InDependence Days

Monday is July 4^th, the day American’s celebrate their independence from England. By my count, this makes 235 years of nationhood. So, good on us.

Seeing as we are living through an age in which national sovereignty and identity are in flux, particularly in the Gulf and/or Middle East, it seems important to discuss the concept of capital “I” Independence Day celebrations.

After all, some countries have a messy relationship with independence.

Afghanistan’s I-Day, for example, is on August 19^th. It commemorates their release from UK control in 1919. Some displaced Afghan communities also call August 19^th Afghan Refugee Day, to mark their expatriate status. I’m not certain of the history here, but it seems oddly appropriate to have the two events coincide; independence can mean both a release from foreign control and an undesirable detachment from one’s society.

Afghanistan has been experiencing foreign invasion of one kind or another since the late 1970’s, right up to current U.S occupation. Independence Day parties may well be somber events.

Here’s my question: does an Independence Day celebration occur in order to rejoice at an important but irrelevant past event, or to mark current independence, or perhaps, as a reminder of what a country is capable of

This 4^th of July, I think I’m going to forget about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, et. al, and raise a cold Sam Adams to current efforts to resurrect independence, in all its forms.

Lawler Literature: The Media on Fire

There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals. P. 58

So, the Supreme Court just recently ruled that the sale of violent video games to minors need not be restricted. Coincidentally, I just finished re-reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. For those of you who have heard rumors about the book’s contents, rather than actually skimming through it, you may be surprised to learn Bradbury’s actual stance on censorship.

He was not, after all, advocating blanket protection for all mediums, no matter their profanity, offensiveness, and insipidity. In fact, the text is staunchly against mindless entertainment. In the above passage, It is mindless entertainment that replaces good books, thus necessitating that those good books burn. The public was allowed to keep comics, confessions, and trade journals, or anything that had more spectacle than substance. (That’s not to say that I think these formats lack substance, necessarily, today. At the time F451 was written they were each a bit more concerned with visual appeal.)

The point was to keep people happy, content, and unquestioning. Deep thoughts tend to make people unhappy, restless, and prone to question the validity of, say, international warfare. And so Montag’s version of the United States is perpetually involved in global excursions, with fighter jets streaming across the sky night and day.

Sound familiar?

The Supreme Court’s ruling is not a victory. It’s a distraction. Scalia claims that a ban on violent video games is a restriction on “ideas,” which the first amendment protects. Bullshit. Violent video games aren’t ideas, they’re images. Often, they’re meant to discourage ideas, to induce thoughtlessness.

I’m not against video games. I thoroughly enjoy them, in fact. But it’s just too much to decidedly sanction an activity where young kids can watch themselves virtually beat a prostitute or ram over a pedestrian.

As the passage points out, effective censorship comes from below, not from above. Scalia and company can’t really enforce such measures, Not really. They can slap a label on an extreme game, but that’s about it. True censorship would involve forbidding the manufacture of them in the first place. I’m not endorsing that either, but simply reveling in the pointlessness of the Supreme Court’s involvement. The best action, I think, would be to introduce a wide variety of quality alternatives. Americans vote with their wallet, after all.

Comic Book Encounters: Johnny Saturn

Johnny Saturn no. 1-5, Scott and Benita Story: If Johnny Saturn met Clev the Bloodhound, they would be immediate and total BFFs. They are gritty muscle-men, each butchered by years of voluntary abuse, heroic without the assistance of superpowers, and disdainful of clever superhero gimmicks.

The difference is that Johnny Saturn is satirical. Or, I think it’s satirical. The comic does not, at least, take itself one hundred percent seriously. Or else JS wouldn’t return from the dead by sucker-punching the “Angel of Noble Failures,” a self-described guardian for deceased losers.

