Classy Hooch: Red Hook Treblehook

Living in West Virginia, I’ve been snowed in this past weekend. I had the good fortune, however, to be visited by my grandchild-seeking parents, whose Dodge Durango scoffs at the drifts that keep my Jetta garage-bound. So while greater Morgantown cowered behind locked doors, we headed out into winter’s worst for no reason in particular.

As I’ve mentioned before, we northwestern Pennsylvania residents are the kind of people who are MORE likely to go out into the world when life-threatening weather … well, threatens. It’s just something we’ve got to do. So the folks and I headed out into the snowy void on Saturday.

For a quick snapshot of the economics of snow, consider the below picture of the bread aisle at our local Kroger:

At the left is the cheapo bread; to the right are the high-end, Pepperidge Farm joints. This, to me, sends a clear message: We’re hungry, but we’re not particular. Being that we already had the essentials – and were not fearing the end times – we chose instead to pick up some other provisions: Ribeye steaks (which, in another fit of winter pique, would be grilled outside) and a bevy of nifty beers.

Among these was today’s beer, Red Hook’s Treblehook. I’m a big Red Hook fan – their Sunrye was a fantastic summer beer, and their Late Harvest wasn’t bad either – so I’m likely to be biased. The Treblehook is a barleywine, part of Red Hook’s Limited Release series. I started it at the halftime mark of yesterday’s Super Bowl (with a Yuengling lead-in), and finished just as the Saints wrapped up their win.

This is a big beer, both in size (1 pint, 6 oz.; 10.1% ABV) and body, which is what you’d expect of a barleywine (the name comes from the fact that they’re typically as high in alcohol as a wine, but made from grain rather than grapes.). The label marks it as a fall beer, but I’d put it up against any winter warmer. It’s a thick brew that warms up the throat as you drink. The mouthfeel is slightly syrupy but not too heavy – just enough to let you know you’re drinking something substantial.

You definitely get the hop aroma as you drink, but it’s not as floral as most hoppy beers. And like any good barleywine, that hoppiness is balanced by strong malt flavors, so you don’t get the bitterness of hop-heavy beers. If I have any gripe it’s that you get a lingering sour aftertaste after a while, but that’s hardly a hanging offense.

Treblehook might lack the spice of others’ winter offerings, but it’s an excellent beer to accompany watching a blizzard through your window … or the Colts choking a last-minute touchdown pass.

Comics and beer map is go!

After a weekend of adding and fiddling, this blog’s map of comic shops and beer joints is done and posted. Have a look by going to the “The Map” page, or by clicking this link. Expect to see these popping up on the blogging and interactive journalism student blogs soon – we’ll be doing some activities focused on the location-pegged updating (e.g., Foursquare) that’s being touted as the big thing for 2010.

It’s necessarily focused on Western PA, but I’ve tried to fill in all the spots I can remember having visited. The only rule was that to be mapped, I have to have been to the place. As I go to more places, the map will acquire more points (color key included on the map page). The next addition I want to make is adding links to points that I’ve written up in the blog.

This year I’ll be making trips to Chicago, Denver, and Portland, OR, which are all pretty fantastic beer cities, so I’ll be making some good additions. I’m also going to be in Columbia, MO, where I’ll be hitting the new Broadway Brewery (and maybe some other spots between here and there, since we’re driving), and of course Pittsburgh and WV still have lots of locations to try. In addition to comics and beer (including both breweries and good beer bars), I’m mapping good diners and book stores.

I hope the visual mapping of this is interesting and useful, and if you’ve got suggestions for the places I’ll be going, I’d love to hear them.

Messin’ with maps

Haven’t been here for a while. It turns out having a kid is hard. More vibrant posting to come this week. For now, though, I’m experimenting with embedding Google Maps in posts, courtesy of a fine walkthrough by my friend Grant.

Since this is hopefully something that will benefit my blogging and interactive journalism class, let’s try it with our own fair Martin Hall here at WVU.

View Larger Map

It kind of works! The only thing is, the map that shows up seems to be zoomed out to the maximum level, yet I want it to be zoomed to the downtown campus of WVU. Hm. Let’s see what Grant says about this …

[EDIT: 523p 1/30/10 - It works! Thanks to Grant and Pat for the help. In a nutshell (you can check their words in the comments), I must have zoomed back out before copying the link code. I didn't think I had, but then, that's my usual defense for things I've forgotten around the house. Playing resumes!]

