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Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies

This weekend, I watched the rest of my Revolutionary Girl Utena DVD, a neefy little thing that contains the first seven episodes of the drug-inspired TV series from Japan. While many anime series are equally drug-inspired (Neon Genesis Evangelion comes to mind), Utena is the only one in which the protagonist seems to realize how completely nuts it all is, and is increasingly surly at being caught up in it all. It's a fun little jaunt down the surrealist alleys of anime. What more can you ask for?

Also of note is that I completed that irritating game, Warcraft II. Being doggedly perservering can be somewhat of a pain sometimes, but it would have tasked me so to not finish it. Now I can do something more productive, like floss my toes. Yes, I've won the game as the Orcish Horde, and the light of the kingdoms of old has been extinguished, never again to be re-born. Ah, evil triumphs at last.

In other news, I failed to watch the Super-Bowl. However, it was apparently fairly interesting, in that the Rams won it literally by a few inches, as the Titans (who comes up with these names?) had a guy running for the goal line, for a TD that would have tied the game, and he got tackled on the one-yard line as time expired. Now that's fairly mighty. Not mighty enough to get me to watch football, but fairly darn mighty nonetheless. Talk about your "close, but not enough" finishes.

Well, that's the weekend update. Oh, all right. You want more content? Here, have some comic book notes.

• Dirty Pair: Run From The Future #1 - Yes, it's the Dirty Pair, those two happy-go-lucky agents of universal destruction, once more out agenting. Writer Adam Warren shows his intrinsic evil here in a simple way. There's an old villain from a previous series who's one of the few to actually survive the giant can of whup-ass that tends to get opened whenever the Pair are around. Everyone's been waiting for her to show up again. So Warren starts this issue off by having her show up - except it's really one of Our Heroines, being snarky and disguising herself as said villainess. Tricky bastiche. Now, for an encore, he'll no doubt have said villainess /actually/ show up, just to confuse the fans further.
• Black Panther #16 - No, really. Priest continues the wackiness, with Everett K. Ross, narrator extraordinaire, ending up in the villain's lair. It doesn't really matter which villain, though, does it. Ross describes it as a plus estate or some such on top of a giant needle-like tower, adding, "As soon as I saw it, I knew it was going to blow up. Places like this ALWAYS blow up. The thing is, I think [the villain] knew it, too. I think that's why he put it there."
• Authority #11 - Still written by Warren Ellis, still with more sensawunda than was in a hundred issues of JLA. 'nuff said.
• Gate Crashers #1 - The first Black Bull comic to be released. Aaaiiee! I can feel my cranium shrinkiii-- I lak blak bul comiks. Dey's good an on tim. Ow! That's enough of that. This is a fetid wreck of a comic, which can pretty much be summed up by the fact that the main character's girlfriend suffers the indignity of having her posterior appear several panels before you get to see her face. 'nuff said, really. As a special bonus, includes moronic jibber in the back where the writers and artists cut-out heads are pasted onto an infantile and totally unamusing comic strip. Way to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Rant 'o the day contains no additives, preservatives or alien spores of any kind. Use only as directed. Do not expose to direct sunlight. Do not fold, spindle, multilate or remove identifying tags. Handle with care. Contains less than 3% milk fat by weight, not by volume. Certified 'Syndicate Approved'. Squeeze the lemon. Remember, kids, only users lose drugs.

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