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You are here: Home / 2014 / Archives for March 2014

Archives for March 2014

Because Japan, That’s Why

March 27, 2014 by

Just another day at the office in Tokyo.
Just another day at the office in Tokyo.
Long ago and far away, on November 10, 2010, the very first article I wrote about Japan was about how Domino’s Pizza was willing to pay $31,000 an hour for a pizza delivery person. If you search this blog for articles mentioning Japan you will end up with hours of reading pleasure. Or so I am told. You can just click the link if you’re lazy. Anyway, amongst the gems you will discover the joys of young girls riding giant penises down the street. That is a family activity in Japan. I tell you this in case you are looking for ways to spice up your next sushi experience. Certainly the flying knife displays at Benihana’s would become more dangerous and fun. Then again we are talking about a country that uses Kentucky Fried Chicken to sponsor Christmas, so maybe that whole “finger licking good” thing just carries over.

The world may never know.

One thing it does know is that perfectly innocent things go to Japan and come back in need of therapy. For example, there is a Disney World in Japan. When you go there you can see all the Disney princesses, just like you can at any other Disney owned park. What’s different in Japan is that after you meet the princesses you can own their underwear.

You thought I was kidding didn’t you?

Online retailer Bellemaison features the Disney Fantasy Shop, a section that sells lingerie in designs inspired by Disney’s princesses. Each pair includes a carefully crafted bra and pair of panties that are intricately lined with lace, and made more vibrant with pastel colors. In some designs, bra straps are equally decorative with hues that sometimes complement the cups.

If you read Japanese you can order online by clicking the company’s link above.

If you do please send us pics so we know what they look like on humans.

Of course now that you’re festooned in your princess panties you need to do something romantic to make the evening worthwhile. Thanks to the fact you’re in Japan now, just go with me on this, you need not buy wine, order food or even go see a movie. No, all you need to do is let your significant other drop by and have him/her lick your eyeballs.

Oh, sure, the Japanese don’t actually do that, despite the stories to the contrary, but there’s nothing preventing you from starting a trend.

After all, once they start at the eyeballs who knows where they’ll end up?

Probably by moistening your pretty princess panties.

Anyway, one thing that has been a tradition in Japan for over a thousand years (unlike eyeball licking) has been the history of the ninjas. Ninjas, in pop culture, are mostly sword wielding assassins who want to kill Batman. Mostly employed by Ra’s al Ghul. Who, oddly enough, isn’t Asian at all.

In the real world, and yes they do exist, their legacy is a touch more complicated. Yes, they killed people but they also protected them. Also, ninjas would use any means necessary to accomplish their goals. If that meant shooting you in your sleep, so be it.

But now the tradition of Ninjutsu may be passing into the setting sun. Jinichi Kawakami, the last living ninja, has decided not to train a successor.

Masters in the dark arts of espionage and silent assassination, they are rarely seen and never heard… until they strike.

Employed by samurai warlords to spy, sabotage and kill, they are relics of an ancient code that have all but died out in the modern age.

All but one. As the 21st head of the Ban clan, a dynasty of secret spies that can trace its history back some 500 years, 63-year-old engineer Jinichi Kawakami is Japan’s last ninja.

He is trained to hear a needle drop in the next room, to disappear in a cloud of smoke or to cut a victim’s throat from 20 paces with nothing more than a two-inch ‘death star’.

‘I think I’m called (the last ninja) as there is probably no other person who learned all the skills that were directly handed down from ninja masters over the last five centuries,’ he said. ‘Ninjas proper no longer exist.’

But Kawakami has decided to let the art die with him because ninjas ‘just don’t fit with modern day’, adding: ‘We can’t try out murder or poisons. Even if we can follow the instructions to make a poison, we can’t try it out.’

An engineer by trade, Kawakami started practicing the art of Ninjutsu at the age of six before he began training under the gruelling regime of Buddhist master Masazo Ishida.

To improve his concentration, he would spend hours staring into the flame of a candle until he felt he was inside it.

