Living or deceased, the policemen, Firemen and armed forces, rise above and beyond.  These are true heroes who face the dangers we all fear.  These men and women, knowing they can lose their own lives, serve and protect us , which in turn, protects America and all her glory.  These are true patriots, proud of their country and will do everything in their power to protect without asking for anything in return.  These are the heroes we need to always remember, always.

Countless Americans gave their lives because of their pride.  Countless Americans come home injured, maimed and suffering, and yet we do not give them the help they deserve. We must rethink our stance about these heroes, and truly put them above all others first.  These are the heroes who made America what it is.  If it weren’t for these men and women, the idea of America would only be a passing thought.  America stands for freedom, and those who served her well, should and will always be remembered.  Here is to those heroes living or in death. May your souls stay as pure as always were, and may God find a place for you by his side.  God bless America, and God bless those heroes whom we shall never forget.

When reading the article I was reminded of the Chinese film and be an actor Jackie Chan, titled The Forbidden Kingdom. That movie if you ask me trinspirasi of “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” in this article. A very touching love story involving Wei, Su, and Wu.

If Indonesia as the country of china that every culture is unique in the country later became a movie. It’s very effective to introduce local culture to the international community, especially if the movie to be a box office and screened in cinemas around the world. The Forbidden Kingdom bleak film that I mentioned above was.

It’s very inspiring to me, and also shows the rich culture of China. This all could not be separated from the consciousness of Chinese society to continue to preserve its culture and unrelenting introduced throughout the world. Even now we can feel, china is very influential in the world.

Cover of The Forbidden Kingdom

Artist – Jim Aparo

An only in America story that starts with a proposition that seems to amount to just asking for trouble.

To celebrate their bicentenary, the US Government plans to have an old Civil War train travel round the States carrying various invaluable historic artefacts including the original Bill Of Rights and The Declaration Of Independence around the continent for all to see.

Batman, and the robotic Metal Men are assigned to travel too, both as security measures and to serve as living exhibits in their own right. What could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything really. The scholars sent to present papers relating to the rare documents prove to be disgruntled Native Americans who hijack the train to insist on the US plunder of their lands be put right at last. They capture Batman and strap him to the train’s cowcatcher, and send the Metal Men off on a wild-goose chase after their missing creator (A story-line running throughout their own comic strip is their search for their ever-absent inventor).

When an independent terrorist assault involving a hidden bomb on the train is raised, the Native Americans unite with the heroes to help save the day in a blaze of patriotic glory and the Native Americans are forgiven for their own impassioned protest activity– hooray. 

Arthur Chappell

The rather disappointing conclusion to the X-Men’s battle with the space alien, Lucifer, and his remote boss.

The story starts well enough with the S-Men’s ultra-cool fighter jet dodging giant waterspouts launched against it by Lucifer. This gets the safely landing X-Men noticed by a group of cowboy ranchers who decide to drive the X-Men off their land. This puts the X-Men in a quandary of how to defeat the rednecks without hurting anyone or further ruining their reputation among humans who fear them.

The X-Men push most of the ranchers into a river which will lead the men safely away from the danger zone – no one seems to consider this potentially drowning anyone. The ranch leader is encased in ice and sent home on his horse before he thaws out. If this is going to make people love the X-Men I’ll ear my own computer.

It then comes down to a straight fight between the heroes and Lucifer, who is using his ‘Dominus’ machine to mass produce giant robots with which to take over and enslave our World. Using the robots themselves to smash the machine, the X-Men leave Lucifer to face the wrath of his boss (seen only on TV monoitors0 as he tells Lucifer off for ruining his plans and summons the evil overlord home to face disciplinary action.

The X-Men fly home triumphant and another adventure ends with our World safe to venture forth in. Hooray.

Arthur Chappell

Professor X, the benevolent wheel-chair bound mastermind behind the good X-Men is a brother to the evil Juggernaut, which he discloses in this story as Juggernaut turns up to assault the X-Men headquarters.

Xavier (X) discloses his past as The X-Men prepare their defences against the unstoppable figure, surrounding the school / fortress with fire trenches, electric fences, grenade stacks, and gas-filled booby-traps. X continues his story even as the mighty Juggernaut ploughs through the defences one by one.

While X was born with mutant genes that gave him a high level of telekinetic and mind reading power, Juggernaut was just an ordinary human child, although something of a bully from the outset. He made the young Xavier’s life hell and even tried to kill him on occasion.

