I wrote the other day about my history with Captain America: Discovering the character when I was in elementary school and an older neighbor gave me some of his comics; admiring Cap and feeling some kinship to him because he fought in World War II, like my dad.

So the “Captain America” movie that came out Friday was kind of like seeing a comic book geek circle completed. Someone – everyone – else has rightly pointed out that the little kids we were back then certainly never expected to see the comic characters and stories we knew and loved turned into big-budget, big-time movies.

Seeing “Captain America” last night I found myself experiencing that same sense of disbelief. To see characters like Captain America, Bucky Barnes, the Red Skull, Dum Dum Dugan and (spoiler) Nick Fury on the big screen makes it seem as if the geeks have truly inherited the earth.

The movie’s a lot of fun. What happens after the end credits is even more fun.

Most fun of all, however, was watching the movie with my son. He’s not as big a comics fan as I was at his age. How can a modern-day kid possibly be, with other interests – video games, the Internet, his own phone for criminy sake – at hand? But he knows the characters and enjoyed the movie. And he enjoys the opportunity to tease me about my geeky interests.

I told him when I tucked him in last night that I never thought, when I was a little kid, that I would be taking my little kid to take to a Captain America movie.

“A little kid?” he responded. “I’m not a little kid.”

I’ve been to the Delaware County Fair here in Muncie three times so far this week. Twice was for work and once was to take my son and one of his friends so they could ride the Screamer and Freak Out and all the other rides.

I still enjoy the fair, but I’m saddened by how small and ordinary it seems now. I know my memories of the fair in the past are filtered through the haze of years, but I swear the midway was bigger and everything seemed more … dangerous in the old days.

By dangerous I don’t mean the possibility that a fight will break out between various groups of young toughs. Frankly, most of the young toughs seem to be pushing strollers these days. Parents seem younger and more tattooed these days than in years past. And while you’re at it, get off my lawn.

But there seemed to be an aura of danger and the forbidden about the fair back then. As recently as the 80s or 90s there was a sideshow that featured performers who could drive nails up their noses – even if there were no two-headed calves.

Casting back even further, I dimly remember attending the fair with my family and glimpsing, over in the distance, what appeared to be women dancing in backlit windows on a carnival facade. Even as a kid I had the impression that there was something taboo about that attraction. I dimly remember some of my more adventurous older male relatives peeling off from our group and heading in that direction. I also remember being herded away from it by my mom.

I still remember vividly a caustic clown in a dunk tank taunting my family members as they went past. Of course, he was just trying to get some of us to come over to pay to throw balls in an effort to soak him. To accomplish that, he called out, “Look at those hillbillies! It looks like they don’t get a lot of practice walking on flat ground.”

Can you imagine the fair offering an attraction like that these days? As much as we might joke about carnies and their propensity for annoying male fairgoers and hitting on females – one year at a local fair a female friend of mine was encouraged by a game operator to pack her bags and join him in his trailer – the modern-day fair is not only smaller but blander. The freaks, geeks and weirdos are gone and the sideshow has been relegated to a pop culture museum.

… as is obvious to those seeing my photographic work.

Nonetheless, I like to take pictures. I take ’em with my phone and point-and-shoot cameras and whatever is handy.

This is one of my favorites, taken in 2009, a few months after BorgWarner closed its transmission plant in Muncie. An auction of tools, equipment and what-have-you was held and I got to go into the plant to look around. And take pictures.

The enormity of the plant – 1.2 million square feet and a half-mile long – is amazing but can be hard to communicate in pictures. Here’s one anyway.

If you’ve been near a TV or movie theater this summer, you might be aware that “Captain America: The First Avenger” opens Friday. The movie adaptation of the classic Marvel Comics character is intended to introduce the patriotic warrior – introduced in the 1940s, revived in the 1960s and a staple of comics ever since – to moviegoers. The character will be a main player in “The Avengers,” a big-screen movie of the Marvel superhero group that opens next May.

While I reviewed and wrote about movies from 1978 to 1990 (first movie reviewed: “Animal House.” last: “The Two Jakes.”) and sometimes got to see them in advance, any inside track I had on movies – other than insight from some friends – is long gone. I haven’t seen “Captain America” and don’t know if it’s good or not.

