Free Pancakes on National Pancake Day!
Free Pancakes on National Pancake Day!
On February 28, 2006 from 7 AM to 2 PM IHOPs across the country will celebrate National Pancake Day (also known as Shrove Tuesday) by offering our guests a free short stack of pancakes*. This is going to be our biggest one day celebration in our history.
National Pancake Day has a rich history that stretches back centuries and has always been a time of celebration. National Pancake Day always falls on Fat Tuesday and this year it will be a celebration at IHOP.
* Limit one free short stack per guest. Valid for dine-in only, no to go orders. Not valid with any other offer, special, coupon, or discount. Valid at participating restaurants only, while supplies last.
Pancakes! FREE PANCAKES! I LOVE PAMCAKES!
However, a) I only just found out about this, and b) there are an insufficient number of local IHOPs in my vicinity.
So I cannot have IHOP pancakes, and shall have to make my own. Because since I leanred about this, I have to have pancakes for dinner. Which means that I have to do the dishes. Damncakes.
Holy Crap, Batman
A final Bat-comment: I haven’t read Frank Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin; I’ve skimmed it. I’ve skimmed the first issue, which featured some ludicrous dialogue, and some ludicrous artwork. Jim Lee is well-renowned for the hyper-idealized physiques of his figure work, which are rippling and sexual and refined in a superheroic sort of way. I have grown to find them both stiff and tiresome, despite the fact that are technically quite excellent. Issue number one featured a two page — ahem! — spread of Vicki Vale getting dressed, and the third issue pushed the veil of irony even further by having a lengthy T&A segment starring a woman who beats up a bunch of guys after growing past tired of being objectified. There’s some interesting writing going on prior to this last sequence, because Miller can’t avoid playing arround with narrative structure. But because I’ve only skimmed it, I can’t honestly say that it justifies the rest of the OTT schtick.
Miller’s Batman: Year One and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns are the conceptual and thematic bookends of the contemporary Batman mythos, and so one naturally wants to give Miller the benefit of the doubt when it comes to redefining and reinterpreting the character for the current generation and reflecting the current worldview. His Dark Knight follow-up, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again was worrisome, and All-Star is baffling, but this newest press release seems to indicate that the premiere bat-scribe has gone bat-shit crazy.
During his WonderCon panel, Frank Miller discussed his next graphic novel. Once again, Miller returns to the world of the Batman, this time with Holy Terror, Batman!. Though the title plays with Robin’s classic catchphrase, the book deals with a serious subject. Gotham has been attacked by Al Qaeda and Batman sets out to defend the city he loves. The book, which Miller has inked through 120 pages, is expected to run roughly 200 pages total.
Miller proudly announced the title of his next Batman book, which he will write, draw and ink. Holy Terror, Batman! is no joke. And Miller doesn’t hold back on the true purpose of the book, calling it “a piece of propoganda,” where ‘Batman kicks al Qaeda’s ass.”
—IGN, 12 February 2006
The justification for this is that Batman and DC superheroes have always been vehicles for American public sentiment, and that Batman fought Tojo and Hitler in the 1940s, and he should continue to participate in American martial wish-fulfillment. However, due to my current faith in Miller’s “satirical” edge or his ability to judge what core aspects of a character woudl appeal to a contemporary audience — and again, I haven’t closely read this stuff, I am going merely upon impressions gleaned from skimming — I predict that this book is going to be a massive train wreck. Back in the hype height of Sin City, it was anecdotally suggested that Miller was going to write and illustrate a comic about the life of Jesus, and comicdom went nuts! It was thought that this was going to be boundary-pushing, inventive, dangerous stuff, and the collective were eager for some daring, provocative stuff. I see now that this current Batman vs. Osama comic is born out of the same envelope-pushing sensationalist instinct, and I hope it comes to a similar nonexistent fruition.
Also? There’s already a comic called Batman: Holy Terror. Calling a book “Holy Terror, Batman!” therefore loses a significant amount of its punch.
Padawan
Thirty-two months ago, I was playing the video game Star Wars: Jedi Outcast and found myself pleasantly surprised to be doing pretty well at it. However, since it’s been thirty-one and three-quarters months since I put the game aside and I haven’t picked it back up to finish my mission during the interim, I don’t think I was doing quite as well as I’d hoped. Or perhaps LucasArts weren’t doing quite as well as they’d hoped in making the game addictive.
