Sometimes it's hard to get started...

The Top 11 Lists that I've started writing in my head and then completely abandoned before I even start typing, is what this list really is.

11. Top 11 Days of the Week

After adding Smunday, Schmensday and Pancake Day, I realized I still only had 10 and couldn't possibly think of an 11th that wouldn't totally just be making up another day. We only have seven. Makes it hard to do a top 11 list. Though I looked it up and found out that other cultures used more than just 7 days in the past. Several cultures had 10 day weeks, and some older cultures had only 3 day weeks. Why did we pick 7? Because it's lucky? Seven's a good number but it doesn't divide well into, well, anything really. I guess if we had 350 days a year we could have 50 good weeks, but as it stands we have 52 weeks and some change left over.

That was just poorly thought out, if you ask me. And Pancake Day should so be a real day.

Smushed right between Smunday and Schmensday.

10. Top 11 Months of the Year

Ok, now I have the opposite problem from number 11, which is in order to make this list I'd have to exclude a month. Do you know how hard it is to pick one to exclude? If you had to pick 11 months to survive and kill one off which one would you pick?

December has Christmas, November has Thanksgiving, January has my birthday...I can't pick one. August? Are there any good holidays in August? Surely I know somebody who has a birthday there, they'd probably be pretty upset if I ditched it. One month's as good as another right? How would you even rank them?

See, this is how I got started in my head and then just decided not to type.

Look at them mocking me with their colorfulness...

9. Top 11 Mistakes made by Scooby Doo characters

This one was a wash as they always make the same mistakes: The Scooby gang always splits up, and the villains always overlook the fact that a bunch of kids might figure out that the monster might just be a guy in a mask.

There's another mistake the Scooby Gang make, actually: How many episodes would it take before any real person started just going, "Oh, there's a monster in town? Probably a guy in a mask. It's happened like 11,000 times already." How is that never their first thought?

They can't even drive without being terrified.

8. Top 11 Presidents of the United States

There's no way to write this list without it becoming a political debate. And I'd feel cheezy for including Washington and Lincoln because they're just the most famous. I should do a Top 11 Presidents that people don't know anything about and use Millard Filmore and Chester A. Arthur and all those guys that were President during random times of the country's existence when nothing particularly exciting was happening.

Quick, what's James Buchanan most famous for? Yeah, I don't know either.

Even I'm not sure which President I am. Oh, it says Van Buren, right there.

7. Top 11 States in the United States

After Texas and West Virginia I ran out of ideas. New York's nice. California has good weather. I guess there's some other nice ones. Illinois? Yeah, it's pretty good, I guess. It has Chicago at least. North Carolina's ok. But really, beyond those, they're all just "States that aren't Texas".

And that's just sad.

This map is 100% accurate.

6. Top 11 Fictional Bars

I came up with Cheers and the Mos Eisley Cantina, and then I ran out of ideas. There have to be more famous fictional bars, right? There's McLaren's Pub from How I Met Your Mother. There's Moes, from the Simpsons, and I guess the Drunken Clam from Family Guy. I couldn't think of anymore without just making things up. I'm bound to have missed a good one somewhere.

Oh, right. I forgot the Regal Beagle.

5. Top 11 Fake Names Generated From Spam Emails

The problem with this is that I have so many. So, so many. Spam Email Generators try to make names that look like real names, but are clearly fake. Things like "Sixta Jo", "Ghastly Q. Looseness", and "Possibly K. Enjoining". There's too many good ones for me to even try to cut that list down to 11. Possibly K. Enjoining is still killing me. I may just write a book where every character is named from a Spam Email I got. I'm almost positive someone's tried this already.

You can't fool me. That's Chuck E. Cheese after some kind of Borg Assimilation.

4. Top 11 Pizza Toppings

A difficult list for me because I run out after pretty much 5. Pepperoni, Sausage, Canadian Bacon (ham), Ground Beef and Mushrooms. I guess I could throw Garlic and Extra Cheese in there to hit 7, but everything else is non-meat related and I'm just not down with that. Mushrooms are as close as I get to putting a vegetable on a pizza. Why would you ruin a good pizza with onions and green peppers? (Sorry, Mom).

I once accidentally bit into a pizza with anchovies on it and I nearly threw up in my mouth. I can still taste that horrible, horrible pain just thinking about it. Gah! Anchovies. Bad, just bad. Don't put bait on pizza.

I don't even need to say anything. Good call, cat.

3. Top 11 Numbers between 1 and 10

Do I include decimals? Pi? Just whole numbers? I thought about doing this list and just doing 1-10 and having pi be one of the numbers, cause I thought that would be funny, but it's a long way to go for a joke. And there's not much to say about some of the numbers. I mean, 7 is lucky, 3 is the magic number, 1 is the loneliest number, but 6? I guess it's 1 third of the number of the beast. What about 4? 8? 10? Wait, I'm thinking of things. I may write this list yet.

And I already ruined the joke. Great. Way to go, Todd.

Wouldn't it be easier to color the numbers first? Just sayin.

2. Top 11 Books by Charlotte and Emily Bronte

Neither of them has ever written a good book, so this just went right out the window as soon as it flashed through my head.

Not pictured: Entertainment.

1. Top 11 Passwords I Use on the Internet

How silly would it be for me to tell you this?

Here's the trick, I just use all *'s for my passwords.

My 11 Favorite Dungeons and Dragons Modules

For those that don't know, I'm a giant D&D nerd. I'm sure most of you are aware, but in case someone stumbled onto my page looking for great deals on medical supplies or pictures of girls in their underwear, well, that's not what we do here.

