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Saturday, April 30, 2005

Student Survivor
Type in the commands necessary to keep your simulated student alive.
A&L Daily Linkdump
Some good links at A&L Daily today.
  • The City Journal considers vaudeville, while in The Wall Street Journal Harold Bloom is talking Hans Christen Andersen.

  • Commentary flings poo at Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

  • And The Moscow Times reviews a new biography of Stalin that proves once again that totalitarianism and meticulous copy editing go hand in hand.
  • I've really come to rely on A&L Daily lately. Maybe it's gotten better recently, or maybe I have, but it's become one of the first stops on my daily hitlist.
    Imagine a Walk on the Wild Side
    Now imagine President Bush singing, Shatner-style, a remix of "Imagine" and "Walk on the Wilde Side" [MP3]. From the people who brought you Bush singing "Sunday Bloody Sunday" [MP3, previously blogged here).

    [via Boing Boing]
    Haruki Murakami's Holistic Detective Agency
    Best New Yorker fiction in recent memory. Great story.
    “So that’s the situation,” she said. “Will you take the case?”

    No need to think about it. This was exactly the kind of case I’d been hoping for. I went through the motions of checking my schedule, though, and pretended to be shuffling a few things around. If you instantly agree to take a case, the client may suspect some ulterior motive.

    “Luckily, I’m free until later this afternoon,” I said, shooting my watch a glance. It was eleven-thirty-five. “If you don’t mind, could you take me over to your building now? I’d like to see the last place you saw your husband.”

    “I’d be happy to,” the woman said. She gave a small frown. “Does this mean you’re taking the case?”

    “It does,” I replied.

    “But we haven’t talked about the fee yet.”

    “I don’t need any money.”

    “I’m sorry?” she said, looking steadily at me.

    “I don’t charge anything,” I explained, and smiled.

    “But isn’t this your job?”

    “No, it isn’t. This isn’t my profession. I’m just a volunteer, so I don’t get paid.”

    “A volunteer?”

    “Correct.”

    “Still, you’ll need something for expenses.”

    “No expenses needed. I work on a volunteer basis only, so I can’t accept payment of any kind.”

    The woman still looked perplexed.

    “Fortunately, I have another source of income that provides enough to live on,” I explained. “I’m not doing this for the money. I’m just very interested in locating people who’ve disappeared. Or, more precisely, people who’ve disappeared in a certain way. I won’t go into that—it’ll only complicate things. But I am pretty good at this sort of thing.”

    “Tell me, is there some kind of religion or New Age thing behind all this?” she asked.

    “Neither one. I have no connection with any religion or New Age group.”

    The woman glanced down at her shoes, perhaps contemplating how—if things got really weird—she might have to use the stiletto heels against me.

    “My husband always told me not to trust anything that’s free,” the woman said. “I know this is rude to say, but he insisted that there’s always a catch.”

    “In most cases, I’d agree with him,” I said. “In our late-stage capitalist world, it’s hard to trust anything that’s free. Still, I hope you’ll trust me. You have to, if we’re going to get anywhere.”
    Friday, April 29, 2005

    Castle Attack 2
    Actually sort of fun once you get past the first two, terribly boring levels.
    RxSunglasses
    For years I've had a strict policy of never wearing sunglasses, because they leave me completely blind. (My eye prescription isn't that serious, but for whatever reason I can't see anything while wearing sunglasses.)

    Well, no more. I bought myself a pair of prescription sunglasses at LensCrafters today during their $100 off sale, and they've already changed my life.

    I now wear sunglasses exclusively.
    Curing the Blind
    Imagine being blind for 25 years, and suddenly being able to see again - using your ears. It sounds impossible, but that's exactly what happened to Pat Fletcher. For the past few years, she's been experimenting with a revolutionary new technology that allows her to see through sound. Using a simple computer program that she downloaded from the Internet, called "The vOICe", which translates visual images into soundscapes, Pat's brain is able to translate those sounds back into images.

    [via Boing Boing]
    These Things Happen To Other People. They Don't Happen At All, In Fact.
    Following up on yesterday's [Napoleon] Lucky! [/Napoleon] comes [Napoleon] Idiot! [/Napoleon], as the two guys who found buried treasure in their backyard are arrested for theft.
    Crebase told investigators the men found the money in the gutter of a barn they were hired to repair, police said.

    "We got an anonymous tip two days ago," Capt. Kris McCarthy told the Eagle-Tribune newspaper of Lawrence. "These guys are roofers. They found the money on the job site. They story after that was all made up."
    (Credit Shemko for the win. He not only scoped the article but came up with the outstanding [Napoleon] Idiot! [/Napoleon] callback. That cat's all right.)
    Hate the Enlightenment? Blame Don Quixote
    Interesting article in the UK's Prospect Magazine which more or less gives Don Quixote full credit for inventing not only the modern novel but also the modern world.
    The day Quixote and Sancho rode out from their unnamed village, a fictional blueprint came to life. Don Quixote is our prototypical text, the first story to emerge out of a self-awareness of its own fictional form, to take as its theme the gap between appearance and reality; to be, in our terms, modern. It is to the modern novel what Sigmund Freud is to psychoanalysis.
    ...
    Fuentes illuminates well Don Quixote's suffering—that he must choose between the drama of make-believe and the mean necessities of reality—but the novel additionally lights the way of readers yet unborn through the knight's dual lesson of the choice he must make and the choice the reader must make about his fictional necessity (or not).

    Believe in me! My feats are true, the windmills are giants, the herds of sheep are armies, the inns are castles and there is in the world no lady more beautiful than the empress of la Mancha, the unrivalled Dulcinea del Toboso! Believe in me.

    Reality, as Fuentes writes, "may laugh or weep on hearing such words." But reality also feels itself outmanoeuvred, outgunned by their appeal. After hearing them, we as readers can forever understand that there is more than one objective reality.
    The comparison to Freud strikes me as sort of a backhanded compliment, but the rest is certainly true.
    There is a view in literary-critical circles that Don Quixote's signal accomplishment was the victorious elevation of the novel over the romance. The deluded knight's attack on Master Pedro's puppet theatre for example, is, according to Bloom, "a parable of the triumph of Cervantes over the picaresque and of the triumph of the novel over the romance."

    Yet this seems a limited reading of the novel. It is as unfair to say that the Quixote is merely a "critical parody" of the romance as it is to say that its eponymous hero is merely mad. The forms of Cervantes's moral thought are pointed to in his humour: the author is simultaneously satirising Quixote's belief in chivalry and commemorating it through the comic forms of his forgiveness...In the Quixote [romance] is the engine both of Quixote's folly and of our deepening sympathy—a reader's way of recognising a hero's predicament as latently his or her own. Through the innumerable possible readings of the Quixote, we can perhaps identify a core of distinct principles: that there is no reality without folly, and no underlying perception of reality without romance, of one kind or another, to draw out human curiosity.
    This is certainly true, too.

    One last thing. It's a minor part of the article, but it bears considering:
    But Cervantes could not know that in 2002, in a poll organised by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, 100 writers worldwide would vote Don Quixote the "best and most central work" in literature, eclipsing the plays of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky's novels and Homer's epics.
    In Don Quixote vs. Hamlet: The Brawl for It All, I do think it's Don Quixote by a nose. The Odyssey potentially edges out Hamlet, too, or so I feel right now. Too close to call, certainly.

