A Headful of Stars.

I was just lying on the balcony with my daughter after breakfast (cereal for her, toast for me). She looked up at the high-rise opposite, at the crowded nest of aerials on the roof. Space rocket, she said. Then she looked at the next block over, another mighty omphalos crowded with aerials. Look, she said, another space rocket. It was a lovely bit of magical thinking, I thought, which time-machined me right back to when I was a kid, when I thought anyone who did repair work on a TV aerial was inherently mysterious, quasi-magical. These people climbed up to the highest points in my infant world and communed with the magical forces that brought me the Daleks and Doctor Who. They were practically spacemen themselves, up there, sifting through the ether, talking to stars. 

O Captain, my Captain.

As my friend Anthony will attest, I am not remotely a comics aficionado. I know basically nothing about the medium. I'm a total arriviste, a lowly noob, a schmuck who never paid his dues in the basements of Orbital Comics, trawling for that hard to get copy of...well, I don't even know the appropriate reference.  

That aside, where that is the admission of my total ignorance, I still can't get over how amazing it is that Joss Whedon in the first Avengers movie was able to convey the entire characterisation of several lead characters with just one line of dialogue.

I never really got Captain America until he said this (you can ignore the author of this clip who thinks it's a straight endorsement of Christian dogma):

And I likewise never got The Hulk until he said this:

As you can guess therefore, I am pretty much pathetically moist about Age of Ultron. And hanging out with Anthony again, so he can mock my ignorance... 

Dead End Geek.

Excuse me while I blow your mind with this here epic treatise on the psychopathology of the geek, and why the geek kings need to stop dragging the reputation of geeks everywhere through the mud with their lazy, fatuous reversion to cliché. And if you’re thinking of complaining along the lines of tl;dr, then please don’t. George Orwell’s essay 'The Lion and The Unicorn' is 23,000 words, and people still read that.

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