Letters from Limbo

There have been no new posts on the blog these last days because I was very depressed. The reason for this is that I was just informed on Friday that my health insurance was cancelled by the job center - in 2012.

So I wasted another one of my free days taking the bus all the way to the clinic in Markgröningen and back. I was all prepped to get the knee surgery I obviously need and now I don´t know what is going to happen.

THE YOUTH WHO WENT FORTH TO LEARN WHAT BUREAUCRACY WAS

By the way, now is as good a time as any to tell you of the first time I wasted one of my free days with going to Markgröningen. Lord knows I hinted at it enough and my readers are probably already tired of being teased by me. First I have to say that the clinic in Markgröningen is one specialised in knee problems so they are the best address for that kind of stuff. After I returned to the orthopedist with my MRI pictures he told me that I had to go to Markgröningen and the doctor there would decide what had to be done. So I made an appointment - which wasn´t very early thankfully - and was all set to go there because you can take a bus to Markgröningen. Now the thing is there´s only one bus line that goes to Markgröningen and there´s only one bus every hour. So if you miss the bus you have to wait an entire hour until the next one arrives. Which is not a problem if you have enough time, but taking into account time for going from the bus stop in Markgröningen to the clinic and time to get dressed and ready to leave the house I still had to get up pretty early.

But I thought I had planned it right so there would be no problem. Of course I couldn´t sleep that night and overslept in the morning. Nowadays getting out of bed is a real fight especially when I can´t walk. I guess the days where I could haul my body out of bed even if I was dead tired are over. I´m much too old for that and if I try it my body doesn´t cooperate.

So I can´t get up when I want, I have to wait until my body has rested long enough to work again. Okay, I was already late although not too late. After visiting the crapper and putting the soothing oinment on my knee and getting dressed I went to the bus station where I saw the bus leave just before I arrived. Which didn´t exactly surprise me because that always happens to me lately. Either it takes a long time for the bus to arrive or it leaves right before my eyes. Since I already anticipated this I had some reading material with me - in this case the X - MEN : BATTLE OF THE ATOM hardcover I had just gotten with my last amazon order.

It´s one of the few good series left at Disney - or Marvel if you still want to call it that - and I think it was the only good thing that day. Because I had missed the bus to Ludwigsburg I was now pressed for time - a little bit - but there was still the possibility to get there on time if the bus driver didn´t go too slow. But as luck - or the gods who are a sadistic lot as far as my personal experience is concerned - would have it the driver stopped at all the stations and wouldn´t you know, I missed the bus.

There are some things that can´t be explained by logic but fall under Murphy´s Law like the fact that the bus you are trying to catch is always leaving on time while the one you have to take because you missed the previous one is always late. So I spent over an hour reading my X - Men hardback at the bus station in Ludwigsburg before I finally could go to Markgröningen. And before you say it could have been worse : it WAS raining that day. It ALWAYS rains when I´m traveling. Not to dwell too much on this I finally arrived in Markgröningen - although now already one hour too late - only to find out that the bus station was not really right at the clinic but rather a very long distance from it. Which is no picnic if you have a busted knee. But I managed to get there eventually and went to the registration desk to deliver my papers. Which is the part where things really got interesting ( and when I say interesting I mean f - ed up ).

So I gave my papers - my health insurance card, the paper with the appointment and the letter I got from the orthopedists office - to the woman behind the desk and she told me I needed an letter of referral. I had already anticipated this - usually I tend to forget these things - so I had paid my doctor a visit the day before to get one. But when I gave it to her she told me that the letter was from my doctor and I needed one from the orthopedist. Since I still have no cell phone - I know, I´m a dinosaur - I had to go take the lift to the bottom floor to use the public phone and try to call my orthopedist so they could fax a letter of referral. Why the woman at the reception desk couldn´t do this is still beyond me.

Anyway, after the walk from the bus station to the clinic my knee was already a bit sore but it couldn´t be helped. I went down to the bottom floor and tried to phone my orthopedist which is like trying your luck at the lottery because the line is always busy and it´s almost impossible to get a connection - which is the reason why most people go there in person even if it´s only to get an appointment. I was even lucky enough to get connected only to find out that I accidentially had dialed the fax number of the clinic in Markgröningen instead of the office of my orthopedist.

To make things worse the phone had just swallowed up my last coins so I could not try again. It was already 2 hours after my official appointment and I couldn´t get to Ludwigsburg, get a new letter of referral and make it back in time to Markgröningen. So the only thing I could do now was to make another appointment ( this one 2 hours earlier so I already dreaded how I was supposed to make it to that one in time ) and go home. Of course I had to wait a long time for the bus to arrive in Markgröningen but I read the complete BATTLE OF THE ATOM before I got home.

So I arrived in Ludwigsburg and although I was really tired and my knee was aching I decided to go to the orthopedist to get a letter of referral so I don´t have to make another trip to Ludwigsburg to get it. But when I spoke to the woman at the desk she said that they already gave me one. She had checked the computer and it said I was already issued one. Then she opened the letter I got from them ( you remember that it was with the papers I gave the woman at the clinic in Markgröningen ? ) and there it was all along. If only the woman in Markgröningen had bothered to actually open the envelope my complete odyssey could have been avoided.

And that is how Subzero spends the days when he doesn´t have to work.

Coming back to my health insurance that was canceled, I have no idea what it means. The plan was to get surgery on my knee on Monday, the first day when the Stadionbad is officially closed. They are shutting down for 4 weeks to do the usual repairs and initially I thought I could use this time for my vacation as usual. Then I was told that I needed surgery and I thought at least it´s on the first day when my work is closed so I should be finished with the first part of rehab. Afterwards there are two to three months of more rehab following until you can work again but at least I can start right away. But now ? I don´t know. First I have to sort all this mess with my health insurance out so on Monday I´m going to the personnel office to see if they can use their connections. That´s one of the perks when you are working for the municipality. And I think it´s better if I don´t speak with the jobcenter directly with the mood I´m in right now.

