Ten things I never want to read online again
Just a short list of things that annoy me beyond all reason:
1) “The Liberal Democrats need to get off the fence and say what their actual policies are”
Yep, because it’s not as if we’ve got tons of policy papers out there, or a simple pocket guide to our policies, is it?
2) “Ringo Starr was a terrible drummer”
Ringo got a reputation as a bad drummer because he didn’t lock in with the bass, as was the fashion in British recordings in the early 60s. That isn’t actually bad drumming, and anyone listening to him can tell that he was one of the most imaginative players of his time period. Just listen to Rain, Tomorrow Never Knows or Happiness Is A Warm Gun.
3) “Pet Sounds is the only good Beach Boys album, and other than that they only did crappy surf songs”
Anyone who says this gets their opinions from the music press and hasn’t bothered listening to any of their other albums. Whether you like them or not, for example, you can’t describe Carl & The Passions or Holland (spotify link) as ‘crappy surf songs’.
4) “New Doctor Who is much more sophisticated than the original series”
The original series was trying to do something rather different than the new series – it was working from a British set of TV conventions that are theatrical in origin, rather than an American, cinematic, set of conventions. This can make it difficult for those attuned to the modern style to watch. But that does *not* make it less sophisticated. In fact, on every level on which one can make a reasonable comparison (except effects – and with a few exceptions the old series was nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests), the old series was vastly superior. Fewer plot holes (note I don’t say ‘no plot holes’), better performances from the leads, better characterisation, more memorable individual lines, and a more coherent worldview. The new series may be shiny, but it’s for the most part a soulless pastiche of the old series made by people who don’t understand it (or who do but fear their viewers wouldn’t – and I don’t know which would be worse).
5) “The free market would run healthcare more efficiently than the NHS”
I don’t believe this for a second, but assume it’s true for a second – as someone who’s seen my (American) wife collapse in the middle of the night, be delirious and unaware of her surroundings, but try to prevent me from ‘phoning an ambulance because her first thought was “We can’t afford it!”, and who’s seen friends in the US believe they have cancer but be unable to afford to have a checkup to find out, I’ll take a little bit of inefficiency over that any day.
6) “I’m buying [Comic X] to support the character, even though I’ve hated the last dozen issues”
The character doesn’t need your support – it’s a fictional character (see also people saying “Dick Grayson deserves a turn at being Batman”). All that you’re doing is encouraging bad comics to be produced.
7) “Grant Morrison’s comics are just weird for weirdness’ sake”
See the comments to this post for several people’s take on this view…
8) “Where are all the female political bloggers?”
here and here and here and here and here. And that’s just the ones on my blogroll.
9) “ZaNuLieBore”
Grow up. As far as I can tell, no critic of New Labour has ever used this ‘word’ – certainly I’ve never seen it. On the other hand, plenty of apologists for them use it as a way of dismissing the arguments of those they disagree with – “Yeah yeh, teh ZaNuLieBore is teh ev1l! We get it, go away.” Not only is this fatuous, but something about the ‘word’, the very look of it, makes me faintly queasy.
10) Any explicit search terms involving Nicola Bryant
Honestly, this really *isn’t* a fetish site for one-time Doctor Who companions.
Why you should not watch the Watchmen
(Warning – some of this may actually be triggering for some of you).
I decided long before the Watchmen film was even made, let alone released, that I wouldn’t be watching it. This was not out of some great moral objection or anything like that – I just didn’t want to see it. But now, I *do* have a moral objection to seeing it…
I already knew this film would be very far from my kind of thing – things like Jog’s review where he says
If, as artist Frank Santoro recently remarked, the original comics were “a Lutheran reformation text knocking on the door of the Catholic establishment by a devout believer,” then the movie kicks down the castle church’s door, leaps onto the altar and pounds all the wine in sight ‘cause it just don’t care and then it flexes its muscles and slips on its shades before saying “the treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men.” Then it pulls out a skateboard and grinds down a pew out a window. Also, this happens after the Enlightenment.
show me that whatever merits it has are not ones I’m interested in. But that’s fine – I’m also not interested in seeing that film about lesbian vampires that’s coming out, or the one with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. I’m not quite egocentric enough to think that every film should be made specifically for me. But having read a post by the hateful little turd David Hayter, I am convinced that there is a very strong case that seeing this film, and thus giving this ‘person’ any more money, is actually an immoral act.
