DOLLAR STORE STUFFING!!! Well, dollar store stuffing mix, mixed with frozen vegetables (last time okra and mashed up Brussels sprouts; here with stir fry vegetables), flax seeds (fiber supplements = win), and occasionally other stuff like fake crabmeat, cheese, and/or mayonnaise. Once all this stuff is in the bowl together, I usually add a generous portion of oil, some water, mix the stuff up well, and then nuke it in the microwave for upwards of fifteen minutes or so -- basically until most of the mixture is cooked out of it and I'm left with a semi-spongy but mostly crunchy sort of casserole. It's pretty good! And as long as they keep selling stuffing mix at the dollar store, it'll probably be a staple of my diet for quite some time... or at least until I finish the two bags of stuffing mix currently in the cupboard.

I've also become quite fond of fake crabmeat and cream cheese sandwiches lately. I got the idea from Boston sushi rolls, which I quite like, but somehow these sandwiches manage to be even more palatable. I'll have to start using light or fat-free cream cheese to make them, though, so that I can even start claiming that they're healthy and low in calories.

Other random photos: a shot of the cups from which I usually drink and one of the figures currently decorating my desk. I've had the Foot Tech Ninja and Donatello since December, and Skeletor has been here for a few years (and if you can see Cubone behind him, he's been here even longer), but I took this photo primarily to showcase Emma Frost -- a new addition courtesy of the delightful Mickey! She'll make it down to the basement and get a proper photo shoot in a few days -- I tend to keep new figures in my room for a bit before relocating them to the subterranean studio -- but for now I'm very much enjoying having her upstairs and placing her in various poses and whatnot. Not pictured is the Transformer Landmine on my bed. I keep new Transformers in my room to fiddle with as well -- they tend to stay until I get another Transformer to replace them. Landmine has been up here for a couple of weeks, though I imagine the turnaround period will be much shorter whenever those new Animated toys hit.

And I had a very strange set of dreams during today's nap. One of them involved alligators entering via some hidden entrance and attacking me in the living room, which prompted me to contact the Justice League of America for help. Just before I woke up, Batman was on his way and Firestorm was creating an anti-alligator enclosure to keep everyone safe until he arrived. Yep.

I've even added a plugin that makes the thing work retroactively, so you can enjoy the sellout javascript gimmickery on posts as old as... I guess not too old, actually. Apparently I haven't been linking to larger images of stuff for very long! Ah well.

Anyway, here are the figures I picked up this weekend and some of the ones that arrived in a box today. Click on the thumbnails to see larger pics!

I've actually had Edward Scissorhands around here a while -- my sister gave him to me for Christmas several years ago -- but I didn't take him out of his package until last Friday. Although he's not superarticulated (though he gets a fairly high joint count because all of his scissorfingers move individually), he's still pretty cool. The Scarecrow, however, is completely new to the collection. I actually considering ordering him on eBay a few weeks ago -- I was thinking of using him in my Legion of Doom, although this Scarecrow is the Marvel version -- but dropped that idea when I happened upon a legitimate DC Scarecrow on clearance. Still, I thought it was pretty amazing that I happened upon this figure for $3.97 at KB Toys this weekend, since he's pretty much been out of retail circulation since 2006. (He must have been hidden away in the back room, since I've been to that KB before and never come across the toy.) It almost felt like this Scarecrow was destined to come home with me... and so he did.

Speaking of DC characters and figures on clearance, I couldn't pass up the Justice Brainiac when I saw him for $4.98 at Spencer Gifts... so now my Legion of Doom has six of its original thirteen members. Spike no longer has to pull double duty, but he was all too happy to pose with Brainiac before rejoining Angel and the gang.

Donna Troy was the last of the figures I picked up this weekend -- like Brainiac, she was $4.98 at Spencer's. Dr. Light arrived today along with some other toys I ordered last week. He's pretty cool for $3.75, though if I divide the $7.18 shipping charge evenly among the four figures and add it to his official cost he comes out to $5.55. I'd still have paid that for him -- my Teen Titans figures need an antagonist and my DC figure collection needs more rogues -- so it's all good.

