San Diego!

Okay kids, I'm off to San Diego for the convention. I'll be driving back with Kandrix, stopping at as many delicious In & Out Burgers as possible, big ol' report and such next week.

Play nice while I'm gone!

Wheel of Fortune

Last Tuesday, I convinced the roomie to take the day off work and join me in a shopping-furniture-hunting-trying-out-for-wheel-of-fortune-extravaganza.

On the shopping front, she had more luck than I did, though I did buy a new watch.

Furniture-wise, I found a table for what I'll generously call my dining room. It's a pub table with six chairs, dark cherry in color. I'll be getting it on August 11th, so that means I'll be one step closer to maybe actually having a housewarming.

After all that, we met up with Joe & Susan at the Emerald Queen Casino to try out for Wheel of Fortune. On the way there, we passed by a restaurant with the oddest name:



That's right: "Poodle Dog" (and underneath, "Good Food"). If you look at the sign, you'll see there's also something called the "Pup Room" attached. Bizarre...

Anyway, we get to the EQC and there were probably 600 people waiting to try out:



The way it worked was you filled out a form, then five people at a time were randomly picked to go on stage and play a mini version of WoF (pick a letter, if it's up there, you have 3 seconds to solve or it goes to the next player).

None of us were picked to try out, though they may still pick your name later if your application seems interesting. Funny enough, my accountant, Otto Chase, was picked and he got to try out:



He ended up winning the mini game, so I hope he gets to go all the way through and play on the Wheel.

Afterwards, we hit Harmon’s pub in Tacoma - the food wasn't all that great (dessert was good), but it was fun hanging out with Joe & Susan. Then we drove home and that was that...

Is This Your Sandwich?

Bring the funny

On Friday night, a group of us went to the Sub Pop 20th Anniversary comedy show at the Moore Theater.

It was hosted/MC'd by Kristen Schaal and featured four comedians (in order of performance): Todd Barry, Eugene Mirman, Patton Oswalt and David Cross.

Each comedian did a roughly 30-minute set and Kristen performed in between sets, so the show was about two and a half hours long overall.

The Moore gets really hot, so by the end of the show we were pretty uncomfortable, but the show itself was really good and the comedians more or less got better and better as the night went on. Not bad for only $20!

Here's a parting shot from the end of the show with all the comedians:

Max Payne Trailer

Looks... interesting. Starring Mark Wahlberg:

Converse music video

The song is cool ("My Drive Thru"), but the video is even cooler. Featuring N*E*R*D (and produced by Pharrell), Santogold and Julian Casablancas (of The Strokes) for Converse:

Iron Man & Punisher

Was feeling kinda crappy yesterday because of allergies, so after finishing work I decided to not do anything constructive or go out, but instead spend a couple hours reading comics.

I'm really behind on reading tons of mainstream Marvel/DC books, so I've slowly been catching up on a lot of series. Last night, I read Iron Man for the first time in something like two years, pretty much since the Ellis/Granov run.

This book is REALLY good.

Daniel and Charles Knauf have done a great job of taking Ellis' concept of Extremis and creating an extended and well thought-out run, re-introducing the Mandarin in a slow burn that was excellent to read all the way through.

I don't hear a lot of buzz about this book, but I feel like it compares to the recent run on Captain America by Brubaker in how much set up and pay off you get every issue for the entire series. Highly recommended.

I've also been slowly working my way through the Punisher series by Garth Ennis. 60 issues worth and much like Iron Man, I was pleasantly surprised to see Ennis continue to take elements from early stories and work them throughout his series all the way to the conclusion, giving you a sense that if you read the series from the get-go, you're getting a great long story that never feels stale. Violent, over-the-top, gritty, interesting and fun, this book never dragged on for me. I can see Marvel doing a couple of Punsiher Omnibus' worth of Ennis' stuff for sure.

Next up for me, I'm catching up on some DC books, including the Morrison Batman run...

Colt 45: Works Every Time

Check out these bomb Colt 45 limited edition cans designed by Jim Mahfood:

Trip Recap: Wizard World Chicago

So Thursday evening, Jenna and I headed over to WW:Chicago for their Preview Night (which is from 4pm - 7pm). Jenna was volunteering for the CBLDF, so while she was doing that, I just wandered around the show and caught up with various people.

Post-show, there was a big DC dinner which the two of us were invited to (Jenna used to work at DC, which is where I met her). We went to Bob Chinn's Crabhouse which had some great seafood, including some of the best coconut shrimp I'd ever had.