The further steps he gives allow additional customization that includes layers the reader can turn on and off, but let’s get this bit fixed first. More to come.

Blog spammer roundup!

Blog spammers are fascinating critters. Their idea, as near as I can tell, is that if they post a comment on your blog, you may click their name to follow them back to their own blog where you will, hopefully, buy whatever product or service it is they’re peddling. WordPress uses Akismet to shunt most all of these directly to my spam can, yet the practice continues. Presumably it works in some cases, or else they wouldn’t be doing it. Right?

Although the practice may be reprehensible, the idea behind it does have a basis in reality. I posted a while back about my own dawning realization that blogging is a conversation, not a pulpit. Done right, your post is a continuation of some worldwide discussion. Through the act of linking, you give due diligence to what sparked your ideas; others, in turn, link to you and further that conversation; and all the while, you pay comments both back and forward to the ancestors and descendents of your ideas.

But linking doesn’t end with the link itself, and here’s where the blog spammers miss the sense of linking even while practicing the letter. When you blog, you’re a stepping stone in the path, which is both great and insignificant: Without your particular pebble, the path would still exist, but it wouldn’t be the same. My friends from Mizzou – Jeremy Littau, Hans Meyer, and Carrie Brown – all run some great (and far more focused) journalism blogs. We’ve fed on each other’s ideas, and we share space on each other’s blogrolls. When they comment on my blog, they say things that are, you know, relevant. When the blog spammers comment … well, you get this [all links removed]:

Attili Sattibabu: Thank you for giving such a informative blog. Your website happens to be not just useful but also very creative too. There are very few people who can think to write not so easy content that creatively. Keep posting !!

Sofia Ahr: Great post. I gained some very valuable information from it. I have been struggling with an addiction myself for most of my life, so what you wrote really meant a lot to me. Visit my blog if you’d like to read more. Thanks again for this blog – it is really informative.

Nigeria Forum: Hi. I needed to drop you a quick note to impart my thanks. I’ve been following your blog for a month or so and have plucked up a heap of good information as well as relished the way you’ve structured your site. I am seeking to run my own blog however I think its too general and I would like to focus more on smaller topics.

As you can see, generalized flattery is a popular tactic. Here’s a short-and-sweet one in response to my post against a Dislike button on Facebook:

templerel: Bravo, what necessary phrase…, a brilliant idea

I only wish I knew what phrase this was in reference to. I would use it more often to better display my brilliance. Some REALLY make with the gushing:

Sau Kaylor: Only want to say your article is striking. The clearness in your post is simply striking and i can assume you are an expert on this field. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with succeeding post. Thanks a million and please keep up the delightful work

This came in response to a post about drinking two beers in a Morgantown bar on a Friday when my wife was out of town. Clearly I am an expert in … what? Bars? Solitude? Lindsay Robertson has a great list of do’s and don’ts for online PR folks (I’m being polite in using that label), not that any of these guys would ever deign to read it.

Others do a marginally better job of targeting their fakery [asterisks added to avoid giving these guys any free traffic]:

Luther Blisset: Hey. I have launched a new Farmville site. If you want the latest hints, tips and cheats then have a look at http://www.ultimate[*]farmville.com

This post came in response to a post on Farmville’s holiday trees. The robots are becoming sentient! Or at least capable of recognizing keywords. Here’s another one in response to my post on the outcome of our baby shower:

Dustin: I laud the valuable post you provide in your articles. I will bookmark your blog and have my baby check up here recurrently. I am quite sure they will study lots of new stuff here than anybody else!

You just been lauded! It is humbling to know that my writing is inspiring fathers to direct their babies to my site. Be warned, though – I do occasionally use profanity.

Similar to the blog spammer is an animal you may have noticed on Twitter, where the “follow me and I’ll follow you” idea is even more streamlined. I don’t have many followers, so when I do get ‘em, it’s interesting to see where they come from (Caesar’s Palace? Huh?). Most are my friends, or friends of friends, or people who started following me because I responded to their tweets (see?). Some are religious (@bryanthewitt), which I suppose it taking the “follower” idea in a literal sense. I’ve got at least one (@buddaway) that is entirely in Chinese, which I don’t speak or read. What is the thinking here?

