[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] 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]

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

[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.’

[xmas] All I Want For Christmas…

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

[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? ‘

[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] 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.’

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

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

[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

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

[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.’

[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] 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.

[press] Honest Daily Mail Clarifications And Corrections …

[life] What are the chances of your coming into being? … ‘So what’s the probability of your existing? It’s the probability of 2 million people getting together – about the population of San Diego – each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice, and they all come up the exact same number – say, 550,343,279,001…’

[blogs] Online community: For every blog, there is a season … On how blogs end … ‘Just as reaching the end of a good book feels like demise writ small, so, too, does shutting down a blog. A blog’s promise, encapsulated in its reverse chronology, is that there will always be another post, even if the reader doesn’t know when.’

[comics] Alan Moore – meet the man behind the protest mask … interview with Moore where he discusses the use of V for Vendetta masks in recent protests …

…More than 100,000 of the £4-£7 masks sell every year, according to the manufacturers, with a cut always going to Time Warner. Does that irk Moore?

“I find it comical, watching Time Warner try to walk this precarious tightrope.” Through contacts in the comics industry, he explains, he has heard that boosted sales of the masks have become a troubling issue for the company. “It’s a bit embarrassing to be a corporation that seems to be profiting from an anti-corporate protest. It’s not really anything that they want to be associated with. And yet they really don’t like turning down money – it goes against all of their instincts.” Moore chuckles. “I find it more funny than irksome.”

[conspiracy] The Umbrella Man … brilliant Errol Morris short interview with Josiah Thompson on a weird detail from the assasination of J.F.K. ‘[John Updike] said that his learning of the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird’

[comics] Gallery Of Art From Gene Colan’s Dracula … missed this at Halloween but Colan’s art is always worth a look.

[eyes] Monroe or Einstein: Check If You Need Glasses at Your Computer … find out if you are shortsighted …

[comics] ‘Superheroes are our dreams of ourselves’ … Alan Moore interviewed by the Independent … ‘He stepped away from mainstream publishing and film royalties: an act of artistic integrity that has seen him branded as everything from eccentric to bitter. Eccentric perhaps, in the way that writers often are, but bitter? Certainly not. The man that greets me is warm and affable, and delighted to be asked to talk about one of his favourite works, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s a series he says is dear to his heart, particularly those more recent episodes published by the independent Knockabout Comics.’

[web] Google Analytics A Potential Threat to Anonymous Bloggers … I’ve always believed that it is almost impossible to be completely incognito and publish something on the internet – here’s one more example of the pitfalls anonymous bloggers have to watch out for … ‘Watch your history. Sites like Whois Source track your history of domain and nameserver changes permanently, and Archive.org may archive old versions of your site. Being the first person to follow your anonymous Twitter account or promote the link could also be a giveaway.’

[science] Richard Feynman on Curiosity …

‘The world is strange. The whole universe is very strange, but you see when you look at the details that the rules of the game are very simple – the mechanical rules by which you can figure out exactly what is going to happen when the situation is simple. It is like a chess game. If you are in a corner with only a few pieces involved, you can work out exactly what is going to happen, and you can always do that when there are only a few pieces. And yet in the real game there are so many pieces that you can’t figure out what is going to happen – so there is a kind of hierarchy of different complexities. It is hard to believe. It is incredible! In fact, most people don’t believe that the behavior of, say, me is the result of lots and lots of atoms all obeying very simple rules and evolving into such a creature that a billion years of life has produced.’

[books] Stephen King Goes to the Rescue of JFK … Stephen King’s latest book reviewed by Errol Morris …

In “11/22/63,” we get glimpses of a nimbus of evil that surrounds the world. There are no single crimes. Each act of cruelty or violence is somehow associated — harmonized, King would suggest — with every other act. Inside the past, Amberson learns there are no accidents, no inadvertencies. Just an infernal machine. (Tick, tock.) He says: “Coincidences happen, but I’ve come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, O.K.? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears.”

There is a darker what-if. What if history is too forceful to redirect? What if jiggering the engine produces no favorable outcome — merely a postponement of the inevitable? If he had lived, Kennedy might not have escalated the war in Vietnam, and might have kept America out of a bloody mire. But we don’t know.

[comics] Bruce Wayne’s Medical Records … ‘By far the greatest contributor to patient’s ongoing morbidity are his multiple and seemingly ceaseless musculoskeletal injuries. The most significant of these was sustained several years ago, when he was rushed to GCGH with several fractures of his lumbar vertebrae, reportedly after falling while rappelling. Skeletal series obtained at that time revealed numerous (>20) areas of orthopedic injury in various states of healing, which could not be fully explained by recent fall, including areas of all extremities and many ribs; confirmatory bone scan similarly showed many areas of increased uptake. Patient’s robust stature is not consistent with osteogenesis imperfecta, and skin biopsy was negative for abnormal collagen and P3H1 or CRTAP genetic defects. Malignancy was suspected, but eventually ruled out following oncology consultation. Patient explained most of these (and most subsequent) injuries as being the result of membership in a private and apparently quite intense mixed martial arts club. Patient has denied being the victim of domestic abuse by Mr. Grayson following indirect and direct questioning on numerous occasions.’ [via jwz]

[books] Errol Morris Interviews Stephen King … on his new book about time travel, J.F.K. and Lee Harvey Oswald …

Oswald just happened to be at the right place at the right time. He and his wife were effectively done, and she was living with Mrs. Paine out in Irving. He used to come on the weekends, but that week, he came on Thursday — the night before the assassination. And it seems pretty clear from his actions and from the things he said that he had decided to do this, but that he could be persuaded to change his mind. He and Marina went to bed that night and in bed, he asked her, “Is there a chance that we can get back together?” And she was very cold to him. She said, “No, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, Lee.” And in the morning, he left his wedding ring and he left all the money in his pockets in a teacup in the kitchen for her. And that was it. There is this chain of ifs, but really, it’s as simple as that. He wanted to shoot somebody. He wanted to be somebody famous. It’s all there. The pieces all click together pretty nicely.

[books] Is Reading On The Toilet Bad For You? … ‘No writer owned the arena of toilet reading more than Henry Miller. He read truly great books on the lavatory, and maintained that some, Ulysses for instance, could not be fully appreciated elsewhere. The environment was one that enriched substantial works – extracted their flavour, as he put it – while lesser books and magazines suffered. He singled out Atlantic Monthly. Miller went so far as to recommend toilets for individual authors. To enjoy Rabelais, he advised a plain country toilet, “a little outhouse in the corn patch, with a crescent sliver of light coming through the door”. Better still, he said, take a friend along, to sit with you for half an hour of minor bliss.’