Say what?

I can accept it as a cosmic joke that the closest living relative of the great and terrible Tyrannosaurus rex is the tasty chicken on my plate (get your revenge on Rex with this delicious-looking recipe for marinated red chile chicken.) But to think that the fierce and independent (and, face it, cute) little kestrels I see around here so often, who so perfectly exemplify Gary Larson’s dictum that “Birds of prey know they’re cool,” are … parrots?

One way or another, that’s what they say here: “Field Museum’s genetic study rewrites family tree on birds.”

Read + weep.

(Well, not literally: there’s no picture.)

Friends, I give you the future of publishing, dead-tree edition. Not necessarily this implementation; but here’s where it’s going.

By odd synchronicity I was discussing bind-on-demand, book-on-demand technology last night with some ASFS friends, in the hospital room where we visited one of our number who’s recovering (nicely, thank you) from knee-replacement surgery. Okay: I was ranting about it; it’s one of my hot buttons. I’m sure this comes as just a huge surprise to you.

I’m not sure why there’s still such resistance to reading on handheld devices, although one of the many great things about the Kindle is that it’s bringing a lot of readers around to e-reading.

For some reason a great many people get defensive at the notion of e-books, as if somehow they’ll snatch the dead-tree books out of their hands and off their bookshelves. How, exactly?

Look: I hugely prefer reading on my Palm TX Handheld. I love having, literally, a library of fiction and non-fiction books in my shirt pocket, especially waiting in long grocery-store lines. I love being able to search electronically, for, say, the introduction of a character who’s just been mentioned again without my retaining any idea in Hell who she is. I love, and make frequent use of the backlighting (lack of which is one of my several beefs against the Kindle.)

But look, kids: fond as I am of reading on my PDA, I’m also fond of money. So as a professional writer, I say: you only want old-school books you can hold in your hand? No problem! If you want them in Sumerian cuneiform on clay tablets badly enough to pay for ‘em, I’d love to find a way to accommodate you. All I really care about is that, though my sins be scarlet, my books be read. And that I get paid for ‘em, of course.

And I think bind-on-demand technology, such as the Espresso, is how that’s going to work in the future.

Here’s my model for it: you go to a bookstore. It maybe has some hardcopies on hand for ready perusal. Mainly it’s got terminals for you to browse for what you want, read some samples, see the latest. When you find a book you want, you specify it, and then specify the parameters for your own volume. Large print? Got it! Paperback or hardcover? Your choice! Depending on content, even options such as with or without illustrations - B&W or color.

Basically, you pay first for the content - if it’s a public domain book, such as from Project Gutenberg, that part’s free* - and the online publisher and writer get their share. Or just the writer, if the writer’s jumped through the necessary hoops to set up pay-per-download (the thing that’s kept me from doing this myself for almost ten years now.)

Then you pay for the actual production of the book: any special options (large font should be cheap or free; hardcover instead of paper, not so much). And a bit for the storekeepers’ profit. (As the linked article points out, this technology could also revitalize local mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar stores.)

Then you hit Enter, go sip a latte, and in a few minutes, out comes your book. Your book: customized to your desire.

There are various ramifications. How about: pick your own cover? The writer or publisher can contract with willing artist/designers to put up their own versions for purchase and DL. It’s handled the way the written content is: preview, pick, pay, print.

Now, I’m not sure that’s the model the Espresso will follow. Likely not; among other things, I suspect there’ll initially be plenty of hitches as one or another player tries to make thing proprietary. I think the model I propose will be successful, profitable for writers and sellers, and great for readers. It isn’t the only possible model; it’s not the only one that could meet those parameters; there could be better ones.

If so, I’m eager to see ‘em.

One of the most wonderful aspects of the fabrication revolution - software moderated, produced on demand - that we’re undergoing, largely without fanfare, is the death of another incarnation of the Procrustean ideal of one size fits all. Because one size never fits all - does it?

I’m an unabashed technophile. It’s advances such as this - and I emphasize that even if the Espresso sucks, or fails and dies, it still points the way to brighter things - that justify that childlike love.

Note: I have my gripes about the Kindle hardware (no backlighting; good luck fitting it in that shirt pocket), and there may be some unfortunate or even odious traits to Amazon.com’s approach both to e-pubbing and independent pubbing. As a professional writer, there are many reasons I adore the Kindle; as a reader, I look forward to getting the money together to buy one even though I like my Palm better. But those are matters for a future post. Stay tuned.