The comic does a good job of juxtaposing the mangled, worn-out body of Saturn with the perfect, David-like physique of The Utopian. Utopian is a genuine superman with impressive powers and a cape. He is also ridiculous and flamboyant. Johnny Saturn beats him to a pulp, Persephone detains him in a web of binary code, and Dr. Synn, the arch-baddie, flicks him away like an overly enthusiastic gnat. This despite his much lauded super-strength and his ability to fly. Clearly, Scott and Benita Story are making a point about the superhero genre in general, namely, that such powers don’t exactly cultivate a wellspring of good personal qualities. Clairvoyance might actually make a person insufferably conceited.

Meanwhile, Saturn, ugly, gruff, and unsubtle in a big way, has disproportionate stores of empathy and courage. He touchingly dedicates himself to helping the city mole-people, who are being captured and experimented upon in droves by a government-protected mad scientist. I can’t imagine Superman serving these pale, poor underworld citizens quite as diligently. Saturn quickly becomes their king. In the end, he decides he belongs there, in the sewage system community. These are his people. He is the antithesis of the metahumans like the Utopian who look down on the world from above.

Comic Book Encounters: More Bloodhound

Bloodhound, no. 5, 6, 9, 10: Dan Jolley: I don’t have issue 4 of Bloodhound, so let’s jump right into issue 5, which opens with Clev already shirtless, injured, pursued by enemies, and hoisting a man over his shoulder. Typical. That man is Firestorm, a superhero, apparently, who has some lethal mind-bending powers. Also, he can engulf his own body in flames. I like him.

Firestorm and the Bloodhound seem pretty screwed; they’re trapped in an abandoned warehouse out in the boonies with nothing but a smashed-up cellphone. Meanwhile, Luis Salvador’s cartel is moving in on them.

But, of course, all is solved with a little of Clev’s blunt force trauma. In fact, similar climactic solutions occur in issues 6, 9, and 10, too.

Clev always seems to be embroiled in a one-sided battle, outnumbered and inadequately armed. Unless you count his actual arms, a pair of guns that should be registered as weapons of mass destruction. The man tends to punch to pieces whatever real-estate is in his vicinity. You could probably make a drinking game with all the instances of Clev emerging from a pile of rubble. Double shot if said rubble crushes everyone else to death, while Clev himself remains unscathed.

Comic Book Encounters: Bloodhound

Bloodhound, no. 1-3, Dan Jolley and Leonard Kirk: The first issue of Bloodhound did not resurrect my faith in prison etiquette. The main character, Travis Clevenger, former cop and current prisoner, uses his beefy fingers to gouge out a fellow inmates eyeballs. The sockets spurt like a fountain, making it clear who th eponymous bloodhound is. Hint: it's the guy who is habitually coated in someone else's blood.

Clev is built like Dog the Bounty Hunter, with a worn-out face like Micky Rourke. He's released from prison so he can hunt a stalker with inhuman abilities. He is not subtle. When to men in a car are watching his motel room, he smashes a bathroom sink through their windshield.

If you like gratuitous violence and members of law enforcement who refuse to toe the line, you will love Clev. But more on him later. I've still got 4 issues to read, and I get the feeling that the rending of flesh will only escalate.

Comic Book Encounters: Hard Time Season Two

Let’s do a spurt of Comic Enounters, shall we? Starting with:

Hard Times Season 2 No 1, Steven Gerber and Mary Skrenes

Of the similarities between public high school and maximum security prison:

Run-of-the-mill Brutality: check.

Casual Sexual Assault: yep.

Covert Drug Abuse: Hell yes.

Callous, Angry inmates: Uh-huh.

Corrupt and Indifferent Figures of Authority: Totally.

Crumbling infrastructure: Of course.

Ethan was bullied in high school. When his best friend violently retaliates, Ethan ends up in prison. It is not, as it turns out, a remarkably different experience. The series ended in 2006, but it seems worthwhile to read the scant few back issues.

More comics to follow within the next 24-48 hours.

