Last Night

So, yeah, I was in bed when you called but not fully asleep. I may have sounded odd when I answered because I thought three things all at the same time:
1) It's another prank call.
2) It's bad family news.
3) Your Sister, who sleeps next to the phone, isn't moving. The girl can apparently sleep through explosions.

Don't hesitate to call us when you wish. It was just the rare early night for both of us. Usually, yeah, I'm awake.

There are no grand plans for the weekend. She has to compile school information, and I find myself curiously, um, curious about the NFL Draft. That will last approximately 34 days starting tomorrow. I will also till the garden some more.

Picture/Geek Babble of the Day
Yet another comic-book movie is in the works. Robert Downey Jr. plays Iron Man, and these are the first decent pics we've seen from the set. The story from the comics is industrialist playboy Tony Stark was captured by guerrilla forces (originally Korean, then Vietnamese, now maybe Al Qaeda) to make high-tech weapons. In the capture, his heart was damaged, and he made a supertech pacemaker. Then he built a suit of armor around the gadget, fought the captors, escaped the wilderness, and returned home to run his billionaire empire and fight crime.


Here's what I spy with my geeky eye. First, Downey looks the part. Stark always had some type of facial hair, and his got the right age and complexion. Second, the boy is cut. I don't think I've ever seen him in such good shape. Third, that pacemaker design is nifty. I like that he can't fully disguise the device, unlike in comics where its subcutaneous. This makes him an obvious "iron man" even outside the armor. Iron Man is, essentially, Batman in armor. He's a sex mo-sheen with more money than God. Unfortunately, he drinks like a fish, and he gave up his armor to a sidekick while he dried out. But he's smart without being a geek, and he saves the world from such threats as the Mandarin (A Chinese tyrant with ten power rings), Crimson Dynamo (the Soviet/Russian Iron man), and a slew of c-level thugs with gadget-powered evil schemes. I loved the book when I was young but haven't picked up an issue in decades. The writers always seemed to overthink the premise, and it wasn't fun or engaging.

This appears to be the film version of the classic Iron Man armor. The design has radically changed over the years, but it started off in the early 1960s as what you see above: a bulky, gray boiler with limbs. He's an old-school Marvel character, working alongside Captain America and the Hulk.