•The band Team Robespierre, earlier this year, recalled an article on “Cooking with Fugazi.”

•Conan O’Brien (sounding oddly like my friend Chuck Blake) announces his new show and how he was bribed with a pizza pie.

•Comic books are occasionally clever, and Marvel not long ago introduced the idea that the planet-eating monster Galactus has a daughter, Galacta, who — though I’m guessing they never quite use the phrase — basically has an eating disorder. (And eating disorders mean it’s back to school time, girls!) To compensate for talk of planet-eating giants, here’s a brief remembrance of my favorite comic from my early-80s childhood, Micronauts.

•Ali Kokmen noted this Times article about freeganism — eating garbage on principle — trying to become mainstream cuisine (“In a Brooklyn neighborhood, a group of ‘friends and co-conspirators’ enjoy Grub, a communal dinner made from wasted food recovered from the trash…”). It’s spreading like the Walking Dead virus, people.

Arguing yes: Lilit Marcus, author of Save the Assistants

Arguing no: comedian and entrepreneur Jen Dziura

Moderating: Michel Evanchik

Hosting: Todd Seavey

You may well be torn on this one — perhaps you’re planning to attend the following week’s Ayn Rand Institute event in Manhattan and love captains of industry.  On the other hand, you often suspect crazy people rise to the top, using as a tool their craziness.  How to resolve this tension?  Attend the debate, that’s how.  Perhaps you’d like to vent during our Q&A segment.

A very hardworking friend of mine points out this related Time article asking the important question: Is your boss a psychopath or just mean? (This question may, of course, be applicable to people in your life other than your boss.)

All this is a reminder that I should focus a bit more on actual punk in September, as we approach October’s release of my “Conservatism for Punks” essay in the volume Proud to Be Right (or PBR, as you Williamsburg-types should start calling it).  As Bono said back in the old-timey days of 2003, when obscenity on TV caused legal scandals: “Keep fooking oop the system!”

I think I may have hastily passed up a chance to toy with the system the other day, by the way, when I got a robocall (somehow defying the Do Not Call list, as non-profits can) saying merely: “This is Survey 2010!  Do you own a small dog?”  Saying no caused it to hang up, though perhaps I should have investigated further by saying yes.  Surely many people will do precisely that.  Then again, I never lie, not even to robots.

Two imperial notes before we exit this blog’s troubled and anemic “Month of Imperialism,” though:

•They’re planning a 3D movie about The Battle of Midway, arguably the largest battle of all time, and one of the most historically significant.  Take that, Japan, with all your stupid manga!

•And speaking of old-timey imperial battles, Dimitri Cavalli notes this silent-movie-ized version of the climactic battle from The Empire Strikes Back.  I can’t end on a more fitting note than that.  I’m not saying I shouldn’t, mind you, just can’t.

A reminder of just how dangerous it is to let government wade into these matters at all was noted on Drudge, in the form of an ABC piece that paints blatantly racist Mississippi middle school rules about which students can hold which school positions as a legacy of Jim Crow — when in fact the rules in question were put in place in 1969 as an ostensibly-progressive quota system to ensure black participation. Just stay out of the whole area, politicians. And abolish public schools while you’re at it — but more about that this coming weekend.

In more-elite school news, Emma Watson’s short haircut has left people saying that she’s left her youthful Hermione days behind, but what they really ought to be saying is that she finally looks like a Brown student. Might the haircut indicate that the time for an experimental lesbian phase has arisen? Has Brown taken steps to ensure that a resulting sex tape does not leak out? I’m only asking questions.

Watson will, of course, appear on film in one of the year’s three big remaining nerd films (after this week’s Machete, the year’s most perfect date movie). November brings the first half of the final Harry Potter film, and December brings both The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Tron: Legacy, which is arguably the major-movie sequel longest separated from its original, at twenty-eight years. Let us hope we are not in for another Phantom Menace experience.

This revelation leaves me wondering, as E.O. Wilson might put it, why everyone isn’t studying zombie ants.  Then again, militaristic and imperialist ambitions could take on whole new, more terrifying forms if militaries around the world really figured out the mechanics of mind-controlling spores, so maybe the zombie ant phenomenon would benefit from a period of benign neglect.

