Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be doing something new here. To make up for the drop from three SecGov pages a week to two, I wanted something I could put up on the weekends that would be easy to get out there.

Over the course of my life I have created a lot of superheroes. As far back as I can remember I have been creating superheroes. The earliest I recall was Pat-Man. He was me with the power to turn into a wolf. That’s all he was. I’ve mentioned on the site before that around grade five or six I created a comic starring a guy called Zappo who had electrical powers (and an electrically-powered frog called Zap-Frog). Anyway, I never stopped and don’t plan to soon.

I’ve been a fan of the Marvel Universe since around age ten when I learned of it through trading cards and reading a library copy of the Marvel Handbook A-C a dozen times. The idea of a coherent fictional universe filled with all different types of heroes and adventures is what I wanted out of things. I figure that I have enough notes to populate at least four Superhero Universes with characters. So that’s what I’m gonna do.

For at least a year I’ll be putting up a sketch of a superhero each Sunday. Some will be totally new that I come up with as I sketch, others will be ideas fro Little PDR’s notes. I’ve said more than once that I don’t consider myself an artist and that I only draw my stuff because I don’t have someone else to do it. I will not be designing particularly great costumes or anything, but at least I’m getting ideas out of my head. That’s my goal. That said, at least sketching is easier than doing a whole comic page, that’s for damn sure.

I don’t know quite what it is, but this feels like one of the least educational or captivating Heritage Moments I’ve seen. It’s like this: These guys are practicing music. They have to practice O Canada. They don’t do it well for a second. Then they do it well.

I like that one guy’s accent (are Les Voltigeurs de Quebec a bilingual group or is he speaking Engish because he knows he’s being used to fill Canadian children in the future with national pride?). I like the way he laughs when they don’t play well the first time (I know nothing of professional music. Are they really expected to do it perfectly the first time they see the sheet music?). That’s about all I got here. It’s not bad, it’s just there.

I’m only giving this one Two out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. It washes over me and leaves nothing behind. That’s that. I’m done thinking about it.

There’s a new Dave Barry novel coming out! Learning this proves that my joining Twitter was not a mistake. Learning this proves that my spending a bunch of money and reading time on school was a mistake. I’ve been waiting forever for this it seems like.

I grew up reading Dave Barry’s column every Sunday. I watched the sitcom based on his life. And, most importantly, I read his novels Big Trouble and Tricky Business. Those things were comedy gold. I’ve read them each twice, and this is something true of very few books (Stephen King’s the Stand and George Orwell’s Animal Farm are two of the only others I can think of right now). And then it seemed like there was nothing for a long time. At least one of those novels had a movie version come out, I recall, but eventually my life got significantly less Dave Barry in it. It made me sad. But now there’s a new novel.

The new book, Insane City, of which I have only just learned and haven’t even read what it is about is officially the book I’m looking forward to most in 2013.