Minty Fresh

I am a big fan of mint. From the plant grown in the ground to all the stuff flavored by it I dig it all. As long as it's good and minty.

For a long time I was a big Altoids fan. I discovered them in the early 90's before they were widely available. They only place I ever saw them in those days was in little tobacco shops around Manhattan. It's a wonder I found them at all being that I don't smoke but I think I wandered in there with a friend who did. The "Curiously Strong" slogan caught my eye and I bought some. Good stuff. The first of the strong stuff flavored with real mint.

I say I was an Altoids fan because I don't eat them much anymore. A few years ago I started finding them curiously weak. All the tins I purchased were stale and wimpy. It didn't matter what store I bought them in they weren't any good. I don't know if it's because they changed them or that quality control has gone down hill. Either way I'm off of them. It's a shame really because they were so good. A lot of my friends still find them good so maybe I have gotten quite a few bad tins. Who knows? It's enough to keep me away though.

White Tic Tacs are also a favorite of mine. They're changed their recipe over the years but I still like them. They're one of the only "sugar mints" that I like. Except they have a strange after taste. That leads to eating mint after mint because the beginning taste is better. I do find that if I eat two white with one red (cinnamon) Tic Tac it improves the flavor all around. I carry a box of them with just that ratio when I'm out.

I'm not really a gum person but I have been chewing some mint gum lately. The explosion of super strong mints that Altoids lead a decade ago found its way into the gum world recently. They now have a variety of super minty gums. I've been chewing Eclipse brand and I've tried a few others that are good too. The flavor lasts a while and even reaches to the edge of my chewing patience. About fifteen minutes or so. That's longer lasting flavor than the typical mint.

If you're a real fan of mint you have to try the Tom's of Maine spearmint mouthwash. I use their toothpaste, which also comes in a variety of natural mint flavors, and one tube came with a sample of the afore mentioned mouthwash. It's strong with a natural spearmint kick that will get you going. I was never a mouthwash user but I keep some of this stuff around because it tastes so good.

And now a word on the mints I don't like. "Sugar mints". They're the kind, like Lifesavers, that have been around for years. They say they're mint flavored but they are really sugar flavored with some mint thrown in. I'm glad Altoids changed the mint landscape because this used to be all we had.

I also can't stand all of the "chemical mints" that have proliferated since Altoids. These mints are supposed to be super strong but don't contain any actual mint. They're made from some chemical flavoring that tries to mimic mint but just tastes artificial to me. Usually these are found in some gimmicky packaging and the mints are an afterthought.

Wintergreen mints. These are not real mints. They're the original chemical mint but they're been around so long that people accept them as one of the basic mint flavors. I never could stand these. They taste like they were made in a lab to me. I've also noticed that this is the favorite mint of people who don't like mints. I guess that makes sense being that it's not a real mint but I've always found that odd.

Who would have thunk that I'd have so many thought on mints? Just another little bit of insight into being me.

Comics I Bought: October 25, 2007

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got 2 new comic plus a hard cover collection:

Walking Dead - 43

The Authority Prime - 1 (I swore off The Authority a while ago but this was recommended)

John Romita: Marvel Visionaries HC

And now for some reviews of things I've read this week.

James Sturm's "America: God Gold and Golems"

Comics and history. Once again right up my alley. This book collects three of James Sturm's stories: "The Revival", "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight", and "The Golem's Mighty Swing".

"The Revival" is a tale set around a religious revival meeting sometime in the 1800's. Revivals were standard stuff back in the days of the US frontier but are pretty well forgotten now. We have churches and god everywhere these days and they're as well organized as any government or corporation but back in the less populated and less technological days that wasn't the case. So traveling preachers would move across the land with big tents and "revive" everybody's love of the lord. People would come from a long ways off to gather, see the show, and get revived. It was a second chance for everyone. Or third chance. Or fourth.

Sturm did a nice job of imagining this and giving us a taste. A taste not of the revival show itself but of the people going to the revival. Why they were going, what they were hoping to achieve, and a taste of their sincerity. All while out in the woods. This story humanizes the past. People who lived then had hope and dreams just like we do. Sometimes that's forgotten when we look at history. This story captures it well.

"Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight" is more of a plot driven tale. It's about a bunch of people living in a dying mining town. They're are good people and bad people and a we get to see how each acts as a death in the town is imminent. It's a nice slice of life tale but I found it the weakest of the three stories just because it didn't capture the time and place as well as the other two. And it gave us some obvious lessons like "don't be bad". This one could have been any time and place. It was nicely done other than that.

