Incredible Hulk - An App for Anger

A typical Sunday morning, I'm standing around a discount store while GoofGirl and 3C examine every single item and discuss their merits and drawbacks as potential birthday presents for a party that starts in less then 45 minutes.  They will also identify several items that they need - and because this is a discount store it easier to agree with them.

(I don't care about currency manipulation - but forcing us to absorb vast quantities of cheap crap seems a perfectly valid reason for some sort of action against China.  Of course from the Chinese perspective this is probably just a legitimate response to our exports of noxious entertainment that is corrupting their national soul.)

While waiting, I wander over to the cheap cellphone cases.  Most are in hideous patterns featuring purple hearts and pink stars that leave little wonder as to why they found their way to this commercial trash bin.  I didn't really expect to get something totally cool, but at least I hoped to find something interesting.

Then I saw a selection of Avenger cases.  But which one to get?  I always thought Captain America was kind of a boring Dudley DoRight (I was going to write Boy Scout, but I don't want to make fun of Boy Scouts).  Iron Man is Tony Stark, a charismatic billionaire - not someone I can relate to.  Thor is right out since I'm not a pagan.  Besides it's just a smartphone, not mighty mjolnir (is there an app for that?)  

Then I saw it, the Incredible Hulk, and it all came flooding back (plus my old clear case was starting to get slimy).

As a kid I watched the Incredible Hulk, starring Bill Bixby.  TV shows in the 1970s were like Victorian novels, bloated with vast amounts of exposition.  I'd watch the plot slowly creep along, while waiting for David Banner to get ticked off and finally become the Hulk and start breaking things.

Anyway, my mom wandered into the den during an episode in which they were burying David Banner alive (because he looked like a local gangster - apparently a member of one of those WASP gangs, the Squires or their blood enemy the Equerries.)  Anyway, my mom pronounced this as "disgusting," declared the show inappropriate, and turned off the TV. This was just before Banner was going to get mad transform and bust up a cement mixer - hulcus interruptus.

But for me the show was about more then watching construction equipment being rapidly disassembled. The Hulk was a lonely, friendless guy, living in the shadows, and terrified of his own emotions.  That's a super-hero I could relate too when I was young.  I needed the Hulk and he was cruelly taken away.  But, now he is back and I need him more then ever.