The remainder are fairly often some would-be entrepreneur (currently I’m being followed by a holiday gift guide and a Cyprus jewelry dealer). Ever click on these profiles? They nigh-always will take you to some get-rich-quick site, or, even better, a get-rich-by-using-twitter-to-gain-followers site. I often wonder: When you pay these guys for their wisdom, how often is the first tip “Start following a crapload of people and hope a few will follow you back and pay you to tell them this tip.” Or maybe you don’t get that tip until the top tier.

If you’re on Twitter, try this sometime: Scroll back through your follower list. Your followers are listed in last-in, first-out format, so the top listing is the most recent. The farther back you go, the more legitimate followers you’ll find. For some reason, the Twitspammers drop you after a while. What, I wonder, is the metric they use for deciding that their following you won’t be fruitful? At what time do they decide to hang it up on you? And how can I make them do it sooner?

The “follow me and I’ll follow you” approach is key to social media. It helps us connect with others. People we don’t know can introduce themselves and their ideas to us via following, or linking, or commenting; we, in turn, can do the same. I follow Ethan Watrall, an assistant prof at Michigan State who teaches some awesome comics-oriented classes. We’ve never met. I started following after some other comics-oriented folks retweeted him, and after I responded to some of these, he started following me too. We’re part of a conversation now, which is terrific.

The link is a kind of sign – a sign of shared interest, of community. Like any sign, though, if it can be used to signify, it can be used to lie. Lying – false representation of interest to draw business – is the business of the blog spammer, and that’s not going to stop any time soon. But do they have to be so dumb about it?

Classy hooch: Fruli

This week I’m drinking Fruli, “a high quality Belgian white beer blended with pure strawberry fruit juice.” Apologies to Fruli fans out there – I don’t know how to type an umlaut so you’ll have to envision the two dots over the “u”.

Here’s what i know from the website. Fruli is a mix of wheat beer and strawberry juice. It is brewed in Belgium near the city of Ghent. It won several awards, and was compared (favorably, I assume) by Time Out London to a “strawberry smoothie with bite”.

That’s the homepage – the rest of the site is curiously incomplete. Under “Fruli” in the navigation bar, you can select “FAQs” or “Fruli fun,” but these pages are blank when you go to them. This is a shame because I really would like to know the kinds of questions that are frequently asked about Fruli – I had naively assumed “Its got strawberry juice in it” would answer 99.9% of the questions you might ask about Fruli, but clearly there’s more under the surface.

There’s also a Fruli blog, but when you click the “blog” link you get the message “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” This is fascinatingly cryptic, and it makes me want to unravel Fruli’s secrets.

Here’s what I know about Fruli from drinking it: Its got strawberry juice in it. You get it in the smell before drinking without even trying. The taste is clearly of strawberries. Exactly what I’m drinking is a little hard to determine. At first I thought it was a little wine cooler-y, but it’s better than that. You can get at the beer in Fruli, but it takes some exploration to get past the juice, which really stands out. REALLY stands out.

Not that that’s terrible if you want to drink a fruity, juicy beer. One of the best things about Fruli is that the taste seems very natural. If you’ve ever made a strawberry drink in a blender, well, that’s what it tastes like; you’re drinking juice, not strawberry flavoring. And there IS beer in there, but you probably won’t think of it as beer. Maybe more like a strawberry-beer smoothie.

That sounds a lot more disgusting than I meant it to.

Fruli’s fine. It’s fruity and well-made for what it is. I probably wouldn’t buy it again – it’s not really for me – but it does something different and accomplishes what it sets out to do. With so many beer trends turning into a game of out-hop/alcohol/dark the last guy, here’s something to be said for that.

Giving iBirth

We’ve got a daughter! Thessaly Jane was born at 10:13 p.m. Wednesday, January 6, at Ruby Memorial Hospital. She weighed 7 lbs, 4 oz., and is … well, I forget how long she is. She’s generally sleeping well and seems to enjoy the music of eels and Flight of the Conchords. Also popular are the variety of commercial jingles and TV theme songs that are the only thing I can think of to sing to her. She is particularly fond of the J.G. Wentworth opera jingle.

So I’m excited about that, naturally, but it’s not the focus of this post. What I want to write about is something I didn’t expect: The use of my iPhone in the process.

I have never had a cell phone. I was (and perhaps still am) fundamentally against their use on a variety of levels. They tend to make people into jerks. They scream for priority over the person you happen to be talking with in the flesh. They allow me to be reached at places I want to be unreachable (“Just turn it off” isn’t a valid response because people will ask “Why did you have your cell phone off?”). They also reflect a changed culture I’m still not entirely comfortable with because I am an old grouch.

