Diamonds and Rust

Earlier in the week, I picked up The Best of Judas Priest and Priest's new album, Angel of Retribution off of iTunes, almost immediately after watching an hour-long show on VH1 Classic featuring Rob Halford, Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing. I'm quite happy with both of the albums, but –as far as the song "Diamonds and Rust" goes– I still have to say that I like the Joan Baez version better than the Judas Priest version, with the notable exception of the unplugged version that Halford, Tipton, and Downing played on the show; probably because it was a very nice meld of Baez and Judas Priest. And it's always nice to see that Rob Halford can still wail.

Anyway, the first three seasons of X-Files were re-released last week in six-disc sets, presumably to replace the seven-disc sets of the first three seasons. I hear the extras are the same, and I was worried about the extras until I suddenly realized that I didn't need them to enjoy the first season, which I used to loathe. I'm watching about three or four episodes a day and will probably finish the first season tomorrow night, and then it's on to the second season, which includes the one guy who should have gotten a spin-off series, good ol' One-Arm Krycek! If you didn't watch the show, that makes no sense to you, but then again, this blog as a whole probably makes no sense to you, does it?

I did, however, cheat and watch one episode from Season Three, as it's easily my favorite X-Files episode of all time, and that's "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'." If you actually watched the series and don't know the episode that I'm talking about, it's the one that had Jesse Ventura playing a bleeping man in black, with a cameo at the end that still makes me laugh. Yes, the episode is deliberately funny.

My unfortunate and sudden addiction to X-Files, though, has really interfered with my comic book reading. I'm not terribly worried about this, since Tales of Wonder still doesn't have a concrete date on when Amazing Spider-Man will be released on DVD-ROM, and The Avengers has been pushed back to the end of April. Plenty of time to read the... about 700 issues I have remaining of the ones I got. While I still haven't figured out which came first, Super Skrull or Mimic, I have found out that Super Adaptoid may pre-date both of them (though definitely Mimic). And you thought comic villains were generic these days... Hey, at least we're not still getting shit like Plantman. No, seriously, there was a bad guy named Plantman.


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