look, i know it's been a long time, and this is hardly the comeback post. but i read this today and actually got choked up at the sheer awesomeness of it all. enjoy. -d

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(borrowed from trina [thanks], & shamelessly stolen from the seattle times)

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APRIL 29, 2010 - Seattle - Thursday was shaping up to be just another school day for 13-year-old Erik Martin, but then something extraordinary happened: Spider-Man called.

Spider-Man happens to be one of the few people who knows that Erik, too, has a secret identity — he's Electron Boy, a superhero who fights the powers of evil with light.

And Spider-Man needed Erik's help.

Erik, who is living with liver cancer, has always wanted to be a superhero. On Thursday, the regional chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation granted him that wish with an elaborate event that involved hundreds of volunteers in Bellevue and Seattle.

The local chapter, which serves four states, grants more than 300 wishes every year to children with life-threatening medical conditions, but only a few of them involve so many participants.

Pulling off a wish like this one required a big story, and a lot of heart. And so, with a note of panic in his voice, Spider-Man explained the dilemma: "Dr. Dark" and "Blackout Boy" had imprisoned the Seattle Sounders in a locker room at Qwest Field. Only Electron Boy could free them.

Erik got into his red-and-blue superhero costume, and called on the powers of Moonshine Maid, who owns a DeLorean sports car. For good measure, more than 20 motorcycle officers from the Bellevue Police Department and King County and Snohomish sheriff's offices escorted Electron Boy to Seattle.

"They shut down 405 — they shut down I-90," marveled Moonshine Maid, aka Misty Peterson. "I thought it would just be me, in the car."

At Qwest Field, Electron Boy was directed by frantic fans to the Sounders locker room, where the entire team was shouting for help behind jammed doors. With a little help from Lightning Lad, the alter ego of local actor Rob Burgess, Erik opened the door with his lightning rod. The Sounders cheered.

"Thank you, Electron Boy," said defender Taylor Graham.

"You saved us!" exclaimed forward Nate Jaqua.

"Good job, big man," said defender Tyrone Marshall. And forward Steve Zakuani mutely bowed his thanks.

Electron Boy seemed a little dazed by his powers. Out on Qwest Field, the Sounders gave Erik a hero's congratulations, posed for pictures and gave him a jersey and autographed ball.

Everyone was startled when, overhead, the Jumbotron crackled to life.

"Electron Boy, I am Dr. Dark and this is Blackout Boy," sneered an evil voice, as the villain — Edgar Hansen, and his sidekick Jake Anderson, both of Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch" — taunted the young superhero. "We are here to take over Seattle and make it dark!"

On the Jumbotron, a video showed a Puget Sound Electric employee Jim Hutchinson trapped in the top of his bucket truck in front of PSE's Bellevue headquarters. Only Electron Boy could save him.

As Electron Boy's motorcade — the DeLorean, the 25 motorcycle officers and a white limo — rolled through downtown Bellevue, pedestrians stopped in their tracks and pulled out their cameras to take pictures. Clearly, somebody famous was in town. But who could it be?

 "It's Electron Boy," Erik's older sister, Charlotte Foote, shouted out the window of the limousinMore than 250 PSE employees gathered outside the company's headquarters and cheered as Electron Boy freed the trapped worker. "It was so loud, people in office buildings were looking out the window," said Make-A-Wish communications director Jeannette Tarcha.

But Dr. Dark and Blackout Boy were still at large. Electron Boy got a tip that the evil duo were at the Space Needle, where they had disabled the elevator and trapped people on the observation deck. Racing back to Seattle, Electron Boy stepped out of the DeLorean to a cheering crowd of dozens of admirers, and confronted his nemesis.

"How did you find us, Electron Boy?" Dr. Dark demanded.

Erik wordlessly leapt at Dr. Dark with his lightning rod, freezing the villain. Then he unlocked the elevator and freed the people trapped upstairs.

Bellevue police Officer Curtis McIvor snapped handcuffs on Dr. Dark and Blackout Boy, who couldn't resist some last words: "How can we thank you for saving our souls?"

A tiny smile played around Electron Boy's mouth. Just for good measure, he held his lightning sword to Blackout Boy's throat again. The crowd went wild. "Hip-hip, hooray!"

