First Crush

On Day 17 of 30 Days of Blogging, I continue splicing Leo's topic into three topics. Having covered my first memory (possibly) yesterday, today we move on to:

First crush

But we again run into a problem: I have no idea who the first one was. I don't remember ever really having a crush, like a giggly swooning writing their name on the insides of my notebooks crush, but over the years I've had some low key crushes that I'm willing to share.

Literary Crush: F. Scott Fitzgerald. We would hang out in nightclubs, and listen to jazz, and smoke, and drink, and dance, and be friends with a lot of flappers, and he'd call me Joel and I'd call him F. Scott, and there would be no Zelda in sight to screw things up.

TV Crush: I have two, and have had both for years and years. There may be others who come and go, your Chace Crawfords and your Yigit Puras, but these two have endured the test of time. One is a character, and the other an actual person.

First, Dr. Crusher. Yes, I'm aware that she's female. I don't want to date her, but ever since I was a teenager I felt like Dr. Crusher and I would be best friends. She was the smartest woman on the Enterprise, and for about a year I prayed every night that I would get a brain tumor so that I could contact the Make a Wish Foundation and my wish would be a guest starring role on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and then Dr. Crusher and I would meet and become BFF's.

Yes, I'm aware that this plan was both deeply flawed and psychologically disturbed.

However, knowing that Gates McFadden tweets photos of herself playing with her Dr. Crusher figures just confirms that we are meant to be friends.

The second TV crush is Tom Welling. I watched "Smallville" way past the date when it was physically and mentally painful to do so (looking at you, Season 8) because Tom Welling was still on it every week, although that was about the time when he wanted to be a "serious actor" and stopped taking his shirt off onscreen so much.

Music Crush: For quite a while there, JC Chasez had the crown. I even had a shrine:



which I decided to (mostly) get rid of when I moved here. It was just as well, because by then I had moved on to Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer of "Green Day". I don't want to actually date Billie Joe. He could totally just lay on the couch with his guitar and plaintively wail about how we're out of a cheese and the remote fell on the floor and is too far away to reach, and I would make him a sandwich and be happy.

I would date the hell of out Brandon Flowers from "The Killers".

That's all I can say about that without getting the vapors.

Sorry, Billie Joe.

A Very Special Issue of Superboy

This isn't a comics blog, mainly because there are a thousand of those on the web, if not more, and most of those people are better at reviewing, poking fun at, or giving serious thought to comic books than I am. Since I read comics, though, and I like to talk about myself, they're bound to come up from time to time, especially when I'm walking through the comic store and see something like this on the top of the 50 cent bin:



What the hell? This is the cover of a code-approved comic written for children? And what's actually going on in the story? Why is Jonathan Kent dead? Why do the Kents have holes in their walls with slats visible? Did he hang himself? Was it because he tried to watch "Smallville: The Complete Seventh Season" in one sitting, and/or while sober? And why did the editor think it was a great idea to juxtapose the hanging body imagery with the headline for the delightful "Adventures of Super-Baby" backup feature?

I had to know, so I pulled Superboy #189 out of the 50 cent bin and carried it to the register with my other purchases. I could have flipped through it right there, I guess, but it's a store, not a library, and Mike, the owner, has to eat, too. When I walked up with it on top of my pile, he smirked.

"I knew if I put that on top of the bin someone would buy it."

"I just want to know what's going on. I mean, look at it! I have like a billion questions!"

"And for only fifty cents, you can have answers!"

Fifty cents won't even buy me a candy bar, but it can buy me the strangled corpse of Jonathan Kent. When I got home, I still had questions, so I set about finding answers.

Our story opens, as so many stories do, with Superboy showing his parents a gift from friendly aliens. It's the kind of present that fits in every home and decor: a metal bust of Superboy with glowing red eyes that shoots telepathic beams of unknown radiation into nearby people.



I wonder if Superboy #190 is the equally special issue where his mom's brain explodes.

Anyway, like all people with telepathic metal busts of themselves, Superboy immediately uses it to remind his mom to get some dinner on the table, because the whole Women's Lib movement hasn't caught on yet. While we're looking at that picture, I'm also kind of confused by his mother's updo. Where's all that hair going? It's not pulled into a bun or a twist or a knot or anything. It just seems to be "up". Maybe it's just standing on end from too many doses of telepathic alien rays.

Before Superboy can use the telepathic metal bust of himself to order his dad to give him the car keys and some money for a pack of smokes, there's a knocking at the door, and when Jonathan Kent answers a magic noose flies out of nowhere, wraps around his neck, and tries to strangle him before Superboy saves him. In most houses, a disembodied flying rope trying to strangle the patriarch would be kind of a problem, but Jonathan calmly explains that it's just the Kent Family Strangling Curse:



That last guy, if you didn't click the picture to check, was strangled BY HAIR. That's a pretty determined, pissed off ghost they're dealing with, and Superboy responds in the best possible way: by flying off to another, more important emergency. Twice. Rather than staying home to guard his dad, who is promptly half strangled by a tree branch, a garden hose, and a piece of industrial cable from a giant spool that just happens to be laying around the neighborhood. Smallville is a booming center of industry, you know, what with the general store and the bank and all.

