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Tuesday, January 31, 2006

I Couldn't Let This One Slide
Everybody's second-favorite literary magazine, The Greensboro Review, is also reviewed in this issue of Literary Magazine Review, which leads to possibly the single greatest analogy in the history of reviews:
The stories and poems chosen for this issue are accessible yet challenging, and many pieces, especially among the fiction, managed to spur my own creative intellect. In fact, the more time I spend with The Greensboro Review, the clearer it becomes that, like the struggling sperm, I have found a place to lodge and grow, and I look forward to the work that GR will publish in the future.
Our Ears Are Burning
It's not available online, but people who have access to a copy of the latest Literary Magazine Review will find some kind words for your favorite magazine and mine:
"...the refugees who edit and contribute to Backwards City Review guide us into what feels like literary territory without boundaries, writing without borders, with enough wit and grace and in-your-face panache to charm even a stale middle-aged schlub. This magazine is a good read."
Why not see what you've missed, and make sure you don't miss any more? Better yet, be a part of Backwards City; a year's subscription is included with every contest entry.
Interviewing Art Spiegelman
The Arizona Republic interview Garbage-Pail-Kid creator Art Spiegelman. Garbage Pail Kids? Really? (via Bookslut)
Randolph, Utah
To get to the place where they like George W. Bush more than any other place in America, you fly west for a long time from Washington, then you drive north for a long time from Salt Lake City, and then you pull into Gator's Drive Inn, where the customer at the front of the line is ordering a patty melt.

A little taste of how the other half lives from the Washington Post. (The secret ingredient is condescension.) Via MeFi.
Oscars
The Squid and the Whale was robbed. Only one nomination? Come on.
How a Comic Is Made
Step-by-step demonstration of how to create a comic. Via Boing Boing.
Each Great Opening Line Is Great in Its Own Way
100 Best First Lines from Novels, via Cynical-C.
Monday, January 30, 2006

Chewbacca's Blog
http://huuuuuurrnnnnnnnnnnn.blogspot.com/
Newspaper Jargon
Neat list. Via AskMe.
Coetzee on the Problem of Translation
Fascinating essay by J.M. Coetzee in The Australian. (via Bookninja)
Superman Meets I Love Lucy
At Dial B for Blog.
The Onion Interviews Stephen Colbert
At the A.V. Club.
AVC: You're saying appearances are more important than objective truth?

SC: Absolutely. The whole idea of authority—authoritarian is fine for some people, like people who say "Listen to me, and just don't question, and do what I say, and everything will be fine"—the sort of thing we really started to respond to so well after 9/11. 'Cause we wanted someone to be daddy, to take decisions away from us. I really have a sense of [America's current leaders] doing bad things in our name to protect us, and that was okay. We weren't thrilled with Bush because we thought he was a good guy at that point, we were thrilled with him because we thought that he probably had hired people who would fuck up our enemies, regardless of how they had to do it. That was for us a very good thing, and I can't argue with the validity of that feeling.

But that has been extended to the idea that authoritarian is better than authority. Because authoritarian means there's only one authority, and that authority has got to be the President, has got to be the government, and has got to be his allies. What the right-wing in the United States tries to do is undermine the press. They call the press "liberal," they call the press "biased," not necessarily because it is or because they have problems with the facts of the left—or even because of the bias for the left, because it's hard not to be biased in some way, everyone is always going to enter their editorial opinion—but because a press that has validity is a press that has authority. And as soon as there's any authority to what the press says, you question the authority of the government—it's like the existence of another authority. So that's another part of truthiness. Truthiness is "What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true." It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.
(via Kottke)
Culled from the Internet for Your Convenience
* "A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person." Michael Dirda on John Carey on the nature of art.

* Front pages of newspapers from twenty years ago, the day after the Challenger disaster.

* Wikipedia's History of the Jews in England.

* The 100 Greatest Dogs in Pop Culture History. Surprisingly, Family Guy's Brian only clocks in at #27, while Krypto the Superdog hits #19.

* Weird vintage ads with demonic-looking children.

'A Zen Master's Life Is One Continuous Mistake'
Today's (actually Saturday's) wisdom from Dōgen via my Zen Calendar 2006.
Sunday, January 29, 2006

Godzilla 101
Syllabus for a Berkeley seminar called Kaijû Cinema: An Introduction to Japanese Giant Monster Movies. (via Gravity Lens)
Let CSI Help You Commit Murder
When Tammy Klein began investigating crime scenes eight years ago, it was virtually unheard of for a killer to use bleach to clean up a bloody mess. Today, the use of bleach, which destroys DNA, is not unusual in a planned homicide, said the senior criminalist from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Klein and other experts attribute such sophistication to television crime dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which give criminals helpful tips on how to cover up evidence.
'As Real as Science Fiction Gets'
The New Yorker on Battlestar Galatica.
But on the Bright Side
After we've destroyed the planet we can look at Leping Zha's amazing photographs and remember how nice everything used to look before we trashed it.

(via RaShOmoN)
And on a Darker Note Again
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.

...

The debate has been intensifying because Earth is warming much faster than some researchers had predicted. James E. Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, last week confirmed that 2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth's average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years, he noted, and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet."
On A Lighter Note
McSweeney's brings in the noise and/or funk with Our Policy on Marriage and Things You Can Do If You Love Jesus Other Than Honk.
The White Elephant in the Room
Strange confluence of abortion links this morning. MetaFilter links to this moving and sad story about a religious woman who could not bring herself to abort a son that would be born without a brain, not even to save the other, healthy twin. (She got lucky; the other twin was apparently born without complication.) Linkfilter links to a story of a woman who was aborted but survived.

On the more pro-choice side of things, Linkfilter also links to Martin Avery's "Confessions of an Abortionist" essay at infidels.org:
It was a case of the blind going to the blind. I was horrified and told her that, of course, I could not perform an abortion. I had heard about some of the drastic medicines given in such cases and I warned her against them. I told her that I could go to prison for doing what she wanted, and I was against such things personally. I probably sounded fierce, for I was afraid someone would find out that she'd been to me with such a request, and I feared even that would get me into trouble.

She left me a great deal more frightened than when she arrived. I had told her that no decent doctor would perform an abortion. And I had scared her pretty badly about using any home devices. Also I'd added a little homily on her 'sins. I should have been shot, but I felt righteous about the whole business. She had some money. She'd been teaching school and saved several hundred dollars and she offered me the whole sum if I would get her out of the jam. I needed the money, but I felt a virtuous glow over turning it down. I was living up to medical ethics. I was being a good citizen and an honorable physician.

So she went away, and I settled back in my empty office and read medical journals and old magazines and treated a few persons who came in with colds and indigestion.

The next day her name leaped at me from the front page of the daily newspaper. Her body had been found on the doorstep of her home, at one o'clock that morning, by her brother as he was returning from a dance. She had shot herself, and she died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Saturday, January 28, 2006

Aslan Died For My Sins
Jaimee and I saw the much-anticipated Chronic-what?cles of Narnia (are we still doing that?) today, and I enjoyed it pretty much exactly as much as I was expecting to: it's a good adventure story and nostalgia party, all wrapped up in a rather unsightly Christian-apologetics package.

