4/1/05 7:45 PM: "Remember: You are a soldier in the data war. It is important that you use only real bullets." -- Jon Carroll

THE POWER OF PRAYER: My neighbor Mike has a new grandson (by his own 13-year-old daughter, but that's a discussion I'm not in the mood to start). The child had viral menengitis, which (as near as I can tell) is absolutely horrible. A secondary, opportunistic infection took root (I watch two episodes of Medical Investigation and all of a sudden this stuff sounds natural in my mind), but the kid pulled through. Mike, who's survived multiple gunshots and stabbings himself, attests it to "the power of prayer." I wouldn't discount modern medical science, but I see his point.

To wholly trivialize the point, I see that Top Hits Monthly finally made a karaoke version of "Smile Like You Mean It" by The Killers in their April batch, which is something I've wished for (if not directly appealed to a higher power for) since I realized it was the song best suited to my range by the whimsical band. So there that is.

THE FALL OF THE BAT: I read comic books -- this should come as no surprise to anybody, given the weekly reviews I post at UGO. For the most part, I don't care about what happens, since it's the manipulation of licensed characters that I don't own nor exercise any control over. But every once in a while, I see something that gets my metaphorical goat, and I am pressed to comment.

First of all, this week I reviewed a comic book called Countdown to Infinite Crisis #1. It's excessively ham fisted, but I'll deal with that in a moment. At the core, Batman is angry because, after years, he's realized that some of his best friends altered his memories for reasons that are not flattering to anybody. So he's done some things that could be considered paranoid and extreme. These things, for probably the third time in four years, have gotten out of his control and into what we laughingly refer to as "the wrong hands."

Then, I read at Newsarama (a competitor/collaborator with Comic Book Resources, where I work) that one of the Bat's apprentices did not die, as everone believed, but has secretly been building himself into a kill-first vigilante along slightly meaner lines than the Azreal character who wore the "mantle" of the Bat for a while (yeah, even I think this is getting jargonistic). It's just such a pathetic ploy, like fan fiction writ large, that it sickens me.

Then, to add insult to injury (and really, who wouldn't take the opportunity to do that?) the main villain in that Countdown mess is not only a character I have enjoyed for years (Max Lord), but he's gotten a graft of Lex Luthor's personality, and in the space of a few panels pisses on the entire Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis run of Justice League (known to some as the "bwa-ha-ha" years). "Why do you think I kept the League ineffectual for years?" the alleged Max said at one point. During that "ineffectual" time, the League handled Despero, the Extremists, the Gray Man and Lobo (long before he was a goofy parody of himself), to mention a few.

I get that the current regime at DC doesn't like the "bwa-ha-ha" era in general and maybe even Giffen in specific. Why take it out on people who did? The Bat-God myth had its roots in that era, with Morrison (another love-hate relationship for DC) picking up the threads and spinning them into gold. So he goes down too. Gah ...

THE LUCK OF THE DRAW: I've been thinking a lot about my relatives on my mother's side lately. I came across the picture here of me (at age 13, I think) with my cousin Karschon. For the first four years of our life, and again when I lived with my mom at age 6 or so, we were like brothers. His birthday is a month or so before mine, but I was always the brains and him the brawn. We got along famously, and loved each other fiercely like best friends who are brothers do.

Karschon's life turned out differently than mine. He followed closer to his mother's footsteps, becoming a belligerent, weed-smoking unemployable, flirting with jail time and dodging paternity. He's my age and nowhere near as far along. Which may not be a fair comparison, but it's true.

It makes me think about my little brother Chazz, who my mother has "given up on" (years from now this stuff is gonna come back to haunt me, I know, and I don't care). I had to admit my mother is not exactly parent material, and probably should not have had children. But I got insanely lucky/blessed, getting shuffled off to my great aunt and uncle at age 4 and staying with them until their death. They instilled in me the opposite of my mother's family's teachings -- that I could do anything, that no goal was too far if I was willing to work for it. They encouraged my eccentricities and intellect, they indulged my quest for knowledge and simulating worlds in our living room. Karschon never got those chances. I just think about this stuff sometimes.

SCATTERSHOT: I sometimes wonder why I don't blog like normal people do -- little gems on a regular basis -- but rather save up and blast out a huge salvo of data at one time. I have no freaking idea.

INSTANT MESSAGE: Is the last blog why you started having "that conversation" with me, 220?

TELLING STORIES: So I dug up Faraway, another sci fi novel I actually started before The Crown and have since folded into what my "fan" Chinedum calls "The Crowniverse." I started editing it, being 90% done, and decided to start posting it in May, chapter by chapter, as another serial novel. By then my paperwork with the feds should be done, and I can start talking about the ideas in question. I also got the central conceit for Book Three of The Crown from my dawg Inpu, so while I'm posting Faraway I plan to be writing Book Three. Which is cool.

I finally got to do something whimsical for April 1st over at CBR -- writing the news summary as a narrative, in the style of Brian Michael Bendis' What If? stories in December 2004. That was cool.

RISE AND FALL: There was something I really wanted and enjoyed, and I lost it yesterday. Within an hour, something else that I really wanted and enjoyed returned to me. It's very strange standing at the pivot point on a scale. It's a lot of interesting conversations, I tell ya ...

THAT'S THE NEWS, AND I AM OUT OF HERE: One last quote: "Yes, I do love gorillas but it's society's crime not ours." -- Grant Morrison