Just when I thought there was nothing new under the sun, along come grid lines on the back of wrapping paper.

For all I know, the grid lines have been there for years on select (read: expensive) brands, but this weekend was the first time I’d seen them. I was wrapping a gift for my wife — Saturday was her birthday — and when I flipped over the Hallmark “Happy Birthday” wrapping paper, there were the grid lines.

Usually, when I cut paper to fit a particular gift, my scissor line ends up crooked because I have nothing to guide me. Not this time. With the light-blue grid pattern, I was able to cut like a pro. The package looked good when I was finished, too, and it’s not often I can say that.

The difference between an ordinary schmuck and a genius, I’m convinced, is that the schmuck is constantly hitting his forehead after the fact, realizing that some new invention was only common sense, but somebody else thought of it first. The genius, meanwhile, is already on his way to improving some other product or inventing something new.

Guess which category I’m in?

Fellow Review columnist and blogger John Whitacre and I were chatting about Lost Horizon by James Hilton, a novel John recently read.

I like the story that frames the novel: A group of men gathered for dinner learn the fate of a British traveler who claims to have visited Shangri-La, the fabled lost land whose name, coined by Hilton, has become synonymous with any hidden paradise. We know that groups of people gossip around tables, and that gossip often turns from the humdrum to the esoteric as the night wears on. The framing story gives the more fantastic tale it bookends more believability. We know it’s still fiction, of course, but it feels more real.

For this reason, framing stories are popular in fantastic fiction. Mary Shelley uses one in Frankenstein, where the good doctor is discovered by a group of polar explorers. He tells his story about overstepping nature’s (or God’s) boundaries to the ship’s captain, a man who is doing somewhat the same thing by exploring the Arctic Circle. Strangely enough, because one fictional character is telling a fictional story to another fictional character, the tale is more believable.

A framing story is also used in The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. And Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of one of the twentieth century’s most enduring icons, Tarzan of the Apes, frequently used framing stories. In The Land That Time Forgot, he claims to have come by the knowledge of a land where dinosaurs still rule when a manuscript relating the adventure washes up on a beach. He also uses framing devices in some of his John Carter of Mars tales; I don’t have the books in front of me, but I recall that the author received mental transmissions from Carter on Mars, and may have even claimed to be a distant relative of the fictional warlord.

Ladies and gentlemen, the framing device, one of sci-fi and fantasy fiction’s unsung heroes and an important tool in a writer’s bag of tricks.

Here is my print column from April 10, 2008.

A clown on the toaster doesn’t make me happy.

I learned this from my daughter, Malori, who turns 17 today.

The clown made a Shroud-of-Turin-style appearance after she placed a Schwebel’s bread bag too close to the toaster one morning. The heat melted the plastic and transferred the clown face and some nutritional information from the bag to the appliance. Granted, the face was elongated like a funhouse-mirror image, but there was Happy the Clown, leering at me daily as I waited for Pop Tarts or bread slices.

(According to the Schwebel’s Web site, Happy is on the bags because founder Dora Schwebel thought Depression-era customers deserved “an uplifting symbol of hope and optimism.” If I want encouragement from a clown, I don’t need a toaster. I can watch the news to see what new lame-duck policy Dubbya is spinning.)

Malori’s spin on the Happy transference was that it would brighten our world, a singularly optimistic view from somebody who didn’t want to pay for a new toaster. Her mother’s take was that the clown looked disreputable, like when I wear old rock band T-shirts in public. We went toaster shopping, and Happy went to brighten a landfill somewhere.

A second lesson I learned from Malori also involved a home appliance and loss. She put a metal cup in the microwave and lit up the kitchen, Roman-candle style. After I removed the cup’s charred remains and aired black smoke from the house, the digital display on the microwave stopped working. Malori called it coincidence. Lesson: Sometimes, digital displays on appliances just go bad, regardless of fires that rage simultaneously inside them.

Another learning opportunity came with Malori’s sixth-grade report on Poland. Every one of the report’s 20 pages referred to Poland as a leading exporter of potatoes. The fact appeared in sections on the country’s economy, history, government and leisure-time activities. I don’t have it in front of me, but sentences ran like this: “Poland merged with Lithuania in 1386, and 600 years later, potatoes would become a major export”; “While potatoes are important to the country, it became a member of the Warsaw Treaty Organization in 1955″; and “Many people around the world celebrate Poland’s culture, not to mention its potatoes, which are a major source of income.” Lesson: If you say it often enough, people will believe you. If they don’t, you still have filled the required pages. (And what does Idaho think of all this?)

