“A guy my brother knows is getting rid of his daughter’s middle-aged rabbit. If no one takes him, he says he’s going to release the bunny into the cemetary where there’s a pack of coyotes.”

Even though we’d pretty much reached our limit for animal companions, it was a hard plea to deny…which is how we ended up with this handsome fellow…

His previous owners never bothered to give him a proper name. While my wife worked on coming up with an appropriate handle for the little guy, I started referring to him as “Ponyboy,” due to his golden mane of fur. The name stuck, and would become a source of bemusement and “I remember that book/movie!” from the folks at the vet’s office.

Ponyboy (or “Pony” or “Pody-po”) had been a hutch bunny for most of his six or so years of life, but took to indoor living with a ravenous gusto. Though my wife was told that he “didn’t like carrots,” the scar in between my right thumb and forefinger tells a different story — one of a little bunny who wanted his treat so bad he mistook my hand for a root vegetable.

Behaviorally, he was a stubborn little sweetheart who made no bones about his expected due (a cracker on being let out and another upon returning to his cage for the night). He was a low-stress addition to our menagerie and we were glad to give him a place to spend his later years in warm, well-fed comfort.

Spry and eager up till the end, Pony passed away last night from heart failure.

Stay golden, Pody-po. You were a great little bunny and will be missed.

In yesterday’s Dave Ex Machina post, Dave Lartigue articulated some his reservations about the upcoming Lord of the Rings line of Lego sets and the fan lobbying efforts to see other licensed properties in plastic brick form. Dave’s approach was even-handed and written with a admitted awareness of his own biases, so it should come as no suprise that the comments to the post turned into patronizing and snide jabs about Dave’s irrational grudge against geekery.

But Dave has not been operating alone in this sphere of anti-geek hatred, oh no. The commenter also cites Dorian Wright and yours truly as the other power players in a triumvirate of joyless buzzkillers. While I was honored to be included alongside such august peers, I was a little baffled by the characterization.

Sure, Dave, Dorian, and I share similar — but not identical — perspectives about the geeks’ tendencies toward entitlement and the banalities of excess. And, yes, the three of us have cultivated public personas which could charitably be described as “cynical” or “grouchy,” but a quick survey of our blogs should dispel any notion that our geekiness is merely an excuse to hate on the poor, persecuted masses of fandom.

Besides the fact that fandom really doesn’t have anything to fear from three dudes whose combined monthly pagehits represent a microscopic fraction of the daily traffic on one of the AOL/Gawker sites which constitute the WalMarts of geekblog scene, there’s also the crucial fact that we don’t bear any ill will to geekiness as a general concept.

Any ire is directed at specific behavioral manifestations of the subculture, ones that unfortunately happen to be in ascendency at the present time — most specifically the “Cult of Awesome” and “fan of a being a fan of” syndromes which have reduced discussion to a stock set of tired symbols. It’s a situation that echoes Carl Sagan’s observations about UFOs and alien beings in the popular consciousness; what passes for “creativity” tends to be a consensus of recieved banalities whose widespread adoption is seen as the validation of some universal truth and not a profound failure of imagination.

How many loud fans of some piece of shit artifact from someone else’s childhood actually care about the damn thing, and how many care about it because the Echo Chamber demands it? I’m not going to second guess the masses’ tastes (or lack thereof), but the issue is that anyone who doesn’t reflexively cheer or questions the nature of the enthusiasm gets labelled a “hating hater who hates fun.”

“Why don’t you just avoid all that, then?” says the concern troll wrapped in a cloak of partronizing “moderation.” Well, apart from building a geek-proof Faraday Cage (which will still elicit comments about that one Star Trek: TNG episode), I can’t imagine how to further distance myself from the irritating din. I don’t follow io9 or Comics Alliance or Kotaku or any of the other major geek sites (except for Joystiq, and only for info on pending releases). I’ve cut or loosened ties with my main vectors for irritation, even folks I considered (and still consider) friends.

Contrary to certain summary judgements, I like the social aspects of the geek scene. It’s nice to have folks with which to discuss stupid ephemera and our mutual hobbyhorses. Yet no matter how well one tries to limit their exposure, the endemic idiocy of the scene leaks through the cracks and seams.