To hone his hearing he would practice listening to a needle being dropped onto a wooden floor in the next room.

He climbed walls, jumped from heights and learned how to mix chemicals to cause explosions and smoke.

He was also trained to withstand extreme heat and cold as well as go for days without food or water.

‘The training was all tough and painful. It wasn’t fun but I didn’t think much why I was doing it. Training was made to be part of my life,’ he said.

And at the age of 19, he inherited his master’s title along with a cache of secret scrolls and ancient tools.

But he says the art of the ninja lies in the power of surprise, never brute force or outward strength and is about exploiting weaknesses to outfox larger, more powerful opponents while distracting their attention to get the upper hand.

And, he says, the ability to hide in the most unlikely of places is a ninja’s greatest weapon.

‘If you throw a toothpick, people will look that way, giving you the chance to flee, he adds. ‘We also have a saying that it is possible to escape death by perching on your enemy’s eyelashes; it means you are so close that he cannot see you.’

Kawakami now runs the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum, in Iga, 220 miles southwest of Tokyo and recently began a research job at the state-run Mie University, where he is studying the history of ninjas.

He says he has decided not to take on an apprentice to pass on the legacy, making him the last in the line of Ban clan ninjas.

Ninjas, also known as shinobi, have been feared and revered throughout history for their talents as assassins, scouts and spies.

They are mainly noted for their use of stealth and deception but also for their amazing powers of endurance.

Ninjutsu can be translated as ‘Art of Stealth’ but also means ‘Art of Enduring’ and the ninjas themselves were noted for being able to walk long distances without stopping, jump over seven feet and dislocate their joints to escape from small spaces.

But they are not only ruthless killers as depicted in so many Hollywood movies.

In fact, ninjas considered the art of espionage far greater than that of fighting which was always a last resort – ninjas were skilled in spying and defeating foes using intelligence, while swinging a sword was deemed a lower art.

But if necessary, they had to be experts with weapons such as shuriken, a sharpened star-shaped projectile, and the fukiya blowpipe, usually filled with a poison dart.

And they were also skilled at making both poisons and medicines.

Excluding the whole killing thing those are the same skills taught to Boy & Girl Scouts the world over. Just in case you’re ever thinking of messing with a Scout.

There is no word, and God knows I looked for one, as to why he’s refusing to train a successor. I’m sure it would be an interesting reason but, no matter what it is, the decision is his and his alone.

And so, like many things the west doesn’t truly understand, another part of a colorful universe fades to black.

Unlike your pretty princess panties which will, ultimately, fade to beige.

Desperate House DJs – Back to Brooklyn from Bill McCormick on Vimeo.

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Getting All Sciencey and Stuff

March 25, 2014 by

A well heated frabjulator is required for any idnoderotteroid.
A well heated frabjulator is required for any idnoderotteroid.
Sometimes when people hear scientific jargon they tune it out. After all, it’s usually in Latin or Greek, related to obscure concepts and presented with the enthusiasm level of lint. Scientists are, in the main, solitary figures. Social interaction is not their forte. That’s why when someone like Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson comes along they get treated like rock stars. It’s even more fitting that the latter is honoring the life’s work of the former by re-launching his legendary TV show, Cosmos. What’s interesting about the new version of the show is that it’s taking apart the arguments of creationists one at a time. From why an eyeball is easily predictable and not too complex to evolve to why selective breeding of animals (think from wolf to dog) is just a manual version of evolution. Others have been jumping on board the science bandwagon as well. From loudly debunking the anti-vac crowd, a group whom I loathe, to proving that the Earth not only revolves around the sun but that it also revolves on its own axis. Thus do we end up with seasons and time zones, respectively.

It’s not magic folks.

But this next bit might seem like it. Sarah C. P. Williams, from Science Magazine, reports that scientists may have come up with a real cure for cancer and it’s not something you order out of the back of some bullshit magazine or buy from Kevin Trudeau.

And it involves neither crystals or Vitamin C.

Survivor. When mice with human tumors received doses of anti-CD47, which sets the immune system against tumor cells, the cancers shrank and disappeared.

