Stick-N-Find is the technology for me, the perennial loser.

I don’t mean “loser” the way most people do, to describe somebody perpetually down on his luck, although that could apply to me too.

No, I mean it in the literal sense: I am constantly misplacing stuff.

My wallet, for example, goes AWOL a lot. In the winter, it’s easier to keep track of, jammed in my coat pocket along with various receipts, pens and lint. In the summer, though, it lives a third of the time in my car, a third of the time in my back pocket and a third of the time, I guess, on Tralfamadore, the alien planet in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” where earthlings are displayed in an intergalactic zoo.

With Stick-N-Find technology, I could affix a bottle-cap-sized disc to my wallet and then send a low-energy radio signal from my iPhone that would help me home in. (By the way, I’m not being an Apple elitist by name-dropping the iPhone, as it’s one of the few devices that can pick up on Stick-N-Find signals. Take that, Android users.)

The new gizmos were on display at a trade show in Barcelona, Spain, recently. My boss wouldn’t pay for me to cover it live, so I had to settle for an Associated Press story.

As soon as I read about Stick-N-Finds, I knew what they were: real-life versions of Spider-Man’s spider tracers, tiny metal arachnids that our hero sticks to suspects or on villains’ getaway vehicles so that he can find them later. Once again, life imitates art.

Currently, Stick-N-Find technology is prohibitively expensive. At $25 each, I can’t afford them for my wallet, car keys, television remote control, shoes, favorite shirt, dog leash, glasses, glasses case, stapler, tape dispenser, screwdriver and hammer. But if the price came down — say, to a dollar or two — I’d have more radio waves buzzing around my house than a 100,000-watt FM station.

With these little gizmos, I would never again search fruitlessly in a closet for my favorite tie only to find it draped around the dog’s neck two rooms away. Or locate the whereabouts of a shaving cream bottle inadvertently wedged behind two piles of clean towels.

I know Stick-N-Finds would also be great for my marriage, which is constantly under stress from the forces of misplacement. See, my wife is a loser too — otherwise, why would she marry me — compounded by her penchant for throwing away items of financial value

Many an early morning has found me Dumpster-diving in my own trash cans, separating eggshells, napkins and other refuse in a vain attempt to find an unpaid water bill or an important tax document. I pity clerks who must open return envelopes from Casa Schillig, smudged as they are with butter and grease, smelling like a troll’s unwashed armpit.

My wife’s greatest accomplishment (to date) was shredding one of my paychecks, thinking it was just a stub. I tried to tape it back together, creating a sort of Frankencheck, but the bank wouldn’t even consider it. I’m pretty sure the teller was laughing from behind her glass window.

Stick-N-Find would help me with my female Jack the Ripper by allowing me to affix homing devices to important pieces of paper and locate them inside the house (where they inevitably turn up) before I spend 20 minutes rooting through garbage.

Besides my wallet, the item I would most want to Stick-N-Find is a book, “1,100 Words You Need to Know,” a massive tome I use when teaching. That book is the literary version of Jimmy Hoffa, but unlike Jimmy, it eventually turns up — after I’ve bought a replacement. A few years ago, after a copy disappeared for months, I found it in a pile of books discarded by a colleague. Last month, after sending out an embarrassingly pleading email to fellow teachers, I found it stuffed between the pages of another, even larger, book.

A Stick-N-Find would have lopped hours off my search. Indeed, it wasn’t until I stopped looking that the darn thing showed up, which is always the way. There’s an old saying that lost items appear only when the devil is finished with them.

If that’s the case, I hope Old Scratch’s time with “1,100 Words You Need to Know” has netted him an impressive vocabulary, maybe one he uses while explaining my wallet to visitors at the zoo on Tralfamadore.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published March 7, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

A pun, they say, is the lowest form of humor.

Dear College of Cardinals:

I appreciate your interest in having me assume the mantle of pope in the wake of Benedict XVI’s resignation, but I must decline for the following reasons:

1. I’ve been racking my brains to come up with a “pope-ular” name with no success. Apparently I can’t keep Christopher, patron saint of travelers, because pontiffs must always adopt new names (I’m waiting for Pope Super Bowl XLVII, myself) and because church officials took away Christopher’s feast day when I was a baby, allegedly after they discovered he wasn’t a real man and instead was only a legend.

