loonyblog.

It’s suddenly come to my attention that my TiVo these days is occupied largely by reruns of The Simpsons and Family Guy, along with whatever the History Channel is showing this week on Investigating History and/or History’s Mysteries. Until Alias starts back up again in January, pretty much the only show I care about is Smallville. So consider this my plea for suggestions: what television shows don’t suck?

A few things you should know: I don’t like live action sitcoms very much, and generally my favorites tend to be episodic sci-fi shows like DS9 and Babylon 5. Having said that, the problem with shows like that is that you need to watch from the beginning, and it’s tough jumping in right in the middle. I’ve thought about tuning in to Enterprise this season, but I feel like I’ve missed so much at this point that I really need to wait for the reruns to get caught back up.

But anyway, any suggestions are much appreciated. Post ‘em in the comments if you’ve got any.

Dark Horizons: A sequel to “The Usual Suspects”?

Ever since I created a domain exclusively for e-mail, I’ve been creating aliases for every single retailer or mailing list I sign up for, so that when one of them starts to get spam, I can just turn it off. Well, it took a while, but one of them’s gotten a couple of spam e-mails in the last few days. Whenever this happens, I will post the name of the retailer or website, so readers of this site can be sure to avoid them in the future.

Ladies and gentlemen, the first addition to the official loonyboi.com Scumbag-Who-Sells-Your-E-mail-Address-to-Spammers List is…

(Drumroll please)

MacMall.com.

If you must do business there, be sure to give them an e-mail address you can cancel later on, as they are clearly the lowest of the low.

“But wait!” You say, “how can you be absolutely sure that it was MacMall who sold your e-mail address?”

A few reasons. One, their privacy policy clearly states that they share information with third party companies. Of course, they say you can opt out of such things, which I did, however apparently that wasn’t enough for them. The other reason is that my e-mail domain is 100% absolutely private, and not linked to anywhere on the web. I create an alias for every conceivable use, and it was the mmall@ address (which had only been used for that one time I purchased something from MacMall) that started to receive spam. Since that address was never posted anywhere on the web, I can only assume that it was MacMall that sold my address to evil baby-eating spammers from hell.

So that alias has been turned off. I do a lot of shopping online, and every single place has a different alias, so I’ll continue to post whenever one of them starts to get spam.

A few weeks ago, Heather and I made a trip to visit Stef with the family in Virginia, and then we stayed behind and spent a couple of days in D.C. It’s taken me a bit longer than I’d have liked, but we’ve posted the photos over on our .Mac site.

A quick note about the quality of some of these pictures: while we were at Arlington Cemetery, the battery on my digital camera died on me. As a result, the last bunch of photos were all taken with a crappy disposable camera. I had the photos developed into a Kodak Picture CD™, which I was pleased to discover is automatically recognized by iPhoto, so I didn’t lose any quality by having to scan them in. Still, they’re noticeably darker than the digital pictures, and they’re slightly out of focus as well. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.

Click on evil Lincoln to check ‘em out for yourself.

Last night, in a fit of unbridled stupidity, I dropped my iBook. In doing so, I bent the power plug, but when I used pliers to get it back into shape, it didn’t work. This meant that I had either killed the internal power plug, or I needed a new A/C adapter. I prayed it was the latter of the two, but figured I’d take it by my local Apple Store to see what was wrong with it.

So today I did just that. I walked on in, walked up the stairs to the Genius Bar, and saw…a really, really, really long queue to meet with an Apple-branded genius. I asked about making an appointment (as I was told one would be mandatory), and was told that the earliest I could make one would be tomorrow. Here, go ahead and check the queue at my local Apple Store. Fun, isn’t it?

Well, I decided it wasn’t really worth coming all the way back in tomorrow, so I did what any self-respecting New Yorker who knows squat about Apple computers: I went to Tekserve. I’ve used Tekserve a few times before, and just as they’ve been in the past, service was fast and friendly. I was in and out of there in a half-hour, and I wasn’t charged for the time there, as it turned out that it was just the A/C adapter that needed to be replaced. Phew.

I wonder how much business Tekserve gets from fed up Apple Store customers. The Genius Bar is great in theory, but in practice it just doesn’t work. It should be a Genius Room for high-traffic locations like the SoHo store, as five guys behind a bar just won’t cut it on the weekends. In any event, I’m just happy my iBook is okay. The thought of traveling without it would give me nightmares for months to come.

If you lived in New York in the early nineties and were into independent comics, there was a pretty good chance that you were a fan of Cry for Dawn. CFD was a horror anthology, featuring stories written by Joe Monks and illustrated by then newcomer Joseph Michael Linsner. The book was a great one in its day. The art was great, the stories, while a bit cliched in retrospect, were clever in that old school E.C. horror kind of way, and Joe Monks had a wicked dark sense of humor that he put in everything he wrote.

As I said, if you lived in New York at the time, there was a very good chance you were a CFD reader. That’s because the pair were at every major comic book convention. And in those days there were a lot of them. Anyway, when the two went their separate ways in late ‘93, they still attended comic conventions, only they were at opposite ends of the convention center. I’ve been going through my old comics n’ stuff today, and I turned up some interesting documents from that time. Read on for a story of how I got involved in their argument, complete with scans of the offending document.

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There’s a brief article on NewScientist.com that suggests that people who look at Superman as a role model are less likely to help other people. The logic being that “to compare themselves to an exceptional individual makes them realise their shortcomings.”

I question that logic. By the same token, you would think that any artist who looks at Van Gogh for inspiration, no writer who looks at Shakespeare, no musician who listens to Beethoven and no basketball player who looks up at Michael Jordan would ever be able to accomplish anything. While I’m no researcher, my guess is that this sort of thing only occurs in insecure people who are intimidated by greatness. Most people, you would think, would not be so timid.

Of course, the entire nature of this study is questionable. They asked people if they would be willing to volunteer for a fictional community program after listing the characteristics of superheroes (and specifically Superman). What one has to do with the other is beyond me.

In preparing to sell off large portions of my comic book collection, I naturally had to go through and pick out the good stuff…that is, all the stuff I wanted to actually keep. While I am selling off about 95% of my collection, I’m keeping a nice collection of trades and graphic novels that I can’t imagine parting with. This includes my beloved complete run of Taboo, my signed & numbered hardcover collection of Dave McKean’s Cages, my nearly complete set of Cerebus phone books (they go up to “Going Home”), the complete Transmetropolitan and so on. And of course, this also includes most of the works of Alan Moore.

In pulling all of this stuff out, I got a bit nostalgic, so I recently re-read some of my favorite comics of all-time: V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. V and Dark Knight each require their own entry (which I intend to do eventually), but today I’m going to talk about Watchmen, a book that has only gotten better with age. I’m going to specifically talk in-depth about the ending and how it reads post-9/11, so if you’ve never read it, don’t click below. But if you have, read on for my thoughts on re-reading this classic of graphic literature.

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Amazon.com: the complete in-print Criterion collection.

MSNBC: Hardee’s serves up 1,420-calorie burger.