Savage Chickens captures the spirit of the age.

Captain Marvel and the zeitgeist: You can have Heath Ledger's Joker or you can have Billy Batson in Shazam!, but you can't have both.

The irony here is that the comics version of Captain Marvel can actually get fairly dark: witness a lobotomized Captain Marvel as a stooge for Lex Luthor in Kingdom Come, the quasi-reformed Black Adam committing genocide in 52, or what they've done to poor Mary Marvel. And that's not even getting started on Miracleman.

Via io9.

''The idea of change and hope has permeated the country, regardless of politics, and that includes Hollywood,'' says Kevin Feige, president of production at Marvel Studios, home to Iron Man and the soon-to-be-launched Captain America. ''Discussions in all our development meetings include the zeitgeist and how it's changed in the last two weeks. Things are being adjusted.''

Marvel Comics is happy about the election. I think, perhaps, a little too happy. Via io9.

Links for your post-Christmas blues.

* In the future, all movies will have lightsabers.

* Rest in peace, Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt.

* Barack Obama is stupendously ridiculously popular.

* Al Franken is not quite so popular, but he's looking like Minnesota's next senator.

* Confidential for Mac users: the weird inability to change location in Finder dialogues is easily rectified.

* In the zeitgeist: people living life backwards.

* 95 Old School Games You Can Play Online. Via MeFi.

* So you're saying we need Batman? (Thanks, Kate!)

If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing. Eight years is an eternity in the life of a culture, and when we look back on an era, we do it through pinholes: a movie here, a book there. What will stand out, decades from now, as the singular emblems of this moment in history? Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.

Battlestar Galactica
American Idol
Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart
The Corrections
Black Hawk Down
Cohen’s Borat
Green Day’s American Idiot
Far Away
Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life

Battlestar is a decent if limited pick, and Idol a fairly inspired one, though not for the reasons given—but the exclusion of The Wire is simply criminal, not to mention Sopranos and Deadwood, and (yes) 24. For film, it might actually be The Dark Knight, or else There Will Be Blood. (Maybe Children of Men?) For books—surely the hardest category—it's probably The Road, for a few reasons. I'm too illiterate in music to even begin to answer: the best I could manage would be a half-serious suggestion of Gnarls Barkley, or else just name a Springsteen album because that's how I roll.

Via The Chutry Experiment, who points (among other things) to the unforgivable omission of viral video.