    [also via A&L Daily]
    Hmm
    Scientific American has an article which claims monkey toy preference breaks down along the same 'expected' gender line as human toy preference:
    Several intriguing behavioral studies add to the evidence that some sex differences in the brain arise before a baby draws its first breath. Through the years, many researchers have demonstrated that when selecting toys, young boys and girls part ways. Boys tend to gravitate toward balls or toy cars, whereas girls more typically reach for a doll. But no one could really say whether those preferences are dictated by culture or by innate brain biology.

    To address this question, Melissa Hines of City University London and Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University turned to monkeys, one of our closest animal cousins. The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the "masculine" toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys.

    Because vervet monkeys are unlikely to be swayed by the social pressures of human culture, the results imply that toy preferences in children result at least in part from innate biological differences. This divergence, and indeed all the anatomical sex differences in the brain, presumably arose as a result of selective pressures during evolution. In the case of the toy study, males--both human and primate--prefer toys that can be propelled through space and that promote rough-and-tumble play. These qualities, it seems reasonable to speculate, might relate to the behaviors useful for hunting and for securing a mate. Similarly, one might also hypothesize that females, on the other hand, select toys that allow them to hone the skills they will one day need to nurture their young.
    I'm not calling bullshit or anything, but I'd really like to see those results replicated.

    [via A&L Daily]
    Thursday, April 28, 2005

    Munch Update
    Last August, Munch's "The Scream" was stolen from its museum in Norway, much to Ezra's pleasure. Now a newspaper is claiming the painting has been destroyed.

    [via MetaFilter]
    Da Bomb
    Salon is bringing the heat.
    For most Americans under 40, the dread that saturated the 1980s is indelible. It was part of the fabric of their childhood. One friend recently rediscovered a little booklet of poems and stories she'd written in the second grade. "About half of them," she says, "mentioned nuclear war and how scared I was that I was going to die. The specter of nuclear war absolutely terrorized me when I was young and I think it's to blame for the fact that I had horrible insomnia from the ages of about 5 to 12."
    I don't know how widespread this fear was among people my age, but growing up in the late '80s and early '90s I was terrified of nuclear war, and yes, it kept me up at night too. For about a year in fifth grade I couldn't fall asleep; in the dark every plane was a missile, and the skies over NJ have a lot of planes.

    I remember knowing at the time, intellectually, that my fear was basically irrational, but being unable to shake it anyway. What ultimately happened is that my fear of nuclear war got mixed up with my fear of dying, a more general, dispersed dread that I've mostly learned to live with.
    Blogging Everest
    Because it's there.
    Confessions of a Midlist Author
    Frightening New York Times profile of Steve Stern, a midlist author who "everyone believes in" whose sales have thus far been "modest."
    Robert Weil, the executive editor of W. W. Norton, considers the situation to be even more dire. "If you speak to publishers about the sales of literary fiction - I mean we're in real trouble in this country," he said. "Sales are shocking these days, even compared to 10 years ago. And publishers are seriously cutting back."
    Aw, crud.

    [via Monkeyfilter]
    [Napoleon] Lucky! [/Napoleon]
    Friends find treasure buried in back yard. Unbelievable. These things don't happen.

    In fairness, I much prefer this version of the story, which depicts the friends already squabbling about the money.

    In other news, Hamburg, Germany, faces an epidemic of exploding toads.
    Marginally Interesting Aspects of Essentially Uninteresting Things
    American Idol Department:
    American Idol is the most watched television series in the world, but a pattern has emerged that makes the show pretty boring. The producers and judges pick one contestant to "pimp" and this contestant ends up winning, making American Idol less a show where the viewers pick the winner and more a show where the judges and producers get the viewers to vote for who they like. Borrrrrrring.

    So, here at votefortheworst.com, we have a solution. Help us by voting for the worst that American Idol has to offer.
    Wednesday, April 27, 2005

    Dǒngma?
    One of the best things about the near-future of Firefly is the notion that a Sino-American alliance colonized space, leading to a mix of the two cultures. In that vein, here are some Mandarin phrases for Firefly fans.

    This show was the best science fiction on tv in recent memory. I'm still sad about its cancellation.
    Remembering Douglas Adams
    Anecdotes from Terry Jones, Neil Gaiman, Stephen Fry, and others. At FilmForce.
    And, Of Course, The Inevitable
    Darth Vader's blog.
    How Star Wars Changed the World
    From Wired.
    Kevin Smith's Spoiler Review of Revenge of the Sith
    WARNING, MASSIVE SPOILERS:
    "Revenge of the Sith" is, quite simply, fucking awesome. This is the "Star Wars" prequel the haters have been bitching for since "Menace" came out, and if they don't cop to that when they finally see it, they're lying.
    I don't know. I feel like Kevin could have used more cursing.
    Two from A&L Daily
  • On Dali

  • On the Looting of Ancient Art
  • LifeGem
    Because diamonds are a girl's best friend forever the perfect memorial for your loved one.
    Why is a LifeGem Right For Me?

    If you desire an everlasting connection and closeness to the one you have lost, the LifeGem is right for you. Each LifeGem, as a celebration of life, tells a unique story and represents a new beginning.

    This closeness and mobility, offered only by a LifeGem, will help you keep your loved one with you and in your life at all times.

    And of course, as the LifeGem is a one-of-a-kind diamond, it will be a treasured heirloom in your family for generations to come.
    Creepy. (Thanks, Steve!)
    This Will Not End Well
    Scientists say they can read a person's unconscious thoughts using a simple brain scan.
    Tuesday, April 26, 2005

    Serenity Trailer
    Joss Whedon's Serenity (based on the hit excellent television series Firefly) hits theaters September 20th. Here's the trailer.

    I can't wait for this.

    UPDATE: Wikipedia has some background, if you're not already in the know. [via MetaFilter]
    I Can't Believe You're Doing This To Me
    Robert Zubek's Breakup Simulator. Get your practice in before you make it count.
    How Readable is backwardscity.blogspot.com?
    Less readable than The Guardian, slightly more readable than most academic papers! Whoopsies. In our defense, though, we've got the smartest readers on the Internet.
    Mission Accomplished
    I stumbled across this quote from H. L. Mencken today. I got a kick out of it.
    The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

    The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

    -H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
    The AMAZING STORY of SUPERMAN-RED and SUPERMAN-BLUE!
    Somebody scanned in an old-school Superman comic. What's funniest is that DC liked this idea so much that wound up using it in the aborted Superman redesign a few years ago.

    [via MetaFilter]
    'Jorie Graham, Superstar'
    Mixed review of Jorie Graham's latest book from David Orr in The New York Times. Burn?
    In this uncertain atmosphere, Graham is a uniter, not a divider. For one thing, she's nice. In interviews, Graham comes off as kindhearted and eager to praise -- the sort of person you'd want as a colleague or mentor. She has friendly words for avant-gardists like Susan Howe; friendly words for formalists like Anthony Hecht; and friendly words for her tribe of former students (''I love all of them,'' she says, and it must be true, because they show up with remarkable frequency as winners of the many contests she judges). Moreover, as Shelley might say, if Graham fell upon the thorns of life, she'd blurb. A typical Graham book plug is so rhapsodic and inscrutable (one blurbee has ''an ear so finely tuned it cannot but register all the finest, filamentary truths the eye discerns'') that it practically yodels Poooeeetrrry! Which doesn't mean she's insincere. As Graham puts it, ''There are very few poets whose work doesn't, someplace in its enterprise, stun me.'' Poooeeetrrry!
    Burn.
    What's the Matter with Liberals?
    From The New York Review of Books
    For more than thirty-five years, American politics has followed a populist pattern as predictable as a Punch and Judy show and as conducive to enlightened statesmanship as the cycles of a noisy washing machine. The antagonists of this familiar melodrama are instantly recognizable: the average American, humble, long-suffering, working hard, and paying his taxes; and the liberal elite, the know-it-alls of Manhattan and Malibu, sipping their lattes as they lord it over the peasantry with their fancy college degrees and their friends in the judiciary.

