Randy’s Blog

Last year, on the day before my birthday, an article appeared in my RSS reader about a new book by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke that had just been published. It was called More Encounters with Star People: Urban American Indians Tell Their Stories. I was elated with the news! I had been looking forward to anything new from her for months on end. And all of a sudden, there it was, almost like a birthday present for me.

I ordered the book right then, and read it as soon as it arrived. As usual, there were some wild stories that gave me a lot to think about. I knew I would write a blog post on it, but for some reason it's taken me an entire year to do so.

To recap, Ardy Sixkiller Clarke is a retired professor from Montana State University. Over the past several decades, she's collected stories from American Indians about their encounters with star people (aka aliens/extraterrestrials). In 2012, she published her first book on the topic, Encounters with Star People: Untold Stories of American Indians, which I wrote about at length here. It focused on interviews with American Indians on reservations. In 2014, her second book was published, Sky People: Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Mesoamerica (which I briefly mentioned in this post). That book saw her fulfill a lifelong dream of traveling through Central America, following in the footsteps of the 19th century explorers Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood. Along the way, she interviewed Mayans who'd had experiences with star people. Her third book, which is the topic of this blog post, was published last year (2016) and focused on interviews with American Indians who'd left the reservation.

I love her books for a variety of reasons:

• You get a glimpse into the lives of indigenous people. In the latest book, you get a sense of the challenges people face when they leave the reservation for modern society. They walk in two worlds, not quite belonging to either one.
• The stories of the star people. How do people react when confronted with a star person? What do the star people say? What does the experiencer say? What did they learn?
• Reading about Ardy's adventures. She has a number of serendipitous events, like when her car breaks down in New Mexico, and the mechanic who fixes it is an Indian that not only has read her books and recognizes her, but has his own story of UFO sightings to share. A fair number of her interviews happen like that, purely by chance.

The main thing from this book that stuck with me the past year is just how far behind humans are from the star people. For example, in one story, a star person said that verbal communication is not very common in the universe, and is actually a sign of how primitive humans are. That really shocked me, even though nearly everyone who communicates with a star person reports it happens telepathically. Another star person said that where he comes from, they do what's best for the species, whereas humans do what's best for the individual. He said humans have the cure for disease and old age, as well as forms of energy that would eliminate the need for fossil fuels, but these are not released because it's not profitable for those in power. Sadly, this did not shock me.

I'll share two stories in particular that have also stuck with me. The first comes from a doctor in Oklahoma, who is from the Southern Cheyenne tribe. He said he hit a deer one night as he was driving home from the hospital. When he got out of the car, the deer transformed into a star person! They stood on the side of the road, communicating telepathically. The star person said he wasn't hurt; he had healed himself with his mind, something humans would eventually learn to do (and that a few humans could already do, but they were scorned by the medical profession). The star person went on to say:

• In the grand scheme of things, Earth is not that important. No one wants to invade it. There are far too many habitable planets that don't have intelligent life that would be easier to colonize.
• His species does colonize uninhabited planets and have taken humans who were willing to leave Earth to those planets to help colonize them.
• He was aware of a species that was abducting humans. They have been encouraged to stop, but there is nothing his species can do to stop them. There are many other intelligent species that are unhappy with the attention human abductions have brought to space travelers, because their goal is to explore and study without changing the culture.

The other story is so wild it's difficult to believe. The story played out over 3 years. It started at a conference honoring Indian women leaders, where Ardy was approached by a woman who was a widow with a 14 year old daughter. She believed her daughter would be taken by the star people at the age of 17 to help colonize a planet inhabited only by human females. The star people had learned that human males always bring violence and greed with them, so they were trying a female-only colonization as an experiment. The mother was terrified of losing her daughter, and refused to seek counseling, so Ardy kept in touch with her by calling her weekly and visiting her periodically.  

A couple of years later, when the daughter was 16, Ardy visited them. The woman revealed she was now allowed to join her daughter on the new planet, and as a result had become vegetarian, like her daughter, since the only food source would be plants. Then, a few months later, the mother and daughter vanished. Their phone stopped working. The house was donated to charity. Someone else was at the mother's job, saying the woman left and didn't leave a forwarding address. Ardy said she couldn't get the woman out of her mind for months. Every time the phone rang, she thought it would be her, but it never was. She even visited the family's ancestral village, but no one knew where they were. Now, Ardy says, she looks at the stars and wonders if there really could be a woman-only planet, and whether or not it would be a happy place.

