Aptly categorized?

So, a friend was visiting from Boston and I decided to take him to visit Zanadu Comics, the legendary Seattle comic book store. As we strolled among the comics and graphic novels, and the now-mandatory action figures scattered about the displays, my eye was caught by a felicitous juxtaposition. There was a figure of the Batman comics character Harley Quinn in her Nu52 design on top of a bookshelf; here she is in all her blister-pack glory:

You'll forgive the all the glare and reflection, the result of the plastic following all the rather improbable curves of the figure. The box just happened to be sitting on top of a label intended to identify the genre of books below it, but in which I saw another meaning:

Why, yes, I am sure it is somebody's. Holy unintended signification, Batman!

Phone blogging

Internet service is out in our neighborhood.  In lieu of a real blog post, here's a picture of a lucha libre trinket.

More on scribbling

So, I made some hopefully-not-too-snarky remarks on the Other Blog on some public writing in my neighborhood. That response concerned an A-frame sign on a sidewalk, but there is a growing and nigh-ubiquitous (at least on Facebook) idiom: the occasionally-clever and frequently-flat e-card aphorism. Any number of DIY sites allow you to create these; here's the example at hand today:

This showed up in some stream or other of mine, probably Facebook. It's mildly clever, in that ain't-I-naughty kind of way. But a lack of parallel structure throws it off.

The prose couplet starts off with two distinct singulars being made equivalent: childhood punishment and adult pleasure. Nice opposition there, on two levels. But these two singular concepts are modified by the same plural possessive: our. I guess I can go with that, perhaps, if we conceive of each of these as representing a universal or an ideal; but this universal is then given two plural manifestations - naps and spankings - and the introductory phrase for example leads us to believe there are even more. This is not a case of a Platonic ideal, then.  So let's revise to get some parallelism:

It's funny how our childhood punishments are now our adult pleasures. For example, taking naps and spankings.

Okay, but I think we can polish even more. "To be" - in the original is and in the revision are - as the main verb can almost always be improved upon. How about we take are now and make it become, a slightly more active verb, adding a nuance of process to the meaning at the same time:

It's funny how our childhood punishments become our adult pleasures. For example, taking naps and spankings.

Okay, one more thing: the gerunds (the -ing verb form acting as a noun) in the short list of examples are mismatched. In the first, the person doing the taking is the one getting punished or experiencing pleasure; in the second, the person doing the spanking is an outside agent - not the experiencing party we are most concerned with. If we modify the last element, we can clear this up and get another nice two-word opposition to close with:

It's funny how our childhood punishments become our adult pleasures. For example, taking naps and getting spanked.

The taking-getting opposition is not just a fillip; it clears up the concept and creates a more consistent rhythm as well: two anapests with a beat between.

Demonstrably better.

With that, it's time for this pest to take a nap.

Dime novel

So, there's this dime that is presenting me with a quandary:

It's a 1944 Mercury dime that found in a drawer. I checked online, and the coin is worth $1.45, for the silver content alone. If it were uncirculated, it might get a collector price, but it's not, so it won't. So here's the dilemma: $1.35 isn't enough to make me want to drive to the coin shop to sell the dime. But it doesn't seem right to present a buck-and-a-half 's worth of silver as ten cents, either.

This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened to me. Some years ago, I came into possession of an old $100 bill - the bookstore on the campus where I was head of security thought it was counterfeit, but it was just old (1934 IIRC) and different-looking. I traded five crisp twenties from the ATM for it. It turned out the bill was worth all of $106, maybe a little more if it had been uncirculated, which it hadn't. I held onto it for a while, and then decided I no longer wanted to keep track of where it was. I also had a Kennedy half-dollar that I got back when I was six or seven and had no use for; it was worth $11, again for the silver. Looking through my pile of funny-looking coins and checking the internet, I found enough to net me a little over $20. That was barely worth the time and gas to go to the coin shop, but I did, and felt a little lighter for it. I also had an extra $100 to spend, since the original swap had been so long ago.

But now I have no other pile of coins to which I can add this dime to gain some economy of scale; just one lonely Mercury, too valuable to spend without feeling foolish, but not valuable enough to invest much into converting. I could just throw it back in a drawer, but I am trying to reduce the miscellany and clutter in my life, practically and metaphorically. I could just keep it in my wallet, hoping I'll remember that it is there if I ever happen to find myself by chance near a coin shop. Or I could just spend it like a dime, trusting that it will eventually wash up on some numismatic shore where it will find a home. I could frame it and make it into a tiny wall hanging.

Or I could blog about it, getting at least $1.45's worth of mileage out of the anecdote, and not worry about.

(Numismatics counts as geekery, right?)

5 x 5 Movie Review: Star Trek: Into Darkness

So, Wonder Wife and I actually saw a movie in the theater, and despite my prior disavowal of interest, it was the new Star Trek flick. Here's the five by five:

1. Is there such a thing as too much fanservice? The window, Carol, the shout, "I'm a doctor," and the cameo all say yes.

2. Without going through the whole crew-as-D&D-party schtick, Uhura is definitely the bard.

3. Wonder Wife reports that watching four seasons of Enterprise actually helped her understand the technobabble and track the events more closely.

4. So, if the killing of Gromek in Torn Curtain was a -1- on the movie-conflict scale, I think -10- used to be the ending of the Wild Bunch or Bonnie and Clyde. So we're up to, what, eleventy-seven now? Or we've switched to a logarithmic scale like earthquakes and warp drive. In any case, there sure was a lot of stuff blowing up and bodies flying and all that. It was loud, too. Or maybe I just don't go to enough movies.

5. Overall: engaging, if predictable.

Oh yes - and I don't know about where y'all are, but a movie-popcorn-soda date in Seattle now costs about forty bucks. And when did theaters start serving Mini Pancakes?

They were out, anyway.

Wonder Wife Wednesday: D&D Character Classes

Here's a little tutorial if you need to brush up, as only Wonder Wife could give it:

Spoilt

So, I guess the big movie news right now is Star Trek: Into Darkness. A friend saw it and was so surprised to have liked it so much he texted me to tell right after it was over. I have seen some reports that it didn't make enough money in the opening weekend, and I have read some reviews, mostly from web-pals. Many of these reviews have "spoiler alert" warnings or visual landmarks to tag where you should stop reading if you don't want to know major plot points before you see the movie. I guess there is a pretty big deal to spoil in  ST:ID; it might even be a "reveal" a la Crying Game. That I know it exists at all, much less what it is, even though I haven't seen the movie, is not the result of my ignoring or missing spoiler alerts: it is the result of an article showing up on one of my aggregators that had PUT THE SPOILER RIGHT IN THE TITLE.

Now, I'm not a stickler for spoilers, and there is something a little tenuous about 'spoiling' the second movie in the reboot of a twenty-three-year-long film franchise based on a TV series that premiered forty-seven years ago. But I think that this particular plot point, if prematurely disclosed, might ruin some genuine delight on the part of some fans; since geek culture accepts spoiler-alerting as S.O.P. these days, I can't imagine why someone would PUT THE SPOILER RIGHT IN THE TITLE.

Personally, it's no skin off my back. I am not that invested in the Star Trek reboot, maybe because it seems like just another example of Hollywood youngifying everything. So I'm not racing to see it, although I probably will eventually, and I think knowing this bit of information won't affect my enjoyment much, if at all. It just seems really odd that someone would... do that.