Today's the last day of my twenties. Tomorrow, I am old, as depicted in the following synopsis-of-my-life Spiegelman comic that was given to me by Amalle when I passed my exams:



Now entering panel four. Banana peel approaching. Abandon all hope.

Tuesday links.

* I do feel a bit like my characters from one movie could walk into another one of my movies and it would make sense, whereas people from other peoples’ movies would probably feel a bit uncomfortable there. Wes Anderson interviewed in Interview. There's also a profile in this week's New Yorker, apparently, though it's not online. (via Rushmore Academy)

* Case Studies of Comic Book Medicine. More here.

* Graduating during a recession can have a lifelong impact on your earnings.

* Also from Yglesias: Cable monopolies are killing your internet access.

* Infinite Thought has Engels on entropy.

Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.

The quote is from 1833's The Dialectics of Nature, and goes on to suggest a kind of eternal return:

It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of beings conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation; a cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes. But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space, however many millions of suns and earths may arise and pass away, however long it may last before the conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and to pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.

* And Boing Boing has your Scooby Doo/zombie apocalypse mashup of the day.

Ryan Dunlavey's excellent comic strips mashups.

Via MeFi, it's I Love Comix.

Unexpectedly busy day yesterday. Here are some links.

* One of Flashforward's creators has apparently been fired, suggesting the show might get better soon. Nerds may also rejoice at the news that Brannon Braga isn't actually involved with Flashforward at the moment, as he's off driving 24 further into the ground.

* "Good Ol' Gregor Brown" and other "Masterpiece Comics."



* The future of academia? UNC Chapel Hill has made Spanish 101 online-only.

* More bad news for NJ's Chris Christie in advance of next month's election: federal prosecutors gave the New York Times specifics on how one of his former assistants, to whom he made a large, undisclosed loan, may have improperly helped his campaign. Lautenberg isn't an independent observer by any means, but for what it's worth he's called for a federal investigation.

* Columbia has suspended its environmental journalism program. Because the environmental crisis is so 2008.

* A new book called Manthropology makes a lot of claims about the "inadequate modern male" that don't seem right.

Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 meters record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.

Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.

Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.

Also, "manthropology"? Really?

Saw this in the Dawn Treader while waiting for Vu's flight to get in, had to get it. Could this be the world's most perfect comic? Superman vs. Terminator.

Post-exam link catchup.

* Today's abolish-the-Senate factoid: The 10 Senators on the Senate Finance Committee who voted for the public option yesterday represent millions more people than the 13 who voted against it. Dramatically depowering or outright eliminating the Senate should be near the top of any long-term political agenda for progressives. Also in Senate health care news: Tom Harkin says the public option has the votes to pass, while Ben Nelson thinks it's 2008.

* I don't usually play look-at-the-wingnut, but John Derbyshire says women shouldn't have the right to vote because we "got along like that for 130 years." Also, we should repeal civil rights legislation because it's wrong to "try to force people to be good." Well done, sir.

* Okay, a second round of look-at-the-wingnut: Newsmax ran a column yesterday advocating a military coup to solve "the Obama problem." Remember, conservatives love America and progressives hate America.

* Corzine continues to gain in New Jersey, with independent Chris Daggett now polling at 12%.

* Background ephemera from the new Red Dawn remake. It sounds like the Commies may have a point in this one.

* Where Superman gets his powers. At MeFi.

* New Scientist is having a flash fiction contest.

* Another entry in Jonathan Lethem's ten-million-part series on why he loves Philip K. Dick.

* People think torture works because it works in movies.

* New favorite song: Zork rock. (You know where I found it.)

* Also from Boing Boing: Trotsky: The Graphic Biography.

A few more links for today, as my brain is otherwise useless.

* io9 has your Disney/Marvel crossovers in the other direction. I too am looking forward to the Dark Mermaid Saga.

* Again with the Comics has scans from Chris Ware's extremely rare "Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future." Get them before the C&D.

* Who's ruining air travel now?

* Biden breaks down 2010.

* Today in our awesome post-racial society.

* And could Jennifer's Body actually not be all that bad? Feministe reports.

This month's "Theory killed English" article is stranger than most, as it begins with a recognition that drops in English departments are commensurate with drops in foreign languages, history, and "philosophy and religious studies" (which I had no idea was a single discipline). It therefore concludes that these disciplines must all be part of something called "the literary humanities," whose decline can still be pinned (of course) on politicized disputes within English itself. Now, it's true that I have long thought History was ripe for academic colonization, but I think my friends in that department might resist the idea that their discipline is a mere appendix to mine.

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

It takes real work to look at numbers showing a roughly 50% decline across the board in the humanities since 1970/1971 and conclude that intra-English shifts must be the primary culprit. I look at these same numbers, note the nearly identical drops in History and elsewhere, and conclude the decline must have been caused by external pressures, having nothing to do with theory or the canon at all.

News of the upcoming AMC adaptation encouraged me to check out the trade paperbacks of Robert Kirkman's zombie comic The Walking Dead (wiki), whose ten-book / sixty-issue run I subsequently blew through in about three days (including some just-can't-stop reading until 4 or 5 AM last night). The Walking Dead is one of a handful of books like Y: The Last Man or Planetary that are just painfully, painfully good, and since neither of those titles are being published regularly it may just be the best title on the market right now. Or so it seems to me now, in the full throes of this terrible zombie high. Kirkman describes his intent in the introduction to Days Gone By to create the feel of a George Romero film that never ends, and damned if he doesn't nail it. Unflinching, brutal, innovative, and intensely unforgiving, with an acutely Mbembian sense of what survival is and what it means, this is a must-read instant classic of the genre.