"The Golem's Mighty Swing" is a story of a barnstorming all Jewish baseball team back in 1920's. They're not quite all Jewish but that's their hook. They get to travel the country, play ball, and face lots of prejudice. Once again a nice job is done capturing a time and place and you feel for they players as they try to get by in life. I'm a football guy and never have had much love for baseball or baseball stories (sorry I find "Field of Dreams" uninteresting) but this one is good because they happen to be playing baseball. No poetic baseball ramblings to have to read through. Just the lives of some guys who are trying to make a living playing the game. And a look at the drama of the playing the game rather than the game itself. Nice stuff.

So if you're a fan of history and comics pick this book up. Some nice stories.

Touch Me Babe...Again

Let me continue the tale of my new iPod Touch that I started last week. After I set it up with all of my photos I began to load all of my little digital camera videos from over the years. Nothing long; just short movies of friends and family at parties, gatherings and outings. I had already converted them to mp4's (the video format that iPods use) but that's when things got confusing. You can't sync folders of video like you can photos. Apple assumes all the videos you will load onto your iPod are movies, TV shows, or music videos. You have to use iTunes to organize those and there is no section for home video. This is where iTunes really lets me down. I can see how adding video organization to iTunes was an afterthought.

First off I loaded the video into iTunes but since they are my home videos there is no metadata in them for iTunes to read. So I had to enter all the information about my video (date, place, event, people) into the iTunes song info slots. That took a little adapting on my part (making the album name the date of the photo) but I got it all entered and things lined up right. I copied them onto the iPod and that's when things went haywire. Organizational wise that is.

The first thing I noticed was orientation. Like my photos sometimes I take movies horizontally and sometimes vertically. But the movie always comes off the memory card horizontal. No problem. I just rotate the movie clockwise and nobody is on their side. When I saved all of my movies as mp4's I rotated them to the correct orientation. When viewing them in iTunes everything was fine. The vertical ones were vertical and the horizontal ones were horizontal. But when I looked at then on the iPod it had turned all of the vertical ones horizontal. That's horizontal across the small width of the iPod. They were tiny and not watch-able. Especially compared to the nice big horizontal ones.

I did a quick test and sure enough the iPod auto-detects which movies are vertical and reorients them. But iTunes, which I have to manage the video with, doesn't! I had to go back and re-save the vertical ones horizontal. Now I have two copies of each of them in iTunes one vertical for iTunes and one horizontal for the iPod. Annoying. Maybe there is some preference buried in iTunes to handle this but I couldn't find it.

Once that was done I noticed that the organization wasn't what I wanted it to be. The movies were arranged by date (which I had in the album name slot) but none of them were arranged into folders like an album is when they're music files. All the videos were in one big list. I went back into iTunes and dug around. It turns out there is another tab named "video" amongst the music info. There are only five fields there for show name, episode ID, season number, episode number, and a pull down to indicate TV, movie, or music video. Hmmm...

I decided to name the show as the date the video was taken, the episode ID with the event, and make them all "TV Shows" in the pull down menu. Oh, by the way, there were 121 videos I had to do this for. That's after already filling in the song metadata for all of them and then refilling in that data on the about thirty of them that I had to re-save as horizontal. What a pain. But when I put them on the iPod they were all in folders lined up by their dates.

Another stranger thing is that the names on the iPod video folders (the date taken) is actually the name of the album from the iTunes song data not the TV show name from the iTunes video data. I only know this because a couple of times I put a person's name after the date taken in the iTunes "show name" data field and that name didn't show up in the folder name on the iPod. I put that name after the date taken in the iTunes "album name" data field and sure enough it showed in the folder name. Weird. I'd think it would use the video data first for a video.

After all that extra organizing time I was glad to get everything on the iPod. Y'know, the thing is great for watching my videos. Little moments in time captured and brought back. I think I like watching them on the iPod better than the computer screen. Part of it is that they seem more precious and intimate and part of it is the sound. With my nice pair of head phones I noticed the sound is pretty good on those little videos. It moves well as the people are moving. The sound doesn't come across nearly as well on my desktop even with my nice computer speakers.

Organizational issues aside, and they are considerable, I think the iPod Touch is a great machine for viewing both photos and video. Plus it plays music too did you know? Once Apple gets the memory on them up to about 60 gigs I'll really be thrilled.

