I moderate the alumni email list for my highschool graduating class (Bronx Science, 1984). This morning, a message came through from a former classmate stationed in Iraq. The top was date-stamped:
February 17, 2007 * 1914 local time
…and I thought to myself, July, or August?
I got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
mister_wolf had reminded me a few days ago that I’d been meaning to pick up the DVD of Nausicaä, so yesterday I did. I also discovered that the official English translation of Pom Poko was out; I figured Disney would never release that story of magical shape-changing animals who make weapons out of their own testicles. Yet there it was! I got both.
Today I watched Nausicaä, which still holds up after all these years. I just love all those great designs — the planes, the armor, the giant bugs. And probably more facial hair than in all the rest of anime put together.
One bit that I’d never noticed before: Towards the end, the valley people are under attack, and take refuge in the hull of an ancient abandoned ship of some kind at the edge of Acid Lake. The ship has a conning tower, and looks like it might be a submarine, but it could be a surface ship with a rounded body, sort of like this. It’s even got some fins towards one end, like in that picture. And one of the characters says about it “It was supposed to have been built before the Seven Days of Fire. They say it’s been all over, even to the stars.” (That’s Disney’s English dub translation.)
So Spider-man kills Mary Jane by fucking her to death with his radioactive jizm! Seriously, that’s a plot point in issue #3 of Spider-Man: Reign. Set 35 years in the future, a sort of Spider-Mannish rip-off of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, so it’s not in mainstream continuity, but still. I guess they figure Warren Ellis sells well, let’s all try that gonzo shit.
No, no spoiler warning. Do you worry that a loaf of moldy bread or a carton of rancid milk will spoil? No, you don’t, because they’re already damn spoiled.
This is why I don’t read superhero comics. Much.
I’m willing to believe that Iranian munitions are finding their way into the hands of insurgents in Iraq. It’s entirely plausible. I’m even willing to believe that the Iranian government might be deliberately arming Iraqi insurgents. Despite that, I think expanding the war into Iran would be an even bigger disaster than it is in Iraq.
But look, Telegraph, if you’re going to run an article about allegedly Iranian munitions found in Iraq, well, first it would help if the anonymous American “senior defense department officials” making this claim were actually personally stand by their claims. Second, you might want to accompany the article with a photo of an actual Iranian mortar round, and not one from Pakistan. Here’s a hint: Iranian munitions are labeled in Farsi, complete with Farsi numerals.
Same for you, Washington Post, and you, LA Times.
Update: Don’t take this one to the bank. Turns out that maybe some Iranian munitions manufacturers do use western writing on their bombs. (That’s from a .IR domain, so it probably really is Iranian, though note that in the image the text is in a different font and different location on the mortar than in the US-released photo. Also, the Iranian image has obviously been Photoshopped.)
The anonymous American “explosives expert” said that the mortar’s tail fin was distinctively Iranian. Said tail fin is not visible in the released photos.
Also, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was not aware of the briefing, and is not standing by the claim that the Iranian government is supplying Iraqis with weapons.
I’ve been watching lots of westerns on DVD recently. Once Upon a Time in the West for one, and the second season of Deadwood for another. And, um, that’s it. So maybe not a lot, but hey, it was a whole season of Deadwood. The mustache on this guy here was inspired by a photo of the historical Seth Bullock, hero of Deadwood.
Once Upon a Time in the West is a classic spaghetti western by Sergio Leone, with Charles Bronson as a man with no name (but a different man with no name than the one Clint Eastwood played in other Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy) seeking revenge while he plays the movie’s background music on a harmonica. The harmonica is important, a hint about his secret past, the reason he wants revenge, and when that bit of backstory is revealed, it’s the cruelest damn thing I’ve ever seen in a movie. Henry Fonda is the villainous villain, in a great job of casting against type. Jason Robards is the less-villainous villain, the one we don’t mind cheering for.
Deadwood is fascinating to me for a few reasons. One, it’s all about power and law, and the establishment of law in an unlawful place. I’m always kinda fascinated by that. Another, it’s got a great main character in Al Swearengen. (You may think Seth, the hero, is the main character. You’d be wrong.) Just like in Once Upon a Time in the West, there are two villains (actually more, but two main ones), but Al’s the beating heart of the show, driving all the action, swindling and murdering and organizing, a joy to watch, an engine of swearing. Third, the dialog is fantastic. There’s a strong Shakespearean influence (If the Bard had been inordinately fond of the word “cocksucker”), with bits that sound like they might be iambic pentameter, lots of monologs, and bits of stage direction in the dialog. Here, a sample from the second season premiere, Al and his henchman Dan stand on Al’s balcony, watching telegraph poles being raised:
By the end of the second season, Al’s even wandering around talking to a severed head. The third (and final) season isn’t out on DVD yet. I don’t know what the holdup is.