One of the aspects of the game I enjoyed was the essential first-person shooter (FPS) aspect of the game. I enjoyed pointing my camera around corners and sniping foes and trying not to aggro various stormtroopers, probe droids, bounty hunters, etc. To a lesser extent, I enjoyed using the lightsaber. The amount of “battle damage” it would inflict upon the environment always sent the render function into a bit of a tizzy, and the combat would demonstrably lag. And what’s the point in playing a Jedi game if you can’t wield three feet of neon fury?* Also, it took me a good slice of forever to complete two levels.
Peter and I share many tastes, but not many skill sets. Years ago we co-played a game of Grim Fandango. We’d tried this once before with a game where we swapped levels, but the amount of time it took me to finish a term made him impatient, and he just zoomed through the entire game one evening while I was absent. So why he agreed to sit at my shoulder and talk me through a puzzle game is beyond me. Peter, like many gamers, is a power premiere player: he gets a game early and the first thing he does is to finish it, burning through all levels as quickly as possible. Then, he goes back and enjoys the game’s replay value. When deciding to purchase a game, the shortness of the initial completion and the amount of replay enjoyment are the two costs he weighs.
But because of this gameplay methodology, my first-time meandering drove him grazy with Fandango. I’d wander down every blind alley and click on everything trying to find hidden functions and features. And I’m currently playing Star Wars: Jedi Academy in a similar manner. I’m trying to explore the whooooole map on each level. I’m not simply interested in accomplishing the mission, I want to look at the design and the tech and the amount of planning that went into making a world and a video environment. I like the sound editing, especially. The way the footsteps change from a flapping pat to a quick clang as the avatar wanders from desert dunes to corrugated corridors. And the constant machine noise of drones and whirrs… One of the best ways in which Star Wars was able to convince film audiences back in 1977 that it was a believable, tangible setting was not the archtypal characters or the Campbellian plot structure: it was the way the film sounded. We love the hum and crackle of the lightsabers and the howl if the TIE Fighters… even if they sounded like nothing we’d ever heard before, they sounded convincing. And the videogame sounds the same.
Meanwhile, I’ve figured out how to turn off weapon environment damage and reduce the quality of the texturing, so that Jedi Academy is able to run on my machine with only the occasional hiccup, despite having fifty fewer megahertz and significantly less visual memory than recommended by the manufacturer. And despite the added bonus of being able to design one’s own lightsaber and select a particular fighting style, I find myself once again most enjoying sneaking through corridors, weapon at the ready… inching around corners and catching my enemies unaware. Perhaps this time I won’t let almost three years pass before I get to level three.
Btmn: Highly Condensed
I was poking around the comic shop today, trying to find something Batman-y to hang another post on, but nothing was really lighting my fire. I considered writing about the two-part story that just wrapped up in Detective Comics, as written by Shane McCarthy and illustrated by the always-excellent Cliff Chiang. It was a classic Batman story: good Alfred bits, Batman versus the police, a non-superhuman villain, a taut pace and a solid resolution. The story stars the relatively recent psychotic villain Mr. Zsasz, who kills an astonishing number of people over the course of two comics. Which brought home the frequent iComic fan comment about Batman’s relationship with the Joker: why hasn’t Batman killed him? The Joker will always escape, and he will never be cured or redeemed. Which means that every day that Batman lets him live is another day that Batman is responsible for a future murder. With the Joker it’s usually be semi-acceptable because the Clown Price of Crime has a bemusing aspect that makes the murders part of the fantastic game of comic violence. Zsasz, on the other hand, is psychotic in a particularly nasty, ’90s manner. And to have the issue end with Alfred telling Bruce that he did the right thing by putting Zsasz back into custody, by keeping him alive felt a little distasteful.
But not enough to go into a full-blown morality post about it. Nor did the pathetically few (five? maybe?) pages that Batman actually appeared in in Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s All-Star Batman & Robin #3. ASB&R has been getting wildly divergent press from the iComics community. I think it fails at its essential mission: to simplify and streamline the ages of Batman continuity into a core essence. This book does not capture my essential Batman, full stop. And so it ceases to be interesting.