Comics I Bought This Week: October 18, 2007

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got 2 new comic plus a magazine:

Ex Machina - 31

Rex Mundi (v2) -8

Rough Stuff - 6 (A magazine about comic art)

And now for some reviews of things I've read this week.

Kafka - By David Mairowitz and Robert Crumb

I bought this online this because of a whim. I've never read any Kafka. Yet another of the world's great writers that I only know by reputation. It's a big world. This book isn't quite a comic nor a illustrated book. It's a hybrid. Part illustrated biography and part comic adaptation of Kafka's stories it's not like anything else I've read. And it works well.

The book attempts to not only give you a piece on Kafka's life but to explain him a little too. And to explain how the world has explained him since he became a famous writer. It's an ambitious task to be done in so few words (at least compared to a standard text biography) but there are lots and lots of illustrations. As a matter of fact there are so many illustrations and they are so integrated into the text that the two are nearly inseparable. But not quite wholly a comic.

Robert Crumb was the perfect choice to draw this book because his drawings really humanize the situation. There's rarely any heroism in a Crumb drawing just the every day details that make up our word. Those details may not be pretty but they feel real.

This book made Kafka real to me. Not as a writer but as a person. His writing was because of the person he was and this book concentrated on revealing that person. When his stories were adapted it was to illustrate a point about Kafka. Whole stories weren't even adapted so that also sets it apart from other works adapted from prose authors. It really is a different sort of comic.

So if you have any interest in Kafka, comics, or Crumb this is a good book to pick up. Just don't expect takes on Kafka's stories but a take on Kafka's life.

Touch Me Babe...

I bought one of the new iPod Touches. The 16 gig model. I've been waiting for a device that I could use as a portable photo album and this is the first one that I thought could fit the bill. I've spent the last few years scanning, editing, and organizing all of my snap shots that were on film as well as my digital photos. I want to be able to find any picture in my archive at anytime. Even when I'm out. Sometimes an old picture can illustrate a point better than words but I've never been able to cary all my pictures with me. Now I can. Well, I still need some kind of carrying case for the iPod but that's pretty minor. The thing is just too new for the dedicated cases to have come out yet.

Last month I finished the final edit of my photos so everything was ready to go. There were some bumps in the road though. iTunes is the software that's made for working with the iPod and I've always thought it was pretty good. I've never had any real problems with it but all I ever used it for was to manage my music files. After all, that's what it was programed to do. Now I have to manage photo and home movie files with it too. That makes things a little more complicated.

I already have all my photo files organized by date and event with the names of the people who appear in them as the file names. That was a lot of work but it allows me to easily search for someone or some place and is independent of any photo organization program. That was important to me because I don't want my photo collection to be tied to any one program. No worries about updating a photo program or it becoming obsolete.

The Apple OS X operating system handles my organization method just fine and I'm sure Windows or Linux would too. It's just named folders and files. Operating systems are made to organize that stuff. And with OS X the search function is really good and even displays thumbnails of the photos right in the search window. My system is fast and flexible and none of the photo viewing devises I've seen so far had the software to keep up with it. Every portable MP3 or video player is a photo viewer as an after thought. The iPod Touch isn't so I went with it.

My first fear with the new iPod Touch was that I'd have to use iPhoto. I generally think Apple does a really good job with it's software but I can't stand iPhoto. It takes all my well organized folders and disorganizes them. It won't even line them up by name (i.e date) as the OS does. I don't want to have to reorganize everything. I shouldn't have too either. But I didn't have to use iPhoto because I found that iTunes will sync with my already organized folders. Hurrah, but with reservations.

iTunes and syncing. There's another thing I can't stand. That's because every time you open the program it has to sync the things you indicate. That's fine unless you want it to sync with thousands of things. That's why I've always manually managed my music. It won't let you manually manage photos. Ouch! So I start to sync my iPod with my photo collection, 4000 or so of them, and after a few minutes iTunes crashes. Then my G4 tower won't recognize my new iPod. It won't even reset it back to the factory settings. So I try my laptop. It recognizes the iPod and when I go to sync the photos it crashes iTunes. I rebot and the laptop still sees the iPod. Whew! I sync slowly a few folders at a time and all goes well. Except my desktop G4 tower still won't recognize my new iPod Touch. Long story short it's a bad USB2 port on the PCI card. Not Apple or the iPod's fault and I need a new card. But that's for another day because I had another free USB2 slot.

