Maybe the best movie of the year -- definitely giving Serenity a run for its money -- and I saw it on the last possible day of 2005. The Squid and the Whale is the story of a family undergoing a painful divorce after 17 years of marriage, based upon the real-life childhood of the writer/director, Noah Baumbach, who with Wes Anderson co-wrote The Life Aquatic, last year's best and most underrated movie. The older son stays with the father, while the younger son stays with the mother. (But enough about me.)

The Squid and the Whale is very funny, nicely awkward, and very moving. It's quiet and understated and very very well-crafted. The characters are great. The dialogue, great. Aside from a few important nitpicks, mostly involving Pink Floyd, it's nearly perfect. Wes Anderson produed it, so you know it's good. So check it out.

The art of Kris Davidson. (via Drawn!)

There's been less activity on the blog than usual lately for a few reasons: partly because I've been busy laying out Backwards City #3 (cover teaser); partly because the Internet always slows down in the gap between Christmas and New Year's and there's nothing you can do about it; and partly because I've been travelling and haven't always had access to the 'net. Once I'm back in Greensboro (a few days from now) we'll get right back up to speed.

Backwards City #3 is practically finished, by the way. All that's left are a few intense sessions of proofreading (joy!) and one comic whose finishing touches got delayed by the holiday. The issue will be coming out in mid-February, and it's pretty safe to say that it's our best issue yet.

I'll be pimping this particular product again, so for now, let's just suffice it to say that you absolutely should subscribe.

(Our fiction and poetry contests are still open for submissions as well, by the way, and keep in mind that electronic submissions are now being accepted for those contest as well. The $15 entry fee includes a year's subscription.)

So that about wraps it up for 2005. It's been a pretty great year for us, between our first two issues coming out and getting some notice and attention among the literati, the blog's steady increase in popularity, and the magazine's first halting steps towards financial self-sufficiency. Hope to see you all again in 2006. To kill the thirteen hours remaining in '05, I recommend the beautiful and addictive Falling Sand Game. Instructions are here. See you tomorrow.

Thane Rosenbaum in Forward on movies based on novels.

At Dial B for Blog.



Incidentally, Animal Man's a fairly interesting character in the DC Universe, albeit a minor one. Read all about him here and here and here and here.

Martin Amis v. Stephen King v. A.M. Homes at The New Yorker Festival.

If you want to know about last night's Yo La Tengo concert at Maxwell's in Hoboken, this is the place to find scientific, objective observation of the event in question. Ben ("Mr. Meesher") makes an appearance, as well as providing a useful link to the Yo La Tengo 2005 Hanukkah Diary.

Cinescape on The Year in Comics. (via Gravity Lens) I didn't read any of House of M, though from what I heard about it it sounds like I didn't miss much.

I have, however, been reading the (spoilers) Infinite Crisis series at DC, and so far (through #3) I've been very impressed. The idea of bringing back the Golden Age [EDITED], as an apparent villain no less, is quite interesting -- and #3's revelation that [EDITED] from [EDITED] is the true mastermind of all these events is a quite surprising decision as well, given how that character has always been characterized. Is Earth-2 coming back? Is the Multiverse coming back? Is the DC comics universe going to split into two continuities, a DC-Light for kids and DC-Dark for adults post-adolescents? In certain circles, these are very important questions.

There is a stereotype of literary fiction shared by both science fiction readers and non-science fiction readers: that academically-sanctioned, "serious" contemporary fiction is all about dull middle-class people having affairs, and that the writers of this fiction do such things as use a couple hundred pages to describe events that could quite easily be described in a paragraph. This stereotype is not entirely inaccurate — such books do exist. But just as it is unfair to condemn all SF as clunkily-written space operas for people who are hiding from puberty, so it is unfair to dismiss all literary fiction as unimaginative hogwash for people who yearn to be seen as sensitive. (via Bookslut)

'The more daughters there are in a household, the more likely the parents are to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat.'

Astronomers recently have discovered a flock of at least eight other planet-like objects in sometimes wildly eccentric orbits. Four new "ice dwarfs," plus two more probable moons around Pluto, were announced in the last six months.

The latest mini-world, temporarily nicknamed "Buffy" and more than 5 billion miles from the sun, was revealed Dec. 13. The object, about half the size of Pluto, was spotted roaming through the so-called Kuiper Belt, a vast junkyard of icy, rocky bodies stretching for billions of miles beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Since there may be no one around to say it tomorrow, say it now: buena suerte to DonEzra and Fay and Duncan the Dog, who ditch the Boro tomorrow for a cross-country drive on their way to become the Backwards City Seattle Auxiliary. These guys will be missed.

Ask MeFi: Should I lie to my three-year-old daughter about Santa Claus?

More or less. Light traffic out there on the internets today. If you need something to escape your family, though:

PCWorld's Greatest Fifty Gadgets of the Last Fifty Years

Comixpedia's Top 25 People in Webcomics 2005

The Guardian's 2005 in Books Quiz

World Destruction in Fiction, Television, Comic Books, and Film

From the archives, it's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas (In the Ernest Hemingway Manner)."

“Father,” the children said.

There was no answer. He’s there, all right, they thought.

“Father,” they said, and banged on their beds.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We have visions of sugarplums,” the children said.

At Salon, including what's wrong with Reading Lolita in Tehran (which I haven't read, but which I happen to know Casey hated).

Where to begin? How to tell her that the author she so admired would have sneered at her praise? Here, again, is Nabokov from that 1962 BBC interview: "Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions." Nafisi, at least when she was living in Tehran, was in need of a great deal more than riddles with elegant solutions. I don't think Nabokov would have cared much about what she needed. "I don't give a damn for the group," he told Playboy magazine in 1964, "the community, the masses, and so forth ... there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art." And: "I have neither the intent nor the temperament to be a moralist or satirist." Mediocrity, he thought, "thrives on ideas." By which, he told Time magazine in 1969, he meant "general ideas, the big, sincere ideas which permeate a so-called great novel, and which, in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales." This is the nicest way I can think of to tell Nafisi that Nabokov didn't give a damn about anything -- politics, feminism, humanism -- that she does, at least not in any of his fiction.

