Sutekh The Destroyer

In one of the locked threads, everyone was comparing TNA to lame childrens shows. I regret that I could not participate in that discussion but would like to offer that TNA is the equivalent of PJ Katie's Farm:

I still do a double take whenever I see legendary comic book writer Gerry Conway's name show up on a "Law & Order" episode credits. I forget he was a staff writer for the 1999-2000 season and then did a stint on "Criminal Intent." Hilariously, IMDB shows that four of his "Criminal Intent" episodes were adapted for the Russian version, meaning he gets royalties in Ruples.

I feel sorry for the fans of Detroit, but at the same time I'm glad the Lions won't get a playoff win while Suh is with them (PFT and other "newz" sites claiming that Suh will be cut/traded this off-season). I'm also glad that Suh's suspension was lifted as Suh can't go running his mouth this winter claiming "they would have won if I had been on the field."

I didn't care for Doctor Sleep. Just too much a hodge podge of different ideas and cliches from King's other works all mixed together. King took what was a pretty tight ghost story (The Shining) and went off into some bizarre directions that read like a 16-year old's bad creative writing.

This is just starting to get mainstream attention, due to being buried over the holidays. http://masterherald.com/half-life-3-confirmed-by-gabe-newell-in-hiatus-not-coming-soon-reports-suggest/5844/ "How to Piss-Off and Anger Your Fans" by Gabe Newell, coming to bookstores everywhere soon.

First, Do No Harm by Lisa Belkin. 1994 non-fiction book by New York Times (current Huffington Post) reporter Belkin, who spent several years at Herrman Memorial Hospital in Houston, Texas, chronicling the lives of the doctors on the hospital's "death committee" who decide which patients to end treatment for and to not revive. A very interesting time capsule of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the medical field, before "do not resuscitate" orders were a common thing for a person to have, and doctors were genuinely anguished over whether or not to pull the plug on people in irreversible comas or who had suffered catastrophic injuries (not that today's doctors aren't) and were destined to live their lives as wheelchair-bound vegetables. Today, of course, almost all hospitals will comply with Do Not Resuscitate orders without question, and the idea of a patient's family members having to appeal to a committee of doctors to get their comatose loved one taken off life support seems surreal to many people. Still, an interesting read, even if Belkin's writing is sometimes overwrought.

Just finished Down and Dirty Pictures, which is Peter Biskind's sequel to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and chronicles the 1990s rise of indie filmmakers like Atom Egoyan, Kevin Smith, and Tarantino and the rise of Miramax and Sundance Films and how Biskind viewed these people as the saviors of the New Hollywood era. Yeah, this book hasn't aged well with Smith making microbudget "body horror" drek, Tarantino going off to make homages to his favorite exploitation genre films, Egoyan pretty much falling off the face of the Earth, the Weinsteins getting kicked out of Miramax, and while the Sundance Film Festival still exists, the actual Sundance Channel just did a "Revenge of the Nerds/Revenge of the Ninja" double-header. EDIT: To be fair to Tarantino, he's definitely making the types of films HE wants to make, I just think that Biskind and some other critics expected him (at the time) to go to do weightier stuff than homages to Cleopatra Jones, ninja films, or obscure Spaghetti Westerns.

In one of the locked 2014 omnibus threads in the "Movies & TV" section, someone complained about how all the old Mike Hammer novels (I, the Jury specifically) were about a sexist, ultra-violent thug who passed himself off as a private eye and slept with every woman and blatantly murdered the bad guys. Um, that's kinda the whole point/appeal of the Mike Hammer novels.

I really don't like it when The First 48 films in New Orleans. The homicide cops there (Travis Chuck Ward especially) are probably the worst at using First 48 to "audition" and ham it up for the camera to try and get their own reality series or otherwise get famous.

Wasn't Kawada the one who complained to the press that he wanted Baba to cooperate with UWFI, and ended up in Baba's doghouse for all of 1996?

This whole "Chip Kelly will now oversee the personnel dept." thing is going to lead to his eventual downfall, right?

Worst movie I saw for the first time in 2014 was the 2012 direct-to-DVD turkey Thanks for Sharing about a group of sex addicts whose lives intertwine at a New York support group. Mark Ruffalo struggles to stay on the wagon while dating Gwyneth Paltrow, Josh Gad gets fired from his job as an emergency room doctor after using sexually harassing his boss, and Tim Robbins struggles to keep his sobriety (he's both a sex addict and an alcoholic) while bonding with his drug addict son. Apparently, everyone involved worked for scale and did the film as a favor to director Stuart Blumberg, who wrote Ruffalo's The Kids are Alright and Paltrow's Keeping the Faith. They would have done him a bigger favor by convincing him not to make this film. Blumberg's direction is slipshod at best, and his screenplay is full of unlikable characters. If you ever told somebody: "I really want to watch a movie where Josh Gad jerks off to Internet porn, then takes a doughnut out of his trash can and eats it" then fucking run to your nearest Red Box or go to Amazon Prime and start watching.

Got to meet Donna Douglas back in 2003 when she was making the talk circuit after Buddy Ebsen passed away, very nice woman and polite to her fans.

It's actually kinda fun to show Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends to my god daughter and let her see how horribly written the cartoons from my era were. Though when I sit and watch Octonauts with her, I sometimes think cartoons were definitely better during my day.

Axis left me pretty cold, but then I don't regularly read Iron Man or anything with Havok or Sabretooth, so the big changes coming out of this didn't really affect any of the main books I read.