A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a “do not eat” signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells.

A decade ago, biologist Irving Weissman of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, discovered that leukemia cells produce higher levels of a protein called CD47 than do healthy cells. CD47, he and other scientists found, is also displayed on healthy blood cells; it’s a marker that blocks the immune system from destroying them as they circulate. Cancers take advantage of this flag to trick the immune system into ignoring them. In the past few years, Weissman’s lab showed that blocking CD47 with an antibody cured some cases of lymphomas and leukemias in mice by stimulating the immune system to recognize the cancer cells as invaders. Now, he and colleagues have shown that the CD47-blocking antibody may have a far wider impact than just blood cancers.

“What we’ve shown is that CD47 isn’t just important on leukemias and lymphomas,” says Weissman. “It’s on every single human primary tumor that we tested.” Moreover, Weissman’s lab found that cancer cells always had higher levels of CD47 than did healthy cells. How much CD47 a tumor made could predict the survival odds of a patient.

To determine whether blocking CD47 was beneficial, the scientists exposed tumor cells to macrophages, a type of immune cell, and anti-CD47 molecules in petri dishes. Without the drug, the macrophages ignored the cancerous cells. But when the anti-CD47 was present, the macrophages engulfed and destroyed cancer cells from all tumor types.

Next, the team transplanted human tumors into the feet of mice, where tumors can be easily monitored. When they treated the rodents with anti-CD47, the tumors shrank and did not spread to the rest of the body. In mice given human bladder cancer tumors, for example, 10 of 10 untreated mice had cancer that spread to their lymph nodes. Only one of 10 mice treated with anti-CD47 had a lymph node with signs of cancer. Moreover, the implanted tumor often got smaller after treatment—colon cancers transplanted into the mice shrank to less than one-third of their original size, on average. And in five mice with breast cancer tumors, anti-CD47 eliminated all signs of the cancer cells, and the animals remained cancer-free 4 months after the treatment stopped.

“We showed that even after the tumor has taken hold, the antibody can either cure the tumor or slow its growth and prevent metastasis,” says Weissman.

Although macrophages also attacked blood cells expressing CD47 when mice were given the antibody, the researchers found that the decrease in blood cells was short-lived; the animals turned up production of new blood cells to replace those they lost from the treatment, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cancer researcher Tyler Jacks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge says that although the new study is promising, more research is needed to see whether the results hold true in humans. “The microenvironment of a real tumor is quite a bit more complicated than the microenvironment of a transplanted tumor,” he notes, “and it’s possible that a real tumor has additional immune suppressing effects.”

Another important question, Jacks says, is how CD47 antibodies would complement existing treatments. “In what ways might they work together and in what ways might they be antagonistic?” Using anti-CD47 in addition to chemotherapy, for example, could be counterproductive if the stress from chemotherapy causes normal cells to produce more CD47 than usual.

Weissman’s team has received a $20 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to move the findings from mouse studies to human safety tests. “We have enough data already,” says Weissman, “that I can say I’m confident that this will move to phase I human trials.”

Here’s the thing. There are several scientists who believe, but can not yet prove, that this treatment could be stand-alone. That would mean that cancer victims could show up ate their local doctor, get a shot or series of shots and be cured.

That doesn’t mean it will work but it most certainly can. And even if this isn’t a 100% cure I would bet good money that this information could be used in conjunction with other treatments.

In other words, we just got one step closer to a real cure.

Worst case scenario, according to a couple of scientists I spoke to is that cancer could be just as manageable as diabetes.

No longer a death sentence it would just be one more thing to watch out for.

Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip: Get Better from Domestic Science on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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The Death of All Things and Other Happy Thoughts

March 21, 2014 by Bill McCormick

Admit it. Now you want to party with Death.
Admit it. Now you want to party with Death.

