Mimi's Last Coffee

I was in the process of putting together something for my other blog, and it occurred to me that one of the issues that I was bound to be addressing was the fluidity and vagueness of language. Really, it's not just about the Bible either, but about the way people nitpick details in literature.

Anyway, many years ago, Scott McCloud had made an improvised comic strip called Mimi's Last Coffee. I say improvised because it was part of McCloud's "Morning Improv" project, in which he was taking suggestions from readers for titles and then making them up as he went along. In the associated discussion forums, some discussion broke out after McCloud published the first panel of the comic:

Somebody wondered where the story could go since this appeared to be Mimi enjoying her last coffee, and since that was the title of the story, what else was there to tell? Well, it's been at the back of my mind time and time again over the years, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise in examining the fluidity of language. The fact is, comic strip aside (although McCloud does play with possible meanings of the title in his storytelling) the phrase "Mimi's last coffee" has a near-unlimited range of possible meaning.

Starting at the end of the phrase with the word "coffee", I think a lot of people don't realize that they're dealing with a word that has so many meanings. People probably assume most of the time that "coffee" is referring to the hot brown liquid that many people enjoy with breakfast, but that's just one of a number of meanings. "Coffee" is a word that refers to many aspects of related concepts to that beverage. Coffee is a beverage, yes, but not only can it be prepared in numerous ways (Have you ever tried Turkish coffee? It's a whole different experience!) but the word refers to different parts of the process of making coffee. Starting from the beginning, there is a tree called "coffee", and it produces a fruit called "coffee". The seed of this fruit is known as "coffee", and this seed is commonly dried out and roasted to make a substance known as "coffee". The dried, roasted "coffee" is ground to a variety of different granularities and packaged as "coffee" which people buy and combine with hot water to make the aforementioned beverage. After the grounds are used, they're still "coffee" although nobody consumes them; they either thrown them away or use them for fertilizer (I think).

Being such a big part of our culture, "coffee"" is also used for a number of other concepts related to the food product in one way or another. For instance, "coffee" is a shade of medium-brown. (Mimi could be painting!) "Coffee" can also refer to the food product in a collective sense, referring to types or brands of coffee, as in, "I don't like Folger's coffee or any of the grocery-store coffees; I prefer Starbucks coffee." Actually, if you go to Starbucks or a similar coffee establishment, you'll find that they offer many different coffees. I used to work an opening shift at Starbucks, and before we opened the store, one of the things that had to be done was of course brewing up the coffee; I'd brew a pot of dark roast coffee, then a light roast coffee, and decaf would be my "last coffee". Many years before that, though, I used to have a social gathering at my house in college every week at which I served my friends coffee; such social gatherings are commonly referred to as "coffees". There may be other shades of meaning (including the idiomatic phrase "wake up and smell the coffee"), but that will do for this writing, I think.

So, how about "last"? Once again, devoid of context a person usually thinks of the word "last" as meaning "final" but I think even in that sense of the word there are shades of meaning. Someone who was going to quit drinking coffee and had a hard time keeping their resolve might repeatedly declare "This is my last coffee!" and then have yet still one more, and one more, etc. There are other senses of finality, however. Suppose Mimi were to treat two of her friends to coffees at the local cafe, and having only two hands in which to carry coffee cups, she might carry two cups to the table and then go back to the counter for her last coffee. Also, even if she is drinking her coffee alone, any particular cup of coffee might be her last coffee of the day. If Mimi were working at the coffee shop, even if she intends to come back for a drink after her shift concludes, she could very well call the final cup she serves her last coffee. If she's making coffee for herself at home, and she finds she has only enough supplies for one more cup/pot, she might declare that she has drunk her last coffee, and must go to the store for more.

Furthermore, the word "last" doesn't only carry the concept of finality, but the concept of previousness. Mimi may be enjoying a cup of coffee now, but may have a story about how bad her last coffee tasted. Or if she throws the sort of little coffee parties I mentioned earlier, and you attended one, you might hear about how things went at Mimi's last coffee. There are other senses of the word, too. Suppose that Mimi went to the cafe and found that they were serving a particular coffee blend that was her least favorite; she might declare that that is the last coffee she would ever drink, and have no coffee at all.

Finally, there is, I suppose, the question of who (or what) "Mimi" is. As I already hinted at somewhere above, Mimi need not be the consumer of the coffee, but could be the server, or some sort of host; I also implied the possibility that Mimi could be an artist painting a picture in mainly brown colors. Mimi could be a coffee grower, a coffee roaster, or a professional coffee taster. There's a chain of restaurants called Mimi's Cafe, at which I've never had a coffee, but I assume they offer it, and every day at every location there must be a last coffee served. Mimi could be a company that produces and sells coffee, and "Mimi's last coffee" could be a reference to their most recently introduced product. Mimi could be a family pet that found an unfortunate taste for coffee, unfortunate because coffee was poisonous to her and it caused her demise.

Language is a very fluid thing by necessity, and that has its good points and bad points. Namely, when you read what may appear to be a simple phrase, you can never be 100% sure that you've got a clear grasp on it, so it's best not to leap to conclusions about whether it is stating something right or wrong.

Paperless office of the mind

I was thinking last night about blogging. I was thinking about what it is that appeals to me. Thank heaven that it's not the publicity, because among the few hits I do get on this blog, the majority of them still seem to be looking for penguin sex.

See, I've always done this, even before the world wide web existed. I used to journal. You know, I'd get one of those little books with blank pages, and write whatever was on my mind in it whenever the mood took me. It even had some limited amount of readership, as I would always encourage friends who visited me to feel free to pick up a journal and peruse it. (I girl I was dating once read one cover-to-cover, which led to a few interesting conversations.) Someone once told me that largely what computer technology does is not so much make new things, but make electronic versions of things that already existed. Blogs are really electronic diaries.

But there's a difference that for me is key. I think what started me thinking about this last night was hearing someone say something like, "There's nothing scary about an empty piece of paper." I have no recollection of where I heard it or if that was anything like an exact quote. But I remembered that back in my journaling days, there was indeed something quite scary to me about a blank piece of paper.

I actually even once wrote a journal entry about it, and while I don't have it with me now, I remember it pretty well. I'd bought a new journal, and I began to write about an intense fear I had at the very moment the pen touched the paper. Here was a whole book full of empty pages, and while I tended to think those journals were overpriced, the actual value of the thing was as yet to be determined. An empty book held infinite promise, like a block of marble, waiting for the artist's chisel. It could be a book of recipes, a novel, a scientific thesis, a portfolio of sketches, an autobiography, anything was possible. However, once the pen met the paper and the writing began, all those infinite possibilities would disappear, and the result, no matter how great it might possibly be, could never possibly live up to the infinite promise of the empty page.

Of course, there's nothing rational about it. An empty page is, in a more tangible sense, nothing at all. To say that an empty page is somehow better would of course make no sense, the promise of anything without actualization is the delivery of nothing at all. Yet it stuck with me, every time I went to write.

There also was the fact that I felt since the page was a certain size, my writing had to fill it. It always surprised me how many times I ended up writing a snippet of fiction or a personal reflection that was worded so that it would just exactly fit the page size allotted. I was a slave to the physical medium of my writing.

And THAT'S what makes blogging so great. The medium of the web is pure information. There is no paper sitting there before me with the promise of anything. When I start a new blog entry, there is no space to fill: you can't scroll down the page to see the blank space below, as there is a presentation of nothing but a cursor, blinking and waiting. There's no permanence of the medium, and if I'm not happy with my writing, There's no ripping out of pages, crumpling them up and throwing them in the waste basket, there's just the click of a button, and all is gone! Or better yet, I simply can decide not to press the "Publish post" button.

There's no pressure to create greatness when nothing is being wasted but time. The internet is pure information. Our writing need not be stacks of dusty forgotten journals, our music need not be piles of CDs in cracked jewel cases, our photos are not limited by the quantity of film we can afford to buy. Hey, how many times have you seen this?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Who would bother to write that out longhand? But in an electronic medium, we toss out a page of gibberish just to fill imaginary space. Here; I'll do it again, just because I can:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

There's something oddly freeing about that.

And what's my point? (Does it matter if I have one?) This blog is a journal in a sense, yes, but it is a journal that shares very little in the way of the physical properties of a "journal" as was known in the classic sense. Just as Scott McCloud wrote years ago about the idea of comics on an "infinite canvas", so all electronic forms of media have no limits in the digital world. Isn't a blog a journal with an infinite number of pages? Isn't a live webcam a documentary film of infinite length? Isn't 3D modeling sculpture with an infinite-sized lump of clay? The web allows media within it to be everything or nothing, all at once. It's exciting, but perhaps most of all, it's fun.

FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: ad nauseam

So after some difficulties this morning and over the preceding weekend, I finally got into my e-mail this afternoon and found that I'd actually received quite a bit of electronic correspondence over the last few days. Interestingly enough, I really don't get a lot of spam, and this time was no exception. Emails giving me information that I had actually asked for, notes from family and friends, and info from guys at my church who are involved with and/or leading groups with which I'm involved. And there was the one fly in the ointment.

