His review of Sin City, which rocks the Backwards City hard at 2:45 pm tomorrow (or thereabouts).

And when you're done there, check out the Comic-to-Film comparison.

Astronomical drawings from the 19th century at the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery.

Here's the Aurora Borealis, as E. L. Trouvelot observed it on March 1, 1872:

With predictions of his future behavior and suggestions for dealing with him now and after Germany's surrender. Prepared for the OSS by Harvard psychologist Dr. Henry A. Murray in 1943.

I got word today that BCR is going to be profiled in Clayton Couch's "Best of 2004" column in the upcoming Library Journal. It's a great review:

[REDACTED UNTIL APRIL 15th...SORRY]

Mr. Couch is clearly a genius. And his check is in the mail.

You're all living in sin! Sin!

A former sheriff's dispatcher who quit her job after her boss found out she lived with her boyfriend is challenging North Carolina's law against cohabitation.

Debora Hobbs said she was told to get married, move out, or find another job after her boss found out about her living situation. The legal arm of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina filed the lawsuit Monday on her behalf.

The lawsuit seeks to abolish the nearly 200-year-old - and rarely enforced - law that prohibits unmarried, unrelated adults of the opposite sex from living together. North Carolina is one of seven states with such a law.

Convicted offenders face a fine and up to 60 days in jail.

The things you learn from Google.



This has been the background of my computer screen for three straight laptops now.

Before that, for a long time, my background was Corridor in the Asylum, which is still in the running for the imaginary title of my imaginary first book (especially if I can get the image on the cover).

Arranged Marriage in the City on NewYorkMetro.com.

That's not good.

A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure.

Amazing structures built using only pennies. No glue or adhesive, just gravity. It sounds boring, I know, but it's pretty impressive once you take the time to click and see it.

[Via Geekpress via Boing Boing]

“For a bulky segment of a century, I have been an avid follower of comic strips — all comic strips,” Parker wrote. “This is a statement made with approximately the same amount of pride with which one would say, ‘I’ve been shooting cocaine into my arm for the past 25 years.’”
...

Writing in The New Republic in 1948, Marya Mannes referred to the form as “intellectual marijuana.”

“Every hour spent in reading comics,” she asserted, “is an hour in which all inner growth has stopped.”

But don't worry, things get better.

By the 1960s, the groundwork for a new and ongoing appreciation of comics had been laid by McLuhan and other intellectuals, notably the literary critic Leslie Fiedler and the soon-to-be-famous novelist Umberto Eco. Drawing on theories from psychology and sociology, Fiedler and Eco studied comics as an example of social myth — popular stories that illustrated the dream life of the common person. For Fiedler, the superhero was an example of urban folklore, in which the dark forest of the fairytales became the urban jungle of Batman.

Meanwhile, Eco believed that the serialized nature of comics — where the adventure is always continued tomorrow or next week — reflected the anxious, provisional rhythm of modern life.

Since then, we’ve seen an ever-deepening appreciation of the form. Comics are now studied in the academy, archived in research libraries and lavishly reprinted in expensive collector volumes. In one Toronto high school, they have been used for the past three years as part of a successful program to boost literacy. And the recent rise of the graphic novel and manga (Japanese comic books), not to mention the recent massive success of Hollywood films based on comics (Spiderman, Spiderman 2, Hulk, Ghost World), has only strengthened the form’s cultural importance.

Incidentally, we're still looking for comic artists for our second and third issues. Send your work our way.

[via A&L Daily]

MetaFilter Has Lebowski on the mind. See here.

The Dude Himself at LebowskiFestWest

The Kenny Kramer behind The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski conquers NPR

The Big Lebowski Quote Generator

...to which I add from the archives:

LebowskiFest

Big Lebowski soundfiles

The Dude's House: Forum

A Different Big Lebowski Random Quote Generator

BL Script

all from here

The Big Lebowski and Buddhism

from here, and

Can the Big Lebowski predict the future?

Which Big Lebowski Character Are You?

Wikipedia on BL

IMDB

Obligatory Amazon Link

(all new, baby).

Jennie, teach your freshman seminar on The Big Lebowski. Seriously.

Way out west there was this fella I wanna tell ya' about. Goes by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least that was the handle his loving parents gave him, but he never had much use for himself. See, this Lebowski, he called himself "The Dude". Now, Dude, there's a name no man would self-apply where I come from. But then there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense. And a lot about where he lived, like-wise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place so darned' interestin'. See, they call Los Angeles the "City Of Angels", but I didn't find it to be that, exactly. But I'll allow it as there are some nice folks there. 'Course I aint never been to London, and I aint never seen France. And I aint never seen no queen in her damned undies, so the fella says. But I'll tell you what, after seeing Los Angeles, and this here story I'm about to unfold, well, I guess I seen somethin' every bit as stupefyin' as you'd seen in any of them other places. And in English, too. So I can with a smile on my face. Without feelin' like the good lord gipped me. Now this here story I'm about to unfold took place in the early nineties - just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm and the Eye-rackies. I only mention it because sometimes there's a man, I wont say a hero, cause, what's a hero? Sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here - The dude from Los Angeles. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude. The Dude, from Los Angeles. And even if he's a lazy man, and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County. Which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide. Sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough.

I can't believe I slept through last week's Lebowski party.

You can hear the title song from Bruce's new album, Devils and Dust, at ITunes and (somehow, somewhere, don't ask me how) on AOL.

It reminds me a little bit of "Blood Brothers." (Holler if you hear me?) In any event, it's really good. Pay the dollar and listen.

I've got my finger on the trigger
And tonight faith just ain't enough
When I look inside my heart
There's just devils and dust

Lyrics.

It's a surprisingly complicated subject.

The Chronicle of Higher Education takes on B.F. Skinner.

Why Star Wars Has to Stop at SciFi.com.

Find out here.

Gerry Canavan from this day forward you will also be known as Happy Menace

Jaimee Hills from this day forward you will also be known as Profound Lover

Ezra Plemons from this day forward you will also be known as Amazing Leader

Tom Christopher from this day forward you will also be known as Pesty Hunter

Patrick Egan from this day forward you will also be known as Arrogant Dominator

It'd be The Nameless Dread.



UPDATE: The LiveJournal seems to have been taken down. You can still check out the images at photobucket, though.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v117/robyngoth/nd1.jpg
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v117/robyngoth/nd20.jpg

I think that's all there is.