Other Malori lessons? Wearing the same dress to homecoming two years in a row is worse than having your fingernails pulled out, one by one, in some dingy warehouse in the tenement section of New York City. It is possible to lose a driver’s license within the first month of receiving it. It is possible to lose your glasses within the third month of receiving them. If you want your cell phone to simply ring, as opposed to playing the latest rock-, pop- or rap-ditty download from the Internet, you’re hopelessly old-fashioned, even though Poland is still Europe’s leading exporter of potatoes.

But those aren’t the important lessons.

Malori has also taught me that my heart isn’t so icy it can’t melt with pride at her accomplishments; that I’m not so jaded I can’t get a lump in my throat when I see her, all grown up or nearly so, paging through college catalogs and planning for a life beyond the one she has shared with her mother and me; that I can feel both joy and sadness watching my little girl — who seems as if she showed up in my life yesterday, not 17 years ago — become a young woman, wishing I could spare her life’s pains but knowing I can’t, knowing you need the occasional dark sky to appreciate the sunshine.

A clown on the toaster may not make me any happier, but my daughter certainly does, and that’s a lesson well worth learning, and re-learning, over 17 years. I wouldn’t trade it for all the potatoes in Poland.

Happy birthday, kiddo.

A recent Associated Press article on polygamy quoted an expert whose name, amazingly, was Mary Batchelor. It didn’t say if that was her maiden name or if she married a Batchelor. Come to think of it, most women marry bachelors, unless they marry polygamists.

What’s next? How about an automotive expert named Axel Gere. A dry cleaner named Clint Brush. A marriage counselor named Faith Keeper. An environmentalist named Heather Greene. A farmer named Tillie Ground.

The mind boggles. A friend says people grow into their names, so that it’s not uncommon for a person surnamed Gold to become a metallurgist, or one named Pigg to raise sows. Hey, stranger things have happened.

The second issue of Kick-Ass — by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., published by Marvel Comics’ ICON imprint — was released last week. The first issue (above) is sold out, with Marvel going back to press to meet the demand.

I can see why. The book is a true original. It’s a realistic look at what would happen if a teenage comic book fan decided to imitate his favorite heroes by putting on a colorful suit and fighting crime. The teen in question, Dave Lizewski, buys a wetsuit and a pair of goggles and hits the streets in search of bad guys. The first group he sees is a bunch of graffiti artists. In attempting to stop them from defacing a wall, Lizewski — to put it bluntly — gets his ass kicked. Then, he gets hit by a car. And that’s all in the first issue.

The second issue picks up with Lizewski undergoing six months of rehabilitation. He needs several surgeries and lots of time off school. His “secret identity” is protected, however, in a way that Millar may have more to say about in future installments.

The book is funny, obnoxious, vulgar, honest, and pathetic, all at once. It makes the reader realize just how much fantasy is involved in standard super-hero comics, even the ones that seem realistic by comparison to titles of previous generations. I hope Millar is able to keep the concept grounded in reality; he may have already given in to the temptation to exaggerate slightly in the second half of issue two. If that happens too often, this will become just another comic book story about a super-hero, and it could be so much more. Here’s hoping.

Romita Jr. is one of my favorite artists, but he seldom draws titles that I’m interested in for reasons other than his art. Last year, he drew The Eternals, which was a blast. His work on this book is even better. Tom Palmer, one of my favorite inkers, does the honors here; he and Romita are a dream team.

I initially avoided this comic book because of the title, which I thought was too blunt and over the top. I shouldn’t have.

When I was six or seven years old, I saw Planet of the Apes for the first time. Charlton Heston played the astronaut, Taylor, marooned with talking simians on a world that he found out in the climactic scene was his own Earth. (It wasn’t until years later that I wondered why he never noticed the apes spoke English.)

Heston was so busy in the movie: running, jumping, cursing at gorillas, and refusing to go gently. At that age, I probably didn’t even realize he was acting; I thought he was Taylor, and how cool if I could be there with him on an upside-down world being chased by apes all day and night. Heston also made an appearance in the film’s first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and he was just as good there — cynical and outspoken, right up to the point when he annihilated the whole planet. How antisocial can you get? I used to stay up late to catch the Apes films on TV. The first two (of five) were always my favorite: The make-up was better, the action was more pronounced, and they both had Heston.

A few years later, I saw Heston in Ben-Hur, a movie I watched with my fellow seventh graders at Marlington Middle School. Heston was there, too, whipping his horses around the arena in the classic chariot scene, giving Jesus a helping hand as He carried his cross. You talk about epic. The movie defined it.

