US Women's National Team (soccer) comes to town! We went!

Hey, friendos.  

Jamie and I went to see the US Women's National Team (in soccer) play Iceland this evening at Austin's Q2 Stadium where we usually take in Austin FC.  

The game started a tad early - 6:40 or so.  And so we drove in rush-hour traffic all the way from Lower Austin to Howard Lane to catch the train to Q2.  The drive:  terrible.  The train - amazing.

lightrail!  It works!

I've liked to try to follow the USWNT since being completely won over by the team in the 1999 World Cup.  Brandi Chastain's goal is, in my book, one of the great sports moments of my lifetime.  I followed the team through the Mia Hamm era, Abby Wambach, Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan...  The US women tend to dominate globally for a variety of reasons.  However, the World Cup in 2023 did not go our way.  But!  the current line-up under coach Emma Hayes won Gold in the 2024 Olympics, and is... great.

So, yeah, finally getting to see this team is 25 years in the making, for me.  Also, Austin needs an NWSL expansion team.  Just saying. 

Jamie has watched USWNT with me since 1999, and so getting to go to this together is real partner stuff for us.

For posterity, here was our starting XI.

Not bad, right?  I've wanted to see Rose Lavelle play for a long time - but this whole line-up was pretty awesome.  (spoiler: Lavelle did not disappoint - nor did anyone)

Me and "Batman" (1989) - at 35

Today marks the 35th anniversary of the release of Batman.   

Our final episode of The Signal Watch PodCast covered this movie.  I invite you to join Jamie and me through a chipper discussion of the movie and the forces around it.  And I've previously written about me and Batman.

To repeat some of what's the podcast and maybe elsewhere - I very much recall my excitement around Batman in 1989. 

I'd really come to comics in 1986, and like a lot of readers at the time, I mostly read X-books and the Bat-titles.  Bat-comics were kind of exploding at the time in the wake of Dark Knight Returns and with the arrival of the terrific talents of folks like Alan Grant on writing chores, veteran Jim Aparo and fresh talent Norm Breyfogle on pencils.  I think this era is one of the many well-loved eras for the books, and with good reason.  

Even in the era of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, Batman was the first movie I ever followed through development and to release date - then through box office and into home video.  It was not the first movie I ever loved, but it was the first movie I felt a level of personal attachment.  

I recall articles in Comics Scene, then the paper.  Reading Nicholson was the Joker and feeling uncertain how that would go.  Prince would be on the soundtrack, which seemed bizarre.

So excited was I - I purchased the novelization prior to the release of the film, and was half-way through reading it when I realized "this is a very dumb thing to do" and I cast the book aside.  I didn't know the term "spoilers" then, but I realized I was going to maybe ruin the experience a mere 4 or 5 days prior to seeing the movie.

My memory of seeing the film itself will always be tied up with a few unrelated things.

Lollapalooza, Rock n' Roll and where we're at in 2024

 

Back in the summer of 1991, with a newly minted driver's license, I drove from Spring, Texas to Austin.  We picked up a friend of my brother's, and then we pivoted, driving into Dallas just before dusk.  

The next day, my brother, his buddy Mike, my buddy Scott and I attended Day 1 of the first two dates in Dallas of the first Lollapalooza tour.  Back then, Lollapalooza was fairly small, and a roving event that moved the artists and associated folks from city to city.  Dallas had sold better than expected, so they added a second day, which was, because of scheduling, the day before the original date.

We kind of knew about the music festivals in Europe, but at the time, music festivals here had sort of died out except for the very successful Monsters of Rock thing (the history and complexity of which I won't get into here).  Bands mostly played 2-3 acts together at most.  Something like Reading was way out of reach on our shores.  You had to have Farm Aid to see anything like a festival that I was really aware of.

Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell somehow cooked up the idea of his caravan of 120 Minutes friendly bands (we did not have the term Alternative in 1991), pulling together a fascinating herd of musicians, hitting cities all across the US.  That I could see Jane's Addiction, Ice-T, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Rollins Band in one day was mind-boggling.  As promised Farrell also brought along artists and international food I wasn't familiar with (I recall looking for food from Africa every year and never regretting it).

24 Years of Wedded Bliss

So, April 28th, 2024 marks the 24th anniversary of Jamie and I making it official.