In particular I continuously found myself hung up on the ultimate fate of Susan -- who, as we learn in The Last Battle, is cast out from Narnia/Heaven forever for the unspeakable crime of, well, read for yourself:
"Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all those. "If I have read the chronicles right, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?"

"My sister Suan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "is no longer a friend of Narnia."

"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"

"Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
That the rest of these delightful children are all killed in a horrible train wreck at the end of the series is also just a little off-putting. It's the most down ending to a children's book since finding out what happens to Tinkerbell at the end of Peter Pan.

Basically everything else I find interesting about Narnia I've basically already linked to previously:
* The Passion of C.S. Lewis
* All About Narnia
* C.S. Lewis didn't like the idea of a Narnia film...
* Anthony Lane has some fun with Narnia in The New Yorker
* Just How Christian Is Narnia?
* Burn, Narnia, Burn
* Far From Narnia: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials
* Catfight! Philip Pullman vs. C.S. Lewis
Writer as Demiurge: Animal Man
I saw into another world and it was worse than this one. It was like I glimpsed Heaven and...and it wasn't Paradise. It was more like Hell.

What if God, or whoever it is, created us to be better than himself? What if God's reality...Heaven, if you like...what if it's so bad that he had to imagine us to help make his life bearable?

What if we're characters and not people?

-Grant Morrison, Animal Man, Issue 19
As suggested by J.T. in the comments to this post, this morning I checked out the 26 issues of the Grant Morrison run on Animal Man. Very interesting, very strange stuff; what begins as the adventures of (Morrison's words) "an out-of-work, married-with-children, third-rate superhero who becomes involves with animal rights issues" rapidly becomes a deeply metafictional, almost self-indulgent exploration of the production of superhero narrative itself.

In short, after a series of bizarre retcons, personal tragedies, and a little recreational peyote use, Animal Man becomes aware of his creator, who explains to him the true nature of his world. It's quite surreal, rather Gnostic, and very much unlike any other comic you've ever read. The closest comparison I can think of is to some parts of the Cerebus series by David Sim (though I understand Marvel has recently tried to rip this idea off somewhat in the pages of New Avengers).

It's very good. Rightly legendary.

If you're a superhero dork fan and you haven't checked out Animal Man, consider buying all three trades. For more information on Animal Man, consult your local library.
It Was Twenty Years Ago Today
On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch.
Friday, January 27, 2006

A Comics Panel with Seth and Chris Ware
...illustrated by Gordon McAlpin in more-or-less the style of Chris Ware. Great stuff via Drawn!, which has been on a great roll lately. Click over there and just scroll down.
Can Poetry Cure Mental Illness?
And here I thought it caused mental illness. (via the Rake)
Fridays Never End
Here's a few more:

* 12 Steps to Artificial Life (via)

* The religious affliation of comic book characters list has been expanded. (also)

*You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded
front door. There is a small mailbox here. The original Zork, online.

* RAND's Fifty Books for Thinking about the Future Human Condition. Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse both rock the 'The Past' category, but the rest seem a little bit wonky. (mefi)
Thank Coyote It's Friday
My client, Mr. Wile E. Coyote, a resident of Arizona and contiguous states, does hearby bring suit for damages against the Acme Company, manufacturer and retail distributor of assorted merchandise, incorporated in Delaware and doing business in every state, district, and territory. Mr. Coyote seeks compensation for personal injuries, loss of business income, and mental suffering caused as a direct result of the actions and/or gross negligence of said company, under Title 15 of the United States Code Chapter 47, section 2072, subsection (a), relating to product liability.

Mr. Coyote states that on eighty-five separate occasions, he has purchased of the Acme Company (hereinafter, 'Defendant'), through that company's mail order department, certain products which did cause him bodily injury due to defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labeling. Sales slips made out to Mr. Coyote as proof of purchase are at present in the possession of the Court, marked Exhibit A. Such injuries sustained by Mr. Coyote have temporarily restricted his ability to make a living in the profession of predator. Mr. Coyote is self-employed and thus not eligible for Workmen's Compensation...
This is being forwarded as if it were anonymously written, but it was actually written by Ian Frazier and published in The New Yorker in 1990. It was then republished in his book, Coyote v. Acme, of which it is the highlight. So, not anonymous at all, actually. Here's a version that gives proper attribution.
On the Other Hand
Astronomers have just discovered an Earthlike planet around another star, so when we're done ruining this planet, we can just move there.
Collapse
The last few weeks I've been reading a chapter or so a day out of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Suceed, Jared Diamond's followup to Guns, Germs, and Steel about environmental catastrophism and the way societies fail when they destroy their own environments. I finally finished it tonight. It's a truly fascinating read, detailing several case histories of collapsed societies before turning its critical eye to our current situation. Healthy doses of denial, ignorance, selfishness, irrationality, and the tragedy of the commons all play their role in the sudden and rapid decline of numerous, seemingly prosperous cultures.

The book's very best chapter is its last, in which Diamond addresses and handily defuses several one-line objections to his thesis (It's not that bad! Environmentalists have been wrong before! We'll invent our way out of it! God is coming back soon!). If you're not already an environmentalist, this book will make you a believer.

You can read the eerie opening pages here at NPR. Click the +/- for a lengthy (but good) excerpt from the excerpt.
A Tale of Two Farms: Two farms; Collapses, past and present

A few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in their strengths and vulnerabilities. Both were by far the largest, most prosperous, most technologically advanced farms in their respective districts. In particular, each was centered around a magnificent state-of-the-art barn for sheltering and milking cows. Those structures, both neatly divided into opposite-facing rows of cow stalls, dwarfed all other barns in the district. Both farms let their cows graze outdoors in lush pastures during the summer, produced their own hay to harvest in the late summer for feeding the cows through the winter, and increased their production of summer fodder and winter hay by irrigating their fields. The two farms were similar in area (a few square miles) and in barn size, Huls barn holding somewhat more cows than Gardar barn (200 vs. 165 cows, respectively). The owners of both farms were viewed as leaders of their respective societies. Both owners were deeply religious. Both farms were located in gorgeous natural settings that attract tourists from afar, with backdrops of high snow-capped mountains drained by streams teaming with fish, and sloping down to a famous river (below Huls Farm) or 3ord (below Gardar Farm).

Those were the shared strengths of the two farms. As for their shared vulnerabilities, both lay in districts economically marginal for dairying, because their high northern latitudes meant a short summer growing season in which to produce pasture grass and hay. Because the climate was thus suboptimal even in good years, compared to dairy farms at lower latitudes, both farms were susceptible to being harmed by climate change, with drought or cold being the main concerns in the districts of Huls Farm or Gardar Farm respectively. Both districts lay far from population centers to which they could market their products, so that transportation costs and hazards placed them at a competitive disadvantage compared to more centrally located districts. The economies of both farms were hostage to forces beyond their owners' control, such as the changing affluence and tastes of their customers and neighbors. On a larger scale, the economies of the countries in which both farms lay rose and fell with the waxing and waning of threats from distant enemy societies.

