A summer of great food and drinks has left me to weighing more than I ever have before.  A whopping two hundred and thirty pounds in fact.  Two hundred and thirty pounds doesn’t quite fit right on my five-ten frame…unless you’re into big bellies and fat faces that is.  Add to that I’m closing on the half century mark, it was time I did something to reverse the tide a little bit.  So, with all that being said, in early September, Amanda Leigh and I went with a low carb diet.  I won’t say straight up keto, cuz that shit bores me so much, I’d be done with it in a week. 

Actually I don’t even wanna say “diet”, more like a bit of a lifestyle change.  I’m a pizza (almost every day for lunch), chips (almost every evening) and fast-food junkie.  Add to that weekend beers, and you’ve got yourself the perfect recipe for fat fuckatude.  Speaking of those beers, I’ve also majorly cut those, and other boozes, from my diet. 

I’m only three weeks in and I’m down a respectable five pounds so far, with a goal of  thirty to fourty overall.  With any luck (or my natural stubbornness and a bone deep loathing of wasting my time), I’ll get through Halloween and Thanksgiving, without falling off the wagon too much.  Christmas….well all bets may be off for that….we shall see.  

Do I think whoever is reading this, really cares?  Nah.  Of course you don’t.  Everyone and their dog (Fido you chubby bastard) posts “My weight loss journey” stories on social media every day.  This is my way of holding myself at least a little accountable.  It’s a “if it’s not in print, I don’t gotta stick to it” kinda thing.

Will I ever have abs of steel.  Not a chance.  Jesus…I weighed as little as 170 pounds in my early thirties and still had a squishy belly.  I just wanna look halfway decent in jeans and t-shirt and maybe extend my life a couple of years.  I mean shit, there’s a lot of Marvel and Star Wars movies left to watch.

RIP Len Wein. I didn't realize until you were gone, just how much you meant to my childhood.

First blog post in years and I mean YEARS!  Why has this talentless, lazy fuck decide to strike up the keyboard one more time?  The passing the great Len Wein. 

Now, if you had asked me a week ago to give you a list of my all-time favourite comic book writers, I’ll admit that Len probably wouldn’t have come to mind.  Not because he wasn’t great, but because he was writing my favourite books, The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Team-Up and the 1970s Incredible Hulk, when I was too you to appreciate or realize, who was writing each issue.  Len’s run with Ross Andru (my all-time, tits up, favourite Spider-Man artist) in the mid-seventies, is where I cut my fanboy teeth.  I mean Hell, last fall I picked up an old issue of The Incredible Hulk (#214) that I loved as a kid.  Unbeknownst to me, it was written by, yes you guessed it, Len Wein.

Len and Ross’s stories, from that time, solidified my opinion of not only who Spider-Man and Peter Parker was and still should be, but also what a hero should be.  Under Len, Spider-Man fought a many crazy and colourful villains, maintained one of the best supporting Spidey casts ever, all the while grounding Peter’s life in reality.  It was Peter’s apartment from this time, which I still think of as his home.  Power cable spool for a coffee table and Elvis Costello posters on the walls and all. 

The more and more I read of Len’s prolific writing in the 70s and 80s, I realize just how much he had written for both Marvel and DC.  In the days before “event books” guys like Len, wrote stories that I consider the glue which keep (no matter how much both companies try to destroy it) each Universe together.   

I haven’t even mentioned that Len co-created Wolverine and plotted the early issues of the new X-Men.  Stories which helped save the franchise, and give us one of the most popular versions of the team.

Obviously I can only comment on Len’s work, not Len the man.  A man whom by all accounts these past few days, was a pretty great guy in real life too.

From a guy who is just realizing now, how much he really appreciated all of your work over the years, thanks Len Wein!  Rest in peace you awesome specimen of a writer.

 

Best of the Year time again

The year is winding up and it's time to starting thinking about the best "stuff" of the 2013.

It's been a long time since my last post but, in my defense, the laptop got moved to another room and I haven't felt like moving it.

So, to make up for lost time, here's a picture of Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson...

OMFG!  Kimmie's rap on Hell's Kitchen may be the most embarrassed I've felt for someone on a reality show in a looooong time.  It was a performance worthy of American Idol auditions!
At least's she's proved two things this season.  She can't cook and she can't rap.

I like to read books, but my attention span (or lack thereof) and, for some reason, reading makes me sleepy almost instantly,  so in the run of a year I don't get a lot of reading done, besides comic books that is.  Well here we are and it's July 1st (Happy Canada Day everyone!) and I recently decided that I'm going to read 20 books before 2012 is over.  Shouldn't be hard right?  Well so far I have only one book in the "finished" pile, Patrick deWitt's Sisters Brothers (it was a book club book at work...there are only two guys in our book club, me and another guy, and we're both notorious for not reading the books).

I've started the first A Game of Thrones book, but it's slow going and I'm halfway through the second of The Strain trilogy, The Fall.  Wish me luck.  I'll try to use my lil ol' blog here as a check-list of sorts.

So Katie Holmes has filed for divorce.  How on Earth did she manage to slip away from her alien captors long enough to see a lawyer?