Superboy makes it back to save his father each time, to the point that you kind of wonder if maybe he's letting his dad get choked a little on purpose. I mean, that roast beef dinner he wanted still isn't on the table, and fear is a great motivator. Really, though, he's just figuring out that they're not fighting a vengeful ghost, but rather than vengeful disembodied spirits of the Phantom Zone criminals, who were trapped in a hellish bodiless existence for all eternity by Superboy's birth father.

And what are they using to enact their revenge?



You got it: the telepathic metal alien bust of Superboy with glowing red eyes, which Superboy must then destroy to save his father from alien criminals imprisoned in another dimension by his other father.

And this is why Superboy can't have nice things.

Smallville, season 4, a couple of years late

You expect a certain degree of pain when you decide to watch “Smallville”. You know that you’re gonna get slapped around a little, what with the show depending on plot points like the Kents misplacing their son for three months, TWICE, and hoping no one notices or “alien parasites from a cave wall were controlling my brain” being a valid excuse for missing a couple days of school.

The fourth season, though, which I’m watching now, takes flagrant viewer abuse to a whole new level, and the worst part is that they make you think you somehow asked for it just by turning on the television. One second you’re watching Tom Welling’s shirt fall off (or get burned off in a furnace, or get torn off by an Indian shapeshifter, or explode off in a phonebooth through the power of red kryptonite), and the next your suspension of disbelief is cowering on the floor in tears with a red handprint on its cheek while “Smallville” stands over it screaming, “You love to make me hit you!” like Joan Crawford on family dinner night.

In no particular order, here’s my short list of issues with Season 4, which I’m only watching because I was told Season 5 is awesome and Season 6 is slightly less so.

1) The Kents are perpetually on the verge of losing the farm. How the hell does this keep happening? In the first season, they got a bank loan. In the second season, they got a huge settlement from Lex for dead cows. Later, when they took in Lex after he got disowned and financially cut off, he repaid them by paying off all the debt on the farm when he had money again. Martha Kent ran a produce stand, worked as an executive assistant to the CEO of a multinational company, and manages a coffee shop. Somehow, in spite of this, they’re back to losing the farm again. Jonathan Kent isn’t just a bad farmer, he’s also a crappy bookkeeper.

2) The Kents are noble and poor, but they never actually seem to go without anything. They have an endless supply of lumber, tractors, fenceposts, and barn siding to replace the things that get broken when Clark is possessed by Jor-El or spurting heat vision in a state of sexual arousal or overpowered due to solar flares. Clark has an endless supply of flannel shirts (I mentioned above that he goes through a lot of them), and none of them have patches or frayed sleeves or even a button missing. The problem is that we’re always told the Kents are poor, but we’re never shown it. They’re TV-poor, which means that the electricity at the farm never gets shut off and they never have to have pancakes for dinner because flour is cheap.

The only things they actually seem to go without are the large expensive presents that creepy, bachelor Lex keeps giving their pouty-lipped, pectorally-gifted son that he just wants to be closer to and whose secrets he wishes to explore. Listening to the Kents talk about being poor is kind of like listening to the Skywalkers bitch about how horrible slavery is in “The Phantom Menace”: “Oh, it’s terrible being a slave, just awful. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go polish my race car.”

3) Chloe can’t manage to stop herself from making the same mistake, over and over. At the end of the first season, she gave up on Clark because she couldn’t compete with Lana. Oh, and at the end of the second season, she gave up on Clark because she and Lana didn’t want to fight with each other over him. And hey, during the third season she started working for Lionel Luthor to try to get over giving up on Clark because he wasn’t interested. So here we are in the fourth season, and Chloe just got done crying inside because Clark and Lois smiled at each other. I look forward to the episode when Chloe rams a steak knife through her hand because that’s as much fun as falling in love with Clark when you’re anyone other than Lana, and Chloe clearly enjoys that sort of fun.

4) Clark joins the football team in the fourth season, and explains to the coach that he has no idea what position he plays because he’s never been on the football team. He also has to argue with his dad about being allowed to join the team when he could possibly accidentally hurt someone. It’s a plotline that should be full of dramatic tension, just like it was a couple seasons ago. When Clark joined the football team. And argued with his dad about being allowed to. Did all the writers go out to lunch and let the kids running the lemonade stand across the street write this story arc? Maybe before they start working on season seven they should actually sit down and watch the other six, because I don’t feel like sitting through another episode where Lana gets sucked into a tornado and nobody can figure out that Amy Acker is eating people.

5) French witches. That’s all I’m going to say about this season. Sometimes there are good ideas and sometimes there are bad ideas. Devoting an entire season to Clark’s battle against French witches is a bad idea.

The end.