Another Covers Dilemma

I'm not quite done with my big pile of comics--I would be if I stopped buying them--so I'm pushing the Comics Recap and Everyday Heroes back a week.

In the meantime I ran into a slight problem with the cover for the third Girl Power book.  Originally I was going to use this graphic, which is kind of cool:

The only problem is with the way the story is written there's no male bad guy so it doesn't make a lot of sense.  So I went to go look up pictures of women brandishing a knife, of which there are more than a few.  Maybe you can pick a winner from these:

Keep in mind these are just comp images, not finished products so they're in low resolution.

Any of these strike your fancy?

It looks like the chick with the knife behind her back is winning.  It does have kind of a neat "Psycho" vibe.  Here's a cleaned-up version:

Two Cent Tuesday: Growth Chart

Over a month ago I created a full bibliography of all the stuff I'd written and published since 1994.  Eventually I got to thinking of a way to represent this graphically--in graph format.

Because the idea that occurred to me is that by looking at those books I could track my growth and lack thereof as a writer.  So first let me post the chart and then I'll get down to explaining it.  BTW, the numbers are pretty much arbitrary values.

Click to embiggen as Offutt would say...

The bottom (Y?) axis represents a year, some being listed more than once as they correspond to a particular work.

From the chart you could extrapolate a few distinct periods:

Period One:  Infancy (1994-2001)

We start arbitrarily at 1 with A Light From the Darkness in 1994.  It was by all measures not very good.  It's the kind of thing I probably shouldn't put out there, but what the hell.  Hardly anyone ever buys it.  There's a slight uptick then with the Rebirth Trilogy as I eventually called it:  First Contact, The Savior, The Final Battle.  The story was a little sharper though the grammar was still pretty bad.

 Period Two:  Aggressive Expansion (2002-2007)

Starting in 2002 with The Leading Men I began to get into literary fiction.  Really between 2003-2006 was when I was sort of hitting the books, really working on the craft and all that.  That was when I naively thought if I just worked really hard at it I'd find that fabled Northwest Passage to getting published.  There is a large drop for what eventually became Young Family (Children of Eternity #2) just because it took three drafts to get that into something not completely awful.

Period Three:  The Peak (2008)

All that hard work on craft and all that left me burned out in 2007, but it opened the door to reaching the peak with Where You Belong in 2008.  That's where I was in the zone as they say.  I'll talk more about that next week.

Period Four:  The Permanent Period (2009-Present)

Since reaching the peak, things have largely plateaued.  There were a couple of setbacks in Time Enough to Say Goodbye and Awakenings, both of which required a couple of drafts.  The Chances Are series I consider to be the best from this period, though others may disagree.  More or less right on through the present things have been keeping an even keel.  The name "Permanent Period" comes from Lay of the Land by Richard Ford where the narrator claims you eventually reach a point where great changes are no longer possible.  You are who you are and that's how it's going to be from now on.  That's not really a bad thing in my book; if you've been at it for almost 20 years and you still haven't figured out your identity yet that would be the bad thing to me.

The idea here is to chart a writer's growing maturity--or lack thereof.  You start off knowing very little and then you learn until you reach the pinnacle of your powers and then you settle in.

I used myself because who else do I know that well, but really you could do this for any author who's been around 20-30 years.  I could plug in my literary hero John Irving or someone like John Updike or Kurt Vonnegut or Stephen King or John Grisham or whoever else you want to name who's been around for a long time.  I'd wager the chart would wind up looking pretty much the same.

You could look at it like an athlete in whatever sport.  A guy breaks into the league, hones his game, becomes a star for a while, and then as he gets older settles back in as a reliable but perhaps not spectacular player before finally calling it quits.  Think of Michael Jordan for instance.  He was drafted in the early 80s and then through the 80s was honing his game before he exploded in the 90s as the king of basketball and then with the Washington Wizards he settled into being an OK but not great player for a couple years before he retired.  So it goes.

So where do you think you are on the chart?

Box Office Blitz Playoff Results Round 1

Here we go with the first round of the playoffs.  Read Friday's post if you want a recap of the rules.  The gist is they're pretty much the same.

