…are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls

underlying art by James R. Bingham

No San Diego Comic Con for me this year.  Instead, I’ll be at the Christian Comic Arts Society table at the Pan Pacific Film Festival with Jose Guillen (Friday), Ralph Miley and Clint Johnson (Saturday).

Alex, Andrew, Sam, and Steve over at Nerdversity 101 asked me a few questions regarding Thundarr, classic G.I. Joe, and my upcoming Kindle Worlds G.I. Joe project “The Most Dangerous Man In The World” based on the infamous “lost” Joe TV episode.

it’s always a delight
to see a master at work play

…and with savage good humor
after they finished torturing / brutalizing / degrading him
they threw him naked / writhing / screaming
into the pit amid the mutilated corpses
of his friends / family / followers
and carefully started shoveling muck on him
to form an air pocket so he would stay alive for hours
surrounded by the ravaged remains of his loved ones
and as he felt the ice cold blood soaked earth fall around him
he bescreeched “my god my god why have you forsaken me?!?!?”
and the men above paused and laughed and said
fool, who do you think sent us?

It has been pointed out that outrage is no good if it does not point to a viable solution.  For those who might be interested in helping out by taking in children who are in need of foster care, we present the following resources:

http://scffaa.org, 

http://www.childhelp.org/programs/entry/california-childhelp-foster-family-and-adoption-agency/, 

http://adoptuskids.org/for-families/state-adoption-and-foster-care-information/california, 

http://californiacasa.org, 

http://www.casala.org, 

Even if one can not be a full time foster parent or an adoptive parent, one can be a child advocate and help out in some way.  Like the story of the starfish on the beach, it may not be possible to help them all, but it will mean everything to the ones who can be helped.

…to bite Hobby Lobby and SCOTUS on the ass…

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

– A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo

Better known to American audiences as The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, this iconic Italian Western frequently scores high on “best of” lists: Sergio Leone’s best film[1], the best of the Dollar a.k.a. “Man With No Name”[2] series, the best spaghetti Western, and (more rarely) the best Western ever.

It is a grand, entertaining epic, a significant notch up in scale from the previous films in the series[3]. It is almost a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story, set in a landscape of bleak lifeless deserts and abandoned blasted and burned out cities destroyed by war.

The restored version is currently streaming on Netflix, returning about 14 minutes of previously deleted footage[4] but only serving to make an already meandering story even more meandering. No new or vital story points are revealed, though Eli Wallach’s Tuco character certainly benefits the most from the fleshing out.

And that’s what makes The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly so fascinating…and muddled.[5]

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