Seattle City Councilwoman Sally Bagshaw stepped forward with a key to the city and a proclamation that Thursday was Electron Boy Day. Afterward, Erik posed for the TV cameras, flexed his muscles and spent some time astride a Bellevue police motorcycle.

"He's over the moon," said Foote. "This is definitely beyond anything we thought it would be."

Watching her son run across the plaza in front of the Space Needle, mom Judy Martin said Erik goes to school when he's able, but is often too tired. "He hasn't had this much energy in a long time," she said. "They called it the power of the wish, and they're right."

Like any good superhero, Electron Boy kept his innermost thoughts to himself. But he did have one important thing to say:

"This is the best day of my life."

four years ago tonight(ish), while the rest of the world watched the opening ceremonies of the Turin winter olympics on NBC, FOX quietly and unceremoniously burned off the last four episodes of the greatest sitcom ever made. still the only time i've ever cried during a TV show. -d

i've added a new microblog to living the dream. it's called 'song of the day'. basically gives me a chance to share simple day to day stuff underscored by whatever music i happen to be listening to. it has the same flash player as this blog does. the cool thing is that on 'song of the day', it will aggregate all the songs and play them as one long playlist if you leave the window open. the latest posts will show up on this blog just to the right there -->. here's the info:

link: http://blog.daveaxelgard.com/song_of_the_day/

rss feed: http://blog.daveaxelgard.com/song_of_the_day/rss.xml

hope you enjoy it. -d

it's sunday night. the night when, tucked shamefully in the darkest recesses of the ill-lit stucco box i call home, i hunker down and wade through the minefield that is my hulu queue. these are moments i love and loathe. it's the only chance i get all week to catch up on the shows i actually like. but there are only so many of those. and when they're done, instead of turning off the computer and going to bed like a sane person, i let that damned fool continuous play feature drag me through half-hour after half-hour of rapidly denigrating television until suddenly it's 3am, my queue is empty, and i'm exhausted and angry and all i have to show for it is an empty box of gushers and 3 more pages of les moonves/jerry bruckheimer revenge fantasies. point is, this is going to change in 2010. and nothing inspires change like the embarrassment of full disclosure...

-- my queue --

community, 30 rock & [formerly] conan: the only reasons to feel good about turning on network tv. period. amazing how they can have so much good stuff can still manage to screw it all up.

the daily show (jump ahead to 3:15) & the colbert report: jon stewart and the first half of colbert offer arguably the finest political satire anywhere. but the last of colbert is just too awkward. even for me.

modern family: stereotypes are funny. really really really funny. too bad everything else on ABC sucks.

snl: kristen wiig. and that is all.

chuck: the plots are retarded. the acting is barely passable. and since buster got shot in the face, there is no reason for anything that happens at the Buy More to ever raise its head from the cutting room floor. but somewhere between the cars, the gadgets and the beautiful girls who usually end up fighting each other in showers, i do love this show. plus, it has without question the best soundtrack on television.

glee: i hate it. i hate how it makes me feel. i hate how patronizing the story lines are. i hate the idiot tingles i get from the inane writing. and i hate that in every episode, there are just enough impressive vocal performances and Sue pot shots at that idiot director guy's lesbian haircut to keep me from deleting the series from my queue. blech.

the simpsons: it amuses me less than the old ones do, but i feel like not watching it would be blasphemous. or at least racist.

family guy (american dad/cleveland show, etc, not even gonna waste time finding clips): it's stupid, easy, derivative comedy that unfortunately makes me laugh pretty consistently. also makes me wonder if censors even watch fox's shows anymore.

castle: captain mal. and that is all.

better off ted: ok, not everything else on ABC sucks. this show is usually pretty funny (and occasionally very very funny), but more than anything it fills the voids left by "arrested development" and "andy richter controls the universe" with portia di rossi and that funny white lab guy.

