- Mark Evanier on the origin of the phrase “top banana.” I’m not entirely sure if this is true, but it’s a lot more convincing than some of the other origin stories I’ve seen.
- The most environmentally friendly city in the United States? Surprisingly, it might be New York City. [via]
- I wonder if that means we’ll be able to avoid post-apocalyptic scenes like these [via]
- Maybe we can at least stop getting letters like these. Although I do particularly like the 1911 letter to Mayor Jay Gaynor about “the disgraceful acts that take place daily in Bryant Park.” Imagine if the letter writer had ever seen it during Fashion Week!
- Speaking of letters, and more particularly, Letters of Note, I particularly liked Kurt Vonnegut’s letter home after surviving being a POW and the bombing of Dresden. Makes me want to re-read Slaughterhouse-Five.
- Continuing a theme: Navy was ordered to listen for Martians in 1924.
- Sure, an “iTunes for magazines” sounds like an intriguing idea — maybe — but what does it even mean? [via]
- Often find yourself bemoaning the lack of originality in Hollywood and endless parade of remakes, sequels and prequels? It’s much worse than you think. [via]
- Speaking, sort of, of such, should Stephen King write a sequel to The Shining? Well, if it’s a good sequel, why not? [via]
- Meanwhile, King is delaying the e-book release of his new novel, Under the Dome. (I’ve heard some good things, but I am waiting for the e-book.) Allegedly, it’s “in hopes of helping independent bookstores and the national bookstore chains sell the hardcover edition.” Which actually, on King’s part I don’t really doubt, although I’m sure his publisher is eyeing its own bottom line more closely. The exercise will probably have no effect at all, given the price war being waged between Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Target (among others), except to annoy those of us who want a copy but don’t want to cart around a 1,000+-page hardcover.
It makes me wonder, though, what things would be like if one could purchase e-books from independent bookstores. Maybe it’s time to start looking into IndieBound more closely…
- For now, I guess I’ll just have to settle for reading King’s new poem in the November issue of Playboy. (That link, to The Guardian, is SFW. The link to the poem itself? Not so much. Then again, it doesn’t seem to be working anymore, so if you want to read “The Bone Church,” you may have purchase the issue or wait until it’s reprinted elsewhere. [via]
- Also potentially a little NSFW: this Graffiti Control on the Death Star cartoon. I found it amusing, though. [via]
- Of course, if I wanted to avoid the price war altogether, I could go with free books only. Like Gregory Maguire’s new novel. He and his publisher are giving away 2,500 copies of the book, provided you agree to make a small donation “to a local charity, someone who needs it, or a stranger on the street.†I don’t have any particular interest in the book itself — I liked but didn’t love Wicked, the only Maguire book I’ve ever read — but it’s an interesting idea. Although that seems like a big print run for a small publisher to just be giving away. [via]
- I’ve heard reasonably good things about the book that started this Jane Austen mashup craze, and my sister and her husband even recently bought me a copy. But now there’s a third? Mansfield Park and Mummies? I don’t think I’ve ever been more glad that Jane Austen only wrote six novels.
Though, there’s already a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sequel planned. [via]
- And finally, speaking of Jane Austen… Mitchell & Webb’s “Posh Dancing” [via]
comics
Wednesday various
 |
|
- Your roof is leaking if you think I’m going to start using any of this 1950s hipster slang. [via]
- Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And then, of course, I blew away the other road with my machine gun.Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle wanted to be a poet. [via]
- And finally, M. Rickert on storytelling:
I think that to say every story has already been told is to dismiss the temperament of words, to devalue nuance and meaning. Yes, of course, if stories are summed up into one or two sentence synopsis, then I imagine they all fit into certain categories. But stories are not just a matter of summation; if they were, the summation would be enough to satisfy that need for story. In fact, every word matters. I don’t know why people are so eager to diminish stories. You don’t hear architects bemoaning that every building has already been built. Within each field of creation there is a structure that exists as the foundation of that creation. The opportunity for expansion and artistry lies within that structure and is not diminished by it.
Tuesday various
- Plagiarism Software Finds a New Shakespeare Play. Well, maybe. Unless we can dig up Zombie Shakespeare, I think it’s still just conjecture. [via]
- Speaking of zombies, however, I’m not so sure I agree with The Guardian‘s contention that:
No zombie is ever going to be a pinup on some young girl’s wall. Just as Pattinson and all the Darcy-alikes will never find space on any teenage boy’s bedroom walls – every inch will be plastered with revolting posters of zombies. There are no levels of Freudian undertone to zombies. Like boys, they’re not subtle. There’s nothing sexual about them, and nothing sexy either. It’s all about splatter and gore and entrails and our own fear and fascination with just how messy and vile and extraordinary our bodies are.
Which seems to be making all sorts of gender-based assumptions on some pretty shaky and limited evidence. I’d also suggest that the so-called subtlety of broody vampires like Edward Cullen is actually a pretty thin veneer over a shallow pond. [via]
- Dr. Scott’s Case Studies of Comic Book Medicine. More here. [via]
- Two new ways of looking at things: the US highway system as a subway map [via] and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” as a flowchart.