The top 3 movies of last weekend were:

1. Frozen $31.6M
2. Hunger Games 2 $26.1M
3. Out of the Furnace $5.2M

The first matchup between #1 Rusty and #8 Briane was essentially a bye week for Rusty because Briane has been sidelined with health issues recently.  (If you could, send some good vibes Briane's way.)

Rusty picked:
Frozen $35 mil
Catching Fire $32 mil
Out of the Furnace - $8 mil

That's a trifecta for 900 points, which is more than enough to advance him to the next round.

Now we get to some real matchups.
#2 David Walston vs. #7 Michael Offutt

David picked:
1. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire $34M
2.Frozen $32M
3. Out of the Furnace $7M

That's 100 points for Hunger Games and Frozen and 400 for Out of the Furnace for 600 total

Michael Offutt picked:
1) Frozen $34 million
2) The Hunger Games Catching Fire $30 million
3) Out of the Furnace $10 million.

That's a trifecta for 900 points.  Which means Michael gets the upset win!

Next up we have the Dilloway Bowl between #3 Chris Dilloway and #6 P.T. Dilloway
Chris picked:
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire $46m
Frozen $32m
Out of the Furnace $7 mil

That's 600 points

I picked:

1.  Hunger Games 2 $35M
2.  Frozen $30M
3.  Thor 2 $6M

 That's a mere 200 for me.  So Big Brother moves on to the next round.

And finally we have #4 Andrew Leon vs. #5 Maurice Mitchell

Andrew picked:

1. Frozen -- $32m
2. Catching Fire -- $30m
3. Out of the Furnace -- $6m

That's a trifecta for 900 points

Maurice picked:
1. Frozen $35 mil
2. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire $32 mil
3. Out of the Furnace $7 mil

Also a trifecta for 900 points!

But Andrew picked Frozen closer than Maurice so by a whisker he moves on to the next round.

Because I'm lazy and don't feel like rearranging the brackets all the time we'll do this NCAA basketball style.  That means next week for Round 2's winner's tourney we have:

As for us losers it'll be:

Get ready for Round 2 beginning on Friday!

Comic Captions 12/9/13

It's time for another Comic Captions, where your job is to recaption a comic book panel.  The goal of course is to make it as humorous as possible.  This is another case where you can also make it as dirty as possible.

This week's comes from Spider-Woman Agent of SWORD #2

I'll go first

Madame Hydra:  Hey baby, need a lift?

Now it's your turn!

Box Office Blitz Playoffs: Round 1

The regular season of season 2 has finished, with Rusty coming out on top.  But now we begin the playoffs to determine who will be the last one standing for the title of Box Office Blitz Season 2 Champion!

The scoring process will work the same as it did in the regular season, like this:
100 points per movie you guess right
100 points if you guess the top grossing movie right
200 points if you guess the 2nd top grossing movie right
300 points if you guess the 3rd top grossing movie right

In the event of a tie, the winner is determined by who is closest (higher or lower) to the top movie's gross.  If that is a tie, then we move to the #2 movie and if that's a tie we move to the #3 movie.  In the unlikely event someone is still tied I'll have to come up with some kind of overtime.

There will not be a 300 point bonus for the winner because there's really no point to it.

Instead of everyone competing against everyone, for the first round of the playoffs all eight players pair off based on their position at the end of the regular season.  Here are the matchups for Round 1:

Whoever gets the most points in each matchup advances to Round 2 while the loser will play for nothing but pride next week in the loser's bracket.  The points earned are not cumulative, so next week everyone goes back to 0.

With all of that now as clear as mud, here's the list of movies out in the theaters this week:

• 12 Years a Slave
• Black Nativity
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2
• Dallas Buyer's Club
• Delivery Man
• Ender's Game
• Free Birds
• Frozen
• Gravity
• Homefront
• Jackass: Bad Grandpa
• Last Vegas
• Out of the Furnace*
• Philomena
• The Best Man Holiday 
• The Book Thief
• The Christmas Candle
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
• Thor: The Dark World

For my matchup I will pick:

1.  Hunger Games 2 $35M
2.  Frozen $30M
3.  Thor 2 $6M

And now you make your picks in the comments.  I'll wait until Monday night to tally the scores so I can use the Actuals.  That way we don't have any reversals later on.

Good luck--for everyone except Chris.

