Persepolis 2.0 is a recaptioned remix of Marjane Satrapi's original Persepolis around the current Iranian election protests. Via Boing Boing.

Really, it's already Friday?

* Michael Jackson and SF: Michael Jackson "cameo" in Back to the Future II. (And here's a real cameo from Men in Black II.) io9 remembers Captain EO.

* At right, of course, there's a panel from Persepolis.

* NASA thinks it's solved the 1908 Tunguska mystery.

* Happy birthday to the toothbrush.

* 'How Wall Street Will Ruin the Environment': Robert Bryce at The Daily Beast slams Waxman-Markey.

In short, given its length and complexity, the cap-and-trade bill would be better named “The 2009 Lawyer-Lobbyist Full Employment Act.” Proponents are ignoring the fact that Enron (remember Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay?) desperately wanted caps on carbon dioxide because they saw huge profits in being able to trade carbon allowances. And now Congress wants to give Wall Street traders—the same pirates who helped engineer the financial meltdown—a mandate that requires a massive new trading business that has the potential to be gamed in the same way that Enron gamed the California electricity market? Hello?

* And Wired has a detailed look at swine flu hysteria, just in time for the outbreak at Duke.

Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, has now protested the situation in Iran before the European Parliament. Via Bleeding Cool.

Marjane Satrapi, Iranian author and director and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian filmmaker and Mousavi spokesman, presented a document that they claimed had come from the Iranian electoral commission.

The document said liberal cleric and former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi came second in the election with a total of 13.3 million votes, while president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came third with only 5.49 million votes.

However, there is no certainty about the legitimacy of the document.

These are the same numbers that have been floating around the Internet all week.

Marjane Satrapi lets us know how to draw a movie.

"As a cartoonist, I am very solitary," she says.

"For the first six months, I felt like killing everybody at the studio every day. In front of them I was, like, 'Hello, how are you doing?' and as soon as they were gone it was, 'Die, die, die!'?"

Links for this fine Monday:

* Marjane Satrapi interviewed in the New York Times.

I don’t very much like this term of graphic novel. I think they made up this term for the bourgeoisie not to be scared of comics. Like, Oh, this is the kind of comics you can read.

* Using Curb Your Enthusiasm (which is having a terrific creative renaissance in its sixth season, by the way) to treat schizophrenia, in the New Yorker.

* The PETA article up today at Salon is interesting insofar as it demonstrates the hostility to environmental and animal-rights movements that dominates popular discussion of these issues. Even though (aside from the hyperbolic "#1 cause!!" claim) PETA is otherwise correct that a meat diet significantly contributes to global warming and other environmental hazards, the article is still framed from the headline on as "Suck on this, PETA." I'm not even sure why the PETA angle was necessary in the first place; couldn't the same article have been written without name-checking a hated fringe group?

* In other environmental news, another new report argues that we passed peak oil in 2006.

* I haven't commented yet on this whole Raymond Carver kerfluffle, and I don't have much to say now, except that I think there's a good argument to be made that Gordon Lish was the actual writer of those stories, not Carver, and that in any event it's as certain that they should be left alone as it is that a collection of the "original versions" will be out next year.

The case is complicated by the fact that Carver himself, unlike Eliot, seems to have persisted in preferring his own original versions (though this is a murky matter too). He went on to publish a rewrite of The Bath entitled A Small Good Thing. In it, the painfully bleak ending is replaced by an upbeat reconciliation scene, with the baker turning out to be a sweet, vaguely Christ-like guy, and the parents reconvening at his store where he plies them with some heavily symbolic warm bread and pastries - a scene of saccharine religiosity that betrays the hard truth of the tale, replacing it with the sentimental wishfulness of the teller. A lot of people prefer it, but then a lot of people prefer bad art that makes them feel good to good art that makes them feel bad.

* Searching for God in the brain. Bet he's not in there, either.

I was thinking just the other day how much I miss The Show (with Ze Frank). This little song doesn't make me miss it less. Via Waxy.

Salon reviews Persepolis, which I'm really looking forward to. Salon also wants to abolish the electoral college, just a few hundred years too late.

AskMe: Help me survive the coming apocalypse. Remember: Zombies hate sunlight, and always aim for the head.

And at New Scientist: How does it feel to die? You might ask Funky Winkerbean's Lisa Moore, who has just died of cancer. The funny pages sure seem to have gotten a lot less funny since I stopped reading them on December 31, 1995.