Also ringtones.

So that was my perspective. I got one in October, however, as the planning for this semester’s blog journalism class suggested its necessity. Also, I wanted to be reachable by my pregnant wife. So I bought one and was rudely forced into a “minimum” calling plan that I will never use – I hit maybe 120 minutes in a month. On the plus side: Lightsaber app!

The iPhone is a crummy phone but an excellent computer, and it is this that I needed and this that came into play during our birth. We decided to update our friends (and people we knew in ninth grade) via Facebook throughout our hospital stay up until the point where Jess needed me consistently, at which point we’d switch to radio silence.

From packing our bag Monday night to the day-long journey from 2 to 3 cm on Tuesday right up to her water breaking at 1030a Wednesday, I posted what was up. And got responses. LOTS of responses. People mainly offered words of encouragement, but also advice and questions, and far more interest than I had expected. In fact, from when I switched off the feed at 1030a through the 1013p birth, I received a number of concerned posts on my wall asking if everything was alright (it was). Not only that, it’s a nice thing to read back over.

Updating Facebook was a big thing for us – people wanted to know what was happening, but if I was assisting Jess in labor I wouldn’t have time to make calls and send emails – but if that was the extent of my usage, I wouldn’t be posting this. There were also little things, like calling the doula from the iPhone when we went in, and posting pictures – many, many pictures – as they happened, but these are still just phone things. As shitmydadsays puts it, “no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.” The big deal for me was not what my phone could do, but what it allowed us to do.

We wanted to do natural childbirth. We went to a midwife, set up a birthplan, all of that. We wound up needing a mild Pitocin drip because the midwife said we needed to induce (PItocin mimics Oxytocin, a hormone the body produces during labor to spark contractions). Jess took a minimum-level narcotic at 7 cm when her body started producing Oxytocin, which combined with the Pitocin to give her nearly constant contractions (at which point they also dialed back the Pitocin), but otherwise that was it.

To monitor contractions, however, the mother needs to be lying on her back so that the monitor belt and gravity provide enough pressure to register those contractions. That’s the standard position if drugs leave you immobile, but it’s also the worst position for moving the baby along, and therein lies the problem.

Jess wanted to be as mobile as possible, and had been changing positions as her body called for it. Because of this, the contractions weren’t registering (but they were definitely happening), so the nurse couldn’t identify if and when more Pitocin was needed. Without this information, Jess would need to stay lying down.

The nurse had seen me updating earlier, and asked if it was an iPhone. I said yes, and she said she’d heard of an application called Contraction Master (dynamic name, huh) that was designed for just this purpose. Within a minute, I had looked up the app, bought it, and started using it.

Even in the midst of labor, it was the simplest thing possible – just a big purple button to push when the contraction began, which would change into a big red button to push when the contraction ended. The app recorded start time, stop time, duration, and frequency, so whenever the nurse came in she’d check this information with me and determine what to do.

The app also includes the ability to mail this information, so I’ve got every contraction from when I started until we were able to drop the Pitocin at 7 p.m. Here’s a sample of our readout:

Why this matters to me is not because, Gee Whiz, I can do stuff with my phone. It’s because we wanted to have our birth in a certain way, a way the midwives we trusted told us was best. Thanks to this particular piece of personal technology, we were able to do so. We also knew when to dial back the drugs to minimize stress to Jess, allowing us to use a light enough dose of narcotics to get over that rough patch that Jess was in complete control during the pushing (a fact that impressed those present so much that they brought in several residents to show what a good natural childbirth looks like).

I can’t tell you how proud I am of my wife for her strength throughout labor. That’s something I expected. But what I didn’t anticipate was how gratified I am that a little gizmo I brought to take pictures and update friends wound up helping to bring our child into the world. Sometimes new technology isn’t so bad.

Baby time!

We’re been at the hospital since 8 a.m. today. No idea how long we’ll be. Both midwives say it would be a good idea for Jess to come in and induce, so induce we have (at 9 a.m.). Jess is nervous, I’m anxious, parents are coming, and dogs are baffled; if I hadn’t mentioned the kid, I could be describing any typical holiday.

Right now she’s chatty and resting comfortably while we wait for the Cervidil (sp?) to take hold. The midwife will be introducing small amounts of Pitocin, not “blasting the uterus,” as she refers to it. We’re only at 1 cm but pretty far effaced. Also we’re watching the Fresh Prince, so the kid will have an extensive knowledge of early hip hop culture.

