Here’s a British video showing actor Bill Nighy as a banker reduced to squirming when being questioned about the proposal for a Robin Hood Tax on bank transactions.
The British newspaper The Guardian writes about the campaign to introduce the tax and how bankster firm Goldman Sachs immediately tried to game an opinion poll on the matter at the tax proposal’s website.
Contrast this with video from Fox Business News where a couple of guys, one glabrous and one odious, castigate Barack Obama for wanting to rob from the banks to give to the poor.
You see, in the United States the good guys are the Sheriff of Nottingham and Guy of Gisborne. Everyone knows that.
And DD still can’t find a YouTube video of the Jack In the Box commercial, now playing all the time, portraying an employee who poses as Robin Hood as a laughable buffoon. Because he wants to take from the rich and has a fat ass in green tights.
It’s hard to outdo the New York Times when the newspaper reports on the field of synthetic biology.
What you always get is a radical departure from reality for the sake of hype and nonsense to delight the inner child. Or, on the other hand, something radically intelligence insulting.
It’s a nice gig, particularly when it’s done from within the pages of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine.
It’s hard to come up with a more ludicrous lede graf than this:
It all started with a brawny, tattooed building contractor with a passion for exotic animals. He was taking biology classes at City College of San Francisco, a two-year community college, and when students started meeting informally early last year to think up a project for a coming science competition, he told them that he thought it would be cool if they re-engineered cells from electric eels into a source of alternative energy. Eventually the students scaled down that idea into something more feasible, though you would be forgiven if it still sounded like science fiction to you: they would build an electrical battery powered by bacteria. This also entailed building the bacteria itself — redesigning a living organism, using the tools of a radical new realm of genetic engineering called synthetic biology.
“Synthetic biology is the coolest thing in the universe,” babbles some community college biology professor to the NYT writer, Jon Mooalem.
Change the world, make bacteria that squirt gasoline and/or electricity,
transform the world from community college at 26 dollars a credit. You name it, we’ll do it.
“Moo,” said the synthetically engineered cow as it ate ground-up rubber tires and plastic from a landfill, converting them to USDA grade-A beef.
But the magazine won’t let up. Once the magic wand of literary license begins to wave, there’s no putting it down:
As commercial applications for this kind of science materialize and venture capitalists cut checks, the hope is that synthetic biologists can engineer new, living tools to address our most pressing problems. Already, for example, one of the field’s leading start-ups, a Bay Area company called LS9, has remade the inner workings of a sugar-eating bacterium so that its cells secrete a chemical compound that is almost identical to diesel fuel. The company calls it a “renewable petroleum.” Another firm, Amyris Biotechnologies, has similarly tricked out yeast to produce an antimalarial drug. (LS9, backed by Chevron, aims to bring its product to market in the next couple of years. Amyris’s drug could be available by the end of this year, through a partnership with Sanofi-Aventis.) Stephen Davies, a synthetic biologist and venture capitalist who served as a judge at iGEM, compares the buzz around the field to the advent of steam power during the Victorian era. “Right now,” he says, “synthetic biology feels like it might be able to power everything. People are trying things; kettles are exploding. Everyone’s attempting magic right and left.”
If you want to build a bookcase, you can find a nice tree, chop it down, mill it, sand the wood and hammer in some nails. “Or,” says Drew Endy, an iGEM founder and one of synthetic biology’s foremost visionaries, “you could program the DNA in the tree so that it grows into a bookshelf.”
DD broke down the hype at The Register last year in a piece entitled Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist.
Let’s take the wayback machine and see how well the Times story fits the cliches and rubbish:
Having delved into Lexis, [I] can say with authority that a couple of hundred major stories have run on [synthetic biology] in the last two years. They fall into two categories: Rewritten press releases distributed by newspapers, made only for the purpose of announcing the synthetic biologist and how world-changing his research effort/company will be; and stories explaining how synthetic biologists will revitalise the world, but bad synbiologists will be making diseases, bioterrors and bio-errors, killing millions.