I, Andy Maskin, being of sound mind and body, hereby grant authority over my handling should I enter a persistent vegetative state to the United States Congress pursuant to the following conditions:

1. Congress shall convene for the sole purpose of determining whether or not I should be sustained or allowed to die. A special quorum for this session shall consist of at least 62% of the House of Representatives and 70% of the Senate present and accounted for. Both houses of Congress must each agree, by a simple majority, on the same course of action.

...

4. If Congress is unable to make a determination based on the conditions set forth above, then the decision whether or not to keep me alive with machines shall fall to the Bush twins. If Jenna is unable to serve in this capacity, then Bjork may cast a vote in her place. If Barbara is similarly unavailable, her vote may be cast by a well-trained parrot of Jenna's choosing.

5. In the event of a tie between the Bush twins (or their aforementioned proxies) then that tie shall be broken by the oldest living descendent of Adlai Stevenson...

[Also via MetaFilter.]

Book of Genesis edition. Interesting stuff.

The contemporary reader would do well to read the King James side by side with the English Revised. Some lovely stereophonic truths come of the fact that a devotion to God did not preclude the use of narrative strategies.

If not in all stories, certainly in all mystery stories, the writer works backward. The ending is known and the story is designed to arrive at the ending. If you know the people of the world speak many languages, that is the ending: the story of the Tower of Babel gets you there. The known ending of life is death: the story of Adam and Eve, and the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, arrives at that ending. Why do we suffer, why must we die? Well, you see, there was this garden ...

[Via MetaFilter]

Only one of evolutionary biology's most startling thinkers. Let The Boston Globe tell you why.

[via The Panda's Thumb]

The Happy Poster Project. Most are lame, one or two or okay, and a few are really good. My second favorite is probably the Alice one. This one, however, is the best.



My understanding is that they want us to hang these places. I'm not going to do that.

[via MetaFilter]

From Jeffrey Sachs's new book, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time:

...the four hundred richest U.S. taxpayers had a combined income in 2000 that exceeded the combined incomes of four of the countries of Mr. Bush's tropical tour. The difference was astounding: the $57 billion in combined income of Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda was the income of 161 million people, who average $350 in income per year, whereas the $69 billion was the income of four hundred individuals.

[Quoted at Marginal Revolution.]

Lifesize LEGO sculpture of Han Solo frozen in Carbonite.

[Via GeekPress]

I'd been eyeing the Trivial Pursuit Book Lover's Edition for some time, and today I finally picked it up. The questions are hard, and there's (in my humble opinion) too much of a focus on pop literature and not nearly enough focus on literature literature -- but it was a fun diversion without becoming tedious. It actually wasn't as impossible as we were expecting, or as it easily could have been.

I'm sure, given the company I keep, I'll have ample opportunity to play again.

This is the sort of TP that probably works better in teams.

Bookslut's reviewed the game in much more detail.

The Language Game. I got to round 8 before my head exploded. There are 21 in all.

This week's New Yorker -- amid a fascinating, almost-humanizing portrait of our next Chief Justice that clearly should have been called "Finding Nino" (not online, but an interview with the author is), reviews of Spamalot and a new biography of Kierkegaard, and an actually not-terrible story -- has a snippet about Popstrology, the new, absolutely reliable science that tells you who you are based upon who topped the pop charts the day you were born.

November 16th, 1979: The Commodores, "Still."

"People change, people grow, but few accept this as well as you." Are they kidding? I'm probably the worst person at accepting this in the entire world.

Hilariously, Jaimee was born under The Piña Colada Song. And all must kneel before my brother, born beneath David Bowie's "Let's Dance." Clearly the kid is destined for greatness.

Quirky little flash applet lets you obliterate your favorite websites, via Martian attack, dinosaur attack, nuclear attack, and many others. Oddly compelling.

[via MeFi]

The debut of a new literary journal always causes me a small pang in the breast. It can be such a vicious world for these little literary nestlings. A trim, handsome journal out of Greensboro, North Carolina makes its debut with this Fall 2004 issue, and if Volume 1 Number 1 is any indication, the folks behind Backwards City Review should be assured that, whatever perils await them on the road of financing, distribution, sales, etc., they’re well ahead of the game in the editorial department.

Wait, we're supposed to distribute it? Check out the rest of the very kind review, as well as this month's other featured magazines, here.

And needless to say, we still have some copies available for sale.

After years of kinda sorta wanting to read it, but always being skeptical, I bought Venus on the Half Shell -- the book Philip Jose Farmer wrote under the pseudonym of Kurt Vonnegut's pulp fiction alter-ego, Kilgore Trout -- for three dollars. (Cover images here. I have the really filthy one.) According to the interview quoted here, Farmer intended to write a whole series of these, but Vonnegut stopped him after the first one.

The entire book revolves around what many people would say is the central question of human experience: "Why are we born to suffer and die?"* It's a subject I never get tired of.

Now, Venus on the Half Shell is no classic. But it's such a bizarre merging of fiction and metafiction that it's really worth reading, particularly for any Vonnegut completist -- the style is such an intentionally perfect-but-imperfect approximation of Vonnegut's that it's basically the closest you'll ever get to reading a book from an alternate reality.

It's a rather strange literary experience.

--
*For what it's worth, I'd say the central question of human existence is actually "How is it that there is a universe in which we might be born to suffer and die in the first place?" Once we get that worked out, the rest of our questions, including the first one, should all fall into place.

Please read and retain for your records. If the Constitution were managed by the credit card companies (You mean it isn't? Quiet, you.) . By Evan Eisenberg at Slate.

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR U.S. CITIZENS ABOUT CHANGES TO YOUR CITIZENSHIP AGREEMENT.

PLEASE READ AND RETAIN FOR YOUR RECORDS.

We would like to explain certain changes in the terms of the Citizenship Agreement for your U.S. citizenship ("Agreement"). Some of the terms in this notice may already be in effect on your account and will not change. Any terms on your account not changed here remain in effect until such time as we ("We") decide they do not.

Funny 'cause it's true / sad 'cause it's true. Via Boing Boing.

Anyone who cares about higher education in this country should be looking with interest and horror at the Florida state legislature's Student & Faculty Academic Freedom Bill, which among other things gives students the right to sue professors and universities if they feel their ideological beliefs are not being represented in a class.

How hard is it to see what a disaster this would be for everyone involved if it were somehow able to pass? Every single good professor I've ever known (myself, I hope, included) would get sued instantaneously, most of them from both the left and the right (myself, I hope, included). Challenging students, whoever they are and regardless of what they believe, is part of what college is for.

So this bill effectively outlaws college. Super.

