Why the MCU Is Cool: The Heroes I Like

[This is the second post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


So perhaps one of the reasons I like the MCU is just plain that I like superheroes.  Which, in some sense, I do.  But I’ve never liked all superheroes equally: I don’t believe anyone does.  Some you like, and some you like a lot, and some you don’t care much for at all, and some you really despise.  It’s like anything: Shakespeare plays, Beatles albums, Stephen King novels ... anything that has sufficient variety, you’re going to like some, dislike some, and be distinctly “meh” on quite a few others.

I used to find it hard to describe what sort of superheroes I like, until I realized what the pattern was: even when it comes to comic nerddom, I’m still a non-conformist.  I like the lesser-known heroes: the more obscure, the better.  With a few exceptions, when it comes to the big names, I’m not that big a fan.

On the DC side, that means I hate Superman, and most of the others I can take or leave: Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash.  The only big name I even sort of liked was Batman, and honestly the best thing about Batman was that, without him, you couldn’t have The Brave and the Bold, and that’s where a lot of the really obscure guys showed up: Creeper, Deadman, the Metal Men, Metamorpho, etc.  On the Marvel side, I thought Spider-Man was okay, but Captain America was nearly as bad as Superman, Hulk was practically cliché, Thor was boring, the Fantastic Four were annoying, and Iron Man was utterly useless: a knock-off Batman with better armor.  The only really big name I really liked was Wolverine, and I’m nearly positive that that’s just because I liked him before he got super-popular.  I can distinctly remember buying Giant-Size X-Men #1, which wasn’t the first appearance of Wolverine ... but it was the second.¹  It’s emblematic of my comic buying habits: I saw a cover with a bunch of heroes I didn’t recognize at all, so of course I had to have it.  New superheroes!  Is there anything cooler?  New people with new powers, new costumes, new personalities ... I’m one of those schmucks who is easily seduced by the new, the different, the revamped, the reinvented ... gimme something fresh and I’m a sucker for it.

So, when it came to Marvel, my favorites were always the more obscure folks: I liked Moon Knight, Ghost Rider, Warlock, Son of Satan, Hellcat, Moondragon, Power Man and Iron Fist, Tigra, Cloak and Dagger, and a billion other guys, most of whom you will have never heard of (unless you’re as big a comic book nerd as I am).  Probably the biggest (Marvel) name I can say I really liked was Doctor Strange, and that was mainly because Doctor Strange gives us the Defenders, which had a membership so fluid that there was practically someone new every issue.²  And, as much as I liked the Defenders, I also liked the Avengers.

Okay, now it’s time for a brief diversion on comic book publishing philosophy.  Let me stress that I don’t have any inside info: this is all based on things I’ve read, things I’ve heard, and a lot of observation.  The first interesting thing about comic book publishing philosophy involves a story about a lawsuit.  I’ve never been able to find out if this is actually a true story or not,³ but I read about it in some book about the comic industry, and it certainly seems true, in that it neatly explains a universal principle.  The story goes that, decades ago, when there were a lot more than 2 comic companies, company A had a hero, but they retired him.⁴  Some years later, company B made a new hero that resembled company A’s hero in some way: same name, similar costume, identical powers ... I don’t remember exactly how they were alike, but that’s not that important to the story anyway.  So company A decides to sue company B—again, I can’t remember if this was a claim of copyright infringement, trademark dispute, or what.  But, again: not that important.  The point of the story is, the court ended up ruling that, sure, the heroes were similar, but company A wasn’t using the hero any more, so therefore the similarity of company B’s hero wasn’t costing them any loss of revenue.  Therefore, no damages.

And, supposedly, this is why every comic company ever regularly trots out their old heroes, no matter how stupid (and let’s face it, some of those older heroes are pretty damn stupid⁵), even if they really don’t want to: because they’re trying to make sure their rights don’t lapse.  Titles like The Brave and the Bold were excellent for this sort of thing, because you had a big hero (in this case, Batman) to sell the issue to the masses, and you’d have a minor, or resurrected, or maybe even a long-forgotten, hero who’s just appearing to stay in circulation.  If the minor character happens to achieve some reflected popularity, that’s just bonus.  Mainly, you keep the guys in there, in the public eye.

