At the end of Sam Jardison's list of Top 10 books on cults and religious extremists comes this rather startling plot summary:
"10. The Bible Eyes of fire, seas of blood, rivers of tears, scarlet beasts, plagues of locusts, pealing trumpets, bottomless pits, mass murder and mayhem. Now this is a crazy book."
Full-page scans of Superman’s first appearance in th 1938 Action Comics
via Robot Wisdom
I like reading Poetry Daily (wish it had a proper RSS feed). I’ll sometimes print out poems I like and put them in my Poetry folder to pull out and marvel.
This poem, by Abraham Sutzkever (translated by Jacqueline Osherow) stopped me in my tracks and reminded me of how poetry differs from prose, how brief poems can open vast spaces.
…accumulated since Easter…
…compiled over the last few weeks, as you can tell from the Easter
links…
Flickr Photo Download: SearsWishbook.1983EC.P408
Ad for a newfangled CD player from the Sears 1983 wishbook
Tricks of the Trade: Philosopher
“How to win any argument”
For those of us who saw “Thank You For Smoking”
Career Calculus
RecipeSource: French Fry Spam Casserole
Technotheory.com - Wallet Efficiency
A recent interest of the efficiency blogosphere
Yahoo! Picks - April 18, 2006
“But the tribulations have only just begun for the marshmallow rabbit. For these brave, sugary little souls, the bunny apocalypse has arrived…"
Peeps Tortures
Asteroid » Easter turducken
“As with traditional turducken, Easter turducken starts from the inside
out. The core is formed with miniature Cadbury cream eggs”
A Cadbury egg, inside a Peep, inside a hollow chocolate bunny – with photos!
hellokitty psychological test
If you can’t trust Hello Kitty,. who can you trust, really?
Don’t Click It
Experimental interface, Flash-enabled. Move the mouse around BUT DON’T CLICK. Click and you get told off, kinda.
Wikipedia’s entry on Le Petomane includes this wonderful paragraph:
In the following decade Pujol tried to ‘refine’ and make his acts ‘gentler’; one of his favourite numbers became a rhyme about a farm which he himself composed, and which he punctuated with the usual anal renditions of the animals’ sounds. The climax of his act however involved him farting his impression of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
For a man described in many articles about him as a recluse, Uncle Alan sure granted lots of interviews, mainly in reaction to the V for Vendetta movie (which I enjoyed). Here are some links to interviews I collected. Keep in mind, when you read, that Vendetta artist David Loyd supported the film and was a co-creator of the comics series.
MILE HIGH COMICS presents THE BEAT at COMICON.com: A FOR ALAN, Pt. 1
MILE HIGH COMICS presents THE BEAT at COMICON.com: A FOR ALAN Pt. 2
MTV.com interview
I love how the interview really takes the Devil’s Advocate approach: why aren’t you thrilled and impressed that your story is now a great big Hollywood movie?
Alan Moore | The A.V. Club
Alan Moore Interview Index
A very decent compendium of interviews from the early 90s onward
Cinescape interview - ‘Lost Girls’ - Part 1, Part 2
Good longish interview (esp. the second part) on art, pornography, and breakfast cereal. One of the better of the latest round of interviews with AM, as it gets more into philosophy, and less on his gripes with the industry. One of the fanboy comments from the first interview bears repeating here:Holy crap, you got to interview Alan Moore? And you didn’t just spend the whole time peeing your pants and screaming “ALAN MOORE! ALAN MOORE!”? That’s what I would’ve done.
From the In Our Time newsletter on the Goethe discussion:
The talk in the Green Room went on for quite a while. Not unexpectedly. We
failed to include a great many of the aspects of Goethe that makes Goethe
Goethe. On the programme itself I pointed out that we said nothing
whatsoever about his work as a scientist, although it was an area in which he
was frustrated at not being recognised as highly as he thought, and some of
his contemporaries thought, he deserved to be. His work on colours, for
instance.
Nor did we go into his almost rabid anti-Christianity. He called it, let us
be polite here, a load of manure. It’s not too difficult to see a direct
line to Nietzsche from this one. He hated the symbol of the cross. In fact,
he was quite a good hater. He hated the peasants because they had too much
emotion and not enough intellect and yet, in his early days, the days of
storm and stress, he himself stormed against classicism and stressed the
primacy of passion.
Nor had we time to mention that, despite his well-publicised relationships
with women (and eventually he married the lower class Christiane Vulpius
after she had beaten off Napoleon’s army at her front door) he was, by the
standards of the time, remarkably tolerant of homosexuality. He praised the
openness of homosexuals in Rome and there seems to have been evidence of his
own bi-sexuality.
Sarah Colvin observed that one of the reasons there were so few women in
Goethe studies was that when they came across the women he wrote about, they
tended to criticise the way in which the women were portrayed and any
criticism of Goethe was considered to be anathema to the great Goethe
scholarship establishment and they were given the cold shoulder.
This was confirmed by the other two, ie: that there is a halo around Goethe
studies still and you take your PhD in your hands when you attack it. Dan
Wilson, who revealed the darker side of Goethe in Weimar, ie: his treatment
of the peasants and his sending of prisoners onto the battlefields against
the law and the various other authoritarian views he took, was rounded on by
many Goethe scholars and outrage was expressed across that world.
This must come in some way from the need for Weimar to be the other Germany
after the Second World War. Germans quite understandably had to look for
somewhere and someone that represented the opposite of Hitler and Fascism.
They lighted on Goethe and Weimar. Now that that is being seen as a
blemished place (though no comparison whatsoever with the Third Reich), hands
are thrown up in horror.
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg
Courtesy Netflix, I saw Orson Welles’ F for Fake, a fascinating document. I saw it, listened to the commentaries, and saw it again. It’s a dense, layered, rich lasagna that uses fakery to talk about fakery. It has some bravura editing for the time (1974 or 1976, sources vary) and includes some very personal Wellesian material.
The Wikipedia page on F for Fake includes the following passage, where Welles muses on the anonymous artists and craftsmen who built Chartres Cathedral.
Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life … we’re going to die. “Be of good heart,” cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.
(originally posted in 2006-04-15, updated for micro.blog)
Enter the amount of tax you paid into the National Priorities Project’s interactive tax chart and see.
“Power reveals. When a leader gets enough power, when he doesn’t need anybody anymore–when he’s president of the United States or CEO of a major corporation–then we can see how he always wanted to treat people, and we can also see–by watching what he does with his power–what he wanted to accomplish all along."