Thanksgiving Rap

Actually, no rap. That was a bait-and-switch just to get you to keep reading. But what a glorious thanksgiving thus far. Exhibit A: The 11 lb. turkey a faery left in my fridge for my birthday. That was divine, and we still have 7 lb. of it in the freezer now! Exhibit B: It is only Friday, and yet it feels like Saturday! So that means I still have a Saturday to go. Sweet. There are more exhibits which would absolutely punish the opposing anti-Thanksgiving team, but why bother. They know they lost. Thanksgiving is splenderiffic and they know it.

My conference was a good time and worth the investment my department made in me going (I hope they too see it that way). I made some new contacts, met some new co-authors, and more or less got to complete a draft of a paper I needed to complete. I also learned some new techniques that are going into one of my papers as soon as I make sure I know what it is they were doing. All in all, I came away from the trip with some sage advice from someone I met, that makes me think my career is best served by continuing in the vein I've been working on the last 3 years.

That's a wrap. I hear the tink-tink of glassware that alerts me to a dinner being made. Til then, here's a list of the seven least faithful comic book adaptations ever. Note that "least faithful" does not mean "badly executed," but in most of these, it did mean just that. Ultimately a creative team should take the source material and tell an interesting story with it, whatever it is. And for that, I actually thought Ang Lee's Hulk was a pretty ambitious, gutsy story in every way. The psychological metaphor was always what Hulk/Banner was about. If you go back and read interviews with Stan Lee or Jack Kirby, they're fairly explicit that Hulk was a metaphor for psychological disfunction and anger ("I get mad and become a MONSTER!"), just like the Spiderman was for puberty and X-men were for 1960s era civil rights and racism. So Ang Lee told that story, and not a simplistic HULK-SMASH story. And besides, I liked it. But the others on the list were just plain bad. Another list of "just plain bad comic book movies" would have to include Spiderman 3 and X-men 3 though. Even though they were "faithful" in some technical sense (X-men 3 especially since so much of it was ripped off verbatim from a Josh Whedon series written for X-men), it was just a butchering of the previous two movies' seriousness and genuine drama. OH well. Like I said, evidence of the "shitty third movie in the trilogy" Hypothesis, so win-win for me.