Category: Entertainment

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Apparently Stargate: SG-1 has been canceled after 10 seasons. I wasn’t a fan, but you’ve got to admit, 10 seasons is a serious accomplishment. But I found one remark interesting:

Ironically, this is the first year since Season Four that plans were already in place, both creatively and in signed actor contracts, for another year. The show has lived on year-to-year since moving to SCI FI, with the writers forced to write a possible series finale every year — only to find the show renewed once again.

A space-based show on the Sci-Fi Channel, used to planning one year at a time, has finally decided to plan two years, only to find themselves cut off halfway through. Starring (among others) Ben Browder and Claudia Black. It sounds oddly familiar. Where could I possibly have heard something like this before?

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While writing an article on Earth-Prime yesterday, I had an interesting thought linking Superboy Prime’s “continuity punches” from Infinite Crisis with the early appearances of Earth Prime.

DC Comics established Earth-Prime as the reader’s world. It was basically the same as the real world, with no super-heroes, and allowed DC characters to interact with a world in which they were fictional characters. It also allowed the comics’ writers and editors to write themselves into stories. In 1985, as DC was dismantling the multiverse concept with Crisis on Infinite Earths, they established the existence of a Superboy on Earth-Prime, just before they destroyed the universe. This Superboy returned after a 20-year absence as one of the main villains in Infinite Crisis.

Flash #228 (1974), “How I Saved the Flash,” featured writer Cary Bates traveling to Earth-1 and meeting the Flash. Up until this point, the conceit had been that on Earth-Prime, comic writers would dream about super-heroes’ adventures on Earth-1, just as Earth-1’s writers would dream about heroes on Earth-2. In this story, the connection went the other way, too: Earth-Prime’s Cary Bates was able to influence events on Earth-1 by sheer force of will, which he called “plotting power.” Continue reading →

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The Blood KnightSorry I haven’t posted much here lately. The main reason is that I’ve been re-reading Greg Keyes’ Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series before picking up The Blood Knight. (I’ve also been spending time at the Comic Bloc Forums discussing the Flash relaunch.)

Re-reading The Briar King and The Charnel Prince both followed the same pattern: I read half of the book over the course of the week, then finished it on the weekend. I started the new book, The Blood Knight on Saturday morning and basically spent the weekend on the couch reading. About ¾ of the way in I realized acutely that, no matter how fast I read it, there would still be one book left when I finished.

It’s funny, when I first read The Briar King I didn’t like it much. I think mainly I was expecting something less steeped in medieval Europe (based on The Waterborn and The Blackgod). I picked up The Charnel Prince anyway, and liked it much better, and quite enjoyed The Briar King when I reread it.

One thing that’s unusual about this series is that there’s no Merlin figure. No Gandalf to show up in the first few chapters and explain what the Ring is, who wants it, and what has to be done with it. No Moiraine to explain who the Forsaken are, and what it means to be the Dragon Reborn. All the characters are pretty much figuring things out as they go. And they make mistakes—pretty nasty ones in some cases.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Greg Keyes and Neil Gaiman are the only authors whose work I will buy in hardcover, sight unseen. Looking at Keyes’ website, I realized that I actually own a copy of every book he’s published. There aren’t too many authors I can say that about.

Only 1½ years until The Born Queen…

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Friday afternoon I was walking down Fifth with a couple of Subway sandwiches in my backpack. This section of the Gaslamp Quarter is almost entirely restaurants, and most of them have dining areas out on the street, with the host or hostess’ podium right there on the sidewalk. I had spotted something odd ahead of me, but I’ll let this overheard exchange speak for itself:

Hostess: “Come quick, or you’ll miss something really cool! There’s a sandwich in the street!”
Voice from inside: “Oh, I already saw him.”

Guy dressed as a sandwich

For the record, it turned out to be part of a big promotion for the movie, Accepted.

The convention clearly strains resources to the limit. These traffic cones, used for creating lanes for the shuttles and whatever traffic was allowed in front of the convention center, include such messages as “Reserved,” “No Parking,” and “Stop”—none of which applied to their current use!

Traffic cones with varying labels

Now, I have yet to figure out the connection between Playboy models and comic books, except that these days they do seem to have the same target audience. There were several models doing signings and photo ops around the hall. On Thursday morning, though, this model hadn’t set up her booth yet. The bag on the table looked disturbingly like a body bag.

Playmate Body Bag

This last one actually has no connection to the con, but I forgot to post it on Monday. It’s probably only funny if you’re familiar with the BSD operating systems. (It took me a while, but I eventually realized BSD in this case meant Broadway San Diego.)

BSD Wicked

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Here’s the latest round of strange sights from San Diego.

[Outhouse on a crane]We stayed at the Radisson Harbor View. The end of the hallway had a view of the harbor, but our room had a view of the construction across the street. When we first stepped onto the balcony, we saw a crane lifting an outhouse up to the topmost floor of the site. There’s something inherently absurd about a port-a-potty flying through the air.

We walked up and down Cedar Ave. from the hotel to the Little Italy trolley stop at least once a day, stopping at the same It’s a Grind coffee house we frequented two years ago. Strangely, we didn’t notice this message on the street until our last day in town:

No SBC to India

Now, it may look like a tagger’s commentary on outsourcing, but it makes more sense if you happen to know that India Street is just a block away.

Apartment high-rise with identical balconies... and one red umbrella.There were quite a few high-rise buildings that looked very much like this one. Sort of the skyscraper equivalent of clone homes, I suppose. This one had one difference: One of the tenants had set up a large, red umbrella on their balcony.

Moving on to the Gaslamp Quarter, we saw—but didn’t photograph—a club called Tsunami Beach. I don’t know about you, but if there’s a tsunami, the last place I want to be is on the beach!

This next one was actually pretty neat. The window boxes outside Dussini (a Mediterranean restaurant on Fifth Avenue) are full of low-water plants. Practical, low-maintenance, and still decorative.

Windows box with low-water plants

Finally, here’s a sign from somewhere along the 5, elsewhere in San Diego:

Fish and Richardson

I think it’s pretty safe to say that Richardson isn’t a fish…

Next: con-specific weirdness.

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I mentioned that on Saturday, we left Comic-Con for a few hours to check out the ships at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. We saw five:

  • The Star of India, billed as “the world’s oldest active ship”
  • The HMS Surprise, a replica of an 18th century British ship.
  • The Berkeley, an 1898 steam ferry
  • The Medea, a 1904 yacht
  • A B-39 Soviet submarine.

The big attractions, of course, were the Star of India and the HMS Surprise. Naturally, the Star of India was closed when we got there.

Star of India as seen from a porthole in the Surprise
The Star of India seen from the Surprise

The Surprise was fun, though. It turns out it was built in the 1970s as a replica of an 18th century British Royal Navy vessel, the HMS Rose. It was sold to 20th Century Fox in 2001 and used to film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. After filming was complete, the museum bought the ship and renamed it the HMS Surprise in honor of the fictional vessel.

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