BattlePong: The Game.

Just listened to it on BBC.com. Very good. While, like some, I don't really approve of retconning the second phase out of existence, I suppose it may have been necessary -- and in any event I'm not 100% convinced they're doing that.

This should be a lot of fun.

Granted, living next to PClem has taught me one thing: Don't Jinx it.

Regardless, I'm hoping that when I say future BCR contributor Kent Johnson has a pretty good thing going with this poem about Abu Gharib, nothing ill occurs. (Link goes to BlazeVox2k4, an online journal. There is music. Don't be scared, at least not more than you should be.)

Kent Johnson is a regular contributor for Jacket, and "somehow" got himself mixed up in the famous "Yasusada Affair" of a couple years ago.

Our pal, Marcus Slease, mentions wanting to tackle Kent in this blog post. I think he meant it literally. Regardless, he (marcus) was the first person to fill me in on the Yasusada stuff, I just never got around to looking into it until this week.

Fun Fun. Much like our favorite portuguese modernist, Fernado Pessoa. He wrote through four fully developed heteronyms, even writing criticism by one, on another's poems. Alter egos? See..poets can be superheroes.

In semi-related news, NPR (scroll way down for the link...)had a short story yesterday about the Military, and how they were sponsoring writing workshops for military personnel, in order to help them cope with their experiences in our war against terror. (You can also google, "operation homecoming") Looks like Tom Clancy is one of the great writers they have giving out advice!

Some snips: "If you want to write a book, then get a computer and write it...You'll find it isn't as hard as you think it might be." (okay. My paraphrase. but it is seriously, like 90% close) Easy for you, Tom, easy for you.

My favorite (this one is 98% accurate):
"The best killers are poets, not engineers. That's been true throughout history. A successful warrior is a person who can envision what he wants to do and accomplish it. And it really is an artistic mindset that makes that happen."

Sharpen a pencil? I should be sharpening a sword, I guess. What's next, ARMY-LIT?

In a new book, Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker that language originates not in our genes but in nonverbal emotional signaling.

'Voice Attractiveness' Linked to Sexual Proclivity.

(also via Geekpress)

Neat. (via GeekPress)

Maybe it's written in our genes.

Orc-Fu.

I could. But given the way the test works, I think it would be hard not to. They shouldn't tell you if you're wrong until the end.

Too many articles about science fiction, not enough articles about history and non-American civilization. Your free encyclopedia surrenders.

Via Boing Boing.

Unbelievable video of an empty fighter jet atomizing as it crashes into a concrete wall.

Find the best deals on EBay by exploiting misspelling.

Can we think what we cannot say? What can the Piraha people of South America -- who famously count "one," "two," "many" -- teach us about the way our brains work?

He'll be taking over the Tonight Show in 2009. Wow. Nice.

Until the death of Uncle Scrooge in 1967, anyway. This is the comic's continuity, not the cartoon's.

I hadn't even known a Duckberg comic existed.

Now you can play Mancala online.

The world is a frightening web of interconnection.

Best example: The Wall Street Scandals.

Via MetaFilter.

A Greensboro blogger makes a list of all the other Greensboro bloggers. Congratulations, folks...we made the list. (Although our description - a Mr. Sun-type blog - leaves a little something to be desired. We're clearly Boingboingesque.)

MSNBC has an excerpt from Robert Zimmerman's new autobiography, as well as a link to a recent interview. This article focuses mostly on his motorcycle accident, but it has some surprises:

Eventually I would even record an entire album based on Chekhov short stories—critics thought it was autobiographical—that was fine.

He's got to talking about Blood on the Tracks, huh? Wow. That's my favorite Dylan album - well, that and Blonde on Blonde - but I never made the Chekhov connection before.

Unless he's just bullshitting here.

I don't know how she's polling nationally - I suspect not very well, though I doubt the Republicans will be able to successfully turn her into Hillary II, as they want - but Teresa Heinz Kerry is an extremely popular figure in my little corner of the world.

All us commie pinko academic types love her.

Here's the profile the New Yorker ran on her this week.

Saw Napoleon Dynamite today at Neil's insistence. Now, this is a funny movie. That should be said up front. It will make you laugh. You should see it.

However, if you're anything like me, you'll leave the film feeling hollow, because unlike the far superior movies it blatantly rips off -- Rushmore especially, but also Donnie Darko, and one scene in particular from Hugh Grant's About a Boy -- the movie is in no way life affirming. You're laughing at caricatures, not with three-dimensional characters, and except for the last five minutes (which, not by coincidence, feel extremely tacked on), there's nothing in this movie that suggests even the possibility of redemption or joy.

Rushmore isn't like that. Even Donnie Darko isn't like that. And it's a huge problem for the film.

I leave Rushmore feeling energized. I left Napoleon Dynamite feeling bad about the world.

It's even older than Go. Reminds me of Backgammon.

My brain hurts.

According to Fox News, the good citizens at Black Box Voting have shown the answer is a resounding yes. (With video.)

