Huzzah! A comical-book themed story by the estimable Michael Chabon in the new ish of the New Yorker, “Citizen Conn.”

“Though he was at the time unknown to me even by reputation, I soon learned that my own husband had been among the millions of American boys in the nineteen-sixties whose minds were blown by Feather’s art work in comic books such as The New Frontiersmen and Mister Arcane.”

Sounds like he’s doing a Ditko take, mashed up with some other folks. Yes, that first fictionalized title is a Watchmen shoutout; in Moore’s comic, the title is a right-wing scandal sheet trusted by Rorshach with his memoirs. Ditko is legendary for his ground-breaking work for Marvel (on Spiderman and Doctor Strange), and for his eccentric legend as a big fan of Ayn Rand.

I haven’t read more than the first couple sentences, but the clever layering of Moore’s fictional right-wing publication into a Ditkoesque career seems amusing and appropriate. Among other things, Watchmen was a fictionalization of comics history, and that is a thing that Chabon has delighted in giving us for years now.

UPDATE: The story is more a take on the Stan Lee – Jack Kirby – Ditko thing, with Kirby and Ditko compressed into the single character of Mort Feather.
WITH a full-on cameo by none other than Seattle’s own Comics Journal, an issue of which is described as featuring a Gary Groth endless interview with the story’s Lee-alike, the “Citizen Conn” of the tale’s title.

The New Yorker has a discussion with Chabon on the piece up.

He sez Lee-Kirby, so I guess my Ditko stuff up top is off base.

Many incremental successes today.

A troubleshooting session with a software vendor went smoothly enough, and now orders are flowing, more or less, directly into Quickbooks. This will inevitably dramatically increase accounting issues but it also transforms my inventory monitoring and reordering into something to which I can apply Quickbooks analytical tools. Which, well, they are what they are.

I taught myself how to strip, crimp, and verify cat-11 telephone cable. I also installed and verified a couple of additional phone jacks.

I reviewed my annual haystack of tax reporting forms and it looks like I am only missing a couple, which means I am probably a week away from filing.
I am clearly noticing my heart rate improving while running. I still need to check with the docs about my sacroiliac stuff.

I began working through some products in Amazon AWS, specifically EC2 server setup and usage. Some fiddly bits defeated me, as I was using downtime on the tech support call and it has been years since I had to use PuTTY for ssh and the like.

This past week, I started working on getting Viv set up to use her iPad as an A/V playback device, installing an ElGato TV receiver on the media Mini and then banging on antenna reception. I managed to rewire the existing forty year old roof aerial and currently we are missing only the Kitsap-located tower signal that carries channel 13 and the signals from Tacoma that carry KBCT. This is kind of aggravating because I like KBCT’s programming more than KCTS’.

We do receive it in the guest room, which makes no sense: the five dollar antenna there gets it but the six foot aluminum kite on the roof does not. Electromagnetic waves: how do they work?

Anyway the upshot of all this extreme retro nerdery is that our iPads and iPhones are now portable televisions. The EyeTV app only supports one viewer at a time, though, so you can steal the broadcast away from other users on the LAN, which has delighted our inner brats no end.

Some time in the past couple weeks I also moved all of our object-based playback media into a more useable setup, so we can easily get to the vinyl and CDs and cassettes. The stuff still needs to be organized, especially the CDs, but at least it is no longer hidden from sight. I’m sort of contemplating some roofline shelving for the discs, but am not totally sold on the idea.

Running still going as previously noted. Looks like I am settling into about a mile and a half a day, plus a mile walked with the pooch. Still puzzled about what people mean when they describe exercise as something that makes them feel good. An interesting aspect of watching the time of the run and my heart rate is how similar the time needed and apparent personal physical effects are to my father’s longtime exercise regime.

I have a hard time imagining I will get into the same kind of shape he was when he was my age, though. That guy would bust his ass every morning for twenty minutes, and so far I would not describe what I am doing as ass busting.

It is sort of motivating me to work on the room the treadmill’s in, though. Next thing: music.