Fun trivia: I bought my very first ebook at GenCon 2012. When I accompanied my wife in the autograph line for Michael A. Stackpole, author of some of her favorite Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (several books in the Rogue Squadron series), I was surprised that one of the few items for sale at his table was a superhero novel called In Hero Years…I’m Dead. In lieu of hard copies, Stackpole had it available only on disk in ebook format. Undaunted by my complete lack of an eReader, I bought a copy anyway, for a few reasons:
1. I rarely buy much at GenCon because I’m not a gamer. The only vendors to extract profit from me were Stackpole and Oni Press, the only professional comics publisher on site.
2. I read the Rogue Squadron graphic novels Stackpole wrote for Dark Horse Comics once upon a time. Not bad, considering I read none of the novels and had no idea who most of the characters were. (Wedge, yes. The others, my wife had to explain to me.)
3. I’ve found the best way to spur myself into trying a new medium is to buy a work first, then worry about the device later. We owned our first DVD (The Phantom Menace) months before I bought my first DVD player. Likewise, the Blu-ray in my Up combo pack waited a good while before I could do anything with it. So there’s a precedent.
I’d like to read Stackpole’s novel at some point. As of this writing, though, I still have no eReader. I didn’t ask for one for Christmas. It wasn’t targeted on my Black Friday hunt. I’m not saving up for one. It’s not even on my wish list.
Sasha’s parents may be divorcing and deserting Paradise in separate directions, but judging by the evidence presented in tonight’s new episode of Bunheads, “Take the Vicuna”, their forgotten credit cards are keeping their daughter company in their absence. Their magically limitless credit line is enough to secure her new luxury apartment, cover the utilities bills (and hopefully the learning curve that goes with those), provide two carts’ worth of startup food and accessories, and still have thousands left over to throw a righteous housewarming party for her core friends, several classmates, the grownups who didn’t abandon her, and for reasons unknown Aubrey (Victoria Park), her onetime cheerleading captain. The snacks are plentiful, the guests receive parting gifts, and the decor is so over-the-top ornate, you’d think Sasha shares an interior decorator with Tom Haverford from Parks and Rec.
After seeing Zero Dark Thirty as part of my annual Best Picture nominee binge, I exited the theater with just one thought on my mind: I’d hate to be a guy trying to start a new country in this day and age.
If you’re among those fans rooting for Michelle to remove foot from mouth and get back in good graces with her surfer bartender oceanographer near-beau Godot, this week’s new episode of Bunheads, “The Astronaut and the Ballerina”, may have been a disappointment for you. Michelle approaches, makes bad jokes, digs her hole a little deeper, gifts him with a copy of Finding Nemo because of oceanography, but then watches her baby steps to forgiveness interrupted by a surprise visitor: her deadbeat brother Scotty!
After months of squeezing in an episode here and there whenever time permitted (which was rarely), tonight I finally finished watching all five seasons of The Wire. It’s sixty episodes of the most politically charged, complicated, incisive, meaningful, profane, discomfiting, provocative, challenging television I’ve ever seen. It’s not a show for everyone, but following the storylines of its roughly eight thousand different characters (give or take three) became an unprecedented adventure that part of me secretly hopes has left me scarred and ruined for any other TV show or fictional tale that dares to try impressing me in the future. Its multifaceted examination of life on the streets of Baltimore at every level made my own lower-class upbringing look like the life of a prince, put my comparatively benign hometown in perspective, and has made it hard for me to read any local crime news without wondering how much they’re not telling us.
Longtime MCC readers are surely aware of my addiction to writing lists. I confess before you now that my lifelong listaholism extends beyond what you’ve seen here in the past. In our household I appointed myself Chief Grocery List Officer. I keep track of all the comic books I own on Excel sheets. From 2000 to the present I’ve kept Notepad files of every single movie I’ve seen in theaters. Many a Post-It has died in service to my never-ending attempts to remember what chores and repairs need to be done around the house. All the odd sights we see on vacation each year have been made possible by lists, though those are always collaborative efforts with my wife the list-enabler.
My annual quest to see all the Best Picture Academy Award nominees continued last weekend with the scrappy indie competitor of the lot, Beasts of the Southern Wild, a magical-realism fable about stubborn penury-dwellers who do their best to ignore ripped-from-the-headlines natural disaster and do whatever they want whether it’s healthy for them or not. Not since No Country for Old Men has a film left me so depressed.
Tonight’s new episode of Bunheads, “I’ll Be Your Meyer Lansky”, saw the return of one of Michelle and Fanny’s most dreaded mutual enemies: their accountant, Eric (Ron Butler). Though they ostensibly “run” a dance studio as an awkward partnership, neither of them is big on bookkeeping, finances, profit margins, simple math, or numbers in general. Consequently, the studio is tanking hard, thanks to the Nutcracker fundraiser disaster, Fanny’s reluctance to bill many of her poorer students, and both instructors’ penchant for canceling classes on a whim and/or plot device. 
I hadn’t originally planned to see Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Unlike many of my longtime Internet peers, his films aren’t an automatic draw for me. Though Reservoir Dogs has been a qualified favorite of mine since college, the rest have been a mixed bag. His previous work, Inglorious Badwerds, was a mature, complex, riveting film about WWII and about the role of film in WWII, but was hampered by Brad Pitt’s Kentucky-fried B-movie brigade who snuck in from the direct-to-video good-ol’-boys revenge flick next door. From the trailers, Django looked to me like a 2-cool-4-school blaxploitation Western. Call it Shaft in Texas or Black Grit. Despite the talented cast involved and the joyous responses from the critical majority, it didn’t really sound like my kind of movie.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 