So in The Trial of the Flash, the Flash kills the Reverse-Flash, who is from the future, as supervillains are wont to be. The Reverse-Flash had a hate-on for the Flash, I forget why originally, but it was retconned around a few times. To make it plain that he was the anti-Flash, not only was he evil, but his costume was the literal reverse of the Flash's—mostly yellow with red accents.

So, The Flash #323, "''Run, Flash -- Run for Your Wife!'" opens on board the JLA satellite, with Firestorm and Wonder Woman talking about how no one knew the Flash was getting married. Cut to the Flash, racing to the chapel, where the Flash meets his parents, and it turns out it's not just the other JLA members who didn't know he was getting married: neither did his parents until 48 hours before the current page. Indeed, they've never met "this Fiona-person," as his mother calls her when the Flash goes to change. Lest you think Barry Allen was on distant terms with his parents, his father is his best man and his parents are helping him get ready for the ceremony. So it seems no one knew much about "this Fiona-person," including the Internet, which basically goes "WHO WHAT WHO" when you Google "Fiona Webb."

So Flash is now getting ready when his mirror fades out so that he can get a message from a Guardian of the Universe, the Green Lantern Corps guys. The Guardian wants to tell the Flash that a deus ex machina happened, a giant-ass energy discharge that took out a lot of planets and stars, gaining speed until it "surpassed the velocity necessary to break through into the swirling miasma of the time-barrier," at which point it broke up, but not before releasing the Reverse-Flash from the "obscure dimension" where the Flash had "left him stranded for all eternity" (italics all in the original). It seems Flash is kind of a dick, but all things considered, I'd probably also leave a super-fast evil guy stranded in some nether dimension for all eternity—though why the evil guy doesn't just die there is beyond me, since nether dimensions don't come with supermarkets. Anyway.

Now we've already seen the first of the many inexplicable things that happen in this series, which is that the deus ex machina by which Flash stranded the Reverse-Flash in has been trumped by another deus ex machina. I can ignore many such background events, though, the insane physics of the super-hero universe, as just what happens: I take them as the god-level events they're supposed to be and pretend they make sense. What I can't ignore is what happens next, which is that the Flash tells the Guardians of the Universe that he doesn't want help from the Green Lanterns. Why? "It's because of my emotional stake in this matter that I must confront this foe above all others alone! You Guardians must promise me—from this moment on you won't interfere or aid me in any way ... no matter what happens! No matter what?"

What?


Okay, fine, I guess the Flash is just crazy. What the hell, Flash? This isn't a public safety issue as well as your own vendetta, this guy who wants to kill you who has your exact powers but no conscience? You're going to fight this guy and it's okay not to get help, even though he might take out a whole city's worth of people in the course of nailing you, because you're too emotionally involved. Good one.

Anyway, so the Flash races off to find the Reverse-Flash and has a flashback (ha) to what's bumming him out, which is that the Reverse-Flash killed his first wife, Iris Allen, four years ago with "a vibrating karate blow which inflicted lethal and instant damage to the molecules of her brain!" In other words, the Reverse-Flash vibrated his hand through Ms. Allen's head. Immediately after this, the Flash fought the Reverse-Flash and trapped him as mentioned above. So the Flash runs to the Flash museum—yes, there's totally a museum devoted to the Flash, which as I recall is a key gathering point for all Flash-hating supervillains—and finds that the Reverse-Flash has rigged his own statue to deliver the message that he's going to get revenge for his entrapment by killing Barry Allen's new bride. Finally, the Reverse-Flash tells Flash to "home in" on the Reverse-Flash to continue the chase.

Two things:

One, yes, the Reverse-Flash knows who the Flash really is. It's part of his being from the future, or maybe he just super-followed the Flash around. I don't know. Why he doesn't just make use of this information, I also don't know.

Two, yes, the Flash's primary foes get statues in the Flash museum. You know how people want to stop naming mass killers because they want to stop glorifying them and thus encouraging new ones? Well, the same principle applies here: way to go, morons, you just made being a super-villain look sexy. Idiots.

So ... cut to the wedding, where everyone's waiting for Barry Allen, including Ralph Dibny, rich guy and superhero, who is for no reason that I saw friends with Barry Allen (well, they're both superheroes, and Dibny's a public superhero, but what public excuse he has for befriending an average police department forensic scientist, I don't know). Fiona Webb, the bride-to-be, is nervous, which wouldn't be helped if she knew her boyfriend was the Flash—oh, I forgot to mention that she doesn't know he's the Flash. This is a key plot point.

