Friday Friday.

* New York in the 1940s: a great Flickr set.

* Change we can believe in: President Obama has vetoed the Mutant Registration Act.

* Problems with secrecy in comics' direct market.

* Homages to Ditko in the New Yorker.

* Failed Anti-Batmans.

* Ecocomics: a new blog devoted to the intersection of economics and comics regarding such questions as supernatural disaster insurance, the construction industry in the Marvel Universe, how Two-Face funds his crime sprees, and where the Canadian government get the money from to keep making super-soldiers.

* 'The God That Failed:' why we don't live in space colonies.

It's true what Drawn! says: there's some very good stuff in this Flickr stream.

With Durham looking like this:



(though increasingly less so), it seemed like a good time to put up some pictures from Albuquerque. Which I have done—here.

Old photographs at Flickr, via MeFi, which naturally has a run at the highlights.

Link dump #4, son of the mother of all link dumps.

* Still another Pac-Man text adventure. (Previously.) See also: Guitar Hero as text adventure (1, 2).

* It turns out the Bush administration didn't bother to keep case files on many of the prisoners in Guantánamo. Via Pandagon.

* Cultural treasures of New Jersey.

* Make Something Cool Every Day makes something cool every day.

* Crooker Timber had a Charlie Stross book event today with tons of links.

* Also at Crooked Timber: Should you delay parenthood till tenure?

* And Obama gets it.

Thirty ways to die of electrocution, via Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern. Via MeFi

Dark Roasted Blend visits Socotra Island, which it calls "the most alien-looking place on Earth."

Imagine waking up on the Socotra Island and taking a good look around you (let's say your buddies pulled a prank on you and delivered you there, and lets also assume that you don't have any hangover from abuse of any substances). After a yelp of disbelief, you'd be inclined to think you were transported to another planet - or traveled to another era of Earth's history.

The second would be closer to the truth for this island, which is part of a group of 4 islands, has been geographically isolated from mainland Africa for the last 6 or 7 million years. Like the Galapagos Islands, this island is teeming with 700 extremely rare species of flora and fauna, a full 1/3 of which are endemic, i.e. found nowhere else on Earth.

More photos at Flickr. Via MeFi.

Nighttime links.

* Weekly retro illustrations of Mad Men episodes. At right: "Joan and the Xerox."

* Ten things you didn't know about the Earth.

* Noise Artists for Obama. (via PClem)

* Obama's on Letterman tonight. He'll talk about lipstick and pigs.

"Keep in mind, that technically had I meant it this way she would be the lipstick," Obama said. "The policies of John McCain would be the pig."

* John McCain isn't such a good campaigner without Sarah Palin to hold his hand.

* And the Department of the Interior scandal is the perfect story. It's got everything: oil, sex, drugs, corruption. Drill, baby, drill.

Playing blog catchup.

* Thursday night we watched American Gangster, which wound up being significantly worse than it should have been due to significant script problems. (Denzel Washington's character, Frank Lucas, is basically a complete cipher, and the pacing of the plot keeps Lucas from encountering his chief antagonist, Russell Crowe's Richie Roberts, until the last ten minutes of the movie.) Still, the movie stands as a useful lesson in the utter absurdity of the War on Drugs; both Lucas and his competitor Nicky Barnes, who separately controlled the heroin trade in New York during different points in the '70s, served ridiculously short sentences, leading to this farcical exchange in New York Magazine in which the two meet and discuss the good old days.

MJ: You guys have been described as being competitors. Is that true?

FL: Well, Nick wasn’t gonna catch me—I was paying $4,000 a key. Nick, you was probably paying $65,000 or $70,000, weren’t you?

NB: During that time I was paying $35,000.

FL: And I was paying $4,000. So there was no fight then.¹

MJ: Which one of you guys had the best dope?

FL: Mark, here you go! Stirring shit up. Man, I had the best dope in the world. I had 98 to 100 percent pure.