    Conservatives generally regard class as an unacceptable topic when the subject is economics—trade, deregulation, shifting the tax burden, expressing worshipful awe for the microchip, etc. But define politics as culture, and class instantly becomes for them the very blood and bone of public discourse. Indeed, from George Wallace to George W. Bush, a class-based backlash against the perceived arrogance of liberalism has been one of their most powerful weapons. Workerist in its rhetoric but royalist in its economic effects, this backlash is in no way embarrassed by its contradictions. It understands itself as an uprising of the little people even when its leaders, in control of all three branches of government, cut taxes on stock dividends and turn the screws on the bankrupt. It mobilizes angry voters by the millions, despite the patent unwinnability of many of its crusades. And from the busing riots of the Seventies to the culture wars of our own time, the backlash has been ignored, downplayed, or misunderstood by liberals.
    Interesting ideas, though I disagree with good chunks of it.

    [via A&L Daily]
    A Field Guide to Critical Thinking
    I'm continually surprised how many people need something like this.

    Not YOU, of course, dear readers. I'm talking about other people.
    Monday, April 25, 2005

    Robocop: The Musical
    MetaFilter has your preview. From the people who brought you Silence! Silence of the Lambs: The Musical.
    Two from Rashomon
  • The 25 Greatest Comic Book Covers of All Time

  • The Unicorn Tapestries at MoMa's the Met's Cloisters. I saw these when I was in fourth grade and never forgot about it. They're outstanding.

    [Rashomon]
  • Does Watching TV Make You Smarter?
    A new book argues that it does. The New York Times has what appears to be an excerpt.
    For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.
    Or else they've made us all so incredibly stupid we don't even know what smart is anymore. One or the other.

    [via MetaFilter]

    UPDATE: Take, for instance, Johnson's much-vaunted episode of 24. I love 24; I watch it every week. But it certainly isn't making me any smarter.

    How does 24 accomplish its deep critical work? By
    a) stereotyping nearly every character
    b) constantly violating believability, including its own established rules and conventions
    c) reminding its viewers of the current plotline with at least five minutes of reintroduction and reexposition every single week
    d) completely retconning the plotline every five episodes, dropping entirely almost every plot thread that came before.
    Seriously, I have nothing against junk culture, which I sadly consume as much as everybody else -- but if you want something that'll make you smarter, read a book. I recommend Among the Missing by Dan Chaon.

    UPDATE 2: Uh, or the first issue of Backwards City Review, which is guaranteed to make you smarter or your money back. (This is not a guarantee.) Order it today.
    Mice Put in 'Suspended Animation'
    Sweet.
    In the latest study, Dr Roth and his colleagues found that the mice stopped moving and appeared to lose consciousness within minutes of breathing the air and H2S mixture.

    The animals' breathing rates dropped from the normal 120 breaths per minute to less than 10 breaths per minute.

    During exposure their metabolic rates dropped by an astonishing 90%, and their core body temperatures fell from 37C to as low as 11C.

    After six hours' exposure to the mixture, the mice were given fresh air. Their metabolic rate and core body temperature returned to normal, and tests showed they had suffered no ill effects.
    Can You Tell the Difference Between Real Photographs and CGI?
    Take the quiz? I flunked; five out of ten.
    Someday, This Will Kill Us All
    What a nuke looks like on the inside.

    [via Linkfilter]
    I Didn't Know This Could Happen
    A 20-year-old Scottish woman is suing a hospital where she had an abortion in 2001 after one of her twins survived the operation.
    Dan Chaon
    ...read in Greensboro a few weeks ago, and I was shocked to discover that I was the absolutely last person among my circle of fiction writers to discover his work. They'd all read him before me, passing his excellent second collection around, but somehow it never got to me.

    They had their excuses -- PClem swears he loaned me the book -- but I know it was a conspiracy.

    My second favorite story from Among the Missing is online: "Big Me", which is great in no small part because it uses the Gerry of the Past / Gerry of the Future construction I've been amusing/torturing myself with since elementary school. I can't find my favorite story from the book -- "Here Is a Little Something to Remember Me By" -- online, but you should buy the collection for this story alone. It's unbelievably good.

    Or you could buy You Remind Me of Me, the very funny novel he read from, which comes out in paperback tomorrow.
    Sunday, April 24, 2005

    Guess the Google
    Game that gives you twenty pictures returned by a Google image search and asks you to guess the keyword.
    Extreme Insect Closeup
    Portraits of a Hidden World.

    I'd put a picture up, but it'd make Jaimee scream.

    [via Boing Boing]
    That Other Magazine
    Can anyone recall another week where The New Yorker didn't publish any fiction? This is the first one I ever remember seeing.

    Or perhaps I'm just forgetful.

    The Saul Bellow piece is pretty good; it's just a collection of his reflections to Philip Roth about some of his books. Not being overly familiar with Bellows's work, I just skimmed down to the pieces I recognized. For instance, take this, Structure of Fiction (Fall 2002):
    I don’t like that book, “Seize the Day.” I never think about it, I never take it up, I don’t touch it.
    The John Brown piece is good too, if only for some much-needed perspective one of America's most complex and most unfairly maligned historical figures.
    Long before he led the botched and bloody anti-slavery raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, Brown, we are taught, was a moral visionary and a man of uncanny courage and integrity. Every one of his central moral convictions and most of his peripheral ones, too, have been vindicated by history. He was a dedicated feminist, who had his sons do the housework on terms of equality with his daughters; he was a farmer who had gentle and respectful relations with neighboring Native Americans, so that, even before he became famous as the fighting fury of abolition, they liked and respected him. Above all, he was convinced, throughout the eighteen-forties and fifties—a time when even most abolitionists were prepared to wring their hands and tolerate slavery if it could be limited in scale—that the practice of holding men, women, and children as property was an absolute evil, that it had, at all costs, to end, and that the race who had been enslaved were not merely to be pitied but to be respected and armed, as citizens and fellow-soldiers. Far from being an incoherent fanatic, he was an eloquent speaker and writer, who composed an entire alternative Constitution, one reflecting egalitarian values that did not become commonplace until our own time.

    He was also, as even an admiring historian cannot deny, a man of violence and, by almost any definition, what we would now call a terrorist—a man who believed that the government of the United States should be met with violence because it supported and perpetuated oppression. He believed that there were no distinctions to be made between innocent and guilty in a society determined to perpetuate an evil. “It is better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by a violent death” than that slavery should live, he declared. He led his sons out into the fields of Kansas at night to massacre unarmed men while their families listened, and insisted afterward that he had been right to do it: that where legislation and compromise had failed only violence would succeed. He is the man who made Lincoln possible, and the acknowledged spiritual patron of Timothy McVeigh.
    Saturday, April 23, 2005

    Oops I Did It Again
    The Louie Armstrong original. I've always preferred this version.



