Mile High

Last week there was an incident on a plane involving the eternal conflict between the God-given right to recline one’s seat vs. the Constitutional right to have leg room. A woman reclined her seat but the man behind her had placed a device that prevented the seat from moving back. They started an argument, somebody threw a drink in somebody’s face and they had to divert the flight and kick these people off.

We can have a harmless, fun debate over who was right and who was wrong but it’s a trick question. Both these idiots were wrong. They inconvenienced hundreds of people because they couldn’t conduct themselves like adults.

I’m ambivalent about the reclining debate. I have long legs but don’t need much leg room. I drive with my knees about an inch from the dashboard because I’m uncomfortable sitting farther back and stretching my arms to reach the steering wheel. Unless the seat is actually touching me, I will never ask for more leg room in the back seat.

Despite my brief flirtation with first class, I am very low maintenance on an airplane. As long as the plane doesn’t crash, I’m good. I just sit and read and listen to music and wait for my arrival. I’ve also been remarkably lucky over the years and have almost no flying horror stories. I only once had a flight canceled but got on the next one a few hours later. The woman at the gate thanked me for not yelling at her when they rescheduled my flight because some customers had been so nasty. Why would I yell at someone trying to help me who holds my travel plans in her hands? It’s not her fault there was bad weather. I was convinced at the time that they kind of moved me ahead on the standby list just because I was polite. I’m pretty much the airlines’ dream.

There were a few things in recent years that have annoyed me on planes but not enough to complain to the other passengers. Years ago I took a red eye home from Los Angeles on the theory that I could multitask by sleeping for six hours and then get home refreshed. I had a few drinks at the sad airport bar so I could fall asleep. No dice. I was wide awake. It didn’t help that the woman next to me was playing with a Rubik’s Cube all night (this was actually a few years ago and not 1983). The clicking of the cube was surprisingly loud, even over the sound of the engines. But I would have felt like an idiot telling her the Rubik’s Cube was keeping me awake. On our way home from Florida, I was trying to sleep and the woman next to me was flipping through and refolding every page of her newspaper 20 times and spent 15 minutes situating herself and it was too loud for me to sleep. That also wasn’t that big a deal since I only needed a nap and not a full night’s sleep. Other than that, I’m low maintenance.

In addition to this seat reclining prevention device, they also sell some type of sling you can wrap around the seat in front of you and around your own seat so nobody can see your face. I guess this offers you some privacy but I would think sitting on a plane with a big sling would just draw attention to you. People would want to see if it’s some celebrity who doesn’t want to be noticed but when they peek behind the sling, they’d say, “No, it’s just some asshole.” There’s also a plaid seat cover you can wrap over your seat, I guess to dress it up because you’re such a wacky individual and want to show off your creative quirkiness. If the person sitting next to me used this thing, they would have to divert the plane because I’d be laughing too hard.

Ant-Man? Who's that?

Ant-Man was the first heroic identity of Hank Pym, a founding member of the Avengers in the comics. He is a scientist and had the power to shrink, due to the size-changing properties of Pym Particles, and control ants. There’s supposed to be some sort of Ant-Man movie coming out at some point but that may feature Scott Lang in the title role, which he took over after Pym moved onto other identities.

After a time, Pym discarded the Ant-Man identity and became Giant Man and then Goliath, each of whom had the power to grow as a result of the Pym Particles. During a period when he was amnesiac and mentally unstable, he became Yellowjacket, who could shrink. Then for awhile he was just uncostumed Dr. Hank Pym, who could shrink inanimate objects. Then he became Giant Man again and then Yellowjacket again. For awhile, he was the Wasp, in honor of his missing ex-wife.

So as you can see, Hank has had many code names.

