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øRev. NørbLove, NørbDEAR READERS, LAST MONTH I WENT TO MY TWENTIETH-YEAR CLASSREUNION. AND PUKED ON MYSELF. DURING DINNER. I THINK. I DON’TREALLY REMEMBER. I WAS PASSED OUT MUCH OF THE TIME. I DUNNO.Rev. NørbHail, if i’d a knowed people were actuallyreading this column, i woulda wrote better tastart off with (no, i mean, seriously, why is it thatif one writes about some manner of <strong>issue</strong> onefeels particularly impassioned about, it garnersno reaction whatsoever; but if one is merely babbling,prattling on about idle flummery merelyto fulfill contractual obligation, et al, peoplesuddenly take notice? Like, i could be raving atthe top of my metaphorical lungs about impendingArmageddon, alien invasion, or the littleman who lives in the six-point-five-dimensionaluniverse parallel to our own and observes myevery move, waiting to STRIKE from his wackyland of backwards time flow and take my placein the stupid three-point-five-dimensional universei live in and ride my universe backward intime [for him, which is forward in time for us] sohe can hop back to his home universe after a fewdecades and live his life over endlessly, ANDNO ONE WOULD PAY ATTENTION TO MYLOGICAL AND IMPASSIONED DIS-COURSE. However, if i, having jack shit towrite about one month, toss off a few idle paragraphsabout shooting baskets, people wanna seemy hook shot? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOUREADING THIS GIBBERISH FOR, FOO?Within the course of one 72-hour period lastweek, not one but TWO different people cameover to my house and asked if they could holdmy copy of Amazing Fantasy #15. Like, whatkinda pathetic tourist attraction have ibecome??? What exactly has my role in contemporarypunk rock society eroded to??? I run afucking comic book PETTING ZOO f’rChrissakes!!! [however, the hook shot is comingalong just fine, thank you very much, but i’mstill baffled as to how the hand knows where tothrow the ball at. I mean, both my hand and theball are completely out of my range of vision;shouldn’t my shot be going wildly askew, bombardingpigeons and windows and the occasionalstray priest as often as it hits the backboard? Ialso don’t quite understand how i can go to aspot on a basketball court where it is completelyphysically impossible for me to even get the ballanywhere near the basket with a traditional jumpshot {like, maybe it’ll graze the bottom of thenet on a bounce}, but if i shoot a hook shot fromthat same spot that is way too far for me to shoota regular shot from, i can overshoot the wholebackboard if i am feeling particularly mightythat day. Like, is that normal? Or is my freakishbodily construction once again manifesting itselfin curiously inscrutable fashion? {i’ve also got32this cool jump hook from abouttwenty feet out, where the balldoesn’t even have an arc on it, it’s just straightdown the ol’ hypotenuse in a Favre-ian frozenrope to the backboard, ricocheting off the glassand into the basket, leaving everything a-shakin’and a-rattlin’ in the aftermath – dude, i swear toGod it’s like a fuckin’ laser beam or something.Of course, if there are any observers present, irevert to properly pathetic form: Truly am istreetball’s answer to Michigan J. Frog} Imean, i can’t throw a baseball or a softball or afootball for shit. I’m fucking beyond pathetic.Absolutely hopeless. I also can’t shoot a basketballfrom very far out – UNLESS, OF COURSE,I AM FLINGING IT SIDEWAYS, ONE-HANDED, OVER MY HEAD, BLINDLY. Theni’m kinda okay! I must be part fiddler crab orsomething].All of which cannot help but serve to bringus to our first question, this one from a Ms.Megan Pants of California, to wit: Have you yet,or will you ever, see the Hulk movie? Megan,your answer is as follows: Yes [now, many ofyou {well, some of you} {okay, NONE of you}may, at this very point in time, be noticing