Unsolicited Advice

When people ask what I've been doing lately, I tell them I've been making rat costumes out of socks. First, they say, "Wait, you're making rat costumes out of SOCKS?" Then, they say, "Wait, you're making rat COSTUMES out of socks?" Finally, they get to, "Wait, you're making RAT costumes out of socks?" Nobody ever questions the Avengers part, oddly enough. Since apparently I am just talking to myself with the Chaplin stuff, I jammed the rats into their superhero socks and took photos instead. Behold, the Rat-Vengers, Earth's Mightiest Rodents:

My flatmate the cosmologist (who will henceforth be known as "David Goldberg", because when I asked him what he wanted his alias to be his first concern was that it project the correct air of 'nice Jewish boy from Jersey'  no I swear I cannot make this stuff up ) is a bit of an odd duck. Enumerating all of the reasons I say this would take a mid-length novel, but the pertinent one right now is that he loves costume parties, and particularly loves throwing them for his birthday. I actually showed up about twelve hours before the last one -- literally, my plane landed at 5am and I ended up napping on the sofa after being driven out from the airport by a cheerful madwoman named Jazmin, because at that point, between packing and freaking out and flying and time changes, I had been awake for something between two and three days. (If anyone is interested in the minutia of my life, I happened to have known said flatmate online before I moved out here, and when I called ahe...

Apparently it is still possible to hang out on these here internets and not be aware of the breathtaking rapidity with which rabid slash fans will pick up new favorite people. Yes. There is Stark/Banner slash out there already. I'm pretty sure it was out there before the movie finished its opening day. I had a look at it, once I managed to stop laughing at the entire blog entitled "Tony Stark Has Sex With Everyone". It obeys Sturgeon's Law just like everything else. Most of it is crap. Some of it is decent porn. A small amount is decent even for not-porn. None of it is at all unusual for slashfic, although unlike the anime stuff, very few people are using it as an excuse to mangle another language. For the record, that was not where my brain went when I saw the movie. The part I found strangely charming was where the one man who must not be upset on pain of Hulk decided that his favorite Avenger was the one whose third-favorite hobby, right after playing with scie...

For any of the Avengers fans curious about how the Stark + Banner bromance thing goes in the comic canon, I dug this here up for yas: Hulk vol 2 071 Hulk vol 2 072 Hulk vol 2 073 Hulk vol 2 074 It's pretty much just Stark and Banner for this short arc, with a few vaguely peripheral people of whom I have never heard before, and of whom no one probably ever heard again. A few notes, for context: Tony doesn't drink anymore. He dried himself out some years ago in the comics, because he noticed it was starting to interfere in his being a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. This is basically the only way to get Tony to do anything. He has kept the rest of his world-famous collection of bad habits, on the basis that he is TONY motherfucking STARK and he can do whatever he wants. Bruce is on the run again, pretty much now and forever. He does typically show up when the Avengers assemble, but aside from that he spends most of his time being an itinerant supergenius an...

In which I apply way too much logic to the Hulk. Again. [small Avengers  spoiler. spoiler. spoiler spoiler spoily spoiler. this is getting monotonous, but i suppose it's better than being beaten by a rampaging mob of comic geeks.]

[spoilering. spoiler spoiler. for seventeen seconds of Avengers . when can I stop doing this?]

Mark Ruffalo on Inside The Actor's Studio : I love these things. This show is basically 45 minutes of pointing a camera at some poor guy in a strategically isolated chair who's compelled to answer questions ranging from silly to deeply embarrassing. You really can't get a better format for psych profiling. The first thing you notice about Mark Ruffalo is that he never looks quite fully-ironed. I have yet to see him play any parts where he looks fully-ironed, either. Sort of like how Angie Harmon never plays anything where she looks entirely unlike a tomboy, and RDJ always manages to spend at least part of the movie looking like a crazy homeless man with puppy-dog eyes. Although, left to his own devices, Ruffalo cops to owning ties. He's got some fairly nice suits and everything matches, plus he can manage to stay clean-shaven when he tries, so I would imagine the scruffy thing is a combination of it fits his personality and he thinks it looks good. (I agree...

Skipping around and reading reviews of the Avengers  movie, I note there are still people complaining that the Black Widow is sexist. [Click for spoilers. Also, consensus view please: When can I stop spoilering these things?]

Finally got around to watching the Edward Norton Hulk  movie. And it is definitely that way around. It is not a Hulk film starring Edward Norton; it is an Ed Norton movie guest-starring the Hulk. I admit up front to not being a fan of his at all. His favorite themes in storytelling are pretty much the opposite of anything I find even remotely fun to watch or enlightening to ponder. They're generally good films for what they are, but what they are is not to my taste. Still, the compare and contrast between the character of Bruce Banner as written and played by Edward Norton and Bruce Banner as written by Joss Whedon and played by Mark Ruffalo is an interesting example of how far apart you can get with interpretations of comic book characters and still technically all be canon.

[[Edit: Hi, people from some kind of Iron Man message board. Poke around the blog to find other stuff on Avengers, Iron Man, and RDJ.]] When we went to see The Avengers  I was not expecting to be impressed by the Hulk. The green guy has not exactly had a good record on either the big or small screen. The Hulk's story is really just your basic werewolf tale, and it's far too easy to ham it up to the point of self-parody, making Banner nothing but a giant bucket of angst and the Hulk nothing but a really big blunt object. For some reason, the casting is also often terrible -- prior to the Norton version, their greatest success in the part was Lou Ferrigno. (Ferrigno is not actually a bad actor. YouTube has a few episodes of the infamous TV series, which happens to include one where a sudden infusion of plot-related unobtanium results in Ferrigno spending about an hour playing not-the-Hulk, and delivering lines other than "Rauuuuugh!" They manage to get tears out of ...