Saturday Grab Bag a Dee Doo Dah

I'm headed to the Baltimore Comic Convention today, because a buddy of mine decided to celebrate his own birthday with a group geek outing, and my birthday is not too far away so I'm withdrawing from the self-indulgence bank against that future date. My amazing wife is home by herself with the kids, and hopefully the brood will behave themselves until I can get home. I will report on any interesting revelations, experiences and observations from the event next week, but for now, just a couple of quickie notes!

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So this is the first day off the little guy has had since three days in a row of seven-hour kindergarten shifts. (Eight hours if you count the bus rides.) He's the one I worry about the most, in terms of just going bananas with the freedom (or boredom) of an unstructured day. While the little guy enjoyed the first, second, and third days of school with approximately equal amounts of enthusiasm, I will note that he has already broached the subject of "Soooo ... how long do I have to go to school for, exactly?" I have consistently answered him with "Thirteen years!" in as chipper and nonchalant a tone as I can muster, and for the moment he accepts that (mostly, I suspect, because he really has little to no grasp of how long a year is, yet alone a decade-plus).

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I am enjoying for the moment being on top of the football pick'em pool for the 2013 season! There has been exactly one game, played on Thursday night, and I picked the Broncos to cover the 8 and a half points they were favored by. (In case you missed it, Peyton threw seven TDs and the Broncos won by 22 points.) That pick put me in a seven-way heat for first, while the other twenty-some-odd people who thought the defending Super Bowl champs could win at Mile High (or at least beat the spread) are in their own tie for dead last. The way the displays for the pick'em pool website work, you always see your own name at the top of a similarly-ranked group whenever there's any kind of tie, so as I said, right now I am first-among-equals in position number one. And I am enjoying it because it most certainly will not last! But for one brief shining instant I can feel like a gifted prognosticator.

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I have been seeing this picture:

around teh interwebs for months and months without having any idea what it was. Other than, you know, a demonic-looking Daniel Radcliffe. But since I was under the impression that the erstwhile Harry Potter was trying to move away from genre-ish fare and establish himself as a serious adult actor, I figured it must be a promo still from something highbrow and literary like, I don't know, a BBC production of The Screwtape Letters or something else not exactly my cup of tea.

But then the Toronto International Film Festival started this week and I read some articles about it and suddenly I was hipped to the fact that Radcliffe was cast as Ig in the film adaptation of Horns, which (a) is a novel written by Stephen King's son Joe; (b) is a novel I've read and enjoyed so much I recommend it to (read: push it insistently upon) others; and (c) is a movie I'd actually be interested in seeing. Yes, I might venture out to a first-run theater for a film featuring neither comic book superheroes nor hobbits! OK, it's a supernatural pitch-black horror/comedy, but still. Gotta start broadening those horizons somewhere.