Pym is infamous for creating Ultron, the homicidal adamantium robot. This was an artificial intelligence that quickly turned against its creator, developed an Oedipus complex, and would vex the Avengers for years. In 1999, Ultron went from a menace to a genocidal menace when it massacred the entire population of the fictional nation of Slorenia. Pym saved the day and destroyed Ultron but was discomfited by owning up to the fact that he had based Ultron’s brain patterns on his own so Ultron may have been acting as Pym would have. (This robot-brain-based-on-human-brain is a common thing in Marvel. Ultron created Jocasta, with a brain based on the Wasp’s gentle personality. The Vision’s personality is based on Wonder Man’s. Together they form a twisted sort of family, which I find one of the more fascinating aspects of Pym’s story.)

Does that make Pym a genocidal murderer? The comics have recently argued that it might, given that something he created killed so many people. However, I would argue that Ultron’s personality could have evolved past Pym’s so he was not acting as his creator would. I would also argue that Ultron created the heroic Vision, so Pym was indirectly responsible for saving lives through the Vision. Avengers 2 will apparently have Tony Stark creating Ultron and it’s a shame to do this and strip Pym of his most potent story. Sure, let’s give something else to Stark to do since he doesn’t have nearly enough spotlight.

Hank Pym is also closely connected to his ex-wife Janet Van Dyne, the fashion designer and heiress also known as the Wasp. Unfortunately, he is also notorious for hitting her during one of his mental breakdowns. It was unfortunate that Marvel went in this direction with Yellowjacket since it cast a shadow over one of its oldest heroes that lingers until this day. Once Hank hit Jan, it wasn't like they could sweep it under the rug and to their credit, the writers immediately showed the consequences of the slap. Jan showed up to an Avengers meeting with a black eye, having divorced him off-panel right after the fight. Hank was exiled from the Avengers for years so it’s not like he didn’t face any consequences. (In contrast, Spider-Man once punched Mary Jane — and he has super strength — in a fit of madness and nobody ever said anything about it. So maybe it’s only the unpopular heroes like Hank who face consequences for that sort of thing.)

Hank and Jan were out of touch for awhile but later started dating on and off, although they never remarried. They always had a weird marriage even before the abuse. Hank had frequent mental breakdowns and was amnesiac when he took the Yellowjacket identity and married Jan. She knew it was really Hank and married him anyway, which seems like kind of a bizarre way to begin things, but that was the Silver Age for you. I believe Hank has a child with Tigra now. Either that or the father of her baby is the Skrull that took Hank’s place during Secret Invasion.

Speaking of the Wasp, where is she in the movie Avengers universe? She has never been a heavy hitter or even had her own series but I have a soft spot for Jan. She was part of “my” Avengers and grew from being kind of a dingbat into one of the team’s most effective leaders. There’s speculation that she’ll be dead even before the Ant-Man movie begins, which would be a shame. The Wasp helped found the Avengers and even named the team and it seems disrespectful not to do anything with her. She has a sunny personality that would do well in balancing out sometimes-serious personalities like Captain America and Thor.

Out of Office Auto Reply: Simpsons Marathon

I will be out of the office and away from polite society in general for 12 days starting right now due to the Simpsons marathon on FXX.

During that time, I will be out of reach of cell phones, the Internet and all other forms of written and verbal communication due to the viewing of more than 500 episodes that have aired since December 1989. In that time, I may be able to sleep for a few half-hours during the particularly uninteresting early episodes, such as that weepy one with Lisa’s cowboy teacher, or the stupid episodes of the early 2000s, such as the one with the horse jockeys.

However, tomorrow will be prime time for viewing so please do not disturb me. That’s when they will start running the glory years of The Simpsons as season 4 begins. The first episode I remember ever watching was “Kamp Krusty” and for the next few years, the show just took off and aired one gem after another.

