I’m back from a week on Bali, where we felt as relaxed and removed from the cares of life as a Japanese Batman. [click to continue…]
From the category archives:
Look Like Flies
(readers who don’t have children of a certain age shouldn’t worry if they don’t understand this post).
The Little Professor points us to the forthcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.
She then suggests some additional titles. I can’t believe she left out War and Peace and Zombies, however. Now 50% longer! And you’d have these great contrasts between the command styles of the Prussian and French and Russian and zombie generals. (Writes itself.)
But Marvel comics is ahead of the literary curve, as always, with Marvel Zombies. They specifically explore one possibility that Miriam sees as needing careful treatment: what if a vampire became a zombie? A vambie! (In related news: witchaloks!)
UPDATE: Come to think of it, this old literary mash-up post – continued here – is even funnier than zombies. In all modesty.
On X-Mas I gave good ol’ PZ a visit. He had up a quote from Rick Warren:
I believed that evolution and the account of the Bible about creation could exist along side of each other very well. I just didn’t see what the big argument was all about. I had some friends who had been studying the Bible much longer than I had who saw it differently…Eventually, I came to the conclusion, through my study of the Bible and science, that the two positions of evolution and creation just could not fit together. There are some real problems with the idea that God created through evolution… My prayer is that you will have this same experience!
The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with vegetation and beauty…man and dinosaurs lived at the same time…From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.
After that, I decided to give my X-Mas presents the attention they richly deserved. The adverb that describes the way my mother-in-law shopped for me is ‘awesomely’. [click to continue…]
I know, I know: it’s been two days since my last Haeckel post. Well, worry no longer! My X-Mas cards got a link from the University of Chicago Press! They just put out a new biography of Haeckel that is, I gather, more of a general intellectual history of the reception of evolutionary theory in the second half of the 19th Century, doubling as an attempt to burnish a somewhat tarnished reputation: The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought
All well and good, you agree: but surely there is more to life than German X-Mas jellyfish imagery? Yes, indeed! ASIFA has posted a wonderful series of Einar Norelius illustrations from a 1929 Bland Tomtar Och Troll (a Swedish x-mas annual of fairy and folktales). For example, here’s some sort of Aquatomten admiring a bunch of jellyfish. (Or maybe the guy’s just drowning.)
You see: there’s also Swedish X-Mas jellyfish imagery. So I added another card image to my flickr set, to add variety. (Not my best work, admittedly. But I only have so much 100-year old Swedish holiday card stock in my ephemera file.)
Jacob Levy has a very interesting bloggingheads exchange with Will Wilkinson. At least it’s interesting if you want to understand what the hell just happened up in Canada, politically. That whole ‘didn’t the queen shut down parliament, or something?’ thing. If that interests you.
Next: there has been some indignation in response to Gerecht’s piece in the NY Times, defending torture and extraordinary rendition. Yglesias starts like so: “Because Reuel Marc Gerecht adheres to an appalling and cruel ethical system and the people who decide what runs on major newspaper op-ed pages have no ethics whatsoever …” [click to continue…]
It’s a Flickr set. Plus I set up a CafePress thingy.
I started some of this last year: “And so in the end it was the littlest shoggoth of all who guided Santa’s sleigh that night.” Made some printables and gift tags They’re still there, if you want ’em. But if you want to do anything with the images, downloading the images from Flickr is probably simplest. I put them up under a CC license.
This took way too long.
ASIFA Animation Archive has a complete scan of a WWII era cartooning guide ‘for use of U.S. Armed Forces personnel only’. It’s a pretty solid little how-to. (Confidentionally, I’m kinda nostalgic about this stuff, as you may have noticed.) Bonus points for the advice about rendering racial stereotypes and for advising budding cartoonists to sketch their fellow soldiers in the shower. (Don’t ask, don’t tell – just sketch.) Also, ‘cartooning the female’ sounds like an MLA paper title.
In other news: Will Wilkinson linked, a few weeks ago, to a TED lecture by the psychologist, Jonathan Haidt on ‘the moral mind: the real difference between liberals and conservatives’. Will didn’t agree with it much. But I quite liked it. It pretends to be doing way more paradigm-busting than a basically pat, introductory lecture could possibly manage, but that’s a pardonable rhetorical sin. It fit well with intro philosophy material I teach (not about liberalism/conservatism but about pretty much all the other stuff Haidt talks about). So I suggested to my students to watch and they liked it very much. Here’s my favorite bit (round about minute 10). He apparently did a survey in which he asked respondents whether, if they were buying a dog, they would want the one that was a member of a breed known for being ‘independent minded and relating to its owner as a friend and equal’; or would you prefer the one that is ‘extremely loyal to its home and family and doesn’t warm up quickly to strangers’? Turns out, liberals pick the first option more, conservatives the second.