The bulk of the post is basically what you’d expect – he, as writer of the film, believes it’s the greatest thing ever, and that if you don’t go and watch it and earn him more money then you’re sending a message to the studios that you don’t want to see films with ‘brains and balls’. He also manages to demonstrate that he completely, utterly missed the point of the original book with his talk about ‘Rorshach fans’, and compares this Zak Snyder film with works by Kubrick and Coppolla, thus demonstrating his utter lack of qualifications to work in the film industry. But that’s more or less what I’d expect from something like this.
But then we get to something that disgusted even me – his message to those who aren’t planning to see the film:
Because face it. All this time…You there, with the Smiley-face pin. Admit it.
All this time, you’ve been waiting for a director who was going to hit you in the face with this story. To just crack you in the jaw, and then bend you over the pool table with this story. With its utterly raw view of the darkest sides of human nature, expressed through its masks of action and beauty and twisted good intentions. Like a fry-basket full of hot grease in the face. Like the Comedian on the Grassy Knoll. I know, I know…
You say you don’t like it. You say you’ve got issues. I get it.
And yet… You’ll be thinking about this film, down the road. It’ll nag at you. How it was rough and beautiful. How it went where it wanted to go, and you just hung on. How it was thoughtful and hateful and bleak and hilarious. And for Jackie Earle Haley.
Trust me. You’ll come back, eventually. Just like Sally.
For those of you who don’t know, the ‘Sally’ he refers to here is a character in the comic, who was the victim of an assault and attempted rape but who much later had a brief affair with her attacker. This was one of the less savoury parts of the original work – Alan Moore does unfortunately have a tendency to overuse scenes of sexual violence in his work – but Moore and Gibbons definitely present it as a *bad* thing. You don’t come away from the work thinking ‘she wanted it’ (the character herself comes away thinking that maybe she had led him on, but that’s something that rings true) or that the Comedian’s actions are anything other than reprehensible and disgusting.
I don’t know… I know this doesn’t go well with my posts about Dave Sim, but I just have a hard time with the idea that someone who considers a rapist a character it’s a good idea to favourably compare himself to, and who thinks that the general public all secretly want to be metaphorically raped by him and his filmmaking friends, is someone who should be encouraged.
He’s asking people to send a message to the studios… well, I know what message *I* want to send, and it isn’t ‘make more films with David Hayter scripts’…
(Internet connection still essentially non-existent. TalkTalk still not bothering to do anything about this. We’re moving in a couple of weeks, so hopefully a new phone line and a new phone company will mean I’ll be able to update this on a more frequent basis again).
Why An Aardvark?
I would really appreciate feedback, especially from my politically-aware female readers, for this and the next few Cerebus posts, even if you don’t know anything about Cerebus. I am very aware of my white male privilege, and I am talking about works that are incredibly problematic in every conceivable way, but for which I have an absolute adoring love. I could *very* easily fall here into being That Bloke, and I don’t want to…
This is part one of what will, I think, be a three- or four-part series on Cerebus. I’ve noticed a number of comic bloggers recently start talking, rather cautiously, about Cerebus as one of the great comics again. For a long time very, very few people have publicly stated a liking for Dave Sim’s 300-issue story about an aardvark, and it’s gratifying to see that, now the series has been over for a few years, people are slowly starting to put it in its proper perspective.
For those of you who don’t know about comics, the problem with Cerebus is that its creator, Dave Sim, is incredibly, unbelievably misogynist. His widely-publicised views are so repellent that many people absolutely refuse to even consider reading his comic work, because they don’t want to give money to anyone who espouses those views (a stance I can absolutely understand – I boycott Nestle, try to boycott Coke, and where possible given their near-monopoly on public transport in this city I refuse to give money to Stagecoach (whose CEO has donated money to groups teaching creationism and trying to get rid of homosexual rights) so I quite agree that this is a perfectly reasonable stance to take). Others, less reasonably, refuse to admit that there could possibly be anything good in the work of someone with such repellent views.
For many comics fans, this misogyny is the defining feature of Sim’s views and work – a view not helped by the vocal coterie of online fans he has who seem to think that making public claims that women should be denied the vote, or going on to Gail Simone’s message board and calling her a fat cunt, are ways to increase public respect for Sim’s work.
But Sim presents a more interesting case than most for discussing whether it’s possible to separate the artist and the art. In the first place – and it’s a minor point – he’s not the only creator of the Cerebus comics. Gerhard, the background artist, has never supported Sim’s views (though he did, until relatively recently, tacitly support Sim-the-person) and did a huge amount of work which does deserve reward. In fact at the moment I think he’s getting all of the money from current Cerebus sales, as Sim is buying out his share of Aardvark-Vanaheim, their publishing company.