Once the pictures were on the iPod they were a joy to behold. I can hardly begin to describe how nice the iPod Touch is as a photo viewer. The screen is clear and crisp and the touch screen is a wonderful thing and really changes the way you look at pictures. You can pan, zoom, and change from vertical to horizontal effortlessly. When looking at a photo I'm constantly recomposing it and seeing new things in it. One picture becomes many pictures. It's like having a built in "Ken Burn's effect" for every picture in your collection. Worth the price of admission.

I wish the iPod had some sort of search function in conjunction with the photo viewer. I can't actually search for anyone by name as I can on the computer and that would be helpful. But at least the photos all lined up perfectly in the folders named with the dates. That's more than they do in iPhoto.

The video functionality on the iPod Touch is good too. But there were some pain in the ass organizational problems with the video. I'll tell you about that next week. I'm a little too bleary eyed for it now.

Comics I Bought: October 11, 2007

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics plus two new hard cover collections:

StormWatch Post Human Division - 12 (Last Issue).

Brawl - 1 (of 3) (Some Billy Dogma comics by Dean Haspiel).

"Short Comings" by Adrian Tomine (A story originally serialized in "Optic Nerve").

James Sturm's "America: God Gold and Golems" (I've never read any of Sturm's stuff but I've read good reviews of it).

And now for some reviews of things I've read this week.

Marvel Westerns Hardcover Collection

This oversized HC collection reprints five issues of one shot western themed comics that Marvel published in 2006. You get a bunch of new stories plus some 1960's reprints of stories by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Don Heck, Dick Ayers, and Paul Reinman.

As far as the new stories go it's a mixed bag. That's what you'd expect from an anthology and that's what you get here. There was only one truly unreadable story and the rest ranged from okay to pretty good. The art was generally nice across the board.

All the old 1960's were excellent as you would expect because the editors had the luxury of choice. Obviously they weren't going to reprint a story that they thought was a stinker. The writing wasn't as sophisticated as we're use to today but the storytelling was better. That is one of the problems with the book. The modern stories are so much more clunky, confusing, and cluttered than the old ones.

I'm not an "old comics are better than new ones" guy. But the new guys in this book are competing with Jack Kirby working in a genre with which he was a master. That's a tall task. I think most of the new guys did nice jobs but the clarity of Stan and Jack's storytelling stands out. Especially in contrast. Stan and Jack could also create a sense of wonder that's hard to match.

A couple of notes: Marshall Rogers drew and colored the first story and though I didn't like his coloring and I think he had lost a bit of his drawing ability by this time his storytelling was excellent. It was one of those times where I flipped through the art and went "eh" but when I actually started reading the story I was hooked in. Nice Job. And the Don Heck story from the early Sixties is possibly the best artwork I've seen of his. I really like it.

I've always been a fan of westerns and it was actually the old Sixties stuff that got me to buy this book but overall the new stories were pretty good. If you like westerns give it a read.

Me and Edgar

I bought some pastels this week. I have never worked in pastels for more than a few minutes way back in art school. I not sure why I never worked in pastels. Maybe because they were never considered a very manly medium, maybe because they were never really taught at art school (where they were seen as a second rate medium), or maybe because the only ones I ever used were the cheap ones. Cheap pastels are like pieces of hard chalk. Half of the stick turns to dust and falls off of your paper as you grind away. They are really tough to work with. You can do something with cheap paint, cheap pencils, cheap brushes, or even cheap crayons. But cheap pastels are a frustrating nightmare. Sometimes I wonder why they exist.

I bought the pastels because I was inspired by a book that I saw in a catalogue. I didn't actually get the book but the title was something about using pastels as intense color. There was a simplicity to the cover drawing that I liked. That little one inch high drawing made me think about pastels in a different way. Not that I had ever thought about them much at all.

The famous Impressionist Edgar Degas is the one who put pastels on the map. He's the only famous artist I know who worked extensively in pastels. Everyone I knew who was into pastels (back in art school) was inspired by Degas. Pastels pretty much begin and end with ol' Edgar. That little book cover made me see them differently. So I went out and got a cheap set of pastels. Ha! You'd think I'd know better.

By cheap I mean about twelve bucks for ten sticks or so. Some of the colors were okay but the red was like rubbing marble on the paper. I managed to get a couple of things done but it was a struggle. So I ordered an expensive set from the internet. By expensive I mean thirty bucks for fifteen sticks. The full retail is fifty bucks but I got them at a discount art supply web site. Fifty is a little too rich for my blood but thirty was alright. These pastels are softer and a lot more of the pigment sticks to the paper. I like them so far. I haven't gotten to really delve into what I want to do with them yet but they've got me thinking.