This concept of using the big guys to sell the little guys crops up again and again, and especially in the “supergroups.”  In music terminology, a “supergroup” is when a bunch of successful musicians from other bands all get together and form a new band.⁶  In comic terms, all groups of superheroes are in one sense a “supergroup.”  But to use the term in the musical sense, there are two basic supergroups: one for each company.  DC’s is of course the Justice League of America, and Marvel’s is, naturally, the Avengers.⁷  Oh, sure: there are many, many groups of superheroes.  But most of them, such as my favorites the X-Men and the Legion of Superheroes, were created as a complete unit: in other words, X-Men members Cyclops, Angel, the Beast, Iceman, and Marvel Girl (a.k.a. Jean Grey) didn’t exist before the X-Men existed.  They were created specifically for that group.  But a true supergroup gathers heroes who were previously appearing in their own solo titles, as separate, pre-existing heroes.

The original Justice League, for instance, was Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter.  If we were playing “one of these things is not like the others,” I think you’d see the odd man out here.  But let’s look at the original Avengers: Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, and Ant-Man and the Wasp.  (That’s right: Captain America is not an original Avenger, although he did come along just 3 issues later.)  See the pattern here?  They always throw in a minor character or two, because that way the big guys help sell the little guys.

This pattern is generally taken to an extreme in the supergroups: the minor character(s) end up being crucial to the team, because otherwise the audience can’t figure out why the writers keep them around.  So, in many incarnations of the Justice League, J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, is the guy who stays on the satellite and coordinates the missions for all the other members.  On the Avengers side, Hank Pym, a.k.a. Ant-Man, a.k.a. Giant-Man, a.k.a. Goliath, a.k.a. Yellowjacket, is pretty crucial to the history of the Avengers.  This creates a rather serious dilemma for the architects of the MCU, as on the one hand you need Ant-Man, and, on the other hand, Ant-Man is pretty stupid.  I mean, he shrinks and talks to ants.  Not exactly exciting as superheroes go.  You can get more action of Aquaman, with a decent writer.  But let’s explore that in a future installment.

The point here is that the Avengers, like the Justice League, always appealed to me for exactly the opposite reason that they appealed to most people.  I never cared about the fact that the greatest heroes of the Marvel universe were all there: Iron Man and Hulk and Thor and Captain America.  Because I never particularly cared for those guys.  I loved the Avengers because of the little guys: Ant-Man may be stupid, but Hank Pym is actually very interesting, and Wasp is very cool.  Then there’s Scarlet Witch and Vision and Beast and Hawkeye and Black Panther and Black Widow and Tigra and Jocasta and Hellcat and Wonder Man.  The Justice League seemed to follow a strict formula of one or two A-listers and then fill out the mission roster with the lesser-known guys, but the Avengers would often do entire storylines where the “Big Four” would never show up at all.  So, while I was in general more of a DC man than a Marvel one, it’s definitely true that I liked the Avengers more than the JLA.⁸

But that’s difficult to translate into the MCU.  The whole function of the MCU is to sell movies (and TV series).  To do that, they need to push the big names: the Big Four, of course, and Daredevil to a lesser extent (because he’s a lesser known name, if still bigger than most of the folks I liked), and they’ve finally managed to bring Spider-Man home, who’s probably the biggest name of all.  But those are not the guys I care about.  So what’s really interesting to me is how successful the MCU has been at integrating the smaller names.  We’ve only had two Avengers movies, and already I’ve gotten to see Black Widow, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Vision.  Now, with the advent of Civil War, they’ve added Black Panther.  Over on the Netflix side, Power Man was introduced in Jessica Jones, and he’ll be getting his own series in just a little over a month, plus Iron Fist is also in the works.  And, speaking of Jessica Jones, that opened the door for Hellcat, of all people, who is one of the most interesting comic stories of all time, and another one of my favorites.  Hell, they even managed to devote an entire movie to freaking Ant-Man, which I swore was impossible—or, if possible, could not possibly be any good.  But it was all right.  (They had to go the Scott Lang route and relegate Hank Pym to a side role, but, again: we’ll look at that angle in a bit more detail in an upcoming installment.)  Point being: the MCU has really done pretty well—surprisingly well, even—with bringing out the lesser known heroes.  And those were always the ones I loved.

