St Thomas Time

I can see my house in this pic.

As you might know, I've been living on St Thomas since January. For the most part I haven't said much about it—I suppose I've had other things on my mind. Well, today we're going to examine one of the most interesting things about this island. No, not the beaches. No, not the resorts. No, not the plant and animal life. No, not the deep scars of colonialism. Something much more fundamental.

St Thomas exists within a temporal anomaly I call the Tropical Time Envelope. Due to the locality and obscurity of the phenomenon, it has not been the subject of much research. Nobody can say for certain what mechanisms are responsible for the distortion field's existence, nor do we know whether the island is responsible for it or merely subject to it. Its influence upon island life, however, is plainly observable.

In the interest of science, I have cataloged some of the Tropical Time Envelope's most salient effects, and submit them for investigation by parties with more experience in these matters.

2 out of 3 and the 1%

Umberto Boccioni, Visioni simultanee

ITEM ONE

James sent me an email yesterday evening. (Perhaps you remember me recounting a conversation I had with him last month.)

Subject: wow, i didn't think it would happen like this

http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2015/jul/16/breaking-shots-fired-tennessee-riverpark-chattanooga/314944/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sandra-bland-texas-jail_55a7c7d0e4b0896514d06f41

Granted the latest police assault on an African American happened a few days ago, but I don't think the story broke until today. I'm still rooting for the Pirates to win the world series

ITEM TWO

Lately I've been reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty as a dessert course to Karl Marx's Capital, Volume I, which I (finally) plowed through during the spring months.

Unsurprisingly, some very substantial differences stand between the nineteenth-century Capital and Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It's quite possible the very progenitor of Marxist socioeconomic analysis might have dismissed Piketty one of the "bourgeoise economists" he lambasts at least once every three pages in Capital. Piketty, by his own admission, is no Marxist: at several points he criticizes Marx and his method, and declares that capitalism is, historically, the best avenue for elevating the standard of living for the greatest number of people. (Which is not debatable in itself: twentieth-century experiments in communism tended to be concomitant with hard-handed totalitarianism and persistent poverty, which anti-capitalists and free-market skeptics frequently find themselves having to answer for in barroom debates.)

Return of the Comics Page Again

"Gasp!" he gasped. "Two new(ish) comics!"

Part Three

Part Four

I have fun making these, I really do. I wish they didn't take so damned long to produce, though. I don't keep a running count of the time from start to finish because I'm a little afraid of it. If there's a reason I prefer writing, that might be it. The total time it takes me to do one of these is probably on par with how long I'd require to write between two and four blog posts (depending on size and meatiness) or bang out the rough draft of one short story.

There's something to be said for the long-term satisfaction of watching the archive gradually grow, though.

Conversations with Friends

Juan Muñoz, Last Conversation Piece

I'm sitting across from James at a hookah lounge in Astoria. It's about 2:30 in the morning. James has revived some since getting out of work at 11:40, and now we're discussing dystopian fiction, The Economist, "Two Bad Neighbors" (The Simpsons), and the chronic grievances of the progressivist (which have lately come to include vituperative disagreements between progressive cliques).

I pass the hose to James and he leans forward and rests his elbows on the table.

"Listen," he says. "I'm going to give you James's Three Predictions for 2015."

"Shoot," I say.

He holds up a finger. "One. In the next six months, there will be another national outcry over the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of police officers."

"Probably."

Smarter than the average bear?

A grizzly bear's brain. (From special interest site grizzlybrain.webs.com.)

Last night a friend replied (via text message) to some belabored joke I'd made (via text message) implicating dill pickles in the HUAC sessions, saying "Patrick, you are smarter than the average bear."

I don't know about that. Is it the mark of an intelligent man to be thrown for a loop by some conversational callback to a cartoon animal from the Dark Age of American Animation?

Smarter than the average bear. What does that mean, anyway? I'm not certain that human intelligence and ursine intelligence are commensurable magnitudes. Let's ponder this for a minute.

A (Very, Very) Quick Look at (One Scene from) Doom 2099

I swear I'll shut up about Marvel 2099 after this.

A completely unscientific poll (two respondents were surveyed; one of them was myself) has verified that the best title in the Marvel 2099 line was Doom 2099. The premise alone is pure gold: Dr. Doom mysteriously reappears in 2099, alive and well, but with some unaccountable memory holes. He resumes control of Latveria and enacts a plan to, in his words, instate himself as the architect of the world's future. And the thing is, the world is such an awful mess at this point that a global hegemony under Doom would almost definitely be an improvement. Doom 2099 casts the hammy megalomaniac as a benevolent dictator and antihero, and it's a blast to read.

At this point, if Doom 2099 is remembered for anything, it's for being the springboard for the career of Warren Ellis, who takes over the book from John F. Moore after issue #26. But Moore does a wonderful job at the helm, which came as a surprise to me, having already seen how problematic and glum his X-Men 2099 shaped up to be. I have to regard the two books as a kind of dialectical pair: X-Men 2099 is about a bunch of hard-to-like good guys (with some flecks of badness) who always lose; Doom 2099 is about a charismatic bad guy (which some flecks of goodness) who always wins.

Rather than review Doom 2099, I'd just like to share one of my favorite scenes. Like any event in a comic serial, some context must needs be supplied.

Funny Pages Footnote

I'm pretty sure everyone running a webpage with any kind of pageviews counter finds themselves checking their stats compulsively, even when there's really nothing at stake and they have no plans to examine or put to use their findings. I know I do.

While I was peering at Beyond Easy's stats some hours after throwing up yesterday's yesterday's post, I noticed someone had visited the archives to glance at this post from 2013, where I consider whether it's worth my while to keep doing comics at all. Between someone else discreetly pointing out how habitual these mini-crises have become with me, and what yesterday's comic implies about my talent for getting caught up in in loops, I feel more than a little absurd.

But it is pretty funny.