*It’d, of course, be civilized and appreciative for booksellers who avail themselves of such public-domain services as PG or The Internet Sacred Text Archive to toss them some coin by way of donation. You might give it some thought, too. Please.

Oh, and I’ve got some tidings regarding Sacred Texts, too. Soon…

Jack was a member of First Fandom - the pioneers! - a mainstay of the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society, and a friend. He and his wife Ruth, who survives him, played gracious hosts to many a pleasant pre-Bubonicon party.

Sad news. Fandom in general and our Albuquerque fannish family are diminished. Jack is missed.

My condolences to Ruth and the children.

(I note that his death is already mentioned in his Wikipedia entry, linked to above.)

I’m fine with it, myself. Especially since it’s still a relatively cool season this year.

But, sadly for the Em, it’s the annual July 4^th Fireworks Bombardment. Actually, it’s fairly light and late this year. Heck, the 4^th is only a week from today. Usually it sounds like a hot night in Baghdad by now.

Tonight it did start to pick up. Emma wouldn’t stay outside even to eat dinner. When I ventured out front a few minutes later we got such a loud, sustained, and variegated barrage I briefly thought there might be some kind of professional show going on.

Fortunately, Emma’s noticed that the explosions taper away to nothing later on. Last night she went out late and stayed out most of the night. So she’s not liable to get as bored as she has in years past, which is good.

And of course, it’ll all be over soon.

Thought not.

It refers to this guy:

Robert Vavasour Ferguson was an American baseball player of the 1860’s and 1870’s, when men were men and umpires wore top hats and sat on tall stools to call the games.

He didn’t only luck out in the middle name sweepstakes; his defensive prowess won him the splendiferous nickname “Death to Flying Things.” As in, fly balls.

Otherwise, he was apparently kind of a dick.

But this post isn’t actually about a human, much less a surly one, but rather Earth’s Nicest Cat, TJ.

Just got back around 11:30 PM from hanging with my pal Joe, whose work week ends Thursday. As we did last week we sat on his front porch and talked while he drank German beer, a long-favored pastime of ours.

And I noticed, soon after returning, that TJ had caught a moth.

Hooray for TJ! He was immensely pleased with himself. As well he should be. Aside from the fact I hate those little bastards (I think it was one of the wool-eating kind: need to get more cedar balls) , I don’t think I’ve ever seen him actually catch one before.

And he’s tried. Oh, he’s tried.

I don’t know about your experiences, but all the cats I’ve known have been fixated on catching anything that flies. At least inside the house. They go into their alternate state, the primal hunter state where most of their personality is suppressed and they focus totally on their instinctual drive to kill.

They also tend to lose, as a natural concomitant, whatever sense they may have. It causes them to fly around the house like crossbow bolts, and about as dangerous. They race and jump and knock stuff over and slam into things in their crazed urgency to get those bugs. Even TJ, who when he’s not in robot-killer mode is the sweetest person I know (as he must be; otherwise he would have murdered his incredibly aggravating sister Squeak long since.)

In fact it seems to go beyond mere predatory instinct taking control. They often show what seems a kind of moral indignation: how dare those things be able to do something that I, a cat, cannot? Intolerable! Death! Death to the heretics!

I’ve seen them get so outraged they just sit back and chitter up in sheer inarticulate fury at houseflies. And I mean inarticulate: it’s as if they’re so damn mad they can’t even form normal cat vocalizations.

You have to be pretty pissed if you can’t even say, “mao.”

So it’s a big thing for TJ actually to bring down an airborne insect. And thus,for tonight at least, he earns the soubriquet, “Death to Flying Things.”

Update: Utterly Irrelevant Addendum - Holy shit! Kinky Friedman got old, and now he looks just exactly like Richard Boone!

You know - the guy who played Paladin on “Have Gun - Will Travel,” the greatest TV Western series ever?

]]> http://victormilan.com/blog/2008/06/27/death-to-flying-things/feed/ http://victormilan.com/blog/2008/06/25/emma-fits-in/ http://victormilan.com/blog/2008/06/25/emma-fits-in/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:00:58 +0000 Victor http://victormilan.com/blog/?p=168 To fit in around here, you really have to be a character. For one thing, you need to help keep the other denizens of the madhouse entertained.

Emma continues to show she belongs in the Milán Pack. Just now, with the street full of youths, not all the most reliable-looking, and with bass thumping from the speakers of a truck across the street, what roused Emma to bark fiercely?