A Java puzzle for your Festivus Eve. (MeFi)

AskMetafilter takes on the third of the eternal guestions today. The phrasing of the original question is a little too McCartneyite for my tastes, but the thread has some good replies, both pro- and anti-Lennonist.

--
Answers:
a. Betty.
b. Mary Ann.
c. John.

Well, that about wraps it up for humanity.

Dial B for Blog on Superman as a Christ-figure:

Christ was raised by Joseph and Mary; Superman was raised by Jonathan and Martha. Christ lived in a time when Hebrews sometimes referred to God as “El,” Superman’s birth name is Kal-El son of Jor-El. Christ and Superman were both sent from above to offer salvation for humanity. Both had “evil twins,” the Anti-Christ and Bizarro. Finally, and most tellingly, Christ and Superman both died, and were subsequently resurrected.

A side-by-side iamge comparison is included.

He's got some not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek things to say about the Silver Surfer as well. (via Gravity Lens)

John Q. Gotham: Searching for the most statistically average person in New York.

"La Conchita" by T. Coraghessan Boyle.

"The Word" by Vladmir Nabokov.

Louis Menand on literary book prizes.

Far from Narnia: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

The makers of Grow have posted a fun, christmas themed mini version of their normal fare. I say mini because there's only six puzzle components, thus making "completion" of the game easier to achieve in a quick 10 minute session of putzing around.

Anyway, feed the scene with the necessary elements in the correct order and you get a satisfying, if not strange, Christmas tree. I'll toss the solution in the comments.

Three cheers for whimsy.

What next for DFW after Infinite Jest? A reprint from the first issue of n+1.

It was nice to know, at last, that there was a certifiable genius at work, and one could feel the anticipation mounting for the next Wallace effort, which would not only claim the awards denied Infinite Jest, but also galvanize public discussion in a rare way, like Catch-22 or the first final episode of Friends. Would the new novel be even bigger? (It seemed both logical and unlikely.) Or would Wallace pare out what many considered extraneous, leaving us with the leanest, meanest, 500-page novel in recent memory? When asked about his work-in-progress, Wallace responded by inquiring whether his interlocutor had ever read the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, and, if so, whether he had done so under the influence of hallucinogens. There were rumors that the new novel had to do with porn.

Eight years, of course, is not so long to wait. Moby-Dick may have been written in six months, but a gestation period measured long modernist novel since Joyce. Our writers have longer life spans and fewer children than their forerunners, and Pynchon, Gaddis, Henry Roth, and Franzen all asserted their right to greater leisure. What distinguishes Wallace is his diverse and rather prolific interim output: a demonically descriptive collection of quasijournalistic essays; a brilliant if uneven book of stories; a biography of the concept of infinity, which reads miserably if you don’t know much about higher math, and, according to expert reviewers, more miserably if you do; and now another book of stories, Oblivion. Has a novelist ever written such a thrilling, remarkable novel and then swapped himself, even temporarily, out of the genre?

(via Rake)

The Guardian interviews Ursula K. Le Guin about the state of fantasy literature. Among other tidbits, J.K. gets burned:

Her credit to JK Rowling for giving the "whole fantasy field a boost" is tinged with regret. "I didn't feel she ripped me off, as some people did," she says quietly, "though she could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one of them. That hurt."

(via Bookslut)

But Google's got us covered, yet again. They've put up their end of the year Zeitgeist tally of 2005. Always fun. (Although I prefer the regular, weekly version.)

www.theyrule.net is an interactive flash-app that lets you find, create, save and annotate maps between the Boards of Directors of the 500 largest companies and corporations. A crisp site. It's fun to grab a company off the menu and just see where it will tree to. Better though is to just make connections between company A and company B, or to load maps that others have made.


Since the BCR just missed the cut off for being included in the site, the slickest part, then, is how you can drag and edit the map as you go - an exercise in visual composition if nothing else.

It's a FLASH site with a little click-through intro, but for the most part very smooth. Worth a look.

via the newly redesigned (Blogger died on them) Wooster Collective. Also worth a look if you haven't been there in a while - all their artists have been reporting back with "Best of (Street art and otherwise) 2005" lists - some are very well informed, and most include pictures.

Barbie, that plastic icon of girlhood fantasy play, is routinely tortured by children, research has found.

The methods of mutilation are varied and creative, ranging from scalping to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving, according to academics from the University of Bath.

The findings were revealed as part of an in-depth look by psychologists and management academics into the role of brands among 7 to 11-year-old schoolchildren.

The researchers had not intended to focus on Barbie, but they were taken aback by the rejection, hatred and violence she provoked when they asked the children about their feelings for the doll.

Here's one possible explanation:

“The children never talked of one single, special Barbie. The girls almost always talked about having a box full of Barbies. So to them Barbie has come to symbolise excess. Barbies are not special; they are disposable, and are thrown away and rejected,” Dr Nairn said.

She added: “On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate. She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.”

(via A&L Daily and MeFi)

Kristen from E! Entertainment Television is reporting that Arrested Development will probably be picked up by ABC or Showtime. SpoilerFix (warning: TV-Guide-style teasers for future episodes) says it's likely to be ABC.

Roger Ebert's Best Movies of 2005. Includes the overall top 10, as well as other categories. Everybody-but-me-and-Jaimee's favorite Me and You and Everyone We Know makes the list, as well as Crash and Munich.

A reader from Atrios has assembled some tasty "Best of Bush Outright Lying About Wiretaps: Holiday Edition" quotes. I don't know if "fun" is the right word for the experience of reading this, but for some reason I call it pleasure. Also the blogger in question looks good in a tie. Snips:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

- President G.W. Bush - April 20, 2004

Starting today, Backwards City Review is now accepting online submissions. Currently we're only accepting online submissions for the fiction contest and the poetry contest, but assuming this goes well we're going to start accepting online submissions for everything after issue 4.

