Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wants to do two things in this post. First, comment some more on “The Dark Knight.” And second, blog about a big ole (yet sorta fun) waste of time he just completed earlier this week.

To begin! “The Dark Knight.” Your Maximum Leader is still thinking about the film. It is that memorable. To address a few items left by various commenters on the preceeding post… For our good friend Brian, the Bruce Wayne as playboy/fop or brooding millionaire… Your Maximum Leader might be missing some nuance of your description. He has felt that the best Bruce Wayne was Michael Keaton. Keaton’s Bruce Wayne was the sort of absent-minded yet innocuous rich guy. Christian Bale pulls this much more towards the young rake of a rich man. Not foppish, but very self-centered and self-indulgent. (In “The Dark Knight” a ballet performance is cancelled because Bruce decided to take the whole ballet troupe with him on his private yacht for a little woo-pitching.) Your Maximum Leader thinks that Bale’s Bruce Wayne works well with the alter-ego of Batman. Without attempting to get all Tarantino here, is Bruce Wayne the “act” or is Batman the “act?” Which is the real “essence” of the man? Your Maximum Leader thinks that for the purposes of these movies Batman is the real man - and Bruce Wayne has devolved into the cover story. In a way, Bruce Wayne, the rich playboy is someone we can identify with. We see plenty of rich celebs all over teevee and the interwebs. We want to see Batman. So, in the end your Maximum Leader doesn’t think that “The Dark Knight” will do much to change one’s impression of the Bruce Wayne side of this character. Wayne is essentially a minor subplot.

Your Maximum Leader finds Ellison’s comment interesting. The interesting part is this: What amazes me is that a movie this good was made with DC characters. Maybe Marvel doesn’t have the monopoly on three-dimensional heroes and villains with a backstory. Perhaps after years away from the genre, he is having trouble with the idea that Marvel comics always had the more developed characters. Your Maximum Leader’s years of reading comic books were in the 80s and into the 90s. This was the age of Millers “Dark Knight” reinvention of the Batman story. (And it was the era of “The Watchmen” (soon to be a major motion picture - and still a fantastic comic book). It could be that the comics in which your Maximum Leader indulged were all well written and well developed. So he’s never thought that DC lacked for good characters. It could also be that the movies based on the DC characters have lacked good screenwriters…

Anyhoo… Moving on from movies…

Your Maximum Leader, on Wednesday night, decided to check in to see if his Blogger/Blogspot logins worked. (They did.) He then did something that he’s never done before. (But perhaps you have…)

On the left side of the Blogger main page there is a little rotating spot showing the names of blogs that have recently been updated. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t believe he’s ever clicked on that link before. But Weds. night he clicked through on any blog name that he thought sounded interesting. He did this for 1 hour. He rarely had to wait more than 30-40 seconds for an interesting sounding blog title to appear. Just for the record, he didn’t click on any purely numerical blog titles. In fact, here is a list of blog title “types” he didn’t click on: all numeric, chinese/japanese/asian characters, any blog title that was a song lyric, any blog title that was “businessey” sounding, anything written in “3l33t.”

So there…

He was surprised at how many innocuous blog names just linked you to pages that were obviously set up just to improve someone’s web site search results. There were also a number of blogs that were really fronts for dating sites. Your Maximum Leader was surprised at the dearth of porn sites. In 1 hour he probably only saw 5 or six blatantly pornographic titles appear as links - and only clicked on two that were not blatantly porn but were instead funny and suggestive.

Well… Over the course of 1 hour there were only three blogs worthy of note. Here they are.

A Very Creepy Blog. A blog dedicated to discussion of the art and articles of the horror magazines of the 1970s and 1980s. Your Maximum Leader was a “Creepy” and “Vampirella” reader back in the day.

Smells Like Grape. A wine review site.

I write it, you skim it. A personal blog with some rather interesting posts. Some neat links too. Including this one: Barack Obama is your new bicycle. Barack Obama is not your Maximum Leader’s new bicycle, but he is the new bicycle to so many people…

Your Maximum Leader might play this little game of Blogger update again some time…

Carry on.