So there’s one reason I’m so enamored of the MCU.  But there others.

⇐ What “MCU” Means, and What It Means to Me

Bringing the Funny ⇒

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1 Unless you count the teaser panel of the issue before his first proper appearance.  Which I don’t.

2 Although, to be fair, I also had a great affinity for the mystical superheroes, who were fulfilling my comic book requirements and my fantasy requirements simultaneously.  And Doctor Strange is pretty crucial to the mystical storylines, at least on the Marvel side.  Back on the DC side, it would be Dr. Fate and Phantom Stranger, along with some other lesser known guys (Spectre, Demon, Deadman, Ragman, Zatanna, Blue Devil, etc).

3 And I did some extra research while writing this post, only to come up completely blank.

4 Or her, but let’s face it: that far back, it was probably a “him.”

5 Exhibit A: B’wana Beast.

6 Being a child of the eighties, my go-to example of a supergroup is Asia, composed of former members of Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and the Buggles.

7 We could discuss other supergroups: the Justice Society of National Comics (the predecessor to DC), the Invaders—originally known by the unimpressive moniker “the All-Winners Squad”—of Timely Comics (the predecessor to Marvel), the Crime Crusaders Club (another terrible name) of Fawcett, even the Mighty Crusaders of Archie Comics (yes, Archie had superheroes too).  But the big two are the only two left, for all intents and purposes.

8 Don’t get me wrong: the JLA had Firestorm and Zatanna and Red Tornado and Black Canary and Phantom Stranger.  So they had fun times too.  Just not as many.

And now for something not nearly as completely different as it was last time ...

Well, I have to bail on another post this week, unfortunately.  I just (as in hours ago) finished a long project for $work,^* and there’s just no time to work in a proper post before the weekend is out.

So, let’s play another little game of “Last Two,” which I invented about two years ago when I also didn’t have time to do a proper post.

Last two movies I watched:  We (meaning the whole family) just watched The Little Prince on Netflix, which we all thought was pretty good.  Even our eldest, jaded teen that they are, managed to keep their earbuds out of their ears long enough to get to the end.  Higher praise I cannot imagine.  Before that ... I think it was The Last Witch Hunter, which is sort of brainless entertainment, except it had XXX, Frodo, and Ygritte, which is not a bad cast for brainless sword fighting and car chases and nonsensical explosions (considering it’s a movie about witches).  But I’m not particularly hard on movies.

Last two audiobooks I listened to:  Well, I just finished Bitten, which is the first in the Women of the Otherworld series.  I wanted to try it out because I’d heard good things about, but I found it distinctly “meh.”  I’ll try at least one more to see if it improves, but it was a little too Harlequin-romance-y for my tastes.  Not bad ... just not great.  Before that I blew through Around the World in 80 Days, as a palate cleanser after coming off of The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi (which is the one I would really recommend: it was a bit slow for the first 2 or 3 chapters, then it took off like a bat out of hell and was amazing straight through to the end, plus I’ve already talked about what an awesome reader Wil Wheaton is).  80 Days is one of the few Verne books I never read when I was younger, and I picked it up at one of those buy-1-get-1-free-but-only-certain-titles sales at Audiobook.  One is always a little surprised by the casual racism when one reads a book published in, say, 1873, but it was actually the casual classism that irked me more.  ‘Cause, you know, Phileas Fogg is an English gentleman, and Passepartout is just a servant.  And here’s a fun fact that you might not know if you haven’t read the book: Fogg hired Passepartout the day they left on the journey.  So they go off and have all these adventures and Passepartout trusts Fogg implicitly depsite barely knowing him ... because he’s a gentleman.  It’s sort of ... disturbing, really.  But a sort of fun book nonetheless.  Just a bit anachronistically jarring when you’re reading it 150 years later.

