RANDOM THOUGHTS TO START THE WEEK

 

Outside my office window, one of my neighbors has just finished clearing the sidewalks up and down the street with his riding snow plow. It’s the kind of thing neighbors do for each other on Damon Drive. We watched each other’s kids and now, that they are grown, we watch each other’s cats. It’s nice.

I’m staying away from live TV today (Monday) because I have no desire to listen to the media normalize the most stone evil people in the United States. Also, my saintly wife gets way too crazy anxious when Ohio State has a major game. I am respecting her wishes not to have the game on. I have a dozen recorded episodes of House Hunters I can watch instead, not to mention movies and such on my streaming channels. I’m good.

But I will take note of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, recognizing one of the greatest Americans of my life and reminding myself that human decency and excellence has existed in the past and will exist again in the future.

What I’ll be writing today, in between yelling at home buyers complaining they can see their neighbors fa mile away and have to drive thirty minutes to work, are random things that crossed my mind. These are things that are too quickly considered for full blogs, but make a nice compilation of subjects. I hope you enjoy them. 

                                                                               

 

Will the real Harvey Bullock please stand up?

I’m getting ready to watch Collector’s Call on Me TV. I see the end credits of The Andy Griffith Show and they include one for a writer named Harvey Bullock. Probably not an earlier career for the character of the same name in Batman comic books and such. But the name keeps popping on other Andy Griffith episodes and other vintage shows. Sometimes as a producer. Eventually, my curiosity sent me to Google. Where I soon learned this Harvey Bullock had a long and fruitful career in television and movies. But this in turn led me to a comics-related question.

There is a wee dispute over who created the Batman character. He first appeared as “Lt. Bullock” in a handful of panels in a tale by Archie Goodwin and Howard Chaykin. No first name. Which killed my theory that Goodwin might have known, if only by name, the TV writer and producer.

The Harvey Bullock best known to Batman fans appeared nine years later in a story by Doug Moench and Don Newton. Though Goodwin is legally credited as Bullock’s sole creator, Moench has not contested this out of respect for Goodwin. It’s pretty clear the two characters aren’t the same. Moench says he got the name from guitarist Hiram Bullock.

Maybe some day I’ll do a deep dive into the work of TV’s Harvey Bullock. Until then, while I’ll probably still do a double-take whenever I see his credit, I’ll remember the two Harveys aren’t related. Unless Gotham’s Bullock had an uncle?

                                                                       

                                                                      

I started reading Kaiju Unleashed: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Strange Beasts by Shawn Pryor this morning. In his foreword, Jason Barr wrote what I thought was a particularly apt summation of the genre:

It is my belief that the kaiju genre offers us, on the surface, not only the basest of thrills, but the genre also reminds us of the potential for humanity to solve, quite literally, the biggest problems. After all, as humans, we measure ourselves by the adversity we face, and the kaiju is a perfect stand-in for the world-shaking moral issues we collectively face alongside our nettlesome individual challenges. We create the beast in order to reassure ourselves that we can slay it, to see if we can measure up to the task. Sometimes, these victories require great sacrifice and redemption, but, in the end, humanity almost always wins, even if it is a big tenuous at times. And even if it is rarely a lasting victory.

                                                                               

    

I enjoyed Black Panther Vol. 1: Reign at Dusk by Eve L. Ewing recently, even though I hadn’t read the apparently years worth of Black Panther comic books that preceded it. T’Challa has been banished from the throne of Wakanda and is a fugitive living in the city of Birnin T'Chaka under an assumed identity. He’s still fighting for his people, but which fewer resources than he had. Ever since Don McGregor put his indelible stamp on T’Challa back in the 1970s, the character has often had to battle against the most incredible odds.

Today, transgender representation is more important than ever in our lives and in our entertainment. This volume introduced Beisa (Natima Ngoza), a trans woman from a neighboring country who transitioned early in life. Her family seems to have accepted her until she refused to follow in her father's footsteps and join the army. An expert thief and Olympic level athlete, she’s investigating politically-motivated disappearances. Which brings her into conflict and uneasy alliance with the Panther.

I love this new character and the matter-of-fact way in which her situation is introduced. Being trans is not the main thing about her. As I said, I love her a lot, so much so that, in my head, I have been shipping her and T’Challa. I hope to see her continue to play a major role in subsequent volumes.

                                                                             

                                          

The Holiday (2006) is my favorite movie I’ve never seen. Or, to be a bit more accurate, I’ve never seen from start to finish. My entire experience with the film has been finding it while channel-surfing and watching the last forty minutes of it. But, wow, do those final moments have an impact on me.

Here’s the Internet Movie Database summery of The Holiday: Amanda lives in LA and is a movie trailer editor. Iris lives in Surrey and is a journalist. The two decide to swap houses for two weeks at Christmas - both trying to forget their troubled love lives, until love finds them anyways.

Cameron Diaz plays Amanda. Kate Winslet plays Iris. Jude Law is Graham, Amanda’s widowed brother who is raising two young girls. Jack Black plays Miles, a Hollywood film composer. Eli Wallach is Arthur Abbott, a famous screenwriter from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Living next door to Amanda’s LA home, he’s befriended by Iris. Those are the key players.

Here’s why I love this movie I’ve never seen in its entirely. It makes me cry in the very best way. One of the medications I take daily makes me more emotional than usual. There are commercials that make me tear up. There’s the Amazon one where a janitor gets to sing on stage in front of his coworkers. The Toyota one where a father and daughter reunite a little girl with her lost dog. I turn on the waterworks when they run.

There are three wonderful scenes in The Holiday that will always bring forth the tears. The first is when Arthur is honored at a special Writers Guild gala to celebrate his career. He doesn’t think people are interested in him and his work until he enters the auditorium to applause and then takes the stage to reflect on his life and work. Go ahead, Read into this what you will. I won’t deny I take this scene personally.

The second is also at the gala. Miles asks Iris to go out with him on New Year’s Eve. When she says she has to return to London before then, he says he’s never been to England. The two friends become something more in that scene.

The third is when Amanda, finally realizing she’s in love with Graham, tells the driver taking her to the airport to stop the car. She gets out, runs across pristine snowy fields, to Graham. When she gets to his house, she sees he’s been crying over losing her. I can’t watch that scene without smiling through my own tears.

So, yeah, I’m a big old crybaby. Screw you.

I’ll be back soon with more stuff.

© 2025 Tony Isabella