Mysta vs. Cargo X25

In Planet Comics #61, the Safety Council quarantines suspicious cargo and learns that its concerns are justified. When their scans accidentally activate the regrowth of miniaturized demon-birds and uncover a faux terrorist plot, Mysta leaps into action.

There are a few interesting things in this story. First of all, Mysta's secret identity finally gets a name, sort of. It's Technician 106. That's all the identification that Garro seems to know her by, which makes me wonder if he's really just that disinterested (or pretending to be) or if that's all the identification that the Safety Council allows. Also interesting is Garro's attitude toward her at the end. Though Mysta/Technician 106 has proved herself over and over again on missions she's undertaken with Garro, he dismisses her contributions to this one and says, "Leave such things to men, who can handle them."

Here's my theory: Garro's falling for her and is trying to cover it by refusing to use her real name (I bet he knows it; whatever her cover name is, I mean). He's started worrying about her on these missions, which explains - though doesn't excuse - his sexist remark.

Meanwhile, Bron's still holding things together solo on the Moon. He seems to have gotten over his resentment of that situation though and appears to be resigned to his new role. However, he's obviously in love with Mysta and wishes she reciprocated his feelings.

I'll come out and admit to being a Brysta 'shipper. Though Garro and Mysta are clearly interested in each other and we've got kind of a Moonlighting/Castle dynamic going on with them, they'd make a horrible, dysfunctional couple. I'm crossing my fingers that Mysta realizes what a faithful friend she has in Bron. (Sleestak has an equally valid take on Bron's isolation on the Moon that recalls his previous career as a criminal, but I'm hoping it's romance, not force, that's keeping him there.)

Another interesting thing is that Mysta calls her machine-man Robot II in this adventure. The robot's changed a lot since his first appearance in the series, but I think this is the first time Mysta's acknowledged that it's actually a completely new model.

The Thing and the Challengers of the Unknown ALL Hate Cephalopods

[Marvel Two-in-One: The Lost Issues]

Western Wednesday: Comics in August

Western Wednesday is a weekly tribute to six-guns, steampunk, and sasquatch. Here are some comics coming out next month that celebrate one or more of those themes.



Jonah Hex #70 (DC)
Written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti; Art by Ryan Sook and Mick Gray
August 3; $2.99

For a man like Jonah Hex, death is a constant presence – always looming, always ready to strike. But how and when will it come for Hex?



Moriarty #4 (Image)
Written by Daniel Corey; Art by Anthony Diecidue
August 3; $2.99

"The Dark Chamber" story comes to a climax in this installment, which sees Professor Moriarty finally confronting Tartarus in an epic battle that will change his destiny and decide the fate of London and the world.



Reed Gunther #3 (Image)
Written by Shane Houghton; Art by Chris Houghton
August 10; $2.99

Reed and his best bear buddy Sterling are separated when the legendary steel-driving man, John Henry, returns from the dead while the sneaky Mr. Picks escapes to the East Coast with the mysterious monster-creating Idol.



Deadlands: Death Was Silent (Image)
Written by Ron Marz; Art by Bart Sears
August 17; $2.99

Visionary Comics and Pinnacle Entertainment present the third one-shot of the weird Western world of Deadlands. A silent bounty hunter rides into a remote town, but the town holds dark secrets that may turn the hunter into the hunted.



Alpha Flight #3 (Marvel)
Written by Fred Van Lente and Greg Pak; Art by Dale Eaglesham
$2.99

Heroes on the lam! Having escaped imprisonment at the hands of the corrupt Unity Party, Alpha Flight find themselves hunted by the government they’d sworn to protect. Outmanned and outgunned, the Flight decide to go guerilla, but what will they do once the government raises the stakes by revealing their leverage against the team, including Northstar’s boyfriend and the child of Guardian and Vindicator held hostage?

