Since I've decided to attempt a test run of Lightbox 2 on Scary-Crayon -- and since I spent quite a bit of time yesterday fooling with it to tweak its appearance to my liking! -- I've decided I might as well use it here too. (Seriously, you have no idea how frustrated and obsessive I get when things are off center by even a few pixels! I'm still not quite sure what the hell the problem was, though my cheap and brilliant fix seemed to work.) Eventually I'll get around to making unique prev/next buttons for Wesoteric and SC (which I may end up reusing to add prev/next links to the layout of each post!), but I'm in no incredible hurry. 🙂

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. 😐

My hands must be secreting some sort of anti-Batdude chemical. First my new Movie Masters Batman snapped in half at the waist this weekend (luckily I was able to return him), and then I managed to snap off Batzarro's arm during today's photo extended shoot. The fit of the arm is tight enough that I can still wedge it back into position and have it stay (the extreme tightness of the joint requires some pretty forceful motion to turn the arm to begin with, which is likely how I managed to break it off), but I'm still not too pleased about that. 🙁

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. (more...)

I picked up four figures today, and get this -- all of them suffer from some significant flaw. With three of them it's not too bad, since they were on clearance, but the most expensive one -- the new Batman Movie Masters figure -- just snapped apart at the fucking waist when I tried posing him. Argh! I've still got the receipt, so I should be able to return him, but given how in demand these things are I'm not sure I'll be able to get a replacement. I'm also not sure I care, since I am seriously pissed with the quality of these figures. I suspect that a bit more fiddling would have caused him to lose his leg as well.

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.

Before yesterday, I really didn't think Jeremiah Wright was all that bad. Well, I admit that I thought he was "out there" -- and certainly a liability to Obama -- after first seeing the snippets of Reverend Wright's sermons on YouTube early this year (or maybe even last year; conservative websites were harping on them long before they became the talk of mainstream media). But when I had the opportunity to listen to the full sermons I found it obvious that they had been taken entirely out of context for the purpose of vilifying the man and, by extension, Barack Obama.

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. (more...)