In a way, I was slightly disappointed in the book. While the stories were fascinating, there was much more fear among the urban Indians. The reservation Indians from her first book had more positive interactions with the star people. I'm not sure why that is.

Some critics have questioned how Ardy can encounter so many people with stories of UFOs and star people (she says she's interviewed more than 1500 individuals). Her answer to that is simple: she asks.

I have never seen a UFO or encountered a star person. For anyone reading this post, have you?

A few Fridays ago, I went to a presentation about solar eclipses, given by a lady who works at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. She talked about the history of eclipses, and about the total solar eclipse later this summer. She had several really good tips for people going to see it, some of which I hadn't considered. Things like:

• Expect hurricane evacuation level traffic
• Bring toilet paper (and food and water and medicine)
• Don't expect the internet to work

Those three things really drove home how crazy it might get in the path of totality, and made me very glad I went to the presentation. Forewarned is forearmed!

When talking about the history of eclipses, she mentioned how Edmund Halley (of Halley's Comet fame) started one of the earliest "citizen science" programs that we know of. Prior to a total solar eclipse in 1715, which passed over England, he asked the public to record the exact time totality began and ended, and send him the results. He used the data to better calculate the moon's exact position, which made future eclipse predictions much more accurate. Cool stuff.

That was on a Friday night. The next morning I took Wendy's car in for an oil change, and for what turned out to be fairly expensive repairs. To pass the time, I brought along a gigantic book on data analysis that I've (very) slowly been working my way through the past few months. I got to a chapter on survival analysis, which I learned predates statistics by nearly 2 centuries. The topic originated in a paper published by the Royal Society of London in 1693. It was written by, of all people, Edmund Halley! And it had a most excellent title:

An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind, drawn from curious Tables of the Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw, with an Attempt to ascertain the Price of Annuities upon Lives

If you're interested, the paper is available online.

The only reason I knew Edmund Halley's name in the first place is because of Halley's Comet. And yet, in the span of just over 12 hours, I encountered 2 references to him that had nothing to do with the comet!

At some point last year I came across an article on the New Yorker's website called Weeding the Worst Library Books. It interviews two Michigan librarians who created a popular blog called Awful Library Books, which features old and outdated library books that should be removed ("weeded"). One of the books featured on their blog, and mentioned in the New Yorker article, is this:

I don't know about you, but when I saw this cover, I laughed out loud! It is so ridiculous, it takes the cake in just about every possible way. It's not just a book about sasquatch, it's about psychic sasquatch! And not just any ordinary, run-of-the-mill psychic sasquatch, but psychic sasquatch connected to UFOs!!!

It was so ridiculous I knew I had to have it. So I asked for it for my birthday last year, and Wendy bought it for me. I knew it would be awful, I was just hoping it would be hilariously awful.

Well, I finally got around to reading it a couple of weeks ago. And to my incredible surprise, the joke is on me! Instead of being a hilariously awful book, it turned out to be a fascinating and intelligently-written one! It's authored by an anthropologist, Jack Lapseritis, who's spent much of his life investigating sasquatch reports, and was finally forced to accept what many people have reported, and what he eventually experienced himself: telepathic communication with sasquatch creatures! And in a number of cases, UFOs were observed at the same time as the sasquatch!

To say that I was stunned by this book would be an understatement. I have never been interested in sasquatch before; I've always thought "So there's a big ape deep in the remote wilderness that's eluded researchers. Big deal!" But this book has opened up an entirely new area of research. After reading it, I've subscribed to blogs of other sasquatch researchers, and noticed a few of them have come to similar conclusions as Lapseritis: sasquatch, UFOs, and the paranormal are all intertwined. How interesting!