Locas
by Jaime Hernandez
I never knew why I wasn’t a bigger fan of Love and Rockets. Jaime Hernandez’s artwork is brilliant — I remember poring over issues back in my SVA days, stunned at the perfection of his lines. And his pages are full of gorgeous eye candy; Maggie Chascarrillo is (to my eyes) the sexiest comics character ever. But somehow I lost track of the story and lost interest in the comic.
Lucky for me a collection came out with all of the stories of Maggie, Hopey, Penny, Izzie, and the rest, in one great big hardcover. I bought it a couple of years ago, but had trouble reading it because of the sheer size of the volume. At the time I lacked a comfy chair for reading, and would read in bed, where this massive tome was just too unwieldy. And when I got me a comfy chair, I’d lost track of the book. Till a couple weeks ago I hunted it down, moved by having read Ghost of Hoppers.
So now I’ve read it. Jaime’s art is still brilliant — crisp lines, large expanses of solid black, complex faces and emotions rendered deftly in a few simple lines. And I’ve got a handle on what was throwing my younger self off. It was the panel transitions. Jaime is very fond of unusual transitions. It’s common for him to skip away from a scene in progress for one panel as a non-sequitur, then shift back to show some time has passed. Or to have dialog flow as if one panel is directly following another, while the images shown indicate that more time has passed. As a young nerd, used to direct storytelling, this sort of thing confused me, but now I can appreciate it. And having years’ worth of stories in a single 780-page collection makes it easier to piece together the character’s motivations than when I was reading it in little bits, months apart.
Also, coming at the story as a young SF reader, Love and Rockets defied my expectations of coherent world-building. Jaime’s stories are set in a world with rockets, superheroes, and monsters, yet these things generally occupy the fringes of the narrative. It’s like a modern third-worlder’s experience of the Internet — he may know it exists, and know one or two people who’ve used it, but it’s not part of his everyday life. If you’ve got the SF reader’s habit of taking background details and trying to work out from them how the story’s world works, Love and Rockets will confound you as much as a Gabriel García Márquez story.
This is probably less of an issue for readers with wider tastes, or who are used to Japanese manga storytelling techniques. Speaking of which…
Ode to Kirihito
by Osamu Tezuka
I just ordered this through Amazon recently. It’s a Tezuka work from the early 1970s, about a doctor trying to find the cause of a disease that gives its victims dog-like faces. (It also generally kills them with respiratory shutdown after a month or so, before any furries out there get too excited.) The beast-like appearance of the disease’s victims brings out the beast-like behavior of normal people confronted with something unusual; there’s plenty of betrayal, slavery, bigotry, rape, murder, and insanity in these 822 pages.
Tezuka’s artwork is at times simple like a child’s cartoon, or stylized like modern art, or toned and realistic like a photo. His layouts are sometimes conventional, sometimes wild and inventive. Shaenon Garrity has a longer review, with page scans, which is what initially drew this book to my attention.
The funniest thing about this afternoon’s Mooninite-induced panic is that the billboards don’t actually look like bombs. Real bombs are hidden away inside innocuous-looking containers. The blinky lights and LEDs counting down to zero are artifacts of Hollywood dramas, a modern-day symbol of “bomb”, the cinematic equivalent of the shiny black sphere with a fuse sticking out that you see in cartoons.
The city of Boston was shut down today not because of devices that looked like bombs, but because of devices that looked like Hollywood fake representations of bombs.
So I’m in the local coffee shop, waiting for my chai to steep, and four members of a local left-wing political action group are finishing up a meeting. They’ve apparently just had a new member join up, because the leader congratulates him on joining a group that’s “hated by right-wing Zionists”, which she immediately amends to “right-wingers and Zionists”.
I turn and ask her “What about left-wing Zionists?”. She’s says there’s no such thing, because anyone who oppresses people can’t be left-wing.
I should probably have done something other than shrug and turn back to my chai, but she was leaving anyway, and where the hell would I even begin? How can I argue with someone who claims to be a left-wing anti-Zionist, yet doesn’t know what leftism and Zionism are? Would she even believe me if I told her I went to a left-wing Zionist school for eight years?
I don’t want you to think this is a problem unique to the left. I run into the same thing on the right even more often — people who live in their own little fact-bubbles and don’t even know what the words they’re using mean.
