Introduction

Welcome to the first posting of the Comic Book Curmudgeon blog.
I’m a 40 something fellow who read and actively collected comic books in the 1970s and slightly into the 1980s. I mostly read DC comic book. I quit reading comics when DC had its “Crisis on Infinite Earths” storyline. I had invested a lot of time in understanding the DC multiverse. With “Crisis”, DC completely scrapped their 40+ years of history and re-wrote it. I’ll grouse more about that some other time.

At any rate, my purpose with this blog is to celebrate the golden, silver and bronze ages of comic book. I promise that I’ll try to keep the criticism about the newer stuff down as much as I can. Come with me now on a journey into yesterday. This was a time when heroes were heroes and villains were villains. Most comic book stories lasted one issue and character cross-overs were a special event.

Not Gone

It has been over a year and a half since Rascal passed away. I think of him very often. He’s still with me in spirit. I have since adopted a new male cat, Scamp, who helps fill the void left by Rascal.

While Scamp, in no way replaces Rascal, he is similar in many ways. He’s a rogue like Rascal. They both want constant attention and like to play all the time and play rough.

Rascal hasn’t visited me in my dreams in a long time, but I think of him a lot. He was a very special cat.

My Political Choice

I’m not normally very “in-your-face” when it comes to discussing politics. I believe that the way a person votes in an election is a very personal thing and I’m not in favor of shoving my beliefs down anyone’s throats. Normally, I’m content to only discuss these things with people who wish to do so and let everyone vote his or her own conscience. In this election, I feel compelled to go a little bit further and proactively share my opinions with friends and acquaintances of mine.

I think this election is an extremely important one. We all need to consider very carefully our choice. This is why I’m writing to you. I support Barack Obama and Joe Biden in this election. Here are some of the reasons.

Most Americans will agree that this country is in a huge mess.

The American economy is in a shambles. The dollar is currently very low compared to other currencies. One US dollar is currently worth about 1.05 Canadian dollars. In 2004, when I took a trip to Canada, the dollar was worth about 1.25 Canadian Dollars.

Fuel costs have surged in just the last 3 years. In March of 2005, I bought my VW Beetle. At that time, gasoline was just approaching $2.00 per gallon. I thought the price was awful! I was amazed the first time I filled up my 15 gallon tank and it cost me nearly $30! My previous vehicle had a 10 gallon tank and I was used to being able to fill it for $20 or less. Now, $2.00/gallon seems cheap! Gasoline costs have backed down from their historic highs this spring and summer, but they are still too high. At one point this summer, it cost me $63 to fill up that formerly $30 fuel tank!

We are currently involved in two military conflicts on the other side of the world. One conflict (Afghanastan) was understandable and supported my most people. The other (Iraq) was (I believe) totally unnecessary, unjustified and is now widely not supported by most Americans and most of the world. These conflicts have cost us thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Afghani and Iraqi lives. The economic cost to us has been enormous! During a time when our economy is floundering, we are pumping trillions of dollars into these conflicts.

I could go on and on about our present woes, but I’ll stop here. There is no one cause of all of our troubles, but there is one factor that is consistent in why we are not able to resolve these problems. That is the current (Cheney-Bush) administration. All of these problems have transpired on their watch. In the worst cases, they have caused the problems (Iraq War) and in the best cases, they’ve sat by and allowed the situation to get worse (weak economy).

For six of the almost eight years of the administration, the Senate and House of Representative have been controlled by the Republican Party. The Democrats are not blameless, however, for most of this time, they have lacked to power to challenge the powers that be. The Republican congress has been content to blindly comply with the wishes of the Cheney-Bush administration without ever questioning anything.

In 2000, John McCain ran against Governor George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. It was obvious (to me and many others) that Bush was supposed to be the “annointed one” by the Republican political machine. McCain ran counter to their desires. He revelled in being a Maverick. At an early point in the race, it looked like he might have a chance. People responded to his “Straight Talk”. That was soon quashed by the special interests involved. When he conceded the primary to George W. Bush, the Bush team pressured McCain into giving his endorsement. When he finally gave it, McCain said simply, “I endorse George W. Bush.” When he was questioned about why Bush would make a good president, McCain repeated, “I endorse George W. Bush.” This he repeated over and over. I liked this because I saw what he was doing. He was giving them what they asked for, but not exactly what they wanted nor exactly how they wanted it. I respected that in him.

Now, in 2008, things are much different. John McCain is now the Repbulican Party nominee for President. Rather than being the Maverick, he has become a member of the establishment. When many people started changing their minds about continuing the “war” in Iraq, McCain steadfastly started to march in lock step with his commander and spout the same “no cut and run rhetoric”. Since then (and slightly before) they have become inextricably locked together.

McCain is now running on a campaign of change. His qualifications to carry this out are dubious at best. He was a member of the US House of Representatives from 1982 to 1987. He has been a US Senator since 1987. That a total of 26 years in Congress. During the first six years of current administration, he was in the controlling party. Also, according to John McCain, he has voted with George W. Bush over 90% of the time!