[What? It's got Sasquatch in it. - mm]

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

When I first started this marathon, I anticipated thinking mostly about the social themes in the Planet of the Apes films. That’s because I was most familiar with the first two films, in which the social themes are so important that they often overshadow the adventurous plots. As the series progressed though, those themes became…well, not less important exactly, but simplified.

The first two films addressed several issues in order to explore the complex variety of problems in how people treat each other. They talk about war and prejudice and overpopulation and technology and other issues that I’m not remembering right now. But starting with Escape from the Planet of the Apes, the intricacy of these issues began to be eroded by familiarity. As the series kept going, it ran out of ways to talk about so many specific things at once and instead began to focus on a general message of tolerance.

Not that I think that was a bad move. It was absolutely the right thing to do. It didn’t contradict the first two films, but by jettisoning the biting commentary in favor of a broader message the series gained some flexibility that served it very well.



Now, I’m also not saying that Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes are better movies than the original film or Beneath the Planet of the Apes. They’re not (though some will disagree with me about Beneath). Any five-film series is going to start experiencing some diminishing returns and PotA is no exception. But I was surprised by how much I genuinely enjoyed the movies, right up to – and including – this last one.

When I reviewed Boom’s current Planet of the Apes comic for Robot 6, I explained that I hadn’t at that time seen the last two movies “partly because they’re not generally regarded as any good.” A commenter took me to task for that, saying that my statement “doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, given that Conquest is widely regarded among fans as being one of the best films in the series. For many people, it’s the best of the sequels. Very few people, in fact, would say that film wasn’t any good.” He went on to suggest, “It would be a good idea for CBR’s writers to at least do a little research before posting articles.”

I admit to feeling a bit defensive about that last bit, so in response to him, I let Rotten Tomatoes defend my assertion. They give Conquest a 44% fresh rating from critics and a 49% rating from audiences. That supports my statement that audiences in general didn’t like the film; an entirely different statement from saying that it’s the worst of the bunch. For the record, the freshness rating for the movies suggest that critics liked them in this order (from best to worst):

The original Planet of the Apes
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
The 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Battle for the Planet of the Apes



Audiences rated them differently:

The original Planet of the Apes
Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (tie)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
The 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes

Clearly, the commenter was correct in saying that Conquest is regarded as one of the best in the series. That isn’t the same thing as saying that a lot of people liked it, so I stand by my original statement. The irony is that now that I’ve seen it – and Battle – I’m in the 38-49% that liked those movies. And like I suggested at the beginning of this post, that isn’t the only surprise.

As you can tell from reading the posts on Escape and Conquest, my attention became much less concerned about the films’ themes and much more about their continuity. As the series streamlined its social message, its timeline got more and more clunky. I struggled to keep it straight, resisting the theory that the films depict different timelines, but Battle challenges that approach even more.



If Battle reveals how much time has passed between it and Conquest, I missed it. The only date I remember being mentioned in the film is in the framing sequence in which John Huston plays the legendary Lawgiver and relates the events of the film to his students. At first look, it doesn’t appear that much time has passed between Conquest and the main events of Battle. Caesar (still played by Roddy McDowell) and his wife Lisa look to be the same ages they were during the ape rebellion, but they do have a pre-teen son, so clearly a little time has passed. There’s a scene in Conquest where Caesar and Lisa are clearly about to mate, so my first assumption was that their son, Cornelius II, was conceived then, placing Battle 10-12 years later. That’s impossible though. Too much has changed. Which is the major continuity problem with the film.

The biggest change is that all of the apes have now learned to talk. That’s a huge difference from Conquest and isn’t easily explained by a ten-year time lapse. On top of that, one of the main characters, an orangutan named Virgil (Paul Williams) claims that he studied under another, older orangutan named Mandemus (Lew Ayres). Virgil’s not a kid (Paul Williams was in his 30s when the film was made), so ten years isn’t enough time for Mandemus to have learned to talk and then taught other students. Much more time has to have elapsed.