Of course, what this all really puts me in mind of is the best Observer column I ever wrote. (You'll want to read Eric's column from that week first.) The mon(k)ey shot:

“Offer the balloons to passing children. Do not offer the monkey to passing children and do not offer the balloons to the monkey.” Do/Don’t. More arbitrary commands from the Father – more threat of castration. More separation from the mother/ Monkey. Acculturation = Neuroticization. But Father: may I offer the Monkey to the balloons? To whom should I offer the passing children – to the balloons, or to the Monkey? Why can’t a thing be offered to itself, the Monkey to the Monkey, the balloons to the balloons? Whence autonomy? And mustn’t the passing children stop before I can offer them anything? What do I do if they just keep on passing? What do I do if the balloon pops or the Monkey dies or the rules fail? How can I act if I am not first told how to act? What do I do if the Monkey offers me to passing children? Or offers me a balloon? What if I find that I myself am the Monkey? Must I be offered, or may I choose to pass? How do I know where I stop and the Monkey begins? Where the Monkey stops and the balloon begins? How do I tell the difference? Or is it différance? What if I get confused and switch the balloon for its opposite? The Monkey for the Non-key? Do the rules remain the same or is a new offer to be made? And can I haggle? Can I monkey with this offer or is it somehow non-negotiable? And what is it to monkey, really? Can I monkey with the balloon? Can I monkey with the Monkey? Can I monkey with myself? What can the children monkey with? Can the Monkey monkey with the children? Can the Monkey monkey with the balloon? Doesn’t the Monkey monkey with everything the Monkey touches by definition? What can’t a Monkey monkey with? And if the Monkey starts to monkey with the Monkey, how will we know when things have ballooned out of control?

Courtesy of The Superman Homepage. Link also contains a comphrensive summary and analysis of the entire Superman mythos.

I put this on the other blog, but I thought some people might like it here too. This article in the Guardian makes the case that everyone in the world deserves a vote in American elections. An excerpt:

For who could honestly describe the 2004 contest of George Bush and John Kerry as a domestic affair? There's a reason why every newspaper in the world will have the same story on its front page on November 3. This election will be decisive not just for the United States but for the future of the world.

Anyone who doubts it need only look at the last four years. The war against Iraq, the introduction of the new doctrine of pre-emption, the direct challenge to multilateral institutions - chances are, not one of these world-changing developments would have happened under a President Al Gore. It is no exaggeration to say that the actions of a few hundred voters in Florida changed the world.

So perhaps it's time to make a modest proposal. If everyone in the world will be affected by this election, shouldn't everyone in the world have a vote? Despite Bob Dole, shouldn't the men who want to be president win the support of Liverpool and Leipzig as well as Louisville and Lexington?

It may sound wacky, but the idea could not be more American.

Keep dreaming, but it's an interesting idea.

The future is now.

The exoskeleton consists of a pair of mechanical metal leg braces that include a power unit and a backpack-like frame. The braces are attached to a modified pair of Army boots and are also connected, although less rigidly, to the user’s legs.

The History of the Transformers. Excellent.

(via Memepool)

"Craziest," by Liz Dubelman. I hear The New York Times Magazine is going to report this week that ScrabbleLit is replacing ComicLit as the new new replacement for the novel.

Weird.

...debuted today. I have the old two on tape, so the geeky part of me is very excited about this.

You can listen online, starting Thursday. Do it for Douglas.

Up on the bbc4 website is a partially updated and sort of illustrated version of the classic interactive fiction/adventure game, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

So far I haven't even gotten to my favorite part, which is still just a few moves into the game, where I can lie in the mud and wait wait wait. Nuts to you, giant yellow bulldozer.

This looks like a nice new port, and I'll see if I can make it through. If not, I think there is a walkthrough here.

(via Grand Text Auto)

Actually looks pretty good.

Someonebuilt a mechanical version of the original Pong. There's some lag on the bounce, but still, this is pretty incredible. They got the sound perfect.

Like a comic book, but overtly political.

My favorite page is this philosowonk one about Strauss and the neocons, but this is probably the funniest:

Nauseating little maze game where the movement of your cursor is reversed.

At least, that's what Nature Magazine says.

Neil Farbman gives his highest, unqualified recommendation to The GIMP for Windows, an open-source, free Photoshop replacement program. Obviously, it's not as good as Adobe, but it's also free.

For what it's worth, after eight hours of ownership, I completely love my new computer.

My relationship with Best Buy has ended with enmity on both sides, and me in the possession of a new Toshiba Satellite M35-S456. I'm pretty happy with it so far.

I didn't buy the Best Buy Service Plan for $500, partly because it's a ripoff, and partially because I plan to never give Best Buy any significant amount of money ever again for the rest of my life.

I did buy the Toshiba Extended Warranty for $200 though...enough can happen with computers that it seemed worth it. I hate to spend any money on this whole scenario at all, but I guess I can swing $200.

I'll let you know when this one starts to totally crap out on me. In other words, see you in three months.

UPDATE: In fairness, I should mention that I've had a series of free, expensive laptops for over three years.

I've been made to suffer for it, though. I've been made to suffer.

In painting form, here.

John Salavon's other work is worth seeing too.

(via Metafilter)

They can be opened with a Bic. See the article here. Direct link to videos here.

Via Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing (and, soon, the BCR) comes a great Philip K. Dick essay on the ultimate nature of reality.

My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly -- and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog's extrapolation was in a sense logical -- given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.
...
I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story... which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.
...
In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.

In Plato's Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

That was a lot to quote, but what can I say? I love Dick.

If you've seen Waking Life, this is the essay that's referenced in that movie. Either way, read the rest.

The best public graffiti ever (sorry, no link or picture) is a stencil from Boston, MA.

What it says is, "Doritos is People."

Here are a few links:

Did the KGB create the Kennedy Conspiracy myth?

