So I got a table for “Friends of Cerebus” so we could sell some CEREBUS THE NEWSLETTERs, that and it is nice to have a table to call home base though out the show. Last year Jeff S got a table for CRIC (Cerebus Readers in Crisis) which was right beside Steve Peters of Awakening Comics. It was a great place to sit and relax and occasionally shoot the shit with Steve.

Friends of Cerebus, which will consist of Jeff T and myself, will be sitting at table #133:

SPACE 2010 floor plan

So after I restored my blog the other day, something goofy happened: the blog entries with a tag of ‘cerebus’ had the tag removed.  It sounds like a project for the next long weekend: going through the 750+ blog entries and retagging them. . .oy. I only tag this one with Cerebus so y’all know what is going on if you try to sort the entries by this tag.

So after a couple hours of messing around with mysql databases and reinstalling wordpress, the CFG blog has been restored. wOOt! I’m sooooo happy I managed to restore it. The first thing I did after I changed my automatically created password – created a back up of my wordpress blog using the blog’s interface. that should save me some headache next time I have to do a restore. . .

Now all I have to do is tweak the current theme as I lost the old theme in the upgrade to the latest wp software.

weeeeeee!

So Facebook is really acting up on me. So much that I logged out of it, cleared the cookies for it and relaunched firefox. I tried to log back into facebook and this is what it told me:

Account Unavailable
Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

uh-huh.

So I keep refreshing and trying to log on, after a couple times I get this instead of the above:

So now I’ve got to log in to see the log in page? Jackasses.

And when I do manage to log in – FaceBook thinks I’m new. As my friends list has totally been wiped out, at times my wall is totally blank with nothing in it ~ not even my status updates, even ones I somehow manage to just post:

and when I try to post status updates? It tells me I need to be logged on to do that – but you can plainly see that I’m logged in:

What the hell Facebook? I know your service is free – but I’ve still got to look at the ads, so while I don’t pay for it, you are ad supported, you should be able to afford some level of quality to your site. I’ve reported it twice now. Once I got a form email back. The next, nothing. What the heck.

So me and a friend took off this past Monday to go to the New England Patriots training camp. I may not be able to get tickets to a game at reasonable prices, but I can sure afford the ‘free’ tag on training camp admittance and parking. So we headed over to Gillette Stadium for the 9:30 am practice. The parking lot wasn’t crowded that badly – plenty of cars already there, but still tons of room to park and not that far from the fields.

The practice fields are right by the stadium, just to the east of it. Walking up to them, there are two full size football fields with field goal posts. There are bleachers to that run along the long side of one of the fields, and a grassy slope on the other side of the fields closest to the stadium – also on that side were bleachers that were for friends and family of the team. The other two sides of the field were not open to the public.

Morning practice was in full pads and uniforms. The red jerseys being the quarterbacks, the white jerseys being offense and the blue jerseys are defense. I don’t know all the different things they ran though, but when the quarterbacks all lined up and the receivers and running backs did some different routes, there were a lot of balls in the air. Here Brady airs one out to Joey Galloway who is in front of Kevin Faulk:

Brady was moving around like his knee was all good. It was nice to see. I can’t wait to see him take some snaps in a real game at full speed, but watching him move around in practice did give me some confidence for the up coming season. They did some defense vs offense drills as well:

There is a period count down clock in the corner of the fields where the grassy slope side meets up with the side with the bleachers, where the people who want to watch walk up to the fields. After 11 periods of differing time frames, the morning practice ended and everyone was cleared out.

We headed out and grabbed some ice cream at the baskin robbins in the Patriot Place mall. We then walked around the Bass Pro Shops, and after some lunch at a restaurant on route 1, we headed back for afternoon practice.

More series of drills and scrimmages, and the guys were only in shorts and a different set of pads, as they didn’t appear as “bulky” as they did in morning practice:

It was a fun time watching the guys run around and toss the ball back and forth. Since it was free, it was totally worth sitting in the hot sun and watching them practice. Now only if their games were reasonably priced. . .or at least tickets would be obtainable at face value.

