Today's blog entry was going to be about how much I hate those stupid inflatable yard holiday decorations, but then I realized that everything in the blog has been negative this month. So instead, let me mention something that I actually like: Heroes on NBC.

Heroes is up against Monday Night Football and is marketed to that group of television viewers that is disinterested in sports (you know, geeks and women). As much as I love comic books, I'm not going to bypass weekly football for a television show about, well, anything. I wouldn't have ever discovered this gem except for NBC's brilliant decision to also air it on their sister station SciFi Network on Fridays before Doctor Who, which I also love. And starting last week, NBC.com now streams old episodes so that I can catch up on the elements that I missed. (Heroes is as much an episodic serial as any other soap opera, so, believe me, there was a lot to catch up on.)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: America loves super heroes. (I think it's part of the American Dream.) Despite the entertainment ghetto to which comic books have been traditionally relegated, they continue to inspire more popular entertainments such as movies and television shows. If this show was a comic, it would never reach the mass audience it deserves. And it's a blast to find a well-written television show that contains as much wonder, suspense, and excitement as an issue of Grant Morrison's JLA. If Superman Returns had been written half as well as this, it could have been among the greatest movies ever.

Yet despite being a television show designed for a mass audience, the show is very loyal to its comic book roots. (In one episode, a major character is revealed to be a member of the "Merry Marvel Marching Society." Sweet!) Heroes is an enjoyable mixture of X-Men meets X-Files with a hint of Smallville. Though this makes it a little predictable for longtime comic readers, it more than makes up for that with an enthusiastic and encouraging embrace of the super hero genre. In any given episode, you'll find such echos of such characters as DC's Phosphorus Man, Thorn, and Waverider, or Marvel's Cannonball, Rogue, and Shadowcat. Excelsior!

So there you go. Something I like. This blog will now resume its regularly scheduled bitching.

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Sometimes posting to a blog is like being in a food fight: throw enough pie and someone's GOT to get hit in the face. (This column is going Larry King style, baby!)

• Bravo Channel is showing both The Princess Bride and Back to the Future today. Could those be two of the best movies ever made? I say yes!
• Huge underdog University of Georgia today beat (nay, CRUSHED!) the mighty Auburn Tigers, destroying any hopes Auburn had of running for the national title. Go Dawgs!
• Television advertising execs just don't understand: the current Bellsouth ads use the song "Stuck In The Middle With You" to promote that product. The song was written about sitting between recording executives. Can telecom execs be that different?
• Of all the cars I've ever owned/driven, the one I miss most is a 1985 Ford Crown Victoria LTD Country Squire Station Wagon.
• Recent studies say that happy people are sick less often than people who are optimistic or active. That means that a cynical asshole like me will likely outlive the rest of you bastards so long as I'm happy being a cynical asshole. Hooray for science!
• Julia Roberts' single sexiest film role was as Tinkerbell in Hook. Does that say worse things about her or me?
• The National Football League has a patent on confusion; it is simply impossible to tell who is any good from week to week. Some may call this parity or equality but I call it exciting. Chicago: undefeated. Dolphins: incompetent. Final score: Dolphins 31, Chicago 13. I say this, I sure look forward to December 31, when the Dolphins play the currently undefeated Colts.

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This weekend I was thinking about how pleased I am that baseball season is over because it means that after several months of self-imposed exile, I can listen to Atlanta's 96 Rock radio station again. During the season, 96 Rock - Atlanta's oldest FM station, number 96.1 on your analog radio dial - forgoes classic rock 'n roll for Atlanta Braves coverage. It sucks to tune the radio in hoping for AC/DC or Tom Petty and hearing Skip Caray lamenting weak batting instead.

I suppose it's a trade-off for the Clear Voice >shudder< owned radio station: losing the listening audience like me that tunes out because we're not hearing music versus the increase in listeners due to the broadcast of a baseball game. But who even pays attention to baseball anymore?

Television ratings for baseball games have been gradually declining for decades. Major League Baseball frequently points out that revenue is up and allowing for inflation, ticket prices have remained relatively consistent over the past half-century. This really means that revenues aren't so much up, they're just much larger numbers thanks to that same inflation. So baseball revenue has been largely stagnant for years, indicating an overall decrease in interest among a growing American population. America's Pastime? More like America's Past Time.