The Panda's Thumb has the frightening details. MetaFilter has also been talking about this, as well as a similar, even worse bill currently under discussion in Ohio, which in part forbids professors from "persistently introducing controversial matter into the classroom or coursework that has no relation to their subject of study and that serves no legitimate pedagogical purpose."

Who determines "relation to their subject of study"? Who adjudicates "legitimate pedagogical purpose"? And somebody better tell Case Western to shut down its English, philosophy, comparative literature, political science, classics, and mathematics departments, because I think nearly every single course I took there in four years fails to meet this standard in way or the other.

And the MFA Program in Writing at UNCG is even worse. We're there to learn spelling, punctuation, and syntax, not what Brian Crocker thinks about poverty. Keep on task, people!

Call me crazy, but I just don't think you go to college to have your preconceived notions ratified. You go to college to learn. If you already knew the Absolute Truth about Everything, you wouldn't have to go to college.

And I'm so incredibly tired of Newspeak. Just call it the Ruin Higher Education Act. At least that would be honest.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have the unique ability to concretize Mongolian barbeque-style restaurants through sheer force of will. Tonight I discovered, in the course of random "mongolian barbeque greensboro" Googling, that there's a BD's Mongolian Barbeque franchise in Fayetteville. So of course we went.

And it was good.

Best flash game ever. Take your little man around an alien planet and try to figure out their language. It's hard; I made it almost all the way through, but I have to go play Frisbee in a minute, so I cracked and used the walkthrough on the absolute last sequence. Kinda wish I hadn't.

[Via MetaFilter, which has more games to make your Friday Good.]

Ooh baby.

You've seen this guy's work everywhere, and his webpage is excellent.

[Via Rashomon.]

Gravity Lens had some good links today, including:

the 13 Symptoms of Pseudoscience

the 10 Laws of Bad Science Fiction

this year's 4 inductees to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame

how one of the President's bioethics advisors learned all she ever needed to know from watching Star Trek [BugMeNot link to bypass registration]

and the essential gift for any person who's afraid they may be abducted by forgetful aliens: the Dude-Where's-My-Planet dogtag.

Check it out. His few-week hiatus is finally over.

I enjoy this isn't a game and what did i just eat?, but I think to me they are the only real things in this world gets the prize from the new class.

Tonight's Daily Show had an amazing rundown of the way cable news has handled the Schiavo case. You can watch the clip here. Somehow they just keep topping themselves.

Completely atrocious.

Barney Martin, who played Jerry Seinfeld's dad on Seinfeld, has passed away.

Paging Ezra Plemons... At He-Man.org.

Fan-made animation for "Bloodmobile" by They Might Be Giants. I only dare post this because PClem is out of the state. Otherwise he'd break me in two. [Boing Boing]

Homestarrunner's new MegaMan parody game. [Flash] Keep try!

There's absolutely no content to this post, because David Pescovitz is still looking for a copy of the original pamphlet, but the image itself is too good not to post.

Dear Wendy's,

Today I was eating at one of your fine establishments and found a human finger in my bowl of chili. Please send me $25 million dollars.

Sincerely, One Horrified Woman.

God, that is just unbelievably gross. And Wendy's is the good fast food place. But don't worry:

Since all of the workers at the restaurant were in possession "of all 10 of their fingers," health inspectors assume the finger likely entered the food chain as a result of the manufacturing process, according to county Environmental Resources Director Ben Gale.

So it's all good.

(Also via Boing Boing)

Wow, what a neat way to set up your your laptop's background.



Gotta credit Boing Boing.

People always ask, "How could something like Nazi Germany happen?" A new book argues that it just isn't that complicated:

A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.

To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also -- in great contrast to World War I -- particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich's unsavory, murderous side.

[Via A&L Daily, which should be near the top of your daily rounds.]

They're having a Springsteen conference all about the Boss at Monmouth University. Let's all of us go. (Via the Don via Grand Text Auto)

Cool site.



(Via Boing Boing)

Ausiello at TVGuide.com is teasing us again. Come on already, make the stupid movie and then make the stupid Faith-on-a-Motorcycle spinoff:

Question: Are we getting any closer to a Spike movie? — Heather

Ausiello: Based on my conversations with both Whedon and WB entertainment president David Janollari last Thursday, it certainly sounds like we are. When I asked Janollari if he had given any further thought to the Spike telepic I pitched him at press tour in January, he said, "I have given it more thought since you brought it up. It's certainly something that I continue to get many fan letters and e-mails about, and it's something that we discuss a lot around here. But no decision has been made." Well, literally 15 minutes after I hung up with Janollari, Whedon called to weigh in on a William the Bloody revival. "I'm really for it, but I have never really spoken to David Janollari," he said. "I occasionally would bring it up with [execs at 20th Century] Fox, and they'd be like, 'Yeah, that would be cool.' And I'm like, 'Who do we need to talk to?' And then nothing has really happened. I've been really busy in post [-production] on Serenity and haven't been able to get the wheels turning, but I definitely intend to investigate it." When I relayed to him that Janollari had just told me that he was open to the idea, Whedon responded, "Well, that's something that I hope to get a chance to pursue." And what about his Wonder Woman commitment? Wouldn't that further delay things? "[Spike] is not necessarily something that I would write and direct myself," he suggested. "I have a lot of brilliant friends who worked with me for many years who might be able to take the helm — somebody who both James [Marsters] and I would trust." Whedon also revealed that the Spike pic would not be a prequel, thereby alleviating the age-related concerns Marsters recently expressed in Ask Ausiello. "For me, Spike is a very contemporary guy," he said. "It's sort of what distinguished him from Angel."

(via AICN)

UPDATE: True Whedonphiles can download all 52 minutes of the Firefly/Serenity panel at Wizard World here.

Searchable database of great world skylines.

Here's Greensboro. That is Greensboro's skyline, right? I think it is but it's hard to be sure I'm not just looking at some stock "small city" picture. [EDIT: I'm 99% sure that's actually Greensboro's skyline.]

And here's a popular one: Jakarta. And here's Rome and Paris. London. &c. It's kind of fun.

Some plants apparently have a bizarre, heretofore undiscovered mechanism by which they can edit out bad DNA and put a grandparent's good RNA in its place. Really, really weird science.

(via MetaFilter)

Film clips of Britain over the last 100 years.

"The Inivsible Century" at newstatesman.com. [A&L Daily]

Exactly what it sounds like. Don't miss the target gallery.