NB: Frank had a nice package, no doubt. I had to get a pen and a pad and mediate my stuff. But when you took the mix out, my thing was close to his. Close enough for somebody not to wait on one when they could get the other. Frank, you were mostly on 116th Street, right?

FL: Yeah.

NB: Well, I had powder in all five boroughs. Not just uptown.

FL: You were big, Nick, all over.

* Friday we spent a good chunk of the day hiking in a state park near Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, before deciding to head back to NJ rather than stay the night. I'd heard good things about Harper's Ferry on the internet, and it seemed like a good chance for a getaway-on-a-budget—but it turned out to be a classic tourist trap, a fake town with nothing but overpriced shops, weird Civil War nostalgia, and bad restaurants.

We were pretty unimpressed.

But Maryland Heights is a nice little hike, though, worth doing if you're nearby anyway.

We spent most of the morning out in Pittsboro with Lyle Estill at Piedmont Biofuels, one of the largest renewable energy projects on the East Coast. Literally begun as a garage project in Estill's backyard, Piedmont Biofuels grew into a cooperative for approximately 600 local users before incorporating as an industrial site that sells biodiesel for blending with commercial petroleum.

Estill's a great guy and Piedmont's a fascinating and important project, which I'll have a lot more to say about in an longish Indy article we're working on about responses to Peak Oil in the Triangle. (One of the things that won't be in the article are some more Kim-Stanley-Robinson-inspired, science-fictiony thoughts on Utopia, particularly Robinson's critique of enclavism and his advocacy of distributed Utopian nodes, dispersed in a network and immanent to the system they oppose. That's the switch from the biodiesel cooperative to Piedmont Biofuels Industrial, LLC, and I think it's pretty interesting.)

In the meantime, here's the FAQ, and here are the pictures Jaimee took while we were out there. What's impressive is not just how clean everything is, but the lengths to which the group has endeavored to make the project both sustainable and ecologically friendly—alongside the biodiesel plants are sustainable farms, hydroponic greenhouses, biodiversity gardens, waste-product reclamation, and a huge vermicomposting bin.

All in all, it's a pretty ecotopian place.

I took this week's picture way back in 2005 in Fort Lauderdale, the night before we left on a cruise. (Thanks, Mom!) I've mentioned before, I think, the way this cruise was both incredibly fun and extremely eye-opening on a socio-economic and political level; some of the photos are new at my Flickr site, and here's my scintillating real-time travelogue in eight parts. (Warning: scintillating.) 0 1 2 3 3b 4 5 6

Investigating the origins of the bizarre warning sign below (originally found at Boing Boing) leads to the world's coolest Flickr group, Stick Figures in Peril.



Here's my entry, from our honeymoon:



A related group, Warning Signs, is something I've linked to before, but it too is awesome.





Aficionados should refer to "Signs of Life" in their copies of Backwards City #2 for more sign-related hijinx. I could put it online, but I feel weird about it; I don't live there anymore.

We was still trying to figure out our new camera, so not all of the pictures we took at Etti's wedding came out as good as I hoped. I also have to admit that I got bored taking pictures (as I usually do) about ten minutes into the reception and mostly stopped altogether. Still, I present to you a Flickr set of pictures from Etti's wedding, entitled "How Do You Give Up a Name like Etti Eckstein?"

Continuing evidence for the long-suspected theory that my life is a low-budget TV show constantly looking for excuses to reuse sets: My cousin and Jennifer grew up in neighboring subdivisions and went to the same high school.

I've put up some pictures from the weekend at Flickr, though be warned things got just a little bit racy.

No posting today on account of our second wedding anniversary. (Just nine years left till Jaimee has to buy me a sword.) In honor of the occasion, this week's blog icon is a picture of the Mona Lisa from our honeymoon, my favorite shot from the whole trip. Also, I've put up a few some never-before-Flickr'd photographs from our wedding—none of which show me crying like a big baby.

See you Tuesday.