So with the confluence of Facebook, Twitter, this blog, et al, it seems as there is a lot of redundancy.

The tweets were posted in my blog so I’d be able to download them along with the blog to save on the hard drive, but now with Tabbloid, I can just get a pdf of my tweets and my blog together, so I’ve taken my tweets off the blog. As facebook updates and tweeting becoming to similar for some, with there even being web applications for updating both at the same time, I’ve grown to wonder at the use of twitter. . .but to me twitter is the one that is for the constant updating of how ever often you want, and facebook updating is the once or twice a day thing. . .I think of twitter as more a stream of consciousness and facebook as giving your friends a shoutout of what you’re up to that day.  Twitter being more random, a place to put miscellaneous thoughts before the fly away and facebook as a place to share things you think are cool / interesting with you closest 50+ friends. Heh.

That being said, I’ve taken my blog postings off my facebook “wall” – the blog here is open to the public so to speak, and the url is listed in my facebook profile, if they’re interested enough to read it, the know where to find it.

***

I’ve been doing some “motivational” posters with  a Cerebus theme to them. A couple of my favorites thus far:

Ahh, fun stuff.

One of those list memes from Facebook. . .rather then just do a “note” there that won’t get seen here, I’ll put it here and let Facebook grab it from the blog’s RSS feed.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you have read more than once.
3) Tally your total at the bottom.

I’ve even added comments ’cause some of these selections makes me wonder about the sanity of the person selecting them for the list. . .
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (augh. really? gah.)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (not that nerdy)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (Gah, more “chick flick” books. gah!)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee +
6 The Bible (does halfway through Psalms count?)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (gah! what the hell? Austen? Brone? another Bronte? augh!)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell +
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (huh?)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (ewww. She ranks up there with Austen and the Brontes)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller +
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (some, but not all)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (huh?)
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger +
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger X (loved it!)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams +
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll +
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame +
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis +
34 Emma – Jane Austen (gah!)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (who the frak has a love affair with Jane Austen?)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe +
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell +
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery +
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (does it count if it is on my Amazon wish list?)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding +
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert +
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (WTFS?)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley +
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White +
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare x (why have the complete works of & then this separate entry? idiots)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl +
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

And I reiterate my thought: #25 should be at #42. . .

So yesterday I went over my brother’s place for a (couple days late) B-day party. My sister’s family came up from Jersey, and with Dad there, we left the little one with him and went to Providence to play some paint ball. My brother had  done it before and kind of knew what to expect, none of the rest of us had.

Before we paid we had to sign this liability release waiver that  was on par with the one I signed to go skydiving. The only thing that the paintball place left off that the skydiving one had was ‘death.’ Though who knew you could potentially be fully paralyzed by playing paintball. Only later would I find out why they put this on the release form.

For $32 you got rental equipment: a facemask/goggle combo, chest/back “protection” and a paintball gun with 200 rounds. The  chest/back protection was more of a cloth guard to protect whatever shirt you were wearing from the paint ball and perhaps a little from the sting of the paintball. The guy who handed us our equipment gave us a quick round down of the rules ~ keep the muzzle cover on until told to take it off, no blind shooting – meh. the guys on the other team had no qualms about doing this – and keeping your facemask on while in the “arena”.

For the paintball gun he went over the safety and the muzzle cover, and that was it. I asked about the bolt that I saw on it, and he said if the gun jammed you could pull that back. Okay. Nothing about the air pressure (CO2? it was set at approximately 50 psi) or the arc that I would find out was the trajectory of the paintball. My sister wanted to know if there was a sniper perch that she could safely sit in and just pick us of from. And she wasn’t the one in the Army.

