Some things never change

I don't know what inspired me to check the Columbia Daily Tribune yesterday, but Lord am I glad that I did.

When I was toiling away as a basement-dwelling minion of a Big Midwestern University (BMU) which need not be named here, one of the few joys of my life was reading the local paper every morning. For a small college town, Columbia gets a disturbingly large portion of the weird crap that goes on in this state. I'll always cherish the time the local Greek-types made national headlines for doing something stupid three times in three months, but that's a story for another time.

Anyway, when I checked the website yesterday, I was greeted by these two headlines:

Janitor Strives to Unlock Code behind Graffitti

Iggy Makes a Night of It

The first is about a custodian at the county courthouse tracing an anarchist conspiracy that spray painted the courthouse wall. The second story (which has the best title I've heard in ages) is about a rescue effort that took at least 24 hours to get a runaway iguana out of a tree.

Ahh, that takes me back...

In other fun news, STL hockey great Tony Twist kicked someone's ass yesterday. This, of course, has happened many, many times, but yesterday he did it outside of the rink for a change. Twist won an appeal in his long-running lawsuit against washed-up comics tycoon Todd McFarlane. McFarlane, back in the early 90s, created a villain by the name of Tony Twist for his God-awful Spawn comic books. Shortly thereafter, Twist the NHL enforcer sued over Twist the lingerie-wearing mafia boss and won $15 million in court. About the same time, McFarlane's empire of crap collapsed under the crushing weight of his ego and vast unpaid debts.

Real Twist

Fake Twist

All this is funny (to me anyway) for two reasons:
1. Todd McFarlane's misfortune is always funny.
2. The Twister retired from hockey six years ago, and he's still more entertaining than all the current Blues put together.

Finally, a reason for Diet Coke to exist!

Back in high school, my mad scientist of a chemistry teacher taught us that sodium explodes when it comes into contact with water. To demonstrate this point, he showed us a film of someone throwing a brick-sized lump of sodium into a lake.

While this was only one of many memorable films we saw in that class, the sodium one has long held a special place in my heart. I doubted if anything could ever match the eerie beauty of a dozen sodium fragments bouncing across the water as explosion begat explosion.

I was wrong.

Speaking of strange events and toxic substances, the Horseradish Festival was this weekend in lovely Collinsville, IL, aka the Horseradish Capital of the World. Darn, missed it again this year!

Evolution of Stick Person

On the subject of mutants, which kinda-sorta tie in with evolution, etc., I wanted to share with the world the wit and wisdom of a young Frau Skippy, circa 1989:



That is all.

I'm the Juggernaut, bitch

So the Frau and I went to see "X-Men: The Last Stand" the other day. Overall it was pretty entertaining, though I can see why a lot of people hated it. Anyway, here's what I thought:

THE GOOD:

• The action scenes, as a whole, were very impressive.
• I sat through two and a half X-Men movies just hoping to see Beast go medieval on a large crowd of bad guys. It was so worth the wait.
  
• Bullet-Tooth Tony as the Juggernaut, however briefly and badly written he was, still kicked ass.
  

THE BAD:

• Too many mutants, way too little time.
• They promised this would be the finale to the series, which (judging by the last 3 seconds of the film) was obviously a lie.
• Speaking of which, shouldn't Magneto, like, go to jail or something?
  
• If there is a sequel, I count five major characters who, one way or another, are permanently out of the story. At least four of them deserved better.
  
• (Of course, that strange condition known as "comic book death" is only marginally more permanent and/or inconvenient than the average hangover, so who knows.)
• I spend most of the second half pondering one question: is Arclight a dude now? According to the Internet, the answer is no, but I still have my doubts.
  
• Telling the famous "Dark Phoenix Saga" dominated the X-Men books for several years; squishing it into a subplot of a movie (especially a relatively short one) did not serve it well.
  

Overall, though, I would say the good outweighed the bad. It was an entertaining end to the series (maybe) and a very enjoyable way to spend an evening, whether it ends the series or not.

I learned a valuable lesson this morning...

If you are nearly killed by a rusty Dodge minivan with chrome spinning rims, do not expect to have a good day.



Every morning on my way to work, I say a little prayer that the new Metrolink line will be ready soon. (Of course, I also pray for world peace, but that doesn't mean I'm holding my breath for it.)

The South will rise again, just not in Kimmswick.

An article in today's Post Dispatch caught my interest:

Guns of Civil War fall silent in Kimmswick.

Apparently Kimmswick, a small touristy town about 20 miles south of St. Louis, had an annual Civil War reenactment, which has been canceled due to poor organization and low attendance.

The thing that struck me about all this was a quote at the end of the article by Hank Goehring, the founder of the event:

"The thing I liked most about our event is that it wasn't structured," he said. "We had re-enactors going into stores and harassing the storekeepers; we had them stopping cars and searching for alcohol. . ."

Hmm, I wonder what made the locals want to end it?