Godzilla vs. Tamagotchi.

abandonedsubwaytunnels.com.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:56 PM  |

Great New Yorker profile on Al Gore last week. God, what a tragedy.

Via retired lazy blogger Neil Howard Farbman, here's this site, which will tell you what the going rate is for various keywords on text ads. For instance, the top rated clickthrough for "credit cards" is $2.34 a click, while "sex" will get you at most a mere $2.01.

What gets you the most?

The highest I know of is the word "mesothelioma," a disease related to absestos inhalation. $100 a click -- paid for by trial lawyers looking for victims of mesothelioma for class action lawsuits.

Ain't that America.

Unbelievable.

In his new book, Richard Dawkins takes us back to time to the origins of life -- and speculates on what forms life might take if evolution could be rerun. Would flight evolve again? Would language?

Fantastic article from The Guardian.

Willizzle Safizzile (of all pizzle) knizzles.

Snoop Dogg, among his other exploits, has introduced a language.

It's based on his use of "izzle" as a suffix for existing words, sometimes substituting all but the first letter of a word - calling himself, for example, D-O-Double Gizzle (Dogg) or saying in a 2003 television commercial for AOL 9.0,"Now wait just one minizzle!" The most common variation is the one used in The Times's headline, but no word is sacred when it comes to the "izzle."

It's not all fizzle and gizzle for the D-O-Double-Gizzle, thizzle. It's rizzle.

Is it here to stay? Maybe in hip-hop, but nowhere else if Snoop has anything to do with it. Snoop himself has had enough. He recently told Ryan Downey of MTV News: "The message is L.I.G.: let it go. O.K., America? Let it go. You can't say 'izzle' no more. Tizzle, fizzle, dizzle - none of that. It's over with. … Let's find something new. Maybe pig Latin, anything."

Fo' shizzle.

Profile of Fantagraphics from this week's Seattle Weekly. (Via BoingBoing)

From CNN this morning:

[Johnny]Ramone, who had been fighting a five-year battle with prostate cancer, died in his sleep Wednesday afternoon at his Los Angeles home surrounded by friends and family...

Johnny Ramone co-founded The Ramones in 1974 in New York along with singer Joey Ramone, bassist DeeDee Ramone and drummer Tommy Ramone, who is the only surviving member of the original band. All four band members had different last names, but took the common name Ramone.

And one last snip for Gerry:

Though they never had a Top 40 song, the Ramones influenced scores of followers, including bands such as Green Day and Nirvana.

Even Bruce Springsteen was moved. After seeing the Ramones in Asbury Park, N.J., Springsteen wrote "Hungry Heart" for the band. His manager, however, swayed him to keep the song for himself and it became a hit single.

The Ramones and me have always had a touch and go relationship. On for ahwile, off for a while, but always on in crucial times; I had just a little bit of Rock and Roll High School in me; For years I carried around a "Hey Ho, Let's Go" t-shirt given to me by a good friend, Johanna; When Joey died in 2000, I was nearing my last semester as an Art student, and divorcing myself from two of the best friends I'd ever had; Nowadays, the Ramones and the Donnas (He thinks both bands were contemporaries in the 80's. I don't have the heart to tell him) are all I hear come out of my friend Will's car. Can't say I think their music is any good. But it always speaks to me, and I always respond. And that, as they say, is What will suffice.

RIP Johnny. Long live rock and roll.

For instance, take a look at their airline emergency cards.

(via Boing Boing)

Obviously Google would buy it. The guy's a genius.

One of us should do this for the new design.

Via none other than Hardy Gieske, we have the Internet Scrabble Club. Scrabble's answer to the International Go Server. Very good site.

Hi all -- Just a quick reminder, don't forget to click the Goooooooogle ads when you see them in the sidebar. We've finally started to get some new ones, so click 'em! Also, do all that other stuff.

And if you're a Greensboro local, don't forget to come to our booksale this Saturday at 8 am. We'll have every book you could ever need there...and cheap. See you then!

I'm not a Salon subscriber, so I can't read their 2001 interview with BCR correspondent Kurt Vonnegut at the moment -- but I can read this three part interview with the man himself from McSweeney's c. 2002:

Vonnegut: Well, do you know the one about the man who fell of the cliff? And on the way down, he happened to grab on to a very thin branch in the mountainside. Do you know this one — about praying to God because there was nobody else around? [Laughs] See, I've already threatened you. [Laughs] So this guy is finally praying to God. He says, "Please, God, help me out here. Tell me what I should do." And God says, "Hello, my son. I will help you. Just let go of the branch and I will see that you are safe." And the man cries out, "Isn't there anybody else up there I can talk to?"

That cat's all right.

(via Metafilter)

Play in other people's books, or construct your own.

So I'm teaching Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" tomorrow. I'm pretty excited about it; it's a great story. But what I'm most excited about is the 10 minute Blues mix I made with the help of my good friend Jennie T:

"Got My Mojo Working" -- Muddy Waters

"Devil Got My Woman" -- Skip James

"Wang Dang Doodle" -- Koko Taylor

I really feel like to teach this story best, I should just play Blues for the whole fifty minutes. But ten will have to do.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:38 PM  |

Someone's put interactive gamebooks from the 1980s online. It's like Choose Your Own Adventure and Dungeons and Dragons had a series of extremely nerdy babies. Good luck.

...but who would want to?

(both this link and the one below are via the triumphant return of Geekpress)

Find out here. I don't. But at least I could tell which one was bouba and which one was kiki.