I’ve been reading Rich Handley’s Timeline of the Planet of the Apes and he suggests a thirty-year difference between Conquest and Battle to account for some of this stuff. That puts Caesar in his 50s, meaning that Cornelius II was born when Caesar was in his 40s. But it also creates new problems, like the age of Caesar’s human aide, MacDonald (Austin Stoker).



Battle’s MacDonald is the brother of Hari Rhodes’ MacDonald from Conquest who was the aide of the evil governor in that film before switching allegiance to the apes’ cause. The problem is that Stoker was only thirty years old when he made Battle, meaning that his character would have to have been born around the same time as the events of Conquest. And since Rhodes was 40 when he made that film, it makes a 40-year difference between the brothers’ ages. Not impossible, but extremely unlikely.

Regardless of whether Handley’s got the timeline right, you see the problem. Too much history has passed to allow for a short time frame, but MacDonald’s age (and possibly Cornelius II’s) don’t allow for a long one.

Sidebar: I do like Snell’s theory that the US government took genetic samples from Zira and the original Cornelius and used them to enhance primates and create the apes we saw in Conquest. That would explain why those apes look nothing like real ones. It might even explain how the new apes learned to talk so quickly. It doesn’t explain Mandemus though. A significant amount of time has to have passed for him to learn to speak.



According to Handley, Ty Templeton (who wrote Mr. Comics’ Revolution on the Planet of the Apes mini-series) had a theory that Mandemus had actually been part of Armando’s circus and had learned to talk by being around Caesar, making Mandemus – not Lisa – the first primitive ape to speak. That’s a stretch, because it doesn’t explain how Mandemus gained the ability unless Caesar had some kind of supernatural powers that gave it to him.

Although... supernatural powers would help account for Mandemus’ being around early enough to teach a young Virgil. And actually, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. It’s exactly the scenario that Templeton suggests in Revolution and it’s based apparently on some early production notes from Conquest that suggest that Caesar does in fact have otherworldly abilities (gained perhaps by going through the time-field while in the womb). Handley even suggests that there’s a way of watching Conquest so that Caesar’s communicating telepathically with the apes he’s inspiring to revolt.

All of which has probably given you a headache by now, because it has me. By the time we get to the Planet of the Apes TV series with its dogs (aren’t they supposed to be extinct?) and photos of 22nd century New York (shown completely destroyed in Battle), I begin to wonder if it’s worth trying to make this all fit.

That makes me want to reconsider Mike DeStasio’s take about the alternate timelines. Again, not only does his theory allow for infinite inconsistencies, it has the advantage of being advocated for not only by Hasslein in Escape, but also by Virgil in Battle.



In his Introduction to Timeline Handley describes Mike and my theories as a very old debate amongst PotA fans. “Do the films form a circular chronology, with three through five leading to one and two, then back to the last three…or does the final trilogy creat an alternate, more optimistic future, canceling out the dismal world seen in the first two?” I don’t know that that second view perfectly describes Mike’s theory, but the circular one does express the way I’ve been trying to see the series. Complicating the discussion – as it always does with popular, long-running series – is the question of which stories count. If I can make all five movies fit into a circular timeline, do I also need to make the TV shows fit? Or can they be an alternate timeline a la Mike’s theory?

The answer of course is, “Sure. Why not?” I can do whatever I want and so can you. Handley explains this too. Based on Hasslein’s theory, “every time someone crosses the time barrier – the Hasslein Curve – in either direction, it’s possible for history to become modified. If so, given the astounding number of time-trips in this mythos[…]this renders the whole 'circular vs. changing' debate a far more complex question, for instead of two or three histories, we now have the potential for many more – infinitely more in fact…

“Planet of the Apes history could very well be neither a circular loop nor an 'A or B' set of divergent highway lanes, but rather a Möbius strip embedded in an Escher landscape twisted up in a pretzel and tied in a sailor’s knot, continuously looping back upon itself, readjusting with each successive time-trip and enabling all of the various contradictory incarnations to occur on the same continuous, ever-changing loop. Sorting out one timeline from the next thus becomes virtually impossible.”



