Do Depressed Rockhoppers Tear at Their Feathers? or Tell 'Em That it's Human Nature

I'll keep this quick, since the last the thing the internet needs is a blogger (or reporter, or whoever else for that matter) blogging about the death of Michael Jackson. Roger Ebert wrote probably the best obit I've seen since his death.

I don't really want to get into his influence, or the sordid details of what did or didn't happen. Just want to relay a story.

Here goes:

I went to the zoo on Sunday with my girlfriend. It was pretty awesome. We saw the penguins exhibit, it was kind of cool I guess. I think I would have enjoyed it a little more if the birds were not mic'd up so that we could hear them constantly squawking. It was also easily the most crowded exhibit. I would have liked to get up a little closer to check it out, but I didn't want to be the guy blocking a bunch of toddler's view of penguins.

But anyways, during all the commotion of the penguins feeding was a single Rockhopper Penguin standing off to the left. You know, the penguins with the yellow stuff sticking out the sides of it's head, making it look like a cross between Wolverine, Gene Shalit, and Larry Fine.

It was the only one in a pack regular (I guess you'd call them) looking penguins. It wasn't trying to get near the other penguins to get food, and the other penguins weren't anywhere near him. He had a healthy radius of space surrounding him.

The rockhopper looked a older, its feathers were disheveled, and he was shaking. Christina, who is kind of an amateur orinthologist, had told me years ago when a bird is upset, it starts to tear at its feathers.

The penguin walked around in a circle by itself and defecated on the ice below its feet. A couple of kids and parents laughed. I was hoping he had a plan to escape the embarrassment of how totally different it was in that moment, maybe he'd jump down into the water. He'd jump back up in that weird looks-like-the-tape-is-being-reversed way that penguins tend to do when they hop back out of the water, his feathers smoothed out. He'd waddled over happily and fold right back into the pack. He didn't.

Christina and I both decided to leave because we couldn't take our eyes of the guy. We went over and looked at the jellyfish for a little while. It's entirely possible that we were projecting something onto a situation that didn't even exist. From my understanding the Pittsburgh Zoo takes pretty good care of its animals, and if a penguin was sick, it wouldn't be out there with the rest of them. Also, I would like to think that most people that work at a zoo are compassionate types that would spend a little more time with an animal that has been exiled from the pack. I'm not even sure that penguins do the feather thing when they are sad or upset.

It took me a couple days to notice the parallel between that bird and the famous guy who died last week. I was just struck by the isolation (real or imagined) that I saw with that bird and couldn't help but think that Michael Jackson was in a similar lot for most if not all of his life. The Onion put together a timeline of his life, and on the last date it said "June 25, 2009: Jackson experiences the only normal event in his entire life."

So what's the point of this whole thing? I don't know, go adopt an ugly mutt from an animal shelter instead instead of spending a bunch of money on expensive combination of Poodle and Dalmatian (PooMation? Dalmoodle?). And make fun of people less. I guess.

Anyways, here's my favorite Michael Jackson song:

Computer problems

Yeah, my computer was down for awhile. Gonna do a longer post, in the middle of it right now, actually. But my eyes are tired, here's a couple things I should give a shout out to on here.

Here's my girlfriend's blog.

Here's my friend Sean's blog, he intends to review every issue of Amazing Spider-Man (up to I believe issue 500) that he got on a DVD or CD-ROM or something. I'm intensely jealous for several reasons: 1. He has 500 issues of Spider-Man at his disposal, as long as he does not scratch the disc. 2. It's a good idea. 3. He could conceivably have the will power to see it through to the end. I'm pretty sure I'd crap out after about 30 issues of Stan Lee dialogue.

Here's my homie Brian Nac's blog on music, it's so good people have been sending him free stuff.

And finally, here's a link to a cool site called Xtranormal, once you sign up you can pretty much stage, direct, and write dialogue for little weeble people, it's pretty fun.

Here's the one I did. It took me about an hour or so on a Sunday afternoon to make. I was aiming for a David Lynch/Tim and Eric late night talk show vibe. I'm not sure if I accomplished that or not:

Всадник привидения: Русский человек мести гимнаста! or Why I haven't posted anything since I first started doing this

I was pretty excited about doing a blog. Unfortunately, I ended up having my computer crash on me due to a nasty virus, so I didn't have access to my laptop for awhile. As another result, I had to reformat my hard drive. I lost some files in the process. Most of them were mp3's and story notes that I would jot down onto my computer, usually things that make a lot of sense as I'm drifting of to sleep (most of which I'd come back to fully awake and wondering why I thought it would be a cool idea for Ghost Rider to be re-imagined as a male Russian gymnast).