Also, Sim apparently lives a spartan life with little or nothing in the way of luxuries, and gives very large amounts of money to charity, so your money is very unlikely to be of any benefit to him anyway.
But these are minor points. The main question, in my view, is to what extent Sim is responsible for his own views. This is a trickier question than it might seem. Most comic fans just know of SIm as a misogynist, but this is primarily because the vast majority of people reading the comic dropped it after issue 186, where Sim first advanced his then ‘thesis’ that women were soul-sucking voids destroying the ‘inner male light’ that was the basis for all creative work and all civilisation.
And reading that essay, or some of the others he published around that time, it is quite possible to see Sim as just a misogynist arsehole, and even to see how he might have come by his views ‘rationally’. He was an intelligent man, but not particularly educated, and very interested in Big Ideas. Almost all his social life was based around comics fans and creators, who are a self-selecting group that is overwhelmingly male and (at least in the circles Sim was moving in, people like Rick Veitch, Chester Brown, Neil Gaiman and so on) more intelligent than average, while most of the women he socialised with were his girlfriends, chosen primarily for their physical attractiveness. You can see how someone in that situation could come to the conclusion that women are just less capable of thought than men. (This is not – NOT – to say it’s a defensible conclusion. Just that it appears to be one that one could come to while still remaining more-or-less rational, given Sim’s circumstances).
But having dropped the comic, most people didn’t see the evidence of Sim’s increasing mental deterioration. Sim had had a spell in a psychiatric hospital in the late 1970s, and later claimed that he spent most of the 80s ‘faking’ ‘normalcy’ – acting normal to fit in, while secretly holding many of the opinions for which he was later ostracised. He also, for the whole of the 80s and much of the early 90s, smoked *huge* amounts of cannabis.
Even without knowing these facts, though, it’s apparent in retrospect that SIm’s views on women are not the aberrant and abhorrent views of an otherwise rational man, as they appeared when he first went public with them. Since that time, he has announced that he has found a secret hidden meaning in the King James version of the Bible (and also in the Koran) which ‘proves’ that all of history is a conflict between God and a transsexual demiurge who is the YHWH of the Bible and lives in the middle of the Earth. This demiurge also caused the 2004 tsunami as a result of Sim revealing the ‘truth’ in his comic, as well as possessing many people around him and making them think he was mad. Sim also gave up masturbation because he believes YHWH gives psychic powers to women, which they use to read men’s minds while they are masturbating.
A typical example of Sim’s ‘reasoning’, from Collected Letters 2004, Vol 1:
I think YHWH’s contribution back in the early 60s was Peter, Paul and Mary. I mean it is a way of looking at Christianity; seeing Peter, Paul and Mary as the three cornerstones after Jesus. Of course, being YHWH her point was; if you have Peter, Paul and Mary, what do you need Jesus for? I think this amused God a great deal – to the extent that he countered with John, Paul, George and Ringo. Paul, of course,was actually James: James Paul McCartney. So John and James were the leaders of the band, like the sons of Zebedee, John and James, the brothers Boanerges, the sons of thunder[...] So it was a good joke that on the cusp of becoming famous John and James had ditched Peter, Pete Best, the drummer since this is basically what the biblical John and James had attempted to do with Peter the apostle[...] Now, having ditched Peter, that meant that you had three kings or a Ring of Stars (Ringo Starr)[...]The Beatles were the template that attracted their own disciples, the Rolling Stones, which was another play, in my view, on the fact that there had been a pool of disciples for the two Jesus’. There was Peter, Cephas, the rock or stone, but he rolled back and forth between the two Jesus’[...]
Both bands, by the way, noticed the James and John connection and were led to wonder: in that case, who was Jesus? The conclusion was Brian Epstein. Which conclusion, I think, led to the premature demise of the Beatles manager and the exiled member of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones. And, of course, later on Monty Python with the financing of George Harrison incarnated the viewpoint[... etc ad infinitum]
Now, I have no formal psychiatric qualifications so wouldn’t want to speculate publicly on what diagnosis, if any, someone would give Sim based on this kind of thing, but I’ve had a lot of experience working with people with mental illnesses (I worked as a nursing assistant on a psychiatric ward for a couple of years fairly recently) and I’ll just say that this stuff sounds awfully familiar.
