Warning Labels

I watched a little of Good Morning America this morning. I've been walking to work in an effort to lose weight again (I gained back 20 of the 50 that I lost. I'm a little irritable about that), and walk with a co-worker. We meet at about 7:30, and I had time to sit and get some news.

I had one of these 'Oh good grief!' reactions this morning. They were talking about the Food and Drug Administration wanting the pharmaceutical companies to put being warning labels onto their products. There byline was something like 'Overdosing can cause damage to your bodies.'

...

Well, DUH! That's the definition of OVERDOSING.

We don't need bigger labels on the packages. We need people to stop popping three times as many pills as what the company says. More is not always better, and the pain doesn't stop immediately. Give the drugs time to work before you say, 'gosh, I still have a headache.'

They had a five minute peice on later saying essentially 'Follow the instructions printed on the label.'

Once again...DUH!

Okay, my rant is done for now. Thank you for listening.

Legion of Superheroes

Recently, I happened to catch an episode of the Legion of Superheroes on the Kids WB. It’s done in the anime-ized version of the Batman Animated Series, much like the Teen Titans (although, thankfully, they did take a step back from that.) I found the episode okay. It followed on of the stories of one of the most popular heroes Timber Wolf.

Seeing it triggered my want to go back and take a look at the original comics again. I had read a few in middle school and high school, but a friend from college – Chad Roseland – got me hooked into them. I have a pretty complete collection of them from the early 90s through to the early 00s. It’s been a fun read of going back through them.

It’s been quite a trip. As a superhero group set in the future, they have gone through many incarnations. I have got a couple that took place before ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths,’ so I saw the Superboy connection. With the Crisis, Superboy disappeared, and they set up Mon-El/Valor (my personal favorite Legionaire) up as the ‘savior and seeder’ of the future. It was a fairly ‘ideal’ future.

They did go and do a really dark version of the future, where the major characters were allowed to grow up and you got to see ‘what happened’ after the civilization collapsed. Earthgov was controlled by an alien race (the Dominators), the ‘heart of the Legion’ Cosmic Boy had lost his powers, the Legion was outlawed. It was pretty gritty.

Some readers apparently wanted the return of the sweet kids, so they created a ‘clone’ Legion, and for a while they had both the gritty dark future Legion and the sweet teen Legion going at the same time.

DC’s Zero Hour jump started the Legion, getting rid of all of its past. They started from the beginning again. I enjoyed the read – kind of the early ‘Ultimate’ type of series. It was a good balance of the sweet teen and the gritty.

They cancelled the series in the early 00’s, and restarted it again, I made the hard choice not to get it. I didn’t really like the direction it had been going, and, well, let’s face it, comic collecting can get very expensive. I haven’t read a new Legion in years, but I still have a warm spot in my heart for them.

Open House

My work had its yearly Christmas open house yesterday. Essentially, it is a day we open up our offices to the rest of the campus. We are located right at the edge of campus, so very rarely do others come down to visit. We get up on to campus a little more regularly, but we still don't see folks that often.

Part of our open house is to supply the campus with wonderful food. I supply the meat and cheeses tray (which I buy - I'm a little too lazy to try to slice all the cheese and meat myself - that, and I can't slice it nearly thin enough), and I usually bring chocolate chip cookies. I spent part of Saturday night making chocolate chip cookies. It was very nice, and of course, the cookie dough was very good as well.

I thought this year I'd try something a little more this year as well. I made ginger snaps. The internet is a wonderful tool; it works well as a cookbook too. So, I got the recipe. I bought fresh ginger, grated it in front of the Vikings game, and then finised making them during the Packers game. All in all, it was a successful Sunday, but the ginger snaps were wonderful, if I do say so myself. I found out that ginger snaps are my friend Dag's favorite cookie, too, so I'll probably be making them again in January sometime.

It's been a good couple of days. Today, I'm supposed to be off towards Turkey Valley High School, but there is a 2 hour late start due to fog. Ah, well. I'll be out of here in a couple of hours.

Brrrr

Well, here I am taking a vacation day from work. Why, you may ask.

Because our furnace has stopped working, it's 50 degrees inside, and someone has to wait here for the furnace folks to call us back.

I'm a little grumpy. Can you tell?