Shorter David Frum

I'm voting for Romney over Obama because the Republican party is so batshit insane.

Shorter Kathleen Parker

I didn't get nearly enough hate mail when I dissed Sarah Palin. (q.v.)

Imperator Paulson

The bailout passed the house, and Bush signed it.

All your economy is now belong to Paulson, first among equals.

Couldn't resist.

(NB: Making fun of Paulson's power doesn't mean that passing the bailout wasn't the right thing to do -- if it was that or nothing. (Lots of smart people endorsed doing this.) But nearly everyone -- including those who were for the bill -- thinks that, however the vote should have gone today, this bill sucks. And we here in the US used to be against monarchical rule. Particularly by those responsible for the crisis they're brought in to fix. Hence lolPaulsons.)

50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs (Memes to Distract Myself as the World Burns, pt 2)

Today Tom Spurgeon presented his list of The 50 Things That Every Comics Collection Truly Needs. He invites readers to play along by replacing some items with others, but I thought I'd play along in a different way, by trying to turn it into a meme: accepting Spurgeon's categories as a given, how well does your comics collection stack up?

Note this is supposed to be things that you own, not things you have read -- consumption not literacy is the order of the day. I've read a number of items on this list that I don't happen to own copies of (e.g. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary, Raw, etc.), but those don't count.

Looking at Spurgeon's list, I went through and categorized each entry into one of four categories:

Plain = Things I don't have
Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough
Underline = Do collections count as runs? If so yes, if no no

If one is interested in comics primarily as an artistic medium, this is not a list to pay much attention to. But it's a very good list, IMHO, as far as comics as a cultural phenomenon is concerned, with a wide spread of different types, categories, various significant elements from a wide variety of places & times.

Counting "Things I Have" and "Collections", but not "Don't Have" and "Some But Not Enough", I have 28/50 items. Throw in all the "Somes" and it comes to 33/50. Guess I've got some buyin' to do.

My list below. If you have a comics collection and a blog, consider yourself tagged. (If you're missing either, they're both quite fun things to have, methinks.)

***

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s
5. A Barnaby Collection
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels
10. Several Tintin Albums
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste
14. Several "Indy Comics" From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can't Explain To Anyone Else
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand
25. Maus
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb's Sketchbooks
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick.
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books
32. A You're-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes
34. Some Love and Rockets
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody's Kid
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics
40. A Comic You Made Yourself
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur
43. Some Frank Miller Comics
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories
46. A Tijuana Bible
47. Some Weirdo
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres
49. An Editorial Cartoonist's Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

iPod Wordle

Depressed and despairing about politics and the world? What to do?

I know... an internet meme!

This one is via Gary Canavan (whose blog I just discovered, but which seems cool). It involves Wordle, a fun internet time-waster which I discovered a while ago. Here are the rules:

1. In iTunes, select View Options under the View menu.
2. Turn off everything but “Artist.”
3. Select all and copy.
4. Search and Replace the word “track” with nothing.
5. Paste the results into the Wordle.net Create page.

Alas, to make it work I had to make a few alterations. First, I keep all my music on my iPod, so this is the iPod, not iTunes. Second, I couldn't get the names of songs to disappear, so those are still there.

Doing this got the following:

Click on that for a larger version (I can't figure out how to make it bigger, sorry...).

But, you may notice, this is dominated by the single biggest thing in my iPod (by number of tracks), namely, the audiobook of the unabridged Lord of the Rings (with tracks every three minutes so there's lots).

So I removed all those words ("Tolkien", "Fellowship", etc.) -- plus "Disc" for good measure -- and did it again (keeping the settings consistent, just 'cause) and got this:

If you have a blog, and an iPod (or an iTunes with music in it, or anything else), consider yourself tagged.

Friday Bird Blogging

Yes, we're still in the middle of my mid-autumn blogging slowdown (scheduled to continue through mid-November). But that doesn't mean I can't do an old blogosphere meme: Friday pet-blogging!

So here are a few photos of our lovebirds, Snark & Boojum, (their names are explained here) from this week.

Posing with Sara


Ready for their close-up


This is the second one of a pair I took, one right
after the other; here they're looking up having
heard the shutter of the first one (and/or seen the flash).


Back inside and ready for a nap.

