Posts Tagged ‘Lex Luthor’
Star Wars Day Links! Yay!
* A brief history of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Star Wars Minus Star Wars. Is Luke Skywalker of ‘Star Wars’ inspired by Wisconsin war hero? Star Wars and Jihad. May the toys be with you. Me talking Star Wars at Salon. The only review I read, which seems 100% right to me (very light spoilers).
* They Might Be Giants Look Back on Every Album They’ve Ever Made.
* This is maybe the most “Cold War” story of all time.
My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.
When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.“
* Running the Red Cross like a business.
* This seems true, at least as FYE as it is usually conceived goes, but all the same it’s not necessarily a great argument for FYE practitioners to make.
* The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic.
* UMass brass cash in despite budget woes.
* 10 Revealing Tidbits We Found in Football Coaches’ Contracts.
* The law school collapse continues.
* Milwaukee’s Push to Move the Homeless From the Streets Into Permanent Housing. U.S. Department of Justice agrees to review Milwaukee police. Milwaukee to pay $5 million to settle suits over illegal strip searches.
* Today NASA Begins to Take New Astronaut Applications. Do You Qualify?
* My life story: Tsundoku.
* Yet another trailer: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
* The Trouble With Calling Jessica Jones an ‘Antihero.’ Show Me a Hero: Thoughts on Jessica Jones.
* Academic librarians: what do they do all day?
* Sylvia Plath — you know, for kids.
* Where the jobs are(n’t), 2015. The other me who went to grad school in philosophy instead is pretty unhappy right now.
* People Who Curse Have Better Fucking Vocabularies, According to Science.
* Followup: Report: Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Mystery Buyer Is Right-Wing Billionaire Sheldon Adelson.
* Another followup, from years back: Cop Who Sought Photos of Teen’s Erection in Sexting Case Commits Suicide Moments Before Arrest.
* I understand why they made the decision they made, but I don’t think this paradigm is really sustainable: All LA Schools Closed After Hoax Threat.
* An Unbelievable Story of Rape. Difficult but very powerful read.
* A record 409 scripted TV series were produced this year, according to FX. Almost too many, don’t you think?
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal doing the Lord’s work on Schrödinger’s cat. BONUS.
* Hear 6 Classic Philip K. Dick Stories Adapted as Vintage Radio Plays.
* The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong).
* Did the utopian pirate nation of Libertatia ever really exist?
* And your daily dose of total institutional breakdown: Embattled state’s attorney refused to prosecute cop who admitted to perjury. Prosecutors have hijacked America’s criminal justice system while no one was looking. LAPD found no bias in all 1356 complaints filed against officers. And maybe the worst just in sheer audacity: Denmark passes law to seize jewelry from refugees to cover expenses.
All the Friday Night Links!
* We are ruled by fools: The amount of airtime granted to climate change on both the Sunday shows and the nightly news was up, too — to a total of 27 minutes, and an hour and 42 minutes, respectively, for the entire year.
* So long and thanks for all the fish: Freedom Industries has declared bankruptcy.
* “Why Is The Rest Of The Country Fixated On A New Jersey Traffic Jam And We Have No Clean Water?”
* Fracking Chemicals In North Carolina Will Remain Secret, Industry-Funded Commission Rules.
* Judge Rules Detroit Is Trying To Give Banks ‘Too Much Money.’
* Remember that most of the “steps” any insurance company or pharmacy makes you go through are pretty much nothing but hoops, in the purest sense of the word. These are obstacles being placed in your path in hopes that you will become discouraged and give up—and they won’t have to pay for your medication or treatment. Show them that you are not going away.
* The headline reads, “Six Years After Chemical Ban, Fewer Female Snails Are Growing Penises.”
* Every Scary, Weird Thing We Know the NSA Can Do.
* The Most Dangerous Sentence In U.S. History.
* Total Disaster as Springsteen Tries to Sell Recordings of Live Shows.
* The rule of law still has a few bugs in it.
* Star Wars retcons we can get behind.
