Running Commentary 9/11/2026

Hello,

I've been doing a lot of reading lately. I need to get some of my notes typed up and published here soon.

Anyway...

Watching...

Lanterns

• Very little of Hal in this episode, which tells the show’s version of John Stewart’s backstory. Very different from the comics, although maybe drawing on the character of Frank Laminski, briefly the Phantom Lantern, who had sought to earn a place in the Corps by training away his fear. We at least get context for the William Tell scene from the first episode here. The Stewarts were, I took at least, a sort of commentary on sports or show-biz parents, obsessed with living their dreams through their offspring and subsequently being very poor parents to their children. John’s mother, in particular, was incredibly abusive but never hateful, which came off creepily realistic in a way a less ambiguous performance wouldn’t have.
• In the comics John Stewart’s earliest appearance involved foiling a plot to spark a race war in America. At the time of the character’s creation and in his early days he was meant to be a bit of a representative of black America as a whole. This came out a little goofy at times but a big thing creator Neal Adams wanted was for Stewart to be a middle-class college graduate, as a contrast to the usual trend of stereotyping black men in comics as impoverished criminals. In the intervening decades this has all somewhat faded as Stewart has become much more involved in stories set way out in space, on other planets. Also in the intervening decades, the notion that authors are doing black Americans a big favor by conspicuously not giving black characters a gangbanger characterization has come to be seen as rather patronizing, even still, on the whole, racist. After all, if a character is meant to embody Black Exceptionalism, doesn’t the exception prove the rule? I noticed maybe something touching on that in how Stewart is shown here raised cut off from any sort of community, and even presented with the negative-stereotypical “gangbangers” Adams had pointedly avoided depicting as an obstacle to his own success explicitly. Maybe I’m reading too much into the show.
• This show has, thus far, not exactly been strictly faithful to every aspect of the comics, so when the Guardian showed her true self to Stewart’s mother and that true self was very tall rather than very short as the Guardians are in the comics that might not mean anything. But comics Manhunters, in their true forms, are tall and blue-skinned. Later on, the same character slips up and refers to Stewart’s “programming” rather than his childhood as the foundation of his self. Could it be that the Guardians that are offering Stewart a place in the Corps are really Manhunters? That’s a theory; another is that they’re actually from Qward, as early comics depicted the anti-matter people there as tall with crossed white suspenders over red, like the Guardian wears. These are possibly true, but if either is I’d have to understand how fake Guardians could convince Hal to go along with this, since he knows the real Guardians.

• There’s a lot of forward movement in this episode. We find the Manhunter, and the conflict between John and Hal is out in the open by the end. Of course, I think Hal knew John was meant to replace him the whole time; I think what he really wanted to know if John would be a better lantern than he would. Hal does not seem happy as a Green Lantern, and I can see him willing to step aside and let someone else shoulder the responsibility. But by the end of the episode he’s lost faith in John.
• An odd thing about this show is that, for all the liberties it takes with Green Lantern lore, I don’t think someone unfamiliar with said lore would be much impacted by a lot of moments in this show. Hal’s meeting with Sinestro is one such moment.
• So, this version of John Stewart doesn’t seem to be a degreed, professional architect; just, timeline-wise that seems to have not been something he had time to do. But I do appreciate that he still has a serious personal interest in architecture. Again, the two lanterns in this show do feel like the same people, just in different circumstances
• I’m not saying that one couldn’t build a big militia compound in the rural Great Plains, but I do get the sense that this show has confused Iowa with Idaho. I do that sometimes myself.
• I did not have any real idea who the Manhunter would be before this episode, but I did figure out who she was before the show revealed it, when Macon mentioned she was his nurse when his cancer was healed.

Eating...

Tuscan Chickpea Soup

Cooler weather ahead means it’s coming up on soup and stew season. Here’s a relatively light soup still full of greenery to sort of ease you in. I haven’t made this recently but I hope to do so again soon.

Ingredients

• 1 TBSP olive oil
• 1 pound spicy Italian sausage, casings removed
• 2 cups yellow onion, chopped (1 large or 2 small)
• ½ cup celery, chopped (1 or 2 stalks)
• ½ cup sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 8 cups chicken stock
• 30 oz. canned chickpeas, drained and rinsed
• 4 cups kale, torn
• 2 ounces Parmesan cheese, grated
• ¼ cup heavy cream
• 2 TBSP fresh basil, chiffonaded
• ¾ tsp kosher salt

Procedure

1. Heat oil in a large enameled Dutch oven over medium-high.
2. Crumble sausage into oil and cook until rendered and browned, 5-8 min.
3. Add onion and celery and cook until beginning to soften, stirring continually and scraping up browned bits.
4. Add tomatoes and garlic; cook, stirring, for a minute.
5. Add stock and chickpeas and bring to a boil.
6. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer, uncovered, for 15 minutes.
7. Add kale; cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes.
8. Remove from heat and stir in cream, cheese, basil, and salt.
9. Serve, garnished with extra Parmesan.