So how responsible is Sim for his views on women, and to what extent are they even ‘his’ views, as opposed to ‘his illness” views? Does that question even make sense? Should one boycott his work for his views, or would that be punishing someone for their mental illness?
This wouldn’t matter were Sim’s work the kind of ‘outsider art’ one normally associates with this kind of statement – reading Sim’s writings, one would get the impression that his work would be the comic equivalent of Wesley Willis or Wild Man Fischer or at best Charles Manson’s music – interesting far more for what it says about the mental state of the creator than for any quality of the work. But the fact is, Sim is the single most talented comic creator I’ve ever known of. I would take Sim’s work over the complete work of *any two* of, say, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Chris Ware, Eddie Campbell, Darwyn Cooke, Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, J.H. Williams and George Herriman. No exaggeration.
So, can I possibly justify promoting work by someone who considers many – most – of the people I know, love and admire to be literally Satanic and subhuman? Or can I justify *NOT* promoting work that would significantly enrich the lives of those same people to a great extent?
I’m very torn about this… but I’m going to go ahead and look at Cerebus as a whole work over the next few days…
That’s Really Super, Supergirl
One problem I’ve had with Final Crisis that no-one else seems to have had – or if they have, I’ve not seen them mention it – is the portrayal of women and the (lack of) portrayal of gay people.
Now, don’t get me wrong here – I’m not going to get all faux-outraged at the scenes where Mary Marvel and Supergirl are fighting or whatever. I think it’s perfectly obvious that that sort of stuff is as much a commentary on the ‘haunted vagina‘ type of superhero comic as anything else – if you’re unconvinced, then go back and read Bulleteer. Morrison knew exactly what he was doing there, and it’s very different from the way the same tropes were used in the execrable Countdown .
I’m less forgiving of J.G. Jones’ terrible cover for issue 3, which I’ve described before as Supergirl thinking “Oh dear, my mouth appears not to have anything phallic in it, and the closest thing I have is this finger. I wonder if *you* can think of anything I could use?”, but at least that wasn’t part of the story, and we did have a choice as to which cover we got (that was an issue where Holly went to the comic shop for me, and she was fairly horrified by that cover).
But there’s a deeper structural problem to Final Crisis, and one that’s inherent in the story Morrison wants to tell.
Basically, in Final Crisis, we are presented with two stories running in parallel. One is the story of Darkseid’s fall, rise and fall. The other, which has greater ‘cosmic import’ by the end of the series, is the story of Nix Uotan’s search for the love from whom he’s been separated by whole realities. Throughout what is presented as the main story, we are presented with love stories which reflect Uotan’s need to get back with Weeja Dell – J’onn J’onzz’ shouts “M’yriah!” (the name of his dead wife on Mars) as he dies, Hawkman wants to be with Hawkgirl and sacrifices his own life to be reincarnated in a world where she’ll love him, Superman travels through the Bleed and Overvoid to save Lois Lane. Almost every heroic character here is being presented as a man trying to get back to the woman he loves, in clear parallel to Nix Uotan’s own struggle.
I trust that, from that last sentence, you begin to see the problem. With a very few exceptions, male heterosexual love is presented as *the* motivating force for th’ whole whang-dang-doo multiverse, which means that because of the structure Morrison has chosen male characters get to be active, while female characters are *re*active. This also means that characters like Oracle – who given some of the themes of the story that I’ll be returning to tomorrow should have had a *much* bigger role in the story – are sidelined.
(Some of the comparative lack of female action may also be due to Morrison’s decision to take Wonder Woman away from the action for most of the story, because he doesn’t believe he has a good grasp on her character – understandable, as she doesn’t have one, or at least not a consistent one between writers.)
Also surprising is how much this reinforces heteronormative roles – odd for a writer like Morrison, who has introduced more gay characters to Big Two comics than any other writer I can think of. In a story that’s largely about the power of love, ‘love’ here is a strictly monogamous relationship between one man and one woman – the framers of Prop Eight would be proud.
What’s particularly galling here is that one of the very few female characters to have an important part in the action, the new Question, Renee Montoya, is gay, yet this is not as far as I can recall mentioned even in passing – in fact one could easily come away with the impression that the ‘Charlie’ she talks about (the old Question) is a former lover, rather than ‘just’ a friend. You’d think that given that DC are about to put Batwoman in Detective Comics, one of their flagship books, and that the Question and Batwoman had a romantic relationship in the past, there would have been a mention of this (someone’s going to point out one I missed now, aren’t they? I did check…)
This could not only have strengthened one of the few female characters to take a major part in the story, it would have helped get rid of the overpowering sense that in this respect at least Final Crisis, far from being innovative and new, is reinforcing a rather conservative world view.