Anyhow, that’s the story so far. We’re hoping for the best, and for as few additional interventions as possible (though I hear those things are like Pringles, once you’ve popped). As always, further bulletins as events warrant (likely via Twitter).

Here’s who Facebook thinks I am

We’re on baby watch here at Comics and Beer – the January 3 due date is now officially blown – so blogging will be light and airy. I apologize for the absence of beer posts – I just learned my Missouri driver’s license expired on October 19, 2009, so was shut out of my last purchase attempt. Granted, I’ve got a fridgefull of all kinds of stuff, but like I said, I’m a little preoccupied (although more than willing to start drinking).

So while we wait, I Facebook (and design syllabi). And while I Facebook, I notice what Facebook knows, or thinks it knows, about us. For example, I AM indeed an English major:

As well as a member of the (high school) class of 1996:

So yeah, the Facebook ads hit from time to time. But, like a lot of social media marketing attempts, they often just miss the mark, and this turns out to be even more distracting. Think of it as a kind of uncanny valley – in movies, we can easily accept a character that is clearly cartooned or unhuman, but the closer we get to almost human, the creepier it gets.

The same thing goes for advertising, only swap “creepy” with “annoying.” Consider this:

While it’s true I’m a journalist and am a fan of learning more, I’ve got a PhD in Journalism, so their MA probably isn’t something I’m in the market for.

Location is another near-miss I see a lot of:

Close, but I live in West Virginia; it’s like Ohio, only with more mountains and poverty.

Now I realize that these ads are designed as a balancing act between the general and the specific. The creators want to identify niche markets to serve while at the same time not wanting to get so specific as to overly limit their potential customers. But the targeted nature of the ads (I get a LOT of Ohio ads, yet few for WV or PA) suggests that they’ve got access to some of my information. If they know I’m a father-to-be (and the ads suggest they do), is it too much to expect they’d get my state right?

Understand, I’m not ASKING advertisers to delve more deeply into my info – I hate that these places know anything about me – but I’m fascinated by the errors. If they’re trying to sell to specific audiences, why not try to get it right?

On the other hand, sometimes the ones that are really off are kinda refreshing:

Ho. Lee. Crap. Is this who the Facebook advertisers think I am? Who I can relate to? Who I aspire to be? While I am a dad-to-be, who in god’s name chose this refugee from the Oak Ridge Boys as the face of their chintzy grant-awarding service? Up until last year, I did make less than $45,000 – far, FAR less – and while I’ve had my share of bad haircuts, at no time did I approach looking like this guy, so which of my posts indicate that I am a roadie or roustabout?

But this one’s really my favorite:

Boyyyyy do you not know who you’re dealing with.

Blogging class finalization: Readings

No baby yet, so I’m battening down the pre-semester hatches at work. I’ve mentioned before that I’ll be teaching a blogging and journalism class this semester (you can check out the as-yet sparsely populated course blog). Currently I’m finalizing the syllabus, which means currently I’m trying to fit 15 pounds of sausage into a ten-pound bag. Is it any wonder why I’m letting myself be distracted from the task to write a blog post?

In seriousness, I’m hoping a little bloggery will help me suss some things out (as well as clearing the cobwebs). Now’s the time when all those great ideas I had in the shower need to crystallize into something teachable, doable, and gradable. So maybe you, Internet, can help with a few things.

Today, I’ll talk about the course text. We’re using Dan Gillmor’s We the Media, which I realize is a little dated as social media texts go, but it’s also one of the seminal works in this area. I don’t want to use some “how to blog” book as the main text because I want students to also get at the history and philosophy behind what we in journalism and communications are currently grappling with.

Also, although it’s been colloquially known as “the blog class” around fair Martin Hall, the class is about more than that. To my mind, the “what can we do with this?’ tone of Gillmor’s book allows for a good first approach for students.

Finally, the class will be supplemented with a number of other readings (in addition to the actual blogs and feeds students will be following). Right now the list includes:

• Ward, M. (2002). Journalism Online. Woburn, MA: Elsevier Science.
• Perlmutter, D. D. & Hamilton, J. M. (2007). From Pigeons to News Portals: Foreign Reporting and the Challenge of New Technology. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University. (I also considered his new book, Blog Wars, but have not read it)
• The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. (2008). New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Beckett, C. (2008). Supermedia: Saving Journalism so It Can Save the World. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin.
• Mathison, D. (2009). Be the Media: How to Create and Accelerate Your Message … Your Way. New York: Natural E Creative.

