[canals] Does Birmingham Have More Canals Than Venice? … Jez Higgins compares the two cities. ‘In fact, the difference between the two is rather less than you might think – Birmingham has around 58km of canal, while Venice has 42km. Given a population about around a million against Venice’s 62,000, that actually means that Birmingham is vastly under-canaled. It has a trifling 5⅘cm of canal per head of population against Venice’s magisterial 67¾cm. For Birmingham to reach Venice-equality we would need to build another 620km of canal.’

[newsletter] BLAST! … I’ve really been enjoying Mo Morgan’s new newsletter – a nicely designed and well focused collection of links and thoughts. Recommended.

[comics] Grown Man Who Owns Bane Action Figure Has Love To Give … ‘Saying that he is here, that he is caring, and that he is available, local man Philip Gorney, who owns a 6-inch Mattel action figure of the comic book villain Bane, confirmed Thursday that he has love to give. “I could make somebody happy, I am loving, and I deserve to be happy, too,” said the 31-year-old man who has drawn several full-color illustrations of the superhero Swamp Thing…’

[alien] Alien 40th Anniversary Short Films … Six official short films celebrating Alien’s 40th anniversary.

[work] Moderately Motivated Gen-Xer for Hire … ‘Candidate understands that individual contributions often have limited value in the wider context, and is content to follow orders with no grasp of said orders’ ultimate purpose or importance. Gratification on a severely delayed timetable is perfectly acceptable. Candidate is accustomed to a reporting structure that includes multiple redundant levels of management.’

[life] Mariko Aoki phenomenon … Do you have a urge to defecate after entering a bookshop? You are not alone! ‘Persons with a history of experiencing the Mariko Aoki phenomenon were described as having a “book bowel” tendency (Japanese: 書便派 sho’ben-ha) in Vol. 41 of Book Magazine.’

[comics] No, I’m not counting that appearance in Super Friends … Mike Sterling looks back at the shock of the JLA’s appearance in Swamp Thing #24. ‘Alan Moore had already been reexamining (or “deconstructing,” if you will) the superhero genre over in England with his reintroduction of original Captain Marvel 1950s knock-off Marvelman. What was once bright and cheery with that character is now menacing and mired in modern day government conspiracies and violence. But the JLA’s appearance in Swamp Thing set the tone for nearly all future appearances of superheroes in this series. They’re never just “as-is,” it’s always in the context of “what’s wrong with this,” or “here’s what’s really odd about them,” or “did you ever realize this?” They’re all recontextualized in the comic’s tone, designed to make you see them differently, to reconsider them, to be kept off-balance by them.’

[life] John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician … enjoyable profile of John Horton Conway – the creator of the cellular automaton called Game of Life.

Conway made what he called “The Vow”, promising himself: “Thou shalt stop worrying and feeling guilty; thou shalt do whatever thou pleasest.” He no longer worried that he was eroding his mathematical soul when he indulged his curiosity and followed wherever it went, whether towards recreation or research, or somewhere altogether nonmathematical, such as his longing to learn the etymology of words. Conway’s fate now was to do all the stuff that he had formerly feared his fellow mathematicians might floccinaucinihilipilificate. “Floccinaucinihilipilification” is his favourite word. He reckons it’s the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary (it is certainly in the top three), and without prompting he gives an account of its etymology: it is a Latin-based word, invented circa 1730 at Eton as a schoolboy’s joke. And, Conway recites nearly verbatim the OED’s definition: “the action or habit of estimating as worthless.”

[comics] Katsuhiro Otomo’s Sleeping Beauty … the creator of Akira’s version of the fairy tale.

[books] A supposedly great article I’ll never read the same way again … A look at inaccuracies in the journalism of David Foster Wallace. ‘One accusation was made in 2011 by Wallace’s good friend Jonathan Franzen, who offhandedly accused Wallace of making up dialogue in his famous “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” piece. “Those things didn’t actually happen,” he told New Yorker editor David Remnick. “You notice he never published any nonfiction in your magazine.” Franzen seemed salty about it at the time, leading plenty of people to accuse him of levying a cheap shot, but probably not as salty as he should’ve been, knowing how famous his (admittedly dead) friend had gotten as a dogged truthteller by sort of making some of it up.’

[truecrime] The real story behind Harper Lee’s lost true crime book … An interesting look at one of Harper Lee’s unfinished books. ‘“He might not have believed in what he preached, he might not have believed in voodoo,” she once wrote, “but he had a profound and abiding belief in insurance.” In the course of her reporting, she turned up dozens upon dozens of insurance policies, all taken out by Maxwell, seemingly without the knowledge of the insured, with his home address as the correspondence address and naming himself as the beneficiary. The more she learned about the earlier deaths, the more convinced she became that at least five of them were murders, even though he had never been convicted of any of them.’