What but her nemesis, a young mother with a pram?

To be fair to Emma, the mother was walking a somewhat stout little dog. That’s got to up the threat factor.

•••

To further support Emma’s pack-appropriate eccentricity, on our walk today we got rained on. At home Emma doesn’t like to be out in any kind of weather. By which I of course mean weather, as in, the weather doing something, not just sort of being there. Today, though, she happily ignored the fact that it was raining. As long as the rain stayed light.

To my surprise she didn’t even react to fairly loud thunder. Usually if any kind of boom is even audible when she’s outside, she’s shrieking and thumping at the back door to come in. Out on the ditch this afternoon, she didn’t even blink. Apparently she figures Daddy will protect her.

(This might be ill-advised. Daddy is tall, hence liable to attract lightning.)

I enjoyed the rain myself. Mostly. It’s a rare treat to see New Mexico on a cloudy, rainy day. And light rain falling on me actually feels pleasant. Certainly knocks down the heat.

But then as we approached the point where I intended to turn around the rain began coming down for true. Then Emma was, like, “Daddy, can we seek shelter now? Don’t you know enough to come in out of the rain?” Fortunately there were trees with thick enough foliage to offer some respite.

Even then I was more concerned by the lightning. If I’d expected that, or if I’d heard thunder before we set out, I would have kept us home. Naturally it waited until we were on our way up the ditch.

Mostly it seemed to stay fairly far away. Although supposedly, I gather, lightning can smack you from over-the-horizon out of a clear sky. Which mainly fosters in me a sense of fatalism: hey, if lightning can hit me from a blue sky, why should I sweat a little I can actually see and hear?

Although there was one flash-crack near enough to make both of us jump. I didn’t feel quite so damn blasé then.

As I anticipated the hard rain didn’t last long. After just a few minutes it stopped raining altogether.

With summer actually well underway there aren’t many birds in evidence except at dusk and dawn (I’m taking that latter on faith, believe me). There were the usual pheasants screeching in the fields, although I didn’t see any, and a scrubby molting mallard (I hope it was molting.) As we walked back toward the exit from the ditch I saw half a dozen or so swallows flying in spirals just above the trees ahead.

Terrestrial wildlife was a bit more active. Early on we heard a bullfrog groaning. Despite the fact it sounded, as they always do, like something suffering acute intestinal distress, it also sounded happy, somehow.

Coming back I saw round ripples emanating from a point near the ditchbank, from which I deduced a frog had just hopped in. If so there must’ve been a pair, since as we got closer one launched itself from the bank right where the ripples were coming from.

A little farther along I saw hopping across the trail into the weeds to the side that noble creature, the toad. This was a particularly fat and splendid specimen. I’ve always really liked toads, for some reason. They do eat a lot of bugs, which is certainly to the good.

By this time it had started raining again. Not hard, but not lightly, either. Since I’d put the most vulnerable item of the sundry electronalia that I load myself down without before setting foot out the front door (my Palm) in my water-bottle carrier I wasn’t worried about being soaked. It would’ve felt much better, though, if the wind hadn’t decided to start blowing kind of briskly.

The final quarter to half mile of ditch is lined both sides with nice, tall trees. That brought us relief from the wind, if not so much the rain, which commenced to fall straight down. I heard something stirring in the brush to my right, the west side, and looked to see a cottontail bunny dart off into the tall grass of the Nature Center field.

All in all, it was much more pleasant than walking in hammerhead heat. And any walk where you don’t get fried by lightning is a good walk, yes?

I’d resigned myself to not having honeysuckle blossoms - with their attendant wonderful aroma - of my own this year. I was prepared to be content with the fact that both the honeysuckles I’ve got in the ground, the store-bought one and the one I coaxed into rooting myself from a clipping, seemed established and thriving. I had originally been going to buy one that already had flowers on it, but decided it didn’t look too healthy, and instead picked a more robust-appearing, but flowerless, plant.

Then Saturday afternoon I went out to check on the honeysuckles and discovered two yellow flowers toward the top of the storebought vine. They didn’t broadcast their smell very far, but they definitely had it - that honeysuckle scent I’ve longed for for such a long time.

It’s a big thing for me. I love the smell of honeysuckle; it’s probably my favorite scent. I’ve really wanted my own for years - the whole 21 years I’ve been in my house. I’ve tried in the past to grow them but despite the legendary hardiness of the plants mine died.

