NOT A Part of Our Heritage eh Historica Dominion Institute?!

Recently one of my good friends posted this on his Facebook wall:

I cringed a little and re-watched it then posted the commented "...Ya except that it's 90% lies (this is awkward...)" knowing full well that he'd want me to clarify a little I knew it would be too long for a regular reply so I decided it would make an excellent blog post instead. This may take a while to explain so maybe you'll want to change into your robe and slippers and make yourself a nice frothy mug of hot cocoa and relax. Let's begin...

    For those of you who didn't grow up watching Canadian television in the 90's this was part of a series of PSAs which started airing in 1991 and came to be known as "Heritage Minutes". They are brief sixty-second short films that each depict a different chapter in Canadian history. Over 74 of them are available online here if you're interested in watching them (two are missing and, according to Wikipedia there were even more completed but never aired). Anyway as I was saying growing up I must have seen most of the 76 that aired and these ads or short films or whatever you want to call them sort of became a part of my Heritage and shaped my early childhood knowledge for the history of my great nation (because the history curriculum they taught in schools was a complete joke, something that I understand has been corrected a little since then) anyway the two 'minutes' I was most impressed with were the one where you find out that the "Winnie" in "Winnie the Pooh" was short for Winnipeg Manitoba (the bear was originally owned by a Canadian soldier in WWI and donated to the London Zoo after the war) and the one you just saw (unless the video didn't load properly in which case it was the 'Superman one'). I was so amazed by the fact that this icon of North American, nae, world culture and mythos had Canadian roots. It was for me a source of national pride! To make matters worse when it first came out people would talk about this heritage minute and spout out their own half remembered trivia about Superman's Canadian roots that further warped the reality of the situation like for example people used to tell me that the city of Metropolis was based on Toronto and that the Daily Planet that Clark Kent and Lois Lane worked at was based on Joe Shuster's experience working at the Toronto Daily Star! Naturally I didn't question it after all they wouldn't be allowed to just make up something and put it in a Heritage minute now could they?

    Imagine my shock then when I realized that they pretty much did exactly that! My first warning came when I saw this somewhere as an adult in my early twenties. Now that I had the internet I decided to look into this further and was puzzled when I at first couldn't find any link to Canada. At the time (probably due to denial) I brushed it off as Americans not wanting to admit that one of their most beloved institutions was created by a Canadian (sorry Americans but a: like I said I was in denial and b: it seemed like something that some Americans would do). It wasn't until a few years later that I discovered that there is no way any of that could be right. I found out that Joe Shuster was born in Toronto but his family moved to Cleveland Ohio when he was just ten years old which as you know is in the United States of America. He met Jerry Siegel in high school (still in Cleveland) and the two of them eventually started their own sci-fi fanzine called Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization (admittedly not the catchiest title in the world!) where in the third issue they did a story called The Reign of the Superman.

    In the original story a down and out man named Bill Dunn is standing in a bread line (this was the Great Depression after all) when Professor Earnest Smalley, a mad chemist, tells him he'll give him a "real meal and a nice suit" Dunn eagerly agrees and follows the professor to his home. Smalley tricks him into drinking a secret formula he'd been working on made out of a meteor that fell near his home. The Prof is a spoiled trust fund millionaire who wants to basically use Dunn as a guinea pig for his experiments. Bill Dunn gets wise that something is up and flees the house when Smalley leaves the room. He then starts hearing the thoughts of everyone in the surrounding area and passes out. When he awakens he pulls himself together and finds out that besides telepathy he can also see the surface of Mars and later realizes that if he concentrates he can see anywhere in the universe he wants including the near future! He also can basically brainwash anyone in the world to do or say what ever he wants them too and that's it, those are his only powers. Oh and either as a result of the drug or just because the realization makes him drunk with power, he becomes a massive a-hole who eventually tries to conquer the world and has no problem starting WWII (this was written before the Nazis took power in Germany and before Mussolini started implementing many of his fascist policies in real life mind you) he kills Smalley (although that part was sort of done in self defense) and is about to kill a reporter who stumbled upon the whole thing and who was a good guy when he realizes he is about to lose all his powers and go back to being in the breadlines. Luckily this gives him a change of heart and he doesn't murder the innocent reporter.  Reading it you can tell it was written by a couple of high school students in the early 1930s who were heavily influenced by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (their "Superman" is similar to his Übermensch). The story was written in 1932 by Jerry Siegel under the pen name Herbert S. Fine. A year later he had Shuster do some illustrations to jazz up the piece and he drew William "The Superman" Dunn as an evil bald guy in an expensive business suit, Lex Luthor's character design was obviously a wink to this story... oooorrr Shuster was incredibly lazy I'm not sure which is the most true. 