It’s similar to how reactionary platitudes dominate the sphere of current political discourse. If you have even the slightest level of engagement with the scene, you will encounter them without exception. The thinly veiled suggestions to “put up or shut up, but mostly shut up” are utter bullshit akin to an “AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT” bumpersticker…or in this case, “GEEKMERICA: LOL IT OR LEAVE THIS DELICIOUS BACON.”

Whether I wish to pillory it or not is my own goddamn business, but it doesn’t surprise me that the same folks who are so quick to slap on “hater” tags when we defame geekdom’s perceived honor are nowhere to be found when Dave, Dorian, I put the time and effort into tackling other subjects…which is to say, “over 95% of the time.”

Never send to know for whom the cuckoo cuckoos.

It cuckoos for thee.

Hey, kids! Are you ready for the pointless distraction that’s sweeping a paralyzed nation?

It’s Lobby, the legislative boardgame that’s fun for the whole dysfunctional family!

Based on the zany antics of our real-life legislators, Lobby lets players choose a role from a variety of congressional roles!

Which will YOU be? The vacillating center-leftist castrated by a lack of sincere convictions? The dittohead ideologue who wears his profound ignorance as a virtue? Or perhaps the cynical sociopath set loose on a voter-enabled looting spree! (Hint: Don’t pick the committed progressive, as they always come in last.)

No matter what role you take, the object is to fulfill the marching orders provided by the corporate interests who funded your campaign! How you go about this is up to you! Will you insert a poison pill into a procedural vote to fund VA Hospitals? Present a toothless and hopelessly compromised piece of overdue social legislation as a resounding victory for “the base?” Or find a handy Other to legislatively demonize while the pillars of the realm crumble around you?

But be careful, because Lobby is a game of sudden reversals — thanks to the potentially fatal “sex scandal” and “red smear” cards lurking in the deck. Having an absolute majority and public opinion on your side is no guarantee of success, either, thanks to the procedural rule which allows your opponents to hold their breath until they turn blue…or the supine Fourth Estate mobilizes the masses against your pork-laden pièce de résistance!

In the crazy world of Lobby, nothing is ever certain…except for the fact that the rich get richer and everyone else slides a little closer to serfdom!

Lobby! It’s more than a game! It’s a goddamn fucking travesty!

It was recently announced that DC plans of releasing a way-after-the-fact funnybook version of the American remake of the Swedish film based on Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. While I’m sure there’s a audience for the comic — namely folks looking for some literary pretense to mask their burning desire to see anatomically impossible T&A shots of punk rock pin-up girl — the silliness got me thinking about the waning phenomenon of licensed film adaptations.

There was a time, not terribly long ago, that such cross-media repackaging efforts constituted a huge industry. Mall bookstore shelves groaned under the weight of prose distillations of such enduring cinematic classics as April Fools Day and Solarbabies, and publishers like Dell and Gold Key cranked out off-model funnybook iterations of films both blockbuster and bottom-tier.

The business model for this niche of the publishing biz rested upon the limited distibution channels of the era. Prior to the days of streaming video, back when cable television and VCRs were expensive novelties (or before they even existed, period), film audiences were subject to the scheduling whims of local movie theater or small cluster of regional market TV stations when it came to viewing a given flick.

This was especially true among the younger set, who lacked the funding and access of the adult crowd. If you were a kid who really loved The Magic Sword or Star Wars or Hatari and wanted to prolong or revisit the experience, prose and comic adaptations were one of the few reliable and afforable ways to score one’s fix on a user-controllable basis.

Even better, retailers’ and parents’ less stringent gatekeeping for such works made it possible to get one’s grubby mitts on once-removed works whose R-rated cinematic source material would have been absolutely verboten. The usher at the cineplex might have buster your for sneaking into see Halloween III, but the half-stoned teen working the register at Booksmith didn’t give a rat’s ass if you plunked down two bucks for the flick’s paperback transcription.

Prose adaptations seldom — if ever — rose above the level of pulpy workmanship. Artistry was never the intended pupose nor part of the formula for quick and dirty profit. Tap some journeyman writer or past-prime hack to crank out a luridly accessible narrative, toss in a collection of briefly annotated stills in the book’s midsection, and throw that sucker up onto the shelf. Deviations from the source were fairly common, stemming either from the author working outside the loop of script revisions and late-stage edits or asserting some atrophied form of artistic license as rebellion against his of her work-for-hire thralldom…which is how you ended up with sex scenes in the book versions of Tron (former scenario) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (the latter one).