The biggest difference between Huls Farm and Gardar Farm is in their current status. Huls Farm, a family enterprise owned by five siblings and their spouses in the Bitterroot Valley of the western U.S. state of Montana, is currently prospering, while Ravalli County in which Huls Farm lies boasts one of the highest population growth rates of any American county. Tim, Trudy, and Dan Huls, who are among Huls Farm's owners, personally took me on a tour of their high-tech new barn, and patiently explained to me the attractions and vicissitudes of dairy farming in Montana. It is inconceivable that the United States in general, and Huls Farm in particular, will collapse in the foreseeable future. But Gardar Farm, the former manor farm of the Norse bishop of southwestern Greenland, was abandoned over 500 years ago. Greenland Norse society collapsed completely: its thousands of inhabitants starved to death, were killed in civil unrest or in war against an enemy, or emigrated, until nobody remained alive. While the strongly built stone walls of Gardar barn and nearby Gardar Cathedral are still standing, so that I was able to count the individual cow stalls, there is no owner to tell me today of Gardar's former attractions and vicissitudes. Yet when Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland were at their peak, their decline seemed as inconceivable as does the decline of Huls Farm and the U.S. today.
[+/-]

This book is absolutely worth reading, although be warned that you will probably feel quite depressed afterwards. As time goes on I find it harder and harder to keep an optimistic outlook about our society's long-term prospects. Unless we turn this ship around, we're doomed. We may be doomed already.
Thursday, January 26, 2006

Pixar City
Hot on the heels of the Disney-Pixar merger, the bad, Pixar-free Toy Story 3 has already been cancelled. Good Toy Story 3 to come?
"Eastern" news from the BBC.
Some Fluff pieces, but I liked 'em - Hong Kong and Chinese Bloggers "debating" censorship and Google.cn.

And in unrelated news, things start making sense with this piece about how Filipinos name their babies. Being named Don ("sir") from birth is one thing, but I'm glad MY name isn't Hitler Manila, that's for sure.
East v. West
The Prospect considers why Eastern philosophy hasn't made more of a dent in Western poor thinking philosophy. [via A&L Daily]
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Quitter
Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 78, winner of the 1982 Nobel literature prize, said in an interview published in part by a Spanish newspaper Wednesday that he has stopped writing, at least for the time being.

More from The Independent. It's the world's loss. (via TEV)
'Creative, Collaborative, Enthusiastic Scavengering Behavior'
Encyclopedia Hanasiana talks to Sean Stewart, science fiction author and alternate-reality gaming pioneer.
Did you find these games appealing from the beginning?
I did. One of the dirty secrets of doing this stuff is that I am such a better writer now than before I did this project.

Why is that?
When you work as a professional novelist, in this day and age, part of what you are encouraged to do—and part of the natural process—is to slowly work down and reach more and more deeply within yourself to find your own authentic vision and slowly get past pastiching what others have done. Pastiche always came easily to me because I read very widely from a pretty young age and enjoyed most kinds of fiction. I could do faux Cormac McCarthy and I could do faux John Carter of Mars. Gradually, as a novelist, you’re encouraged to push down through that and find your authentic voice as a writer.

With AI, we got in over our heads. We underestimated just how hungry the audience was to be entertained and how much we would need to do to entertain them for how long. I ended up getting to a point where, as a writer, I was in a bizarre need-driven zone—to the point where I punched through everything I was as a writer into the much bigger, darker, oil-well deposit of everything I had been as a reader.

I was allowing myself to use all of it—Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner and Andre Norton and Tolkien and Dashiell Hammett,1984, Little House on the Prairie, everything—because there was a cast of literally scores of characters going in scores of directions—some personal, some political. It was every kind of writing that I had ever imagined or read, let alone done myself: political posters, pamphlets, business websites, personal diaries of 55-year-old women going through relationship agonies, weddings, funerals, demonstrations. It was extraordinarily liberating, in a sense, because there was no time to worry about “Is this tasteful?” You just had to go and keep going.
'We Don't Fact-Check Books'
Good to know.
That's a Hell of an Act
The Aristocrats is actually quite enjoyable. I can't believe Jaimee agreed to watch it with me, but she did, and she actually laughed. She thought Sarah Silverman took the prize ("It's all about timing"); I liked Billy the Mime, among other things.

It's amazing that the movie could basically repeat itself for an hour and a half and still never feel stale.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006

H.M.
When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever president. The removal of large sections of his temporal lobes left Henry unable to form any new personal memories, but his tragic loss revolutionized the field of psychology and made "H.M." the most-studied individual in the history of brain research.
Old time Illinois.
If you're on dial-up, you won't like these links. Tons of big images on the web from the Illinois Digital Archive - a slew of all sorts of pictures from old old time america. I found it while doing a google image search, but it's certainly worth a look if you're into horse drawn hearses, crazy old school mail carriers (great sign on the car), and Princess Leia operating an old time switchboard.

One of my favorites right now is this Eclipse during ice storm taken at Eberhardt house 321 S. Elm Street. All these from only the first collection, the Arthur Public Library District.
How American Idol Really Works
Of course, American Idol invites and expects you to side with its judges. But while the show presents the trio as being besieged by an army of the utterly deluded, the reality is absolutely otherwise. Let's do the math. If Ryan Seacrest is to be believed, then something like a hundred thousand people turned up at Soldier Field to throw their hats into the American Idol ring. During the two hour show, we saw no more than 30 in total. At the end of the show, we were told 34 had made it through to the next round in Hollywood, but only a handful of successful auditions were shown on screen. And those that were concentrated almost exclusively on gimmicks rather than talent: the cutesy sisters, the inevitable twins, the fat girl, and the hippy who talks to the animals. There are two pre-audition selection rounds before contestants are allowed to meet the judges. Clearly then, the show's army of "talent" spotters deliberately sent Derek, Crystal and the others crashing and burning onto national television, in the sure and certain knowledge that humiliation means ratings.
Popmatters is on to the American Idol scam. (via MeFi)
I cannot escape the conclusion that with this season's opening episodes, American Idol has completed its sad transformation from an engaging guilty pleasure into a repulsive and immoral spectacle that should be shunned by all right-thinking and self-respecting Americans.
How to Find a Human
How to get a human agent at various customer service numbers.
Already Wednesday
Some links:

* Google agrees to censor search results for China. Very unfortunate, smells-like-selling-out decision from Google, though in all fairness it's probably unavoidable given the reality of the current Chinese government.

* Are we like the families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many adherents afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse. More from Daniel Dennett on the current state of world religion, again adapted from his new book.

* How William Gibson discovered science fiction.

* Films ranked by use of the word "fuck." Also provides vital fucks-per-minute statistics.

(via, via, via, and via)
Brothers Grimm
Terry Gilliam is very much a hit-or-miss director for me: Brazil and 12 Monkeys are classics, and The Fisher King is weird but eminently watchable -- but I can't imagine why anyone would ever watch Holy Grail more than once and I've never been able to watch Time Bandits without falling asleep.

The Brothers Grimm falls between Fisher King and Holy Grail for me. It's very strange, a little bit boring in places, and it just doesn't hit the heights that his earlier, better work does -- but it's still a Gilliam movie and thus it's still worth watching.

I liked it well enough. It's just not great.

The real Gilliam diamond-in-the-rough, the one hardly anybody has watched but everybody should, is the movie he didn't direct but starred in: Lost in La Mancha, the documentary about his doomed Quixote project. I know I've mentioned it before.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006

A Brief History of Pixar
In honor of the big Disney-Pixar deal, Kottke links to How To Turn 10 Million Into 7 Billion: A Brief History Of Pixar.
WBPN
The WB and UPN networks are merging into one giant black hole of suck.
Welcome to Templar, Arizona
A really good webcomic. Just check it out.
Locus's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2005
Via Bookslut, two good best-of lists from Locus Magazine.