(via Gravity Lens)

Watch a hilariously suicidal monkey deliberately provoke a tiger. Comic sound effects at no additional charge.

I have a sneaking suspicion this video does not accurately reflect real jungle conditions.

Josef K, Gandalf, Philip Marlowe, Madame Bovary, Hamlet...none can hold a candle to Yossarian. (Exception: Milo Minderbinder.) One Hundred Favorite Fictional Characters at The Independent.

It's getting about time for me to read Catch-22 again. Maybe I'll bring it with me to Italy. What a great book.

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?"

"He sure is," Doc Daneeka said.

"Can you ground him?"

"I sure can but first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule."

"Then why doesn't he ask you to?"

"Because he's crazy," Doc Daneeka said. "He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."

"That's all he has to do to be grounded?"

"That's all. Let him ask me."

"And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.

"No, then I can't ground him."

"You mean there's a catch?"

"Sure there is a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

Where toys go to get dismembered, get reassembled, and get new names and superpowers, all from the minds of children. Very cool site from Cincinnati's Toy Lab. (Via Boing Boing.)

Who else but...Lowell from Wings?

The Myth and Reality of Espionage. At cia.gov of all places.

The New Yorker wonders.

The Aflac campaign apparently was born in the tradition of all memorable advertising lines, from “Ring around the collar” to “We’ll leave the light on for ya.” The American Family Life Assurance Company, a Fortune 500 company, was one of the largest suppliers of supplemental insurance policies (plugging the gaps in traditional insurance policies, usually for life-threatening illnesses or injuries), and had what to a small agency like Thaler’s seemed like a robust advertising budget of forty million dollars. (By contrast, a major drug company like AstraZeneca spends hundreds of millions annually to promote a single drug, Nexium.) When Thaler travelled to Columbus, Georgia, to meet with Aflac’s C.E.O., Dan Amos, he told her that what he wanted was for people to remember the name.

Thaler’s company was competing against another agency and had six weeks to devise a campaign. The creative team of Eric David and Tom Amico, who led the effort, were becoming frustrated. Walking to lunch one day, David silently repeated “Aflac, Aflac.” He started to say the word out loud. The more he said it, the more he realized he sounded like a duck. He ran back to the office and stood over Amico’s desk and, with a nasal effect, quacked, “Aflac! Aflac!” In five minutes, they wrote the first Aflac commercial, featuring two businessmen on a park bench. One mentions the value of supplemental insurance, and the other says, “What’s that?”

“Aflac,” quacks a duck.

"The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today."

So that's what went wrong with me.

Humans are different, for we cooperate with complete genetic strangers - workmates, neighbours, anonymous people in far-off countries. Why on earth do we do that?

For several decades, researchers have had a possible explanation: apparently selfless acts are nothing of the kind, but are instead a clever way of promoting individual self-interest. When rivals meet again and again, for example, the rewards of cooperation can outweigh the costs of conflict, so getting along pays dividends. Scientists have also come to realise what philanthropists such as Getty and Gates have long known: that altruism does wonders for your reputation. But does cooperation always have self-interested roots? Some researchers are starting to have their doubts.

Over the past decade, experiments devised by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, among others, have shown that many people will cooperate with others even when it is absolutely clear they have nothing to gain. A capacity for true altruism seems to be a part of human nature. It is a heartening discovery, yet one that has also touched off a firestorm of debate.

Why not try meth? At Salon.

--
Winners don't do drugs.

Eugene Volokh has recanted the pro-torture position he advocated the other day. Kudos to him.

(UPDATE: For a dissenting, kudosless view, here's Roch101 in the comments.)

This .pdf of the US Antarctic Program Participant Guide will let you know for sure.

(Via GeekPress)

Champing at the bit to get your hands on Backwards City #2? Can't believe that 40% of the editorial staff has the gall to get married in the middle of literary journal publishing season, pushing our already-a-touch-late release date back a whole month? You may need therapy.

Or you may just need to take a look at Chris Bachelder's e-book, Lessons in Virtual Photography, at McSweeneys.net. Chris is the author of the excellent Bear v. Shark, blogged here and here. Chris is awesome. And we've got one of his stories.

Still not enough for you? Then check out "Chocolate Milk Nosebleed Boys" by Kurtis Davidson and think about preordering his new book, What the Shadow Told Me, which is coming out on May 31st. KD has a new story in BCR #2, too, and it too is excellent.

Also in BCR #2: The winners of our first annual literary contest (Enter now! The postmark deadline is April 15th. Friends, colleagues, and and former students of Fred Chappell are not eligible to enter.), some hot comics (which we've still got a little space for -- so send us your work), and great poetry. Much, much great poetry.

So if you haven't yet, you should subscribe. Subscribe before April 15th and get BCR #1 and #2 for the unbelievably low rate of ten dollars; subscribe after April 15th and get BCR #2 and #3 for $12.

You: How can you make money with such low prices?
Us: That's not funny.

By fluke or design, novels that address the attacks of Sept. 11 are suddenly popping up on bookshelves, three years after the fact. Naturally, this sudden deluge has given rise to all sorts of worried and contradictory questions: What took so long? Has it really been long enough? Can fiction redress the wounds of that day? Are we ready to even try? Is it even possible to write a novel about 9/11 that is actually good?

Three novelists are trying, anyway, and Salon has the reviews.

Neat abstact music video for a John Coltraine jazz piece. Click "Watch the Movie" to see it.

(via MeFi)

Inside the heads of five video game writers.

Real life Shaolin Soccer (or Jedi Knight, if you prefer) [STREAMING VIDEO]. This guy's out of control.

Everything you ever wanted to know about ancient Hebrew cosmology.


The cosmos as described in the book of Enoch.
Picture © 1992 by Robert Schadewald.

Only this webpage can tell you for sure.

The horror...the horror...

I'm posting this almost exclusively for my friend and workshop partner Jeremy Isaac, who likes himself some Waits. But it's interesting reading for a general, non-Isaac audience, too.

Blog triumphialism writ large.

"The End of the World: Interpreting the Plague" is a pretty fascinating look at what happens to a society of scared little monkeys when a bunch of them start dropping dead all of a sudden.

"Jesus in the Classroom" is an detailed and impressively balanced history of the Cupertino school situation, where the Declaration of Indepence Was Banned From a Fifth Grade Classroom (but of course not really). This article does an amazing job of presenting both sides of the issue, painting Williams (the teacher involved) not as a cynical schemer (as you might expect if you've read any of the details of the case), but instead as a man who (a) was trying to teach to the California state standards as he understood them as best he could (b) did an good-to-exemplary job of teaching about a number of other religions (c) underwent a radical conversion experience one day and was simply unable to stop talking about it. ADF, the legal defense group fronting the case, doesn't come off quite as well, but isn't portrayed in a negative light, either.