Thursday Review: Last Action Hero

About a month ago I read an article on The Onion's AV Club about one of my favorite underrated movies:  Last Action Hero.  It's hard to believe that the movie is 20 years old now; seems like only yesterday we were not watching it in the theater.  Somewhere you can probably still buy the Last Action Hero figures hardly anyone bought.  I bought a couple I like to joke are my nest egg for retirement because in another 30 years they'll be worth big money!  Of course first it would help to know where they are.

In case you never watched it, much of the movie serves as a satire of action movies, especially the cop action movies like Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, and the like.  In the "real" world a kid named Danny loves the Jack Slater action movie franchise.  At an old theater he gets a sneak peek at the latest one (Jack Slater IV) along with a supposedly magic ticket.  The ticket actually is magic and transports Danny into the movie, where he lands in Slater's backseat during a car chase with some villains.  From there the satire begins with the loud rock music, the car jumping obstacles and smashing through stuff without a scratch, and the car driving perfectly straight while Slater turns around in his seat to shoot his gun.

From there Danny joins Slater in hunting down a gangster and his main assassin Benedict who has one eye and uses a variety of trick glass eyes in the other.  Benedict is a lot smarter than his boss and figures out Danny is not of his world.  He eventually steals the ticket and uses it to cross over into "reality" which is a pretty awesome place for a movie villain because the good guys aren't guaranteed to win.  That's where the movie applies the satire the other direction as Jack Slater follows Benedict and has to adapt to not having unlimited ammo and actually suffering pain when he punches something--and (most horrifying of all) classical music.

As much as I enjoy the movie the drawback for me has always been that at times it got a little too cutesy.  Like it (accurately) points out how there's not a single homely woman in Jack's world but then takes it to extremes by having most of them dress like hookers.  Or the cartoon cat Whiskers who's a detective at the station.  Just showing the cat the first time was a funny gag, a little send-up of Roger Rabbit in a way of combining animation with actual film, but having the cat show up later as part of the action was a bit much.  On the other side in the end sequence there gets to be a bit too much winking when Jack Slater meets Arnold Schwarzenegger and so forth--something that sadly Ocean's Twelve did not learn from about a decade later.

This was probably the John Carter of its time, a movie that got hamstrung mostly by poor management.  Like John Carter the end product isn't as bad as some people would make it seem.  At least it's never seemed that way to me.  But then I prefer a movie that tries an ambitious concept and doesn't entirely succeed over one that plays it safe all the way.  It's why I like other movies like Darkman and Pacific Rim that were not huge successes at the box office.  In this case the ambitious part was making sort of a meta-movie with a movie-within-a-movie and sometimes crossing with other movies on top of that when Benedict fetches The Ripper from Jack Slater III and the ticket inadvertently summons Death from The Seventh Seal (played by Ian MacKellan in his pre-Gandalf/Magneto days).  If it hadn't gotten so over-the-top in its satire it would have been even better.

Like the AV Club reviewer I wouldn't agree with critics who complained that neither "reality" in the movie is actual reality.  That Danny's world isn't exactly our world (because our world doesn't have magic tickets--so far as I know) wasn't really the point.  The point was for Jack to enter a world where his world's rules no longer applied to see if he could overcome that, if he could be a hero outside of his scripted reality.  It's something I do in the 5th Scarlet Knight book when Agnes the witch is drawn into a parallel universe without magic and has to overcome that handicap.

Where I disagree from the AV Club review is when they say all Danny learns is that magic is real.  In the same way that Jack has to overcome his handicaps to be a hero in the "real" world, Danny has to find his courage to be a hero.  Early in the movie Danny's apartment is robbed and while he briefly considers trying to fight back in the end he just ends up cowering in a bathroom.  As well it's pretty clear that he spends most of his free time in a dark movie theater, usually by himself.  Contrast that to the end when he has to help Jack stop Benedict on the rooftop and then get Jack back into his movie universe to save his life.  Presumably then after the movie Danny might not spend so much time in the movie theater hiding from real life.

So see there are a lot of hidden depths here that a lot of people never bother to contemplate in large part because the movie was deemed a failure and therefore it must suck.  Just like you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you shouldn't judge a movie by its box office receipts.  As Jack Slater would say that's a "Big Mistake."