For John McCain to claim to be the best agent of change in this election is laughable. If he was in the controlling party for six of the last eight years, how did he allow the country to get in this shape? Also, how is he going to bring about change when he has a history of voting like Bush? He will most likely continue the same policies that have gotten us into this mess. It is ludicrous to expect a different outcome when you continue doing the same things over and over!

During the last eight years, very serious harm has been done to this country. Of all the harmful things that have happened, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were probably among the least. The most harmful things have included: becoming involved in an unnecessary and intractable war, the loss of soft US power in the world arena, the torturing of captives and the subsequent loss of US moral authority, the horrible condition of our economy, the weakening of the US dollar, extraordinarily high energy prices, the US taking unilateral action without the backing of the majority of the rest of the world, the ignoring of planetary threats (global climate change) and many other concerns.

For John McCain and the Republican party to tell us that they are the best choice for this country is like an irresponsible, abusive spouse whom you’ve kicked out. He says he knows he messed up again and again, however this time he’s really changed. If you’ll just give him one more chance, he’ll be the best partner ever.

Brack Obama is, admittedly, a somewhat unknown quantity. The unknown is sometimes scarey just because it’s unknown. However, should we make a choice between someone who promises change and we have no reason so far to doubt him, or someone who promises change, yet has consistently been part of the problem or least let the problem continue.

I’m willing to embrace the unknown and support Senator Obama. I’m willing to have hope for this country that it will once again be a great nation. The other option is the anti-hope candidate that uses fear and hatred to control us. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take hope anytime.

Thanks so much for letting me come to you this way. Hopefully, you can tell that this is a subject about which I’ve given a lot of thought and am passionate. As I stated earlier, I really do respect your opinions. I’ll be making some more posts here about the topic. If you’re interested, please come back and read some more. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I sent it to you because it’s such an important issue and you’re an important person to me. Thanks again.

Sincerely, Mike Moore

Flip-Flopping

I just read an article about the idea of “flip-flopping” in politics. The articles makes the point that this practice isn’t all bad. I would tend to agree with that. In reality, I really dislike the term “flip-flopping”. It unfairly simplifies the issues.

To me, it should be called what it is… changing one’s mind. When politicians change their stand on an issue, there could be purely political reasons behind it, but much of the time, I believe, there are less sinister reasons for it.

For the last 7+ years, we have had an administration which has refused to change its mind, even when presented with new facts which contradict a position. This is an extremely dangerous practice! I’ll not elaborate further, but just throw the opinion out there. Of course, it’s equally dangerous to change one’s position on a whim, solely because the political wind changes.

It seems to me that in this case (as in many others), the best path lies somewhere in between. A good, effective leader, should be concerned with getting as much information as possible on a subject and basing his or her opinion on the available facts. When given contradictory evidence, a truly great leader should have the courage to change his or her mind. I have rarely heard a politician simply say, “I changed my mind.” when charged with flip-flopping. I don’t see what the big deal is. We all do it and we all understand it.

One of the things I’m looking for in the next president is the ability to be thoughtful and decisive, and to also be curageous enough to change his views. When these views are made or changed, I want the next leader to be able to explain to me why he believes his views to be correct and to convince me as well. To me, this is what a great leader should do. Unfortunately, this has been sorely lacking on the national seen here in the US for almost 8 years.

We really do need a change in so many ways.

No excuses for not backing up!

I know that making a backup of your computer can be a pain, but it’s well worth it! Those of you (like me) have ever had a hard drive fail or have otherwise lost access to your files and didn’t have a recent backup, know this to be true. Backing up used to be extremely painful! Back in the old days, all we had were floppy disks and backup tapes! To backup a 40MB hard drive would take about 28 floppy disks (or more) and hours of sitting at the computer swapping disks.

Now, I’ve got a 300GB external hard drive that I use for backup purposes. I had been using Norton Ghost on my desktop computer and just copying files from my old notebook computer. Ghost is a great program, but there are some things I don’t like about it. #1 It’s expensive! I think it’s around $70 or $80 to buy it. #2 you can only use it on one computer. When I buy software, I normally buy one copy and install it on my desktop and notebook computers. I know that technically, I am supposed to buy 2 copies, but I really don’t see what the harm is. Most individual people do this as well. With Norton Ghost, you can do this because the program has to be activated on your computer. After you do this, if you install it on another computer, you have to activate it on that one too, but they won’t let you do it.

I came across another program recently and decided to give it a try. It’s called DriveImage XML. Like Ghost, it allows you to create an image of an entire hard drive on another hard drive. Also, it allows you to later explore that image so you can restore just certain files if you want. I tried it a couple of nights ago and it seemed to work great! Another really cool thing about it is that for individuals (not businesses), it’s FREE!

I started it up on my new Toshiba notebook and let it run. Less than 2 hours later, my computer was completely backed up. I didn’t try to restore anything yet, but I was able to explore the backup and see the individual files. I’ll try restoring some files this weekend.

The only thing that annoyed me was that because I was using Windows Vista, in order to do the backup, I had to temporarily turn off the User Access Control feature. DriveImage XML tells you that you need to do this. It was a pain in the *you know what*, but it’s just a minor thing. I won’t be using it to do scheduled backups, however, because running without the User Access Control can be dangerous. I like its protection.

