Lots of Friday Night Links

* PopMatters launches their five-week-long Joss Whedon spotlight today. I’m supposed to have something on zombies in Firefly and Dollhouse towards the end of this, so watch for that…

* Should Gov. Walker accomplish his goal, he will have stoked a level of union anger that I very much suspect will become a key driver in an Obama victory in 2012. He will also have prompted the nation’s unions to work together for a common objective– a feat that would have seemed impossible just one month ago. The column begins with the new Rasmussen (!) poll showing how bad things are getting for Walker in Wisconsin.

* ‘Ongoing Reports on the Republican Massacre of Parody and Common Decency’: eliminating money for poison control centers.

* Have we reached Peak Beck?

* Unsolving the city: BLDGBLOG’s interview with China Miéville.

* The wages of sin: A man accused of being a large-scale meth dealer may lose his beloved collection of nearly 19,000 comic books.

* Blunt Assessment: The Need for Legal Weed in Philadelphia.

* Best job report in three years, but. Could the jobs report be understating progress? Chris Hayes: Why Washington doesn’t care about jobs. Charting the collapse of male earnings.

* Who’s afraid of the Tea Party?

* Eight GOP Senators Reignite Filibuster War With Blanket Threat To Block All Bills They Don’t Like.

* You had me at one of the fathers of nuclear weapons wrote science fiction about super-intelligent dolphins helping to overcome the Cold War.

* Same sex marriage in the Free State. Great news!

* Nemesis watch: James Franco Straddles Two Roles at Yale.

* How Facebook works:

The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know. Women look at other women they know. Overall, women receive two-thirds of all page views.

There’s more there on gender and Twitter, too:

According to the research, there are more women on Twitter than men, women tweet about the same rate as men, but men’s tweets are followed by both sexes much more than expected by chance.

* And 1 in 3 Art Students Can’t Tell Famous Paintings from Paintings by Monkeys.