Since this is for the contest, online contest entries must be accompanied by the $15 entry fee, which includes a year's subscription to Backwards City Review.

Happy submitting!

The math of Sudoku. (via)

How do newspapers draw a line between reviewers and reviewees when book reviewers are often authors themselves, and in any event often travel in the same social circles? The New York Times's public editor reports.

Accounts of the recruiting and vetting of reviewers in recent months indicate that editors tend to first seek a commitment that the person will do it. Then it's time for what Mr. Garner calls "my Kenneth Starr questions," a reference to the former Whitewater prosecutor: "Do you know the author? Have you written about this person, or vice versa? Are there any other potential conflicts of interest?"

Mr. Harris uses a simple test to determine whether a relationship between a potential reviewer and the author is too close: "Do you know the names of her children?" If the reviewer knows the names? "It's not good."

(via my mom)

retroCRUSH has.

Monitor Duty has.

The Positive Ape reports from the Masters of American Comics show at UCLA. (via Boing Boing)

The Grooved Spheres, the Dropa Stones, the Ica Stones, the Antikyhera Mechanism, tbe Baghdad Battery, the Coso Artifact, Ancient Model Aircraft, the Giant Stone Balls of Costa Rica, impossible fossils, and out-of-place metal objects, all at About.com. (also via the Huge Entity)

A computer has been used to decipher the enigmatic smile of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, concluding that she was mainly happy.

The painting was analysed by a University of Amsterdam computer using "emotion recognition" software.

It concluded that the subject was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, New Scientist magazine was told. (via the Huge Entity)

The fantasy of Santa overseeing a force of gleeful elves magically producing toys from nothing allows the Christmas machine to continue functioning by allowing the consumer to overlook the true nature of the goods they are putting under their Christmas trees. A Marxist Reading of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

Your candle burned out long before your legend ever will.

Apropos of yesterday, is Philip Roth America's greatest living writer? Or is he wrong about everything?
How is Joan Didion doing?
Can Don DeLillo predict the future?
Do "gimmick books" suck?
Has the fantasy craze ruined science fiction?
Did you know the only violent overthrow of an elected government in U.S. history occurred right here in North Carolina?
Are MMORPG players in danger of losing touch with reality?

(via via via via)

Cool site. Below: Ali KOs Sonny Liston. (via RaShOmoN)

Presenting the Hurra Torpedo Documentary. Hurra Torpedo, of course, is the greatest rock band of all time. (via MeFi)

Marvel's experimenting with digital comics; you can read Spiderman, Captain America, She-Hulk, and Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius online. Newsarama has more details. (via Gravity Lens)

When we made the ad for our second contest a few months ago, we honestly didn't even have Kong on the mind. But he's on our mind now. Serendipity. And whatever Kong's doing in the picture at right, with his little white bag and pink bow and that smoking volcano in the background, he wants you to be a part of it.

All the details are here. Entry fee of $15 nets you a year's subscription, and the two winners each receive $400 and publication in Backwards City #4. All entries are considered for publication.

The editors will be judging the contest on Kong's behalf. You can send entries to:

BCR Short Story/Poetry Contest
Backwards City Review
P.O. Box 41317
Greensboro, NC 27404-1317

or wait until Monday when we launch our hush-hush, high-tech, nobody-knows-about-it-but-it's-gonna-be-huge online submission system. Hope to read you.

The Panda's Thumb considers. Among other people, they quote Simon Houpt of Canada's Globe and Mail, who writes:

The fittest of them all, of course, is Kong, whose computer-generated imaging makes him the most emotionally resonant character onscreen. It’s undeniably touching to see his enormous beastly face crinkle up with sadness. (A clutch of TV entertainment reporters wept shamelessly at Kong’s death, even if their print and on-line counterparts remained unaffected.) Kong laughs, he cries, he pouts, he is shamed, he is proud, he has childish temper tantrums, he takes his date skating in Central Park. He’s us, and we are him, and the filmmakers have placed a $207-million (U.S.) bet that audiences from Tacoma, Wash., to Dover, Pa., will be taken in by Kong’s humanity. Audiences may not realize it, but the movie is a forceful argument for shared traits, Darwin’s notion — the one that so disturbs creationists — that we’ve evolved from other primates. Which means that, as good as the efforts are of the American Museum of Natural History, in the end that big monkey may do more to crush the creationists than a thousand intelligently designed Darwin exhibits ever could.

You never know, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Interesting article at the UnMuseum. Via Cynical-C.

On the way back from King Kong tonight, amid our discussion of such matters as how the unique ecosystem of Skull Island came to be and what destroyed the seemingly advanced culture of the original inhabitants, the question was raised whether or not King Kong needed to be remade at all.

The answer, of course, is plainly no. The first movie is legendary, and enough of it is in the cultural zeitgeist that we've all seen it, even if we've never actually seen it (which I don't think I have, certainly not the whole thing in one sitting). The sense of rewatching is palpable, particularly during the iconic Empire State Building sequence at the movie's close. And a quick search on the Internet confirms just how much of the original film Peter Jackson kept word-for-word and shot-for-shot

But putting aside the remaking question, King Kong proves why Peter Jackson is the greatest nerd director of all time. (As if Lord of the Rings didn't settle that.) Besides simply being incredible fun, the movie accomplishes what it needs to to work as art: it makes us sympathize with Kong. It makes us root for him; tell me you aren't cheering for him, clinging to the side of the Empire State Building, trying to take out those planes. Kong is perfectly achieved. His facial expressions, his every move, the hairs on his arm, even the never-mentioned but telling scars on his body and face are exactly right, flawless. Kong out-acts everyone else in the movie by a long stretch.

Other people, smarter than me, have already said what needs to be said about the way all versions of King Kong sublimate our cultural anxiety about imperalism and racism. So instead I'll talk about Peter Jackson.