Here are a few points made in The Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection:

• At the time the book was written (late 1990s), the author had interviewed 76 people who reported some level of telepathic contact with sasquatch, and/or observed sasquatch and UFOs at the same time.
• He claims sasquatch are extremely psychic, and can read people's minds, which makes them so elusive. They know who's coming and why.
• They are inter-dimensional beings, who can shift in and out of our reality, which is why their footprints suddenly disappear, or why no footprints are observed when they're seen walking over muddy ground.
• The sasquatch are people with their own culture, who want to be left alone. They are not animals to be hunted and killed. (Apparently this makes some Bigfoot hunters angry, since their goal is to kill a sasquatch and bring in the corpse as proof of their existence.)
• Sometimes they're seen being picked up or dropped off by UFOs.

There's much more in the book, of course; that's just a small sample. One other interesting point: the preface is written by R. Leo Sprinkle, a counseling psychologist. He's worked with clients who have had sasquatch/UFO encounters and says his clients were not crazy people; they just needed help dealing with experiences they couldn't explain. He also urges scientists to take the study of the paranormal seriously, and mentions the Society for Scientific Exploration as one such example. I was thrilled to see the SSE mentioned, because I joined that society way back in this blog post, when I discovered their journal, the JSE!

Finally, getting back to the Awful Library blog, I was pleased to see that not everyone thought Psychic Sasquatch was the type of book to be weeded. In their blog post on the book, a librarian comments:

As hokey as this book is, I’d keep it in my library unless the condition was awful. There’s a huge audience for Bigfoot in my community, and one of the most well-attended programs we’ve had was from a group of Bigfoot ‘researchers’!

Lately I've been encountering references to UFOs in unexpected places. Here's a roundup of them:

Fargo, Season 2

Wendy and I recently watched season 2 of the TV show Fargo. It was a fictional tale set in 1979 about ordinary people caught up in a turf war between the Kansas City mafia and the North Dakota mafia. Weirdly, there was a UFO subplot throughout the season: they kept appearing at critical moments in the story. Several episodes hinted that some of the main characters were being abducted by aliens. Nothing about the UFOs was ever explained. It was left, as in life, a complete mystery.

New York Times

The New York Times recently ran an article with the headline "People Are Seeing U.F.O.s Everywhere, and This Book Proves It". It's about a married couple that recently published a book called UFO Sightings Desk Reference. They gathered statistics of UFO sightings collected by two organizations (MUFON and NUFORC), and created a 371-page book full of charts, graphs, and tables that break down the data by geography, time, and shape of UFO. There's no narrative in the book, just data. The article also linked to their blog, New York Skies, where they discuss some of the patterns they've uncovered during their research.

Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos

Eventually I plan to write a blog post about Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) and the over 14,000 psychic readings he gave during his life, and how they've been thoroughly documented and cataloged, and how he became known as "the sleeping prophet" and "the father of holistic medicine" and "America's greatest psychic", and how some of his predictions are still coming true today. But, this is not that blog post. 

Instead, I will mention that I recently read the book Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos, written by astronomer James Mullaney. He explores what the Edgar Cayce readings say about our universe. I was very pleased to learn that Mullaney is a highly qualified astronomer: he was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society of London, helped contribute to Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series, and has written for, and served as editor of, Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines.

I was even more pleased when I read the preface of Edgar Cayce and the Cosmos. Mullaney writes that with his scientific background, he was skeptical of the Edgar Cayce material, just like he was skeptical of UFOs. However, he says:

I came to realize that such a formal background can also in many situations blind a person to the deeper realities lying behind nature. With further study of both the Cayce material and the UFO phenomenon, I soon lost all skepticism about either of them!

Atlantis Author

Last month I went to a presentation given by an author who's written a number of books about lost civilizations, such as Atlantis. During the Q&A at the end, I asked if he was working on any new books. He said yes, he'd just finished one, and it was on a topic he never thought he would write about: UFOs!

I had the day off on Friday, which was forecast to be in the mid-70s, so I hit the bike trail for the first time this year. I actually had a chance to go for a bike ride in February -- there was a day in the mid-60s -- but it was the day after my trip to Chicago for the Nintendo Switch event, and I just didn't have the energy. So I seized the opportunity on Friday.  And I dressed for success, too! I wore my padded shorts, thin socks, a bit of sunscreen, a bike helmet, and my Camelbak, which was full of water. Plus there was a snack bar tucked away in my saddle bag.

