Excowsions: Torvald Has Been Bullied!

Fellow blogger Laura (aka Tegan) has already done most of the heavy lifting in recounting the tale of our momentous meeting in their Seattle suburban home last Friday (in a post and photos she put up while I was still bouncin' around Seatac Airport on Friday night!), but out of synergy and also in synchronicity with a very special day both Friday and today (more on the latter at the end of this post), here's my post and photos about meeting one of my favorite pair of bloggers, Laura (Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog) and her husband Eric (The Wonderful Blog of Oz). I'm a big fan of both blogs and I'm definitely a big fan of the Gjovaags.

It was very wonderful to meet them and have them shake my hoof. They invited me into the home, and yes, I saw the amazing Aquaman collection. Of course there were photo opportunities for me as I met the incredible Torvald, Laura's troll who has been more places and met more celebrities of the SF and comics world than you have had hot dinners. Really, Torvald's travels make mine look like wandering down to the corner to pick up a loaf of bread and a can of condensed milk for a teatime snack...check 'em out here! (He's even met Two-Face!) But for all that world-trotting, he's a pleasant and placid personality and we soon became close friends. Maybe it's our similar stature but I think we saw eye-to-eye on a lot of things:
John and Laura snapped away merrily like paparazzi—funnily enough, they both managed to take almost exactly the same photos every time!—as I met another member of the Gjovaag household: Monty the television-top penguin:


Monty even let me try on his beautiful Fourth Doctor scarf. Thanks, Monty! And check out the Gjovaags's ultra-cool comic book spinner in the background...man, I'm jealous!:

We had a lovely dinner at the award-winning Italian restaurant down the hill (early for Laura and Eric, late for me still on New York time, but it all balanced out.) Pay no attention to Laura's scurrilous comments about my table manners and eating habits, though: I do not chew with my mouth open. (My best pal and traveling companion John on the other hand sometimes has to be reminded of that and to keep his elbows off the table). I did fall in the ravioli at one point but thanks to the wonder of the Shout Stainstick, no harm done. We had a lovely chat about our lives, respective towns, travels, blogging, Aquaman, Doctor Who, and Oz, until full of pasta and garlic bread, we all waddled back up the hill where I got a chance to meet another member of the household: Scraps the Patchwork Girl of Oz, the star of my very favorite L. Frank Baum Oz book. Oh, Scraps, you are so colorful and lovely with your patchwork dress and button eyes!


Together we giggled and danced and sang:

Kizzle-kazzle-kore;
The wolf is at the door,
There's nothing to eat but a bone without meat,
And a bill from the grocery store.

Which brings me to that momentous occasion of today that I mentioned earlier: today, Tuesday May 15, is the birthday of L. Frank Baum, the First Royal Historian of Oz. Although it's not as an amazing confluence of events as last year when it fell on the same day as Miracle Monday, celebrate today and Baum's life and work by reading an Oz book or comic book (I'm especially fond of this one myself!). Oh okay, you can watch "The Film" too if you want! But especially today's a great day to check out Eric's Wonderful Blog of Oz...fun any day of the year, but especially on May 15!

Back to Friday: we all exchanged some fun 'getting to know you' gifts (thank you for the books and DVDs, Laura and Eric!) and then John and I had to hop back into the rental car and zip down Route 5 for our red-eye flight back to New York. We were both beaming all the way. It's a wonderful thing to be part of the blogosphere and I love reading other blogs and when people email or comment on my little puppet-town cow-blog here, but it's fantastic when you finally get to meet and shake hooves with the people behind your favorite blogs. I'm especially looking forward to this year's San Diego Comic-Con to meet some more of y'all, because, blogs are fun. But people are funner! 'Specially good folks like the Gjovaags. Thanks for welcoming little stuffed me into your home, and hope to see you again soon!

Excowsions: Dream Country

Dream Country. Neil Gaiman may or may not have coined this phrase, but the title of his Sandman arc has a different meaning in my little stuffed-with-beans head.

