Friday night infodump of all the links I want to keep out of the papers.

* SciFiWire says the new Prisoner disappoints.
* Salon says it's time to bring back Marx. He went somewhere?
* NASA says that explosion last month turned up quite a bit of water on the Moon.
* Jermaine Clement says Flight of the Conchords was almost completely different—but it seems clear to me he's joking.
* And the RNC says it's not subsidizing abortions—anymore.

The headline reads, "NASA to Bomb the Moon."

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.

Junk we left on the Moon. (via Gynomite)

The LRB blog highlights the little-known second sentence spoken on the Moon, as well as the last, while 3 Quarks Daily remembers the Apollo 11 Plan B.

In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.

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.

Sunday links.

* How Neil Armstrong ruined science fiction.

* Increasing cell phone use may be largely responsible for highway fatality numbers that remain static in the face of widespread safety improvements. If you're looking for hyperbolic commentary on this subject, check out Matt Yglesias and the good people at MetaFilter, none of whom have ever used their cell phones while driving, of course not, no sir.

* Curing blindness by implanting a tooth in the eye. Also via MeFi.

* And Buster Bluth stars in Ctrl, about a man who can use keyboard commands to modify his life.

Today is forty years since the moonshot.

Tuesday!

* Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in jail on Monday. I think what I enjoy most about this is the absurd dialogue, oddly ubiquitous, over whether the punishment is "too lenient" or "too harsh"—as if, that is, it were a sentence one might possibly serve out and not more years than any human being (much less any 71-year-old human being) has ever lived. They might as well have sentenced him to a million jillion years.

* Uranium on the Moon! We need to secure it before the Russians Chinese Martians Islamofascists get their hands on it; clearly we have no choice left but to blow up the Moon.

* The World Clock will depress you in any number of ways. Only 14,766 days of oil left; forty years, less than a third of Madoff's prison sentence. (via @charliejane)

* Obama spoke today to the controversies over gay rights that are rapidly disillusioning so many of his supporters. Via LawDork, who seems reasonably pleased with the speech, if at the same time anxious for real action to be taken.

* 'Iraqis jubilantly celebrate U.S. troop withdrawal': U.S. forces handed over formal control of Iraq’s major cities today ... “a defining step toward ending the U.S. combat role in the country.”

* Twitter Politics: With the Iranian election, we've seen a privately owned technology becoming a vital part of the infrastructure supporting political activity. That's a problem.

* Debating the public option: Will it just turn into a giveaway to the private insurers? Do you really have to ask?

* It seems like only yesterday that Obama was being accused of orchestrating the coup in Honduras. Now he's a communist for opposing it.

* And Ezra Klein has your chilling vision of things to come.

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. And it gets worse: the robots are already eying the Moon.

Calvino in the New Yorker.

What happens on the earth when a moon dies is not easy to describe; I’ll try to do it by referring to the last instance I can remember. Following a lengthy period of evolution, the earth had more or less reached the point where we are now; in other words, it had entered the phase when cars wear out more quickly than the soles of shoes. Beings that were barely human manufactured and bought and sold things, and cities covered the continents with luminous color. These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more awash with new products, new toothbrushes, a New York with its own Manhattan that stretched out dense with skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush.

In this world where every object was thrown away at the slightest sign of breakage or aging, at the first dent or stain, and replaced with a new and perfect substitute, there was just one false note, one shadow: the moon. It wandered through the sky naked, corroded, and gray, more and more alien to the world down here, a hangover from a way of being that was now outdated.

Ancient expressions like “full moon,” “half-moon,” “last-quarter-moon” continued to be used but were really only figures of speech: how could we call “full” a shape that was all cracks and holes and that always seemed on the point of crashing down on our heads in a shower of rubble? Not to mention when it was a waning moon! It was reduced to a kind of nibbled cheese rind, and it always disappeared before we expected it to. At each new moon, we wondered whether it would ever appear again (were we hoping that it would simply disappear?), and when it did reappear, looking more and more like a comb that had lost its teeth, we averted our eyes with a shudder.

It was a depressing sight. We went out in the crowds, our arms laden with parcels, coming and going from the big department stores that were open day and night, and while we were scanning the neon signs that climbed higher and higher up the skyscrapers and notified us constantly of new products that had been launched, we’d suddenly see it advancing, pale amid those dazzling lights, slow and sick, and we could not get it out of our heads that every new thing, each product that we had just bought, could similarly wear out, deteriorate, fade away, and we would lose our enthusiasm for running around buying things and working like crazy—a loss that was not without consequences for industry and commerce.

That was how we began to consider the problem of what to do with it, this counterproductive satellite. It did not serve any purpose; it was a useless wreck. As it lost weight, it started to incline its orbit toward the earth: it was dangerous, above and beyond anything else. And the nearer it got the more it slowed its course; we could no longer calculate its phases. Even the calendar, the rhythm of the months, had become a mere convention; the moon went forward in fits and starts, as though it were about to collapse...