    "Ok," you're thinking "that's all very interesting but I thought this blog was a response to your friend posting a Heritage Minute video!" Well have no fear because there was a point to that last paragraph and hopefully some of you are already starting to piece it together. In the Heritage Minute one of the VERY FIRST THINGS WE SEE is a piece of text which says "Cleveland , Ohio 1931" (at least they admit Cleveland exists?). Ignoring the fact that he's not a 17 year old (maybe he was supposed to be 17 but they did the old film and television tradition of casting a guy in his thirties to be a teenager who knows?) we see a young man raving excitedly about some dude who has amazing powers and abilities. It is obvious early on that he's talking about the classic golden age Superman character that boy turns out to be Canadian Joe Shuster who single handedly created Superman all on his own. As you just read though the proto-Superman  story wouldn't even be written until the following year and not by him but by SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY!!! As far as I know Joe Shuster didn't even know the story existed until Jerry Siegel showed it to him when he decided to put it in their third fanzine issue and wanted Shuster to draw a few pictures for it! If they were trying to be at all factual they should have had the title come up and have him be like "Jerry says he's going to be able to read minds and see out onto other planets and maybe even into the future!" Followed by the Lois woman going "Your friend's idea sounds like a jacked up version of Thus spoke Zarathustra, plus it's kind of dumb!" at the end he'd hand her a piece of paper with a bald dude in an expensive suite drawn on it and say "Oh by the way if he asks me to illustrate it for the magazine this is what I was thinking he'd look like!" followed by the narrator (who by the way is noticeably absent in this one as if when they approached him he was all like "Eff that noise I'm not involving myself in this lie!") going "That idea was a huge flop but it led them to later retool the character from the ground up as Superman!" But no of course they don't care about minor details like 'the truth'. 