I started in Glacial Park and rode the Prairie Trail north to the Wisconsin state line. It was 11.6 miles round-trip. This was my idea of "taking it easy", but now I know better. That was way too long of a ride to start the season! I was exhausted when I got home. So, note to future Randy: start the season with a 5 or 6 mile ride instead.

As they say on the inter-webs, "pics or it didn't happen":

You can tell in a couple of the photos that there was a prescribed burn happening that day. I was worried the rest area just across the state line would be covered in smoke, but fortunately it wasn't. The wind directed it away from there.

There was one spot on the trail where you could hear a chorus of frogs singing away. I stopped on the way back just to listen to them for a while. They were very loud.

Ride stats:

• 11.6 miles
• 1 hour, 19 minutes

For the record, my season total for last year was 84.4 miles.

A couple months ago I subscribed to a new movie streaming service called FilmStruck. It has all kinds of classic and critically-acclaimed movies, including the Criterion collection, indie films and foreign films, along with bonus material like hosted introductions and short interviews. It's basically like Netflix for film lovers. It wasn't available on any devices I owned, so I used my credit card reward points to buy an Amazon Fire TV player just so I could watch FilmStruck. And it's been worth it! 

There's also a FilmStruck blog at http://streamline.filmstruck.com/. Several times a week they write about a movie in their collection and provide all kinds of interesting background information. This has been required reading for me; I've discovered films I would otherwise have never heard about.

I've watched over a dozen movies so far. Here are some of the best:

Dodsworth (1936)

This was the first movie I watched on FilmStruck, and I have yet to see anything better. I was shocked that a movie made in the 1930s could be this good. The FilmStruck blog wrote about it on New Year's Eve, framing it as a film about new beginnings. It's about a rich businessman who sells his business and retires. He and his wife travel to Europe to see the world, but her insecurity about growing old starts to drive them apart. I've seen the movie described as "a mature and intelligent marital drama" and I think that sums it up. The acting by everyone is incredible, and the cinematography in some scenes was so good I still think about it. Dodsworth was directed by William Wyler, who I'd never heard of, but he is apparently one of Hollywood's greatest directors. I've seen several people refer to his film The Best Years of Our Lives as being a masterpiece, but I have yet to watch it. (It won Best Picture in 1947, beating out It's a Wonderful Life.)

World on a Wire (1973)

I found this movie just by browsing the FilmStruck catalog. It's a made-for-TV German movie and is basically The Matrix, about 25 years before The Matrix was made. Instead of focusing on people in the matrix, it focuses on the people who created it. They simulate their society inside a computer and use it to predict consumer trends and election results. The movie has been described as "gloriously paranoid" and I think that is an understatement. Everyone is being watched by someone else. And the cinematography is on steroids! The camera never seems to stop panning, zooming, tracking, or circling. And mirrors are everywhere! Nearly every scene has one and you constantly see reflections and reflections within reflections within reflections! It's crazy, but I loved it. There are lots of Kubrick references throughout the movie, too.

It seemed odd that this was a made-for-TV movie, but one of the bonus interviews explained that in Germany in 1973 there were a grand total of 2 TV channels: channel 1 and channel 2. By making it for TV, they had a much larger audience than they would if it was released in theaters. TV viewers also got more excited about multi-night movies ("television events"), so World on a Wire is split into two 2-hour parts. It has a rather glacial pace as a result. Still, I enjoyed the movie, and the more I thought about it afterwards, the more I liked it.

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

This is the one movie I've seen so far that I like as much as Dodsworth. Two friends meet for dinner at the beginning of the movie. They eat dinner, they talk, and they leave. That's the whole movie! It's just a 2-hour dinner conversation between two friends! I was highly skeptical that this would be good, but I read that Roger Ebert ranked it as one of the best movies of the year, so I gave it a try. While watching it I realized that it all boils down to storytelling. They're just two guys telling stories about their lives. There's no reason their stories couldn't be just as fascinating as any other movie. 

