Even the most casual reader of this blog probably knows I’m a big fan of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. The comic is one of the best out there, and the film, directed by Guillermo Del Toro, is my favorite comic book film.
So it was with great pleasure that I read that Hellboy 2, whose future had been in doubt after Revolution Studios announced it would be closing its doors in October 2007, has been picked up by Universal Studios—the company that passed on the first film years ago.
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I’ve started to follow the news recently (after staying away from much of the news media, for my mental health) and came across this article about the development of hardware that will allow us to control mechanical devices with our minds. According to the article, scientists have already managed to implant a chip in a quadriplegic man’s brain that allowed him to use his mind as a controller. The article goes on to claim that eventually people will be able to interact not only with the Internet via their minds, but with the thoughts of other people, going way beyond Snow Crash and even The Matrix.
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What with all the M. Night Shyamalan bashing going on over his latest dopus (as in opposite of opus) Lady in the Water, I thought I might remind you that Mr. Shyamalan’s been on a slide for some time and direct your attention to The Journal of the Alien from “Signs”, which I wrote back in 2002.
I also added two other old fake-news articles from a previous BBn incarnation, Mr. Owl is a Lying A-Hole and Economics Study Claims “Free Parking Prize” Destabilizes Monopoly. All were published in May 2002 in the old BBn.
I’d post “Warcraft Orcs Stray into Sims City,” which I also wrote for BBn, but an updated version of that piece will be published next month in ToyFare #110.
From The Patriot Ledger:
A South Shore attorney and former state representative died in a drowning accident on Nantucket.
Mark Fitzsimmons, 55, of Marshfield, died Friday afternoon when he apparently became caught in a riptide off the south shore of the island near Clark’s Cove.
Mark was a good friend of my father’s and our family. It was Mark who bodily hauled my father out of class his senior year of high school and marched him down to the guidance counselor’s office to fill out an application to Harvard. Twenty-five years later, Mark—despite being a Yalie himself—helped me during my own admissions process to Harvard.
Mark and my father shared a good-natured rivalry for decades, my father being a Harvard Republican and Mark being a Yalie Democrat. I went to The Game (the Harvard vs. Yale football game) with my dad and Mark several times. He was a good man, a funny guy, and a damned good lawyer, from what I’ve heard.
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The Amazing Screw-On Head was a one-shot comic book by Mike Mignola. Published in 2002, it went on to win an Eisner award for Best Humor Publication. Mignola’s idea with Screw-On Head was that his Hellboy stories never quite turned out as bizarre and weird on paper as they did in his head. ASOH was his attempt to depict a Mignola story in its purest, unadultered form.
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When we last saw our hero, I had just driven off from Midas in my black 1998 Nissan Maxima SE, a new muffler in my car and a song in my heart. The song was “Wax Ecstatic”, and it has been playing on the car stereo when it mysteriously disappeared.
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In 1962, writer and academic Umberto Eco published an essay called “The Myth of Superman,” in which he outlined how Superman (and superheroes in general) didn’t fit the traditional concept of a mythological hero due to the nature of capitalism and the episodic nature of Superman’s life. In essence, Superman has countless adventures over decades, all of which take place in a continuous present, while he remains the same approximate age. His story has a beginning, but it will never reach its end; but more importantly, he can never make progress, can never develop as a human being.
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When it came out three years ago, Pirates of the Caribbean was a sleeper hit, a surprisingly entertaining adventure film based on a theme park ride. And there was a time when that, as they say, would have been that. But in today’s Hollywood, Pirates went from being the equivalent of one of those rum-soaked Jolly Roger tourist boats to a money-making dreadnought, balanced carefully on Johnny Depp’s memorable performance as Captain Jack Sparrow.
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Let me begin by saying that I am not a worldly person. While I haven’t, as Quint says of Hooper in JAWS, “been countin’ money all my life,” I also have not developed any horny calluses over thousands of hours of hard, back-breaking outdoor work. But my naivete extends far beyond a mere unfamiliarity with extensive blue collar labor. Take, for instance, cars.
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I just finished playing Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. I was a huge fan of the The Secret of Monkey Island and later played both the third and fourth games, but somehow I missed the second one, and after being reminded of the games by Ed recently, I decided to hunt it down.
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