{"id":443,"date":"2006-11-15T11:01:06","date_gmt":"2006-11-15T11:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=443"},"modified":"2006-11-15T11:01:06","modified_gmt":"2006-11-15T11:01:06","slug":"sea-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=443","title":{"rendered":"Sea Town"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m housesitting for a week in Seatoun, up on the hill. My workspace holds a commanding view over the eastern side of Wellington harbour, including the channel out to the the Cook Strait and the hills of the Wairarapa. Clouds are eating the whole horizon as I type, so the the view proceeds from perfect white sky down to release a short tumble of bush-clad hillside before striking the shoreline. It is very still.
\n===
\nGetting lots of writing done. This is a very good thing. Feel like I’m making progress with the Ron the Body writing, in that I’m genuinely expressing the tale at its core in an effective way. I’ll see how much Ron I can get done this week, but it feels like I’ve finally found some momentum on this. Writing long-form works is all about momentum, and it can be damn hard to take hold of that.
\n===
\nHave nosed through house-host’s shelves and, feeling myself coming down with a cold last night I pulled out and read a Batman comic collection, ‘A Death In The Family’. This is the infamous storyline where Batman readers were invited to call a 900 number and vote for whether Robin would live or die. The vote came out narrowly on ‘die’, and having read the crappy character of this Robin for the first time, I’m not surprised.
\nAs a comics geek I’ve known about this story for two decades but I’ve never known that the whole storyline is set in the Middle East. (Which apparently includes Ethiopia, but there you go.) Batman and Robin go into Lebanon and fight terrorists. And what really astonished me, as in I had to check I wasn’t dreaming, was the bit where Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeinei appears in Ethiopia and offers Batman’s homicidal maniac arch-villain the job of Iranian ambassador to the UN.
\nSo the final chapter has the Joker wearing Saudi-style ‘Arab dress’ and ranting at the UN about how Iran is really like he is and then trying to kill everyone in the General Assembly with a deadly gas. Batman and Superman team up to stop him, while berating the evils of diplomatic immunity, Iran-Contra, the American Embassy hostage situation in Tehran, and the obvious wickedness of Iran.
\n(Side note: the only good character in the whole story, apart from the core cast, is an Israeli agent.)
\nIt was quite ridiculous. Wikipedia notes<\/a>: “The story arc was panned by many as implausible, and some have accused Starlin’s depiction of the Middle East as racist…” which at least confirms this really happened. Weird.
\n===
\nI can find no update on the V situation. Can anyone else uncover a follow-up?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m housesitting for a week in Seatoun, up on the hill. My workspace holds a commanding view over the eastern side of Wellington harbour, including the channel out to the the Cook Strait and the hills of the Wairarapa. Clouds are eating the whole horizon as I type, so the the view proceeds from perfect … Continue reading Sea Town<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-79","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}