Baddies, Baddies, Baddies

My sister's ferrets! See Guinness escape. Usually, he is stealthier, like Houdini. Always he is cute.

Lawler Literature: Family Matters and Territoriality

There’s not a whole lot of crossover between historical accounts and personal narratives. In fact, I often loathe memoirs precisely because they are, by definition, narrow and solipsistic, while history books tend to have the opposite problem; they’re too broad, too impersonal, to latch on to any specific details.

Maybe that’s why I so genuinely enjoyed reading Jeannette Walls duo of novelistic memoirs (or perhaps memoiristic novels?): The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses.

Taken together, the two books become a multi-generational epic, featuring, first, early 20^th century American ranchers, and then a nuclear family of 1960s Western drifters. Of course, the ranchers and the drifters represent different generations in the same family. Jeannette Walls and her siblings spent their childhoods vagabonding across the United States in a stationwagon navigated by their half-mad parents. Walls details their heartbreaking escapades in her first book, The Glass Castle. For her second book, Half Broke Horses she adopts the perspective of her tough-as-scorched-earth maternal grandmother, bringing the tale back to its true origins.

In a uniquely American twist, land seems to be the historical hitch, particularly in the West. How do we value land now as opposed to then? Is it a gift, or a burden, or a birthright? Walls, who, remember, spent her youth in a rather landless, anchorless state, seems to contend that it is the land that defines you. Land gives you history.

Here’s Walls writing with the voice of her grandmother, Lily the rancher, in Half Broke Horses:

Maybe it was the Irish in me, but everyone in my family, going back to my grandfather…had always been obsessed with land. Now, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to own some outright. There was nothing to compare with standing on a piece of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it. The soil belonged to you, and so did every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, and all the water and minerals under the land all the way to the center of the earth. And if the world went to hell in a handbasket—as it seemed to be doing—you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it. Land belonged to you and yours forever. P. 200

Before Walls wrote the above passage, she wrote the following one in The Glass Castle. It is from her personal perspective this time, right after she has discovered that her own mother, the drifter, has knowingly owned one million dollars worth of property inherited from Lily. She surmises that such funds could have staved off many of the hardships her and her siblings had endured:

‘You mean you own land worth a million dollars?’ I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars? Had all those years, as well as Mom and Dad’s time on the street—been a caprice inflicted on us by Mom? Could she have solved our financial problems by selling this land she never even saw? But she avoided my question, and it became clear that to Mom, holding on to land was not so much an investment strategy as it was an article of faith, a revealed truth as deeply felt and incontestable to her as Catholicism. P. 273

I admire how the two passages dovetail to reveal an evolution in American values. Once upon a time, land was inarguably more valuable than money. As Lily points out, no one could take it away from you, and if you were savvy enough, you could survive off of it. Now, that fundamental narrative has changed. Dollars and cents are valuable. Independent farmers and ranchers are a dying breed.

Still, I Jeannette Walls, in her contemporariness, has survival instincts very much in common with her grandmother. It is Rosemary, Jeannette’s mother and Lily’s daughter, who holds on to property for sentimental reasons. Lily and Jeannette are more practical. Perhaps this pattern indicates a swing of the proverbial pendulum: the mother chooses to ‘hunker down’, the daughter chooses to cut loose; then, vise versa, and so on and so forth. Either way, each successive generation is defined by their relationship to property, or lack thereof.

Fictional Fathers of the Year

Literature is replete with awesome/horrifying/morally ambiguous fathers. Here are a few of the most intriguing one’s I’ve encountered in the past year. Most of them are no role models, certainly no Ward Cleavers are among them, but they all get high marks for pure entertainment-value.

Most Badass Father: Jim from Jeannette Walls Half Broke Horses: “An excellent marksman and horseman and a wrangler at age 14. He worked in Canada for a while but fell afoul of the Mounties for using his pistols a little to freely. He returned to Arizona and became a lumberjack and a homesteader…He joined the cavalry and, during the Great War, served in Siberia.” And from what I’ve read, Jim is still only about .25 as badass as his wife, Lily.