Note, I’m not asking that the comic should have been turned into the left-wing equivalent of a Chick Tract, or for scenes of Batman/Alfred slash (heaven forbid), just that in a world where even the BBC thinks it’s reasonable to use ‘gay’ as a pejorative, it’s a shame when a writer who usually pays a hell of a lot of attention to subtext and buried cultural assumptions and who is generally on the side of the angels in these matters ends up inadvertantly sending the message that the love of men for women is the most important kind of love in the world. It’s not a terrible thing – if I can forgive Alan Moore the obsession with rape and sexual violence in his work, then I can certainly forgive this. And Morrison manages to write the female characters extremely well. It’s just that a very small amount of effort on his part (a couple of added panels would have done it) could have made the comic better in this respect.
Tomorrow, on to praising, rather than burying, what is still, after all, my favourite superhero crossover of all time…
Linkblogging for 24/11/08
Just a quick linkblog today, as I’ve got some important stuff to do in the remainder of the night…
Bobsy from the Mindless Ones continues to interview a cold, heartless, remorseless child-murderer.
Tucker Stone continues to review old issues of The Brave And The Bold.
Charlie Brooker appears to be living my life.
Laurie at Liberal Conspiracy has a fine post on Reclaim The Night and how men may also feel much the same way as women do about walking the streets alone. I’m usually in at least two minds about this kind of argument – it seems to me to sometimes deny the difference in experiences between groups with and without power. Having said that, Ms Penny’s feminist credentials are impeccable, and the article does ring true emotionally with this particular intimidating-looking straight white male who cringes whenever he goes past a gang of lads half his age… just be aware that I may just be linking to it because of my privilege or something…
And to finish with, another great post from the Mindless Ones, this time on Kraven
Linkblogging for 18/11/08
Sorry I’ve not posted much for a couple of weeks. I’ve had various bits of life-related bits to attend to, and some work stress (can’t talk about that publicly, but I will say “Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged!” as a very subtle hint…)
Anyway, got a comics post mostly written which will be up in the morning, and BFAW tomorrow night, but for now, here’s some links. And if I go a day without posting on here in future, please feel free to leave abusive comments calling me an idle tosser…
Alix at the People’s Republic Of Mortimer has a great post about the Tories’ cargo cult tax policies.
Over at The Independent, they seem to think that… women don’t have ideas… or something? Apparently if Richard Dawkins, Malcolm Gladwell and Christopher Hitchens write ‘big idea books’ (though what the big idea is for at least two of those I don’t know, frankly – Dawkins is a third-rate thinker at best and Hitchens has let alcohol and a forty-year-old grudge against Bill Clinton ruin a once-sharp mind) they’re being typically male, whereas if Naomi Klein or Lisa Jardine or whoever do, then they’re ‘outliers’. Piffle, inspired by the increasingly-reactionary Germaine Greer, and dangerous piffle at that – though the article is so badly written one can’t tell if the writer is arguing for or against the proposition; or if she is merely, in the American ‘journalism’ style, laying out a bunch of quotes from random people with no coherent thought as to a larger context or argument behind those quotes.
Is it me or is the Independent getting really, really sloppy in recent weeks? I only read it online, but the writing’s getting almost as bad as the Guardian, and they appear to have sacked all their sub-editing staff…
Pillock has a really good post on post-Crisis DC Comics, one of many things I want to write about myself, soon…
The Mindless Ones have a great post up on Edward Gorey
Fred Clark, having finished his several-year-long dissection of the first Left Behind book, now turns his eyes to the film version.
And another post from the People’s Republic of Mortimer to finish off, to remind everyone that the so-called ‘tax cut for the lowest paid’ that Brown was touting last week was actually the fudge he introduced to try to fix the problem he caused by *raising* taxes for the poor to cut them for the rich – and this ‘fix’ makes the poorest of the poor still worse off. Don’t let him get away with it.
Linkblogging and apologies
I’ve posted practically nothing for the last week, for which I apologise. Unfortunately, my wife came down with the ‘flu a few days ago, and then just as she was getting over it she kindly gave it to me, so I first had to look after her then had to look after myself.
(Annoyingly, this one affected my stomach, so I couldn’t just get rid of it with massive amounts of vitamin C as I normally do.)
