The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
On the right, my five-year-old chair. Or the middle, if you’re counting the half of my wife’s inferior desk chair that you can see. On the left, the new hotness, ready for duty.
Again, I haven’t bothered to, like, dust, or de-cat-hair or anything like that, but the old chair is still in perfect shape, after five years of daily use. I couldn’t be happier with this company’s products, y’all.
I put myself on an RSVP list for this enormous bastard today, which just means that they’ll let me know when it’s for sale, which will be good, because it’ll take a while to sell the house so that I can afford it.
Be sure to note the tiny FF members and the Silver Surfer, for scale.
I somehow wrote over 2,000 words about Superman yesterday and never mentioned the dog.
And I can’t decide which picture I want to use, so have another:
I gotta say, including the dog in this movie was a stroke of genius in a film that is not wanting for genius moments. And making Krypto an asshole was another great decision. I’m choosing that word deliberately, mind you; Krypto’s not mean, he’s not a bad dog, no, he is in fact the goodest of good boys, but he is absolutely a furry little asshole and he could use quite a bit more training. And having a pet, much less a pet he can’t really control, humanizes Superman in a way I really like. Superman’s powers don’t help him with Krypto at all, and his anger when he can’t find his dog after Lex and his crew invade the Fortress of Solitude leads to one of the movie’s best scenes– and, not for nothing, one of its most relatable as well. It’s a two-minute masterclass of acting from both Corenswet and Nicholas Hoult. One of them has to play the part of a man who could absolutely wipe the problem in front of him off of the face of the earth with no consequences, but who knows he can’t do that, and has to contain his perfectly understandable rage. The other guy has to stare his death in the face and smirk. It’s a stellar scene, and for my money better than this scene from Superman ’78 that it’s a callback to:
I had forgotten what a champion shit-talker Reeve’s Superman is. “Diseased maniac” indeed. Corenswet could never. He’s too nice.
… suddenly it hits me that none of the three men in this scene are with us any longer. Damn.
But back to the dog: Krypto is 100% CGI, a decision that I didn’t like until I saw the film and realized that there is about a minute out of the entire movie where they could have used a real dog, and most of that minute is in the two pictures at the top of the post. And the CGI is seamless anyway; the FX in the movie are generally solid, but none of the occasional less-than-perfect shots involve Krypto. (For some reason, shots where Superman is flying directly toward the camera tend to look weird, and I’m not sure why.)
So yeah. Absolutely ready for Krypto to have his own movie, where he goes and does dog stuff and accidentally saves the world while the Justice League is busy with something else. The Zeppo, but with a lead I actually like.
Tomorrow: maybe not a Superman post! But we’ll see.
We just got back from Superman, the first movie I’ve seen in theaters in a good long while and the first superhero movie I’ve seen in theaters in longer than that. If I write a review of this movie right now it’s going to come off as completely unhinged, because I don’t remember the last time I loved a movie as much as I loved this one. Y’all know what I’m like about this stuff. I need to give it a day or two to cool off before I try to write a review. That’s assuming I don’t see it again tomorrow, which isn’t off the table, and which might reset the clock.
It’s fucking fantastic. Go see it. But let’s set that aside, and talk about TikTok for a minute.
This is KJ and Trinity Blair. They’re TikTokers. They’re also identical twins. KJ has about a quarter million followers and Trinity has 1.6 million. Before I say another word, I wanna be real clear that I have no intention of saying anything negative about either of them and since both of them are way more famous than I will ever be it’s not like they have a reason to give a shit what I think anyway.
Trinity Blair’s main account is here and KJ’s is here. Trinity also runs a podcast, I think, but I don’t really know anything about it. Go ahead and look at any of their videos. I guarantee you will see a comment where someone asks if they know about each other, and anything where both of them show up you will have someone who will ask if they are twins. I only know they exist because they ran a little … joke, if you’re being generous, publicity stunt if you’re slightly less generous, or “scam” if you’re not generous, where they pretended to not know each other existed a while and actually brought their parents into it where each of them confronted a parent about her “secret” twin sister.
Now, through this whole thing, there were people posting comments and linking to videos of the two of them together, because it’s not like they purged their accounts before they did it. But one way or another they probably realized that they’d be able to convince a whole lot of people that they hadn’t previously known about each other, since every single time one of them posts they get a dozen comments about it anyway.
You know what you don’t ever see in their comments? “Hey, are you two secretly the same person?”
And maybe you see where I’m going with this, and what the connection to Superman is.
I have long been willing to die on the hill that everyone in the world not knowing that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person is not remotely the high bar to suspension of disbelief that people think it is. Clark Kent and Superman have been seen together. They live in a world with shapeshifters, for God’s sake, and there are photographs of the two with each other. Clark Kent, while an influential journalist, is just a journalist, and a print journalist at that, and unless you think most of the world can pick Josh Marshall or Jamelle Bouie out of a lineup he isn’t close to being famous enough that most people know his face. And you know what people would do if they thought the two of them looked alike?
They’d say “Man, you and Superman really look alike,” not “Man, you and Superman are clearly the same guy!” Trinity and KJ Blair are literally identical and people regularly question whether they’re twins. That’s the reaction– people looking at twins and questioning what they’re seeing. Every set of identicals on the planet has the experience of someone seeing them with their twin and asking if they’re identical twins, and I suspect most same-gender fraternals have been asked the same thing.
