I managed to scan various goofy Post-It doodles before I left so that I could post them today for you. Because I care. Care about subjecting the world to yet more Huey/Gosalyn shmoopiness. ( Mostly Disney, some HA!, DC, and original. )

In conclusion, although I have songs for almost everything else fannish ever, I didn't have a song for Huey/Gosalyn until I remembered the best duet ever, from Viva Las Vegas:

I totally forgot to mention that I was going to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, didn't I? So, um...I'm in Vegas. Hi! It's really hot here, and also I am pretty sure composed 112% of neon tubing.

We spent the afternoon at the pool. Our hotel (which isn't on the strip; we'll be staying on the strip when we get back from Arizona) has a shark tank in the middle of the pool, and a waterslide that goes through the shark tank. I think this is a feature that should be included in all pools and most showers.

I have had "Viva Las Vegas" stuck in my head since we arrived, which is a shame because I only know the first line and the chorus. Also, I have a deep need to watch Back in Action like 47 times. I mean, more so than usual.

mizzmarvel and I watched Meet the Robinsons tonight. It was super cute! I mean, the time travel made pretty much no sense, but the animation was wonderful, the voices were superb, and I fell desperately in love with all of the main characters. My only quibble was ( small quibble, major spoiler )

I'm all full of theories lately! One that I've been kicking around but keep forgetting to post about is an explanation of the humans in Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers. See, according to that one comic story in Disney Adventures that someone once posted on scans_daily, and also common sense, Rescue Rangers takes place in the same universe as DuckTales, Darkwing Duck, Goof Troop, and TaleSpin. But the latter four are populated solely with anthropomorphic animals, and CaDRR has humans. Now, I refuse to believe that humans are simply sneaking around the fringes of Duckburg and Spoonerville, so...what gives?

But consider this! In the shorts, Donald and the triplets et al. are, again, anthropomorphic beings in an anthropomorphic world (you don't generally see lots of bystanders, but certainly Goofy's "suburban life" cartoons were populated with a lot of other dogs (all of whom looked exactly like Goofy, but that's another matter)). But Chip and Dale are not anthropomorphic, really; they're animals, like Pluto.

And further, any mouse person you might see in, say, DuckTales is going to look a lot more like Mickey than Gadget. (Not that Mickey ever showed up, except probably as a plethora of hidden Mickeys, but there are rodentine supporting characters in Barks's stories that look like Mortimer.)

So what if it's all a matter of point of view? When the story is about Donald or Darkwing or Baloo, the animals are just animals. But when you tell a story about the animals, they become anthropomorphic - because the central figures are always anthropomorphic - and the previously anthropomorphic animals are shifted one level up, into full humans. So Professor Nimnul might really be a pig or something! I guess. The key point to take away is that from a certain point of view, Chip is always wearing that kicky bomber jacket and fedora combo. I think that's an important thing to carry with you in an uncaring world.

Of course, none of this explains Quack Pack, but then, nothing could.

Bonus Observation: Guess - without going to the Rule 34 site - which Disney Afternoon lady features in the most porn, and not-technically-porn-but-still-creepy art on DA? Bet you can't!

I was thinking about how Supergirl is the embodiment of the teenage girl in comics (which I really think she is; there's no other character quite as recognizable who is so inextricably tied to teenage-girlness as Supergirl, even in the incarnations where she's not a teenager), and what that all means, and it got me wondering who the embodiment of the teenage boy is. I don't think it's Robin; to me, Robin, at least in the archetypal sense, is much more a symbol of a child than a teen.

And then I thought, "What about Spider-Man?" I'm not too familiar with the character, so I'm willing to entertain arguments for and against, but if he is, I think it's interesting to compare his shtick and Supergirl's and see what exactly the world is asking of its teenage girls versus its teenage boys. That is to say, Peter's thing has always been, "My life is hard because I am powerless, and even when I get powers it's still complicated and sad, and the media hates me, and my uncle is dead, and life is confusing and full of hormonal turmoil." Whereas Kara's, at least historically, has been, "I'm pretty and perky and everyone likes me and I always find a solution!" Part of that is DC vs. Marvel and part of that is that conflicted heroes were just starting to find their way when Peter first appeared, three years after Kara, but I do think it's an interesting dichotomy, and one that fits in with an idea that intrigued me in American Sweethearts: that (especially in times of trouble) girls are our hope for the future, and we need them to be sunny and flawless. Perhaps the Karas of the world are meant to guide the Peters along.

This is not a terribly worked-out idea or anything, but...thoughts?