There's this guy, see. He's a nice guy, a good Christian, and someone who I enjoy talking with face-to-face. However, over the weekend he had sent me an e-mail with a picture of and little blurb concerning Barack Hussein Obama (with a noted emphasis on the fact that yes, that's his middle name!). This isn't the first time that he's sent me an e-mail with a subject line starting "FW: fwd: fwd:" or whatever. No, there was some matter of signing a petition that would do something having to do with prayer in schools or some such thing that of course turned out to be completely meaningless on a quick check of Snopes.com.

This time was different, though, and to tell you the truth, I was simultaneously unhappy and glad that it was different. It turned out that the bare content (minus editorializing) of the e-mail was correct! This happens so rarely in these situations, it threw me for a bit of a loop. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't just fire back, "No; this is all wrong; please stop forwarding these to me; can't you see what this is doing to your personal credibility?!" You know, I'll admit that I actually get a bit of smug self-satisfaction from sending out such an e-mail, but you can't send out that e-mail when the person sending you info happens to be right.

So what was the part that made me glad? It was the dawning of a realization that came as much less of a surprise to me than the discovery that the e-mail was technically true: I DON'T CARE! It doesn't matter to me if you find out that Hillary Clinton's a lesbian, John Edwards has made a hobby of torturing puppies, Mitt Romney has seven wives, or Rudy Giuliani was really the mastermind behind 9/11! It doesn't matter whether you have a reputable source or not, whether there's a photo attached or not, or whether there is an action required of me or not. I don't care if you have twenty pictures of cute kittens playing with balls of string, or a heartwarming poem to remind me of what's so great about mothers, or even a coupon for free ice cream. If the subject already starts with even one "FW:", don't click a button and send me a "FW: FW:" because I DON'T WANT IT!

Obsessive forwarders of the world, I'm cutting you off. If you want to send me your own e-mail, please do. I'm not going to read anyone else's.

Protesting protestantism

There's something I love about irony.

If you ask an evangelical protestant Christian why they are not Catholic, they'll probably have a short list of things that they perceive as being somehow wrong with the Catholic Church. Now, I don't have a source for much of what I'm going to say here, only personal experience from having now lived a fair portion of my life among Protestants, you'll just have to take my word for it if you're not in the same sorts of social circles in which I tend to find myself.

What's wrong with the Catholic Church? Well, it tends to boil down to authority. Maybe it's an American thing, since the U.S. is a country that was largely founded on the rejection of supposed divine authority, but there is this feeling that it is clearly wrong to have a person (a.k.a. The Pope, or maybe your local priest) who tells you what to think when it comes to spiritual matters. The Church (I'll henceforth use a capital "C" when referring to the Catholic Church) apparently has all these rules that you have to follow. The Bible has a specific meaning that the Church teaches; worship is done in a style that the Church dictates; communion, baptism and various other rituals are carried out with a specified liturgy the Church prescribes; etc. Sure, there are other issues, but aside from a few deeper theological issues that most people don't really fully understand anyway, most of it boils down to the fact that rather than a free church in which we all are equals and exist on the same level, the Church has this complicated hierarchy of authority figures that dictate every aspect of your faith life.

The irony in this all is that in the end, most of our evangelical protestant churches have discarded this sort of structured hierarchy in return for a hidden, more vaguely-defined one. Even early on in my experience as a Christian, the first church I ever attended had special meetings to welcome newcomers into their congregation. I actually remember very little about those classes except for one thing that I thought odd at the time. The pastor who was running the class repeatedly informed us, in an odd manner that seemed proudly sly, that "At this church..." (subtle dramatic pause) "...we don't wear ties!" Apparently having grown up in a much more formal church, this guy was very interested in this fact, and seemed to be sure that everyone else would be as well. Big whoop, right?

Yet, there was something about this that in a way he never admitted, perhaps least of all to himself, was indeed a big deal. At the time, I always suspected that the fact that he even brought it up implied that it was a big deal to him. I thought, "You know, I wonder if he'd prefer to wear a tie anyway?" Maybe that's it, and maybe it's one of the smallest examples of the sort of thing I'm talking about. Sure, he doesn't have to wear a tie, but I suspect that although it's not written down anywhere, it is the case that he is not allowed to wear a tie. Not that this is solely a church thing; I've worked in offices with relaxed dress policies, and people tend to give you dirty looks if you show up wearing a tie.

But the institutionalization doesn't stop with an unstated dress code, people talk about how more traditional churches have rituals and liturgy, and sing old traditional songs. At our church, we have once again our own unstated liturgical service, and it's one that's similar to every evangelical church I've attended in my dozen or so years as a Christian.

At the appointed time for church to start, the worship leader will get up on the stage with the band, take his guitar and welcome everyone to church. He will welcome everyone to stand, which is not expressly required, but everyone with the exception of a few elderly people and those in wheelchairs will do so. Most people will show up five to ten minutes later, perhaps as much as twenty minutes if they have children. Around this time, the band will pause and an associate pastor or perhaps a deacon will walk onto the stage. He will welcome everyone again, compliment the band, and invite everyone to sit down. A short speech will be given about upcoming events, the need for more volunteers in children's ministry, and an admonition to visitors not to give money for the offering, but merely fill out a visitor card and drop it on the bag. He says a short prayer, and the band plays a song while the ushers pass the offering bags around. Everyone is asked to stand again, one more song is played, the worship leader asks everyone to shake hands with their neighbor, and everyone sits down as the senior pastor takes the stage and the band exits. The sermon opens with a bad joke or perhaps a humorous movie clip on the screen. Everyone pulls out their sermon notes, which consist of three bullet points with a missing word or phrase to fill in. After about forty-five minutes of talking, the pastor apologizes for his sermon being "so long", wraps it up and excuses everyone. People with children pick them up; every child has a craft project in a white paper sack with a Bible verse sticker on it. People mill about on the patio eating donuts if it's an a.m. service, cookies if it's p.m., and either way there is also coffee, juice and water.

Deviate from the above in any way, and the congregation will freak out. I had a pastor whose wife was a ballet instructor, and at one service, during the music phase, some dancers came out on stage and did a little routine. In principle, there's nothing wrong with this, but departing from routine was bizarre, and a few people got up and left.

Now, there's nothing wrong with routine actually. Like I said above, these things happen in the secular world, too. What about the deeper issues of theology? Surely those are the real vital ones, right? In the Church, if the Pope says things are a certain way, then that's the way they are, and supposedly, that's bad to have a single person driving and defining faith for a large group of other people.

First of all, it has to be understood, as I myself did not understand until a few years ago, that the Pope's every word is not somehow law on par with scripture. At times, the Pope does choose to speak with such authority, but most of the time, he's a lot like a senior pastor of a worldwide church, simply being there to guide and teach like any Protestant pastor would do.

Second of all, who says our little local churches are so different? When my pastor stands up at the lectern on a Sunday morning and says "Jesus is trying to say such-and-such through this passage of scripture," is it at all appropriate or acceptable for me to stand up at my seat in the congregation and say, "Excuse me, but I disagree with your interpretation?" Of course not (in general: as I have mentioned elsewhere, my church does a yearly "open mike" service where anyone can ask the pastor any question they want), that would be incredibly out of the norm; the church would sooner stop serving coffee on the patio!

Lastly, there are a few things to be said about this. Most churches, including my own, have a "statement of faith" which is a document which outlines our theological position. Anyone who wants to join the church has to read the document and sign a statement saying that they agree with it and will not oppose it within the church. While it may seem to some to be a shade totalitarian, it makes sense that you would have such an instrument to foster unity in the church. If you don't agree with it before you join, why would you want to join? If you come to an understanding that disagrees with it after joining, why would you want to stay? At the same time, if you have a question about an issue, there is no rule against discussing it with a pastor or fellow member of the congregation, only against actively opposing it from within the church.

Many things that I have said here in my blog would shock numerous people at my church, (many drop their jaw at the mention that I'm a registered Democrat, which I think is the least of my issues) although I don't keep the existence of this blog a secret; I don't think anyone from my church reads it. If I were to say some of the things I have said in this blog at any sort of official church meeting, I think it's possible I might lose my membership, I'm not sure, but I think it would be fair, actually. Still, I have the right to say whatever I want outside of church, and the thing of it is, that doesn't make me any different from Catholics. In truth, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Catholic that has complete and undying devotion to the Pope; most I have met admire and respect him, but also have occasional issues on which they respectfully disagree with him.

Is the pastor of a church just a little Pope? Sure, we Protestants recognize that the pastorate and the laity are two categories of people between whom God makes no strong distinction. At the church picnic, he's just another guy you josh around with, chat about work, play frisbee with, etc. But on Sunday morning, he's the one standing on the stage, telling everyone what the Bible means, and while you may share the same theological position as he does, you're not going to take his place on the stage Sunday morning as easily as you took his place in line for the hot dogs Saturday afternoon. While the board of elders (or whatever) can have him replaced if necessary, in a very real way, while he is in office, the pastor is the church.

