There’s simply no denying it: Rob Liefeld is utterly shit!

See, for example, item #4:

I held this picture up to my roommate out of context and said “I want to see how long it takes you to figure out what is happening in this panel.”  He stared at it for about 45 seconds, brow furrowed, before timidly offering, “Breakdancing contest?” 

[Via LinkMachineGo]

Who could have guessed that this woman was destined to become a lawyer?

[Via GromBlog]

Possibly the best comment yet on Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader:

“Kindle combines your love of reading with your even bigger love of putting your book down so it can recharge for three hours.”

[Via Peter Gasston, posting to a comment thread at A Brief Message]

From an essay on how literary novelists feel upon seeing their work adapted for the big screen:

Palahniuk was working as a mechanic when his 1996 novel “Fight Club” was made into a film directed by David Fincher. “I only quit my job … because my phone rang with personal calls all day, and I couldn’t get my real work done,” he said in an e-mail message. “On the day ‘Fight Club’ started filming, my agent sent dozens of white roses to the garage where I worked — that kind of botched my standing among the other mechanics.”

What would have been the appropriate gift for a mechanic on the threshold of graduating to the ranks of the literati, I wonder? A really high-quality spanner set?

The trailer for the film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis demonstrates that the film-makers have stuck pretty closely to both the style and the content of Satrapi’s graphic novels. (No doubt it helped that Satrapi was co-director of the film.)

More importantly, it appears to be a successful transfer: the film apparently retains both the whimsical touches (like young Marjane’s conversation with God) and the serious side of Satrapi’s story of a little girl coming of age in Iran at the time of the revolution. I’d like to hear a trailer using the English language soundtrack, but what I’ve seen in the trailer looks promising.

[Previous posts on Persepolis can be found here and here.]

[Via Fimoculous]

Greg Knauss is a slave to Microsoft Outlook.

James Parker’s article on rock stars’ on-stage banter includes this gem:

Fugazi of Washington, D.C., had riot containment down to a fine art: You might say it was part of their raison d’être. Anyone stage diving or slam dancing at a Fugazi show risked a brisk philosophical re-education—the music would stop, and through the buzz of idling amps, singer Ian MacKaye would make his displeasure plain. “You wanna kick and punch people?” he can be heard asking on Jem Cohen’s 1999 documentary Instrument. “Then get the fuck up on the football field!” Co-singer Guy Picciotto becomes interested. “Those two?” he asks, before addressing the culprits in a folksy, reflective manner:

“You know, I saw you two guys earlier at the Good Humor truck, and you were eating your ice cream like little boys. And I thought, ‘Those guys aren’t so tough! They’re eating ice cream! What a bunch of swell guys!’ I saw you eating ice cream, pal. Oh, don’t you deny it. You were eating an ice cream cone. You were eating an ice cream cone. Oh, you’re bad now, you’re bad now, but you were eating an ice cream cone, and I saw you.”

It says something for the presence of Fugazi, for their commitment to a complete encounter with their audience, that Picciotto was able to improvise such a beat-perfect oratorical flight. What can have remained of the mosh pit goons after this fantastic denunciation? Two smoking pairs of sneakers?

I find this photograph oddly compelling…

[Edited to add that no sooner had I pressed ‘Post’ than I realised that I should have titled this post “Girl with glasses”. jr]

This MetaFilter thread pointed out a couple of utterly terrifying accounts of things going wrong on board civil airliners.

From the story of Fedex 705:

By now, Tucker’s right arm was nearly useless as the grave injuries to his skull brought on paralysis. He knew that his wounded crewmates could not last long against Calloway, so he assisted the only way he could. He pulled the control yoke all the way back to his chest, and rolled it to the left.

The DC-10 was executing a barrel-roll at nearly 400 miles per hour—something the aircraft had never been designed to do.

Then there’s the tale of the Gimli Glider:

On the ground at Gimli, it was Family Day at the local racetrack. Sports Racers buzzed along the decommissioned runway as spectators cheered from the sidelines. A collection of campers at the end of the airstrip soaked up the summer Saturday evening as their dinners sizzled on assorted barbecues. Without the jet engines to announce the airliner’s approach, the people were oblivious of the 132-ton Boeing behemoth which was bearing down on them.

This Steampunk Laptop looks gorgeous:

This may look like a Victorian music box, but inside this intricately hand-crafted wooden case lives a Hewlett-Packard ZT1000 laptop that runs both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. It features an elaborate display of clockworks under glass, engraved brass accents, claw feet, an antiqued copper keyboard and mouse, leather wrist pads, and customized wireless network card. The machine turns on with an antique clock-winding key by way of a custom-built ratcheting switch made from old clock parts.

If it came with Apple hardware inside that lovely casing and had Mac OS X installed it’d be perfect…

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

The UK Department of Social Scrutiny has some helpful advice for some 25 million of my fellow-citizens:

Protecting your compromised identity
The following is a list of steps you should take to safeguard your identity.

1. You should, without delay, change your date of birth. This has the added advantage of enabling you to pick a more suitable star sign than the one you already have.

[…]

Steven Poole has made a PDF copy of Trigger Happy, his book on “the inner life of video games” available as a free download under a Creative Commons license.

Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.

I haven’t read Trigger Happy yet, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read of Poole’s work at Unspeak so I’m expecting an intelligent, nuanced look at the subject.

[Via MetaFilter]

I don’t know whether this cover version of Crazy is really “The Worst Studio Session Ever”, but it’s unquestionably a … what’s the word I’m looking for? … memorable performance.

Don’t assume thirty-odd seconds in that you’ve seen all there is to see; it’s worth watching right up to the end, I promise you.

[It looks to me as if the there’s something amiss with the soundtrack; in places the ’singer’ moves away from the microphone but his voice doesn’t get any quieter or less distinct. Still, even if the vocal was overdubbed there’s no denying the gusto of the singer’s performance.]

[Via GromBlog]

Covering the Mouse is a site devoted to cover versions of Disney songs.

I’d imagine that the site will be nuked from orbit by the Disney lawyers the second it’s brought to their attention, but in the meantime there’s some good material there. My favourites are Marilyn Manson’s take on This is Halloween from The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Vandals’ cover of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

[Via MetaFilter]