Personal highlights Sin City, It's Superman!, and Magic for Beginners all make the cut, though I definitely would have given Serenity the nod over Sin City in the film category.
'We Have a Built-In, Very Potent Hair-Trigger Tendency to Find Agency in Things That Are Not Agents, Like Snow Falling off the Roof'
Interesting and surprisingly hostile interview with Tufts University's own Daniel Dannett in The New York Times.
But your new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, is not about cathedrals. It's about religious belief, which cannot be dissected in a lab as if it were a disease.

That itself is a scientific claim, and I think it is false. Belief can be explained in much the way that cancer can. I think the time has come to shed our taboo that says, "Oh, let's just tiptoe by this, we don't have to study this." People think they know a lot about religion. But they don't know.

So what can you tell us about God?

Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world - that's a hopeless idea. There is no such thing.
(via Kottke)
A Bold 24 Prediction, Aufrance-Style
Jeremy Aufrance dropped this prediction on me in the hallways of McIver today and I liked it enough that I wanted to record it here, for all posterity, in case by some wildly unlikely chance it turns out to be right.

It's probably occurred to most of us, somewhere in the deep recesses of our minds, but he's the first person I know to have put words to this somber national hope.

SPOILER? - HIGHLIGHT TO READ
He thinks Palmer is still alive.
/SPOILER? - HIGHLIGHT TO READ
Congratulations to Chris Bachelder
...whose story "Blue Knights Bounced from CVD Tourney" from Backwards City #2 will appear in New Stories from the South 2006!

If the other stories are half as good as Chris's this should be a great year for the anthology. While you're waiting for the chance to re-read "Blue Knights," why not check out Chris's e-book, Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography as mcSweeneys.net?

Doesn't this just make a person want to go and enter our contest? Don't forget, you can now submit online.
Jacktracker
A Google Maps hack chronicling Jack Bauer's movements on Day 5 of 24.
Monday, January 23, 2006

Backwards City #3 Is at the Printer!
After some false starts, a few unavoidable delays, and half our staff suddenly and unexpectedly moving away, Backwards City #3 is finally going out to the printer tomorrow, which should mean it will be in your mailboxes very early in March.

This is a little later than we'd hoped, but sometimes things happen.

I should say again that this is our finest issue yet. I'm very proud of what we put together. In a couple weeks we'll put up some excerpts and you can see for yourself.
'The Last Question'
The story Isaac Asimov considered his finest, online.
"Ask Multivac."

"You ask Multivac. I dare you. Five dollars says it can't be done."

Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a question which, in words, might have corresponded to this: Will mankind one day without the net expenditure of energy be able to restore the sun to its full youthfulness even after it had died of old age?

Or maybe it could be put more simply like this: How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

Multivac fell dead and silent. The slow flashing of lights ceased, the distant sounds of clicking relays ended.

Then, just as the frightened technicians felt they could hold their breath no longer, there was a sudden springing to life of the teletype attached to that portion of Multivac. Five words were printed: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
The Fifty Most Loathsome People of 2005
Some tough words for the big newsmakers of 2005 by The Beast. An overall decent list, with a few surprises:
4. You

Charges: Silently enabling and contributing to the irreversible destruction of your planet. Absolving yourself of your responsibility to do anything about it that your immediate neighbors don't. Assuming that it's normal behavior to spend several hours each day totally inert and staring into a cathode ray tube. Substituting antidepressants for physical motion. Caring more about the personal relationships of people you will never meet than your own. Shrugging your shoulders at the knowledge that your government is populated by criminal liars intent on fooling you into impoverished, helpless submission. Cheering this process on.

Exhibit A: You don't even know who your congressman is.

Sentence: Deathbed realization that your entire life was an unending series of stupid mistakes and wasted opportunities, a priceless gift of potential extravagantly squandered, for which you deserve nothing but scorn or, at best, indifference, and a cold, meaningless demise.
Red-Haired Barbarians: The Dutch and Other Foreignersin Nagasaki and Yokohama
Some more cool Japanese prints via RaShOmoN. Here's Nagasaki as it looked in 1802:

Good Bye, Lenin!
This is a great movie. In 1989, Alex Kerner's mother, a patriotic East German socialist, suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma shortly before the Berlin Wall falls. Eight months later she awakens too fragile to survive any sort of extreme shock -- so her family conspires to hide the fall of the DDR from her with an increasingly elaborate fantasy-history of German reunification.

Excellent, excellent. You must see it.

Hard to believe this was sixteen years ago. I was ten at the time. Now I'm old and busted.

Amazon/Netflix
Sunday, January 22, 2006

When Are They Going to Get to the Fireworks Factory?
Hopefully before it explodes. (Also via Cynical-C)
The List of All Movies Reagan Watched While He Was President
Today's bizarre trivia ephemera from Cynical-C. Highlights include Superman II, Rocky III, Return of the Jedi, Star Treks III and IV, Cocoon II, Karate Kid II, and, of course, Crocodile Dundee II.
Bad Idea City
Via G-Lens: A full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, which aims to generate infinite, clean nuclear-fusion-based energy, will be built in March or April in Hefei, capital city of east China's Anhui Province.

Experiments with the advanced new device will start in July or August. If the experiments prove successful, China will become the first country in the world to build a full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, nicknamed "artificial sun", experts here said.


Emphasis on the if. If not...
You Can Listen to Snippets from Penn Jillette's Radio Show
...at freefm.com. (via Boing Boing)
Superman: Red Crescent?
Young Arabs will soon be poring over a new group - and new genre - of superheroes like Jabbar, Mumita and Ramzi Razem, all aimed specifically at young Muslim readers and focusing on Muslim virtues.

Mr. Mutawa's Teshkeel Media, based in Kuwait, says that in September it will begin publishing "The 99," a series of comic books based on superhero characters who battle injustice and fight evil, with each character personifying one of the 99 qualities that Muslims believe God embodies.




Interestingly, according to the caption for the picture accompanying the article, the 99 qualities that Allah embodies include "speedy," "expandable," "mystery powers," and "a gem expert."
Saturday, January 21, 2006

Popular Science Myths
Click here. Includes whether or not chickens can live without their heads, if lightning ever strikes the same place twice, the legitimatcy of the five-second rule, and my pet "weird fact" peece, whether hair and fingernails continue growing after death.
Cinematic Three-Way Dance
Barton Fink vs. Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) vs. Broken Flowers

Just three random movies I've happened to see lately.

* Barton Fink is more or less the only Coen Brothers movie I watched and didn't immediately love; I last saw it as a high school senior in my father's basement, and our entire gathered audience agreed afterwards it sort of sucked. But over the years I've heard people insist that Barton Fink is not just underrated but actually the best of the Coen Brothers movies. So I gave it another shot.

Honestly, it really does sort of suck. It has its moments -- I definitely found a lot more to enjoy in the elaborate parody of writerly pretention this time around -- but it's no Lebowski or Hudsucker or Man Who Wasn't There. (Or Fargo or O Brother or Raising Arizona, &c.)

