Sunday, February 10, 2013

A Sunday Review

TV this week:

  • Young Justice: "Usual Suspects" - And finally it all comes to a head! Oh yeah, this was what I was waiting for, and it did not disappoint. But the best moment was the reveal of the mole at the end. Not who I was expecting. Very much not HOW I was expecting.
  • Young Justice: "Auld Acquaintance" - The finale of the season was quite an adventure. Again, I wasn't expecting a lot of what happened. The individual fights were excellent, but snarkly Klarion just sort of made the episode for me, despite being annoying every time he was on the screen. What the Light gathered at Cadmus was very interesting, as are the missing 16 hours. Looking forward to starting season two.



DCBS
Here are reviews of the DCBS comic books that I've gotten around to reading and reviewing, sorted by the original shipping date:
  • Jan 2nd
  • Arrow #2 - Three "chapters" each on a different subject. Nothing earth-shatteringly interesting there.
  • Batman Beyond Unlimited #11 - We're finally getting near the end of the Jokers story in Batman Beyond... The Superman Beyond story is kind of cool. And the history of Barda was ok. No Aqua-family though, pity.
  • Superman Family Adventures #8 - There's a strange and interesting twist in the Superman legend.
  • Road to Oz #4 - Interesting choice to use the map that has East and West switched, but I suppose it makes sense if you know enough about Oz. Still, I'm willing to bet it'll confuse some readers.
  • Jan 9th
  • Smallville Season 11 #9 - Still can't quite figure out what's up with Lex and Tess, but it's getting more interesting. I kept expecting AC to pop up with the pair were running across water.
  • Love and Capes: What to Expect #6 - Wow, I really love this book. I think we need to go hunt down the back issues or collections and get the rest of the series. Good stuff.
  • Spongebob Comics #16 - Eh. No Mermaid Man. Still pretty funny. Eh.
  • Doctor Who V3 #4 - Ha, bonding time. I like how Amy works out that she can help. Eight people actually died, which means Amy saved seven.



Fortean Times #284
Fortean Times #284 (March 2012). Nicely spooky cover for a nicely spooky subject. I was more than a little surprised at the cover article, particularly the whole link to Mormonism. It seemed to me to be mostly a silly story, but who can tell after this amount of time what the real circumstances were? It is another warning not to take the supernatural too seriously, though. The woman died of fright, aka a shock, which might have triggered some other underlying medical condition.

There's also an article on UnCon 2011. As I'm unlikely to ever make it to an UnCon but am at least familiar enough with conventions to understand the descriptions, I very much enjoy these reports. Another article talks about submarines in Loch Ness. The author proposes an expedition to retrieve the many subs lost in the depths of the loch to help clean it up (then display them as a tourist attraction).

Strangedays was fun. The picture of the "blue" lobster is very striking, very cool. It also included a Fortean Follow-ups section, which is always lovely to read. Sometimes I remember the stories, sometimes I don't. The second half of the movie piece that was the cover story in the last issue is here, and it covers A Man Called Gannon, Men in Black, The Railway Children, Rio Grande and Three Men and a Baby.

Archaeology has an interesting report of strange structures in the Arabian desert that don't seem to have any use and can only be seen from the air. It also has a follow-up on the destruction of ancient earthworks, reporting that a 72-year-old man was arrested for plowing the structure into oblivion. Classical Corner talks about how tales become facts by being repeated in supposedly reliable sources. The quote "A fact is a statement repeated in two textbooks" sums up the article nicely.

Science talks about the difficulty of getting equipment to Mars to explore, and all the failures involved in getting there. It mentions the "Great Galactic Ghoul" that some folks in NASA jokingly blamed for eating probes in space. Ghostwatch is about two travelers who seek directions from a house they later learn doesn't exist any longer. Alien Zoo has a bit of cryptozoological Canadian coins along with a couple of other stories.

The UFO Files has a really interesting story of a 1968 sighting that still isn't fully explained, and what happened after the off-duty policeman reported the sighting. Blasts from the Past starts a series on the Fabulous Flying Men of 1880. There's some really bizarre stuff in there. Random Dictionary starts a series on UFO Crash Retrievals. Again, interesting stuff. If there were so many downed test aircraft, the cover-up sometimes was worse than the crashes, I think.

Fortean Traveller goes to Bangkok to talk with skulls. Police News is about animal hoarders, and having seen Animal Cops I don't think the pictures really do justice to the reality of animal hoarding situations. That's one subject Illustrated Police News didn't sensationalize enough.

Forums has an article about skeptics' double-standards (in this case accepting an anonymous report that a psychic's show is faked instead of getting solid evidence), an article about belief and the human brain and an article about Transient Global Amnesia (which could explain a lot of "lost time" events).

Interesting reviews that nearly made me put books on my wishlist, but I resisted. Letters were great, including a lovely haunted house story. Another good issue.



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