26 | December | 2014 | "DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!"

With Dark Horse Comics having to give up its successful Star Wars license for good as of 2015, what’s a comic company to do but blow out everything they currently have in a big sale of epic proportions? Well, other than rent a small moon-sized space station with the ability to destroy planets in order to try and keep that license going, of course. Anyway, from now until 11:00 p.m. (PST), Wednesday, December 31, you can get twenty years of Star Wars digital comics at half price. That’s a LOT of books, folks. Well over 500 issues (568, I believe) of different comics totaling over 28,000 pages of stories and art. Yikes. Anyway, you can buy these digital issues singly at half off or just say “What the Force?!” and just get every single issue for $300. I wonder if your favorite reading device will creak and groan from the strain of all that content? Will it weigh more if you happen to have enough storage space to fit every book on a hard drive or other storage media?

However great this deal sounds, remember this, Padawans: The internet can indeed be more dangerous than Mos Eisley spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than you can online. You must be cautious. Granted, you can and should save all that reading material to “the cloud” in order to access it any time you like. But I’d also suggest a home storage solution just in case that cloud goes all Alderaan one day. Hey, in space, no one can hear you scream… unless you lose all your stuff you thought was safe because you didn’t have a safer home backup. Then, it’s all “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.” as you see that money well spent vaporize into nothingness. Get this deal, for sure – but make sure you stick it somewhere safer than online with the rest of the stuff that seems to get swiped on a regular basis. Given that these books will never see the light of day again (thanks, Disney!), it’s best to stock up, even on those issues that you wouldn’t read.

Other than a clip here and there over the years, I’d actually never seen all of Stanley Donen’s 1958 film Indiscreet until a few days back when I was up late stressing over some stuff. Yeah, the kitchen and other major repair jobs that are needed but seem to be hard to impress on the folks who run this place about how urgently they need to get taken care of. Bleh. Anyway, it’s an interesting and not quite perfect film about a woman (Ingrid Bergman) who thinks she’ll never find love who ends up falling for a man (Cary Grant) who she thinks is married. There’s more and a twist or three, but I’ll let you track this down and watch it if you’ve yet to, as it’s a fun film to wile away some time.

I’d have to say this dance sequence was the funniest thing I’d seen in a while at that hour of the morning, as I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t sleep afterwards thanks to the scene replaying itself in my head a few times. While I knew that Grant could hoof it like a maniac when he needed to in his earlier films, I didn’t think he did any fancy dancing this late in his career. That, and the scene is played entirely for laughs and gets them even when seen in that out of context clip above. Anyway, study those moves well and use them at that New Year’s party you’ve been invited to. I’d bet those steps work with any modern uptempo beat and I’d also bet that someone’s going to try and out-step you at some point on that dance floor. Of course, if they’re not in on the gag and have never seen this film, they’ll look a lot more foolish than you do, that’s for sure…