* Stop me if you've seen this one: In Broken Flowers, Bill Murray is an embittered aging man who may or may not have fathered a son he never knew. But despite the striking similarity to the characters Murray recently played in Rushmore, Life Aquatic, and Lost in Translation (among others), the movie is quite good and definitely worth seeing. Damned if it doesn't feel a little bit like déjà vu, though.

* Gigantic wins from pure, unadultered geeky delight. It's just two fun hours of people talking about They Might Be Giants and They Might Be Giants talking about themselves. Very enjoyable. You may need to have gone to (several) TMBG shows to really get it, though; I'll never forget my first one, and this brought back some very geeky joy.
How to Survive a Robot Uprising
Tips on defending yourself against the coming rebellion.
Gwen Stacy in Spiderman 3?
Hmm. How's that going to work? Haven't they already sort of missed the Gwen Stacy boat?
'The Passion of C.S. Lewis'
Another very good dissection of the Narnia series, this time in the New York Review of Books.
Friday, January 20, 2006

Previously on 24
Via Jeremy Isaac, a few-days-old (but still fresh) interview with a 24 scriptwriter.
Slate: Where did the concept for 24 come from? Did it start as a show about counterterrorism or as a show that would take place in 24 episodes over a single day?

Loceff: It really started with a single idea from a single person, Joel Surnow. He came up with the idea of a show that took place in 24 hour-length, real-time episodes over the course of one day, and he called Bob Cochran, his producing partner, and pitched it to him. And Bob said, "It's a great idea, it'll never work, don't call me again." The idea that you could stitch together every detail episode to episode and preserve continuity for the length of a season and tell a story while using no time cuts, no flashbacks, nothing but pure real time just seemed too difficult. To create a situation where each new episode has to start in the exact same place as the previous one, with the actors' hair in the exact same place, seemed crazy. But Joel called Bob back the next day, and that was it.
Kafkamesto
The Flash game that lets you BE Franz Kafka. JayIsGames has a writeup which may help. (via MeFi, which is also having a discussion about Greensboro's beloved crazy uncle in the attic, Orson Scott Card)
DFW: The Audiobook
Footnote- and long-paragraphophile David Foster Wallace tries to read his latest book, Consider the Lobster, aloud1.



---
1It isn't easy.
Friday
...is the day I traditionally post links to other sites on the Internet. Via all the usual places:

* Hamas spends £100,000 on 'image makeover'.

* Disney trying to buy Pixar, which means I may get my Pixar-flavored Toy Story 3 after all.

* The paintings of Joyce Polance.

* The 100 most expensive books. I knew I never should have thrown away my signed first edition copy of Ulysses.

* The 3% "federal excise tax" you pay on your phone bill each month --levied in 1898 to pay for the Spanish-American war, though it was so nice they decided to keep it -- may be on its way out.

* The Wall Street Journal loves Green Eggs and Ham.
Thursday, January 19, 2006

The Movie Deaths Database
With 273 deaths on file. (via MeFi)
See It
I have no new articles to link to, nothing revelatory to say at all, really, but for what it's worth allow me to add my voice to the deafening volume of praise being heaped on Brokeback Mountain. Like so many, I was skeptical as a result of the trailer, and that single line of dialogue we all know so well. Forget it. Forget it all. See this movie and witness one of the most wrenchingly beautiful films I've seen in years. I can't say with certainty that I've seen Heath Ledger in anything before, but his performance is one of the most astonishing, breath-taking transformations in memory. Again, this praise shouldn't come as news to anyone who reads film reviews, etc., but coming from someone who has misgivings about nearly everything, hear me when I say I have none regarding Brokeback Mountain.
Cubeoban
Another Internet sliding puzzle. [Flash] (via MeFi)
Holy Nostalgia, Batman!

Fans of the old Batman TV series will certainly be interested in Dial B for Blog's detailed six-part retrospective on the show. As I may have mentioned before, my brother and I must have watched every episode of this show at least twice.

This page has all the bat-onomatopoeia you will ever need.
Starbuck
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer interviews Katee Sackhoff, Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica. Among other things, there's some interesting points about what it means to be a woman in sci-fi:
There has been a lot a positive and negative reaction regarding Starbuck. Initially, it surrounded just the idea of the character as a woman. But no one had gotten a chance to even get to know your character back then. Now, two seasons in, have you read anything about her?

I don't read them. My mom does. If there's a good one, or a funny one that's really bad, she tells me to read it. I think one time, someone said I was so ugly it looked like I fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, and landed on my face. (Laughs.) And then, I climbed on top of a 10-story building, fell off of that, and landed on my ass. I was like, that's really funny! Obviously someone went through that much effort to figure out, you know, how my ass got flat and my face ... that's funny. You have to laugh about it.
(via Gravity Lens, which takes a little umbrage at the idea that Battlestar Galactica "isn't really science fiction": I need someone to explain to me how a show about humanity, slaughtered and driven from the twelve worlds they occupy by technology that they created, now pursued and manipulated by these same enemies, having to determine on-the-fly what constitutes "human," and preserve the remnants of the race doesn't qualify as science fiction. I tend to agree. Just because some science fiction is juvenile and some science-fiction fans are weird doesn't mean the whole genre is toxic.)
Goldstein Offers Truce; Big Brother Defiant
Bin Laden's latest audiotape threatens additional terrorist attacks but offers truce "with fair conditions." I'm certain this tape is real and that he's negotiating in good faith -- so merry Christmas, war is over. (via MeFi)
Kearl's Guide to Sociological Thanatology
The sociology of death and dying. Via MeFi.
Ephemera Now
Vintage ads. Huge image gallery via RaShOmoN.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Jury Nullification
Jury nullification is a jury's refusal to render a verdict according to the law, as instructed by the court, regardless of the weight of evidence presented. Instead, a jury bases its judgment on other grounds. Historically, examples include the unjustness of the law, injustice of its application, the race of a party, or the jury’s own common sense.

Remember this next time you're asked to serve on a jury; the judge will almost certainly fail to mention it.
Make your own superheroes. Fear not the Law.
For all the people who want to just tool around with City of Heroes, but not have to suffer any of the grief that comes with MMORPGs, it's good news that NCSoft has released their powerful Character Creator free. This is the same tool that has been praise-praise-praised by players, and even got NC Soft sued by Marvel because of "copyright infringement" concerns.

You'll need a PC (drat for me), and the installer is in Korean, but this should be fun. Via Slashdot/Games and where the main links/descriptions are: 1up.com. Or just download the thing.
Delicious
All about the man behind the Hershey bar. (via A&L Daily)
Blizzinks
* Why Angela Carter is still popular