Afterwards, we headed back to the Hyatt, where I was staying with Chris Burnham. Jenna took off, that was the last I saw of her as she had more trip stuff to take care of. The Hyatt bar was where pretty much every night was spent drinking and chatting. I got to bed pretty late that first night, like 3am.

Friday, I didn't get to the show until noon, but I pretty much just scoped out the show, talked with some dealers and guests, caught up with friends, the usual. There's a theater only three blocks from the show, so after closing Chris and I went and saw Wanted which was actually really good. Then it was back to the convention center for the Warren Ellis Q&A. Picture by Chris:



It was fun, Warren read from his book and then answered all kinds of crazy questions, plus did his Alan Moore impression and generally was quite entertaining. The evening ended at the Hyatt bar.

Saturday was more of the same, this time my only obligation was for the Devil's Due panel announcing the projects I was working on and a bunch of other upcoming DD projects.

The rest of the day was like Friday & Sunday, it's hard not to turn these con reports in to a name-drop fest, I talked to a lot of people, met some cool guys and gals and
just generally had a lot of fun.

Post show, had dinner, saw Wall-E (so good!) and then retired to the bar.

Sunday, nothing to report, just closed out the show, then had some drinks with Adi. I got to spend a lot of time with Adi over the weekend, which was great, at shows we never seem to have time to chat and with him living in England, we definitely don't chat as often as I'd like.

After drinks, we headed out to Giordano's for dinner (deep dish pizza place, though I ended up having pasta), then back to the bar for a while. Our flight wasn't until 10:40pm, and long story short, it didn't take off until 1am. According to Chris, I was annoyingly nonplussed by the whole event while he was quite agitated by the whole situation. Granted it sucked, but we did eventually get home (not until 3am local time), but we did get home, so it all worked out.

The end.

Trip Recap: Chicago

After Charlotte, instead of going back to Seattle, I crashed with my friend Jenna in Chicago before I headed to Rosemont for Wizard World.

I landed in Chicago around 5 in the afternoon on Monday. Jenna was there to pick me up. We went back to her place, dropped off my stuff and then headed out for some awesome Korean barbecue.

The bbq place was interesting too because we were, obviously, not Korean and were treated as such, including ordering some items and being told that, in the nicest way possible, we weren't Korean and shouldn't order it, even though we'd all had it before. That experience was offset by the fact they re-filled our side dishes dozens of times which no other place had done. Plus, $90 for four people was not bad considering how much food we had.

We headed over to a place called the Outdoor Cafe, another Korean Place, for some Bing Soo dessert and back to her place for sleepy time.

On Tuesday, we walked around Chicago, did a bit of shopping and had lunch at Gibson's Steakhouse, then went on an architecture cruise. The cruise thing was cool, it's a narrated tour that takes you through all the canals and talks about the architectural history of the buildings around Chicago. Here's me and Jenna on the boat:



Afterwards, we did a bit more shopping and then headed to Greek Town for dinner at a place called The Greek Islands. The food was great (yay flaming cheese!) and by that point we were pretty exhausted, so it was back home and that was that.

Wednesday we started off the day by heading to a farmers market in a park, where we had delicious organic (read: expensive) burgers. Jenna had some stuff to do before her trip to Rome (that coming Sunday) and I had some business stuff, so we parted ways. I went to Chicago Comics and met up with Adi, Gene Ha and Alex Ross for lunch at a little sushi place. Good food, good company, great conversation, I had a blast.

Afterwards, I headed over to the Devil's Due office to talk to the guys about The Corps and Vampire Hunter D, spent a few hours there and then headed off to meet Jenna at Wrigley Field for the Cubs/Orioles game:



It was perfect baseball weather, sunny but not super hot, we had great seats and the Cubs won, plus I got to see a game at Wrigely, so no complaints.

Afterwards, we headed to Little Saigon to eat at a place called Pho Viet. The food was fine, but the highlight was that there was a kid there from Vietnam (who apparently is very well known there) singing and dancing. I managed to snag a short clip of him dancing some Michael Jackson moves:



That was that for Wednesday. Thursday morning was pretty chill, just relaxed at home, read and we watched the semi-final Euro 2008 soccer game between Spain and Russia in the afternoon before heading over to Rosemont for the preview night of Wizard World: Chicago, which I'll get to in the last recap post tomorrow...

