About the Embassy & the Ambassador

          Hello! My name is Mike Norton. Michael J Norton, to be more precise, though in the scope of the Internet that still isn't enough to narrow matters just to me. I am a man composed of three all too common names. O' woe unto me. I should note that "Orto" was something held over from high school, where I just chopped off the n's from my last name in my search for something slightly less pedestrian than 'Norton.' I simply wasn't suffused with a particular pride in my family name. That's all there was to it.  So, no, my Italian friends, the name has nothing to do with eggplants nor is it an attempt at any boast concerning something large and purple. Ah, another fantasy shattered. So sorry.

          I'll be reaching the perhaps over-ripe age of 40 in mid-April, and one of my biggest birthday wishes this year is that I finally figure out what I want to be when I grow up. In the meantime my cover is as a husband (since 1985), father (since 1990 and again '92) and a Laboratory Director for a consulting engineering company, a field I ambled into back in 1988. No, I'm not going to plug the company here.

             To the left is a pic of the Emperor Norton, the self-elected ruler from the 1800's. The central image is as seen in the Sandman card set of some years back, given to me by comics pro, fellow fan, former Legendaire, and heckuva nice guy Mark Stegbauer . That the sad march of time has replaced me in his sight with another Mike Norton (that one a Michael S. Norton) who happens to be a comics artist Mark worked with on at least one project, doesn't mean I think any less of Mark; he's a fine artist who rode a wave at Marvel heading into the mid-nineties (He was series inker on their second Nova series) and wiped out when the comics market hit its nadir in '95 and series were cancelled left and right. He has come back from it, though, with stronger skills and a broader view than he went in.

        The Emperor's no direct ancestor that I know of, but it's a nice, folksy, historical reference with a comics angle to it - a Sandman one, no less! - so it's a fine starting point.

        I'd left this site to languish for a long while, save for a few, minor changes over the past couple years. Seeing the end of the millennium at hand I decided it was criminal to let the technical wonder of the worldwide web - even with my minuscule command of web design - go unused. It's too great an opportunity to let it go by without even trying to make something of it.

        I will try to make this site's priority content over flash, but as to what I'll hope to accomplish here... who knows? This is a bit of creative self-expression, and hopefully a place where I can put entertaining and maybe even useful information up for people of like mind. I leave it to you to tell me if I've succeeded.

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