For now, I only glance at it from a safe distance. But just a few short years ago, I [...]]]> One day I’ll write a memoir about my former obsession with professional wrestling, how I fell out of it, and the tragedies of the business and how they paralleled changes in my own personal life.

For now, I only glance at it from a safe distance. But just a few short years ago, I was still ordering DVDs online from guys like Chris Schoen over at IVP Productions to watch guys like Mark “Bison” Smith do their thing overseas, thousands of miles and oceans away from the turmoil in the States.

In addition to being one of the better “big men” working in the business (and probably better than anyone comparable to his size working stateside), he was from all accounts one of the good guys. Sadly, he passed away yesterday in Puerto Rico due to complications from a heart attack.

Zach Arnold at Fight Opinion, who extensively covered the Japanese wrestling scene before making the same transition I did to full MMA devotion, was a friend of Smith and has a great piece on him. I urge you all to check it out.

He was 38.

I know where I’ll be: at the Holiday Inn on Wolf Road, along with a throng of fellow eager, excited, and pathetic geeks for the Albany Comic Con. It runs 10:00am until 4:00pm and, in addition to all the great talent and swag assembled, it will help raise [...]]]>

Official poster. Click for full image.

Where are you going to be this Sunday?

I know where I’ll be: at the Holiday Inn on Wolf Road, along with a throng of fellow eager, excited, and pathetic geeks for the Albany Comic Con. It runs 10:00am until 4:00pm and, in addition to all the great talent and swag assembled, it will help raise some much needed funds for Japan. From the website:

Professionals and dealers will donate items to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The proceeds will be donated through Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to Caritas Japan, from St Ambrose church to help the people of Japan. 100% of all proceeds from this auction will reach the people of Japan. The massive effort to relocate and house people who have lost everything, in the tsunami disaster, will be ongoing. Please bid generously to help support this effort. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Japan, in hopes they can recover fully, and quickly from this horrible disaster. Thank you in advance for your support in this effort. (2-3pm). Click here to view the items for the auction.

In addition, writer Ron Marz (who’s actually a local) will be selling an exclusive print for $10, all of which will go to Japan disaster relief.

Not bad for a form so frivolous, no?

All joking aside, I’m a huge fan of the form and excited for this Sunday. The last time I went I walked away with some fantastic stuff from the seventies and early eighties, walking away with stuff ranging from stories involving the Justice League investigating the murder of Santa Claus(!) to one of the more intelligent treatments I’ve ever read in the medium. I also had some fascinating conversations with not only artists and dealers, but also passerbys and fellow enthusiasts at the bins and boxes assembled on the various tables. The real shame is that it only runs six hours, as I could literally spend an entire day talking to people and sifting through the great stuff available withot getting bored.

I’m a bit passionate, if you haven’t caught on yet. I was reared on comic books and, contrary to popular opinion, credit the genre exclusively with cultivating my love of words at an early age. Despite preconceptions that the books are dismissively written for children, comic book writers are known and sometimes notorious for writing above the heads of children to make the books accessible to older folk, much like Pixar does with its animated films. As a result, comic books expanded my vocabulary far more than any other book, newspaper, or magazine could. If some writer used a word or described something that was alien to me, I was likely to either just take a guess using the context provided or just ignore it completely. If those same words or descriptions were used by Captain America, on the other hand, I needed to know exactly what the man in red, white, and blue was saying. After all, the fate of the world literally depended on it.

So I’m going to celebrate and give back to an industry and genre to which I owe a great deal, and to meet – again – those people like Ron Marz with whom I grew up admiring and have since developed a good rapport with and further appreciation for.

So check it out, because you won’t regret. And feel free to come find me. I’ll be the guy with a smile a mile wide.

THE ALBANY COMIC CON
Sunday, April 17th
@ The Holiday Inn on Wolf Road
http://www.albanycomicbookshow.com/

If you were to read news articles like most people read news articles – a [...]]]> I’m sickened by the coverage of what’s being termed a nuclear crisis in Japan, but it’s not from worry. It’s from a media and specific journalists that are sensationalizing this story at the expense of science, logic, and the Japanese people.

If you were to read news articles like most people read news articles – a quick glance at a headline and skimming of the first couple paragraphs – you’d be under the impression that Japan was about to become an uninhabitable, permanently irradiated wasteland. However, according to all legitimate scientists in the field and various other outlets, that simply isn’t the case.

That’s not to say there isn’t cause for concern. The situation is not good. However, the mainstream media in the U.S. has contributed to a certain level of unnecessary and unfounded panic surrounding certain developments. There are facts and there are uncertainties, but the two have been lost in the confusion that has resulted from the perpetual feeding frenzy the media has been engaged in since the waves of the tsunami crested.

The latest occurred last night, when news broke that the remaining workers at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant had been evacuated because radiation levels had become too high. As it turns out, it was only while levels spiked, and the workers returned after an hour.

However, unlike the brave 50 who have remained behind to contain the damage despite the risk to their own health and lives, MSNBC (among other outlets) did little to quell the fire. The website is in what I call Crisis Mode: when a huge news story breaks, they modify their regular site design and instead draw further attention a single story by centering one headline at or near the top, blowing up the font size to three to four times its normal size, and changing the case to all capital letters.

Last night, the news organization continued with its coverage by using this method to inform that workers had been evacuated from one of the sites. And yet, buried near the bottom of the nearly 2,000 word news article are these tidbits:

Officials in Tokyo — 150 miles to the south of the plant — said radiation in the capital was 10 times normal by Tuesday evening but there was no threat to human health. The city is home to 13 million people.