If you're going to sin, you might as well be original

There's been a lot of buzz around the Internet about a piece of stolen artwork, and it's growing. Not just the buzz, but the scope of the theft.

Todd Goldman, an "artist" and online purveyor of pop-art T-shirts was holding an art exhibit of his works and somebody noticed a similarity between the art on one of the canvases and a webcomic drawn by Dave "Shmorky" Kelly in 2001. Fans of Shmorky researched, and the plot thickened. Among several versions of the work in question, one of them appeared, upon being superimposed with the webcomic, to have actually been traced from it! This wasn't merely an homage, but surprisingly blatant plagiarism. That wasn't all; further research of Goldman's (so-called) work turned up case after case of striking similarities to extant works found in various places on the web. It's hard to say where any of this is leading, or how much of this is a misunderstanding, but it seems that virtually nothing that Goldman has created is original. It's a fascinating story, and if you're not familiar, you might want to read about it and see the evidence yourself.

I'm not here to condemn Goldman, nor do I intend to defend him. What I want to consider here is the nature of plagiarism.

When I was in college, I took a lot of courses from a lot of different disciplines. However, not being much of an artist (on the technical side, that is; I like to think I'm creative), I ended up taking only one course from the art department, a course known as "Photomechanical Reproduction". In other words, we were making art with Xerox machines. It's been a heck of long time now since I was in that class, but as hazy as my memory is, I do remember the issues that it brought up on the subject of what art really is, the nature of originality and the legal aspect of fair usage. (Although I tried a number of different techniques throughout the course, my favorite images to work off of were money; for one project I made a stack of very authentic-looking zero-dollar bills using only the money I had in my pocket and the free supplies at the local Kinko's.)

You could scoff at such work being considered "art"--and you could probably come up with some snide remark relating the idea back to Goldman's dubious techniques--but there was really something to it, and over the years since then, I've used the things I learned repeatedly to make what I considered to be works of art, sometimes from somebody else's art as a basis, and sometimes from nothing at all; you can make rather interesting art on a Xerox machine with no source material at all, if you know a few tricks. Maybe I ought to scan and post a few I've done. But as usual, I'm getting off-topic. The question is: is copying another person's art something that can be art itself?

Webcomics artist Scott Kurtz put one of his own characters in a pose just like the original piece, and had him say the same line, but nobody considers that plagiarism, I assume. It's not just because Kurtz didn't trace the artwork like Goldman did; there are a lot of works in Goldman's portfolio that people are calling rip-offs that don't really look much like the thing people are claiming he ripped off. At the same time, something can be a blatantly stolen and still be somehow special and original because it's intended for parody purposes. Think "Weird Al" Yankovic, or better, a little panel I threw together in a couple minutes:

It doesn't matter so much that both the image and the caption are blatant copies; I'm not likely to get sued for this picture because I'm making a point with it, not trying to rip off Shmorky or Jim Davis. In many ways, intent has a great deal to do with whether something is considered plagiarised, doesn't it? If I printed out the original webcomic and put it on the wall of my office, people would see it and laugh, and nobody would have a problem with it, least of all the artist, who might even be flattered. Blow it up on a big canvas, tell people it's my original idea, and put a $5,000 price tag on it, and now we have a problem. An artist ought to have the rewards of his or her art and in the former case, I would be increasing the acclaim of the art, while in the latter, I'm taking money that should be theirs.

But people do take other people's artistic ideas and make money off of them all the time. I'm not just talking about parodies, which have some amount of legal protection, but stealing images in order to make an artistic statement that launches from preconceived notions of existing iconic images and ideas. How many people have made artistic statements launching from Grant Wood's "American Gothic"? (Contrary to popular belief, the image depicts a father and daughter, not a married couple.) There's something to the concept of taking a pre-existing idea and running with it in a new direction, or even taking it as it is and merely presenting it in a new fashion. Some artists, such as famously Marcel Duchamp, take items that are not not art, and present them as art.

Is there really such a thing as an original idea? Many great artists make their art by copying things they see in the world around them, or illustrating a well-known story. Even those that tend towards the more abstract still use concepts that we all understand on some level, whether it be the ordered, clean colored blocks of Piet Mondrian or the chaotic splatterings of Jackson Pollock. One might wonder what a change it would bring to the legal status of Goldman's work if he openly admitted the complete lack of originality, and stated proudly that his artistic genre was plagiarism. Really, why not?

The odd fact is that plagiarism is a very strange concept, one of those ones that is hard to define, but you "know it when you see it". When you were required to write a paper in school, you were probably admonished by your teachers to use the encyclopedia, but not copy your info directly out of it, but rather summarize. When you summarize or paraphrase, you state in your own words and sentence structures the meaning of someone else's writing. Since the words and the sentence structures are yours, you do not use quotation marks, though, of course, you must acknowledge the author of the idea. If you use the original sentence pattern and substitute synonyms for key words or use the original words and change the sentence pattern, you are not paraphrasing but plagiarizing, even if the source is acknowledged because both methods use someone else's expression without quotation marks. I copied most of this paragraph directly from another website about plagiarism in an attempt to be ironic, but is it plagiarism when I acknowlege having done it, despite lack of quotation marks?

Sure, Goldman stole the image, but in a way, the true originality of Goldman's method was the blatant manner in which he stole it. I don't know if anyone would call that art, though.

A spiritual quest

I've been too busy lately with my new job to post much, but I thought I could throw together a quick post on a topic that continues to entertain me. My traffic stats. Now while I've been trying very hard to push myself as the leading authority on Complete Crap, but seem to have slipped a bit in the ranking somehow, there are certain things that I can be proud of.

People all over the Internet are searching for things, and occasionally, they find them here in my humble blogs. My advice for other bloggers is never to underestimate the power of poor spelling. As I once commented in my other blog:

I'm glad to see that thanks to anonymous, this blog was located by a blog search for "canabis outdoors fertilisers". Evidently, I will continue to be a popular blog for stoners with questionable spelling skills.

Likewise, here in this blog, I've noticed an upswing in people wondering what Christianity teaches about "mastubation" finding me out through searches like "christian gay blogger mastubation", "does god approve of mastubation" and "videos of mastubation in human beings". I hope through the serendipity of my omission of an 'r', I managed to enlighten these people. No video, though. Sorry. Wait, no I'm not.

It seems that I continue to be a popular destination for people looking for sexy penguins, too. (And how can I forget that other lovely search result?!) While the actual sexy penguin traffic is not huge, I enjoy mentioning it for the mere fact that it will allow me to reuse the tag I created for the article. Penguin sex! Penguin sex! Penguin sex! Actually, I probably should be worried...

Of course, just as I largely got my new job because I knew someone in the company, a fair amount of web traffic comes through association. I seem to get a lot of hits coming through Arbuckle, a parody of Garfield that I suspect both fans and haters of Garfield would enjoy. I know I do. I also get some people passing through from lonelygirl15, an Internet phenomenon that I plan to write a post on some time in the near future. Not so much funny, but a very interesting art form in its own way.

In my other blog, the search terms can always be curious. I get far more hits there overall, but here are a few interesting ones: "the 7 plagues that hit pharoah" Time for a recount? "angel makes the earth rotate so satan would be in light" Wow, there's got to be an interesting story behind that one. "the bible verse with anybody without sin caused the first stone" Actually, this is an interesting bit of creative spelling, as a Christian would believe that Jesus is not only the one man without sin, but also the person who created/caused the first stone, heh. "bashemath's husband" This is interesting because the Bible has a bit of confusion over who Bashemath's father was, but none at all about the identity of her husband. So who knows what this guy was looking for?

Hmm, I guess it's been slow lately, but help me out. Leave a bizarre comment that will bring some interesting searches here. I'm bored. Whoops, gotta go, somebody is searching for sexy penguins again...

Five favorite quotes

So my friend Marauder tagged me to post about my five favorite quotes. I don't know why I'm responding, as it's just going to encourage him and others to keep doing things like this, but well, here I am. Here are five quotes I'm rather fond of, in no particular order:

"From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the LORD his God." -Jonah 2:1

I might as well start with my favorite verse from the Bible, seeing as I'm a Bible blogger. I'm rather fond of this verse because there's something simultaneously absurd and profound about the idea of praying from inside a fish (or whale?). It seems like an entirely unlikely place to be praying, but on the other hand, most people would do exactly that upon finding themselves in such a position, and in Jonah's case, if he had bothered to talk to God earlier in his story, he probably wouldn't have been there.

"Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds." -Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

I like this quote, because whether or not Stephenson is a Christian (I have no idea) I think he's hit on a profound truth. I think just about every religion, including Christianity, is like a shiny gold coin with a mountain of crap piled on top of it. Even in a good church, how much of the time one spends in there is spent studying the basic, fundamental truths of Christianity that really matter? Not that you could do that 100% of the time, because all the extra stuff is important, too, if it happens to be tangential to the fundamental truths rather than central.