While that’s not at all satisfying for the me who digs neat, clean, organized stories, it’s extremely liberating for the me who – 1800 words into this post – hasn’t been able yet to say one word about the plot of the film because I’ve been focusing on continuity. I appreciate the permission to shut up about it and enjoy the stories.

As I said above, I liked the story in Battle. Following the ape uprising in Conquest, Caesar has started a new society in which apes and humans are supposed to be able to get along. But they’re not equal. Apes still don’t trust humans and have developed strict rules to prevent humanity’s taking over again. The humans are of course chaffing from the restrictions.

Complicating the situation, Caesar mounts an expedition with MacDonald and Virgil to go into the old city and look for archives that may have records of Caesar’s parents. He finds what he’s looking for, but that ends up being inconsequential. What’s important is that there are still humans living in the city, mutated by radiation fallout (the forbearers of the mutants in Beneath) and resentful of the ape uprising. They follow Caesar and the others back to Ape City and mount an attack, determined to wipe out the apes before the apes can (they assume) return with their own forces to destroy what’s left of the mutant population.



To make matters worse, Ape City’s chief military officer is a gorilla named Aldo (Claude Akins in a sad bit of miscasting; he doesn’t have the presence to play an intimidating villain) who hates humans and wants them all killed. There’s a whole subplot about Aldo’s trying to wrest control of the city from Caesar and he sees the mutant attack as an opportunity to declare martial law and seize power. Aldo of course is the name of the ape who first said “no” in Cornelius’ version of history in Escape. His role is very different here, but he certainly is an advocate for ape supremacy and an important historical figure. Perhaps by Cornelius’ time the details of his exact actions were lost. Cornelius might have invented a connection between Aldo and the story of Lisa’s “no.”

And here I am again, explaining contradictions. As I said when I wrote about Escape, it’s too fun not to. The difference now, thanks to Mike DeStasio and Rich Handley, is that I don’t feel pressured to explain everything. As we’ll see next week when we look at the live-action TV show.

Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes

I'm enjoying my Planet of the Apes marathon way more than I expected to, so I've started looking for ways to continue exploring that world. Though I'm keeping my expectations for Rise of the Planet of the Apes modest, Boom!'s current Planet of the Apes comic is awesome and I have high hopes for Archaia's prose novel Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes.

From the press release:

Archaia Entertainment has set July 25th for the release of Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes, its first illustrated novel, through its new book trade distributor Publishers Group West (PGW).

Written by celebrated author, artist, and digital producer Andrew E.C. Gaska, and adapted from a story by Gaska, Rich Handley, Christian Berntsen and Erik Matthews, Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes recounts what happened between the scenes of the classic 1968 Twentieth Century Fox film, centering on the astronaut John Landon, Chimpanzee scientists Dr. Milo and Dr. Galen, and Gorilla Security Chief Marcus. The book contains 30 full-color paintings and another 19 black-and-white illustrations, including a cover by legendary artist Jim Steranko (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and interior art from some of the top talent in the industry, including renowned book cover painter Ken Kelly (Conan, KISS), Joe Jusko (Savage Sword of Conan, Tarzan), Sanjulian (Eerie, Vampirella), Mark Texeira (Ghost Rider, Wolverine), Leo Leibelman (Heavy Metal), Matt Busch (Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica), Brian Rood (Indiana Jones, Star Wars), Tom Scioli (Godland), David Hueso (G.I. Joe: Storm Shadow) and newcomers Dan Dussault (Critical Millennium) and Dirk Shearer (Mice Templar).

Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes marks an expansion of Archaia’s successful collaboration with Gaska, following up on his science fiction comic epic, Critical Millennium: The Dark Frontier, which has received early critical acclaim.

