Oh, Thursday.

* Water discovered on Moon.

It's not a lot of water. If you took a two-liter soda bottle of lunar dirt, there would probably be a medicine dropperful of water in it, said University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine, one of the scientists who discovered the water. Another way to think of it is if you want a drink of water, it would take a baseball diamond's worth of dirt, said team leader Carle Pieters of Brown University.

I can't wait to drink bottled moon water. Delicious.

* NeilAlien has some good links about the Kirby heirs' attempt to reclaim their Marvel copyrights in the wake of the Siegel heirs' successful lawsuit against DC.

* Naomi Klein interviews Michael Moore about who hates America more.

* For every newly converted vegetarian, four poor humans start earning enough money to put beef on the table. In the past three decades, the earth's dominant carnivores have tripled our average per capita consumption; in the next four decades global meat production will double to 465 million tons.

* Salon on the end of oil and the era of extreme energy.

* Moammar Gadhafi vs. the World Cup.

More Monday links! More!

* Jacob directs my attention to the Spider-Man lizard. As Jacob says, you won't be disappointed.

* Amanda Marcotte says last night's explosive office hijinx on Mad Men were a quiet reference to the Kennedy assassination. I think she may be right.

* Japan's real-life Dollhouse.

* The mother of all Infinite Jest ending theories. (Thanks, kate!)

* Last words of the executed in Texas. Found poetry.

Cathy, you know I never meant to hurt you.
All my life I have been locked up.
I am tired.
I’m ready, Warden.

Monday night.

* What went wrong with Terminator Salvation? There's been some loose talk that T4 isn't all that bad, but this is incorrect. It is that bad. It's worse. Via MeFi.

* Speaking of bad scripts: On Lucas's original script for Star Wars. Also via MeFi.

* The Spider-Man newspaper strip has retconned the Spider-Man-was-never-married retconned. Please adjust your interest in Spider-Man accordingly.

* Scandal at Oxford! The university's first female professor of poetry has resigned nine days into her tenure amidst allegations that she organized a smear campaign against one of her opponents for the job.

* Five ways to tell if your life is a Wes Anderson film. Via Rushmore Academy.

A few links I've missed over the last few days.

* xkcd discovers the secret origins of the Kindle.

* RIP, Philip Jose Farmer. More here, especially about Venus on the Half-Shell, the book he published under the name Kilgore Trout. It's not half-bad.

* 'Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights.'

* Spider-Man is taking a job at McDonald's in these tough economic times.

* And Joss Whedon explains why DC Comics movies don't work. He's right and wrong about this; there's something to be said for the "pain" thesis, but mostly it's a failure of writing and directorial ambition, compounded by corporate cowardice...

Fresh from his appearance in Amazing Spider-Man, Obama takes on the Green Goblin in Thunderbolts #128. He's also picking the new Youngblood team.



I bet DC is regretting not including him in their election storyline last year.

Will Morbius, the Living Vampire, be the Big Bad in Spider-Man 4? I remember seeing this character in the animated series when I was a kid—he certainly seemed ridiculous then, though some of that may have to do with silly network interference. (Aside: Who knew Morbius was a part of Blade's backstory?)

If I were Sam Raimi—and I am—I'd go the whole other way with it. All humans: Spider-Man vs. the cops, Spider-Man vs. terrorists, Spider-Man vs. Kingpin, Spider-Man vs. Black Cat, Spider-Man vs. Punisher, Spider-Man vs. Kraven the Hunter. (Spider-Man vs. the Vulture! Spider-Man vs. the Terrible Tinkerer! And so on.) Part of what was deeply wrong with Spider-Man 3, I think, was that the bizarre physical properties of Sandman hadn't been earned—it turned the franchise into (yes) a cartoon. An all-human ensemble would immediately restore suspension-of-disbelief and thereby restore credibility. Cut the next few song-and-dance numbers and you're halfway there.

I'll give Raimi the Lizard because he's kind of been grandfathered in, but leave Hydro-Man and the Rhino at home this time around...

Son of news roundup.

* Burger King is pushing the viral marketing hard lately, following up its gag body spray with a Facebook application that gives you a free hamburger for every 10 people you unfriend.

* Speaking of body spray, here's an interesting study suggesting it's not about the smell.

And a new study in the U.K...found that men who used Lynx deodorant, Axe's British-brand cousin, were seen as more attractive by females than men who used a "placebo" deodorant with no fragrance.

But: the women just saw videos of the guys in the study—they couldn't smell them. Meaning that Axe actually works by making you feel more attractive. If you feel more attractive after soaking yourself in an aerosol version of car air freshener, you may not be the most urbane man to begin with, which leads to the second part of the study's results:

Women rated the fragranced men as more attractive when the sound on the videos was off, but had no statistically significant preference when the sound was on.

* Obama to team up with Spider-Man. Which wanted criminal will he pall around with next?

* Zipcar comes to Duke. More here.

* Larry Flynt says porn needs a bailout. Via MeFi.

* Creative billboards.

* Malcolm X on a Canadian game show.

* The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.