The same way I did: HARD WORK. Just kidding. Neat article on the Bard from this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. The article focuses mostly on one of my favorite plays, The Merchant of Venice, but before getting there it begins at the very beginning:

A young man from a small provincial town -- a man without independent wealth, without powerful family connections and without a university education -- moved to London in the late 1580's and, in a remarkably short time, became the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time. His works appeal to the learned and the unlettered, to urban sophisticates and provincial first-time theatergoers. He makes his audiences laugh and cry; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. He grasps with equal penetration the intimate lives of kings and of beggars; he seems at one moment to have studied law, at another theology, at another ancient history, while at the same time he effortlessly mimics the accents of country bumpkins and takes delight in old wives' tales. Virtually all his rivals in the highly competitive theater business found themselves on the straight road to starvation; this one playwright by contrast made enough money to buy one of the best houses in the hometown to which he retired when he was around 50, the self-made protagonist of an amazing success story that has resisted explanation for 400 years.

(via my mom)

My September 11 was spent in Winston Salem - the Old Salem Village, to be more exact - where I listened to readings and wandered around at the Bookmarks Book Festival, sponsored by Krispy Kreme. Overall, it was a good day. The weather was nice, although a tad hot, and it seemed like everyone was having fun.

I spent most all of my time in the "Creative Cafe" booth, where Pam Uschuck from Salem College had organized a line-up of readers. It was a die hard group that managed to weather the heat of the tent, plus the withering barrage of music and other entertainment from the so so close, "Main Stage." We were like a happy bunch of refugees in there, only we couldn't hear ourselves think, water cost two dollars a liter, and there was no food worth eating in sight. (Unless you wanted a dozen glazed.)

I was really there to see my mentor from Chattanooga, Richard Jackson, read some of his new poems, but I ended up getting to hear lots of great readers. (Despite missing some of the ones I wanted to see - Bill Pitt Root and Richard Katrovas)
Some of the highlights included Ann Fisher Wirth being drowned out by the Star Spangled Banner, (before blowing me away with some of her poems from the book, Blue Room) and Galway Kinnell using his new computer to great effect. He'd just gotten a G4 powerbook, evidently, and hadn't managed to figure out how to print a new poem off at the festival. So Pam held the computer while Galway read, and a stalwart Richard Katrovas scrolled down. Turned out to be a pretty good poem, a take off of our favorite Orpheus and Euridice Myth.




Click on the pics to get a larger image. Sorry that I don't have more to say, save for Moravian Sugar Cake can give you quite a stomachache if ingested too quickly. More write-up of the Festival can be seen here.

Your mission: Spot the Virgin. I got 61%, and I was better at spotting virgin guys than virgin girls. Good luck.

Pioneer 10 and 11 are going slower than they're supposed to be. What's holding them back? I assume it's a forcefield put in by the aliens to keep the human race from ever leaving this solar system -- but the truth is we just don't know yet.

Out of Hong Kong comes Shaolin Soccer, easily one of the best movies I watched this year. I've been waiting for it to be out on DVD forever. We watched the US Theatrical Version instead of the Original Chinese Version, mostly out of fear that the other wouldn't be subtitled. I'm told the Original is better though; I'll check that out next time.

Basically, this movie asks the question: what if kung fu masters turned their attention to soccer? Hilarity ensues.

This is a great movie. Clever while staying true to its genre and funny without ever being cruel.

The most interesting part, for me, came with the revelation about Team Evil in the finals (yes, the opposing side really is called Team Evil). We know going in that the other team in the finals is going to be able to fight back Shaolin-style; the only question is how. Naturally, I assumed that they would just have Shaolin monks as well -- but the real answer, (spoiler) that they've been pumped up with "American drugs", is a lot more interesting, especially with its suggestion that there is more than one way to summon the mystical power that drives the Shaolin Soccer team. The last image in the movie is also, in a way, a callback to this -- (spoiler) a billboard that reads "Shaolin Craze Hits America," the ultimate victory being the spreading of Chinese influence even to America.. Those two moments, along with other metafictional and genre-bending moments throughout, made this movie more than just a joke; it's a work of art.

Pick up this DVD.

Fantastic article in the Village Voice from Paul Collins of McSweeney's, rebutting the notion that the the electric light bicycles motor cars television the Internet is responsible for the destruction of all literary culture in America.

Now, as a novice practictioner of this dying art, of course I think that all people should be reading much, much more than they do.

But Collins quite persuasively argues that literary culture isn't dead, it's just evolving, and that the same type of people who decry the death of literature now were doing the same type of crying in 1959, 1909, and 1842.

Analysis of the flaws of modern polling and a few tough-but-fair potshots at El Presidente thrown in for free.

Well, I read it on the Internet.

Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrit in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millennia old.

The discovery is of monumental significance. It is mind-boggling to consider that we have available to us a language which has been spoken for 4-7000 years that appears to be in every respect a perfect language designed for enlightened communication. But the most stunning aspect of the discovery is this: NASA the most advanced research center in the world for cutting edge technology has discovered that Sanskrit, the world's oldest spiritual language is the only unambiguous spoken language on the planet.

More here. And a little more on Sanskrit here.

From LIFE Magazine. This isn't the full hundred -- you have to buy the book for that -- but it's still a pretty astounding compilation.

Now Wal-Mart is building on the ruins of an ancient city. Even sad monuments to a lost past need low prices every day.

From 1up.com. We're using "important" very loosely here. Still, it's interesting reading.