We took our gear and went out into the area where the other players were at – there was an area with some tables so you could stage your gear, rest up and get your gear ready for the next round. There were two indoor arenas, we didn’t go to the outdoor one as it was not in use that day. Once I walked on the concrete floor I realized why they had put the disclaimer for possible full paralysis on the the waiver: the floors were slippy as hell. In fact, I had noticed that my chest/back “protection” was kind slimy, but when I went to get another one, that one was the same too, so I didn’t bother. Everything had a thin coat of something on it. It didn’t smell like any solvent I was used to smelling – and I’ve smelled a lot of chemicals in my short life so far – I couldn’t quite place this smell or the sliminess of it.

The big arena wasn’t in use, so the five of us went down there and split into two teams. As soon as the ref yelled “go” I tried to hide behind one of the giant inflatable shapes that served as cover. I peeked above it to see where the other team was, and got slammed in the cheek with a paintball. Augh! I raised my hand and yelled out. The paintball had gone thru the slits in the mask had covered my cheek. It didn’t hurt with the mask, but the goo was slimy. As the matches progressed, I found myself reverting more and more to my Army training. Finally, after 14 years of being out of active duty, I had found a usage for it.

Our little squad of five usually played each other in different combos, but for a few games we played some other teams. One team was three guys who must have been mid to late 20s. Our power play of 5 on 3 quickly dismissed them. Feeling heady on such a lopsided victory we agreed to take on another team of 5 guys. Big mistake as they wiped us out quickly and we only had one confirmed “kill” on their team.

One of our crew asked one of the refs what the slime was that was all over the place. The ref stated it was from the stuff used to clean up the paint from the paintballs. So I can only assume that any indoor paintball arena will have the same coating of slime on it. Ewww!

Overall, the paintball was a lot of fun – though next time I’d like to get more then 200 balls. I had to go out twice in the middle of a game ’cause I ran out of paintballs. I felt like the guy from the movie Wanted: part of the time I kept trying to get my balls to arc around the inflatable plastic shapes to hit the other team – you could see the paintball arcing in mid flight, a little irritating when you are trying to shoot someone with it. I’d also be great to have four people on each team that you know to play with, and to have an area that would be at least twice the size of the “large” arena at this place. But it was fun, and I definately do it again – though I’d bring a change of clothes next time, and a pair of gloves that I wouldn’t care about getting paint on. I didn’t find any welts on me, but my brother’s wife was bleeding where a paint ball hit her hand that she was using to hold the front grip of the paintball gun.

So this past weekend Jeff T from the Art of Dave Sim site and myself went down to New York for the annual comic book convention held at the Javits Center.  We headed down on Friday morning and made it to Queens about 12:30 or so. After parking the car at a friend’s place and taking the LIRR to Penn Station, we met up with L^enny to make our mod-trio complete.

We walked right into the con, no line, and the volume of people there was moderate. I bumped into Nate just long enough to say hi and be told by his friend that it wasn’t Nate (a like-a-look perhaps?). L^enny went to meet up with his podcasting buddies, and Jeff and I headed off to find the coat check. One con helper would say go down that a way, and we would get there to find an empty coat check with a sign that said closed. We get to another one halfway down Javits Center to find that one was closed also. We entered the con floor and asked someone and they stated go back were we came from in the first place – just one level lower. So after 15 minutes of searching we finally found the only open coat check, which of course, had a line.

After standing in line, we went upstairs so I could meet up with Adam Koford and get a copy of his latest book “The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out“, which he was also signing. Then we realized it was time for the premiere of the Futurama movie “Into The Wild Green Yonder“. The movie was pretty funny, though the plot (ancient races at war and only Fry can save us), has been done before in Futurama (can someone say ‘Giant Brains’?). The movie was shown at the “IGN Theater” at the Javits Center, which appeared to be the biggest room that NYCC had for panels and whatnot, which is why I think they put it there – not that it was a real theater. I only say that because they continuously had problems with the projector for the left side of the room. The projector on the right side was fine, but the left one kept having ‘sync’ing problems and two mirror images, one red and one green would appear on the screen, which would then go black as the techs tried to fix it. whatever was wrong with it kept reoccurring, gah!