    So that's the biggest problem with this whole thing but it's not the only one. To continue the story obviously you know that the proto-superman (as I call him) was not the version we are familiar with today. The reason he was so different was that Siegel and Shuster tried to get the story published but the major pulp and magazine publishers could not be less interested, besides being a naïve short story written by a high schooler there were a few rookie mistakes that even I noticed like typos etc which right there would have made it look unprofessional and turned me off to printing it if I were a big time editor although I would have given them props for having a character in the story read an issue of the very magazine it was in (the old man was reading it on page 4)! Siegel thought long and hard about it and eventually decided that the whole "If only I had helped the world instead of trying to conquer it" idea he presented at the end of the story would make for a much better premise then 'our hero is a dick that you want to punch in the face who suddenly grows a conscience when it no longer matters' one that he had originally written. Siegel retooled the story so that now the superman would have more physical abilities instead of mental ones and disguise himself as a shy meek quiet sort of guy in order to live a normal life (some accounts claim he based Clark Kent after Shuster's personality) he created the character of Lois Lane as a sort of in joke because he was kind of girl crazy in his teens but few of the girls he liked wanted to have anything to do with him so wouldn't it be funny if the love interest was infatuated with Superman but absolutely loathed Clark Kent not knowing they were the same person? Jerry Siegel told Joe Shuster his new ideas and also said that now he wanted to do it as a comic book (a bold idea when you consider there were very few original comic books in 1934, most being reprints of newspaper funnies). In those early days Superman could run at speeds of up to 100 m/h (most cars couldn't even do that back then), he could leap tall buildings in a single bound (not fly), he could lift a large heavy duty truck over his head no problem and bend steel with his bare hands and was basically impervious to bullets. As far as I can remember those were his original powers (I've already read so much writing and fact checking this article that I don't feel like tracking down a reprint of Action No. 1 to cross check) Joe took all of this into consideration. He based Superman's face on Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Clark Kent's look was taken from another movie star of the day Harold Lloyd. He gave Superman a cape in order to better show his movements, after all what's the point of having him do extraordinary feats if no one can tell that's what's happening? Shuster had Superman and his Clark Kent personas based on movie stars. For the Lois character he spotted an ad in the newspaper written by an amateur model looking for work. That girl turned out to be Joanne Carter (her real name was Jolan Kovacs). The two hired her and ended up basing Lois Lane's looks on Joanne. Joanne also was apparently the basis for Lois Lane's personality (well according to Siegel anyway who ran into her years later and eventually married). Even though they didn't meet her until the first issue's script was finished when the first issue failed to get a publisher Jerry Siegel tried to burn it. Joe Shuster was able to save his original cover page and persuaded Siegel to keep trying. Jerry Siegel re-wrote the script, presumably with Lois's new personality since even in early Superman stories she was a bit more two dimensional then the original concept would suggest. The reason I even mention that little tidbit was that when you hear it you realize that the 'Lois' person in the Heritage Minute whom we are to assume was to become the basis for Lois Lane WASN'T EVEN BASED ON A REAL PERSON!!!!!!!!!

So lets recap: 

1. The first Superman story wasn't even written until a full year after this supposed 'reenactment' was taking place.
2. Superman was completely different originally even when it was written.
3. The person who came up with all of his abilities and his secret identity was NOT Joe Shuster as they claim it was but Jerry Seigel, I would use the defense that perhaps he is just telling her what Jerry Seigel told him but it is obvious that he's making up stuff on the spot so even that defense won't work.
4. It doesn't matter anyway because Joe Shuster and his family moved to the states when he was nine or ten, thus making that "You Canadian kids" line that the woman says to him strange since he technically wasn't a Canadian anymore, thus negating the whole point of doing a Heritage Minute about it in the first place since it's more a part of our southern neighbor's heritage when you think about it.
5. Lois Lane wasn't based on a friend of Joe Shuster's but was an amalgam of different women originally, most notably a model they hired in the eleventh hour of development (in 1934 no less).

    There are two other tiny bits of criticism I have about the Heritage Minute one is that Joe Shuster says "That's it, a bullet! A bullet, he's faster then a -no he's faster then a speeding bullet!" Superman was pretty fast in the original comics but it wasn't until at least the radio show in 1940 that he was "faster then a speeding bullet" and most film and cartoon historians credit the Max Fleischer cartoons of late 1941 (one of the film historians in the special features of the DVD says it was most likely Fleischer studios who came up with that line though the radio show could have, something none of the other websites mentioned proving I've done more research so HA IN YOUR FACE!!!!) with that line which would make it a full decade too early for him to day that! The other thing is that as he's leaving she says "See what your cousin Frank says in Toronto" which may seem odd until you realize that... no wait let me re-phrase that, which defiantly seems odd when you realize that she's talking about his first cousin Frank Shuster who you may recognize as the first half of the famous Canadian comedy duo Wayne & Shuster. They were a famous team from the early 1940s-1980s on Canadian radio, television and movies as well as guest starring on the Ed Sullivan Show a record breaking sixty-seven times and various other cameos on American TV. Frank, however, is two years younger then Joe so in 1931 that would make him fifteen or even fourteen years old. Why then would Lois give him that advise? Is it because Joe Shuster was in the target demographic? Because I'm pretty sure that Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster were gearing the book more toward young adults closer to their ages at the time. The only reason that's in there is because clearly the person who wrote it was told to mention that they were related somehow but didn't know how to work it in (although they took so many embellishments with the truth anyway I'm surprised and disappointed that they couldn't find a better more clever way to do that).