I would have put Zelda and probably Final Fantasy (over Dragon Warrior) on the list. Also, Civilization definitely belongs on the list.

Of course, there's still 18 to go.

I know there's been a lot of comic stuff on the blog lately. I've sort of had comics on the mind. Maybe this will be the last one for awhile. Maybe.

Anyway, here's DC's 5-Page Preview of Superman: True Brit. Co-written by John Cleese. Looks to be a humorous analogue to the highly impressive Superman: Red Son book I blogged about way back when.

(Via Cinescape.)

As complied by this guy. It's enough to make a fellow want to buy the DVDs -- or at least start getting the Cartoon Network.

No doubt delighting in the chance to cross-promote another Time Warner property, CNN has a story up about Identity Crisis, the miniseries that's set the DC Universe on its head by focusing not on a madman's end-the-world-scheme but on the simple, brutal murder of a superhero's wife.

Despite its many and vocal detractors, it's currently the number #1 comic series in the world.

Identity Crisis website.
Identity Crisis discussion forum.

This is really bad.

I've linked to at least one of these before, and maybe all of them, but the Philosophy Games at The Philosophy Magazine are really top-notch.

My favorite is Staying Alive. For the record, via spaceship, virus, and let-my-body-die, I stayed alive.

Quick, fast, easy, addicting.

I had some time and a little spare cash today, so I went out and picked up Art Spiegelman's latest. It's not for everyone -- as you can tell from the digital excerpt below, it's pretty wildly partisan. But I think -- for a large segment of us, anyway -- In the Shadow of No Towers pretty closely expresses what we feel on this anniversary of the Sept. 11th tragedy: a creeping, shaking horror both at what happened on that day and at what has happened since.

It'll be compared to Maus, of course, and it shouldn't be. This is a very different work. Maus was an interested-but-dispassionate reflection on his father's horror; In the Shadow of No Towers is a reflection on Spiegelman's own. With very little temporal remove from the events of that day three years ago, In the Shadow of No Towers doesn't even try to wrap its head around what happened. All it can do is talk. This is raw emotion, fashioned into art.

Even the book's latter half -- an unexpected diversion into the early history of the comic form, complete with full-color reproductions -- strikes a moving and disturbingly eerie chord. It's actually somewhat hard to believe that Spiegelman didn't create these images himself, post-9/11. But he didn't; these images always been there, waiting for us to rediscover them and imbue them with new meaning.

It's almost enough to make you believe in an collective, psychic unconscious -- that somehow, on some preconscious level, we all always knew that something like this would someday happen.

There's something to see here -- check it out next time you're in Borders. This is a book, I think, that people will remember.

And for locals, of course, mine is available for loan.



UPDATE: I wound up having more to say about 9/11 than I wanted over on my other blog.

In the virtual world of Second Life, a computer generated landscape in constant development by its members, one programmer has recreated the mental experience of schizophrenia.

(via Waving at Myself)

Four simple and elegant fables, nicely illustrated by elaborate woodcuts.

(via Metafilter)

I never would have guessed that.

(via Marginal Revolution)

Digital Bits has a review up of the new Star Wars Trilogy DVD, including a catalog of new changes Lucas has made since the last time he ruined the trilogy.

Dark Horizons summarizes.

The biggest change that will have fans screaming is the confirmed replacement of Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen as Anakin's ghost at the end of "Return of the Jedi". Why Christensen is there but McGregor hasn't replaced Obi-Wan seems a glaring continuity error.

Other changes will receive a more mixed reaction. The hologram of the Emperor in "The Empire Strikes Back" done by an old woman and voiced by Clive Revell has been replaced by Ian McDiarmid who played him in the prequels and "Return of the Jedi". The speech has been changed too and gives away the Luke-Vader connection early on.

Most other scenes have just been cleaned and tidied up a bit with more detail - the lightsabers, the Jabba the Hut scenes in "A New Hope", Naboo being included in the Jedi celebrations (although the Emperor statue demolition has been pulled), Luke no longer screaming during his Empire fall, and now Greedo and Han fire at the same time.

That last one has to be a joke, right? It has to be.

UPDATE: Screenshots of the changes. The new Episode IV Jabba looks better, at least, but it's still an awful change, just like all the other awful changes were awful. I hate George Lucas.

UPDATE 2: Okay, special effects changes are one thing -- but changing dialogue twenty years after the fact is another. Giving the Emperor a new speech in an effort to hammer the prequel trilogy into continuity is incredibly lame. So is Star Wars itself, true, but this is even lamer.

I hate George Lucas.

Because if you don't build it, no one will.

I finished up Bear v. Shark tonight, which I mentioned the other night, and I can reveal a few things:

1) It was our Michael Parker that was thanked in the acknowledgments.

2) This is, in fact, a very, very good novel; it's definitely worth taking a look at.

3) My favorite chapter, in its entirety:

Chapter 33: Patents Pending

Possum v. Squirrel
Owl v. Deer
Squid v. Monkey
Cow v. Mastiff
Varmint v. Critter
Scorpian v. Pigeon
Blind v. Deaf
Jew v. Puerto Rican
Manx v. Mutt
Spanish Moss v. Kudzu
Hitler v. Elvis
Toddler v. Snake
Middle Manager v. Homeless
Oliver Wendell v. Sherlock

4) On the other side of the looking glass, it really is still just us.

Kickin' book.

Jeff Harrell's UNEMPLOYED: The Great Adventure.

