Polite Dissent

It’s a beautiful day in central Illinois. The sun is out, a nice breeze is blowing, and not a storm cloud in sight. I just returned from a nice bike ride, from Pekin to Groveland to Morton and back by some mostly deserted country roads. Passed a group on tandem bikes. I could never feel comfortable on a tandem, sure you go faster, but I never entirely trust the other person to steer. There were a few recumbent tandem bikes too. I’ve never seen those before — they just don’t look comfortable.

Today is day for housekeeping, both literal and figurative. I need to file and put away this month’s shipment of comics, plus do some yard work. I also want to play with some of the WordPress CSS files and spruce up this site a little.

In the meantime, here are some good weekend blog-o-bits:
Laura at Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog waxes rhapsodic about Aquaman #18, and particularly some very nice interior art. Makes we want to run out and read the issue now; unfortunately it won’t be in my shipment until next month (sigh…)

Johanna at Cognitive Dissonance continues her weekly “chick check” (Marvel here, Mature DC here ), with results that are slightly less dismal than usual…so far. As she cautions, regular DCU titles still have to be totaled.

Michele at A Small Victory reports that children’s book writer extraordinaire Syd Hoff is dead and writes an elegant eulogy. Rest in Peace, Mr. Hoff.

H at The Comic Treadmill takes a hard look back at the Outsiders Special #1 and issue #28. His closing dialogue between the JLA and Geo-Force is a must read. (H, you’ve got to get a longer name so that links to you are easier to see. Just one more letter, please. How about “Ha”, or “Hi”, or “He”?)

In Anime news, the series Full Metal Alchemist has secured a US release in October of this year. I understand the Cartoon Network will be showing it as well. I saw several episodes of this at Millennicon this year and it was excellent. (I watched a subbed version, so the dubbed voices in the trailers seem a little off to me…). This series bears no relation to Full Metal Panic, another highly recommended anime series.
UPDATE: Watch Trailer 2 (as it explains the story better), then Trailer 1.

UPDATE: I see I’m having some sort of problem with the archives and calendar. I’d like to point out that this was happening before I started changed the CSS. Oh well, I’ll see if I can find a fix tomorrow… UPDATED UPDATE: Fixed the archives, temporarily, by upping the number of posts per page.