'After the Wall: Traces of the Soviet Empire.' Via MeFi.

The New York Times Magazine covers the ruins of the Second Gilded Age. Love the caption for this one at MetaFilter's DU: "Even Aperture Science is feeling the pinch."

UPDATE: MetaFilter ruins everything.

Some links for Sunday.

* Robin Sloan has a filtered #iranelection Twitter feed with most of the repetition and chaos stripped away. Via Boing Boing.

* Salinger and kids today: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ” Via MeFi.

* Another ruins of the modern world roundup. This one has some repetition but also a few I hadn't seen before.

* Advantage: chubbiness. People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.

Late night shouldn't-have-taken-that-nap links.

* Stephen Colbert to guest-edit Newsweek. That's just weird.

* Yesterday marked the first night in my life where I had any real desire to see The Tonight Show; the Daily Beast has a few highlights. For my part I thought Conan did pretty good, despite some jackass fans who demonstrated that adoration and heckling meet again someplace on the other side. Someday I may even watch the Tonight Show again.

* But you don't have to take my word for it: Conan's got the coveted Obama endorsement now, too.

* Anthony Stewart Head is still teasing a Ripper spinoff.

* 'No Lifeguard on Duty': empty and abandoned motel pools.

* 75% of Americans now convinced terrorists have superpowers. Advantage: idiocracy.

* Production design for Pixar's Up.

* And ethanol still sucks.

Lots of pictures of Ozymandian Detroit around this weekend, from Time to Flickr. Lots of images to choose from, but the one I went with is a R. Crumb poster linked in the MeFi thread.



Sadly the picture's not big enough for the lettering to be read, so here's a closeup of the fourth to last panel.



Originally that's where the comic ended, but Crumb later went in and drew three possible answers: ecological collapse, technofuturism, and ecotopia. Right now we're still hovering over "What's next?"

My former students may appreciate the similarities between this static image and the Soylent Green opening titles...

Saturday night's all right for blogging. After the first few links we even get to some stuff that's not about Watchmen.

* Walter Chaw's Watchmen review goes to many of the same places as my own, albeit in a more thoroughgoing way:

Freeze any frame of the film and find in it the panel that inspired it. With each section separated by grabs from the covers of the comic book's initial run, fanboys should have no quarrel with the fidelity of the piece--but the reaction to the picture will likely continue to be fairly muted, as devotees of the graphic novel didn't exactly appreciate it for its slickness and sexiness. I'd hazard that what attracted people to the book is that Moore's vision is one of absolute respect for the power of the image in molding human history. Snyder does seem to understand this in restaging the Kennedy assassination with one of his masked heroes as the culprit, drawing a line pure and true from Zapruder's inauguration of film as history to the comic-book medium's inextricable hold on the collective imagination-in-formation. The power of Moore's work is that it takes the divine and, like Milton's mission, explains the ways of these gods to men in terms that men can understand: they're corrupted by their power and governed by their avarice and the essential baseness of being human. This sentiment is all but jettisoned, alas, by the time Snyder recasts the pathetic victories of sexually-reawakened schlub Night Owl (Patrick Wilson) and paramour Silk Spectre (a severely overmatched Malin Akerman) as triumphant victories. Watchmen--filthy with its director's now-trademark ramping technique--sees itself as a superhero adaptation of a human book. The failures of these characters are just weaknesses our übermenchen must overcome, not the foibles and hubris that lead to their downfall--and ours.

Vu and kate both get at this deep in the comments to my original post as well.

* Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman says Watchmen is a "great film" and then spends the rest of the post explaining why it isn't.

* The headline reads, "Watchmen's first day disappoints." You're telling me!

* John Scalzi argues for a statute of limitations on spoilers.

Television: One week (because it’s generally episodic, and that’s how long you have until the next episode)

Movies: One year (time enough for everyone to see it in the theaters, on DVD and on cable)

Books: Five years (because books don’t reach nearly as many people at one time)

To my mind the whole "spoiler" hysteria needs to end; suspense is an overrated aesthetic in all but the rarest cultural productions.

* Husband, Wife Unaware They Are A Comedy Team.

* I suffered from this for years without knowing there was a name for it besides "being a college student."

* Another picture of a grown-up Calvin and Hobbes for your collection.

* The economy and literature: Will this crisis produce a Gatsby? More at MeFi.

* Does the financial crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? David Harvey on the credit crunch and class.

* Abandoned places: a LiveJournal community. (Thanks, Eli!)

* And attention would-be humanities grad students: there are no jobs. None.

You had me at "Abandoned Amusement Parks." Via MeFi.

This post is for your eyes.

* Andy Kehoe's "Psycho World," a slightly more surreal Where the Wild Things Are (and I can only imagine he's completely sick of hearing that).



* Future worlds and alternascapes from James Paick.





* And WebUrbanist builds off my infamous Statue of Liberty post with 25 Post-Apocalyptic Visions.

Craig Ferguson visits the abandoned San-Zhr Pod Village in Tawain, a Flickr set of which I previously blogged here. Via MeFi.

And two from Boing Boing: Joss Whedon fans, thinking ahead, are already organizing their "Save Dollhouse!" campaign in anticipation of the show's inevitable cancellation, and Cory Doctorow links to this neat slideshow of abandoned office space from bankrupt companies.

Abandoned hotels seem to be the soup of the day. I'm seeing tons of links to BLDGBLOG's post on the abandoned hotels of Sinai, while Angie emails in this Flickrset of a ruined resort in Taiwan.

Lost America: Night Photography of the Abandoned West. Via MeFi, which has many more necro-aesthetic delights.