Now, many people refer to my quasi-legendary status already — my wife is fond of saying I’m a legend in my own mind — but it still smarts to know that the guy your parents named you after has been downgraded. This must be how the Planet Formerly Known as Pluto felt when it was relegated to a mere chunk of interstellar debris.

2. I still owe another year on my 2009 Dodge Journey and don’t want to trade it in for a more expensive Popemobile, even though I hear the Official Car of the 21st Century Papacy™ comes with heated leather seats and bulletproof glass. If you could somehow make it submersible, so I could drive underwater, and paint it black like the Batmobile, I might be willing to reconsider.

3. I would have to change my Twitter account. Granted, cschillig has fewer than 300 followers (and most of those are robots or institutions), but I’ve grown fond of it and wouldn’t want to swap for an official Vatican handle, even if it came with the promise of a million-plus followers.

Furthermore, I doubt the Holy See would be too understanding if Pope Schillig started tweeting about movies and comic books. “God bless Quentin Tarantino” would probably get me brought up on heresy charges at worst or grounded from the Popemobile at best

4. I don’t think I could jog very well in a shoulder-to-ankle vestment. Nuff said.

5. I would have to move to Rome and learn a new language, which would take time away from my graduate studies in Pig Latin.

6. I would have to talk to many people who disagree with my message. As a teacher in civilian life, you’d think I would be used to this, but I’m not. And swapping lessons from “no apostrophe in Presidents Day” and “avoid run-on sentences” to “no condoms in Africa,” “no meat on Fridays” and “no women priests” wouldn’t do much for my self-esteem.

7. The thought of carrying a big, ornate shepherd’s crook is tempting. There are a lot of people I’d like to smite in this world, believe me, but nobody takes you seriously when you smite without a big, ornate stick. (That’s why I’m not allowed back in Rite Aid.) Still, I’m afraid that if I had access to one regularly, I’d smite so many people that it would be scandalous.

8. The headgear. Man, the headgear. I mitre get made fun of when I’m out with the guys.

9. My marriage. I would have to get a divorce and an annulment to become pope, which wouldn’t make me very popular with family and friends. Plus, my wife would get half of everything, so you’d have to draw a line down the middle of Vatican City and give her 50 percent. Since VC is already the smallest sovereign nation, I don’t think its residents would appreciate having their living space divided in two, nor would they like seeing the Pope’s things thrown out a window or stacked on the curb. (If they even have curbs in Italy.)

Thanks again for the consideration. When the white smoke flies, I hope maybe you can make room for me in some other capacity. If the new pope needs a court jester or an official driver (especially for that Popemobile), keep me in mind.

Sincerely,

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published Feb. 21, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

Oscar front-runner “Lincoln” came under scrutiny last week for a historical inaccuracy.

The movie, written by Tony Kushner, depicts Lincoln’s fight to pass the 13th Amendment. In the film, two Connecticut congressmen vote against outlawing slavery, making the slim margin by which the measure passes more dramatic.

The problem is that, in real life, all four Connecticut representatives voted for the amendment.

After checking the facts, modern-day Connecticut lawmaker Joe Courtney cried foul in a letter to director Steven Spielberg. Courtney wants the scene changed before the film’s home video release.

Kushner admits that the scene is inaccurate, that he conjured congressmen and bogus voting records from the Nutmeg State (including imaginary names) as part of the “time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama,” according to a statement in an Associated Press story. He noted that other characters and dialogue in the movie are also fictional.

Kushner isn’t the first screenwriter to take what some see as egregious and unnecessary license with the truth. In 2007, “The Great Debaters” dramatized the victory of an all-black debate team from Wiley College over a Harvard team in the 1930s. In real life, the team won against the University of Southern California. Harvard, after all, sounds much more prestigious. (Sorry, Trojans.)

At the same time that “Lincoln” received a historical dressing-down, Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” the 1966 account of a 1959 quadruple murder, came under fire after newly discovered documents revealed that Capote’s depiction of several key actions by the Kansas Bureau of Investigations is inaccurate, putting the lie to the author’s claim that his book was spotlessly true.