[you can’t really read the scale on my little screencap. It runs along the bottom from liberal, through neutral, to conservative.]
This was funny to me because I had made a rather similar point to my students by talking about the ethics of promise-keeping, quoting Nietzsche from Genealogy of Morals: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man?” I have this great schtick I do about that one – the Kantian dogshow. (Way funnier than Haidt with his ‘fetch, please!’ joke.) Here’s my cartoon to go with. (I really want to do a better one. A nervous group of humans hovering around an intense little dog that looks like it might be about to make a promise. I think Jules Pfeifer could draw a good one.) [click to continue…]
I just watched the 30 minute spot. Very well done. In case people have been worrying that Obama’s secret socialist ‘spread the wealth’ scheme hasn’t gotten enough play, maybe because the MSM has been trying to keep it under wraps – well, Obama has gone and broken through that silence from the other side. He has gotten the socialist message out loud and clear. He is definitely in favor of raising taxes somewhat on the wealthy to offset tax cuts for the hard-hit middle class. If this be European-style socialism, if Obama wins handily on election day, then I take it conservatives will acknowledge that the American people have handed Obama a clear mandate for wholesale abandonment of American values in favor of European-style socialism. Right? (I mean: I don’t think it will be a mandate for that. I’m a sensible sort of person. But conservatives will surely see an Obama victory as a mandate for socialism. Right?) [click to continue…]
Expanding my unsystematic researches into early 20th Century German typography and book design, I recently stumbled across this gem (click for larger):
It’s the George Salter designed cover for a 1930 German edition of Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel.
It’s a perfect example of ‘vague sense of a foreign land‘ phenomenon. He’s got a cowboy in Georgia. A line of Dusenbergs to represent Tennessee, just north of the skyscrapers of New Orleans. A boxer guarding the Mexican border. And we’ve all heard those dreadful stories about trains through Utah menaced by baseball players employing the classic overhead swing. And I dunno what army is invading Chicago. Other examples of this sort of thing?
I’m sure there’s nothing to this so-called ‘financial crisis’ that wasn’t explained adequately in that classic Sutherland instructional video, “The Wise Use Of Credit”. If not, then in that companion volume, “What Makes Us Tick”.
We have a friend who travels on business to India a lot. He was discussing how maybe next week isn’t the best week to be away from home because if the whole system melts down he’ll get stuck in Bangladesh, with the airlines unable to buy gas for the planes because money has seized up globally. Getting back to Singapore would be like a cross between Burmese Days and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Not that he really thinks that. It’s just that everyone is thinking that. I mean: it almost definitely won’t happen.
I’ll just talk nonsense for a while. Because: what do I know? I praised Scott Morse’s art a couple weeks ago. Since then I bought a new collection of his stuff, Scrap Mettle
Calling her ‘Lying Sarah‘ is all well and good. But we need something snappier. How about Sarah Prevaricuda? You know. Sung to the tune of Heart? (I know, I know. It’s got the same problem as that Savage Dragon endorsement. Too je ne sais quoi for flyover country.)
You lying so low in the weeds
I bet you gonna ambush me
You’d have me down down down down on my knees
Now wouldn’t you, Prevaricuda?
Come to think of it, what is that song even about?
No right no wrong, selling a song-
A name, whisper game.If the real thing don’t do the trick
You better make up something quick
You gonna burn burn burn burn it to the wick
Ooooooh, Prevaricuda
OK, that part describes standard Republican operating procedure. What Henry calls ‘the mechanisms of Nixonland’. So I get why they play that part.
But what about this?
Back over time we were all
Trying for free
You met the porpoise and me
And:
Sell me sell you the porpoise said
Dive down deep down to save my head
So if she’s the barracuda (prevaricuda), then that makes … McCain the … porpoise? (Or is Obama the porpoise?) Either way: it’s ok to call McCain (or Obama) a porpoise, but not ok to call McCain an old fish? (I think I read something about that at the Corner today.)
Or maybe it’s some sort of commentary on Rick Warren, ‘the porpoise-driven life’? Is the song saying that, after Saddleback, McCain needs Palin?
Who writes this stuff? I mean: who gets paid to think it up? Not me, clearly.
Hello again, crooked timber of humanity! I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. It feels like I’m always saying that, but then, that’s what happens when you move to the once-every-Jovian-year posting schedule.
“[T]he court made no distinction between what needs were reasonable, given the age of the children, and what simply amounted to a ‘fourth pony,'” wrote Parker, who was joined by Judges Rudy Coleman and Thomas Lyons.
It’s good to know that this old post has had so much influence on the legal community.
link thanks to.
Related topic for discussion: Tolstoy’s classic pious fable, “How Many Ponies Does A Man Need?”