uch like Friday's, today's blog features random bullshitting up here, with various news and entertainment items below.

I had hoped to present a review of Kung Fu Hustle today, but that would have required me to actually see the film, and since I didn't leave the condo all weekend except for a quick trip to Jamba Juice and Trader Joe's Sunday evening, that didn't happen. The missed opportunity was largely a result of my wacky sleeping schedule, and the extensive work I've been doing on my fantasy novel.

In a nutshell, I've been staying up until well past dawn lately, since I've been writing all night. This was taken to a ridiculous extreme on Friday, when I started writing at around 4am, kept going while Malaya got up and headed out into the bright world, and didn't stop until I reached a good break point, by which time it was nearly 1:30pm. I went to bed pretty much immediately after that, but as I was already 4 or 5 hours past my usual bedtime, Friday was out for doing anything out of the house. I didn't sleep for long and got up around dinner time, then felt very tired that night and went to bed around 4, then woke up at 8am Sunday morning when Malaya got up to head off to Kali.  It's now 5am Monday morning, I've been up since 21 hours ago, and oddly I'm not really that tired.

I was exhausted like 7 hours ago, but I caught a 15 minute nap on the couch while Dusty made himself at home on my lap, and since then I've been wide awake, with a little assistance from a can of Pepsi. This afternoon I even managed to review all the stuff I wrote Friday night, and made several changes and additions I thought of overnight.

Friday's outpouring was quite productive though; I don't know my single day fiction writing record, but the current chapter length increased by over 11,500 words, and it was all pretty good stuff; little editing required. I can't get that into the groove every day, but at the rate I'm going lately, spending at least 4 hours a day working on the novel, I'll definitely finish this summer... and then go back to the start and find a way to cut something like 100,000 words out of the painfully-bloated chapter 2 and somewhat bloated chapter 3. By that time I'll have gotten Malaya to help me get my shit organized on sending out sample chapters and query letters to various agents, and hopefully some interest will develop.  How can it not, when my work is just so darn wonderful? *cough*

And no, I wasn't satisfied with the amount of work I did Friday. Despite writing more than I did in some months last year, I still thought that I could have gotten started earlier in the day, and could have hewed closer to my outline and advanced the story more while throwing in a bit less detail about things that probably didn't need to be described in that much detail.  Never satisfied with my work; same story as always. Bleh.

In other news, there ain't none. I told you I didn't leave the house all weekend, and it's not like either of the cats grew wings and started harvesting the spiders that crawl along the ceiling by the back door. Although Jinx would if she could. Dusty, on the other hand, would probably just hide under the bed and hope no one noticed him down there. Or lick and stare at them all day, without ever actually using them for anything.

And yes, those are the two reactions most men would have to suddenly growing a perky set of breasts. Not that any of us needed that image in our minds this morning.

¤ Aeon Flux, a movie I suppose I am obligated to be interested in for the title alone, has an official website at last, with a very cool intro movie and some pretty cool floating circle navigation things too. Unfortunately that's about all they've got, since there isn't even a hint of a trailer or teaser or anything yet. I loved the original Aeon Flux shorts back in the old days of Liquid Television on Mtv, and even bought them on VHS, a decade ago. The series wasn't as good, but it had its moments, and really, there's no way they could have translated the sheer nihilistic brilliance and stylized uber-violence of the early self-contained 4 minute action sequences into half hour cartoons. Though they tried.

Without even a teaser trailer to judge from there's no telling if the movie is any good or not, but it's supposedly being released later this year, so we should hear more about it soon enough.

¤ Cool pictures from a serious train crash in Japan.

AMAGASAKI, Japan - A packed commuter train jumped the tracks in western Japan on Monday and rammed into an apartment complex, crumpling passenger cars into twisted metal. At least 50 people were killed and 340 injured in the deadliest rail accident here in four decades

It's huge news in Japan since they have a great train service and everyone rides it, and they take public safety very seriously there, especially when it comes to their mass transit.

Scary how the train cars just piled into the side of the building and literally wrapped around it as more cars slammed into it from behind. Had to be a heavy death toll in the bent car there. I can't tell if that's the lead car or if it derailed several cars behind the locomotive, which then continued on out of sight. The longer shots show half a dozen cars off the bottom of the screen, all of which are still on the tracks, though I imagine there were injuries aplenty in them as the train came to such a sudden halt.

Whatever blame you want to lay on the civil authorities in this instance, you certainly can't fault them for having insufficient rescue workers. Cute matching white helmets too, though it would be even cooler if they all had color-coded head protection to match their little jumpsuits.

There's no word of video of the crash, but making the safe assumption that at least several dozen guys on the train were busy making their own upskirt train videos, you know moving pictures of the derailment will turn up. Along with lots of photos of panties from ankle view cameras. 

¤ They're filming a new Superman movie for release next year, and they recently revealed the new costume to much fanfare. It's exactly the same as the old one, as far as I can tell, but I'm not exactly a huge Superman fan. He was always too square and wholesome and All-American for my taste. As for the outfit though, my first thought? Cute hot pants, Clark. There aren't a lot of guys who can pull of the rust-red manties look, and I'm not sure you're among them, but your outfit certainly is unambiguously mantastic.