At any rate, this looks like it might be a goodd solution.

Here I Am!

It’s 2008. I got started in the computer field basically 1984. At home, I had had a Sinclair ZX80, a Timex/Sinclair TS1000 and a Timex/Sinclair 2068. PCs were still fairly new. IBM had come out with the original PC and other companies were starting to come out with clones. At work, we were starting to get some on the clones. The ones we had were Sperrys. They came with 640K of RAM and two 5.25″ 360K floppy drives! The monitors were monochrome (either green or amber) and displayed only text. These desktop computers cost the company, for which I worked, about $3,000!

Just a couple of months ago, I bought a new Toshiba notebook computer with my stimulus check. It has 3GB of RAM, a 200GB hard drive. Of course, the screen is color and can beautifully display photos and other graphics. It cost me $650.

So, for about 78% less money than the PCs we used to buy, I got a computer that has 4915 times more RAM and 291,271 times more storage space (compared to two 360K floppy disks)! I still find that incredible!

Feeling better

Rascal visited me this morning. Before you call the guys in the white coats, let me explain. This morning, I was half sleeping. The radio was on and I was drifting in and out of sleep. I felt something jump up on me. It felt like a cat, but it didn’t feel like Pandora. I immediately thought, “Could it be Rascal?” It jumped off of me and laid down right next to me. I turned over and I saw Rascal. I was overjoyed. Then I woke up.

Rather than being disappointed that it was “only a dream”, I was elated. I felt good. No matter what it was, I felt him. For just a second or two, I felt that he was there. I was very happy that he came back… even if it was “only a dream”. I believe that when you love someone, he or she is never really dead. I do believe that they can come back and make their presence know. I think this is true of animals as well. They come back if we are willing for them to.

Regardless of what my experience this morning was, I know that Rascal is still alive as long as I love him and I know he’ll be back from time to time… if “only in my dreams”.

An emptiness

While I was still lying in bed this morning, Pandora cam and laid at the head of the bed. I was physically petting her, but I was really petting Rascal.

I went to church this morning and my church friends were very supportive of me. Many of them have had indoor pets and know what pain it is to lose them.

When I got back home, the place seemed somewhat empty. Pandora was lying on the bed. I felt an urge to go look for Rascal, but I know he’s no longer here. I just decided to love Pandora all the more. A few tears are welling up as I write this.

1997 – 2007

Rascal breathed his last breath today. I had been giving him the fluids. He seemed to be doing fairly well, considering his condition. I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks, because there hadn’t been much of a change. Basically, he was hanging in there. His appetite had improved and he was eating dry cat food. I had an appointment for the vet for him this coming Monday.

Anyway, I had noticed that he breathed heavily when I picked him up. I noticed this earlier this week. On Wednesday, I went to the vet’s office to get some more fluid. I asked them about it. Since Rascal would be OK again when I put him back down, we thought that it might be anxiety because he thought I was going to give him fluid.

Anyway, earlier today, he didn’t seem to be any different. I went to Scottsburg with my friend, Judy. We were concerned about another friend of ours, so we drove there to visit her. I was supposed to go, with Judy, to a dinner tonight.

After I got back from Scottsburg, I noticed that Rascal was breathing very heavily even when he was just sitting on the bed. I called Judy and told her about it and I cancelled my evening with her. I called the animal hospital and they told me to bring him in right away. I had to stop at Judy’s on my way, because she had left the tickets in my car. On my way to Judy’s, I knew things weren’t good at all when Rascal started gurgling. While I was at Judy’s (I was still in the car, Rascal stopped breathing and stiffened. I called Judy back to the car. We hugged and both cried.

I called my friend, Jerry and asked him if I could bring Rascal up to his place in Scottsburg. When Rascal was first diagnosed, I asked Jerry if we could bury Rascal in his yard. Of course, he had said “yes”. When I got there, we wrapped him in a towel I had with him in his cat carrier. We then put him in a box and buried him. I was really moved when I saw that Jerry had already mad a small plaque out of cement that read “Rascal”. That was one of the nicest things that anyone has ever done for me.

I visited with Jerry for a while. I’m back home now. When I got in the apartment, I picked up Pandora and told her that Rascal wasn’t coming back and it was just her and me now. I asked her to give her daddy a little extra love for the next few days. Even though she can’t understand me talking to her, I think she knows what happened. Animals are very intuitive.

I’m OK now, but I know the next few days will be hard. I appreciate all the kind thoughts of my friends and family. Thanks.

The life of Reilly

Rascal is doing better. The vet didn’t find any evidence of infection. We started Rascal on fluid therapy. He got his first treatment on Wednesday. Every 2 or 3 days, we’re going to give him fluids subcutaneously. This will help get rid of the toxins. I’ve heard people tell me that they’ve had cats live for five years of more with kidney disease.

Rascal had his first treatment on Wednesday and one on Saturday morning. He seems to be eating better and has just a tad more energy. I saw him eat some dried cat food earlier today. He still not eating a lot, but he is eating. I’m very encouraged.