Ah, well. That wasn’t the first time I’d seen that group in that coffee shop, and it probably won’t be the last, so maybe I need to stock up on facts and counter-arguments for next time.
LPJ’s Choice and Blood is a d20 Modern supplement about abortion, centering on the conflicts around abortion clinics. It includes new intermediary classes like Clinic Defender, Sidewalk Counselor, and Blogger, and its new feats include Flash Mob, Medical Immortality, and Street Demonstration.
It’s a 24-page PDF, and it’s not free; I’m not sure how much it costs. This thread on Story Games suggests that this may be just a cheap attempt to make quick cash off of a sensational idea. But if I owned d20 Modern I’d be tempted to get it just for those classes and feats.
Technically I’ve missed Blog for Choice day, but it isn’t really tomorrow till after I’ve slept, and there’s something that’s been bugging me.
Why do people, even those who support abortion rights, talk about conception? It’s a pre-scientific concept. The Feast of the Conception dates back to the 7th century, long before anybody had any notion of how the mechanics of reproduction worked at a cellular level. It was clearly just a word that meant something like when life begins, so people who say “life begins at conception” aren’t actually saying anything meaningful.
People who try to nail conception to a particular stage of cellular reproductive development can’t even agree on which stage it is. Same say it’s fertilization, some say implantation, some say the whole period from fertilization to implantation.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to use actual scientific terminology when discussing matters of science? Personally, I think anyone who places the point of individual life beginning prior to gastrulation just hasn’t given the matter any serious thought.
I've decided to start using flickr and taking more photos, what with having this handy pocket-sized digital camera and all.
I think you can see all of my photos here. Just a few so far; most of it's fake Nintendo DS game covers.
Took this one today, on the N train. New, all-electronic displays, which ought to solve the problem of a train getting re-routed and having a useless track display.
cthulhia was in town, so we met for brunch and robot lobsters.
Brunch was gonna be at Viselka’s, till I noticed that right across the street was a Max Brenner’s! A chocolate-themed restaurant! Who could pass that up? I’d been meaning to go ever since I first noticed their Union Square location opening up, but hadn’t gotten around to it. So, inside for breakfasts, and even the eggs come with a side of bread and little dishes of butter and spreadable chocolate. And of course, astonishingly delicious hot chocolate for drinking, served in miniature toilet bowls. They’re called “hug mugs”, handleless mugs that you’re supposed to cup with both hands, but jeez, look at the thing! Cthulhia wanted me to write “R Mutt” on mine with a Sharpie.
Then it was off to the Cooper-Hewitt for the Design Life Now exhibit. This was a bit overwhelming — so much stuff! Inkjet-printed silks, electronic slow glass, political cartoons, interactive light-piping floor tiles, and of course the robot lobster. Which I was a bit disappointed by, since it was just sitting still in a case, with a video playing to show it moving.
A couple of you have just posted about Dinesh D’Souza’s new book blaming “the cultural left” for 9/11. You (and everyone else reading this) might be interested in this 1997 article in Mother Jones magazine, by Adam Lieberman, about why he left movement conservatism. Here, his experiences with D’Souza, while writing for the Dartmouth Review:
The following year, when I applied to be editor-in-chief of the paper, I was rejected in favor of a staffer a grade younger; D’Souza told me that while I was clearly the most intelligent candidate, the point of the Review was not to be a vehicle for expressing ideas, or even to gain the greatest public support through persuasion, but rather to mobilize the small hard-core of students and alumni who naturally shared its views, through tactics of shock and ad hominem attacks.
Go read the rest. It’s pretty short, and chock-full of quotable bits.
Libertarians like to remind people how every law passed by state authority, no matter how minor, is ultimately backed up by brutal force. I’m not a libertarian, but here’s some evidence backing them up:
An SVSU student who made headlines for being tasered during a struggle at a Saginaw City Council meeting after refusing to remove his hat is telling his side of an unusual series of events that has left him facing criminal charges that could result in several years in prison.
(via BoingBoing)
holyoutlaw)
I’d been assuming — not sure why — that the Pentel Pocket Brush’s ink was water-soluble. Wrong-o, me! I hereby declare the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen the most awesomest brushpen ever, and I wish I’d cleaned out Hudson County Art Supply’s stock back when they were selling them for $5 each.
(Not to be confused with the Pentel Color Brush Pen; that pen’s ink is water-soluble.)
Fleeing from the house cleaners, I spent a few hours at the NYU Starbucks. Quick-and-dirty life drawing with a 005 Pigma Micron and a Pentel brushpen.
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