Okay. I’m going to try not to dwell on HeroClix in such excruciating detail with this entry, but as HeroClix related stuff is pretty much all I’ve done in the last week or so since Christmas, this may be a short entry. Which will doubtless be a relief to the many many SAS’ers out there who have bitterly complained to me in the past that my blog entries are just too goddam lengthy for them to be able to read. (SAS = Short Attention Span, BTW.)

Let’s see. Mike Norton’s new package, with many lovely figs, showed up on Saturday. I won’t bore you with what Paul and I got, except to say that we both got a lot of stuff we specifically wanted, and Mike is a very generous guy, since a lot of the stuff he sent is from Clobbering Time, an out of production booster set that we can no longer find anywhere around here.

We did make that trip into Tampa on Sunday as planned, which was fun, sort of. Big Top Flea Market did indeed have a stand selling collectibles, including clix, and I spent every cent I took with me improving my collection with several figures I really wanted… and then I lost my mind and did what I’d vowed I would never do in this game, and used my debit card to pick up a Unique figure for $15 that I REALLY wanted. It’s a nice sculpt and has good powers, but $15 for a tiny little figurine… I am sadly out of control. Paul would have bought a $12 Unique if he’d had the money, but he didn’t.

I will note that the woman running the stall annoyed me, since I’d brokered a deal between her and Scott to trade Scott’s two Unique figs that he had on him (well, he left them in the truck) for a DC Starter Set Scott badly wanted and that we hadn’t been able to find elsewhere. She said she’d do it, and we walked all the way out to the truck, got the figs, and went all the way back… and she reneged, obviously having had time to think better of it.

I can understand to one extent the business sense that led her to making that decision, since it was obvious from her reaction to me buying my Unique that she rarely sells Unique figs, and so, having thought it over, she probably wouldn’t be wild about the idea of getting two more Uniques that wouldn’t move in exchange for a starter set she almost certainly would sell eventually for cash.

However, on the other hand, I’d spent $30 on figs and it simply seems to me to be bad business to break a promise to a customer who has spent that much money on little pieces of plastic within the last half hour. She didn’t lose my business because she does have the cheapest prices in Tampa on boosters and sets, and her single prices on figs ain’t bad for the cheap ones. But she pissed Scott off royally and he’ll buy all his stuff at Hooked On Comics from now on, and he’s been spending a lot of money on these things, so she made a poor choice there.

After the Flea Market we all headed into Tampa proper (Big Top is in Temple Terrace, which is Tampa, sorta, but Temple Terrace people say it isn’t and they’re snotty about it). I got dropped at a Border’s to spend my Christmas gift card from Sean and Erica while Paul and Scott went on to Hooked On Comics. (There are other reasons not to take me to Hooked On Comics having to do with a past incident between me and HOC’s trollish proprietor, but there’s no reason to go into that here.) The Border’s Scott dropped me at was without a doubt the lousiest Border’s I’ve ever seen, with a piss poor SF/fantasy section and a pretty lousy selection of graphic novels, too.

My experience with bookstores is that Barnes & Noble’s is by far superior at nearly all their locations in terms of selection and service, and this Borders did nothing to make me re-think that. At every Borders location I’ve ever been in, one ends up with a choice… rude employees, or simply incompetent ones who don’t know a goddam thing and can’t help you to save their life despite the fact that they’ve been stashed behind the Customer Service counter, probably to keep them from breaking stuff or accidentally setting something on fire elsewhere.

At this location it was the latter; I went up to the Customer Service counter three times with questions or requests, and on all three occasions it was just a waste of effort on my part. Still, I’ll admit that Borders does separate their annoyingly impolite and deliberately unhelpful employees from their simply inept ones well; all the employees at this location seemed to genuinely want to help me and to find it distressing that they could not, apparently, tell their asses from a hole in the ground even with illustrations and a diorama.

Mind you, if I have to choose between being glared witheringly at, as if I’m something unconscionable that no truly civilized culture would allow to walk the streets like a normal human being, simply because I ask a question, and being given embarrassed, baffled, hopeless and pleading looks in response to me asking a question, well, I’ll take the latter. But I’d rather just have someone at a Customer Service counter who can actually service me, the customer.

I mean, if that’s an option.

Which it doesn’t seem to be at Borders.

Anyway. I ended up finding an interesting sounding novel by Michael Kube-McDowell, but didn’t buy it, because I also found the last book in Thomas Harlan’s interesting OATH OF EMPIRE series, and the grim truth of the matter is, you cannot buy two full price paperbacks for $15 any more, and I had spent every last cent of actual cash I had on figs, so the gift card was all there was. I ended up putting the Kube-McDowell book back, and getting a cheap copy ($4.99) of George R.R. Martin’s first WILD CARDS collection, which I once owned, long long ago, and remember liking, at least, some of the stuff in it.

Speaking of George R.R. Martin, I just went out and checked his website, and yes, the pathetic worthless no good goddam dweebweezel still can’t get his thumb out of his ass and finish A FEAST FOR CROWS, which is especially aggravating, because he isn’t supposed to be WRITING anything called A FEAST FOR CROWS, he’s supposed to be writing A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, but instead, he just had to do a whole ‘nother umpty-thousand page installment in this fucking eternally blathering fantasy series he’s just fucking torturing me with before he gets around to writing A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. So, yes, this fucking fantasy series has at least two installments left in it, one of which Martin apparently simply can’t finish despite the fact that he claims he’s constantly writing away at it (jesus FUCK, I wrote SIX NOVELS OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, Martin, you wanker), the other of which will doubtless be finished seventy years in the future, if then, by Martin’s designated literary heir’s designated literary heir.