Appropriately the Box Office Blitz playoffs begin tomorrow!

Cover Reveal: Chances Are Paperbacks!

Today I'm doing another cover reveal.  This time it's for my books, which makes it extra-special.  I released the Chances Are books last winter with covers I'd cobbled together.  From a distance they looked passable.  They've sold well enough that I suppose most people didn't really care.  Here are the old and busted covers:

Note the man shadow's cheesy legs I had to add to line up

Note how thin the woman's shadow is

This one is just bad all around.

When I decided to make paperbacks, I initially used the same covers.  The graphics are really too low-res, so they look like crap.  Thus I decided that I should get new covers made.  But I didn't want to reinvent the wheel.  I just wanted to replace the silhouettes on each cover.

So when I heard on Facebook he wasn't that busy, I contacted artist A.L. Sirois, who drew the Scarlet Knight promo comic book.  It turned out to be a little more difficult than either of us expected to get something workable.  Here are the new covers but for some reason Blogger is lightening them in places; this happened on another pic I loaded recently; I don't know what Blogger's deal is with that.  They don't look that way on Amazon or in Paint Shop Pro.

You'll notice too I transposed the text and graphics.  This is to avoid the margins for the paperbacks.  The only margin I have to worry about for the text is the fold on the left side.  The new covers are a bit better resolution, so they look better.  Plus now they're in matte instead of annoying super-glossy format that makes taking a picture of them impossible.

The finished product!

All three paperbacks are for sale on Amazon and Createspace.  They make great gifts!  And stocking stuffers if you have a rather large stocking.

Two Cent Tuesday: Grumpy Potpourri

Let the grumpiness commence!

In the spirit of Festivus, I feel like airing some recent grievances.  Maybe later I'll challenge Rusty to the Feats of Stength since we're probably the only ones who still get the Seinfeld reference.

So like a month ago Blockbuster announced it was finally mercy killing both its stores and its DVD by mail service.  I was reluctantly using the latter because Netflix pissed me off a few years ago by sending me the same broken DVD TWICE and I'm too lazy to go to the Redbox kiosks.  Anyway, I could have seen the handwriting on the wall a while ago.  Blockbuster's problem wasn't just people were going digital with movies, but also that they sucked in providing for the customers.  I mean just about all the movies on my Blockbuster queue that were "Medium Demand" or "High Demand" or "Very High Demand" were readily available on Netflix's DVD service once I switched back to them.  Part of that is probably because they knew they were winding down their business, but really long before that they were slow about mailing movies and if you weren't able to get a new one the day it came out, forget about it for like six weeks.  So really, why should people stick with you?  The only advantage of Blockbuster is their envelopes are so much nicer.  They're easier to open and much smaller than Netflix's, which don't fit in the mail slot for my apartment's mailbox, which is extremely irritating.  Why does Netflix need to waste so much paper?  Think of the trees!

Anyway, speaking of companies going out of business in the near future, I recently got a $5 off coupon from Best Buy and decided to use it on a Sims 3 expansion pack since there was really nothing else I needed.  I could buy it to download from the site so that seemed simpler than going to the store.  WRONG!  With Amazon for instance you pay for the download and BOOM! you start downloading it and then installing and playing it.  But stupid ass Best Buy you have to wait for them to add it to your "digital library" which takes like an hour or so.  Well then I go to my digital library and where is it?  Not there.  I chatted with some dope in customer service who "assumed" it would take up to 24 hours.  Well gee 48 hours go by and still my game isn't there!  I tried to email them.  No answer.  Tried again 40 hours later.  No answer.  Ranted about them on Twitter and got an auto Tweet--and that was it.  Finally I sucked it up to navigate their obnoxious phone system.  When I get a person she assures me they'll send me a code by Email in 24 hours.  Nope.  I call the next day another lady tells me they'll send a code in 24 hours.  Nope.  I call the next day the guy gives me the code over the phone.  Hooray?  Nope.  Doesn't work.  Finally I just went to EA's Sims 3 site and bought the game from them for $20.  Ten minutes later it's installed.  Gee, 10 minutes vs. 5 fucking days.  This is part of the reason they'll be out of business in a couple years.  Which is kind of sad because honestly I still like having them around for situations like when I bought my new computer and for whatever reason the thing only had DVI connectors and I have a VGA monitor.  I was luckily able to go down to Best Buy and get an adapter.  But when Best Buy goes under what do I do?  Wait 2 days to get it from Amazon?  Wait a day or so to find some Ma and Pop computer parts store?  Because the only other stores with electronics these days are Wal-Mart, Target, etc. and they wouldn't carry specialty parts like that.  I guess I'd just be screwed then.