Now, having researched intently and done things right, mine grow. And I was rewarded with flowers. Flowers I never expected until next year. Yay!

I would’ve mentioned this earlier but I had no landline phone service over the weekend, hence no Internet. Fortunately, the repair guy arrived within two hours of my calling today and got me back in business. Of course this enables me to upset myself and waste my life online…

Speaking of which … I was looking at this Spanish-language blog on Agorism. I’m back to studying Spanish again, and as with the gardening (and, it pleases me to report, various other areas in my life) actually sticking it and making progress, however sporadic. Although my vocabulary isn’t huge, I read it pretty well; it’s my listening comprehension which lacks.

Anyway, I found an unfamiliar word, which wasn’t a great surprise. In Firefox I supposedly have a Spanish-English dictionary plug-in installed - which, unlike my English dictionary plug-in, I’ve never gotten to work. Anyway, in a transport of optimism, I highlighted the word and right-clicked it. Up came a context menu with an option to “translate.” This took me to a laundry list of choices - French to German, Japanese to English - and clicked on the “Spanish-English.” And up popped a definition in Babelfish!

Only … I wasn’t using Firefox. I was using Opera. Specifically the new 9.50, supposedly a significant upgrade.

Whoa! Did Opera do this before? I never realized it. I didn’t even have Javascript enabled (I usually use Opera to browse pages that don’t require Javascript and on which I mostly don’t care about graphics.) Anyway, this is great - exactly what I’ve been hoping for as an online language-learning adjunct. This’ll make it a lot easier to read articles in Spanish without totally losing my train of thought as I fumble through a dead-tree dictionary. Plus Babelfish handles different verb tenses (mostly; although it just choked on “tendrá.” Which I’m pretty sure means “will have,” but I wanted to check.)

So, cool. Now I can fritter my life away reading Spanish-language websites as well as English! Progress!

Oh - the shiny new Firefox 3.0 supposedly releases in a few hours. If the development team’s dreams of mass downloads are realized (allegedly 1.5 million users have vowed to DL the update on opening day) the Internet will slo-o-ow to a crawl. Or if, like me, you’re bound to it-for-dialup, an even greater and more aggravating crawl.

Personally, I plan to wait and see if any really picturesque or horrifying bugs have escaped beta testing before I DL. If you want to jump ahead on into the madness, though, go here.

And in the interests of fairness, you can snag Opera 9.50 here.

And if you don’t want to see really horrifying bugs, under no circumstances click here.

- Lowe’s grocery store, 4^th and Griegos, Albuquerque.

By and large, life here on Jupiter is pretty entertaining.

I saw that happening as Emma and I were walking on the ditch east of the RGNC this afternoon. I never did see that particular hummingbird. Saw plenty more.

So, how did that story get started that hummingbirds never, and possibly can’t, stop and perch? Somebody mentioned that to me in the last month or so, and I thought about it right off the bat today, as we walked through the leafy tree corridor to the ditch entrance. A hummingbird lit on a branch right over the trail, although it didn’t linger long.

On the surface the belief makes sense: clearly the little bastards have to move around a lot in order to eat vast amounts to keep their furious little metabolisms blazing. And if you spend any time actually watching them, you see fairly quickly that, regardless, it ain’t true. You see them take time outs all the time: on feeders, on tree limbs, on bushes, on wires.

I guess this once again shows we tend not to see what we don’t expect to.

Also, driving the short block from Candy to Veranda to park, I saw a big white bird flying over the RGNC fields. It looked too big and not quite right to be a white pigeon - rock dove - such as you see flying around here a fair amount. I thought maybe it might be a cattle egret, which I have seen in that area, albeit it seems a bit late in the season. It went away to the north.

As we walked north along the ditch it (I’m presuming it was the same big, white bird, since we don’t get them here all that often) flew back over heading south. This time I thought fairly sure it was a gull. It was almost entirely white, with maybe a bit of black at tail and wing tips. This was surprising: we get gulls here, which most people don’t know, so that it startles hell out of ‘em when they do happen to spot the birds. Or make people think they’re crazy, as several have remarked to me.

