Well there you have it. Another football season come and gone. Time to put on the black clothes and go into mourning for the next 7 months. Congratulations to the Pittsburg Steelers, winners of a sometimes boring, sometimes exciting Superbowl. I picked the Steelers to win and was actually fairly close with my prediction (24-17) to the final score (21-10). I have always admired Bill Cowher as a coach and I really wanted to see him coach the Steelers to the victory and I am really happy for him, Jerome Bettis, and the city of Pittsburg.

There were some really funny commercials this year. Unfortunately they were often spread so thin between boring, meaningless commercials (is that an oxymoron?!?) that they did not have as much impact as they could have. ESPN has all of the commercials up at their site here in case you missed any or want to see them again. You have to have pop ups turned off and I had to hit the fast forward button the player occasionally to get things going.

My favorites were the streaking sheep (which fits right in with last Fridays’ shaved animal post), the bear/beer commercial, the defibrillator/fly and friendly skies ones (both by Ameriquest) and the Sprint locker room commerical.
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I want to take this moment to salute my brother-in-law Mike. Yesterday our church was doing a blood drive for the Red Cross and Mike and I went in at 11:45 to do our part. Unfortunately the iron level in my blood was .1 over the maximum limit and I was turned away. Mike, however, was able to soldier on and squeezed out a pint in a record 5 minutes time.

While I left church with a superhero name….Ironman….Mike was the true hero of the day, and he got 3 homemade cookies and a glass of orange juice to prove it. Not that I’m bitter or anything…

Okay, so at the beginning of this year I waxed eloquent about the Uberlist concept and made my list. Since it is a fluid list vs. a set of resolutions it has grown over the past month and is currently up to 110 items. I was overly ambitious with what I thought I would accomplish this first month but I did fairly well. My list is typed on Word so when I complete an item I change the font color to red rather than delete the item so that I can see what I’ve accomplished. One time items are in black. Ongoing things such as pick up dirty cloths before leaving for work are in blue. Any deadline dates changed are in purple so I can keep track of things that had to be extended to complete.

Overall I’m quite pleased. Things like drinking water vs. pop, tea, etc. and starting to exercise seem to have alluded me thus far though thankfully there is still time to get into Speedo shape by the summer. 😉 Despite this I have:

1. Read 7 books this month, making me 3 ahead of where I need to be to reach my goal of 50 books this year.

2. Put up shelves in basement (with Jeff’s help) and began organizing collectibles, art supplies, etc.

3. Organized my Favorites folder on my home PC (not an easy task, believe me).

4. Cleaned and organized bathroom shelves (and have managed to keep it organized).

5. Updated my comics pull list in an effort to cut back, go for quality, and save money.

6. Repaired my damaged garage door.

7. Made preliminary plans for bathroom redecoration.

I have also been tracking several things in my journal that are part of my Uberlist.

In addition there are ongoing Uberlist items that are broken out into once a month and quarterly time slots and I have done pretty well with these. I am reading to Mary and we’ve been working on Tori’s room.

I plan to give monthly updates like this, no doubt much to your chagrin, as it helps me to remain focused and accountable.

Here’s hoping for an even more productive and enjoyable February!

Its never too late to be an Uberlister, so feel free to join in!
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Happy Groundhog Day everyone! Evidently we are in for 6 more weeks of winter. Considering the average temperature here has been in the 50’s, 20 degrees above normal, I don’t know what “winter” actually means this year!

It was 20 years ago this past Saturday, January 28th that the space shuttle Challenger disaster brought home the reality of the dangers of space travel and rocked the foundations of the NASA program.

People from my parents generation talk about what they were doing when President Kennedy was shot. For my generation this was one of the big disasters that cemented its memories on our collective consciousness. In 1986 I was a junior in high school and was in biology class when the tragedy occured. Schools around the nation had live feeds of the shuttle liftoff due to the fact that Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was to be the first teacher in space. McAuliffe was chosen out of 12,000 educators who had applied for President Reagan’s teacher-in-space program. I remember being so shocked seeing this

and realizing that it was not a joke and that all seven crew members were dead, including a teacher who had captured the hearts and imaginations of students everywhere. We spent most of the remaining school day watching coverage of the disaster and talking in hushed tones. It was a sad, weird school day.

