While BuckBokai awaits the season tipoffs in NBA and European basketball, somehow attention has strayed to another great competition, that sport for Americans who don’t like sports:...
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Pirate Bay co-founder Svarthol...
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Hungary wants to know: Which woman is best for Spiderman?
From the news portal Index, based in ever-randy Hungary, comes exploration of the question “Melyik nőt döngölje meg Pókember?” which might be translated as, um … well, let’s put it this way. Within the URL link to the story, the webmasters and/or editors have changed the article title to the more, shall we say, family-friendly “Melyik nő illik a legjobban Pokemberhez?” or “Which woman is best suited for Spiderman?”
(While BuckBokai admits this has little to do with sports, hey! Pinup comic babes!)
In light of the Spiderman movie franchise reboot which featured Gwen Stacy replacing more traditional Mary Jane Watson as Peter Parker’s love interest, the author tantalizingly known only as Cinematrix reveals his/her choices for getting with the Spider someday – since “the franchise gets rebooted about every 10 years.”
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Nine super innings: DC Superstars #10
BuckBokai was going to do a full-on review of a highlight in science-fiction sports literary history, namely the lead story of DC Super Stars #10 (1976), but the issue has proved elusive to download and more importantly has been amazingly critically analyzed by Comic Treadmill back in 2005 and recently by Baseball Prospectus, so we’ll refer you to those links.
If you haven’t been lucky enough to experience the life-changing greatest of DC Comics finally living up to their “Strange Sports Stories” franchise in form, this epic is based on an argument between the simply awesome Sportsmaster and the Huntress. This couple makes a bet stemming from a dispute in which the Huntress maintains that the bad guys never win (she must have been hip to the Comics Code Authority of Earth prime, eh?) and thus set up a superheroes vs. supervillians match.
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For the glory of Empire: Reviewing Mike Resnick’s “The Olympians”
With the XXX Olympiad currently in full swing, BuckBokai today pimps a favorite science-fiction sport story, Mike Resnick’s “The Olympians.”
Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2012, “The Olympians” serves as the seventh chapter in Resnick’s Birthright: The Book of Man
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Dreaming of 1992: An Olympic basketball movie trilogy
In 1992, the landscape of international basketball was changed forever. While most recall the dominance of the USA’s Dream Team – quite probably, BuckBokai asserts, the greatest squad ever assembled in any sport – the hoops in that famed Olympiad of 20 years ago were packed with dozens of compelling backstories, the least two of which were certainly not the silver- and bronze-medal winning Croatia and Lithuania teams.
On the eve of the opening of the XXX Olympiad and with that 20th anniversary observation firmly in mind, BuckBokai recommends a loosely connected trio of films that’ll make for fantastic viewing for the sports history nut. In the virtual screening room, we’ll run this trilogy in order of subject’s finish in the Olympic games.
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What if, Babe? A review of Harry Turtledove’s “The House that George Built”
Nowhere do the seemingly mutually exclusive entertainments of sport and science-fiction come closer than in that simple musing question “what if…?”
In sport, the question is often lamentably formed of second-guessing the decision of manager, general manager, umpire or player. To wit:
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“Lineup for Yesterday” by Ogden Nash
For no good reason other than this stuff should probably be recorded – and it’s public domain – here’s “Lineup for Yesterday,” an abecedarian poem by Ogden Nash written in 1949. Nash celebrates the greats from days of his youth in the clever, easy style that so drove his popularity through to his death in ’72.
You gotta love the lines on Walter Johnson and Bobo Newsom…
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The simple rules of Butterfly Derby (plus review: Futurama, “The Butterjunk Effect”)
Though not currently based in North America, BuckBokai couldn’t wait to get his hands on this week’s episode of Futurama, the horrifically-titled “The Butterjunk Effect,” promising as it did another science-fiction sport to record in the annals.
Masters of the online science-fiction editorial universe io9, via reviewer Esther Inglis-Arkell, trashed the ep. Inglis-Arkell noted the out-of-character dialogue and action pressed upon Leela and Amy, and yes, BuckBokai must agree that a lot of the early stuff with catty remarks about shoes and weight seems like character-unspecific stuff written in somebody’s sleep. The io9 scribe did note some good bits to be hand in “the throwaway lines and sight gags that Futurama always excels at”; concurrence on this as well, then.
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