Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Stray Voltage: April 10th, 2013

I'm in Albany on business this week.  Yesterday, we discussed a bit about the Free Market, with a mechanic's eye to the possibility of bolting on a steering wheel and stick shift, so that we could drive the market in whatever direction we wanted.

No, not really.

What we really talked about was gas/electric coordination and reliability and the reality of the fact that the whole country--but New York and New England in particular--are becoming increasingly dependent on natural gas for power generation.  Which in turn makes the electric business increasingly dependent on natural gas pipelines.  That's not exactly a problem, per se, but pipeline capacity is a limited resource, and while we can address it at some level with fuel diversity, reality again is that gas is much cleaner than the alternatives--and usually cheaper, too.

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In case you missed it, the Washington Times today has a story on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, who apparently studied in the West as a kid.  The story's kind of what you'd expect, so much so that I think it's proof positive that you simply cannot trust the quiet ones.

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I started reading some of the GI Joe: Cobra mini-series yesterday, and I gotta say that it is as good as advertised.  The story here is that a Joe washout gets sent undercover with Cobra... and wackiness ensues.

Actually, that's as far as I've gotten.  But so far as it's gone, it's been pretty good.

Also read some of the old 1980s comics yesterday, too, and those were a riot as well.  Very different stylistically from what's being put out today, but I liked that old style.  

More talking, more exposition... more story.  I get that it's less "cinematic" or whatever, but the fact is that I still think of comics as an at least partially literary medium, meaning that words are fine.  You don't have to deconstruct everything to the max and make it widescreen.  Sometimes, you can just tell a story in simple terms, and if it's a good story, we'll all still like it.

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