Bowling for Soup: 1985 (2004)

Robert Palmer girls. Aerosmith. 80s rappers. This video name-checks (and, er, sight-checks) so many elements of pop music from my youth, it’s crazy. Unfortunately, like Alien Ant Farm’s video for their cover of Smooth Criminal, if you don’t get the references, there’s not much else to the video.

Whitesnake: Here I Go Again (1987)

This video goes out to Jeff McClure.

I’ve had some four or five things I’ve wanted to post lately, but this week was quite possibly the worst one I’ve ever had in my professional career. It’s eaten my brain. With luck I’ll be back to posting in a while.

Peter will snicker when he reads this. He’s our friend, the Mathematician. When he talks about what he does, even Stephen’s eyes sometimes glaze over. He’s a smart man and I enjoy some personal nerdy one-upmanship simply because I call him my friend. So Peter, this post is for you…

On Wednesday afternoon, Eli and I decided that we would go around the corner to the church that has a pumpkin patch every year. When we hopped out of the car, two teen girls were manning (womaning?) the patch. We found out what the costs were for the various sizes and piles and then set out to spend the $11 I had on as many pumpkins as I could get.

Once our selection process was finished, Eli and I headed over to the girls with our pumpkins. I knew that I was close to the $11 limit but hadn’t yet calculated the exact change. Both girls had their homework spread out all over the card table and one of them had their math calculator. I told them what pumpkin price piles I had grabbed from and as I was doing that, I added up the amount in my head. It came to $10.75. The first girl tried to add it up on the calculator. She couldn’t make it work out correctly. So she handed the calculator off to the second girl. She couldn’t do it either. I said, “Ok, here’s a $4, 2 $2, that’s $8. Here’s 2 75¢ and a 50¢, that’s $2 for a total of $10 and then one more 75¢ is $10.75.”

There was a pause as both girls squinted up at me from their homework. The first one said with a bit of awe in her voice, “You are REALLY good at math.”

So there you are. I am a Math God. I know that it’s a surprise to those of you who thought all this time I was more of an artist type, but who can argue with a couple of teen girls minding a pumpkin patch. I know I felt good about it the rest of the day.

Yesterday there was a box on our front step. I brought it in and as soon as Eli saw it he said,

“We got a package!”

As if this were the holy grail just shipped from Amazon.

When I opened it, hundreds of peanuts escaped and like a maniacal monkey Eli started scooping them up off the floor. He had not yet seen the true wonder of what else the box contained.

Side note: Last Christmas we got a box just like this. It contained, what I thought was a gift for me and Stephen, a couple gift if you will, and a gift for Eli. The peanuts went straight to the garbage because there were many of them and I didn’t want to have to vacuum them up. A few days later we got a phone call from Sean in Arizona. He asked Stephen how he liked his new Playstation 2 game. Stephen’s reply, “What game?” Seems I had thrown the Gran Turismo 3 out with the bath water.

So this box, once opened and excavated, I left sitting in the floor of the office so Stephen could also paw through it and verify it contained no elusive Playstation loot. Fast forward to this morning…

Eli comes in from his morning diaper summit with Stephen and spies the box. In the box was a piece of bubble rap. This was the first view I had of my child this morning.

See the look of intense concentration. Once Stephen had shown him how to pop the bubbles he knew genetically to systematically go down the rows of bubbles checking for unpopped ones. Now see the look of sheer joy at finishing the project.

P.S. Kat and Sean, we loved our gifts. Thanks especially from Eli for the bubble rap.

As some of you know we watch movies at our house on Tuesday nights. Aren’t we clever, clever people for thinking up that oh so descriptive name? From this picture you might think that all the tvs in our house were on the fritz.

You’d be wrong.
What that picture is of is the subset of us who didn’t want to watch the subtitled French black comedy last night, watched Angel instead.
On a 7 inch screen.
Like a bunch of girls at a sleepover.
We had girl talk and milk and cookies too.
Now don’t you want to come and join the Tuesday Night Movie Club?