UNEMPLOYED: The Great Adventure
Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 2004 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
UNEMPLOYED is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Revision 88 / Serial number 840726

West of House
You are standing at the bottom of a low hill in front of a red brick house. There is a small mailbox here.

> i
You are carrying:

An expensive laptop computer

No job

I'd say it's pretty well done.

(Incidentally, if you decide to click around the rest of Jeff's website, I'd recommend that you not be too taken in by all the forgery blogging. As far as I can tell, the right wing's latest conspiracy theory is essentially without foundation. See my comments at Three Guys here, here, and here.

They've been moving the goalposts all day with this stuf. It's a classic example of the Chewbacca Defense.)

Salon has a review up of Art Spiegelman's new book about 9/11 -- In the Shadow of No Towers -- previously referenced here. The more I hear about this book, the more certain I am that I'm going to pick it up. Salon says it "may be the finest and most personal work of art to emerge from the tragedy." I can believe it.

Incidentally, the BCR picked up two more graphic narrativists this week. Publishing comic lit is one of the things about the magazine I've been looking most forward to, and the pieces are excellent.

I guess what I'm saying is, don't forget to subscribe.

Damn you, Edison!

That was the last thing that didn't cause cancer. Now everything does.

Only the Fiction Bitch knows for sure.

I think I had this game on my handheld Sega player back in the early 90s.

It's still fun.

Becuase in the future, everything will be made of Lego.

If you're looking for a good alternative to The Story and Its Writer for next semester, and Porter and Bich's book doesn't do it for you, it sounds like you could do worse than The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories.

I was telling someone today: I love short stories. I love writing them, and I love reading them. I just wish they had a market.

Only the Eyetrack Experiment knows for sure.

Presenting the Rapture...in comic book form. Must be clicked to be believed.

Today in the Twilight Zone, Bush is singing U2's classic "Sunday Bloody Sunday."

And it’s true we are immune
When fact is fiction and tv reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die

Lyrics.

And, of course: January 30th, 1972, Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Neil and I actually stopped there during our trip to Ireland. It's pretty much a sacred site, still.

They've got a lot of those over there.

The always-reliable Blogger has been down for since late last night...that's why we haven't been updating. If you're reading this, it's back -- which means you should probably scroll down. There's a number of righteous posts (and not just mine, Tom and Pat's too!) that have been in limbo, and are now free.

...America rejoices.

My laptop is in the shop again today, just three weeks after it came back the last time. I'm hoping that they just agree to honor their no-lemon policy, but I'm not holding my breath.

Because if things don't go our way in November, we're all gonna need it.

The question is not whether there are certain animal behaviors which we might read as thought. The question is whether or not there is some *actual inner life* behind the actions of animals, an inner life composed of intentionality, at least some degree of deliberative choice, and temporal awareness.

My coeditor Tommy C. and I once got in a knock-down-drag-out fight on this very subject, an argument that effectively ended our friendship (which makes BCR editorial meetings very awkward indeed). He said yes; I said no*. That's why I'm so gratified that he mailed me this article from The New York Times, which takes the question of "Can animals think?" head on and decides, well, probably not.

--
*With the possible exception of dolphins, whales and even maybe some primates. Dolphins are pretty freaking smart.

Our argument was mostly limited to whether or not dogs can think, now that I think about it. And yes, it really did end our friendship. In all seriousness. Yes.

Phillip Longman is a modern-day Cassandra, whose sage warnings about "the baby gap" have too-long gone unheeded in the corridors of power of the secular elite.

If we all don't start breeding soon -- and not just one baby, five, six, we've got to outbreed Utah for God's sakes -- we might as well just throw in the towel now.

You've got your mission. Now get to it.

The book I'm reading now is Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark, which I'd been dimly aware of before last week, but only ordered after hearing about it from this one guy at a party.

One thing I can say for sure -- it's incredibly bizarre. Told in extremely short chapters--you might very well call this a novel in short-shorts -- it's a story of the post-postmodern future, where televisions have no off switch and can read your mind. And there's one question that's on everybody's mind:

The question is simple, as are most profound questions.

Given a relatively level playing field -- i.e., water deep enough so that a Shark could maneuver proficiently, but shallow enough so that a Bear could stand and operate with its characteristic dexterity -- who would win in a fight between a Bear and a Shark?

When the moment comes that this book has ceased to be parody because it accurately reflects the world of mass media and popular culture, do you think there will be anyone around who's still intelligent enough to notice?

Or has that moment already passed us by?

While you're around, don't forget to scope out the website that started it all. It appears to be down as of this writing (1:25 am Monday), but it'll probably be up again soon. (EDIT: Now that it's up, I see it's a completely different website, for a band. The original website? I have no idea where that it is.)

(Interesting Sidebar: The acknowledgments for the book thanks an "extraordinary teacher" named Michael Parker. Is this the Michael Parker? Our Michael Parker? There's absolutely no way in the world we could ever possibly find out the answer to that question.)

I'll let you know how things turns out. I already know who won the first bout, because that's not what this novel is about. No, this novel is about Bear v. Shark II, The Sequel: Darwin's Duel, Surf Against Turf, Lungs vs Gills in the Neon Desert for All the Marbles. The stakes, truly, have never been higher.

I'll tell you this: My head says Shark. But my heart -- my heart is with the Bear.