The memoir genre — already held to a lower standard of “truthiness” than other non-fiction writing — has been sullied by any number of stretchers and outright lies. The most famous, or infamous, contemporary case is James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” which has more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese in its account of the author’s drug abuse and rehabilitation. The publisher now acknowledges it as “a work of literature.”

Maintaining a sharply demarcated line between truth and fiction, fact and fancy, isn’t as easy as it might appear. The Bible, a source that many take for gospel (pun intended), contains passages that all but the most ardent fundamentalists read as allegory and parable, such as the stories of Adam and Eve and the Tower of Babel. The difference between believers and nonbelievers often boils down to their individual assessments about where the Good Book stops being symbolic and becomes empirically true.

Any assessment of “truth” in a literary work (even one labeled “non-fiction”) should paraphrase a famous statement from the Watergate era: What did the writer know and when did he know it? The assessment should also take into consideration the author’s intent.

William Shakespeare, for example, takes great liberties with the historical Macbeth. He deviates substantially from the facts of the Scotsman’s life as presented in “Holinshed’s Chronicles,” most significantly in how Macbeth came to the throne. Historically, Macbeth had a legitimate claim to the crown and murdered his rival in battle. In Shakespeare’s play, the title character has no such claim and kills the king while he sleeps.

However, Shakespeare’s intent is not to present his audience with history, but to give them a dramatic, satisfying theatrical experience.

Ultimately, “Lincoln” has a similar goal. However, in a film that takes great pains to recreate the look, feel, dress and speech of a particular era in American history, it is unfortunate that an easily avoided inaccuracy — one that didn’t slip through as a mistake but was knowingly altered — will have so many viewers believing that Connecticut lawmakers were on the wrong side of history.

That’s worth some sort of recognition on the forthcoming Blu-ray and DVD release, maybe a mini-documentary or an audio acknowledgement on the commentary track. But I’d stop just short of wanting to see the scene edited or removed.

After all, the mistake is now part of history, and those who demand absolute fidelity to the truth should want it to remain.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published Feb. 14, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

We have unusual dinner conversations.

If ever a family is the polar opposite of the traditional sit-down-to-eat type of Americana popularized by Norman Rockwell on Saturday Evening Post covers, it is mine. Even for major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, it is normal for us to gather in blue jeans and sweatshirts, blithely ignore the social norms of which fork to use with what course (even the idea of “courses” is alien, as we usually just throw everything onto the table and dig in), and engage in conversations more suited to the locker room than the dining room.

Admittedly, I’m often the catalyst for these discussions. In recent years, I’ve started holiday dinner table debates about what the shape of many well-known monuments says about the self-esteem and … uh, inadequacies of earlier generations of architects and politicians, and defended my long-held belief that people’s interior organs are not located in fixed positions but rather vary greatly from body to body.

Out of respect for the nature of a family newspaper, I’ll avoid saying anything else about the former and concentrate on the latter.

Somewhere, I once read a quote that said if individual facial features — eyes, ears, nose, and so on — were spaced as differently as interior organs, we’d have a hard time recognizing one another as human. This isn’t to say that some people’s hearts are located where their appendix should be, just that there are certain differences in our interior anatomies that are more extreme than many people might guess.

I have performed no research to back this up, and my Google searches haven’t been very helpful. When you type “How far can my liver move?” into a Web browser, you get some crazy answers, believe me. But it sounds like something that might be true, which is my only litmus test for dinner table conversation, so I threw it out there next to the Easter ham and dinner rolls just to see what people would say.

The three nurses in the family — my wife, sister and brother-in-law — openly mocked me. My mom, who had just passed a plate of yams that looked suspiciously like chopped-up intestines, looked appalled. But none of them could entirely refute my claim, at least not to my satisfaction. (When people started turning green, we changed the topic.)

I vowed to seek out opinions from surgeons and gastroenterologists to prove everybody wrong, but I’ve been too busy playing Words With Friends and reading Donald Duck comics to make any phone calls. Yet.

Another unusual conversation happened last weekend. As my wife, daughter and I enjoyed a restaurant meal, the subject turned to longevity and left-handedness. A study from the ’90s says that left-handed people, on average, die seven years earlier than right-handers, a trend variously attributed to a higher rate of accidents, the stress of living in a right-handed world, and certain diseases more common to those who use the “sinister” hand.

