KRYPTO!

On July 15, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, movies3 Comments

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.

In which I’m not here

On June 2, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I just got home from a day trip to the northern suburbs of Chicago for my niece’s first birthday party; as my brother is not comfortable with me posting pictures of his children to my blog (which I understand completely, for the record) please allow as a substitute this most excellent picture of his dog Jack that my son took. Jack, you will not be surprised to learn, is a Good Boy.

Take bets in comments on whether I’ll make it through a single day of my big summer plan before it falls apart.

Snarf, 2004-2018

On August 11, 2018August 11, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn life14 Comments

For reasons that aren’t really clear to me– I live my life online, and I write about goddamned everything— I don’t tend to write about it when my pets pass on. When my wife and I got married in 2008, she had a cat and two dogs and I had two cats– our five pets were actually against county ordinances for the first several years we were married, until one of my cats died and we were down to a legal two cats and two dogs. My author description on most of my books describes me as living with “an assortment of pets.” Since I started this blog, we’ve lost Hector, one of our dogs, and Kashmir, one of our cats, who I know I wrote about a couple of times. I did not mark either of their deaths with a post, and I don’t know why.

We had to let Snarf go this morning. My cat (she is twenty years old, has lived with my wife for half of her life, and is still manifestly my cat) is now our only pet. Snarf was nearly fifteen years old, a ripe old age for any dog but particularly so for a German Shepherd, a larger breed that most of the time doesn’t make it past twelve or thirteen. She’d been on a slow decline for at least a couple of years now; I’d had a conversation with my mother as recently as last weekend about how much longer we were going to let things go. If you know German Shepherds, you know they tend to have issues with their hips, and over the last couple of years it had been getting harder and harder for her to move around. In addition, she’d gone stone cold deaf. But she was still her, and like I told my mom when she asked, how do you get up in the morning and decide okay, today’s the day I kill my dog? Today, and not tomorrow? How the hell do you decide that, until it’s already past the time when you should have decided?

I dropped my son off at day care yesterday morning and spent most of the rest of the day in front of my PS4. Around noon I realized that Snarf wasn’t in the room with me. If I was home, Snarf was always in the same room with me, to the point where lately I’d been trying not to move around all that often because she’d force herself up and follow me around, even if I was just going to the bathroom or getting something from another room.

And I’d been home for three hours, and I hadn’t seen her yet. I actually thought right then that I was about to find my dog dead on the floor in my bedroom. But no; she was alive, just a few steps slower than she’d been even the night before. I don’t know what changed, but overnight she’d gotten worse. Much worse. She stayed in the bedroom almost all day.

She didn’t eat dinner last night, and she didn’t eat her breakfast this morning, and that was after my wife woke me up crying because she couldn’t get the dog to get up and go outside. She’d made it to our bedside, where she slept every night, and that was as far as she wanted to go.

That’s how you know, I guess.

Our vet has been taking care of Snarf since she was a puppy– she’s actually known the dog for longer than I have– and she was nice enough to come in on her day off to take care of us. And for the third time, I had to explain to my son that one of his pets was going to die– only this time, it was a complete surprise. Kenny knew that she was getting old, of course, but she wasn’t sick in a way that a nearly-seven-year-old was going to really notice. As far as he can remember, she’s never not been an older dog, and it was even harder than usual to explain why what was about to happen had to happen.

I’ve had, depending on how you count, somewhere between four and seven dogs that I could have called my dog, and two that I was actually personally responsible for. Snarf was probably the smartest dog I ever had, and she was absolutely the best-trained of all of them. She was loyal and friendly and scary as hell when she wanted to be and she was happy and she had fourteen good years with us and some months that maybe weren’t so good.

And as I’m writing this, the doorbell rings, and it’s not greeted with a chorus of dog barks, and that’s the moment when I lose it and start crying again. I’m not answering the door. Whoever is out there should have called first. There’s supposed to be a dog there, telling them to stay away, until the moment I let them in the house, when they became safe and a friend.

She was a good dog. I’ll miss her a lot. Bye, babygirl.