"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." -Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

This quote by Crick is one I find humorous. As you may have gathered from some of my previous posts, I'm not completely set against the concepts of evolutionary theory, and actually am often found to be an advocate among fellow Christians for the concept of evolution in a general sense. However, I've always thought that the amazing complexity of the DNA molecule points very strongly to the idea of an intelligent designer. I think it's funny that Crick here seems to be agreeing with that assessment, but insists that any serious scientist must keep his mind closed to such an idea.

"A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing everyday without repeating himself." -Charles M. Schulz

A lot of people seem to feel that the comic strip Peanuts got sort of old and tired towards the end, or that it was never quite as good as the earlier strips. This may be true, but keep in mind that Schulz was drawing the thing for fifty years! One of my favorite blogs is The Comics Curmudgeon, in which the writer rants daily on what's really really bad on the newspaper comics page. I love newspaper comics, and consider it a wonderful art form all of its own, but it's true that there is a lot of bad stuff out there. At the same time, consider how difficult it must be to come up with 365 new jokes every year, and to draw a picture for each one. Even though I laugh along with Josh's other readers at his blog, I appreciate the challenge that these artists are facing, and bow down to even the mediocre ones as being far more talented than I probably ever will be.

" 'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
" 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
" 'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
" 'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.' " -Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

I feel like this a lot. (Alice, or the cat? Take your pick.)

San Diego Comic-Con 2006

So I'm back from a long weekend that included a trip to the San Diego Comic-Con. I was very pleased with my visit, not in a small part due to the fact that I wasn't expecting to see much there that I really was looking forward to. Granted, the SDCC is just so darn large that you certainly won't get bored, it's just that I didn't know of too many artists that I was looking for there that I hadn't already met.

Well, it turned out once I started browsing around that I found quite a few good ones. Rather than rank the artists in terms of who I was most excited to see and therefore possibly slight somebody, I'll just tell you who I did see that excited me, and share a bit of the excitement.

Shortly after arriving, I overheard a couple walking past me having a discussion about a book the woman had just bought. "His name is 'Shannon'?" the man asked, looking at the signature on the cover. I spun towards them.

"Is Shannon Wheeler here?!" I asked. They verified that that was exactly who they were speaking of, and pointed me towards a stall overbrimming with Too Much Coffee Man merchandise, and Wheeler himself, natch. I picked up a signed copy of TMCM #10 and came back later for a T-shirt.

I then headed off to see one of the only artists that I was interested in that I was certain would be there, Roberta Gregory. I used to read her stuff all the time years ago, but had mainly lost track of her. I was glad to see her on the list of artists, and to find that she's still doing work despite being not nearly as well-known as she ought to be. I bought a comic for a friend and got it signed, and then bought a copy of "Real Cat Toons", which, as the site promises, came with an original drawing on the back. (I don't know if she always draws something like that; it may be because I mentioned my cat having just died.) She was a lovely, friendly person to talk to, and had a lot of cool freebies, including a Jack Chick parody comic about Christian intolerance towards homosexuals. (I'm hoping to share that with a few friends of mine; I'm hoping you know who you are, are reading this, and will e-mail me to tell me whether you'd like me to e-mail, snail mail, whatever the thing to you, if indeed you'd like it. Gregory said she not only doesn't mind it being copied, but hopes it does get copied regularly.)

Then I wandered off to find a few webcomics people I like, including Tycho and Gabe of Penny Arcade and and Scott Kurtz of PvP. I brought a copy of the strip that I'd linked to some time ago, and told him that as a Christian, I'd really liked it. He chuckled and began not only to sign, but to make a sketch. (Read the comic first before continuing this story; if offended, skip to the next paragraph.) I leaned over to see what he was drawing and groaned, "I'm going to regret this, aren't I?" His wife(?) exclaimed, "Oh, don't do that!" and he giggled gleefully and said, "But that's what it would be, wouldn't it?" I supposed so, but I told him I wouldn't frame it and put it up at the office.

Later, I ran into the creator of Bob the Angry Flower, Stephen Notley. The guy actually wears a flower costume, and seems to have a brain that's just as random and genius as his comic. Really a neat guy to meet, he seems like the sort of guy you'd have a blast just sitting and talking to for a couple hours.

Lastly, (I don't think I forgot anyone, that would be embarrassing), I managed to meet Jeff Keane, the current artist (and son of the original artist) of Family Circus, who was kind enough to knock out a quick sketch for me.

Perhaps at a later date, I'll post some photos I took, who knows?

Watchmen Chapter XII: "A Stronger Loving World"

Spoiler warning: If you have not read Watchmen, do not read these notes. See intro/disclaimer.

Cover: The cover image is a clock at a hair before midnight, drenched in blood.

Page 1: The clock is at midnight, a yellow circle stained with blood, while the repeated classic blood-drop shape is found on the sign on the lower-left of the frame. The two bands playing this concert were "Pale Horse"--named after the steed that death rides in the book of Revelation--and "Krystalnacht"--named after the pogrom near the beginning of the Holocaust in which the streets were filled with glass. The date is November 2nd, the "Day of the Dead".

Page 3: The Utopia is showing "The Day the Earth Stood Still", a movie about an alien who comes to earth to stop humans from destroying themselves in nuclear war.

Page 6: Note "THE VEIDT METHOD-I WILL GIVE YOU BODIES BEYOND YOUR WILDEST IMAGININGS". As noted, in this context it has triple meaning: The face meaning of bodybuilding, the fact that New York is now littered with thousands of dead bodies, and the fantastically grotesque body of the dead alien. Note the drop of blood on the hydrant's right "eye".

Page 7, panel 1: Note the shape of Laurie's teardrop.

Page 7, panel 3: Note that Jon is completely unfazed by his surroundings.

Page 8: More subtle than usual, Jon is narrating Laurie's actions.

Page 8, panel 4: Laurie is picking up the gun.

Page 11: Jon's dialogue and action in panels 3&4 is repeated on the next page.

Page 14, panel 2: Adrian shows more remorse over the cat than over millions of New Yorkers.

Page 14, panel 5: As Laurie creeps up behind him, "...something he wasn't expecting."

Page 17, panel 3: "...light?"

Page 19, panel 7: Once again, in front of the Gordian Knot mural.

Page 20, panel 7: Rorschach's "No compromise" face, as seen in I.24.6.

Page 23, panel 1: Rorschach's face suggests the shape of Dan and Laurie.

Page 27, panel 1: It seems that Adrian's dream is the closing scene of "Marooned". Adrian, alone on an island far away from the rest of civilization, has built a route to his society's salvation on the backs of dead men.

Page 28, panel 1: Echoing Jon, Sally says "It never ends. Never." "Peace on Earth", while a pretty standard Christmas greeting, seems particularly appropriate.

Page 28, panel 3: "The Architects of Fear" was a real episode of The Outer Limits in which scientists pretend that earth is being invaded by aliens to avert nuclear war.

Page 29, panel 6: Laurie is talking about herself, of course.

Page 30, panel 3: Her description sounds a lot like the Comedian's old costume.

Page 31, panel 1: The Institute for Extraspatial Studies is of course gone, but the new building going up is being built by "Pyramid Construction", no doubt owned by Adrian. The Utopia has been replaced by the "New Utopia", and is playing some films by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, "Nostalgia" and "The Sacrifice", the latter being the story of a man who vows to God to give up everything to save the world from nuclear holocaust. Now that the Russians have become allies, the Gunga Diner has been replaced by Burgers 'n' Borscht.

Page 31, panel 2: The news kiosk has been replaced by a vending machine. Headline says "RR" is considering a run for the presidency. This turns out not to be Reagan.

Page 31, panel 3: In the place of the fallout shelter sign, a poster advertising the new peace with the Russians is being placed.

Page 31, panel 4: Veidt's new "Millennium" line has been released. Rather than focusing on the past, the focus is on the future. Note the people on the sign are looking to our right, towards the future in comics language. The graffiti has a far more positive tone.

Page 31, panel 5: Note V's on Seymour's shoes; are these Veidt brand shoes? Also, Pioneer Publishing's logo is visible in the background, similar to the Rumrunner's logo, it bears some resemblance to a skull.

Page 31, panel 6: There is a clock in the background at 11:55 as Seymour enters the office.

Page 31, panel 7: Another clock is found inside the office

Page 32, panel 4: "Who wants a cowboy actor in the White House?" Indeed.

Page 32, panel 5: Ketchup drips on Seymour's shirt, as yet not fully seen.

Page 32, panel 7: Seymour's hand hovers over Rorschach's journal, which holds the biggest story the New Frontiersman or any other paper will ever see, as indeed, the very fate of the world may be in Seymour's hands. The happy face logo with characteristic red drop shape is the final image, and we are left wondering what the real end of this story will be.