I like dreaming. Cause dreamin' can make you mine. I like dreamin', closing my eyes and feeling fine. Oh wait, I'm channeling seventies pop radio there for a minute. Let me start again. I like dreaming. It's a dandy way to have a vacation without ever leaving your bed. I especially enjoy those dreams—c'mon, you know you've had 'em—where you're in some new and detailed oneiric landscape that is both vaguely familiar within the context of your actions in the dream and at the same time someplace you've never been in before. It's a fictional environment, not necessarily a fantastic one: there are houses and hills and roads and trees, not aliens and time machines and dinosaurs. In short, it's like the world around the corner, but you've never seen it before, and after you wake up, you'll never see it again unless you fix it in your head, which I like to do when I jot down my dreams (don't worry, I'm not gonna blog 'em—I know how boring dreams can be if you haven't dreamed 'em yourself). I call these fictional landscapes my own Dream Country.

Of course, I dream about London a lot—y'all know how much I love England's capital city. But more often than not I'm not dreaming about St. Paul's or Big Ben or the Thames or Hyde Park, I'm dreaming about out of the way corners I've never been in before, mundane and ordinary London locations—and nearly always set in a London Underground Tube station or catching a big red London bus. Not surprising, if you know my obsession with London Transport. I will be happily wandering in my dream and come across a London bus in an usual locale and run to hop on board even though I don't know where it is going. I love dreams like that.

What's this got to do with my drive around Seattle last Friday, you ask? Well, imagine my surprise riding in the big rental car down the Bothell Everett Highway towards the home of fellow bloggers Laura and Eric, idly looking out the window while John drove, and spotting this:


"Stop! Stop!" I screamed, and John swerved and pulled off the highway with a crunch and spray of gravel into the parking lot of Country Village, an antiques and craft market. After John scolded me for yelling in the car, we hopped out and ran up to the mirage only to discover that yes, it is indeed an authentic London Routemaster double-decker bus:


Now, it's not that I've never seen a London Routemaster outside of London before. They're all over the place in Manhattan as tourist buses, for example. But it was just the surprise of finding one purely by serendipity, added to the fact that it's basically unrestored, that gave me that weird and uncanny feeling of déjà vu. Why, you could even see where this bus was supposed to go, the wonderful Dream Country of Clackney Wick:


Or maybe I'm misreading that crumpled destination roller and it says Clapton and Hackney Wick. But...no. This is a Dream Country bus, and it goes to a place only in my dreams, that you can't find on Google unless I'm talking about it. (See?) That's the joy and the delight of Dream Country: a place that doesn't exist but ought to.


Maybe this only matters to someone as captivated by London Transport as me. Maybe it only felt spooky and mysterious because there was no one else around, and whatever the Routemaster had been turned into (I thought it was a photography studio, although someone on one of my Flickr groups thinks it's a bead store), it was closed so I couldn't find out its true purpose. Or maybe the utter surrealism of the place was due to the freakin' giant chicken behind us in the parking lot:


Whatever it was, that's one of the things I love best about excowsions: finding the usual and unexpected around every corner. Just like in Dream Country, real-world travel is the journey, not the destination.

Excowsions: Going to Boeing

A lovely Friday (this past one) in Seattle. Balmy springy weather, sunny bright blue skies, a stomach full of pancakes from Julia's of Wallingford, and a rental car with a full tank of gas. Could there be (in my Chandler Bing voice) a more perfect day?

Yes! Yes, there could be. Head on down Route 5 towards Seatac airport and swerve off (don't forget your turn signals) onto exit 158 and head for Boeing's Museum of Flight. I've been to Seattle a bajillion times and every time I pass the big billboard with the SR-71 Blackbird soaring across the sky and narrowly missing Air Force One I say to myself "Self, you oughta go to the Museum of Flight." Well, Friday was the day!


The Museum of Flight is built in a giant horseshoe around the original Boeing "Red Barn" aviation factory, which provides a dandy historical context from the age of the Wright Brothers to the Starship Voyager. Oh wait, it doesn't go up quite that far, but there's still plenty of cool stuff to see. Right from moment one when you pull your rental car into the space-age parking lot there's stuff to look at. See, somebody parked their planes right on the front lawn! I always get in trouble when I leave my toys on the lawn at home:


Plop down your fourteen bucks at the front desk to get a dashing wristband that gives you admission to the entire museum. But don't rent that audio tour! The sign says "Audio tour rental, $5.00"...but when I asked to rent one they pulled out a credit card machine and said "And we'll also need a credit card to take a deposit on the audio tour module." Well, okay, sez I, slowly taking out my MasterCow. Then desk clerk runs my card through the machine and hands me back the slip to sign on the deposit for a total of

wait for it

Six hundred dollars.

