Brian Alvey

Jack and I played in the backyard for an hour two days ago. Our backyard was covered in a foot of snow with a layer of hard frozen snow on top. Jack walked across it with no trouble, but most of the time when I took a step my foot went through. Jack played on his swing set and marveled at a pretty large rubber ball that was barely poking through the snow.

After we came back inside, I told him that I had a blast with him. He asked me what that meant. I explained that I had such a good time playing with him that I felt like I was taking off in a rocket ship — blast off. I asked him if he had a blast too and he said no, he didn’t feel like he was a rocket ship taking off. I told him it was just an expression and that I wasn’t really going to take off into the sky. He assured me that he still never once felt like he was a rocket ship.

“You had a blast daddy. I just had fun.”

Twitter is this crazy new service for teenage girls that let’s them update their friends all day long so everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It’s like the status message on your IM client, but instead of changing between “Idle” and “Away” and “Online” you can tell your friends that you are “going shopping,” “getting my hair done” or “shaving my legs” and those status messages can be broadcast to their phones.

This year at SxSW, its the Year of Twitter. They have monitors that show you a stream of Twitter statuses and my whole team is getting Twitter update text messages on their cell phones around the clock.

The crazy thing is that as long as I’m hanging out with them, I don’t need to use the Twitter service myself.

I just listen:

“Now C.K. is going to take a shower.”

“Now C.K. is having a meatgasm.”

“Now C.K. is awake.”

“Now C.K. is having lunch lunch lunch.”

“Now C.K.’s parrots are fighting.”

“Now C.K. is telling an awesome muffin joke.”

If a store has a big international cheese section, I usually poke around and look for my favorite Norwegian cheese, Nökkelost. It’s a light yellow cow’s milk cheese with caraway seeds in it.

Sadly, the most popular Norwegian cheese is Gjetost, a nasty medium brown goat’s milk cheese.

My mom was trying to get me to eat a Gjetost sandwich when I was about 12 and when I refused she handed one to my dad and said that he eats it and I should too. My dad took a bite and spit it back out and told me I didn’t have to eat Gjetost. My mom was angry that he didn’t cooperate, but I’ve never forgotten that moment.

Even at Norwegian import stores you can buy all sorts of other ethnic food, but they never have Nökkelost. They say it doesn’t come in very often and when it does it gets bought up and disappears quickly. Well, of course it does — the other cheese you sell is nasty!

So I did a little research last night and I found out more about these two cheeses. Nökkelost even has a Wikipedia page. In it I learned that my favorite Norwegian cheese is flavored with cumin, caraway seeds and cloves, is “expensive and somewhat rare” and that an American version was made in the 1960s by Kraft. It was called “Caraway” then later called “Kuminost Spiced Cheese” and it vanished in the 1970s.

Then I found an online store where I can buy my “expensive and rare” cheese. It’s $57.66 for a 2.2 pound wheel. Holy cheeses! That’s like a whole tank of gas. It’s a good thing my birthday is coming up soon…

So I’m no longer a comic book convention virgin. (Hmm, there’s got to be a joke in that line somewhere. Maybe it’s too obvious.)

NYCC was a blast — the perfect way to spend a weekend while your family is out of town.

I got to cross three more comic giants off of my list — David Mazzucchelli, Bill Sienkiewicz and Chris Claremont — and I even met them in the order I had them in my last post. Wild.

I left some people off of my hit list who were not scheduled to be at the conference, but ones I plan to meet in the future. Frank Miller, John Byrne, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Jerry Ordway and there are easily a few dozen more who escape me because I’ve been out of comics for so long.

Plus I still need that solid 60 second conversation with Stan Lee so I can thank him for that 11th birthday tour.

This weekend I got to meet a bunch of my comic creator heroes at the New York Comic Con.

It all started with me saying a quick hi to Stan Lee in the hallway where he was heading to audition a dozen new costumed heroes for his upcoming round of Who Wants To Be a Superhero?

Since then I’ve met Denny O’Neil, Joe Staton, John Ostrander, José Luis García-López, Peter David, Michael Davis, David Mack, Michael Bair, Michael Golden and Greg Pak.

Comic legends I didn’t get to meet yet include: David Mazzucchelli; Bill Sienkiewicz; Chris Claremont; Walt Simonson; Denys Cowan; George Perez; Neil Adams; Mike Mignola; Carmine Infantino and Gene Colan.

Luckily, I’ll get another shot at meeting them all tomorrow.

I caught some of the game on the radio on the way to one of Jack’s friends’ houses. I saw bits and pieces of the game, probably none of the more significant plays, but we had a great time with the kids. I saw a few seconds of Prince’s half-time performance and I’m pretty sure he was doing the Foo Fighters’ Best of You. He has great taste, doesn’t he?

That’s only fair because Dave Grohl does a great Darling Nikki.

Congratulations to Peyton Manning, Mr. Preparation.

And in case you missed it, TV Squad carried on AdJab’s tradition and covered the important stuff — the Super Bowl commercials. Since I missed almost all of them, I had to click and see what “Letterman and Oprah” was all about.

Very touching.

One of the great things about a wedding or birthday party is that you get to do a crowd mashup, taking people from all the different areas of your life — work, school, families and beyond — and slamming them together.

We had a party for Jack’s fourth birthday yesterday and afterwards some of the guests headed back to my house. I ended up playing pool for hours with my step-dad, my best friend from college and my best friend from high school.

My step-dad was already dominant on the table, but then he retired from his job of 35 years, moved upstate and started running a pool hall so he plays all the time. Yikes.

We had a blast.

We have some balloons floating around the house from some kids thing we went to recently. They are the metallized nylon or foil kind that you see in hospitals (often wrongly called Mylar balloons), not the choking-hazard balloon animal kind and they have kids characters on them like SpongeBob and Dora.

Jack said something to me about his “SpongeBob balloon” and I laughed and told him he sounded like Ricky Ricardo saying “the Babalu.” That got me thinking about Desi Arnaz’s hit song and sent me to the Wikipedia to read up on Desi and Lucille Ball.

When we got together with Grandma Jackie this weekend someone mentioned couples where the wives are older than the husbands and I pointed out that Lucy was six years older than Desi and my mother and I went on and on about how he cheated on her, how they divorced but stayed in daily contact and how the television networks originally didn’t want to see an all-American redhead with a Latino husband. I ‘splained the original premise of the show and how they went on tour to prove that the pairing could be popular and refine their concept with their writing team.

In addition to his one hit song, Desi is credited with inventing the rerun, with pioneering the use of a multi-camera setup on a show with a live audience and with designing a set that would allow for filming in front of a live audience while following safety codes.

We should have been home from our trip by midnight last night, but we got home closer to 4am. There were delays leaving Colorado and then even more once we were in Chicago.

It could have been way worse, but both boys were fantastic considering the circumstances and we spent the whole trip with our favorite kids’ band. I will tell you way more about that soon.