My only concern about the novel is the mention of Dr. Galen. Hopefully I'm forgetting a different Galen that might have actually been on the East Coast during the events of Planet of the Apes [update: I was; see the comments below], but the character I'm thinking of is the one Roddy McDowell played in the live-action TV show. That took place on the West Coast and probably not even during the same time period as the original movie, though my copy of Timeline of the Planet of the Apes doesn't arrive until later today for me to check and make sure.

Space People Hate Cephalopods

[Calvin's Canadian Cave of Cool]

Western Wednesday: Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino's next movie is going to be a Western. Or, to be more accurate, a Southern. It's a spin on the Django spaghetti westerns about a bounty hunter who drags around a coffin with a giant Gatling gun in it. In Tarantino's take though, Django will be played by Jamie Foxx as a former slave who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christopher Waltz) to free Django's wife from the evil plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio is the name at the top of the rumor mill right now) who still owns her. /Film has been following the movie's development for a while and has tons of details.

Playlist found a quote from Tarantino talking about his vision for the film:

I’d like to do a Western. But rather than set it in Texas, have it in slavery times with that subject that everybody is afraid to deal with. Let’s shine that light on ourselves. You could do a ponderous history lesson of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Or, you could make a movie that would be exciting. Do it as an adventure. A spaghetti Western that takes place during that time. And I would call it ‘A Southern.’

I want to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.

Mysta vs. the Borers of Andros

In Planet Comics #60, Mysta and Safety Council Director Garro head to the planet Andros to oversee the investigation of some energy "impulses" on the supposedly dead world. It's a strange mission for an organization devoted to planetary safety, but probably they're foresighted enough to know that where there are mysterious energy readings there could also be a threat. Turns out of course that they're right.

It's a cool, if straightforward adventure filled with giant, subterranean, metal worms and battle armor and cool flying cars. There's not a lot to comment on other than general awesomeness, but Mysta does continue to mellow in her attitude compared to the hard line she took in her early adventures. Where Garro sees the antagonists of the adventure as "devils," Mysta believes that they can be educated and invited to join the civilized galaxy. Personally, I don't see whatever good she's seeing in the race of what are essentially slavers. Is her struggle with her romantic feelings for Bron and Garro taking away some of her edge?

I wonder if he leniency is related to her memory lapse earlier in the story. While preparing to descend to Andros' surface, Mysta realizes that she used to know something about the planet, but has forgotten what it was. She remembers once she gets a visual cue, but I don't know what caused the lapse. We don't know how old Mysta is or what effect internalizing all of Earth's scientific knowledge had on her brain. Is she just slowing down mentally from natural causes or is this a more serious problem? Is it possibly the result of her being away from her Moon lab for too long? Is there equipment there that helps her organize and retain data?

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

There’s not a lot of plot to talk about in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, but the movie does raise some huge questions about continuity that need to be addressed. It takes place in 1991, twenty years after the events in Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Armando (Ricardo Montalban) is still running his circus and Zira and Cornelius’ child Milo (played as an adult by Roddy McDowell) is still part of the show. For obvious reasons, Armando and Milo are keeping quiet about Milo’s ability to talk. Things were bad enough for talking apes in Escape, but the situation has degenerated even more in the last twenty years.

In Escape, Cornelius told a story about a plague that wiped out all cats and dogs on Earth, leaving humans petless until they began domesticating primates. Because of the apes’ intelligence and dexterity, however, they were able to be used for more than just affection and soon became slaves. According to Cornelius, this happened over centuries until an ape named Aldo learned to speak and uttered his first word, “No.” The apes rebelled and the Planet of the Apes was born.