We met up with  L^enny and his friend Bruce after the movie and then proceeded to stand in a huge line for the coat check that wrapped around the downstairs floor a couple times. When we were getting up to the first turn in the line, some con guy was telling us that this was the line for white ticket holders only, and anyone with a yellow ticket should go to the other line. There was another line? Yellow and white tickets? There was no organization to this mess. Jeff looked at his ticket: white. Whew! Our line ended up a lot shorter and within 2 minutes we were at the front, we had pretty much skipped the entire line, it was great – for once luck favored us.

One taxi ride later  we were at Rub, for some excellent bar-b-que. It is a first come, first served place with not much room. So while couple were arriving after us and being seated before us, our little foursome had to wait more then the promised 20 minutes for a table.  But it was well worth it – the appetizers were amazing – we had the hush puppies (like a RI clam cake, but with no clams and some bits of onion and potato, very tasty), buffalo wings and bar-b-que chili cheese fries. . .ohmygawd those were some of the best wings I’ve ever had, and the fries? So very very tasty. I could’ve just had more appetizers and been very happy. . .but then the meat came. And it was a lot of meat: 1 full rack of short ribs, 1 full rack of long ribs, 1 full rack of baby back ribs and a three meat tray of pulled pork, brisket (dry) and hot spicy sausage (they were all out of burnt ends or we would’ve gotten that instead). Very tasty meat, ‘specially the baby back ribs. Yummy!

Another cab ride back to Penn station and we were back on the LIRR to Queens where Mark was awaiting us. The next day Jeff and myself dressed up in our Venture Bros costumes and hide our shame with our coats. Actually, it was just cold, and there was no way I was going to freeze my tookus off to look cool at the con when there was a coat check where we could dump our stuff off. Our first stop on Saturday was a Marvel panel that the guys wanted to see and I said what the hey. Sitting at the panel in VB garb was just fun in itself. ‘Specially when a woman dressed up as Black Cat sat right beside Jeff. What a trio we would’ve made. Almost as good as this JLA version that will never happen:

That is a Harley Quinn, me as Henchman #42, Superman and Wonder Woman. Walking around the con on Saturday, I had as much fun getting my picture taken in costume as I did getting my picture taken with the different cos players there.  Like the 501st Legion people that were there:

And of course the other Venture Brothers cos players out there, we saw at least 2 Monarchs (possibly 3, one was on the floor and the other two in line for VB panel) and 2 Dr Mrs The Monarchs, a Dr Girlfriend, a female Dr Killinger, a Speedy, a Molotov Cocktease and a female Dean and Hank.

During our wandering around Jeff and myself met up with Nate and talked about Cerebus stuff and what goodies we had found at the con thus far. Nate mentioned a piece of original art from Cerebus #11 which had been colored but no one at the booth selling it knew who had colored it in. After hanging for a while, Nate parted ways and Jeff and myself walked around the con floor just taking it all in.

About 5pm or so we made our way downstairs to the panel room for the Venture Brothers panel. I had looked at the con website and it stated panel room 1A08 or something that ended in 08. Umm. So I wondered why the big line was for panel room 3, so Jeff said just to ask one of the 4 people sitting at the info booth. So I walked up and looked at them – one on the end was talking with some woman, and the other three were just looking at the woman. I stood there and realized I had none of their attention, even in costume. Umm. So I said ‘Excuse me, which room is the Venture Brothers panel in?’ No response. So I repeated my question. Still no response, so I muttered something under my breath and basically yelled ‘Excuse me.’ That got their attention – not all 4 have to be focused on that one woman, someone could have answered my question. I asked it again and got a very terse A3.  Nice lack of customer service NYCC.

