Thursday Is The Cruelest Month

* Lori Nix’s tiny apocalypses.

* Stephen Colbert vs. the death penalty. Last night’s Daily Show had some really good bits too.

* The year in photos, 1, 2, 3. Tough year.

* The top ten climate events of 2010. It was another hottest year on record.

* The past is another country: Americans in the 1930s were strongly pro-socialized-medicine, strongly anti-venereal-disease, and only slightly pro-fascist.

* And the future has been canceled: The Arthur C. Clarke Award is out of funding. Via MeFi.

More Michele Bachmann Alternate Universe Woes

More information is coming out about the alternate universe Michele Bachmann comes from: it turns out that in Bachmann’s timeline it was FDR’s Hoot-Smalley tariffs that turned an otherwise run-of-the-mill recession into the Great Depression.

Now, of course, in our universe this was called the Smoot-Hawley Act and it was signed into law in 1929 by Republican President Herbert Hoover. Moreover, here on Earth-1 FDR didn’t even take office until 1933, at which time the Depression was almost four years old.

We’ve got to find some way to send Bachmann back home.

Puns I’m Only Just Now Getting

Puns I’m only just now getting: Oh, it was that sort of deal…

I always thought it was a new accord/compromise/understanding/pact…

Saturday Night’s All Right for Blogging

Saturday night’s all right for blogging. After the first few links we even get to some stuff that’s not about Watchmen.

* Walter Chaw’s Watchmen review goes to many of the same places as my own, albeit in a more thoroughgoing way:

Freeze any frame of the film and find in it the panel that inspired it. With each section separated by grabs from the covers of the comic book’s initial run, fanboys should have no quarrel with the fidelity of the piece–but the reaction to the picture will likely continue to be fairly muted, as devotees of the graphic novel didn’t exactly appreciate it for its slickness and sexiness. I’d hazard that what attracted people to the book is that Moore’s vision is one of absolute respect for the power of the image in molding human history. Snyder does seem to understand this in restaging the Kennedy assassination with one of his masked heroes as the culprit, drawing a line pure and true from Zapruder’s inauguration of film as history to the comic-book medium’s inextricable hold on the collective imagination-in-formation. The power of Moore’s work is that it takes the divine and, like Milton’s mission, explains the ways of these gods to men in terms that men can understand: they’re corrupted by their power and governed by their avarice and the essential baseness of being human. This sentiment is all but jettisoned, alas, by the time Snyder recasts the pathetic victories of sexually-reawakened schlub Night Owl (Patrick Wilson) and paramour Silk Spectre (a severely overmatched Malin Akerman) as triumphant victories. Watchmen–filthy with its director’s now-trademark ramping technique–sees itself as a superhero adaptation of a human book. The failures of these characters are just weaknesses our übermenchen must overcome, not the foibles and hubris that lead to their downfall–and ours.

Vu and kate both get at this deep in the comments to my original post as well.

* Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman says Watchmen is a “great film” and then spends the rest of the post explaining why it isn’t.

* The headline reads, “Watchmen‘s first day disappoints.” You’re telling me!

* John Scalzi argues for a statute of limitations on spoilers.

Television: One week (because it’s generally episodic, and that’s how long you have until the next episode)

Movies: One year (time enough for everyone to see it in the theaters, on DVD and on cable)

Books: Five years (because books don’t reach nearly as many people at one time)

To my mind the whole “spoiler” hysteria needs to end; suspense is an overrated aesthetic in all but the rarest cultural productions.

* Husband, Wife Unaware They Are A Comedy Team.

* I suffered from this for years without knowing there was a name for it besides “being a college student.”

* Another picture of a grown-up Calvin and Hobbes for your collection.

* The economy and literature: Will this crisis produce a Gatsby? More at MeFi.

* Does the financial crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? David Harvey on the credit crunch and class.

* Abandoned places: a LiveJournal community. (Thanks, Eli!)

* And attention would-be humanities grad students: there are no jobs. None.

The ‘C’ Word

Al Giordano: ‘Thirty-two and the years that followed marked a paradigm shift for the American left, a time when certain tendencies of its creative class finally engaged in a conversation with the workers and for years after that listened to them and served their interests in the books, plays, songs and movies and journalism they wrote (the later McCarthyism purges in fact were aimed at breaking that historic alliance). The irony of that moment was that it took an electoral campaign and an unlikely president to catalyze that alliance.

When we hear, in 2008, a major party nominee for president at an hour of economic crisis unafraid to use the word “capitalism” critically, we can see that the American left is at just such an historic crossroads today.