Growing to serve side by side in the Korean War, X watches helplessly as his brother deserts the battlefield under heavy enemy fire, and goes after him to bring him back. Both brothers find themselves in a cave in the hills where the future Juggernaut, a still at this point just a wicked cowardly man called Cain, finds a mysterious artefact conveniently left there by the Cyttorak, an ancient tribe. Touching the amulets despite warnings from CX, Cain is transformed into Juggernaut, relentless and unstoppable killing machine-like man, and sets out to kill Professor X, who buries his brother under tons of rubble that will take Juggernaut years to break free from.

The story is told as Juggernaut, now free, attacks the school with his single-minded intent being the death of Professor X.

The Juggernaut is actually based on Hindu mythology, so quite why a Hindu temple deity would be left in a cave in Korea is unclear. The Juggernaut was a giant statue that crushed many of its worshippers as it was pushed into place in an Indian Temple and became a bi-word for big machinery. Many large haulage trucks are referred to as Juggernauts. The idols of the Hindu Juggernaut wee a source of martyrdom, with some of the faithful willingly let themselves be crushed under the feet of their god even though carved in stone.

The killer Cain becomes seems out of place in an X-Men story. He seems more suited to a story featuring the Hulk, who he resembles in many characteristics as a being that gets bigger and stronger and meaner the more you throw at him.

The story ends as Juggernaut breaks through the defences, with the young X-Men ready to have to face him using their own powers rather than their traps and weapons. With this thrilling cliffhanger, the comic ends. Could the X-Men be wiped out as early as issue #13? Not very likely is it?

,

It was a usual cool rainy night in December. Families were having a sound sleep unsuspecting of a tragedy that would abruptly change their lives. Fearful loud cries were heard as strong current of water, a flash flood triggered by the Typhoon Sendong rains, literally washed away household belongings and even rocked some houses down.

The morning that followed showed hundreds of people dead and much more missing. The family of one of my colleagues, or shall I say, one of my good friends, was not spared. His wife and a child were left alone in their house in Cagayan de Oro as we were having a meeting in Manila. The mother and son were able to rush to safer place but lost all their things, save for the clothes they were wearing.

Aids for the victims came from all over the place, local and abroad. Our company did its share in helping my colleague. His friends also extended some help. On my part, I did ask help from my friends whom my colleague never knew. Gathered a good amount and sent it to him. To my surprise, he politely asked me if he can donate the money I sent him to some other victims saying that he has been active in relief operations using part of the financial assistance he got from the company and some personal friends.

I felt frozen for a moment as I try to picture my colleague’s face in my mind, a person in need who feels that he’s still blessed.  I felt humiliated that I only gave a share out of what’s extra from my pocket. This man, a victim himself, has shown a bigger heart in giving away even the food which is about to be fed in his own mouth.

He did not actually save lives. He was not even there as the typhoon lashed its might. This is all about his attitude towards hardship and his heart for the neediest that struck me!

Heroes are those who extend a hand so that others may continue living… Great Heroes are those who give part of their life so that others may live!!!

Spoiler space warning .

The sub-plot back story to a second of the Preacher’s fascinating enemies, a boy called Root, with a face that has ended up shaped like a bare backside. Here we have the unfortunate wretch’s pitiful origins. He will end up being known only as Arseface.

He starts out as a well meaning, polite, naïve and slightly retarded hippy in a redneck Southern States community. Though white, he is very sympathetic to the black activism cause at the height of the Civil Rights movement, in the days of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King. This makes him unpopular with the racists at his school.

The boy lives with, and admires his drunken violent father who beats him up on a regular basis. Many others bully him too, with only one friend seeming to give a hoot for him. Together they steal the cop’s gun and shoot bottles with it. They also take drugs and become blood brothers, vowing to be friends even unto death. They are Nirvana fans, dangerously influenced by the suicide of Nirvana singer Kurt Colbain.  They use the gun to kill a barking dog that annoys them, and then decide to kill themselves. While his friend succeeds, Root fails and blows his face inside out, ending up with the disfigurement that gives him his new identity as Arseface. This may make him one of comic book history’s least likely villains in the making.

When his dad dies, in an incident-involving Preacher, Arseface vows vengeance. Preacher has another unlikely enemy.

Ennis makes the villains in Preacher quite tragic figures rather than power crazed megalomaniacs. They are bitter, unlucky unloved individuals who have a lot of anger to share and kill for. They become likeable.

Arthur Chappell

Just imagine: you’re crawling around in the mud, just like in the movies. You’ve got your coworkers next to you, and all of you are wielding M-16s. Shots fired in your direction – you’re trained to fight, trained to fire back. A huge firefight ensues… you see your friends getting injured and dying all around you…. and the whole time, all you can think is, God, I hope my kids are okay.