A Dungeons and Dragons module is basically a short story that you play through as a group with one person running the story and everyone else playing major characters. Modules were all the rage when I played in the 80's and early 90's, usually written by guys who worked for TSR (including Gygax, himself) and some of them were well crafted stories, and others were just series of monsters and bad storytelling mushed together and sold for $5.95 (yes, I'm old enough to remember when modules cost about six bucks).

Here then is my list of the favorite modules I ever ran or played in.

*SPOILER ALERT*

I will be ruining the end of some of these, so if you never played them or you don't want to know the twist ending for some reason, just check the names and the pictures and don't read my descriptions.


11. The Isle of Dread

The Isle of Dread was the module you got if you bought the box-set of  Expert Dungeons and Dragons, which contained a rule book for characters levels 6-10 and this module. Ostensibly the idea was to introduce players to adventures that were outside rather than a dungeon crawl, and the island was basically covered with monsters, dinosaurs and randomly large animals (mostly snakes). The players were sent to the island based on a scrap of a note that they found showing the island's approximate location in the sea and the teaser text that told them that the island was actually covered with fabulous treasure!

The story itself wasn't very cohesive, and really you just went from one monster encounter to the next until you'd covered the entire island, but it was different and new and didn't take place underground so it had all kinds of cool things like weather and swimming and mountain climbing and what have you. Basically things kids playing D&D would never do in real life.

My favorite story about the Isle of Dread though was that in another campaign that some friends of mine played, one of the characters, a high level Fighter named Draygon, had actually chartered a boat to the island, killed everything on it, and claimed it as his own. Thus it became the Isle of Draygon in most of our campaigns after that, and I always thought that was cool.

Quick! Send the natives to slow it down!

10. Mad Monkey vs. the Dragon Claw

I didn't get to play as much Oriental Adventures as I'd have liked. OA was an add-on book for Advanced Dugeons and Dragons (1st Edition) that let you play Ninjas, Samurais, and everyone's favorite class: The Bushi. Why was it everyone's favorite? They just liked saying "Bushi". Bushi were just fighters, they didn't have any special magic abilities or anything, but it's fun to say. Bushi. Bushi. Bushi. Ok, I'll stop now.

Bushi.

The story of Mad Monkey vs. the Dragon Claw was a great read though. Basically Dragon Claw, who is one of the immortal powers of the Oriental game setting, has challenged all the other Immortal powers by telling them that his fighting style is the best. He's also made a bet that if his followers, using his fighting style, can beat everyone else, then the Immortal Powers have to let him rule over the world (or part of the world at least) however he wants to.

Dragon Claw, however, is being a jerk, and he hasn't told the other Immortals that one of the reasons his guys are the best is that he's supplied them all with magic weapons. One of the other immortals, Mad Monkey, has figured it out, and has approached the adventurers with the information and is supplying them with powers and magic items of their own to go out and destroy Dragon Claw's disciples. It's like a Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu movie as a playable game, and how could you not love that?

Aaaah! The ground is gone!

9. Vault of the Drow

A classic module that almost all old school D&D nerds are familiar with, Vault of the Drow was the player's first opportunity to fight Lolth, the Goddess-Queen of the Drow.


The Drow, if you were wondering, were this wonderfully horrible evil race of dark elves who were totally awesome in a "if they show up, you run" kind of way. They were sort of like the Agents in the first Matrix movie, and just mentioning Drow, or finding Drow weapons laying around could terrify a group of level 10 adventurers back in the day.

Of course then someone (*cough* R.A. Salvatore *cough*) wrote some terrible books about the Drow, basically told us all about them, including how their society worked, which pretty much destroyed any fear they ever instilled in anyone in a "Wait, Darth Vader's a whiny little kid?" kind of way.

But still, it was a fun module.

If there's anything more horrifying than giant spiders, it's giant FABULOUS spiders.

8. The Rod of Seven Parts

This is kind of cheating because Rod of Seven Parts is less a module than it is an entire campaign, but I liked it because it had a great back story about the war between the Dukes of the Wind and the Queen of Chaos, it had lots of adventure hooks while your group tried to find all seven parts, and it just felt epic.

You had to go to other planes of existence to find certain parts. You had to battle the ghosts of the Generals of the war that was fought over the Rod long ago, and if you managed to find all seven parts it became a very powerful artifact called the Rod of Law.

It was also the only magic item in D&D history that got it's own novel, written by Douglas Niles, who wrote several Dragonlance novels, and the next Module on the list.

Not pictured: The Rod.

7. Horror on the Hill

Horror on the Hill is just a straight forward little story, but it exemplified, for me at least, exactly what a D&D module should contain: A snippet of story, a setting, some bad guys, a cool ending. Horror on the Hill started with the players gathering at an old abandoned fort, and heading into the hill to fight whatever horrors were there (even the name works to explain everything you're doing).

There are rumors that a witch lives in the hill, but it's mostly filled with goblins and hobgoblins, and then, right at the bottom SUPRISE! A red dragon. A neat little addition that let you introduce your low level characters to fighting dragons, and pretty well capped off an interesting little adventure. Nothing too special, just a well done romp through dungeon land.

No, the Horror is on that Hill! Over there!

6. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks

This one is a classic. The players start the game being told by the Duke that a bunch of monsters keep coming out of this cave and attacking his lands, and the players are sent to deal with the problem. They head to the mountains, enter the cave, and discover that it's even more bizarre than they imagined.