So we walked up to panel room 3′s line, which was snaking around on itself about 3 times, and basically looked like a huge mess. No sign that said ‘End of Line starts here’, no rope or anything to mark off the different sections of the line, or the line from folks not yet in the line – how many times did people walk up and think they were at the end of the line only to be told: the end of the line is waaaaaay back there not were you just busted in on. To top it off, there were rumors going around the line that the panel had been moved up to 6:15 or 6:30, no one was quite sure. When we were finally let in, we noticed that the 5:30 panel had been canceled, so I asked the guy at the door and he stated no, the panel was still at 6:45. So we waited in line for about an hour, and then waited in the room for another hour or so. Meanwhile, the room was crazy fun: female Hank and Dean were running around, I’d stand up and wave my fist and say ‘We’re going to get you’ and they’d run around the other side of the room. A Dr Mrs The Monarch would stand up on her chair and shake her tookus at the room, then she (or perhaps another one, they looked alike), walked up to the teevee camera and made a smoochy face at the room on the huge screen. It was good times.

Finally Doc, Jackson and Mike showed up. They had some deleted scenes from the soon to be released DVD to show and then took questions. After the panel they were going to sign autographs for an hour – and to get the most autographs done they were going to just sit there an sign and people got up row by row. . .we hung around for 10 minutes to watch the progression: which was very slow. So we just said the heck with it and took off. We met up with Mark, got our jackets and took off for Penn station.

On Sunday Mark had a previous  engagement so we took off by ourselves again on the LIRR. A chocolate croissant and freshly squeezed OJ later and we were at the con again. We dug around in comics back issue boxes for quite some time, finally my growling stomach must’ve stop Jeff, who asked if it was time for fried doughy goodness and drinks. When we were snacking, Jeff looked at the clock: 4pm! Yoinks! So we made our way over to the Albert Moy booth where the piece of original art was that Nate told us about. Jeff looked at it and noticed that Dave’s signature was on top of the coloring, making it appear as if Dave had signed it after it was colored. Jeff also thought it was Dave’s coloring as it wasn’t reminiscent of Gerhard’s style:

Jeff asked how much and he stated $500. Jeff told him he’d think about it and be back later, and we went to stroll around Artist’s Alley looking for Jim Shooter or Mike Dawson. We saw neither, but instead saw Peter David (I finally got to shake his hand and thank him for all his great work that I’ve enjoyed over the years), Collen Doran (picked up Orbiter finally, I don’t know why I never got around to that as Colleen’s art & Warren Ellis’ writing = epic win), we saw the Simonsons, Walter and Louise – I wanted to stop and thank them as well, but Walter was being interviewed and Louise was busy talking to someone else – that and they already had a crowd around their table, we also saw the crowd around Bill Sienkiewicz and Kevin Nolan’s table, we stopped by Bob Burden’s table and we each picked up a copy of the signed limited edition Flaming Carrot Comics Limited Hardback Edition #1.

Before we knew it, they had turned off some lights, then turned off some more, and it just kept getting darker and darker, and I had spent all my money anyways and Jeff didn’t see the place that had the other comic he was thinking of getting – so we took off back to Penn station again.  When we got back to Mark’s place, neither him nor his wife was at home, so Jeff gave him a hollar on the cell and we took back off home again.

Overall, the con was a good time – just a bit . . .unorganized. The con organizers should go to SDCC as just “regular joes” and then go to their con as regular joes – trying to make sense of mess of what passes for lines, trying to get in panel rooms that people are trying to exit: through the same doors, being led astray with misinformation looking for the only open coat check, more messes of lines with the coat check, and some of the con volunteers being less then pleasant to deal with. . .But other then that, it was a good time.

• Why does the new couple above me insist on doing jumping jacks at 9:52, blasting their teevee at 10:09pm and doing other loud activities so late at night?
• Why can’t people learn to use a turn signal? Learn to merge properly? Learn to pay attention while driving to what they should be doing: driving?
• How cute is it that my nephew tried to grab my tattoos thinking it was something on my leg that he could remove?
• Trying to determine her sincerity is straining my patience. Why.
• It was still light out when I left work this evening. Spring is coming! It better be, as these cold snowy days are making me long for motorcycle riding weather.
• Really, how hard would it have been you lazy shit?
• Why include it in one paragraph and not another? “It was left out unintentionally.” Really. Umm. So any plans to include it next time?
• ::sigh::