I’m a leftie, and while I’m not accident prone, I remember feeling stressed in various college classes when I was limited to a few left-handed desks shoved in the back of a classroom, and I still get bummed when I drag a shirtsleeve through wet ink. But is this enough to erase seven years? I don’t know.

On the positive side comes news that vegetarians — a tribe I’ve belonged to for 38 days (provided I don’t backslide between the time I write this and the time you read it) — are 32 percent less likely to suffer from heart disease than their meat-eating peers.

I was heartened by this research, and by a 2011 study that says happy people die earlier than unhappy people. I wouldn’t call myself unhappy, but I’m certainly not the Pollyannaish, foppish type who thinks everything is wonderful! wonderful! wonderful! either.

I’d call it a wash — the seven years I lose for left handedness is made up by the time I gain from cynicism and a healthy heart, even if said heart is located closer to where my appendix should be.

I can’t wait to bring all this up around the dinner table the next time everybody gets together for a holiday meal. No matter what they think of my theory of interior organs, I bet they will prefer it to more photos of the Washington Monument.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published Feb. 7, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for gun-rights advocates who keep shooting themselves in the foot — and other parts of the anatomy — in their attempts to persuade us that more guns equal a safer society.

Last Saturday was Gun Appreciation Day, selected by apparently tone-deaf organizers on the weekend before a federal holiday to honor civil-rights giant Martin Luther King Jr., whose own life was cut short by gun violence.

On this day, five people attending gun shows were accidentally shot — in Raleigh, N.C., where a man’s gun discharged, striking a trio of bystanders at the entrance to the Dixie Gun and Knife Show; in Indianapolis, where a man shot himself in the hand as he exited the Indy 1500 Gun and Knife show; and closer to home, where a man shot a fellow exhibitor while opening a box containing a gun at the Medina Gun Show. All were accidental.

“Accidental” and gun mishaps, unfortunately, go hand in hand. In 2011, 851 people died in this country because of accidents with the 310 million estimated firearms in civilian circulation.

It’s only common sense to recognize that the introduction of a gun into a situation increases the chances that a gun will be fired, intentionally or unintentionally, in that situation — sometimes to the detriment of the user and sometimes to the detriment of innocent bystanders. Also, to be fair, sometimes to the detriment of an aggressor, but not as often as we might hope.

For instance, one of several Time magazine articles published in the Jan. 28 edition (where most of the statistics in this column originate) notes that New York City police officers’ “hit rate” in a gunfight is 30 percent when the target does not shoot back and an abysmal 18 percent when the target returns fire.

Yet one of the most insistent reactions to the recent mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary is a call to increase the number of armed personnel in our schools — either with armed police officers or teachers. If a New York City cop has only an 18-percent chance of hitting a shooter, do we really expect better results from a seventh-grade science teacher?

Proponents argue that the presence of guns on school campuses is a deterrent, so that guards and teachers may never have to use those guns, that their presence is enough to keep potential shooters away.

But consider: If five people can be shot accidentally in one day at gun shows, how many accidents might we have to accept as a consequence of keeping our kids “safe” in class?

More knee-jerk legislation is not the answer to gun violence. The country doesn’t need additional restrictions on gun ownership because the vast majority of gun owners — last weekend’s accidents notwithstanding — are responsible people with the sense to store weapons and ammunition safely.

Yet we also don’t need to encourage the further proliferation of guns. With more guns than people in this country, we have enough firearms already.

It is unconscionable that the NRA is using the recent Sandy Hook tragedy as an opportunity to extend its political reach, and it is just as unconscionable that politicians, including the president, are using it as an opportunity to advance a political agenda. Both sides are preying on — and perhaps are victims of — fear. Cooler heads on both sides, or maybe somewhere in the middle, must prevail.

The sad truth is that, in 2011, the most common reason for gun deaths by far was suicide, with 19,766 people ending their own lives with firearms. Clearly, more needs to be done to bolster mental-health services in this country, which is why the $15 million that Obama has proposed to train teachers to recognize mental illness and the $40 million that would help school districts refer students to mental-health help are the most sensible components of last week’s executive and Congressional to-do list. The same sorts of services need to be made more readily available to adults, as well.