The players have to deal with strange armored men, bizarre lights, hallways made of materials they've never seen before, doors that slide open and closed. It's all very intriguing in a "What the heck is going on" kind of way.

Turns out, the players are actually on a spaceship that crashed onto this fantasy planet. The DM was instructed to keep that secret until the last possible moment, describing the "shiny metal armored men" who turned out to be robots, and describing the fluorescent lighting as "magic like you've never encountered before". It was a nice twist to find out that you were on a spaceship the whole time.

Two things of note about Barrier Peaks: Stephen Colbert listed it as one of his favorite modules, and it introduced an idea that was later used profusely in video games, namely that to get to certain parts of the ship you had to find different colored keycards to open the doors. I'm sure the game described them as magic door opening scrolls, but in games like Doom and Quake and other First Person Shooters this became the standard way to progress through the game. So good for them on both counts.
 

Surprised that it's not Japanese? Me too.

5. Baltron's Beacon


This one is probably one of my favorites less for the module itself than it was for the enjoyable time I had playing it. In the middle of a swamp is a giant green light that fires up from this keep, and the players are sent in to find out what it is and destroy it, since it's calling all the monsters in the area to head to the keep, and nobody likes it when all the monsters get together. It just never ends well.


I remember the keep as kind of fun to explore, but mostly what I remember is that at the beginning this creepy Druid guy who lives in the swamp gives you these black seeds that you have to put into the green glow at it's base level in order to destroy it, and that's how you finish the game, you have to get to where the green glow starts and toss the black seeds in.


Now I was playing a thief in this game, so I was sneaking off by myself all the time and getting in trouble, and at one point I got captured by the BIG BAD GUY, who tied my character to a metal chair, drenched me in water and started casting shocking hands spells on me to torture me in an effort to find out why our party was here.

I did the typical action star thing at first and refused to talk, thinking I'd be awesome, but then a little actual role playing kicked in. See, I realized that my character wasn't the tough guy, he was thief! And I didn't know the rest of the party that well (I mean, in real life, sure, but my character had just met their characters) so I said, forget it, I'm not getting killed for these people I barely know. So I spilled the whole thing to the evil wizard, the black seeds, the green glow, tossing them in, the whole bit.


I'll never forget that moment, one of my all time favorite role playing game moments as the DM looked at me, and then in character for the evil wizard said, "You expect me to believe that you traveled all the way across a dangerous swamp and fought through dozens of monsters to get into my keep so you could MAKE POPCORN!"


It was a great moment, and I remember looking back and realizing that was the point in time that I realized how much fun you could have with an RPG, and that being the super awesome action star was never as much fun as playing a flawed character (like a thief willing to sell out his "friends" to save his own life). I've never looked back. The first thing I try to do when I make a character now is figure out how he's flawed. Cause that's the fun part.

What is SHE looking at?

4. The Keep on the Borderlands

Here's an example of where a module becomes popular just through sheer volume. When you bought the Basic Dungeons and Dragons box set, chances were you got this module. I heard rumors from other people that they got B1 Search for the Unknown, but I never actually saw that happen, and I bought dozens of these over the years, all of them containing Keep on the Borderlands. I always thought it was weird that the module they gave you to start with was labeled B2, and made you feel like you had already missed something.


The module itself isn't that great, as I recall. It reminds me a lot of Horror on the Hill: the characters show up at the eponymous keep and then just keep exploring the caverns nearby that are full of monsters. I remember there were some kobolds, and some lizardmen, and there was an evil priest in the keep itself who had allied himself with some of the bad guy monsters.


But what I really remember about it is that for years and years, and even to this day if you find someone that played the first Basic D&D, they all had or remember this module. That's pretty impressive if you ask me, so out of sheer nostalgia I'm ranking it 4th on my list.

Smallest.War. Ever.

3. Temple of Elemental Evil

First of all, kudos to these guys for having a cool name. Temple of Elemental Evil just sounds cool. Second, this module was huge. Much bigger and more full of stuff than any of the other modules I ever remember buying. I think it might be bigger than the Rod of Seven Parts, which was a full on campaign setting. I guess technically Temple of Elemental Evil qualifies as a campaign setting as well, since you could run, I believe from level 1 to 8 without actually leaving it.


Basically it was this giant temple built by an evil horde, and even though humans and elves and dwarves and gnomes had eradicated most of the evil horde of monsters, the Temple was still there and became sort of a base for bad guys to do bad things. So the players have to show up and beat them down again, but it turns out that underneath the evil temple, there's layer after layer of dungeon that goes down miles into the ground.


So players can just keep going back to town, then heading back to the temple to dig further and further down, defeating evil as they go. Kind of a cool way to run a campaign if you just decided you didn't want to bother with politics or overland maps or introducing any sort of NPC mystery to solve. You have dungeons, you explore them, you kill monsters you take their stuff. Rinse, repeat. Great stuff.

Never buy the creepiest house in the neighborhood.

 2. Ravenloft

It may just be that I liked Dracula so much, but Ravenloft was always one of my favorites. Strahd, the evil vampire, has a castle and a nearby village full of ravishing young women to satiate his bloodlust, and the players have to show up and put a stop to it.


It's cool, because you get a lot of the Dracula feel, there's gypsies and wolves and people with names like Tatiana and Ilsa, and a creepy vampire castle full of undead things to fight, but it also has a full story, and you may actually start to feel some sympathy for Strahd when you find out all the horrible things that happened to him. It's really well done, and also contains the Sunsword, where my friend Anthony got his alter ego name from.


