How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part 3 - Offline)

Fortunately, one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging is because I kept pretty busy this summer, with something going on just about every weekend, and sometime during the week. Here are a few highlights – with photos!

I hosted my second Father’s Day back in June, and that was lots of fun, indoors and outdoors. We followed that up with Father’s Day-related family outing to the Phillies game in July. In between the two were a couple of days at the beach with some of the family.

In August, we saw Rebecca awesomely play a lead role in her children’s community theatre production of "Beauty and the Beast, stirring the high school theatre memories of her Uncle Mike.

The biggest family news of course was the birth of Ella Grace Armandi on August 21. Rebecca is the big sister she always wanted to be! Lots of girls in this family!

And finally, I spent a long overdue day hanging out in Burlington with the youngest old people I know, Cioci and Unk, hearing lots of old stories and memories of days gone by. Highly recommended.

Other fun stuff
Besides all of this family stuff, I did a few other things worth noting along with the usual time-killing summer activities.

I joined my brother and friends to see the Apples in Stereo show at World Café Live, that was a just a fun time of hanging out with great live music, spent a Saturday at the Princeton Record Exchange, the biggest used music store I’ve ever seen, where I bought about $50 worth of cool music (top picks: Jerry Lee Lewis, REM and the Everly Brothers) that will find its way onto mixes for years to come.

A few barbecues, lunch-time concerts and extended after-work happy hours, not to mention a few ill-fated dates, round out the summer.

I finished off the summer on Labor Day weekend by going crabbing in Barnegat Bay in Long Beach Island, NJ. Caught a few crabs, had a few beers, had lots of laughs. A great way to cap off the summer.

So, I didn’t blog at all, but I kept myself pretty busy with a lot of new things – and that's even better.

Bring on the Fall.

Special thanks for the photos to my brother's Flickr page. After scouring through my hard drive and e-mail inbox for hours, I finally realized that almost every photo I wanted to use he already posted online, making them much easier to grab. Thanks Skip!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part 2 - TV and Comics)

Continuing my summary of what I was doing all summer when I wasn't blogging...

As for TV, summertime no longer means reruns. While the networks primarily ran game shows and reality shows (so easily skippable), cable as usual offered great options, though I only followed a few. I watched the premiere episodes of Swingtown and the The Middleman, but didn’t feel compelled to stick with them. As for returning shows, the second season of Mad Men has been fantastic so far, and Monk continues to be a fun diversion, though not quite compelling.

The one new show I added was Jurassic Fight Club from the History Channel, an hour-long documentary series that features paleontologists theorizing how different types of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures battled throughout the world, based on bones and other archaeological evidence, The climax of each episode is a 15-minute re-enactment of the battle in glorious CGI, and it’s pretty brutal stuff. The show became a little repetitive though and while I’m still recording it, I’m not quite as fascinated as I once was. The novelty’s worn off a bit.

But now, it’s post-Labor Day and the new TV season is about to begin. First up is the final season of The Shield, which premiered this past week. The network shows are all back thought September and October, and I’ll hopefully write about the new fall season soon enough – including a preview of what is likely (hopefully?) the final season of Smallville.

Comics

I’ve done a pretty good job of not buying new comics for the past several months after the disappointment of Countdown and the new Justice League book, among other things. My plan to wait for trade is mostly in full effect (not helped of course my this new tendency to put almost everything in hardcover first, making that wait even longer – over a year in some cases). But this summer, DC, or more accurately writers Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns sucked me back in with their summer event, Final Crisis and some related spin-offs.

Final Crisis is about "the day evil wins" and involves a new version of Jack Kirby’s New Gods as envisioned by Grant Morrison in his typical off-kilter fashion. The first issue begins with the death of J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, and the return of Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, who was killed back in 1986 in Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC’s first major summer event. So far, it’s been a little hard to follow but I trust Morrison to pull it of in the end.

A little more straightforward is a pair of spin-offs written by Geoff Johns – Rogues' Revenge, about a banded together group of Flash villains and Legion of Three Worlds, which involves a whole bunch of characters, including several continuity challenging versions of the 30th (or 31st) Century’s Legion of Superheroes, as well as Superman and Superboy Prime, one of the villains from 2006’s Infinite Crisis ,who was first introduced around the first aforementioned Crisis, though he was a good guy at the time. The story promises to impact future storylines in books featuring Superman, Flash and Green Lantern, as well as the Legion. With art by the incomparable George Perez (also of the again aforementioned 1986 Crisis), this appears to be just a fun book.

Final Crisis, Rogue’s Revenge and maybe even Legion of Three Worlds (at least one speedster is likely to make a comeback in this story) all provide the prelude to the return of Barry Allen in the Flash: Rebirth, also by Johns, coming later this year. This is another book that I will have a hard time waiting for the collection. Just about everything else coming though, I can wait.

One of these days I may REALLY quit.

We’ll see...

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part 1)

June 30? My last post was over two months ago?! Apparently I decided to take the summer off from blogging, despite all kinds of "stuff" happening tailor-made for this place. But, once I started missing a few things, it got harder to catch up. And with such a gap, I started to feel a little overwhelmed about everything I "should be" covering, and that kept me away even longer. So finally, I realized/decided by the end of July, well, I’m taking the summer off.

Now, I want to wipe the slate clean and start fresh for the fall, so I’m going to get all of this out of my system with a series of summarizing posts. Then, we can begin again with hopefully a little more regularity.

The biggest miss of course was my review of The Dark Knight. If you scroll down this page, I spent almost a year blogging about my anticipation for this release. Then on July 18, it finally comes out and…nothing, even though I saw it twice (and still hope to catch it in IMAX). I reviewed Iron Man back in May , but skipped reviews of the other big summer movies I saw – Indiana Jones, The Incredible Hulk and … The Dark Knight.

One of the reasons I think I skipped it was because I didn’t know what to write. I LOVED the movie. There are only so many ways I can write "awesome". And I had read so much about the movie before and after its release, it was hard not to be influenced by some of what I had read. Heath Ledger’s Joker was inspired and Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent was mostly great, though the resolution seemed a little… rushed, despite the movie’s length. Returning cast Bale, Oldman, Freeman and Caine built on their strong showing from Batman Begins with even meatier performances. Nolan blended drama, action and humor to create a fantastic, very dark sequel. It immediately leaps to the top of the list of the best comic book movie, though it’s followed pretty closely by Iron Man, as I wrote earlier.

The Incredible Hulk was a fun movie too. Casting aside the Ang Lee version from 2003, this Edward Norton-led version owed a lot to the TV show and the comics. It provided what we were looking for the first time – lots of action, with some major fight scenes against the military and the Abomination, and featured the Bixby-like Banner on the run and in hiding doing menial jobs under false names. And like Iron Man before it, the movie made clear its part of a larger Marvel movie universe. Kudos to Marvel for taking control of the movies based on its characters and planting the appropriate amount of seeds.

As for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, while it was great to see Harrison Ford back with his fedora and whip on the big screen again, the movie was a bit of a letdown that slightly tarnished the legacy of the character. It has its moments, but overall it was disappointing.

I didn’t see other comic adaptations Hellboy II or Wanted in the theatre, but I’m sure I’ll catch them on cable within the next year. Other summer movies I considered seeing but haven’t were the comedies Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder, both still in theatres. I’m on a mini-vacation late this week. Maybe I’ll catch one of them.