Fashion jokes aside, what are the differences between this one and the one worn by the world's more famous ex-equestrian, Christopher Reeve?

This first look at Superman Returns- due in theaters in June 2006 - shows that the skin-tight costume stretches over only the actor's muscles and frame, without the augmented armored pecs or abs of recent movie superheroes. Director Bryan Singer famously changed the fluorescent spandex suits of the X-Men into dark, leather-like uniforms for those movies - both of them smashes that sold more than $364 million in tickets. But on Superman Returns, he says, he wanted "something classic."

...

Singer decided to keep the cape, the blue body suit, the red tights - even the V-cut opening of Superman's boots. But Superman Returns makes a few subtle changes to the suit:

• The character's S insignia is slightly smaller and higher on his chest, and instead of being painted on, it's more of a three-dimensional plate.
• The insignia is added to Superman's belt buckle.
• Costume designer Louise Mingenbach preserved the blue, red and yellow motif, but the shades are slightly darker than the bright primary colors of the comics. Superman's yellow belt is more golden, and his cape is a deep scarlet.

Well, all right then. The article also has a bit from director Singer, the guy who churned out those adequate but boring X-men movies.

"With X-Men, although they had extraordinary powers, they also had physical weaknesses," he says. "The suits were for protection as well as costume. Superman is the Man of Steel. Bullets bounce off him, not his suit." 

What does the movie's costume say about this Superman's personality? 

"He's not afraid," Singer says.

"Not afraid" is a pretty good summation, I suppose. Of course the fact that he's invulnerable to anything but Kryptonite and has every superpower you can imagine has to help with the confidence. He gets extra points for being secure in his masculinity, though.

The article also makes some comments about how it's not a padded suit, at least in terms of the muscles. The unknown actor they found for the role really is a buff guy, which is cool, I guess. It's silly, as it always is when mutants or aliens or whatever who are super strong, but he looks pretty good. Logically though, if you were genetically super strong, you'd have the physique of a quadriplegic, right? I mean nothing short of reversing the earth's orbit or stopping a speeding locomotive would even cause you to break a sweat, so how would you ever get a work out to stay in shape, much less to build muscle? Sure, Mr. Incredible lifted trains and stuff in his movie, but he was just really really strong; he couldn't fly and move without his legs propelling him.

I guess you could do passive resistance by pushing against your own body; arm to arm as hard as you could or whatever, but we could all be doing that right now, and how many of us are, much less are doing it enough to build up visible muscle tone?

What I've long thought would be interesting is a more real world Superman. Or call him by some other name if you wish to create a new superhero, but basically it's a guy with super strength and flight capabilities. Why live a life with an alter ego who is boring and has a shitty job? Sure, you'll keep a disguise handy for when you want to go buy some damn groceries or get a burger without the paparazzi following you, but my superhero would use his powers for profit, while still doing some philanthropic work and crime fighting for the good PR.

You could break into any bank, but why bother when you can lift 50 tons and fly at super speed? Rent yourself out as a human crane. You know how long skyscraper construction takes and how much they pay in crane rentals? You could work an hour or two a day lifting girders and make $500k a week easy. How about teaming with Fed Ex and carrying shipping containers around the world in an hour for the price they pay for half a dozen 737s? Better yet, offer something no one else can and start your own emergency delivery service. You'll deliver anything from anywhere to anywhere in the world in ten minutes for $250k, no questions asked. There have got to be businesses that would pay anything for that service, and you could do some freebies with donor hearts and such just to keep your name in the paper as a good guy. Better yet, if you didn't care about current drug prohibition laws you could make a billion a month running drugs for the cartels. Hell, they'd be paying you not to deliver pretty soon, since you'd flood the market and prices would plummet. (After all, the only thing worse for drug dealers than complete ease of delivery would be legalization.)

If you didn't mind the human pony ride aspect of it, you could even rent yourself out. Who wouldn't pay to be carried through the sky by Superman, or a reasonable facsimile thereof? Solo flights without extensive safety equipment would cost the most, but you'd offer cheaper flights where you carried a roller coaster safety cage type thing with six seats. You couldn't take them around the world in ten minutes since the G-forces would kill them, but you could still take them farther and faster than anything else. Hell, you could do well with fast travel; plenty of billionaires would pay whatever you asked for thirty minute trips across the Pacific with home pick up and drop off.

The best legal profit I can think of comes from space travel though. Assuming you can fly into outer space, and survive, you could take up satellites and offer satellite repair for unbelievable profits. What's it cost to launch a satellite now? $50m or something? And you can do it whenever you want, and could even carry technicians up in a modified rocket ship so they could do repairs or maintenance?

And how about civilian space travel? They're always talking about tourist space flights in the near future, but it never seems to happen, and people are lining up to pay $100k or more for some quick trip in a jet that flies really fast. Imagine what you could charge for week long trips to the moon? A month on Mars? It costs NASA $1.5 billion and four years to get a toaster oven there, just for the sake of comparison.

Anyway, this has gone on long enough, but you can read into this and imagine what sort of things a superhero will be doing when/if I someday get around to writing one up in a novel. The challenge in such a book would be to make it interesting and insert some overall plot and conflict to make it compelling, rather than just an amusing sci-fi type story with superheroes acting like real people. That's been done anyway, by Spider-Man, for instance.