Obviously, I'm basically sympathetic to the school district in this dispute, so it's hard for me to tell if this even-handedness works both ways, but I do know that I came out of the article with a little bit more of an understanding of where Williams' suit is coming from (though needless to say I still think he and his lawyers are wrong). It's not online, though. Why won't The New Yorker just put everything online? It'd make my life a lot easier.

Go meets Tetris.

Vladimir Bryntsalov, the pharmaceutical king of Russia, ... plans to spend $2 million on setting up a personal rejuvenation laboratory. He has had a course of stem cell injections and feels no older than 20, though his biological age is about 60.

(via MetaFilter)

Science at its finest. Video files of three water-balloon-popping scenarios filmed in low orbit on the Glenn DC-9. The same site also links to high-speed photographs of exploding water balloons under Earth's gravity conditions.

(Via Cynical-C)

At 3m.com. (Via Boing Boing. My friend Eric from college really did have a duct tape tuxedo, and his once made his girlfriend a duct tape dress.)

All from A&L Daily's top links today.

How to Win the US Memory Championship from Slate

The Making of William Faulkner by J.M. Coetzee in The New York Review of Books

A Philosophy of Boredom from The New Statesman

All about Wikipedia from Wired

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:31 AM  |

Cool image gallery of surreal Polish circus posters via Rashomon.

The Retail Alphabet Game.

Maps of all your favorite old- and new-school video games. Zoomable, too. Just great.

Here's Final Fantasy (click to enlarge):



(Via MetaFilter)

REMINDER: The opinions expressed at backwardscity.blogspot.com are the opinions of the individual editors who write them, not BCR or the editors as a group.

Two highly charged political posts in one week, much less a single day, was a little much. So I'm sorry for that -- it's been a rough week and today's absurdities really got to me.

But it's not what BCR is for, and it won't happen again.

According to The Washington Post, Bill Frist has called a comatose* woman (who has been completely brain dead* for over 15 years) to testify before Congress, all in a fanatical effort to prevent her life from being ended with dignity in accordance with both her and her husband's expressed wishes and Florida state law:

"The Senate and the House remain dedicated to saving Terri Schiavo's life," Frist said in a statement today. "While discussions over possible legislative remedies continue, the Senate and the House are taking action to keep her alive in the interim." He said the chairman of the Senate Health Committee has requested the presence of Terri Schiavo and her husband, Michael Schiavo, at a hearing on March 28 regarding "health care provided to non-ambulatory persons."

Although the Senate did not subpoena Schiavo or her caregivers, Frist's statement noted that federal criminal law protects witnesses called before congressional committee hearings "from anyone who may obstruct or impede a witness's attendance or testimony."

I think this is just about the single sickest thing that's ever been done on the floor of Congress. Are they going to wheel this woman's vegetative body into the committee chamber and start asking it questions? What is this perverse fascination with torturing Michael Shiavo? Why do they want to turn his private hell into a much worse, very public one?

What is wrong with the Republican Party[EDIT]'s leadership[/EDIT]? I don't know whether to cry or vomit.

(Thanks to Kevin Drum, who is equally horrified.)

UPDATE: *For clarity, I'm using the common understanding of these terms, not the exact medical definitions. As Majikthise says:

Court-appointed, government-appointed, and private physicians have confirmed that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Schiavo suffered massive brain damage as a result of a cardiac arrest 15 years ago, and ongoing neurological degeneration interim.

Patients in a PVS have no higher cognitive function and no chance of recovery.

Terri is neither comatose, nor brain dead. She is in a vegetative state because her higher brain centers have been destroyed and replaced by fluid.

"A collection of over 600 drawings made during the Spanish Civil War by Spanish schoolchildren, both in Spain and in refugee centers in France, rendered in pencil, crayon, ink, and watercolor."



(Also via Cynical-C, which found it on the fantastic Rashomon image blog)

"The cat just threw up on the carpet. Trouble's a-brewing."

Omens and superstitions associated with various animal behaviors, A-Z.

(via Cynical-C)

...using "non-judicial variables" like age, sex, and race.

Harper and computer scientist Stamos Karamouzis, who developed the network, reconstructed the profiles of more than 1,300 death row inmates from a national population using simple attributes such as race, sex, age and highest year of education when first imprisoned for a capital offense.

"We took a thousand of those profiles and used them to 'train' the network," says Harper.

They then tested the system using 300 profiles the network had never seen. It predicted the execution and non-execution rate with greater than 90% accuracy.

Flash game from Russia that starts out like another game you may have played, but rapidly differentiates itself into a totally new puzzle experience. Those Russians make a fun game.

Click on the big white Cyrillic letters to start.

"It's not like the first one. It's more emotional," said the director of the upcoming space adventure "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," which arrives in theaters May 19.

"I describe it as a 'Titanic' in space. It's a real tearjerker, and it will be received in a way that none of us can expect," he told theater owners at the ShoWest convention.

Okay, so at least we can finally be sure it'll suck.

Open the door for your mystery date. (Via Boing Boing)

UPDATE: Eugene has recanted this position. Kudos to him.

--
A few weeks ago, in my post about Ed Cone's Newcomer's Guide to the Blogosphere, I suggested Eugene Volokh as a good place to visit for a conservative take on the news. I'm going to yank that recommendation after reading this post -- in which a highly intelligent, supremely rational, well-educated man expresses his happy support for the deliberate infliction of bloody cruelty entirely for its own sake.

Lest you think I'm being unfair, here's what Volokh actually says, and what he goes on to defend in a number of updates and never even half-recants:

I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there's a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way. [emphasis mine]

He's saying the deliberate and cruel infliction of pain is a good in and of itself.

I'm devastated to see someone I respected -- even if I didn't always agree with him -- wallowing so unrepetently in humanity's absolute darkest impulses. Even in our worst moments, there must be some check upon our bloodthirsty rage. That way lies Lord of the Flies. That way lies madness and utter devastation.

Matt Yglesias has quite a bit more to say about this:

A society that encourages bloodthirsty behavior is going to become a society composed of bloodthirsty individuals.