I will be propping my eyes open with toothpicks and drinking cases of discontinued Four Loko to stay awake as Bart gets an elephant, the people of Springfield sing of corrupt New Orleans, the radioactive Curies terrorize millions, Krusty sings “Send in the Clowns,” Homer wears a muumuu and threatens kids with his reaching broom, Homer earns some extra money plowing snow, and Marge’s pleas to fix Main Street are overwhelmed by a catchy song about a monorail. Most of all, I will be watching for the millionth time the pièce de résistance of The Simpsons, “Rosebud,” as Mr. Burns searches for his teddy bear in probably my favorite episode. I have these on DVD but will be watching everything again anyway.

Later in the marathon, I will deliriously catch some of the later episodes. It’s actually been awhile since I’ve seen a new one so I will need to catch up with everybody.

If you have something that needs immediate assistance, please contact my manager. See you in September.

How similar are movie Tony Stark and comic Tony Stark?

Not very. Of course, I don’t know what changes they’ve made to the comics since the movies so Tony Stark in print may be closer now to Tony Stark on film.

I always thought Tony was kind of bland in the comics. He certainly did not have the same level of arrogance as his film counterpart does. Stark was a rich playboy but always did have a generous spirit and a conscience, which he showed years ago when his company stopped manufacturing war weapons.

The big development through the decades for Iron Man was his alcoholism. The movies haven’t touched on this except to show a close up of Robert Downey Jr. taking a drink. “Demon in a Bottle” was a good story but in retrospect, it’s hilarious to watch Tony spend just one issue 12-stepping his way out of addiction. Maybe that was the state of understanding of alcoholism in 1979. It was realistic when he relapsed in 1983, as recovering alcoholics do, this time drinking so much that he had to give the Iron Man armor over to Jim Rhodes. Tony was sober for a long time but I’m hearing he may have relapsed again.

The other shakeup to Stark’s personality was that in the mid-‘90s, there was a story in the Avengers that revealed that Iron Man had always been a pawn of the time-traveling villain Kang. Iron Man then betrayed the team and severely injured the Wasp to the point where she had to be mutated into an actual wasp creature to save her life. Then they decided to bring teen Tony in from the past before the point where Kang corrupted him so the world could have a still-heroic Iron Man. Thank God everyone now ignores this horrible story. Let us never speak of it again.

In the last decade, a few developments have made Tony Stark more cold-hearted and arrogant. He advocated the registration of superheroes in the misguided Civil War series. This raised serious questions of civil liberties, since the heroes were drafted into working for the government, and brought Iron Man into direct conflict with Captain America. And do not get into a moral battle with Captain America. Iron Man has also done a number of shady things over the last few years, particularly by associating with the Illuminati, a group of heroes who take morally dubious actions to save the world — actions that years ago would have been unthinkable in comics.

In contrast, movie Tony Stark is arrogant and obnoxious. Downey’s performance has been charming but I’m starting to find him insufferable. Nobody else around Stark can speak a full sentence because he’ll just interrupt them with a smartass comment that graces everyone else with his shining ego. Just once, I’d like one of the other Avengers tell him to shut up.

Iron Man in the movies has a personality that is closer to Hawkeye’s. In the comic, Hawkeye is a loudmouth. He’s a very competent, longtime Avenger but can be sort of uncouth and arrogant. I’m guessing that’s why they toned him down in the movie to be personality-free while possessed. Having two Tony Starks running around would have been really aggravating.

Defending Freedom of Speech When It's Actually Threatened

The events in Ferguson, MO, are appalling for a number of reasons. Let me understate it by saying when citizens are trying to get answers for why police shot an unarmed kid and left his body lying in the street, it is overkill for a militarized police force to fire rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds of unarmed protestors. Many others have more incisive takes on all this than I will ever have and I leave it to them.

However, one thing that does strike me is the very real abuses of the First Amendment in all this. Two reporters were arrested after taking pictures of police officers in a McDonald’s. The police fired tear gas into a network’s camera crew and dismantled their equipment. These are real examples of the government arresting and/or harassing journalists to prevent them from doing their jobs of keeping the public informed, not to mention harassing the unarmed public from assembling.