Peter Jackson is a great director, almost like the Platonic form of George Lucas. He loves his B-movies, but he doesn't allow that love to cheese up and ruin his films. He loves special effects, but he knows they're not the point. He knows what sort of movie his audience is there to see, but he never talks down to them or insults their intelligence. Two pictures in a row now he has taken projects I didn't think could ever live up to the hype and blown my doubts out of the water.

He isn't perfect: he's way too in love with the Skull Island idea, which takes way too long and overshadows the rest of the film. A small but significant number of the special effects fall flat because he makes CGI human bodies do things real human bodies can't possibly. There are more than a few obvious homages to Lord of the Rings itself, including one particular bit which so strongly echoes the Mines of Moria it becomes distracting. Jack Black is really funny as always and pretty good, but probably miscast simply because of his notoriety. Jackson doesn't get an especially good performance out of Naomi Watts, either, who is often doing things I don't understand the motivation for.

So Jackson isn't perfect. I mean, he cut out the Scouring of the Shire. But he is a hell of a lot of fun. He's that rare director who can really raise the stock of a film. Everything nerdy he touches turns to gold. If anyone else had done Kong, I probably would have rated for the rental. But he did do Kong, and so you shouldn't wait.

Here & Now interviews Chris Ware, winner of the Gerry Canavan Memorial Book of This Arbitrary Length of Time award and thus a strong contender for Gerry Canavan Memorial Book of the Year. Both the interviewer and yours truly agree that this book has a "gobsmacking level of craft on display." For his part, Chris has deserved good words for Spiegelman's classic Maus, as well as a lot of other interesting and funny things to say.

He also explains how to get the glow-in-the-dark map to work, which I hadn't been able to do (not that I was really trying) until this moment. Eureka! Like everything else in The Acme Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book, it's pretty great. (via)

Fantasybookspot.com interviews Kelly Link. (via Bookslut)

In other news, women are dirty women are aroused by monkey sex.

Pornography studios might do well to take a tip from the Discovery Channel. According to a recent study, women are aroused by watching monkey sex. Sure, they're more aroused by watching human sex, but the loving habits of the bonobo are enough to bring out the primate in any civilized lady.

The study, conducted by Meredith Chivers of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health and J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, was published in the October issue of Biological Psychology. The researchers found that while straight men are only aroused by females of the human variety, straight women are equally aroused by all human sexual activity, including lesbian, heterosexual and homosexual male sex, and at least somewhat aroused by nonhuman sex.

It's science.

Fox still hasn't officially canceled "Arrested Development," but if it does, other networks are interested in the show. (via AICN)

Who will pen the next important terrorism novel? Delillo? Houellebecq? If you guessed Updike, then you are correct. The L.A. Times chats with the 73-year-old, not-ready-for-Stockholm writer about his upcoming novel, The Terrorist, about an American teenager of Middle Eastern descent who finds solace in the bosom of Islamic fundamentalism.

Doubtless this will propel Updike a nose ahead of Roth and Oates in the three-way race of (overly) prolific American novelists gunning for the Nobel. Roth made real headway, to be sure, with The Plot Against America, but don't count out Joyce Carol Oates's talent for rendering violence and bloodshed on the page; she needs only to marry said violence to the proper, internationally relevant landscape. Genocide anyone?

Dial B for Blog is your source for DC Comics Ape Covers. Via Gravity Lens, which has some other good stuff today, including an interview with Kong himself:

Wil Forbis: You must be very excited with your return to the big screen.

King Kong: It's fun, you know. I'd be lying if I said I didn't like the attention. But I try not to get to wrapped up in the Hollywood stuff. I mean, the world has had this kind of on-again off-again love affair with me since the first picture. I've learned that the limos and the red carpets never last. So I make sure that's not what validates my image of myself. My main concern is to make sure King Kong is happy with King Kong. Then I can worry about what other people think.

At L.A. Weekly. Central question: Are comic books art?

(both this one and the last one via Bookninja)

At the Chronicle. Central question: Is theory dead?

The classic Vonnegut novel hits the big screen in 2007. The screenwriters' previous credits include Muppet Treasure Island, Tomb Raider 2, and the forthcoming Atlas Shrugged, so you *know* this'll be good.

Why is Bokonon doing this to us? (Thanks to Bokonon Jeremy W. for the tip.)

Lindsay Waters takes aim at every English department in the country in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The death of Susan Sontag, in 2004, served to point out just how much things had changed in the critical world since the annus mirabilis of 1964, when the Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl and Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation" appeared. She spray-painted on the walls of the academy the incendiary line, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Railing against imposing theories of interpretation on the "sensuous surface" of art, she rejected the New Criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, and other attempts to inflict meaning on art. Pleasure was her principle. Forty years on, what we have 24/7 in most English departments is the complete and total ascendancy of hermeneutics. Instead of the erotics of art, we've got the neurotics of art: the meaning-mongering of interpretation for its own sake.

Insightful, incisive article. (via A&L Daily)

If last night's Arrested Development fell just a little flat for you, as it did for me, it's probably because you don't watch Prison Break (the show AD keeps getting preempted for). The TelevisionWithoutPity forums provide a primer.

1. The title (obviously)
2. The Jamba Juice line. In Prison Break, the main character, Michael Scofield, said, "We're not breaking out of a Jamba Juice, gentlemen."
3. Tobias calling himself T-Bag. On PB, T-Bag is a real sicko: an inbred murderer, rapist, and pedophile. He also found out about the break-out scheme, so he's forcing the rest of them to take him along.
4. GOB drawing the map of the prison on his stomach. On PB, Michael tattooed a detailed schematic of the prison's blueprints on his torso (however, they're hidden amongst another, superficial tattoo)

Also:

A couple other Prison Break references I noticed were in the play. People call Michael "Fish" and Sucre calls him "Cuz."

And the riot seemed like it was at least a shout-out.