Volokh notes that even torturing and killing a man who raped and killed dozens of children is, from a certain point of view, "ridiculously inadequate." Which is quite right and entirely part of the point. Unleashing excess cruelty on serious wrongdoers doesn't, in the end, solve anything, or balance out any sort of scales. Dead kids aren't revived and they're not really avenged, either. Family members pain and loss doesn't go away. You're merely telling people that they can and should try to fill the void left in their souls with the suffering of others. These are impulses that can and will easily become misdirected, turn into casual disregard for the interests of third parties, and spill over into all manner of contexts. There are real questions posed by what one might term "purposive cruelty" that's supposed to accomplish some worthy end other than mere indulgence of a desire for cruelty. But of the sort of thing we're contemplating now, there's no real affirmative case. Indulge the desire for cruelty for cruelty's sake and all you'll get is cruelty.

So does MetaFilter. So does everyone. But the words I really think of are Umberto Eco's:

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world.

Evil is evil, even when it wears a mask and froths about justice and "the greater good."

Poisonous ideas like this are extremely difficult to combat, because the only sane response is to recoil in horror. After all, how do you begin to argue with someone who sees nothing wrong with brutally torturing a person solely for another's pleasure?

It just astounds me that a conversation about whether or not we should deliberately torture people we're about to put to death to sate the bloodlust of the victims' families can even be on the table.

Some days I think the human soul is not a soaring bird but an abyss.

What we still don't understand. From New Scientist.

Word. Reuters has the story. TRU is sold - the question remains only whether the new owners will keep the stores, or if they just bought them for the real estate........

I hate you, Wal-Mart. You killed Geoffrey.
I hate you, Geoffrey. Your name is spelled terribly.

Link.

Whoops.

A&L Daily links to this New York Observer review of Jonathan Lethem's new book, The Disappointment Artist, which as a drooling Lethem fanboy I will surely be reading. Some of the material discussed in the review seems to come from the excellent "Personal History" from The New Yorker that I couldn't link to last month because it wasn't (and still isn't) online. I guess reading the review is the next best thing to reading that essay. Then, when you're sold, buy the book.

The first issue of The Gamer's Quarter -- a magazine that seeks to subject video games to the same sort of critical analysis/wankery that literature gets -- is available online as a PDF. Table of contents here.

(Via Slashdot, which says in part, "Included are fourteen lengthy articles, each with a unique perspective; one piece looks at the cultural meaning of Katamari Damacy, while another piece speaks of the writer's gradual acceptance of death as a learning tool." I don't know about all that, but I do know I've been trying to get Ezra to buy Katamari Damacy forever. It's universally beloved.)

Papier-mâché anatomical models from the National Museum of American History. Neat/gross.

7,500 brain teasers, riddles, logic problems, and mind puzzles.

Hurra Torpedo, a Norwegian faux* metal band that uses kitchen appliances for percussion, covers "Total Eclipse of the Heart." (Alternative link.)

You'll tell your grandchildren about the day you saw this video. Probably the best thing I've ever linked to on this blog.

(MeFi)

--
*At least I think it was faux. I hope it was faux.

Human population density over history. Clearly, something's gone terribly wrong. (via Cynical-C, which also points us, excellently, to 101 Useless Japanese Inventions.)

One idea for a story that I've played around with for a while and never really gotten to work, and I guess I'm just releasing into the wild now, is a "Guide to the Adult Rereading of Peter Pan." The ending of this book is incredibly dark, dark, dark, and nobody knows it because of the Disneyfied version we all grew up with. I never read the book as a kid; I only found out the real ending of the book when I stumbled across it on the 'net last year. Check out the last chapter:

Michael believed longer than the other boys, though they jeered at him; so he was with Wendy when Peter came for her at the end of the first year. She flew away with Peter in the frock she had woven from leaves and berries in the Neverland, and her one fear was that he might notice how short it had become; but he never noticed, he had so much to say about himself.

She had looked forward to thrilling talks with him about old times, but new adventures had crowded the old ones from his mind.

"Who is Captain Hook?" he asked with interest when she spoke of the arch enemy.

"Don't you remember," she asked, amazed, "how you killed him and saved all our lives?"

"I forget them after I kill them," he replied carelessly.

When she expressed a doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to see her he said, "Who is Tinker Bell?"

"O Peter," she said, shocked; but even when she explained he could not remember.

"There are such a lot of them," he said. "I expect she is no more."

He doesn't even remember Tinker Bell. That's cold. And things get colder.

All this is a long way of saying that I just can't imagine how any writer could possibly write a sequel to this book, given the circumstances of the ending. But someone's been chosen to do just that.

AICN says it's SPOILER: (Highlight to read) Beast, Gambit, and Angel. It's about time they added [the first of those]. They're also finally chosen a director (though I still say they should have just waited until Singer was done with Superman).

Refresh your memory about everything X-Men at the astounding rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks FAQ.

At Slate. WARNING: Contains easily avoidable spoilers for bad movies you ought not to see anyway.

Let me second the nomination for Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes. Just awful. That movie's ending is by far the most convoluted, most incomprehensible, single worst movie moment of all time (and intentionally so). After seeing it in the theater, Jaimee, Eric, Neil, and I spent almost forty minutes in the parking lot trying to figure how the last two minutes of that movie could possibly have happened, until Jaimee finally made us leave.

And I could tell the twist ending to The Village simply from reading an Internet transcription of its trailer, so you KNOW it's bad -- but Simon de Vet's verbal beating of it takes the prize:

The Village
I saw the twist ending coming within the first ten minutes, and spent the remaining eight hours of the film coming up with better twist endings:
- The village is on the bottom of the ocean
- The village is in a frighteningly plausible apocalyptic near future
- The village is surrounded by dinosaurs
- The village is on the moon
- The village is part of an elaborate reality TV series
- The village is microscopic, and located at the center of an atom
The Village is remarkable, as its twist ending is not only worse (or at least less interesting) than that of any other movie, it's worse than any other ending that is conceivable. In mathematical terms, the value of twist ending in The Village is less than epsilon, for any epsilon.
Simon de Vet

Burn.

I just ask one thing: leave Fight Club alone. It's good. I swear, it's good.

1. MoMAO: Pop art images of Mao Tse-Tung. The Last Banquet in particular is amazing. (via Cynical-C)



2. The MegaPenny Project: What various astronomical amounts of pennies would actually look like. (Also via Cynical-C)

3. Gallery of amazing images from the Hubble Telescope. Space's greatest hits. (Also via Cynical-C)

4. In death, Buddhism and Catholicism are one. The Buddhist afterlife meets the Catholic afterlife in this series of paintings from artist Moira Hahn (press release, artist statement). (via LinkFilter)

"Listening to the Beat of the Bomb." At The New York Times. I'll quote like a third of the article:

When Dr. Wolfe listens to this music, he hears people telling of great cities "scorched from the face of the earth" and wondering if they'll know "the time or hour when a terrible explosion may rain down upon our land."

