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1 April 2004
[comics] Yet Another Dave Sim interview from the Onion AV Club … ‘It was pure guesswork on my part back in 1979 as to whether I would have the stamina to write, pencil, ink, letter, tone, and fill the back of a monthly comic book for 26 years. In retrospect, I should’ve said 250 issues. Finishing the book, the last four years, what had previously been an interesting job that left me a certain amount of spare time for other things had become a 15-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week, Herculean task. At the age of 23, I actually thought I would be fine into my 50s doing a monthly comic book, but that I would let myself slack off by ending it at the age of 47. It’s a young man’s game.’ [thanks Kabir]
2 April 2004
[book] Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg — one of the New Yorker Articles that formed the basis for Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point … [via Sashinka] ‘Once, in the mid-fifties, on a whim, Lois took the train to New York to attend the World Science Fiction Convention and there she met a young writer by the name of Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke took a shine to Lois, and next time he was in Chicago he called her up. “He was at a pay phone,” Lois recalls. “He said, ‘Is there anyone in Chicago I should meet?’ I told him to come over to my house.” Lois has a throaty voice, baked hard by half a century of nicotine, and she pauses between sentences to give herself the opportunity for a quick puff. Even when she’s not smoking, she pauses anyway, as if to keep in practice. “I called Bob Hughes, one of the people who wrote for my paper.” Pause. “I said, ‘Do you know anyone in Chicago interested in talking to Arthur Clarke?’ He said, ‘Yeah, Isaac Asimov is in town. And this guy Robert, Robert…Robert Heinlein.’ So they all came over and sat in my study.” Pause. “Then they called over to me and they said, ‘Lois’ — I can’t remember the word they used. They had some word for me. It was something about how I was the kind of person who brings people together.” This is in some ways the archetypal Lois Weisberg story.’
4 April 2004
[blogs] New Kids On The Blog — the Observer examines blogs in the UK … ‘Those already bored with the phenomenon – particularly the techies who started blogging years ago as a way of sharing boring stuff about computer code – claim that the golden days of blogging are over, that what passes for blogging nowadays is the most banal wash-up of aimless lives, millions of pages slowing the internet and clogging Google. What they really don’t like is that publishing on the internet is not just for geeks any more.’
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5 April 2004
[books] Amazon World — amusing user reviews from Amazon.com. Moby Dick: ‘I am quite the fan of stories which involve man eating sea creatures, such as Jaws. Moby Dick is nothing compared to such classics, I fear. In fact, it is boring with a capital B. What is the whales motivation? You dont know. There is no suspense, and I find the idea of people hunting whales offensive. Offensive with a capital O. Whales are lovely, peaceful creatures and that is why their slaughter has been outlawed. This book makes whales seem like demonic, murderous creatures of doom. Such a thing should not be read to a child, for it preaches that animal cruelty is ok. Never before have seen such an abundance of immoralality! I am offended! I feel as if my brainards are going to freeze over and crumble like spoiled peanut brittle. Take my word for it, dont read this book’ [via Kottke’s Remaindered Links]
6 April 2004
[ipod] The Incredible Future Boy Versus Malevolent Gutter Punk — blogger foils mugging attempt with iPod mini … ‘I was carrying my iPod Mini. Just in case you haven’t seen one, the mini is not your mother’s iPod. The rounded edges and soft plastic chassis that characterized the older generations have given way to one sharp little fucker of a digital lifestyle appliance.’
7 April 2004
[bbc] Alastair Campbell’s Wheel of Retribution — a little bit out of date but fun (especially if you work at the BBC) … ‘Whip… John Humprhys.’ [via Blah Blah Flowers]
8 April 2004
[blogs] How to write a Blog-Buster — Guardian Online covers Fiction written using the blog format … On Belle de Jour: ‘The anonymous prostitute’s diary is a familiar genre in erotic fiction, one that, in print, probably wouldn’t float many boats these days. But via the blog form’s sense of immediacy, Belle de Jour has revived the cliches so successfully that publishers are offering six-figure advances and journalists are desperate to find out who the real Belle de Jour is. But her real identity, call girl or literary hoaxer, is something of a side issue. The blog gets so much attention because, with its teasing sequence of daily “entries”, it tells an old story in a new way.’
[bbc] The Reith Lectures 2004 — the BBC is releasing the 2004 Reith Lectures as DRM-Less MP3 Files. This year’s lecturer is Wole Soyinka discussing “The Climate of Fear”. [via plasticbag.org] » The Changing Mask of Fear — download the first lecture as an MP3 file.
» BBC releases Reith Lectures online as MP3s(es) — Tom Coates on the release of the MP3’s … ‘Hopefully it’s the first open distribution of many programmes of this kind – enlightening, significant and weighty pieces of work that actually have the potential to make the world a better place – available for free from the BBC.’