Apparently there's a Top 5 YA Crushes thing going around? I wanted to do this, since I always like talking about myself, but I didn't actually read that much YA when I was in the proper age range. Mostly I read kids' books and Piers Anthony. And once I started reading more YA, I was too old to really crush on the characters; mostly I just think they're adorable and wee. So I present to you my Top 5 Kids and YA Crushes, Sort Of, roughly in the order I encountered them:

1. Sam Thomas and Alan Gray (The Baby-Sitters Club, Ann M. Martin)

Did I mention that I am bending the rules further by listing 5 canons instead of 5 characters? Whoops. I have always had a weakness for comic relief boys, and thus found Sam and Alan both totally adorable as a kid. Sam, fair enough; Alan, I have discovered upon rereading as an adult, I probably was not supposed to like as much as I did, but oh well. They like to annoy the girls they like but are inherently decent! I love that! And apparently Alan gets more well-rounded in Friends Forever, which pleases me, even if I can't picture him with Claudia instead of Kristy.

Honorable mentions go to Bart Taylor, who I liked as a kid because I automatically liked Kristy's love interest, but who I find kind of lackluster as an adult, and Charlie Thomas, who I didn't care about as a kid, but whose good-natured responsibleness has won me over as an adult.


2. Edmund Pevensie and Eustace Scrubb (The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis)

I cannot piiiiiiick. Both Edmund and Eustace are flawed characters when we meet them, in sharp contrast to the shining benevolence of the other kids around them, and both go through hellish experiences and come out the other side wiser, but still very much themselves. I love that Eustace isn't perfect after he turns back into a boy - he can still be peevish, all the way through the end of the series - but he's trying. And I love that Edmund, who was always the brains of the family, grows up to be a wise, thoughtful man whose most important characteristic is his fairness. The prickly ones are so much more interesting than the perfect ones.


3. Pickles Johnson (School Daze, Jerry Spinelli)

I swear, someday I will make my post about these books. Pickles is just one of those utterly captivating people who comes up with madcap schemes and you don't think to ask why you're going along with it until you're halfway through. He's a brilliant inventor in such a charming kid way, and utterly, hilariously confident in even his more ridiculous schemes. He's deeply loyal to his friends, utterly fearless, and sweetly, boyishly nice, and every time I read a scene about another one of his strangely enchanting quirks the nine-year-old in me swoons. He plays taps when the school's hamster dies. I LOVE HIM.


4. Dandin (Mariel of Redwall and The Bellmaker, Brian Jacques)

I have a thing for thieves, and by all right Gonff, Prince of Mousethieves, should be on this list, but I'm trying to stick to kids and teens on my kids and teens list, and I always got the impression that Gonff, immature as he is, is in his early 20s (or whatever mouse years correspond to that). But Dandin, Gonff's great-grandson, has inherited a lot of his thiefish sass, mitigated by a more straight-forward hero nature (actually a lot of the flute-playing, nimble daredevil thiefishness is gone by The Bellmaker, which is kind of a bummer), and the blended archetypes work really well. I love how friendly and clever and loyal he is, and that he never tries to steal Mariel's spotlight, and that all he wants is to go on adventures with his best friend (and vaguely-suggested love interest OH I HOPE I HOPE I HOPE). Mariel is the reason that Mariel of Redwall is my favorite Redwall book, but Dandin certainly helps!


5. Marco (Animorphs, K.A. Applegate)

I hope you didn't miss the multiple mentions of how I like the funny ones. I'm a lot more cheerful than Marco (or any Animorphs character, thank God), but his life philosophy has matched mine as well as any fictional character I've ever encountered: you've got to laugh, because otherwise you'll cry. I love how he just wants to keep everyone sane with tomfoolery, and that he never wants anyone to feel sorry for him, and that he's keenly, cuttingly smart, because it takes brains to be funny. I love his insecurities and how he wants to take care of his dad, and I love that he is bad at driving a truck when he's a gorilla, and I love that he can apparently speak a tribal dialect of Portugese for no reason. I was the only one I knew who liked Marco instead of Tobias as a tween, but I stuck with it then, and I'm sticking with it now.


Honorable mentions:

George Cooper (The Song of the Lioness Quartet, Tamora Pierce): I'm not sure if George counts, because he's a grown-up (okay, he's 17 when we meet him, but Alanna's 10 so that's like ancient to her), but he is one of my all-time literary crushes. So snarky! So devoted! So badass! ILU GEORGE.

