I was born into a house of readers. There was always books, magazines, and comics around when I was a kid. My mother made sure we all learned to read as early as possible so we would escape into books and leave her alone for a while, having five kids one right after the other will do that to a woman I guess. One of the ways she made sure we all could read was to make us read aloud to one another. I remember being made to read aloud from one of my little story books while my older siblings squirmed around waiting for me to get done.
One of the first things I remember reading avidly, besides the comic strips and the sports section of the Detroit Free Press, was comic books. They were always around and I loved them from the first minute I laid eyes on them. They were really cool and best of all they were in color. My brother Charlie bought most of them in those early years, he had a paper route and he blew most all his earnings on books, comics, and monster magazines. My taste in books did not line up with his, he dug mostly sci fi books but I liked sports stuff at that age, but when it came to comic books we were all on the same page.
We dug the
Fantastic Four,
Thor,
Spiderman, Sgt. Fury, which would later become
Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.. We loved the Marvel heroes because they seemed more like us in that they were flawed people, which I've heard Stan Lee say was exactly what they were trying to do. Superman and Batman seemed too perfect, too invincible, too heroic, there was no darkness there, at least in the mid 60's to the mid 70's there wasn't. Superman always beat whoever he fought and he was so damn clean cut while doing it. Yuck. I always thought, and still do in fact that Superman is a fascist dick. For more examples of Superman's dickishness and other unintentionally funny comic covers and panels click
here.
After our Mom died and we went to live with our crazy rageaholic control freak aunt and her offspring we practically doubled our comic collection overnight. One of my cousins was a comic book reader too so we pooled all our comics in a big box and we'd all root through that box when we wanted to find something to read. I know, I know, if we had taken care of those comics then they'd be worth a small fortune today, well we didn't so there.
It was during this time, the early 70's when my favorite comic of all time came out. It was called Kamandi and it was drawn and written by comic veteran, nay, comic demi god Jack Kirby.
I loved this comic because it was set in a Planet of the Apes like world, the hero was blond like me, it was action packed, and because I could imagine myself doing all that fighting and heroic stuff. I lived for the day each month when this comic hit the stands. I'd have scour the racks with a quarter in my sweaty little hand waiting and dreaming of what was going to happen next in Kamamdi's world. Looking back on the comic now I see why I really liked it, it was because it was a fish out of water in a hostile environment story with a hero who was anti authoritarian and rebellious. I devoured Kamandi until the dark day Jack Kirby left the book, when he stopped writing and drawing it, I stopped reading it.
Then in the mid 70's found Deathlok. He was half computer, half human and all pissed off all the time. I loved this one. This dude took no crap, kicked ass, and just wanted to mess up the people who made him the killing machine he turned out to be.
I kind of stopped reading comics when I hit high school and found out I could make the pretty girls hang out with me if I made them laugh. I also found out I liked to smoke pot and drink beer and cheap wine. I didn't make time for comics when there was a joint to be smoked or a stray bottle of Boone's Farm to be had. I still read novels, Rolling Stone, High Times, and National Lampoon but not many comics.
I read a few in college but after I left school I really got back into them. I started collecting them hot and heavy in part so I would not have to deal with my shyness around women, it was easier to read a comic than to make conversation and try to make time with a woman. During this time, the mid 80's, I was into
American Flagg,
X-Men and it's spin offs,
Thor but only when they were following Norse mythology kind of closely,
Wonder Woman but only when George Perez was drawing her, and a bunch more.
I quit collecting cold turkey in the late 80's because I decided that I had to be a part of the real world instead of sitting stoned in my bedroom reading comics and because I left my aunt's house and moved to Roanoke, VA. When I got my own apartment I had no money for comics and money got tighter when my deadbeat room mate John C. flaked out on me and moved out. I eventually sold my comics to help pay the rent but I did save some of my Thor's and a few American Flaggs, unfortunately they all got water damaged in an aquarium accident and I had to toss them. About the only time I read comics now is when I check a graphic novel out of the library but I think it's really cool that more and more folks read them and that women are not only reading them they are also writing and illustrating them.
I learned a lot from reading comics and I used to hate it when a "grown up" would see me reading one and they'd say, "Oh so you like funny books huh?" I wanted to shout at them, "Have you ever read a comic book? Not all of them are mindless crap like Archie and Jughead and talking animals like Scooby Doo!" It was from comics that I learned about issues like hand gun violence, drug addiction, racial intolerance, cloning, rape, child abuse, and different mythologies (It's not like I didn't already know something about all those things but I paid more attention when the information was in comic book form.).
I loved reading comics but some of the movies they've made from them you couldn't pay me to see, for instance Daredevil, or The Punisher or The Hulk, despite the fact Jennifer Connelly is in it. I've got mixed emotions about the up coming Watchmen adaption and I'm praying they don't dumb it down for the masses. And I fervently hope they don't make a movie out of Kamandi, because knowing Hollywood they'd hire someone like David Hyde Pierce to play the lead role. If they did something stupid like that, then I'd might have to get a blow torch, a pair of pliers, and some pipe hittin' brothers and get all medieval on their asses.