In Conquest, that timeline has been shortened to two decades. By 1991, the plague has already killed off the pets and the apes have been subjugated into slavery. They haven’t learned to talk yet, except of course for Milo. The events of Conquest play out much as Cornelius described them in Escape, only a couple of centuries early and with Milo replacing Aldo as the leader of the rebellion and a female chimpanzee being the first regular ape to speak. She says the word, “No,” but it’s not an objection to slavery, it’s in protest to the violence of the apes’ revolution. The film ends with Milo’s (though he’s taken the name Caesar during the film in order to disguise his being the son of Zira and Cornelius) pronouncing that the apes – having won their freedom – will be humane rulers of the planet.



A brief comment about that: Caesar sounds overly hopeful in his closing speech. He talks about “those who were our masters are now our servants” and the apes’ dominating humanity with compassion, but that’s perhaps overstating the scope of the revolution. They’ve taken one city (though an important one), but Caesar makes it sound like a worldwide conquest. I take it as rhetoric optimism; pumping up the troops. Without knowing yet exactly how the next film, Battle for the Planet of the Apes plays out, I expect the apes to have a harder fight ahead of them than Caesar paints a picture of.

But back to the inconsistencies. After watching Escape, I determined that Cornelius must have made up his story about the pet plague and Aldo’s “No.” But there are too many similarities between his version and what happens in Conquest. It’s easy to write that off as lazy writing, but not nearly as much fun, so I’d like to reconcile the two versions if I can.

In the comments to my Escape post, Mike DeStasio (a brother-in-interests who runs excellent blogs dedicated to jungle girls and Hercules, while also contributing to Conan and Red Sonja blogs) offered a theory based on Dr. Hasslein’s thoughts on time-travel from that movie. His whole comment is worth reading, but if I’m not misrepresenting him [update: I am. Mike explains in the comments below.], it boils down to the creation of alternate universes. In essence, each Planet of the Apes film depicts a different reality (or lane in Hasslein’s highway). Logically, this works just fine. It incorporates an explanation directly from the series and explains everything perfectly. But I’m not completely satisfied by it.



It’s incredibly geeky of me, but I can’t enjoy the series as much if all the movies don’t take place in the same reality. I can still like Conquest if Caesar is a different character from baby Milo in Escape, but I like it so much more if they’re exactly the same guy. If they aren’t then the Planet of the Apes movies aren’t so much a continuing series as they are succession of standalone films. They’re not worse movies if they’re standalone, but my personal preference is for the continuing series.

So, with much respect to Mike and his equally valid theory, I’m going to offer an alternate one that will keep the films in the same reality while – hopefully – still making sense. To make it work I have to adjust my theory about Cornelius’ story in Escape. He can’t have made everything up. There are too many similarities between his version and what really happened, so I’m going back to another theory that I’d discarded while thinking about Escape. It’s consistent with the first two movies that Cornelius went to work either for or with Dr. Zaius at some point and discovered some details about the apes’ history with humanity. While watching Escape, I couldn’t figure out why Cornelius kept some of those details and embellished others (primarily the apes’ annual observance of the revolution), but I could have been overestimating the amount of detail that Cornelius had.

Perhaps he only knew a few facts: the pet plague, the slavery, the “No,” an ape named Aldo. Knowing that these details would be just tantalizing enough to piss the human military off if that’s all he shared with them – and fearing the torture they’d perform on him trying to get other details out that he didn’t have – he filled in the blanks himself. He didn’t realize that the revolution happened in the 1990s rather than the 2170s, for instance. Or who led the rebellion. Or who first said, “No.” Or who Aldo was (he doesn’t appear until the next film).

Battle may force me to rethink this all over again and I may end up just adopting Mike’s theory anyway, but for now it works to keep the first four movies consistent. Zira and Cornelius didn’t change time by coming back; they paradoxically caused their own timeline to happen. Not in the way that Cornelius related it, but in the way that it had always, actually taken place. And not just by giving birth to Milo. Conquest reveals that the pet plague was brought to Earth by a spaceship. Since Earth in the ‘70s for this series has a lot more space travel going on than the real '70s did, maybe it was a human-piloted ship that brought back the plague. Or maybe it was Zira and Cornelius’. I kind of like that second option best.