Oh, and if I have any Ithaca-area readers, remember that the Fall booksale is in mid-swing now: second weekend (of three) begins tomorrow...

Update on a Totally Different Matter: Hooray for Al Gore! Although I still think the world would've been better off if he'd become President after the presidential election he won, rather than having it stolen by his opponent.

Saturday Systematic X: Flower Edition

Welcome to the first Saturday Systematic X of 2007. Both "new" and "year" produced excessive numbers of songs, so instead, I present you these "flower" songs for the new year:

1. (Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess, John Lennon
2. (Nothing But) Flowers, Talking Heads
3. Chad Gadya, Chava Alberstein
4. Flower Lady, Phil Ochs
5. Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall, Simon & Garfunkel
6. Flowers on the Wall, the Statler Brothers
7. San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair), Scott McKenzie
8. Wallflower, Bob Dylan

Explanation of the non-obvious entry: Chava Alberstein's "Chad Gadya" is from the album Crazy Flower. Oh, and the "open-parenthesis-is-before-a-in-the-alphabet-thing" is iTune's idea; I just copied it.

And before you ask, yeah, I've been told before that the Wallflowers (headlined by the son of the author of "Wallflower") are a good band, but I've never heard them. Any suggestions for a good album/song to start with? (Or any good "flower" songs I'm missing?)

As always, this is a meme: do it yourself (on "flower" or anything else), and leave a link in the comments.

***

In other news, I'm hoping that blog posting will now resume its more ordinary schedule. But I have a heavier-than-I've-ever-had-although-not-heavy-in-absolute-terms-I-suppose teaching schedule this term, so no promises.

Saturday Systematic X: Wait Edition

"If you want start a meme and stuff, you need to do it regularly."

-- apologies to Arlo Guthrie

With this whole Saturday Systematic X thing, not all words work equally well, of course. Typing "love" into my iTunes search box gets me -- unsurprisingly -- a huge number of results -- 128, in fact. No problem with that, I suppose, except that I don't feel like typing in 128 !@#$% entries. Similarly, typing in "night" got me 67 entries -- including every single song from the album A Hard Day's Night. (The iTunes search function searches not only title and but artist, album, and various other things too, I think.) Again, just too gorram many.

I suppose that, given the season, I should have made this a "Christmas" edition... but I only had three songs with "Christmas" in the title, and it didn't seem fun enough. (Yeah, only three: whadya want, I'm Jewish.)

So a certain selectivity is required. If the first one produces too many results (or too few), try again -- and wait until you get a manageable one, and blog that.

Like, for example, "wait", which produced a list of 15 songs -- a reasonable size. So, in alphabetical order by title, we have:

1. Awaiting On You All, George Harrison
2. Can't Wait, Bob Dylan
3. Crying, Waiting, Hoping, The Beatles
4. Groom's Still Waiting at the Alter, Bob Dylan
5. Jersey Girl, Bruce Springsteen
6. Just You Wait, Lerner & Lowe
7. Memories Can't Wait, Talking Heads
8. She's Waiting, Eric Clapton
9. Someone is Waiting, Stephen Sondheim
10. Wait, The Beatles
11. Waitin' on a Sunny Day, Bruce Springsteen
12. Waiting for a Girl Like You, Foreigner*
13. Waiting for the Big One, Peter Gabriel
14. Waiting for the End of the World, Elvis Costello
15. Waiting for the Sun, The Doors

A few notes: the Beatles rendition of "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" is from the Live at the BBC set that came out some years ago. (I actually once had the Buddy Holly version... but that was on cassette, and who listens to cassettes any more? I should get that again sometime.) And if you're wondering why "Jersey Girl" by Bruce Springsteen is on that list... it was actually written by Tom Waits.

As always, this is a meme: if you have an iPod and a blog (or the equivalents), do it for yourself, whether or not it's Saturday, either on the word "wait" or any other; report the results; and leave a link in the comments.

Also, what great "wait" songs am I missing? Anything I simply can't wait to get?**

_____________________
* I am so not going to apologize for this.
** I'm not going to apologize for that, either.

Saturday Systematic X: Wish Edition

To (rather loosely) paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, if you want start a meme and stuff, you need to do it regularly.

Last week I introduced the Saturday Systematic X, a variant on the blogosphere tradition of the Friday Random Ten. The basic idea, again, is this: instead hitting "random" on your iPod or equivalent, and blogging the first ten items, you type a word into the search box, and blog howevermany songs come up.

This week, the word is "wish". Rather to my surprise, I got a far shorter list than I did last week with "God"; instead of 17 songs, I only got 5:

1. I Wish You Would, The Yardbirds
2. I Wish You Wouldn't Say That, Talking Heads
3. More I Cannot Wish You, Frank Loesser
4. Wish I Could Stay, Joss Whedon
5. Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd

Given the tradition of the "wish song" in the musical, I suppose it's fitting that two of the five should be from musicals -- "More I Cannot Wish You" from Guys and Dolls, and "Wish I Could Stay" from the Bufy the Vampire Slayer musical episode... except that neither of those are traditional wish songs. Go figure.

Again, a fun list -- and a fun mix (not the same thing).

And, as before, this is a meme: if you have an iPod and a blog (or the equivalents), consider yourself tagged: do it for yourself -- either on the word "wish" or any other (and it doesn't have to be on Saturday) -- report the results... and don't forget to leave a link in the comments!

Friday Saturday Random Systematic Ten X: God Edition

Variation on a theme.

There's a long-standing blogosphere tradition of a "Friday Random Ten" -- set your iPod to "random", read off the first ten items, and blog them. (I even participated once myself.) Then there are variations -- Fred Clark on Slacktivist has been doing systematic Friday tens for some time now, reading off an alphabetical selection of his iPod with titles like "Racing to Rapture", "Not Nothing" and "Mr. & Mrs.".

Well, here's a variation: the Saturday Systematic X. It's Saturday, not Friday*; it's systematic, not random, as I'll explain in a minute; and since the system determines the outcome, the number is a variable -- X -- rather than a set number like 10.

Here's how it goes. You pick a word, type that into the search box of iTunes or the equivalent, and read off the list of pieces that are included.

So for the first week -- for no particular reason -- I typed "god" into my search box, and got 17 items, which I here present in alphabetical order by title:

1. Chorus: Glory to God in the Highest, Handel
2. God, John Lennon
3. God Bless My S.U.V., The Capital Steps
4. God Give Me Strength, Elvis Costello
5. God is Love, Marvin Gaye
6. God Only Knows, The Beach Boys
7. God Part II, U2
8. God Save the Internet, The Broadband
9. Hand Of The Almighty! (God Will Fuck You Up), John R. Butler
10. Little Tin God, Don Henley
11. Part 2: Chorus: Behold the L, Handel
12. Ravel:Ma mère l'Oye (4hands)/3: Laideronnette, imperatrice des pagodes, Ravel
13. The Messiah, Part 28. Chorus: He Trusted in God, Handel
14. The Messiah, Part 35. Chorus: Let all the Angels of God Worship Him, Handel
15. The Messiah, Part 51. Chorus: But Thanks Be to God, Handel
16. The Messiah, Part 52. Air(Contralt): If God be for us, Handel
17. With God On Our Side, Bob Dylan

It's systematic, since it depends on entering a word... but it's also random in lots of ways, of course. Not the least is that which items come up are a bit random, since they depend on how the titles were entered -- which in my case was frequently done by that automatic function in iTunes that looks at a CD and figures out the title -- often differently for different disks in a set (e.g. Handel's Messiah above), which I never bother to correct; I have copied them as is above, with all the variations intact). So, for example, Joan Osborne's "One of Us" was entered just as that and not as Joan Osborne, "(What if God Was) One of Us" -- which is how it's listed on the album cover, I think -- and thus doesn't show up. And I love that Ravel shows up for "des pagodes" -- the pagodas -- where, if only alphabetically speaking, God dwells.

Still, a fun list. At least I thought so. A lot of Handel.

It does make a damn strange mix to play (I've been playing it, in random order, as I write this), what with the leaps from song-structured music to snippets of classical music. But I sort of like it.

I may even do this again.

And now this is a meme: if you have an iPod (or the equivalent) and a blog (ditto), consider yourself tagged: do it yourself -- either on the word "god" or any other -- and report the results. (It doesn't have to be on Saturday -- whenever you read this, you're tagged!) And leave a link in the comments!

____________________________
* Not for any interesting reason, or even for the alliteration, but because I just thought of it today.