I knew next to nothing about Black Hand when I decided to order him, but since he's a DC villain and only cost $2.99 (or $4.79 after the shipping charge) he was practically a shoe-in for the collection. I didn't expect to like him nearly as much as I do, though. Not only is the sculpt impressively detailed, what with the complexity of his costume and the veins and deformities of his exposed skin, but his joints turned quite smoothly and never made me feel like I ran the risk of breaking him -- an assurance I needed given my recent "fun" with Batmen. And whereas I tend to think that ball-jointed necks are overrated among action figures (some folks swear by them), here's a guy whose ball-jointed neck is extremely useful. I'm hardly familiar with Black Hand, yet he's seriously in the running for being my favorite DC Direct figure.

In this respect, however, Hand's got stiff competition from the just-released New Gods Darkseid, which was really the main reason I placed the order. In fact, as of now, he's the only DC Direct figure that I've ever paid full price ($12.75 here, or $14.55 with shipping) to own. I'm not sure I would be quite as impressed with the figure if I weren't totally into Darkseid -- it's pretty much perfect as a Kirby Darkseid, but he's not markedly superior to Mattel's DC Superheroes Darkseid (see above, along with the smaller JLU version) -- but I can never have too much Darkseid. I heart Darkseid.

And that is all for now.

I almost don't even want to see The Dark Knight now.

Any guesses? My diet has pretty much consisted of this stuff -- with slight variations, of course -- for the past two weeks or so.

Sure, "God damn America" sounds pretty harsh, but Wright was chiefly talking about the American government -- and the injustices towards "racial" minorities that he attributed to it in that sermon, for the most part, have been well documented. When he thundered that "America's chickens are coming home to roost," he was quoting former US Ambassador Edward Peck and highlighting that our country is far from being an innocent bystander on the international stage. Far from gloating that America had gotten its just desserts with 9/11, Wright was simply pointing out that "violence begets violence, hatred begets hatred, and terrorism begets terrorism" -- and that, as we move forward, we need to recognize this reality and stop perpetuating the cycle. And the sermon from which Obama lifted the title of The Audacity of Hope was probably one of the best and most interesting sermons that I've ever heard. I haven't heard all that many sermons, of course, but considering that I'm hardly Christian I was surprised by how engaging I thought it was. I listened to it twice.

(Okay, I have no idea why the heck he went off on how Hillary Clinton has never been called a "n-" and how that fit in with that Sunday's lesson -- I haven't heard the full sermon or seen the transcript -- but he's probably right about that. Right?)

I even enjoyed watching Rev. Wright's interview on Bill Moyers Journal. True, that he described Obama's actions as those of a (typical) politician was a little dickish, as Bill Maher put it, but I liked that they showed lengthier clips that put Wright's comments in context and gave him the opportunity to talk more about his service to the country and his community. Here, it seemed, was the fair and accurate portrayal of the man that the media had deliberately hidden from the public.

And then in separate speeches to the NAACP and the National Press Club, Wright fucked up. To be sure, there's probably something to be said for his assertion that most Americans know very little about the black church, and I agree with his mantra that "different" does not necessarily mean "deficient." Yet "separate" does not necessarily mean "unequal" -- and the kinds of differences that Wright argues exist provide both hateful and "well-meaning" racists with legitimate reasons for advocating the same kind of separation that was deemed unconstitutional during the Civil Rights Movement. How can integrated schools work when Wright asserts that whites and blacks learn differently because their brains work differently? (Seriously, in this respect, can you think of a more problematic statement than Wright's contention that, "in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we [are] comparing apples and rocks"? Again: apples and rocks? Never mind that Obama and even Wright himself have proven perfectly capable of learning despite being part of a Western educational system that supposedly places people of purported African descent at an inherent disadvantage.) How can diverse individuals come together and truly learn from each other when their interests in music and other subjects are influenced not by cultural, environmental, or other substantive factors but, supposedly, by their DNA? Dogs and cats are "different" -- and not "deficient" in that neither species is objectively superior to the other -- but unless a particular dog and cat had proven capable of getting along in the past, I would hesitate to place them in the same room unattended. And yes, I'm aware that many dogs and cats do get along famously, but by suggesting the existence of physical differences that do not actually exist -- that "race" goes beyond the superficial and that "culture" is a product of biology -- Wright's comments can more be easily adapted to serve the forces of division rather than unity.

