It’s Labor Day here in the Empire. The holiday that has been co-opted and become a celebration of the successful completion of a Summer. It also signals what is for many the Long March towards Winter. Via Autumn. Me? I fucking love the Fall. Favorite season. It’s not too cold, but it’s cool enough to snuggle up with a blanket. It heralds my favorite Opiate of the Masses: football (and my 1a: hockey). In addition, a secondary market of cool balms to draw me out of my peretual existential crisis arrives in the form of Fall Television Programming. Finally let us not forget how it drums up my favorite gauntlet of Fabricated Reasons to Celebrate, which is the stretch from Halloween through Christmas.

So yeah, I’m down with Labor Day. Cool enough. But I’m really down with what it signals.

(Oh yeah wait this is Monday Morning Commute the column where we share the various aforementioned balms and  non-literal and perhaps literal sedatives that get us through the week with minimal scarring so I’ll start by giving you a rundown of what I’m enjoying this week and then you do me the solid of letting me know what you’re totally into this week and that way we will all be a happy commune full of run-on sentences and dementia and cool arts and farts to try out okay how does that sound?)

Read the rest of this entry »

[WEEKEND OPEN BAR: The one-stop ramble-about-anything weekend post at OL. Comment on the topic at hand. Tell us how drunk you are. Describe a comic you bought. This is your chance to bring the party.]

Love `em or fear `em, there’s no denyin’ that extraterrestrials are an absolute fixture of our pop-culture consciousness.

Aliens have been depicted in variety of forms, from the benevolent bestowers of universal knowledge that helped build the pyramids to the nefarious sons-of-bitches that ruined Jeff Goldblum’s Fourth of July. Some spacemen want to go home. Others just want to call their folks. And the worst of `em want to kill Danny Glover.

Coming from outer-space (and thus being the most foreign specimens imaginable), aliens are elicit more fear, joy, and awe than anything on Earth. Who amongst us hasn’t looked to the skies and wondered whether or not we’d be visited by someone – or something – from beyond? You might’ve been inspired or horrified or curious, but I have no doubt that the thought’s crossed your mind.

So, the prompt for our open-bar: Who is your favorite extraterrestrial?

Read the rest of this entry »