Watchmen Chapter XI: "Look on My Works, Ye Mighty"

Spoiler warning: If you have not read Watchmen, do not read these notes. See intro/disclaimer.

Cover: The cover image is of a butterfly surrounded by snow, a strange image in the shape, of course, of the blood drop from the cover of chapter I. It may be symbolic of the concept that Adrian is trying to create a layer of protection to preserve life against harsh reality that would easily destroy it. Of course, before the chapter is over, this too will be destroyed.

Page 1: Elements of Adrian's monologue narrate the shifting view of his fortress as the panels gradually zoom out.

Page 1, panel 2: Adrian mentions Burroughs' "cut-up technique", a method that was used to create the novel Nova Express, a name shared by the news magazine that Adrian owns through Pyramid Deliveries.

Page 4, panel 5: "...and no time like the present." Adrian says, surrounded by ancient things. He walks under the Gordian Knot mural, towards his own Gordian solution.

Page 5, panel 5: On first read, it's not clear what he is doing, but note the time: 11:25 PM, EST.

Page 5, panel 8: Note the object in the foreground of panel three is gone.

Page 6: Once again, "Marooned" and Watchmen narrate each other.

Page 8: Adrian begins to tell his life story. In all of Adrian's flashbacks, he is viewed only from the back.

Page 9, panel 1: Joey mimics Adrian's pose. One assumes that if Adrian and Alexander "meet in the Hall of Legends", the first line would be a bit more solemn.

Page 9, panel 7: Compare this panel to 13.4; most of the NY conversations in this chapter are overlapping one another in time. While the Antarctica scenes take about 45 minutes, the parallel NY scenes are about ten minutes, but it's not immediately obvious, of course

Page 11, panel 1: Adrian's greatest secrets have also been entrusted to his servants that he is going to bury in just a minute.

Page 11, panel 4: Adrian has not touched his own glass, and his servants are clearly dead.

Page 13, panel 1: Another panel mimicking the previous.

Page 14, panel 1: Another panel mimicking the previous. (Note Nite Owl in the place of the seagull.)

Page 14, panel 5: "We're out of our natural environment." Join the club...

Page 18: Adrian continues his life story, ironically narrating Rorschach's actions behind him.

Page 18, panel 7: Adrian suggests Eddie killed Hooded Justice...

Page 18, panel 8: ...and may have been involved in a plot against Kennedy.

Page 19, panel 4: Clock at 11:55.

Page 21: Adrian continues to narrate his thought process and Rorschach's actions.

Page 23, panel 9: "Another minute, we'd have been gone. Talk about lousy timing!" Another huge understatement.

Page 24: Adrian now narrates his own journey, the flashbacks to Eddie's death, and the scenes in NYC.

Page 24, panel 7: The bottom panel on these four pages shows a progression of actions at the pivotal corner in NYC, each one from a 90-degree angle from the previous. Virtually all of the supporting cast congregates at the epicenter of what is about to happen.

Page 27, panel 1: Adrian stands in front of the Gordian Knot mural, and tells them it's done.

Page 27, panel 2: A clock at one minute to midnight, and suddenly, the reader realizes the countdown-to-midnight motif was a red herring; doomsday came at 11:25.

Page 27, panel 3: The comic book kid is the first to notice something.

Page 28: Everyone freezes and stares across the street in horror at whatever is there.

Page 28, panel 1: Clock.

Page 28, panel 2: Rorschach blots and painkiller bottle.

Page 28, panel 4: "Bringing light to the world" "Gordian Knot"

Page 28, panel 5: More clocks.

Page 28, panel 12: Close with the same shape.

Page 29: In an article written immediately after Adrian retired from crime fighting, Doug Roth reveals his liberal leanings. Note that Adrian's servants are former Vietcong officers, once defeated by Dr. Manhattan, now working with their boss to destroy him. Adrian closes with, "I don't mind being the smartest man in the world. I just wish it wasn't this one."

Watchmen Chapter X: "Two Riders Were Approaching"

Spoiler warning: If you have not read Watchmen, do not read these notes. See intro/disclaimer.

Cover: The cover depicts a radar screen, and the reflections off the glass along with the two radar blips make the form of a happy face with a line passing through the right "eye". Note the clock stands at 11:59. The title of the chapter is "Two Riders Were Approaching", a theme that will be repeated profusely within the chapter.

Page 2, panel 1: During times of high tension internationally, the President of the United States carries a briefcase known as "the football", which has launch codes for our missiles. Here, President Nixon appears to be carrying a literal football, oddly enough.

Page 2, panel 6: Classic Ford slapstick; he was known for being fairly clumsy.

Page 2, panel 7: Two riders on planes are now two riders in trams.

Page 6, panel 7: Rorschach has a soft spot for children, too.

Page 7, panel 1: The servants and Bubastis mimic the pose in the previous panel.

Page 7, panel 4: "...problems to solve... It's the same old story." As the view pulls back to show the Gordian Knot mural.

Page 9, panel 2: Rorschach's coat must actually be pretty rank; a close look at the stain on the front indicates that it's ten-year-old crusted dog blood. Compare various shots of his coat with VI.24.4.

Page 12, panel 3: Two riders approach our protagonist.

Page 13, panel 1: In the background, two riders approach. On the back of the comic, Veidt promises, "I will give you bodies beyond your wildest imaginings," a phrase with triple meaning in the beginning of chapter XII.

Page 13, panel 7: "The Watchtower", a reference to the chapter's quote.

Page 14, panel 2: Rorschach's "Happy Harry" face. (See I.15.3)

Page 15, panel 3: Many of the employees of Pyramid Deliveries (owned by Adrian) were unwittingly in on the conspiracy.

Page 15, panel 7: Up until now, Dan was of course unaware of what had happened to Hollis.

Page 16, panel 7: Dan seems to have forgotten for a moment who he's talking to.

Page 17, panel 1: Note the logo: this is a Pyramid Deliveries ship.

Page 18, panel 2: Clock one minute to midnight.

Page 19, panel 7: From this panel throughout the next page, Rorschach unwittingly narrates Dan's thoughts and actions.

Page 20, panel 7: "Do you wish to add rider?" Of course, because it's two riders, right?

Page 22, panel 5: "It paints disturbing picture" as he approaches the "Hiroshima lovers".

Page 23, panel 1: Same exact spot, the next morning. Rorschach's journal is being picked up. On this page, the dialogue and "Marooned" switch off narrating each other panel by panel.

Page 23, panel 4: The "sentry" may be another implication of a clock at near-midnight, but it's not as clear as some.

Page 23, panel 6: The "sentry" is revealed to be a scarecrow, our first clear hint that the doom the protagonist is fighting against may be just in his head.

Page 23, panel 8: Two riders were approaching...

Page 23, panel 9: No, it's only the end of the world literally.

Page 24, panel 4: New Frontiersman's hall has been vandalized with Nazi graffiti.

Page 24, panel 7: Possibly the most important piece of mail the New Frontiersman has ever received, and the editor wants to burn it.

Page 28: Two riders were approaching...

Page 29: Notes from Adrian's desk. Adrian writes to his marketing executive, "The American public has never gone in for super-heroes in a big way." Also, he suggests the introduction of the "Millenium" line, seen in the epilogue of the last chapter.

Watchmen Chapter IX: "The Darkness of Mere Being"

Spoiler warning: If you have not read Watchmen, do not read these notes. See intro/disclaimer.

Cover: This is a bottle of "Nostalgia" perfume. In many ways nostalgia is an appropriate theme for this chapter, as it's mostly told in flashbacks that lead Laurie to the conclusion. The image appears several times throughout the chapter, but we don't find out where it is until the end, when we see that it was flung by Laurie.

Page 1: This is panels six through eight of page nine of the previous chapter, seen through Laurie's eyes.

Page 3, panel 9: It's odd that Jon knows things, and yet they "slip his mind" nonetheless.

Page 5, panel 3: Jon was surprised because he was destined to be surprised. He will be surprised at least twice again in this chapter, although he already knows how it all turns out.

Page 6, panel 8: Jon is clearly guiding Laurie through these memories, although on the face of it, they seem to have little to do with the subject at hand. Is Jon looking for an excuse to care about humanity, and thus he needs Laurie to come to the conclusion she does?

Page 7, panel 1: Who would Sally have a grudge against...

Page 7, panel 6: ...and what would it have to do with Laurie's parentage?

Page 8, panel 4: A drop of water falls on the right eye of Laurie's slipper.

Page 8, panel 7: That moment of preordained surprise.

Page 9, panel 4: Just because Jon understands "gravity" doesn't mean he has to obey it.

Page 10, panel 4: "And inside, there was only water."

Page 10, panel 7: "All that effort, and what did it ever lead to?" That's Laurie's eternal question.

Page 11, panel 5: As Hollis mentions in his autobiography, Sally loves "blue" humor.

Page 11, panel 8: Hollis' book has just recently been published.

Page 12, panel 2: These are all surviving members of the Minutemen excepting the Comedian.