* The Official Burt Ward Homepage

* Classic Mathematical Fallacies

* Maria Dahvana Headley grew up listening to the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign of the 1980s. As a student at New York University in the late '90s, she applied that advice to her love life, turning down most men who asked her out and dating only intellectual, literary types. Frustrated by those guys, she reversed course, resolving to spend one year responding positively to all flirting and saying yes to literally anyone who asked her out. The ensuing 150 dates included a homeless man, several non-English speakers, 10 taxi drivers, two lesbians and a mime.
Won't Somebody Think of the Children?
Cinescape tackles sex (mostly cleavage) in comics. (via Gravity Lens)
Beautiful, ass-kicking women have jiggled and trounced their way through the criminal underworld since comics’ inception. Publishers know that their young, mostly male readership likes a little sex with their violence and they’ve always obliged. And while one could construe powerful female characters as almost feministic, when combined with titillating art, an obvious conflict emerges. Those images contradict any pretense of equality when the subjects become sex objects. No comic creator should justify scantily-clad super-heroines with, “Well, she’s a really strong woman.“ I doubt most comic creators see their female characters as feminist icons. They may like the characters for other reasons, and like most men, they like breasts. Again, they draw what they like. Yet, I know that superhero comics that double as soft-core porn repel some female readers. I’m not offended by those images, but I’m a guy. However, while I don’t want comics to serve as feminist manifestos, the comic industry must realize that some comics’ depiction of women repels potential readers by focusing more on boobies than on story. Ultimately, most female heroines don’t depict “empowered, independent womyn” so much as male fantasies combining sex and violence. Personally, it only bothers me when it lowers superhero comics to juvenile wish-fulfillment instead of using them to address questions of morality, power and responsibility, and the like. I don’t mean that DC should inspect every panel of WONDER WOMAN to remove any distracting cleavage, but there are a number of titles that traffic more in tits and ass than story.
Really, he's right.
A 24 Movie?
There's talks. I guess they'd have pee breaks every six hours or so.

As for this:
"This series could go 15 years," he says. "This could be Law & Order. If we do the CTU thing for seven years and then want to do a day in the life of a cop with a different actor, we can."
I really think they've missed the boat here. If they hadn't gone back to CTU for season two, but instead gone someplace completely different -- as I believe they'd talked about at the time* -- they might have gotten away with it. But now they're pretty married to the CTU concept. The series wouldn't survive without CTU, and probably wouldn't survive without Jack.

--
* For instance, Year Two might have been opening night of a play. Year Three might have been about stockbrokers.

There was even some talk, I think, of using the same basic cast of actors playing roughly the same characters in a new 24-hour situation every year. So Jack would always be a hard-ass get-it-done sort of guy, and Tony would be his somewhat embittered loyal sidekick, and Palmer would be the conflicted but essentially virtuous leader -- but one year they'd be chefs, and the next they'd be public school teachers, and so on.

If I'm remembering right. Regardless, they stopped talking about this very quickly.
More on the Not Taking of the Sky from Me
"A sequel's unlikely," Whedon told Empire with a note of clear regret, "but it's amazing what permutations of something can happen." But if not a theatrical encore, that leaves... yes, you guessed it, a possible return to the smaller screen. "As long as I was able to service the characters with integrity and had enough money so that I wasn't hampered, then I would love to return Serenity to TV. I love that universe; it continues and those characters live on. There could be a series, there could be a miniseries, there could be all sorts of things. I'm not ruling anything out. I'll let it simmer for a while and see if anyone calls." (via GeekPress)
Tuesday, January 17, 2006

'Bruce Springsteen Songs, If the Title More Accurately Reflected the Subject Matter'
Via Shankar, at McSweeney's.

You and I Are Confronting the Industrialized Wasteland Alone, and We Must Cling Together, for We Are Beset on All Sides by Inescapable Oblivion.
Country Boys
David Sutherland's three-part, six-hour profile of two teenage boys growing up in rural Kentucky is available for free at pbs.org. You can also get it at Netflix or Amazon as well, of course.

I haven't had time for this one yet, but I've heard good things. (via MetaFilter)
PKD
Jonathan Lethem talks Philip K. Dick with Benjamin Walker on the Theory of Everything podcast about Philip K. Dick, UBIK, The Matrix, literary merit, genius, insanity, and on and on. (via Boing Boing)
Iraqi Invasion
A Text Misadventure.
Oval Office
You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States. You knew Scalia would pull through for you.

There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of the room and there is a full-length mirror upon the wall.

What do you want to do now?

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

> LOOK MIRROR
Self-reflection is not your strong suit.

> PET SEAL
It's not that kind of seal...
(via Waxy)
Wacky, Wales, Dick
* Top Ten Wacky Conspiracy Theories. Reptilian aliens, faked moon landings, the 2004 tsunami, and the phantom time hypothesis, among others. Watch out for the passion.com ads. (via)

* Just for Jennifer W., the Library of Wales is reprinting some forgotten 20th-century Welsh classics. (via)

* R. Crumb's comic "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick," originally published in Weirdo. It seems to describe more or less the same mystical experience encountered in "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later," which is the essay referenced at the end of Waking Life. (via)
Darwin, Wolphin, Parrot
* Denis Dutton in The Australian on Darwinian aesthetics.
Our aesthetic psychology has remained unchanged since the building of cities and the advent of writing some 10,000 years ago, which explains why The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, remain good reading today.

We haven't lost Pleistocene tastes for fat and sweet foods, nor have we lost our ancient tastes for artistic entertainment.

The fascination, for example, that people worldwide find in the exercise of artistic virtuosity, from Praxiteles to Renee Fleming, is not a social construct, but an evolutionary adaptation; the worldwide interest in sports comes from a similar source.
(via A&L Daily)

* The Washington Post on Wolphin, the new DVD-magazine from the McSweeney's people -- which, the WP claims, sort of sucks.
The idea of a DVD magazine full of odd little films still sounds great. But maybe it's the kind of idea that should be executed by somebody other than the editors of self-consciously weird literary magazines.
(via Bookslut)

* If you're going to cheat on your boyfriend, be sure to kill your parrot first.
Monday, January 16, 2006

Martin Luther King Comics
from 1956: Martin Luther King & the Montgomery Story

from 1957: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

(via MonkeyFilter)
It's the Only High-Energy Power Bar Good Enough for Jack Bauer
Watch Kiefer shill (in character!) for the Calorie Mate energy bar in three Japanese commercials.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

(via MetaFilter)
What Blogging Is For
Kottke is all about MLK today.
Iowa
Via Bookslut and EarthGoat, the Press-Citizen talks to Lan Samantha Chang, who recently took over the Writers' Workshop in Iowa City -- while elsewhere on the 'net there's some glee outrage over a recent MFA Handbook unceremoniously booting Iowa out of their list of the top-ten writing programs.

It's hard to believe, but it's possible for us to identify the precise moment Iowa began its slow but inevitable decline: March 2002, when they failed to admit every one (Can you believe it? Every single one! The fools!) of the founding editors of Backwards City Review.

I heard Lan Samantha Chang read here in Greensboro not so long ago, by the way. I enjoyed Hunger soon afterwards.

UPDATE: You can see some responses to the Iowa demoting at the Handbook's mailbag, including Tom Kealey's justification for ranking Iowa as at-most #11 in the country.
I didn’t list any program as “top ten” that doesn’t fund all of its students and fund them all equally. I think this issue is extremely important, as it levels the playing field in workshops and makes for a less-competitive atmosphere.
This is hugely important. No writing school should admit students it can't provide for. That's the difference between a valuable and worthy academic pursuit and exploiting deluded people's dreams.