The Guardian loves Consider the Lobster.

Fifty-five underated writers nominated by fifteen litbloggers at Syntax of Things.

Greatest city in the world. [also via MeFi]

Don't embarrass yourself when eating or ordering sushi. [.mov] (via MeFi)

December 24, 1996
If we must put people to death, why not at Wendy's. Is
midnight in a prison basement better? Wendy's provides
the two things an execution needs most: plenty of light,
and refreshments. The light allows the condemned to feel
death as an inevitable blending. The refreshments allow
the audience to take in their own hands the tamed
substance and to feel themselves securely on this side of the blender.

This morning while getting my oil change/fuel-system tune-up/new tires I read the complete text of Joe Wenderoth's seminal Letters to Wendy's, which we here at Backwards City have mentioned several times before. It's a great book, which would surely be on everyone's top-ten-of-2005 list had it not been published five years ago. It's not something you can so much communicate -- the book really has to be experienced.

The one above seemed to fit the feel of the day, what with the Governator's big termination and all. Two others we haven't copyright-infringed before:

August 19, 1996
Today I was thinking that it might be nice to be able, in
one's last days, to move into a Wendy's. Perhaps a Wendy's
life-support system could even be created and given a
Wendy's slant; liquid fries, from instance, and burgers and
Frosties continually dripped into one's vegetable dream
locus. It would intensify the visits of the well, too, to see
that such care is being taken for their destiny.

April 7, 1997
This fear of dying -- does it make sense? I look forward to
news of the final descent, wherein I will gain unlimited
access to drugs and to being cared for. Since we have come
to understand how thoroughly artificial our significance is,
and since we have at the same time invented great new
drugs to ease pain,I see no other conclusion: this is the
most wonderful time ever to be dying!

Although his selections were good, Michael Chabon's edition of Best American Short Stories 2005 didn't live up to last year's quite excellent entry in the series. As is so common with collections of this sort, I found myself just flipping through more of the stories than I would have liked. But there are good stories here nonetheless, from Dennis Lehane's "Until Gwen" and George Saunders's "Bohemians" to strong entries from BCR #1 heroes Alix Ohlin and Cory Doctorow. (I'm not in love with the Kelly Link story -- it was one of only two from Magic for Beginners that fell flat for me -- but it was very good to see her in there too.)

The overall winner? It's the first story in the book, "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face" by Tom Perrotta, which you can read for free at Post Road. It's about baseball, as well as some other stuff, and it has an A+ ending, not to oversell.

Ananova reports that Superman Returns may have a bulge problem.

America's editorial cartoonists are pissed. Next up: a national philosophers' strike. It'll hurt, buster, it'll hurt.

This Christmas, give your child the gift of fast-food:

McDonald's Cash Register
Pizza Hut Playset
Dairy Queen Playset
KFC Playset
DQ Playset
Subway Playset

(via Linkfilter)

Gilbert Gottfried has a blog.

Comes from Alan Keyes's PAC Renew America. Rarely do you see such a splendid case of miss-the-pointousity:

One wishes that writer, Moore, could have used his considerable talents to produce uplift as opposed to depression, to reach for the sublime instead of the prosaic, to inspire by taking the high road instead of the low. But, unfortunately, with the influence of the political view from the left upon him all he could do was take the low road. If all one can do is see the worst in man, claim nothing is ever worth the effort, and that western ideas have destroyed any vestige of light in man then you are doomed to stay on that low road. So, we end up with despair and darkness in our art, too many artists having taken the low road.

Just as sadly, we see that the political Left hasn't learned much since 1986. They still see the west as causing all of the world's problems, still see capitulation to our enemies as the right course of action, and still feel that Patriotism and right and wrong are words with meaningless distinctions or, worse, even dangerous concepts.

Moore has lament that his work with Watchmen had "started a whole genre of pretentious comics or miserable comics," but since he insisted on taking that low road, but what could he expect? His politics, if emulated, ends up at this very place.

The Left, so sure that they are the ones qualified to "watch the watchers," fail to see that it is they, rather, who need the watching.

[Applause] (via Bookslut)

Time Magazine wants to share with you the hidden secrets of literature that are Roth and Sittenfeld. I do remember an offhand mention of Prep, and a New York Times in brief review of The Plot Against America, but I'm so glad those sleuths at Time were there to remind me. Jessa Crispin takes the words right out of my mouth with her own reaction.
Via Bookslut

Or so I'm beginning to believe. Michael Parker's well-reviewed If You Want Me to Stay snags another rave, this one from The New York Times, whose reviewer calls it "exquisite but deadly." Having bought my copy in October, I was planning to read it now that the teaching semester is over, but these comments, combined with Fred Chappell's blurb on the back cover declaring it "the one that takes the skin off," I'm beginning to wonder if it'll bite me.

Misery sells. [via BookNinja, which in honor of King Kong also links to the world's most-recent books about giant apes]

Radio scan of New York's FM band on the night John Lennon was killed, December 8, 1980. (Direct link to .mp3 file.)

Slickdeals has the details. If you need Word or Excel, don't miss this. Sorry -- the Web site is misleading, and this doesn't actually come with Word, Excel, or Office after all. Sorry for the hype, too good to be true.

Today's entry: probability. By Louis Menand in The New Yorker.

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake.

Good stuff about rats being smarter than people, and everybody being smarter than the McLaughlin Group, contained therein. (via MetaFilter, because I'm like three New Yorkers behind)

Click here to find out more. I'm currently enjoying Level 4.

Dead Artist: Top Level 7
Successful Artist: Level 6
Famous Artist: Level 5
Student or Teacher Artist: Level 4
Starving Artist: Level 3
Untalented Artist : Level 2
Unknown Artist: Bottom Level 1
Forgotten Artist: Level 0

See also, The Seven Levels of Photographer.

I guess I'm taking the day off. It's a wasteland out there.

The final 2006 World Cup groups are available here, with some commentary from the New York Times here and extensive commentary from ESPN SoccerNet here.