    [via Cynical-C]
    Cue the Theme Song
    New Zelda Details Revealed.

    [via Slashdot, which also has some interesting things to say about Myst IV and gaming moments that moved you.]
    MacGyver Minute
    How to start a fire with a can of coke and a chocolate bar.

    [via Boing Boing]
    Chairman Mao Wins the Poetry Slam
    I'm pretty sure I've linked to this before, but 1000 Blank White Cards really is one hell of a cool game. Let's play.
    Finally I Accomplish Something With My Life
    I'm now the Grand Champion on the Sopranos pinball machine at New York Pizza on Tate Street.

    This record will stand for a thousand years.
    Friday, April 22, 2005

    Happy Earth Day!
    No blogging for me today. I'll be back tomorrow.
    Thursday, April 21, 2005

    Katamari Damarcy
    What makes Katamari Damarcy such a great game? Scale. There's just something indescribably satisfying about starting off smaller than a thumbtack and ending up big enough to swallow a city.

    The game designers did an amazing job with the game environment; you can roll up with nearly everything you encounter in this world, you just have to get big enough.

    Worth $20? Oh yes. It's the most fun, most innovative, single best video game I've played in a long long time.
    Here Comes Conan
    Poor Ezra's doom is sealed as the Age of Conan MMORPG enters development. [via Slashdot]
    England Prevails
    My mother said I broke her heart, but it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch we are free.

    I picked up Alan Moore's V for Vendetta early last month, after reading "Why V for Vendetta Matters -- Especially Now" shortly after hearing about the upcoming movie (starring Natalie Portman!). With things finally settling down as the semester closes, I got a chance to read it.

    It's good.

    It's really good.

    I don't think it's better than Moore's other classic Watchmen, as some people say -- but it's hard for me to imagine ever giving any comic the nod over Watchmen.

    In a fascistic, alternate-universe England, V -- dressed always as Guy Fawkes -- asks "At what price order?" He's an anarchist, you see. Hell, after reading the book, you may be one too. Risky to make your hero a terrorist; surprising that despite his methods V's goals can be compelling nonetheless.

    The astoundingly complete V for Vendetta Shrine has everything you could possibly want to know about the book. Give it a clickaround, even if you don't plan on buying the trade. The Analysis page in particular is outstanding.
    Burn
    Funny lecture (with video) from a professor whose laptop was recently stolen by a student looking to cheat on his next exam.

    Boing Boing comments here and here.
    Lexicon: The Role-Playing Game
    Neat game idea from The 20' By 20' Room, a new gaming blog.

    The basic idea is that each player takes on the role of a scholar, from before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they ceased to be). You are cranky, opinionated, prejudiced and eccentric. You are also collaborating with a number of your peers -- the other players -- on the construction of an encyclopedia describing some historical period (possibly of a fantastic world).

    The game is played in 26 turns, one for each letter of the alphabet.
    [via MetaFilter]
    No More Secrets
    In The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, journalist Howard Morland argues there are no more nuclear secrets.
    One result of nuclear secrecy has been a mythology and a bureaucracy which, to this day, are almost impregnable. The secrecy industry can be expected to fight for its survival, but the larger society deserves to know what is being protected, besides vested interests. The belief that keeping secrets will discourage nuclear weapons proliferation is widely held, but is it true? Are the secrets really secret in any practical sense?
    XRaye
    Fun little socket-wrench-themed game. [Flash]
    Star Trek Meets the War of Northern Aggression
    Obsession meets obsession when Star Trek people and Civil War re-enactors go head to head.
    Kung-Fu Hustle
    Positive review of Kung-Fu Hustle, the movie I'll hopefully be seeing this weekend. Shaolin Soccer was awesome.
    'Tangled Up in Bob'
    The Nation is talking Dylan.

    Some interesting stuff here for Dylanphiles. Also, I had no idea that Rob Gordon from High Fidelity was based upon a specific individual. I really thought he was just every nerd, everywhere. So you learn something new every day.

    [via A&L Daily]
    Wednesday, April 20, 2005

    Vintage Superboy Covers
    Neat.

    [via Boing Boing]
    Jesus' Son
    Great movie. Never saw it before last night. I showed clips from it ("Work" and "Emergency") in my 105 today. When I read the book the first time, I remember not being quite as keen on it as everyone else I know. Maybe I'll pick it up again.

    Nobody rocks harder than Jack Black.
    Bigfoot Lives!
    And this time he's been caught on tape.
    Nyrdl
    Incredibly bizarre, incredibly frustrating game. [Flash] No real instructions; I think you're supposed to just figure it out from the pictures.
    More on Will Wright's Spore
    More on Spore, the upcoming game from Will Wright in which you are more or less God (previously blogged here).
    Regardless of what you could dream up, the game would find a way to make it work. Top-heavy characters would bobble along awkwardly, creatures with branching networks of a dozen legs would learn to walk, and animations for fighting and eating would be generated on the fly.

    The editor was what Wright called an 'artist in a box.' It automates all the grunt work of modeling, skinning, and animating a creature. It's a "creative amplification of the player," allowing gamers to totally customize the experience even if they don't have any artistic skills. Moreover, because the creatures are defined simply and animated using these procedural techniques, the data files are incredibly small -- as small as 1K each! This makes creatures easy to move around, store, share with friends, upload to databases, etc.
    This still looks so amazing.
    Chuck
    Little Fluffy Industries is finally back, with Chuck: The Game, in which you cruelly hurl your fragile little dollman through four unforgiving levels.
    The 5000 Fans Theory
    "5000 Fans Theory was first floated by Brian Austin Whitney, founder of Just Plain Folks, in one of his monthly newsletters. Brian pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year — be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever — stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.

    Now, 5000 is a big number, but not that big. That's like, what, one-eighth of an average baseball stadium? And you might not even need that many. Here's an exercise: take your own salary, pre-taxes, and divide it by 20. If you were to quit your job right now and start living as a full-time musician, poet or author, that's how many fans you'd need, spending $20 each year to support your art. So, if you're making $30K yearly, you'd need 1500 paying fans each year to replace your salary. And it gets better if you're willing to take a pay cut. In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans. As Hobbit sez, there are a lot of people working for minimum wage doing stuff they hate."

    The BCR salutes its 5000 fans, both real, imaginary, and on-staff.
    Where the Sidewalk Ends
    The great children's poet and adult entertainer Shel Silverstein did it all -- singing jazz songs, hanging with Lenny Bruce, writing plays, drawing cartoons, and living at the Playboy Mansion.
    Tuesday, April 19, 2005

    More Accurate McDonald's Slogans
    Ba-dab ba-da-da...



    [via the always excellent Cynical-C]
    Reagan's Raiders
    From the Dark Pit of Stuff From The '80s Best Left Forgotten comes Reagan's Raiders, in which a 75-year-old president volunteers for the top secret Project Alpha-Soldier and becomes a superhero.

    Seriously.

    New Pope
    Pope Benedict XVI:
    As a young priest he was on the progressive side of theological debates but shifted to the right after the student revolutions of 1968.

