Modest Apocalypse

CRK!
CRKK!
CRRAKKK!

That's the sound about fifty feet of tree makes when it's buffeted by ridiculous winds, snaps, and takes out your chainlink fence. Or it would be if the last "Crrakkk!" was about five times the size.

On the upside, nobody was parked in the spot traditionally used for parking next to the house. Nobody's going to for awhile, either, as there's a bloody great tree parked there at the moment.

According to a neighbour out surveying the carnage, the cloud-covered sky was lit pink an hour or so back. "That's not a good sign," he said, and given that a good portion of the fence is now roughly parallel with the ground, I believe him. It calmed down for awhile, but the lightning and thunder picked up a few minutes ago and are currently blasting the sky to shreds. The real damage in the neighbourhood seems to have come almost entirely from the wind. Sounds like someone had a branch blast through their window down the street, and a van got taken out by another falling tree a few blocks down.

Tiina's going to have a big surprise when she gets back from the Harry Potter movie in half an hour or so...

***

NOTES

A couple follow-ups on this last few days' postings.

First, the TYRESE GIBSON'S MAYHEM! promotional train keeps on rolling, with Gibson's efforts being both successful (at least in terms of first issue sales, which is the metric all the PR's focusing on--personally, I'll be more interested in seeing how the second to fourth issues sell. The problem with selling 20k copies of a #1 is that unless your fans are really, really fanatical, you're likely facing a pretty steep drop when it comes time to order #2...)

That was a long parenthetical. Let me try that again: The TYRESE GIBSON'S MAYHEM! promotional train keeps on rolling, with Gibson's "grassroots" efforts being both successful and not terribly appreciated by retailer Brian Hibbs.

Something about the whole "make #1 sales look huge" scheme seemed off to me, and it took me awhile to put my finger on it. The whole thing was clarified somewhat--hey, I do believe it's hailing now. Real Wrath of God stuff. Man, that is something.

OK, the whole thing was clarified somewhat when it was pointed out to me that Platinum's attempts to manipulate sales numbers for Cowboys & Aliens didn't fool anyone in the comics industry and almost certainly wasn't intended to. Rather, it was likely aimed at getting the attention of Hollywood in general, and quite possibly at two of the three current screenwriters attached to the film (Orci and Kurtzman) in particular. Granted, the attempt to have the #1-selling graphic novel of December 2006 was foiled when Diamond reclassified the book as something other than a graphic novel. Fortunately (from Platinum's point of view), by that point it had already appeared as a #1 seller (for a specific store) in Entertainment Weekly. Sure, in the next EW the editors made a point of mentioning that the book was really more of a promotional item, but as far as I can tell, Platinum doesn't mention that in the PR.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at, in my own ramblingly incoherent way, is that Platinum's manipulation didn't fool anyone in the comics industry, and the "sales" numbers of TYRESE GIBSON'S MAYHEM! #1 isn't going to fool anyone in the comic industry either. I'm really not sure who those numbers are intended to fool--the "hater" in me is tempted to believe the person they're really fooling is Gibson himself, based on his really hammering what's pretty obviously an inflated number in the interviews I've read. But Gibson is a "2.0 celebrity", and rightly or wrongly, my kneejerk instinct is to associate the attachment of "2.0" to anything that's not a computer program with attempts to artificially create the kind of multimedia sensation that can't really be artificially created. So I wouldn't be surprised if there are plans to try and develop TYRESE GIBSON'S MAYHEM! as a film or TV vehicle almost certainly starring Tyrese Gibson. I wonder if the film would still be called TYRESE GIBSON'S MAYHEM!...? And, giving Gibson the benefit of the doubt, maybe his attempts to portray the direct market sales of the first issue as an indicator of actual wide interest are for the benefit of someone who'd actually believe it. The whole thing's just weird to me, is all.

Also: yes, for a good portion of high school I thought condoms were apartments you owned like a house.

A