that i,Rev. Nørb, am boldly scuttling the previous formatof this column, where the plethora – theHUGE, HONKERIN’ PLETHORA – of lettersseeking my sage counsel were printed in toto{joke’s yours, if you wanna}, followed by myprofound responses, genial discourse et al...well, fuck that shit, man. That made the columnlook kinda... i dunno... fruity. TOO MUCHWHITE SPACE! TOO MUCH ORDERLI-NESS!! TOO MUCH TIME FOR THE READ-ER TO COMPOSE THEIR THOUGHTS ANDCHIP AWAY AT MY INSCRUTABLEINSCRUTABILITY!!! FUCK WHITESPACE!!! WHITE SPACE SUCKS!!! FUCKTHE MAN!!! FUCK THE MAN!!! The kidsdon’t want your honkey establishment whitespace, man! The kids want a riot of alphanumericcharacters jammed into every conceivable orificea folded-over piece of newsprint has togive!!! And, ‘pon my word, said riotous andpulpy orifice jamming is what they shall receive,in spades and such!!! Never more shall theunwelcome brightness of white space darken myalready dark dimension of verbiage!!! If treesshall suffer, die, and be fatally mutilated that imay spew pointless points re: the Hulk movie{it was a piece of shit, Megan. An utterly irredeemablepiece of shit. I mean, i THOUGHT theproblem was going to be the CGI Hulk. As itturns out, i was actually fairly okay with thecomputer-generated Hulk ((although ol’Greenskin did kinda look like HoppityHooper or someone [[“Dig ‘Em” fromSugar Smacks??]] as he BOINGed thru thedesert)); that was the least of the movie’s considerablewoes. Not to put too fine a point onthings, but i think i speak for all humanity wheni say WHAT the fucking FUCK was all thisSHIT about BRUCE BANNER’S DAD??? NickFucking Nolte??? WHO FUCKING CARES???This was even worse than the first Supermanmovie, when they couldn’t keep MarlonBrando’s fat grey-hairy ass off the screen forlonger than five minutes at a crack ((i mean,after about an hour pointlessly spent documentingKrypton’s demise, for no other reason thanto give Brando more screen time, they finallyblow the fucker and his entire planet up, and youthink, okay, great, they finally got past the Jor-Eland Lara stage of things... but then the bastardkeeps showing up in like hologram recordingsand shit! Endlessly! Night Of The Living Jor-El!!! I mean, why the fuck didn’t they just callthe movie The Adventures of Jor-El andFriends? I mean, fuck, in the introduction, ithink Christopher Reeve’s name didn’t come onthe screen til AFTER Jor-El’s AND LexLuthor’s AND the director’s did! I’m not evensure he got billed above Margot Fucking Kidder,f’r Chrissakes!!! He’s lucky to have gottenbilled above Ned Beatty!!!)). I mean, WHY dothese director assholes think anybody is reallypaying to see a “name” actor in a supporting rolein movies of this nature??? Nick Nolte will playthe Hulk’s dad??? Oh, THERE’S a box officebonanza!!! THERE’S a fuckin’ main event!!! Imean, these people making these movies haveNO CLUE what people read superhero comicbooks for. Class? Can you tell me what peopleread superhero comic books for? CLASS: PEO-PLE READ SUPERHERO COMIC BOOKSFOR THE SUPERHEROS, REVERENDNØRB!!! Why, YES. That’s EXACTLY correct.We go to see movies like The Hulk because wewant to see The Hulk, just like we go to seemovies like Godzilla because we want to seeGodzilla, or Giant Spider Invasion because wewant to see black VW Beetles with eight flailinghydraulic appendages attempting to approximatean invasion of giant spiders, and so forth. SOWHY THE FUCK DOES IT TAKE BRUCEBANNER FORTY FUCKING MINUTES TOTURN INTO THE HULK, THEN??? I have inhand my trusty, crusty copy of The IncredibleHulk #1, cover-dated May of 1962. BruceBanner changes into the Hulk for the first timeby the middle of page five. Furthermore, pageone is just a splash page, thus the story actuallybegins on page two. Therefore, in the first threeand-a-halfpages of the story, they found room to
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