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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Penn & Teller's Smoke & Mirrors
Waxy has the story on an unreleased Penn-and-Teller game for the Sega 3D0:
Years ago, I'd heard about a mythical unreleased videogame developed by Penn & Teller for the Sega CD and 3DO. The game was supposed to be an oddball adventure game, with some cruel magic tricks and minigames thrown in for good measure. This Absolute Entertainment press release from March 1995 sums it up nicely.

The most infamous part was "Desert Bus," a "VeriSimulator" in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I'd read the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point.
As Kottke says, this is very reminiscent of the Takeshi no Chousenjou anti-game Metafilter was talking about not too long ago. (via Cynical-C)
Arrested Development Gossip
The notoriously unreliable New York Post Page Six reports that Showtime has picked up AD for at least 26 more episodes...here's hoping.
More on Octavia Butler
BookNinja has a roundup of obituaries.

I read Parable of the Sower in Professor Barbaret's most-excellent Utopias/Dystopias comparative literature course in college. Her death makes me sad.
Evil Will Always Be Lurking at the Edge of the Village. On the Other Hand, It Will Never Invade.
A Theory of Fun author Raph Koster takes on the lessons of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. (via Boing Boing)
Sex With Steve Almond
...goees just about as well as you'd expect. (Via Bookslut. We've ripped on Steve before. )
101 Free Games
1-Up.com's "definitive guide to the best new free games on the Web." (via Jay Is Games)
Self-Promotion, Followed By Links
* In case you missed it, excerpts from Backwards City #3 are now online. Check out poems from Martin Arnold, Beth Anne Royer, David Shumate, Melissa Jones Fiori, C.L. Bledsoe, and Debbie Urbanski; the full text of stories from Michael Czyzniejewski and J.G. Brister; a fiction excerpt from Sarah Blackman; a comic from Lindsay Nordell; and art from Bart Vallecoccia. It's a great issue, and there's a lot more in it, including comics and Lynda Barry and what can only be described as the worst literary feud of all time, by Jonathan Lethem and Chris Offutt. I guess what I'm saying is, you really need to subscribe.

In other news:
* The New York Times profiles Deborah Eisenberg, author of the new story collection Twilight of the Superheroes. (via The Elegant Variation)

* It's official: blondes have always had more fun. (via A&L Daily)

* And via Drawn!, a little art. I really love this murderous Donald.
At Long Last
At long, long last, excerpts from Backwards City #3 are on the Web site. Check them out.
Monday, February 27, 2006

Happy Birthday, Superman
March 14, 1988: Superman turns 50, and TIME and Dial B for Blog are there.
'He said it had nothing to do with God. He was passionate about it'
Scenes from the life of Samuel Beckett.
Unseen. Unforgotten.
Never-before-published images of the Birmingham civil rights movement. Via MeFi.
Top 100 Singles of the Seventies
At superseventies.com. Here's the list for the year of my birth, 1979:
1. "My Sharona" - The Knack
2. "Le Freak" - Chic
3. "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" - Rod Stewart
4. "Bad Girls" - Donna Summer
5. "YMCA" - Village People
6. "Reunited" - Peaches and Herb
7. "Ring My Bell" - Anita Ward
8. "I Will Survive" - Gloria Gaynor
9. "Too Much Heaven" - Bee Gees
10. "Hot Stuff" - Donna Summer
It was a rough year. (via Cynical-C)
Art
From underground Ukranian artist Serhiy Kolyada.



(via an email from the artist)
Links
From all the usual places:

* Science-fiction writer Octavia Butler has died.
* Maps of a Flat Earth.
* Chris Ware overrated? Bullshit.
* How not to stage Shakespeare.
Sunday, February 26, 2006

Best Trailer Mashup Ever
Toy Story 2: Requiem for a Dream. Here's the main site. Via MeFi.
Saturday, February 25, 2006

So Long, Mr. Furley
What can you blog on the day Don Knotts passes away? I know he was in everything, and that he'll always be best known for that other show -- but he'll always be Mr. Furley to me.

UPDATE: Here's a link to that "Don Knotts is Dubya" movie I linked to way back when.
The Truth About Tom & Jerry
Tom and Jerry, the lovable cat and mouse locked in cartoon combat, is a Jewish conspiracy, according to an Iranian official.
Friday, February 24, 2006

Time and the Funny Books
Over at Newsarama, Joanna Estep takes a look at the passage of time in sequential art. Here's Part 2 and Part 3. (via Scott McCloud)
Thursday, February 23, 2006

Having a Weird Blog Can Cost You
Just take a look at the sad story of Star Jones's biggest fan:
“Well, I did google you,” one interviewer said, “and I found your web site.” She had an injured foot, which was propped up on the chair next to mine and pointing at me in all its Ace-bandaged glory.

“Oh,” I answered.

“I have concerns about some of your writing,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Particularly, your letters to Star Jones raised some questions.”

...


Then I realized what was going on. The interviewer thought I was actually stalking Star Jones. So I said what anyone would in that situation: “I’m not stalking Star Jones.”

As soon as I heard myself say the words, “I’m not stalking Star Jones,” I knew the interview was over.
Another Thing to Worry About
Our universe may one day be obliterated or assimilated by a larger universe, according to a controversial new analysis. The work suggests the parallel universes proposed by some quantum theorists may not actually be parallel but could interact – and with disastrous consequences.
U.S.!
Some great publicity for Backwards City #2's Chris Bachelder's new book (released on Tuesday!), U.S.!:
Dead men allegedly tell no tales. But in Chris Bachelder's antic satire U.S.!, mystical resurrection begets the renewed ability to write dreadful, politically transparent fiction. The word-slinging stiff in question—famed muckraking author of The Jungle (1906) and avowed socialist Upton Sinclair—is serially reanimated and assassinated countless times after his "death" in 1968, having written an astounding 87 books by the age of 90. Dogged productivity carries no reward for the undead: Sinclair's murderers are accorded increasingly more acclaim as each successive novel is met with proportionate amounts of critical vitriol. A righteously absurd, corporeal allegory for the demise of the radical Left in America and a meditation on the efficacy of the political novel, Bachelder's vicious cycle of afterlife and death is also malevolently funny.
(via the Rake)
X3
Via Bookslut, The Comic Reel talks to X-Men 3 director Brett Ratner, as well as Halle Berry, Ian McKellan, and Hugh Jackman.

