Love this song

I almost picked it as my favorite earlier. This version is from 1979.

If I ever had to teach dramatic monologue, I would use it as an example.

Thanks Again for the Liebster Award, guys!

Nicole Sloan and Kerry from Aspernauts nominated me for a Liebster on Tuesday, but Sourcerer has too many followers to accept, so I Kerry graciously agreed to allow me to passed the  nomination on to The Writing Catalog. I answered Kerry’s questions in my acceptance post over there today, but I thought it only fair, since I was nominated for my work here, to answer Nicole’s questions and link to my nominees here, as well. Here are my nominees:

1. Things Matter
2. Wordgasm
3. The Scribbler’s Quill
4. Lazy Lady
5. Outright Geekery
6. All Things Tolkien
7. A Tolkienist’s Perspective
8. The Leather Library
9. NOLA Feminizer
10. Part Time Monster

 

I selected blogs with under 200, based on WordPress followers. Some of these blogs are almost there. Give them a look, you might like them as much as I do. Now on to Nicole’s questions.

Just in case you need something to do

image via The Droid Lawyer.com

ProPublica has a lawsuit tracker that shows the status of a LOT of lawsuits related to NSA spying. I’d intended to have a post about government surveillance today, but simply did not have the time to put it together.

We will have more on this soon.

image: The Droid Lawyer

Chris Claremont, Nightcrawler return to X-Men

by Jeremy DeFatta

It looks like we have more big news coming out of the comics industry this week, this time from Marvel: Chris Claremont (who is responsible for most of what you think of when you hear X-Men) will be writing an ongoing series featuring Nightcrawler beginning this April. Read more about it here.

I’m excited to hear about this, being as this can be a great writer/character pair.

Claremont is responsible for a lot of goodness in the X-Men universe, and two of his most recognizable stories are Days of Future Past (soon to be a big deal of a movie from Fox) and The Dark Phoenix Saga (which anyone else who grew up with the old X-Men cartoon will likely remember vividly). He is also the co-creator of such characters as Emma Frost (former White Queen of the Hellfire Club) and Mr. Sinister, both of whom have experienced a sort of renaissance of interest in recent years. He also co-created Rogue, my favorite of Wolverine’s “little sister” characters. See here for more about his tenure at Marvel.

I feel that Nightcrawler is one of those characters you either love or you hate. Personally, I love him. He’s often presented as the moral compass of the X-Men and demonstrates a naturally merciful outlook on life, despite the fact that (given the very visible nature of his mutation) he has experienced a great deal more persecution over the course of his life than many of his teammates. Another telling trait is his friendship with Wolverine—he is one of the first people to accept the savage Canadian as a rational human being, all appearances at this point to the contrary.

Intriguingly, both Claremont and Nightcrawler have been absent from the X-Men roster for awhile now, though Nightcrawler is making his comeback in Jason Aaron and Ed McGuinness’s Amazing X-Men after a shocking death several years ago in the Second Coming storyline featuring the mutant messiah, Hope. These are likely still available at your local comic shops.

I highly recommend checking out Claremont’s body of work and all the other stories I’ve mentioned in this post. Go ahead and subscribe to Claremont’s Nightcrawler beginning in April; I know I will! Tweet me @quaintjeremy. Let me know your thoughts below.

image: Bampire/DeviantArt