Way, way back on 9/28/2012 I wrote about the discovery of zombees. These are, for all intents and purposes, dead bees that keep walking around and messing up eco-systems. Kind of like the Bee Movie, but with better acting. And way, way, back on 1/2/2014 I wrote about the organisms that science believes are immortal. Neither you nor I are on that list. And maybe we shouldn’t be when we have the technology now, as in break out your wallet and grab one, to build a Killbot. Think Transformers without the moral restrictions. Oh sure, it would require you to make more than the minimum wage to afford it but what’s the point of climbing to the top of the mountain over the backs of the poor if you can’t have a Killbot or two?
[Read more…] about The Death of All Things and Other Happy Thoughts

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A Well Balanced Day

March 20, 2014 by

All things must balance.
All things must balance.
Click on the pretty picture if you’d like to see more of the redoubtable Mr. Doherty’s work. I was going to write the most depressing blog in the history of blogs. Think the death of bees and literature all in one day kind of thing. But then someone made me smile. DAMN HER!!! And then this young lady, say 20 to 25, who boards the train where I get off answered my daily “Hello smiley” with her first words instead of flashing her usual electric smile. She said “Hello Shrek.” Well how the hell could I be in a bad mood after that? Even the train conductor was laughing and I don’t think she’s cracked a smile since Elvis died. Another thing that put me in a good mood was finding out that a group of Ohio college students went down to the Lake Como ConneXions Church in Orlando Florida. Believe it or not this is a Florida story that doesn’t involve nudity, erratic behavior or sex with animals (although there have been 2 separate instances of Floridian men having sex with dogs on their front lawns this past week). No, in this case I bear thee good news. The kids from Ohio went to that church to make caskets for infants and toddlers who die and their families can’t afford them. Florida has no health care system to speak of and this is a, sadly, common occurrence that happens around 4 times a month. And when the families can’t pay the $400 the state mandates the deceased are slated for cremation or the family’s credit is ruined with another bill they can’t pay. Since many religions prohibit cremation this has been a real problem. And now there is a real solution. I’ll leave you with the words of wisdom issued by a young lady. “Caskets are not personal,” said Liz Bowles, 21, a senior majoring in fine art. “This is like giving a piece of your soul to someone who is broken.”

Then I noticed Andrea’s blog. She’s dealing with 5 kids, one with special needs, a new home and trying to deal with public aid. I am going to share part of this with you but, if you need to cry tears of joy, go read the whole thing.

You have no clue I have cried more days than not; that I fight against bitterness taking control of my heart. You have no clue that my husband’s pride was shattered. You have no clue my kids have had the worries of an adult on their shoulders. You have no clue their innocence was snatched from them for no good reason. You know none of this.

What you do know is I tried to buy my kids some food and that the EBT machine was down so I couldn’t buy that food. I didn’t have any cash or my debit card with me. I only had my SNAP card. All you heard was me saying “No, don’t hold it for me. My kids are hungry now and I have no other way of paying for this.” You didn’t judge me. You didn’t snarl “Maybe you should have less kids.” You didn’t say “Well, get a job and learn to support yourself.” You didn’t look away in embarrassment or shame for me. You didn’t make any assumptions at all.

What you did was you paid that $17.38 grocery bill for us. You gave my kids bananas, yogurt, apple juice, cheese sticks, and a peach ice tea for me; a rare treat and splurge. You let me hug you and promise through my tears that I WILL pay this forward. I WILL pay someone’s grocery bill for them. That $17.38 may not have been a lot for you, but it was priceless to us. In the car my kids couldn’t stop gushing about you; our “angel in disguise.” They prayed for you. They prayed you would be blessed. You restored some of our lost faith. One simple and small action changed our lives. You probably have forgotten about us by now, but we haven’t forgotten about you. You will forever be a part of us even though we don’t even know your name.

Several years ago I was buying groceries and ended up about $5.00 short. I started to pull things off the belt when an elderly woman behind me handed the cashier a $10.00 and then turned to me and said “Keep the change.” I was so stunned I couldn’t reply. She just walked away smiling. Since then I’ve made it a point to watch for others who are short. It’s usually a buck or something. If I have it I help. You’d be amazed how many people a buck can make happy.