Noblest Father: Thomas Randall from Christopher Golden’s Strangewood: He risks insanity, death, and perpetual ensconement within a glob of peanut butter to save his comatose son.

Best Physicist Father: Mr. Murray from Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time: How many father’s can tesser through time and space? And yet, he is a lovingly imperfect father.

Most Unapologetic Alcoholic Father: Malachy McCourt of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes: Should he spend the dole money on a casket for his baby daughter or on a Guinness? It’s a conundrum, apparently.

Most Sad-Sack Father: Thaddeus Lowe from Shane Jones’ Light Boxes: To be fair he is a sad-sack for very good reasons. His daughter has been kidnapped andit has been bitter cold February for hundreds of days.

Most Estranged Father: Lorenzo Brown from George Pelecanos’ Drama City: Brown hasn’t seen his daughter since he was arrested, and, Spoiler Alert, they are not reunited at the end of the novel.

Honorable Mentions: Mr. Brady from Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (another unapologetic alcoholic in Ireland); The Ghost of Aunt Fanny’s Father from Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial; Clive from Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 (authoritarian colonist, sexist, racist adulterer); Carthage Kilbride from Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (a play based on Medea. Carthage=Jason. Need I say more? Oh, infanticide.)

Two Words for You Kid: F*king Sleep!

Growing up, bedtime stories were a nightly ritual for my siblings and me. Many of those children’s books, I’m realizing, had a recurrent sleep theme. The glossy covers were saturated with an indigo/dark-blue color-scheme, there was a prevalence of graphically depicted moons and stars, and the words themselves formed a hypnotic chant of soft sounds repeating over and over again. There was Agatha’s Feather Bed, Goodnight Moon, and my inexplicable favorite, The Napping House, among others. All of them revolved around the task of going to sleep.

As an adult I’m more able to decode the parental subtext beneath all those gentle words and nocturnal settings. My mother, all parents really, had just one message to convey with these bedtime stories: Go the Fuck to Sleep! This succinct interpretation is the title of Adam Mansbach’s new ‘children’s book for adults.’

Here’s the best part, according to me:

I know you’re not thirsty! That’s bullshit, stop lying. Lie the fuck down, my darling.

The child’s sudden urge to hydrate is just a ploy, but as Samuel L. Jackson learns, resistance is futile.

Sure! Fine! Whatever! I’ll bring you some milk. Who the fuck cares? You’re not gonna sleep.

Besides Jackson’s brilliant reading, there was a New York Public Library event during which both Werner Herzog and Judah Friedlander each voiced the text.

FYI: the cover of Go the Fuck to Sleep has an illustration of a toddler sleeping next to a family of tigers. Above, the full moon obscures the letters ‘u’ and ‘c’ in the word ‘Fuck’. Totally resembles every bedtime book in history. I wonder how many people will maybe accidentally buy it for their children. They should definitely buy it for themselves.

Special Collections

You know, some very cool historical things exist out there in the world. They specifically seem to coagulate in library collections. Perhaps because nerdy librarian-types are the only kind of people who would think to preserve a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, presumably sent to Thomas Jefferson Hogg (is it me, or am I detecting an unusual number of split ends? Not Shelley’s fault, I’m sure).

The MS lock is at the New York Public Library. They also have Malcolm X’s Koran, Charlotte Bronte’s writing desk, and Charles Dickens’ letter opener, made from his deceased cat’s paw.

Harvard College just opened an exhibit called Tangible Things, indeed full of tangible things. Strange, tangible things. Like a rock-like mineral that formed in the body of a wounded Civil War veteran. They also possess Mark Twain’s telescope, with which he was researching a never-finished novel about microbes. The protagonist was to be a cholera germ. Seriously.