    You're still reading? Ok good! Don't worry I'm almost done I just wanted to address some things for my closing statements. My original plan was to spend no more then an hour on this and then publish it but near the end of the introductory paragraph I decided I WOULDN'T be like the Historica Dominion Institute and would actually do some research! That was four days ago and I'm just finishing it now (oh well at least you know I didn't just pull this all out of my @$$). Anyway in that time I found out that the stuff I mentioned about the newspaper being based on the Toronto Daily Star and Metropolis being Toronto originated from a 1992 interview with Joe Shuster himself! In the interview he claimed that as a boy his father would read him the funny pages from the Toronto Daily Star and that was what got him interested early on in science fiction and illustration. Then when he was a little older he got a job as a paperboy for that same newspaper (so I guess they were part right he did work for the Toronto Daily Star just not the way they thought). While it was Jerry Seigel's idea to have Clark and Lois work for a paper he let Joe Shuster come up with the name and look of it so Shuster called it the Daily Star, then when Superman was picked up for international syndication one of the editor in chiefs over at National Allied Publications (one of the companies that eventually merged to become DC Comics) made them change it to The Daily Planet for some reason. In that same interview Shuster also admitted that early Metropolis was based on Toronto: 

"Cleveland was not nearly as Metropolitan as Toronto was, and it was not as big or as beautiful. Whatever buildings I saw in Toronto remained in my mind and came out in the form of Metropolis... As I realized later on, Toronto is a much more beautiful city then Cleveland ever was... I guess I don't have to worry about saying that now."

 Well that certainly seems cut and dry now doesn't it? Clearly he admits to it in this interview, who did this again? Oh ya it was THE TORONTO 'FREAKIN' STAR!!!!!!!!! Forgive me of being a little suspicious that this piece is in some way biased! It was the only interview he ever did where he said that and he died later that year before he could retract it! I wouldn't be as up in arms if it weren't for the fact that I've seen pictures of both cities in the 1930s and-- you know what? See for yourself!

Here is Toronto's Skyline in the 1930s...

Now Here's Cleveland...

...Finally here are some shots of Metropolis from Action Comics #8

Now I don't know about you but I think that looks more like Cleveland, especially the orange tower in the background behind the truck in the fourth panel (looks like the centre tower in the Cleveland photo to me) and the square buildings in the sixth panel (in front of the centre tower in the Cleveland photo). Since the article was part of a series about the history of the 100th anniversary of the Toronto Star it would make sense that Shuster would try to flatter them and exaggerate the importance the newspaper and indeed the city had on the creation of Superman but that one I'll leave up to you since it's not actually related to the main focus of this article which is the Heritage Minute.

    So there you have it, every time I see this now all those facts and arguments flood into my mind at the same time so I'm sure you can understand why I'd be angry enough to write a lengthy blog about it! Oh and just so we're clear this isn't the only problematic one they did. Oh no remember how I said that 76 of these things aired but only 74 are available online? Well one of the missing ones was about peace keepers in Cyprus. A Canadian peace keeper saves a Greek Cypriot from a Turkish one. This used to be shown on TV and was played in the old Museum of Civilization in Ottawa but the Turkish government protested because the Turk was wearing a fez, something that was banned by the Turkish government in 1925 (fezzes were part of a religious caste system and so when the country became a secular democracy they were banned, it's actually a good thing when you read more about it) now you can't find it on DVD, VHS (who watches those anymore anyway am I right people?) or on the official website (no one's posted it on youtube either as far as I know). Kind of makes you wonder what other poorly researched and factually inaccurate ones exist? I know from now on I'll never be able to trust them and will always be suspicious whenever they come on because apparently they don't do any fact checking or have any rules about what you can and cannot say in them!