Part 1
Part 2

They make the movie sound like it won't suck, but that's their job. For my money they should have waited until Bryan Singer was done with Superman Returns and let him finish up his own trilogy.
Another Review of The Brief History of the Dead
This time at Slate. I may have to shell out for the hardcover for this one. (via)
Don't Mess with USPS
There's malfeasance afoot in UNCG Postal Services:
Three employees of UNCG Postal Services were arrested last week for mail theft. Last Tuesday, police arrested two full-time employees and one part-time student employee on various charges relating to student reports of missing mail. The three are accused of stealing mail while at work.

...

The stolen mail consisted mostly of birthday, holiday, and graduation cards, which are more likely to contain cash or other valuables. A four-month joint investigation by UNCG Police and the US Postal Inspection Service used decoy cards and surveillance to find suspects responsible for the theft.
Bet You He Loses
When the retired doctor from Austin suddenly began spending big money in Las Vegas, the casinos assigned him a "host" and gave him first-class airfare, hotel suites, meals and shopping trips for his wife, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court in Austin.

The casinos even gave him an Alaskan cruise, the lawsuit says.

The retired doctor, Max Wells, kept coming back, the lawsuit says — and kept losing money. By the fall of 2005, Wells had lost $7 million, the lawsuit says. By January, another $7 million.

Now Wells is suing the casinos and a major drug company, claiming that the prescription drugs he was taking for Parkinson's disease set off a compulsive gambling spree.


I'm surprised there haven't been more suits like this. How much of casinos' business comes from targeting gambling addicts? Isn't this a moral hazard?
The Final Cut
Has anyone ever heard of this movie? It must have been in theaters for thirty seconds. It's not a cinematic classic by any stretch, but for a night with the flu, it fit the bill.

The basic premise is this:
(a) In the future, some rich people have chips in their heads that record everything they see.
(b) When those rich people die, people called "cutters" splice the recorded footage into a video to be shown at a person's funeral, almost always with the intention of making that person look like a saint, even when they weren't.
(c) Robin Williams is one such cutter, perhaps the best in the business -- he's the guy you want splicing your footage if you have really nasty secrets you don't want revealed.
It's interesting, almost Philip K. Dickian in sections, though somehow it never really gels into a great flick. I don't regret renting it, though. If you enjoy sci-fi schlock, I expect you'll like it well enough.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006

'Battle-Scarred Gilliam Looks to Future'
"I always start with the best intentions, but then the money disappears. The chaos results from not having enough time and money."

At the BBC.
Call No Man Happy Until He Is Dead
John Lancaster takes a look at "the fragility of contentment" in The New Yorker.
Unknown White Male
t 9 a.m. on July 3, 2003, Doug Bruce woke up on the F train near Coney Island. He had no idea who or where he was. There was a swimsuit in his knapsack, but it was cool and rainy out. He knew what cars were, but he could not identify specific hood ornaments; he could sign his name—a left-handed scrawl—but he was able to decipher only the “D.” His scalp was covered with bumps and cuts, and he had a pounding headache. Two days later, recalling that morning, he wrote, “I go to a shop and buy some water. I’m cold and wet. I’m afraid I have committed a crime.”

Doug's story has been documented in a movie, Unknown White Male, which opens in at least some cities this Friday. I'll be seeing it if and when it comes to the 'Boro.
You Can't Make Money Blogging - Part 1 Billion
The big blogging news today, of course, is Kottke calling it quits as a professional blogger just one year after beginning the great micropayment experiment. The cold, cynical bastards at MetaFilter, having predicted as much, are beside themselves with glee. Others are less gleeful.
Random Links for a Flu-Addled Wednesday
* Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci.

* Star Wars cut scenes.

* Animal Man: The Man with Animal Powers!

* Jessa Crispin Hates Self-Published Books, Except Self-Published Comics, Which Are Even Cooler Than Legit Books.

* Henry James's "Obscure Hurt."

* David Cross's Open Letter to Larry the Cable Guy.
?
* Whatever happened to George Holliday, the man who videotaped the Rodney King beating?

* Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?

* What happens to all the animals if people disappear?
Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Ad Flip


Classic print ads from the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. (via RaShOmoN)
Weird Student Emails
This NY Times article about professors getting weird emails from students is interesting, but seems to overstate its case a bit. I wondered if the professors might have held back from describing the real horror stories out of a sense of propriety.

Kieran Healy also picks up on something the article missed, which is the weird email addresses students choose to email you from.
One thing it didn’t mention: even though universities give students email addresses, it’s often the case that students won’t use them. Instead they prefer their free hotmail or yahoo or gmail addresses. No problem as such there, except that sometimes the students pick the kind of addresses for themselves that aren’t exactly professional-quality. Frankly it feels a bit odd to correspond with, e.g., missbitchy23 or WildcatBongs about letters of reference or what have you.
LEGO Brokeback Mountain
There's nothing in the world that you can't Brokeback Mountainify.
An Eye for an Eye Leaves the Whole World in Debt
Salon interviews Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young and legal scholar William Ian Miller, author of the new book Eye for an Eye.
So, let's say you poke out my eye...

Then, instantly, my eye becomes yours. To get the value exactly right, we say an eye is worth an eye. You have a right to my eye. Now you can say to me, "I'm going to take your eye." Then I'm going to say, "Hey, what would you be willing to accept instead?" It becomes an initial bargaining position.