While I won’t say they’re not crazy the fact is we do get gulls here. But it’s usually in late winter, like mid-February. And they don’t stay long. Most people don’t see them because, big surprise, they tend to stay close to the river. And when they move away it’s generally to congregate at dumps and landfills, also a mighty shock. Mostly, I suspect that on the rare occasions folks spot them they pass them off as hallucinations, or anyway white doves. Sea gulls are associated with the sea, right? Albuquerque is high desert, which is associated with not-sea, right? About the opposite of sea. Ergo, no seagulls here. QED.

See above on what people don’t tend to see.

So then as we headed back south, here it came north again. The wings didn’t look quite right for a gull: they seemed broader and rounder and not so distinctly angled. Yet the bird was close enough I could see it didn’t seem to have a long neck tucked against its body, nor was it trailing conspicuous long legs, which seems to let out a heron or egret or other wading bird. So I have to say a gull it probably was.

Avoiding, for once, the obvious labored pun about “see gulls” - you can thank me later - I’ll point out that it was a very pleasant summer day here in Burque. It was hot but not terribly hot, especially in the shade. By some mad coincidence, that particular route is fairly plentifully equipped with shade. Also there was a touch of a breeze, which helped. And the humidity’s been way low - like 4-9% up where they actually measure it, and not too much higher right down here by the RG. Which of course makes it less oppressive.

But it turned out not to be as hot as I expected. I came home and Weatherscan claimed it was 84°. It’s usually a few degrees higher down here in the Valley in summertime, as it’s a few degrees lower in the winter.

But they’ve been claiming for days it was going to be verging upon brutal: 96° for a high. Even though I was out from about 2 to 3 in the afternoon that seems unlikely to happen by the time temps max out around 5 or 6. I doubt it’ll crack 90. Once again the predictors appear to’ve messed up.

But they can predict climate patterns perfectly fifty years in the future. Also, pigs fly.

Another delightful thing I saw was big ruby dragonflies skimming right along the ditch, just above the water’s surface. They seem to come out for a very short time: I first noticed them about, ahem, twenty years ago - a year after I moved into the house, if I recall correctly - when a lady friend came to visit and we went down to frolic in the river. then as now it wasn’t much of a river, but she wasn’t wearing much of a bikini, either, so it had its compensations. Anyway, we had these big bright red dragonflies zooming all around us. They were astonishing: shiny scarlet all over, wings, eyes, bodies, everything. I hadn’t seen them before.

Until today I hadn’t seen them since. I apparently haven’t been in the right place during what I can only guess is the two to three week window they’re active. I see lots of dragonflies in the course of a summer. There are some that I seem to recall appear mostly in later summer that have drab bodies but red wings. I had about talked myself into believing these were really what we saw, in spite of the fact, we’d gotten pretty close and prolonged looks at the incredible ruby dragonflies, until I saw some again at last today.

So that’s pretty special, right there. Living ruby dragonflies. Indeed do many things come to pass.

Just up front: if you haven’t seen it, it’s a great movie. Also if you have.

I first started to get hopeful, I think, seeing an early trailer for it. The first review I read was by James Berardinelli of ReelViews, who’s the only critic I follow, in large part because he tends to get action movies, and not condescend to them. He basically said that director Jon Favreau had made it as an action movie that happened to be about a superhero, not as a funnybook movie. Which was the very promise the trailers seem to hold out, and what got my blood a-pumpin’.

I actually had more knowledge going in than with most comic book movies, having read the book some back in the Seventies - especially when Barry Smith, now dba Barry Windsor-Smith (the only man for Conan in the comics, since Frazetta wouldn’t do the deed) was doing the art. And I didn’t read it that much, although as a devout technophile I always did have a weakness for the battle robot/powered suit conceit. I just generally didn’t, and don’t, follow aboveground comics, not even X-Men - and I was briefly a villain in the series. (Seriously; tell you later.)

So I can’t really address how truly the movie stuck to the comic, although it seemed to do so fairly well. What I can talk about is how true it stayed to how to make a kick-ass action movie.

Which to my mind was: very.

One reason I looked forward so darned much to seeing this was that I’ve recently become a fan of Robert Downey, Jr., as a result of finally seeing the brilliant Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, in which he played Harry Lockhart, an amiable and very resourceful lowlife who finds himself (in both senses of that phrase) as the unwilling hero of a film noir plot. His Tony Stark is, in an odd way, an upmarket version of Lockhart: a heavy-drinking, tail-chasing, remarkably charismatic and morally oblivious tech genius.