Uh uh. No way. Nuh-huh. I'm not signing that. The clerk explains that this is just a deposit in case the module is lost or broken, but I'm not feeling at all confident in carrying around a six hundred dollar plastic phone, especially since my hooves are full of my camera—and I'm feeling a little paranoid since I put a crack in my laptop screen a couple days before. I've done enough audio tours in museums (for example, the excellent audio program in London's Cabinet War Rooms) and have never been asked to put down this kind of moolah as a safety. "I'm sorry, I don't think I want this," I explain. "I'm kind of a butterfingers." She tries to convince me that the thin lanyard strung from the end of the plastic phone will keep me from dropping it, but I fix her with a stern stare and say "It's more difficult with hooves." In the end she grumbles a bit and holds me up for another five minutes while she voids my receipt, tears up the credit card slip, and refunds my five dollars. I head off for the museum feeling safer if a little worked up. Sitting on the end of the counter is a placard promoting the audio tour. It lists a "fifty dollar cash deposit required." Huh. Looks like some contradiction there, huh? I might have put down fifty dollars cash deposit for a good audio tour and not been too devastated if I accidentally sat on the phone. But six hundred? Why, that's two hundred copies of 52. That's four years worth! I will not spent four years in this museum! Later when I get home I do some research on the Museum of Flight's website and find that I probably just shoulda downloaded some of their podcasts, but whatdaya gonna do? What did I do? I fired up my Star Trek soundtrack playlist on my iPod and stepped into the museum.

The six hundred dollar audio tour, however, was the only disappointment of the trip. While not as massive or as comprehensive as Washington's Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (which I was lucky enough to visit last May around this time), it's still a wonderful museum.


Start your visit in the original Boeing building, the "Red Barn," which features a great early history of Boeing and Seattle/Pacific Northwest flight and aviators, plus a dandy sideroom exhibition on the Wright Brothers. Peer in historic Boeing offices, see early planes in construction, plus a whole buncha plane parts that I wouldn't be allowed to play with because I'd probably wind up with some nuts and bolts left over. The room is bright, airy, and sunny—a perfect exhibition space—and there's something to see everywhere you turn. Look, here's a Sopwith Camel just my size. But they've got it strung from the ceiling so I can't get in it and soar about. Curse you, Red Baron!:


Move from here into the large two-story Personal Courage Wing, both floors a very thorough and comprehensive history of aviation during the two World Wars. There's a lot of great planes and models to look at, plus plenty of multimedia including film and radio to give you background into the lives of the fighters and fliers of the World Wars. The equipment and machinery are amazing and fun to look at, but most touching was an exhibition of photographs of National Medal of Honor winners—the men and women behind our victories—accompanied by their own words. Very touching and a vital addition to learning the history. It made me reach for my little monogrammed handkerchief. See, already I have things in all my hooves; I surely woulda dropped that audio tour phone!

Of course, don't miss all the cool planes:



And there's even a small display that includes a Steve Savage, Balloon Buster comic book. Boy, am I sure glad I didn't buy a balloon in the gift shop:


From World War II step into the modern age of aviation in the massive and aptly named Great Gallery, which has seventy-eight, count 'em, seventy-eight planes and plane replicas in its hangar-sized exhibition space:


...including the Lockheed Blackbird...yes, that's the X-Men's plane. Thankfully, Gambit was nowhere to be seen:

...the front half of a commercial jetliner...hey, this must be that plane from Lost!...