If you want victims to be more highly valued and you want real, adequate compensation, this is how to do it. Now if I offer you what some lousy insurance company says your eye is worth -- say, $100,000 -- you'll say, "No way! I would never have let you take my eye for that." Instead, you can be sure I'll put the same value on not losing my eye that you would have put on yours, and I will pay you that amount to keep my own eye. How about $5 million? Let's start there. And we'll bargain it out.
I'm So Ridiculously Sick
Stupid flu.
Monday, February 20, 2006

Oh, Marvel
Looks like they're at it again. Those wacky kids at Marvel Comics have decided to use their heroes to comment on national security and civil liberties. In an upcoming series entitled "Civil War," to be released in May, Marvel's finest will find themselves wrestling with political and philosophical enemies, the likes of which their powers have never before faced.

"Civil War" provides problems in spades. The story opens with a reckless fight between a novice group of heroes (filming a reality television show) anda cadre of villains. The battle becomes quite literally explosive, killing some of the superheroes and many innocent bystanders. That crystallizes a governmentmovement to register all super-powered beings as living weapons of mass destruction. The subsequent Registration Act will divide the heroes into two camps,one led by Captain America, the other by Iron Man. Along the way, Marvel will unveil its version of Guantánamo Bay, enemy combatants, embedded reportersand more. The question at the heart of the series is a fundamental one: "Would you give up your civil liberties to feel safer in the world?"

Or another question: does this sound particularly compelling to anyone under the age of, say, 17? I thought comics were supposed to be a refuge from the real world's problems. I'm not talking about graphic novels or the more serious fare, of course, but super hero comics of the sort teens and pre-teens used to devour because they were, well, fun.
Morning Linkage
* I know I promised never to link to another fake trailer, particularly a Brokeback parody trailer, but I'm only human; I can't resist the siren song of The Empire Brokeback.

* And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news. (via A&L Daily)

* L.A. City Beat interview with Daniel Rees, creator of the extraordinary Web comic Get Your War On.

* AskMetaFilter: Is it responsible to have a child when there is a high percentage of passing on a genetic disease?

* The Five Most Dangerous Children's Books Ever Written, According to Sean Hannity.

* And, just for Presidents Day, Wikipedia's list of fictional presidents. (via Gravity Lens)
'Do Not Attempt to Become Buddha'
-Dōgen, Zen Calendar 2006
Sunday, February 19, 2006

Delay
I know I promised online excerpts from issue #3 by Monday, but it's not going to happen. Check back by mid-week and they'll certainly be up by then.
Video Game Themes on Piano
Usually it's NES themes, but today it's Sonic the Hedgehog.
Build Your Own Batcave
At HiddenPassageway.com. (Thanks, Steve!)
Insane
"Well," she said, "we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he's been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can't bear to take it from him."
Saturday, February 18, 2006

The Gay Cowboy Movie
J.T. was right, Brokeback Mountain is excellent. But you may not be surprised to know that (unlike J.T.) I have allowed myself a single misgiving about the movie: the casting. Don't mistake me, both Donnie Darko and Heath Ledger are beyond good in their roles, but the movie really struggles to portray the passage of almost 20 years with actors who never look older than 29. It isn't limited to the leads, either -- both Dawson's girlfriend and the Princess Diaries have precisely the same problem.

I'd really hate to lose any of these actors, but credibility was definitely strained.

Other than that, I'll just say that it's both a very enjoyable movie and a very interesting cultural moment. The best and most perceptive review of the movie that I've seen is the one I've already linked to, from The New York Review of Books. There's semi-spoilers here, so click the [+/-] to read one insightful excerpt.
Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.

After that—because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.
For the time being, anyway, you can read the Annie Proulx story via Google's cache here. Watching the movie I tried to imagine which parts of the movie composed the original story; it turns out damn near all of it.
Cliffs and Cartoons
Via Drawn! comes this fantastically complete archive of cartoonists' drawings of cliffscapes, including entries from Chris Bachalo, Clive Barker, Charles Burns, Neil Gaiman, Phil Jimenez, Jim Lee, George Perez, Judd Winick, and Dover, New Jersey's Joe Kubert. Drawn! has a link to an interview with Walt Parrish, the Cliff Gallery's curator, too. Below: Backwards City favorites Will Eisner and Chris Ware. Fantastic.
Oh, Crap
The age of retirement should be raised to 85 by 2050 because of trends in life expectancy, a US biologist has said.
Friday, February 17, 2006

When Lexy Met Clarky

Superboy's first duel with Luthor, from 1960's Action Comics #271. Via Supermanica, the Superman wiki.
It's Science
Metafilter informs us that all life may have evolved from viruses, while Bookninja links to an article about a recent Duke study that demonstrates almost half of all U.S. presidents suffered from some mental illness.
Rereading Jaws
At Slate.
Academics have bravely tried to pin all kinds of meaning on Jaws. (My favorite theory, found in a Web search, ventures that the shark is the embodiment of the vagina dentata myth). But the moral (and morality) of Jaws seems pretty straightforward: The preppies are gonna get it. They've been sitting out the 1970s, Benchley is saying, practicing free love on Long Island when they should have been marching with protesters in Harlem. ("Nothing touched them—not race riots … not police corruption.") The shark—like a thousand horror villains before and after—is nature's revenge for their carefree debauchery, their unwillingness to get with the program of equality and universalism. "People who are sexual outside of marriage get punished," says Stefan Fleischer, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who teaches Benchley's novel. "And if it's society as a whole that has loose morals, it'll get eaten up by a shark."
(via Bookslut)
So That's What All Those Exploding Barrels Are For
Rube Goldberg Asskicking Device developed with a Half-Life 2 mod. Oddly compelling. (also via Cynical-C)
Probably the Most Repulsive Document I Have Ever Read
The Smoking Gun has up a truly repugnant "Contract of Wifely Expectations" from the trial of Travis Frey, an Iowa man facing charges of attempting to kidnap his wife as well as for child pornography. What an Atwoodian nightmare. (via Cynical-C)
Today's Kitsch Moment
...is brought to you by this huge collection of cigarette packs. (via RaShOmoN)
Katamari Damarcy Flash Mini-Game
If I had a PlayStation, I'd play Katamari Damarcy all day long. (via Boing Boing)
Thursday, February 16, 2006

More Fantastic Creatures
This time it's the legendary creatures of the Himmapan Forest. (via MeFi)
Breaking News: Religious Beliefs Contradicted by Science
This time it's the Mormons on the chopping block. The L.A. Times has the hit piece story.
Popaganda
The Art and Subversion of Ron English. (via Drawn!)