I'm pretty sure that radio ratings are falling across the board as people are given more options in the home, office, and car. (I looked at the internet in an attempt to verify this, but all I could find were sites maintained by radio advertisers such as the Radio Advertising Bureau, and they are the last group of people who would willingly confirm this.) I'm not surprised that broadcasting baseball games may provide a shot in the arm for declining ratings in an industry besieged by the variety of popular entertainment. However, I would think that weakening your listening base by bisecting your listenership into summer sports fans and winter rockers would only damage your all-too-important brand loyalty.

So give it up, 96 Rock, and give me America's other dying amusement: rock and roll.

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In the movie Robocop, when post-resurrection Alex Murphy is having a flashback to his previous life in the now-abandoned house, his son is sitting in front of the tv (watching the show T.J. Lazer - thank you, Shatner!) with a bunch of comic books in front of him. Those are Marvel ROM, Spaceknight comic books. Clearly the design for ROM, a toy turned into a comic, was one of many that influenced the Robocop costume. But I think it's odd that a movie that takes place in the future would depict a boy reading comic books that were canceled before the movie was ever released.

It's perhaps a little more odd that the director of Robocop, Paul Verhoeven (also director of Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Starship Troopers, and Hollow Man) believed that Robocop was the story of Jesus Christ in the future. Like Jesus, Murphy rose from the dead and saved his people - police, not Christians - from persecution. It should be pointed out that Verhoeven was the director, NOT the writer of Robocop, who got the idea from Blade Runner. I think the fact that Robocop was driven largely by vengeance sort of puts the whole thing outside the realm of comparison. If Paul wanted to make a point, I think he should have made a film where Jesus crawls out of his cave and goes all biblical on the Romans' ass.

As I read back on what I just wrote, I realize that I'm talking about a movie that was released in 1987. That was 19 years ago. It's those sorts of realizations that start to make you feel old. My parents wouldn't let me see Robocop because it was rated R. Yet I was allowed to see Good Morning, Vietnam, even though it was rated R. It's those sorts of realizations that start to make you understand why you're fucked up.

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I have a friend who is absolutely in love with Oscar Goldman, the eternally inappropriately sunglassed chief of the U.S. government's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and boss of United States Air Force Colonel Steve Austin, the world's only Six Million Dollar Man. Because of this man-crush, I'm frequently subjected to long marathons of Six Million Dollar Man episodes, one of the most boring shows known to mankind. As an unwilling participant in the misadventures of Steve Austin, I've learned quite a few things about how poorly the United States handles its scientific secrets and how world-famous NASA moon astronauts spend their free time.

For those of you who may not know, Col. Austin was chosen for bionic implants after he crashed a NASA test plane. Sure, we may have the technology, and technically we can rebuild him, but why would we want to? It's an expensive procedure to waste on a fellow who can't even properly land a plane. (By the way, $6,000,000 - six million with an "M" - in 1973 translates into nearly $30,000,000,000 - thirty billion with a "B" - in 2006 when adjusted for inflation using NASA's own inflation calculator. That's approximately how much money the world's second richest man, Warren Buffet, recently gave the world's richest man, Bill Gates, to spend on eradicating pandemic diseases. I suppose that no one told him that he could have purchased bionic limbs for the same cost.)

Presumably, Austin's particular disfigurement was perfectly compatible with the potential bionic replacement surgery that the OSI had already planned for a future accident victim, but I'm really not sure why they chose Steve Austin. Austin is demonstrated, even in the pilot episode, to be a laid-back, sunrise-watching, skirt-chasing, self-indulgent pacifist. Hardly a prime candidate for the job of "patriotic super-spy." In fact, Austin will even lament the implementation of his bionics, calling himself "less than human." Steve, last time I checked, being faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive does not lower you to "less-than-human" status; laying in bed and complaining about how good you now have it does.

The good Col. Austin had both of his legs replaced with bionic limbs that could propel him at speeds up to 60 miles per hour. His new bionic right arm could lift several hundred pounds effortlessly. His destroyed left eye was replaced with a camera that could provide a 20x magnification. And all of these modifications were made without reinforcing his hips for the jostling of the extreme vibrations while running, his spine from the torque created while lifting cars, or his skull from the frequent "karate chop" knockout blows to the head that every thug, hitman, and Soviet spy would employ to incapacitate him. That's good medicine.

