[press] Honest Daily Mail Clarifications And Corrections …

[comics] 2000AD – Dummy Issue Promo … fascinating look at a 1976 mock-up of the first issue of 2000AD. Looks very much like they were planning a sci-fi version of Action.

[movies] Kubrick speaks in regard to ‘The Shining’ … from The Kubrick Site …

Q: You are a person who uses his rationality, who enjoys understanding things, but in 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining you demonstrate the limits of intellectual knowledge. Is this an acknowledgement of what William James called the unexplained residues of human experience?

A: Obviously, science-fiction and the supernatural bring you very quickly to the limits of knowledge and rational explanation. But from a dramatic point of view, you must ask yourself: ‘If all of this were unquestionably true, how would it really happen?’ You can’t go much further than that. I like the regions of fantasy where reason is used primarily to undermine incredulity. Reason can take you to the border of these areas, but from there on you can be guided only by your imagination. I think we strain at the limits of reason and enjoy the temporary sense of freedom which we gain by such exercises of our imagination.

[comics] Full and Uncut Interview with Alan Moore … the full text to a abridged interview in the Independent published online … ‘Comics is great if you’re working with an artist that you’ve got respect for and you’re working in a situation where there aren’t the arbitrary demands, just the general bullshit of the comics industry to deal with. I think that me and most of the artists that I respect, we’re too old for all that. We’re old, we’re tired [laughs], I just simply cannot be putting up with the petty interference that is part and parcel of the entertainment industry.’

[blogs] The 90 Best Tumblr Blogs Of 2011 … Need to procrastinate today? This list of Tumblr blogs may help.

[life] History Of The Universe In A Nutshell …

History of the universe: Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people and ends up thinking about itself.

— Dan K (@teeheehee) July3, 2011

[comics] Dan Clowes On Book Shops … Clowes on the cover of New Yorker.

[funny] Go Look: The Most Awkward Family Christmas Photos … Worth visiting if only for photo #20 which is what my nightmares are made of.

[movies] Killian Fox’s favourite film: 2001: A Space Odyssey … ‘Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is, for me, primarily about the experience of total awe.’

[crime] What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn? … fascinating quasi-forensic look at what happened to Dominique Strauss-Kahn on the day he was arrested … ‘At 1:31—one hour after Diallo had first told a supervisor that she had been assaulted by the client in the presidential suite—Adrian Branch placed a 911 call to the police. Less than two minutes later, the footage from the two surveillance cameras shows Yearwood and an unidentified man walking from the security office to an adjacent area. This is the same unidentified man who had accompanied Diallo to the security office at 12:52 PM. There, the two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes. They are then shown standing by the service door leading to 45th Street—apparently waiting for the police to arrive’

[movies] In Toy Story, Who Was Andy’s Father? … Jess Nevins On Toy Story … ‘We have to assume that Woody was, indeed, an old Davis family toy. The logical assumption is that he was Mr. Davis’ before he was Andy’s. (We could extrapolate other ways in which Woody joined the Davis family, but Woody being Mr. Davis’ toy is the least unlikely). But how did Woody remain mint if Mr. Davis played with him? And if Mr. Davis played with him, why doesn’t Woody remember him? We know the other toys remember their previous owners–Jessie remembers Emily, Lots-O-Huggin’ Bear remembers Daisy–why doesn’t Woody remember Mr. Davis? ‘

[xmas] The 27 Worst Nativity Sets … As prophesised there is a bacon and sausage nativity.

[xmas] All I Want For Christmas…

[books] The War for Catch-22 … A look at the genesis of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 … ‘The Czech writer Arnošt Lustig claimed that Heller had told him at a New York party for Milos Forman in the late 1960s that he couldn’t have written Catch-22 without first reading Jaroslav Hašek’s unfinished World War I satire,The Good Soldier Schweik. In Hašek’s novel, a mad state bureaucracy traps a hapless man. Among other things, he stays in a hospital for malingerers and serves as an orderly for an army chaplain.’

[comics] A Moment Of Cerebus … a blog dedicated to publishing something to do with Cerebus, Dave Sim and Gerhard every day.

[weird] The Lazarus Sign … ‘The Lazarus sign or Lazarus reflex is a reflex movement in brain-dead or brainstem failure patients, which causes them to briefly raise their arms and drop them crossed on their chests (in a position similar to some Egyptian mummies).’ [via YMFY]

[crime] A Kiss Before Dying … fascinating true crime story from 1960s America about a High School girl murdered by her boyfriend after she asks him to kill her …

After the arrest, the gossip centered less on Mack than it did on Betty. “She was seen as a slut and a diabolical manipulator,” says Shelton Williams. “My father overheard a customer at his car wash say, ‘Everyone knew that girl was no good. She tricked that boy into killing her.’” Betty’s classmates in Winterset, which was canceled after the news of Mack’s arrest, puzzled over her intentions on the last night of her life. Had she really wanted to die, or was she still hoping, somehow, to win Mack back? “I think Betty trapped herself in a real-life drama of her own making,” says Dixon Bowles. “She was ad-libbing all the way, and it spun out of her control. I remember a teacher taking me aside afterward and asking me, ‘Was Betty pregnant?’ And I said, ‘No. I wish it were that simple.’ It was a game of chicken, and she never backed out.”

[weird] Fan death … ‘Fan death is a widely held belief in South Korea that an electric fan left running overnight in a closed room can cause the death of those inside. Fans sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on.’

[space] Jupiter’s heart is dissolving … ‘New calculations suggest that Jupiter’s rocky core is dissolving like an antacid tablet plopped in water. The work could help explain why its core appears smaller and its atmosphere richer in heavy elements than predicted…’

[comics] Steve Bell’s political cartoons of 2011 – in pictures … gallery of Bell’s best work — the G8 Madness cartoon is definitely worth a second look.