Gone Gradin'

Sort of like gone fishin', except not as much fun. And I don't even like fishing.

Blogging will resume when grades are in. (Or just possibly before if the need to procrastinate becomes overwhelming.)

In the meantime, here is some Monday random Flickr blogging (via) on the number 3352:

(Photo by Aster Chang)


(Photo by Peter and Julie)

Back in a bit...

Snark and Boojum: Friday Bird Blogging

Posting pictures of one's pets is a blogosphere tradition -- one which I even participated in once when we were birdsitting some friends' cockatiels.

But something new came into our lives this week. No, not the Democratic Congress -- something else.

I'm speaking of a pair of lovebirds which we (re)named Snark and Boojum.

These are the first pets my wife and I ever adopted together. (She had a fish when we began dating). They seem, so far, happy and very loud. They seem to be constantly either snuggling contentedly or squabbling -- an old married couple, in other words. They're both male (we think), and they're something like 2 - 3 years old.

So, by way of both introduction and Friday Bird Blogging, here are Snark and Boojum:

That's Snark on the right and Boojum on the left.

How did we get them? We charmed them with smiles and soap, obviously.

So I hope you'll all join me in giving an enthusiastic welcome to Snark and Boojum...

(You can read about their namesakes here or here.)

Another Silly Meme

Sometimes they're irresistible:

Click on the picture for a larger version. For the original, the challenge, and the other entries, go here. Source of second image here.

Friday Posting: Two Blogospheric Traditions

One of the things I like about the blogosphere is its nescient culture and traditions. I haven't done all that many specific blogosphere games (just one meme), but I do like them. And because of various circumstances I can participate, this week, in not one but two blog traditions that I don't usually do.

The first of these is the Friday Random Ten. The notion here is simple: get random songs from your iPod, note the first ten, and post them. I haven't been able to do this until now because I haven't had an iPod. But I was given one for my recent birthday; and after a few weeks most of my music (and some other fun stuff) is now on the iPod. I doubt I'll do it every week, but for now, here is a

FRIDAY RANDOM TEN

1) The Lord of the Rings, unabridged reading by Rob Inglis: the Fellowship of the Ring, Disk 3, Track 20
2) * Ditto, The Return of the King, Disk 11, Track 9 (beginning of chapter 7, "Homeward Bound")
3) Talking Heads, "I'm Not in Love"
4) George Harrison, "All Things Must Pass"
5) Annie (the musical), "It's the Hard Knock Life"
6) Tracy Chapman, "Mountains O' Things"
7) The Beatles, "I Saw Her Standing There" (live version, from the BBC)
8) ** The Hobbit, unabridged reading by Rob Inglis, Disk 6, track 11
9) Pimsleur Mandarin Set II, Unit 13 - Readings Track
10) Eric Clapton, "After Midnight"

* Yes, I have the entire thing on here. It comes up a lot on "random" because they put track dividers every three minutes, so there are a lot of tracks.
** Yes, I have The Hobbit too. Shut up.

This, incidentally, is why I never play my iPod on random -- I have a special playlist called "songs" which includes all but only songs, and if I want random I play that. But as I understand the rules of the Friday Random Ten, one sets random for everything one has on the iPod... which, for me, includes some non-music and leads to some weird choices. So it goes.

The other Friday blog tradition is pet blogging. This began with Kevin Drum's cat blogging, but has since expanded to a lot of different types of Friday blogging (plus parallels on other days too). Well, we don't have any pets... but we do occasionally pet-sit a pair of unrepentant felons known as Weber and Fields. They're with us this week, so here we have

FRIDAY BIRD BLOGGING


Ruler of the Roost


Everything is Tasty


Squabbling (not kissing, despite how it looks)

Happy Friday!

Friday Five and Sunday Ten: Good Comics Covers

Tom Spurgeon has an excellent comics news blog called The Comics Reporter. One of the fun features that he does is one called "Five for Friday": he'll come up with a comics-related question to be answered with a list of five -- questions like "List Five of Your Favorite Comics Quotes (Without Attribution)", "Name Five Comics You've Found Non-Comics Readers Feel Are Easy to Read" or "Name Five People You Would Draft Into Making Comics -- No Cartoonists Who Have Worked as Such Since 1985" -- answer it himself, and then post responses from other people which he receives in the day or two after. It's a fun High Fidelity-type game in the comics field, although his comparatively strict deadlines, and my haphazard schedule, means I've only participated once myself.