Since I mentioned Sims 3 Expansion Packs, they are largely a ripoff.  I wanted the "Movie Stuff" one because it promised to have superhero costumes and I thought that some professional ones might be better than someone's homemade ones I recolored for my characters.  WRONG!  The problem is EA is so fucking arrogant about these things.  Instead of designing like some generic superhero costume parts, you can pretty much only get their character Peacock Man or whatever the hell it's called.  If you don't want Peacock Man you're screwed.  And for the ladies the ones they designed looked great if you were making She-Ra, who incidentally is not classified as a superhero.  I mean, did these people even read a comic book or watch a superhero movie ever?  Pretty much for $15 you get like 3 or 4 new outfits per sex/age and maybe a couple new hairstyles, most of which are pretty fucking lame.  And they're so lazy they just give you full outfits instead of putting shirts, pants, skirts, etc. separately, which would be more useful.  It's a ripoff.  The sad thing is that people do so much better work from their basements than EA's professional designers do.  I mean the hairs EA designs are always crap.  They're always so flat and dull compared to what other people do on their own.  Here's an example:

Less Boring.

BORING.

Now just to get my goat I'm sure you all will say you like EA's better, but you would be wrong.  If they just put a little thought and effort into their creations they'd be much better, but they'd rather bilk suckers for $15-$40 per set.  Then again most people probably aren't as big of sticklers about this as I am.  Maybe they want to use Peacock Man.

I think the summary of my first three points is that big companies suck because they just don't put much effort into it and then they wonder why they fail and customers eventually leave them.  Surely if there were a better way of designing my people (like if I actually could draw) I'd do that rather than use EA's crap.

Since "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" are behind us, what's this bullshit of websites like Best Buy being "sold out online" of stuff?  I understand if a product is no longer being made it could be "sold out" but really if it's still in production like Kindle Fires for instance then it's not like you can't just order more of them from the manufacturer.  Instead of "sold out online" you should just say it's backordered for a few days.  But really I think it's more that they want you to go into the store to look for it in the hope you'll spend more money there than online.

Here's a mini sports rant for you.  Considering NFL teams are starting such luminaries at quarterback as Josh McCown, Kellen Clemens, and something called Scott Thorzien, you'd think a guy who led his team to a .500 record and won a playoff game could get work as at least a backup.  I am of course talking about Tim Tebow who got Denver to the second round of the playoffs and was rewarded with being traded to the Jets, whose brilliant plan was to bring him in for the "wildcat" and then have him run the ball for 2 yards.  Every.  Single.  Time.  Because no one would ever figure that out!  After a tryout with "genius" Bill Belichick's Patriots he's now on the street.  My thought for why this happened is that teams are lazy.  For someone with Tebow's somewhat limited skill set you need to redesign your offense to accommodate him.   Denver had success when they did that.  No one else has tried that because it would take a lot of effort.  Why go to that much trouble when you can just shove some journeyman like McCown or Clemens or Chad Henne in there?  Even horrible teams like Jacksonville are too lazy to give it a try, despite that if the gamble paid off the coach might actually save his job.  Or I suppose instead of laziness you could all it arrogance.  But I'd say if you're 1-9 then you are clearly not a coaching genius; you might as well accept your failure and try something different.  Or not.  It is the NFL (the National Football League as every "analyst" has to call it as much as possible) where "new" typically means doing what other teams did 15 years ago.

A final thought on NaNoWriMo:  after I got to the 50,000 it was harder to get motivated to write except on weekends.  I suppose 50,000 is a good goal for a lot of people, but for me it was much too short.  And then having achieved that goal it's kind of a letdown.  Just another reason not to bother with it.