Weekend fun

Trip recap continues next week when I have time, for the weekend I leave you with this awesomely innovative commercial for... well, you'll find out:

Trip Recap: Charlotte / Heroes

Okay, finally getting around to talking about my 10-day trip, which I'll do in three parts so it's not just one ginormous block of text.

The trip started off a bit sucky, I had a flight to Charlotte that connected through Denver. Here in Seattle, they loaded 20,000 pounds of extra fuel on the plane, which made it 8,000 pounds to heavy to take off with. At first they tried to take some freight they were carrying out, but that didn't work, so eventually they siphoned the extra fuel out.

Delays suck, and I wouldn't have cared if I didn't have a very close connecting flight in Denver (40 minutes). Considering we took off over an hour late, I wasn't too confident that I'd be making the connection. We landed in Denver eleven minutes before my connection took off and sure enough, when I turned on my phone, there was a voicemail from United telling me that I had been re-booked on to another flight. That left the following day. :(

The flight attendants had announced all the connecting gates, mine being at Gate 19 and we had arrived at Gate 32. I decided to grab my luggage (I hadn't checked any luggage, it was all carry-ons) and ran to the other gate. Luckily, I made it literally a minute before they closed the door. Special thanks to JD for taking me out to Green Lake and making me do a mile or two so that this run in the airport didn't make my body explode. Thanks bud!

Having caught the connecting flight, I ended up sitting next to a couple guys who were also headed to Heroes Con. The one guy was playing Mario Kart on the DS, so I promptly challenged him. After dozens of races, our point score was in the low 200's, but then it was time to land and our point differential was only four, so we decided to call it a tie. Even though I clearly won.

At the airport, I hung around for a half hour until Kandrix's flight landed, then we took a cab to the hotel and checked in. By this time, it was one in the morning and considering I didn't have time to grab some grub in Denver, I was running on fumes so we wandered around and found a Fuel pizzeria and grabbed a late night slice, went back to the hotel and crashed.

Friday was the first day of Heroes Con, the show is still one of my favorites, all about the comics and a great atmosphere. Saw tons and tons of people, had a bazillion conversations and generally had a blast. Caught up with I met up with Chris Giarrusso, Gregg Shigiel and Eisner Award nominee Jacob Chabot, who had all come out to ECCC. I asked Gregg about where to eat, since he meticulously researches all the good places to eat around any convention.

So that night, Kandrix and I, plus the trio above, along with a bunch of guys from the Image crew (Larsen, Kirkman, Ottley, Howard, Keatinge to name a few) all went out to Lupie's Cafe. Lupie's is known for its chili and it definitely lived up to the hype, it was great!

Post-dinner, we headed back and hung out at the Westin bar, which became a nightly occurrence (as it does pretty much every year).

Saturday was rinse, lather, repeat - more show, then another food fest, then hangout time at the bar.

Sunday was mellow, I had finished most of the stuff I needed to get done, so I browsed around for things to buy, got a couple of super awesome shirts but that's about it. Ended up having lunch with Dan DiDio & Jann Jones from DC Comics, then dinner with another big Image group, this time to the Cajun Queen where we had Cajun steak and etouffee, great stuff.

Following dinner, we met up at Heroes Aren't Hard To Find, the shop that Shelton (the guy who runs Heroes Con) owns for a dead dog party. He has a great shop and we spent quite a few hours there shooting the breeze. After that, it was back to the hotel for some comatose-like sleep.

Monday morning, I met with Frank Cho for breakfast (joined by Brandon Peterson, Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner), then took a shuttle to the airport and headed off to Chicago, which shall be recounted in part two (guaranteed to have at least a couple of photos to break up all the damn text!)

Thai Bulbs

Check out this great ad for Sylvania Light Bulbs from Thailand

Balls!

Last night we went to the Mariners game vs. the Toronto Blue Jays. Amazing seats, only six rows from the field and right behind the Blue Jays' dugout:



In the bottom of the sixth, Ichiro grounded out to short stop Marco "Segway" Scutaro. As Segway was headed back to the dugout, he tossed the ball in to the crowd.

And by "in to the crowd," I mean "to me:"



Bomb!

The game seemed like it was out of hand early on, but the Mariners kept it close and and Willie Bloomquist singled in the bottom of the ninth to drive in Raul Ibanez for the win, 7-6. Fun times!