Ride the Lightning Mailing List – Page 2

Names

WALLACE (m) “Welsh” or “foreigner” (French). Sir William Wallace was the Scottish hero who briefly expelled the rule of England from Scotland in the 13th century.

WALTER (m) “rule people” or “rule army” (Teutonic). Composed of the elements wald “rule” combined with either heri “army” or harja “people”. Sir Walter Scott was an novelist from Scotland, the author of ‘Ivanhoe’.

WALLY (m,f) Short form of WALTER or WALLACE (masculine), or VALESKA (feminine).

LINDA (f) “beautiful” (Spanish) or short form of BELINDA or MELINDA. It can also mean “snake” or “serpent” from Teutonic linde. The serpent signified wisdom in Teutonic legend.

ANGELA (f) “messenger” from the Greek word angelos.

I especially like the contrast between Wallace (who felt like an outcast in his own family) and Walter (who is the more ruthless of the two). “Linda” representing wisdom fits with what Wally said about her teaching him everything he knows about being an adult. Angela as a messenger, though… that’s an interesting idea.

Super-Speed Perceptions

Replying to Minyon’s post:

has anyone ever wondered how he staves off the boredom. I mean at the speed he processes information, a normal conversation would seem to take forever. I actually remeber a story in one of the annuals where the whole thing took place from Wally’s POV, and the entire story was resolved in the time it took for an elevator to fall 2 floors. Normal life must be a real DRAG for the man.

Wally’s perceptions have changed from time to time. In the first issue, he runs several miles past Vandal Savage before the image even registers on his retina – which doesn’t make sense, because if that were true, how could he possibly run around things and dodge obstacles? Then in #30, there’s another story from Wally’s super-speed perspective. He and Connie go to a movie, and everything is taking place in normal speed, when suddenly the picture stops on one frame, and everyone in the theater (including Connie) freezes. He can’t figure out what’s going on, until he notices a pressure at the back of his neck. he turns around, and there’s a bullet hanging in mid-air. Suddenly he realizes his speed has reflexively switched on, and he goes around the theater looking for other bullets and stopping them before they actually hit anyone. He notices after a while that the picture’s moved to another frame (though realistically, the screen should’ve gone dark between frames), and decides he’d better hurry up. Once he’s confident he’s caught all the bullets, he goes over to the gunman and switches his perceptions back to normal speed (at which point a bullet he missed hits the exit sign). So at as far as William Messner-Loebs was concerned, Wally could switch from normal to hyper-speed perspective at will.

That elevator story– does anyone remember which annual it was in?

Re: DC shutting down web pages

I’ve been out of town all weekend, and haven’t had a chance to catch up with the whole discussion, but I have *some* info on this. About a year ago, DC shut down a Superboy website (I forget the title, but I think it was fly.to/superboy ) that had lots of unpublished stuff and images and such. They didn’t actually shut it down so much as say “you can’t have anything on this list,” and he decided that there wouldn’t be anything left of his site but an article or two (like my Les Mis page now consists of one article and a FAQ), and pulled it down completely. Last I heard he’d opened a new site based on the developing relationship between Superboy and Wonder Girl, avoiding the stuff they were complaining about.

Around the same time at least one other site, a Secret (as in Young Justice) website, got a similar letter. Actually it was an identical letter; someone had sent it to her, apparently as a mean-spirited prank, so she took her site down until she discovered that it hadn’t actually been sent by DC, then put it up again.

There may have been one other site, which I think may have been Hawkman-related, around the same time, but I don’t recall the circumstances of that one at all.

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Another poster asks if my site will be okay

I think so. The only thing I’d be worried about would be the images. The articles certainly, and probably the bios, should fall under the research/reference/review category, though I’ll have to qualify this with IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer).