more useless opinions combined with a little brutal honesty
Audience Participation Time II Help Choose My New Car http://www.vikingsofficialonlineshop.com/Teddy_Bridgewater_Jersey_Vikings
Posted in Personal with tags Automobiles, Chevrolet Cruze Eco, Ford Fusion, Personal, Toyota Prius on February 25, 2011 by thelasthonestman
So this is what my wife and I have been reduced to on the road. My wife car, a Ford Escort bought back in 1999, has well over 200,000 miles on it. The engine was replaced a couple of years ago on the relative cheap, and while the vehicle is still running well enough for now it evident that this car is on borrowed time. My own car, a 1996 Ford Mustang, has only a little more than 73,000 miles showing on its dashboard of course, that more a result of a broken odometer than it is a lack of use.
Which all means that it finally time for us to buy a new car. With my wife driving an hour to work every day, and with gas prices continuing to rise to obscene levels, fuel economy is probably going to be the number one priority when we choose our new vehicle. With that in mind, we have some choices that have come immediately to the forefront at we begin our search.
The Chevrolet Cruze Eco would be our first choice if we had to make it today, though it no slam dunk. What we like about the car is the outstanding gas mileage (42 mpg on the highway), its top ranked safety ratings, and the good reviews we read on it. Plus, my wife likes the way it looks. Also on the radar is the Ford Fusion, which gives us a couple of options itself (the S version which gets slightly better mileage than what my wife current car does, or the Hybrid which gets even better). And then there the Toyota Prius, which get the best mileage of all of them but which has been described in some reviews I read as handling like a on the road.
We not locked into just these options, but they seem to be the best candidates so far. So who out there has some suggestions for me? Chime in with your opinions in the comments about these three options as well as any suggestions you might have.
I wrote a month or so ago about the media attention Marvel Comics was getting for their latest of a Major Character nonsense that they continued to thrust upon their dwindling readership, and I already talked about how both the company and the other major publisher in the industry, DC Comics, seem to be doing everything in their respective powers to kill the comic book business once and for all. And just when you think the companies can get any more creatively bankrupt, you have the Senior Vice President of Sales at Marvel admitting this past weekend at a retailer summit in Texas that the company will a major character every quarter in an effort to drive sales because why try to revive a dying form of entertainment by trying something positive for longer term growth when you can rely on short sighted gimmicks instead?
Don get me wrong I love comic books, and I devastated at the idea that in twenty years, the business might be gone forever. At least I not the only one who thinks that way there a host of other comic fans like myself who are sick of much of what passes for modern comic books these days (another good take on this can be found at this link on one of the many comic book blogs I frequent). I buy a fraction of what I used to ten years ago so far as new material goes (concentrating my money mostly these days on older books), and I can see a time when even a die hard like myself doesn buy anything new anymore. I definitely will be saddened if I part of the last generation to care about comic book characters as something other than movie headliners or television cartoon adaptations.
It sad that, as is clearly evident with each passing month, Marvel and DC just doesn care. So what happened for the last couple of weeks?
The flu and a terrible case of it. I ran a fever for more than a week, a fever that got close to 105 at times and made me feel well pretty much as bad as I felt in a long time. At my worst, I felt like Marvis Frazier facing off against Mike Tyson back in the day.
What was worse, I tried to work through it at first and let just say that my strategy didn work out so well. It took me two weeks to feel anything close to better, and even now, I still coughing stuff up from my lungs. Bleh.
Needless to say, I fell behind on everything including updating here as getting through each day while sick was about the only thing on my mind lately. As I trying to catch up on everything else work, home stuff, my upcoming fantasy baseball drafts, etc. I also try to catch up here as well, so thanks for being patient. None of the subjects today are earth shattering or new, but there items I thought were worth mentioning (and due to a busy schedule, that I hadn been able to get to until now).
Pictured here: Marvel editors coming up with new ideas to save the dying comic book industry
The Fantastic Four is catching the attention of the mainstream media, as the news surrounding the latest issue of the team title which features the of one of the team members was broken early, before the book actual release into comic book shops. I not going to spoil here who bites the bullet though clicking on the link above will bring you to an article that has the deceased hero identity and I already pretty much ripped Marvel and the comic book industry as a whole for their lack of vision in keeping our industry alive, so there not much reason to rehash things again here.
