 This is the Facebook page for Botch's Transformers Box Art Archive.Become a fan and learn whenever there are updates to the Archive! |
 This is the Twitter feed for Botch's Transformers Box Art Archive.Follow us and learn whenever there are updates to the Archive! |
 This is an RSS feed for all posts to BotchTheCrab.com, both Transformers and non-Transformers posts.
|
| FROM THE GALLERIES |
Marvel Zombies: Dead Days Marvel Zombies: The Covers |
| I'm A-Twit |
|
loading this crap... |
My absolute favorite author is Vladimir Nabokov (pronounced "vla-DEE-mir na-BAH-kof"), best known as the author of Lolita. Nabokov's books are not considered easy reads: he is generally considered a "prose stylist" and his works have the complexity and texture of poetry. For my own part, I enjoy works of complexity that reward a careful and astute reader who decides to invest in an arguably less accessible but ultimately more layered fiction. I don't recommend Nabokov to everyone; aside from being dense, his stories are almost all character studies with far less emphasis on plot than on nuance. However, if I do lend or buy you a copy of Pale Fire or The Defense, you can definitely take it as compliment.
Nabokov died in 1977, just two years after I was born. His final published novel, Look at the Harlequins!, is an odd, fictionalized autobiography, a seeming parody and/or comment on himself, but a fitting final work for an author whose repertoire is laced with characters with whom he shared a great deal of biographical information. (Russian born, emigrated to Germany and thence to America, etc.) However, Harlequins was not the last novel on which he labored. At the time of his death he was working on a new piece, one which had gone through several working titles but was last known as The Original of Laura. Prior to his death, Nabokov instructed his family to burn his unfinished work, lest an imperfect and unpolished aspect of himself be made public.
Alas, they did not destroy it, which brings us to my sad dilemma.
Acting is lying. It is the ability to convincingly enact a fabrication. As such, you might imagine that playing the part of a practiced liar would be an easy task for any actor. But we all know that some actors play deceivers better than others.
Was it just coincidence that everything just kept leading back to Andrew J. Robinson?
I am enjoying my new job quite a lot. I like the atmosphere, the co-workers, the work ethic, the social value of the product, and the work I am personally doing. It is a refreshing feeling to care about your job. And since it's 17 floors up in the middle of downtown Portland, I have a wonderful metropolitan view outside my window. This picture was snapped with my camera phone while sitting at my desk. You get the full city thing, with a little park nestled in there and the distant mountains to remind you you're still in Oregon. Ah, the city. I never get tired of skyscrapers.
I took a short mid-book intermission from the Spitz biography of The Beatles to finally read Shakespeare's Richard III. It had been on my mind since I used one of the play's most famous lines in a song lyric recently. ("A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!") It had been quite some time since I had actually sat down and read any Shakespeare, and I had forgotten how much I love his stuff!
Between high school, college and my own initiative, I've read about 15 Shakespeare plays. My favorite is also the longest, Hamlet, which I have read at least 11 times; the 10th time was actually aloud to Dollface in one four-hour sitting. What can I say but that I could always relate to the Prince? The black mournful wardrobe, the disdain for his villainous stepfather, the precarious dalliance with insanity and suicide...
Friday was a great day. I got my first real paycheck since moving to Portland, and I got my first Monster Pretender in the mail, Wildfly. His soft Pretender shell has that familiar plastic smell of so many forgotten infant toys, I immediately wanted to put him in my mouth. (It was suggested that I wash him first.) And I was able to share the news of this acquisition over drinks with some new people that I found through the Oregon thread of the TFW2005 message boards. Got drunk and had a great time!
Saturday was hangover day. Initially, this involved nothing more strenuous than lying in bed and reading the rest of the Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane series, a comic I highly recommend to anyone. After the queasiness subsided, we drove around, trading in unwanted CDs and DVDs for new (used) ones, buying new comic books, eating at Burgerville (best fast food burger joint ever), getting our real license plates for our car, and watching the Zeffirelli Hamlet starring Mel Gibson.
It may surprise you to learn that I find biographing myself to be a thoroughly uncomfortable task. Here I sit, the creator and author of my own personal weblog, plainly a trifle self-absorbed, ready to offer any and all unsolicited opinions, shot from the hip, about my bubble world; those who know me personally are perhaps awkwardly aware that I am a graduate of the "waiting for my chance to talk" school of conversation. At least, that is my self-perceived tendency. But crafting my own biography, no matter how short, seems to overstep some boundary of modesty that my innermost sensibilities deemed prudent to erect. The biographing process is gross in flavor, it has the oily feel of a lie even in dry truth. In blog form, I can drop tidbits about myself and my interests in negligible doses: little bunny pellets, initially adorable in their multiplicity and relative timidity, but through systematic exposure, the wise cage-cleaner realizes it's still just shit. A full biography? Like garbage bags of rabbit shit.
Nonetheless, I have successfully banged my head against this moral wall, and the resulting stars across my vision, so beloved of cartoon animators, danced maypole-like around my head until they yielded this: a respectable About Adam Alexander page. It only took me a year.
Occasionally, my wife would hear me say that our apartment is really hers, that I just have one room in it (my computer/music/toy room/den/cave). This upsets her — disproportionately, I think — because she wants me to feel that the apartment is truly as much mine as it is hers. To this end she has permitted me to place baubles here and there throughout the apartment. Often the baubles complain to me that they feel out of place at best, and disowned or abandoned at worst. I understand and sympathize with their disorientation, but I will direct them now to my bedroom dresser, which I think looks comfortably in-place, mine and acceptably tacky.