P for Portman
Comic Book Resources talks to Natalie Portman about the upcoming film adaptation of V for Vendetta. (via Bookslut)
La Condition Humaine
Book covers inspired by Rene Magritte. Via Kottke.
Blueprint
Great The Incredible Machine-type game at teagames.com. (via MeFi)
The South
William Faulkner maps out his Yoknapatawpha County.



(via Bookninja)
Wednesday, February 15, 2006

A Picture Is Worth 1000 Samuel L. Jacksons
Today's Worth 1000 Photoshop contest is all about SLJ.
Holy Terror!
Though the title plays with Robin's classic catchphrase, the book deals with a serious subject. Gotham has been attacked by Al Qaeda and Batman sets out to defend the city he loves.

...

Miller proudly announced the title of his next Batman book, which he will write, draw and ink. Holy Terror, Batman! is no joke. And Miller doesn't hold back on the true purpose of the book, calling it "a piece of propoganda," where 'Batman kicks al Qaeda's ass.'"


More at the San Francisco Chronicle. Via Bookninja and Metafilter.
Death Is Not the End
LargeheartedBoy's BookNotes feature has a playlist to listen to while you read Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead, submitted by the author himself. The Brief History of the Dead is, of course, the book Salon made me want to read yesterday. (Thanks to RockStatic's newest correspondent, Jeremy I.)
Moby Marginalia
Recovering the lost annotations of Herman Melville. (via A&L Daily)
Happy John Frum Day, Everybody
Neat article in Smithsonian about the cargo cults of the South Pacific. Via GeekPress.
This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

But the venerated Americans never came back, except as a dribble of tourists and veterans eager to revisit the faraway islands where they went to war in their youth. And although almost all the cargo cults have disappeared over the decades, the John Frum movement has endured, based on the worship of an American god no sober man has ever seen.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Rereading Curious George
Not only does the story reveal the sinister side of a corrupt wildlife trade with perilous roots in Western imperialism, but recent ethical, legal and scientific considerations on the personhood of primates makes a traditional reading of Curious George both impossible and irresponsible.

(both via Cynical-C)
Psychoanalyzing Marmaduke
Here comes that big dog who likes to dip his bone in our spa.
LethemFilter
MetaFilter has a hot thread up with all sorts of links to (BCR #3 contributor) Jonathan Lethem blogging and podcasting.
Songs Like That Were Lies That Life Is Black and White
Interesting essay in Threepenny Review about Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." (via the Rake)
I'm Sold
Salon is really making me want to read Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead today.
Kevin Brockmeier's second novel is both eerie and intimate, as befits a book whose first chapter appeared in both "The O'Henry Prize Stories" and "The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror." It begins in a city, or, rather "the city," a metropolis not unlike New York (it has a river, a subway and a Christopher Street) but that has no discernible boundaries -- in fact, it seems to go on forever. The people who inhabit the city work in diners, banks and jewelry shops; there's even a modest newspaper. They drink coffee, drive garbage trucks and play mah-jongg. Everything about them is ordinary except for the countless different hallucinatory ways they got to the city: by crossing a "desert of living sand," riding a trolley through a forest of giraffes, and falling into an "ocean the color of dried cherries." Everyone in the city is well aware of the fact that they are dead.
Link This
* MetaFilter links to Retro Junk, the place where all your childhood memories go to die.

* Arts and Letters points us to The New Yorker's profile on the Shakers.

* According to New York Metro, there's this thing called "blogging" now. At least I think that's what it's called.

* The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films Never Made.
February 14th Is For Lovers
Happy National Purity Day, everyone.
In Darkest Night

Over at Monitor Duty, Alan Kistler is ready to tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Green Lantern.
Monday, February 13, 2006

No Ice, Please
Benito Middle School student Jasmine Roberts examined the amount of bacteria in ice served at fast food restaurants.

...

The 12-year-old compared the ice used in the drinks with the water from toilet bowls in the same restaurants. Jasmine said she found the results startling.

"I thought there might be a little bacteria in the ice, but I never expected it to be this much," she said. "And I never thought the toilet water would be cleaner."
The New York Review of Books on....
* J.M. Coetzee reviews Gabriel Garcia Marquez's latest.

* Remembering librarian/U.K. poet laureate Philip Larkin.

* Why Brokeback Mountain is not just another love story but is specifically a "gay tragedy."
Comix
The New York Times notices for the millionth time that comics are a hot commodity, while Crimeboss.com shows off some vintage crime comic book covers and Dial B for Blog takes on the secret origins of Super-Archie Captain Pureheart.
O Captain, My Captain
Poetry in movies. (via Bookslut)
Issue Three Is Here!
Woke up this morning to find Backwards City #3 on our porch. Subscribers will be getting their copies in the mail in a week or so. Lapsed subscribers and nonsubscribers, your time is up, you must subscribe.

Things are busy at the moment in the Backwards City, so we won't have a chance to update the Web site until the weekend. In the meantime, all you can do is bask in the glow of our mighty contributor's list:

Martin Arnold * Rafael Avila * Lynda Barry * Sarah Blackman * C.L. Bledsoe * J.G. Brister * Isaac Cates and Mike Wenthe * Michael Czyzniejewski * Noah Falck * Gibson Fay-LeBlanc * Melissa Jones Fiori * David Harrison Horton * Julia Johnson * Eric Joyner * Andrew Kozma * Jonathan Lethem and Chris Offutt * Clay Matthews * Brian MacKinnon * Lindsay Nordell * John Pursley III * Jesse Reklaw * Beth Anne Royer * David Shumate * Matthew Simmons * Patricia Storms * Amish Trivedi * Debbie Urbanski * Bart Vallecoccia * John Verbos * Mark Wallace * M.O. Walsh * Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Saturday, February 11, 2006

Case the Promised Land
One of the few nice things about being sick this weekend is that I finally had time to watch Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born to Run, from the recent Born to Run rerelease. Best musicmentary ever. No doubt. So good.

