Author: DOuG pRATt

It’s Boston Marathon weekend, and Morgan Spurlock is here to talk about the San Diego Comic Con

Marathon Monday is going to be hot! One year when I ran Boston the sun was brutal and the temperature was hovering around 90 and, believe me, in that heat you take almost every water stop! At the 24-mile mark is Coolidge Corner, and tomorrow, one day before 25,000 pairs of running shoes go by that spot, Morgan Spurlock will be at the Coolidge Corner Theatre for the premiere of his new documentary, Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope.

Friday morning, Spurlock was on PRI’s The Takeaway, talking about comic books and the San Diego convention.

[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/takeaway/takeaway041312j.mp3|titles=The Takeaway: Morgan Spurlock on ‘A Fan’s Hope’]

Spurlock says that without the involvement of Stan Lee and Joss Whedon he probably wouldn’t have gotten permission from the convention to make the movie, but Morgan is a known name and his reputation precedes him — in a good way, I think. He’s a friend to fanboys and a kindred spirit. Speaking of somebody with a reputation, here’s a picture of me with Smilin’ Stan “The Man” Lee at a show in NYC a couple of weeks ago.

When I was down in New York I stopped at the table of the Jack Kirby Museum. I donated some money and chatted with the guys representing the organization. We talked about the Kirby family’s ongoing litigation with Disney-Marvel, and we agreed it’s a shame how the company took the path it did, rather than offering an out-of-court settlement.

There’s a vocal contingent of Jack supporters who are out to make Stan the bad guy for stealing credit that rightfully should be shared with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. But the well was poisoned long before the so-called Marvel Universe came into being in the 1960’s. As the late Joe Simon said on page 114 of My Life in Comics, “Jack always thought Stan had told his uncle that we were working for DC. He never gave up on that idea, and hated him for the rest of his life — to the day he died.” The hard-line Jack supporters have taken Kirby’s hatred to heart, and I think their zeal has caused them to lose their perspective. As I told the Kirby Museum reps, I will not support Jack by hating Stan.

Windows XPiration Date

There are four computers in the house with Windows XP SP3. Updates for them will stop on April 8, 2014, when Microsoft ends life support for XP. By that time Windows 8 should be out. I have a system at work running Windows Server 8 Beta, and it took a while for me to warm up to the new Metro user interface. Fortunately, Microsoft included a trick, where if you place the cursor in the lower left corner of the screen, there’s an option to launch a more familiar Desktop-style interface.

With Apple’s phenomenal success in touch screen products, the introduction of a new version of Windows for consumers seems as irrelevant as it is inevitable. One area where Microsoft is enjoying success is with the Kinect and its gesture interface. The Kinect’s lead developer was Johnny Chung Lee, who I featured four years ago, when he was at Carnegie Mellon University. Microsoft has released a software development kit for the Kinect, with hospital operating rooms being one of the best possible uses for touch-free display control.

http://youtu.be/vXVXEgpTY1A

My past American Life

Having been a young man who was involved with Campus Crusade for Christ when I was in college, I can assure you that the sort of bizarre, twisted, ridiculous thinking that’s described in this week’s This American Life is all too real. Click the audio player to hear part 7. (Sorry, the audio is no longer available.)

I used to attend a church called Grace Chapel in Lexington, MA. It was headed by Gordon MacDonald, who became one of Bill Clinton’s “spiritual advisors” when the Monica affair hit the news. Click here to read more about Gordon.

Watching a Little Beaver

Whah hah! Leave It To Beaver is back on Netflix Watch Instantly! But it’s in high definition, despite the lack of the HD symbol. Why is this not good? Because on my Sony 32XBR100 TV it puts a small 24-inch image on the big 32-inch screen. Why, Roku, don’t you provide a feature to disable HD on SD outputs?

(By the way, the title of this post is a reference to a character in the Red Ryder comic strip.)

Follow-up: 42-inch Panasonic 1080p plasma, with a free Blu-ray player deal, is on the way from Amazon, with free shipping. Total cost is $470, thanks to Amex points.