•Speaking of turning people into arthropods, I have only recently learned (from Byrne Hobart) of the most disturbing horror movie premise of all time, as notoriously explored in the film The Human Centipede, about a German scientist whose goal is to do something which is far worse than whatever you’re imagining, and which I will not describe on this blog but which is explained on Wikipedia, for the not-easily-sickened.

•Real-life Germans may not be much saner, given not only their history of producing dark or violence-admiring thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, Hitler, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt — not to mention, apparently, plans for a cannibalism-themed restaurant.  What is wrong with German people?

•In other movie news, Paul Verhoeven — whose films, he admits, have been influenced by his youthful fascination with the Nazi conquest of his native Holland — plans to look at Dutch colonialism in Indonesia in his next film, which sounds interesting to me.

•Less promising, I fear, is the plan to let the director of Underworld remake the 1990 Verhoeven movie Total Recall, which, as Scott Nybakken likes to point out, is an already-perfect film.  There is no way the Underworld guy is going to improve it — and presumably without Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, or Michael Ironside, just for starters.  It’s as foolish a fool’s errand as remaking The Wizard of Oz.   How about a J.J. Abrams remake of Blade Runner while we’re at it?

The only way I think a Total Recall remake could be made worthwhile, at least as an exercise in metafiction, is if the protagonist kept having the sneaking suspicion that instead of reality he’s experiencing…a remake.  (By the way, if you rewatch the original Total Recall — and you certainly should — you’ll be struck by how heavily The Matrix, which came out nine years later, must have been influenced, to put politely, by the pill-vs.-illusion scene.)

•On a brighter (and at the same time darker) note, the protracted legal wrangling over whether Peter Jackson will be able to produce two Hobbit movies has led Guillermo del Toro, who eventually had to give up on plans to direct the films, to make plans instead to direct H.P. Lovecraft’s Antarctic horror classic (imitated in The Thing, the first X-Files movie, and other works) At the Mountains of Madness…in 3D…co-produced by James Cameron.  This may prove to be, at long last, the first big-budget movie to do Lovecraft justice.  Can Cthulhu be far behind?

•Finally, the aforementioned Nybakken, himself a veritable ayatollah of rock n’ rolla, notes that you can live one of the greatest sci-fi series of all time — and skip Burning Man — by attending a three-day Mad Max reenactment.  Good practice for the end times, after the empire collapses.  But tomorrow: a look at Emma Watson.

Then again, what Americans consider “old” is laughable to inhabitants of the Old World.  Plymouth, England, for instance, traces its founding not to 1620 (or 1607 like Jamestown, lest we neglect it) but to the Bronze Age.  America just got here yesterday, really, and we’re still getting our footing.  I still recall pointing out Manhattan’s oldest church to my British friend Sangeeta Sahi and getting a “So what?  Oxford has been around for over a thousand years, Cambridge for two thousand” as a compassionate response.  Of course, Sangeeta is also the sort of softy who once declared a teddy bear’s facial expression that of “a gormless idiot.”

But enough about the English — tomorrow a look at those thuggish, brooding latecomers to the New World, the Germans (who, like the English, have been known to display imperialist tendencies).

Coincidentally, I am scheduled to have dinner the next night with an Italian, Catholic, libertarian economist of my acquaintance, whereupon I should begin my recruitment drive for our second Debate at Lolita Bar for September because, yes, we’re doing two, the first asking “Are Bosses Usually Jerks?” (Sept. 7) and the second, the one for which I still need a “no” debater, asking “Is Macroeconomics a Fiction?” (Sept. 23).  Decide for yourselves which is more illusory, God or “trade deficits.”  Don’t feel obligated to pick just one, though.

Speaking of wild costumes and tough dames, it occurs to me that Wonder Woman, whose costume change I mentioned yesterday, looks better as subtly redesigned by this Halloween costume company than she does as normally depicted by DC Comics (with star-spangled panties, no cape, and mere knee-high boots), and a Halloween costume being an improvement over the real thing is rare, perhaps even unique, so kudos to someone. I’m pretty confident the Darth Vader costume I wore for Halloween as a kid was not as impressive as the filmic original, though I’m sure I was terrifying.