Just think for a minute about dating a guy who can run at the speed of light or faster. Wouldn't you notice he had really good reflexes? Screw the "oh, Barry's always out and around where we can't reach him!" shit; wouldn't a guy who can outrun bullets give some sort of clue in his daily life? Twitchiness? A lot of completed crosswords lying around, or maybe seven billion origami swans? The neatest or the messiest house ever? A blurriness about the edges when sitting still? Something? No? I guess not. Either that or Fiona Webb is as dumb as a bag of hamsters, which is my guess based on how she behaves later on. Anyway, she's so thrilled to be marrying Barry, whom she apparently only agreed to marry about 48 hours ago. She can't believe it's true!

Cut back to the Flash, who figured out that the clue meant that the Reverse-Flash is waiting for him at his old home, the one he shared with the now-dead Iris Allen. It's been standing empty for the four years since the murder, and now people are coming to look at it to consider buying it, just as the Flash and Reverse-Flash trash the place in a moment of seconds.

Back to the chapel: Fiona Webb is starting to think she's been stood up at the altar. She's starting to cry! Cut to the Flash, who's trying to throttle the Reverse-Flash. And ... end issue #323.
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Depressive thinking

One of the things about depression is how boring it is. Especially when you're getting better, you find yourself bored shitless and don't know what to do: nothing you think of sounds good, ever, or it seems like so much work for an extremely unlikely reward, or it seems stupid and a positive waste of resources.

And yet you can't just sleep—that's what got you into this mess in the first place. Watching TV is like being asleep, but it makes you stupider. Playing video games is okay for a while, but then it makes you stupider and it's also enervating. Reading is good if you have the attention span, but depressed people don't focus well. Oh, and you're probably broke, not that shopping for shopping's sake isn't also enervating and wasteful. Cooking and eating makes you fat; cleaning is depressing in itself for many people, plus it all gets dirty again so fast.

Excuses, excuses, you say. Right: that's depression. In the same way that a normal person might look at graduate school and say "maybe later," so do I view filling my days with something besides sleep and minimal work.
And the rest …

So when you're writing stories for kids, your brain may want you to write dialogue for a character that goes, "That's some straight-up bullshit right there, man."

Thanks, brain, I love you, too.
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Because I am intensely bored

and I have no one else to tell this to, I'm going to write about the Flash. No, I'm not obsessed with the Flash—yes, this is that Flash, the DC superhero who runs super-fast—but I picked up a trade paperback called The Trial of the Flash, which covers about two years of the Flash comics from 1983 through 1985. In this "epic," which I'd heard called a classic, Flash goes on trial for killing a supervillain nemesis of his, Professor Zoom, AKA the Reverse-Flash.

This entire series of stories was so full of lunacy that I seriously wondered what the so-called creative process was like for it. I mean, at what point do you say that the best way to give Flash a change of facial features is to invent an intellectually challenged super-punchy guy for a few issues just to bust up Flash's face so that he has to get plastic surgery from super-intelligent gorilla hermits? Because I straight-up want that job, no matter how badly it pays: I want to invent things that make no goddamn sense and run with them, damn the torpedoes. Now, you may think that this could be made to make sense, but maybe this will make you think differently: no one notices the Flash has a new face. Seriously, he's been sitting in court with cameras on him for weeks on end and no one says, "Hey, Flash's face looks different today!" I mean, you can see his nose and the entire lower third of his face in his mask, and not one person says, "Wow, that's weird, let's pull up a file photo." This is writing for prepubescent rhesus monkeys hopped up on Red Bull and Twizzlers, readers with no long-term memory or sense of how normal people of average intelligence behave.

So here, then, is a recounting of The Trial of the Flash. This is one more instance of the completely useless nature of the Internet, as I'm basically writing a book report on the Flash's early-'80s adventures. Why? Because it would be really funny if this were the only document that survived into the deep future, and accordingly this was the only information future intelligent beings had about humans in the early twenty-first century. If somehow this is true, I'm not sorry, future persons, but neither am I especially proud.

And the rest …

And the rest …

At long last

Gonna defend the dissertation. Gonna. Been twelve years. Twelve.

It doesn't seem likely. I have a good job now, too.

Twelve years. What was I thinking?
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O CANADA

Another ongoing post. Why I like Toronto/Canada!

1) They actually get mad about corruption.