Page 15, panel 4: Eddie expresses a lack of interest in other heroes, but sticks around to talk to Laurie

Page 15, panel 6: Arguably the most significant panel in this chapter, Laurie and Eddie stand together and share the only tender moment they ever will. Eddie comments that Laurie's hair is not like her mother's hair, but here we see someone who does have hair like hers. Also, I only mention it here because it's the only time attention is drawn to it, the "funny little mole": both Laurie and Sally have a mole on their face...right next to their right eyes, of course.

Page 17: The dialogue on this page is of course a red herring; Laurie and the reader are led to believe nuclear war is coming, but it's something completely unexpected.

Page 18, panel 1: The face of the person Jon kills is not yet known to him, of course.

Page 20, panel 2: Eddie has this moment in a framed photograph.

Page 20, panel 4: The Watergate scandal never broke in this world because Woodward and Bernstein were assassinated. Was the Comedian the assassin?

Page 20, panel 5: Eddie makes a joke about the JFK assassination, and an implication is made here and elsewhere (XI.18.8) that he took part in a plot that also involved Nixon. I believe the laughing man is G. Gordon Liddy.

Page 20, panel 8: This is the second (and perhaps last) time Laurie and Eddie meet, and their positions mimic 15.6, but this is clearly not a tender moment.

Page 21, panel 3: "Only once," Eddie says, the implication not being exactly what Laurie thinks it is.

Page 21, panel 4: A drop of scotch falls on the right eye of Eddie's button.

Page 22, panel 3: Of course, Jon's never wrong.

Page 23: Laurie starts to put the pieces together.

Page 26, panel 1: "My whole life's a joke." because she's the daughter of the Comedian.

Page 27, panel 1: The crater appears similar to a happy face, with the destroyed mechanism lying just below the right eye.

Page 29: Pages from Sally Jupiter's scrapbook. Newspaper clippings and an essentially failed attempt at producing a movie suggest how much Sally valued her fame. Sally's letter from Shexnayder along with the Probe interview let us into the world of the Minutemen, giving us the inside info on how Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis were sexually involved with each other, and she comments on the ousting of the Silhouette for being a "gay woman" (note that the term "lesbian" does not seem to be in use in the world of Watchmen) and how it was highly hypocritical.

Watchmen Chapter VIII: "Old Ghosts"

Spoiler warning: If you have not read Watchmen, do not read these notes. See intro/disclaimer.

Cover: The cover image of this chapter is that of Hollis' retirement statue, surrounded by various other souvenirs of his adventuring days. The theme of this chapter is the past, oddly enough, since it has no flashbacks. In the picture on the wall, the Comedian's right eye is obscured by the cigarette smoke.

Page 1: The panels in this conversation come in pairs.

Page 1, panel 1: Hollis' memorabilia with a can of beer...

Page 1, panel 2: ...and Sally's memorabilia with a bottle of "Nostalgia".

Page 1, panel 3: Hollis' point of view, looking over his phone to the television...

Page 1, panel 4: ...and Sally's point of view, same.

Page 1, panel 5: Hollis' Minutemen picture and a book about him...

Page 1, panel 6: ...and Sally's Minutemen picture and a book about her.

Page 1, panel 7: Close-up of Hollis' picture, centered on him...

Page 1, panel 8: ...and close-up of Sally's picture, centered on her, and well-meshed together in two panels.

Page 1, panel 9: Outside of Hollis' home.

Page 2, panel 1: Outside of Sally's home.

Page 2, panel 2: Side view of Hollis' hand on armrest...

Page 2, panel 3: ...and side view of Sally's hand on armrest.

Page 2, panel 4: Hollis' feet.

Page 2, panel 5: Sally's feet.

Page 3: "Marooned" and Watchmen once again trade off narration of each other.

Page 3, panel 1: The "Hiroshima lovers": a physical ghost-like appearance.

Page 3, panel 2: The newsvendor remembers the "Spirit of '77".

Page 3, panel 3: The newsvendor remembers his dead wife.

Page 3, panel 7: The newsvendor is talking to Malcolm; we've seen this panel before, indicating that we're still chronologically in the middle of the events of chapter VI.

Page 5, panel 4: "A few skeleton's are bound to keep jumping out of the closet." Of course, that's not all that's come out of the closet.

Page 7, panel 1: Rorschach busted Big Figure in '65, so that was back when he was "Kovacs pretending to be Rorschach." Most of these cons that have grudges against Rorschach probably don't know what he's like since '75.

Page 8, panel 8: "Sweet Chariot" sugar is a reference to the hymn "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in which the chariot was to carry the hymnist to the afterlife.

Page 9, panel 1: "...you don't smoke." the detective says as he surveys Laurie's "cigarette" in the ashtray.

Page 9, panel 9: "Suddenly, we have a deadline." What's that deadline? It's...

Page 10, panel 1: "October thirty-first, nineteen eighty-five." There, that's all straight.

Page 10, panel 5: A dollop of glue falls on the Comedian's right eye.

Page 10, panel 6: The sixth panel on this and the next five pages narrates the seventh and final silent panel.

Page 11, panel 3: "Oh, it's plenty cold enough where that's headed." Antarctica, of course.

Page 11, panel 4: Shea is talking about "Marooned".

Page 11, panel 6: This is the only look at the "alien" before the final chapter.

Page 12, panel 1: "God knows what these people have instead of brains..." Like what, pumpkin guts?

Page 12, panel 2: "...an acceptable face..."

Page 12, panel 4: Nova Express is, of course, owned by Pyramid Deliveries, which is owned by Adrian.

Page 12, panel 6: A drop of pumpkin "blood" lands on the jack-o-lantern's right eye.

Page 13: "Marooned" once again narrates the action.

Page 14, panel 3: "Too warm in there?" The first of two times the cons misinterpret Rorschach's actions.

Page 15, panel 4: This looks a lot like VI.24.4.

Page 17, panel 2: "...he's climbin' up on his bunk, like a little kid." The second time.

Page 18: Dan narrates Rorschach's chase.

Page 22, panel 3: "Guess I want somebody to wave a wand and make it all better, y'know?" Yeah, that would be one of those, um, what is it called?

Page 23, panel 3: "...deus ex machina..." yeah, that was it. And of course, an excellent description of Jon. And of Adrian's plot to stop nuclear war.

Page 26: "Marooned" narrates the knot-heads journey to Hollis' home.

Page 27, panel 1: Clock at five to midnight.

Page 27, panel 5: Hollis' memory (or fantasy?) isn’t quite holding up to his present situation.

Page 28, panel 7: A drop of blood falls on Hollis' face in the photo.

Page 29: The issue of the New Frontiersman that we saw in this chapter. While most of this seems to be paranoid rambling, the "Missing Writer" article comes surprisingly close to connecting some dots that would uncover the truth of the conspiracy that nobody else begins to suspect.

Watchmen Chapter VII: "A Brother to Dragons"

Spoiler warning: If you have not read Watchmen, do not read these notes. See intro/disclaimer.

Cover: The cover image in this case is, at first glance, a repeat of the continuing motif of a "face" with a mark over the right eye. When on the first page we once again open with a zooming-out sequence, we see that this is indeed a mark over an eye, but in this case, a left eye, and the "eye" that we saw in the original picture was a reflection in this eye, therefore also being a left eye. While book five was specifically about symmetry, there is, of course, a symmetry to the whole series; the reversal to a left eye may allude to the fact that we are now past the midpoint of the overall story, and what follows reflects back on what came before (see comments on page 4 below). This scene being viewed through the goggles of Dan's Nite Owl costume introduces the theme of this chapter, not often stated outright: Dan feels as though his Nite Owl persona (symbolized by his continually watching costume) is somehow living and calling out to him. The whole of this chapter seems to revolve around the idea of (to borrow a phrase from Superman) "mild-mannered" Dan Dreiberg, a guy who is really pretty much as boring as he fears himself to be. And yet within Dan is the possibility of transforming into Nite Owl if he would just "...blow away the cobwebs." Many things in this chapter remind me of Frank Miller's Return of the Dark Knight.

Page 1: Clearly, Dan hasn't even touched any of this stuff in a long time until today.

Page 2, panel 7: Dan and his dusty old "jalopy" may seem sort of cute, but there's power there that one might never suspect.

Page 4, panel 8: "Looking back..."

Page 4, panel 9: "...hindsight...on reflection." Aside from these words describing the scene, they also hint at the theme of the costume watching over his shoulder.

Page 6, panel 1: The Comedian and Laurie have a few things in common, eh?

Page 7, panel 3: "These days it hardly bothers me at all." ...as the suit looks on once again.

Page 8, panel 5: "...I sort of regretted the Crimebusters falling through..." I've noticed that many people who comment on Watchmen talk about which heroes were members of the Crimebusters, but as far as I read it, that superhero team never came to be, having only that one short meeting.

Page 8, panel 8: "Is there any other sort?" Dan knows costumed adventurers are all a little off in the head.