Andre is played by Andre Gregory. His friend is Wallace, played by Wallace Shawn (instantly recognizable as the "Inconceivable!" guy from The Princess Bride). Andre does most of the talking, and shares the real-life experiences of Andre Gregory, the actor. He's had a very unusual life with a number of strange experiences (one of which borders on the supernatural). Wallace is the more down-to-earth guy who's led a normal life and is skeptical of some of Andre's beliefs. The film is fascinating, and makes the point that most people go through life asleep. I would like to watch this again sometime.

I learned about My Dinner with Andre on the FilmStruck blog. I hadn't heard of it before, but apparently it's a well-known movie. The blog post pointed out that The Simpsons once poked fun at it, when an episode showed a kid playing a My Dinner with Andre video game. Ha!

Finally, a few honorable mentions:

* The Baron of Arizona (1950) - Vincent Price stars in a non-horror role. It's based on the nearly unbelievable true story of a man in the late 1800's who spent years creating fake land grant documents in an attempt to con the U.S. government into believing he owned all the land in Arizona. And he nearly succeeded!

* To Be or Not to Be (1942) - A very dark comedy about Polish actors who get mixed up with a Nazi spy. The jokes about concentration camps were in shockingly poor taste, but the movie is now considered a comedy masterpiece. It has one of the funniest lines I've heard in a movie in a long time.

* Gaslight (1944) - A man marries a woman (Ingrid Bergman) and slowly drives her mad in an effort to uncover her family secrets. A young Angela Lansbury plays their maid, and both she and Ingrid won Oscars for their performances. The term gaslighting originated from this movie.

I will of course let you know if I encounter any movies better than Dodsworth!

Last Saturday I went down to Chicago to preview Nintendo's new video game console, the Switch, which comes out on March 3rd. It was an invitation-only event letting people try out a bunch of games on the console. I got the invitation via email back in January (just a week after we went to Chicago for a Bulls game). Nintendo claimed they invited me because I was "a loyal user".

Well, flattery will get you everywhere, so I graciously accepted the invite. Wendy planned to come with me, since I had 2 tickets, but she had to go to Kansas at the last minute, which meant I was by myself for the event.

When last Saturday arrived, I took the train to Chicago. To pass the time, I brought my Nintendo 3DS and played Dragon Quest VII. It's an RPG game that can take over 100 hours to complete -- by far the longest video game I've ever attempted! With an hour and a half train ride each way, it easily kept me occupied.

When I got to Chicago, I had a quick lunch at the train station (a vegetarian banh mi sandwich from Saigon Sisters) and got an Uber ride to the event. I was scheduled for the 2:30-5:30 event, but I got there around 2, after reading it was best to arrive early. The line was already well established by then:

At 2:30 they shuffled us all inside, checked our tickets, and had a countdown to the start of the event. And then it began! There were booths set up for a bunch of Switch games, and you could just walk up and play a game. Some booths were more elaborate than others. I played a round of Mario Kart at this fancy booth, but I did poorly, coming in 8th place:

There were lots of games to try. I didn't even try to play them all.

If you were so inclined, you could go up onto the main stage and play games in front of the crowd. Here are two people playing "1-2 Switch", which has a bunch of mini-games:

The main reason I was there, though, was to play the new Zelda game, Breath of the Wild:

Everybody was there to play Zelda, though, so they had a process in place: get a ticket for specific time slot, and once your time arrived, you got to play a 20-minute demo. I had about an hour to kill before my time slot, so I played a handful of games, like the aforementioned Mario Kart, Disgaea (which was new to me), Super Bomberman R (also new to me), and Street Fighter 2 (I got my butt kicked by some random dude).

Eventually I got my 20 minutes of Zelda. There was a Nintendo rep who guided me through the demo and told me about things I could do. It was fun, but playing a new game, with a new controller, with someone watching over my shoulder and giving me tips, in a loud and crazy room was total sensory overload! The 20 minutes went by in a flash.

I played a couple other games afterward, but then decided I was done. I was getting hungry at this point, so I got an Uber ride to Native Foods (the vegan restaurant we went to after the Bulls game) and had dinner. Then I walked back to the train station, hopped on a train, and continued playing Dragon Quest VII.

The event was fun, and I'm glad I went. I will buy a Switch so I can play the new Zelda, but I'm not planning on running out and buying it on day one. I think I'll finish Dragon Quest first!

