Saturday, September 04, 2004

A HORRID DAY FOR THE MID-AMERICAN CONFERENCE: Just brutal:

Boston College 19, Ball State 11
Michigan 43, Miami 10
Oklahoma 40, Bowling Green 24
Wisconsin 34, UCF 6
Iowa 39, Kent State 7
Penn State 48, Akron 10
Maryland 23, NIU 20
Indiana 41, Central Michigan
Minnesota 63, Toledo 14

A total disaster if you're a MAC fan like me and you wanted another weekend of upsets in the early going--really my favorite part of the season, before everyone gets bogged down in a bunch of tedious local rivalries no national sports fan cares about. AND before the useless conclusions to the season, with no real champion and a whole lot of whining and polling and senseless, sport-destroying controversy. But this year--nothing. Almost every MAC team got crushed by a BCS team. And Marshall lost to Troy State. Only NIU and to a lesser extent Bowling Green kept it close. (And the BC-Ball State game, but BC isn't exactly major college football either.) Now, most of these games were away games--BCS teams are far too cowardly to expose themselves to losses on foreign soil this early on--but still. Were the BCS teams just more prepared this year? Were they all worse last year? Or was the MAC better? Hey, I have no idea. I quit following college football in a few weeks anyway, when all the fun conference vs. conference stuff is over. (No American sport needs promotion/relegation quite like college football, by the way. No American sport needs legitimacy like college football, actually.)

At least Rutgers beat Michigan State.

Watching JLU tonight: How come only Siegel & Schuster, Bob Kane, and William Moulton Marston get credits for Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman? I know Siegel & Schuster had a legal settlement, and I guess Bob Kane did too. And Marston is famous enough that maybe DC would want to make obvious who created Wonder Woman. But none of those characters were even in tonight's episode. Would it kill them to have a "The Question Created By Steve Ditko" thing in there? Or "Supergirl Created By Mort Weisinger"? I guess they think it'll open up more lawsuits, but would not attributing credit preemptively defuse lawsuits?

And I thought Batman was created by Bob Kane AND Bill Finger. What happened to that? Well?

My other comics-related point: I have heard discussion within the comics blogs about the demise of the "floppy", or the 32-page traditional comic book. I am completely fine with this, as long as DC and Marvel keep coming out with these about 200-page collections that contain about an hour's worth of reading, are sub-twenty dollars, and are generally really worth the money since they generally don't leave you hanging until the next volume. Like the Greg Rucka-Klaus Janson Batman comic I just purchased--it's a great little read. I don't feel cheated by having my reading interrupted. So leave the floppies for the collectors, if you must--I understand the comics industry still depends on them--but keep up with the collections for us readers of comics.

That is all.

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