We'd "dated" for years prior, back to 1995, but that's if you call "dating" two people just saying "yup" to each other and now we were an item.  There wasn't much in the way of trying to figure things out regarding our status.  I wasn't taking her to a movie and then dropping her off and wondering what she was thinking.  We were just together.  And while I didn't know that we'd get married in the first months, there was just not a lot of work there - we just didn't have a trial period or casual dating phase.  

When I hear about people having relationship drama, I'm just of the opinion that you aren't writing a romantic novel about overcoming all kinds of obstacles in liking each other.  I'm not saying there isn't any work or misunderstandings, but, kids, it can be pretty good pretty early on.  With Jamie's medical history, we wound up having plenty of drama that wasn't us arguing, so don't mistake things for being all smooth sailing.  And I got cold feet a couple of times as we headed toward what looked like a lifelong relationship - what with college ending and next phases of life starting.

But into those next phases we headed, sharing an apartment for two years before nuptials.  We got married on a Friday in April of the year 2000.  We were 25, which was pretty young by the standards of my peers.  But, also, most of my friends responded to the news with "shocker, man".  Which means people probably knew we were getting married before I knew.  

Me vs My Facial Hair

Beards are in.  Facial hair is *in*.  Cool dudes are wearing beards.

I'm not one to care much about remaining trendy or fashion (he said, wearing his Bugs Bunny t-shirt as if to put too fine a point on it), but beards and mustaches when I was a young man were for girlfriends' dads and people trying to show you they were, in fact, an iconoclast.  Which, in itself, was super strange.  Facial hair is a pain and it *should* be far more normal to have a beard than not have one. After all, to have a beard, all you have to do is nothing, and a beard happens, if your genetics are so inclined.

And yet...  it's often been the fashion to have a smooth face.  And not just recently.  George Washington?   Chin clean as a newly washed dinner plate.  Paintings of renaissance dudes?  Maybe a twirly mustache.

But going back to college, me and my Norelco have had fairly regular meet-ups.  I'd shave for work pretty much every day, just as I'd done since, like, 9th grade (when my need to shave was to keep the odd patches of beard and peach-fuzz stache from creeping in). 

Until a few years ago, the longest I'd ever gone without shaving was five days on vacation.  But this year, around Christmas, I let it go for several weeks.  And, then, from March 15th to April 17th, I didn't shave.  

these pics are me "reacting" to reaction videos

Here's what I learned.  

The $420 bottle of Batman Perfume and DC Comics in 2024

Hey, look, a $420 bottle of Batman perfume.

A long time ago now, comic artist and famed "nice guy" Jim Lee became President of DC Comics.  He'd been put in a position of power during the Diane Nelson era, having had brought in the Wildstorm Universe to DC Comics, first as an imprint, and then shoehorning it into the New 52 (pretty much against logic and reason).  And he was the foil to Dan Didio's blustering and general ass-hattery.  

But every time an interviewer put a mic in front of Lee, he'd say things that I found confounding.  Chief among those things was that comics weren't really a form of reading, they were a collectible.  DC was in the collectibles business.  

Which makes sense if you made a million dollars because kids were speculating wildly on comics in the early 1990's, but has made minimal sense since that fateful era that almost killed the American comics industry.

Martin Short Appreciation Post

A while back someone tried to do a hit piece on Martin Short.  It was weird - the legit journalist spent a day or so with Short and his take at the end was "I never thought Martin Short was funny."  Which is super weird.  

The article was not received well by the general public.  

Multiple generations are fans of Short, and, sure maybe he's not to everyone's taste.  Look, if I want to write a blog post and howl into the wind about something, whatever.  But spending time and energy of a legitimate publication to work through my personal taste in comedy, that's super weird and says more about me (and my editor or lack thereof) than it does Martin Short.

But let it be known, at this blog, we dig Martin Short.  From Ed Grimley where we first found out about Short, to his many movies, to Jiminy Glick, to his current work with Steve Martin, both stage shows and Only Murders in the Building - I've certainly liked him.  

I mean, this is how he responded to his pal David Letterman having a massive heart attack.

 

If you never saw Jiminy Glick, I think Short was oddly ahead of his time on this one

And, of course, his Ed Grimley sketches

It is *hard* to remain as funny as Short has over the years, and to keep it relentlessly fresh.  And to find new avenues for what he does.  I mean, there are multiple levels upon which I appreciate Only Murders in the Building, but certainly I'm a fan of how Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez have created some great characters.

Anyhoo, if you've got a favorite Martin Short bit or role or clip, share in the comments!