As a Chicago native, I’m particularly fond of the Newberry Library, where I spent a semester as an Undergrad learning about island culture and colonialism: the Philippines, Hawaii, Haiti, and more. (Did you know that previous to the Revolutionary, there was an epidemic of a disease called “the jaw-sickness” among the slave population in Haiti? Despairing slave women would secretly perform an operation on newborns that would effectively force the child’s jaws to remain shut; thus, the baby would starve rather than grow up in slavery. True story, according to C.L.R James.)

Anyway, the Newberry has a vast collection of books, manuscripts, and maps. They have the Latin Vulgate Bible, c.a 1250. One of the previous owners was Calvin Ellis Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Happy Birthday Mrs. Stowe!). Also, they’ve got an original Lewis and Clark map. Impressive.

I think people, myself among them, like historical artifacts because, unlike the information you look up on Wikipedia, such objects have a physical, tangible presence. Something more substantial than a fact to be memorized. I can imagine Charlotte Bronte’s work space all day, but if I go to the New York Public Library I can prove to myself that such a space existed in reality, too. Sometimes we need that kind of reassurance.

But He Truly Did Live in a Log Cabin! Honest.

I am very disappointed to learn that Abraham Lincoln was not really a bass, or even a baritone. The U.S president, and possible vampire hunter, did not, indeed, have any variety of a deep voice emanating from his giant diaphragm.

Rather, documents from witnesses seem to indicate (because obvs their was no recording equipment at the time) that Lincoln was a tenor. In fact, had a rather high-pitched sounding vocal box. Think of that next time you hear the Gettysburg Address via an imitator. The actor will use his sultry big-man voice, and you, enlightened, will watch the audience be deceived.

So, how did Lincoln get Morgan Freeman-ized?

We can maybe blame Gregory Peck. Then again, he was probably just imitating someone else who was imitating Lincoln.

Did you know, when Peck played the President in the 1982 mini-series, he was already ten years older than Lincoln was at the time of his assassination. I really hope The Blue and the Gray didn't totally shape your image of Pres. Lincoln.

Cause... image blown. Real Lincoln was squeakier and younger.

[Also, George Washington never gave long speeches because speaking too much irritated his dentures. And Thomas Jefferson was terrified of public speaking, so instead of delivering the State of the Union address, he began the tradition of writing a letter to the members of congress. Fun facts.]

Old Chicago Water Tower

Urban dwellers,
Who among you does not love it when some architectural anachronism pops up amidst a block of slick post-modern buildings?


This is the Old Chicago Water Tower, a limestone edifice located right near the heart of the Magnificent Mile. It looks a lot like a medieval cathedral, but it is in fact not a place of worship, nor is it quite that old. Still, seeing it in reality is disorienting, like someone stuck an odd piece in the wrong puzzle. I mean, there's a Macy's right across the street.

According to my research, the Tower is one of the last remnants of pre-2oth Century Chicago. Unlike most other nearby structures, it managed to survive the Great
Fire of 1871. It is not, however, still operational. Chicagoans dumped the old H2O matron when electric water pumps were introduced. Now, it serves as an informational tourist attraction.

Oscar Wilde, who is the patron saint of dandy aesthetics, called the tower "a monstrosity."


Clearly, Wilde was unfamiliar with Chicago's parking deck.

Book Encounters: "There is Such a Thing as a Tesseract!"

One physicist says that the big question is: Are we alone in the universe or not? I go out at night and look at the stars, hundreds of billions of stars, and think that there are surely other galaxies whose solar systems include planets with thinking life. I don't believe that we are alone, and that brings up more questions. When I look at the night sky I'm looking at time as well as space, looking at a star seven light-years away, and a star seventy light-years away, or seven hundred or seven thousand or...

-An Introduction By The Author, Madeleine L'Engle

I first read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle when I was in grade school. A lot has changed since then, I suspect. For one thing, my mother isn't reading the novel to me and suffering through my habit of asking too many plot-related questions, my requests for glasses of milk when she's mid-sentence, and my general peskiness. These days she only has to tolerate this behavior when we watch movies together.

