Walking on the Moon

Robert Buck was a well respected writer on aviation weather and author of many books.  He passed away early this month.  AOPA has a short obituary.

As I’m sitting down to file the comics I’ve bought this week, I thought it might be worthwhile to throw up some capsule reviews.  From least enjoyable to most:

•  Sandman Mystery Theater 5 of 5 (John Ney Rieber & Eric Nguyen)
  • This series seems to be setting the stage for a new Sandman series.  I was a big fan of Wagner and Seagle’s Sandman Mystery Theater and the book being on my pull list got this pulled for me.  I wasn’t really blown away.  The characters didn’t compel me particularly strongly and the art was muddy in places that made it difficult to follow the action.  It was atmospheric though. Wagner and Seagle’s work took a while to grow on me too.  Origins are always difficult to get right.  I’d stick around for another series, probably.
• Jonah Hex #18 (Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Val Semieks)
  • Heh.  Hex.  Well, it’s not Lansdale/Truman, but I’ve been enjoying this incarnation of Jonah Hex.  Not undying literature, but good pulp western fun with an almost completely irredeemable “hero.”  Almost always worth it, with a few gems.  This one was worth it.
• The Spirit (Darwyn Cooke, J. Bone & Dave Stewart)
  • I’ve been enjoying Cooke and company’s take on The Spirit.  I’m a little surprised by that.  I hold The Spirit in high regard and I’d be pretty perturbed to see a bad version on the shelves.  This team’s doing a good job keeping the spirit of the classic stories without being tied to the history slavishly.  They’ve moved the characters into the 21st century but kept their heart.  This issue seems to be the beginning of moving the characters along a real dramatic arc, where the first two (an introductory and fairly generic Spirit tale and a P’gell rewrite) were more taking them out for a spin to make sure they handled OK.  It’ll be interesting to see if they can maintain their sure hand as they set out to take more ownership of the story.
• All Star Superman #7 (Grant Morrison, Frank Quietly)
  • For my money, All-Star Superman has done a great job at capturing the feel of Silver Age Superman stories without making you feel stupid for reading them.  Considering how goofy some of those stories are, this is a feat in itself.  Beyond just working the plot kinks and restoring a sense of wonder for the universe that Superman inhabits, Morrison and Quietly have been showing that these characters deserve to be the enduring touchstones they are.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Jimmy Olsen portrayed as someone who deserves to be “Superman’s Pal” because he’s gutsy, competent, and selflessly brave rather than the relation being deus ex machina.  Now, that issue wasn’t this issue, which is one of the weaker ones of the run – I’ve never liked Bizarro.  Still the series is fantastic.  Worth riding the dip.  The trade hardback for the first 6 issues is out this week as well.  Treat yourself.
• Fell #8 (Warren Ellis, Ben Templesmith)
  • Yum, Fell.  Ellis and Templesmith’s regular trip to the PD of the worst place on Earth is as good as usual.  The series is a series of one-off books with a very loose continuity, much more Dragnet than Hill Street Blues, but each story has some wonderful hook.  Intended as a simple comic for people who just want a good story and don’t want to follow any kind of continuity, it delivers a pop every issue.  And, as one of my comic shop guys said – it’s cheaper than anything on the shelf with no ads.  Buy it.  (Not for kids, though)

My review of The Best American Science Writing 2006 is up in Bell, Book and Candle.

A couple weeks ago I posted about the bees that seemed to be setting up shop at my local airport. Last Thursday, 29 Mar, I was taking a friend up for a tour of LA and heard and saw more.

First, when we got there the formerly bee-covered Cirrus was gone. We were told that the owner had ripped the cover off – bees and all – fired up the engine and gone to another airport. This left a few perturbed bees running around SMO, but though we were around for a while, none of them bothered us. They tell me that most of the bees in LA county are africanized, so that’s pretty good luck.

Other than coming back and finding that the bees had taken my parking space that was my whole involvement. But the story I heard was that our friend with the bee-covered plane had proceeded out to his destination and only found a few intrepid bees still gripping his aircraft on arrival. On departure to return to SMO, a few more wayward bees had appeared. When he returned to the ramp, however, the remaining local bees began returning to the plane and re-establishing the clump.

After the clump began re-forming they summoned a beekeeper who, I’m told, vacuumed them up – queen and all – and there’s been peace in the valley since then.

I would have loved to see the little buggers clomp back on to the plane on return, though.

Warren Ellis posted an amazing shot of Atlantis’s departure. Actual picture courtesy of NASA, in more ways than one.

I was up shooting approaches this morning with my favorite CFI and we saw a pretty amazing thing on the ramp when we got back. A swarm of bees was attached to one of the aircraft parked on the ramp, in full on “protect the queen” mode.

That whole dark patch is bees. I hope for the owner’s sake that the bees are just moving the hive somewhere and that they haven’t decided that they’d rather have a moving base of operations. Man, what a potential nightmare.

Practical matters aside, I’d really hate to have this happen. When I was younger I had a serious phobia about stinging insects – I sat on a hive full of ground-based bees at an impressionable age. I’m pretty well over that now, but I still wouldn’t like have to deal with a hive in the Archer.

I’ll be hosing my plane down with wasp and bee killer for the forseeable future. (Image courtesy of Andy Hoover.)

For the first time since installing Akismet I had to moderate a spam post today. Not bad.

I’ve put my review of The Weather Makers up on Bell, Book, and Candle.

When I jumped up to WordPress 2.1.2, I also turned on Akismet, a plug-in that filters blog spam. If you’ve never run a blog, you probably can’t believe the volume of crap that gets autoposted to even the most backwater and benign of blogs. When I logged in after 3-4 days of not touching this blog, there were more than 600 comments all spam. At least I was forced to believe they were all spam; love comments though I do, I’m not reading 600 ads for unsavory, illegal “products” thinly disguised as comments to find the one comment that might be out there.

The 600+ set was a pretty big wakeup call. I think my blog has passed some threshold or some new set of comment spammers have appeared and there’s been a sudden jump in comment spam. At any rate, I was finally sick enough of it to get an application key and start using Akismet.

So far – after a few hours – things look pretty good. If you’ve been trying to comment and not seeing your posts show up, now’s a fine time to try again, as I’ll probably see them. If you do post a comment that doesn’t appear, send me a note.

I started Akismet up a couple hours before this post.  When I made the post, Akismet had blocked 10 bad comments.  You can see the current total near the bottom of most pages.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2. Let me know if anything looks too weird.