(Also, accusing the US government of creating AIDS as a means of genocide against Africans? I mean, it could be true, and Wright is correct about the Tuskegee experiment, government involvement in the crack epidemic of the 1980s, and other injustices that suggest our government would not have been above such an act. But since there will never be any convincing proof of this AIDS conspiracy (as if the government would ever let that information become public knowledge -- imagine the fallout!), publicly asserting one's belief in it is not at all helpful. To most Americans, it sounds completely nuts.)

So like Obama, here is where I break with Rev. Wright. Granted, he should be able to say whatever he wants to say, but I hope that, after these most recent remarks and Obama's unequivocal rejection of his comments, people will stop bloody paying attention. Yet what I find most disturbing and unfortunate about recent events is not what Wright said, or the potential that his comments have to completely derail Obama's candidacy, but that he actually seems to be gaining support. And whereas before I thought that a national dialogue on race might be helpful, I now think there is an excellent chance that it is totally going to suck.

Anyway, here are the best of the results. I'm also trying out a new plugin for displaying the larger versions of images, which you'll see when you click on the smaller photos below. I'm not sure if I'll keep it (I'm not the biggest fan of javascript and fancy effects, hence my choice of this simpler plugin over the Lightbox JS-based variants), but let me know what you think.

Is this the first time that I've featured Buffy figures on Wesoteric? I forget. Anyway, I've had Spike, Angel, and Willow around for ages, but Cordy and Xander are new! Well, kinda. I got a Cordy for $4.88 a couple of weeks ago with intent to use her as Lois Lane, but a) she was far too tall compared to my previous Superman figure and b) I found an actual Lois Lane figure (albeit a super one) soon afterwards, so she got set aside. Also, her arm had broken right out of the package, which was no fun. But then, this past week, I came across the same Cordy and Xander for $1.88 each, so I picked up two more Cordy figures (one of which is seen here, and yay her arm did not break!) and a Xander. I've always thought this Xander looked really weird, and I'm not the biggest fan of the character anyway -- he's kind of a dick -- but $1.88 is pretty tough to beat.

Now all I need is a Buffy, eh? Not to mention a Faith, an Anya, maybe one of those superarticulated Willows...

I really, really like that Superman figure. Anyway, five down... two to go!

Did I mention how much I like that Superman figure? And here he is surrounded by friends and foes -- note that I have much more of the former group than the latter. Darkseid eyeing Jimmy Olsen is deliberate, btw.

And with the addition of Black Manta and a proper Scarecrow (as opposed to that huge scarecrow from some other toyline), my SuperFriends Legion of Doom now has five official members. Eight more to go!

And that is all for now.

it was warming up
now it's cold and wet again
nature is fickle

Turns out that when I updated the corresponding plugin in January I forgot that I made the structural organization of Scary-Crayon and Wesoteric different, so there's a subtle difference in the code for each plugin that causes the SC version to fail under certain circumstances on Wesoteric (and vice versa). But now that problem has been fixed (I think/hope so, anyway!), so feel free to search to your heart's content.

This post was almost accompanied by a photo of the recently trimmed Bacardi, but he just ran away when I went to get the camera! Some other time, then... but so as not to deprive you of cuteness, here's an old linked page that I came across while searching for that post. I do love the blue.