And I have another cigar review up this week:

The Ashton ESG has leaped up near the top of my favorite cigar list. There were lots of wonderful flavors playing in and out throughout the smoke, making for a nice, complex experience. Best of all, the smoke remained smooth, even at the finish. I will definitely ask my wife for another one for Christmas!

Read the whole thing!

My latest cigar review, of the Romeo Y Julieta 1875 Cedros No. 2 is up at CigarJack.

I haven’t really had much of an opportunity to try out the Romeo Y Julieta line, which is odd considering how ubiquitous it is. But I recently had a birthday and one of the nice side effects of being known as a cigar smoker is that I have a tendency to get lots of cigars as gifts. This was a gift from my parents, and I was eager to try it out.

Check out the whole thing.

I downloaded Firefox 3 a few days ago, and I am now perpetually irritated because I am having issues with websites hanging on me all the time–especially if I’m working on multiple tabs at once. I never had this problem with previous versions of Firefox. Heck, I’ve never had this problem with IE 7. I’ve looked around the web for a workaround but to no avail. Has anyone else noticed this issue?

Best commentary on Boumediene, hands down.

If you’ve ever had problems trying to unclog a sink that’s full of hair, John Scalzi has some excellent advice for taking care of it.

WARNING! Here there be spoilers!

I emailed Jim Henley earlier today because I was eager to see his take on The Incredible Hulk, which I very much enjoyed. So I was a little disappointed to find that Mr. Henley did not enjoy it.

Mr. Alex Knapp of Outside the Beltway insists that I review this boring movie ASAP. Okay, short version: I was bored. Slightly longer version: I don’t consider it an improvement on its Ang Lee predecessor, which in any case was not as bad as people like to claim.

[...]

At bottom, I feel like this Hulk movie had a lot of the flaws of the first one without most of the virtues. It’s surprisingly slow-paced. It’s largely somber. On the other hand my eight-year-old daughter liked it a lot. Precocious child.

I was a little surprised to find that Jim found it boring until I re-read Jim’s take on Ang Lee’s Hulk (which I also enjoyed), in which Jim says:

Note to the uncultured: THE Hulk was always Bruce Banner. I have no idea why the producers of that TV show changed his name. But my purist sensibilities were so offended that I never watched it.

“Ah-ha!” I exclaimed. Because, you see, The Incredible Hulk was a giant love letter to the original Incredible Hulk TV series, which little Alex spent his formative, pre-comic years watching, and remains the foundation through which he views the Hulk character. The TV series was all about (David) Bruce Banner on the run, looking for a cure, and desperately afraid of the thing inside of him. Heck, there was even a brief cameo in the film to “campus reporter Jack McGee” that was blink and you miss it.

I also say that I very much enjoyed the little fanboy notes that Jim did not, primarily because I’m digging the fact that Marvel films is trying to build a little Marvel universe within movies, and I enjoy little extra touches like that.

Still, I think where I and Jim and everyone can agree is that the climactic battle between Hulk and the Abomination was fundamentally flawed. I liked the movie’s take on Emil Blonsky–the warrior who wants to keep on fighting, and who REALLY wants to beat the Hulk. But then to have him go on a random rampage through Manhattan? It just didn’t make sense.

Look, I accept that superhero movies must have a climactic fight/action scene. But the best such scenes are the ones in which the fight, and the hero’s ultimate triumph, stem from the virtues of the hero over the evils of the villains. Which is why I really liked the fight scene in Iron Man, because Tony Stark won both through cleverness (”How’d you solve the icing problem?”) and the loyalty of his friends. Both of these are virtues that Obidiah Stane lacked.

The Incredible Hulk, on the other hand, was just a fight between two monsters. Hulk wins because he’s the strongest one there is. Yawn. The only heroic impact of the fight was Betty being able to get through to Hulk to keep him from murdering the Abomination.

(For the record, the best climactic hero/villain fight in all of superhero movie history is in Superman II, where Superman, first of all, breaks off from fighting in Metropolis to avoid harming innocents, and secondly uses Zod’s greatness weakness, his hubris, against him.)

I’m not going to say that The Incredible Hulk was without its flaws–especially the final fight scene. The industry rags mention that Ed Norton (who was apparently promised, then denied creative control of the film) wanted something on the order of 20 extra minutes in, but was denied. Probably because this movie was trying too hard to not be the Ang Lee’s Hulk. I’d be interested to see what’s in those 20 minutes.

So, final verdict? Not as good as Iron Man, but better than X-Men. A 7/10 superhero movie.

As you have probably noticed, the design for the site has been updated. It still requires some tweaking, to be sure, but the bulk of this is the main new look for the site. That said, don’t go thinking that this is the site re-launch. The all-new Heretical Ideas is coming soon–though not, I’m afraid, by the 15th. There’s still a lot of behind the scenes work going on.

Right now, though, I’ve got everything in play and it looks like the relaunch will be a go on July 1st. In the meantime, there will be bits and tidbits posted here, and of course I’ll still be blogging about politics over at Outside the Beltway.

See you on July 1!