Margaret Atwood wrote a hack sci-fi novel, Oryx and Crake, on this in 2005. The most amusing part was the premise that only two jobs will exist in the future – a person could be a synthetic biologist, or an ad copywriter doing promotions for synthetic biology companies. This showed Atwood had an appreciation for the megalomania in press release news on the subject …
The more one reads the proclamations from synthetic biologists, the more one finds they seem to have in common with the claims delivered by civilian egotists at the Pentagon who went on about a revolution in military affairs before Iraq went bad.
Biology, in fact all science, is given new starch. And anything fantastic that can be imagined will happen. The obstinacy of nature, results dictated from Murphy’s Law in which experiments simply do not work – or actually do work, but just in ways that are no more or less productive than previously – is not in this story.
The script on synbio also demands the saluting of Amyris Biotechnologies, founded by Jay Keasling, as the firm which will cure malaria, according to the New York Times. The Times, by the way, appears to have had the greatest number of significant suck-up pieces on synbio published in newspaperland in 2007. If the number of times Amyris’s work on producing a new source of the anti-malarial, artemisinin, is the criteria by which such a thing is accomplished, malaria’s trouncing is in the bag; with the answer to global warming as the icing on the cake.
Since this is the active reality, one must expect bragging about the character of our future saviors.
“[There's] a nobleness and commitment they bring to these problems that I find really inspiring,” said [prince of Silicon venture capital] John Doerr to the Times in June. Of course, he was bankrolling the same noblemen.
Summer was also for newspapermen to declare a consortium of universities working on biofuels – Stanford, UC Davis and UC Berkeley – to be the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, press which some scientists actually involved seemed to believe. (This Manhattan Project is in addition to the Manhattan Project the US military mounted to conquer IEDs. That went well.)
A lab director from Berkeley, Graham Fleming, told the Contra Costa Times the work was “probably the most important thing any of us will do in our scientific lives… We’re off on a great adventure”.
“Cellulosic ethanol is just the beginning, and not even an ideal one,” reported the journalist tasked with delivering the grand vision. The reader will have noticed that, historically, the work of many scientists being compared favorably to the Manhattan Project prior to actually achieving anything is a recent American invention, perhaps to sow confusion and head off disappointment if, and when, new Manhattan Projects flop.
“‘Grow a house’ is on the to-do list of the MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group, presumably meaning that an acorn might be reprogrammed to generate walls, oak floors and a roof instead of the usual trunk and branches,” reported the New York Times in publishing another blowhard piece on synbio in July.
Ten years ago, people from MIT were dispensing this scented bathwater.
“[We may develop] a tree which has gasoline or kerosene as its sap… Maybe you’ll plant a house, let it grow, and then move into it,” wrote W Daniel Hillis, ex of the MIT Media Lab for the LA Times in 1997.
While at Lehigh University and working on a PhD in chemistry in the mid-Eighties, this writer was familiar with a faculty member, a molecular geneticist, studying Trichoderma reesei, a fungus which produced cellulases. Of course, the big-eyed idea then was also to define and apply the science enough so as to enable the maximum production of cellulase for use in production of biofuels.
The scientist built a career on it, but cellulosic ethanol still isn’t running the country. Although cellulase from T. reesei is used in the digestion of cellulose, it is not especially inexpensive or practical. In the past couple of years, an oil-rush-before-actual-oil industry has sprung up, one which promises cheap cellulases as well as many other things. Much of it is new snake oil for the investment rubes, lubricating jacked-up subsidies, grants, and hand-outs to the corn industry for benefits no one sees except as costlier food.
Without going into great detail on why the infinite bounty of nature’s enzymes has resisted easy lending to cheap-as-water industrial transformations, it may suffice to say that old-timey molecular geneticists and biochemists knew something of the limitations in engineering various microbial boxes. And they tended not to waste a lot of time explaining it to journalists who usually didn’t want to hear it, anyway.
It involves some complication to explain precisely why, for example, active proteins which work miraculously well for the microbial systems in which they evolve, tend to become increasingly unstable when removed, purified, and put in a different environment. Regardless of having genetic sequences for the production of cellulases in hand, lifetimes can be spent puzzling over and characterising the fine details of a protein’s chemistry and its interaction with the world at large.