Okay, today, at 11:57 AM (CDT), the Vernal Equinox will occur. Susmita Baral shares some fun facts you probably didn’t know.

1. The vernal equinox is when the sun moves across the celestial equator and as such, there should ideally be 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.

2. The vernal equinox takes place on March 20 or 21 each year and is the indicator of the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere.

3. Ever wonder why the spring boasts warmer temperatures? Because the Earth’s axis is tilted towards the sun, which means longer daylight hours and warmer weather.

4. The term equinox is a derivative of the Latin word equinoxium, which literally means “equality between day and night.”

5. The holiday Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This year, Easter is on Sunday, April 20.

6. The vernal equinox may take place once a year, but there are two equinox’s each year: one in March and one in September. During the two equinox’s the sun rises east and sets west.

7. The ancient Egyptians built the Great Sphinx of Giza on the west bank of the Nile to directly face the rising sun on the vernal equinox.

8. The Mayan city Chichen Itza has been the celebratory site for “The Return of the Sun Serpent” since ancient times on the spring equinox. The sun, when it sets, creates a triangular shadow on the El Castillo pyramid which creates the image of a descending snake that’s said to be the feather serpent god Kukulkan.

I linked to Susmita since most bloggers are lazy jerks and simply post that “equinox” means “equal night” which is wrong. Since she got it right she gets honored here today.

Ann-Marie Imbornoni and Elissa Haney add in a little more fun.

Reasons for the Seasons
These brief but monumental moments owe their significance to the 23.4 degree tilt of the Earth’s axis. Because of the tilt, we receive the Sun’s rays most directly in the summer. In the winter, when we are tilted away from the Sun, the rays pass through the atmosphere at a greater slant, bringing lower temperatures. If the Earth rotated on an axis perpendicular to the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, there would be no variation in day lengths or temperatures throughout the year, and we would not have seasons.

Rituals and Traditions
Modern astronomy aside, people have recognized the vernal equinox for thousands of years. There is no shortage of rituals and traditions surrounding the coming of spring. Many early peoples celebrated for the basic reason that their food supplies would soon be restored. The date is significant in Christianity because Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

The first day of spring also marks the beginning of Nowruz, the Persian New Year. The celebration lasts 13 days and is rooted in the 3,000-year-old tradition of Zorastrianism.

Now, the big one. Every year some brain dead yahoo pretending to be a journalist toddles off to a park or restaurant or psychic parlor to videotape eggs standing up. This is always “due to the solar gravitational equality offered on the vernal equinox.” Well, no, it’s not. It’s simply due to placement and gravity. You can perform this trick, and it is a trick, 365 days a year. It depends on the properties of the egg and has nothing to do with gravity.

NOT A THING!

Okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you. I just get frustrated by idiots.

Anyway, it seemed appropriate to put some balance back into this blog. Especially today.

In honor of that, let’s all do a little Sun Dance.

Klangkarussell – Sonnentanz (Video HD) from Prìsma BestDruide on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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1,248 Days Featuring 1,036 Posts and I’m Reduced to This

March 12, 2014 by Bill McCormick

This is how Chi-Town rolls!
This is how Chi-Town rolls!
When you start a blog you are imbued with great thoughts. I will write such and such and so and so will see it and the world will change. Peace will encompass the planet and the redhead will want to do many wrong things for all the right reasons. As time goes on you discover that no such great thing will happen, or not during your lifetime anyway, so you start paying attention to who really is reading your stuff. And this is a soul searching moment. Because, while you will find those who enjoy and share your efforts you will also find those who loathe the air you breathe. If you were to die in a horrible accident tomorrow these people wouldn’t be happy until they saw slow motion video of the event. Preferably in 3D with Surround Sound. That’s disconcerting to say the least. If the redhead were just to touch the back of your hand you’d feel better at that point. But then you come to realize that the haters don’t really hate you. They hate everything. They live in fear, hidden from human interaction by self made barriers. They hate themselves, they hate their families, thy hate anyone who doesn’t hate as they do. They would rather embrace a proven lie than even acknowledge simple truths. So you learn to relegate them to background noise, your heart rate stabilizes and you hope that the redhead will hold your hand and kiss you.