I obviously love science fiction, however space, the stars, and the real space program hold equal fascination to me. I am proud of all we have accomplished in our explorations of the universe and look forward to many more exciting discoveries thanks to the passion of dedicated men and women like those who gave their lives two decades ago for their dreams…and ours.

In Memorium: Ellison S. Onizuka, Michael J. Smith, Christa McAuliffe, Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Gregory B. Jarvis, Ronald E. McNair, and Judith A. Resnik
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There is an interesting article on 7 myths concerning the Challenger disaster here.

From the lofty heights of early 20th century American fiction to this…the blog has no shame. Our lastest guilty pleasures (yes, our…meaning myself and Mary ) is Rollergirls. Rollergirls is A&E’s latest offering in the ‘reality’ television series that follows the girls of the T.X.R.D. as they live their lives and skate. Should I be embarrassed that I look forward to every Monday evening at 9 p.m. central time? Probably, but I most unequivocably am not. A&E describes the show as “the rollicking, real-action show that puts you on the fast track of the Austin Thunderdome. Check out the five-team, all-girl league of tough and sexy young athletes who pay to skate and play to win. Their raucous bouts combine fierce competition with jaw-dropping outfits and crowd-pleasing personalities”. The contention is that the show is completely unscripted, but one still gets the feel that they are watching a less testosterone filled version of female professional wrestling.

Mary and I happened to stumble across this show a few weeks ago during the episode in which The Rookie, Venis Envy (pictured below) makes her first roller derby appearance.

Miss Conduct, Jailbait, Mighty Aphrodite, and Witch Baby how can one not watch? My favorites of the group are the aforementioned Venis Envy and Sister Mary Jane and Punky Bruiser (pictured below)

One of the more fun commercials for Rollergirls shows Sister Mary Jane in her day job as a school teacher telling her class “now we don’t hit” followed by a cut of her beating the crap out of someone on the track.

The two teams that the show seems to focus on the most are incidently the ones you end up liking the most, the Putas Del Fuego

and the league dominating Holy Rollers

Rollergirls is a fun guilty pleasure. It is an interesting look into the lives of people who may or may not be just like you and me who have the joy of taking on a different persona outside of their 9 to 5 careers to compete in an entertaining, if somewhat dubious, sport. Expect the odd profanity…and by ‘odd’ I mean ‘frequent’ as well as drinking and the occasional fight. Of course if anyone watches next week I’m prepared to be really embarrassed as next week’s previews looked like this will be the most inappropriate show they have shown yet.

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Not to be outdone, however, is our other favorite A&E guilty pleasure, Dog the Bounty Hunter. Dog the Bounty Hunter follows Duane “Dog” Chapman and his family of bounty hunters as they take on the dope dealers and criminals of the Hawaiian Islands. Dog and his family are somewhat of an enigma. They are devoutly Christian. They often pray before their day begins and demonstrate sincere care and concern for the people whose lives they get involved with. At the same time they swear like sailors and are not afraid to put the beat down on someone if need be to capture their prey. The posse includes Dog’s ‘brother’ Tim and his son Leland, pictured below

and Dog’s wife Beth, whose enormous bossom and ever-present cleavage cause Mary, Tori and I to giggle in embarrassment at the interesting array of outfits she chooses to wear.

While highly entertaining there is a sad undercurrent to Dog the Bounty Hunter as they show how drugs, especially the drug Ice, is ravishing the Hawaiian Islands and devastating the lives of people who are caught in the cycle of abuse. Duane Chapman himself is a former convict who has turned his life around and is trying to help others do the same. While a lot of what goes on in the show is posturing for the TV, I truly believe their faith and concern for their community is sincere and it adds a real depth to this otherwise guilty pleasure reality show.

Well there you have it. Those of you who have cringed at all the Robert E. Howard and Conan talk over the last few days can cringe no more!…..er, wait….maybe you’re cringing more now…. at the very least maybe this will keep you guessing as to what may be next on the ol’ blog.

It has been exactly 100 years since the birth of Robert Ervin Howard, a writer I have come to revere in much the same way I do Edgar Rice Burroughs and J.R.R. Tolkien. Like Burroughs, Howard created many varied and memorable characters and like Tolkein, he created mythological ages for his characters to inhabit, the most famous of course being the barbarian Conan.