In the early 1990s, during the time I was reading comics, Marvel launched a title featuring a new superhero named Darkhawk. 

He's really Chris Powell, a teenage kid who finds a mysterious amulet in an abandoned amusement park. Just by holding the amulet and wishing, he can transform into Darkhawk, a powerful being with all kinds of super abilities. With another wish, he can transform back into his teenage self. I bought a few of the early issues at the time and really liked it. Due to my meager funds, however, I couldn't afford to continue buying it, so I gradually lost interest in the hero. But I always remembered how great those few issues were, and how cool Darkhawk was.

A few years ago, Marvel announced a new Marvel Unlimited service. For $70 a year, you can read digital versions of over 17,000 Marvel titles using their mobile app. I signed up, and reading Marvel comics quickly became the main reason I used my tablet. (A 10" tablet is roughly the same size as a comic book.) One of the first things I looked for was Darkhawk, but it was not available. 17,000 titles is a lot, but it's nowhere near the number of comics Marvel has published in its long history. I easily found other exciting comics to read, though, so the service was (and still is) a great value.

Once again, time passed, and all thoughts of Darkhawk subsided. But that all changed late last year, on the night of November 7th. That night I had a dream I went to a comic book store and found nearly every issue of Darkhawk, including the annuals. I bought them all. The total was $39, and I had $40 in my dream wallet. I was stoked!

When I woke up the next morning, I checked Marvel Unlimited first thing, to see if Darkhawk was available (they add a few dozen comics to it every week; some new issues, some old issues), but it wasn't. So I searched the internet for any Darkhawk news, and I almost couldn't believe it, but I found some! A couple of days before my dream, Marvel issued a press release and buried at the very bottom was a note that Darkhawk would be added to the Marvel Unlimited library later that very month! Just like in the dream, I was stoked.

I didn't have to wait long. About a week later, on November 13th, Darkhawk was added. I eagerly jumped in and read them, and they were just as good as I remembered. But soon I discovered a problem: only the first 9 issues had been added, and the Darkhawk series ran for 50! This was a bummer. It had taken several years for the first 9 issues to make their way to Marvel Unlimited. I had a feeling it would be several more years for the remaining issues to do the same.

I felt defeated, but still somehow stubbornly attached to the idea of reading every issue of Darkhawk. So I traveled to a local comic book store and combed through their entire back issue selection: the high-value back issue bin, the one-dollar back issue bin, even the fifty-cent back issue bin. When I left the store, I had five new Darkhawk issues. My entire set of Darkhawk comics, including the ones I bought in the '90s, now included these:

• 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 25, 34, 36, 44

At this point I realized how futile it would be to track down all the Darkhawk issues at comic book stores. It would take forever! But how else could it be done? I visited a few internet-based comic book stores, and saw that I could search for each issue, select what condition I wanted it in (mint, near mint, very fine, fine, etc), add it to my cart, and repeat for the next issue, but for some reason that didn't feel like the best solution. So for a few days, I was stumped.

Finally, the light bulb turned on inside my head.

The answer was ebay!!

I searched through ebay's listings and discovered the mother lode: someone was selling the entire run of Darkhawk: issues 1-50 plus all 3 annuals, just like in my dream. It was not $39 like my dream, but it was just slightly over $1 per issue, which seemed quite reasonable. I bought it, and 3 days later a big box of comics was delivered to our front porch.

Over the next couple of weeks, I read the entire series. It had obviously been canceled after issue 50, so I was expecting the writing to get really bad in the latter half of the series, thus leading to the cancellation. It really didn't, though. The entire series was written by the same writer, Danny Fingeroth, and while he made some changes to the character in the latter half that I didn't like, the issues were always surprisingly well written. Sometimes when the writing in comics is bad, it feels like a chore to keep reading, but that never happened with Darkhawk. It always kept me engaged and interested in what happened next.

What I really enjoyed about the series was how much Chris Powell struggled both in his personal life and as a superhero. His father, a police officer, disappears after taking bribes from a mobster. His mother, a lawyer, is prosecuting the same mobster, and dealing with threats and assassination attempts. Chris tries to use his Darkhawk identity as "an edge against crime" to try to find his father and protect his mother, all while keeping his identity secret and trying to help raise his younger twin brothers.