My good friend Eric emailed me a story not too long ago. The story was about a secret underclass of people who were kidnapped as babies and reared to be slaves for the American upper class. It focused primarily on the slave serving Rupert Murdoch; it was a pretty good story.

Unfortunately for Eric, it turns out his story is basically true (Latimes.com registration via bugmenot -- latimes18485; latimes18485):

A Filipina who was awarded $825,000 in damages by a jury after alleging that she was held as an indentured servant by a movie industry executive and his wife says her dream is to remain in Los Angeles and to bring her husband and three children here from the Philippines.

A tearful Nena Ruiz, 60, said last week at a Koreatown news conference that she had not seen her family for four years, but that she was afraid to visit her homeland because she feared for her safety from "agents" of her former employers.

I'm just glad I'm not the only Zeitgeist Man.

Via last week's TIME Magazine cover story, "How to Live to Be 100 (and Not Regret It)" -- which I picked up off the supermarket shelf for obvious reasons -- I've discovered an unusual fact: a ridiculously high percentage of Okinawans live to be 100.

Okinawa Centenarian Project.

Remember that Tom Hanks movie from this summer, The Terminal? I didn't see it either. But The Guardian did, and is now bringing us the true, sad story of the refugee behind Spielberg's feel-good flick.

He's the dude who amputated his own arm after being partially crushed by a cave-in while hiking in Blue John Canyon -- and then walked out of the woods under his own power.

I saw this guy on Letterman shortly after this happened. It's an unbelievable story.

You can read it in his own words at Outside Magazine.

Hey everyone...don't forget to keep clicking the Goooooooooogle Ads in the right sidebar when you see them. I got our first earning report from Saturday, and you can help us make a ton of money for the magazine with just a few clicks.

I'll be back later with some fresh and terribly interesting content. Thanks for coming by so often, and stay tuned for some big updates soon on our first issue (including when it's due, and who's going to be in it).

Hope you're enjoying the holiday weekend.

Here. Some commentary, although sometimes a little flamewary, from Metafilter here.

There's one possible explanation that Dawkins rules out immediately:

Other theories miss the point of Darwinian explanations altogether. I refer to suggestions like, “Religion satisfies our curiosity about the universe and our place in it.” Or “Religion is consoling. People fear death and are drawn to religions which promise we’ll survive it.” There may be some psychological truth here, but it’s not in itself a Darwinian explanation.

I think he's missing the Darwinian explanation: a propensity towards religious belief evolved in our brains to keep us all from killing ourselves in despair. Imagine two tribes of human beings, one with the religion gene and one without.

The religion gene tribe thrives, because it bothers to procreate, because it's able to go on day-to-day, because its members are less likely to throw themselves off cliffs when they realize what the world is really like.

I'm a believer in Dawkins' memes, but I'm not convinced that religion is really an abstract mental construct with no physical survival value. I think there's a pretty clear survival value.

This was another thing Marcus and I got to talking about during our big death talk last night. Religious evidence basically becomes entirely untrustworthy if you can conceive of religion as an evolutionary side effect -- how can you ever know that your mystical experience is really real and not just a side effect of your brain's desperate desire to see/manufacture some pattern in the chaos of life?

If our own brains are working against us in our search for God, epistemologically speaking, we're in a lot of trouble.

Fascinating report. And it makes perfect sense, when you think about it.

...is a suicide hotspot. This is an article from The New Yorker from about a year ago, but it's really interesting. The bridge is basically a strange attractor for the depressed and suicidal in the Bay area, especially when the media treats the suicide numbers like a horserace.

The coverage intensified in 1973, when the Chronicle and the Examiner initiated countdowns to the five-hundredth recorded jumper. Bridge officials turned back fourteen aspirants to the title, including one man who had “500” chalked on a cardboard sign pinned to his T-shirt. The eventual “winner,” who eluded both bridge personnel and local-television crews, was a commune-dweller tripping on LSD.

In 1995, as No. 1,000 approached, the frenzy was even greater. A local disk jockey went so far as to promise a case of Snapple to the family of the victim. That June, trying to stop the countdown fever, the California Highway Patrol halted its official count at 997. In early July, Eric Atkinson, age twenty-five, became the unofficial thousandth; he was seen jumping, but his body was never found.

Ken Holmes, the Marin County coroner, told me, “When the number got to around eight hundred and fifty, we went to the local papers and said, ‘You’ve got to stop reporting numbers.’” Within the last decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology have also issued guidelines urging the media to downplay the suicides. The Bay Area media now usually report bridge jumps only if they involve a celebrity or tie up traffic. “We weaned them,” Holmes said. But, he added, “the lack of publicity hasn’t reduced the number of suicides at all.”

No, I'm not especially morbid tonight. I just ran across this article while doing a little research for the story I'm writing instead of going to sleep, and I thought I'd share.

Some fascinating pictures (if you're a nerd). Via Boing Boing.

Badlands
Adam Raised a Cain
Something in the Night
Candy's Room
Racing the Streets
Promised Land
Factory
Streets of Fire
Prove It All Night
Darkness on the Edge of Town

Good Labor Day party at Fay and Ezra's tonight. First I had a good talk with an otherwise delightful fellow from the PhD program who has regretfully decided to vote for Ralph Nader this fall. I tried to talk him off the bridge, but I don't know if I did. Mostly we got to talking about how the two-party system is irredeemably broken and how the entire apparatus of information dispersal in our society is aligned against the anti-corporate left.

Structural critiques of society make me want to get a PhD in English.

