The Watchmen movie!

To be made by the director of 300! And the plot is supposedly unchanged, and still happening in 1985. My cup runneth over.

Quck roundup

• An interesting look at the military aspects of social networking.
• Underwater windmills
• How we would fight China
• The metaweb/FreeBase
• Evidently February was cold
  
• Blurb has dropped their prices.
• Strangest suicide attempt, ever

  Two Georgia men survived a gruesome suicide attempt Friday after cutting their own arms off with a saw, reported Atlanta's Journal Constitution.
  
  The 40 and 41-year-old men managed to remove three of their four arms, cutting them about six inches above their wrists, Atlanta Police Major Lane Hagin told the Journal.

• Baby steps to a better editorial, it's easier to see why this one is so wrong.
• The 20 best comic book weapons.
• It's odd seeing this already existing - I stumbled across this C.S. Lewis quote yesterday "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' which is the general gist my future novel The Comedian.
  

300

I just got back from seeing 300. It matches the hype. The visuals are stunning, the story magnificently told, the actors all unknown and brilliant. It makes the top five of all time list.

Tales of the Black Freighter

It was a meta story in Alan Moore's greatest work, the Watchmen. And it's now online, on it's own!

Two links and new word

• Gentleman's Emporium - for that cool 1879 look.
• More comic covers! From wired
  

The new word is MacGanized. It's the organization of Mac users. Rather than be organized, they just know people who are organized who find stuff for them. Quite common.

Sunday rapid fire

• Create Visio diagrams programatically
• An interesting interview with Frank Miller
• Creepy pictures from North Korea
• A new studio album from Ramblin' Jack Elliot!
• I rode past this last week.
  

Religion and super heroes

Here is an interesting list of Super Heroes by religious affiliation.

Least surprising: Captain America - a Protestant, no shocker there.
Most surprising: The Thing - Jewish!

They classify the favorite of my later teen years, the Question, as Objectivist, which is close enough to a religion I suppose.

Garrison Keilor creeps me out

I was looking online for Gillian Welch appearances and encountered her on prairie Home Companion. Since her songs were spread through the whole show I listened to the whole show over the web.

While listening to his very good announcer voice I began getting a creepy vibe from all of it, particularly from Garrison Keilor, and after a while I realized why.

In about 1988 I was nearing the end of my comic book period and encountered the comic book miniseries V for Vendetta. The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic fascist Britain and is centered around a concentration camp escapee bent on revenge. One of the minor characters is the official spokesman for the government who got his start as an announcer/administrator at the concentration camp where the protagonist was interred.

It's a vivid story and made a deep impression on me. For some reason Garrison Keilor deep, rich telling of bland stories and anecdotes reminded me of my conception of the announcer in the comic book.

I hadn't thought of V for Vendetta in years...

Oddly enough, a quick google search tells me that V for Vendetta will soon be a movie.

UPDATE--corrected the spelling of "Keilor".

The classics never die

I came across this again today, suffice it to say, the classics never go out of style.

The best comic book cover ever.