If I seem annoyed, well, I am. I, and about a million other people, have been waiting, not for THIS installment, but for what now turns out to be the NEXT installment, for many many years now. It’s just frickin’ AGGRAVATING.

I know, there’s a way to look at this as good… if Martin’s writing so slowly, he’d obviously doing a good job, and anyway, if he came up with so much extra material to add into a story and a fictional world I love as much as I love this one that he had to put off A DANCE WITH DRAGONS for another ten or twenty years, well, that’s just more good stuff, right?

And this is, without a doubt, the most brilliantly conceived and evoked fantasy series I’ve ever read.

But I am not a patient person, and I WANT THE FUCKING BOOKS NOW.

All right, enough of that. Let’s see, what else…

Paul and Scott are getting irritatingly good at playing HeroClix, and I’m starting to lose games to them. Of course, we’re playing longer games with bigger teams and more actions per turn, necessitating that we play with time limits, which often means we don’t finish games and the person who gets the first, or biggest, kill in the shortest time wins… not at all the same as being the person who manages to outmaneuver and destroy the opposing team winning, as we’d been playing before. I think I’ll suggest going back to some lower point value teams, so we can finish some games.

I finished rereading A Horse And His Boy yesterday and will start rereading The Magician’s Nephew today. Since I never trouble myself to even try rereading the meandering, baffling, grim, utterly depressing and totally disappointing The Last Battle when I reread my Narnia books, that means I’ll be through these soon and can start something else… probably re-acquainting myself with the Wild Cards universe, or maybe staring The Dark Lord, that Thomas Harlan book I mentioned earlier.

It’s very disappointing to get through The Silver Chair, however, and realize forcibly that this is the last time I’ll be reading any adventures of the ‘modern’ Narnia kids… the Pevensies, Eustace, and Jill. Horse and Nephew are both flashback books, and each are utterly delightful in their own very different ways (and the Pevensie kids are in Horse, briefly, sort of), but Lewis does such good characterization that I’m just left wanting to know more about Peter, Susan, Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, and Jill… and I never can, because C.S. Lewis is dead now, and anyway, the characters all do show up in The Last Battle, where Lewis does utterly aggravating and unacceptably horrible things to them, which is one large reason I never re-read The Last Battle (the other one being it’s a badly written, terribly plotted book that makes absolutely no sense even where it’s not doing intolerable things to some of my favorite fictional buddies).

So it’s always kind of sad, getting to The Magician’s Nephew and realizing that the Chronicles of Narnia are about to come to a close… and, in fact, the modern day, sequential Chronicles, in which Eustace and Jill should at least have one more adventure coming to them (at LEAST, I mean, the Pevensies got to stay in Narnia for decades on their first trip, and then come back at least one additional time each) ended with The Silver Chair.

Ideally, the Chronicles of Narnia should be some wonderful ongoing series, with a steadily aging but never declining C.S. Lewis doing a new one every year or so.

Instead, though, we’ll just get Harry Potter books, more and more of them every year, until there are no trees left and we all asphyxiate on our own carbon dioxide and alien archaeologists sometime in the future, poking through the rubble of our lost civilizations, can only construct strange, wild, complex conjectures about the odd religion we were apparently all fanatically obsessed with that led us to utterly deforest our own planet so we could keep printing more and more volumes of Holy Writings on material manufactured out of the murdered carcasses of our world’s natural atmospheric purification system.

I never met C.S. Lewis, but I will say this… J.K. Rowling, you are no C.S. Lewis, ma’am.

And FUCK Tuxedo Slack and all his asshole ilk who love Harry Potter but just can’t get into the Chronicles of Narnia. Cretins. If ever there was an argument for a National Trephining Service, it has to be people like that.

Okay, let’s get away from the hostility for a moment and thank Mike Norton and Tammy Ruplinger for their recent emails, and all those who hung comments on my last couple of excruciatingly geeked out HeroClix installments, as well. Y’all are the salt of the Earth. Of course, I’ve never been certain that the Earth needs salt, just as I am completely baffled as to how happy clams really are… but never mind, never mind. Comments are good. Email is good. I appreciate those who provide me with both, at least, I do if you’re not the son of some deposed African minister who wants to deposit several million dollars into my bank account. (But if you are, give it up. I’m just too cynical and I’m simply not going to give you my bank account number. If I’m missing out on a huge finder’s fee by being so surly and unwilling to trust, well, it’s a problem I’ll work on in my next incarnation.)

Oh, yeah, Chad and Mel gave me a pecan log for Christmas. I’d never had one before, but I just tried mine, and it’s nummy. So thanks, Chad and Mel.

And now it’s time for me to gibber like a loon for a paragraph or so:

Yarf! Wokka wokka! How ‘bout those Mets, huh? Say, I read this thing in the paper the other day where Ben Affleck is proud that he made the writers of PAYCHECK change his character’s dialogue so that his character likes the Mets instead of the Red Sox. He said he just couldn’t stand to give a line like “I really love the Red Sox”. I mean, geez, Ben, heard of something called ACTING? But never mind that, I figure when Ben and Britney both get their divorces they can marry each other or at least act as if they’re going to and everyone can talk about ‘Bentney’ for a while. Won’t that be fun? Plus there’s a new AMERICAN IDOL starting soon, yay! Maybe Rupert from SURVIVOR can get a job as a panelist replacing that annoying Randy guy. “Dude, you SUCK,” says Rupert, “but don’t sweat it, I can’t fuckin’ sing a note either… oh, shit, I can’t say ‘fuckin’ on TV, can I? Goddam, I bet they just fucking bleeped me, the assholes.”

Okay, I’m done.