Who is Wonder Woman?

I don’t normally focus on DC but with the Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice movie coming out, there has been a bit of “buzz” around Wonder Woman, who is guest starring and making her first movie appearance. She’s an interesting character in that so many people obviously know her as Diana Prince, played by Lynda Carter in the ‘70s TV show, but I wonder how many people know the comic.

The movies definitely need a Wonder Woman since she’s one of DC’s “big three” with Superman and Batman. She’s been around since the ‘40s and was the first female superhero, or at least the first one who lasted. In recent years, they’ve retconned her history to make her an illegitimate daughter of Zeus and Queen Hippolyta (I think — the reboot was interesting but I only read a little and DC reboots every few months anyway).

My Wonder Woman was in the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot by the great George Perez in the ‘80s. In this, Themyscira (Paradise Island) was populated by the Amazons, women who had been murdered in distant times and reincarnated by the Greek gods to live on the island. Queen Hippolyta was pregnant when she was murdered and when she started to have maternal longings, the gods directed her to form an image in clay on the beach, to which the gods gave life. Princess Diana was born. Years later, the Amazons decided to send an emissary to Man’s World (Themyscira is inaccessible by normal means). Against her mother’s wishes, Diana competed in combat and won the chance to be that emissary. She adopted that improbably American-looking costume after being inspired by Steve Trevor’s mother Diana, a pilot who had crash-landed on Paradise Island during World War II and helped the Amazons defeat some demons. Wonder Woman later joined the Justice League of America. Her adopted sister is Donna Troy, also known as Wonder Girl (and you do not want to wade into Donna’s tangled Vietnam of continuity).

The Olympians Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter, Artemis, Hestia and Hermes all blessed Diana with various powers, including flight and strength that is second only to Superman’s. Wonder Woman also possesses a golden lariat, forged by Hephaestus from the Girdle of Gaea, which can compel people to tell the truth if she lassoes them with it. She is commonly regarded as one of the strongest mortals on DC’s Earth.

Wonder Woman has at times been portrayed as a superhero, diplomat and warrior. My favorite characterization has been the compassionate warrior who would kill, but only if she had no other option. A few years ago, Wonder Woman actually was forced to kill Maxwell Lord, who was mind-controlling Superman to kill Batman. She snapped Lord’s neck on live TV, which led to a debate in comics and the real world about whether she had no option but to kill him.

Wondy’s rogues gallery consists of god of war Ares, the Cheetah, the sorceress Circe, Psycho Man, the Silver Swan and some other people. The oddest villain she fought is Egg-Fu, who in the Silver Age was a giant egg characterized like an Asian stereotype — yellow, slanted eyes, Fu Manchu mustache, dialogue with “L” in place of “R,” etc. DC soon realized this was breathtakingly inappropriate so they dropped the Asian motif and he became just a big egg.

Wonder Woman has also been through countless incarnations. Creator William Moulton Marston showed her in a very feminist but surprisingly racy S&M light in the ‘40s. In the early ‘70s, they removed Diana’s powers and had her fight crime in a white jumpsuit rather than her iconic patriotic bathing suit, but a lot of people thought it was sexist to strip DC’s most prominent woman of her powers (and let’s not even get into that nonsense of Wonder Woman losing her powers if a man chains her). She had that invisible jet and boyfriend Steve Trevor in the Silver and Bronze Ages but those went out the window. She has dated Superman and was engaged to Aquaman in an alternate reality. She was temporarily replaced by hardcore Amazon warrior Artemis (not the goddess) in the ‘90s. While the Golden Age Wonder Woman was retconned out of history, at one point Hippolyta took up her daughter’s title and journeyed to the past, retroactively having adventures with the Justice Society of America in the ‘40s. (Originally the team made Wonder Woman, second in raw power to Superman, their secretary. Really? She should have kicked their asses and made the guys take minutes and get her coffee.)

During the John Byrne run, Wonder Woman was temporarily dead, having been killed by Neron (DC’s Satan). This led to the scene of Hippolyta cradling her daughter’s body and crying, “Princess Diana is dead,” in an issue that coincidentally (or did it??) ran the same month as the Princess of Wales actually died. Shortly after, the Olympians resurrected Diana as the goddess of truth. She was too compassionate to stay in Olympus and eat bon-bons and not help people of Earth unless they prayed to her, so she returned to superheroing. I think she’s now the god of war.

See, this is why I don’t do DC much. Their characters are fun but so convoluted that now I have a headache. 