You also can’t have a proper synthetic biology blowjob without including a storm cloud amid all the sunny skies. And Drew Endy, as genius and wizard, must make an appearance.
“The rise of synthetic biology only intensifies ethical and environmental concerns raised by earlier forms of genetic engineering, many of which remain unsettled,” reads the Times. “Given synthetic biology’s open-source ethic, critics cite the possibility of bioterror: the malicious use of DNA sequences posted on the Internet to engineer a new virus or more devastating biological weapons.”
For Oryx and Crake , Margaret Atwood’s bit of science-fiction on what synthetic biology would do to the world, almost everyone is killed off with a manmade plague put into pills for increasing sexual potency.
“So beware of how we are being sold this scientific revolution with pledges to help Africa’s poor and ease global warming,” wrote someone for the Brit newspaper The Guardian around the time I did Promote Your Local Synthetic Biologist.
“How synbio could go wrong keeps even dedicated synthetic biologists awake at night,” it was said.
Since I purposely kept away from mentioning Drew Endy for the piece in el Reg, sort of like a tree growing into a roving bookshelf, he showed up for the comments section — a keen observer of the press on the subject.
“I was grateful to see your article’s attempt to bring some perspective to the current press-driven hype frothing around synthetic biology.” commented Endy. “It would be good to develop still more perspectives on how synthetic biology is (or is not) any different from the last 35 years of biotechnology and genetic engineering. There are some real changes underway, but most of them are at the level of underlying technologies used to design and build genetic systems, and not in the high profile applications that attract most of the attention. A good place to learn more is to study the student project presentations from the iGEM jamboree … ”
“BigGovernment.com and other news outlets are reporting that PharmAthene, closely tied to late Congressman John Murtha and DHS Under Secretary Tara O’Toole, has seen millions of dollars added to a 2003 contract without competing for it,” read the lede of a piece at BioPrepWatch on Friday.
“O’Toole, who once advised the Alliance for Biosecurity (believed to be run by PharmAthene), is now in a position to steer business to PharmAthene at the expense of taxpayers,” it concluded.
And like terrorist-caused infection that national threat assessment always likes to warn about, the perception of influence peddling in this part of the bioterror defense research industry has inexorably spread.
Because of it, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity quietly divorced itself from its old lobbying group, the Alliance for Biosecurity last year, shortly after O’Toole’s confirmation at DHS.
The divorce were not posted on the Center’s website, however, until January 14.
News of the post was first advanced to Armchair Generalist who graciously showed it to DD.
“I am writing to let you know that the Center for Biosecurity at UPMC has resigned its membership in the Alliance for Biosecurity,” wrote Thomas Inglesby, its director.
“The Alliance has established itself as a substantive credible stakeholder working in the nation’s best interests on complex and challenging biosecurity policy and technical issues,” he continued.
“Unfortunately, there was an effort to undermine these contributions in the last few months,” alluding to the news that won’t go away.
The impression of taint and cozy dealing in the small part of the biodefense industry represented by the Center for Biosecurity and the Alliance for Biosecurity has persisted and exacted a cost. It appears the bad odor won’t go away just yet.
John Pike, a defence analyst and founder of Virginia-based Global Security, said he doubted the test would change Gates’s view. “[Bob Gates] seemed to believe that there was no prospect of the plane engaging targets at ranges of several hundred kilometres, and that engagements at ranges of less than 100 kilometres were not militarily interesting,” he said.
The [Missile Defence Agency] statement did not specify what the range was during the test.
Ivan Oelrich, a physicist and vice-president for strategic security programmes at the Federation of American Scientists, said: “What would be interesting would be how far away it [the missile] is.” He said that to be useful, the laser would have to be able to shoot down missiles from at least 100 miles. It would also be expensive to keep one or more planes on stations waiting for a missile.
“Human Resources people are drowning in resumes and they can’t keep up,” says executive recruiter Mike Oily.