Have any thoughts about this article? Leave a comment! I'd be happy to hear what you have to say! Oh and sorry if this article shattered your childhood like realizing the truth did mine...

Research:                                                                                    

1. I got most of my info about the Heritage Minutes from Wikipedia
2. As well as some of my Joe Shuster research,
3. My Jerry Siegel research, 
4. My Joanne Carter research,
5. My Wayne & Shuster research,
6. The three or more articles I read about Nietzsche's Übermensch, 
7. And my Reign of the Superman research
8. Additional Joe Shuster research including the only quote from that Toronto Star article I could find came from this website
9. I got my city skyline photos and the Action Comics #8 panels from this website, I was google image searching for "Cleveland Skyline 1930s" and stumbled on a blog article much like this one but written by an American blogger and actually giving Shuster's Canadian roots more credit then I did. In a further co-incidence I own and thoroughly enjoyed the book he wrote called Was Superman a Spy?
10. There were a few additional sources but I either already linked to them during the actual article (I'm thinking of you Reign of Superman full scan and Historica Dominion website! ) or forgot where I saw them.

Local Blogger Returns to Home Planet After Year Long Hiatus!!!

    ...Well ok perhaps I haven't been doing any interstellar traveling but I was really busy shortly after the first post and then forgot I had this page...then I remembered I had it but couldn't remember what my login password was and now I've finally remembered where I wrote the damned thing down so I'm back on the air! (or net as it were) anyway one of the reasons that I created this page/decided to get back into it was that I needed an outlet to vent sometimes about things or wanted to share things that are perhaps too meaty for a V-Log or facebook post. Lately something weighing on my mind was the recent and unexpected death of one of my favorite professors in the Television & New Media classes I attended at Loyalist College. And so in one of the most blatant tonal shifts since 1983's Pod People jumping from horror flick to kid friendly E.T. Rip-off (if you don't know what I'm talking about type in "MST3K Pod People" in Google Video and watch the full 97 minute one); I'm going to talk about Kevin Sansom.

    For the past three days since his death I've been reading tributes and eulogies about him on facebook (they don't use a capital 'F' so neither will I damn it!) I even shared a story of my own but the thing is after writing it I got thinking that what I wrote wasn't my favorite memory of Kevin. No my favorite memories, the moments I cherished the most were the small ones that don't really make a great story and don't mean much to other people but certainly mean a lot to me. Kevin Sansom taught computer classes and the like and so whenever a piece of editing equipment would break or act strange the catch phrase was "Quick go find Kevin!" You could usually hear this battle cry coming from the halls of the editing suites if you hung around long enough and I often found myself either saying it or following it. This was so common an event that in the facaulty offices of the television department there were signs with arrows leading to Kevin's office saying things like "KEVIN IS THIS WAY!!!" (someone was obviously a Loony Tunes fan!) anyway back to my point, my favorite memories of Kevin were the ones that took place during those moments. When I would eventually track him down (if he wasn't teaching a class) we would hurry back to wherever I was working and often times he would fix the problem in under two seconds. Occasionally though he would get a little stumped and have to try different things to get it to work. When that would happen we would both try to solve the problem together. Now maybe it's because I'm a guy but I actually love problem solving when a solution is eventually found. And so whenever something would go awry even though I'd want to get back to work quickly deep down I'd secretly hope it would take Kevin several minutes to figure it out and that his first couple guesses wouldn't work (plus not feeling like a complete idiot was nice too). I remember there were a couple occasions where it was the first time he'd encountered that specific problem before. Those were my favorites because we would just make small talk while we worked on the problem with the occasional "...ok try that..." thrown in and when we finally would find the solution he was one of those people who would make you feel like it was both of your accomplishment even though in truth he did the lion's share of the work (he'd say things like "See? Even I learned something new today!")