In his own contribution to the collection, he cites what may be the first nuclear country song, "Atomic Power," released in 1946 by a well-established cowboy-country singer by the name of Fred Kirby.

The song asserts that atomic power "was given by the mighty hand of God" and suggests that those who use it unwisely will face cosmic retribution. When country music faced the bomb, it looked at the power of the atom through the prism of religion.

For the songwriters and the people who listened to their work, Dr. Wolfe said, the atomic bomb was not so much a weapon of war as "absolute proof that the deity exists and his power is infinite."

As a result, many of the country songs of the atomic age carried titles like "Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb," or "There Is a Power Greater Than Atomic."

There is no power greater than MetaFilter.

"Geologists have called for a taskforce to be set up to consider emergency management in the event of a massive volcanic eruption, or super-eruption. The recommendation comes in a report timed to coincide with a BBC TV drama that depicts a fictional super-eruption at Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, US."

(Via Marginal Revolution, which adds that the supervolcano, may, in fact, be prophecized by the Bible Code. Supervolcano previously mentioned/feared here.)

Which is pretty excellent.

And when you're done there, be sure to check out John's blog.

Everybody knows the Nazis failed to invent the A-Bomb. What my book presupposes is...maybe they didn't?

(via A&L Daily)

Amazing Amazon search engine that spells out your search terms with images from the results. Click on the book covers for more information and a link to the Amazon entry.

Calvino
Lethem
Nabokov
etc

Neat, and actually fairly useful -- how else would I have found out that inaugural BCR contributor Kurt Vonnegut finally has a new book coming out? If there were only some way for us to get Amazon kickbacks off this thing, it'd be perfect.

(Also via MetaFilter.)

"What do you do when you've created the most popular PC game of all time? If you're Sims designer Will Wright, you set your sights even higher. His latest project, revealed today at Game Developers Conference 2005, is nothing less than a game about the past and the future, the evolution of life, the development of intergalactic civilization."

This game sounds amazing:

* Tidepool phase: In the game's initial state, the action most resembles a sort of free-form Pac-Man. There's also a strong hint of Super NES classic E.V.O. and quirky GameCube cult favorite Cubivore; fighting and consuming other creatures allows you to adjust the form and abilities of your creature.
* Evolution phase: Once your creature begins to grow and take on a distinct physical form, the game switches to a more Diablo-like feel. With its emphasis on battling other creatures to strengthen yourself while making forays away from your safe haven, this section is very much about growth and development.
* Tribal phase: When your creation has achieved a satisfying level of physical development, you can focus on its mental acuity. At this point, you relinquish control of an individual and instead move to a streamlined RTS interface, caring for an entire tribe of your homebrewed beasties, giving them tools, food and slowly upgrading their state of existence. Think Populous.
* City phase: Here the game becomes more like Wright's own SimCity, with emphasis resting primarily on building up the technology, architecture and infrastructure of your race's dwellings.
* Civ phase: Once your city is established, you can zoom out to the global scale. Here your people begin seeking out other cultures in a Civilization-style experience. Interfacing with the rest of the world can be tackled in many ways, be it militaristically or diplomatically; on foot, in boats or by airship. Ultimately, however, the goal is for your creatures to conquer the planet.
* Invasion phase: Once the world is your oyster, you can move on to other worlds in your solar system to colonize or terraform. And beyond that you'll find other solar systems, scattered throughout a beautifully-rendered galaxy in which planets lurk among dust clouds and black holes spew ejecta. Here you set forth to make contact with other planets.

The Invasion section of the game is enormous, potentially endless. After hunting for other populated worlds, players can venture into the universe in the manner they think best fits their personality: Whether using the diplomacy of Star Trek or the destructive fury of War of the Worlds. Some races will welcome players, while others will greet instellar visitors with hostility.

(Via MetaFilter, which has more, including some amazing screenshots. I wish I had this game right now.)

UPDATE: In the comments, Neil says, correctly, "Sign up today!"

UPDATE 2: And here's the link to Carolina Donor Services.

--
New Zealand joins Holland in experimenting with the no give/no take organ donation policy.

If I were a fascist, I'd make organ donation mandatory. But since I'm not a fascist, people's squeamishness will still win out. Pragmatically and ethically speaking, though, everyone should be an organ donor. Seriously.

(via Marginal Revolution)

Self-esteem is for everybody. What Sesame Street looks like in China, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Palestine, Russia, and South Africa (which even has an HIV-positive character to reflect the reality of life in that nation). Really interesting stuff.

Reason #17.

I know something about this, having grown up as the child of a fiction writer. When my mother, Hilma Wolitzer, published her first novel, "Ending," in 1974, it featured a scene in which a woman performs oral sex on her dying husband: "I kneeled and made a carpet of our clothing on the floor, and I led him down inside me." After the novel came out, Brian Spiviano went roaring down the ninth-grade hall, shouting, "Read Page 180! Read Page 180!"

Maybe nowhere.

Over the years, string theory has simultaneously become more frustrating and fabulous. On the one hand, the original theory has become mind-bogglingly complex, one that posits an 11-dimensional universe (far more than the four- dimensional universe of Einstein). The modified theory is so mathematically dense that many Ph.D.-bearing physicists haven't a clue what their string- theorist colleagues are talking about.

On the other hand, new versions of the theory suggest our universe is just one of zillions of alternate, invisible -- perhaps even inhabited -- universes where the laws of physics are radically different. String buffs claim this bizarre hypothesis might help to explain various cosmic mysteries.

...

But skeptics suggest it's the latest sign of how string theorists, sometimes called "superstringers," try to colorfully camouflage the theory's flaws, like "a 50-year-old woman wearing way too much lipstick," jokes Robert B. Laughlin, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford. "People have been changing string theory in wild ways because it has never worked."

Bonus points for a mention of the old alma mater (go Spartans).

Two years ago, Don Steinberg presented Brainteasers: The Aftermath in The New Yorker, but I only found it today on MetaFilter's Knights and Knaves link.

PROBLEM: I was born in Boston, and my parents were born in Boston. Yet I was not born a United States citizen. How is this possible?

ANSWER: I was born before 1776, before the United States was created.

