I saw Batman Begins, and I agree with the multitudes who are proclaiming it the best Batman movie ever.

It’s still not better than Spider-Man, though. See, I came out of Spider-Man wanting to be Peter Parker. I came out of Batman Begins wanting to be Commissioner Gordon. Let’s face it — Batman has it ROUGH. Besides not having any actual super powers (other than super-determination and super-wealth), he’s just slightly crazy.

Gordon, though… as an honest cop in a crooked town, and one of the few people Batman trusts, he’s a hero I can identify with.

No spoilers here. Move along.

–Howard

I’m tired of reading this and saying nothing.Sometimes you just have to speak out…

Every morning the first thing I read, by virtue of where it sits, is the back of the St. Ives Apricot Scrub bottle. According to the bottle, they make this stuff with “swiss glacier water” which is “nature’s pure form of moisture.”

Ahem. No, it’s NOT.

Nature’s pure form of moisture, for any acceptable definition of the word “moisture” and the word “pure” is DEW. It’s as close as nature can get to providing us with distilled water.

Glacier water, on the other hand, is a mess. I just read about the problems they’re having with infectious human waste on the glaciers of some of the worlds most travelled summits. Drinking from a glacier is a sure-fire way to get you some high-altitude Hershey-squirts. Maybe swiss glaciers are cleaner, but that just means that they’re “nature’s less-infected form of dirty snow-melt.”

If any of you reading this work for St. Ives, would you PLEASE send a memo to your marketing team and tell them to pull their heads out?

–Howard

Today I accepted a calling (that’s Mormon Jargon for “unpaid job at church”) as the Assistant Ward Clerk in charge of finances, also known as the “Financial Secretary.”

When I put on my suit this morning, knowing the gig was coming up, I looked in the mirror and realized that without the beard, and with the classic male-pattern baldness showing nicely now that my hair is more than a quarter-inch long, I totally look the part of a timid little church accountant.

Oh well.

Most of the job is data entry, and I realized as I did it today that recording the contributions made by faithful saints is a pretty heady responsibility. The system is set up such that there’s no way I could abscond with the money — that’s not the point. The point is, I can see who is donating how much, and that irreversibly alters my opinions of these people. I see an aspect of their lives that few others do, and almost without fail they are elevated in my sight. I can see the honest and generous tithe of the wealthy man, and I can see the Widow’s Mite. I saw, for the first time in I don’t know how long, my OWN contributions. Sandra takes care of that for our family, and it was a nice reminder that she DOES take care of it. I mean, I never doubted, but SEEING the check, handling it, and inputting the pertinent details somehow made it more real.

Naturally, the first big thing that will get done is an audit. Any time they rotate new people into the Finance Secretary post, it triggers an audit. Oh, goody.

–Howard

I’ve figured out what bothers me most about the new Fantastic Four film: The Thing isn’t big enough.

For all its faults, The Hulk put things in proportion nicely. Even at minimum size, the Hulk was half again as tall as the average human male in that film. But The Thing, whose comic-book appearances are comparable to The Hulk’s when you’re trying to decide whether size matters, is basically just an actor in a rubber-suit.

I don’t mean to diminish the role of “actors” in the movies. After all, if special effects become paramount, you end up with more Star Wars prequels. But when you’re creating a monstrous, rock-skinned superhuman THING, a rubber suit is going to fall about three feet short.

–Howard