Anyways, I didn't lose everything, and I'm slowly putting music back on my laptop. A lot of the songs were mixes that I put on, and I've bought a couple CD's since my computer went down so there's some new songs on there now, too. Same goes for some of my notes, too. Most of the ones that I thought were good ideas that got lost, I still have the same ideas, and some of the better ideas were saved some external drives.

So my computer is similar to where it was before the virus but some of the notes are different and some of the songs are gone. But the virus is gone, and it's moving as fast as it was when I first bought it. So it's kind of like my computer was retconned.

Retconning is one of the most fascinating and frustrating aspects of storytelling in comics. It's a retroactive change done to a previously established story.

The retcon at it's most simple is this: Spider-Man is a popular character, so you can't age him to the point where he is no longer relevant to the kids. So instead of his first adventures taking place in the sixties (when his series started), we're just to assume that they took place in the 70's, then 80's. Aging only a couple years for every ten or fifteen years that the book has been published.

Sometime it's absolutely necessary to keep a character that sells tons of money in licensing young and relevant. Unfortunately, the natural progression of the character suffers. That's why some of the most critically-lauded mainstream super-hero stories (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, All Star Superman) are all, to some degree or another are self-contained stories that don't have much bearing on the previous continuity.

A good example of a complex retcon in a comic is the story of the Swamp Thing under Alan Moore's tenure. The condensed version of the original Swamp Thing is pretty straightforward: scientist Alec Holland gets dosed in chemicals, becomes Swamp Thing, plant guy. Alan Moore retconned Swamp Thing into a plant-creature who happened upon Holland during his death. He ended up taking on Hollands personality and memories, but for all intents and purposes was, according to Moore "a plant that thought it was Alec Holland, a plant that was trying its level best to be Alec Holland." In effect, Alan Moore changed the last 10-odd years Swamp Thing stories. They still happened, but they didn't happen to the character readers thought they knew.

Sometimes it makes sense (Batman was created in 1939, yet if you read one of his monthly titles, he's only been doing the crime-fighting for about 10 years) and sometime's it's done in service of the charcter (Batman kills a guy in his first appearance, his "no killing" rule was added to show how his parents' death affected him), or merely historical (Reed Richards and Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four served in WWII, then Vietnam, then Desert Storm, I think). Sometimes it occurs in television (Kenny returning to life constantly on South Park), and it occurs in the surreal semi-real world of pro-wrestling (try to find a reference to Chris Benoit in anything put out by the WWE after the murder-suicide).

Sometimes it's a simple as recasting a character on a sitcom, like that guy in Bewitched or Carlton's mom on Fresh Prince. Even the term "history is written by the winners" is in and of itself, and idea of retconning on a particularly massive scale. Over the last couple years, and in particular George W. Bush has been saying in press conferences that eventually, the public perception of his decisions will be retconned by history.

Several summers back, I dated a girl for a couple months. Eventually it ended, and because of that weird masochistic tendency to see what someone I used to date was up to, I went onto her blog. She ended up posting a conversation in e-mail with a new boyfriend or some such guy. It was interesting because (at least from my narcissistic perspective) she used all the same terms in this conversation that she used to have with me with the new guy. It wasn't particularly upsetting, the relationship had run its course, and I still thought she was cool. But I still thought, "man I've just been retconned."

But then again, I think we do this a lot more often than you think. Both in terms of what we remember, and we do. I'm sure that if there were snarky comic book fans that read about my life, I'm sure at least one would remark "the Y2 character lost it's edge after he graduated high school. He was a lot more interesting when he was in the marching band and deathly afraid of girls."

(Three weeks mysteriously go by)

I left this blog in edit for a couple weeks, because I didn't want to post it until I had some time to look at it with fresh eyes. Looking back at it now with fresh eyes...eh it's okay. There was a lot more I wanted to write down about how we end up retconning ourselves and our memories or somesuch. I thought about deleting the whole damn thing. But then I would have retconned this blog out of existence. Har de har har (or RDRR).