- And finally, speaking of the Beatles, what if the band never broke up? [via]
Tuesday various
- John Seavey on the “Vote With Your Wallet” Fallacy as it applies to comic books:
And of course, the worst part is that DC and Marvel are the bread and butter of the modern comics store. For all that people encourage buying indie comics as a way to vote with their wallets, if DC and Marvel (possibly even just Marvel) got out of the publishing business and decided to focus on their movies and videogames, it would be an utter apocalypse for the comics industry. All the other companies combined do not sell enough copies to keep a comics store in business. And without comics stores, indie publishers have very few places to sell their stuff. So voting with your wallets…might actually mean buying DC and Marvel books you hate just to keep the store you like in business.
The business model of the comics industry would drive Warren Buffett mad.
- Is Detroit on its way to becoming a food desert?
About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.
Not a single produce-carrying grocery chain in the city. From the little I saw of it a couple of years ago, I’m sorry to say I can believe it. [via]
- Is Accelerated Reader’s only criteria for assigning points the number of pages in a book? It sure seems that way, if Hamlet can be “worth fewer points than the fifth installment of the Gossip Girl series.” Shouldn’t some other factors be taking into account? [via]
- “When Henry Hudson first looked on Manhattan in 1609, what did he see?” This, apparently. I got to see a little of the Mannahatta Project a couple of weeks ago when I accompanied my mother to an after-hours members event at the Museum of the City of New York. Interesting stuff. [via]
- And finally, when the police shoot the Fire Chief in the courtroom over speeding tickets, you know that, just maybe, something’s wrong. [via]
Wednesday various
- Patton Oswalt on the joy of failure:
I never want to get to a point where I feel like I’m done. Or like I got it. You always want to have that, “Oh shit, this wall just collapsed, and there’s a whole room behind it to explore.â€
I posted a quote from the interview just the other day, but I think the whole thing’s worth checking out, even if you’re not immediately familiar with Oswalt’s comedy or acting. I also like what he says about the internet:
We haven’t seen it yet, but there’s going to be a generation that comes up where the new trend will be complete anonymity. It’ll be cool to have never posted anything online, never commented, never opened a webpage or a MySpace, never Twittered. I think everyone in the future is going to be allowed to be obscure for 15 minutes. You’ll have 15 minutes where no one is watching you, and then you’ll be shoved back onto your reality show. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong.
I’ve read mixed reviews of Oswalt’s new movie, Big Fan, but I’ve heard a couple of really intelligent interviews with him and director Robert D. Siegel, so I’m eager to check it out.
- Fox rebooting Fantastic Four. This seems to be the new thinking in Hollywood: if your last attempt was a financial or critical failure — and the 2007 Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer movie was arguably a little of both — don’t even wait, just re-boot the whole thing. Studios used to wait a respectable few years, time enough to slink away and let the shame and stink of failure dissipate, but that’s happening less and less. Eight years separate the abject failure of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin and Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the franchise with Batman Begins, for instance, while only five years separate Ang Lee’s Hulk and Edward Norton’s (not so incredible) version. The gap is narrowing — and with the recently proposed Battlestar Galatica re-reboot and this Fantastic Four news, the gap seems to be disappearing altogether. As Gerry Canavan jokes, “In the future franchises will be rebooted before the first film even comes out.”
Still, I guess one way of looking at this is that Hollywood is now committed to remaking movie franchises over and over again, no matter how many times it takes, until, finally, they don’t suck.
Although, as the AV Club points out, this may just be fallout from the recent Disney acquisition of Marvel:
Before Marvel settled down with Disney, it had tumultuous affairs with several other studios. With Sony, for instance, it had a baby called the Spider-Man series. And Marvel’s time with Fox produced several offspring, including film series based around the X-Men, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four. By the terms of that arrangement, Fox has the rights to make movies around those characters (plus Fantastic Four hanger-on the Silver Surfer) in perpetuity so long as it doesn’t stop making them.
This too-soon reboot, then, might not go anywhere or even be expected to go anywhere. It may just be a ploy to hold on to some rights that would otherwise revert to the Mouse.
- Speaking of the Disney/Marvel merger, while I think it’s too soon to know for sure what (if anything) this will mean for the future of Marvel, I tend to agree with Mark Evanier’s take:
This isn’t about publishing. Disney didn’t say, “Gee, it would be great to own a comic book company!” They could have started fifty comic book companies for four billion clams. This is about characters and properties which can be exploited in many forms. The publishing of comic books may or may not always be one of them…..[T]he future of Spider-Man has very little to do with the Spider-Man comic book. That hasn’t mattered for a long time.
And while I tried my own hand at some Marvel/Disney mashups two days ago, I think I prefer these more artistic ones. [via]
- I worry that some future journalism students will see this story and wonder, “what’s the big deal with paying your sources?” [via]
- And finally, some terrific photographs of the same spots in New York City, composited into a single shot based on similarity. It’s a neat trick. [via]