Plus, really good artwork and giant maps of the castle, always a bonus. Plus, again, Ravenloft is just a cool name. I like things with cool names.

Standing on his balcony, Strahd surveyed his lands and decided, "I live in a Hell hole."

1. Castle Amber (Chateau D'Amberville)

So any of the old school gamers I ever played with know this is my favorite module. I used to run it all the time, every time we started a new group, and really, I can't even explain why. I'll give it a shot though. The game starts with the players on their way somewhere, they stop to camp, they wake up in the morning in a foggy mist, and suddenly they're at Castle Amber.


If they try to leave they get killed in the mist (the module helpfully points this out to them by having a mule run off into the mist with a rope tied around it, and you hear it scream and if you pull the mule back by the rope you find a mule corpse). Basically you have to go inside the castle or die in the fog, so right there you're already off and running.


But to me, the great thing about it, is that the Castle is just full of the Amber family, who are all bat guano insane in various different ways. One of them has been buried alive by the others and she's become a ghoul out to kill anyone who comes across her. One has set up a boxing match where players can fight his flesh golem boxer. One is dead, and the only way to get out of the castle is to find his tomb and leave through there.


It 's also filled with great little puzzles that I love, like the dinner party where the players can pick and choose what dishes they want to eat that all have random magical effects on them. Eating the green beans with slivered almonds might give you a +1 strength boost until you leave the castle. Eating the cheese soup might turn you into a rabbit. It had a great little setup where these ghosts bring out every course and you asked all the players "Are you eating the braised lamb?" And only after everyone decided and the plates were taken away would you tell the players what the effect was. So it was basically just this random Russian Roulette of "Do I want to eat that?"


Another puzzle had a room with letters on the floor, and you had to cross the room in 7 steps, so you would always spell out a word (a nonsense word, usually) so whatever the first 7 letters you stepped on were would light up, and when you got across the room each of the words you could spell out would have some magical effect on you. You might get a forcefield that protected you from damage, or you might get frostbite. You just never knew.


So, for the great story, the interesting characters and the totally awesome puzzles, Castle Amber has always been my favorite Dungeons and Dragons module.

When giants are swinging trees at you and crushing your towers in their bare hands it's time to move.

11 Actors who played Batman

So I picked out a new background, plus, Blogspot added this thing where it's real easy to put pictures in your posts (I mean, I guess I always could have, but the interface is much simpler now) so I went a little nuts and found a bunch of pictures and...

What was I talking about? Right. Batman.

Anyway, here's a bunch of people who have played Batman through the years. I had to include voice actors as well, since there are really only like 5 guys who ever played live action versions of Batman (not counting fan videos on youtube). So here they are:

11. Actor: Lewis Wilson
Played Batman in: 1940's Batman Serials

I'm not sure I've ever seen a 1940's Batman Serial, at least not an entire one, I'm sure I've seen clips of the show, but I gotta give this guy credit for being the first actor to portray him on film (as far as I know). I kinda like the pointy mask, and the ears that look more like devil's horns than bat ears. That cape is probably made out of some thick material that's more like carpet than cloth.

I don't think he ever fought any of Batman's signature villains, though. I'm guessing it was a lot of bad guys in suits, mobsters, probably Nazi's since it was the 40's, and no end of hilariously stereotyped Chinese and Japanese bad guys, who were probably white actors with their eyes scotch taped into a ridiculous squint, and a jet black fu-manchu.

Lewis Wilson is also the only person to ever play both Batman and Iron Man (Ok, he played a character named Jerome 'Iron Man' Collins in a movie called Sailor's Holiday, which since it was the 40's probably wasn't gay porn) and his son, Michael G. Wilson, was a producer on every James Bond Movie since Moonraker (including the new Bond movies). Lewis was married, briefly, to Dana Broccoli, who later married Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, who was the producer on ALL the Bond films, which is probably how his son got involved.

You had no idea James Bond and Batman were so intricately linked, did you?

Cell phones in the 40's were HUGE...

10. Actor: Val Kilmer
Played Batman in: Batman Forever (1995)

Poor Val. I like him in so many things: Real Genius, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Salton Sea, Willow...

He was unfortunately saddled with taking over the Dark Knight just as Joel "It should be neon and have nipples" Schumacher was taking over the Batman Franchise. Can't really blame him for that, or for a terrible script that included Robin (the movies are much better off without Robin) or the line "Holy rusted metal, Batman! I mean, really, this thing is metal and rusted and it has holes..."

Way to play off the jokes there writer guy.

Kilmer himself, however, wasn't bad. He did a great Bruce Wayne (I still think that's the key to a Batman actor, almost anybody can handle the suit and the stunt guys do all the fighting, you just gotta pull off insane rich guy). Too bad he couldn't have been in a better Batman movie.

Val Kilmer, as far as I know, has no ties to the James Bond franchise, though he was once in a great spoof of the spy genre called Top Secret. Man, Val Kilmer's been in a bunch of good movies.

And for Batman's next amazing trick...

9. Actor: Rino Romano
Played Batman in: THE Batman (Voice), (2004)

I had to capitalize all the letters in "THE" up there, because that was how this show was marketed and differentiated from other Batman shows, was it was called THE Batman. It followed a young Bruce Wayne/Batman, who I think was still in high school, and lots of people (Travis) hated it because they changed all the bad guys and he gets his butt kicked every week by guys like the Riddler and the Penguin, who are generally less physically violent criminals and more cerebral criminals.