Funnybook adaptations tended to be more straightforward in nature, reverse-engineered storyboards sanitized and exposition-ified in accordance with the standards of the mass medium and its perceived audience (i.e. “kids”). The creation of the MPAA rating system and the subsequent embrace of more “adult” themes in cinema (along with the Gold Key/Dell split, which upended the major licensing powerhouse in comics publishing) slowed the comics adaptation trend through most of the 1970s (Marvel’s spins on Planet of the Apes and, uh, Killdozer nothwithstanding).

And then came a little film called Star Wars. Not only did Marvel’s comic book version of George Lucas’s space opera epic save the publisher from looming insolvency, its success was enough to drive a popular monthly series while encouraging the powers-that-be to recapture that oh-so-profitable lightning in a bottle.

The bulk of these efforts were released “Super Specials,” a magazine-sized format which combined the comics adaptation with “making of” articles and related backmatter. While a logical move in theory, the execution was muddled by Marvel’s choice of material. Don’t get me wrong — I was thrilled to be able to add funnybook versions of Xanadu and Rock and Rule to my collection of comics oddities. I just that I have a hard time believing that “some popculture historian is going to buy uncirculated single copies of these from a quarter bin fifteen years from now” is a viable business model.

Marvel’s embrace of the “limited series” format in the early 1980s led to the publisher splitting the difference with a number of its film adaptations from that era, where multi-issue installments hit the spinner racks in slightly staggered tandem with the collected Super Special editions. Again, the theory was sound, but the notion of reaching a wider audience was kind of rendered moot when the material in question was mediocre comic book version of The Last Starfighter.

Even when the source material and the creative team was top notch, the results tended to be far less than the sum of the parts…

…as was the case with Marvel’s 1982 attempt to do funnybook justice to Blade Runner.

The comic version of Blade Runner was — along with a Twilight Zone Magazine photo feature and film review — my initial point of exposure to Ridley Scott’s seminal cyberpunk classic. I was ten years old when the movie hit theaters and while my parents wouldn’t have cared about their fair-haired eldest boy catching a R-rated film, the pimply teenage usher at the local multiplex was not as progressively minded…especially after my friends and I dumped all the illicit brew out of the giant cooler so we could use it as an improvised sled-slash-boat.

As much as Blade Runner perfectly encapsulates the grimly stylish wonder of its era for me, I didn’t actually see the film until a heavily edited version popped up on a local UHF station a few years later. My early impressions were gleaned from the comic…

…and, boy, what skewed impressions they were.

Writer Archie Goodwin and artist Al Williamson are two creators I have an immense respect for, but they had a tough row to hoe when it came to capturing even a fraction of what made the Blade Runner such a spectacular bit of cinema.

The film’s strengths are so firmly rooted in the medium that they defy easy translation. More than the adequate plot and (mostly) adequate acting of its principles, its a work that derives its power from spectacle — the syncretic arrangement of lighting, art direction, set design, and music. In short, it’s the type of film (along with Speed Racer or Apocalypse Now) that you use to break in a new home theater system.

While comics are also a visual medium that draws from a related palette of techniques, they also have a different aesthetic hierarchy when it comes to presentation. Wide sweeping shots and two-page spreads may be employed to similar ends, but the equivalency can’t be measured by a simple mathematic ratio.

Williamson was a master at depicting sci-fi scenes in comics and did a solid job translating Syd Mead’s visuals and Ridley Scott’s shadowplay of Blade Runner to the printed page, but the results are superficial echoes limited by the medium itself.

Goodwin, on the other hand, latched onto the much despised narration (which works better if you imagine Harrison Ford rolling his eyes in disgust as he recites each soporific line) of the film’s original cut, a point of approach where the Blade Runner most closely approached traditionally exposition-heavy conventions of comic book writing…

…and then he magnified it by a factor of ten, letting it bleed into the dialogue and the most self-evident sequences imaginable.

In the film, it’s possible to overlook the wooden verbiosity amidst the visually arresting spectacle. That’s not the case with the comic book version, where it is overembellished and nigh inescapable.

It’s hard to hate too much on the Blade Runner comic adaptation, given its creative pedigree, the part it played as a stopgap popcult touchstone of my childhood, and the realization that it was never intended to rise above the level of an ephemeral grab for licensed revenue.

