Of Bats and Beer...

On Wednesday evening Liesel and I went up to Syracuse to pick up my brother Siegi at the airport. Siegi had been in Germany all of the past year and was finally coming home, so of course the usual God Bless America jokes were going all around- everything smelled, looked and tasted like Freedom! We stopped off at a Wegmans on the way home to get Siegi better reacquainted with Freedom via a six inch sub, a Dr. Pepper, salt and vinegar chips, and getting him to buy a six pack of Sam Adams as he was now 21. Yay Freedom.

On Thursday Siegi and I went to visit our Mom at her workplace. She works as a law assistant to a local judge (who happens to have the nickname "The Hanging Judge", though he doesn't like that name), and had wanted us to come in for a while. Apparently the morning's case had finished early so none of the assistants nor the judge had anything better to do than sit around and talk with us for two hours. There was the usual update about our future plans, Siegi recounting some of his travels in Europe, and then the conversation drifted to more interesting topics. Siegi gave a lecture on the Munich Olympics and how the German government had completely and utterly mishandled the terrorist attack, even going so far as releasing the two captured terrorists in exchange for the return of a Lufthansa jet that they had stolen. There was a huge discussion on accents, including what the exact definition was and what part of America had no accent. All in all it was a pretty entertaining time.

We then headed out to do some shopping with my sister and Danielle for my sister's freshman year at college. She had a 50 dollar Target card, but this quickly ran out under the avalanche of things that the girls deemed necessary for a successful first year of college. After this we headed to Sam's Club to check out computers (including a really cool Dell computer that has a touch screen that swivel 180 degrees!) We then went to B&N to use Liesel's gift cards. While there I tried to resist the urge to pick up Batman: The Long Halloween, but in the end could not. Let me tell you, it is an amazing piece of work. The writers for Dark Knight apparently had said that it was one of the main sources for the movie script, and I definitely see how. Many of the scenes in the book appear to be lifted directly from the movie, even though the script is very different. They even use the phrase "Ibelieve in Harvey Dent" throughout the book. It still focuses primarily on Harvey Dent and relies on gangsters backing supervillains as the main enemies, but a lot of things have changed, most notably Mr. Dent. In this version he is more zealous in his work, and a much darker character than the White Knight of the movie. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes Batman, the movie, film noir, or just good stories in general.

The final event of the evening was heading out to a local bar with my brother. We surprised a bunch of Siegi's friends with our appearance and quickly got ourselves added to their trivia team, as apparently there is a trivia contest every Thursday with a cash prize for the winners. The trivia for this round was split into sports, 90's entertainment, Christmas in July, and trigon. The latter was a list of 3 items, and you had to find the common element among them. Here are a couple of examples; post if you think you have the right answers:
Meat, moth, medicine (and no, it isn't alliteration)
Pantyhose, Silly Putty, chickens
Laverne and Shirly, Mork and Mindy, Joney loves Chochi (and no, I don't know how to spell those)
It was a lot of fun, and I got to have some interesting brews while I was there (Ithaca Nut Brown Ale: really good). I later got driven home and watched a lot of Batman: The Animated Series on aol-tv. The psychological depiction of the characters is almost always spot on or better than in the comics; of particular awesomenes I would suggest Heart of Ice (which actually won an Emmy) and Two-Face parts 1 and 2.

Well, that's about it for now; until next time...

"We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess."
- Mark Twain