it's always sunny in philadelphia: like pretty much everything else on FX, you can't talk about sunny with everyone. i've found it's too loose, too weird and/or too repellent for most folks. (apparently people don't like mostly improvised shows about completely deplorable people.) but when you do find somebody else who laughs to tears at the mention of a priest cum crack addict cum exoskeletal homeless guy cum amateur wrestler, you know you've found a friend for life. -d

fair warning: this post might not be for the faint of heart, but i had to share it b/c it's completely ridiculous and fascinating. the other evening i was reading the september 09 national geographic in the bathroom (where i get most of my magazine reading done) and i started reading a saucy little article about orchids called 'love and lies'.  that's right, 'love and lies.'  if it sounds like the title of a harlequin romance mass market paperback, well, it read like one. to give you an idea of the angle the author took, the tagline under the title read:

"How do you spread your genes around when you're stuck in one place? By tricking animals, including us, into falling in love."

the article focused on the procreative habits of orchids. which sounds interesting enough i guess, though not necessarily novel. what little i'd heard of orchids in the past (primarily from the spike jonze movie 'adaptation') was all pretty interesting. and the article stayed at about that level of interestingness -- pretty -- until about 2/3 of the way thru it. and then it blew my mind.

[i'm quoting directly from national geographic from here on out, and it does get a bit graphic. but only in a national geographic kind of way. and not in the 'topless tribes of sub-saharan africa' national geographic kind of way. just in a 'replenish the earth' kind of way.]

If it's starting to sound as though I don't trust orchids, that's because I've seen what they can do to some of my fellow animals. There's a video on YouTube -- a riveting snippet of interspecies porn -- in which you can watch a wasp be utterly bamboozled, and then humiliated, by an Australian tongue orchid. The tongue orchid (Cryptostylis) lures its pollinator by deploying a scent closely resembling the pheromone of the female wasp (Lissopimpla excelsa). The male wasp alights on the tonguelike labellum, tail first, and commences to copulate with the flower, probing its interior with the tip of his abdomen until it bumps into the sticky pollinia, which attach themselves to the insect's posterior like a pair of yellow tails.

Having to play pin the tail on the pollinator is only the beginning of the wasp's humiliation. For with the tongue orchid we have passed beyond pseudocopulation into a realm even more perverse: More often than not, the wasp, in the throes of his misguided sexual exertions, actually ejaculates onto the flower.

Surely this represents the height of maladaptive behavior, and natural selection could be expected to deal harshly with a creature foolish enough to squander its genes having sex with a flower. ("Costly sperm wastage," is how the literature describes it.) That would be bad news for both the wasp and the orchid that depends on him. But as with so much else in the bizarre world of orchid sex, the matter is not quite so simple.

It appears that in some insect species, such as Lissopimpla excelsa, females can reproduce with or without sperm from a male. With it, they produce the usual ratio of male and female offspring; without sperm, they produce only male offspring. How convenient—for the tongue orchid, that is. By inducing wasps to waste their sperm on its flowers, tongue orchids are decreasing the amount of sperm available to female wasps, thereby assuring themselves an even larger population of pollinators. Not only that, but the overabundance of male wasps increases competition for females, which makes the desperate wasps less picky in their choice of mates and that much more likely to fall for a flower.

What about the poor wasp? Why hasn't natural selection killed off an insect so dumb as to have sex with flowers? The best explanation I've heard is from John Alcock, who says that although the wasp may occasionally waste his genes on a plant, his "extreme sexual enthusiasm" is still a better reproductive strategy for an insect than being cautious about one's choice of mate. On balance, having sex with anything that moves yields more offspring, even if it also leads to occasional romantic disaster.

come on, seriously?! a stem fatale?! a femme petale?! a flower with a survival mechanism based on attraction, lust, deception, and ultimately the manipulation of the procreative habits of not just another floral species, but that of flying, flapping, brain-laden fauna?  how ridiculous is that! so complex and mischievous. it's like the plot of some scary, sexy movie which, let's be honest, would probably star kate beckinsale. only it would be way better than any movie she's ever done (except serendipity, obviously). it would probably resurrect her career. anyways, this probably just makes me a complete nerd, which i'm okay with. speaking of, if anybody knows anybody who would want to pay me to make sexy nature documentaries, i'm available. and now if you'll excuse me, i'm gonna go re-read that last paragraph. i'm pretty sure there is a good metaphor for human single life in there somewhere. -d