Thieves enrage Canadians, and they really go to town when the thieves are in government. The big difference is that Canadians don't take thievery as proof that government doesn't work, just that it needs fixing.

I always found that people in the US take governmental inefficiency corruption as evidence that government control of things doesn't work—and yet never take private corruption as a sign that private companies need fixing. Enron can steal billions, and who cares? But let the Post Office ask for a two-cent upgrade every three or four years, and watch out! (Meanwhile, maybe FedEx has raised its rates by twenty-five cents? Oh, that's just inflation for you.) And so they become disaffected with government, turn more and more things over to private enterprise, and take private corruption in stride—and pay more for the "privilege." The government can't just be more efficient than private industry, it has to buy you a fucking unicorn and rainbow before an American thinks it's working.

Americans will endlessly flock back to private companies that have repeatedly dicked them over, and even feel sorry for the felons who ran them. A governmental agency fucks up, and not only must heads roll, but people lose all faith in the agency. Your car keeps breaking down? You find other ways to work five or six times a year. Transit goes on a two-day strike? Screw them, I'm buyin' a car! Then I'm gonna complain about the cost of gas, insurance, repairs, and parking! And don't get me started on the traffic! Why doesn't the city build more roads? Jesus H. CHRIST!

Canadians aren't like that. They don't like taxes, but they repeatedly have said in polls that they will pay more if the system works. They love their public healthcare, their low tuition, their parkland. And they get mad over small corruption. They don't see it as proof that the system doesn't work and that everything should be turned over to private industry. They see it as proof that it's time to kick and scream.

Good for Canada.

2) Torontonians, at least, love their gardens.

Seriously, this makes a huge difference.

Starting April 1, everyone starts buying bedding plants and shrubs and roses and seeds and dirt and other kinds of dirt and pots and fertilizer and gravel and iron or steel implements. Then they start to worry over their gardens.

About April 15 or May 1, the city furiously re-installs all the greenery it furiously uprooted back in early October. Bushes, bedding plants, the whole nine yards, boom, wickety-wack, city employees start digging holes and filling them with plants.

This includes the parks. There are a million parks here. There are many parks one house-lot wide and deep—it looks to me that when a house burns down the city sometimes buys the lot and makes a tiny park of it. If there's two lots butting back to back that make a kind of alley between streets, even better. So sometimes you'll be on a "Discovery Trail," a city-designated "green walk," and happen across a park one house lot wide. It will have a sign, maybe a swing set or slide, and lots of plants. All parks here have flowers and bushes, and pretty well-tended flowers and bushes too.

Private gardens? Everywhere. Any house, including rentals, will have a garden. It varies from the manicured to the wild, but there's something in front of every goldurn house. Many people go the whole nine yards and put bedding plants in along the walk and have a three-foot deep bed the whole length of the front of the house, plus climbing plants on trellises. Even condo- and apartment-dwellers: You look at a twenty-story building in the warm months, and one of five balconies will have some little attempt at plants.

Yeah, I know people have gardens in the States, but not four of every five houses, not maintained all summer, and not elaborate.
And the rest …

Americanisms

Since I moved to another country, I noticed I use a lot of Americanisms. Maybe I used them before and just never noticed it. I don't know. All I know is that I'm saying things like this a lot.

If these aren't American per se, tell me why you think that. I'm looking for terms that are most commonly American, meaning other groups might have heard them but would never use them. These are in alphabetical order, where "(rare)" or "(common)" means "rare or common for me."

Interjections:

     aw, CRAP
     bite me
     blow me
     cheese (see: geez)
     Christ on a crutch (rare)
     criminy
     cripes
     crumbs
     dag; dagnabbit (rare)
     dang; dangit (common); ding-dang it
     dude!; whoa, DUDE; dude: WHAT. THE. FUCK.
     gee (common); gee willikers (rare); gee whiz
     geez; geez Louise
     goldangit it
     goldurn
     golly
     gosh; gosh-darn it
     holy schlamoley! (extremely rare)
     holy Jesus! (very rare)
     holy smokes! (rare)
     oh, Jesus fuck
     jeepers
     jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick! (rare)
     nasty; that's NASTY (pronounced n'YASTY)
     nuts (my very favorite)
     okey-dokey; okily-dokily
     phooey
     shoot
     shucks; aw, shucks
     spiffy
     suck me
     swell
     tarnation (rare)
     that's somethin; that's really somethin'
     whoa, nelly
     wickety-wack; boom, wickety-wack
     yes, indeedy!