Sam Moon (Fearless, Francine Pascal): Sam is the only YA character I read when I was a teenager, and I thought he was SUPER dreamy when I was 16, but in retrospect he's kind of a spineless wonder and those books are ridiculous. Oh well!

I do actually know how to code by hand, but I used to use MS Frontpage for website-making, because I'm lazy. Then I switched to my Mac, and lo, my Frontpage was tragically lost to me. Persnickety GIGO-proving program though it may be, I'm way behind on updating Super.Girl, and it will go significantly faster if I use an HTML editor (especially since this week is hell, oh my God, I seriously considered taking work home with me tonight because I have so much of it and now I kind of wish I had).

So! Does anyone have recommendations for a Mac-compliant HTML editor along those lines? I do have MS Office for the Mac, so a Frontpage for Mac would be divine, if such a thing exists. I am also hearing about Dreamweaver, NVU, and Mozilla Composer. Thoughts? Advice? Bootleg copies?

Today mizzmarvel and I went down to Coney Island and watched the hot dog eating contest. It was pretty much like this, except EVEN BETTER. Then, after we'd finished our own hot dogs, we totally saw Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut leaving Nathan's and ran over to get pictures of them. Mine picture mainly features my thumb. Whoops.

But still. We were close to greatness, you guys.

Then we played Skeeball and traded in our tickets for, among other things, a horrifying knockoff troll doll with a Koosh ball for a body that we named Joey Chestnut.

Anyway, I'm proud to live in a country where I can watch a man eat 68 hot dogs in ten minutes, watch another man have people to pay to shoot him in the head with a paintball gun, go on a Ferris Wheel, get a blotchy and highly unattractive sunburn, and earn an incredibly shoddily made harmonica by playing Whack-a-Shark. Go Team USA!

I have a dream, and that dream is to read every issue of Action Comics. This dream is beset by forces outside my control, like that I'm lazy and easily distracted, but its flickering flame will not be extinguished from my heart. And for you lucky people out there, it means ridiculous Golden (and eventually Silver, and Bronze, and Modern) Age scans!

( Now to put a hastily conceived plan into action! )

1. I went to two tap classes today and oh my God, you guys, I missed tapping so much. It was kind of a Goldilocks effect - the first one was mind-numbingly easy, and the second was just a scootch too hard, but I'd rather be challenged than stupefied, so I'm staying in the hard one. We did the Shim Sham! (Not that fast or well, of course, and only the first four sections, but still.) I will now be annoying my landlords by doing this around my apartment constantly (they live below us).

2. NPR described my Supergirl costume retrospective as being written with "considerable wit and grace." Three generations of liberal New York Jews have reached their apex in me, at this moment.

1. Some sort of Disney meta thing, for critical analysis of anything Disney, from the movies to the merchandising to the parks. If you want to write an essay about the existentialist themes in the Mighty Ducks trilogy, this is your jam! Actually I might just start that one.

2. A comics Big Bang. Or two, I guess, one for each company. Not that I need another thing to be writing, but it might actually make me sit down and write the GL/GA Navy/pirate AU of epic epicness, starring everybody.*

3. Okay, this isn't a community, at least not in the LJ sense, but I like lists of threes and I've been whining about this a lot lately, so I'm going to post it anyway: a Disney convention! Because I want to spend three days in a big room with hundreds of other people who want to discuss the merits of the various direct-to-video sequels with me and whether Max is Goofy Jr. and how much of a genius Carl Barks was, and I know there are people who want to discuss things I don't really know about like Annette Funicello and the history of the Tiki Room and their collectible Davy Crockett coonskin caps, and they should get to rock this con too! Also because I want to make the Giselle curtain dress for Halloween but mizzmarvel and I also want to be Anastasia and Drizella (we would rock those costumes so hard, you don't even know) and also I've been meaning to be Ariel for like ten years and I feel weird about wearing a Disney costume to Comic Con but I could totally wear all three of these to Disney Con! So someone should organize that, and have it in New York, and then I would go. The end.



*And me!**

**Points for getting the reference, but not if you're queenitsy or harriet_vane, who I know do.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been feeling gloomy and crampy and generally miserable lately (although I did manage to get myself up and go pass my yellow belt test tonight!), and have been self-medicating with Fred and Ginger movies. I've been planning for a while to review/recap/whatever them like I did with the Bing/Bob Road movies a while back, and I finally got off my duff and did the first one, Flying Down to Rio.



( But when you dance it with a new love, there's a true love in her eye... )

Woke up at five with cramps so bad I nearly threw up. Went into work late and left early. Am taking solace in watching my fourth Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie of the week, and also a meme:

From harmonyangel: If anyone would like to give me a fandom that you'd like me to share three of my unpopular (or "likely to piss off someone somewhere") opinions about, feel free to comment.