Via my mom, a trip back in time to 1969 to Allen Ginsberg's testimony at the Chicago 8 7 trial.

The misunderstanding deepened when Mr. Ginsberg, who wore a psychedelic tie over a bright sports shirt, began testifying about a "Human Be-In" he attended with Jerry Rubin, one of the defendants, in San Francisco.

Mr. Foran objected that "Be-Ins" were irrelevant to the charge against the seven defendants of conspiracy to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. But Judge Hoffman stopped him. "I don't even know what he's talking about," the judge said. "What is a be-in? I'll let him testify about what a be-in is."

Mr. Ginsberg launched into a lengthy explanation about "a gathering of young people aware of our planetary fate, imbued with a new consciousness, a new planetary life style ... emphasizing life rather than competition, acquisition and war."

Nodding, Judge Hoffman said he had "a vague idea, a very vague idea" of what a "be-in" was.

But the communication chasm really began to yawn when Mr. Ginsberg began describing his role at a news conference in New York in February 1968 at which plans for a Yippie Festival of Life were announced.

He said he had given a brief speech at the conference and then chanted the "Hari Krishna Mantra." Without warning, he suddenly launched into the mantra:

"Hare Krishna. Krishna Hare Krishna. Hari Rama. Hare Rama, Ram. Ram. Hare. Hare."

Shaking from laughter Mr. Foran rose to say that the mantra "has no materiality to this case."

"But it has a spirituality to this case," Mr. Ginsberg said.

In honor of next week's release of King Kong, Gravity Lens has some good links about comic book monkeys, including Gorilla Grodd, Monkeyman, Beppo the Super-Monkey, and the rest.

In the tradition of that great Marvel series of yore, and since Gerry brought up the FF, take a look at what the Fantastic Four might have been like if the filmmakers had taken Michael Chabon up on his idea for the screenplay. He considered Galactus and the Surfer, but gives reasons why that wouldn't be possible.

Anthony Lane has some fun with Narnia in The New Yorker.

It was only a matter of time before a major studio got its talons into C. S. Lewis. The one thing delaying any attempt to film his Narnia novels was the lack of technology; until recently, for example, there was no computer-imaging program powerful enough to re-create a wholly convincing wardrobe. That obstacle has now been surmounted, and “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” is upon us. The leap of the story is unchanged: the Pevensie children, Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and Lucy (Georgie Henley), are evacuated from London during the Blitz and dumped in a pile of old chestnuts: the creaky country house, the shrewish housekeeper, the twinkling professor who knows all.

And so to the conceit that, for decades, has stirred both the souls of the faithful and the loins of professional Freudians: first Lucy, then Edmund, then all four children feel their way uncertainly through the folds of a deep, furry passage and into another world.

Having never been much of a fan of the Fantastic Four, I was able to enjoy the movie. Some of the acting is pretty terrible -- people complain about Jessica Alba, but she's much, much better than the guy playing Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic -- and you should know going in that the Commish basically carries the whole thing. Without Chiklis, there's no movie.

The plot also has some pretty big holes in places. But overall it's fun superhero fluff that's worth a rental.

It's got nothing on Batman Begins or Spiderman 2, however. And I'm pretty skeptical about the inevitable sequel.

The Chicago Tribune's list of notable books of 2005 is the most charitably varied list of noteworthies I've seen, with more small presses and authors/books I haven't heard of but wish I had than any other round-ups under current scrutiny. Congrats to friend and deserving honoree Porter Shreve for his very funny novel Drives Like a Dream.

Pope set to abolish the doctrine of Limbo. (via Metafilter) Dante reportedly furious.

This post says everything I would want to about Salon's new Broadsheet blog. Alison (who also writes for one of my favorite sites, TWOP) hits several different nails squarely on the head, without missing the chance to point to the real issue here, which is whether women are under-represented in the media (all signs point to yes) and what should be done about that. See her post for a scathing indictment of Salon's attempt at a solution. (And thanks very much to Louise for the link.)

The BBC interview from the other day was in memory of the anniversary of John Lennon's murder, which happened twenty-five years ago today. Via the MetaFilter thread comes another interview with Lennon, this one from Playboy in 1980, shortly before he was shot.

PLAYBOY: "John, what's your opinion of the newer waves?"

LENNON: "I love all this punky stuff. It's pure. I'm not, however, crazy about the people who destroy themselves."

PLAYBOY: "You disagree with Neil Young's lyric in 'Rust Never Sleeps'-- 'It's better to burn out than to fade away....'"

LENNON: "I hate it. It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. I don't appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison ...it's garbage to me. I worship the people who survive. Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo. They're saying John Wayne conquered cancer... he whipped it like a man. You know, I'm sorry that he died and all that. I'm sorry for his family, but he didn't whip cancer. It whipped him. I don't want Sean worshiping John Wayne or Sid Vicious. What do they teach you? Nothing. Death. Sid Vicious died for what? So that we might rock? I mean, it's garbage, you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn't he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us. No, thank you. I'll take the living and the healthy."

Intriguing list from The Guardian. Sadly, I've only been in one of these: Abbey Books in Paris. Most startling omission? The Strand Bookstore in New York, the largest and best used bookstore I've ever been in. They have everything.

For real. It's about hockey. It hasn't been updated in the last two weeks, though, presumably because Elisha Cuthbert's been caught in a cougar trap since then.

UGO interviews legendary comics artist Alex Ross. Includes an image slideshow. (via Gravity Lens)

Presenting the nine muses. [Flash]

Polyhymnia: Muse of spiritual movements
Terpsichone: Muse of dance and unemployed creative professionals
Thalia: Muse of (romantic) comedy
Urania: Muse of astronomy and muse of the future
Melpomene: Muse of tragedy and misunderstanding
Euterpe: Muse of music that rocks
Erato: Muse of sex and Cosmo headlines
Clio: Muse of History Channel producers and presidential speech writers
Calliope: Muse of eloquence, academia, and graduate students

Salon asks the question a lot of other people have been asking.