For another thing, I was too young to be wary of literature with Christian underpinnings. But so far, and I'm only three chapters in, I detect more of a happy medium between science and spiritual matters. Meg's parents are physicists, after all. Meg is a math genius. Unlike the Narnia series, we have not entered into a world of pure scientific exclusion; this is not pure unredeemed fantasy. In fact, many Christian sects contend that L'Engle's narrative is not at all in keeping with their values.

What with all the magical beings who've already been introduced, it seems like AWIT has a more gnostic vibe than any dogmatic Christian proselytizing. Which I like. Mythical creatures are the shit.

But, to be honest, if L'Engle starts preaching at me, I'll probably put the book down. And that will make me feel sad, because I loved this story as a kid. I'm just really uncomfortable with propaganda when it's directed at children. Even light propaganda.

The Vehicle was Quiet...Too Quiet

Imagine you’re a child somewhere in the 5-10 age bracket. Someone hands you a steering wheel. Maybe it’s attached to a parked car, or not attached to anything. Whatever.

What is the first sound that comes out of your hypothetical child mouth?

Vrooom…Vroooom….Vroooooooom!

If you were anything like me, the innocent vrooming is quickly succeeded by the sounds of carnage and horror: Screeeeeech! Bang! Kabaaaaam! And, sometimes: Oh, the humanity! My whole family was in that car! (And people wonder why, as an adult, I don’t have a driver’s license! Mystery solved.)

The next generation of kids/driver-imitators may have to skip the vrooms, but keep the carnage. That’s because electric cars, the proposed future of our transportation system, run silently.

Detractors are concerned that noiseless electric cars are a safety hazard for the blind and visually impaired who will undoubtedly have difficulty navigating intersections without the usual aural cues. Obviously, people who possess the ability to see, but lack the brains to listen, aren’t immune to injuries either.

Of course, some people can’t hardly wait for the reduction in sound pollution promised by e-cars. Others are suggesting ways to, um, ‘artificially enhance’ their vrooming capacity. These innovators, for example, put speakers behind the wheels that play a loop of engine sounds coordinated to the cars movements. To my ears, the recording sounds like a garbage disposer. (Why engine sounds, anyway? How about Pop-Goes-the-Weasel? But I guess that would get confusing if you refuse to sell ice cream out of your car.)

Meanwhile, vroom could go the way of clip-clop clip-clop.

Maybe parents should teach their kids to make ambulance noises instead.

Weee onngg weee onngg!

The Jezebel Witch and the Whore of Babylon

I wonder if I'm the only person who is oblivious to these kinds of things:

John Kerry, the New England Senator who ran for president back during the '04 election, is a descendant of John Winthrop, the Puritan founder of Massachusetts Bay.

In 1637 Winthrop & co. famously banished Anne Hutchinson from Boston after a heated persecutory trial, during which Winthrop and Hutchinson butted heads continuously

about religious doctrine. Winthrop even gives her a cute nickname: the Jezebel Witch. Rather than resort to name-calling and fruitless accusations, Hutchinson tries to appeal to logic.

Which was a mistake. She was, of course, condemned. A sorceress she must be.

Winthrop did such a shoddy job of arguing with Hutchinson, a woman, that the Puritans established a little university called Harvard to boost the old Intelligence Quotient of the male population thereabouts.

But here's the fun part: Anne Hutchinson is the witty, charismatic ancestor of none other than George W. Bush.

As Sarah Vowell describes in The Wordy Shipmates:

Winthrop's heir, John Kerry, debate[d] Hutchinson's great-something grandson, George W. Bush. Only in this instance it's the Hutchinson who is flummoxed by his opponents sensical answers. Bush's constant blinking appears on television as if he thinks the answer to the questions he's being asked are tattooed inside his own eyelids. (p.234)

Bush attended Yale, by the way, not Harvard, which would have been fittingly circular Karmic justice. No university wants that bad press. In Yale's defense though, Kerry went there as well. He should have done foremother proud and gone to a liberal arts college in Rhode Island, where Hutchinson was exiled to. But I guess that would be too perfect.