Doodles! Also, actual sketches from a sketchbook? HOW CAN THIS BE. ( All Disney this week. It's a sickness, I know. )

Out to dinner with Mom:

Me: Baldness used to be a sign of general dopiness. That's why Elmer Fudd is bald, and Charlie Brown.
Mom: But now it's a sign of virility.
Me: What?
Mom: Well, Mr. Clean.

And then I laughed for about 20 minutes.

Dear Scrooge,

Please stop flirting with your villains. It's not going to make them go away, and it makes me feel funny.

Love (so very much so),
Jess


(But seriously. Someday I will make the epic post, "Scrooge and Goldie: They Totally Did It You Guys," and you will see how his courtship basically consists of violence and taunting. I know Glomgold's beardiness is tempting, Scrooge, but please, control yourself!)


Meanwhile, Panchito faces an existential crisis.

Title: Joining
Fandom: Disney (DW/LP)
Rating: G
Summary: "Jealousy."
Notes: Short prompt response for mizzmarvel. I decided to continue her far superior work here.

( I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. )

Reposting from here:












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Ha ha! Back to Sunday! (Well, technically it's Monday, but shhhh.) ( Mostly ducks, leetle bit of Hey Arnold/Avatar/books/original stuffs. )

52 by every DC writer and artist ever, oh my God

For those not in the know, for some reason DC decided to jump to One Year Later after Infinite Crisis, but simultaneously release a weekly series that would cover what happened in that year. Because why make stories easy to follow?

One of my coworkers lent me his trades of the series and insisted that I read it. I really have no interest in any of these giant crossovers – they actively annoy me, actually – but since Booster features heavily in it I figured I’d eventually have to man up and read the thing. And, well, I don’t really feel that it’s enriched my life. It’s basically a case of too many cooks – there are too many threads going on, and too many plotlines wrapping up in the last volume with a “Oh, yes, um…we planned that all along! Really.” And since not all of the threads connect (Ralph and Booster, for example, are hopping around in their own cataclysmic plotlines with no one paying attention to them), the whole thing just feels disjointed.

On top of that, the whole missing trinity shtick just pissed me off. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are gone, yet the rest of the world still manages to wipe their own asses! HOW CAN THIS BE? It’s just too meta for me – I honestly don’t think that the characters think of the trinity as the center of their world, or even of the superhero community. I mean, a couple years ago Batman was supposedly an urban legend. You can’t have it both ways. (Also too meta: the constant references to “the Crisis” and to 52. Fifty-two is not a significant or mystical number, so the use of it outside of a weekly series is completely random.)

( Further spoilery thoughts on the individual plotlines )


The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present by Joanne Reitano

This book was not very good. There was tons of information in it, but it was all put forth in the worst way possible. First off, the prose was boring. Like, New Yorkers rioting because they disagree over which actor plays a better Hamlet, and the militia being called in and firing into the crowd and over 30 people dying should not be a boring story, but in this book, it is. Second, it was written more like an argument (New York has historically been defined by conflict) than a history, which meant that she gave the significance of events before saying what the events actually were, which was incredibly confusing. Third, it was basically a long list of riots, most of which were over racial and ethnic strife, so towards the end when she started talking about New York’s history of tolerance, it came out of nowhere. I know New York is usually tolerant, but you have to at least mention that somewhere in the book if you want to use it as a stepping stone. Fourth, STOP CALLING IT “GOTHAM” I KNOW THAT’S A NICKNAME FOR NEW YORK BUT IT JUST MAKES ME THINK OF BATMAN. And finally, comparing Giuliani to Superman goes against everything I hold dear.


Roomies! or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Beer, Shortpacked! Brings Back the Eighties, and Shortpacked! Pulls the Drama Tag by David Willis

Most of you have, I’m sure, been linked to at least one Shortpacked! (probably the Batman DDR one). Roomies! is the first webcomic David Willis did, which eventually became It’s Walky!, which eventually spun off into Shortpacked! and Joyce and Walky! Roomies! isn’t, actually, very good - the art’s weak, the storylines tend to be ludicrously melodramatic, and the whole thing is guided by a weirdly puritanical mindset. But I’m a completionist, and I love the latter part of It’s Walky! (as well as JaW! and Shortpacked!), so I got all three books. It really is worth it, thanks to the commentary and supplementary materials. Plus, I just like having books. Booooooooks.