I...didn't hate it as much as Travis did. It's got a catchy theme song, and I thought the voice actor was really good (that's the aforementioned Rino Romano, up there). But the central theme of the show was less Batman and more teen angstyness. Like someone was reading a lot of old Spiderman comics and said, "Yeah, Batman should go through more crap like this. Does he have a girlfriend who can break up with him and a bunch of friends and teachers who can be villains?"

He doesn't. But it didn't stop them from trying. They gave him a pseudo-love interest in this Gotham City cop who always seemed like she was just about to figure out he was Batman, or something. I can't remember, it's been a while since I watched it.

Not pictured: Angst.

8. Actor: Adam West
Played Batman in: Batman TV Series (1966)

Probably a lot of boos from the crowd for having this guy so low on the list. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love Adam West. In fact, I want a tv show where Adam West and William Shatner play Odd Couple type roommates. Maybe one of them is a retired cop, and the other's a con man who just got out of prison, and they're brothers, or something? I mean, who wouldn't watch that show? I'd TIVO that every week. Instead Shatner's doing some terrible TV show called *#&$ my Dad Says, which is based on a webpage and is apparently the worst thing on television, ever. It will probably never get cancelled.

Anyway, the reason I put him so low on the list is that he did some lasting damage to the Batman franchise (enough that it took Frank Miller and a bunch of other comic book writers most of the 80's to make Batman cool again and not campy). But still, I loved this show, watched it all the time when I was a kid. It just wasn't "cool" Batman.

I like Batman when he's the toughest, smartest guy in the room, when he appears from the shadows to knock bad guys out, when he's three steps ahead of the Joker, and when he disappears just as the Gotham PD shows up and leaves Commissioner Gordon scratching his head, wondering how he does that.

This Batman hangs out in Commissioner Gordon's office, has a bright red phone for the Commish to call him on, and lives with his aunt who makes sandwiches and has no idea Bruce and Dick are Batman and Robin. (Here's a question: Does she think they're a couple? Does the Aunt from the 60's show worry about that? I think she does).

Look at my belt buckle. LOOK AT IT!

7. Actor: George Clooney
Played Batman in: Batman and Robin (1997)

God, was it really that long ago? 13 years? It doesn't seem like that long. Again, I can't blame Clooney for Joel Schumacher running this franchise into the ground, kicking sand on it, spitting on it as he walked away. He had an even more ridiculous script than Kilmer had to deal with. And he had the most horribly miscast villain in Batman history (Schwarzenegger as Dr. Freeze). I won't even go into why that's such a bad idea, I'll just say that Dr. Freeze was a skinny, bald, aging doctor who used his genius in science to become a villain, and they cast the biggest, most muscle-bound actor known for quipping one liners in Hollywood. Then they let him quip one liners like "ICE to see you..."

Hang on, I have to throw up a little.

Ok, I'm back. Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I think Clooney would have made a great Batman in a GOOD batman movie. He definitely has the rich playboy thing down. He's versatile enough to go from charming Bruce to serious and insane Bruce, he's charismatic enough to carry a weak script, but the script they gave him wasn't weak, so much as it was dead, buried, and rotting.
 

I got paid a LOT of money...and I'm sorry.

6. Actor: Diedrich Bader
Plays Batman in: The Brave and the Bold (Voice), (2008)

The Brave and the Bold is just a great, great show. It's incredibly fun, it's got lots of cameos from DC heroes and villains, and it's like you gave some guys who really like Batman and the whole DC universe a chance to just shine. And when I figured out who Diedrich Bader was (the guy from Drew Carey) I was like, "Yeah, I recognize the voice now."

But what's weird is, it's almost pitch perfect. Bader's voice is right on par with the show. It's not a dark Batman, and it's not a campy Batman, it's stuffed itself comfortably in the Fun without being too campy category, and Bader's voice just goes perfectly along those lines.

He'd be higher on this list, probably, but like I said, as much as I enjoy fun Batman, I like dark, brooding Batman better.

Drew Carey's friends fight crime.

5. Actor: Jeremy Sisto
Plays Batman in: Justice League: The New Frontier (Voice), (2008)

Jeremy Sisto was in Clueless, a movie I unabashedly love. He was in Law & Order, a TV show that I unabashedly love. And he voiced Batman, a character that I unabashedly love. I have some unabashed love for Jeremy Sisto, somehow. Weird, right?

But the thing is, I really liked this movie. It's a sort of retelling of the formation of the Justice League, it's set in like the 50's or 60's (sort of blurs the line), it has Neil Patrick Harris as Flash, Lucy Lawless as Wonder Woman, and David Boreanaz as Green Lantern. It's a great story, a lot of fun.

To begin fighting crime, simply remove baby from straps.

4. Actor: Michael Keaton
Plays Batman in: Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992)

There was a lot of hate for Michael Keaton when he was announced as the Batman in Tim Burton's movie, and I remember hearing a lot of "Mr. Mom!? C'mon, seriously?!" But I always thought he was a great choice. He can definitely straddle the line between being funny and being seriously dark, and I thought that would be a great choice for a Bruce Wayne, you get your charming Playboy and you get your disturbed vigilante, and really the suit makes pretty much anybody in decent shape into Batman.