One thing that really makes the movie is that it’s character driven, as any good action movie should be; and Downey’s Stark is that character. Other characters aren’t as well developed; they don’t need to be. It’s Downey’s/Stark’s show.

Not that the supporting cast isn’t good. Jeff Bridges does a fine turn as villain Obadiah Stane - what a great name - and when The Dude decides to sell out, he doesn’t do it by half measures, does he? While he’s no Hans Gruber (and who is? Aside from Alan Rickman, of course) the shaven-headed and bearded Stane’s relentless joviality menaces far more effectively than any sneering or scenery-munching style of villainy.

Gwyneth Paltrow is smart and also hot enough to puddle titanium as Stark’s factotum Pepper Potts (not such a great name, but I doubt that’s the screenwriters’ fault.) I admit my greatest moment of suspense in the film came toward the end when I thought I saw her head inexorably toward becoming that most hated of Hollywood clichés, the screaming female hostage. But, surprise! She doesn’t. Which brings us to the other thing I really loved about the movie.

Of course - you knew this was coming, yes? - you can’t have a smart movie about a smart, witty, charismatic character without a smart screenplay. Downey got one from Shane Black in KKBB; the screenwriters, almost unbelievably for a film with four credited writers, gave him another one here. The dialogue is crisp and mostly believable; neither characters nor story take a turn for the dumb. It’s an action movie you don’t have to turn off your brain to enjoy - and I think you know how I feel about that.

The special effects are amazing. Better: they’re there to serve the plot and action, not to take their place. Too many filmmakers think all it takes to make an action film is a bunch of chase scenes and SBU. Not that shit doesn’t blow up, and very nicely, too. And the action scenes are clearly and well choreographed and well-photographed; none of these half-second cuts that too many filmmakers think are edgy and advanced, instead of baffling and annoying.

And, OMG, Ralphie is totally in this movie. Yes, Peter Billingsley, the plump-cheeked kid from my favorite Christmas movie ever, A Christmas Story (yes, it actually beat Die Hard and Lethal Weapon) Not only did he play one of the characters - for some unfathomable reason I failed to recognize him - he was actually the executive producer. Indeed do many things come to pass. And, good to see he’s still working.

And yeah, despite the header - best I could think of, okay? - I know the song has nothing to do with the Iron Man comic book. And hell yes, of course they had to use it in the movie!

Okay, on the unlikely assumption I’m not the last person in America to see this movie, I should say: spoiler warning. Even though I already knew what it was anyway, but was still eager to see with my own eyes. Unlike most people, including everybody else in the theater, I always stick to the bitter dregs of the end credits (What, you say you got a life? Good thing I don’t, huh, pal?), not just in hopes of seeing an Easter egg, but of seeing if anybody I knew worked on the film (if they did I missed it.)

Anyway … I’m at best ambivalent about the trend of using black actors to portray characters who were white in previous versions from whatever medium. Still, I know that books, movies, TV shows, and comic books were all awfully pale for a while there. Sometimes it works wonderfully well; sometimes you get The Wild Wild West. Which, granted was not Will Smith’s fault; rather, the real problem was that the screenplay sucked major ass in almost every possible way. It would’ve been tough but a competent writer - such as, well, me - could have pulled off the intrinsic improbability of a black Secret Service agent in the West of the 1870s. Given such a script, Smith could’ve shone in the role.

But you also probably know by now that I’m the last person on Earth to quibble about having SHIELD boss Nick Fury played by Samuel L. Jackson, which is of course the Easter egg. You know I love me some Samuel L. in tough-guy roles. I only wish they’d given him Fury’s trademark flattop, instead of Samuel’s same old glossy dome.

See what you miss when you don’t sit through the credits?

On a final note: I believe they intend a sequel to this movie. I’ve got mixed feelings about that. If they can keep Downey and Favreau and the same writers (or whichever ones were actually responsible for the script being so good) it could rock as hard as this one.

But still … part of what made this movie so successful was that it wasn’t a superhero movie. As Berardinelli says, it didn’t deviate far from the standard plot; yet it wasn’t played as a comic-book adaptation. It’s more like near-future SF, or a lightweight (or anyway less than usually portentous) technothriller. It’s cool in large part because it’s not hard to imagine this stuff actually happening.

You start bringing in Norse gods in non-historical horned helmets, giant green guys in purple trunks, and people in gaudy tights flying on sheer force of personality - well, you’re back to a funnybook movie. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it could prove problematic by working against a huge strength of Iron Man the movie.