    Last night as I walked home from work I was thinking about these times and was pretty sad when I thought I'd never experience them again. Then I thought that reaction was a bit odd considering that I was finished with the program since April and wouldn't have had these moments again anyway but then it occurred to me that no one will ever get to experience those brief moments of panic followed by Kevin's calm reassurances and random conversations about nothing in particular ever again and that made me really sad! You know often times, too often in fact, in life we are so focussed on the "big moments" that we forget about the little ones. Especially in times like these and that's really a shame because that's what 90% of our lives and our relationships with other people are made of; just small random otherwise insignificant moments of enjoying each-other's company. In my quest to think of a good story to be read at Kevin's memorial service I kept brushing aside all those small moments in my memory for that one good "story" I'm glad now that I went back later and realized just how important those small memories were and always will be.

    And now we reach the end of this article where I sum everything up for you. I hope in reading this you found at least a little inspiration and laughed a little (heck I'd consider "almost laughter" as a victory!) because that was the kind of guy Kevin Sansom was all over, a confidant yet quiet individual who could both calm your nerves with laughter and wit or inspire you to do great work depending on what the situation called for and that is why so many will miss him, I doubt I will ever meet anyone quite like that again.

As always,

                 -I'm Adam Shaughnessy and Adam Dingman
                                                                                    
                                                                                      Thanks for reading!

Know Your Noir Part I: A Brief History...

Hey gang,


    When I went back on this site to write my tribute to Kevin Sansom I found this article still waiting in the draft section. I had completely forgotten about it and apparently the last time I worked on it was around June 9th, 2011 at 12:56am. Originally it was going to be a pre-curser to a classic film review V-Log series I was going to start making but ended up indefinitely postponing in favor of using the time I would have spent on it to work on my comic with Lucas Jones instead. I decided I'd show you what I had done on it and then in a different font conclude it for you Enjoy!


                            -Adam


Thanks to the huge hype that the video game L.A. Noir has been getting lately I have been thinking a lot about the Film Noir genre and watching (or re-watching) some of the ones that I own. I thought it would be good to do a review of some of those films and give you an idea of what Film Noir actually is since many of you have probably heard of it before but never had it explained to you properly.

To understand what it is it helps to understand where Noir came from and how it came to be. Film Noir can trace it's roots back to the late 1800s. Thanks to the industrial revolution many cities had become little more then cesspools. The air was full of ash and soot, the people worked in sweatshops and then went home to their disease filled over crowded slums and open sewage even flowed through the gutters. As a result moral depravity and indecency of all sorts became wide spread. Heinous crimes like London's Jack the Ripper filled the newspaper headlines. Obviously you can't have all that happen without it affecting the culture and soon literature began to reflect more the world around it and became darker and more gritty. For entertainment people began reading pulp magazines which were becoming more and more popular. Pulp magazines cost next to nothing to publish thanks in part to the fact that they were made out of recycled cheap pulp paper (hence the name pulp magazine). The magazines flourished and evolved. Many famous heros and stories of the day were started in the pulps which continued right up to the 1950s. Authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler published some of their most famous works originally as monthly pulp novels or novellas (every month the books would release a new chapter like comic books do today). By the 1930s and 40s the predominant hero of the books was the hard boiled private detective. Many of the most famous noir films are actually screen adaptations of pulp stories.


    Ok so here's where we come in with the continuation on November 13th, 2011. While the characters of noire may owe their lineage to the British and American pulps of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century the distinct look and style of the films can trace it's roots to mainland Europe.