I’m sure plenty of people are outraged about this, given what I’ve been reading. I’m also sure that the outrage will be nothing compared to the sustained howling that happened during a completely imaginary First Amendment violation: When the network suspended Duck Dynasty after its cast said some unsavory things.

Remember that? First Amendment Weekend Warriors were screaming about how that reality show star’s freedom of speech rights were violated. Was he rotting in some gulag somewhere after being convicted in a show trial and nobody ever heard from him again? No, the show just went off the air for awhile. Nobody suppressed this guy’s freedom of speech. The worst thing that happened was a few weeks of reruns. Compare that to the Tiananmen Square in Missouri.

There simply was no First Amendment violation in the case of Duck Dynasty and to believe otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of what our foundational American rights actually entail. These are the people who start arguments online and when someone challenges them, they say, “You can’t tell me to shut up!!1! Ever heard of a little thing called the Constitution?!!!???!!” In short, the duck guy can’t be arrested for saying what he said but the network was well within its rights to deny him a platform. Speech is free; airtime is not.

It strikes me that we are much more passionate about defending the speech that entertains us and disrupts our reality TV shows than about defending speech when its suppression threatens the public good in a real way. The fact that police in riot gear with anti-landmine vehicles are threatening the public and journalists is just one of the horrific things going on in Ferguson and I hope it gets much more attention than some hirsute people who make duck-related products. 

How does Marvel's sliding timescale work?

Why hasn’t Franklin Richards, born in 1968, gone through puberty yet? How does Korean War vet Charles Xavier still look relatively youthful? Shouldn’t Aunt May be 117 years old?

Many of the Marvel Universe characters who started in the early ‘60s (and a few who date back to 1939) have never seemed to age much. The charter members of the Fantastic Four, Avengers and X-Men have been fighting super villains since the Kennedy administration. Kitty Pryde, introduced as a 13-year-old in 1979, will always be ambiguously college aged. They can do this because of Marvel’s sliding timescale, which keeps characters aging slowly.

Basically, the way it works is that the stories don’t have specific years in them but events way in the past for us are only about 10 years ago in the comics. The Fantastic Four went into space and were transformed by cosmic rays not in 1961 during the publication of the first issue, but about a decade ago. In 10 more years of publishing time, this may increase to 12 years or something. The sliding timescale basically means that the distant past continually moves up a few years. This is why most hero conversations will note past events as vaguely taking place “months ago.” This makes it awkward in old issues when everyone is talking on rotary dial phones in conversations that purportedly take place in 2004.

There is no trippy comic science to justify this but there is a logic to it. Although readers have to wait a month between issues, the superheroes don’t just pause in the middle of battles. If a story is a cliffhanger, no time at all may pass between issues so sometimes a six-issue story may only cover a day in the heroes’ lives. Since a tremendous amount of comic history and epic battles have taken place in about a decade, this means our heroes have been insanely busy recently. It’s a bit odd to think that a major event like the Kree-Skrull War, which happened in the early ‘70s, was just a few years ago for the Avengers.

This means Marvel has had to continually update some historic, real-world events that shaped its heroes’ origins. In the original Fantastic Four, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were World War II pilots but I think this has now been updated to them having served in the first Gulf War. Tony Stark originally made the Iron Man armor while caught in combat during the Vietnam War but they retconned it to Afghanistan. In the future, these origins will all be linked to some war that hasn’t happened yet.

Most of the World War II heroes’ origins have stayed tied to that war. Namor the Sub-Mariner, Nick Fury and the Black Widow have all been kept youthful since the war due to various potions or Marvel anti-aging plot devices. Bucky (the Winter Soldier) has gone into suspended animation several times as the Cold War thawed.

Removing Captain America from World War II would be disrespectful to the character and make less sense since he had to have started during a “popular” war to rally the troops. After all, Cap was punching out Hitler on the cover of his first issue. Marvel has just lengthened the time he was in suspended animation from 20 years to 50. So that’s an easy fix.