Help your resume win the attention it deserves by following these up-to-date tips from our collection of parasite job-hunting industry insiders.
* “Keep it short,” advises one resume expert. “Resumes are by necessity becoming crisper and more to the point. But also be sure to list necessary qualifications. So it has to be sort of long and short.”
With Twitter, texting, and a barrage of quick-hit multimedia messages, we’re getting accustomed to blip advertising. “Readers lose interest in resumes that are clear and well written. They make them feel inferior. And like newspapers, they’re too hard to understand. This goes for cover letters, too.”
* “Show some humor or personality,” says Jennifer Fonebone of Glabrous, a recruiting and staffing company. “I recently called a candidate, even though he didn’t match any current positions, because his online resume title was, ‘Can juggle a career, the wife, Little League coaching and a fuck buddy all at the same time.’”
* “Make your resume read like a news story,” suggests Sam Clamdandy of The Peckerwood Group. Pop an eye-catching headline like, say — “Will Commit Profit-making Crimes for Pay!” or “Knows How to Legally Steal from Clients!” and be sure to include a summary of qualifications.
* “Be results-oriented,” advises Erin Gobra, assistant director of career services at the Chapman University School of Law. Whenever possible, quantify your accomplishments. Example: Instead of simply writing “Drafted OSHA appeal,” she says, include results: “Drafted OSHA appeal completely eliminating an employer fine for employee’s serious permanently invalid-ing on-the-job injury.”
* “Show what sets you apart,” says Nancy Hu, a director of a Wall Street global executive search firm. “I like to see some indication of personal interests. It’s a good conversation trigger and provides some additional insight into who the person is.”
Another expert agreed: “It’s an opportunity to make yourself memorable as an applicant.” While an actual Personal Interest section is not usually advised, you can find ways to integrate your interests into your resume. For example, your interests should list volunteer activities.
But there’s a special way to do this. Find out the charity the boss likes to press his employees into contributing to — like United Way. Your volunteer activities and philanthropy should then mention you have a passion for giving to United Way.
* “Let others sing your praises,” says Deems Noteworthy, co-author of “Make Getting Fired Work for You.” “We add a section at the end we title, ‘What Others Say.’ Then we list five short statements — not necessarily true, but usually without attribution, that others have said about the person.” Examples: “Sticks with it long after everyone else has gone home,” or “The most creative apple-polishing employee I’ve ever had,” or “The most efficient and unprosecutable swindler of customers this company ever hired.”
* “If your name is difficult to pronounce, change it,” says Heather Gotnohart, president of Rebranding Excrement, an executive search firm. “Companies are more likely to call you for an interview if you provide a name they can easily pronounce,” she says. If your name is something like Wrzbowski or Benalshibh, you can forget it. Change it to something immediately recognizable, like a celebrity’s name, say, ‘Brad Pitt.’
“Then at least the boss will be able to always make an office joke and say ‘Brad Pitt’ is under him!”
And take our free resume test to see if your resume has what it takes to make the cut. Please note: A one time ten dollar processing fee will be charged to your credit card.
Also take America’s #1 Free Career Test for help finding the best career for you. Please note: A one time twenty dollar processing fee will be charged to your credit card.
China was trying to show that “we care about keeping the Internet free of criminals and we are doing our part,” said Alan Paller, director of research at … –Datamation
China was seeking to say, “we care about keeping the Internet free of criminals and we are doing our part,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the … – Wall Street Journal
Alan Paller, who is the director of research at the SANS Institute, thinks the impact will be limited. “Sadly, the tack they [China] took is just a whack-a-mole exercise.” Paller added that other hackers will simply take their place.– FierceCIO
“The Internet is God’s gift to espionage,” says Alan Paller, who created NetWars and serves as its chief evangelist. “This is a skill we need Americans to have. But even more we need to find the ones who are already talented and make sure they’re working for the good guys.”
Twenty-one years ago Paller founded a cybersecurity school known as the Sans Institute. The for-profit school, in Bethesda, Md., has 110,000 alumni, most of whom have taken an intensive six-day course in data security. (Paller, 64, directs research at the institute.) — Forbes
To catch a thief, you must think like a thief – the best way to defend an asset is to get inside the head of the attacker and predict his actions.