Last two real books I read:  Dude, I hardly ever read real books any more.  But, weirdly, I’m right in the middle of one right now: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.  I wasn’t going to even start it until next week, but I made the mistake of reading the first several pages to see if the play format was going to work for me, and I got sucked in.  It’s not as good as sometihng actually written by Rowling, but it’s her story, so it’s still interesting enough to make you not want to put it down.  Before that ... I honestly can’t remember.

Last two bands I discovered:  Well, I just (as in minutes ago) discovered Pomplamoose.  Not sure how I never heard of them before, as they’re apparently a bit of a big deal on the Internet.  Everyone else in my house had heard of them, apparently (The Mother is the one who pointed me at them, actually).  I’m just a bit slow, I guess.  Prior to that, I guess I would say Aurora, who I was bit taken with after her appearance on Colbert.  I don’t think it was the song she played on The Late Show, but “Conqueror” is pretty amazing.

Last two albums I bought:  All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend by Aurora, obviously, and before that I think Still Night, Still Light by Au Revoir Simone.  Whom I also discoverd thanks to Colbert, because one third of Au Revoir Simone is now one third of Nice as Fuck, who was on Colbert last week (or the week before, maybe ... I forget).

Last two restaurant meals I ate:  Does Jack in the Box count as a restaurant?  I tried their new portabello-mushroom burger thing.  They keep advertising it all over the TV there, and it looks so good on the commercial ... but don’t do it.  It’s a bad, bad idea.  Before that, no family meal since last week (Topper’s pizza last Sunday—and, may I say, if you happen to live in Southern California and haven’t yet eaten at Topper’s, put down your computer right this instant and order; you won’t be sorry).  I suppose I ate out with my coworkers on Tuesday (I was sick the latter part of the week), but damned if I can remember what we ate.  Japanese, maybe?

Last two real animals I saw (excluding family this time):  I rescued a widow spider out of my shower this morning.  It wasn’t a black widow, but I’m not 100% sure if it was a brown widow or a red widow or what.  But it definitely had the characteristic widow shape.  Before that ... hmmm ... yesterday, I think it was, I saw a bright red dragonfly that swooped in and landed on one of The Mother‘s planter hooks.  It was pretty cool.

Last two television shows I watched:  Hmmm ... not counting watching things like Sesame Street with the kids, I would probably say SCTV Network 90 and Whose Line Is It Anyway?.  Last two shows I watched with another adult ... probably the season finales of Preacher and Stranger Things.  You totally have to check out Stranger Things if you haven’t yet, by the way.  It’s insanely good.

Last two podcasts I listened to:  I don’t really listen to podcasts, per se.  Judge John Hodgman sometimes.  But I do listen to streaming versions of NPR shows, so if we can count that, I was just listening to Car Talk in the car today.  They’re on repeats now, of course, since Tom died.  But I still enjoy it.  Before that ... well, I just recently discovered Nerd HQ and I watched a shit-ton of Zachary Levi’s “Conversations for a Cause” panels, which they thoughtfully videoed and put up on YouTube.  Again, not really a podcast, and, again, not sure how I only became aware of this recently, but they’re pretty entertaining to watch (top pick from the 2016 set: Felicia Day), and I find Levi just as entertaining as Hardwick, and maybe even a bit more endearing, somehow.

And that’s about it.  Hopefully that’ll tide you over until next week.  And, honestly, this post is long enough that I don’t even really consider it “interstitial,” so, you know ... be happy.

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* Technically speaking, the project is not done.  But it’s done enough to make my boss happy once again, and I think I can take the remainder of the project at a more reasonable pace.

Slithy Toves I

"Here to Eat Your Apple to the Core"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

We’ve talked about Cherry Poppin’ Daddies in this series before.  We talked about their ability to crank out retro-swing, lounge, and the as-yet-unnamed hardcore-yet-retro 50’s-early-rock style.  But the first time I heard “Here Comes the Snake,” I knew it was something different.  Ostensibly, it’s a lounge soung, but there’s just something ... slinky about it.  Which of course is entirely appropriate (and I’m sure intentional) given the title and subject matter.  It’s really hard to define—I suppose it’s something in the beat that makes the song just slither along—but I know it when I hear it.  And of course the words to this particular track reinforce the theme:

Yes, I believe, but I’d rather not pray;
What I believe in I’d rather not say, baby.
Did your God show you the door?
Well, I’m here to eat your apple to the core ...

