Took a long nap today. That wasn't bad. Here are some links.

* Lots of speculation today about what sort of health care bill could actually come out of the reconciliation sausage factory. Meanwhile, the always-wrong Politico is once again reporting Obama will back off the public option entirely.

* Game of the night: Canabalt.

* Classic SF of the night: John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There" (1938), the inspiration for John Carpenter's The Thing.

* Man Men has already been renewed for a fourth season.

* Cheney '12!

* To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again. Lawrence Kraus, formerly of Case Western, writes about the possibility of one-way trips to Mars in The New York Times. Taking the neg is this Metafilter commenter:

Yes, you have to bring them back. Otherwise, what's the point of the trip, to prove that you can shoot people into space to die? We already know how to do that.

Yes, helplessly listening to people die on Mars would certainly be horrible. But if we could keep them alive, or better yet, independent and (quasi-)sustainable, that would be amazing. And, I think, worth the risk and costs.

* Four-year-old Fantastic Four franchise to be rebooted already. In the future franchises will be rebooted before the first film even comes out.

Monday night!

* On the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, Kotte catches Moon Fever (and there's only no cure). The Nation celebrates the Gil-Scott Heron way.

* 21 artists who changed mainstream comics (for better or worse).

17. Chris Ware
Though he’s philosophically more in line with the alt-comics community, Chris Ware draws so much media attention, and his books sell so well, that his work is arguably more mainstream than any current superhero title. Ware’s innovations in comic-page design—which include temporal shifts conveyed by complex diagrams and frames within frames—were inspired by Art Spiegelman’s ’70s experiments and by Richard McGuire’s seminal Raw story “Here.” But Ware marries his fetish for design with a singularly sardonic voice and a God’s-eye perspective on his characters, creating an overall tone that’s like a turn-of-the-century circus poster crossed with the post-war angst of literary lions like John Updike and Richard Yates. Ware’s influence is mostly seen among the younger alternative crowd and contemporary commercial artists, but his use of staccato pacing and visual repetition has popped up in a number of superhero comics over the past decade as well.

* Is Harry Potter no longer a ticket straight to Hell?

* Steve Benen remembers the day Medicare enslaved us all.

* Aliens in vintage postcards.

Space News!

* 'Moon could hold water for lunar base.'

* 'New Mexico's Spaceport America is two steps closer to becoming a reality and not just a dream.'

* 'Report urges timetable for human mission to Mars.'

(via Mac)

In honor of John McCain's visit earlier this week to the Fermi 1 reactor, here's "We Almost Lost Detroit," about, well, the day we almost lost Detroit.



There's a live version from 1990 here. By Gil Scott-Heron, who also sang the controversial classic specifically requested for discussion by my class at [Undisclosed Location], "Whitey on the Moon."