One of our baby robins flew this morning. To the best of my knowledge that one hasn’t come back, so I’m wondering now if, upon the first successful flight of a robin’s life, the robin says to the parents: “So long, suckers! I’m outta here! No more regurgitated worms and bugs for me!”

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I must confess that I’m not terribly excited about the new Hulk movie. I was a fan of the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferigno show when I was a kid (so much so that to this day whenever I meet a person whose last name is “McGee”, I get a little creeped out), but the Big Green Lummox never held much appeal for me as a comic character. (Admittedly, I suspect that Hulk‘s writers during the time I read comics really didn’t know what they were doing. For a time they had the Hulk trapped in some kind of interdimensional crossroads, so he was visiting another world in each issue, or something like that….) And the new movie’s trailers didn’t impress me, either — they looked, for lack of a better word, “cartoon-y”. Hulk just didn’t look real in those CGI shots that I saw.

But then, Roger Ebert gives it a decent review, and Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum — the most irritating, pretentious, and ultimately empty-headed of EW‘s annoying corral of “Not ready for The New Yorker” big-head critics — doesn’t, so maybe I’ll check it out sometime. (No link to the Schwarzbaum article — you can get it if you’re an EW subscriber, which I am not — thank God — or if you’re on AOL, which I am.)

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I’m very sure that I’ve plugged this site before, but FilmWise really does have some fun movie quizzes. The ones I really enjoyed when I visited yesterday are the prison-movie dialog quiz, the “list of main characters” quiz, and the “animation screenshot” quiz. Check these out. (And for newer readers, if you haven’t checked this site out, go have a look and a lot of fun!)

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My Buffalo News op-ed piece appears today. Go read it, and be amazed. My first official by-line, at least my first paid by-line. I don’t get paid by Green Man Review for the reviews I do there except in that I get to keep the review materials they send me, but they’re my first actual by-line. Or something like that. The article wasn’t edited strongly, either — just a couple of things were tweaked and a handful of words removed, so I can only surmise that my submitted copy was as close to being editorially perfect as is possible. (Insert sound of swelling head here)

(Actually, regular readers of this space won’t find anything new here, since the article’s basically a distillation of my family’s impressions of living in Syracuse, but still….)

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

USGS computer image of Stellwagen Bank, off Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Stellwagen Bank (the curving area, shaded yellow to green, just north of Cape Cod’s tip) is an area of sand and gravel banks formed during the glacial retreats after the last Ice Age, creating an area of shallow water that is a prime habitat for many sea creatures and thus a major feeding ground for whales. Whale-sighting trips launch from many of the seaside towns in Massachusetts and along Cape Cod, with the boats motoring out onto the Bank (where depths suddenly reduce to less than 100 feet) to observe the feeding whales as they come up for air. My wife and I did this as one of our honeymoon activities, and there were indeed many whales to be seen, some of them quite close. Below is a stock image of a whale lifting its head from the water; this is pretty much exactly what we saw that day.

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Ugh! I just had a post get chewed up. Actually, this one wasn’t Blogger’s fault. When posting, I keep two or three browser windows open, so I can refer to the thing on which I’m commenting while composing a post. This time, the page I was attempting to load on the other browser launched a pop-up that choked, and when I tried to close that pop-up, I got that “Program Not Responding” dialog box. What I don’t get is why clicking “End Now” closes all the currently running IE’s, since it’s not the case that they’re all not responding….or is it? Anyone?

(The post in question was some tame Star Wars babbling that can really wait for another time. And judging by the number of short-burst posts today, I’m guessing that I’m not much in a “content generation” mood right now. Ah well….)

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I’m quite aware that controversy exists as to why we “liberated” Iraq. But I’m pretty sure this wasn’t one of our reasons.

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I’ve never been one to entertain theories of Cosmic Convergence and such, but even so I find something oddly notable in the fact that on the same day my daughter came into the world, Stephen King was nearly removed from it when he was hit by a guy driving recklessly.

That was four years ago, today.

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I’m glad to see that some people still consider it bogus that here we are, two years past 2001, and there’s still no space station in Earth orbit that’s serviced by regular PanAm flights and home to a Howard Johnson’s. If Amazon sells the tickets, I’ll have to put one on my wish list.

I’m also glad to see that difficulties in getting a probe to Mars aren’t limited to NASA. A lot of people get annoyed every time we lose an expensive space probe, but I figure if we’re going to use “This ain’t rocket science!” as a euphemism for “Any idiot can do this”, then maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when it turns out that rocket science actually is a rather difficult endeavor.

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Reading news online early in the morning, when one is still bleary-eyed, is an activity fraught with danger. For instance, this morning I saw this headline and immediately clicked it for the story:

Adam Sandler Arrested by US

After a moment of confusion in the course of reading the linked story, I realized my error. The headline had actually read:

Saddam Handler Arrested by US

Somehow, I think the version I expected might have made a slightly more interesting news item, but that’s just my opinion. (I tend to misread things like that quite often. You can imagine my double-take the first time I ever drove past a Fuddrucker’s restaurant.)

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