We all need hope.

Yesterday I got some news that made me want to write some important stuff. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan asked, in a very demanding sort of way, that President Obama and anyone else around open all the secrets of Area 51 to the public. This is despite the fact that not one single shred of possible anything points to anything going on there other than military research. You remember military research, right? That stuff that keeps our country safe. President Obama, who is smarter than a box of rocks, has thus far declined to play along. I imagine that will continue to be the response, official or otherwise, until Hell freezes over or the Cubs win the World Series. Whichever comes first.

So why does Reverend Farrakhan want Area 51 turned into a tourist trap?

Farrakhan has often referred to a UFO he calls the Mother Wheel, which according to The New Yorker, he describes as a “heavily armed spaceship the size of a city that will rain destruction upon white America, but save those who embrace the Nation of Islam.”

In his recent sermon Farrakhan said, “We believe our words that we have shared on the presence of the Wheel could help the president and America to avert Allah’s warning of chastisement and destruction if America does not bow down.”

If you hit that New Yorker link copy it into a text editor. That is the most poorly designed web page ever. Which is a shame. It’s a fascinating article.

So, we have a great set up; a clearly delusional man with goo gobs of cash who wants to kill all the white people (hey, who among us hasn’t felt like that?) but who doesn’t realize that he’s a mirror image of the Koch brothers, who are trying to exterminate anyone who isn’t white, and preferably Christian in name only, although without the space ship, and that the world has passed them all by long ago.

Really, it could be interesting.

So what’s filling my inbox today?

“Why does Chicago have such weak ass superheroes?”

Oy.

David Welch, of Technorati, clearly has too much time on his hands or has not met anyone to have sex with. Both could be involved, I guess. One causing the other, as it were.

And, as it turns out, my readers care about this kind of stuff. So, here we go.

Metropolis, Gotham City, and New York City. Superheroes tend to congregate around the major cities in America, fictional and real, that supply them with an endless criminals to beat up and villains to apprehend. After all, you’re not going to find many megalomaniacal geniuses trying to take over the world from Tulsa. But what superheroes can you name hailing from Chicago, Illinois – America’s third most populated city?

While everyone moving to Chicago should know that the city provided the backdrop for Gotham City on both of Christopher Nolan’s first two Batman films, as well as Metropolis on the Lois and Clark television series, it turns out the real Windy City’s roster of superheroes is surprisingly slim.

However, there are still a handful of great heroes representing Chicagoland in the funny books. Here are the top 10.

10. Heavy Duty – This “Real American Hero” serves as heavy ordnance specialist for the G.I. Joe team. A Chicago native, Lamont A. Morris, otherwise known as “Heavy Duty” enjoys cooking, classical guitar, and rapping.

9. Toy Boy – This super-powered prankster is a member of the Honor Brigade and star of his own title published by Indie comic creator Tom Stilwell. Toy Boy defends Chicago with an arsenal of hilarious gadgets and witty quips.

8. The Spaceknights – Almost nothing is known about this team of government sanctioned superheroes created during the Fifty States Initiative and designated to defend Illinois with super-human muscle. The member roster has not been revealed, but just knowing that an entire team is looking out for Chicagoans earns it a spot on this list.

7. Reuben Flagg – Born on Mars, the protagonist of American Flagg! Lives battles a giant, interplanetary union of corporate and government interests called the Plex in a futuristic, sci-fi Chicago.

6. Katar Hol and Shayera Thal – This incarnation of the superhero alien of Thanagar, Hawkman, was sent to Earth with Hawkgirl, Shayera, where they fought against Chicago’s Netherworld – a neighborhood of metahumans, paranormals, psychics, and mutants in the old Union Stock Yards on the south side of the city.

5. Jimmy Corrigan – This titular “smartest kid on Earth” isn’t exactly a superhero, but is the star of a widely-acclaimed graphic novel by Chris Ware. Jimmy escapes the unhappiness of his lonely, middle-aged life with an active imagination that gets him into awkward situations.