Page 9, panel 9: "...everything was as clear as day." Surely Rorschach feels the same way about his "face", without the night vision.

Page 10, panel 4: Dan is clearly very lonely himself. Loneliness is actually a major underlying theme to Watchmen, as all of the characters are profoundly alone; here we see even Laurie felt alone when she was with Jon, and they were the only superheroes that didn't live by themselves.

Page 10, panel 9: "These days, I feel like something's watching my every move..." To me, this panel is the central theme of the chapter.

Page 12, panel 3: Chronologically, this chapter happens before most of the events of the previous chapter.

Page 13: On the next three pages, the television narrates what's going on, sometimes with ironic contrast.

Page 18, panel 3: A yellow circle with...oh you get it.

Page 18, panel 4: Dan's owl-like shadow falls on the door to his "workshop".

Page 18, panel 5: He goes down...

Page 18, panel 8: ...to his costume.

Page 19, panel 8: I don't think I need to explain this.

Page 20, panel 7: Dan and his suit look at each other...

Page 20, panel 9: ...and he puts it on.

Page 28, panel 1: They're both going back to old habits, apparently. (Note that "habit" is a word with multiple meanings, one actually being "costume".)

Page 28, panel 4: "...to come out of the closet." both figuratively and literally. The last six panels are a zoom out from the partially-obscured eye of the costume...

Page 28, panel 9: ...to the partially-obscured eye of the Owlship. Laurie was probably talking about sex, but Dan was talking about the thrill of adventuring in itself. Nite Owl is back.

Page 29: "Blood from the Shoulder of Pallas" by Dan Dreiberg. In the movie "Batman Begins", Bruce Wayne says of choosing a bat as his symbol, "Bats frighten me. It's time my enemies shared my fear." Here we see a bit of Dan Dreiberg's view of owls, and their relationship to their prey. Like an owl, his ship comes in with a screech and paralyzes his prey, and he sees Nite Owl as a dangerous predator. Also note that in the story he is telling, he has just left visiting Mothman ("a sick acquaintance at a hospital in Maine"), and perhaps he thus fears something else as well.

Watchmen Chapter VI: "The Abyss Gazes Also"

Spoiler warning: If you have not read Watchmen, do not read these notes. See intro/disclaimer.

Cover: The cover of this chapter is a Rorschach blot that does indeed, as Rorschach himself claims, look like a butterfly; so much so that most people probably would say so as their first impression. The dead dog that Rorschach actually sees is however also an incredibly strong resemblance. The point of this chapter is in many ways embodied in this ink blot, as the lesson in the end is that reality is whatever you make of it when "staring at it for too long", and yet in a way, it's just blobs of ink. Of course the fact that Rorschach tests are being given to a guy named Rorschach is an irony lost on nobody except for perhaps Malcolm Long. This inkblot will be seen again on page 6 of chapter XII.

Page 1, panel 1: One might wonder why, if Malcolm is trying to help Walter disassociate himself from his fantasy Rorschach personality, he would have chosen this particular test.

Page 1, panel 3: Note nothing on the table but a couple notebooks; this will change.

Page 1, panel 6: Rorschach has been injured by his left eye. This is the reverse of the standard imagery, but then isn't Rorschach a reflection of society?

Page 1, panel 8: After being deprived of his "face" and beaten by the cops, Rorschach's face is far from symmetrical.

Page 1, panel 9: Malcolm is either stupid, overly-optimistic, or some combination of both. One meeting and a few inkblots and "I really think he might be getting better."?

Page 3, panel 2: This is the first of a handful of Rorschach's flashbacks, all of which are highly unpleasant.

Page 4, panel 5: Young Walter thought his mother needed rescuing.

Page 4, panel 8: Note the similarities both visually and in "dialogue" to 3.2.

Page 6, panel 6: Rorschach's second childhood flashback. Perhaps this vignette establishes his need to see justice?

Page 6, panel 9: In the notes at the back of the chapter, it is said that others assumed this was an unprovoked attack, as Walter apparently never explained that he was insulted and assaulted.

Page 7, panel 4: Even as a child, he improvised weapons on the spot.

Page 9, panel 2: Second session; Malcolm has brought a bottle of pain medication.

Page 10, panel 1: Walter had to work making women's clothing.

Page 10, panel 2: Dr. Manhattan even had an indirect role in helping create Rorschach.

Page 10, panel 3: Of course Rorschach would like the dress, he hates shades of gray.

Page 10, panel 6: The infamous Kitty Genovese incident really happened, and in our world as well...

Page 11, panel 8: ...but Malcolm thinks Rorschach made it up.

Page 11, panel 9: The theme ink blot again.

Page 13, panel 2: Malcolm's desk: two bottles of pain reliever. Note Veidt logo on this as just about everything.

Page 14, panel 1: Now three bottles.

Page 14, panel 9: "You have friends?" Very sensitive, Malcolm.

Page 15, panel 4: That clock again.

Page 16, panel 5: We'll see this panel again. Coincidences seem to abound at this location.

Page 16, panel 6: The graffiti lovers are a sort of Rorschach test themselves. When Rorschach saw them in the previous chapter, he thought of ghosts. Malcolm sees them and thinks of Hiroshima.

Page 16, panel 7: Another clock at five to midnight.

Page 18, panel 2: Most likely, Walter's "personal reasons" were that it made him think of himself as a child?

Page 18, panel 4: Rorschach's second and final defining moment also takes place at a dressmaker's.

Page 20, panel 9: Rorschach's "shocked face" for the first time chronologically, but the last time in the book.

Page 21, panel 9: "Dark" in every sense.

Page 24, panel 4: Different shape for this bloodstain, but notable anyway.

Page 26: Rorschach's personal, nihilistic philosophy; and yet he seeks justice in the midst of meaninglessness.

Page 27, panel 7: So-called "good people" sometimes wink at evil, don't they?

Page 28: In the end, Malcolm seems to have accepted Rorschach's philosophy, rather than the other way around.

Page 29: The Kovacs casefile. Note that Walter didn't think much of his mother, and so formed a complex fantasy about his father that he never met. The picture from his dream is a bit of "fearful symmetry".

Watchmen Chapter V: "Fearful Symmetry"

Spoiler warning: If you have not read Watchmen, do not read these notes. See intro/disclaimer.

Cover: Reflection in a puddle of the symmetric sign of the Rumrunner. Rorschach's hat is also reflected near the top; apparently this is the same moment as the first panel, from a different angle.

Page 1, panel 1: Chapter V has all of its panels (with very minor exceptions) laid out in a symmetrical pattern from front to back both visually and thematically, i.e. page 1 mirrors page 28, 2 mirrors 27, etc. The blinking neon light of the Rumrunner creates further visual symmetry in those pages in and near Moloch's apartment.

Page 2, panel 5: Moloch is left-handed.

Page 6, panel 3: The corner of fortieth and seventh is the focal point of all the New York action in Watchmen. The Utopia Theater, behind which Dan and Laurie were mugged, the Gunga Diner where they (and Rorschach) have lunch that day, the Promethian Cab Company, where Joey works, and The Institute for Extraspatial Studies, where the newsvendor has his kiosk.

Page 7, panel 1: Spot of blood over Buddha's right eye.

Page 7, panel 6: Grateful Dead poster on wall has a couple points of significance. Obviously, the father thought his family would be better off dead. Also, the poster is symmetrical with a skull and crossbones and represents the cover of an album with a palindromic title, "Aoxomoxoa".

Page 8, panel 1: The splash of water and triangle on the side of the Pyramid Delivery truck is a mirror image to the poster just seen. The boxes on this page are from part two of "Marooned", and of course form a parallel narration to the dialogue.

Page 8, panel 2: This driver is later revealed to have ordered the hit on Adrian. By now, he's already dropped off the message.

Page 8, panel 4: "...where's there to split to?" Well, two characters have found someplace else to go; Jon to Mars, and Adrian to Antarctica.

Page 9, panel 1: Now we get to the grisly focus of "Marooned", which parallels the revelation of the plot in the end: The protagonist has decided the solution to saving the world he knows is to literally rest on the bodies of those sacrificed to the horror from which he hopes to save others.

Page 10, panel 1: Dan's facial expression and activities mimic the previous frame. Also, in the theme of symmetry, note that most of this scene is viewed in a mirror.

Page 11, panel 1: Rorschach's watch, *not* at midnight. Rorschach knows time is running out, but he doesn't realize how immediate his own danger is.

Page 11, panel 4: Actually, once we get to know her, it turns out that Rorschach's landlady is a lot like his mother.

Page 12, panel 1: Note knothead kicking a can into the trash. This is the exact same moment as the previous panel.

Page 12, panel 5: In the background, we see the doomsday prophet come out of the diner where Rorschach was just having coffee...

Page 12, panel 9: ...and dig in the trash, Rorschach's "drop".

Page 13, panel 1: The central story arc concerning Adrian starts with a shot of a 'V' cufflink reflected in the polished desk, making an 'X'.