Most disturbing (and far-fetched) is the premise that these bionic enhancements are powered by self-contained atomic generators in the arm and legs. That alone should be a far more spectacular accomplishment than the bionics these generators power, but it is frequently played down during the shows. In a typical nuclear reactor, radioactive decay is harnessed to heat water for energy generating steam-powered turbines. This makes Steve either radioactive or full of hot air, maybe both. It's possible that since you never saw Steve water his legs, his generators were a new kind of atomic power unfit for anything other than making metal legs move really fast. In fact, I don't recall anything else during the run of the show using the power of these generators in any other way. Nuclear power was instead frequently shown to be a dangerous tool demonstrated by way of several near reactor meltdowns, missing atomic devices, and the destruction of the Bahamas via a nuclear warhead (detonated by Steve himself). Were we supposed to be subtly fooled into believing that Col. Austin was extra-dangerous because of his nuclear powered limbs?

Once fully healed, Steve Austin was put to work as a super spy in order to pay the government back for his new Top Secret "Security Clearance Level 5" super powers. (On a USAF Colonel's O-6 salary, which I estimate was probably slightly less than $20,000 in 1973, including his NASA and super spy bonuses, paying back those $6,000,000 would probably have taken a mere 600 years.) He refused the job at first and has to be tricked into dueling with the Russians for the location of a stolen American warhead. (I know it doesn't sound like something that someone can be tricked into, but Col. Austin does not list "Mensa Membership" anywhere on his bizarre resume.) Reluctantly, Steve agrees to be OSI's poodle, and soon found himself battling Russians, foreign terrorists, mobsters, assassins, robots, moonshiners, rogue archeologists, other bionic men, crooked cops, rockstar groupies, imposter Steve Austins, telepaths, mountain lions, earthquakes, aliens, sharks, and John Saxon.

As a secret agent, Steve reflected James Bond's frequent misunderstanding of stealth and low profiles. Col. Steve Austin, astronaut and college football star quarterback, was widely recognized throughout the world, destroying most chances for subtlety. I suppose that super speed and strength don't naturally lend themselves to guileful subterfuge, but then neither did Steve's fashion sense. (Button up that shirt, Steve!)

What little camouflage Steve did possess was often lost when Steve would capriciously reveal his enhancements to anyone within earshot. He simply couldn't resist the opportunity to jump over a 10-feet tall fence or race an automobile. Steve, here's a super-spy tip: using the line "I eat a lot of carrots," to explain away how you were able to read a car's licence plate several hundred yards away in the dark isn't going to stand up to any real scrutiny. Steve's indiscretion became so widespread, even Monday Night Football host Frank Gifford who supposedly played college ball against Steve Austin in the early 1950s was therefore naturally entrusted with knowledge of Steve's top secret enhancements. (Guest stars always found out about Steve's abilities. William Shatner, Farah Fawcett, and Gary Collins among others all were entrusted with some of the nation's most classified information. They were a trustworthy bunch, I'm sure.)

So Steve Austin was a lousy pilot and an incompetent spy. Based on the fact that the only female interest that he could keep was a fellow American bionic slave/spy, I'm guessing he was probably a poor lover, as well. In one episode, Steve even admits to a crippled boy that he fumbled a lot as a football player. It should be no surprise that Oscar sends Steve to the ends of the earth (which generally looked suspiciously like southern California) on pointless suicide missions; he has to be hoping that one day, Steve won't come back. I sure do.

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Hell, it's my blog I can bitch if I want to. And it's Friday the 13th, so I'll kill someone with a machete while wearing a hockey mask if I want to, too.

PayPal really knows how to get my goat. One month ago tomorrow, I shipped a 24 pound package via USPS Economy Parcel Post to Argentina. (The contents were some Masters of the Universe figures I sold for a friend on eBay.) The buyer has grown impatient after a mere 3 weeks of waiting for an international Economy Parcel Post (read as "slow boat") package and has earlier this week opened a dispute with PayPal for the cost of the item. Of course, this means that PayPal has put a "temporary hold" on my account in the amount of the payment. If this were a $29.50 item, that's be no big deal. But it's not. It's a $295.00 item.

So now, my Paypal account is essentially useless to me until PayPal realizes that I did ship the item, the buyer is just being incredibly impatient, and I'm in the clear. My past experience with Paypal tells me that this will take about 90 days. Meanwhile, PayPal will be hassling me to pay them what I "owe" them (HA!) and I will be unable to take eBay payments through PayPal. As anyone who sells on eBay knows, this means that it is pointless to try to sell anything on eBay. Therefore, no income for me for 3 months.

Once again, let me say to you people out there: PayPal sucks. If you use it, learn to enjoy the sensation of someone grabbing you by the balls and squeezing while ramming a Louisville Slugger up your ass. Fuck you, PayPal.