    Around the same time that Pulps were becoming popular an artistic movement known as Expressionism was coming into prominence. Paintings like The Scream By Edvard Munch, Nollendorfplatz by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner others began using exaggerated shapes and heavy shadows that were far from reality in order to establish mood. The movement became so popular it later went on to influence not only paintings but sculpture, dance, literature, theatre, architecture, music and most importantly of all (to this article) film! Following the first world war new social realities in the Weimar Republic (pre-Nazi Germany) began to seep into art. Filmmakers and filmgoers alike became drawn to the new film movement sweeping Germany. While many of the earlier films of the German Expressionist movement like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari look just like the paintings they were influenced by, later ones such as Nosferatu and Metropolis for example, toned down the surrealist sets in favor of using shadows and weird camera moves to capture the expressionist mood (I acknowledge that there is still a little expressionist influence in the set design though). These films not only influenced German filmmakers but a whole new generation all around the world. Since many artists of all kinds including filmmakers were highly political (or seen to be) and promoted ideas that countered National Socialism (Nazis) many of them had to flee Europe when or shortly after Adolph Hitler came to power. Eventually many of them made their way to Hollywood where they started to work their European (many Czech and other Europeans started copying the German expressionist filmmaking before exile) styles into American films. At the same time the American born filmmakers who were either influenced by imported films when they were starting in their early careers or were later influenced by their peers from Europe were starting to be put in the director's chair themselves. This amalgam of European and American film styles slowly but surely gave birth to the Noire genre we know today. 


    The term is credited as being first used by Nino Frank, a French film reviewer in 1946. Since there were trade embargoes on the Third Reich, no new American films had been seen in France after it's fall in 1940. Watching a plethora of the Hollywood films that were coming in from the last six years Nino Frank noticed how different the American "Police Drama" films had become since he last had seen any. He called the new style "Black Film" because of its use of heavy over exaggerated shadows and dark cynical subject matter. The term wasn't well known in the States until around the 1970s (prior to that they were just seen mostly as ordinary "melodrama" films).


    Originally I was going to end this by mentioning L.A. Noire again and my hopes for that game but since it's already been released and I've purchased and beaten it I can't really write that ending anymore now can I (that game was awesome by the way!)?! So instead I will say that I hope this was interesting and that it was written in a style that I probably won't use as much since it's not exciting or zany enough and I want to attract a wider variety of readers. Oh well this was written and planned while I was still trying to find what tone I wanted to write in and it was an experiment so I don't regret it. I may continue the series (Know Your Noire) at some point but I haven't decided yet. If you didn't get bored and are still reading this and want to see more articles like it you should let me know in the comments section I'm always eager to see people's feedback!


Until next time thanks for reading!


Sincerely,


                  -Adam Shaughnessy (a.k.a. Adam Dingman)

First Blog!

Upon hearing news from a friend that Pearl Jam had recently announced a long term hiatus I decided to do some research to find out if that were true. In my search I came across an article by some idiot calling himself "Simon Sweetman" in it he berated Pearl Jam and said all kinds of nasty things about the greatest band in human history (at least in this blogger's humble opinion). So what did I do about it? Well after leaving one of hundreds of comments (I'm not kidding either) pointing out how much of a tool this guy was (even if you abhor Pearl Jam it was still a bad article for a so called "professional blogger), I did what any other post-modern 26 year old classic alternative punk males would do in today's society; I decided to wright my own blog!

I had been debating whether or not writing a blog would make me cool or just a giant knob for a while now but I decided it was a good way to vent and speak my opinion (this way people can choose if they want to hear it). Of course after I started writing this I got side tracked as usual and after watching tv and eating a bowl of Ramen noodles I had calmed down and realized that I was just rambling on and it was like 2:15AM already and I need to get up at like ten (also the name of PJ's first album by the way!) so I'll delay my thoughts on Pearl Jam which was the whole point of this in the first place (oops!) for another day and get some much needed shut eye.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!

p.s. oh and by the way what happened was that Pearl Jam wrapped up their Backspacer tour in Portugal a few days ago and Eddy wanted to tell the audience in Portuguese something to the effect of "Thank you very much for coming! This may be the last show of the tour but not our last show here we'll be back!" but the translator wrote on a piece of paper for Eddy to say in Portuguese "Thank you all for coming to our last show, not our last show ever but our last show for a while." the rumor mill went nuts until Pearl Jam found out about the mix up and had their spokesperson clarify what happened.