Well Hello There....

It's been a while, a lot has happened but it's a head-wrecking non-blogworthy nature* so I won't bore yous. Cut a long story short have moved back to Ireland and am curently doing a combination of freelance writing and substitute teaching and stand up, so kinda the same thing different location, but with wee school kids shouting 'howya sir!' from chip shops while I'm singing along with Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long-Blog thing and the Commentary! on my wee ipod.

and the Tron soundtrack by Wendy Carlos. There has been some good times, have been seeing more of family, Badbrute and the Brugoes and some great stand up gigs in the company of Marcus Keeley**

See above me all tuxed up for the Monaghan Person of the Year Award black tie

Check it out, there's nothing better than being formally dressed while drawing cartoons of Batman with his wee lad out and Superman pissing himself... these were the pencils I was doing for these redoes of a stand up bit for scanning:

*It depends what kind of blog you like, these days even writing a 'blog' seems quaint, all the hip kids are Lady GaGaing their plurks until they tweet all over the place....the little dayglo feckers well 'I'm staying, I'm finishing my coffee...'
**check out his It was dark and I was drunk blog who is going true similar travails as ole Jimmny H since we both exiled ourselves from Nrrwich and has a great theory about Zac Efron:

A friend and I have a theory that whenever Zac Efron has his period, a Kinder Egg comes out, and the plastic capsule has a piece of paper inside with a list of names of people he has to save in the next 24 hours, otherwise they die.

In further Norwich nostalgia, Marcus and I went to a comedy gig he reviewed it and I photograped-well I held up a wee sliver box in the vague vicinity of people and pressed the bright eye blink button-at the Nowich Arts Centre:

As a performance poet/comedian, it’s rare for me to watch a local live stand-up comedy show in its entirety. Regardless of whether or not I’m on the bill, I’m more likely to be found outside smoking and looking anti-social, politely ignoring my contemporaries’ sets because I have seen and discussed them ad nauseam, or in a small, dark room, blowing raspberries into an empty bucket in anticipation of my curtain call. However, Dan McKee's Saltbox Comedy Club at Norwich Arts Centre was a different affair. Upon given the opportunity to review the gig, myself and fellow comedian superstar Lorcan McGrane threw on our standard-issue Irish malaise, haggard faces and nicotine-saturated charm and made our way to the venue.

Ah happy days, although thinking of them they were pretty horrific days of Marcus and I wandering around a cold Norwich in the rain trying to figure out where to stay....

Superman Returns....to the drawing board hopefully.

Superman Returns is good and the 147 minute running time does fly by (heh!) quite painlessly, but watching it on DVD and taking notes like the dweeb I am has produced more niggling questions that some of you out in the geek-o-sphere might be able to help me with. It seems that no matter how high profile an action movie is there is still a tendency to let logic out the door, and anyone who questions it gets told 'look it's a decent Superman movie whadda want!', well maybe one that made more sense.

I call this the Batman-Skateboot Conundrum, I can suspend my disbelief that character like Batman exists within his fictional universe but when he just happens to have ice skates in his boots when he fights Mr. Freeze in Batman and Robin (1997) when he has just found out about him in the car on the way over it really annoys me. So either he has the skates in his boots all the time on the off-chance of meeting an ice based villian or he has multible boots in the boot of the Batmobile! anyway, that's an argument for another day, onto Supes....

The timeframe of Kypton exploding and the events of the movie. We can probably expect, or be forced to accept, that the technology of Kypton is suffciently advanced and to do things we can't comprehend. But there is supposedly a several thousand year gap between the explosion and little Kal-El getting to earth. The time frame makes sense in terms of making Kypton far enough away from earth not to be detected by humnaity, but this distance makes the likelihood of a craft that can stay on course and keep the infant Kal-El in suspended animation for that long mindboggling. Surely there would be some psychological/physical ramifications from spending 'several thousand' years in a little capsule.
Oh, and then Superman can make the round trip in Five years! Does he not need some sort of rest or sustenance? what kind of packed lunch to you take into space?

Kyptonite We know it's a just a plot device to make Superman vulnerable and to help along as HH would say the PFF quoitient of the movie, which is fecking high enough already, but how exactly does it affect Superman?

It seems to only affect him when he touches it, and then he's fine if he stays a little bit further away from it, it's kinda like characters closing that big metal door to keep the scary ice away in The Day After Tomorrow. When there are traces of it on the structure Luthor is on, Superman is immediately powerless and all those bad men (they were dark clothes just so you know) start beating the shite out of him (so Christians can get their surreptitious S&M rocks off?). So getting far enough away from it allows Supes to fly again and get power from the Sun (surely making him Ra more than the Jesus) fine, then he heads back toward the structure with no ill effects and lifts the whole fucking thing out of the water, close ups of his hands show there are far more prominent peices of Kyptonite all around him yet he can fly the whole thing into space when previously he couldn't even fight off Kumar (an Indian missle expert, you gotta love Hollywood) and a guy with a clown on the back of his head?

Luthor's Plan Using the crystals, Luthor plans to implant them in the sea and grow a new continent. The fact that this new continent will be entirely made up of icy crystals seems not to bother him, he still thinks it will be desirable, even though he has comepletetly obliterated most of America, whose gonna buy his shitty ice houses? What cartographer made all those maps for him and was he/she not a bit suspicious? What 'pleasures' did he show poor old Noel Neill?

His henchmen. There is a vague explanation that he met all his henchmen in prison, but surely there should be some chemistry between these goons? for a director as smart as Singer it's a surprisingly dumb movie dialogue wise, especially when you have the great Parker Posey on board, do these hench men ever have conversations? Do they never question what's going on? Why do they hate Superman? Did he put all of them away? Do all criminals have an a priori hatred of Superman no matter what their crime or how they got caught? What is the 'clown gang' that's mentioned briefly as a news story, sounds a bit Batman Forever if you ask me. What is it about DC Comics and clown henchmen, it works when they are the Joker's henchmen but why does nearly every Batman villian The Penguin, Riddler, Two Face, Mr Freeze have clown henchmen as well? fucking clown henchmen, they really grind my gears.

Other minigripes Doesn't Superman piss you off when he goes on about smoking? like when he keeps blowing out Lois's fag (incidentally doesn't her tiny wee head and toothpick neck make the cigarette look like a length of pipe). What does he care about smoking, he could smoke 1,000,000 fags and be ok. Plus the cabbie's cigar sets off the gas explosion and the henchman who tries to grab Luthor's cigar and gets immediately chrushed. Speaking of him being a dick, it's not really fair on the dog when Clark Kent throws the base ball into the horizon....

I'm sure there's loads more, but I'll leave that to other Superman Returns nitpickers: Cinematical, Peter David, astronomy nitpicks. Oh wow, Ghost Rider's out soon, I'm sure that'll make loads of sense....