Netflix
Sick
The evil thing my students gave me that I've been fighting for the last few weeks has finally caught up with me.

Be back Monday.
Friday, February 10, 2006

Save Our Bluths, Damnit
Remember, tonight the last four episodes of Arrested Development air on Fox. Rumors continue to swirl about Showtime or ABC picking the show up, but this could very well be the end.

UPDATE: RIP, AD.
Star Wars Valentines
You are the small thermal exhaust port right below my main port. (via Gravity Lens)
Thursday, February 09, 2006

Test Your Superboy I.Q.!
At Dial B for Blog.

Jaimee's Not the Only One Painting Fake Pollocks
A physicist who is broadly experienced in using computers to identify consistent patterns in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock has determined that half a dozen small paintings recently discovered and claimed by their owner to be original Pollocks do not exhibit the same patterns.

My beloved alma mater takes it on the chin in this one; one of the people authenticating the apparently fake Pollocks is a professor at CWRU. (via Steve)
Just Another Liberal Professor Trying to Cajole You Out of Your Convictions
Salon interviews one of my favorite philosophers, Tufts's Daniel Dennett, about his new book Breaking the Spell. (via Bookslut)
Timothy McSweeney's Renaissance Tendency
McSweeney's is having something of a renaissance this week. In addition to The Elements of Spam linked earlier, 1997: The Year Tooth Whitening Broke and Jack Bauer's Friendster Profile are also pretty good.
News from Around the Blogosphere
ITEM: Germaine Greer remembers feminist Betty Friedan in the Guardian , while the conservative-friendly New York Sun is predicably displeased with Breaking the Spell. (A&L Daily)

ITEM: AskMetafilter knows where you can get free contemporary science fiction online. Many links besides just Cory Doctorow's craphound.com and Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen, which were the two places I immediately thought of.

ITEM: Boing Boing has a link to a WWII-era Japan civil defense pamphlet, excerpted at right.

ITEM: Via BookNinja, McSweeney's provides us with The Elements of Spam.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Why You Don't Exist Redux
My contribution to the Reasons Why You Don't Exist is up now over at The Huge Entity. Two more articles every day this week.
Volkswagen Bus Ads

After enough time passes, advertising becomes art.

Via RaShOmoN.
What's Current
John DeFore of the San Antonio Current reports on upcoming comics releases. (via)
Reasons Why You Don't Exist
The Huge Entity begins its earth-shaking "Reasons Why 'You' Don't Exist" existential crisis today, with entries from Christopher Willcock of Cutie Programmer and Cliff Pickover of Reality Carnival.

I was asked to disprove your existence as well; my reasons will be popping up on the site later this week. I should warn you: my case is airtight.
"Magic for Beginners"
In the course of a rightly glowing review, Cory also points us to the title story of Kelly's Link's outstanding Magic for Beginners at Fantasy and Science Fiction. Another of the stories from the collection is available at the Jelly Ink Web site.
The Biggest City in the World
Amazing helicopter photos of Mexico City. On the left you'll see a crazy big apartment building, which I linked to because Cory D already snagged Ixtapaluca's amazingly endless field of cartoon houses.
That’s a Terrible Thing for a Monkey to Say
A lot of people seem to be linking to the discussion of Mary Magdalene in this week's New Yorker, but for me the money is in the characteristically excellent Haruki Murakami story "A Shinagawa Monkey" that J.T. linked to on Monday.

Nancy Franklin's overall positive look at 24 is also worth checking out, if you're a fan. As a somewhat embarrassed long-time viewer of the show, my favorite bits were her more barbed comments:
At the start of several episodes in the first season, Bauer tells us, “Today is the longest day of my life.” In late January, I set about watching a hundred and two episodes of “24.” It was the longest week of my life...

Watching the series the way I did, I tended to notice annoying repetitions; it seemed to me that Jack whispered “We’ll get through this” to his daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), at least five times in every episode she was in, and that almost every bit of Jack’s dialogue was rendered first in an intense whisper and then in an angry shout, as in “Where is the bomb? I said, ‘WHERE IS THE BOMB’!” (The second line is always said with Jack’s gun thrusting closer to the other guy’s head.) Also, just in case you didn’t pick up the tip in season one about cutting off a dead person’s thumb so that you can use it on the electronic-identification pad at his office, you see it again in season four.
Interesting Theory
This article in Policy Review on "Theory's excesses and deficiencies" includes a Hippocratic Oath for the Pluralist:
i. I will publish nothing, favorable or unfavorable, about books or articles I have not read through at least once. (By “publish” I mean any writing or speaking that “makes public,” including term papers, theses, course lectures, and conference papers.)

ii. I will try to publish nothing about any book or article until I have understood it, which is to say, until I have reason to think that I can give an account of it that the author himself will recognize as just.

iii. I will take no critic’s word, when he discusses other critics, unless he can convince me that he has abided by the first two ordinances. I will assume, until a critic proves otherwise, that what he says against the playing style of other critics is useful, at best, as a clue to his own game. I will be almost as suspicious when he presents a “neutral” summary and even when he praises.

iv. I will not undertake any project that by its very nature requires me to violate Ordinances i–iii.

v. I will not judge my own inevitable violations of the first four ordinances more leniently than those I find in other critics.
(via A&L Daily)
Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Bizarro

All about Bizarro.