Last week was Thanksgiving and Black Friday.  I'm on record at being annoyed that they have to have sales on Thanksgiving now.  Most people concentrate on the "plight" of the workers for having to work.  When you think about it, the sales creep is really symptomatic of not only our culture of greed but also our inability to actually take a day off.  It's a well-known statistic that Americans take far fewer vacation days than workers in Europe.  We just seem incapable of really taking a day off to relax.  If we don't have to rush around to sales then we have to pack the day with a bunch of social obligations.  We all really need a day just to actually just kick back and take a load off for 24 hours.  No sales, no complicated dinners, no cookouts, no parades, no fireworks shows--just a day where everyone who isn't essential to keeping the country running can not worry about stuff.  Call it National Chill the Fuck Out Day; it's sort of like that movie "The Purge" only the opposite of committing crimes.

I have to slip in a rant now about the Family Guy episode where they "killed off" the dog Brian.  I'm going to use quotes because for now I'm assuming this is still a short-term ploy.  I can't honestly say I was really outraged at first.  Watching the episode I was more like, "OK, Stewie's going to use the time machine to save him...wait, he's not?  We're really doing this?"  It's the kind of thing where I watch through the credits just to make sure nothing is going to happen.  Then later I was pissed because Brian's my favorite character, owing to that he was a struggling writer and an atheist Democrat.  (I'll just ignore that he drove a Prius instead of a good American car.)  My thoughts on this subject are thus:

First, how could this episode be construed as funny in any way?  At least when they killed off Peter's adopted father it was in a bizarre fashion; getting run over by a car is extremely ordinary.  Especially since my avatar Blue II died a couple months ago, I'm a little sore on the subject of dogs dying.  Anyway, part of the reason I've only watched the show sporadically in the last three years or so is this new crop of writers they have blow.  To use Peter's words, they've gone all sissy-man Alan Alda.  Like that horrid 150th episode where Brian and Stewie were locked in the vault that was just painfully unfunny.  There have been quite a few others too where they've just seemed to have forgotten it's an animated comedy, not a drama.  It's probably why I've enjoyed American Dad a lot more than the show preceding it, at least until next season.

Second, what was the point in doing this?  When The Simpsons killed off Maude Flanders it was in large part because the voice actor didn't want to be on the show so much anymore.  In real-live shows we've seen quite a few examples where a character gets killed off because the actor wants to move on to "bigger and better things" (seldom with good results) or like with Two and a Half Men because of a dispute between the actor and management.  Obviously in this case those scenarios don't apply since Brian is voiced by Seth MacFarlane, who still is going to be doing a bunch of other voices on the show, so you're not saving any money and since Brian's voice is his normal voice you can't even claim it's to relieve any vocal stress.  If they'd killed Meg or Chris or someone like that off I could have seen where hey one less paycheck to write.

Third, are the ratings going down so much that you need to pull off something so desperate?  It seems to me that you're just antagonizing the fans.  How is killing off my favorite character going to make me watch the show?  And how is that going to bring in new viewers?  As a writer I've killed off characters plenty of times--the Scarlet Knight series for instance features a number of characters dying--but there's always a purpose to it, but in this case I just don't see what the purpose was.

Those who followed the Grumpy Bulldog Blog would know that I was a big Obama booster in 2012 and in 2008 before that.  I'm using past tense because it's over now.  First there was the Syria debacle where he got outmaneuvered by Putin.  Then the stupid government shutdown (not his fault but still).  Now the complete boondoggle that is the Obamacare rollout.  At this point he's going to go down with the likes of Ford and Carter, except with two terms.  Not a total disaster like Bush II but just couldn't deliver on anything.  Part of that was the opposition was just fucking insane but the other part is I guess he didn't pick a very good team to support him, like the people on this Obamacare website.  He must have hired people from Best Buy to do it.  I mean really that was the center of his legacy and with as fucked up as it's been, unless things get turned around quick he's got nothing to hang his hat on except a bunch of empty promises.

Which is too bad since he was the first minority president you want him to set a good precedent.  As it is, the next black person (or Asian, Hispanic, Indian, etc.) who runs for president people will think, "Oh, another Obama.  Meh."  Which is not what you want.  It would be like if Jackie Robinson had signed with the Dodgers, hit .050 and made six errors a game; baseball would probably still be segregated.  Will his failures spill over to 2016 to pave the way for a Republican victory?  Probably.  In which case don't worry about Obamacare because that'll be the first thing to go.  And if the Tea Party is still calling the shots, anyone who's not a white guy over 40 can expect to get fucked like everyone in red states has been.