I’m going to try to get the Big Finish A Week up tonight if I can stay awake, and should have a review of Warren Ellis’ new ‘graphic novella’ up tomorrow. If you really want to read good stuff, though, Bot’swana Beast and pillock are hammering away like mad in the comments to the ‘Second Coming’ post. I’ll post my thoughts on *that* tomorrow, too, as a separate post rather than comments. Sorry for being a bit crap.
Anyway, linkage:
The Mindless Ones sum up Judge Dredd In One Panel .
Kevin Church on Grant Morrison and David Mamet.
Pillock on Iron Man, Ghostface Killa and Paul McCartney . (I agree totally about McCartney, BTW, and think his mid-70s, let’s-have-twenty-melodies-per-song-and-forget-the-lyrics-making-sense period is well overdue for serious reappraisal).
Mark Steel on how the current recession is all poor people’s fault. (Incidentally, Steel’s latest book and show is his best yet…)
And Jenn Dolari is requesting webcomic people take part in the transgender day of remembrance . Sadly, trans people are one group against whom it is not only socially acceptable to discriminate but actively encouraged. Stonewall have even nominated Julie Bindel as journalist of the year . This is a woman who seems obsessed to the point of monomania with the idea that transsexuals are some sort of weird fifth column wanting to become women so they can destroy feminism, yet she’s given regular space to spout her batty views in the pages of a ‘respectable’ ‘liberal’ newspaper.
I don’t pretend to understand transsexuality even slightly, but the social acceptability of attacks on transpeople horrifies me, for two reasons. The first reason is that intellectually, I simply think it’s nobody’s fucking business what anyone does to his, her or its body, or how anyone chooses to dress, or anything else that doesn’t directly impact on anyone else’s well-being. I’ve been the subject of enough low-level aggression for how I choose to look over the years – and I could prevent that by having a shave and a haircut and maybe losing a few pounds – that bullying people for being different annoys me on a very visceral level.
And secondly, I know enough transpeople (I can name, right now off the top of my head, at least five transpeople I count as friends or have counted as friends in the past, including a couple with whom I’ve been very close – and that’s assuming all my other friends were born the same gender they present as, as I don’t tend to ask people if they’re trans unless they bring the subject up… ) that I know that no-one would go through the shit they go through on a daily, or sometimes even hourly, basis – let alone the physical and financial trauma of the actual operation unless they had a very, very deep need to do so. I may not understand that need, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Writing that, BTW, brought to mind a great short story I read years ago, A Lonely Impulse by the great Roz Kaveney. She wrote it as part of the anthology, Temps, she co-edited with Neil Gaiman in the late 80s, a sort of Justice-League-meets-Yes-Minister thing about superpowered people working for a government bureaucracy, but in this case it’s very clearly a metaphor for the treatment of transwomen by ‘feminists’ of Bindel’s ilk, at least in part (Roz is trans herself). I just discovered it’s up on her website, and I think everyone should read it.
Linkblogging for 24/08/08
Firstly, and obviously most importantly, the final round of voting for miss SB’s Very Prestigious (And Entirely Serious) Blog Of The Year Award is now open. As my wife was knocked out in the last round (and I didn’t make the shortlists, though I was nominated for best fandom blog… *sniff*… nobody likes me…) you should all go and vote for InnerBrat, because she deserves to win and because the poll needs to get more votes than Iain Dale’s Less Prestigious And More Ridiculous Similar Awards…
Via Lynne Featherstone , the Liberal Democrats have created a Facebook group for women who want their say in the party’s policies towards women. As I am not on Facebook (I do antisocial networking instead – I email random people and tell them to fuck off. Far more rewarding) and am not a woman, this is of no use to me directly, but as a high number of people reading this blog are politically-engaged women I thought I should pass it along.
Jog, as always, has good points about the latest issue of Grant Morrison’s Batman.
Homicides due to mental illness have been decreasing for more than 30 years, even as other homicides rise. Remember this next time you read a story in the news about ‘escaped mental patients’ or suchlike. Prejudice against people with mental illnesses is one of the few socially acceptable forms of prejudice for even ‘liberal’ people (the only more acceptable one I can think of is against transgender people, off the top of my head) and it stinks. (Via Bruce Schneier
Cosmic Variance talk about the use of complex numbers in scoring for the Olympics.
And for those of you for whom Flash is not a problem, there are previews of every track on That Lucky Old Sun at the USAToday site. No idea if these are full tracks or just clips…
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