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10 April 2004
[quote] Robert X. Cringely on the Personal Computer: ‘…PC’s killed the office typewriter, made most secretaries obsolete, and made it possible for a 27 year-old MBA with a PC, a spreadsheet program and three pieces of questionable data to talk his bosses into looting the company pension plan and doing a leveraged buy-out.’
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12 April 2004
[ipod] Rejected iPod Engravings … ‘I last 8 hrs. You last 2 minutes. Who’s the man?’ [via I Love Everything]
13 April 2004
[blog] The Diary of a Nobody — George and Weedon Grossmith’s fictional diary of Charles Pooter converted into a blog … ‘Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see — because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’ — why my diary should not be interesting.’ [via As Above]
14 April 2004
[happy] On The Happy Trail — The Observer looks at the study of Happiness … ‘The important point to grasp, says Diener, is that although happiness has a large genetic component, none of us are prisoners of evolution. By identifying the sources of happiness in our lives and making a conscious effort to optimise them, most of us should be able to raise our average satisfaction levels. Or as Norman Vincent Peale succinctly puts it: “Who decides whether you shall be happy or unhappy? The answer – you do.”‘
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15 April 2004
[comics] Cartoonists CD Cover Art — great collection of Cartoonists art from CD Covers … 
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16 April 2004
[books] Clearing Up The Confusion — Neal Stephenson on his new book The Confusion. On Isaac Newton: ‘…the gist of it seems to be that Newton was trying to achieve some specific goals with alchemy. Some of those goals might have been religious, but many were clearly scientific. As a scientist, he knew that he could only explain so much with the tools that he was using, and that to advance beyond that point he was going to need a different toolbox. He recognized that a lot of alchemy was nonsense, but he thought that by going about it in a systematic and rational way he’d be able to solve some scientific problems. He would have rejected the label of magician because it might have had dark connotations to him.’ [via yoz]
18 April 2004
[comics] Readers Of The Last Aardvark — the Village Voice looks back on 300 issues of Cerebus … ‘Despite Sim’s anti-feminist crusade, Cerebus stands on its own as a ferocious critique of power. Sim believes that freedom is an absolute, and to this end he has self-published Cerebus, advocated for artists’ rights, and bucked intellectual-property laws wherever possible (after his and Gerhard’s deaths, Cerebus will become public domain). In an era when selling out is considered synonymous with success, Sim’s resistance is bracing.’
19 April 2004
[book] Page 23, Sentence 5 Meme … [via Feeling Listless] 1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. ‘THE MOST IMPORTANT REASON for accepting that Satan exists is that Jesus clearly believed in him.’ — Satan Unmasked (Overcoming the Jezebel Spirit) by Colin Dye.
[blogs] Blog All About It — roundtable discussion from the Guardian’s G2 Section wondering if blogging is just vanity publishing? … Salam Pax: ‘A tip on how to make your blog popular: position yourself in a place where a bomb might fall on you. Tickles everybody and makes your hits-counter happy. Possibility of death is a downside, but hey! You get linked by A-list bloggers.’
20 April 2004
[film] Plumbing Stanley Kubrick— Iain Watson reminiscences about working with Stanley Kubrick … ‘”Do you know what the essence of movie-making is?” Stanley asked me. “It’s buying lots of things.” The Labour Party was responsible for the fact that nothing bought in Britain worked properly, so he preferred to buy from a distance such as Düsseldorf or California. When Full Metal Jacket was being filmed in England a whole plastic replica Vietnamese jungle was air-freighted in from California, so I was assured. Next morning Stanley walked on set, took one look at it, and said, “I don’t like it. Get rid of it.” The technicians shared out the trees, giving a new look to gardens in North London, and a real jungle was delivered instead, palm trees uprooted from Spain.’
[linky] Just the Links: » Trailer: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
» Magneto Was Right [via plasticbag.org]
» Ping-O-Matic! … useful… especially if you’re still using Blogger [via yoz]
» Like The Wind — Tips and Tweaks for Winamp 5.
» Windows Software Compendium — summary of useful Windows software for the iPod.
» Winamp 5.0 iPod Plugin … Works for Me – YMMV.
21 April 2004
[film] ‘I thought I was really watching her’ — Nick Broomfield on Aileen Wuornos and the film Monster … ‘At the time of her execution, Wuornos was definitely psychotic. She was convinced her mind was controlled by radio waves and believed she was going to be taken off in a space ship to join Jesus Christ. She never showed any remorse; she firmly believed she was ridding the streets of evil men. When a priest came to take her confession just before the execution she sent him packing and knelt down and prayed for her victims, believing they were evil and that God should accept them into heaven. When Jeb Bush cynically produced three psychiatrists to assess Wuornos’s mental state and then pronounced her mentally competent, there was a complete disrespect for what the law really intends, which is that people of unsound mind should not be executed.’