    In the Vatican, he has been the driving force behind crackdowns on liberation theology, religious pluralism, challenges to traditional moral teachings on issues such as homosexuality, and dissent on such issues as women's ordination.
    Sounds like a winner.

    [EDIT: The Mirror has more, withour any of that "mincing" or "politeness" you see in less fashionable media, in "Nazi Past of Right-Wing Papal Candidate." In any event, membership in the Hitler Youth seems like a silly thing to hold against the guy; it's not like he had a choice in the matter. Via Cynical-C.]

    [EDIT 2: MetaFilter's Popethread directs us to TNR's much more positive portrait of Ratzinger. Use BugMeNot to clear the subscribers-only registration.]

    In other religious news, there's a giant foam display of the Ten Commandments in the EUC today. (Supposedly the College Republicans put it up as part of their "Morals Week.") I'm either wildly outraged by or rabidly in favor of this, whichever will get me on TV faster.

    UPDATE: The Washington Post chimes in:
    He wrote a letter of advice to U.S. bishops on denying communion to politicians who support abortion rights, which some observers viewed as a slam at Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry. He publicly cautioned Europe against admitting Turkey to the European Union and wrote a letter to bishops around the world justifying that stand on the grounds that the continent is essentially Christian in nature. In another letter to bishops worldwide, he decried a sort of feminism that makes women "adversaries" of men.

    ...

    He is a lightning rod for church liberals who see the hierarchy as reactionary. Ratzinger was active in stamping out liberation theology, with its emphasis on grass-roots activism to fight poverty and its association with Marxist movements.

    He once called homosexuality a tendency toward "intrinsic moral evil" and dismissed the uproar over priestly pedophilia in the United States as a "planned campaign" against the church.
    Sigh.
    Am I A Hot Robot or Not?
    LiveScience.com invites you to rate the superhunks various robots.
    Pinky, Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?
    I think so, Brain, but who's going to take the time to type all those up?
    On Language
    The New York Times is talking about Tho Fan, the made-up language created for the new XBox game Jade Empire.
    The language Tho Fan sounds ancient and distinctly Asian. Its "sh" sounds come from the back of the throat, as they do in Chinese. Its "r" sounds are made with a tap of the tongue, echoing Mongolian.

    But Tho Fan comes from Canada and was invented only last year. Created in four months, for just over $2,000, it is a real language spoken by unreal people in the Xbox game Jade Empire, released this week. Perhaps it is a sign that, these days, languages are not so much discovered as invented.
    $2000? Dude got ripped off.
    Speaking Of
    Here's the latest from McSweeney's: Passive-Aggressive Vegan Grocery Cashier: A Day in the Life.

    I had no idea (Here comes the burn...) Tom was a grocery cashier (Burn!).

    Just kidding. I love Tom. Just kidding. No, seriously, he's cool.

    Did you notice, in the piece, how the girlfriend's name is Jennifer? Historical footnote: That's where I got the idea for this burn.
    Realistic Punchlines
    At Something Awful. Some are off-color, some suggest well-known racist and sexist jokes, and some could maybe potentially be unsafe for work -- but having never really worked in an office I think they're all safe.

    A horse walks into a bar, and the barman says "Why the long face?". The horse replies:

    "I'm deeply troubled by the anthropomorphic aspects of my existance and the extent to which I am now protected by law."


    McSweeney's did something a lot like this recently.

    [via Boing Boing]
    Monday, April 18, 2005

    Creeping Fascism Report
    Interestingly, in the 24 universe, the unparalleled might of the terrorist dupes at Amnesty International can completely stymie all other agencies, even the US Government's black-ops counterterrorism unit.

    Through a court order.

    In twelve minutes.

    Damn those PC Lawyers!

    UPDATE: Television Without Pity agrees:
    Hey, you! Yeah, you. Are you opposed to your government using torture to get information on terrorists? Do you think that organizations like Amnesty International actually do important work? Do you believe in the rule of law, due process, civil rights, and the Constitution? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the writers and producers of 24 would like you to know that you're a fucking pussy.
    (Thanks, Casey!)
    R. Crumb Has a Memoir
    ...and The New York Times is talking about it. This was quoted at Boing Boing, but it's good enough to quote again:
    "I want everyone to love me," he said, half-mockingly, after explaining that he was once shocked to learn that the racial stereotypes and violence toward women he portrayed in his work were hurtful to many people. "Please love me," Mr. Crumb added.

    A woman in the audience then shouted, "We love you!," and Mr. Crumb held up his hands, cringing, to stop the applause.

    "O.K., you love me," he responded, laughing. "You're killing me, you love me so much. You're choking me. Now back off."
    [via Boing Boing]
    YetiSports
    Help the Yeti climb Mt. Impossible. [Flash] Click the left mouse button to move.
    Motion Induced Blindness
    Trippy.

    The other optical illusions on the site are neat too. Rotating Mask broke my brain, and then Contrast Gain Control ate it. Some of the others we've linked to before.

    [via MeFi]
    Mesa Police Want to Add Monkey to SWAT Team
    In all seriousness. The best part is this quote:
    "Everybody laughs about it until they really start thinking about it," said Mesa Officer Sean Truelove, who builds and operates tactical robots for the suburban Phoenix SWAT team. "It would change the way we do business."
    I'll say.

    This can't fail.
    Game Theory
    Interesting link (and thread) from Slashdot about the concept of adding permanent death to multiplayer online games like Everquest and World of Warcraft. Since my MMORG interest is near-zero, I really don't have a dog in this fight, but I will say that I'd be marginally more likely to play a MMORG if it had well-engineered permadeath.

    Particularly if that MMORG was City of Heroes.
    It's Not Red, It's Infrared
    In a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
    Dueling Kennedy Assassination Pages
    Conspiracy Central vs. The Lone Gunman Corral...who will win?

    [First link via MetaFilter]
    Sunday, April 17, 2005

    The Origins of 4:20
    So why do pot smokers have an affinity for 4:20? This came up in New York Pizza a while ago and here, finally, is the answer.
    The History of the Batmobile
    Dedicated Batmanologists have finally completed a detailed Bathistory of the Batmobile.

    Really fun Batsite.
    Thousands of Missiles Fired by Russian and American Forces over Earth's Arctic Regions
    The aliens! They're finally here! IndiaDaily has the story.
    April Madness: Comedy Movie Tournament
    At Norbizness.
    Bracket 1
    Monty Python's The Life of Brian (1) vs. Heathers (8)
    Sullivan’s Travels (4) vs. Animal House (5)
    Some Like It Hot (2) vs. Repo Man (7)
    Blazing Saddles (3) vs. The General (6)

    Bracket 2

    Modern Times (1) vs. Slap Shot (8)
    Dr. Strangelove (4) vs. Trading Places (5)
    The Ladykillers [1955 Alec Guinness version] (2) vs. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (7)
    Waiting for Guffman (3) vs. M*A*S*H (6)

    Bracket 3
    Duck Soup (1) vs. To Be or Not to Be [1942 Jack Benny version] (8)
    Caddyshack (4) vs. Royal Tennenbaums (5)
    Airplane (4) vs. A Shot in the Dark (5)
    The Philadephia Story (3) vs. Office Space (6)

    Bracket 4
    Annie Hall (1) vs. Bedazzled [Moore/Cook] (8)
    Safety Last (4) vs. Hollywood Shuffle (5)
    The Bank Dick (2) vs. South Park (7)
    Raising Arizona (3) vs. The Incredibles (6)
    How could Annie Hall not win this thing? Furthermore, how could you pick Raising Arizona over Big Lebowski (much less Royal Tenenbaums over Rushmore)?