Oh God Sarah Palin

I know it was several news cycles ago and thus ancient history but I just cannot let Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump go unremarked. Do yourself a favor and read a transcript because it’s full of gems. Palin’s speech was the Gettysburg Address of drunk stroke victims. They should carve it in a shaky font on the side of some blighted building and then implode the building.

Oh God, I just … I don’t even know where to begin making fun of this. Sarah Palin had to be drunk. She had to be. Either that or she was powering through some kind of neurological emergency. She sounded just that out of it on stage. For example:

Looking around at all of you, you hard-working Iowa families. You farm families, and teachers, and teamsters, and cops, and cooks. You rock 'n’ rollers. And holy rollers! All of you who work so hard. You full-time moms. You with the hands that rock the cradle. You all make the world go round, and now our cause is one.

It was nice of her to give a shout-out to Rebecca DeMornay. Here’s Palin talkin’ about Obama’s skills at governin’:

And he, who would negotiate, deals kind of with the skills of a community organizer maybe organizing a neighborhood tea, well, he deciding that, ‘No, America would apologize as part of the deal,’ as the enemy sends a message to the rest of the world that they capture and we kowtow, and we apologize, and then, we bend over and say, ‘Thank you, enemy.’

Can you imagine this woman trying to negotiate with world leaders on the phone or in person? Nixon was plowed half the time but he could still put together a coherent sentence. Here’s Palin singing Trump’s praises:

He is from the private sector — not a politician. Can I get a ‘Hallelujah!’ Where, in the private sector, you actually have to balance budgets in order to prioritize, to keep the main thing, the main thing. And he knows the main thing: a president is to keep us safe economically and militarily. He knows the main thing, and he knows how to lead the charge.

I actually thought you didn’t have to balance budgets in the private sector, which is why Trump has declared bankruptcy several times. But I guess that’s the Lamestream Media talking, trying to bring down the candidate who is able to keep “the main thing, the main thing.” She continues:

Well, and then, funny, ha ha, not funny, but now, what they’re doing is wailing, ‘well, Trump and uh, uh, his Trumpeters, they’re not conservative enough.’

… What?

How ‘bout the rest of us? Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our god, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough? Yeah, coming from the establishment. Right.

This was Palin responding to candidate Obama’s remarks that people become bitter and cling to guns and religion. The remarks were unfortunate but for someone who is trying to puncture that caricature of conservatives, I’ve found that Palin always comes off as extremely bitter.

Well, he being the only one who’s been willing, he’s got the guts to wear the issues that need to be spoken about and debate on his sleeve, where the rest of some of these establishment candidates, they just wanted to duck and hide. They didn’t want to talk about these issue til he brought ‘em up. In fact, they’ve been wearing this political correctness kind of like a suicide vest.

That’s because many of Trump’s positions come right from an email chain forward from your family members who have nothing better to do. That’s why no serious presidential candidate talked about those hordes of turban-wearin’ Messican terrorists before: Because these are substance-free positions designed to get a rise out of people who fear the Other.

This election is more than just your basic ABCs — anybody but Clinton. It’s more than that this go-around. When we’re talking about a nation without borders, when we’re talking about bankruptcies in our federal government, debt that our children and our grandchildren, they’ll never be able to pay off. When we’re talking about no more Reaganesque power that comes from strength. Power through strength. Well, then, we’re talking about our very existence, so no, we’re not going to chill. In fact it’s time to drill, baby, drill down, and hold these folks accountable.

Those are a lot of incomplete sentences. “When we’re talking about …” should end with another clause. She’s trying to make a rhetorical flourish but it just takes too long to get there. The thing is, you actually can write these speeches down ahead of time. You can actually prepare and make sure it makes sense. Palin sounds like she just got the assignment 10 minutes ago and it doesn’t come across any better when you watch the speech. I rehearsed more for my brother’s wedding toast, and that wasn’t nationally televised, you know what I mean?

Oh, I just hope you all get to know him more and more as a person, and a family man. What he’s been able to accomplish, with his um, it’s kind of this quiet generosity. Yeah, maybe his largess, kind of, I don’t know, some would say gets in the way of that quiet generosity, and, uh, his compassion, but if you know him as a person and you’ll get to know him more and more, you’ll have even more respect.

Well, that’s a ringing endorsement: “… and, uh, his compassion.” I’d be extremely flattered if anyone tentatively stammered that about me. Also, I don’t think Palin knows what “largess” means.