I hope it is (and early word of mouth appears to be good) in part because Cap – Marvel’s writers and editors were adept at creating an intimacy among themselves, their characters and their readers – was always one of my favorite characters.

When Cap was reintroduced in the 1960s – found frozen in ice and thawed out by Iron Man, Thor and the other Avengers – I was an early comics reader. Even at a young age, I found the character appealing. Like my dad, Cap had been a U.S. soldier in World War II. The war was less than 20 years gone by that point and to many of us seemed like just yesterday.

But the comics, which were often melancholy, established Cap and his alter ego, Steve Rogers, as a man outside of time. Twenty years out of date – now 70 years! – Rogers awoke to find that most of his associates were long gone and that society had changed. Rogers was not a flag-waving stick-in-the-mud – there was a period in the 1970s when, disillusioned by government corruption, Rogers even gave up the Captain America identity and became a man without a country – but he was a man of honor who stood up for his beliefs.

He was an outsider but a leader of men and women, a symbolic figure who disavowed jingoism (for the most part; it was the early 1960s, after all) and a heroic figure who, if he didn’t always know exactly what to do, figured it out.

Cap was a prominent player in one of my earliest comic book memories. An older neighbor, Mike, gave me his copy of Avengers #4, in which Cap is reborn into the then-modern world. I don’t have that comic anymore – boy I wish I did – but I still think about it. It helped introduce me to a world of the fantastic leavened by real, everyday concerns and cares.

If the movie evokes some of those memories, it’ll be a success for me.

The Interwebs were abuzz this weekend with the news that Tom Cruise, actor and couch-jumper, had signed to play Jack Reacher, the military-police-officer-turned-drifter in a series of 15 (soon to be 16) books by author Lee Child. Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie will adapt Child’s “One Shot.”

Child’s books fall into the crime novel genre, although Reacher is no standard PI or cop. He’s more like a modern-day Japanese warrior, traveling (usually on foot or by bus) around the US. He carries little more than an ATM card and a toothbrush. He doesn’t believe in the ties that bind. He doesn’t even believe in luggage: Reacher travels with nothing more than the clothes on his back, wearing them for a couple of days then buying new ones that suit whatever his locale is at the time.

Of course, like Lassie and the TV version of the Hulk, Reacher’s travels usually bring him into contact with someone who needs his help or a wrong that needs righting. Sometimes he works with local authorities, sometimes against, always exacting justice. But you always get the feeling that no matter how efficient a killing machine Reacher is, he’d rather just be left alone to travel around the countryside.

I can totally see Cruise – who has become more of a celebrity oddity and less of an admired actor in recent years – playing this type of character. But he can’t play it as a typical Cruise “high beam smile” character. Reacher is as quiet as he is capable.

The casting is odd, however, in that much of Reacher’s character is established by how he looks. To quote Lee Child’s website:

Name: Jack Reacher (no middle name)
Born: October 29th
Measurements: 6’5″, 220-250 lbs., 50″ chest
Hair: Dirty-blond
Eyes: Ice blue
Clothing: 3XLT coat, 95 cm. pants’ inseam

Hmmm. Anybody see any discrepancy there? Possibly the idea that Reacher is supposed to be 8-10 inches taller than Cruise and 100 pounds heavier?

Child is said to be pleased with the casting, and I’m sure he is. Cruise will likely draw a lot of moviegoers. And the fact that we’re already talking about the movie, which hasn’t even begun filming, says a lot.

It’s possible that the millions of people who will see the movie won’t care about the physical differences between the character on the printed page and the actor. And Cruise might just bring it. I hope so.

A longtime buddy out in LA posted something on Facebook this morning about the upcoming “Captain America” movie – which opens Friday – and how it ties in to the “Avengers” movie coming out next May.

And the Twitterverse and blogworld are full of spoilers about the two movies this morning. Obviously some screenings have been going on and people are spilling secrets.

I’m wading through the Internets kind of cautiously. I do enjoy spoilers, to some extent, but mostly as an appetizer for a movie, TV show or even book. I don’t want them in place of the main dish.

But I’ll admit all the geeky goodness is building my anticipation for “Captain America.” My loved ones are already sick of hearing me say how, when I was an elementary school kid, the earth was young and dinosaurs roamed the landscape, I never expected big-screen versions of the comic book heroes I loved as a kid. Sure, cheap cartoon versions. Maybe low-budget TV shows where Superman’s flying scenes were accomplished by having the actor lie on a glass coffee table. But big-budget movies? That just didn’t seem possible.