Just how Christian are "The Chronicles of Narnia"? The question might seem absurd; the books' author, after all, was a famous Christian apologist who intended them to teach a form of the gospels. But one critic, at least, has challenged the legitimacy of Lewis' claim (voiced by the lion god Aslan, Lewis' Jesus surrogate) that "you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may better know me there." John Goldthwaite, a Christian himself and a scholar of children's literature, wrote an extended critique of the purported Christian underpinnings of the "Chronicles" in his intelligent, fiery and occasionally injudicious 1996 study of the field, "A Natural History of Make-Believe."

In essence, Goldthwaite argues that Lewis uses Narnia as a sheltered preserve for his own prejudices -- which, it must be admitted, were many and far from pretty. But closer to the heart of this critique lies Goldthwaite's assertion that "whenever a professed Christian feels he must create some wholly other world to explore the meaning of his religion, he is flirting with bad faith. When he fills that world with the make-believes of other religions, he is playing at polytheism. When he further sets sorceresses to rule over it, and werewolves, incubuses and wraiths, he is dabbling in Manichaean dualism, the idea that standing opposed to God's good creation is another, separate and equal, or nearly equal, creation given over to evil."

...

As Goldthwaite sees it, whatever Lewis and his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien may have claimed about their work, it is not compatible with true Christian theology. These two men disliked and withdrew from God's creation -- the world as it is -- considering it corrupt, fallen away from an earlier period of grace that, strangely, they associated with various pagan religions. Both Lewis and Tolkien had theories about how pre-Christian myth prefigured the gospels, but Goldthwaite dismisses this as sophistry. Tolkien had an elaborate justification for the Christian value in creating "secondary worlds," but Goldthwaite finds it lacking in any "explanation for why renouncing the world for places lost in the abyss of time should be thought anything but a rejection of God's plan for the world ... Creating a Secondary World, after all, is in effect a declaration that God's creation is deficient." It would be easier to shrug off this claim as excessive if there weren't so much evidence that Lewis and Tolkien considered this world to be just that: deficient -- compared to the fantasy worlds of their own invention.

There's a lot more good stuff in the article.

Brain goes off.

New Book Written From Perspective Of Gargamel. Only at The Onion, unfortunately. I think I'd want to read the real thing. (via)

The retro-tastic art of Ryan Heshka. One of my favorites at right. (via)

The United States of America v. One Book Entitled Ulysses. All about the Ulysses obscenity trial at AmericanHeritage.com. (via)

“I think this is the most damnable slush and filth that ever polluted paper in print,” read the letter to Margaret Anderson, editor of the monthly literary magazine The Little Review. “There are no words I know to describe, even vaguely, how disgusted I am; not with the mire of his effusion but with all those whose minds are so putrid that they dare allow such muck and sewage of the human mind to besmirch the world by repeating it—and in print, through which medium it may reach young people. Oh my God, the horror of it.” The writer had just finished reading an excerpt from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which had reached America by being serialized in the New York-based Little Review, and he was one of many incensed at the four-letter words and sexual material in Joyce’s story of one day in the life of two Dublin friends. Similar reactions got the novel banned in 1921, sending it on a dozen-years-long legal journey befitting its epic structural template, Homer’s Odyssey. The journey culminated in a New York courtroom on December 6, 1933, 72 years ago [yesterday].

NY Times has the (short) shortlist for the Story Prize. 20K to the winner.

Not really part of Casey's year-in-review series.

It's Superman!
Tom De Haven

Needless to say I really mean it when I say I would have liked to have written this book myself. De Haven was hired by DC to write a novelization of Superman's origin -- come on. But despite my envy I can admit that De Haven does a fantastic job of capturing the iconic feel of the Golden Age Superman while still leaving a human, complex Clark Kent the reader can hold on to.

Of course I would have done a few things differently. Though I understand why he does it, I wouldn't have made Clark quite so stupid. (Superman's not just strong, he's smart. He never gets credit for that.) I don't know that I would have gone with a robot scifi sideplot, and I probably would have put Lois and Clark in the same state before the last hundred pages, and there's a little too much focus on De Haven's original characters while some of the more classic characters get short shrift.

But it wasn't my book, it was De Haven's -- and you can't argue with results.

Check it out. You'll believe a man can fly.

Especially Sam Sacks:

In R.K. Narayan's novel The Vendor of Sweets, a young entrepreneur pushes his father to invest in what seems like a dubious venture: a short-story machine. How the machine works exactly is never made clear, and the hapless man squanders the family savings...

This is but fancy; however, I was reminded of Narayan's machine recently while reading the Best New American Voices 2006, an anthology edited by Jane Smiley. The book gives such a desultory vision of the future of American letters that one can only hope its title is wrong. Without ignoring the occasional flashes of verve, the stories included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a single person of middling talent. All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator's difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible: one story takes place on a road trip to a presidential birthplace, another while moving apartments, another at a wedding, another while opening presents in front of the Christmas tree. None of this much matters anyway, because the things the characters do are always mundane and largely incidental to their psychological conflicts. From time to time a structural innovation appears to offer an interesting novelty, but under the packaging the same old formula is always to be found.

Even the style of writing displays a numbing verisimilitude. The first-person voice is always a lazily generalized vernacular, jazzed up at significant moments with consciously poetic frills in the exposition.

Finally, most of these stories end with a symbolic "moment of clarity" in which nothing happens, but a change has been imperceptibly arrived at. The apogee of immobility at the end of Jamie Keene's "Alice's House" should suffice to make the point: "It's a little after midnight when the phone rings again. It seems as if it's ringing forever, but finally it stops, abruptly and absolutely. And it's quiet again, and I'm alone."

It should be no surprise that every one of the writers in this anthology have one more thing in common: They have attended writers' workshops, either in graduate programs or in similarly organized writing conferences.