4. Tigra – Greer Grant was born in Chicago where she attended UIC before a lab experiment gave her the combination of science, magic, and mental energy of the Cat people. Now as Tigra, she sports a sleek coat of orange fur and black stripes and uses her feline powers to help the Avengers.

3. Luke Cage – Although not a Chicago native, Power Man had a brief stint in Chicago during the 90s as a Hero for Hire. In the Windy City, Cage teamed up with detective Dakota North and uses his superhuman strength and durability to clean the streets of Chicago.

2. James Gordon – Batman’s resourceful police commissioner buddy wasn’t always a resident of Gotham City. According to his character back story, Jim spent more than 15 years with the CPD foiling criminals and acquiring the incredible detective skills that would make him one of the Caped Crusader’s greatest allies when he returned to Gotham.

1. Savage Dragon – Big. Green. Finned. The Savage Dragon isn’t your typical Chicago cop, but he’s got the emerald muscle to take on Chicago’s mutants and superfreaks. Considered to be one of the greatest comic characters of all time, Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon has been defending the Windy City for nearly 20 years.

Now that you are familiar with Chicago’s finest meta-humans, you’ll fit right in at the Chicago Comic Con. But am I leaving out any major heroes in this list? The comment section below is your chance to correct me with your superior comic book knowledge.

Okay, in some semblance of order. first we have to straighten out the facts. Comic Con is called Wizard World and is held in Rosemont. It caters to the more conservative fans of graphic novels. Anyone with a pulse knows that the real comic book celebration in Chicago is C2E2 which is held in the city, features local, as well as national, artists and is where the two cosplayers at the top of this page came from.

Tigra helps the Avengers in New Freaking York and Billy Corrigan’s super power is to bore people to death. The only people reading that self absorbed piece of crap were pot smoking pseudo-intellectuals. You know the kind, 13 years in college with no degree and no job.

Anyway, one thing I do know is that David is white, painfully so judging by that article, and lives on the North Side of the city. God knows the poor bastard may be a Cubs fan too.

Well, let’s not pile on.

Anyway, way back in 1999 a guy named Jiba Molei Anderson began a company called Griot enterprises which began releasing work from African American comic book artists. In 2002 he began releasing the company’s seminal series, Horsemen, and after it began hitting the streets it began garnering a huge following.

Now, transparency alert. I have been a fan of Jiba’s work for a long time and have been asked to be a contributing writer on the re-boot that is coming this summer.

That being said, Chicago has been the stage for many Marvel & DC stories. The Blue Beetle is from here.

Gunsmith Cats, one of the better anime cartoons around, is set here. If you read the story I’m not sure that the authors have been here but that could also just be difficult translations. They do feature a ton of beautiful sky line shots and a hot mustang.

I like Mustangs. My first car was a 1973 Stang.

And, last year, Batman’s favorite Robin, a/k/a Nightwing, moved here and took up crime fighting. Well, not everyone knows how to make pizza.

And Power Man a/k/a Luke Cage and Iron Fist seem to like our Chicago style dogs and deep dish pie as well. Their Heroes for Hire pairing spent a long time here.

And, of course, Supergirl, the occasional sex partner of her clone Powergirl, lives here and takes the Metra to Union station.

While it’s most certainly true that Chicago has not seen the plethora of heroes that New York, both fictionalized and not, has seen it isn’t like we’ve been ignored.

Plus, if you ever wondered how Superman could leap a tall building (pre-flying era), or what the effects of gravity and wind would be on the Flash, you would need to come to Chicago, where all the coolest and smartest people are, to listen to Dr. James Kakalios, from the University of Minnesota but we don’t hold that against him, explain it all at Fermi Lab.

While you’re laughing, I’ll take this moment to remind you that Miguel Alcubierre came up with the math for faster than light travel by watching Star Trek.

Oh, and while I knew most of this I was able to fill in the blanks using Google in under 10 minutes.

)

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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