SUBSEQUENTLY: Like many others, I became a proud U.S. citizen in 1776. The ensuing years have been arduous for me, and I bear no small shame for the unholy means by which I have sustained myself for more than two centuries. You see, I am not only a U.S. citizen . . . I am also a vampire.

In preparation for the big party at Fay and Ezra's house this Thursday, Gravity Blog has your wicked awesome Irish scifi linkage.

Is California about to join Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Jersey?

Even the part of me that realizes all these court victories are just going to mobilize right-wingers for the next thirty years, a la Roe v. Wade, can't help but be jubilant when something like this happens. Let's keep moving foward.

A group blog devoted to smacking down creationism. Excellent.

The New York Times takes on the single biggest problem in television today, the simpleminded refusal to just plan things out in advance. This is a huge problem on Lost, as I mentioned last week, and it's probably the second-biggest problem on 24, after the creeping fascism. From the second link:

Today our bipolar attitude toward the show has swung to contemptuous and disgusted from yesterday's condescending and amused. I just can't get away from thinking that the show is habituating viewers to the idea that ordering a subordinate to taser the living shit out of another subordinate on the basis of a half-hour investigation is a perfectly normal thing for an American government official to do. Any harm that accrues to the subordinate being deliberately and repeatedly electrocuted is entirely the responsibility of the scheming black chick who set her up, not the woman who orders the torment or the man who inflicts it. Repulsive.

(More on that from earlier in the season here and here, with a dissenting voice from Kevin Drum here and here.)

Of course, on the other side of things, tonight's afterschool special about non-terrorist Muslims was pretty terribly insulting in its own right. Bad, bad episode. And bad, bad writers.

(Via Jeremy Isaac and the Television Without Pity Forums)

Outstanding. A very small bit of it is in French, which I can't speak, but it's still outstanding.

(Via Boing Boing, which also links to Drawn!, a comics blog I hadn't seen before.

If you're not reading Chris Ware, you absolutely should be. I'd love to have him in the BCR someday. I've already written him. Are you there, Chris? It's me, Gerry.)

This nonsense from Camile Paglia is making the rounds. I don't have time to do much more than sneer at this, but as usual the people who decry postmodernism seem not to really understand it very well.

The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry. It's why the pragmatic Anglo-American tradition (unlike effete French rationalism) doesn't need poststructuralism: in English, usage depends upon context; the words jostle and provoke one another and mischievously shift their meanings over time. [emphasis mine]

Can anyone tell me what she's talking about? That's what poststructuralism means.

For me, poetry is speech-based and is not just an arbitrary pattern of signs that can be slid around like a jigsaw puzzle.

Uh, Camille, I hate to break this to you, but speech itself is an arbitrary pattern of signs that can be slid around like a jigsaw puzzle.

Good writing comes from good reading. All literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader. Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing. Technical analysis of a poem is like breaking down a car engine, which has to be reassembled to run again.

Okay, now the problem is starting to come into focus. Paglia doesn't think literary criticism is complicated. Well, she's wrong. It is. Literary criticism is a highly specialized field with its own highly specialized discourse; you wouldn't expect a random person to be able to come in off the street and do it anymore than you'd be able to, say, expect a random person off the street to be able to come in, take apart a car engine, and then put it back together again.

That doesn't mean you need a PhD in English to read a book and understand it. You don't need a PhD in economics to do your taxes. You don't need a PhD in biology to breathe. But the idea that any person should be able to craft a rigorous understanding of any text is as postmodern -- in the most pejorative sense -- an idea as that any person, anywhere in the country, is as qualified as any expert to discuss the Theory of Evolution. Knee-jerk populism and 'common sense' have their limits. Some disciplines are hard and require effort to master.

The mere fact that literary theory is difficult and a little abtruse at times doesn't make it evil.

Paglia also says this, which seems to be at the heart of her beef with postmodernism:

The sacred remains latent in poetry, which was born in ancient ritual and cult. Poetry's persistent theme of the sublime - the awesome vastness of the universe - is a religious perspective, even in atheists like Shelley. Despite the cosmic vision of the radical, psychedelic 1960s, the sublime is precisely what poststructuralism, with its blindness to nature, cannot see. Metaphor is based on analogy: art is a revelation of the interconnectedness of the universe.

Or maybe this sort of aesthetic mysticism is incomprehensible hoo-hah. Maybe the whole notion of "the sublime" is just another structure to be studied. Maybe it's just another text.

Here.

I'm gonna take this:

IGN DVD: Ok, I gotcha. One of the things I liked was Bob's frustration, when he talked about celebrating mediocrity, and Syndrome's comment that if everyone is super, then no one is. Do you think people picked up on that point?

Bird: I think so. I think it got misinterpreted a few times. Some people said it was Ayn Rand or something like that, which is ridiculous. other people threw Nietzsche around, which I also find ridiculous. But I think the vast majority of people took it the way I intended. Some people said it was sort of a right-wing feeling, but I think that's as silly of an analysis as saying The Iron Giant was left-wing. I'm definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd.

as a personal f-you to me, though I wasn't the only one, and anyway as with everything I was only partially serious.

At The Straight Dope.

My understanding was that your only real chance of surviving a fall from a plane is landing as horizontally as possible, to keep your spinal cord from collapsing. But apparently snow and pine needles work too.

The Experimental Gameplay Project:
create 50 to 100 games in 1 semester

The Rules:

each game must be made in less than 7 days

each game must be made by one person, including all art, sound, and programming

each game must be based around a certain "toy" ie. "gravity", "vegetation", "swarm behavior", etc.

See what they came up with.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:37 PM  |

Red Mountain Blog: The official blog of newly formed literary magazine Red Mountain Review.

Blockland is a non-competitive multiplayer game where you build with interconnecting bricks. I can't play this at the moment because I'm at school, but if you're on your own computer, you should give it a whirl. Hopefully LEGO will give the guy a contract, rather than sue him. (Via MetaFilter)

Meet New Jersey's next governor. One thing America definitely needs more of is celebrity politicans.

So *now* will Bruce run for office?

...though it may be a fruit. Legislatures should have to send us all a check for $100 whenever they just waste time like this.

Bizarre new flash puzzle in the spirit of the Dark Room, the Crimson Room and the Viridian Room. Waste your day.

Back to work.

All the poetry of Sylvia Plath, online.

At JayPinkerton.com.

...as well as to anything you write in Instant Messenger. You also waive any right to privacy. The moral? Stop using Instant Messenger immediately.

(via MeFi, parts of which are suitably outraged)

The man behind the droid.

Seriously.

The New York Times confirms.