So… I was wandering around Amazon.com today and I saw that apparently “Sleeping Beauty” is going to be released on Blu-ray soon.  Which is great for all those little girls who wished they could really see the details in those flying animals, right?

It was a random enough thing to see that it caught my attention and reminded me of the old fairy tale.  My first gut reaction was that it wasn’t a very feminist story.  My second thought was that it does teach people that it can be good to accept help.  And then my third thought was, “Hey, that story is about Sex Ed!”

Here’s how I recall the plot:

A king and queen wish for a daughter but fail to conceive one through years of attempts.  When finally a daughter is born, a grand christening party is thrown and many are invited including all of the fairies save one: the evil fairy.  At the christening ceremony, the baby receives gifts of character from the fairies like beauty and an ear for music.  Near the end of the ceremony, the evil fairy shows up and bestows a curse instead of a gift: that at some birthday (16th?  18th?), the princess will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die.  The evil fairy leaves and only one good fairy remains.  The good fairy can’t wholly fix the curse but she does ameliorate the curse instead to induce sleep until awoken by the kiss of a prince (or true love’s kiss).  As the daughter grows up, the king and queen refrain from telling her of the curse but instead try to destroy all spinning wheels to prevent the curse from coming true.  Despite that, the daughter does succumb to the curse and falls asleep.  A hundred years later, a prince finds her, kisses her, and they live happily ever after together.

Here’s my interpretation:

A married couple think they can protect their child by hiding her from the dangers in life.  The parents hope that their little girl will only give herself up to a prestigious man with the goal of marriage, so they keep their child in the dark until it’s too late for her to choose the course of her own life and so she goes along with choices that have been made for her.  If only the parents had warned their daughter of the dangers of the world in advance, she might have avoided contamination by a diseased prick.

Just goes to show: Sex Education leads to better results than avoiding the topic.

I’m so wired after I finished watching the beginning of Heroes, Volume 3 (the Television series) that here I am blogging about it.  The remarkable characteristic of Heroes is that people who don’t care for or actively dislike comic books, still enjoy this series.  Completely predictable, however, is the fact that comic book aficionados often enjoy it as well.  I fall into the latter category, although I fell out of practice when I realized that spending money on comics rarely lead to positive experiences with women.

I enjoy Heroes, but I don’t usually obsess over the show as many of my friends have done, nor did I feel disappointed by the show as many of my friends have felt.  Maybe that’s because I don’t find myself demanding that the show be anything other than what it is.  It is a live-action television show with no costumery nor fantastical realms (aside from Las Vegas) that still attempts to tell stories in the way that serialized comic books do.  Not Graphic Novels, not anime, not Superhero movies, but regular old flimsy paper printed, 32-page long, multi-arced comic books.

Graphic Novels, real ones not the flash-based webisodes that get called that, have the protection of their own labels to tell stories in whatever style the author chooses.  They are novels, told in graphical format.  Their subjects may be extraordinary or mundane.  They may contain a great deal of dialog or pages of wordless images.  They may run just a few pages or take up encyclopedic volumes.  Graphic novels are not best analogized by TV or movies or even books.  The closest comparison is immersive video games.  After that, real life.  I claim this because you are forced to see images, but you are not forced to hear or interpret anything else.  You can mute the video game, you can ignore most of reality, but generally you don’t close your eyes to your experiences.  Graphic novels should be impressive or they’ve failed.

Comic books are nowhere near as immersive.  They are structured to be episodic.  They often contain quick summaries of the story so far at their beginning.  They often contain numerous advertisements breaking up the flow.  They are colorful and vibrant and it takes the best of writers to be able to carry off ensemble stories.  There may be issues that progress nothing of the canon of the comic book’s universe.  There may be issues that contradict canon, hopely to be retconned back into continuity later.  And while it may not be the main purpose of a story, every comic book staff member has the idea in the back of his mind that should someone pick up a single issue, that issue (any issue) should be compelling enough to capture a new subscriber.  That’s not necessarily commercial so much as it is survival instinct.

This is how the story of Heroes unfolds to me.  It is often quick and exciting.  The stories progress the canon and develop character, episodic, and overarching… arcs.  They capture the audience with flash and glamour and emotion but avoid the costumes and dastardly plans that would diminish the mainstream viewer’s perception of the show. Certainly there are times when the story progresses slower than at others. Upon occasion, a character seems to take foolish actions or act one-dimensional.  That’s unacceptable for “24″ perhaps, but isn’t it reasonable for The Adventures of Jimmy Olsen?  When my friends tell me that something in Heroes has disappointed them, I tend to suspect that they’ve lost sight of the conceit of the show: it is a comic book.  It is a well-disguised and well-written comic book, but that’s what it is nonetheless.