Heston also played lead roles in Soylent Green and The Ten Commandments, both great films. He played the same part as Will Smith did last winter in The Omega Man, based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. I’ve never seen it, but it’s on that ever-growing list of movies I need to get around to sometime.

Heston died over the weekend. Most people considered it a blessing, as his mind had been ravaged by Alzheimer’s Disease. I’ll remember him as one of the first lead characters I ever had the joy of watching. “Get your hands off me, you damn dirty apes” never sounded so good.

My wife and I were looking forward to seeing The Ruins, a movie based on the excellent horror novel by Scott Smith. Smith isn’t exactly a prolific writer; his first book, A Simple Plan, was released in 1993, and he didn’t publish The Ruins, his second, until 2006. Holly and I had read The Ruins out loud together, something we used to do frequently but do less now that we have discovered the convenience of loading audio books onto iPods. What we gain in convenience we lose in togetherness. But that’s another whole issue.

The movie sticks fairly close to the source material, which isn’t surprising since Smith wrote the screenplay. Two young couples on vacation in Mexico accept an invitation to visit the remains of some old Mayan ruins. They get a lot more than they bargained for when they learn the vegetation is alive and hungry.

At least one character changes names from book to movie, and some of the things that happen to certain people in the novel happen to different people in the movie, but unless you’re married to the source material, that’s always the case, and it’s no big deal.

It’s not the most innovative plot, either, but it doesn’t have to be. Smith uses it to tell a character-driven story about four people facing the unknown and their own human fallibility. The young cast was likable and believable.

The book is helped immensely by the author’s prose: He writes deftly and almost poetically, and the effect is creepy and claustrophobic. The movie, on the other hand, feels inevitable and padded. We don’t have the writer’s words to set the mood and provide back-story, and I miss that. The makers have resisted the urge to stretch things out too much; nevertheless, this would have made a better Twilight Zone episode (and a half-hour one at that) or eight-page Tales of the Crypt comic-book story than a feature-length film. Maybe because I had read the book first, I was less willing to let the story unfold at its own pace. I checked the time in one or two spots — never a good sign.

The gore factor is fairly high. A few scenes are really cringe inducing, including a homemade amputation and some extreme cutting of flesh with knives. It made me wince a few times, but it was never gratuitous. It served the story.

The one real beef I have is with the ending. The novel’s conclusion is bleak. The movie stares at that pessimistic wrap-up like a white-hatted cowboy facing down the bad guy in the center of an Old West town — and blinks.  Wimps out. Takes the easy way out. Pick your expression.

I’m not saying I necessarily like how the book ends, but it does make a certain kind of sense. The movie makes a little less.

If the mark of a great film is repeatability, this isn’t a great film. I have no desire to see it again, although I have a feeling we’ll get a DVD in short order that will contain an “alternate” ending more in line with the book. Good marketing, that. I doubt I’ll fall for it. If I were doling out grades, I’d give The Ruins a C+.

Here is my print column from April 3, 2008, published in The Alliance Review.

 In 24 years of driving, I’ve never run out of gas until last Wednesday, and it’s all John Stossel’s fault.

In December, Stossel did a feature on ABC’s “20/20″ where he questioned whether an empty gas gauge means a car will stop running. He cited a website, TankOnEmpty.com, where drivers share stories about how many miles their cars have gone with the needle on “E.” The consensus was something like 30 or 40 miles, with one brave soul going almost 100 miles.

Stossel then did a test in his minivan to see how far he could travel with next to no gas in the tank. He went 65 miles.

Apparently, American car manufacturers provide drivers with a “buffer” between empty and really empty. Overseas drivers don’t want or get the same treatment. Folks living and traveling in countries the size of a postage stamp want to know exactly how much is left in their tanks. And why not? Most of them can probably walk home in 20 minutes no matter where they run out.

Stossel’s report concludes, “The next time you panic at the sight of a gas gauge on ‘E,’ remember that you probably have enough gas to make it to the next station. ‘E’ doesn’t really mean ‘empty,’ after all.”

Unless you’re blind, you can see where this is going.

I usually don’t swallow news stories the way kids gobble candy, unthinkingly. I like to believe I’m a conscientious consumer, one who questions a report before taking it to heart.

For some reason, though, I accepted the gas gauge story as gospel, so much so that I routinely started to run my cars for days on empty. If I ever thought about it, which was seldom, I assured myself that I had never come anywhere close to the 65 miles of living on the edge from the Stossel experiment, not to mention the 100 miles claimed by the risk taker at TankOnEmpty.com.