And Sack (a graduate of U. of Arizona's writing program) is just getting started. There's much more. (via Bookninja)

Outspoken anti-Intelligent-Design religious studies professor ambushed, beaten by two men who made reference to the class he had planned to teach.

(It should be noted that some people are skeptical that the man was really beaten by creationists, instead believing that the man used an unrelated mugging to gain sympathy for himself after getting in trouble for the nasty anti-fundamentalist emails that resulted in his class being cancelled in the first place. I guess we won't know one way or the other until the guys are caught, if they are.) (vie MeFi)

And so begins Mary McNamara's terrific profile of the actress for the L.A. Times. Keener's star has risen (I hate that phrase) this year with roles in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Capote, but she's one of those severely down-to-Earth people who eschews fame, does her own hair and makeup for photo shoots, refuses to tweak her nipples to make them look perkier. I've never seen her give a bad performance.

She didn't want to add a post-script to her National Book Award-winning memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, but Joan Didion's writing a new chapter on Broadway. No cast members have been named, but this zany heartwarmer promises a season of fun in 2007.

Al Sharpton is in talks with CBS to do a sitcom called (get this) Al in the Family. It's apparently true.

How Craigslist hurts independent and alternative newspapers. At sfweekly.com.

Kelsey Grammar as Beast looks terrible in the trailer.

The audio of Jann Wenner's benchmark 1970 Rolling Stone interview with John Lennon, available online for the first time at the BBC. (Text excerpts from the same interview.) Topics range from his favorite Beatles lyrics to 'the hypocrisy of Beatlemania' to stagnating as an artist to the breakup to his solo career to Paul to hating on the Rolling Stones to, of course, Yoko. Long, but outstanding.

Q: Do you have a picture of ``when I'm sixty-four''?

JL: No, no. I hope we're a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that - looking at our scrapbook of madness.

He would have been sixty-five in October, you know.

Blogger's working again, so I can finally say it: tonight's Arrested Development had me in tears. I think this was one of the best episodes in the entire run of the series. What a great show. Stupid Fox execs. (ObligAmazonLink)

First in a series.

Best Book I Really Didn’t Want to Read but Am Glad I Did:
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini

Worried it was another of those “ethnic” jobbers that occasionally bob up, buoyed perhaps by our uneasy feelings about bombing the country they describe, only to be anointed with a status far beyond their true literary merits (I’m looking at you, Reading Lolita), I dodged this one for months. Finally, Nina promised I wouldn’t be sorry, and goshdarnit if she wasn’t right. It’s a good story! I cried at the end! There are kites! And running! And it’s not about drugs!

Blender finds out the favorite albums of Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe. Here's an excerpt:

THE ALBUM THAT MADE ME WHO I AM
The Sex Pistols
Never Mind the Bollocks
Warner Bros., 1977
“I love real punk — not Avril Lavigne, who thinks wearing a tie is punk. This is my favorite album of all time, and I got into it during the filming of Harry Potter 2, when I was 12. I was obsessed with punk back then. If the Beatles were a phenomenon, then the Sex Pistols were a revolution. Punk is about rebellion, about not caring what other people think of you, and being free. And it’s not about fighting. I don’t fight. I don’t spit, either.”

Radar Magazine talks with David Cross about Arrested Development, The Colbert Report, and a Manhattan man posing as him to pick up chicks, all in the wake of Fox's idiotic decision to cancel the best show on TV.

If there was any justice, Arrested Development seasons 1 and 2 would be this year's Tickle-Me Elmo.

There is SF because the human brain craves sensory and intellectual stimulation before anything else, and the eccentric view provides unlimited stimulation, the eccentric view and the invented world. -PKD

Interviews with Philip K. Dick at philipkdickfans.com.

In today's NY Times, music critic Kelefa Sanneh reviews and mostly admires the new album from party girl and actress Lindsay Lohan.

Pianos crash; drums build; Ms. Lohan murmurs and wails as if she were in an emo band. (And if she were, by the way, it would probably be pretty good.) There's not much of a melody, but it's hard not to flinch when Ms. Lohan turns three words into an unanswered distress call: "Daughter to father, daughter to father."
Surprisingly, much of the CD is better than that single. Ms. Lohan has staked out a patch of musical ground between Kelly Clarkson and the Foo Fighters,and she can snarl a little without laying it on too thick.

Wow. I can't follow that.

The Guardian:

Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion (let alone with the orotund voice of Liam Neeson). He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight. Philip Pullman - he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials - has called Narnia "one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read".

Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.

(via Bookslut)

Fiction, apparently, is dead. (via TEV)

Harold Bloom on God. You've got to give the guy credit, he's got chutzpah:

Q: Yahweh certainly doesn't come across as a sympathetic character...

Bloom: You have to be absolutely a bad reader or crazy or so bound by Judaic tradition of that kind which produces Satmars or Orthodox... how can you possibly like him? He's very bad news.

(also via MeFi, which has more)

Click here. Includes the full-text of the all-black-cover post-9/11 Amazing Spiderman, which features Dr. Doom (of all people) crying at the ruins of Ground Zero. (via MetaFilter)

But curiously, the most melancholic comic strip that I've encountered emerges neither from the alternative weeklies nor from the distant past, but from perhaps the most celebrated and mainstream of the mainstream comics: "Calvin and Hobbes."

It is hard to understand why "Calvin and Hobbes" has developed so firmly a middlebrow reputation, though I suspect it has something to do with the countless decals of Calvin mischievously urinating on the back windows of S.U.V.'s. (All bootlegs, by the way. To his syndicate's chagrin, the creator Bill Watterson refused to sign off on any merchandising apart from books. "If I'd wanted to sell plush garbage, I'd have gone to work as a carny," he said in a rare interview he gave to Comics Journal in 1989.)

John Hodgman laments the current state of comic strips in the Sunday Times, recommending some collected classics in time for the holidays. No, not just the Complete Calvin & Hobbes--that one's already taken care of, no?