W O R D S 1

The newest issue of StormWatch: Team Achilles was pretty good. It was written by Micah Ian Wright, or is it Ian Micah Wright? I already forgot after walking to the bedroom to check. Oh well, that's what you get for having 3 names if you ask me. Unless you're Sarah Michelle Gellar. Thank you can have three names. And maybe Tiffany Amber Thiessen, which was my bowling name for one night.

There was some bad parts to the book, like the fact that I couldn't tell whether this U.N. official was male or female and whether or not he or she was afraid of Colonel Santini or not because the artist couldn't quite depict the emotions on his/her face very clearly. But I'm mostly talking about the writing anyway.

The story relates very much to the critically acclaimed DaVinci Code, which you know was one of the books we read on the Hipster Book Forum. It features the Priory of Sion and also the Knights of Malta (which, according to this book, are the polar opposite knights from the Knights Templar). The twist though, is that we are introduced to a Merovingian, a descendant of Christ, and he's got all of Christ's miraculous powers - or claims to. At the end of the issue, Colonel Santini shoots a guy in the head and tells the Merovingian to raise the dead to prove he's who he says he is. It's something of a cliffhanger and feels a little blasphemous. Good stuff.

Brian posted at 12:33 AM.

There were two interesting articles in the NY Times this weekend.

One of them was about Transgender students on college campuses and how a movement is happening to enstate dorms and bathrooms that are non-gender-specific. It was pretty good.

The other was about robots designed to help care for senior citizens, which rememinded me of a Saturday Night Live skit that was about insurance agains "prescription eating robots." Pretty funny.

Brian posted at 11:05 AM.

The cover story for this week's Reader was pretty chilling. It was entitled "Death of an Invisible Man." It was about this old man, Sterling Coleman, who lived on the south side of Chicago. He died recently from exposure. He had been living for the past for almost 12 years without heat, according to Tori Marlan, the author of the article. He was only 57 when he died, which I glossed over the first time I read it. That seems young. The description of his life was so surreal. He had almost no friends and the one interviewed for the story didn't really know him at all, it seems. The only time they spent together was going to an OTB place and even there, they'd split up. He lived of recycling cans (barely). He dressed like a bum while collecting cans to remain inconspicuous and under the radar of anyone wanting to give him trouble. It was all a very scary scene. It is amazing the way people can just sort of descend into this lonely sort of madness. His brother had died and his mother put into a home and when he lost his job at a steel mill, he pretty much immediately cancelled his heat service. It seems to me like he was a pretty selfless person who felt like he could get along without. Claude had mentioned that if the guy worked at the Steel Mill he should have gotten a pension, but I guess he might have been layed off too early or something.

There was an article about the guy who records live shows. I've seen him out for as long as I've been going to shows. It was pretty cool to read about him, even if I only found out that he records merely because he's a collector, which I guess isn't a bad thing, but he has no intention of every sharing his thousands of recordings. Kinda interesting.

Brian posted at 10:51 AM.