For more information on my forthcoming senescence, please consult Superhero Decadence and Superheroes as Senior Citizens.

Plemons was tall and skinny and good-looking, with light brown skin. He had joined the Army late, at twenty-seven, after discovering that his master’s degree in writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro didn’t make him employable. “I wanted to pay off some debt and also be part of this war,” he said. “Whether it’s our war or Obama’s war, I’m kind of glad the focus is on Afghanistan. Not so much fighting war as providing security. I believe in the United Nations and NATO and the diplomatic side. It’ll take a couple of generations for real progress to come about.” His attitude made him “what the Army calls a liberal douche-bag—a term of endearment, I guess.” He went on, “A lot of guys here are eighteen, nineteen years old. They were twelve years old when 9-11-2001 happened. They’re ready to be warriors, they’re young—part of it’s posturing. They want to make a difference in the way they can, and the way they were trained to is to fight.”

One of my very best friends (and a personal superhero) is interviewed this week at the New Yorker's "Interesting Times" blog about his service as a medic in Afghanistan.

Plemons had been one of the speakers at the service. I had been struck by his remarks. He had said that soldiers had “dual lives” and had to hide one of their identities from their loved ones, “like superheroes.” He had concluded, “We cannot be swayed by feelings that could corrupt us: feelings of guilt, anger, and revenge. In the end, grief shall not take us, and we shall remember.”

Come home safe.

Monday!

* Steve Benen covers the behind-the-scenes wrangling around the public option. Surprising to see a hack like Bill Frist on board. Is he trying to make up for his past?

* io9's ten essential Superman stories. Missing: Alan Moore's Supreme, Superman in all but name. (Also: Kingdom Come? Dark Knight Returns?)

* Conservatives have finally gotten around to removing the Bible's liberal bias.

* The life story of Richard Leroy Walters, a homeless man who left $4 million dollars to NPR.

* Superhero Status Updates.

* The waking nightmare of sleep paralysis.

* And Angel is ten years old today.

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.

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.

Thursday night links.

* Artists and the recession.

* Tough day for celebrity: Farrah Fawcett has died, and Michael Jackson has been rushed to the hospital with cardiac arrest.

* Superhero roast from 1979, starring Adam West and Ed McMahon. Surreal. Via @filmjunk. (No Superman?)

* Towards the personhood of whales: 'Whales Might Be as Much Like People as Apes.'

* 'Twitter Creator On Iran: "I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful." '

* In Tehran, state television's Channel Two is putting on a "Lord of the Rings" marathon, part of a bigger push to keep us busy. Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it's two or three films a day. The message is "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Let's watch, forget about what's happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past. Look ahead.

Random.

* Call us "brights": Evidence is reviewed pointing to a negative relationship between intelligence and religious belief in the United States and Europe. It is shown that intelligence measured as psychometric g is negatively related to religious belief.

* The New Hampshire legislature has passed gay marriage. Live free or die!

* Teaser images from the "lost," DVD-only 13th episode of Dollhouse. This looks really, really good.

* Watchmen watch: costumed vigilantes in Cincinnati.

* "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tells lawmakers it has no power to stop a Salt Lake City firm from taking tons of waste from Italy, processing it in Tennessee, then disposing of it in Utah." Well, who the hell does have the authority?

A little busy today, but here are a few links I've saved up.

* Watchmen link of the day: The Fate of Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis. Via the comments at the Candleblog review.



* Grant Morrison on the superhero genre.

I’m not even sure if there is a superhero genre or if the idea of the superhero is a special chilli pepper-like ingredient designed to energize other genres. The costumed superhero has survived since 1938, constantly shifting in tone from decade to decade to reflect the fears and the needs of the audience. The current mainstream popularity of the superhero has, I think, a lot to do with the fact that the Terror-stricken, environmentally-handicapped, overpopulated, paedophile-haunted world that’s being peddled by our news media is crying out for utopian role models and for any hopeful images of humankind’s future potential!

* Don't Look Back—a flash game based on the Orpheus myth.

* Top 10 myths about sustainability.

* Bad news for solipsists: the universe exists independently of our observation. Via Kottke.

* Also from Kottke: famous directors take on famous comedy bits. A little amateurish, but it made me smile.

Superhero presidents. With appearances by Superman, Captain America, and the notorious Prez.

As befits a gray-haired eminence, I have recently fallen in love with episodes of This American Life, which I now download and listen to constantly. Using a number of "Best Of" websites, I've had great results with Act V, Fiasco!, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, and the two most recent shows on the economy (1, 2), with eight more episodes waiting on my iPod.

The best one I've listened to yet is naturally Superpowers, just wall-to-wall awesome with appearances from Chris Ware, John Hodgman, Zora, and Jonathan Morris from the Gone but Not Forgotten blog—and best of all it turned me on to this very early Chris Ware story once hosted on TAL's website. If you've never heard one of the *really good* TAL episode, start here.