True fact: if you took every swear word from The Sopranos and stacked them one top of another, it would reach the Moon.

Link dump #3, mother of all link dumps.

* I thought I was over Obama kitsch, but somehow the kids' letters to Obama featured on This American Life last week still somehow got to me. Adorable!

* Austen gets a much-needed updating: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

* The Massachusetts lottery: if you've got $10,000+ to burn, it turns out it could actually be a good bet.

* Wikipedia is looking to ruin itself. More at MeFi.

* A zoomable map of the Moon from a 1969 National Geographic. Simply irresistible.

* How to nationalize health care.

* Rethinking your opposition to nuclear power? Rethink again. I've been working on a piece for the Indy on nuclear power in North Carolina that covers some of these themes. Via Steve Benen.

A few midday links.

* There's a new viral site for Watchmen with links to background ephemera created for the film. I'm getting excited for this one despite myself. Via Candleblog.

* Bookninja considers Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, with links to other negative reviews at the Guardian, L.A. Times, the Times of London, and Seattle's Post-Intelligencer. I thought it was okay, if not quite up to its moment, and in any event there were parts of it I quite liked to hear said:

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

I'm sure it reminded more than one Springsteenphile of his song "American Land."

The McNicholas, the Posalski's, the Smiths, Zerillis, too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
Come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothin in their bellies but the fire down below

They died building the railroads worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago they're still dyin now
The hands that built the country were always trying to keep down

* It turns out Dirk Benedict is sort of totally crazy.

There was a time, I know I was there, when men were men, women were women and sometimes a cigar was just a good smoke. But 40 years of feminism have taken their toll. The war against masculinity has been won. Everything has turned into its opposite, so that what was once flirting and smoking is now sexual harassment and criminal. And everyone is more lonely and miserable as a result.

Uh..... huh.

* China censors parts Of Obama's speech. What's more, they did it in a weirdly self-conscious, self-aware way:

At one point, Obama said earlier generations "faced down communism and fascism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions." He later addressed "those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent—know that you are on the wrong side of history."

The Chinese translation of the speech, credited to the Web site of the official China Daily newspaper, was missing the word "communism" in the first sentence. The paragraph with the sentence on dissent had been removed entirely.

A little too on the nose.

* And the first press release from the Obama administration has been released.

At 8:35 AM, the President arrived in the Oval Office and spent 10 minutes alone in the office. He read the note left to him by President Bush that was in an envelope marked “To: #44, From: #43”. At 8:45 AM, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel came in to discuss the schedule of today’s events. The First Lady came into the Oval Office at 9:10 AM. We will release a picture shortly.

Oh, to get one's hands on that note.

Tuesday morning links.

* If movie posters were honest. See also: if covers of marginal SF/fantasy series were honest.

* Who knew full moons had names? Via G-Lens.

* Is California the new Michigan?

* Tough times in the USA: people are eating racoon. This has nothing to do with the recession, apparently—some people are just choosing to eat it because they are gross.

* Potsdam University is offering a graduate how-to course on flirting for computer geeks.

* Arm-Chair Logic has your elementary logic test for the day.

* Solar apocalypse: NASA warns of 'Space Katrina.' My production company has already optioned the rights to this headline, don't even think about it.

* Harper's Index: Bush retrospective mega-edition.

* A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem. That's right: online sexual predators have infiltrated top-level attorneys general offices in 49 states. We must redouble our efforts.

* And Whedonesque asks, appropriately forlorn: Has it really been five years since Angel ended? That is a little hard to believe. The Armchair Critic ranks the twenty-five best episodes, and the five worst, of one of the best (and surely the most underappreciated) SF series of all time.

I Wish I Were the Moon is a lovely microgame in the mold of I Fell in Love with the Majesty of Colors said to be inspired by the Italo Calvino story "The Distance to the Moon." Here's a walkthrough if you find you can't crack the last ending. Via Backwards City of all places.

Space News!

* 'Moon could hold water for lunar base.'

* 'New Mexico's Spaceport America is two steps closer to becoming a reality and not just a dream.'

* 'Report urges timetable for human mission to Mars.'

(via Mac)

Dark Roasted Blend coins your new -punk craze: Dieselpunk. Via MeFi.

Polite Dissent has some links about the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, subject of a cool-seeming new book from Matthew Goodman.

The article continued on and offered an elaborate account of the fantastic sights viewed by Herschel during his telescopic observation of the moon. It described a lunar topography that included vast forests, inland seas, and lilac-hued quartz pyramids. Readers learned that herds of bison wandered across the plains of the moon; that blue unicorns perched on its hilltops; and that spherical, amphibious creatures rolled across its beaches. The highpoint of the narrative came when it revealed that Herschel had found evidence of intelligent life on the moon: he had discovered both a primitive tribe of hut-dwelling, fire-wielding biped beavers, and a race of winged humans living in pastoral harmony around a mysterious, golden-roofed temple. Herschel dubbed these latter creatures the Vespertilio-homo, or "man-bat"...