Unfortunately, the parts of the president’s proposals that will get all the attention are the attempts to ban assault rifles and high-capacity clips, which will serve only to offend gun owners who use those items lawfully and safely for recreational shooting. It will do little to curb crime.

If you own guns, lock them up. Store ammunition separately. While this greatly reduces the effectiveness of firearms for home protection (which is a false sense of security, anyway), the life you save and the injuries you prevent may be your own or somebody who has done you no harm.

Especially if you go to gun shows.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

Originally published Jan. 24, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

I have a lifelong love/hate relationship with stocking caps.

Like many petulant 6-year-olds, I spent my formative years fighting headwear, especially the Dickensian kind with the ball on the end. Perfectly acceptable hats (to anyone but an image-conscious kid) were accidentally-on-purpose left on buses, stuck on snowmen at a friend’s house or buried unceremoniously in the bottom of the garbage.

Unfortunately, I had a mother with an endless supply of stocking caps, each more grotesque and unflattering than the last. Like “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,” every time I got rid of one, another took its place — sometimes brown and orange for the sports team I was supposed to promote, sometimes orange and black for my future alma mater, sometimes affixed with a label for a grain or horse-food company from my dad’s job. Hats were everywhere in Casa Schillig — except on my head.

Mom even resorted to an unethical appeal to authority to coerce my compliance. At times when I was especially uncooperative — usually any day that ended in a “y” — she picked up the phone and dialed her accomplice.

“Hello, Time and Temperature? Yes, this is Chris’s mom. Should he wear a hat today? Uh-huh. Yes, it IS very cold. OK, I’ll tell him. Goodbye.”

“What did he say? What did he say?”

“He said to wear a hat. Do you want to call back and ask him yourself?”

I never did. It didn’t occur to me that Mom would lie — or that time and temperature was a pre-recorded message with nothing to say about headwear preferences of gullible children.

So much for hat hate. Later in life, I reversed myself and started wearing one, maybe about the same time that I switched from Republican to Democrat, a decision that some say proves my head was unprotected for too many years.

Key to this change of heart (hat, not political party) is the often-repeated assertion that 70 percent of body heat escapes through the head.

So when I take the dog for his morning and evening winter constitutional, my uniform includes a blue stocking cap pulled down so far that it practically blocks my vision, making me the Arch Avenue equivalent of Nanook of the North. When I go to work or run errands, I likewise don my headgear.

My niece, who works at Dunkin Donuts, says the hat makes me look like a thug in the drive-thru; my wife says it, coupled with my scraggly beard, makes me a candidate for post-office bulletin boards. Yet I persist because I like looking vaguely unsavory and because I want to support the U.S. mail system.

So imagine my chagrin when a study out of the University of Michigan said the 70-percent statistic is a myth. According to Andrew Maynard, whose research was summarized in a Huffington Post article, you lose no more heat through your noggin than through any other body part.

I tried to forget Maynard’s research as soon as possible, but no such luck: The next day, as the dog pulled me along unshoveled walks (the unofficial status symbol of Alliance winter), I felt colder, as though that 70 percent body heat had been held inside by force of my belief. The next day, I stopped wearing the hat.

Fast forward to Sunday morning. As I was writing this column, I reread Maynard’s research, which has something to do with how much warmer a stocking cap makes you when you dance naked in the snow. (Ah, these academics and their tax-funded research.)

Apparently, escaping body heat has everything to do with how much skin is exposed. Those nude dancers have hats that cover about 10 percent of their body, meaning they are 10 percent warmer than those who dance naked without hats.

For a guy like me who doesn’t dance naked in the snow — at least not while walking the dog — it means that if my head is the only exposed part, then that’s where my most significant body-heat loss will occur, so the hat really does help, just not at the 70-percent level.

This clarification turned the mental trick, because when I walked the dog after reading it, I felt warmer with my hat than I did when I thought it wasn’t helping.

Which proves that warmth has less to do with what’s on our heads than what’s in them, something Mom must have known when she made those bogus calls to time and temperature.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published Jan. 10, 2013 in The Alliance Review.

I forgot.