    And no Napoleon Dynamite? Egan will be crushed.
    RideAccidents.com
    ...is the world's single most comprehensive, detailed, updated, accurate, and complete source of amusement ride accident reports and related news.
    The Pain -- When Will It End?
    Official website of the classic Baltimore City Paper comic.
    Saturday, April 16, 2005

    Maeda Path
    A game of eye / hand coordination. [Flash]
    Grave Images
    Three visual links culled from Rashomon and Drawn!:

  • Da Vinci

  • Dream Anatomy

  • Ojingogo

    All very cool.
  • TP
    Bryan Curtis in Slate explains why Trivial Pursuit is in an irreversible decline.
    Trivia lives; it's generalist trivia, the kind of fluency that Trivial Pursuit prized, that's ailing. Just as the Internet splintered trivia into thousands of niches, Trivial Pursuit has contented itself with turning out games like "90s Time Capsule" and "Book Lover's," and, more frighteningly, those devoted solely to the vagaries of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Gone is the proud generalist of the original Trivial Pursuit, who knew the most common Russian surname (Ivanov) and the international radio code word for the letter O (Oscar). In his place is the specialist, who knows every inch of Return of the Jedi. There are many of us who have a nagging fear we belong to the latter group. "What jungle planet do Wookiees hail from?" a Star Wars card asks. Let's say, hypothetically and only for the sake of argument, that I know the answer. Who is supposed to be impressed by that?
    [mad props to Jeremy O'France]
    Friday, April 15, 2005

    Ugly Children Get Less Love
    A researcher at the University of Alberta has shown that parents are more likely to give better care and pay closer attention to good-looking children compared to unattractive ones...

    Harrell's findings are based on an observational study of children and shopping cart safety. With the approval of management at 14 different supermarkets, Harrell's team of researchers observed parents and their two to five-year-old children for 10 minutes each, noting if the child was buckled into the grocery-cart seat, and how often the child wandered more than 10 feet away. The researchers independently graded each child on a scale of one to 10 on attractiveness.

    Findings showed that 1.2 per cent of the least attractive children were buckled in, compared with 13.3 per cent of the most attractive youngsters. The observers also noticed the less attractive children were allowed to wander further away and more often from their parents. In total, there were 426 observations at the 14 supermarkets.
    Explains a lot, actually.
    Your Head Is Guaranteed to Explode
    Were you aware that our own mad genius Jaimee Hills (along with comics guru and good-friend-of-the-BCR mad genius Justin Colussy-Estes) will *rock* Greensboro at her thesis reading tonight at 8 pm at St. Mary's House on Walker Avenue? Don't punish yourself. Don't miss it.
    How to Deconstruct Almost Anything
    An engineer considers postmodernism.
    TV Spinoff and Crossover Superpage
    Every TV crossover and spinoff ever, it looks like.
    Play Risk 'World Conquest' Online
    Here.

    The Australian Strategy never fails.
    Is There Water on the Moon?
    NASA says maybe. That unlikely discovery, if it ever came about, would definitely bump up the chances of a permanent settlement in the foreseeable future from zero to, say, one.

    When the time comes, there's no doubt Jaimee and I will be among the first lunar colonists. But don't ruin the surprise -- I want to break it to her gently.

    And then after that we're going to Mars.
    Thursday, April 14, 2005

    Art Garfunkel: Television Guest Star
    Ah, McSweeney's.
    Muppet Babies

    In the presence of full-grown non-animated Garfunkel, who appears to have no real dramatic function, visibly frightened Muppet Babies retreat into their own private worlds, never have any adventures, never say anything cute or clever, and become very lonely.
    Just 48 Hours Left in the BCR Fiction and Poetry Contest
    Don't forget!

    Full Guidelines

    POSTMARK DEADLINE: April 15th, 2005
    Entry Fee: $10 / Submission
    (Includes one-year subscription)

    Fiction Prize:
    1st $250 + Publication
    2nd $75 + Publication
    3rd Publication
    Judge: Fred Chappell

    Poetry Prize:
    1st $250 + Publication
    2nd $75 + Publication
    3rd Publication
    Judge: Fred Chappell
    Or Did I Just Blow Your Mind?
    The end of this Colbert report from last night's Daily Show is just about the best thing I've seen today. Classic.
    Wednesday, April 13, 2005

    Napoleon Dynamite Bobble-Head
    I don't know if this thing will quite fit on the dashboard of your car, but I'm pretty sure it might look good in one's office, or above the shrine to your mother in the bathroom. NECA calls them "Head Knockers" rather than "Bobble-Heads." I don't know if that refers to a sound they make when bobbling, or if it's just to give these toys an x-treme edge.

    I still haven't even seen this movie. Is it any good? Does anyone even buy bobble-knockers?
    Unhappy Visitors to Disneyland
    There's something oddly moving about these.

    [Via Boing Boing, of course]
    In Soviet Russia, The Adventure Chooses You
    Funny photoshop contest from Something Awful: "'Choose Your Own Adventure' Books That Never Quite Made It."

    Sorry funny entries, more than a few off-color ones, and bonus points for a couple shoutouts to the one CYOA book that always gave me nightmares, #71, Space Vampire. That was one scary book and I swear there was no way to win.

    I still carry the scars.
    Video Game Tie-In Cartoons
    So how many of these did you watch?
    Science vs. Norse Mythology
    And this is good too.

    [via Cynical-C]
    Tuesday, April 12, 2005

    The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon
    I love these guys, but Patricia Storms's got a point.



    Direct link to strip.

    [Via Drawn!, via Bookdwarf. And don't miss the review in the New York Review of Books that sparked it all.]

    UPDATE: Looks like this wound up being a little preview for Backwards City #2. We're going to be reprinting this comic in our second issue.
    Nothing But Chronologies
    Ken Fussichen's List of Chronologies.
    Bubble Bobble 2
    Play Bubble Bobble 2 for free. [Flash]

    arrow keys: move
    crtl: fire
    space bar: jump
    History's 25 Largest Empires
    Because as every empire knows, size matters.
    Cool Toy Sale (free She-Ra)
    While there's no way to get kick-backs for this, I'm still impressed enough with this sale to mention it. Action Figure X-Press is giving away a free convention exclusive She-Ra figure with EVERY 25 dollars spent on sale items. So, if you bought this statue for Jaimee (she is getting married, after all), you'd be one cent away from your sixth She-Ra. They've got some cool Mini-mates, Starwars Cases, and a 12" Willow doll, among other things.
    Monday, April 11, 2005

    Unintentionally Sexual Comic Book Covers
    Part 1. Safe for work, I think.

    [It's been everywhere already.]
    Andrea Dworkin
    Feminist Andrea Dworkin, whose controversial views on consensual heterosexual sex (often somewhat mischaracterized as "All heterosexual sex is rape") so fascinated eighteen-year-old Gerry and Shankar, has died. The MetaFilter thread has some interesting things to say about it.
    Yyaaaargggg!
    Index of comic book grunts, moans, ululations, and other nonverbal cues. With definitions and examples.