...and didn't I see Tattoo and Saruman flying this one in The Man with the Golden Gun?:


Some of the planes have simulators set up so you can fly 'em. Look! I'm taking the highway to the Danger Zone! Goose! Goose!:


Don't forget to stop in the gift shop (I bought a souvenir pencil). But even after you're done with the big Boeing complex, you ain't done with the Museum of Flight yet, buddy! Oh no no no no no! Dart across the curiously named four lane highway that is East Marginal Way and if you make it, you can tour an outdoor exhibition yard with some of the Museum's biggest-name attractions. No, not Orson Welles, but something even bigger: Air Force One!:


If Harrison Ford isn't busy battling terrorists on board, you can step inside AF1 and see the President's flying palace in all its 1970s glory, including the conference room...:


...the communication station...:


...and the Presidential biffy. Hey, if I was designing this, I woulda put the presidential seal on the toilet seat:


That ain't the end of the fun! Step across the tarmac and come face to pointy nose cone with the Barry Allen of planes, the Concorde!:


I was very surprised at how narrow and small the Concorde was. There's only four seats across in both coach and the forward first class section, and even for slender slender me it's a sideways squeeze down the aisle. I guess if you're riding the Concorde, you're riding it for speed and not luxury. But man, are its bathrooms aerodynamically designed for speed!:


Also, exactly what you'd expect from a major museum: placards relating rumors:


But I kid Rod Stewart. Seriously, if you're in Seattle, don't miss a grand day out—head on down to the Museum of Flight and come away with your spirit soaring. Unless you dropped your six hundred dollar audio tour, in which case the only thing flying will be dollars out of your wallet.

Bye, Rory.

A Wodehouse a Week #3: The Heart of a Goof

'You haven't seen a novel called The Man with the Missing Eyeball anywhere about, have you? I'll swear I left it on one of these seats when I went in to lunch.'

'You are better without it," said the Sage, with a touch of austerity. 'I do not approve of these trashy works of fiction. How much more profitably would your time be spent in mastering the contents of such a volume as I hold in my hand. This is the real literature.'
—from The Heart of a Goof by P. G. Wodehouse

"What are you reading these days?" people asked me. Well, mostly Snuckles, and he never can remember the answer from one day to the rest. But, when I'm out and about on the town with book people, like I was with the good folks from Amazon last week (dining at the fabulous and posh Cascadia Restaurant, home of the delicious lobster-crushed potatoes), that sort of question is likely to come up: "What are you reading these days?" Well, I lowered my lobster-potatoed fork and stared fixedly across the table at them and announced "I am reading my way through P. G. Wodehouse, book by book, one a week." Then everyone says something along the lines of "Oh, that must be fun. How far along are you? How long will it take you?" When I explain that I am on week three and I have another two years to go, they blink and drop their famous miniburgers and exclaim in consternation and uproar: "That's quite an undertaking! You'll never finish it." Sigh.

So here I am at week three, with umpty-umpt weeks to go, but I must tell you this project is a pure pleasure. I've gotten away from straight book-reading in the past few months and it's a delight to dive into a book a week that is light and entertaining and funny and pleasant, a book that has me chuckling out loud on the subway and pulling little Post-It™ tabs to mark especially delightful phrases that tickle my fancy. Check back again in forty-nine weeks or so and see if I still feel the same, but I've gotta be thinking that bar a serious overload of fun, I'm going to be having a boatload of a good time doing this.

Why, look at week three's offering of The Heart of a Goof (1926), a collection of nine short stories (some of them interconnected), all on golf, a subject that is not only not near and dear to my heart but which I actively run away from whenever any of my plus-foured fuzzy pals step up to me with clubs in hand and ask me to go the back nine with them. (I'm lookin' at you, Walt the Sporty Cow). My idea of sport is watching Bend it Like Beckham on TV with a big bowl of pizza rolls by my side, and aside from sussing out that golf is the sport with the long sticks and the dimpled white balls and remembering that Auric Goldfinger is a terrible cheat at it, I know very little about it. But it's one of Wodehouse's favorite sports and one of his favorite to write about—he seldom speaks about other English sport like football (that's soccer to you and me), horse racing (leave that to Dick Francis) or darts, and even quintessentially British sport like cricket and rugby only really pop up in depth in his early Wrykyn and other "Boy's Own" type-school stories like The Gold Bat or The Pothunters. But golfing, my my my, he does love the sport, and it shows. Wodehouse writes about golf with expertise but not technicalities, and more important, he writes about it with humor and passion. Don't be afraid if, like me, you know little about the sport. About all that's essential to understand is that a) it is as important as life and love itself, and b) the lowest score wins, the knowledge of this giving a funny undertone to Wodehouse's description of a doting though clueless mother speaking of her son's golf game:

'Rollo is exceedingly good at golf," proceeded Mrs Podmarsh. 'He scores more than a hundred and twenty every time, while Mr Burns, who is supposed to be one of the best players in the club, seldom manages to reach eighty. But Rollo is very modest—modesty is one of his best qualities—and you would never guess he was so skilful unless you were told.'

Well, maybe you need to know one more thing: to P. G. Wodehouse, golf is love. With only a few exceptions these tales relate stories of avid golfers winning their ladies fair (themselves usually enthusiastic linkswomen) through showing their courage and prowess on the links. Golf as a metaphor for love? Certainly odder things have been done in fiction, and Wodehouse makes it all so wonderful, joyful, and convincing that it puts a scheme in my little bean-filled head to get out there with my clubs and spiky shoes and practice practice practice until I get my handicap squared away and then Keira Knightley will quite fall in love with me. Well, it doesn't quite work that way in the real world, but don't you wish it did?

Like an earlier collection of golf tales, The Clicking of Cuthbert (which of course—no pun intended—I'll get around to reviewing one of these weeks), The Heart of a Goof consists of stories told by The Oldest Member, the venerable Greek chorus of the golf club, who knows all, sees all, and very definitely tells all. Spotting a hapless golfer at the top of every story, he takes him by the arm, plops him down in a chair, and relates to his reluctant audience a short saga of golf, life, and love. Remember those wonderful Commander McBragg cartoons where the Commander would sideline a member of the club to tell a tall tale? Well, that's the Oldest Member to a...heh heh heh...tee...and his hapless victim audience hasn't a chance of escaping the telling:

'But you will, no doubt, wish to heart the story from the beginning.'

The young man rose with the startled haste of some wild creature, which, wandering through the undergrowth, perceives the trap in his path.

'I should love to,' he mumbled, 'only I shall be losing my place at the tee.'

'The goof in question,' said the Sage, attaching himself with quiet firmness to the youth's coat-button, 'was a man of about your age, by name Ferdinand Dibble. I knew him well. In fact, it was to me—'

'Some other time, eh?'

'It was to me,' proceeded the Sage, placidly, 'that he came for sympathy in the great crisis of his life, and I am not ashamed to say that when he had finished laying bare his soul to me there were tears in my eyes. My heart bled for the boy.'

'I bet it did. But—'

The Oldest Member pushed him back gently into his seat.

'Golf," he said, 'is the Great Mystery. Like some capricious goddess—'

The young man, who had been exhibiting symptoms of feverishness, appeared to become resigned. He sighed softly.

'Did you ever read "The Ancient Mariner"?' he said.

'Many years ago,' said the Oldest Member. 'Why do you ask?'

'Oh, I don't know," said the young man. 'It just occurred to me.'

There are stories in here about magic plus fours, a tournament battle for the ownership of the perfect English butler, timid men finding the gumption to fold the woman of their dreams in their tweeded arms on the seventeenth green, and young children scolded by their mother for not holding a mashie correctly. Wodehouse has a lot of fun here, and it shows. How can you resist a book whose dedication reads "To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time," an introduction which suggests that book critics need to publish their golf handicaps aside their reviews of the volume and thus be judged whether they are worthy or not to critique it, and even a lovely bit of self-reference, meta before meta even came along: the book that the Oldest Member is reading in the section I quote at the very top of this post is a masterpiece of golf indeed: we are told it is titled Wodehouse on the Niblick. This is an early collection from the twenties and it's charming more often than it is laugh-out loud, but there are still plenty of funny passages:

'I can stand a lot, but pie-faced Spelvin tries human endurance too high.'

'He is not pie-faced,' said Jane, warmly.

'He is pie-faced," insisted William. 'Come round to the Vienna Bon-Ton Bakery tomorrow and I will show you an individual custard-pie that might be his brother.'

