"Post No. 555"

Okay, here it is October the 11th. and still no DSL. Took my pc to a repair man two days ago. He checked it out. Found the Network card was fine as well as the drivers. In fact, he found absolutely nothing wrong with it at all. Got a connection right away. Brought it back to me. Charged $50. Plugged it in: No DSL. Called him and he thinks that it's my home connection but I won't be around here until Tueday for him to come by and check that. If so I'll have to call the server to come fix their connection. In the meanwhile, still on slow dial up and out $50. for no good reason. (Grrrr.....)

In the meanwhile, I finished reading that run of JLA 47 thru 65 and found them to be quite good even for a title that's now 8 years past. This run contained several complete storylines, beginning with "Once Upon A Time", where an evil witch is released from a magical book and thinks Wonder Woman some sort of faerie princess, and with the power to make all written fiction come to life, to a tale concerning the JLA meeting people who think they are the "real" heroes (although in their civilian ID's), to battles with white martians, to "Golden Perfect", which gives Wonder Woman a crisis over trying to save an abducted child who has been taken to a secret city to rule as their new leader. The populous there thinks he's some sort of Bhudda personna and want to keep him as it protects the city. WW thinks that's wrong and tries to use her lasso of truth, which ends up breaking over the conflict of "two truths", and her goal to repair same and come to terms with her own philosophies.

Along the way we get a couple of single tales, one involving Plastic Man trying to convice a kid that Santa Claus is real, and a "Joker: Laugh Laugh" x-over. Enjoyable run written by Mark Waid, Chuck Dixon/Scott Beatty, and Joe Kelly, with the likes of artwork by Doug Mahnke, Cliff Rathburn, Darryl Banks, Bryan Hitch/Paul Neary (my personal favorites), plus others. (This run went from Nov.2000 to May '02.) When that JLA series originally began, I considered it one of the best DC titles in a long time, and still feel that way even though I think the current series---thus far---is perhaps a bit better.

I've got three misc. issues of Marvel's Astonishing X-men to read (#'s 18 thru 20) and then I'll be diving into that full run of Xombi.