Page 13, panel 3: Adrian's assistant doesn't think it's worth thinking about death. She will soon reevaluate.

Page 13, panel 7: "Spiritual discovery..."

Page 13, panel 8: "Oh, God."

Page 14, panel 4: The composition of this panel along with its mate on the facing page is quite striking. There is a giant 'V' on the wall behind the action, symmetric and, of course, the letter of this chapter. If Adrian and the assassin were not in the foreground, no doubt it would reflect in the water, making an 'X', which is horizontally, vertically and rotationally symmetrical. As it is, however, there is a suggestion of an 'X' made by the foreground figures. At the endpoints of the 'X', there are three faces and a gun: The Egyptian head symbolizing death, the gun being an instrument of death, and Adrian and the assassin representing a murderer and his target--yet which is which? Even without the underlying knowledge of where the story is heading, the immediate truth is that the apparent roles have been reversed.

Page 16, panel 4: But of course, this is a lie, isn't it? After all, Adrian already knows.

Page 16, panel 8: "Tell them I don't have any enemies." This statement is doubly-ironic: on the face of it, it would seem obvious that he does have enemies, and he's being facetious; of course in reality, his statement is completely true, because all of his enemies are dead. Note the 'V' reflected in the polished floor, making an 'X' and echoing the image from 13.1.

Page 17, panel 1: Once again, an 'X', creating a mimicking of both the visual appearance and the dialogue of the last panel. While the dialogue of Watchmen and narrative panels of "Marooned" mimic each other, they also may be said to narrate Rorschach's current situation, as the doomsday prophet moves through the background.

Page 17, panel 8: "I bet there's all kinda stuff we never notice..." like the guy digging through the trashcan again? I certainly didn't notice it the first time I read this chapter.

Page 18, panel 1: The slant on the handwriting appears to have been written by a left-handed person, but of course, it's almost certainly a forgery. Adrian knows Rorschach is a keen detective.

Page 18, panel 2: "Things to Come" is a movie about a world war that essentially destroys mankind.

Page 18, panel 6: "...spotless gloves"? We must assume he's speaking metaphorically.

Page 18, panel 7: This panel is opposite 11.3, which is virtually identical, but represents the reverse action.

Page 19, panel 1: Like page 10, this is a conversation between Laurie and Dan viewed mostly in a mirror. The poses in the first four panels mimic in reverse order and a reversal of characters the poses in the last four panels on that page.

Page 20, panel 1: The dead body in this panel mimics the position of Dan in the previous.

Page 20, panel 6: The shark has been stabbed in the right eye.

Page 21, panel 7: Is "inversion of natural roles" a commentary on homosexuality? The protagonist of "Marooned" here eats "raw shark", get it? The appearance of the shark here becomes very suggestive of the button-with blood spot motif.

Page 21, panel 8: The poster very strikingly mimics the panel from "Marooned".

Page 22, panel 1: The positions of the characters and the poster mimic the previous panel, as does the dialogue.

Page 22, panel 4: "It's like there's a pattern..."

Page 22, panel 6: Blake's case number is not just a palindrome, it's completely symmetric.

Page 22, panel 7: "Raw shark" get it? Ha, ha, ha.

Page 23, panel 1: Rorschach is "ignoring some red lights"(22.9) like "an omen of doom"(7.5).

Page 24, panel 5: Here's that look again (see I.8.2).

Page 25, panel 2: Rorschach leaves the gun...

Page 25, panel 4: ...but improvises other weapons from pepper,...

Page 25, panel 6: ...hairspray...

Page 25, panel 7: ...and matches.

Page 26, panel 3: "Tygers"? This is hinting back to the chapter's quote.

Page 27, panel 6: This panel is framed like its opposite, 2.6.

Page 28, panel 6: Dan's aftershave bottle breaks in the fall.

Page 28, panel 9: Final panel mimics the cover page, with the sign reflected in the puddle, and Rorschach's hat at the top.

Page 29: "A Man of Fifteen Dead Men's Chests" from Treasure Island Treasury of Comics The article talks about many things, including how the government came to the defense of comics publishers because of their own real-life comic book heroes. Note that in our world, EC was nearly destroyed in a similar bit of history.

Watchmen Chapter IV: "Watchmaker"

Spoiler warning: If you have not read Watchmen, do not read these notes. See intro/disclaimer.

Cover: Picture of Jon before becoming Dr. Manhattan. This chapter takes a big departure from linear storytelling in order to give a sense of the way Jon's mind works. Like a comic book, Jon sees his own life as a series of still pictures.

Page 1, panel 1: Note that throughout the chapter, Jon's narration is always in present tense. No matter what time period he's thinking about, all times are now to Jon. The photograph is already in the sand, but it's still in the bar, too, and the couple is still at the amusement park.

Page 3, panel 8: This shot is from the last panel of this chapter.

Page 4, panel 3: Jon can't figure out women, either. "Well, I guess he's just human, like everybody else."

Page 5, panel 5: Even after becoming Dr. Manhattan, Jon is clearly a fatalist, with seemingly little control over his own actions.

Page 6, panel 5: A "fat man" steps on the watch: "Fat Man" was the nickname given to the second bomb dropped on Japan.

Page 6, panel 7: A slow zoom in on the watch shows us the time it was broken...

Page 6, panel 9: 8:16. See 24.7.

Page 9, panel 7: Jon is putting himself together like a watch.

Page 11, panel 2: Actually, all elements heavier than iron come from supernovas.

Page 12, panel 7: Dr. Manhattan was of course named after the "Manhattan Project", the group which created the atomic bomb.

Page 13, panel 2: Although Jon can do pretty much anything, everything he's shown doing is militaristic in nature. The government is trying to send a message to Russia.

Page 13, panel 6: Nelson doesn't look pleased, does he?

Page 14, panel 1: Remember, at first, Jon wasn't a "superhero"; this event leads him that way, by other people's decisions.

Page 14, panel 2: As Dr. Manhattan, Jon seems to have become completely disconnected from the concept of morality.

Page 14, panel 3: As he meets JFK for the first time, he's already seeing the assassination.

Page 15, panel 4: More of Hollis' naïve optimism.

Page 15, panel 7: Hollis has just realized that Jon has made him obsolete not only as a superhero, but as a mechanic. Perhaps even as a human being.

Page 16, panel 2: Jon explains his fatalistic reality to Janey.

Page 16, panel 3: The print on the wall is "The Persistence of Memory", depicting melting clocks on an abstract landscape.

Page 16, panel 4: "Sometimes I think you're messing everything up!" Essentially, that's what Dr. Glass is suggesting in his essay at the end of the chapter.

Page 17, panel 2: Jon is completely disinterested in the Crimebusters, but very interested in Laurie. Could it partially be because he knows which of them has a future for him?

Page 19, panel 3: If Wally Weaver died of cancer in 1971, that means Adrian was planning his move for over 15 years.

Page 19, panel 4: The woman with Eddie is the same woman from the flashback in chapter II. VVN is only three months away, so she is already pregnant.

Page 20, panel 1: Once again, Jon as the personified A-bomb.

Page 20, panel 4: "I no longer wish to look at dead things." Everyone in the rest of the flashbacks in this chapter is still alive in 1985.

Page 21, panel 1: While the world is too interested in Nixon to notice Adrian, the reader might have the reverse problem. Before the Keene Act is passed, Adrian gets out of the superhero business, while Nixon overturns the 22nd Amendment to stay in the President business.

Page 21, panel 2: What sort of person wants to live in some sort of fortress of solitude in the arctic?

Page 21, panel 3: Bubastis is the name of the capital city of the religion of Bast, the Egyptian cat-goddess.

Page 21, panel 6: Is this a moment of self-doubt?

Page 22, panel 6: Another impressive display of Jon's powers. Also Jon shows that he's capable of conceptualizing utilitarian morality.

Page 23, panel 6: This is presumably the second of three murders Rorschach is charged with later.

Page 24, panel 3: The structure that Jon makes is, to his point of view, intrinsic to the sand from which he forms it. See note on 28.1.

Page 24, panel 4: Another clock in the background near twelve. The Comedian's picture is on the cover of the New Frontiersman.

Page 24, panel 7: Watch shows 8:16, same time as shown on Janey's broken watch. Both watches were broken by a "fat man". (See note on 6.5.)

Page 25, panel 1: From here forward, the short flashbacks are a review of what we've seen in the story so far.

Page 25, panel 2: Jon may be Godlike, but he's not omniscient.

Page 27: This structure is a mass of gears and hourglass shapes, and in chapter IX when we see it from above, we will see that it is shaped like a clock.

Page 28, panel 1: Jon does not consider himself to have made this structure, since it was already there in the future.

Page 29: Dr. Manhattan: Super-powers and the Superpowers by Dr. Milton Glass. Dr. Glass suggests that rather than being a deterrent to nuclear war, Dr. Manhattan's presence is encouraging escalation of Russian hostility.