See also: The Bizarro Jerry.
You'll Kick Yourself
Soo Jin Oh reviews Chris Ware's The ACME Novelty Library #16 in the newest Bookslut.
The 16th volume is the first installment of what is anticipated to be a long narrative about an obsessive collector of superhero and toy paraphernalia named Rusty Brown. His sole friend throughout his lonely life is Chalky White, who like Rusty, was once a boy fascinated by superheroes and their ability to protect the vulnerable. Unlike Rusty, though, Chalky gives up collecting comic book figures, marries, and starts a family. Yet, all this has yet to occur in the first installment, which is concerned primarily with setting up the characters and the scenery of Rusty's and Chalky's childhoods.

Our first introduction to Rusty is while he is lying in bed on a cold winter morning, saying "I love you" to an action figure doll of Supergirl while his father yells at him to shovel the snow on the driveway. This scene succinctly captures the psychological architecture within Rusty: a chubby little boy living with an uncaring father and whose consolation is a fantasy world where he has super powers.
You may remember Rusty Brown from the best book I read last year, The Acme Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book.

I've been debating whether or not I should pick this up or just wait for the Rusty Brown and Building Stories collections. I think I just got pushed over the edge.
Silent but Deadly
Remember, kids, hybrids kill. Via MetaFilter.
The Secret Life of Authors
It's difficult to be moderate about the charm of these brief portraits of Rimbaud, Turgenev, Rilke, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Robert Louis Stevenson, Isak Dinesen, Djuna Barnes and a dozen other literary eminences. "The one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors," writes the acclaimed Spanish novelist Javier Marías, "is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals; and although they were probably no more so than anyone else whose life we know about, their example is hardly likely to lure one along the path of letters." That wry sense of amusement characterizes Marías's approach. Though he acknowledges the artistic greatness of his chosen writers, he prefers to point out and relish their personal oddities, all those quirks, eccentricities and obsessions that make them neurotically and sometimes pitiably human.
Paradise Discovered; Parking Lot Planned
An international team of scientists says it has found a "lost world" in the Indonesian jungle that is home to dozens of new animal and plant species.
The Buddha Project
Images of Buddha can remind us to take a breath, to look around, to feel calm and compassionate, to be here now. You can notice Buddha almost anywhere — laundromats, store windows, barbershops, farmers' markets, souvenir stands, tucked away on someone's night table.

The Buddha Project encourages people worldwide to participate by submitting photos of found Buddha, sacred Buddha, ancient Buddha, kitschy Buddha, handmade Buddha.


Finally, a meme I can participate in. Behold the Backwards City Buddha.

(via MeFi)
The End of the Blockbuster?

The Long Tail blog has a three-part series on the decline of the blockbuster record album, followed by a followup post on the on the decline of the Hollywood blockbuster. With neat charts. (Via Boing Boing)
Monday, February 06, 2006

Battlestar v. Battlestar
Sci-Fi Weekly compares the two Battlestars Galactica. (via Gravity Lens)
Jeanette Winterson: 'Let's stop publishing books that don't really need to be books'
As usual, human beings, locked in binary oppositions of good/bad, beautiful/ugly, yes/no, are agonising over a world of books/no books. The rip-roaring success of the iPod, and now the i-video, or whatever it is called, where all the music and films you could want no longer need to be objects, just streams of data, has left the publishing world wondering where it fits in. Nobody, not even academics, who are hardier than most, want books in any other form than books. At the same time, we acknowledge that books have become as throwaway as everything else in our culture, so what do we do?
They like him a lot
Haruki Murakami has yet another short story in this week's New Yorker. I'm not sure, but I'd bet substantial money that only Alice Munro has had more stories in the magazine in the past 2 years.
Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Find the shortest path between any two Wikipedia articles. Via Boing Boing.
Epileptic
I bought the hardcover of David B.'s excellent Epileptic after months of Jessa Crispin pimping it on Bookslut. This was the last new book I allowed myself in the Great December Splurge of 2005, and it absolutely lived up to my very elevated expectations. Epileptic is a graphic memoir in the fine Maus/Persepolis tradition, focusing on the artist's brother's grand mal epilepsy, which over the course of forty years consumes the family in an orgy of seizures, quack doctors, faith healers, violence, psychosis, and hopelessness. It's an excellent read: brutal, engaging, and sad, pulling no punches and offering no easy answers. Definitely one of the publishing highlights of 2005 (even if I only got around to reading it in 2006). Very highly recommended.
Sunday, February 05, 2006

People Should Not Be Afraid of Their Governments; Governments Should Be Afraid of Their People
Superbowl V for Vendetta trailer. Remember, remember, the 17th of March.
The Sun Ra Arkestra and Al Kooper's Blues Project Play 'Batman'
In 1966, a toy company in Newark, New Jersey released a children's record called Batman and Robin to cash in on the popular Adam West TV series of the same name. The music on the LP was credited to "The Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale," but in fact the band was one of the greatest uncredited session combos of all time, including the core of Sun Ra's Arkestra and Al Kooper's Blues Project.

At WMFU's Beware of the Blog, via Boing Boing. Don't miss the MP3s, including the iconic main theme. "Robin's Theme" is pretty wild too.
But What We Didn't Know Was That the House of Cards Was Built on a Pool of Gasoline: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
I've never been someone who was really interested or knowledgeable about business (much to my father's neverending disappointment). When people start talking about stocks or earnings my eyes glaze over pretty quickly. So I went into Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room with quite a bit of trepidation, assuming I would be extremely bored. But I wasn't -- the documentary really makes the company's implosion seem real, even for people like me who may not understand at first quite what was at stake or how it happened.

If you've never really understood why Enron was such a big deal, this is the movie for you.
I used to go to this place.
A piece of dry, if not nostalgic, geek-friendly, web-comic action about the Greensboro, NC store, Cosmic Castle. Looks like this is the first installment of many "journalistic" Greensboro pieces to come.