That’s the opinion of Alan Paller, founder of the SANS Institute and creator of NetWars, an online cybersecurity simulation game in which contestants compete against each other by hacking into and controlling the game’s 12 servers, leaving their user name in them to prove they did it. — Help Net Security
“Predicting legislative action leads to lots of wrong answers,” Alan Paller, research director at SANS, said. “What I know is that Sen. Reid gave Sen. Lieberman the lead on cyber for this session of Congress. Rockefeller and Snow are much more tuned to the research and education initiatives, so they are likely to provide a big chunk of the content of the bill, and Carper’s work is also excellent and will help shape the ultimate bill.” – GovInfoSecurity
After twenty five years I decided to see if I could still play one of the old signature tunes from the DD & the Highway Kings’ first album.
“Roadkill” was the choice, an instrumental played at every gig. Originally, recorded on a 4-track tape machine, all the analog equipment I used to do it is long gone.
Back in ‘84 or ‘85 I started a set in front of a group of hardcore punks with “Roadkill.”
This was a serious mistake.
You have to understand many hardcore punk kids had adopted a set of odd moral standards stringently adhered to. Beating up girls, for instance, was OK. But doing anything perceived to be mean to animals was verboten.
“Roadkill” starts out with a maniacal laugh and shout of its title.
You can imagine how this went over. The punks stood there with backs turned and arms folded for the rest of the set. And that was the last time DD ever played for a crowd of them.
Good news, lads! Good news! The Teabaggers are offended by Captain America and his sidekick.
In response to Marvel’s explanation and apology, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips told Yahoo! News that it “sounds less like a genuine ‘we’re sorry’ than it does a ‘we’re sorry we got caught’ statement.”
“When I was a child in the ’60s Captain America was my favorite superhero,” he said. “It’s really sad to see what has traditionally been a pro-America figure being used to advance a political agenda.”
Hey, there are plenty of right-wing extremist Marvel characters theoretically great for the Tea Party’s big tent.
Nick Fury, The Punisher, Hawkeye, maybe Thor.
Wouldn’t you rather be on the side of The Leader, the Super Adaptoid or Count Nefaria, anyway?
I would.
The best Captain America comics were always those featuring the Red Skull.
Everyone knows that.
And the best comic of all time, Watchmen, is loaded with heroes all Tea Partiers can love. The Comedian — basically Marvel’s Nick Fury, only better and the Nite Owl — who voted for Richard Nixon five times (’It was him or the Communists!’).
Plus DD’s favorite — Rorschach, who despises the prison shrink for his liberal sensibilities, dislikes homosexuals and utters one of the comic and movie’s most famous lines:
All those liberals, and intellectuals, and smooth-talkers; and all of a sudden no one can think of anything to say.
The Cap and Tea Party news also affords me an opportunity to reprint an old appreciation of Marvel Comics from the archives.
So for your repeat enjoyment:
SHAMED BY YOUR ENGLISH? 40 Years of X-Men will fix that; thigh-rubbing optional
Cyclops is in no position to give an opinion.The
Locust, one in a very long list of silly X-Men villains,
backhands him.
For a couple decades DD was an avid reader of Marvel Comics. Then grad school and the Eighties ended.
In the mid-Sixties, I thought the X-Men were thrilling. In retrospect, I was a pretty gullible kid. Although the X-Men movies have made the group seem hip to a mass audience, truth be told, much of the comic book run is dominated by long stretches of patience-exhausting and/or intelligence-insulting trash. (How ’bout the seemingly endless war against the Brood, interstellar aliens … copied almost directly from the “Alien” movies, right down to poor man’s H. R. Giger conceptions and eggs put in the bodies of characters? Or, Lockheed, Kitty Pryde’s pet fire-breathing dragon from the same stretch?)