To be honest, I rather think I’m waiting for the whole One Year Later comics event that DC Comics is about to unleash. More than Frank Miller’s streamlined Ultimate Batman, One Year Later is supposed to jump start the DC Universe so that characters can get back to the business of telling good super-hero stories. Now DC does this stuff all the time. Most recently with Zero Hour, which allowed them to update all the origin stories of all the characters, and prior to that with Crisis on Infinite Earths, which basically got rid of all the silly fifties and sixties comics with Bat-Mite and Ace the Bat-Hound and other camp sci-fi tales. Because comics are a monthly soap opera that keeps on getting tangled up in its own complexity, it is apparently time to clear the decks of the dead wood (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) so that the writers can get back to basics.
And in that vein, The V — “the greatest collection of pseudo intellectual nerds in the world” — has set about condensing comics to their essence. Enormous, sprawling, lengthy, ill-edited, and vast stories are reduced to four panels, crappy computer-generated artwork, and hopefully a joke or two. There have been three or four dedicated to various Batman stories, amongst them the hilarious efforts of Jim Massey and Jon Sung. All of the submission so far can be found in the Highly Condensed Comics group on Flickr. PLEASE NOTE: not only are some of the comics teetering on the edge of highly vulgar, but many don’t make a damn bit of sense unless you’ve already read the comics that they are reducing. You may also have to join the group to see the pictures, so that helps prevent any accidental offensitivity. Anyway, be so warned.
Batmuhn
From John Cleese’s podcast came the unlikely headline that he was going to introduce Batman. Apparently if I had paid up at the official John Cleese website (Pay for something? On the web? It is to laugh!), I would have been more familiar with the cast of Mr. Cleese’s menagerie and wouldn’t therefore have been surprised — but entertained — to find out that Batman was a guinea pig.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that John Cleese is English. Because of this, he seems to pronounce “Batman” the way that someone would say the word were he referring to a member of a cricket team or indeed the personal assistant of a military officer. However, when referring to Batman, captial-B, originally known as “The Bat-Man” when he appeared in Detective Comics #27, well, the pronunciation is slightly different. An emphasis on a different syllable, as my father would say. To call him “the batmuhn” is quaint, but removes the force from the title that will allow criminals to think of him in the proper cowardly and superstitious manner that is their lot.
Brickbats
My recent George Clooney post made me realize that I haven’t done a sufficient amount of blogging about Batman. How can this be? Batman was a key figure in my developmental identity, and continues to be an icon or totem for my romantic ideals of justice, efficacy, and solitude. If he affects my life so much, how is it that Akiva Goldsdigger’s appalling schlockhouse travesty was the first time I’ve mentioned him on my blog?
Well, it’s going to be All Batman, All The Time around here for a little while, just to make up for that. Then we’re resume our ordinary service of weekly diacritical commentary.
BATMAN LEGO! BATMAN LEGO!!! When the Star Wars Lego set were made available for sale, I cursed my age, swallowed my pride and picked up a couple of the medium-priced sets (Original Trilogy only, naturally). I tried displaying them in my office for a little while, but they were eventually replaced with Stikfas. When Spider-Man hit theatres, Spidey-brand Lego sets were sold with an accompanying stop-motion digital camera.
Surrounded by all these corporate Lego tie-ins, it was easy to concede that had these been available when I was a wee sprat, I would have been captivated. Back in the day my stepbrother and I spent hours with Lego figures and Testors paint, customizing figures to be Ghost Rider, various X-Men, and comic characters of our own creation. And while we were all Marvel Zombies at the time, the ability to somehow create or customize a Batman cowl would have had me cross company lines in a heartbeat.
Of course, it rather looks like Lego themselves are having some trouble getting Batman’s mask quite right. It also amuses me to note that the head under the mask is going to have two blank white ovals where the eyes should be, so that the mask can have holes instead of eyes. Taking the mask off, therefore, will reveal a soulless dome of bizarre, inhuman construction. Sort of a reverse counterpart to the makeup Michael Keaton wore around his eyes so that they’d blend in with the black of the mask. It’s not noticeable until their sudden disappearance right before he rips his mask of in Batman Returns. Also worth noting is how they customized the legs of the Penguin figure in order to make him seem shorter and fatter than an ordinary Lego person.
Lastly, here’s a embedded QuickTime video of someone’s CGI Batman Lego movie, starring the voice talents of Mark Hamill, Dick Van Dyke, and even Adam West!
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