UPDATE: I lied! There are about six more...they've been appearing once a month since Aug. 05 in "YES!" weekly. Go figure.
The Greater Generation?
A new book by Leonard Steinhorn argues that the baby boomers are the true "Greatest Generation." Please. What haven't these people screwed up?
As for the boomers' accomplishments, Steinhorn exaggerates them, and downplays or ignores developments that present them in a less flattering light. As noted above, the generally conservative trend of American politics over the past 28 years is a serious problem for his thesis. If boomers are so liberal, why did they, in combination with their elders, elect Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes? Steinhorn argues that deep cultural shifts and politics don't necessarily track, and that most Americans don't pay that much attention to politics. But the fact that they don't itself raises serious questions about how much boomers actually care about their supposedly hard-won ideals, and whether they are willing to sacrifice anything to realize them.
Everybody knows that Generation X (though horribly named) is objectively the greatest of all generations, and specifically the high school class graduating in 1998. Every group of graduates since then has been an abject and disheartening disappointment.

UPDATE: Wikipedia informs me that I may in fact have been promoted to the vanguard of the even-worse-named Generation Y. But it isn't entirely sure.
It's a Sin to Kill a Mockingbird
The Guardian has a nice profile of Harper Lee.
Atlas of the Multiverse
For all your DC Comics Multiverse needs.
Saturday, February 04, 2006

Are We Back?
Blogger has been badly bloggered (even by Blogger's usual standards) all day today. Nearly every blogspot site or RSS feed I normally read has been screwed up for at least half the day. At the moment I can't access Backwards City at all.
You've All Been Holding Out on Me
Why didn't anybody ever tell me how good Haruki Murakami is? I feel like I was the only one not in on the secret.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is indescribably weird and one-of-a-kind excellent. The book alternates between two seemingly disconnected narratives -- and I say "seemingly," but of course part of the excitement in reading the book comes in struggling to put them together. The first storyline is science-fiction noir, reminiscient of something like Blade Runner or Snow Crash; the second is a self-consciously Kafkaesque pastoral landscape where people must surrender their shadows to a mysterious Gatekeeper before entering an isolated, unnamed town fully encased by an impenetrable wall.

How these fit together is a deeply resonant parable about, well, it's hard to say exactly. Consciousness and junk. It's damn good.

Some writers seem like they've been eavesdropping on your conversations; Murakami is like that for me. Next up is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, then Kafka on the Shore.
Sabato
* Somehow I've neglected to link to the Sleepless in Seattle remixed trailer until now. (via the MeFi Brokeback to the Future thread)

* Music history overlaid on a map of the London Underground. [.pdf] But no Springsteen? (via Boing Boing)

* Plagiarism in video games. (via Slashdot)

* Cthulego. And not for the first time. (via Boing Boing) UPDATE: I left out the best one.
Friday, February 03, 2006

The Last of the Great Bunny Reenactments?
Star Wars in Thirty Seconds Reenacted by Bunnies. They've also put up Night of the Living Dead recently.
Fay's Brother Is in the New York Times
And he's smart. Smarter than the Pope, even.
Surely many moral duties are defeasible, and in that sense relative. We all recognize that although lying is typically wrong, under certain circumstances — to protect someone's life, for example — it is justifiable. Yet the fact that one moral claim can sometimes give way for another does not mean that the first claim is groundless, any more than traffic laws are invalidated because ambulances can run red lights.

...

The pope has used the term "relativism" to describe not only non-absolute standards, but also uncertain ones. The alternative to certainty, however, is not nihilism but the recognition of fallibility, the idea that even a very reasonable belief is not beyond question. If that's all relativism means, then it is hardly the enemy of truth or morality.

Accepting that we are fallible doesn't keep us from thinking that we're right. It just keeps us from thinking that we couldn't possibly be wrong. And that's a good thing.
But he gets his best line in at the end of the article:
True, secular values can turn a civilization inside out. In post-Christian Europe, entire nations have been plunged into endemic health, skyrocketing education and hopelessly low rates of violent crime.
Fantastic Folk Monsters of Japan
The Obakemono Project. This is fantastic.

Nopperabou: This famous, faceless apparition seems to take particular delight in terrifying human beings. While its appearance is deeply disturbing, it is only really a danger to those with weak hearts.

There are many stories about
nopperabou encounters, and most of them follow the same twofold pattern: The protagonist encounters what appears to be ordinary human being with the back turned or the face obscured in some fashion. Trying to strike up a conversation, the victim is met with a face as smooth as an egg, without eyes, nose, or mouth. Scared out of his wits, he runs away and seeks out the comfort of another mortal's presence, sometimes someone he knows. After the victim has recounted the whole unnerving story, his companion agrees that this is a very weird tale, and then proceeds to ask, "This face, was it this sort of face?" or something along those lines. At this point what the poor fellow thought was another human loses his facial features as well, and the victim often winds up fainting in helpless terror.

Other favorite entries include nuribotoke, rourokubi, taimatsumaru, ningyo, jorougumo, gyuuki, bakeneko, and kitsune. What a neat site. (via MetaFilter)
It Was 47 Years Ago Today
The day the music died.
Do Do Do Dodododododo Do-do-do
A Super Mario Bros. soundboard.
Metacritic 2005 Wrapup
Top ten films of 2005 from reviewers at all the major newspapers. Brokeback Mountain tops the meta-list, with A History of Violence in second place and The Squid and the Whale eking it out over Munich for the bronze.
Thursday, February 02, 2006

MoLeCuLoUs
Can you invent cold fusion and save the world? [Shockwave] Via JayIsGames.
Three-fer Thursday
* TIME's 100 All-Time Greatest Movies.

* IGN is sponsoring a Spider-Man villain tournament. A Doc Ock-Green Goblin final seems all but assured.

* Tobias Wolff has a new story in The New Yorker.
"The Problem of Susan"
You can read Neil Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan," a response to the much-discussed exclusion of Susan Pevensie from Heaven at the conclusion of the The Chronicles of Narnia, at Cal Webfiles. You can for the time being, anyway -- I suspect the copyright status of this particular Web site is questionable at best.