That said, there’s no denying that it is a profoundly lousy comic that failed miserably at the task it set out to accomplish…which is why I’ve “retired” this soulless simulacrum to the off-world colony known as Nobody’s Favorites.

It’s Saturday. It’s snowing. I was up late reading about the Nazi invasion of France.

Osiris and Ollie have the right idea.

Recommended listening: Eine Kleine Napmusik.

Sixteen months into Malibu Era, and Maura and I have yet to come to a definitive solution for our driving music situation. While it was nice to get back to mix CDs — and a functioning car stereo to play them with — the luster soon faded under the weight of the repetition born of a lengthy commute. The Zune/FM car adapter combo we’d used with Super Lumina may have been a logistical, static-heavy hassle, but one that spoiled us with its expansive capacity and random playlists before it decided to brick up on us one tragic morning.

We’ve weighed other audio options, but the odd configuration of the car’s center console (where the stereo’s LED display doubles as a status panel) and lack of USB or auxiliary ports (because the car’s previous owner, the Government Accounting Office, didn’t spring for what was then an option) made it all but impossible to throw in a mid-range aftermarket sound system without expensive alterations.

I considered saving my pennies for a dealer-installed space radio…until I checked the dealer’s site to determine exactly how many pennies that would entail…

Look, I’m a reasonably loyal GM man who understands the lopsided economics of a captive market, but I also know the difference between “being over a barrel” and “being bent over a barrel.”

Until that long anticipated sack of unmarked hundred-dollar bills materializes on our back step, we’ll just have to get by with our multi-tiered stopgap solutions — a handpicked collection of favorite Clash songs (me) or the single-disc reissue of X’s Los Angeles and Wild Gift (Maura) for solo drives, and the unsteady signal of 740 AM when we roll tandem.

740 is an ultra-low power (25 watts in daylight, 5 after nightfall) local wonder bearing the call letters and legacy of WJIB. If that doesn’t ring a bell (literally, in the station’s signature bumper), then you probably didn’t grow up in Greater Boston between 1970 and 1990 and have a grandparent as your regular babysitter.

The original JIB was Boston’s easy listening oasis, and its listener-supported successor — owned and operated by veteran broadcaster Bob Bittner — gently rocks a similar format where the softer side of Elvis and the Beatles brush up big band classics, old school pop standards, “beautiful music” instrumentals, 1970s mellowdrone stuff and occassional outliers such as Blondie and Taco.

One of the station’s taglines is “the music you won’t hear anywhere else,” a regrettably true statement which makes me respect Bittner’s commitment to the project. I’m at an age where trangressive hipness and genre-territorial jingoism feel like pointless affectations better left to the mewling arrogance of attention-starved young’uns. While there’s a lot on JIB’s playlist I wouldn’t seek out beyond the confines of an I-93 traffic jam, I appreciate its commercial-free (save for the occasional PSA) flow and the the sensations of nostalgic familiarity it evokes.

(Though if you happen to stuble across this, Mr. Bittner, please nix that muzak cover of “Whiter Shade of Pale.” Your listeners can handle the original, trust me.)

One of these Proustian moments of melodic memory took the form of an instrumental cut which entered JIB’s playlist a few weeks back. The tune was intimately familiar yet infuriatingly implacable. There’s nothing worse than knowing something but not being able to materialize the specifics, and each note and phrase carried an unvoiced but oh-so-painful taunt — “you ought to be able to place this, but your memory is screwing with you, nyah nyah nyah.”

If it had vocals, I could have resolved the matter with a quick Google search. As it was, I had nearly resigned myself to an intensive review of the three hundred odd items in my archived set of TV themes before a pop-culture victim pal helped break my mental logjam…

Usually these victories over early onset senility are causes for celebration, the grand satisfaction of scratching a particularly obnoxious itch. There was no such joy this time around, only the self-loathing associated with fumbling such an immediately obvious answer.

The inherent irony within the track’s title didn’t help, either.

It has been three years since I switched Armagideon Time from a music blog format to “a place where Andrew thrashes through the brambles of his mental landscape,” and yet I still get upwards of a dozen promo emails a day from labels begging me to pimp their latest contender for the Next! Big! Thing! stakes.