Happy Independence Day!

Photo by Thomas Hawk.


I'm out of town all this week, so the blog's taking a break. See you next Monday!

The Versatile Blogger

This is a post that's way past due, but I wanted to take the time to do it justice. Artist Michael Dean "MD" Jackson was kind enough to tag me with the Versatile Blogger Award and it's a special honor. I struggle all the time with how broadly focused this blog is. Most of my favorite blogs are very specific in their subject matter, even if the subject is just "comics," but I especially like extremely specific blogs like Double O Section, Shanna the She-Devil Blogger, and Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs. I love those so much that I often think about narrowing Adventureblog's range to one genre or medium. If only I could pick just one that I wouldn't get bored with eventually.

I can't, so for better or worse, I'm stuck with a versatile blog. That's why I appreciate someone's creating this recognition and Mike's including me in his picks for it. I appreciate other versatile blogs too. I can't read too many of them before they become overwhelming, but I was able to pull five to mention from my follow list. I'll list them in a minute, but one of the other criteria for accepting the award is listing seven random facts about yourself. So that first:

1. My high-school job was bagging groceries and I was really good at it. As a result though, I'm overly critical (silently so, I promise) of baggers who can't make a paper bag keep its shape and mix items that shouldn't be mixed. Cold items don't go with non-cold items. Detergents don't go with food.
2. In college, I played the title role in The Sound of Music. I also ran the sound for My Fair Lady, which was an even more fun production. But that may have been because I had a minor crush on the girl playing Eliza Doolittle. Or her Georgia accent anyway. (She switched to Cockney for the play, but that wasn't nearly as attractive.)
3. You can get me to do just about anything if you ask me in a Georgia accent.
4. I can read ancient Greek, though I don't understand as much of it as I used to.
5. My first pet was a black cat we found at the garbage dump. He was only a few days old and we couldn't even tell what gender he was yet. We named him Muffit after the robotic daggit from Battlestar Galactica.
6. I was 10 years old when I wrote my first story. It was Star Wars fan fiction and I proved in not only the title, but also in a major plot element that I didn't know the difference between an "asteroid" and an "android."
7. My son has a live dragon living in his room. It's about two-feet long and bearded.

And now for the blogs I'm passing the award to. Mike says that the official rules call for fifteen recipients, but I'm following his example and only choosing five. In alphabetical order:

1. Calvin's Canadian Cave of Cool: I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Brother Cal's already received this award at some point. That guy collects awards like mermaids collect swooning sailors. He deserves it though for being extremely prolific with posts on a variety of subjects ranging from the Cephalopod Menace to Selena Gomez.
2. Lady, That's My Skull: I came to Sleestak's blog thinking it was a comics blog, and with lots of posts on romance comics and space pulp heroines like Futura and Mysta of the Moon, it is. But it's also a lot more than that, including rants about the grocery store where he works and appreciations for Hayley Mills and of course The Land of the Lost.
3. Poplitiko: My friend Alex Ness started this pop culture group blog. Because it's a group blog (and because its theme is as broad as "pop culture," it has a lot of different interests. Just looking at the current page, I see a love letter to enjoying comics with your children; a linkblogging post covering superhero movies, Doctor Who, and Twecon; and Whatever the Opposite of an Ode is to Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson movies.
4. Siskoid's Blog of Geekery: Siskoid does tend to stick to geek-related topics, so he's not as all over the place as some of the other blogs I'm mentioning, but he has a broad range of interests from Star Trek to Kung Fu movies and he crosses genres and media types easily.
5. That F'ing Monkey: I've known blogger Ken O a long time from Steve Niles' message board, so his was one of the first blogs I thought of in creating this list. He's a huge fan of DC's The Flash and talks about the character often, but you'll also find regular posts about his other interests, especially games and booze.