That said, my understanding is that Iowa actually does do a good job of providing for its students. The competition angle doesn't bother me so much, as long as everybody has something -- and as far as I've heard nearly every student at Iowa, as with nearly every student at Greensboro and most other reputable programs (*cough* Columbia *cough*), is taken care of.
Luckily There's No Such Thing As Global Warming
The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger. (via MeFi)
Two
* How to cheat in Windows Pinball.
* The Time Travel Fund: Just $10 buys you a ticket into the future.
The Greatest American
Oregon Live remembers Martin Luther King, while another Web site asks us to remember segregation.
Murderball
Wow. What a great movie. If you haven't heard of it -- I hadn't until it was recommended to me -- Murderball is a documentary about the United States wheelchair rugby team and its journey to the 2004 Paralympics in Athens. This is an amazing movie, not just as a sports documentary but also as a unflinching, uncensored look into the real lives of quadriplegics. Like nothing you've ever seen. Very highly recommended. Here's Netflix.
Sunday, January 15, 2006

Who Wants to Be a Superhero?
The SciFi Channel introduces the latest reality TV craze.
In nationwide open casting calls, potential heroes will arrive in costume to prove their mettle, revealing the true nature of their superhuman abilities and invoking the noble credos by which they live. From these thousands of hopefuls, Stan Lee will choose 11 lucky finalists to move into a secret lair and compete for the opportunity to become a real-life Superhero!

Finalists will leave their former lives behind and live as their brainchild heroes 24/7, all under Stan Lee's watchful eye. Each week, our aspiring heroes will be challenged with competitions designed to test their true superhero abilities. It's not all just leaping tall buildings in a single bound, a true Superhero will be tested for courage, integrity, self-sacrifice, compassion and resourcefulness. In the end, only one aspiring Superhero will have the strength and nobility to open the gates to comic book immortality.
Battlestar Galactica
If there's a sci-fi person out there who isn't watching this show already: What are you doing? What are you waiting for? The new Battlestar Galactica is right up there with Firefly as a space opera that transcends all the usual boundaries and limitations of television. It puts Lost and Star Trek and everything else to shame; absolutely the best sci-fi on TV, and possibly the best show overall.

I've been holding off on praising the show too much because I've been expecting it to all come crashing down. But last Friday's conclusion to the [REDACTED] arc was the best episode in the entire run of the series, nearly pitch-perfect.

The show really is as good as everybody says it is -- maybe better. This is how you do it right. And it's only improved with age.

Here's some Wikipedia background, as well as Amazon links to the miniseries, first season, and the first half of the second season. Knowledge of the schlock-fi classic original series is rewarded, but by no means required.

It's available from Netflix and Blockbuster too.

Start watching this show.
One Dollhouse to Rule Them All


Intricately detailed dollhouse model of Bad-End. Neat. (via Boing Boing)
Saturday, January 14, 2006

Cubefield
Pilot your ship through fields of deadly, deadly cubes.

(via jay is games)
Capitalism
Like its second-cousin twice-removed, The Corporation, the anti-corporate documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Lost Price is now available on Google Video for free. You've never hated Wal-Mart so much. Union-busting, undocumented workers, overtime and other labor law violations, environmental abuses, sweatshops, lies, sexism, racism, destroyed communities, graft, greed -- it's all here.

Bonus: one of the songs on the soundtrack is the Springsteen cover of "This Land Is Your Land."

Here's the movie's Web site. Of course, if you prefer, you can also buy it.
Beasts in another country
While I'm enjoying mapping out the city I'm new to, our friend and contributor, Marcus Slease is having a whale of a time making his way in and around Seoul, S. Korea. He's there for some months to teach english, and provides some interesting commentary to his experience thus far.

Via Marcus' Blog, Never Mind the Beasts
Superman Returns, Superman Movie Franchise Still Probably Sucks
Kevin Spacey is a perfect Lex Luthor, but Brandon Routh looks 16 years old. I can't approve of this casting. I really want to like this movie, but come on, just look.

Tom Welling would have been a better choice, and I don't even especially like his portrayal on Smallville. (via AICN)
Daddy needs a new pair
Over here in the Pacific Time Zone, folk seem to be really into their shoes. Everyone has hipper shoes than I do, and so I've begun a quest to get a great set of sneaks. But no matter how "backward" my shoe taste is, I know one pair I will never get is this new one from Reebok.



Basquiat Shoes. Can't kids use chalk and sharpie markers themselves anymore?

I think I'd rather have the wooden clogs that say "titanic."

Via Kobayashi 5
Richard Dawkins: Beyond Thunderdome Belief
The Guardian profiles one of my favorite thinkers, Richard Dawkins, no doubt in part because of his recent BBC series on religion, The Root of All Evil -- which Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting recently castigated. (some links via The Huge Entity) Here's a bit from the profile:
Opponents have claimed that Dawkins offers a bleak view of humanity, something he categorically denies. "The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small," he argues, "and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun." But even he expresses regret at our long-term prospects. "Within 50 million years, it's highly unlikely humans will still be around and it is sad to think of the loss of all that knowledge and music."
Yeah, it is, actually.
Art Posters of Lebanon

A collection of 177 posters announcing various art Lebanese expositions over the last forty years. (via RaShOmoN)

Also of interest: Drawn's links to the online galleries of Daniel Davis, Anson Liaw, and Mr. Jago.
Wedding Crashers
Quite possibly the dumbest movie to ever make me laugh.
The First and Most Obvious Question Is, How Does an Upper-Middle-Class White Kid from Wellesley, Mass., Become an International Drug Smuggler?
Before becoming a writer, Richard Stratton ran hash from the Middle East, making money hand over fist and living off adrenaline. Until he got caught.
Canada to Legalize Polygamy?
What could possibly go wrong?
The Mystery of Larry Wachowski
Rolling Stones profiles the Matrix co-creator.
One night in January 2001, Larry Wachowski, co-director of the blockbuster Matrix movies, walked into a dark club in West Hollywood, where the rules of identity easily blurred, just like in his films. The Dungeon served the devoted BDSM -- bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism -- community in Los Angeles. It was a place where power dynamics between two different types of people were regularly played out: eager submissives, or slaves, and the dominatrixes who, for an hour or for a night, took complete charge of their minds and bodies, using ropes, whips, chains, knives and needles. Wachowski fell into the former category. And, friends say, he liked engaging in his pastime while dressed like a woman.
Friday, January 13, 2006

Just a Salad... Just a Salad... Just a Salad...
Jerry Seinfeld doesn't eat meat? Who knew? The things you learn from reading Wikipedia.

We're taking over.
Little Dog Saves the World
...in Tobby Room 1048 [Flash], a fun little platform-jumping game at the toshiba.co.jp website. All the game text is in Japanese, which of course is half the fun.

Click the orange lettering in the middle to start. Arrow keys move, space jumps, shift displays your inventory. You're trying to find all the bombs and save the hotel.

(Via MetaFilter. Here are some hints if you need them.)
Nicholson Baker
Why don't more people read Nicholson Baker? This is what I don't understand. The Mezzanine was easily the best/most enjoyable/most influential-on-me-personally book that I read in 2004; it's a compliation of the various thoughts a man has while on the escalator returning from his lunch break. Room Temperature was one of the best books I read while I was on my honeymoon; this book's narrator's mind wanders while he feeds his baby one autumn afternoon. And. now, U & I, which I picked up at McKay's one day not so long ago and finally got a chance to read today, and which is also excellent. It's the story of "Nick Baker," a successful but not-too-successful writer with a moderately unhealthy fixation on John Updike. The character (who, it should be said, seems to be very close to the author, though I don't want to commit any fallacies here) wants to publish an obituary eulogizing Updike and his influence on the literary world -- and he wants to do it before John Updike dies.