I’m guest-hosting FNV this week. And in light of all the torture talk, well, I thought we needed to mellow out with some classic U2. What am I saying? Everyone knew that if I ever hosted FNV the first one would be all U2 videos. It would just be a matter of which ones…

U2: With or Without You from Rattle and Hum (1988)
Stephen will grouch at me when he sees this because he will say this isn’t really a video and he’s set such high standards of video goodness around here. Technically, he’s right, this really isn’t a video. It’s part of a movie which happens to be all music. But this clip has my all-time favorite added U2 lyric at the end. I’ve even gone so far as to record it off of my VCR copy of Rattle and Hum to tape (no jokes about how old I am, please) so I could hear those extra couple of lines. Also, I saw Rattle and Hum in the theatre with Lana Bob! and about 5 other people. It was almost as good as going to a concert because some nice employee turned the sound up to 11 for the show.

U2: New Year’s Day (1983)
An actual video. A bad one, but still a video. This is from the 80s when someone could say, “Wouldn’t it be cool to make a video in the snow? Does anyone have horses?” The best part of this video is watching Larry bang his widdle drum in the back.

U2: Vertigo (2004)
A better U2 video because they spent more than $3 on it. Also, a lovely marriage of song and video inducing said vertigo. Best line: Your love is teaching me how to kneel. Maybe that’s why I love U2 so much, they pretty much always get my theology right.

You do not torture people. It’s illegal.

You do not torture people. It’s immoral.

You do not torture people. It doesn’t work.

You do not torture people.

Here lately I’ve been interested in the process and analysis of creative endeavors: how is creativity turned into something tangible, and how well does it work for the audience? Blame it on the stuff I’ve been doing for Dragon*ConTV and my natural tendency to analyze. For the forseeable future I’ll occasionally bust out with a critical essay like the one you’re unwittingly reading now, in which I take apart something creative and/or entertaining, ignoring E.B. White’s dictum about frogs and humor and blazing full speed ahead.

With that out of the way, let me introduce specimen number one: Narbonic. Narbonic is a four-panel comic strip that’s web-based. It’s about the exploits of a mad scientist and her henchmen, and it is my favorite comic strip ever.

The comic’s main protagonist is Dave Davenport, a computer programmer who gets a job out of college with Helen Narbon. Helen is a mad scientist who specializes in biology and genetics — not the mad scientist specialization I would choose, but I suppose it works for her. They are joined by intern Mell Kelly and by Artie (literally RT-5478), a hyper-intelligent gerbil that Helen created.

Narbonic, like Girl Genius, posits a world where certain people are mad (or have the Spark) and can thus quite literally create world-destroying wonders. Thankfully that hasn’t happened yet, mostly because Narbonic’s mad scientists tend to laziness and sloth and have the attention span of a ferret snorting Pixie Stix.

The art is solid, though not outstanding. Get Fuzzy is, for my money, the best-looking four-panel comic currently running, and Narbonic doesn’t meet that high standard. But over the years Shaenon has developed a clean aesthetic that works well, and she’s gotten better over the years. Consider this example from the comic’s second week:

But now?

I love the composition of these frames. The BOOM and POW! coupled with Helen’s and Mell’s expressions are glee-inducing. And the first Sunday comic of every new year is an homage to Little Nemo in Slumberland, showcasing both Shaenon’s art and her terrible and powerful knowledge of comics history.

The Little Nemo strips also demonstrate one of Narbonic’s two great strengths: pacing. Each Little Nemo comic presages what is to come in the strip. They feed into Narbonic’s giant story arc, an arc that’s drawing to a close. At the end of this year, Narbonic ends. What’s more, Shaenon decided on the story arc early on. In a recent podcast, Shaenon admitted that she had some idea of the end when she started the strip, and had in fact written one of the pivotal smaller story arcs before Narbonic. Everything was mostly determined by the end of the second year.