His attempts at being a superhero are extremely amateurish. In one of my favorite scenes, he fights a group of villains when Daredevil shows up to help him out. Darkhawk yells "Daredevil! Wow!", which prompts Daredevil to think to himself: "Wow? This Darkhawk character is new!" Over the course of the series, Chris' increasingly erratic schedule gets him kicked out of his house and suspended from school, so he has to find a cheap apartment and get a job with flexible hours. Throughout the series he often wonders if he's doing the right thing.

I'd never heard of the writer, Danny Fingeroth, before, so after I finished the series, I looked him up. He was a long-time writer and editor for the various Spider-Man comics, which made sense, since Darkhawk always seemed to fight a Spider-Man villain.

In the past decade or so, instead of writing comics he's been analyzing comics, such as his book, Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society, and this 2004 article in the L.A. Times about Spider-Man (the "regular-guy superhero").

He was even featured in a 2009 article in the Philosophy Now magazine:

I was pleased to see several references to Darkhawk in the article, including one about how he "agonizes about the rightness of his decisions". It refers to issue #18, where a group of villains is trying to kidnap a Russian scientist. Darkhawk, trying to protect him, takes action that accidentally causes the scientist's death. On the last page, Darkhawk thinks:

All I've ever wanted to do with the [amulet's] power was the right thing... That all I had to do was want to do the right thing -- and the right thing would get done. With no harm to anyone but the bad guys... Am I -- despite my good intentions -- a worse menace than those I fight?!

I'm sure this is all much more than you ever wanted to know about a superhero you didn't even know existed in the first place. So, in honor of Stan Lee, and without further ado:

'Nuff said!

You may recall last year I was excited about OU’s run through the NCAA tournament, resulting in a Final Four appearance. The team was led by senior Buddy Hield, who won several national player of the year awards, and was picked #6 in the NBA Draft by the New Orleans Pelicans. He grew up in the Bahamas, was an exciting player to watch, and seemed like a great guy, too. Genuine and full of enthusiasm.

So ever since the NBA season started, I had January 14th circled on my calendar. That was the day the Pelicans would come to Chicago to play the Bulls. I told myself if Buddy was getting playing time as a rookie, I would consider going. Well, he was getting playing time, a good 10-20 minutes per game, and he had made the starting lineup. He had also been getting better each month, and was named the Western Conference Rookie of the Month for December. All of this meant I decided to go to the game.

I checked nbatickets.com and found some surprisingly decent seats (3rd level, at center court, on the 2nd row) that weren’t too expensive. It probably helped that the Pelicans aren’t a good team. I bought the tickets, printed them out, and made our plans. On Saturday, we took the train to Chicago and then an Uber to the United Center. This was the first time we’d used Uber, and I think it was both cheaper and easier than getting a taxi.

This was also the first time I’d been to an NBA game. Here’s what went down:

The game started at 4pm, with gates opening at 2:30. We got there a few minutes before gates opened, and there were already a lot of people in line. Thankfully we didn’t have to wait long, and getting through the gates went quickly.

We walked around the arena for a bit and got to see the Bulls’ trophy case:

Then we found our seats and were fairly pleased with the view. We had seats at the end of the aisle, which was convenient.

There were lots of championship banners for the Bulls and Blackhawks, who also play in the United Center.

I spotted Joel Meyers, the play-by-play announcer for the Pelicans. I’ve watched him announce Big 12 football games on Fox in the past. He has a great voice, and is an excellent announcer. I really enjoy his commentary. When the NBA season started, I bought NBA League Pass so I could watch all the Pelicans games, and I was thrilled to see he was now calling games for them.

Buddy makes his first appearance! He's on the sideline in the hoodie.

Buddy then proceeds to make lots of 3 pointers during warm-ups:

A giant remote-controlled Bulls blimp flew around the stadium several times:

The announcement of the starting lineup for the Bulls was quite a dramatic event:

The Pelicans win the tip!

I was surprised how little of the game you could hear. There was music playing a fair amount of time, and we were far away from the court to begin with. I could hear the squeaks of sneakers, but it was hard to hear the whistle at times. And you couldn’t hear the ball bouncing on the court, or clanging off the rim. But still, it was fun to watch and experience. There was all kinds of entertainment going on during stoppages, so it never got boring.