Gaiman's story is about an interview with a grownup Professor Susan Pevensie, among other things. It's quite interesting, though be warned that it's more than a little adult -- elsewhere in the story Aslan gets down and dirty with the White Witch.
The professor cuts herself a slice of chocolate cake. She seems to be remembering. And then she says, "I doubt there was much opportunity for nylons and lipsticks after her family was killed. There certainly wasn't for me. A little money -- less than one might imagine -- from her parents' estate, to lodge and feed her. No luxuries."

"There must have been something else wrong with Susan," says the young journalist, "something they didn't tell us. Otherwise she wouldn't have been damned like that -- denied the Heaven of further up and further in. I mean, all the people she had ever cared about had gone on to their reward, in a world of magic and waterfalls and joy. And she was left behind."

"I don't know about the girl in the books," says the professor, "but remaining behind would also have meant that she was available to identify her brothers' and her little sister's bodies. There were a lot of dead people in that crash. I was taken to a nearby school -- it was the first day of term, and they had taken the bodies there. My older brother looked okay. Like he was asleep. The other two were a bit messier."
I'm Lovin' It
Scenes From Lord of the Rings That Might Have Been Used as Setups for Bad Commercials Had the Filmmakers Not Respected the Material. At McSweeney's.
GFY
Following up on this post, another person has discovered a magic-bullet solution to the New Yorker caption contest. (via MeFi)
The Hive Mind
A history of Google.

By the way, for any time travelers in the audience: Next time you head back to 2004, remember, you're supposed to buy Google the day of the IPO, and hold onto it until the day they make the censorship deal with China. Then sell.

(via Bookninja)
Frontaal Naakt
Frontaal Naakt interviews Charles Burns, writer and artist of Black Hole. Warning: probably not-safe-for-work.
Do you have a pessimistic view on life?

I don’t know. When you have children you make a decision…you can’t be completely pessimistic. Obviously you’re making a kind of decision that, you know, if you’re interacting with other people, you want to have a family, that means you got some sort of hope, some interest in the future, so yeah…But there are certainly elements that make themselves clear in my stories…I don’t look at the world as a beautiful place all the time. I think in my stories there’s a few little moments, there’s one moment in Black Hole where a boy and a girl experience these intimate, happy moments and the girl says: ‘Even if I have this one little tiny moment, it ‘ll be good.’ And very very quickly thereafter they’re having sex, and there’s this kind of horrible premonition. So almost immediately that one little spark of hope is suddenly overshadowed by this dark cloud. But they do have, briefly, a good moment (chuckles). What can I say? That’s me!
(via Bookslut)
Brokeback to the Future


Of all the Brokeback Mountain parody trailers on the Internet right now, this one is indisputably the finest.

(via Boing Boing)
Wednesday, February 01, 2006

The Worst Bleeping Movie of All Time
Well, maybe not, but I'm honestly hard-pressed to think of a worse one. I was under the impression that What the Bleep Do We Know? was a documentary about quantum physics, and was expecting good things. Oh no. It's a crackpotmentary, a mumbojumbomentary. New Age crap. Incredibly stupid. Wikipedia elaborates.

Jaimee and I only made it about twenty minutes. When the narrator asserted that the Native Americans on Hispaniola literally couldn't see Columbus's boats approach (because they supposedly had no frame of reference for what a boat was, nevermind the question of how they got to Hispanola in the first place) until a shaman noticed the ripples on the water, at which time he reasoned out that something like boats must exist and then he could suddenly see them, and then he explained what a boat was to the other people on the island, at which time they could see them too...that's when we turned it off.

"You're talking shit! Explain yourself!" --Ricky Gervais, "The Ricky Gervais Show"
Cancel the New Yorker Magazine Caption Contest
How "Christ, What an Asshole!" is the Answer to the New Yorker Magazine Caption Contest.
'There was this thing called building a reputation and a thing called publishers sticking with you'
Julian Barnes on the state of contemporary publishing. (via the Rake, who has quoted the best bit so I don't have to)
The Future Is Colorblind?
Via BookNinja comes a very interesting article from Pam Noles about the lack of racial diversity in sci-fi. Check out the followup, too, which hits at one of the few true flaws in Firefly -- for a solar system supposedly settled by a Sino-American alliance, there don't seem to actually be very many Chinese people around anywhere.
Consider the Davy Fosty Wally
True story. As an undergraduate, my friend took a creative writing course from David Foster Wallace at Illinois State University. On the first assignment he turned in, Wallace wrote, “I swear to God if you ever turn in a piece of shit like this to me again I will flunk your ass. I shit you not.” The meaning of this anecdote is open to interpretation, but to me it suggests several things about Wallace's way of relating to others.
Robert Mentzer reviews Consider the Lobster. (via Bookslut)
Speaking of Vegetarians
I only just learned this from skimming the Wikipedia entry on Superman, but apparently in the comics Clark Kent is a vegetarian now. Who knew?
Ninjaman
You can play it. [Flash] Be sure to click on the Instructions first, and read through the Movement, Attack, and Item tabs. (also via MeFi)
Here Comes the -- New & Improved! -- Spider-Man
Metafilter is displeased with the changes coming in the Spider-Man line. Very displeased.

Some of us are still bitter about the time they tried to change Superman's costume...
Do Animals Have Moral Status?
That's what Martha Nussbaum wants to know in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The answer seems to be quite obviously yes to me, but then again, I'm a hippie pinko vegetarian who should probably just go back to Russia.
Comics for People That Already Sort of Read Comics
That's what Kurt Amacker of Cinescape is talking about this morning, although he thinks he's talking about Comics for People That Don't Read Comics. The trouble with this list is that aside from Maus it focuses pretty exclusively on the superhero genre, which (it stands to reason) if a person were truly interested in they'd probably already be checking out comics and trades.

If you're really trying to convince somebody that comics are worth reading, your list begins and ends with Jimmy Corrigan (unforgivably absent from this list). After that, you might try Maus, or Persepolis, or (next in my reading queue) Epileptic.

Then you slip them Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns or V for Vendetta, once you've softened them up a bit. (via Gravity Lens)

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