Image via Wikipedia

That sounds pretty scary to me.

My dad was in the Army, and I married into the Army when I was 17. Granted I filed for divorce by the time I was 20 because soldiers don’t always make the best husbands or fathers, but I still have a great deal of respect for those who are able to go out there, fight for our freedoms, come back, and live a life that even slightly resembles normalcy.

I’ve had many friends in the military, several who lost their lives.

Honestly, it makes me sick to my stomach to know that soldiers get spit on when they return. This didn’t just happen during the Vietnam War; this has happened after 9/11.

Really? Are we STILL that primitive, people? SPITTING on some complete stranger? Why? That would be like a pro-lifer spitting on a woman for having an abortion. Ridiculous, rude, unnecessary, and outrageously disrespectful! Though there are conflicting stories about this, I have personally known a handful of soldiers who returned to be spat upon at the airport or near the Army base. No major protests, no huge groups of people; just soldiers who have gotten spit upon.

Soldiers are trained to fight, to follow orders, to do whatever it takes to protect the freedom of their country. They go without showers, sleep, and food. They stay on alert for days at a time to make sure nothing happens. They sacrifice their time with their own families to protect your families.

I’m a recently naturalized US citizen. Strange, yes, people don’t think I belong anywhere but here because I have no accent, I’m white, and I write well and get good grades as well as knowing a lot of the slang terms being thrown around. I know there are a lot of people with opposing points of view and who don’t think the troops should be anywhere but in the US at this point, and that’s fine.

Just don’t take it out on the troops. And troops, soldiers, if some girl thanks you for your service to your country, it doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting some. Just saying.

It would be nice for people to be a little more respectful, though. Just in general.

This Veterans Day, thank someone who has been or is in the military. Even just signing that contract could mean the end of their life; they are willing to sacrifice everything to make sure we all have what we need. They make these sacrifices so people like myself can sit at home and go to college and get an online degree.

So, really, even if you don’t know anyone in the military or who is retired military, just find someone who is and say THANK YOU. If it weren’t for their sacrifices (even if the orders they follow are sometimes misguided), then where would we be?

I’d like to say a big THANKS to all of the military veterans, retirees, soldiers, and reserves. This Veterans Day is for all of you.

Much as Casino Royale rebooted the James Bond franchise in a fresh and dynamic way, X-Men: First Class injects new blood into a franchise that, for all its profitability, had become blandly anemic. In fact, roughly the first half of this massive and very well cast origins extravaganza is arguably the best hour of Marvel Comics-derived filmmaking among the torrent of it that’s cascaded across screens in recent years. Audacious, confident and fueled by youthful energy, this is a surefire summer winner for a wide global audience.

The spectre of Bond actually hovers over this British-flavored production in a number of ways, all of them beneficial: The 1962 setting shot through with Cold War tensions conjures up the political moment at which 007 was born cinematically, the hardware and style harken back to an earlier high-tech era that looks quaintly beguiling today and Michael Fassbender as Erik, the future Magneto, cuts a dashingly ruthless figure that can only have been patterned on Sean Connery in the early Bonds. First Class is comprised of an enormous stew of elements and influences but head chef Matthew Vaughn has stirred things so as to make them not only digestible but quite tasty.

Departing from the backstory of the comics, the new yarn, devised by Sheldon Turner and original X-Men director Bryan Singer and written by Thor co-scenarists Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz along with Jane Goldman and Vaughn, pivots on an alluringly fanciful proposition, that the real events of the Cuban missile crisis had a shadow history involving manipulations by figures whose super powers put those of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to shame; it’s as if JFK, Khrushchev, Castro, the CIA and the combined armed forces of the East and West were mere puppets doing the bidding of unsuspected Olympian gods, the most spiteful of whom desire nothing less than human extermination.

Not inaptly, then, it all begins (as did Singer’s original 2000 X-Men) at Auschwitz, where young Erik, challenged to display his “magnetic” powers, sees his mother gunned down by the heinous camp doctor (Kevin Bacon), an event that dictates all his actions from then on. In the more benign setting of Westchester, New York, two kids, Charles and Raven, exhibit odd characteristics of their own that, nearly two decades later, will put them in the forefront of the mutant movement.

Like the most peripatetic of 1960s globe-hopping thrillers, the early stretch of First Class hardly stays put for more than a moment, jumping all over the world—Geneva, Oxford, Las Vegas, Argentina, Miami, Washington, D.C.–in the service of introducing an enormous number of characters and delineating their unique powers. Under the circumstances, director Vaughn impressively maintains a strong focus dedicated to clarity and dramatic power; while Erik scours the world for stray Nazis (his confrontation with two of them in a tavern on the pampas is an early highlight), Charles (James McAvoy) achieves academic prominence and, with Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), is recruited by the CIA with the eventual aim of assembling a “Division of Mutant Powers.”

