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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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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (no relation—to my knowledge, anyway).
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Assessment so far: Very good, very entertaining, very British. I think a lot of American writers tend to come up with a plot and stick close to it (especially in fantasy writing), whereas British authors seem to write with a vague conception of where they’re going but with all sorts of digressions here and there. They wander down the path of the plot and stop to take small side-paths—”What’s this?” “What’s that over there?”—and it isn’t until you finish the book that you (and possibly the writer as well) can see which apparent digressions were important to the plot and which were just pleasant little diversions. That said, Clarke is a very good writer, and these are very good diversions.
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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I’ve noticed that certain portions of the site—particularly the comments section at the bottom of individual entries, the font size and type, and the navigation bar on the main page—look wrong on certain browsers. In the case of the navigation bar, the dotted line goes past the navigation margin into the post; in the comments section, the text box goes outside of the gray container.
Has anyone noticed these problems (or anything else)? If so, could you please let me know (you can post it here or email me), along with the browser you’re using and what version? You can find that out by choosing the “Help” tab on the File menu, and then choosing “About Internet Explorer” or “About Firefox” or whatever browser you’re using.
I’ve had a few hiccups with the site over the last couple of days, including a few lost comments and some other problems. Everything should be more or less okay now, with the exception of the comment by Sean that I lost (sorry Sean!).
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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