It was really funny to see Trump’s pained grimace during this speech. It can’t have been easy but someone actually managed to embarrass Donald Trump.

There are two things I take away from this political endorsement. First, why do we care who Sarah Palin supports for president? She was a vice presidential candidate who lost, then quit her governor job when it got hard, then had a reality show. She is a walking footnote. Second, anybody who makes fun of Obama for needing a teleprompter (as Palin does) should take heed: this tire fire of a speech is what you get when you don’t use a teleprompter or any preparation whatsoever.

Sooner or later, they're all gonna go

All your idols, burning out or fading away. Maybe when you least expect it. Maybe spaced out in a random pattern that makes your hair stand on end. Maybe, if you’re lucky, the corpse will stay warm til you finish the record. It is only a matter of time.

But what an afterparty that will be. The lascivious little hieroglyphic man chats up the guy who died by the needle before. The choirgirl bangs away at the keys. Glimmer Twins and the old Walrus survey the buffet and turn their noses up. The guy in the sharkskin suit sips a cocktail and tells the buff ravenhair a story about his yacht. Two queens and a drum machine turn an arched eyebrow at the whole spectacle. The orange crewcut diva shares snark with them. The rebel with ambition refuses to stop dancing.

Look around and nobody looks familiar. It’s not the same. Everybody’s way too young to idolize. But what they left behind remains and endures. Listen to it all again and feel what you felt the first time.

Does anybody else remember 'The Bradys'?

Not The Brady Brunch. Everybody remembers that. I mean The Bradys, the hour-long drama spinoff that ran for six episodes in 1990.

This was basically a look at all the kids’ lives as adults. The whole cast returned except for Maureen McCormick. I watched all the episodes and it was dramarama. Bobby became a racecar driver, got paralyzed in a crash and married Martha Quinn. Cindy hosted a talk show on the radio. Mike ran for office. Marcia, while bored at home, becomes an alcoholic and recovers in 60 minutes, not including commercials.

Nobody watched this show and they canceled it. Tell me you remember and I didn’t just dream this.

Surely you do remember A Very Brady Christmas, the TV reunion movie that aired to great ratings success in 1988 and 1989. Mike designs a building that collapses after the builders cut corners against his advice. People are trapped in the rubble and Carol sings “O Come All Ye Faithful” so her voice will guide them out of the darkness, as a nod to when she sang it in church on Christmas Eve in the original series. I loved the TV show so I was all over the TV movie as a kid.

I was just thinking about this for some reason. Sometimes a synapse or neuron connects and something floats to the surface of my brain. Carry on.

Adoption 101

After all the planning and dreaming and anxiety, it feels good that we took the first tangible step toward adoption by taking the first of our four classes.

They covered a lot of material and it got a little emotional at times. I liked that it was a mix of people: black people, white people, straight people, gay people, single people, people who have adopted kids already, older people whose kids are grown and who are seeking to care for foster kids. It was encouraging to see people who have already been through the process who can share their experiences with the rest of the class.

We all had to share our stories of why we wanted to adopt and there were a range of answers. Some couples can't conceive, some wanted kids and didn't want to go through pregnancy again, and a few people were taking in relatives' kids who were in foster care and alluded to some of the abuse the kids had been through with their birth parents. And everyone's crying.

Steve and I had the least dramatic story of anyone there (because I assume it's all a competition and we're graded on drama, right?). We just wanted a kid and since neither one of us can bear a child, we thought we'd adopt a kid who needs parents.

They played a video illustrating what foster kids can go through. It was just text on the screen and some voice-overs of kids, scored to bagpipes so it had that Sarah-MacLachlan-abused animals-commercial-full-body-sob feel. "Did I do something wrong that my parents didn't want me?" the unseen child says. And, oops, everyone's crying again.

It was an eye-opener to the kind of issues kids in foster care have. They have problems with trust, fear, acting out and a whole host of potential problems, particularly those who have bounced from home to home. But as emotional and daunting as all the information was, I felt a sense of hope because I feel like we can help these kids and this is a good avenue for that. It's scary getting all this information but that's just parenthood, so we'll just find some steel in our spines, like all good parents, birth or adoptive, have to have.

How to spend your Powerball winnings

Whoever wins the Powerball tonight is going to win, like, Oprah money. There are many decisions to make following a $1 billion windfall. Some people might pay off their mortgages and smartly invest that money to secure their future finanZZZZZZ

I’m sorry. I fell asleep because financial prudence is so boring. So I’m going to tell you how to use that money if you’re a fun person! Because YOLO, right?