Noun phrase fillers that I'm not so sure are American, but which I don't much hear up here unless I'm saying them:

     whadjamacallit
     whadjamafuck
     whats['is/her]face
     whatz(er/is)fuck
     whoozit, whoozits

I use these Yiddish words all the time and am only 99% sure I know what I'm saying:

     putz (rare)
     schlep
     schlemiel (rare)
     schmuck

Adjectives:

     bizarro
     'tardo

Metaphors and similes:

     (like/madder than) a beehive poked with a stick

Imperatives and other verbs:

     git; git lost
     go the whole nine yards
     scoot
     scram
     'splain, 'splainin' (for "explain")
     wangle
     wrassle (rare)

Names to call people:

     buddy
     bunky
     dickwad
     dickweed; dillweed
     pal
     nincompoop
     nitwit
     twerp

I'll continue to update this one. I think this is funny.

And, yes, I noticed that most of these are the most putrid of mild would-be profanities. A few of them are colorful uselessly profane interjections. This is because I'm American.
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Plagiarism and … well, plagiarism

I'm only blogging this 'cause I know I'll forget about it otherwise, and this is actually kind of funny. I don't know whether I mean funny "ha-ha" or funny "umm, ha ha?".

Basic story would be this, assuming it's true, and assuming I digested the order of events properly:

1) Dumb student IMs some comedy-writer-cum-blogger about writing a five-page college paper for her, as she's seen his profile which contains a word that corresponds to her paper topic, which is Hinduism. His profile includes this "hobby": "eating Hindu sculpture."
2) He strings her along outrageously. If she knew anything about Hinduism, for instance, she probably would have been worried when he referred to the god of destruction, Chivas. She doesn't notice and says that money is no object.
3) He agrees to write the paper for $75. She says she can't send money through PayPal because she's not IMing from her own account but her parents' or something.
4) He writes an atrocious paper refers to vindaloo—as a religious term—in the first line. Even if you weren't paying much attention, the line "I made a doody" would grip you, especially as it was on the first page.
5) They dicker. She won't PayPal him. She sends him camera-phone snapshots of bits of the check, from which he gets her real name.
6) He blogs this. His intention here seems to be to out her to her school once she turns the paper in.
7) The Internet goes nuts over this. Everyone has an opinion. Some people apparently make a note of her name and school.
8) Meanwhile, he's trying to get payment. He IMs the original account and gets a confused story about how the owner of it (who writes exactly like the original would-be plagiarizer) has never heard of such a person, doesn't know who must have hacked what she claims is usually her sister's account, and doesn't really care about any of it. Too bad, so sad. B'bye, now!
9) The blogger blogs again. He just meant to scare her and never meant to actually turn her in. It was a joke and he wanted the check as a trophy, not as payment. And, since he posted her name back when his blog was getting 30 hits a day and not thousands, he assumed no one would snitch on her. Well, people are people, and many someones snitched on her. She's been getting calls from everyone from the dean to strangers, she's been called on the carpet, and, yes, she had turned in the paper, I guess without reading it.
10) They IM again—I guess the same address at which no one had been home when it came to that $75 check—and she won't go away without a phone call, and so they talk. She cries, she whines, she admits wrong-doing to him, she wants him to post a retraction, she doesn't want him to email the dean … and it seems she hasn't wholly 'fessed up to the dean. The dean has, however, seen the blog.
11) The blogger ends up talking to the plagiarizer's mom, who's very nice. He feels bad. He tells everyone to stop calling her and replaces all instances of her name (except one in a URL) with a pseudonym. He won't post a retraction.
12) Hundreds of people, including me, post comments. About two-thirds want to see her intestines used in a public art installation. The other third thinks the blogger is a very bad man who should have either just told her to stop being a bad little girl or have simply informed the university without blogging about it.

The blog entries are here:

     Intro
     $75? What $75? Who?
     Followup

I have no idea if any of this is true. I doubt it, actually. I've seen very slim proof that the woman exists. I have trouble believing she could be that stupid, whoever she was. I also note that the blogger hasn't fixed the one URL that includes the woman's real name.

However, as one blog (http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/stepaside/) points out, what's interesting is how angry people get on both sides. Most posters assume the girl will get expelled immediately and two-thirds love this and one-third hates it.

The original blogger said that this would be professorial fodder for years to come. He's right, too.
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