Because tomorrow, maybe you'll be gone

You know how Marvel comics keep trawling through their old characters to see who'd make a new money-generating movie, and then they re-launch the old comic to try to spin a bit more cash out of it, and it's always rubbish and really the whole thing's terribly disturbing if you were a big fan of the original incarnation? Well, you might not know that (a lot of my blog readers are still resisting my efforts to turn you into obsessive fans of superhero comics), but in any case, there's going to be a new TV series based on Runaways (which judging by what I read about it on the internet will be atrocious, despite a perfectly-cast James Marsters as Victor Stein) starting next month, and there's a new volume of the comic out there now, which started last month but I've only just summoned up the courage to look at today.

And it's completely totally awesome! It's absolutely perfectly right, exactly striking the tone of the Brian K Vaughan/Adrian Alphona original and moving it on in new ways rather than re-treading the old ground! I love it! You really should check it out, even if you're not an obsessive fan of superhero comics - I mean, I still do feel that the best thing Marvel are producing right now is Squirrel Girl, but you kind of do need to be a comic fan to get 90% of the jokes, whereas Runaways always was and now is again the perfect comic for a newcomer to pick up. Enormous admiration for Rainbow Rowell the writer (really) and Kris Anka the artist for hitting all the right notes! Where were they ten-and-a-bit years ago when we needed someone to keep the series going and Joss Whedon surprisingly turned out not to be up to the task? Here's hoping it's a long-lasting success...

It's that time again

I've developed a sort of resigned attitude to birthdays now. And saying "I'm forty" always sounds like a vague approximation, so possibly when I tell people I'm forty-one, it will actually sound younger. I'd still rather not be forty-anything, but what are you gonna do?

Roll one

We use a software at work called SmartAssessor, and when I see the link to the website on my screen, it shows up as https/www.smartass...

And when I'm on Facebook, and it wants to tell me that the International Association of Memory group has a new message, I see something like this:

It puts me in mind of the comic called Avengers & Power Pack Assembled, in which some artist cleverly positioned Captain America's shield on the cover of the first issue:

I could quote more examples, but I'll stop there. Nobody likes a smart alec.

Ch-ch-ch-cherry coca-cola, cherry coke!

They've changed the design of cherry coke bottles so they're now almost completely identical to normal coke - there's a thin band of slightly-darker-reddish-purple around the top, and a little picture of a cherry somewhere, but that's as far as it goes for differences. The practical upshot of this is that now whenever I buy cherry coke, the shopkeepers ask me "You know that's a cherry coke, right?"

Clearly they've had lots of complaints from customers who thought they were buying normal coke and ended up with horrid cherry flavour instead. Personally, I always drink the horrid cherry stuff if it's available (indeed, as I've lamented many times before, I'm chemically addicted to it and it's rapidly sending me to an early grave. Nobody cares.), so I resent the suggestion that I'm so stupid as to accidentally buy the wrong kind of coca-cola. What kind of a fool do all the local newsagents take me for?