Here's another interesting tidbit I got from Sarah Vowell: The Puritans were downright outlandish with their nicknames. Hutchinson was called the Jezebel Witch...

But the Pope got an even better/worse epithet. To the Puritans, he was known as the Whore of Babylon.

I guess to the minds of the Puritans, an old celibate man can be the embodiment of slut-titude.

I'll Have the Emaciated Calf, Broiled, with a Side of Potatoes

Every wonder why beef is called beef?

Seriously, why don't English-speakers stop pussyfooting around and call a cooked cow a cooked cow? And, while we're at it, why do we fry up a pig's tenderloins and then, as if the meat has metamorphosized over the flame, name the final product pork? Is there something barbaric about telling our friends and neighbors, "I am going to gnaw on some grilled swine flesh this 4th of July. Care to join me?"

Well, the Norman French apparently thought it was unseemly.

In 1066, the Normans invaded the territories of the Old English-speaking Germanic tribes that had settled in what is now England. As a result the Norman language merged with Old English (which, at this point, was closer to German) and had a baby that modern scholars like to call Middle English.

In the halcyon days before the invasion, meat was meat. That is to say, if you wanted to get all carnivorous at the mead hall with your boys, you would order up a cut of oxen. Not 'beef,' nor the even less manly 'buef,' as the Normans would have said.

If I'm not mistaken, there is a reason why we inherited 'pork' and 'beef' but no equivalent Frenchified terms for chicken or lamb.

In the societies of the invaded English territories, the Normans became the gentry over the Germanic peasants. It seems that the new nobility ate beef, pork, and veal. They didn't eat chicken or lamb. Their Germanic servants obviously had to learn the names of their masters' favorite dishes. And so the Norman terms eventually trickled into Old English and conquered the former, less pleasant customs.

This is Why Clark Kent Isn't a Lawyer

I think I've mentioned my total non-expertise on matters relating to comic books.

Nevertheless, I do know a thing or two about U.S copyright laws.

That is to say, I know precisely one thing about U.S copyright laws: they are currently in a state of extreme, unprecedented chaos.

Thanks to the advent of web sharing and other open access vehicles, this chaos extends to the cellular core of our artistic culture. Artistic 'property' has virtually become a thing of the past, even as diehard capitalists cling to it like a soaked million dollar billfold in the middle of the Atlantic.

And maybe that's not a totally horrible thing. I mean, aside from the fact that the artist should benefit enormously and solely from whatever he or she produces. That's obvious. But what about the artists' descendants? Does the family have more rights to use a character than the avid fans? Even after the original character has changed, broadened, evolved without the original artist's hand?

I pose these questions because of the Man of Steel himself.

For whatever reason [muddled and outdated copyright laws, a potentially shady legal counsel, judiciary acrobatics, two money-hungry families, or two easily manipulated families, or all of the above] Warner Bros., aka DC, have spent the last few years battling the artists estates for the rights to Superman.

If my understanding is correct, and if court procedures continue unabated, the families of Siegel and Schuster may retain the right to control the content of all Superman properties. Actually, the families' attorney, Marc Toberoff, seems to have weaseled his way into owning a big share himself. Right now, The Siegels, the Schusters, their attorney, and WB are sharing Superman. It is not unlike how a set of spoiled rotten adolescents share their action figures. That is to say, they don't share. And then your cool Superman toy gets his arm torn off and you lose the piece under the couch, never to be found again.

What does this mean for future Superman projects?

I don't know, and no one else seems to have a clue either. Maybe DC will introduce Duperman and his plainspoken alter ego Dick Dent.

For much more accurate, informative information, read this article on legalfish.com.