Santa brought my daughter a prism for Christmas this year. Where’d he get the idea, I wonder?

If you guessed, “Who is Isaac Newton?”, then you guessed right! Of course, it wasn’t the legendary Isaac Newton who noticed apples, but the historical person Isaac Newton who recorded his thoughts and experiments for posterity, who painstakingly measured the wavelengths of colors with a prism and analogized gravity to a slingshot.

This morning my four year old daughter, A-, ran from the sunny window of my bedroom and promptly returned with the prism to try to make rainbows.

Naturally, no one needs to make rainbows with a prism anymore. This is because (despite morons abounding) to all important parties, color measurements—and even light measurements—are as solved as shoe sizes.

But the ability to see? That is truly rare. But my daughter has it. And who gave it to her? That’s right. Her very own Santa Claus, otherwise known as Dad.

It was the right kind of start to the day.

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Oh, and I finished that other EPIC COLLECTION(!!!) of X-Men I mentioned.

For posterity, one effect that occurred while reading these 450+ pages of comics was the ability to see the rather finite amount of “types” these stories can have. IE, after you exhaust good vs evil in the plain sense, you have to move on to plot devices like making a good guy character seem evil, but lo and behold it wasn’t really the good guy, but the bad guy all along through some obvious and ingenious use of their powers! And then they also introduced the concept of using an entire comic(!) for a character in the story to tell a (in this case bedtime) tale involving slightly altered characters etc. Is that called meta, but inward; instead of breaking the fourth wall? In any case, time for a break from the Uncanny X-Men! (Don’t worry, Strangest Super Heroes of All, I still love you guys.)