Really, where would the acting career of Hugh Grant be without the influence of lines like that?

He understand the passion players have for the game—and not necessarily gentle loving passion:

'I wish to goodness I knew the man who invented this game. I'd strangle him. But I suppose he's been dead for ages. Still, I could go and jump on his grave.'

...and how love brings golfers together...or is that how golf brings lovers together?:

Barbara squeezed his hand lovingly.

'Don't worry, precious," she said soothingly. 'It will be all right. I am a woman, and once we are married, I shall be able to think of at least a hundred ways of snootering you to such an extent that you'll be fit to win the Amateur Championship.'

'You will?' said Ferdinand, anxiously. 'You're sure?'

'Quite, quite sure, dearest,' said Barbara.

'My angel!' said Ferdinand.

He folded her in his arms, using the interlocking grip.

or these absolutely sublime couple paragraphs:

'Oh, Mary! Mary!' he breathed to himself as he swung.

You who squander your golden youth fooling about on a bowling-green will not understand the magic of those words. But if you were a golfer, you would realize that in selecting just that invocation to breathe to himself Rollo Podmarsh had hit, by sheer accident, on the ideal method of achieving a fine drive. let me explain. The first two words, tensely breathed, are just sufficient to take a man with the proper slowness to the top of his swing; the first syllable of the second 'Mary' exactly coincides with the striking of the ball; and the final 'ry!' takes care of the follow-through. The consequence was that Rollo's ball, instead of hopping down the hill like an embarrassed duck, as was its usual practice, sang off the tee with a scream like a shell, nodded in passing Mary's ball, where it lay some hundred and fifty yards down the course, and, carrying on from there, came to rest within easy distance of the green. For the first time in his golfing life Rollo Podmarsh had hit a nifty.

I have just read The Heart of a Goof in the Penguin paperback edition, which features a dandy Ionicus illustration of a plus-fours, tweed-capped foursome teeing up while a pair of lady golfers wait rather impatiently in the background, but I have two other editions of this book in my collection: a rather non-descript hardcover British reprint published by Barrie & Jenkins in the late seventies (the dull uniform brown typography cover on the left) and a volume in the new uniform Everyman Library reprint in the Complete Wodehouse project (published by Overlook in the US). I've got almost all of these lovely Everyman reprints to date, and this one is one of a selection that Father Christmas brought me while I was on my London holiday this past year, and now that I've re-read the book for the first time in many years, I've got to say "Ta very much, big guy! What a wonderful book to have brought me for Chrimble!" You can get the Overlook hardcover edition of The Heart of a Goof by clicking on the Amazon.com link to the right, and there are many other easier-on-the-change-purse options for older, out-of-print paperback editions available through third-party sellers on Amazon as well. It's the perfect pick-me-up between rounds or a lovely refresh at the nineteenth hole. Even if your golf balls are red and yellow and you're putting through a windmill.

Today in Comics History, Mother's Day: A Mother's Day Poem Upon Reading Avengers #186

This is an expanded and updated version of a post originally published May 14, 2006.

In honor of this Mother's Day
A little bull would like to say

Tho' I don't know my own real mother
I love her lots just like no other

And hope wherever she may be
She misses, cares for, and loves me

But if a mom I had to choose
Someone to sing with quiet moos

I think I'd pick take a second look
At a mom from a comic book

There's lots of moms in comics' world
Franklin's is the Invisible Girl


Hippolyta made a clay daughter
Mera's kid was underwater


Tito Bohusk can't ignore
His mom is Angel Salvadore


Even Catwoman had a kid
One year later, guess what she did


And if you wonder where Clark went
He's in Kansas to see Ma Kent


But as I've thought over and over
I think I'd have to go with Bova.


She'd keep me comforted and fed
She'd tuck her little bull in bed

She's nurturing and oh so fonda
Kids (You can't blame her for Wanda)


Of love her heart would be so full
She'd surely hug this little bull

Hot soup and kisses on my nose
(A mom should be quite good at those).


So Bova, come from Wundagore
There is no more Evolutionary War


But either way I'd like to say
To all moms: Happy Mother's Day!

Ten of a Kind: Architecture attack!

(More Ten of a Kind here.)