And yet the giant story arc doesn’t keep the daily strips from often being funny in and of themselves. Below is the comic with, bar none, my favorite joke in the entire run. It works even if you don’t really know the characters. In between the gag-a-day format of a four-panel comic and the six-year story arc that Narbonic has been working towards are shorter story arcs that last from a few months to nearly a year. Keeping up the pace of individual story arcs while simultaneously moving the overarching story forward and delivering a joke every day is not easy, and yet Narbonic does it, and has done it, day after day after day after day.

I said that pacing was one of Narbonic’s great strengths. The other is characterization. The characters began as two-word traits rather than personalities: the mad scientist, the weapons-crazy intern, the do-gooder gerbil, the geeky computer nerd. But the characters have grown past that without losing the core of their identities. It’s tough to balance recognizable and near-stereotypical character traits with individual quirks. On the whole, Narbonic gets it right.

From that characterization flows the entire strip. Storylines arise because of the characters’ actions, and those actions follow clearly from who they are. Even moreso, the punchlines flow from character, and do so without hitting the same one note over and over.

Shaenon has also let her characters evolve and change. More importantly, those changes matter. Their choices have real ramifications and don’t feel like arbitrary plot devices. Nothing demonstrates this more than the series climax towards which the strip is hurtling. For a long time Narbonic was about wacky mad science, with no one getting hurt, at least not for long. Then we began to see the shape of the overall plot, and shadows crept into the series. Over the last year it’s been growing steadily darker. A major character has become more evil — truly evil — and less sympathetic, going so far as to kill someone coldly and deliberately. Right now the threat of a truly unhappy end hangs over the series, and what’s more, I believe this threat. It’s the corollary to the character’s choices having consequences. Sometimes those consequences are very bad indeed.

Narbonic works because it features believable and interesting characters that I care about. Even in the midst of the wackiest of plots, the characters are grounded. What’s more, I find their story interesting and compelling. Finding interesting characters and a good story within the same work is a wonderful thing.

For a long time, Narbonic was part of Modern Tales. You could read the most recent strip, but you could only browse the archive if you paid for a Modern Tales subscription. Now the strip is freely available. Go read it. You won’t be sorry.

All Narbonic art copyright © Shaenon Garrity. Used with permission.

Last night Eli woke up around midnight, snuffling and crying. He’s been having some congestion. Is it from a small cold? Is he allergic to the cotton that grows all around us? Who knows! What I do know is that he was having trouble breathing and that woke him up.

We went in and patted him and rocked him and Misty sang to him and put him back into his bed. He continued whimpering, so after five minutes or so we came up with a plan. We would make up the guest bed and he could sleep with Misty.

While Misty made the bed I went into Eli’s room to get him. I would like to state for the record that I haven’t had to deal with a half-awake child in the middle of the night in a long time. I’m out of practice. That’s the only excuse I can come up with for me picking up my sleeping child and carrying him to Misty, thus waking him up.

Things devolved from there. I helped Misty and Eli get situated in bed, causing Eli to sit up and declare, “I wanna sleep in my bed.” We put him back in his bed, where he cried and shrieked for Mommy and Daddy. We went back in and moved Eli to the guest bed, at which point he again said, “I wanna sleep in my bed.” Toddlers! Isn’t it cure when they can’t make up their minds and it’s 1 AM and you know they won’t be happy with whatever decision they make? Ha! Ha!

I began to understand the true meaning of, “I’ll give you something to cry about!”

We made Eli sleep with Misty, which worked out okay until early in the morning when Eli began his morning ablutions, which consist of him winding himself in his blanket and wallowing around, smacking whomever is next to him, and eventually rolling off of the bed and onto the floor. “I fell offa bed and onna floor!” It’s all very cute if you’re not sleep deprived, which I suppose is the motto of parenthood. Kids should come home from the hospital with that tattooed on their diapered rears.