Even though a lot of the early material is set-up, it nevertheless develops surprising momentum and tension. The malevolent doctor Erik remembers from the concentration camp now resurfaces as Sebastian Shaw, who has developed an extraordinary capacity to absorb, harness and deploy energy, while his fabulously sexy partner in crime, Emma Frost (January Jones), not only has extreme telepathic ability but possesses an optional indestructible diamond veneer. When Erik tracks them down on board their yacht and seems on the verge of fulfilling his vengeful 18-year quest, his quarry escape in a manner befitting the best of the Bonds.

Once the loner Erik decides to join forces with Charles under the auspices of an offbeat CIA honcho (Oliver Platt) and an adventurous agent (Rose Byrne), the film takes on more the air of a standard-issue Marvel effort as mutant youngsters are trained in hiding to master their unusual powers; they are Hank/Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Alex/Havoc (Lucas Till), Sean/Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), Armondo/Darwin (Edi Gathegi) and, for a while, Angel (Zoe Kravitz). The problem here is not only familiarity but that, unlike the other characters, these kids seem resolutely 21st century, not early 1960s; one of them even says “whatever.” Another drawback, a likely victim of an overcrowded roster of characters, is that two swarthy henchmen of Shaw’s are not even given the benefit of an introduction, much less anything to play.

Still, once Emma Frost penetrates the inner sanctum of the Soviet military and the enormity of Shaw’s scheme becomes clear, the film takes off again with a fantastical rendition of an American/Soviet naval confrontation off Cuba trumped by the manipulative antics of battling telepathic mutants on board an ultra-futuristic plane and a stealth submarine.

Vaughn orchestrates the mayhem with a laudable coherence, a task made easier by a charging, churning score by Henry Jackman that, much as that of his mentor Hans Zimmer did inInception, helps smooth the connections among rapidly changing locations and events. A few of the effects in the climactic section don’t quite measure up, but the visual effects by veteran wizard John Dykstra are mostly terrific. Top-drawer contributions are also delivered by production designer Chris Seagers, costume designer Sammy Sheldon and cinematographer John Mathieson.

The cast is almost absurdly easy on the eyes and is most powerful at the top, thanks to the intense Fassbender, who will now need no audition if Daniel Craig decides to give up Bond after another picture or two. McAvoy is forced to spend a bit too much time with his hand to head summoning telepathic signals but nonetheless conveys the intelligence and sobriety required for the future Professor X. Bacon is formidable as the former Nazi who aspires to far greater power than Hitler could ever dream of, while Jones dazzlingly projects the arrogance of maximum beauty and invulnerability. As the naturally blue-skinned, red-haired and yellow-eyed Raven/Mystique, Lawrence is at her most appealing when conveying an ashamed insecurity about her natural looks, which she can conceal with a human facade. A vulgar cameo by a certain hirsute character provides a hearty laugh.

Opens: June 3 (20th Century Fox)

Production: Bad Hat Harry/Donners’ Company, Marvel Entertainment, Dune Entertainment

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, January Jones, Nicholas Hoult, Oliver Platt, Jason Flemyng, Lucas Till, Edi Gathegi, Kevin Bacon, Caleb Landry Jones, Zoe Kravitz, Matt Craven, Alex Gonzalez, Rade Sherbedgia, Glenn Morshower

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Screenwriters: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn; story, Sheldon Turner, Bryan Singer

Proucers: Lauren Shuler Donner, Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg, Gregory Goodman

Executive Producers: Stan Lee, Tarquin Pack, Josh McLaglen

Director of Photography: John Mathieson

Production Designer: Chris Seagers

Costume Designer: Sammy Sheldon

Editors: Lee Smith, Eddie Hamilton

Music: Henry Jackman

Visual Effects Designer: John Dykstra

PG-13 rating, 132 minutes

Well I just read the news about the actor Zachary Quinto. Oh God he is one of my favorite character in the television series Heroes. The news said that Mr. Quinto admitted she is gay, I mean he is gay.

In an interview with New York Magazine Mr. Quinto said:

“As a gay man, it made me feel like there are still so many things that need to be looked at and addressed.”

Mr. Quinto played the role of Sylar in the television hit Heroes. I mean how you can tell that he is gay, look at his performance there. He can be the most effective villain of his time.  Well, indeed he is a good actor.