And two more comics notes for the month: Matt O’Brien e-mails to note this list of forty comics arguably good enough for classroom discussion, topped by one about Iran, while both Paul Taylor and the Raspberry Brothers have, in the past few days, found themselves discussing the comedic wonder that is the “Italian Spiderman” trailer.

In other cartoonish news, my drawing of the superbeing Fondue-head (a monster who skewers his enemies and dips them into the vat of bubbling cheese in his skull) got me first prize in the Raspberry Brothers’ create-your-own-suphero contest last night. Victory is mine, and this makes up for Evan Dorkin’s response to Fondue-head when I presented the character to him years ago as a suggested foe for his characters Milk and Cheese, which was to send me back a letter simply showing Fondue-head skewered with his own fondue forks (for which I’m quite grateful, in all seriousness).

The most exciting thing going on involving comics this summer is arguably something that has nothing to do with new or changing characters, though: It’s the family whose home was saved from foreclosure because they found a copy of Action Comics #1 as they were cleaning out their stuff to move. Now they’re loaded.

J. Michael Straczynski, much as I love him for creating Babylon 5, sounds like he may not be bringing the same level of excitement to the Superman and Wonder Woman comics he’s now writing for DC. After fighting a vast, complex war in space, JMS is now depicting Superman deciding, I kid you not, to go for a very long walk. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman’s entire reality has been altered by time travel-type shenanigans, with the primary headline-getting result being that in the new reality, she wears pants. I guess if JMS combines the walking and the pants-wearing plotlines at some point, we’ll really have something. (A more beautiful walkabout idea, it seems to me, is Steve McCurry’s quest to make fitting use of the very last roll of Kodachrome film, with which he was entrusted.)

I think this ad for one of the Superman comics in question sums up how much the stories may resemble bad heartbreaking-dilemma-of-the-week “traveling loner” TV shows. One good thing to come of the Wonder Woman pants is that DC executive Dan DiDio, called upon at a comics convention to sum up what he thought of the change, uttered the funniest (intentional) thing I think I’ve ever heard him say, which was: Wonder Woman’s pants are “the epitome of where we’re standing at right now as a people.”

Two superpowers I’m not feeling enthusiastic about lately are (a) veganism, which is amusingly depicted as a source of psychic abilities in the swell Scott Pilgrim but still doesn’t tempt me to try it (much as I admire those disciplined enough to do so), and (b) combining Rainman-like data-sorting abilities with a trade-off in the form of lost emotional, empathic, or moral sensibilities, which I gather is for some reason a real mental tension, valorized to some degree in that popular Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series (not to mention House to some extent, etc.). There is no math score high enough to give you license to be a jerk, please recall. We wouldn’t want the bi punker sociopath genius of the Tattoo series becoming an across-the-board role model, much as we like some of those qualities.

On the plus side, it’s the land that educated the Williamsburg-dwelling rock writer with an interest in conservatism who just e-mailed me to say she wants my opinions on rock and the right — and on a similar note, it’s where my libertarian friend, McGill polisci prof Jacob Levy (at my suggestion) recently saw Montreal-dwelling, formerly Williamsburg-dwelling band Metric.  I offered to give him his money back if he didn’t enjoy them, and he reports that no refund was necessary.  Here’s a reminder why we are both correct.  I almost tear up when she hits those really high notes, which helps aesthetically even if it’s just a nails-on-chalkboard auditory nerve response thing having nothing to do with the emotions conveyed (I find myself having a similar reaction at times to the slightly more nasal Aimee Mann, though I have multiple reasons to cry when I think of Mann).

On a nerdier entertainment note, my one-week vacation may justify taking the time to see my acquaintance Jerm and his Raspberry Brothers mock superhero film clips tonight at Knitting Factory (361 Metropolitan Avenue, again with the Williamsburg) at 8pm, all MST3K-style.  I’ll just say: Batman and Robin.  Another option tonight: 6-8pm artsy storytelling at Cornelia Street Cafe (29 Cornelia St.) featuring my friend Michele Carlo among others.  The brave and bold man might be tempted to catch both events.