I promise you won't regret picking it up.

Image Comics has generously put the first issue online to get you started. Then head down to your local comic shop to get the trades.

Thursday!

* The First Rule of J-School Is You Don't Talk About J-School Debt.

* Nowhere in Manhattan. Hard to believe it is Manhattan. Via MeFi.

* Nnedi Okorafor has a nice guest post at Nebula on Africa and science fiction.

* The CEO of Whole Foods doesn't want us to have health care. OpenLeft doesn't want us to shop at Whole Foods anymore. Everyone at MetaFilter is mad at everyone.

* Top 10 Superhero Comics 2000-2009. I've read more of these than I would have expected, and can plug a bunch: All-Star Superman, Monster Society of Evil, New Frontier, Omega the Unknown, and Planetary are all worth reading in their own ways, as are some of the sillier Big Two offerings (I'll admit to being fond of Booster Gold). Y: The Last Man is good, too, but of course it doesn't really count. Via NeilAlien.

* Language and time. I found this interesting.

David Hauser and colleagues first showed that people with an angrier temperament are more likely to think of themselves as moving through time, than to think of time as moving towards them. You can test this on yourself by considering which day of the week a meeting has changed to, if it was originally planned for Wednesday but has been moved forward two days. If you think it's now changed to Friday, then you're someone who thinks of themselves as moving through time, whilst if you think the meeting is now on Monday, then you're more passive, and you think about time passing you by.

I'm a Monday person for sure. I see can see why Ezra thinks it would be Friday, but it seems very unnatural to me to spatialize the week that way.

* And you can now tweet @Gliese581d.

MMLD #2.

* The recession comes home to Randolph: they're closing our beloved Pathmark.

* A musical tribute to "Ozymandias" from Handsome CD Plus Three.

* On everybody's lips: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Links to reviews here and here. I look forward to having time to read this c. 2017.

* "Do It Again: One Man's Quest to Reunite the Kinks."

* Comics Should Be Good is running a month-long "iconic panels" series all month long to celebrate Marvel's 70th.

* And Joss Whedon says they should have renewed Terminator instead.

Exciting comics nerds everywhere, Marvel Comics has unexpectedly announced that it now owns the rights to Miracleman/Marvelman. Keep an eye on this; it's great news.

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.

xkcd catches my inner monologue.

Monday night links.

* After a brief flirtation with "top five" status, Brüno is back to being a box-office disappointment.

* Top ten comics cities. #2: Chris Ware's Chicago. Via MetaFilter.

* xkcd tackles the frighteningly addictive power of TV Tropes.

* SF by the numbers. Via Boing Boing.

* Why are we so fat?

* Also in the New Yorker: profiles of Al Franken and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, last seen ratifying nature's right to exist.

* And allow me to offer my heartiest gerrycanavan.blogspot.com welcome to North Carolina's newest resident.

Wednesday catchup.

* Rest in peace, Rosie the Riveter.

* Dollhouse tease: Joss will write and direct the premiere.

* Transformers FAQ. Spoiler alert:

I am already incredibly sick of this movie, and I'm just typing questions about it. Sam resurrects Optimus, Optimus kills the Fallen, end of story, right?
Pretty close. Sam dies, though.

Really?
Yeah, for a little while. But then the Transformers in heaven send him back because he still has work to do.

Fuck you.
I'm serious.

Fuck you. There's no way.
It's true. The 6-7 Primes are there in the clouds like Mufasa's head in The Lion King, and tell Sam he's awesome and he needs to live again so he can bring Optimus back to life.

* MMORGS and sociology: "City of Heroes character 'Twixt' becomes game's most hated outcast courtesy of Loyola professor." Via MeFi.

* "Judgment Day," famous anti-racist EC comic from 1953, controversial in its day, at Comics Should Be Good:

Tuesday night.

* I've had to remove the Amazon ads from the sidebar due to Amazon Associates now being taxed in North Carolina. I don't know yet if I'll bother replacing them with anything—they weren't bringing in that much money. Direct donations still of course accepted.

* After something of a slow start with too many hi-I'm-reading-because posts, Infinite Summer is finally starting to heat up with good posts today on IJ and the Kenyon Commencement at Infinite Summer and Infinite Zombies.

* Promo for Dollhouse episode 13. Remember how I said Fred was now positioned to be either the show's new lead or else next season's Big Bad?

* Did the failed Watchmen adaptation hurt book sales? Occasional Fish has gathered some links suggesting it might have.

* Letterman couldn't resist some jokes at Palin's expense last night.

* New B-movie, coming this fall: They Saved Jackson's Brain!

* Things you may not have known about the late Robert McNamara: he was the one who told the world about the hydrogen bomb buried in the swamp outside Goldsboro, NC. (Via Dave F.)

* The New Organizing Institute is having a mock election running superheroes for DC mayor. Of course I'll be voting for Superman, but the Green Lantern's wholesale ripoff of the Obama aesthetic gives me pause.

* Also in superhero news: You're a fun-loving, high-maintenance girl that grew up in a New Jersey suburb. You live close enough to New York City to want the clothes and the cosmopolitan lifestyle, but you're not brave enough to move away from you over protective parents. What's a girl to do? If you're Zoe, you marry the first God of War that crash lands in town during a life or death struggle with his evil adversary! But, what happens when even an all-powerful God can't exactly measure up to your elevated expectations? Jersey Gods.

* ASCII Portal.

DC editor Matt Idleson: "I never want to see Supergirl's panties again."

'Why Chicks Cry': an exhaustive look at sexism and romance comics from the 1950s and '60s. Via MeFi.