First off, rather than paying off that old house, just stop paying your mortgage. The bank can just foreclose. What do you care about having good credit? You have so much cash now that you just won’t need it.

Then pick up and move somewhere much, much larger. Whether you’re taking a lump sum or an annuity, a good rule of thumb is spending 75 percent of your income on housing. So if you win the full $1 billion, you can have a $750 million house built!

Don’t forget to trick out this house with as many luxuries as possible. You’ll want to have a moat, a present wrapping room on each floor, new mattresses every day for your king-size beds, Olympic-size curling facilities, marble ceilings, a pool filled with Fiji water, weather control technology, flat-screen TVs in the linen closets, bowls of blood diamonds with “take one” signs for the guests, and a new stocked refrigerator delivered every time you’ve used up the food in the old one. Don’t forget the luxury of having a toilet encrusted with Swarovski crystals, because it makes dumping out your caviar lunches way more sophisticated, especially when you use gold toilet paper.

How are you paying for all this, you ask? Credit! Charge it all on that unlimited Amex black card that all the billionaires get automatically. How do you think Oprah pays for everything?

Remember, the smartest thing you can do is invest in high-speed jets and yachts and horses. They pay for themselves. Why schlep around in an Aston Martin like a commoner when you can travel in a G6?

But what about paying real estate taxes and paying for maintenance on all these luxury items, you ask? Answer: gambling. Take whatever you have left over and play it on “6” as much as possible at the casinos. The more money you bet with, the better chance you have to win, right? This is a smart way of letting your money work for you!

Good luck, everybody! Remember me when you win!

Bowie

Goddammit.

Last Friday, Steve and I were listening to David Bowie’s latest album Blackstar, hot off the vinyl presses. I loved it. It will take some time to absorb, but it’s in the experimental vein of so much of Bowie’s career: a beguiling blend of pop, rock, electronics, jazz and some stuff I can’t wrap my head around. It was a trip into some of the weird, fascinating dark corners of music.

There were rumors that Bowie was going to tour and we just had to go because who knew how many more tours he had in him? We talked about it Friday and I said I would even lift my ban on seeing concerts at that concrete bunker (whatever they call it now) in Camden to see him. We excitedly speculated that maybe he would go back to the Tower Theater someday, the site of his triumphant show in the ‘70s. “Can you imagine seeing him there?” I thought. Then I wake up Monday morning and it’s too late.

At least Blackstar was a great way to go out. The public didn’t know Bowie had cancer so now I wonder if we’ll parse the lyrics and look for more meaning in songs like “Sue (or in a Season of Crime)” (“The hospital called/ The X-ray’s fine”) or the last thing he left on record, “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” I’ve thought Bowie’s last few albums left a few songs that he could call it a career on. The last album before his decade-long hiatus, 2003’s Reality, had “Bring Me the Disco King,” a meandering track that sounded like Bowie smoking a cigarette and telling stories in a cabaret. His comeback album, 2013’s The Next Day, closed with the stirring “Heat.”

The thing with Bowie is that he left such an astonishing body of work. He went everywhere. I was a fan starting as a kid with “Let’s Dance,” which I still think is a practically perfect pop song and a bright gem of the ‘80s. He could do pop but he was even better outside it, especially in the incredible string of albums he released in the ‘70s. In 10 years, he went from the hard rock of The Man Who Sold the World to the pop of Hunky Dory to the punk/glam of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Aladdin Sane to the Philly soul of Diamond Dogs and Young Americans to the cocaine-fueled locomotive of Station to Station, putting a cap on the decade with the new wave Scary Monsters. Somewhere along the way, he worked in collaborations with two other giants, Bing Crosby and Freddie Mercury.

Best of all that was the 1977-79 Berlin Trilogy — Low, Heroes and Lodger — three albums that were ahead of their time then and are still astonishing today. My favorite is Low, with the off-kilter shimmer of “Sound and Vision,” the fragmented psychosis of “Breaking Glass” and “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” instrumental jams “Speed of Life” and “A New Career in a New Town” and the mournful analogue synths of “Warszawa.” And or course, Heroes gave us the landmark histrionics of the title track, with a vocal that can still curdle my blood.

So basically, you know it’s been a hell of a career if Ziggy Stardust is only like your fourth or fifth best album.