Yes, it's slightly different than the film adaption, but taken on their own terms, both are very good. I suppose if I had read the book first I might have been outraged over the few changes they made in adapting this book in to the film they came up with but honestly, I can't get worked up about it. The book tells the story of Will and Marcus slightly differently than the film does but at the heart of it all it's still a story of a womanizing bachelor who is forced into befriending a teenage boy who is a social misfit. I recommend both the film and the novel.
I had the worst science teachers in high school and the dullest ones ever in college. They took what has become an endlessly fascinating area of knowledge and turned it into something to hate and despise. None of them had an ounce of joy or humor in their teaching styles. So it's no wonder I felt, until recently, that I hated science. However thanks to the National Geographic channel, the Science Channel, the International History channel, and PBS, I now love science. I have come to hate my old teachers even more because I've found out how interesting all the areas of science are thanks to those channels and thanks to this highly readable and engrossing book by Bill Bryson. Thanks to Mr. Bryson's engaging and witty style I have finally come to understand things about the universe, physics, astrophysics, geology that I had thought I would never grasp. Much of what Bryson covers in this outstanding book was covered in classes I had in the past, the biggest difference here is Bryson makes it all interesting and not drudgery. If oyu want to understand the big ideas in science and want to learn about our fascinating planet, galaxy, and universe, then you must read this book. The blurb on the cover is correct, this book is destined to be a classic in science writing.
I picked this massive book, it's almost 700 pages long, up at my local library and I nearly finished half of it before I grew tired of it. Most of what I read was interesting and some of it was gripping. But ultimately I grew tired of Mr. Jensen's prose, it's full of foreshadowing and for some reason he feels compelled to use everyone's full names most every time he mentions a character. I may go back and finish this novel about the lives of the inhabitants of the seafaring village of Marstel, Denmark one of these days, but with so many other books to read out there, I probably won't. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't give it a whirl if you're interested. It really is a massive book that tells a sweeping tale, well, many sweeping tales.
over at the 
Dr. Hoadley told me everything looked good and that my heart is actually a bit stronger than it was when he first met me, of course when he first met me I was having a massive heart attack, the arteries around my heart were nearly all shut down, and my heart was grossly enlarged due to the blood not getting out properly. My ejection fraction, that's the rate blood leaves my heart, is lower than it was due to one of the bypasses not being open as much as it first was, but over all the other three bypasses look good and everything else is hunky dory.
In the end my memories of rocking out to the first Dylan album I ever bought won out and I purchased the Dylan CDs. Listening to my new purchase on the way home I remembered how much I loved it back when I first bought it at age 16. I had forgotten how bluesy some of the versions of the songs were and how reggae influenced others were. Despite Sparky begging me not to, I sang along with Bob on the way home.
It was published in 1951. I'm sure you can imagine that any book about the south that has blacks picking cotton on the cover is going to be a bit racist and over simplistic. Well Sport, you'd be right. 1951 was a time of wild optimism about the everything in this country and at that time we had no idea what price we'd have to pay for industrialisation and all that wide eyed consumption. This book was part of the propaganda effort to make everyone comfortable with non stop mindless consumerism, pillaging of the earth, and the socio political and economic status quo.
and then as if to say not "It's not like that everywhere down there," he adds a photo and a blurb about all the factories in the 1950's south.
Of course there was not a word about segregation in that book, nor the Jim Crow laws, or anything bad about the south at all. There were plenty of photos that reinforced stereotypes though. Ones like this one of the jolly happy docile working black folks having a good time with their overseer farmer bosses.
And of course there was the obligatory shot of the barefoot kids in the one room schoolhouse.
And folks picking cotton.
And one of us mountain folk at a "sing."
Another highlight of this old book are the picture maps of all the southern states. As you can see they show just what was made in each state and where. I love, as my friend Snad pointed out the first time I used this picture, how they use a hillbilly to represent our end of the state, just a hillbilly and that's it. Of course during that time there was a shit load of tobacco and corn being grown here, as well as tomatoes, and also during that time there were book manufacturers, paper manufacturers, and a nascent chemical company that would one day become a giant in it's field was just getting started.
Despite the condescending and somewhat racist tone of the book, I really dig the old photos.
Wherever possible I kept the captions on the pictures, they're like a glimpse into the mind of the author. Incidentally, I bought this book at a local used book store for fifty cents. It had come from the library of a local church. As soon as I saw that it had come from a church library I flipped to the back to see how many people had checked it out and I saw that no one had ever checked it out because the little due date slip in the back had never been stamped. So either the folks who went to that church didn't care much about what went on outside the state much or they didn't need a book like this to remind them of what they already knew. See all the pictures by clicking 