Right now I feel like Al Pacino in The Godfather : just when I thought I was finished with dealing with the idiots of the jobcenter......

Anyway, sorry that there´s not much comic related content in this post but look at the bright side : thanks to the jobcenter I might have to quit my job so there might be an increase in blog posts in the near future. Or at least until I get my health insurance back and a new surgery date.

OF PIN UPS, MUPPETS AND BIGGER BOOBS WITHOUT SURGERY

And speaking about important dates, I was so preoccupied with all this stuff that I totally forgot about POPCULTURE ICON BETTY BROSMER´S birthday on the 2nd of this month. It´s the fourth popular post of all times on the blog and the one that gets the most spam in the comments section. The other two are GREATEST COMIC ARTIST EVER : JEAN GIRAUD and THIS WAS MY SECRET WARS with COMICBABE BATTLE ROUND 4 - SPIDERBABE WINNER - PART 1 ( NOW FINALLY FINISHED ) becoming a serious contender. Man, I really gave them some long titles back in the days. Many happy returns and check out her post for a real pin up icon.

Before closing the post for Today I have to mention that the cover at the top of the post is an altered one. But I just found it fitting for my current mood and here is the original cover, LEGION OF SUPER - HEROES 30.

The reason why I had this cover handy is that I was going over my material of the Legion since I have finished volume 10 of the Legion Archives thanks to the many trips to Markgröningen - successful or not.

Originally the plan was to write about some of the really strange things that happen in the Legion stories I read but I guess this will have to wait for another day. Another thing that has been keeping me busy are the many cosplay pictures I have collected for future posts. Some readers think that I have already given up on my big Yaya Han post since I didn´t write the follow up to my intro post but that´s still in the pipeline.

I just don´t know if I want to do that first or a post centering on male cosplayers. In this whole thing that cosplay has become the boys often are forgotten and I have found some that are really awesome or characters you never thought one could pull off. Or both. And I want to give props.

Speaking about the cosplay thing and giving props I´m also planning on a solo post about cosplay sexbomb Jessica Nigri. There are going to be a lot of her costumes involved in the cosplay post about doing female versions of characters - even Marvel is a big fan of that since they are doing it in their comics now - because let´s face it : she really does a lot of those. I know there are people out there who critique her for not keeping it real ( in my opinion an oxymoron in itself ) but since I mostly don´t know that much about the characters in the first place I can´t really comment on that. As long as it looks good ( and Jessica looks REALLY good ! ) and

she´s having fun doing it - which she seems to have - it´s okay with me.

And let´s not overreact here. Some of the costumes are from Pokemon of all things. So you have to take into account that she had to watch ( suffer ) it in the first place and then she was still willing to be publicly connected with it. A cartoon show for kids that´s basically all about souped up cock fights ( yes, I used the words cock and fight in a sentence about Jessica Nigri and it was without any double meaning behind it ). Anyway, here´s a picture of the always astonishing Jessica and to avoid any polemic I picked one where she´s not in a cosplay costume. I think. Massitaaa !!!

So I thought about picking a Jessica Nigri video for this post but right now there seems to be a problem with YouTube and the only ones I have bookmarked are one with the breast moments of her videos and another one that is a 25 minute loop of Jessica exposing her cleavage ( there´s also an hour long version of that available but if you need that long it´s already hopeless, dude ) and you can probably find them on your own.

What I´m posting instead is this video because of all the talk about female cosplayers getting a boob job. Not that I´m against it, I think everybody should decide it for themselves. But before people start crying " boob job " they should think about the fact that there might be other reasons why a female cosplayer´s chest area looks much bigger all of a sudden. They might have seen this helpful tutorial by Stacey Brennan.



It looks really incredible but it´s the same girl on the left side as on the right side and she achieves a huge difference with just a few tricks.

I also want to continue with the Muppet Specials and Today´s video is THE MUPPETS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD from 1990. As someone who grew up outside of the United States I have never been to Disneyworld ( I know that in America you have failed as a parent if you haven´t been with your kid to Disneyworld at least once ) but I have seen most of the movies.

It´s an especially interesting video from Today´s point of view because Disney now owns The Muppets. And Lucasfilms. And Marvel. Some say this is a good thing since certain seasons of The Muppets couldn´t be released on DVD because of rights involving Lucasfilms. While that´s something that might happen I think Disney is pretty much ruining Marvel - at least as an intellectual property - in the comics and possibly in the movies ( I still haven´t seen the latest four Marvel movies to be sure ).

So here are the Muppets paying a visit to their future bosses. Enjoy !



Okay, a few more videos that are more comic related as a special " Thank You " to my readers since we managed to crack the " 1,750 hits per day " mark with this post which is - fittingly enough - my 470th post . If you have listened to the Comic Geek Speak guys spotlight episode on The Fantastic Four in the Bronze Age you might have heard about the radio show episodes that were produced in 1975 in which Bill Murray spoke the part of the Human Torch, Johnny Storm. You can listen to the episodes right here and here is the video of THE COMING OF THE SUB - MARINER. 


Of course there was a Fantastic Four cartoon show before that in the 60s and here´s the episode with the title THREE PREDICTIONS OF DOOM.



And one you might be more familiar which was broadcast on tv in 1978. I picked THE FINAL VICTORY OF DOOM for this one. I hope you enjoy it !



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