The Friday Link for 9/4/26

Hi all! I hope you have a great Labor Day Weekend!

As good as the latest Spider-Man movie is (and it was pretty good), and as much as I am looking forward to the next Avengers movie, Doomsday (which looks AMAZING), the best comic book adaptation in TV or in movies today is Lanterns on HBO.

For those who are not familiar with the DC comic, Green Lantern is a superhero who is part of an intergalactic police force corps (quite literally the Green Lantern Corps) whose job is to keep the universe safe. Their green power rings, powered by a Green Lantern (1950s comic book logic!), allow the wearer to create powerful green light manifestations. 

What makes the comic book good is not the power, but the people who wield it.  Hal Jordan is the main Green Lantern, the one which is most familiar to us older comic book fans, but there have been more modern embraced versions of the characters; Guy Gardener (a hyper aggressive, short tempered Green Lantern featured in the latest Superman movie), and John Stewart (the first African American Green Lantern) who is the Green Lantern in most of the modern cartoon versions of the Justice League. 

James Gunn, who has done great work with comic book adaptations, understands the basic rule of making a great comic book movie:  Stay true to the comic books! His Guardians of the Galaxy movies and the latest Superman movie show he gets that.

He has absolutely outdone himself with Lanterns. The show features an aging Hal Jordan (a perfectly cast Kyle Chandler) training a new Green Lantern in John Stewart (an equally perfectly cast Aaron Pierre), as they stumble upon a mystery in rural Nebraska, the location Hal got his ring way back when. Also, Nathan Fillion shows up as the Guy Gardner Lantern featured in the Superman movie.

This is really good, not the nightmare that was the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie from a few years ago. If you like a good story, good acting, and comic book fun,  I highly recommend it. Considering it is incredibly popular, I'm not alone.

Let's start with Hal Jordan Lantern, interrogating a suspect he thinks is an alien. 

Here is a great bit of acting as a clearly annoyed Hal Jordan (annoyed because of the mystery on his hands, but also annoyed to have to be babysitting John Stewart) who finds out what exactly Stewart (annoyed that he seems to be getting jerked around by Jordan) went through to retrieve the recharging lantern, and mentions an alien species that concerns Hal. 

And why not a little of Guy Gardner too, from the Superman Movie last year, stopping a military invasion of another country (with help from Hawkgirl and Metamorpho). 

Finally tonight, something completely different.

Minneapolis is home to the only waterfall on the Mississippi River, St. Anthony Falls. The waterfall is stabilized. It had to be because the waterfall itself, through natural erosion, was slowly killing itself, and humans tried to harvest the power of the waterfall.  Their greed nearly caused the complete collapse of the Falls in 1869. 

The Army Corps of Engineers eventually built a wall underneath the falls to save it in 1876...and that's the last thing we know about the wall.  We know it's still there, but we are not too sure about the condition of the wall, and no one seems to want to take ownership of the wall - not the Feds, state, county, or city.  

This is a bit of a concern.  If the wall fails, eventually the waterfall itself will fail, turning into rapids and placing the water intake for the drinking water of Minneapolis above the water line.

Noles Explores and Explains has the details about the history and the problem underneath the river in Minneapolis.

That does it for this week.

Once again, enjoy your Labor Day weekend.  All hail the worker! I hope you can afford to grill something and have the beverage of your choice. 

Please make sure you stay up to date on all your vaccinations.