Be gentle with me....

So anyway, here I am with a blog. I've written lots of stuff lots of places, but never regularly maintained a blog, because I could never think of any one thing to focus on on a daily or near-daily basis. In all probablity, this will ring in the death of this experiment. However- shocking though it may be to learn that someone on the Internet claims this to be one of their defining traits- I am apparently a huge dork. Rather than keeping things confined to any one realm of nerdity, I reckon I'll have much more success keeping this up if I manage to jump around to all the things that make me such a massive nerd (which means I can probably never talk about my wife, because being married will disqualify me in some circles).

I'll open with a story.

A couple weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my Grandfather about miscellany when the olden times came up. I've always been fascinated with my Granddad, as his upbringing in depression-era Brooklyn is like an entire other world to me, lost to time and history. The conversation shifted to his life as a soda jerk at the family soda shoppe; somehow it came up that they carried comic magazines there as well, to get kids through the door. "Oh, I had Action Comics when I was there," he says matter-of-factly. "You remmeber that specific one?" I ask...

"Oh yeah. It didn't sell well."

"How do you remember that?"

"Well, it was the first Superman, and he didn't catch on until a few months later- then a lot of them started showing up- Captain Marvel...."

"And it didn't sell."

"No, no one knew what it was- so we had to rip the covers off and send them to the publisher to prove that they were unsold- we got books on a consignment..."

"So you tore the cover in half and returned the book?"

"No, we sent the cover back - the book we threw out!"

"So you yourself ripped the cover off a bunch of Action Comics #1 and threw them out..."

"I wanted my dime back!!!"

Next time, we'll see how much that dime really was, and how much a comic book really costs now. I'm sure all one of you can't wait.