A Dozen Important Old Links, A Half-Dozen New Links

I mentioned last week that this blog’s been fully active for about two years. In that time, I’ve done eight “theme” months, each a month of blog entries all on a single topic. Here’s a handy table of contents of those extra-focused blog entries:

•The Month Without God

•The Month Without Buckley

•The Month of the Nerd (the first of two, about which, more below)

•The Month of Sex

•The Month of Horror

•The Month of Feminism

•The Month of Liberty (i.e., Property)

•The Month of Evolution

And coming in just a couple months, a ninth and tenth theme month: this May’s just gotta be “Month of the Nerd II” (I’d count the reasons, but we’ll wait until then), and June will be a perhaps overdue “Month of Rock n’ Roll.”

Then, too, don’t forget all my monthly Book Selections and our monthly Debates at Lolita Bar. And the autobiographical Retro-Journal — no, never forget the Retro-Journal. Nor my real job.

Some more recent links of interest, though:

•My Watchmen review last week was mentioned on Kyle Smith’s blog and in his New York Post column this past Sunday. My thanks to another movie reviewer I know, Meghan Keane, for getting me into the screening. And…

•…thanks to J.R Taylor for getting me into that bawdy PETA event mentioned in passing in my review — which makes up for taking me along to that terrible horror movie, The Unborn, by David Goyer, one of the (apparently unreliable) guys behind The Dark Knight and Dark City. Maybe The Unborn was some piece of crap script he wrote back when he was in college and dusted off after his other successes. Stinko. J.R. agreed — and he knows good genre stuff when he sees it, as shown by his blog’s reviews of stuff like this slightly un-p.c. episode of the Superman animated series.

•Speaking of un-p.c. animation, here’s a great Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the 1940s (the animation era that the Superman cartoon J.R. describes is imitating), defending capitalism against radical detractors, which I noted two years ago (after Alina Stefanescu and Katherine Mangu-Ward mentioned it) but mention again now because the libertarian Moving Picture Institute noted it last week — and just because the world needs it.

•If that cartoon is a bit too earnest for you, though, maybe you’d prefer this perfect parody of what Watchmen would have been like if turned into a kid-friendly animated series back in the 80s, pointed out to me by both Dan Raspler (victor in last week’s Debate at Lolita Bar) and Jacob Levy, formerly maintainer of the Phantom Stranger webpage.

•But if I could time travel and produce media from an imaginary alternate timeline, perhaps the most useful thing to do would be to create an alternate universe in which fifty years ago Ayn Rand challenged the liberal media establishment by arguing the case for capitalism against someone like Mike Wallace, the now ninety-year-old Sixty Minutes correspondent. No, wait — that actually happened, back in 1959, as pointed out to me by co-worker Jeff Stier. So things should be OK by now. Or we’ll just have to try harder and this time stay on message: property yes, government spending and regulation no (and speaking of strong capitalist women, here’s a sad bonus link: terrible news about Martha Stewart’s dog and an explosion).