Here comes the snake indeed.  The idea of music that slithers its way into your brain somehow put me in mind of the slithy toves from “Jabberwocky” ... you know, those little creatures¹ who did gyre and gimble in the wabe.  And thus this mix was born.

A long time ago.  Newer mixes have bubbled into existence, struggled along, and even had several volumes completed before I managed to put the finishing touches on volume I of this mix.  The reason is simple: for most of my mixes, I know where to go looking for new songs to add to the collection.  But this particular theme is unusual ... there’s no genre or subgenre of music which is more likely to churn out this type of song than any other.  There are not even too many bands that we can count on going back to again and again: in a certain sense, nearly every track in this particular mix is unexpected.  So, while building the mix, I’ve just had to rely on discovery—just waiting until I happened to stumble on a song which would be perfect rather than being able to go looking for them.  So it’s just grown very slowly, very gradually, and only recently did I feel like I had enough to put things in some semblance of order.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have some immediate ideas.  Our opening track here, “Jane’s Getting Serious” by the lesser-known of the Astleys,² was probably the very first thing to pop into my head when I thought of songs that slink along into your brain.  Very shortly followed by “Smooth” by Santana, featuring Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20.  Supernatural is an uneven album, in my opninon, but “Smooth” is the standout: really amazing guitar work from Santana (as always), and some sexy vocals from Thomas.  Both these songs were no-brainers.

But perhaps the strongest contender for this mix (after the mix-starter itself) is “Why Do We Call It Love,” which is what really caused me to fall in love with the Swing soundtrack in the first place.  We’ve seen Lisa Stansfield’s tracks from that movie show up on Salsatic Vibrato II³ and Georgie Fame’s tracks on Moonside by Riverlight, and those are good tracks.  Nothing wrong with those tracks.  But this song ... this song is just incredible.  Smoky vocals from Stansfield, that slinky beat that drives it to this mix, clever lyrics—“Why Do We Call It Love” has it all, and in spades.

Now, as I said up above, in general bands don’t immediately spring to mind when you’re looking for slinky, slithery songs.  However, if there’s an exception to that, Shriekback must be it.  Primarily centered around the keyboards and vocals of Barry Andrews, keyboardist with XTC for their first two albums, Shriekback can do big, bold party songs, such as most of Oil and Gold and much of Go Bang!, or it can do quieter, reflective songs such as most of Big Night Music and a few scattered other songs.  So throughout this series we’re going to see Shriekback on such vastly different mixes as Funkadelic Bonethumper, Wisty Mysteria, Rose-Coloured Brainpan, Bleeding Salvador, Smokelit Flashback, Moonside by Riverlight, Shadowfall Equinox, and Numeric Driftwood.  They’re versatile, is what I’m saying.  But we’ll probably see them here more than anywhere else, starting with two tracks on this very volume.  “The Reptiles and I” is a slinky but quiet little song of lists from Big Night Music, whereas Shark Walk is one my favorites from Go Bang!, a more upbeat but still quite sinuous tune that focuses more on the selachian than the serpentine.

Other early choices include Joe Jackson’s cover of Louis Jordan’s 1944 hit “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” and Cat Empire’s interesting song about a gypsy woman haunting their dreams, “The Night That Never End.” In the former case, it’s a swing standard—I think Jackson’s version adds a bit more flair and maybe more brass, but the slinky undertones are present even in Jordan’s original.  In the latter case, it’s whatever style you want to accuse of Cat Empire of being—probably something latin-ish—and it carries the sneaky, sinuous theme through into the lyrics, in which a “gypsy lady” sneaks into your sleeping head carrying a bottle of schnapps.  The end of the song, where the trumpet-drenched bridge gets faster and faster until it peaks in a crescendo of frenetic energy, is one of the most amazing pieces of musical craftmanship I’ve ever heard.