22 April 2004
[comics] Mini Gerhard Interview — Dave Sim’s collaborator on Cerebus is occasionally posting to the Cerebus Yahoo Group. ‘…it occurred to me that maybe the pressure of doing a monthly comic all by himself caused Dave’s personality to split and he invented this background artist personality to help him cope with the enormity of it all and that his psychosis was so deep that I think that I actually exist and that I’m going to just *poit* out of existence as soon as I finish drawing issue 300. Fortunately I’m still here. I think.’ [via Meowwcat’s Cerebus Links]
23 April 2004
[comics] B.D. loses his leg in Doonesbury …  » Doonesbury the soap opera (scroll down for article): ‘A four-box daily comic strip it may be, but Doonesbury is also a soap, probably the only one in the world to blend current affairs with a regular cast of characters, ageing, marrying, splitting up, starting dotcoms, doing performance art, having kids, running for office, fighting in America’s wars, going to prison and occasionally dying. For afficionados of Doonesbury, the sight of that bandaged stump on a stretcher and that never-before-seen hair was powerful and affecting.’
25 April 2004
[comics] Dave Sim, The Onion, and Jeopardy — behind-the-scenes at Dave Sim’s Onion Inteview … Who is Dave Sim?: ‘Having had — for 26 years and three months — virtually unlimited space in the back of his comic book to write 100,000 and 200,000-word serialized essays on what he considered the most pressing subjects of the day — some examples being “how feminism usurped the Civil Rights movement from black men” in “Tangent,” “How the Western democracies became so feminized that they failed to support the United States in the war on terrorism” in “Why Canada Slept,” and “Why he chose a combination of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as his personal system of belief” in “Islam, My Islam,” this controversial self-published comic-book artist — who is now being asked by many media outlets (whose formats don’t allow any article longer than 4,000 words) to explain his life and work over the last quarter century in postage-stamp-sized spaces — recently published the 300th issue of his groundbreaking alternative series which began in December of 1977.’ [Related: Earlier Post]
26 April 2004
[politics] Bill and Monica — interesting article which proposes that America’s worst political crisis since Watergate was caused by Bill Clinton being on a diet … ‘The photographic record is clear: between mid-1994 and early 1996, Bill Clinton lost somewhere in the neighbourhood of 25-30lb. One evening toward the end of this time, a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky took a couple of slices of vegetarian pizza into the Oval Office…’
[internet] Creative Commons in a Connected World — Lawrence Lessig is giving a lecture in London … [via The Obvious?] 
27 April 2004
[google] What can’t you find on Google? Vital statistics — John Naughton wonders why Google is so reticent to talk about the technology behind it’s website. ‘…what it all comes down to is this: Google has far more computing power at its disposal than it is letting on. In fact, there have been rumours in the business for months that the Google cluster actually has 100,000 servers – which if true means that the company’s technical competence beggars belief.’
[comics] Wedding Bells for Morrison? — according to Barbelith Grant Morrison and Kristan are getting married. Congratulations! ‘They’re the John and Yoko of comics!!’
28 April 2004
[blogs] Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials — report that US Intelligence and Law Enforcement are tracking blogs. ‘…some analysts say U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials might be starting to track blogs for important bits of information. This interest is a sign of how far Web media such as blogs have come in reshaping the data-collection habits of intelligence professionals and others, even with the knowledge that the accuracy of what’s reported in some blogs is questionable.’ [via Die Puny Humans]
29 April 2004
[comics] My Marvel Years — Jonathan Lethem on growing up in the 1970’s with Marvel Comics and Jack Kirby … ‘Kirby hadn’t been inactive in the interlude between his classic 1960s work for Marvel and his mid-1970s return. He’d been in exile at DC, Marvel’s older, more august and squarer rival. In his DC work and the return to Marvel, where he unveiled two new venues, The Eternals and 2001, Kirby gradually turned into an autistic primitivist genius, disdained as incompetent by much of his audience, but revered by a cult of aficionados in the manner of an ‘outsider artist’. As his work spun off into abstraction, his human bodies becoming more and more machine-like, his machines more and more molecular and atomic (when they didn’t resemble vast sculptures of mouse-gnawed cheese), Kirby became great/awful, a kind of disastrous genius uncontainable in the form he himself had innovated. It’s as though Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Adolf Wölfli, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes. Or if Robert Crumb had turned into his obsessive mad-genius brother, Charles Crumb.’ [via Pete Ashton]
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30 April 2004
[film] Forgetfulness Of Things Past — Steven Rose on the possibility of erasing memories. ‘…an animal was taught a particular task, and then days later was reminded of it by being put in the same context, the memory became labile once more – that means it could be disrupted by protein synthesis inhibitors. It was as if the reminder not only reactivated the old memory, but resulted in an entirely new memory being formed on top of it. Of course, we can intuitively recognise this; when we recall a past event, we are not recalling the event per se, but our memory of it from the last time we recalled it. This is why our autobiographical memories are being reshaped as we go through life.’ [Related: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind]
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