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?

And speaking of deeply unserious: that Shazam! movie may not be so dead after all.

No one watches &c: Fox has won a surprise ruling in their Watchmen suit, throwing the release date and other details surrounding the long-awaited film into doubt.

Quick ones.

* Naturally, Barack Obama is Time's Person of the Year. For a brief while I thought they might pick someone else for shock value, but come on, this was a gimme.

* Jaimee pointed this out to me today, and now I'm seeing it at Politico: if she's selected to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate—which seems, sadly, inevitable—Caroline Kennedy will have been in the Senate eight years in 2016, just like Clinton '08...

* Science fiction and glamor.

* TV Tropes has a whole subsection on comic book tropes.

* The best superhero graphic novels of 2008.

* And my vote for best news story of this or any year: Tiny Swiss watch found in undisturbed 400-year-old tomb.

Can Bryan "Company Man" Fuller save Heroes? Fresh from the (sigh) cancellation of Pushing Daisies, he's looking like the show's last hope.

AUSIELLO: Where did Heroes go wrong, in your opinion?

BRYAN FULLER: It became too dense and fell into certain sci-fi trappings. For instance, in the “Villains” arc, when you talk about formulas and catalysts, it takes the face off the drama. And I think the goal for everybody is to put a face back on the drama. You have to save something with a face; otherwise you don’t understand what you’re caring about. I thought the "Villains" arc started out very interestingly, and then became sort of muddy and dense and I couldn't get my hooks into the characters to understand their motivations. I also started to feel confused about what people's abilities were. One of the great things about the first season is that the metaphor for their abilities was very clear. Those metaphors seem to have gotten complicated in the past two seasons. I share that concern with everybody on the writing staff. It's not like I'm coming in and saying, "This is what you need to do to fix it!" Everybody knows what needs to be fixed and everybody is sort of rowing in that direction.

Pclem matches yesterday's Confessions of a Superhero post with a This American Life segment about a man who began dressing in a hand-sewn Superman costume after his wife passed away. The Superman segment starts about half an hour in.

Poli-Sci-Fi Radio (live 4-6 every Sunday!) turned me on to Confessions of a Superhero, an excellent independent (but Netflixable) documentary about the people who walk Hollywood Blvd. dressed in superhero costumes, taking photos for tips. Naturally, the subject matter makes for a sort of perfect tragicomedy.

Here's the trailer:



Once you've seen the film you can also check out Wonder Woman's MySpace page...

Will the next Superman movie reboot the franchise? A lot of people are taking recent statements from Warner Bros. President Jeff Robinov in the Wall Street Journal that way:

Warner Bros. also put on hold plans for another movie starring multiple superheroes -- known as "Batman vs. Superman" -- after the $215 million "Superman Returns," which had disappointing box-office returns, didn't please executives. "'Superman' didn't quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to," says Mr. Robinov. "It didn't position the character the way he needed to be positioned." "Had 'Superman' worked in 2006, we would have had a movie for Christmas of this year or 2009," he adds. "But now the plan is just to reintroduce Superman without regard to a Batman and Superman movie at all."

I hated Superman Returns as much or more than anyone, but in the absence of a longer interview I find this an excessively optimistic reading of Robinov's statements. "Reintroduce" pretty patently doesn't mean "reboot"...

Late night.

* 'Our Phony Economy': Why measuring GDP doesn't tell us much of anything we need to know. In Harper's, via MeFi.

The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 to 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. “We have to spend our money on something,” shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about “disease-led recovery.” To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well.

* Springfield Punx Simpsonizes celebrities and superheroes. At right: Tobias Fünke.

* Al Giordano says Tim Kaine is growing on him for VP.

The number one rule in choosing a vice presidential nominee is "first, do no harm." If you're a presidential nominee, you don't want a running mate that will distract from you, commit gaffes, speak off-message, or that secretly thinks he or she is too good to be number two.

And the second rule is, "then, do some good." You want a VP that will reinforce your messages and make voters more comfortable with you.

Kaine is so far passing both tests with flying colors.

I'm not there yet—as I've mentioned before, just about everything I hear about Kaine turns me off—but Al's instincts have never steered me wrong. I guess we'll see.

* What are the essential reads in literary fantasy? Personally I'd have to start my list with heavy-hitters from the twentieth century (and my bookshelf) like Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, and Calvino...

* Mission accomplished, corporations! Wal-Mart employee voluntarily enforces her entirely false belief that "copyright lasts forever."

* And will Burn After Reading, the new Coen Brothers comedy, be the new greatest movie of all time? All signs point to yes:

Have superhero movies peaked? A. O. Scott thinks they may have, but on this point he is totally, totally wrong. I promise you: on the day the last cineplex closes down, there'll be a superhero movie playing in theater 3.