Anyway, I’ll try to keep my geekticipation in check this week. Still five more days, after all.

I don’t watch a lot of SyFy, or whatever they call the current-day incarnation of the Sci-Fi Channel. I liked the channel a lot, back in its low-rent days, when it could be counted on for lots of reruns of cheesy old TV shows and MST3K. I really, really miss MST3K.

I fell behind on “Battlestar Galactica” and never caught up, frak it all, and most of the channel’s programming now leaves me cold. I don’t care about the 18th variation on ghost-hunting shows. I admit I like “Hollywood Treasure” because I know a few people in LA who have, at times in the past, done a bit of movie memorabilia collecting.

So I was pleasantly surprised by “Alphas,” the channel’s new show about a team of superhumanly gifted operatives who solve crimes or prevent crimes or whatever beyond-the-capabilities-of-the-proper-authorities occasion is at hand.

The show throws in a bit of “Hellboy,” leavened with “Heroes” and “X-Men” and “Fringe” and, believe it or not, “Big Bang Theory,” the latter manifesting in a somewhat Sheldon-like geek who can see electromagnetic waves and read texts, phone calls, computer screens and the like without benefit of hardware. He is not, however, much of a social animal.

The other members of the team are super strong or super observant or super accurate in throwing or super good at manipulating people. Although the latter operative is a hot Jersey-ish chick who wears low-cut tops, so I’m not sure how much extrasensory power is in play there.

I’ve only seen the pilot for “Alphas” so far, but it was pretty fun and did a good job mixing all its influences but at the same time adding a few elements of its own. I’ll check it out again and maybe this time I’ll keep up as I couldn’t manage to with “Galactica.”

Spoilers, maybe. But based on how many people are likely to see “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” and how quickly they are likely to see it, probably not for long.

I confess that I have not yet read J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” I’ve read all the earlier books but not the finale of her story about the boy wizard and his friends. Why haven’t I? I guess I can blame it on too many other books, new and untried stories and characters, that I want to read.

But part of it might also be the finality of it. I know that once I finish that book it’s the end of the story for me. I can re-read the books, but I won’t get a fresh adventure, probably ever.

I felt that way going into the movie version. I was looking forward to it almost as much as the comic book adaptations coming out this summer. Considering what a great job the “HP” filmmakers have done on the earlier movies, there was little doubt that the final one would be very good.

And it is very good. Lots of time to say goodbye to Harry, Ron and Hermione, lots of action, some beautiful special effects and wonderful moments for characters like Neville and Prof. McGonagall in particular.

If I had any reservations about the movie, it’s that there really wasn’t time to service all the characters. When Harry sees some of his friends and cohorts dead after the climactic battle, I thought, “Oh man, BLANK and BLANK are dead. I wonder how it happened?”

In the hands of lesser talents, the ending might have felt like an attempt to set up sequels. And who knows if Rowling will come back to these beloved characters some day? But I think we can safely assume “Deathly Hallows Part 2” is our farewell to Harry and friends. And a fond one it is.

If you enjoyed the “Sherlock” series on PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” earlier this year – which lovingly updated the Sherlock Holmes and John Watson characters to the modern day but preserved the characters’ social misfit status that makes them so beloved – you might enjoy author Michael Robertson’s series of novels following the modern-day adventures of the current in habitants of 221B Baker Street in London.

Robertson’s series – “The Baker Street Letters” and “The Brothers of Baker Street” so far – aren’t updated Holmes and Watson adventures. The series revolves around two brothers – one a lawyer, the other a former lawyer with a checkered past and a slightly unsettled mind – who have offices at 221B in the present day.

As part of the terms of their lease, the two have to deal with the flow of letters from people around the world who, for whatever reason, write to Holmes at his well-known address. Some seek his help, others do it just on a lark.

The Heath brothers aren’t supposed to do anything more than respond via form letter. But they do, of course. And by responding they find themselves embroiled in modern-day mysteries.

Robertson’s books are easy reads with a lot of sly humor. Give ’em a try if you like “Sherlock.”

I’ve been blogging for years, but always on the topics that I cover as part of my journalism job.

I thought I would try a blog to talk about the trivial, the personal, the silly and the entertaining.