My God.... It's Full of Stars...

I did it. I finally did it. I signed up for Marvel comics online. Now I can read through their library of thousands of comics in beautifully scanned gloriousness... What's even better is that if I pull up an old issue of, say, Uncanny X-Men to get the background of a particular character, they'll also let me know if that series of issues has been reprinted in a trade recently so if I wanted to own them in hard copy format, I could. But I like that this gives me a chance to read some books that I'd never bother to buy--never will I be bored on the internets again!

The tipping point was helping our collections department go through a collection of comics acquired from a local business scion's family on Monday. We wanted to grab some stuff that was likely to get used in the exhibit, and since I have a lot of basic knowledge about comics from the era during which this collection was amassed, I got to be the helper bee. Which meant in the course of about 7 hours I looked at the covers of probably about 10,000 comics. Mostly Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Hulk, X-Men in all their various stripes, and Fantastic Four--but plenty of other stuff too. It was great fun, pulling out suggestive or otherwise entertaining covers to show each other--Spiderman covers from the 1970's are endlessly hilarious--and of course tons of it was a trip down memory lane for me. I started collecting around 1985 or 86, and spent about $20 a month on comics until around 1996 or so. The collection we were picking up was amassed by a guy about my age, who spent more like $200 a month on comics during that exact same period of time. Our tastes were similar; so many of the books he had, I have, and I remember reading them with great fondness.

Might be time to drag out the longboxes and start reading from the beginning....

The Things That Pass For Knowledge...

Is it just me, or is there some sort of strange Steely Dan convergence going on in local radio at the moment?

I'm serious, every time I get in my car and flip through my radio stations, there's Steely Dan. And I've got nothing against them, mind you. I enjoyed them a lot back in the 80's, and I'm always happy to sing along with Reelin' In the Years now and then when I happen across it. But in the last two weeks, it's like there's some kind of Perfect Storm of Steely Dan on the radio. I noticed it at first when I'd be driving to work in the morning and hear I Got the News, and then on the drive home 8.5 hours later I'd hear it again, or another one just like it on a different station. Now it's to the point that when I got out of the car at Trader Joe's this evening, Black Cow was on 103.9; I got back in the car 20 minutes later and 93.9 is playing Deacon Blues. WTF, Steely Dan??? Why are you following me????

The likely possibility is that it's because two of the 5 stations I tend to listen to have recently gone to "Oldies of the 60's, 70's, and 80's" (and fuck you very much by the way, for including the 1980's in that format) and Steely Dan had a lot of hits in those decades. But I'm not hearing, say, America's Muskrat Love every day or two.... I'm not hearing the electronic stylin's of Duran Duran and Rio every time I start my car. It's weird, I tell you. Weird.