Tonight, I got to see new characters, new ideas, and new story lines introduced.  I am enamored of the speedster as I’ve often wanted the powers of The Flash.  I am intrigued by the escapees (what can Jesse do?).  I am reassured by the old familiar faces.  I am amused by Park-Man and the dialog between Sylar and Claire.  I still wish someone would kill off Mohinder and Maya.  And I did not see it coming: the last statement of Angela Petrelli.  Wow.  These were two good issues and I will definitely pick up the next one.

Last Wednesday, I realized I had owned my dog, Dru, for four years to the day.

Then Friday night, August 29th, 2008, as I was playing with Dru, I held up a treat for her to reach by standing on her hind legs.  She only stood up about half as high and for half as long as usual.  My first thought was, “Did my dog’s warranty run out?”  The thought that followed was a vague concern that my four-and-a-half year old dog was starting to develop hip dysplasia and I should get her more hip-helping treats.

On Saturday, I took Dru to a nearby playground behind a school.  This is a pretty fancy high-tech playground – everything looks like a kid-size version of a Playskool  toyset for Li’l People.  AND instead of the super safe sand or gravel that I seem to recall lined the grounds of my childhood’s playgrounds, this one’s foundation is made up of one-foot-square black tiles of…  Nerf?  Supernerf?  Something that’s like Nerf but a little bit like blacktop tar at the same time.  It’s bouncy.  When my dog runs across it, she looks like she’s bounding.

One of the things I do with her at playgrounds is take her up onto the weird structures so she gets used to walking over various surfaces and rope bridges and heights.  This time, I had her stay on this one platform about three feet off the ground while I jumped down onto the bouncy ground.  Then, I called for her to jump to me.  She tilted her head back and forth and didn’t jump.  I thought maybe she didn’t understand and so I stepped back a little and crouched down with my arms open wide (a standard come-to-me pose for dog training) and sure enough she jumped down.

Onto her head!  I didn’t see that coming.  She’s always been very athletic as a pit bull mix and so if I’d predicted any craziness, I might have predicted her jumping onto MY head.  But no: she face planted and then rolled over and then bounced back into the upright position.

I immediately shot forward to hold her and inspect her all over for bruising or bumps or for indications she had bitten her own tongue or any body parts that seemed tender or out of place…  She seemed perfectly fine.  I had just taken her into the vet for a drop-off visit a couple weeks previous for her yearly comprehensive physical and she’d passed with flying colors.  At this point, she still seemed fine.  As a rare treat for her, I let her go completely off leash at which point she started running around the Nerf-ground.  And then around the grass that was around the Supernerf. Now, I don’t speak fluent Doginese but I think I heard, “Wheeeeeeeeeee!  burp.”  She seemed fine.

Sunday, I played with her around the house and she still wouldn’t stand up very high so I bought her some hip treats.  When I took her for a long walk, I noticed that she was starting to drift from side to side while walking – more than usual.  But I figured she was just tired from all the exercise I was giving her.

Monday was a holiday, so I got to play with Dru some more but now I noticed that when I would hold up a hip-helping treat for her, she would try to stand and then when she landed on the ground, one or the other of her back legs would flail out as if she’d got a cramp there.  Once again, I physically palpated the area, tried stretching out her limbs here and there – no problems and no reactions.  Well, lots of licking of my face while I was trying to concentrate, but no pain reactions.  That evening, I started to notice that her head was becoming very tilted to one side and when I took her for a drive, she was awkward in both jumping into and out of my car.

At this point, I grew concerned that maybe she was having neurological problems and so I tried some sensitivity tests around her body (pinches) while keeping her attention forward with some really delicious treats.  She felt all the pinches, showed no tenderness.  I tried some flinch reactions toward her eyes and noticed that her right eye seemed normally responsive but her left eye seemed not to flinch unless my finger practically touched it.  This day, she was also lethargic and seemed to want to sleep more than usual.  I let her.

The next morning, I took her into work with me to keep an eye on her.  This was yesterday.  Sure enough, she still had problems getting into and out of my car.  And at work, we walk down a long narrow hallway and her head was pronouncedly tilted to one side and she kept bumping into either the hallway or me.

I called for a vet visit.  I have an appointment there this morning.

Last night, I did the doggie-equivalent of looking up her symptoms on webMD.com (it was more like dogmd, but called something cuter) and found lots of results for “vestibular signs” that point to bad news.  It could just be a minor inner ear infection.  It could be brain cancer.  A couple of places were careful to point out that the most common version of “canine vestibular disease” is the ideopathic variety which often clears up quickly.  Labeling something as ‘ideopathic’ just labels the medical practitioners as idiotic because it just means ‘we have no idea why this happens’ but sounds cooler than ‘mysterious’…  “Sorry, Mr. Roth, but your dog has Mysterious Inner Ear Curse.  Have you tried a gypsy?”

Anyway, I’m going to go into the vet today and hope that they find… I don’t know… a piece of dog biscuit stuck in her ear?  Something simple that won’t require bajillions of dollars of surgery and medicine but will actually fix her.

I hope Dru’s okay.