What I will add in is the latest in ridiculous proclamations by comic book heads this time by Joe Quesada who tells us that, if the deceased in question makes a return from the dead at sometime in the future you know, because we never really seen deaths and rebirths in comic books as a story telling device in a while (sarcasm alert!) that I can assure you that it going to be very, very interesting and not what anyone expects. (emphasis mine). Maybe Quesada should have said be what everyone is expecting If he had, at least he be speaking honestly as to one reason why the sales of new comic books continue to drop to frighteningly low numbers.
And in another sign of changes in the comic marketplace, there was the announcement that Wizard Magazine (and its sister publication for toys, Toyfare) was ceasing publication, ending its run after almost twenty years (While Wizard was founded in 1991, Toyfare was strarted later, in 1997).
For those seriously invested in the industry, Wizard had stopped being relevant a long time ago. The price guide what was left of it was inaccurate, and the magazine came under heavy criticism at times for being a shill for certain companies and their products, and not an impartial observer of the marketplace. In recent years, the magazine began covering seemingly everything but comics movies, television, video games as its circulation numbers declined heavily. Still, with all of its fault, the advent of Wizard at the time was a big deal in the industry, and the loss of the magazine is a noteworthy event nonetheless.
As is often the case these days, the exciting news in the comic book industry revolves around nothing in the publishing arena, but instead in the movie world. There were two very good tidbits that came out in the last week and one that was uh not so good.
First, the good. One of the comic book based movies I been waiting for anxiously for a long, long time has been a Captain America movie worth seeing and this summer, my wish will become a reality with the release of Captain America: The First Avenger on July 22. I long thought that a serious take on the heart of Marvel universe set in World War II would be a winner, and that exactly what we going to see in director Joe Johnston film. Early pictures from the film have been leaking for a while now, and this photo of Cap in his war attire makes me feel confident that this picture will be on the right track.
Also making news is the announcement that Anne Hathaway has been cast as Selina Kyle/The Catwoman and Tom Hardy as Bane in the third installment of Chris Nolan Batman epic, The Dark Knight Rises.
The choice of Catwoman as a villain/love interest in the film wasn surprising (even if the casting of Hathaway was a minor surprise this sure beats her playing a female Vulture in Sam Raimi aborted Spider Man 4, though), and Hardy presence wasn a shock either, considering his track record of working with Nolan. What was a surprise, however, was the choice of Bane as one of the primary bad guys. I liked the decision myself; the Bane in the comic books was (and is) an intelligent, ruthless, powerful adversary capable of defeating his opponent wither through brawn or through strategy. Anyone who only knows Bane from his god awful portrayal in Joel Schumacher Batman and Robin entirely missed the potential of the character. Judging by Nolan work so far, that not a concern I have here at all.
On the other hand, I am concerned about the first photos getting leaked out from the new Spider Man film. I was already critical of the approach that the film seemed to be taking early on particularly with the unnecessary retelling of an origin that was done perfectly by Sam Raimi less than a decade ago but I was at least happy with some of the initial casting announcements that were being made (Emma Stone as Spidey first love, the doomed Gwen Stacy and Denis Leary as Captain George Stacy among many), even if I was still worried about the film turning into with webs But I was a lot more concerned when I saw the first photos of Spider Man costume hitting the web.
That not terrible but it looks like it immediately deviating from the classic portrayal of the costume (which was nailed 100% true by Raimi in his trilogy). My obvious question is why? Why go away from something that iconic and instantly recognizable? If there good reason to like changing Batman garb somewhat in Nolan films then I understand the reasoning entirely. But change for the sake of change isn smart. My growing skepticism on this film also wasn helped by the news that one of the most iconic characters in the Spider Man universe J. Jonah Jameson doesn appear in this film either. Simmons dead on portrayal of the character that we saw already. As big a Spidey fan as I am I not feeling excited about this movie. At all.