I hated the car, it looked too much like a rocket ship, loved Nicholson as the Joker (not surpassed until Ledger pulled a rabbit out of his hat and knocked it out of the park in Dark Knight), hated Danny DeVito as the Penguin (he would have been a great Penguin if they had done the more comic oriented "upper class criminal in a tux" but they opted instead for "disgusting mutant who bites the heads off of fish"), was ambivalent about Michell Pfeiffer as Catwoman (She's hot, but I didn't like the bizarre zombie Catwoman direction they took that character in), loved the Prince soundtrack for the first one, hated almost everything about the second one (culminating in the ridiculous "Penguins with rockets strapped to their backs") and thought Keaton acquitted himself well throughout both movies.

It's weird, but there's this thing they do in the comics and animated series where villains don't die, they just get locked up in Arkham Asylum and then they come back later, but *SPOILER ALERT* Joker dies at the end of the first one and Penguin dies at the end of the second one, so there's really no hope that either of those characters comes back (good for Penguin, bad for Joker). Not sure why they keep doing that in the movies.

What makes you think I can't move my neck?

3. Actor: Bruce Greenwood
Plays Batman in: Under the Red Hood (2010), Young Justice (Voice), (2010)

Most people probably know him best as Commander Pike from the new Star Trek reboot who convinces Kirk to join Starfleet, but he voiced Batman in a great animated movie called "Under the Red Hood" and came back for the "Young Justice" series (which really focuses on the younger characters of Robin, Aqualad, Superboy, and Kid Flash) and he's just fantastic.

His voice is kind of commanding and gravelly and when Batman shows up to tell anyone anything you kind of pay attention because he has a very serious voice that sounds confident and like he's seen a lot of things and knows what he's talking about, which is really where Batman shines. Batman is Batman because he's experienced, he's good at what he does, he follows his own rules, and he rarely gets outsmarted and I think Bruce Greenwood has a great voice for that.

Up to this point Bruce has done a lot of secondary character stuff, and I don't know that that will change any time soon, but he's definitely got a lot of great nerdy street cred with the Star Trek and Batman stuff going on. So good for him.

That's right, baby. I'm the Bat.

2. Actor: Christian Bale
Plays Batman in: Batman Begins (2005), Dark Knight (2008)

Of all the live action Batman actors, Christian Bale has been handed, by far, the best scripts. Batman Begins and Dark Knight are great, great movies. Christopher Nolan and David Goyer really put together good stories, and I'm still burned that Dark Knight didn't get a best picture nod in 2008. It's ridiculous how good that movie was.

Arguably the worst thing about the movies is Bale, whose gravelly voice as Batman (in an effort to hide his true identity) is, admittedly, a bit over the top. But the scenes where he shines are as Bruce Wayne: Falling asleep in a board room meeting, driving his Lamborghini around like a lunatic, showing up with two women to dinner who immediately start swimming in the fountain and undressing) I definitely get the whole "Rich playboy about town" vibe from him, but at the same time you can see underneath that a separate layer of seriousness and understanding about what's really going on around him, even while he looks clueless.

His interaction with Alfred is great, he has the charming smile and the some really great dialog that he delivers with precision. Overall, while he's had the best material to work with, I also think he pulls it off well, which not everyone would have been able to do.

Batman. Serious business.

1. Actor: Kevin Conroy
Plays Batman in: Batman The Animated Series (Voice), (1992)

Yes, the gold standard for Batman actors is a voice actor, and one that doesn't actually look like he could play Batman in a movie, but that voice, man, it's absolutely perfect. Spot on, 100%, dead on the money perfect.

There's a documentary on the Animated Series DVD's where they talk about the casting calls for all the characters and how they thought they had someone for Batman but then Kevin Conroy came in and they were just blown away.

I remember hearing that voice the first time I watched the cartoon and sort of half-jokingly thinking to myself "That's weird, they actually got Batman to do his own voice..." He's really that good.

Additionally, Mask of the Phantasm, the full length animated movie they made based on the Animated Series, which got theatrical release in 1993, was, up until Batman Begins, the best Batman movie released in theaters, so he's got the movie and TV angles down. And really, like Bale, he had a lot of good material to work with. Warner Brothers went all out for the Animated Series, and it shows, great voice talent, great scripts, great art direction. It's not the greatest art in the world, but it fits the Gotham universe that they were trying to create. I always thought it was interesting that one of the things they did was instead of using white paper to draw on and coloring it in for the night shots they just started with black paper and put color on it, which made everything look darker and really brought out the sort of "Batman" feel that other Batman properties were lacking.

**NOTE: I was reminded that Kevin also did the voice for Batman in the excellent Batman: Arkham Asylum video game, one of the best games ever. So he gets bonus points for that. Thanks Mr. Tact!

Batman as voiced by the eldest Weasley child.

So, that's my list. I'm sure no one will argue any of my choices and you'll all just go peacefully on your way.

It's 2011

So, I have no idea what that background is all about. Just go with it.

It's 2011 and occasionally one of my many readers (Ok, all 3 of you) have commented that I don't post on my blog anymore. That's true. It's been 7 months according to Kayla. Running a blog is tough for me because I can't imagine that many people care about what I think or do on a daily basis.

Blog entries like "I drove to work, had lunch, drove home and did laundry." Are the kinds of things that bore the heck out of me and I mean both reading and writing them, so I don't do things daily. I'm much happier discussing Batman and GI Joe at length, or posting movie trailers or online games that I find. The problem is I don't find them often enough or in a high enough density to bother posting them, so after a while I just forget the blog is here until I have a week where I see two good trailers and three good games or something.

So what I need is a theme. And since it's 2011 I figured the theme should be 11. It's a nice number, and I like it. So the theme for this year is going to be "Lists of my top 11".

