As a kid, Spiderman was one of my favorite superheros because I could relate with him well. Overlording bullies, a passion for science and a desire to help others in distress tied the comic books and my daily childhood grind.

I stopped reading the comics before venom came on the scene and don’t remember much about the New Goblin, but remember Sandman, the Green Goblin, robots, space aliens, encounters with the Fantastic Four and mad scientists. When I saw the trailers for Spiderman 3 I thought the movie was so packed with villains it would turn from the classic character building Spiderman prequels to resemble an episode of the crazy batman TV and movie series. I was pleasantly mistaken.

They do a good job tying the villains together at the end, and you even see some of their struggles and some decent character development. Without giving the plot line away, themes of forgiveness, jealousy, arrogance, pride, graciousness and honor weave through the movie. There is even an interesting series of flashbacks that tie nicely together to show Peter Parker’s understanding of his Uncle’s incident, revealing his heart. As he grows angry and bitter, the flashbacks are more violent. As he becomes more gentle and forgiving, the flashbacks are more understanding.

I’d have to say, one of the biggest surprises of the movie was Peter Parker / Spiderman’s arrogant attitude. In the other movies he acted rather mature and selfless. If you look in the comics, however, this prideful behavior is true to his character. He became very arrogant and demeaning to others. The movie ties that wonderfully with the dark Spiderman. The writers and editors took obvious pains to draw stories far apart and strewn throughout the comic series together into a cohesive and linear webbed plot line. In a few spots it gets sketchy, but overall the effort is still very rewarding to the viewers.

My wife wanted me to watch it particularly because she heard about it being a thought-provoking and revealing truth about husband and wife relationships.

Other than the encounters with the Fantastic Four, who have their own movie series, and some deranged robots and alien possessed doctors and a jealous girl-friend-super-hero wannabe who tries to convince Jane that Peter cheated on her (which he didn’t), I don’t remember much left in this comic series so I’m banking on Spiderman 3 being the last one.

On that note, they wrapped up all the loose plot lines very tidily, just like many of the mini-series in the comics. I remember, in the comics, that the obvious plot line ran over a few comics at a time, leaving one or two unanswered questions to tie plots together, but occasionally tying up all the loose ends to begin with another web of intertwining plot lines over another series of comics.

However… as we’ve seen from the onslaught of Disney action films (American Treasure, Pirates of the Caribbean and the ill-fated Santa Clause) there’s always more milk in the cash-cow udder; there’s still some room for at least one more Spiderman movie based on the content in the comics and if they do it right, it could be another fantastic movie.

One way that I enjoy passing the time is through a good movie. It’s particularly keen when a remake is made because it allows us to see a notable difference in cinema styles, director concepts, plot design and character development.

Take “The Fly” for instance. The original movie with Vincent Price had a dark sepia-like quality to it. By sepia-like quality I’m referring to the dark, rich dripping feel that the characters (most notably from Vincent) brought. It may not have been film-noir, but it felt similar. It also had distinctive rights and wrongs put in situations where grey decisions had to be made and the overall plot was focused on the question of where the soul lies. At what point, when a man is part beast, does the soul no longer exist? It also had some underpinning ideas on mercy killing, love, death and the macabre. Grey.

The more recent remake with Jeff Goldblum also had a dark quality to it, but it was more in the lighting and effects. Some camera angles also presented the overbearing nature of beastly instinct over the meek and gentle scientist. It was a much more classic and less sophisticated “Frankenstein” story. Science goes out of control and trying to act like God comes at a mortal price. In my opinion it was more gore than plot, though still fun in its own right.

Well – it turns out that our friends over at archive.org have been accumulating some very good full-length feature films over the years. Although neither version of “The Fly” is available in public domain, there are still some fantastic gems and some notable clods are available for our enjoyment. It only costs the resources to download and burn to DVD.

Note for techno-phobes: Some of these titles you’ll recognize on the WalMart discount $2 DVD shelf. That $2 gets you $0.20 in packaging and DVD and saves you the hassle of downloading and burning it yourself.

• Rodger Corman’s “The Little Shop of Horrors” starring Jack Nicholson in his film debut.
• Stanley Kramer’s “Cyrano De Bergerac” starring Jose Ferrer.
• Dozens of Charlie Chaplain’s works including the iconic film “The Tramp“
• Howard Hank’s “His Girl Friday” starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.
• H. Bruce Humberstone’s “Happy Go Lucky” starring David Niven, Vera-Ellen and Cesar Romero
• Gregory La Cava’s Frank-Capra-Like film “My Man Godfrey“.
• Even Nicholas Webster’s notoriously bad “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians“… It’s so terrible, it’s funny.

There are over 1300 to choose from. Obviously, there’s no way to go through all of them in any reasonable amount of time, so I suggest you browse through and search for topics, genres and actors you like and try those first.

Blogging isn’t designed for those who want to be thorough. It might take hours or days to collect all the links, cross-references, photos and other media to fully encompass an idea or story. As such, blogs typically restrict themselves to text and are shoved out in 15 minute bursts or less. The result, however, is that bloggers incriminate against themselves.

This world appears to be taken by some spirit against censoring. I would have to say, however, that we should be careful to censor ourselves. Blogging is essentially placing an intimate thought or idea right in Big Brother’s lap. There have been several blogs and even entire sites that I pulled after finding out that certain people had been viewing them and using them as fuel against me. I’ve seen others terribly burnt in social circles or even in their careers because of some seemingly innocuously blog post.

I don’t know much about psychology, but I’m certain that each person on earth has some level of dark side – that if released, uncensored, would be worst than any Mr. Hyde that Louis Stevenson could conjure up in his imagination. And like the fictional story, feeding that dark ego only excites its hunger more. I think it’s because we all know that we have the capacity to become vicious animals that we attack others to draw attention away from ourselves. We see this mud slinging during campaigns quite often because it’s so effective.

When I think of something off the wall to blog about – like aliens, Nephilim, apocalyptic end-times, borg-like world rulers… or when I think of something more commentary to blog about – like flaws in homeland security, my view of the government, any of the problems with the open sexuality of our world, or distrust towards certain executive officers … I have to think about how it might impact me five years down the line; there’s consideration on how it will be used against me.

I am concerned about the type of government that’s starting to take shape. The Homeland Security Act has turned out to be a gateway to imprisoning America to terror, not liberating us from it. Miniature tyrants within the system have taken the HSA and turned it against patriotic America-loving civilians and visitors to the point now that nations of the world, even the citizens of America itself, are beginning to loathe America.

I’m just as concerned about certain changes in the biological environment. This includes the sudden disappearance of honeybees and oceanic toxin-producing algae. Both are examples of catastrophes in modern times that seem prophetic in the context of the end times mentioned in the Biblical book of Revelation.

I could mine dozens, if not hundreds, of commentaries from the former two paragraphs alone. It’s not that there is such splendid variety of topics that I can’t make up my mind what to blog about. It’s the ever increasing power being handed to the TSA, the RIAA, the ACLU, the local and federal police that give me hesitation. It’s the continual reinterpretation of the Constitution even though it stood well, virtually unchanged for 150 years.

Whatever new laws are in place in the future are what will strike down on bloggers for what they blog about now. The process will involve executing future laws on past (current) actions even though the laws don’t exist to forbid you to perform those actions at this time.

We already see gross discrimination happening towards people without consideration of the cultural changes between the event blogged about and current times.