Bird of the Week

In Washington State, on the western side of the entrance to Puget Sound, west of Seattle, there sits a community called Port Townsend. Captain George Vancouver, leader of a British naval force tasked with mapping the Pacific Northwest and namesake of Canada’s major Pacific port, named the harbor Port Townshend in honor of the Marquis of Townshend, a British noble, in 1792; the folks who later built on the location dropped the “h.”¹ Then and now the area is home to forests of Douglas fir, exceedingly tall conifers that, fittingly if coincidentally, are filled with Townsend’s Warblers.

The Townsend’s warbler is not named in honor of the Marquis of Townshend nor after Port Townsend. Rather, it is named in honor of John Kirk Townsend. Born to a Pennsylvania Quaker family, Townsend was brought to the Pacific Northwest as part of the 1834 Wyeth Expedition. This exploratory endeavor was led by Nathaniel J. Wyeth, a successful Bostonian ice‑cutter who hoped to start a lucrative merchant business selling goods to fur trappers. Working their way west from Independence, Missouri to the Columbia River, the two Wyeth expeditions set out to establish a commercial connection between the United States proper and the Oregon Territory. The first, in 1831, was a failure; in 1834, though, Wyeth was better prepared, and he had room in his party for some with non‑business interests in Oregon: two missionaries, Jason and Daniel Lee, and the scientists Townsend and the British‑born Harvard professor Thomas Nuttall. Nuttall was a botanist, while Townsend was a zoologist. The second expedition did result in the establishment of Wyeth’s merchant company, but ultimately Wyeth couldn’t compete with the more established Hudson Bay Company. The more lasting impacts of the missions were the scientific discoveries made by Townsend and Nutall and the blazing of what would become the Oregon Trail.²

Townsend had already made a name for himself among American ornithologists when a strange bird he shot and provided to J.J. Audubon proved to be a specimen of a new species, which Audubon painted and named “Townsend’s Bunting.” A bird of this sort was only seen once again, almost two hundred years later in 2014, by Canadian bird photographer Kyle Blaney, who got a picture of a bird that closely matched Audubon’s depiction of the mystery bird.³ Most people today do not think Townsend’s bunting is a real species; it seems most likely that Townsend and Blaney each encountered a rare mutant dickcissel (a relative of the indigo, lazuli, and painted buntings) that lacked the species’ usual yellow pigment.⁴

In any case, in Oregon Townsend did collect some genuinely unknown species, among which was a green‑and‑black warbler that now bears his name. Many villagers soon knew him as the “bird chief,” a man who demanded they keep their dogs tied up so he could pursue his quarry in peace.⁵ He sent many specimens back east to his friends in science — birds, mammals, and, rather disturbingly, several human skulls taken from the burial grounds of the Chinook, who he complained in a letter were “so jealous of you that they watch you very closely while you are wandering near their mausoleums.”⁶ No kidding. Specimen collection would be the death of Townsend, who succumbed at the age of 41 to arsenic poisoning from his preservative formulas.⁴

With a breeding range running from Oregon and Idaho up through British Columbia and into Alaska, and a preference for old‑growth conifer forest, Townsend’s warbler is essentially the western counterpart to the black‑throated green warbler found in the east of the continent. I encountered a lot of those in an old white pine forest in Grayling, MI, but I didn’t get a good look at any of them because I was at the bottom of the pines and they were at the top. The Douglas firs that Townsend’s warblers sit at the top of are twice as tall as white pine. I might expect this issue to get twice as bad, but then again Douglas fir grows in the mountains, so you’d get the chance to look from higher ground.

The science name of this bird is Setophaga townsendii; the species name of course honors John Kirk Townsend, and the genus name means “moth‑eater.”⁷ Setophaga contains the bulk of North American wood‑warblers, and is probably a ripe genus to be split up in the near future

Curation Links

The Falling Man | Tom Junod, Esquire

For the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks: “What distinguishes the pictures of the jumpers from the pictures that have come before is that we—we Americans—are being asked to discriminate on their behalf. What distinguishes them, historically, is that we, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at them. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness—because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.”

See the full archive of curations on Notion