Strange is your language and I have no decoder

 Writing about characters with amnesia is tricky. Full-on, "who am I" amnesia especially. You spin characters out from what they do, say, and think. The absence of knowledge about who they are is toubh to build on. Tougher than it looks.

Then too, there's the danger that the mystery about their identity will be too absorbing. If the main thing about them is that they're a big question mark, might not the answers be a letdown?

Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for Fiends takes an interesting approach to the subject. In a brief prologue, he introduces his hero Peter Duluth in his own life with his own wife before a smash cut to him being bedridden with three women telling him he's someone else. And Duluth had appeared in several books before this. So there's really no mystery about his identity, at least not for the reader. Unlike Duluth, we know that. Like him, we don't know how he got from there to here.

I haven't finished the book yet, so I couldn't say how it turns out even if I wanted to. The setup is pretty engaging, though.

Germ of an idea

Some tentative good news. If they were trying to make hantavirus the new COVID, it doesn't look to be working. It is a nasty disease to those who get it, but it's not a credible pandemic. And I think for much of the population there's a feeling of "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Maybe I'm wrong, but I hope not.

There's some irony in me writing this post while sick. It's just some kind of cold, though. I'm hoping to send it packing within a couple of days.

He sure is

Okay, I know I'm leaning a little hard on video posts lately. Still.

This song I've heard in the past couple of days. Not for the first time, but everything about it hit me this time. The shouts (barks) Muddy's band let out, maybe inspired by church revivals but mostly just adding to the immediacy. The very authoritative drumming. This came out in 1955. Rock 'n' roll mostly wouldn't rock this hard for some time. Just imagine how this must have sounded and felt back then. It still packs a charge.

Interesting to note that "Mannish Boy" was cowritten by Bo Diddley. Years later, George Thorogood would write the very similar "Bad to the Bone." The song's video shows a pool match between George and Bo.

Nexus

 

Is this the ideal place to be? Not necessarily in a physical sense. The recording was made in Leipzig, and not everyone can travel to Germany. But there's a nice balance here. Church bells and some kind of motor. Birds chirping. Human voices, and with them, a dog. This is where nature meets culture. Maybe this time they can be friends.

Pālule maikaʻi

The aloha shirt, also known as the Hawaiian shirt. Where, I wondered, did it come from?

There's an answer. Apparently a certain mania for Hawaiian things had already hit the mainland by World War I, decades before Hawaii became a state. Ukuleles were a popular instrument through to the end of the 1920s, at least. And the shirt became a craze over the next decade, during the Great Depression. 

Fads are fads, though, and usually burn themselves out pretty quickly. The ubiquitous 20s image of college men wearing raccoon coats to the football game had become a period piece by the start of the 40s. But I have a few aloha shirts, or at least light button-down short sleeved shirts with printed designs that evoke the tropics. So do a number of people with a considerably more credible claim to being cool. So how did this particular fad last? Well, there's the comfort factor, but the truth is you just never know.

#couplegoals

Did you know that Edward Lear wrote a sequel to The Owl and the Pussy-cat in which the cat dies? By falling out of a tree, of all things? The Victorians, man. Or something that happened in his life.

This animated rendition of the original is kinda nice. I like the crumpled paper figures of the main characters.

...all at once

These worlds were soon joined by others – there was Earth-3, an evil mirror universe where all "our" superheroes had supervillainous counterparts and Lex Luthor was the only superhero, Earth X (originally intended as Earth [swastika] before a last-minute change) where the Nazis had won and the superheroes were fighting in an ongoing resistance... and when DC bought up other companies, like Charlton Comics or the characters from Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel line, their stories were claimed to have occurred on other earths in the multiverse too.

This also allowed DC to do stories that they could never do with the main versions of the characters – Superman could get married, or Batman die, and it would be the "real" Superman or Batman, in fact the original ones who had been in the very first stories about those characters, but it would still not disrupt the status of the characters in their own comics.

And this state of affairs lasted for about twenty years, until DC made the mistake so many entertainment companies make. They started listening to the complaints of fans.

While there are a few not-unexpected wokeisms, this blog post presents a good overview of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the twelve issue "maxiseries" from 1985-86 that DC used to wrap up their multiverse and start what they hoped would be a cohesive new single universe. That includes an explanation of why there was a multiverse in the first place, which is an interesting chain of events in itself.

In a way, Crisis marked a fall from grace, the beginning of the end despite it's being a good comic story in itself. This has little to do with the presence or absence of multiple universes. As Hickey notes, DC would eventually bring back the idea of the Multiverse. Marvel would, in time, openly start doing multiverse stories as well. It's a durable concept.

No, the problem is that it taught both major comics companies that permacrisis was the way to go. If you could draw in new readers―or at least maximize the readership you already have―by doing an extended crossover that Will Change Everything, then there's no reason to not be doing that all the time. Or at least that seems to be the thinking of editors and publishers. The result is that eventually, pretty much no one is allowed to tell any other kind of story. Which can get pretty wearing after a while.