David Bowie’s legacy is all over modern pop. My top tier of favorite artists, people like Prince and Madonna, had some Bowie like qualities to me. When they were really on a roll, they were all restless explorers playing with identity and willing to try anything. Once they got into one new thing, you barely got used to it and they were on to something else. There was always this sense of motion.

Of course, no obituary would be complete without Bowie’s cameo appearance in Zoolander (“It’s a walk-off!), one of those things that makes me cackle no matter how many times I see it.

David Bowie seemed like one of those people who had been through so much that he would outlive everybody. It’s sad that he’s gone and we won’t get any more music but he sure left plenty of it to play at the wake.

Dial it back, Rambo

Since that militia started occupying the federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, some people have been comparing them to terrorists. They’re not much different from ISIS or Al Qaeda, I’ve read in different places.

I disagree. Terrorists are people who use terror against the public to achieve their goals. Is anybody actually terrified of these people in Oregon?

These are people who are asking the public to send them supplies like snacks and socks for the cold weather. You would think they would be prepared for the conditions, given that they are in Oregon in January, but I guess they don’t have the master planning skills of ISIS or Al Qaeda. These are people who will leave if the local community asks them to. Terrorists are not usually amenable to local citizens saying “please leave.” These are people who have seized not a federal building or court but a wildlife refuge.

Plus there was the guy who made a hilariously weepy farewell video, explaining to his kids that “Daddy swore an oath to defend the Constitution.” Yes, we all remember when Joe Blow from Oregon swore that oath on the steps of the Capitol before an audience of millions as a brilliant sun set in the background while the bald eagles cried.

I just can’t take these people seriously as terrorists. Maybe some of that is due to the fact that I have a knee-jerk reaction to applying a Simpsons quote to everything and when I hear the word “militia,” I see Homer and his buddies marching down the street as Jimbo gawks “Hey, you’re that drunken posse!” I have that reaction whenever people throw on some camo and grab a shotgun and wave that terrible “Don’t tread on me” flag (which looks like some early colonial settler’s kid drew it) and try to protect us all from Tyranny (read: government is making me pay taxes and/or not letting me do whatever I want). Dial it back, Rambo.

But maybe everybody needs to dial it back. There are legitimate issues here as far as mandatory minimum sentencing and discrepancies between how we treat/frame this militia and other protestors. The one thing we don’t want here is another Waco situation where the feds go in shooting. If we’re appalled by how the police can get rough on protestors in other situations, the solution is not to rough up these people in Oregon. It’s to let cooler heads prevail in all such situations (like whenever there’s not an active shooter) and not just go from 0 to massacre in 60 seconds.

The People You See at the Gym in Early January

One Saturday in early January, she walks in wearing sunglasses nearly as big as her head to shield her from the light of the picture window next to the machines. She puts her huge designer handbag next to the elliptical runner and starts to work out. The velour sweatsuit not only helps her move but also looks great, which of course you need to do at the gym. I never see her again.

The family browses around the equipment, looking for something that will suit them, all chatty and smiling. The teenager settles on walking up and down one of those step machines. The mother takes the step machine next to her and they laugh and talk. Another 45 minutes of that and they might break a sweat. I never see them again.

He saunters on the treadmill while around him they call out numbers because so many people on the first Monday night in January are waiting for machines. I finally get on next to him. He seems lost in his book. Maybe the story is so good that he is unaware his sustained speed is slower than my warm-up speed. When he gets home, he’ll proudly tell someone he was on the treadmill for two miles, neglecting to mention that it took him an hour. I never see him again.

The two women next to me are lucky to have found two treadmills next to each other so they can talk. And talk and talk and talk. They are loud. They are so loud they drown out all the white noise and the sound of my iPod, the volume of which I have already turned as high as I can comfortably stand it. They are probably making a pact to exercise together every night after work. Unless, of course, it snows, or rains, or someone has to stay late, or the friend doesn’t go so there’s no point in you going, or you just have one of those “ugh” days and can’t do it, you know what I mean? I never see them again.

It’s a “judgment-free zone” but Planet Fitness cannot police my thoughts.

Christmas Lights in the Morning

Points of light counterbalance the weak dawn, winking white or steady red and green. They lingered on through sleep, now out of place like those guests who do not realize the party has ended. Did sudden January dawn silence them like partygoers who talked through the night to realize the next day was shot?

The lights will sleep the day away, ready to party again at the sunset. I drive past on my way to work, having slept while Christmas glowed. Eyes of a million colors wink at me about the fun they had when the world went to bed early.