Well, this week's version (which I, as usual, only saw post-deadline) was the superb question "Name Five Covers You Love". But I wasn't all that crazy about the nominees people put up -- although, truth be told, I only looked at those whose nominators provided links, plus Tom's own list even though he didn't -- because he's the host, y'know. (Although yes, I am enough of a geek that I did know some of the listed covers without links. Shut up.) Incidentally, since I looked up Tom's choices, here, as a public service, are his choices, with links:

1. Amazing Spider-Man #55
2. Weirdo #8
3. Kamandi #23
4. Yummy Fur #18
5. MAD #5

Don't get me wrong -- some of the various choices (both Tom's and other people's) were fine covers. But they weren't what I would have listed. So I decided to put together my own list -- I mean, what's a blog for?

But it's Sunday, it's my blog, and I felt like it... so this is ten, not five. (Actually, I found this incredibly easy. I could have gone to fifty. I love comics covers. Oh, sure, many are atrocious... but that's just Sturgeon's law.)

This isn't, incidentally, my "Top Ten Comics Covers Of All Time". It's just "Ten Covers I Love". I love others, too. On a different day I'd make a different list. But these are all great. In each case, I've given a thumbnail linked to a larger version; in many cases, you really have to click through to get what's good about the cover.

Alan Moore's final cover for the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Series retold the entire story so far -- in rhyme -- while also being thematically consistent with the series. It's fabulous.

As Scott McCloud later said in Understanding Comics, so much of superhero costumes worked by making a few simple, bright colors iconic. This combines that idea with an awesome abstraction.

This one's just pretty. It's the cover for the second issue of Jessica Abel's La Perdida; I just got the collected version yesterday (yes, I "waited for the trade" -- or in this case the hardback -- and so missed out on this gorgeous cover. Ah well.)

Another cover that tells the story to date -- in this case, by quite literally putting every panel in the earlier 11 issues of the comic on the cover. (No, not that legibly, but if you've read them it will remind you.) It's a rather audacious idea, and it works.

Maurice Sendak meets the Hulk. I didn't read this issue, but this cover's just awesome.

This comic I haven't read either -- I'm not sure that it's even out yet. And no, I probably won't read it. But it's such a cute cover, which almost reprises the extraordinary Flex Mentallo in a single image. (You sort of have to know the history of these two characters to get this one, I'll admit.)

John Byrne did a lot of cute, self-referential covers back in the day, and I like most of them -- his covers for his She Hulk run were quite fun. But I actually read this when it came out. And it's so dynamic -- the perfect superhero cover -- plus, if you look inside the first page is the one revealed by the ripping hand on the cover. Awesome.

A lot of Dave McKean's covers are wonderful. This is just one I particularly liked.

Simple, marvelously iconic, and I love how it begins the zoom that takes up both the cover to issue one and the entirety of the first page.

And this is, quite simply, the greatest comics cover ever done. (Although this is a close second, I'll admit: if your curious, the answer is that the latter reprinted a story from the former. It looks like this was fairly common, although sometimes a few changes were required.)

In Which I Participate in a Meme

Always Remember...

Okay, I don't know if this will make any sense to most of you... Hell, the whole thing doesn't make much sense to me. But if you want to see the rest of the meme, the links to the whole batch are here.

(Image source, with information on Morrison's Animal Man.)

Haven't been attempting much recently...

...and I don't know when that'll change: I'm in for sort of a hard fall, for various reasons.

I still hope to complete some of my posts about Other Things I Like About Firefly before Serenity comes out on Friday. But it looks like I may not. (Update: Except that, of course, writing this little non-post inspired me to do at least one. Funny how that works.)

In the meantime, though, following the lead of Lance Mannion, I've decided to meme myself. Here's the meme:

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Well, if I've counted properly, my 23rd post was When A New Planet Swims Into His Ken, and it's fifth sentence (not counting the epigraph) was "This is apparently because the announcement was premature -- their hands were forced since someone had hacked their website and would, they feared, preempt the announcement." Just for clarity's sake, the post was about the discovery of the tenth planet, and the fourth sentence was "Details seem sketchy so far."

And that's all I have for now.