Some of these, like Gillmor, are activism-oriented (Beckett, Shirky), but others are here as texts that are practice-oriented (Huffington, Mathison), or context-oriented (Perlmutter), or just interesting artifacts (Ward; no Twitter handle that I can identify – heck, the website for his text is now just a link farm).

I am assigning groups of my 22 students to each of these texts (except Mathison, I think, which is more of a reference), and throughout the semester they will report as a panel on the text and how it applies to real-world examples. They’ll each be posting these to their personal blogs, and I’ll provide links on the main course page.

In addition to all this dead-tree media, the readings will be supplemented by readings from online; Jay Rosen’s Pressthink, for example. But in this area, as well as the texts listed above, I’d love any suggestions you might have to offer.

That’s enough for today, I think. Tomorrow I’ll try to post more, perhaps on some of the projects I’m planning. For now, though, I’m going to get back to actually MAKING the syllabus.

Friday Comics Pull – Year-End Teamup Edition

I was going to blow off a post today, much like the comics publishers have done this week, but it’s the last day of 2009. Finish strong!

Not like it’s a big week, either. In fact, I’ve got only two books, and it’s probably the oddest pairing I could have gotten. Archie Andrews of Riverdale … RISE.

Archie #604 ($2.50 shelf grab) – The “Archie gets married” storyline nears its conclusion, as does my time reading Archie comics. If you recall, last time Archie rebooted this Elseworlds storyline to propose to Betty instead of Veronica. The Betty storyline as a whole has been a lot more interesting. The Veronica story was essentially three issues of “Archie and his wife have everything and are really successful,” but this one is about as close to serious as an Archie story can get. The couple has no money, can’t afford a wedding (or a cake), and Betty has to earn money as a teacher because her husband can’t get a job. And that was last issue.

I actually wound up a little disappointed with this issue, not because the story wasn’t good but because it almost was. Betty gets a fashion job in NYC and they have to move out of Riverdale (beats me how they found an apartment, let alone afforded it with only one earner), and Archie the deadbeat wanders the streets until he falls bass-ackwards into a music gig. Things go well until Betty’s boss insults Archie and she tells him off, essentially throwing away the only job they’ve been able to get. Everything’s coming up Archie!

Things could have gotten kind of interesting from here, but they don’t. Then again, they really can’t – the whole point of Archie is that its universe resets like a sitcom after every episode, so why fault the authors for doing their job? Gimmick or not, the Archie people deserve credit for trying this storyline, especially for having the nerve to write some mildly unpleasant elements into the Betty story after a fairly uninteresting Veronica plot. I won’t be sticking around after the credits roll, but it was more interesting than I had expected.

Blackest Night #6 of 8 ($3.99 shelf grab) – After waiting a week for this (DC distributed this last week to be held until this week), it had better be good. It pretty much was. Last issue, Necron essentially lampshaded the superhero vogue of being not-quite-dead by turning every living hero who’s ever been “revived” into an undead Black Lantern. This includes Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow … well, pretty much all the big ones. Including Flash and Green Lantern, who as of last issue hadn’t yet been converted.

That’s a pretty tough act to follow, but BN #6 does just that. Not only is this a chapter worth reading, it doesn’t just pull an Ultimate Nullifier out of its ass to deal with those events. <SEMI-SPOILER> Ganthet reveals that, since all of the power rings are based on the Green Lantern technology, all of them can be duplicated (like the green power rings) to enlist a short-term deputy Lantern. Rather than yet another deus ex machina, this is an idea that’s already established – it’s part of the reason why Earth has more than one Green Lantern – so it’s actually reasonable that the power would expand to the other rings.

You heard me. SOMETHING PLAUSIBLE (or at least consistent with existing canon) HAPPENED IN A CROSSOVER EVENT.

Not only that, but the deputies that get chosen are some pretty awesome picks, ones that make it clear that the writers have put some thought into setting this up. All those spin-off issues they’ve been putting out? Turns out several of them were relevant, especially that sweet Wonder Woman tie-in from a few weeks back. And the choice for Orange Lantern? Perfect. Some of the spin-offs have been a little trying, but whenever the main Blackest Night book comes out, I’m reminded of why I’m enjoying this story.

To close out, here’s a completely non-comics-related image from here in Morgantown.

This New Year’s Eve, remember: Friends don’t let friends rock the handlebars. Be safe out there.