It would also have been disrespectful to Magneto’s character to remove his origin from the Holocaust. It’s just too potent a story that a Holocaust victim would be so determined not to have mutants meet the same fate. Magneto had been de-aged to infancy sometime in the ‘70s so that accounts for a more youthful appearance. There are plenty of Holocaust survivors alive but given that Magneto had to have been through puberty when he was in the camps, it would eventually be less plausible for him to be alive so they’ll just have to keep de-aging him. His foil, Professor X, once had his mind implanted into a new cloned body after his old body was possessed by the alien Brood, so that’s why his skin still looks fabulous.

Then there are the not-so-subtle ways of keeping characters young. In a roundly criticized story, Marvel had Spider-Man make a deal with Mephisto (Marvel’s devil) to save Aunt May’s life and the price was his marriage with Mary Jane. So they retroactively destroyed a long-running, functional marriage so kids could relate to Peter Parker. This was especially stupid since Aunt May had died years before in a very moving scene and they retconned it into being some actress and May was still alive somewhere. Characters can actually die sometimes and stay dead. And if Marvel didn’t want a married Spider-Man, he and Mary Jane could have gotten a divorce like normal people rather than make a deal with the devil.

So that’s how Marvel does it. Their continuity, though confusing, is basically one linear narrative. To keep its characters young, DC will just reboot the whole universe every few years.

Memo to the Person Who Screamed Throughout the Tori Amos Concert

Your (I’m assuming drunken) screaming throughout the concert certainly added a bit of “local color,” a bit of “flair,” a bit of “je ne sais quoi,” if you will, to a concert that is basically one woman playing the piano and singing. Your garbled cries of “I love you, Tori!” or simply the timeless “Woooo!” really added something to our enjoyment of the quiet ballads and emotional moments.

They added something, alright, but that something turned out to be kind of aggravating. You were far enough away from us in the Kimmel Center that you didn’t bother us as much as you could have. I like reasonable enthusiasm during concerts as long as that doesn’t infringe on anybody else’s enjoyment. Nobody likes the guy who dances over the entire floor space or the couple who grinds all over one another like they’re the only people in the world. But I don’t mind dancing and singing along and cheering at shows. I’ve been one of those people.

But, sir or madam, this was a Tori Amos concert. As much as she has a powerful voice and instrument that can fill the room, this was not a Manowar show or something where the music is so loud and people are screaming so much that nobody will notice one more yell. At Tori shows, people tend to applaud and scream rapturously between songs but are relatively quiet while the songs play. It’s just that kind of atmosphere and it’s no secret that the shows are that way. There are a few scattered whoops but didn’t you notice you were the only one who was screaming almost continuously? Learn to pick up on a social cue.

Maybe you were just going for irony by shrieking your face off during Tori’s “Silent All These Years,” a song about a woman finding her tentative voice after a period of silence. Maybe this was a different kind of art you were making to supplement the art on stage and this was all an elaborate statement about the relationship between the performer and audience.

More likely, you were just drunk and deliberately calling attention to yourself. We could tell you were kind of “doing a voice” and purposely doing that thing where it sounds shrill and like you’re shredding your throat. Your infantile caterwauling didn’t bother me so much as the clear idea that you were just trying to get people to look at you. Sir or madam, nobody cared about you during that concert. You can conduct yourself like an adult and adhere to a social norm. It actually is possible.

It actually became kind of funny as the night went on. Tori would start a song and we would look in the direction of the screamer and wait for his or her take in the form of a “Yeahhrrraahheewwwaahhhh!!!!” Only then, with that glass-shattering approval from the balcony, could we fully appreciate what Tori was trying to say. She had a blessing to continue playing.

It was really more amusing than annoying to me since we were some distance away. Thank God I wasn’t next to this person. If I had been, I would have just told him or her to shut the fuck up.