    Yyaaaargggg!: "Experiencing unimaginable horrors"

    [Ditto. Their scifiscripts.com find was good too. Also, Plush Cthulhu.]
    How to Shuffle Cards
    I don't care how many times you show me, I'll never be able to do this.

    [Also via Cynical-C]
    A Gallery of Walls with Stuff Written On
    picturesofwalls.com.

    [via Cynical-C]
    Don't Panic
    Spiked Central is myth-busting today. For instance, an eruption of the civilization-destroying supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park is merely possible, not likely.
    Sunday, April 10, 2005

    The Incredible Popeman
    And people say I'm too irreverent:
    Pope John Paul II is being reborn in a Colombian comic book as a superhero battling evil with an anti-Devil cape and special chastity pants.

    The first episode of the "Incredible Popeman" is about to go on sale in Colombia and shows the late Polish pontiff meeting comic book legends such as Batman and Superman to learn how to use superpowers to battle Satan.
    This has to be a joke, right? Right?



    [via MetaFilter]
    Saturday, April 09, 2005

    Hitchhiker's Movie Preview
    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular - but that's just peanuts to the Hitchhiker's movie. Listen...

    Aw, crap. I had big hopes for this.
    The Disgust Thickens
    Remember the woman who found a human finger in her Wendy's chili? Police just searched her home to find out if she put it there. There's even unconfirmed rumors the finger belonged to her aunt.

    For what it's worth, she angrily denied the charge.

    This is still really gross.
    T-Rex Facts
    Educate yourself.
    Shooting Hoops
    Holy crap. [Quicktime] Cory and Metafilter agree that at least part of it is fake, but still, holy crap.
    Just Six Days Left to Enter the Backwards City Review Fiction and Poetry Contest
    Entry Fee: $10 (includes one-year subscription)

    First Prize: $250 + Publication
    Second Prize: $75 + Publication
    Third Prize: Publication

    Winning manuscripts will appear in the Spring 2005 issue of BCR. All entries considered for publication.

    Postmark Deadline: April 15th

    Full Guidelines
    Friday, April 08, 2005

    Fuggeddaboutit
    Papers this weekend? Fuggeddaboutit. I'll be at NYP playing their incredible new pinball machine.
    Comic Covers
    Thousands of 'em.

    [Via Gravity Lens]
    Bad Timing
    As luck would have it, the posts I put up just completely buried Patrick's post about the excellent M. Ward's most excellent show last night. Read all about it here.
    Games People Play
  • Defective Yeti reviews DOOM: The Board Game, which beyond belief actually sounds fairly awesome. I think I'm getting this. [Amazon]

  • A downloadable demo of the new greatest game of all time, LEGO Star Wars, is now available at legostarwarsthevideogame.com. I played this thing last night, and it's so much like my childhood, it's scary. Okay, it's so much like last week, it's scary. Outstanding concept, outstanding execution. [XBox, PC, PS2, GBA]
  • Just Pennies a Day
    In his new book, Jeffrey Sachs says we can end international poverty in our time. But will our leaders listen?

    Do you really have to ask?
    What Blogs Are For
    One morning twenty years ago this month, I opened the front section of the Washington Post and read that my friend Stephen Peter Morin had been executed by the state of Texas for capital murder.

    One of the all-time great personal blog entries, at Creek Running North.
    The Long Emergency
    So what happens when we finally do run out of gasoline? Rolling Stone reports.
    Thursday, April 07, 2005

    How Is Paris Hilton Related to the Royal Family?
    Now we know.
    Saunders on Vonnegut
    Vonnegut is, in my view, the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us, in the intensity of his gaze, the kindness of his vision, and the width of the possibilties he considers, a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.
    At Amazon. One of my favorite writers loving on another of my favorite writers. Thanks to PClem for the pointer.
    '25 Favorite Sesame Street Memories'
    Your childhood called. It said baby, come back home.

    I'd totally forgotten about the Teeny Little Super Guy (#7), the dude who lived inside that cup. And I think I could write a whole semiotics paper about #13 ('I Ran Out of Clay, Bert'). The signifier obliterating the signified! It's neat.

    But I must strenuously disagree about #4, the Dreaded Mr. Hooper Death episode. Maybe if you were a little older or a little younger it was okay, but I've talked to a lot of people close to my age and we all agree this completely screwed us up for life.

    And they never should have made Snufflalupagas visible to other people, either.
    Smart Robots
    What does neurobiology have to say about human freedom? Are we free, or do we merely think we? At Reason.
    Yeah, We've Got a Saint For That
    Catholic patron saints for every occasion. Sadly, there's no "patron saint of patron saints," but they do have four for writers.
    The Final Scene of Se7en Reenacted by Stuffed Animals
    Exactly what it sounds like. (Spoilers if you're living before 1995.)
    Wednesday, April 06, 2005

    Action Philosophers!
    Neat-looking comic.
    . .
    Frank Conroy has died. It's been a rough week.
    Seuss vs. Selling Out
    Fantastic collection of The Advertising Artwork of Dr. Seuss.



    [Via Rashomon]
    Bolshevik vs. Bolshevik
    Poster art from the Russian Civil War.



    [via Cynical-C]
    Chang vs. Hip-Hop
    Jeff Chang's remarkable history tells the story of hip-hop, the most important music (and youth) movement of our time. At Salon.
    Chekhov vs. Tolstoy
    Interesting look at two stories by two great Russian writers. Dostoevsky called and he's a little hurt that no one bothered to include him.
    Dracula vs. King Arthur
    To be honest, I can't believe no one's thought of this before.
    Tuesday, April 05, 2005

    .
    Saul Bellow has died. Seize the Day, which we read in Structure of Fiction my first year in graduate school, is a very good book, and Henderson the Rain King (among other things, the partial inspiration for the Counting Crows song) is a great one. He'll be missed.
    Serenity Action Figures.
    Diamond Select shows off some early proofs for Firefly:The Movie:Serenity Action figures. Mal and Jayne in two variants are shown. The opening selection will also have two villains, as yet unnamed. Most likely a Reaver and a Blue handed dude. If you haven't seen Firefly yet, you're really missing out. And if you have seen it, perhaps you ought not look at the figures yet. They are really looking pretty rough.

    Gerry introduced me to the series after the other Whedon shows he'd hooked me on got cancelled. It's an excellent mix of wild-west frontier action and space-faring sci-fi goodness. All the style and flavor of both, and an excellent focus on character development over the arc of the season. I hope the Preacher Figure will have both hair variants.

    Firefly DVDs.
    Super Nintendo Game Endings
    For the ones you beat, and the ones you never did. I'd forgotten how many of these games I actually played. Super Punchout, Super Metroid, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy II and III...
    Backwards City Public Service Minute
    Test your browser's security. [via GeekPress]
    Dodge That Anvil!
    Help an adorable bunny rabbit pick carrots while dodging falling anvils. [Flash]
    Monday, April 04, 2005

    LEGO Disneyland
    Holy crap, that's detailed.

    Nostalgic for What I Forgot I Ever Had
    Full archive of the "Howard and Nester" comics that used to run in the back of issues of Nintendo Power. [via Slashdot]
    Extreme Star Wars Geeks Now Accepting Calls
    For some reason, over sixty people have already lined up in Los Angeles for the premiere of Revenge of the Sith, which opens 45 days from now. And now you can call them at the the payphone: (323) 462-9609. [via Boing Boing]

    Yousa gonna be a lotsa disappointed geeks.
    24 Reruns Twice This Week Only
    Because so many people will be watching basketball because this episode is so important, this week only there will be encores of 24 on Friday between 10 and 11 pm and on Sunday between 9 and 10 pm.