Today's list is "My top 11 favorite Authors". If you have ideas for other lists I can post I'll do those too. I think the most likely outcome of this experiment is that by December I might have remembered to post 11 times. So Good Luck with that.

My Top 11 Favorite Authors

11. Jane Austen
My English teachers would be proud. Well, most of them. When I was in college I had a professor who hated Jane Austen. HATED her. She was a big fan of the Bronte sisters (Charlotte and Emily, if I recall) and I thought it was the worst drek that I'd ever had to muddle through. So, one day I was thinking, "If this lady loves these Bronte chicks, and hates Jane Austen, maybe I should check out some Jane Austen". Turns out Jane Austen was funny, lighthearted, and poked a lot of fun at the landed gentry of England. Plus, she wrote Emma, which was later the story that the screenplay for Clueless was based on, and that's one of my guilty pleasure movies. And it doesn't hurt that her last name is a homophone for the greatest city in Texas. So there's that, too.

10. Neil Gaiman
Probably one of the best fantasy authors in the world, Neil writes some great stuff. Stardust, Neverwhere, and American Gods are fantastic fantasy/sci-fi and if you haven't read them you should. Also, his work on Sandman comics (not the Spider-man villain) was tremendous. Lots of short stories, one in particular about cats dreams that I will never forget. He's awesome and you should read more of his stuff. Also, he wrote one of my top 5 books ever with author #2 on this list.

9. Robert Aspirin
I remember discovering Robert Aspirin because a friend of my parents was moving and left us a bunch of boxes of books. Most of them were Sunday comic type things like Hagar, Beetle Bailey, B.C., and Garfield. But there were a few fantasy novels thrown in as well, and one of them was Myth-Adventures, by Robert Aspirin. I was, at the time, mired in terrible fantasy novels that all felt exactly the same to me, cliche after cliche, Knights and Dragons, wicked witches and pretty princesses. It was all starting to blend together. And then Myth-Adventures was about a kid who wanted to be a thief, got caught by a wizard who forced him to learn magic against his will, summoned a demon, had his wizard mentor die, and then actually learned real magic from the demon who was a fast talking con-artist with a heart of gold. I loved it.

8. Thomas Harris
Thomas Harris has to have had one of the most impressive runs in novel history. Since the 1970's he's written 5 books which have been made into 6 movies. That's a good percentage of wins. It's like a quarterback throwing 5 passes for 6 touchdowns. I'm still not sure how he managed it. Particularly since two of those books are almost the same story. First, only writing 5 books in 40 years but being one of the best paid, most celebrated authors in the world is impressive enough. But the 5 books he wrote were: Black Sunday (about terrorists trying to blow up the superbowl), Red Dragon (about a former FBI agent visiting a serial killer in prison to track down another serial killer), Silence of the Lambs (which is pretty much Red Dragon but with an FBI trainee instead of a former agent), Hannibal (the continuing adventures of the world's most famous serial killer), and Young Hannibal (the prequel to all the madness above). But at any rate I find his books fascinating, and I've never found a serial killer novel writer that I enjoyed more.

7. Stephen King
During that dreadful time in junior high and high school when it was harder to find a good fantasy novel than it is to find a Thomas Harris book that hasn't been made into a movie, someone suggested I check out Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King. I knew King only as a pulp horror writer, and I'd never even bothered trying to read one of his books. But Eyes of the Dragon was really good, not cliche filled, and I realized he had a very relatable writing style that kept me entertained. I immediately drove through all the books he had written, pausing to read The Shining twice. I got sucked into the Dark Tower series, complained with the rest of the world when it took too long to get sequels, and was totally devastated when he was in a car wreck and it looked like he might never finish the series. But even now I still read and enjoy his books. Duma Key was the last one I read (highly recommend it for some fun reading) and I'm starting Cell, which looks like it could be fun too.

6. Aimee Bender
I really wish I could remember how I found Aimee Bender. I think it might have been while searching for another author on this list (#5, below) and finding people on Amazon recommended her if you liked #5's books. I found some short stories she did online and was amazed at how good they were. Totally bizarre, incredibly fun, and a breeze to read. Then I found out she wrote a novel called An Invisible Sign of My Own, found it at a bookstore and loved every page of it. It's now being made into a movie with Jessica Alba. Great stories.

5. Chuck Palahniuk
Yes, the guy that wrote Fight Club. Not even my favorite of his books, but it's a great one. My favorite is still Choke, which also got the movie treatment, but isn't on Netflix. Sadness. But really, all of Chuck's books are great. Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Diary, and Lullaby were all brilliant. His plots are strange, his characters are stranger, and his writing style is sheer bliss.

4. Richard Adams
Richard Adams wrote a lot of books about animals (Shardik is about a giant bear; Plague Dogs is about two dogs who escape from an animal testing laboratory; The Ship's Cat is about...well, a cat on a ship. You get the idea.) But his masterpiece is Watership Down, still to this day my favorite book. I try to read it once a year. If you've never read it, or if you're thinking "Isn't that a kid's book about rabbits?" well, you're half right. It's about rabbits. It's not a kid's book though. It's violent, dark, funny, and probably one of the best adventure novels ever written. It literally makes me laugh and cry and keeps me hanging on the edge of my seat even though a.) It's about rabbits, b.) It's just a story, and c.) I've read it like 20 times now. It's that good.