* Someone stop J.J. Abrams before he kills again.
* BREAKING MUST CREDIT CANAVAN’S RAZOR: The point of the STEM push is to lower STEM wages, not help people get jobs that don’t exist.
* BREAKING: Comedians are psychopaths psychotics. See comments.
* Johnson’s No More Formaldehyde Baby Shampoo.
* Even half of Utah supports marriage equality.
* The Myth Of The Absent Black Father.
* UNC Stops Professor Mary Willingham From Researching Athletes’ Low Reading Levels.
* Rob Nixon is giving a talk at UWM’s Century for 21st Century Studies next Friday.
* Wisconsin may eliminate ban on 7-day work weeks. Workers will be allowed to “volunteer” for extra work.
* This medieval manuscript curses the cat who peed on it.
* This transphobic publication hounded a woman to suicide. You’ll never guess what happened next.
* Pope Benedict Defrocked 400 Priests For Molesting Kids.
* We Would Have Eliminated Poverty Entirely by Now if Inequality Hadn’t Skyrocketed.
America Loves Tuesdays (And So Do I)
* The Obama method: One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists—it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with people with intractable demands—put ‘em on a committee. More on the summit idea from Benen. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I must say that I am deeply skeptical that this method, however effective on the local scale, can work on the national stage. In fact I have come to think that Obama’s (frankly naïve) belief that bipartisanship is possible, much less good or necessary, will stand as the first cause of most of his presidency’s eventual failures. After 2009, he still thinks this. When the mortal enemy who has proven himself beyond redemption time and time again is finally on the ground, don’t help him up! Finish the job.
* The headline reads, ‘Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal “Synthetic Organisms,” Molecular Kill-Switch Included.’ What could possibly go wrong?
* You really can’t please everyone: ‘Is Barack Obama killing too many bad guys before the U.S. can interrogate them?’ As Matt explains, the problem here seems to be that the Foreign Policy author believes torture is not only a regrettable necessity but is, in fact, an affirmative moral good.
* Can the EPA actually regulate carbon effectively? It’s looking more and more like they’ll have to, so hopefully the answer turns out to be yes. Related: all about cap-and-dividend, the carbon-control system no one talks about.
* DC giving Superman to Chris Nolan? If they won’t give him to me, I guess that makes as much sense as anything else. Nolan, take note: The Death of Superman, Red Son, All-Star Superman, and any number of other perfectly good stories are just sitting there waiting to be adapted for the screen. Please, don’t use the Lex Luthor, Evil Real Estate Agent thing again.
* Today in horror clichés: the mirror scare.
* And our long national nightmare is finally over: Shelby has called off the shakedown.
Three More
Wednesday Links
Time for a quick linkdump.
* Even Lex Luthor needs a bailout.
* Two for fans of last night’s comics archetype times table: A Sketch Towards a Taxonomy of Meta-Desserts and Fun to Draw.
* Is this the end of capitalism? David Harvey and The Nation‘s Alexander Cockburn report. (This time for sure.)
Captain Marvel and The Zeitgeist
Captain Marvel and the zeitgeist: You can have Heath Ledger’s Joker or you can have Billy Batson in Shazam!, but you can’t have both.
The irony here is that the comics version of Captain Marvel can actually get fairly dark: witness a lobotomized Captain Marvel as a stooge for Lex Luthor in Kingdom Come, the quasi-reformed Black Adam committing genocide in 52, or what they’ve done to poor Mary Marvel. And that’s not even getting started on Miracleman.
Via io9.
President Lex
Again with the Comics takes a brief look back at the fourth-worst president in American history, President Lex Luthor.
Origins of Superman Villains in the Style of Little Nemo
This Livejournal has scans of the origins of Superman villains, drawn in the style of Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. It’s a little high-concept, but apparently these actually ran as part of a “Secret Files” issue in the 1990s, with the idea that these were the origins as told by Lex Luthor to his daughter Lena (who was later merged with Brainiac 13, but that’s a whole other story).
Gerry Canavan 