    So you can tell your VCR to go back to sleep.
    Sunday, April 03, 2005

    Blind Student Earns M.D.
    Wow. Amazing.
    The Origins of Hinduism
    Hinduism is largely a fiction, formulated in the 18th and 19th centuries out of a multiplicity of sub-continental religions, and enthusiastically endorsed by Indian modernisers. Unlike Muslims, Hindus have tended to borrow more than reject, and it has now been reconfigured as a global rival to the big three monotheisms. In the process, it has abandoned the tradition of toleration which lie in its true origins. From Axess.

    [Via MetaFilter]
    'You Can't Have Virtue without Sin'
    Talking with Frank Miller.
    THE BEAT: I just reread the first few last night and was like "Whoa." What do you think is the appeal of noir and this kind dark, revenge driven fiction?

    MILLER: It's going to sound odd, but I think it's the romance. Every Sin City [story] is a romance of some sort. They're very dark and the consequences are bad and they're usually futile, but I think that's at the heart of it. You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.
    See also Sin City and the Seven Deadly Sins of Moviemaking, which (among other things) tells us this surprising factoid:
    4. Making actors act against screens, not other actors

    Actors usually hate shooting scenes alone because they feed off give-and-take with other actors. But many Sin City sequences were created by piecing together footage of performers whose busy schedules kept them apart.

    Brittany Murphy plays a barmaid who has an exchange with Bruce Willis, but she never met him until Monday's movie premiere. Jessica Alba's stripper character interacts with Clive Owen and Rourke's hulking bruiser, but they weren't really there, and Wood's mild-mannered serial killer pulverized Rourke in absentia.
    Watching the movie, I honestly had no idea this was going on. Well done.
    'Black Holes Do Not Exist'
    Interesting theory that black holes really don't exist.
    George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. "It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist," he claims.
    Take that, Stephen Hawking.
    Saturday, April 02, 2005

    Think You Know Who Will Win the International Man Booker Prize?
    Now you can bet on it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the odds-on favorite, as it should be.
    Good Comic. $1.
    Current and reformed comics geeks alike should rejoice in this week's Countdown to Infinite Crisis, an 80-page stand-alone story from DC Comics that's available for just $1. This story focuses on a fairly minor character called the Blue Beetle, a failed superhero I'd never had occasion read about before. It's a pretty good story in its own right, and it also works as both a whirlwind reintroduction to DC continuity and as setup for something much larger (although [SPOILER] the actions of the Blue Beetle near the very end of the story really leave something to be desired. Hasn't the guy ever heard of lying?)[/SPOILER]. Definitely worth a dollar.

    The whole thing, in addition to being the followup to the Identity Crisis storyline, is setting up a plotline that will come to a head in Infinite Crisis, which is being billed as the sequel to the Crisis on Infinite Earths. The original Crisis was responsible for rebooting the DC Comics Universe and restarting its continuity entirely -- so this should be a fairly big deal.

    But I've geeked out too much.

    In any event, if you ever liked comic books, there's no reason not to head to your local comic book store (Parts Unknown or Acme Comics, in Greensboro's case), pick one up, and see where the DC Universe has gone since you last looked at it.
    Stylus Magazine's Top 50 Albums, 2000-2005
    Talk amongst yourself.

    I only started listening to both #37 and #25, and now I listen to both these albums (and both these bands, particularly Yo La) constantly. Buy these albums immediately. Something about #1 has always given me a little bit of a stomachache, but buy it too.

    PClem, your thoughts?
    Backwards City Fiction and Poetry Contest Deadline Fast Approaching
    Just two weeks left for you to get your entry in for our first ever fiction and poetry contest. The entry fee is just ten dollars, and includes a year's subscription to Backwards City Review, which many reviewers* have called both "transplendently transcendent" and "magically delicious." Fred Chappell will be judging.

    Full details and guidelines here. The postmark deadline is April 15th, all genres and styles are accepted, and all entries are considered for publication.

    And, as always, excerpts for our first issue are available here.

    --
    * Gerry's mom. Seriously, though, we're a pretty good journal.
    Houellebecq
    Via Arts & Letters Daily comes an article about the novels of Michael Houellebecq. Our good friend Jillian Weise -- who at 23 is on her third Nobel Prize in Literature -- loves this guy, and you should, too.

    She's the one who got me to read The Elementary Particles, hands down the filthiest book I have ever read. I still haven't gotten to Platform yet, though I mean to.
    But Who Are We To Play God?
    A "bionic eye" may one day help blind people see again, according to US researchers who have successfully tested the system in rats ... A visual acuity of 20/20 is considered normal, while 20/400 is considered blind. Palanker and his team say their device could provide acuity of 20/80. “With 20/80 vision you can certainly read large forms and live independently,” Palanker says. “It’s a huge step forward."
    Wow.
    Sin City
    ...is an experience, though it may not be one that all people can enjoy equally. This struck me as a very male movie, and in particular it appeals directly to the evil twelve-year-old boy that lurks just beneath the surface of every member of the bad half of the species.

    There's never been a movie that was more like a comic book, not even the original Batman. In case you missed the FilmRot comic-to-screen comparison from the other day, click here.

    The film owes its structure to Pulp Fiction, and like Pulp Fiction the movie drags a little bit in the subplot most disconnected from the main arc. But all-in-all the tripartite structure holds together very well. It definitely feels like one movie, not three.

    If you think you might enjoy it, see it, if only to try and figure out which scene Quentin Tarantino guest directed. (Answer here. We might have known.)
    Friday, April 01, 2005

    Getting Déjà Vu
    At Scientific American.
    To Free A Fish
    Man goes to Chinatown, buys a fish, and sets it free. A photoessay.
    i am 8 bit
    i am 8 bit is instant nostalgia, an art show that pays tribute to iconic images from video games past.


    "Super Mushroom Boogie"

    Click on the gallery for more, including the awesome Pac-Man hand grenade.

    Too bad it's in Cali. [via Drawn!]
    Beauty and Truth
    The best thing about science, and particularly mathematics, is that, beyond all reason, elegance and beauty count.

    The Economist says computers are ruining all that.
    Koran to US: You Will Cease to Exist
    2007's the year:
    A thorough analysis of the Koran reveals that the US will cease to exist in the year 2007, according to research published by Palestinian scholar Ziad Silwadi.

    The study, which has caught the attention of millions of Muslims worldwide, is based on in-depth interpretations of various verses in the Koran. It predicts that the US will be hit by a tsunami larger than that which recently struck southeast Asia.

    "The tsunami waves are a minor rehearsal in comparison with what awaits the US in 2007," the researcher concluded in his study. "The Holy Koran warns against the Omnipotent Allah's force. A great sin will cause a huge flood in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans."
    We gave it a good run.
    Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time
    Ah, April Fool's. My least favorite holiday of them all, because I'm so incredibly stupid. I never remember, and I fall for everything. Plus I find it all just a little mean-spirited.

    I usually try not to talk to anyone on this day, just to be on the safe side.

    In any event, here are the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time from the Museum of Hoaxes. Enjoy.

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