3. Douglas Adams
I debated for a long time about how high Douglas was going to go on the list. Of all the books that I'm capable of reading and re-reading, Hitchhiker's Guide is waaaay at the top of the list. Possibly the funniest books I've ever read, and if I could figure out how to emulate his style of comedy I'd do it in a heartbeat. When I first read the Dirk Gently novels I was disappointed, but I've read them again since that long ago time and I can't imagine what was wrong with me, they're just as good as the Hitchhiker books. I'm sad that they let someone else do a Hitchhiker book after he died. Should have left it alone.

2. Terry Pratchett
This was where my debate was about where to put Douglas Adams, because he and Terry Pratchett hold a similar fascination for me. Terry is more about puns, which can be groan inducing, but the sheer volume of his work is what got me to put him at 2. He's written something like 40 discworld novels (I made that number up and I'm not doing ANY fact checking, so don't quote that). Another great author who made fantasy bearable for me. I love the witches novels, they're the best. My favorite is still Lords and Ladies, about elves coming back to the Discworld and everyone but the witches thinking that it was a good thing, but the witches having to remind everyone that, no, elves are evil little gits, was one of my favorite "turn the genre on it's ear" novels. Plus, Terry and Neil Gaman wrote a book called Good Omens which is the best end of the world novel ever. Ever.

1. Elmore Leonard
Anyone who knows me, even vaguely, could have told you who would be at the top of this list. Elmore is the author who inspires me to write. His sparse descriptions and ridiculously good dialog are what drives me to try to improve my writing at every turn. His 10 Rules for Writing is what I live by whenever I start writing a book or a story. He has books so re-readable that I've re-read all of them. Some of them several times. For me, Unknown Man #89 is my favorite, but really, you could lock me in a room with any one of his novels and I'd be happy for at least 10 read throughs.

So, there you have it. My first list.

What other lists should I make before I completely abandon this blog again?

It's Vs. Day

To begin with, it's Vs. day. Syfy channel vs. 1980's/90's pop music. Tiffany vs. Debbie Gibson. Mega Python vs. Gatoroid. What, what's a Gatoroid?

And see, now I'm done with the vs. theme. I just wanted to start off with that because, really, Mega Python vs. Gatoroid...how could you go wrong. But there's other things to look at.

See, there they are down there.

It's not just that it's Lego Chess. That would be awesome enough. It's that it's Robotic. And the pieces move. And it's quite possibly the most awesome act of nerderry the world has ever seen. It's at the very least in the top 10, chess/lego related acts of nerdism that's possible.

This guy might have the most unique drum style I've ever seen. He's good, there's no doubt, it's just the way he plays pushes him over the top.

The Green Hornet trailer is all over the place, so I just picked a spot that had it and linked it over there. Seth Rogen is definitely Seth Rogen, but still it looks like fun.

Sometimes Travis sends me things that he thinks look terrible, and then, much to his chagrin, I like them. Like RED. Travis's one sentence review: "Looks like Grumpy Old Assassins." Sure, but it's got John McClane, Helen Mirren, Being John Malkovich, and the voice of the Penguin movie in it. Not to mention Dr. McCoy, Young Mr. Hooper, the original Hannibal Lector, Gans from 48 hours, Dr. Doom, and futuristic New York's most famous cabbie. Throw in Weeds, and this might be a more impressive cast than the Expendables. And I thought the trailer looked like fun.

So I guess this post ends with me vs. Travis.

Hey look at that, I brought the theme back.

NINJAS! From NORWAY!

There's nothing about this movie that isn't awesome. First of all, it's about Norwegian Ninjas. Second of all, did you see the first part? About the Norwegian Ninjas? Cause that part was the part that was pretty awesome. Third, it's sort of based on a true story that has something to do with this guy. But really, just the Norwegian Ninjas part is pretty cool.

When I first found the video for Office War, I thought it was pretty cool, but man, Norwegian Ninjas. That's killing me.

I gave up on Lost after the last episode of season 1 because, well, there was all this cool stuff going on, and then they showed me that horrible smoke monster and I was like, meh. But this guy explains Lost in 3 minutes, so if you didn't watch it at all, or if you abandoned it somewhere along the way, like I did, well, you can save yourself all the time and trouble it would take you to go to the Wikipedia and try to figure out what happened.

This guy just makes all kinds of cool pancakes, presumably using some kind of food coloring and big plastic squirty bottles. I dug the Bacon and Egg Pancake.

Also, this is a weird webpage, and it took me a while to figure out that you had to click on the images and move the mouse around to get the guy to do things, but it's called Self Control Freak.

Warning: Froot is not nutritious. Though it may be nootrishus.

Lawsuits. Let's see, you can argue all day about the woman who sued McDonald's over the fact that her coffee gave her 3rd degree burns and say she's an idiot because coffee is supposed to be hot (or you can argue the other side, where you find out that originally all the woman wanted was the money to cover her $20,000 medical bills, and McDonald's offered her $800. Nice.) That's all fine and good.

But here we have the last bastion of a real need for tort reform: Someone sued Kellogs claiming that they believed Froot Loops contained real fruit, and someone else sued them claiming that they believed Cap'n'Crunch with Crunchberries contained real berries.

Awesome. Welcome to the world of Absurdistan, because that's apparently where we live.

Whether you love or hate the Smurfs, Hank Azaria as Gargamel, in what is apparently going to be a live action Smurf movie, will haunt your nightmares forever.

Now this is a Cool Lego Video.

Darth Vader tells you how to get where you're going.

Let's see, we have a Stabby Robot, a Meat eating robot, some Questioning Robots, and some Robots that can track people. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, we're about a hair's breadth away from this.