•Like most people, I loved Dark Knight (despite the troubling fact that Batman-loving six-year-olds probably shouldn’t see it). It may well come to be regarded as the definitive depiction of two familiar characters (not necessarily Batman himself). One of many brilliant moments that may not have gotten much attention yet: despite all that darkness, there […]
As if the Fixx were not already one of the most important rock bands (this is the sixteenth time I’ve mentioned them, and this entry will mark sixteen amazing songs of theirs I’ve linked to, without even delving into the great ones for which there’s no serious video of which I’m aware, such as the […]
Melissa Lafsky of HuffingtonPost found our panel of egg-sellers a bit too flippant, apparently.
I’m just pleased panelist Valerie Bronte’s reference to meeting her farflung offspring someday as “summoning my dark army” is now immortalized.
After criticizing the literary establishment yesterday and planning to review a book on nerds this Friday, I should note for clarity that I was (a) a nerd and (b) an English major (or at least, half an English major — I double-majored in that and philosophy), but I was never an English major nerd, which […]
Who coined the poetic and widely-beloved phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword”? Why, none other than Edward Bulwer-Lytton, widely reviled as, ironically, the quintessential bad writer — for starting novels with florid lines like “It was a dark and stormy night.”
This strikes me as a great little example of how flexible people’s perceptions […]
Can people accurately predict others’ IQs on sight?
I sure feel as though I can spot stupid young women at a glance sometimes, without even hearing them speak, and I can’t claim to know exactly what cues I’m responding to. There’s just a young, helpless, wide-eyed, often overly-fashion-conscious look common to the stupid, at least on […]
So, if all goes according to plan, at almost the same time that Grant Morrison is depicting the birth of the Fifth World (with inspiration from Jack Kirby, Hopi mythology, and elsewhere) in Final Crisis comic books this fall, he will also be depicting the story of the birth of the (Hindu) Fourth World, the […]
I should have stopped watching the show in the middle of season six, when a major conspiratorial cabal was exterminated, but like a dwindling handful of suckers (who wanted to believe Chris Carter had a coherent master plan, even though his characters’ basic motivations would sometimes change between episodes in two-parters), I kept watching for […]
So far, Jesse Ventura has said he’s not running for Senate against his fellow Minnesotans Norm Coleman (R) and Al Franken (D), but Scott Nybakken informs me that one of his co-stars from the movie Predator, Sonny Landham (Libertarian, porn star), is running for what is now Mitch McConnell’s Senate seat. That makes three […]
If last night’s discussion at Lolita Bar about women who’ve sold their eggs did nothing else, it should have served to remind the audience that eggs (and thus, on a subconscious level, women) are rare and valuable compared to sperm, which flows cheaply and plentifully. No one would pay me $10,000 for sperm (not that […]
At least one person has e-mailed me to note the irony that I’m hosting a panel tonight (Tue., July 22) about fertility issues even though I don’t ever want to have kids myself. Nonetheless, as a fan of comic books, Muppets, and Star Wars, I can still appreciate some things created for kids.
The kids’ […]
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of our audience members at tomorrow night’s panel discussion with women who’ve sold their eggs are somehow morally discomfited by the whole business without being able to explain why. It sometimes seems as though anything involving genetics or conscious alterations to biology has that effect on […]
While everyone’s seeing Dark Knight, a word about last weekend’s superhero:
Hellboy makes me realize one reason (besides Galactus not looking right, as noted Friday) that the Fantastic Four movies haven’t been fully satisfying: Ben Grimm (the Thing) should be every bit the cynical, funny, larger-than-life, cigar-chomping bruiser that Hellboy is — the comic book Ben […]
•Mark Millar (no relation to Smallville producer Miles Millar) claims he’s reinventing Superman for a 2011 film, if all goes according to plan, with the director yet to be named. Given that Millar is the man who gave us a communist Superman in the comic book Superman: Red Son and who gave us the […]
The circle is now complete. With today’s Retro-Journal entry, the fortieth in a series of forty, I have fulfilled my forty-week mission to recount the past twenty years of my life (just over half my life so far), six months in each weekly entry.
Today, in 2008, theatre-goers flock to see a brooding pop culture […]