If your impression of Marvel is dictated by what’s been recently made in Hollywood, the occasional glimpse of Stan Lee on the SciFi channel (”Who Wants to Be a Superhero,” more accurately entitled “Look At The Neurotic Egomaniacs!”) or articles in entertainment sections about the marvelous goings-on at comic book conventions, you’ve had no glimpse of this sad history.
Your host will dive into the barrel of X-Men fail for the best apples bobbing around in the bunch.
1. Pathetic and silly villains. See The Locust above, anile human! The Locust was one of many in the rotten swarm. (My opinion is that he was a feeble attempt by Marvel to duplicate the Beetle, an early arch-enemy of Spider-Man. The Beetle, however, was only barely worth more than the paper he was printed on, falling somewhere in weakness between the Vulture and Mysterio. In truth, one can really get going and rip a new hole in Marvel for use of excessively shabby villains in any decade. Do you remember Stilt Man from Daredevil, the Man Without Fear?)
Showing up in Uncanny X-Man #24 in 1966, the dialog in this issue is often WORSE than “Away clod! You shall be the first to feel the bite of the Locust!”
On page 4, the Locust is introduced, overseeing his pet giant grasshoppers eating through a corn field. Spell-binding!
“Eat heartily my six-legged subjects!” exclaims the villain. “Too long have lesser mortals lorded it over the abundant planet! It is not the weak who must inherit the earth … but the strong! And we are the strong!”
Stan Lee, in a separate explanatory box, adds: “If, as you read on, it seems to you that our orthopterous antagonist has a distinct fascist fixation, please forward all analyses to mighty Marvel…”
Uh, no, I won’t do it.
Second place for wretched villain from the Sixties mag was Count Nefaria. The Count was a prop across a number of Marvel publications. With no obvious powers — a good beating by any strong man could have taken him out — for X-Men 22, the Count assembles a team of even more unmenacing villains than himself: the Unicorn (a refugee from Iron Man), the Scarecrow (another Iron Man castoff), Plantman, the Eel and the Porcupine.
Nefaria would show up again in 1975 with a crew of flunkies called the Ani-men. One of these was a man-frog, reinforcing Marvel’s early yen for pulling villains from the ranks of the most unthreatening specimens of the animal world.
The bronze medal for worst villains goes to … Frankenstein. Marvel editors were apparently desparate for filler in 1968. It’s a mistake they wouldn’t repeat for more than a decade. Until pulling Dracula from the mothballs for one issue in 1982.
2. Dialog. Closely related to silly villains, it’s consistantly dreadful, even by the hokey corn pone standards of comic books.
“If only I could tell [Jean Grey] the words I really want to say,” thinks the teenage Scott Summers in 1964’s issue 8. “How gorgeous her lips are … how silken her hair is … how I love her! But I dare not!”
Equally horrible was everything that came out of the word balloons written for Hank McCoy, the Beast. The Beast had a double handicap: He not only talked too much, he also looked bad — a man with the physique of a disproportionately tubby gorilla thrust into an ill-fitting uniform. Had they never seen Mighty Joe Young!? Marvel saddled the Beast with the affected vocabulary of a supernerd, one who would never use one word where two with a total of six syllables would do. The only thing Marvel editors couldn’t deliver for him was head-turning bad breath.
“It’s a pleasure to be divested of the encumbrance of our X-Men uniforms,” McCoy says in issue #7. “I wish you would learn to speak English, Hank,” says Ice Man.
By this time, even the most devoted readers were thinking: “I wish Magneto would kill you in this ish, Hank!”
3. Dealing with female characters.
By the Eighties, X-Men was dressing most of its superheroines in variations of dominatrix gear. Marvel Girl had started the original Marvel tradition of women with pathetic powers. Making too much use of her telekinetic abilities often made her weak in the knees during a fight, just like the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Girl.
By the late Seventies, however, Marvel overreacted, turning her into the Dark Phoenix, a woman creature with the power to destroy worlds. But just before that (and killing her off as a menace to the galaxy), they put her into a black corset, G-string and spike-heeled boots. (Think of it as Marvel jerking Jean Grey between the two poles of stupid-looking nerdy girl and menacing sexual predator.)
