was thinking of changing up everything in 2025, but no: if there’s going to be any conceptual overhaul of the site, it’ll be in 2027, the site’s true 30th anniversary.