Would you like to hear a story about mundane domestic stuff?  A couple months ago I began the great Saga of the Shower Curtain.  I'd had my previous shower curtain for like 4 years but it was getting gross so I thought I'd buy a new one.  The old one was just a basic Wal-Mart model I got for like $5.  I figured it should be easy enough to find something similar.  It wasn't.  I tried a couple hardware stores but they only had ones about as thin dollar store ones.  Eventually I sucked it up and went to Wal-Mart and got a "heavy duty" one for $10.  The problem is when I hung it up is they creased it so tightly that it was jutting into the shower.  I got fed up and tried a second one, only this one I soaked in warm water like I read somewhere.  That's easier said than done since the shower curtain floats.  It was a real mess and in the end it still wasn't work well.  Finally I found the solution:  Command adhesive Velcro strips.  I put one of these on either end of the shower and a matching one on the ends of the curtain.  Then I could pull the curtain tight (after a little trimming) so it wouldn't bunch up anywhere.  But really why was it necessary to crease the damned shower curtains like a pair of pants?

And what's the deal with airline peanuts?  Well I suppose you can't make those jokes nowadays because no one gets peanuts unless they want to pay $50 extra.

Comic Captions 12/2/13

It's time for another Comic Captions, where your job is to recaption a comic book panel.  The goal of course is to make it as humorous as possible.

This week's comes from Thor #365

I'll go first

Frog Thor:  Order the frog legs, whilst thou?  Have at thee!

Now it's your turn!

Box Office Blitz Regular Season Grand Finale!

It's time for the last roundup of Box Office Blitz for the regular season.  This was a pretty big weekend for kid-friendly movies.  The estimated results are:

Hunger Games 2 $74.5M
Frozen $66.1M
Thor 2 $15.5M

My picks were:

1. Hunger Games 2 $50M
2. Frozen $30M
3. Homefront $15M

That's 200 for HG2 and 300 for Frozen for 500 total

Maurice Mitchell picked:
1. Hunger Games Catching Fire - $60 mil
2. Frozen - $45 mil
3. Thor the Dark World - $15.7 million

That's a trifecta for 900 points!

Briane Pagel picked:
1. Frozen, $60 mil
2. Catching fire $55 mil
3. Homefront, $20 mil.

That's 100 each for Frozen and Catching Fire for 200 total.

David Walton picked:
1. Hunger Games Catching Fire - $100 M
2. Frozen - $60 M
3. Oldboy- $20 M

That's also 500 points

Chris Dilloway picked:
Hunger games 2 - $65m
Frozen - $50m
Homefront - $15m

Also 500 points

Andrew Leon was the only one to take advantage of being able to change his picks.  And the gamble paid off as he picked:
1. Catching Fire: $70m
2. Frozen: $60m
3. Thor 2: $12m

For the trifecta and the win for 1200 points since he was closer on Hunger Games 2 than Maurice

And here are the standings going into the playoffs:

	Box Office Blitz
	Scoreboard
	Season 2
		21	Total
1	Rusty Carl	0	14200
2	David Walton	500	12800
3	Chris Dilloway	500	12200
4	Andrew Leon	1200	11900
5	Maurice Mitchell	900	11000
6	PT Dilloway	500	10400
7	Michael Offutt	0	7400
8	Briane Pagel	200	6400
9	PK Hrezo	0	600
		3800	86900

Congrats to Rusty, David, and Chris for winning the regular season and to everyone except Briane Pagel for avoiding the Sacko.  The playoff matchups next week will be:

1 Rusty Carl vs. 8. Briane Pagel
2 David Walton vs. 7 Michael Offutt
3 Chris Dilloway vs. 6 P.T. Dilloway in the Dilloway Bowl (like the Manning Bowl only without the fame, money, endorsements, and Super Bowl rings)
4 Andrew Leon vs. 5 Maurice Mitchell

The rules for the playoffs will be posted on Friday.  In the meantime start hitting the books to get prepared.  Or just half-ass it like I always do.