Superman shows his face. There’s no reason for any random person to ever have the idea that he had a secret identity in the first place. And I’m sorry, it’s a hell of a leap to just randomly decide that he is this other dude who’s busy with a journalism job even if he does get to interview Superman a lot. You would absolutely have people using the interviews as proof they’re not the same person.
There was a great comic where Lex Luthor programmed a computer to figure out who Superman was, and the computer told him the truth– that Superman was Clark Kent. And Lex completely ignored it, as the idea that anyone with that much power might masquerade as a normal person was so completely unimaginable to him.
Corenswet’s Clark doesn’t get as much screen time as I might have hoped, so you don’t get a ton of data about what his Clark acts like– although the scenes with his parents are absolutely stellar. There’s no moment like this, though:
So yeah. This character gets superpowers from Earth’s yellow sun, can shoot fire out of his eyes, and regularly lifts skyscrapers when he isn’t busy flying over them. The idea that the whole world doesn’t just automatically know that he’s some other random human out of eight billion who sort of looks like him is far from the most unbelievable thing about this story.
So, um, these showed up today. They are hand-numbered, 41/199. When I die, my wife can sell them to pay for my funeral. They will make me happy every time I walk past my bookshelves for the rest of my life.
Have I read the books yet? Nope. Although now I kind of have to. We’ll make it a summer project.
Teachers complain a lot, right? The understatement of the decade, surely. Like, read the site for five minutes. Teachers complain a lot. But one thing I feel like doesn’t get discussed enough is how emotionally fucked up the end of the school year can be, and now that I’m down to the last three days I’m starting to really have to stare that in the face. This has, on the balance, not been a bad year– there have certainly been moments, there always are, but in the main it’s been a pretty good year. Top half, let’s say.
Some years aren’t all that bad– last year comes to mind. But this year there are a good half dozen kids who I really, really like, who I’ve grown pretty close to over the course of the year … and I get to see them three more times and that’s it. They’re gone. And because I teach 8th grade, it’s worse, because they’re not just no longer in my class, they’re gone entirely. Like, maybe I’ll see them when they do their grad walk in four years, but that barely counts? And even if they do stay in touch, and some of them do, of course, it’s not like this is the kind of relationship where I can drag somebody out to lunch or go see a movie or some shit like that. Like, not even in a “that’s kinda weird” sorta way! A “people are going to assume terrible crimes are happening!” sort of way!
I don’t want to commit crimes! I just think your kid is cool and I would like to keep them in my life after seeing them nearly every fucking day for a year.
Next Thursday is going to really suck, is what I’m saying.
Related, but not really: I had a parent email me about a concern over the final, which in and of itself is just fine, but in the middle of the message she threw in “as you know, he tried taking his life a little over a month ago,” and NO THE MERRY FUCK I DID NOT, MA’AM. I thought for a minute she had mentioned it and I had forgotten, somehow, and looked through every previous email I’ve gotten from her, and … NOPE. There very much was no message about it.
And, like, how do you respond to that? Do I just pretend she told me? I ended up not directly addressing it one way or another and answering the substance of the email, which feels … weirdly flippant, somehow? I feel like I’m yadda-yaddaing a suicide attempt, but I also really don’t want to correct her on it. I may contact our social worker and see if he knew about it, but that potentially opens up an entire different can of worms if he didn’t.
Mental note, don’t put the question in writing.
I’m putting the Taj Mahal set together, finally, and I decided to do the first two bags tonight. I was kind of surprised at how colorful some of the bricks were since the Taj Mahal is almost entirely white, but Lego loves to use random colors for bricks that are going to get hidden anyway. I’ve wondered before what made them decide that some specific part ought to be some specific color and I’ve usually assumed it was because a certain color of plastic is cheaper or something like that.
It took me a few minutes to realize why they’d chosen these colors for the inside structure of this build. Are you smarter than me? Do you see it?
I actually thought the wheel in the middle was black and it appears to be blue, so I’m a little surprised the black pieces aren’t a dark blue, but yeah: for no better reason other than to do it, they’re echoing the colors of the Indian flag here, just to make the build a little bit more fun while you’re putting the base together. It’s a minor thing, I know, but every time I put a set together I find another reason to think their engineers really ought to be working on, like, global warming or something. These people are geniuses.
Last teaching day of the year today, and after three straight periods of teaching the whole day plus two days with optional after-school study sessions, I’m beat to hell. The final is tomorrow, and it took forty minutes to photocopy everything after the study session so I didn’t leave work after five. That time included one (1) copier jam that ate fifteen minutes, because, Christ, when modern photocopiers jam, they jam everywhere.
Five days left.
We spent a pleasant afternoon at the Niles Renaissance Faire today, or at least a pleasant hour and a half or so, and while I didn’t find a cool hat or a cool cane, both of which I’ve been on the lookout for, I did come home with a neat set of dice and a Kukri. I can now add to the pile of medieval weaponry that is currently sitting in the corner of my office, not on display or anything, just sort of sitting there, because I have no self-control at all and access to adult money.
How was your Saturday?
This. This. This is Right and Correct and if I go see this movie and it disappoints me I am done with DC movies for the rest of my life. I talked some shit about the costume when we got our first look at it and I’m still not a hundred percent on board with some of the decisions they made there, but it looks like Gunn has gotten the core of the character right after decades of on-screen misrepresentation, and if that’s actually Superman on the screen they can put him in a French maid’s outfit for all I care.
I had like four different posts planned for tonight and seeing the trailer knocked all of them clean out of my head.
You’ve got me back in theaters for a superhero movie, DC. Don’t fuck this up.
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