Robert E. Howard was born in a small Texas town on January 22nd, 1906. His father was a doctor and much of his childhood was spent living in various small towns throughout Texas and Oklahoma before the family settled in Cross Plains, Texas in 1919. Howard grew up with a passion for the written word, “As a boy and a youth in my teens, I read purely for the love of reading. I can say with confidence that no man ever loved reading for its own sake more than I. I did not read because of any particular urge for learning, or to merely pass the time, or to escape the realities of life. I read simply because I loved reading for its own sake alone. The printed page was like wine to me.” Robert E. Howard had a great affection for both fiction and poetry and reading over his list of favorite authors arouses a feeling of great kinship despite our existence in different generations: Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, H. Rider Haggard, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Lord Tennyson, among others. So much of the work that influenced him then continues to fire imaginations today. Howard was also known as a famed oral storyteller, often reading his tales aloud as he typed them and he loved to regale friends with stories.

Robert E. Howard began writing at a very young age and he submitted his first story for publication at age 15. It wasn’t until the age of 19 that he was first published, when his short story Spear and Fang was accepted by the magazine Weird Tales. Howard was very pragmatic about his desire to be a writer: “My sole desire in writing is to make a reasonable living. I may cling to many illusions, but I am not ridden by the illusion that I have anything wonderful or magical to say, or that it would amount to anything particularly if I did say it…I took up writing simply because it seemed to promise an easier mode of work, more money, and more freedom than any other job I’d tried. I wouldn’t write otherwise.” To please his father Howard had taken a bookkeeping course and agreed that if he could not make it as a writer in a year he would quit and get a regular paying job. He sold four stories that year and his career as a writer began. Personal freedom and control were touchstone issues for Howard and these came out in his work.

Robert E. Howard’s stories were not originally written to be published in book form…the stories he wrote were for the adventure magazines of his day, Weird Tales, Wild West Weekly, Spicy Adventure Stories, Strange Detective, etc. Howard was unique in that he created several serialized characters. While he was writing these he often felt inhabited by the character and would write several stories about said character and would eventually lose the inspiration for that character and move on to another. That writing style gave us characters like King Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, El Borak, Red Sonya and of course Conan. Each of Howard’s characters inhabited the same “universe” starting with the pre-historic adventures of Kull up through Howard’s created Hyborian Age of Conan. “Howard engineered his tales so that a great Cataclysm always came to seal and divide each era from the next one, so each civilization was barely conscious of the ones that came before, and even then only in myths and legends”. The Conan tales have continued to keep Robert E. Howard’s name in the limelight but it would be a great disservice to think that this is all that he did. In his brief lifetime Howard wrote over 300 short stories, only 22 of which are about Conan. Howard wrote poetry, westerns, fantasy, horror…he was great friends with H.P. Lovecraft and wrote one or two tales that today are considered a part of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.

It would also be a mistake to assume that the Conan tales are nothing more than a written version of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan films. I had not read any of Robert E. Howard’s work until Jeff recommended Dark Horse Comics’ new Conan series last year. Cary Nord’s art and Kurt Busiek’s reworking of Howard’s tales are amazing and they drove me to pick up his books. In the next few days I will post more about the Conan stories specifically.

Robert E. Howard is widely considered to be the father of the Sword and Sorcery genre…a genre based on war, fighting and magic. Howard liked to box and his real life experience with fighting translates well on the page. Many consider his descriptions of fighting and battle to be some of the best in fiction.

Tragically Robert E. Howard’s life was cut short. His mother was terminally ill and in 1936 as her health turned for the worse Howard began planning his death. Hester Howard sank into a coma on June 8th, 1936. On the morning of June 11th his mother’s nurse confirmed that she was unlikely to revive from this coma. Howard went into his room, typed this couplet:

“All fled, all done
So lift me on the pyre.
The feast is over
And the lamps expire.”

went out to his car and shot himself. His robust constitution resulted in his living for almost 8 hours after this before finally succumbing to death. Robert E. Howard left behind a wealth of amazing storytelling and it is a tragedy that he left life so early as his writing seemed to get better and better with each story…who knows what great and wonderful literary characters died with him that day.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of this underappreciated American writer I will be posting more about him, his works, and things based on his characters throughout the week. As long as this post is it doesn’t even skim the surface of this fascinating writer. There is an excellent 18 page biography of Robert E. Howard here that is a must read.

Happy Birthday, Robert E. Howard.

(Conan image by Frank Frazetta)