Motherf#$king epic

Greetings traveler,

Between reading Charlie Huston’s new novel, Sleepless, the gift of a World of Warcraft pre-paid game card from your sister and recent unemployment you have decided that the time has come to resurrect your long-dormant WOW account. Congratulations! You are about to embark on a series of quests to rival any in-game experience that follows. Have a look at the quest tree:

1. Birds and worms

1a. Reinstall both World of Warcraft and Burning Crusade expansion pack the day before logging back into game. (You put this off after the last computer wipe.)
1b. Redeem your game card.
1c. Download the 3.1GB patch needed to update game.
1d. Bed down for the night.

2. Everything old is new again

2a. Finish installing the rest of the patch. (Windows decided to block update when nearly complete)
2b. Try to log into game, but discover you now need a battle.net account.
2c. Try to re-register your games on battle.net only to have it tell you your authentication codes have already been claimed. (Duh, by me.)
2d. E-mail support to see if they can load old info into new account.
2e. Discover that there is already a way to merge accounts.
2f. Merge accounts.

Unmasked

David Sherman is a man of many disguises: Batman, the Joker, Darth Vader, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, a squad of Stormtrooper variations and a Ghostbuster.

Those are just the ones he can actually wear.

"Until a few years ago, I was over 300 pounds. Always a big guy, but it got to a point where I realized if I didn't make a change I'd probably end up with diabetes like all the other men in the family. Part of building a screen-accurate, movie replica costume is being able to portray the character as seen on screen, and being a very large guy - no way that was going to work. Batman was my motivation to lose the weight," Sherman said.

He shed 110 pounds in 2.5 years by overhauling his eating habits for a proper diet and "surprisingly little" exercise. He suited up as Gotham's guardian for the first time in summer 2008.

Once relegated to the din of comic book, horror and sci-fi conventions booked in whatever hotel was willing to host them, pop culture costuming has seen a popularity surge in recent years and Sherman welcomed it with open arms.

"In the third grade, I had to write a letter to someone famous. I wrote a letter to Michael Keaton asking about the special effects from Beetlejuice. I wanted to know how they made things pop out of his head and spin around," Sherman said.

How NOT to forge a check

Want a demonstration of the limits of of Google and the Internet?

Type "how to forge a check" into a search bar. Try "counterfeiting a check." Try "making a fake check." Go ahead, look at page 10 of the search results, we'll wait.

It's nigh impossible to find a single useful link more recent than the 1990s.

"That's good. That's the way we like it," said Detective Mike Korcek.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that maybe it simply isn't that hard to do. Advances in home computer equipment like scanners and laserjet printers lower the cost of entry to a life of check-forging crime. Given the choice between trying to replicate the paper of U.S. currency (a federal crime in itself) and walking into Office Max to purchase a box of decorative paper that looks vaguely check-like, it's easy to understand why criminals are choosing the latter, but even Korcek was surprised at the size of the ring he and a group of law enforcement officers busted up in the waning hours of 2009.

Death protocols

When Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery learns of his new assignment, his stony expression cracks like poorly struck granite.

Montgomery, played by Ben Foster in "The Messenger" opening January 1 at Salem Cinema, is to become part of a casualty notification team (CNT), the men and women dispatched to notify families of active duty soldiers when they die.

That's their duty, "but the job is about something else," says Capt. Tony Stone, Montgomery's team partner played by Woody Harrelson, recently nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance in the film.

"We're all ill-equipped to deal with sudden death," said Oren Moverman, director and co-writer of the film.

Salem noir

I was talking with Emily one day about life and journalism in Salem and she made the comment that Salem has never had anyone to tell it's story well. The Salem noir story idea had been percolating since I started NVR, but it was only after I bounced it off her during that conversation that I got up the nerve to try it. One of the comments on the website said it read like a dime store novel. While the commenter meant it as a slam, it was the highest praise I could have imagined. I also want to heap praise on artist Scott Lakey who put together the cover of the issue. He had been going with a more traditional Sam Spade-esque figure, but when I sent him early drafts of the story he switched over to his interpretation on Frank Ivester as described in the opening graphs. After I got it back, I immediately called him because it's uncanny how perfect his illustration is to Ivester himself. I wish I had a picture of him to show you how close he got.

The meet goes down at a North Salem hash house that smells faintly of urinal cakes.

Frank Ivester, private eye, has shoulder-length silver hair with a matching French fork beard. His small eyes hid behind gold wire-rimmed glasses are shadowed by a tall forehead. He wears a tactical vest and black trenchcoat over a CIA T-shirt. Not used to being the one on the receiving end of an inquiry, he orders a Coke and asks:

“How did you find me?”

A single question validating the level of paranoia pervasive in classic noir fiction.

Media portrayals from the prose of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to Rockford, Columbo and Neptune’s Mars Investigations, paint a portrait of a private dick’s work that is most often thought of as taking place in other, bigger places - Portland, L.A., New York.

Their counterparts in the legal system are police detectives and CSI teams - media darlings - but in a town where the ratio of inmates to free-birds exceeds the norm, P.I. work is plentiful. Doesn’t hurt that most major criminal cases in the state eventually end up in Oregon Supreme Court Building downtown.

Their cases don’t typically begin with a femme fatale on great pins sauntering into the office, but private investigator work in the Cherry City may be no less intriguing than a great noir mystery.

Monstrous mushrooms as the social other

For author Jeff VanderMeer, some organisms in our ecosphere are plain otherworldly.

"Squids and octopi are two and mushrooms are another. Some of the most recent research classifies mushrooms closer to animal than plant," VanderMeer said. "They're the perfect representation of the other - the thing we fear because we don't know it."

Mushrooms don't possess chlorophyll or the vascular structure to move it; neither do they dine on other plants and animals. The liminal space mushrooms inhabit made mushrooms the perfect choice for the fungaloid overseers, grey caps, in VanderMeer's latest novel, "Finch."

Vandermeer stopped at Willamette University last month to promote the book and speak to classes about his writing process.

"Finch" is Vandermeer's third foray into the fantasy/science fiction world of Ambergris. This time the story follows John Finch as he tries to unravel the mysterious death of a human and one of the grey caps. Tackled as a noir detective novel, Vandermeer takes Finch and the reader on an exploration of the seedy underworld of a seedy overworld, but Vandermeer relied on two modern cities when creating his vision.

"Paris during occupation of the Nazis during World War II and Baghdad over the past eight years were the source material," Vandermeer said.

While some might read the book as a commentary on U.S. involvement in the Middle East, Vandermeer said that wasn't necessarily his point.

"When you pull the circumstances out, it becomes much less message and, instead, it's a way of examining the world that Finch moves through. Making it fantasy gives you that leeway," Vandermeer said.

Bring in 'da fear

There were many surprises for the Fearleaders when they took the floor during the Cherry City Derby Girls Black and Blue Debut last month.

There was the packed-to-the-rafters crowd.

“That was the biggest X-factor. All the ideas we had changed because there were so many freaking people,” said Shawn “Shawn of the Dead” Cruz, Fearleader captain.

The deejay that started remixing their big dance number on the spot, much to the chagrin of Ben “Money $hot” Wiebe, who was concentrating on screaming out the step count.

“We're not the Jackson Five, we've practiced the dance twice,” Wiebe said.

But it was the spanking that topped the list.