It may have been a little too inside-baseball for some of the audience, but I loved it.

I know hysterical realism hasn't gone out of fashion, and no one in the world does the logorrheic, obessive-compulsive first-person narrator as well as Baker does -- so why isn't the man getting more love? It's not the Checkpoint fiasco; he wasn't getting much love before that either.
He'd Still Get Elected Over an Atheist
A Satanist is running for governor in Minnesota.
Tecmo Super Bowl
In depth.
Tomorrow's News Today
Wired brings you the Year in Games: 2010. I have to be honest, I sort of want to play both Mario Storms the Beach at Normandy and Star Wars: Adhesive Death Star. (via Slashdot)
Judas Was Framed!
Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars.

The proposed “rehabilitation” of the man who was paid 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane, comes on the ground that he was not deliberately evil, but was just “fulfilling his part in God’s plan.”
I've always said this. The betrayal-with-a-kiss is the linchpin of the whole Jesus story. Without it, there's no crucifixion, and without a crucifixion there isn't any Jesus story at all.

So Judas was set up to take the fall since before he was born. Jesus (who is all-knowing) always knew Judas would betray him. God (also all-knowing) always knew, too. From the moment the universe sprung into existence Judas was slotted to be Jesus's betrayer. So we really have to wonder: Did he ever have a choice? Is it really his fault?

Wikipedia takes on many of the same questions in its entry on Judas.

* If Jesus foresees Judas' betrayal, then it may be argued that Judas has no free will, and cannot avoid betraying Jesus. If Judas cannot control his betrayal of Jesus, then he is not morally responsible for his actions. The question has been approached by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, which differentiates between foreknowledge and predestination, and argues that the omnipotence of the divine is not sufficient grounds for eliminating the existence of free will.

* If Judas is sent to Hell for his betrayal, and his betrayal was a necessary step in the humanity-saving death of Jesus Christ, then Judas is being punished for saving humanity. This goes hand-in-hand with the "free will" argument, and Aquinas's Summa deals with the issue of free will in demons and other beings instrumental in the life of Jesus that are nevertheless damned.

* If Jesus only suffered while dying on the cross, and then ascended into Heaven, while Judas must suffer for eternity in Hell, then Judas has suffered much more for the sins of humanity than Jesus, and his role in the Atonement is that much more significant. Standard Christian dogma holds that the suffering of Jesus was infinite, and that the suffering of Jesus was not time-dependent. This position holds throughout orthodox Catholicism and many forms of Protestantism.

* Do Jesus' last words on the cross, "Father forgive them, they know not what they do," not apply to Judas? Is his atonement insufficient for Judas' sin(s)?
[+/-]

So at worst Judas is merely another pawn in God's Glorious Plan™, and he's possibly a hero. Either way, it's time to cut the guy some slack. See also. (via Pandagon)
Oy Gevalt
Some 3.5 million of today's Ashkenazi Jews -- about 40 percent of the total Ashkenazi population -- are descended from just four women, a genetic study indicates.
The Trouble with Collins
David Orr has some fun in the Times reviewing Billy Collins's latest book, The Trouble with Poetry. (via MeFi)
But the teasing this writer does
is harmless, really, and contrary
to what some critics have suggested,

the problem with his work
is not that it is disrespectful,
but that it is not disrespectful enough;

it never cracks wise
to the teacher's face,
but meekly returns to its desk,

lending itself with disappointing ease
to the stale imagery
of teachers, desks and wisecracking.

In the end, what we need
from a poet with Collins's talent
is not a good-natured wave

from writer to reader,
or a literary joke, or a mild chuckle;
what we need is to be drawn

high into the poem's cloud-filled air
and allowed to fall
on rocks real enough to hurt.
Thursday, January 12, 2006

'Ware and the Frauds'
For a reader, even one devoted to comics as a form, to admit that the best book of the season is a collection of comic strips is to admit that there is something missing on the bookshop shelves.

New York Press has some interesting things to say about comics, fiction, and the boundary between them, paying particular attention to long-time Backwards City favorite Chris Ware and absolutely the book of some arbitrary length of time, The Acme Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book.

Click the [+/-] to reveal one particular passage I thought was very on the money.

Ware does not share this mania. Perhaps his best recurring joke is in the strip “Tales of Tomorrow,” in which an old man, recognizable from any coffee shop or bus station, is seen wearing an absurd futuristic outfit and attempting to take advantage of technology’s promise that it can replace human intimacy. In one such strip, he looks out from his window in one of the linked skyscrapers of tomorrow, linked by roads hundreds of feet over the sidewalks, sees a brick wall and slumps his shoulders. He sits beneath a giant bladder that puffs air as part of the process that allows him to call in to an audio message mailbox system; he is sad as he realizes there are no messages for him. He listens to an old record on a gramophone; he falls asleep in his chair as night falls. Later, he hurriedly races to the phone under the bladder and calls again; there is still no message. The bright colors out of a Sunday comics supplement, the rigidity of the panels and the note-perfect retro design of the strip’s title are all sleight-of-hand; the joke works because beneath the charmingly old-fashioned world of the future is an imaginary past where old men were deceived by the promises of Victrolas and rotary telephones and Louis Sullivan buildings, all of which form the visual points of reference.

Any fashionable novelist seeking to express a similar idea would doubtless have used as analogous points of reference a sleek glass skyscraper and an iPod plugged into an expensive computer. The music and the computer and the city would have been specific, so as to situate the character socially. In focusing the picture too tightly on the particulars, though, most novelists would have lost the iconographic comedy and missed both the absurdity and the despair that Ware creates.
[+/-]

Aside from (mostly) praise for one of my writers and artists, there's some intriguing thoughts about the relative capacities and limitations of both genres. Click this [+/-] to reveal another longish blockquote.

Ware’s ideas and techniques are attuned to the anxieties we all feel, and that’s enough to mark him as worthy of special regard, but most important, and basic, of all is that he works with the primary building blocks of fiction—characters particular enough to be universal, and logical action. Quimby Mouse calling a girl he had a crush on in third grade after having a dream about her; Rusty Brown, whom we come to know as a grotesquely imposing and seemingly insensate man, seen as a child curled up on a bed clutching a teddy bear and sobbing about how much he hates his best friend, or falling to the ground as bullies pelt him with snowballs; these work not because of the schematism of the page layout, or the color choices, or because of the references made to classic cartoon icons, but for the same reasons that any effective fiction is moving.

Fiction and graphic fiction shouldn’t be in competition, as there are things that only Ware can give us and others that he can never give us, that only the novelist could offer. The danger is that comics, with their new and hard-won prestige, will begin to force novelistic ideas into panels and word bubbles too cramped for such usage—and that novels, already anxious about their worth, will try to transport the comic’s rendering onto pages that ought to have inward, not outward depth. We’ll never see the effusive, dithering pronouncements of the mind given the depth in a comic that they can be afforded in a book, which is good—to attempt it would ruin the comic. Some ideas and emotions can only be told in stories through indirectness and aside, ruminations and the illusion of time unique to the printed page. The novel is still the only way to assay everything too vast and equivocal to be reduced to pure symbol and formulation. It ought to be groping with those mysteries that can’t be handled elsewhere.
[+/-]

Check out the whole darn thing. (via Boing Boing)

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