Never mind the fact that that the old AT’s music selections were largely contextual in nature, matching appropriate tracks to whatever topic I was ranting about on a given day. Or that overwhelming majority of artists and tracks shoved under my virtual nose were either not to my liking or — more likely — not that good. I’m sure there’s an appreciative audience for Dave Matthews-inspired “indie” rock clones, but I ain’t it. Ditto the many soporific spins on the post-rock formula or basement-dwelling sample fiends dabbling in anemic “electronica.”

There have been some gems in the sea of summary deletions — stuff from Atlanta’s garage punk scene of a few years back, a two “disc” compilation of vintage and neo-vintage grooves assembled by the FSOL guys, “Giving In” from a Bum Kon retrospective, and some swell remixes of artists I don’t like by artists I do.

Nothing, however, will ever top an artist-penned plea I received in 2007. The missive took the disingenuous approach, name-dropping takeaways from a cursory scan of recent posts as a way of letting me know that they were “HUGE FANS OF YOUR SITE” even though they misspelled both my name and the name of my blog.

I can’t remember listening to their promo track or what genre they were ostensibly part of. Very few artists give any specific details about their genre leanings, and love to cast the widest net of inspirational comparisons possible. What they describe as “a sound that’s equal parts Count Basie, Metallica, Guitar Wolf, Barry Manilow, and Yma Sumac” tends to come out in the wash as “another shitty jam band trying way too hard to be loved.”

It wasn’t the sample mp3 or band name that permanently lodged itself within my memory. It was a phrase following the false fulsomeness that promised listeners the unprecedented phenomenon of “HOOKS AKIMBO.”

I freely admit to committing numerous ideomatic crimes over the past five years. It’s an inevitable consequence of trying to craft marginally clever and/or entertaining prose on a daily basis. The wells of inspiration and talent only run so deep, and missteps will happen…especially when you’re as lax as I am on the editorial skills front. (Writing has never been a constructive experience for me. It is an act of purgation where I drop my load in the bowl and mordantly marvel at what came out before hitting the flush button.)

I will say, though, that I at least strive for some sense of coherence. The results may be tenuous or tortured, but not devoid of logic…even if it was the “made perfect sense during a late night fever dream” variety. “HOOKS AKIMBO,” in constrast, is buzzword wankery at its most nauseatingly nonsensical.

Intended to imply some John Woo-style musical badassery, it instead conjures unsettling images of a six-limbed Rick Nielsen shredding twin double-necked space-guitars on the stage of the Galactic Budokan and the dyspeptic grimace which typically marks my moments of speechless disbelief.

(Pal Dave, who has recently resumed work on his exceptional This Used to Be the Future feature, has determined that “Hooks Akimbo” will be the name of all his hypothetical Shadowrun characters from here on out. Truly a semiotic marriage made in hell.)

Hooks akimbo. Hooks. Fucking. Akimbo. No matter how many times I repeat it, it still strikes straight and true to my disdain cortex. No matter how many times I have tried to forget it, it bubbles to the surface like pestilential discharge from an untreated wound.

Congratulations, band whose name I can no longer remember. You may have moved on to the more lucrative world of customer service representatives and HVAC repair school courses, but one facet of your existence has lived on.

Recommended listing: Hooks sans akimbo are good enough for me.

Where Castle Grayskull was situated on a choice parcel of exclusively zoned Eternian real estate, The Castle Zendo was stuck occupying the back pages of holiday toy catalogs — a miserable patch of landscape where only clueless relatives chose to dwell.

“I think Jimmy’s into those whatchacallems — ‘Rulers of the Galaxy’ or something. I think that’s them there.”

Though relatively imposing in its molded plastic grandeur, The Castle Zendo’s resentful landlords treated the property and its residents with disdain born of thinly veiled envy. The Jipps and Mogs served as cannon fodder in countless undocumented battles, and the hastily sculpted heroes and villains served as disposable jabronis for the better branded players who came to grudgingly inhabit the castle’s grounds.

Time eventually took a harsh toll on The Castle Zendo. Its banners fell away. Its walls faded under long months of exposure to the harsh elements. Its inhabitants fell prey to their ravenous domestic beasts or their own shoddy craftsmanship.

Its remains were consigned to history, where enterprising souls turning the soil for a new bed of begonias would unearth the scattered fragments of a plastic purple turret — or perhaps a stray limb from a long departed Jipp — and quietly contemplate the unknowable events which preceded such a fate.