I was routinely going 50 miles on “empty,” blithely passing up gas stations, wearing my ABC News knowledge like some magical talisman — a St. Christopher medal for the terminally stupid traveler.

Then came last Wednesday. I had two of my nephews in the car. We were heading for the movies with the needle buried on “empty,” but who cared? I was only 40-plus miles into denial when the accelerator stopped responding.

“Oh, I’m out of gas,” I announced. I may have phrased it a little differently than that, using words that would have gotten me a PG-13 rating if they were muttered in the movie we were about to see.

I put the car into neutral, flipped on the hazard lights, and switched to the far-right lane. The kids started to look for spots where I could safely pull over, but I had a different goal in mind: The gas station about a tenth of a mile down the road.

Coasting so slowly that the empty SARTA bus — are there any other kind? — passed me by, I taxied toward the station entrance. My goal was not to push the car even one inch.

We crested the top of the rise at the entrance, looking down into the rows of pumps. The one nearest me was open. We gained speed, enough that I had to brake slightly as I guided the car toward the nozzle.

It was a perfect three-point landing. The kids were in awe — Uncle Chris really knows how to measure his gas, not to mention how to milk maximum drama out of ordinary life.

We even made it to the movie on time, no thanks to John Stossel. The next time I’m tempted to believe anything I see on 20/20, I’ll save myself the trouble and read a fairy tale, instead.

Here’s the deal: Many of the Marvel Comics heroes you’ve been reading about for the past few decades? They might be shape-changing aliens who replaced the real McCoys.

That’s the set-up behind Secret Invasion, an ambitious new mini-series that will cross over into many corners of the Marvel Universe over its eight-month run. The first issue, published this week, is written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated by Leinil Yu, with inks by Mark Morales. Don’t read on unless you want some details of the double-sized book revealed.  

The aliens in question, the Skrulls, are a race that’s been around since the early days of the Fantastic Four. They pop up every few years to cause heartache for our heroes, and quite a backstory has been developed around their planet, its destruction by the world-devouring Galactus, and their various wars with other alien races in the Marvel Universe.

The gist of Secret Invasion is that at some unspecified time in the past, a bunch of Skrulls took on the identities of some of the biggest heroes in the Marvel Universe. Heck, the cover of issue #1 (above) purports to show many of them: Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, and Wolverine. Based on costumes worn by the real  heroes, who return in this issue, the switcheroo might have taken place so long ago that the heroes adventures since sometime in the 1980s have actually starred the aliens and not the real good guys.

I can’t believe that Marvel will actually allow many of its biggest hitters to be revealed as aliens for a substantial portion of their books’ existences. Back in the 1990s, the company backed off of a story where Spider-Man was revealed as a clone because readers howled in protest. But the current revelation could fix at least one problem the company has: A few months back, Spider-Man made a deal with the devil that erased his marriage from existence. Fans are still irate about that one, but maybe could be placated by learning that it was a Skrull Spider-Man who made the Faustian agreement.

But I’m still betting that Bendis has a trick up his sleeve and that what we see in this first issue isn’t entirely accurate. Time will tell.

I haven’t read regular monthly Marvel Comics for a while, so some of the characters, groups and interactions in this issue were unfamiliar to me. Bendis and Yu do a nice job of bringing readers up to speed, though, and I could follow what was going on fairly easily. I bought this issue on an impulse — I thought the story sounded interesting in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of way. The concept was intriguing enough and the execution good enough that I’ll be back for issue #2, at least.

The Topps Company has released a nostalgic effort: Wacky Pack Flashback Stickers. The stickers come in packs, just like baseball cards, and feature product parodies from earlier decades.

The pack I bought this week had sticker reproductions from 1973, ‘74, ‘75 and ‘82. Included among them were Harm & Hammer (Arm & Hammer), Play-Dumb (Play Dough), Hurtz (Heinz) ketchup (”hurts your hand trying to get it out”) and Slopicana (Tropicana) Orangutan Juice, the breakfast of chimps.

If you could see the stickers, I wouldn’t need to explain the parodies; they would be obvious. I’m sure many adults of a certain age grew up with these. I had a bunch myself, and still have a few that I resisted the temptation to stick on notebooks and school folders.

The only thing that isn’t retro about the latest set is the cost: The package set me back $1.99 for ten stickers. That’s steep for a little nostalgia. I won’t be buying many future packs at that price, I’m afraid, although they are a blast to look at.