Seriously, I have pink eye. That's just absurd. Here are some links.

* Utopia is now: curing cancer by virus.

* Dystopia is now: New York is talking about taxing Internet porn. What's 4% of free?

* How the Crash will reshape America.

* Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Via American Stranger.

* Salute to British comic creators.

* Is Final Crisis "the death knell of the 'mad ideas' school of comics writing"?

* Nate Silver tries to statisticize the Oscars.

* Goodbye, Dubai.

* And Candleblog directs us to the official Trilogy Meter. Pretty good, but they got Back to the Future 2 wrong; it's not only better than the original, it's the greatest cinematic achievement of all time.

Thursday links while I should be doing other things. Also, for the tiny handful of Final Crisis fans out there&mash;spoiler alert.

* DC is pretending they've killed off Batman. It's adorable.

* Was Che Guevara "a type of Batman"? So claims Benico del Toro.

* Superuseless superpowers. Via Kottke. "13th Bullet Bulletproof" made me laugh.

* In my email: the Wikipedia page for the hilarious sounding but actually fairly tragic Boston Molasses Disaster.

Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was... Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings — men and women — suffered likewise.

* Earth from space. Just another awesome post from the Big Picture.

* Obama's people: portraits of 52 top members of the Obama team.

* Did the Victorian novel make us better people? Will computer screens kill literacy? What's going to happen all the white people? And is there life on Mars?

Superhero news!

* Smokers of the Marvel Universe.



* Dial B for Blog uses the recent gratuitous [SPOILER] of the Martian Manhunter in Grant Morrison's Final Crisis #1 as the launching point for a passionate rant about the current editorial direction of DC Comics.

Infinite Crisis was a bad story, but at least it was a story. Final Crisis is a marketing plan. There's the money quote, reader: "Final Crisis is a marketing plan."

In the view of Robby Reed, creator of this web site and author of this posting, "FINAL CRISIS" is VERY well-named, because for me it is a death-knell for DC. They have so little regard for either their own characters or those who buy the comics it is horrifying. I actually hope they go out of business, if they keep this up.

At any rate, before purchasing any new DC title in the future, I will inspect each page for evidence of the continuing pornographic destruction of my beloved childhood characters. If I find any, the book goes back on the shelf. Since EVERY book they publish is now like this, that means no more new DC comics for Robby. I will not miss them!

Wednesday links.

* Douglas Wolk, who'd previously run a blog annotating the weekly comic book series 52, is back with a new blog annotating the D.C. Comics Crisis du jour, Final Crisis.

* The New Yorker looks at the rise and fall of movement conservatism, while Matt Yglesias responding to Ezra Klein responding to the New Yorker has a simpler take:

There's something to that, but I think the problem is actually much worse -- the problem with the conservative movement is that it's fundamentally malign....

The trouble is that no sensible person believes that electing conservative politicians will actually improve the situation because even though some instances of reducing the power of economic privilege would be deregulatory and conservative, actually existing conservatism isn't interested in reducing the power of economic privilege except on behalf of some other, greater privilege. Similarly, the conservative movement is correct to say that more stable family structure would be a boon to America's children, but its operational commitment to family values just consists of the political exploitation of anti-gay sentiment. The ideas have some merit, it's the actual moral character of the people able to move the levers of power that are the problem -- they're not fundamentally interested in the merits of ideas, even their own ideas, they're interested in power and greed.

* How to Disagree.

* One of the greater obscenities in this election season has been the proud trumpeting of a child's selling their bike and video games so a vain multimillionaire can continue a failed, flawed, futile race she has already long lost.

* Astrologers say the stars are shining on Barack Obama.

* And I've had this one in my bookmarks for weeks, around the time every other blog in the universe blogged it: Trapped in an Elevator for 41 Hours. With video.

Grant Morrison drops a lot of hints about the upcoming DC Comics superevent "Final Crisis" at Comic Book Resources, while Bam, Kapow! argues that Superman will always suck. You see this sort of thing a lot from people who don't understand what makes a Superman story good or even how the Superman character works—though I find this article to be particularly unfair to the poor guy.

There's actually a good argument to be made that Superman's ethical self-policing is in fact reflective of the ideologies of the status-quo ruling class, and that he should spend less time stopping bank-robbers and more time destroying militaries and ending world hunger—but this isn't it.