The way DD figures it, this was catering to the growing X-Men fanbase of young white men, guys who secretly harbored desires their girlfriends — if they had them — would never consent to: The trampling of their johnsons under thigh-highs, smothering, face-sitting, things of this nature.
(See also “Two Girls Out to Have Fun” — issue 189 in 1985. Corsets, bondage collars, maid uniforms, fuck-me spike-heels and fishnets — it’s a thigh-rubbing fest of superhoines in soft pornographic jeopardy. The only thing missing is a frank girl-on-girl sado-masochistic erotic play scene, presumably ruled out by the comics code.)
Cat-fights were also big. Callisto, the leader of the Morlocks, who lived in the sewers under New York City, dressed in tight leather pants and boots. With eye-patch and a got-it-at-Heidelberg-style dueling scar on her face, she was always ready for a close-in knife-fight with Storm, who’d be wearing almost nothing.
Even characters not originally cast in their underwear were dragged into things. The handling of Kitty Pryde surprisingly encompassed both the icky and the prurient. For one adventure, she was left behind as a hostage in an alien spaceship — in her bikini swim suit. What, no other clothes or bedsheets on the Shi’ar spaceship?
In “What Happened to Kitty?” (Uncanny X-Men #179), the answer is given in the first full-page panel. Well, Kitty Pryde was knocked woozy in the previous issue, dragged into the sewers by Callisto’s crew, stripped and dressed in a torn wedding gown slit to show a garter belt and stockings. Two punkettes in similar wear restrain her, presumably to keep the girl from running to the sex crimes division.
Why is Kitty dressed like this? To marry some weird living-in-the-sewer asexual ogre (pulling back on the thigh-rub at the last minute) named Caliban — another famously pathetic X-Men character. Caliban has mercy at the last minute and says he still wants to be her friend. Kitty says OK, because putting her in a Hustler mag bridal gown while she was unconscious was just so much water … through the sewer.
Now all of this has probably given you the impression I don’t like X-Men.
Far from it! Electronically paging through the collection furnishes a touchstone to many things forgotten. If you collected these issues before a parent threw them out in a fit of pique, you’ll have a similar experience. Things long buried in the mind jump up in their musty old sockets as one revisits comics long vanished themselves from near memory. At the very least, it furnishes proof the brain is not yet crippled by dementia.
Indeed, there’s much to like about “40 Years of X-Men.” And, for the purposes of this post, I haven’t covered any of it.
Advertisement from your Marvel mags, ca. early Seventies.
Most people think Pasadena is very upscale, a place where it’s hard to find bum wine.
Not true!
In at least one spot, made up of two small markets at the intersection of North Wilson and Villa, Thunderbird and Night Train Express are in stock.
These beverages served and serve a purpose. They’re for when you’ve really hit the skids. And because they are fortified with about 18 percent alcohol by volume, they’re bona fide painkillers.
Yes, it’s been a very bad year here in Pasadena and it looks to only get worse.
Good news, lads! Good news! President Obama has cozied up to the banksters, calling them savvy businessmen for looting the country, wrecking the world economy and rewarding themselves with huge bonuses.
Sign No. 11 that you live in a dysfunctional country: Your President turns into a nauseating suck-up.
The Prez: Oh, the banksters will take all their money to the Republicans later this year! Tell me what should I do, Timmy and Larry?
Timmy & Larry: Bow and scrape.
Being republished thousands of times around the web right now:
President Barack Obama has praised the bosses of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as “very savvy” and insisted he does not “begrudge” them their success and wealth, in a significant softening of the White House’s attitude towards multimillion-dollar Wall Street bonuses.
Once a staunch critic of outsized pay packets, Obama adopted a strikingly consensual tone when asked this week about a $9m (£5.8m) bonus awarded to Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein and a $17m (£11m) payday granted to JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon.
“I know both those guys, they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in a interview with Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek magazine. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”
What you mean by ‘most’, Kemosabe?
Prediction: After ridicule by everyone except the banksters for a week: “What I meant to say was [mumble]…” And it won’t make a difference.