[comics] 5 Modern Day Treasures That Got Saved In The Craziest Ways … Amongst other things this article looks at how Moore and Sienkiewicz’s unpublished Big Numbers #3 found it’s way to the Internet. ‘Padraig O Mealoid saw an item on eBay that claimed to include not just Big Numbers #1 and #2, but also a “rare unpublished xerox” of #3 for the low, low price of $49.99. As it turned out, a friend of the seller had worked with Moore on the series, and had been smart enough to hang onto his preview copy of the third chapter. And since there was no legal way for anyone to own a copy anymore, they did the ’90s equivalent of putting it on a torrenting site — they xeroxed a bunch of copies and passed them out to diehard fans, one of whom eventually put his copy up on eBay.’

[newsletter] Recs … Another newsletter I’ve been enjoying – lots of media recommendations from Rex Sorgatz. ‘…Media, tv, podcasts, film, games, apps, music, books, tech, art, and design; also, a super dumb pun on my name’

[truecrime] Who killed the prime minister? The unsolved murder that still haunts Sweden … Fascinating long-read about the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 and the botched investigation and conspiracy theories that followed. ‘By the start of the 1990s, so much time and money had been spent fruitlessly pursuing Pettersson and the PKK that basic questions about the night of the murder remained unanswered. Where was the murder weapon, which was believed to be a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver? Why were witness reports of men with walkie talkies near the site of the killing not taken seriously? Was the police incompetence too extreme to be accidental?’

[people] It’s Still Roy Cohn’s World, And You’re Living in It … A great comic profile from Levi Hastings and Josh Trujillo.

[movies] Burning desire: John Wick and the undying appeal of the revenge thriller … ‘Though John Wick primarily attracts audiences for its simplicity of gun-fu action ecstasy, the film-makers clearly have more universal existential ideas on their mind. Sure, John Wick as played by Keanu Reeves is an ex-assassin left broken by his wife’s death and only capable of exorcising his pain through mass murder and vengeance. But he’s also an individual trapped in the system that created him, desperate to live freely and “retired” on his own terms, without the need to kill again.’

[internet] Why People Fake Cancer Online … A look at why people fake illness on the Internet. ‘This condition of faking illness online has a name: “Munchausen by internet,” or MBI. It’s a form of factitious disorder, the mental disorder formerly known as Munchausen syndrome, in which people feign illness or actually make themselves sick for sympathy and attention. According to Marc Feldman, the psychiatrist at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa who coined the term MBI back in 2000, people with the condition are often motivated to lie by a need to control the reactions of others, particularly if they feel out of control in their own lives. He believes that the veil of the internet makes MBI much more common among Americans than the 1 percent in hospitals who are estimated to have factitious disorder.’

[last] Experience: I manage the last Blockbuster in the world… A poignent check-in with the last Blockbuster video rental store in the world. ‘The final store closures happened so fast. At the end of 2017, there were seven Blockbusters left in the US, but by early 2019 it was just us and one other store in Perth, Australia, in the world. When they closed in March it was bittersweet. We were happy to be the last store, but sad that we were one step closer to Blockbuster ceasing to exist. They called us from Australia on their last night and wished us all the best. That was very sweet. Since then, things have been crazy. The local community has been incredibly supportive, and people have come from all over the world to rent movies: we’ve set up close to 5,000 new memberships…’

[comics] Universe B – The Unpublished Grant Morrison … a comprehensive list of Grant Morrison’s unstarted and unfinished projects. ‘SICK BUILDINGS (1989) – A forthcoming graphic novel mentioned in the author bio in Arkham Asylum, Sick Buldings was a Situationist prank, a story that not only was never published but never existed, and was never intended to exist, in the first place.’

[tech] What I Learned Trying To Secure Congressional Campaigns … Maciej Cegłowski looks at how to improve tech security on high-risk political campaigns. ‘We told people to use Signal, iPhones/iPads, Google docs, and to buy the blue Yubikey. If any of that posed a problem, we found other products to recommend. The goal was not to score those sweet affilliate sales, but to remove decision points and cognitive overhead by standardizing on a known good set of products.’

[pizza] I Staked Out My Local Domino’s to See Just How Accurate Its Pizza Tracker Is … Some quality journalism on an important issue. ‘7:08 p.m. — “PERFECTION CHECK COMPLETE” No, there’s no perfection check. You just put it in the oven ONE MINUTE AGO!!! 7:12 p.m. — The Domino’s Employees Grow Suspicious of Me…’