* It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. Gary Lutz on the sentence, via the too-sporadically-updated Black Garterbelt.

* And will The Dark Knight win Best Picture? Eli Glasner says it just might.

Classic posters of retro sci-fi and retro posters of contemporary sci-fi. Via SF Signal and io9.

With just one day before this long presidential election is really, truly, and finally over, here's a collection of presidential pop culture from Again with the Comics.

My unhealthy obsession with the presidential race has been crowding out the literature and pop culture blogging I normally do. Here's a linkdump to try and correct that balance:

* The Washington Post visits the Manhattan of Mad Men, c. 1962.

* How to land a 747.

* Don DeLillo (fake) blogs politics at the Onion, while the incredible José Saramago—whose excellent Blindess is both the best book I've read in months and a new motion picture out this Friday despite the fact that it is quite literally unfilmable—(real) blogs in Portuguese and Spanish. Via MeFi and Alex Greenberg.

* Salon looks at David Foster Wallace's sad last days, while Boston.com has a map of Infinite Jest.

* Survive the Outbreak: a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure zombie movie. Via MeFi. More zombie fun here.

* Grave sites of famous science fiction authors.

* Concept art from the upcoming Green Lantern movie. More at MeFi.

* Michael Moore's latest movie, Slacker Uprising, is available for free online. "This film, really isn't for anybody other than the choir," said Moore. "But that's because I believe the choir needs a song to sing every now and then." So the film's not very good, is that it? Via MeFi.

* The Evil League of Evil is hiring.

* Stephen Colbert is about to team up with Spider-Man.

* And Neanderthals loved sushi. Who doesn't?

Mightygodking.com achieves the Geek Harmonic Convergence with this marriage of comic book characters with Dungeons and Dragons alignment. Via NeilAlien.

With great franchises comes greatly declining quality: Sony is apparently planning Spider-Mans 4 *and* 5.

Have we really forgotten so quickly?

Temporarily at McSweeney's: Michael Chabon's screenplay for Spider-Man 2.

John Seavey at Fraggmented has a truly great ongoing series on the storytelling engines of classic comic books. (Via MeFi, which has the full list of columns so far.) Some highlights:

* How Aquaman works, or doesn't.
* The world-historical importance of the night Gwen Stacy died.
* Supergirl's Electra-fueled inferiority complex.
* Why you can't kill off Alfred the butler even if you try.
* Why they shouldn't have killed off Sue Dibney, even if it sold a few extra comics.
* Why Superman writes itself.
* And, of course, Howard the Duck.

Classic sci-fi reimagined as Russia woodcuts, probably the single greatest website ever. Via Boing Boing.

It's a little late in the day, but Polite Dissent has your superhero valentines. Non-geeks can click on each image for an explanation of the joke.

*Here's a list of 2008 genre movies to complement the wider list I linked to the other day.

* When Letterman returns next week, he'll be the only late show on the air with writers—Worldwide Pants made a separate deal with the writers' union that will allow him to return with union approval. I have to say, this doesn't help my uneasiness with what John Stewart and Colbert are doing one bit. (UPDATE: The Deadline Hollywood blog has a comprehensive, well-thought-out post about what the Letterman side deal could mean for the WGA, the AMPTP, and for Leno and his writers. Check it out.)

* And in Massive Nerd news, Joe Quesada has finally done what he's always wanted and eliminated Peter Parker's marriage from continuity. (Even the story's own writer thinks it's stupid.) Now Peter Parker and Mary Jane were never married in the first place, and everyone in the Spider-Man comics has either been de-aged or else we've traveled back in time. As is common with these sorts of retcons and reboots, it's pretty unclear what's supposed to have happened in the past or what is actually going on now. In other words, Marvel continuity at last is as ugly and convoluted as DC's. And the nerds are pissed about it.

There is an optimistic gloss that can be applied to the proliferation and popularity of movie superheroes. The phenomena may indicate a subconscious desire to return to a more polytheistic religious culture. Like the ancient Greek and Roman Gods, today's cinematic superheroes have human foibles and they constantly intervene in the affairs of our world. If human beings are somehow genetically hardwired to look to the sky for salvation, then at least we have an array of exotic choices. And as historian of religion Jonathan Kirsch points out in his recent book about the war between monotheism and polytheism, "The core value of paganism was religious tolerance..." You prefer Superman, I prefer Batman. Someone else warms up to Wolverine. If a rain of new Gods is falling from the sky, at least they aren't demanding singular and supine obedience.

But Spiderman 3's central and perhaps subliminal message is reactionary and anti-democratic. The mass of people are inert, victims of vast forces that are beyond their control. The debris of shattered windows and skyscrapers caused by these warring forces descends from above -- as does deliverance. This is the antithesis of the democratic promise, that people freely joining together in a common cause can make history and determine their own fate.

That's Kelly Candaele at the Huffington Post om Spiderman 3. I'm just amazed anyone bothered to think so hard about such a terrible movie. (via NeilAlien, which also links to this brief but useful comparison between comics canonicity and Arthurian legend)