(Granted, I am well aware that the problem in this case is not actually PayPal, but the dipshit who decided that economy international postage should arrive on his doorstep within 3 weeks of shipping. But since I'm not currently in the mood to travel to Argentina to avenge this disruption in my life, I'm attacking the messenger. PayPal doesn't care.)

On a completely unrelated note, why do MLB and the NFL have Breast Cancer Awareness Months? Exactly how many players in either of those leagues are female? In 2002, only 3,000 more women in the U.S. were killed by accidents than died from killer breasts. (That's less than 10 a day in a country with 300 million people.) When was the last time you heard of an Accident Awareness Campaign? Breast cancer isn't even the largest killer of women in America. It doesn't even make the top 5. Alzheimer's Disease is credited with killing more women than breast cancer. (However, a Alzheimer's Awareness Month wouldn't make much of an impression, as everyone who cared to promote it would forget about it by the time it arrived.) I suggest that breast cancer is so widely championed these days simply because it is the only one of the top ten killers of women that doesn't also kill large numbers of men.

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Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's the Sun!

I think that if I were a religious person, I'd probably worship the Sun. Sure, the Sun provides the light energy that makes life possible on Earth, and it has been worshipped by humans for as long as we've been standing upright. Links between the Sun and Christianity (the religion of the "Son") are as well established as the date for Christmas. (Interestingly, the name of the Islamic god, "Allah," may have been derived for a pagan Arabic god of the Moon, the anti-Sun. But that's not today's point.) Despite all of this, the Sun's unique relationship to modern culture goes largely ignored. The Sun gave us superheroes.

The archetype of the modern costumed hero, Superman is powered directly by the Sun. The rays of the Earth's yellow sun charge Superman's amazing Kryptonian physique, allowing him the powers of flight, super sense, and invulnerability. Without the Sun, there's no Man of Steel. That makes the Sun directly responsible for Earth's greatest champion.

The anti-Superman, Batman, is also controlled by the Sun. Unlike Superman, Bruce Wayne has no alien physiology, and must limit his crime-fighting to survivable situations. He chose to adopt a demonic costume and fight in the dark, knowing that his training, combined with mankind's inherent fear of the unknown ("Things That Go Bump in the Dark") will give him an edge against the criminal element. The fictitious construct that is "The Batman" could not function in daylight, and only inspires fear in situations where the Sun is absent. (You can't have a Dark Knight without the dark night.) Again, the abilities and character of one of the archetypical heroes of modern culture, The Batman, is determined directly by the Sun.

As if those two weren't great enough examples of the Sun's influence on American popular culture in general and the superhero in specific, the modern archetype for the superheroic family/team, the Fantastic Four, gained their powers from Cosmic Rays, which by their very nature are generated by the Sun. The Sun's natural radiation must also be responsible for some of the X-Men's bizarre super-human mutations, such as those possessed by Sunspot and Dazzler.

If the Sun has provided all of these powerful and admirable superheroes with their reason for being, I can't think of anything better to devote to worshiping. It certainly makes more sense than Catholicism.

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Dawgs win again, beating a helpless UAB team without really trying. And as happy as that makes me, I'm kept grounded by the Dolphins' considerably less exceptional second loss. It's going to be a long, long NFL season at this rate.

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Football season approaches rapidly. One of the best parts of the NFL season (and there are many, many highlights of the NFL season every season) is the Tuesday Morning Quarterback (TMQ for short) column written by Gregg Easterbrook. I was caught by surprise this week when I discovered that TMQ was returning to Page 2 on ESPN.com this year after several years at NFL.com. Apparently this switch was announced way back in April and I didn't notice it. The season hasn't even started yet and I've already almost fumbled the ball!

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I just returned home from my trip to Canton, Ohio, where Dan "The Greatest Quarterback of All Time" Marino was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. We were surrounded by thousands of Dolphins fans wearing Marino jerseys. The level of fanaticism was almost creepy.

We drove through Amish country to get there. I was really quite surprised to see that there is still such a high demand for carriage & buggy shops. When you think about it, they are already compliant with President Bush's new energy plan, so maybe they are ahead of the game, not a more than a century behind it. (Vote Amish in 2008! They are no strangers to federal government; look at C. Everrett Koop.)

In fact, the Amish may be one of the last reamining groups that someone can carelessly insult on the internet. They certainly aren't going to find out what you flamed them about.

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