…

Officials just south of Fukushima reported up to 100 times the normal levels of radiation Tuesday morning. While those figures are worrying if there is prolonged exposure, they are far from fatal.

Then comes a quote arbitrarily inserted to the point of being apologetic for the tone of the rest of the article:

“These are figures that potentially affect health. There is no mistake about that,” he said.

After inciting fear that the temporary removal of the workers had indicated a complete nuclear collapse was imminent, MSNBC.com suddenly changed its headline, slightly altering its tone:

MSNBC didn’t get the story they wanted, and you can almost see the pouting faces of disappointed fear-mongerers in their addendum from the New York Times. “Oh darn, it’s not as bad as we thought. BUT GUYS IT’S STILL REALLY REALLY BAD.”

Then the site hit paydirt when an off-the-cuff remark from an official not involved in the crisis gave them a new headline:

The “slow-moving nightmare” is a phrase used by a research affiliate at MIT. Without any new developments to report on, MSNBC has once again resulted to covering fear in lieu of facts.

They’re not alone. A recent CNN.com article (among others they’ve posted) employed similar tactics. The tone was of panic and concern, with quotes from political officials in France accusing the Japanese of downplaying the situation and painting various worst-case scenarios. Then, buried at the bottom of the article, was this:

If fuel rods inside the reactors are melting, “the million-dollar question is whether that melting will be contained,” said James Walsh, a CNN contributor and research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s security studies program.

At present, the long-term impact on public health from the crisis appears minimal, Brenner said.

“I think, at this point in time, there’s no real evidence that there are health risks to the general population,” he said.

Compare that to the tone of this article from the BBC:

Both explosions at the plant were preceded by cooling system breakdowns but the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said neither blast penetrated the thick containment walls shielding the reactor cores.

It said radiation levels outside were still within legal limits.

…

Mr Amano said the crisis was very unlikely to turn into another Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant in Ukraine that blew up in 1986.

This was not buried at the bottom of the article; rather, it was in the first few paragraphs.

As pointed out by Popular Mechanics and other outlets, the worst case scenarios won’t come anywhere near as bad as Chernobyl, despite the constant invoking of the 1986 disaster. The facilities were both constructed at similar times, but unlike Chernobyl the Fukushima plant’s design is and always was inherently safer. The Chernobyl disaster was largely attributable to poor design and shortcuts taken to complete the facility.

And as RPI Professor Yaron Danon recently pointed out to various local outlets (as well as RPI blog The Approach):

“I want to emphasize that an additional safety mechanism – the containment of the reactor even after the explosion of unit one – should still be in tact. So even if there is partial or full meltdown of the core, which might be possible if they lose the cooling, radioactivity will not be released from these sites.”

So we are left with a situation that is bad, but not grim and hopeless.

There are so many unknowns in situations such as these that it’s nearly impossible to know what’s going to come next. It’s not irresponsible for the media to report on the worst case scenarios. However, I think it is irresponsible for them to pedal in speculative fiction and to write the narrative before the facts of the situation are in, as they did last night and have done the last several days.

The people of Japan and the international community have enough real concern in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, tsunami, and troubles at the plants. To add to it with misleading or borderline fabricated information just seems cruel and unnecessary.

=====

You can assist in the recovery effort in Japan by visiting the following websites:

• Shelterbox in Japan
• Red Cross
• UNICEF

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“What if God was tired of the way they treated [...]]]>

According to some, she deserves this agony.

Reader GenWar linked me to one of many articles I’ve seen lately that I’ve found disturbing and, as an American, a bit embarrassing. It concerns the reaction some have had to the disaster in Japan, this time coming from WNBA guard Cappie Pondexter:

“What if God was tired of the way they treated their own people in there own country! Idk guys he makes no mistakes,” the guard, now with the WNBA’s New York Liberty, tweeted on her account, cappa23.

“u just never knw!” she Tweeted later on. “They did pearl harbor so u can’t expect anything less.”

It’s not a sentiment that Pondexter is alone in. A glance on many Facebook walls and Twitter feeds will show the same sentiment being expressed ad nauseam, some of which have been collected on various websites for posterity.

There’s also Gilbert Gottfried, whose tweeted joke about the disaster resulted in his dismissal as the voice of the AFLAC duck, which was the one thing keeping him in the limelight (since it clearly wasn’t his material).

The amazement I have with this reaction is two-fold: that people whose parents weren’t even alive when Pearl Harbor happened still harbor resentment towards them for it, and also that they’d be stupid enough to share this with anyone – let alone on a public forum – while the body count continues to climb.

So what exactly for these people are the statute of limitations? What’s the statute of limitations? Will we refuse help for England because of the revolution? Do we look past a disaster in our own soil because it’s in the South, which once seceded from our Union?

It was sixty years ago. It was another time. It was a completely different world.

There can’t be an excuse for this behavior. It’s ugly, wrong-headed, and monstrous, and anyone harboring those sentiments at this time needs to do some very deep soul-searching.

Well, let me be your Catholic Priest, except instead of advising you to recite thirteen Hail Marys, I’m asking you to give $20 (or whatever you can afford) to any of the following organizations helping out with the relief:

• Shelterbox in Japan
• Red Cross
• UNICEF

Your conscience requires it.

And if you’re not one of those select few, why not donate anyway to show the world that Americans are better than that?