Who was that Emerald Archer?

The San Antonio Express-News has been running a small filler story the past week or so, inviting readers to send in an letter describing their favorite super-hero, and explaining why this is so. Of course, yours truly, being the über-geek that I am, have sat myself down and pounded out my own ham-fisted missive extolling the virtues of Green Arrow. Some of you may know I have an afinity for that character. Below you may find my letter, presented here for your amusement:

Howdy Mr. Guzman,

I’d like to add my two cents to the Great Comic Book Hero debate. For my money, Green Arrow cannot be beat. I’ve loved the concept, loved the look ever since I first encountered him more than a quarter-century ago. You may have heard of him--he teamed up with fellow hero Green Lantern and went jaunting around the universe, righting wrongs and championing the oppressed way back in the ultra-groovy 70s. Or you may know of his through his long-time girlfriend, the fishnet stockings-wearing blonde bombshell, Black Canary. Or you may know him as that modern-day Robin Hood with a goatee that shoots crooks with a boxing glove arrow.

Okay, that boxing glove arrow’s a tough one to live down. I’ll give you that one.

But Green Arrow--otherwise known as Oliver Queen--has always been a hero with both feet planted on the ground. Like Robin Hood, he’s often the only one willing to step up for victims who have nowhere left to turn. He’s fought slum lords and poachers, investigated crimes that no one else took an interest in. He was rich once, but lost it all because he was more interested in tilting at windmills than negotiating corporate strategy. There’s not a lost cause that doesn’t have his name on it. He resigned from the Justice League of America because he was incensed by other heroes’ attitudes that some injustices were beneath their notice. He’s told Batman where to go and how to get there--and lived. He despises “all this cosmic crap” that pervades comics.

Unlike some popular characters, he isn’t an alien from a doomed world given powers by our yellow sun. He wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider as a teen. The U.S. Army didn’t inject him with Super Soldier Serum at the onset of World War II. He wasn’t given a glowing green ring by short blue aliens. He’s a regular guy, like you or I perhaps, with an overblown thrill seeker complex. He’s horribly flawed, but he likes his chili hot and his jazz cool. He’s a real person, or at least as real as comic book characters can ever be, which is why I’ve indulged myself with the Unofficial Green Arrow Fansite since 1998 or so. The updates thus far this year have been few and far between, I’m afraid, but there’s enough content currently online there to satisfy even your most obscure craving for Green Arrow trivia.

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A topic is worth a thousand words

For future reference, when writing encyclopedic entries on SFnal matters, a thousand word limit is a real pain. I figured it would be, but great googaly moogaly, I never suspected how limiting it would be. My first draft entries--which I thought were bare bones and minimalist to begin with--turned out to be closer to 2,000 words in length. And the word limit was a hard one, with no wiggle room. I didn't trim. I hacked away with a machete. The hemmoraging was awful. Almost all my clever and groundbreaking insights fell away in agony. So if you're wondering why I don't discuss Themyscira, the formal name of Wonder Woman's home of Paradise Island and how it's named after the ancient Amazon capital on the shores of the Black Sea, or why the political crisis that faces the remnant Earth government in the "Paradise" chapter of Clifford Simak's City parallels the much smaller municipal political crisis that opens the book, well, blame the thousand word limit. Honestly, I could've written 5,000 words on these topics, easy.

Now I get to hold my breath waiting on Gary Westfahl to decide if they're acceptable or not...

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Another Python weighs in

Terry Jones, the man who gave us the uneven but still underrated Eric the Viking weighs in this time. He makes many of the same points Eric Idle did in song, but isn't nearly as funny:

The justice department, for example, is boasting about spending $47m on a local law enforcement programme, when Bush had actually proposed cutting its budget by 87%. And the $11.7m that the secretary of health boasts they are setting aside to help those without healthcare is for a programme that Bush has tried to shut down every year he's been in office.

You can read the rest of Jones' rant, which pretty much continues along those lines, over at the Guardian. And if enough people read his column, maybe he'll finally publish his unproduced Gremlins script...

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Light this candle!

Most excellent news came out of California this morning: Scaled Composites has set June 21 as the launch date for the first official suborbital spaceflight of SpaceShipOne. They topped 40 miles in a test flight a month ago, which is effectively the edge of space. But this flight will take the spaceship above 63 miles in altitude, which is the threshhold for the $10 million X-Prize. NASA also considers the "official" boundary of space to be 50 miles, so whoever the pilot is will become the first private pilot to earn astronaut wings. (An interesting bit of trivia: Neil Armstrong earned astronaut's wings by piloting the X-15 above 50 miles long before he even joined NASA's astronaut corps.)

MSNBC has a pretty good history of SpaceShipOne and Scaled Composites online for further reading. If they really developed this entire system for $35 million or so, that's simply astounding. It could quite literally open space up to the general public, and make it affordable. Sure, SpaceShipOne is "only" suborbital, but I strongly suspect Scaled Composites could design a system with those capabilities for far less than the billions being bandied about by NASA...

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They don't write 'em like that anymore

New skiffy goodness up at RevSF! Yea! The Tissue-Culture King is by Sir Julian Huxley, and is a great story about genetic engineering run amok--although, technically, there's no genetic engineering involved at all. Chapter 25 of Mark Finn's The Transformation of Lawrence Croft is live, and examines the question of what geeks do on the third day of a convention when money is running low. And we're up to installment 82 in Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book. And this one's weird. No, really. It is.

As an added treat, part two of the Top 75 Heroines of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror is live on the site, examining spots no. 55-36. Wow! That certainly spans a large, eclectic range. My personal contributions to the list include Sarah from Labyrinth, Black Canary, Jadzia Dax, Ellie Arroway, Scheherazade from 1001 Arabian Nights, Sydney Bristow from Alias and Dr. Susan Calvin from Asimov's book (not the movie--never the movie) I, Robot. Where do they rank, and what other women are listed? Well, you'll just have to read the article to find that out!

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There may be something to this anniversary thing

One of the reasons I married Lisa was because she paid attention. Other girlfriends didn't, which was pretty obvious when they got me gifts--cologne (I never wear cologne), sweaters and other apparel items that make me cringe, leather handbags (!)--in short, pretty crummy gifts. Then they complained that I am hard to shop for. Me, who bounces up and down like a hyperactive puppy whenever I see something in the store I want, and sometimes even pick it up and dance around with it. Yet they "never can figure out" what kind of stuff I want.

Lisa got me the Firefly complete season DVD set for our anniversary. In the past she's gotten me homebrewing kits and truckloads of books--all titles that I desperately wanted, nary a media tie-in amongst them. Her complaint now is that she has a hard time deciding what I'd like best. It's nice to have a wife who understands my inner geek.

Of course, it helps that she operates on--if not the same frequency, then at least one with sympathetic resonance. My gift to her was The Simpsons Season 3 boxed set. When she started quoting lines from the episodes before the package was even open, I knew I'd picked a winner. As if there was any doubt...

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Eight years ago today

As someone who tends to expect disaster lurking around the next corner, reaching our eight year wedding anniversary takes my breath away to a degree. Can so much time have passed so quickly? Let's see: Two daughters, four job changes, two new homes... yeah, I suppose that much time has passed. My life's completely different now than it was then, and that tremendous degree of change is intimidating.

Last night, Lisa said she was glad we'd reached our eighth anniversary without having to worry about the seven-year-itch. "Wait a minute--" I interrupt. "What seven-year-itch? I coulda had a seven-year-itch? No fair!" Nobody ever tells me these things. Sheesh.

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