Then I butted in on a conversation between Fay, Angie, and the Incredible Mr. Slease, which began as a discussion about mind/body dualism as it relates to alcohol -- as I said, this was a party -- but quickly segued into the usual death/existentialism/nihilism philosophical three-way-dance.

We talked about the usual stuff I talk about when I talk about death -- the sad unlikelihood of life after death, the obscure argument-from-phenomenology that I've been working on since I was 12 which almost convinces me that there's an afterlife after all (I'll talk about this someday, I swear).

Then we got into the experience of death itself: what it actually feels like to die.

I mentioned something I'd read recently (I don't remember where) that suggested that some neurologists believe that it's possible that the subjective experience of death in the last seconds of conscious experience could appear to last forever; that is, it's possible we experience a subjective eternity of life after death in the last second before we die.

This got us talking about Marcus's Mormon upbringing. You see, he's thought about this before, and he wonders if the eternity his mind will construct for him won't be straight out of Mormonism, the religion he was raised in but has now effectively abandoned (an action for which, by Mormon standards, has earned him a permanent spot in Mormon Hell). Mormon Hell is basically "separation from God" -- roughly eqiuvalent to laying at the bottom of a deep well, unable to reach the ring of light at the top. He's afraid that no matter how consciously he may have rejected Mormonism, when his time comes, that's what his mind will construct.

It's a fascinating problem, and one there's no easy solution for. Can we ever overcome the imprints of our youth?

Talking about stuff like this makes me want to get a PhD in Philosophy.

The last thing we talked about, right before I left, was how we think we'll handle the moments of our own deaths. I've been certain since I was young that I'll die consciously, rather than in my sleep.

Sometimes I think I'll be able to handle it. After all, that's what this has all been building up to. You've got to figure that by then I'll be ready.

Other times I think that in the moment of my death I'll be flooded with a certainty that there is simply nothing after life, that this is it, and that now it's ending -- and the final conscious experience of my life will thus be nothing less than pure existential terror.

Have a good night, everybody!

As you can see, we've rejiggered the sidebar a little bit. The big change is the addition of Google Ads, which you are all highly encouraged to click on as much as humanly possible. As time goes on, these ads will start to represent the content of this blog, and so should actually be useful to some people. Regardless, you are encouraged to click on these ads whatever their content at least ten times a day (each). We'll be counting.

(We've also been adding and will continue to add other literary journals to the 'Arts' section of the blogroll. Make use of these as you see fit.)

There are, needless to say, a myraid of ways you can support the BCR in addition to clicking our ads. Get a no-annual-fee Amazon credit card and save $20 dollars on your next purchase from Amazon! Use our Amazon clickthrough while you're at it! Donate money! Get a subscription! Etc! Etc!

In other BCR news, the redesign for our main website is almost finished, and should be going up in the next week or so. It was designed and written by our brave leader, Don Ezra Horatio Cruz Plemons III, and it is truly remarkable.

Thanks for your support. Our first issue will be coming out in November (we hope), and we couldn't have done it without you. And don't forget to submit for issue #2!

Actually got a chance to WATCH that Grayson trailer. Whoa. Do check that out. What a movie that will never get to be.

DC should give these guys a chance with a property. Seriously.

The Sneeze: A blog dedicated to documenting the creation of robot-themed paintings. The Iwo Jima one they're working on should be good as well.

Reminds me of this. I still want one of these posters for my office.

Lots of news today from AICN about Indiana Jones, for some reason:

A special edition of Raiders is apparently planned that will include the impressive shot-for-shot fan remake that everyone (on the Internet) was talking about a few months back. Sounds good.

And on the bad news front: George Lucas apparently intends to write the movie himself.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:44 AM  |

Inner Party Observer: Newspeak newspaper.

BB: "Inparty must continuebe goodthink!"
Thinkpol report alarmwise, unveiling doubleplusungood possibility of Inparty ideodeviates. Goldstein connects possibility uneliminated. BB declared speechwise in VicPalace Ingsoc traitors must be detected and rehabed nodelay:

"Comrades, how will Ingsoc continuelive victorywise? Ingsoc will continuelive victorywise by vaporizing decay within Inparty core. Inparty exampleserve Outparty and prolemass and must causewise continuebe goodthink. Ignorance is strength, Comrades, unforget."

Batman's been murdered. Alfred's in a bad way. Robin has long since hung up his superhero tights, but he's the only one who can avenge Batman's death. Superman and Wonder Woman are sidelining as enforcers for a corrupt Commissioner Gordon. The Joker's back, flanked by two karate-kicking, hipster Jokerettes. And is that the Penguin beckoning from the shadows?

...

Without studio support of any kind, they created a dramatic and visually stunning preview of a movie that may never exist. There's no "Grayson" screenplay, no big studio backing, not even a gentleman's agreement to produce a feature-length film; just a love for the D.C. comics superheroes and an itch for filmmaking.

How Stuff Works explains how they did it.

And you can view the trailer here.

Now (in a frankly transparent effort to get the Backwards City Blog to notice them) somebody's made an all-ASCII Kill Bill, Volume I.

Not as good as the Star Wars one, but give them time.

(via Boing Boing)

That's the question the short-sighted fools at The New Scientist are afraid to answer.

This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself.

But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope.

r0xor: Counting everything for your convenience.

See, blogging's cool! Even Fake Quentin Tarantino has a blog!

It's a pretty well-done forgery. But famous people don't have blogs; I learned this long ago.