Dan Slott, the writer of Spider-Man’s adventures, warned readers earlier in December to avoid the Internet on Dec. 26 until they’d read “Amazing Spider-Man No. 700,” which went on sale that day.

Something big was happening in the Marvel superhero’s world, and Slott didn’t want it spoiled by a careless headline or an overzealous fan. In November, fans learned that Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis — OK, one of his arch-nemeses — Doctor Octopus, had switched minds with Peter Parker, Spidey’s alter-ego. This left Parker’s consciousness trapped inside Doc Ock’s failing body while Ock went off and played Spider-Man, even kissing Parker’s former wife, who didn’t remember she had married Spider-Man because a demon erased her memories.

(I can hear you snickering. It’s no sillier than anything on “Glee” or an afternoon soap opera, so cut me some slack.)

Marvel Comics had been crowing about a further game-changer coming in issue 700, so I told myself to take Slott’s advice and not peek on any comic book websites until after I’d read the story.

But I forgot about Twitter. There I was in the middle of the Pittsburgh airport, waiting for my daughter’s flight to depart, carelessly scrolling through my Twitter feed when I saw the headline from the Hollywood Reporter (spoiler alert for anybody who has not yet read the comic book): “Peter Parker Dies in ‘Amazing Spider-Man No. 700′ Comic.”

I lifted my head and, to quote Walt Whitman, sounded my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

I wasn’t angry that Parker had died, although plenty of fans were (Slott even received death threats). This is, after all, comics, where heroes pass all the time, only to return a month, a year, or even 10 years later, restored by some deus ex machina to full health. Superman and Captain America are two relatively recent examples of superheroes who have gone on to an everlasting reward — and received lots of media coverage along the way — only to find that it wasn’t as everlasting as they thought.

Peter Parker — the nebbish science major without friends, raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben, whose life became only more complicated after a radioactive arachnid gave him all the powers of a spider — will be back, if for no other reason than Marvel needs the status quo restored in time for the next Spider-Man movie.

I can’t even say that news of Parker’s death was a complete surprise — although the mind-swapping with Doc Ock was a shocker — because by warning fans to go incommunicado on the day after Christmas, Slott was foreshadowing that something big was brewing, and death is the biggest brew (or brouhaha) of all.

No, I guess my barbaric yawp was because, in this interconnected world of ours, it’s difficult to be caught totally off-guard by a pop culture event, any pop-culture event. Once upon a time, the world was shocked to learn who killed J.R., but these days, the guilty party’s name would be all over Entertainment Tonight weeks ahead of the episode.

Darth Vader is really Luke Skywalker’s father? That blew my mind in 1980, but if it happened now, somebody would leak the script to TMZ, and we’d sit in theaters and wait for the exact moment when the paternal relationship is announced (1:51:18 in “The Empire Strikes Back,” if you care).

We live in the Golden Age of Pop Culture — or Geek Culture, if you prefer. Not only is an awesome array of contemporary entertainment (and a considerable amount of junk — Sturgeon’s Law still applies) available, but also a vast storehouse of past entertainment, more accessible than ever before.

Want to watch all six seasons of “I Love Lucy,” all nine seasons of “The X-Files” and every extant piece of concert footage from Led Zeppelin? Readily available. How about read the classic science-fiction novels of H.G. Wells or watch one of “The Thin Man” films from the 1940s? Hard copies or digital downloads exist for them all, some as close as your local library. Want to talk about any of the above plus tens of thousands more? Go online and start typing.

But this embarrassment of riches comes with a price: Rare is the book or movie or TV show that we watch “cold,” without spoiled plot points or preexisting opinions sullying the experience.

Just last week, in the middle of the comedy “This Is 40,” I sat horrified as a character gave away the ending to the television show “Lost.” I’ve watched only three of the six seasons. Now I’m not so sure I’ll finish.

Maybe I should be thankful. After all, the revelation saved me a lot of time. And maybe I should take a cue from eastern culture, where endings are less important than the paths characters take to get there.

Regardless, I sometimes wish I had Spider-Man’s powers, if only so I could web up my eyes and ears and avoid the next comic book spoiler — the one that explains how Peter Parker cheated death yet again.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published on Jan. 3, 2013, in The Alliance Review.