I also remembered “Caramel” by Suzanne Vega off Nine Objects of Desire, an album which in general I like less than the magnificent 99.9 F°.  But “Caramel” is probably my favorite off NOoD, and has a perfect sinuous beat to fit in here.  Similarly, relistening to Into the Labyrinth by Dead Can Dance, I was instantly struck by how perfectly the feel of “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” slots in here.  The song has an Arabian vibe that’s reminiscent of a snake charmer’s tune which is perfect for this mix.

Less likely (and more of a stretch for theme here, if I’m honest) is “Take Me Dancing” by Meaghan Smith.  Last time we saw Smith was on Sirenexiv Cola, where she had a poppy electronica/orchestral tune from her excellent album The Cricket’s Orchestra.  Here we have another track from that album, which has a bit of the slinky feel we’re going for here, concentrated mainly in what I feel sure is a Hammond organ.  But what it lacks in strict adherence to the theme it makes up for in sheer joy.  It shows that, while Slithy Toves is mostly a collection of slower songs, there can be upbeat tunes that fit the mix as well.

Another thing we talked about last week was my discovery of KT Tunstall, and how I’ve not been as excited about any other artist in the past few decades or so.  I threw out a couple of candidates for next runner-up,⁴ but I should have mentioned Iron & Wine.  His album The Shepherd’s Dog is a revelation: part folk music, part alterna-pop, with a tinge of electronica and surreal lyrics reminiscent of Michael Stipe or Robyn Hitchcock.  Several of his songs slither about with an ambience that makes them well-suited for this mix.  The one I chose for volume I is “Wolves,” which is sort of the title track to The Shepherd’s Dog.⁵  It’s a slinky, slithery track that flows beautifully into “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove.”

Slithy Toves I
[ Here to Eat Your Apple to the Core ]

“Jane's Getting Serious” by Jon Astley [Single]⁶
“Why Do We Call It Love” by Lisa Stansfield, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Take Me Dancing” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby” by Joe Jackson, off Jumpin' Jive
“The Reptiles and I” by Shriekback, off Big Night Music
“The Night That Never End” by the Cat Empire, off Two Shoes
“Borneo” by Firewater, off The Golden Hour
“Smooth” by Santana, off Supernatural
“Here Comes the Snake” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)” by Iron & Wine, off The Shepherd's Dog
“The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” by Dead Can Dance, off Into the Labyrinth
“Shadow” by the Primitives, off Lovely
“Shark Walk” by Shriekback, off Go Bang!
“Caramel” by Suzanne Vega, off Nine Objects of Desire
“Ghost Highway” by Mazzy Star, off She Hangs Brightly
“Sarah” by Bat for Lashes, off Fur and Gold
“I Close My Eyes” by Shivaree, off Who's Got Trouble?

Total:  17 tracks,  72:20

The rest of the tunes I more or less stumbled upon by accident.  Firewater’s “Borneo” is, like the Meaghan Smith tune, a bit of a stretch here, but it’s a rollicking fun track that upholds the upbeat portion of the festivities nicely.  Plus it flows into “Smooth” really nicely.  “Shadow” by the Primitives is another Middle-Eastern-sounding song that rolls along coming off the back-end of “Lovegrove,” and provides a nice change-of-pace from their usual alterna-pop.

Which just leaves us with our 3 closing tunes.  “Ghost Highway” is in some ways a typical Mazzy Star song, but in others it’s quite distinctive, including a serpentine beat that underscores the duo’s typical echoing, buzzing style.  That flows into Bat for Lashes’ “Sarah,” a slow, sinuous track that shows off her distinctive voice.  And we polish it all off with “I Close My Eyes” by Shivaree.  We first discussed Shivaree’s eclectic style back on Smokelit Flashback III.  “I Close My Eyes” contains quite a bit of torchy Moonside by Riverlight overtones, but it still retains enough of the undulating quality that we’re looking for here to provide a solid closer.

Next time, we’ll go back to the beginning for another installment of the mix that started it all.