Pastels are a lot messier than I thought they would be. Being an oil painter I'm used to messy stuff but pastels are different. A lot of pastel dust drops off as you are drawing and gets on stuff. It can get everywhere. An you can't just brush it off because it's supposed to stick to paper so it sticks to skin, clothing, and furniture pretty well. I find myself rinsing my hands quite a bit.

An interesting thing about pastel paper. Back at art school every pastel artist I knew (there were maybe four of them) was always looking for a good pastel paper that gripped the pigment and mad things easier. All kinds of paper were used including a special pastel paper that was akin to sandpaper. It was expensive stuff. I mention this because a few years later I was reading an article on Degas and it mentioned that he drew with his pastels on tracing paper. That cracked me up. All the time, effort , and money that went into finding great paper and everybody's pastel hero used cheap old tracing paper. Still makes me giggle.

One final thing. The colors you get with pastels aren't particularly "pastel". Usually when you hear the word "pastel" it describes colors used by decorators or some such. It's generally a light version of blue, pink, green, or whatever. The reference comes from the fact that in pastels the pigment is mixed with white clay, chalk, or something along those lines. So pastel colors all have a little white in them. But not nearly as much as in "pastel colors". Just another small observation for ya.

Comics I Bought This Week: October 4, 2007

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got one new comic, one new magazine, and a hard cover collection:

Buffy Season Eight - 7

Back Issue Number 24 - Magic Issue

Finder - Tenth Anniversary Hardcover

And now for some reviews of things I've read this week.

Sojourn Issues 1-34 (plus prequel)

I didn't buy any Crossgen comics for about the first eight months after they debuted back in 2000. They were supposed to be "different" and though I am a big fan of "different" the creators were mostly some of the same names that had been making super hero comics for years. I didn't then and still don't now read many super hero comics. So it wasn't until about eight issues in that I sampled some Crossgen stuff. I ended up liking and buying quite of few of their series.

"Sojourn" wasn't part of the initial launch and came in Crossgen's second year so I actually bought this one from the beginning. It's a fantasy/sword and sorcery/quest type book. Maybe bow and sorcery is more like it since the lead character, Arwyn (a hot blond woman), is an archer. This is the first time since the series (and Crossgen itself) ended in 2004 that I have read "Sojourn". And the first time I have read all of the issues in a row. They read fast with a lot of big panels and not a lot of words. The series holds up pretty well.

The art is by Greg Land with some fill in artists here and there. Land's use of obvious photo referencing can be a little distracting at times. I have nothing against photo referencing but there shouldn't be a jarring difference between the referenced and unreferenced shots. It takes me out of the story. And if you're going to use photo reference I advise learning a bit about photography. All that said I do think this is Land's best work. At least that I've seen. I haven't read any of his later Marvel stuff but I heard complaints that his photo referencing hasn't gotten less jarring. The excellent illustrative coloring (Caesar Rodriguez then Juastn Ponser) is what really puts the artwork over the top. Crossgen had some real talent working for them.

The writing is adequate if not spectacular. The basic plot was: evil guy takes over the world and hero (Arwyn the Archer) goes on a quest to gather up five pieces of an arrow needed to stop him and free the world. Since it's an epic quest they never actually finished the story even in 35 issues. The issues are filled with sub-quest stories and the gathering of three of the five pieces. The story took a slightly different direction with issue 25 when a new writer came on board. It wasn't that different. More like a refocusing because the story had begun to lose a little direction and therefor steam.

The one element I hated in the story was the "Watcher" element. Some super powerful woman who wanted Arwyn to succeed helped her along the way by giving her instruction and a weapon. But this woman "couldn't interfere" and help Arwyn anymore. This cliché is in a lot of stories and is a stupid literary conceit that doesn't make any sense. The chick is already interfering but she can't interfere? It's just a convenient way to move the plot forward when it needs to be. Luckily this angle was dropped by about issue twelve.

I'm actually nostalgic for Crossgen books. They put out a lot of good comics and it's a shame that they went out of business. It's also a shame that none of my comic buying friends bought many (if any) Crossgen comics because they missed out on a whole bunch of good stuff. And I have to be nostalgic by myself (sniff). So track down some "Sojourn" if you're in the mood for a quest with dragons, trolls, magic, winged men, pretty drawings, and huge double page spreads of battles. Check it out and when I re-read more Crossgen stuff in the future I'll let you know.