Unfortunately, Buddy had one of his worst games in a while. He only scored 2 points and got 2 rebounds in 12 minutes of play. So that was disappointing. No one really expected the Pelicans to win, and they didn’t, but they did make a game of it. Dwayne Wade came through for the Bulls, though, hitting several clutch shots in the 4th quarter.

The final score was 107-99, Bulls. During the 4th quarter, Chick-fil-A ran a “Fowl Shot” promotion: if the Pelicans missed two consecutive free throws during the 4th, everyone in attendance would get a free chicken sandwich!

It was funny just how intense and loud the crowd got when the Pelicans shot a free throw. They really wanted that free chicken sandwich! But they were denied; the Pelicans made their free throws. The vegetarian part of me was secretly pleased.

After the game ended, we stayed in our seats for a while to let the crowd disperse. I noticed Buddy walk over and talk to Denzel Valentine, who plays for the Bulls. He’s also a rookie, and also won a few national player of the year awards last year.

When we left the United Center, it was time for dinner. I’d researched vegetarian options ahead of time, and we decided on a place called Native Foods Cafe. It was too far to walk, so we got another Uber ride.

The restaurant turned out to be really good! It’s actually a vegan restaurant, which means everything on their menu is plant-based. No dairy, eggs, or meat. Everything we had was delicious, and that included an oatmeal creme pie and a peanut butter parfait for dessert! It was so good that now I want to go back to Chicago so we can eat there again.

After dinner, since we were only a mile away, we walked back to the train station and eventually caught a train back home.

The whole trip was a lot of fun, with a lot of new adventures.

It's been a while since I've written about my Big 12 Sports river. It's still there, churning away, updating every hour or so with all the latest headlines about all things Big 12. I still check it daily. Most days I just skim the headlines to get a sense of what's going on. Sometimes a story will jump out at me, and I'll click the headline to read the story. And once in a great while, a story is so interesting that I'll send it to Wendy.

When I created the river (way back here and here), it occurred to me I didn't have any way to monitor the various RSS feeds that are used to pull the headlines. If something stopped working, I would never know, unless I actively went looking for problems. At the time, I decided to let the issue slide. It was a lot of work to create the river, and I was ready to take a break from working on it.

A few months ago, as the college football season was getting into full swing, I noticed I wasn't getting as many headlines as I had in previous seasons. So one weekend I decided to write a program to help me monitor problems. What I came up with was a program that sends me an email once a week, summarizing the daily number of posts from each RSS feed for the previous week. It looks like this:

I also added another table, which shows the most recent response code from each website's server:

Between the two tables, I can get a quick sense of what's going on. And having it emailed to me each week means I don't have to do anything! Just a quick glance at the email each week tells me if anything's wrong.

After creating this program, and running it for the first time, it was clear several things were wrong. After a bit of investigation I learned some things had changed in the 2 years since I created the river:

• In West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette and the Charleston Daily Mail newspapers merged into the Charleston Gazette-Mail. For me, this meant 2 RSS feeds were combined into 1 new feed.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette seems to have stopped covering West Virginia sports entirely.
• The Austin American-Statesman seems to have dropped support for RSS feeds. This was mildly disappointing, but I'm not too sad that there are fewer Texas stories in the river.
• Five or six other websites changed the URL for their RSS feed, probably because they redesigned their website.

I fixed all of these issues and immediately noticed a lot more content in the river. It felt much better, like it had when I first created it.

Writing this program paid off the very next week, when I got my first automated weekly email. I immediately noticed two things:

The Topeka Capital-Journal had returned a "404 - Not Found" status for its Kansas and K-State feeds, and no posts had been recorded for either since the previous Tuesday. When I investigated the cause, I discovered the newspaper had changed the URL for both feeds the previous week. I updated the river with the new URLs, and everything was back to working.

I was extremely pleased that my new monitoring program paid off so quickly! 

So I think the lesson here is that many times, writing software is not enough. It helps to write software that monitors your software, and makes it almost effortless to keep tabs on how things are working.