Slithy Toves II ⇒

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1 According to Humpty Dumpty, toves are “something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.”

2 Weirdly, Jon Astley is not related to Rick Astley, despite them both being Astleys, both being British, and looking remarkably similar to each other.  Shame: I’d never have minded so much getting jonrolled.

3 And we’ll see them again on future volumes of that mix.

4 Specifically, Devics and Firewater, the latter of whom we’ll hear from in just a minute.

5 By which I mean that the title of the album appears in the song’s lyrics, even though it’s not the song title.

6 I try not to link to YouTube for music, and in fact I’ve never had to do so before.  But this track is stupidly hard to get hold of—I don’t believe there’s any place you can purchase it digitally at all.  Since desperate times call for desperate measures, I’ll let you know that it is possible to turn a YouTube video into an MP3 file, using any number of sites that will do the conversion for you.  My current favorite is anything2mp3.com.

To post or not to post

It’s been nearly 2 months since I skipped a blog post, and we can’t have that, so I’ll be skipping this week.

Well, okay: to tell the truth, it’s only been a month or so since I actually skipped a post.  But it’s been 7 weeks since I posted saying I wasn’t going to post.  The other skipped post was my annual traveling-for-YAPC-and-just-spaced post.  That hardly counts at all.

So I’m posting here to say that I’m not posting, which is already both oxymoronic, paradoxical, and meta, all at once.  (Yes, that’s right: it’s all two of those three things.  I said it was paradoxical.)  And, while I’m posting about not posting, I’m telling you about my other type of not posting, which was not posting about not posting.  Now, often when I post about not posting about not posting, I post about posting, which makes my non-post almost a post, although it’s typically not as long as an actual post, so I often don’t count it as a post, but rather a post about not posting (which it also is).  But this is not that.  Rather, this is a post that is reflective of the collective of my posts about not posting.  See, my posts have labels.  All my posts.  Even the posts about not posting.  Those posts get a special label, “interstitial,” which indicates their non-postiness.  You know, in case you don’t want to actually read the posts about not posting, on account of their lack of postiness, you can easily skip them, because they all have the same label.  “Interstitial,” of course, means “between things”—in this case, it means the posts about not posting which are between the actual posts about things.

But there’s also a little “word cloud” over to the left (near the bottom), and, you know what I’ve noticed recently?  The “interstitial” tag is the biggest one.  That’s not really how I’d hoped this blog would turn out.  Now, on the one hand, it’s not particularly a fair comparison, because the posts about things all have different labels (22 of them, not counting the the posts which are not posts at all and the posts which are essentially just links to other posts), while the posts about not posting all have a single label.  So, it makes a certain amount of sense that that label has more entries.  That doesn’t make it any more palatable though.

There are 82 posts with the “interstitial” tag.  The next closest would be the “Perl” posts (i.e. the posts which are links to other posts) at 52, then the “fiction” posts that represent my ongoing novel, at 37.  The largest “proper” blog post label is “music,” which has 32 posts, primarily because I find those really easy to crank out, so it’s a standard fallback when I’m pressed for time.  But another interesting point about these labels is that any post can have multiple tags.  So many of the posts which are tagged posts about not posting are actually posts about things, but just not full posts about things.  So they get stuck labeled as “interstitial” when they’re really just ... short.

Like this post, for instance.  I’ll label it “interstitial,” and perhaps also “metablogging,” since it’s a post about posting.  Which is even more oxymoronic and paradoxical (and meta) because now it’s going to be tagged as a post about posting and a post about not posting.  Mildly bizarre.

Now, 37 of the 82 posts tagged “interstitial” are also tagged something else, meaning that only 45 of the posts about not posting are actually about not posting ... or at least only 45 are only about not posting.  I’m starting to think that maybe I need a different label for posts about things that are not full posts about things.  Perhaps “partial” would be appropriate.

Anyhow, this post about not posting has turned out not to be about not posting so much as about posting, and posting labels, and posts in general.  Not sure that makes up for it not being a “proper” post, but perhaps it’s still better than being about not posting at all.  I’ll let you be the judge.