INKSTAND

This holiday season we went through a lot of appetizers. Jeremy, after weeks of vigil, was finally able to purchase Pillsbury’s Savorings from Safeway, although they can’t seem to keep the spinach ones in stock and have yet to carry the buffalo chicken flavor. Bags of Gold caught my eye while scanning the frozen section for some alternative. They’re a lot like a crab cake, but instead of cheese crab and won ton, it’s cheese, spinach and Fillo dough. the bag part around the filling is softer than the top, which gets toasty and crunchy in the oven. As much as I like the spinach Savorings, these tasty bags are bigger and have a satisfying crunch to them.

A couple of years ago the Buffy television series continued on in comic book form, picking up a short while after the TV series ended as “Season Eight”. Just like the show, the comic follows a larger story arc with some stand-alone stories thrown in. This latest issue is one of the self-contained stories that borrows from the never-really-produced Buffy Animated Series. A lot of comics and cartoons in the nineties used the stylization of characters popularized by Bruce Timm’s designs of Batman in his animated series, and the Buffy cartoon followed suit in it’s character design. As far as I know, only a short promo was produced and the latest issue of the comic book uses the plot from that short story.

Buffy, tired from demon slaying, falls asleep and has a dream which is, in essence, the cartoon complete with direct quotes. Since the comic book takes place about ten years after the cartoon, Buffy fumbles around with not revealing too much about the future, like Willow’s lesbianism and Xander’s missing eye, and delights in changes that have not yet happened, like her mother’s death. She ends up fighting a dragon rather than getting to go to a party with her friends. Then she wakes up. The message is that while things seemed so simple when she was young, it’s only hindsight and her life was always complicated.

I enjoyed the use of the cartoon story. It never really had a chance but here it’s used to illustrate another aspect of life in the multifaceted Buffyverse. That cartoony art style gets tired really quickly when put on the printed page, working much better on the screen. The longer storyline in Season Eight has been rather weak so far with some of the shorter story arcs and standalone stories like this being more entertaining.
Here’s the animated promo:

So Far, So Gay



Typical set up for a reality show: a group of people live in a house vying for the affection of a notable person. The thing about this show, that pits an assortment of young men against each other for the attentions of Andrew Shue/Ryan Renolds love child Brody Jenner, is wikkid gay. It starts out with the contestants being pulled out of their hotel beds in the middle of the night in their underwear and sat in front of Mr. Jenner as he introduces himself and the house to them. The house was not uber-furnished like other reality shows featuring ladies, but more like a frat house that dudes could chill in. But we all know that, if anything, that environment is even more likely to induce a circle-jerk if enough alcohol is introduced.
The assortment of dudes include lunkheads, a token black dude and a bona fide homosexual who presents Mr. Jenner a birthday card during the first challenge, offending one of Mr. Jenner’s already-existing friends in the process. The gay dude ends up bailing because he was an avid fan of The Hills who misunderstood what the show was like. The the elimination happens in a hot tub. Yeah, like eight dudes in a hot tub, going over their relationships with this studly guy. Sounds pretty gay to me.
I’m going to give this show a chance just because I’m interested in seeing where the drama comes from. Either it will dispel my belief that this show is totally gay or it will reinforce it. The point of “The Pick-Up Artist” was to get chicks and it was wikkid gay. The point of this one is to be a dude’s best friend. . . I can only hope it supplies some mild j/o material.