White Guys in "The Great Link Dump Robbery"

“[Mr. Bryant's and Kislingbury's podcast] . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson on White Guys, Square Glasses.

It's another big, fat link dump. Let's get started, shall we?

As for writing, here is a wonderful list of 15 words with no English equivalent. If you copy-edit my work (hi Joe!) prepare to be seeing these words again soon. We have a wonderful haunted house of a language and I see no reason not to drive it further towards the bizarreness that we deserve.

Semi-Follow-up: Here is the most thorough and insightful summary of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

(Side note: "GET BIN LADEN" would have been a cooler title, even if it would elevate Bin Laden by reminding us all of how much of a badass Michael Caine is).

Speaking of Get Carter, the man himself is included in the newest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Since about half of the story is entirely opaque to even the most college graduated of us, Jess Nevins and his dear Irish friend [name] have assembled an annotation of the book-- which is just one of many that Nevins has cobbled together.

Speaking of crime-- 40 years ago, a man by the name of DB Cooper hijacked a plane, extorted 200,000 dollars as a ransom, and parachuted out of the plane never to be seen again. He is at the center of the only unsolved plane hijacking case in American history. And, apparently, the FBI might have finally figured it out.

Ever wonder what happened to all of the places Patrick Bateman used to frequent? No? Well, want to find out anyways? No, huh? Well, fuck off, then.

You know what sounds good right about now? Some poached egg and grits.

I feel partially ripped off by life that I had only been introduced to grits this year. Oh sure, it's really kicked 2011 up into my top years of all time, but that comes at the cost of making all those other years look like beggars at the foot of a king.

You know who is awesome? Ansel Adams. You know what isn't awesome? Japanese internment camps. What do you get when you combine them? Something that is still fairly shitty, but, at the same time is an important document of one of the dumber chapters in American history.

Also, as a supplement to "The Longest Wind" supplement, here's a diary from a Japanese soldier on Guadalcanal. I haven't read it quite yet, but I didn't see the harm in linking it. I've been planning and writing an entry on the WWII episode we did, because I wanted to carry on and extend the arguments we (me, mostly) made on that show-- as well as some of the inaccuracies we (me, mostly) made regarding the Japanese and Germany and so forth. That's a long time away, though-- maybe when we do Part II?

You know who was a fun guy? Nixon.

No, wait, he was an asshole.

As I was saying, I was reading the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen this week and I finally made it around to the prose section in the back. I usually save Alan Moore's back matter for a later date because, to be frank, they're denser than hell and the man is a far more skilled comic book writer than he is a novel writer. Thankfully the stories were short and weird enough to catch my attention and, in a rare fit of clarity, I actually recognized several references. Not only is Detective Munch complaining to Rawls about giant ants (which is a rad sentence on its own), but the space ants are basically space Muslims that worship a frozen man encased in ice.

Oh, and there are clangers. What the hell are clangers? Well, since you're probably American, you've probably never head of them until now.

Clangers are these little knitted piglets that live on the moon that speak in whistles. Yup.

The only reason I've ever heard of them is because of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, which only rarely ever lowered its bile lever to talk about the works of Oliver Postgate.

And here they are.

Don't you just want to hug one?

The point of all of this is that I recognized a reference to a 1970's British TV show for kids in a comic book about Voldemort and Mick Jagger fighting Sean Connery. It's a rare thing and I'm going to revel in it.

Ah, heck, here comes one more video--

Ten for Grandpa from Pie Face Pictures on Vimeo.

Now let's get the fuck out of here and get some waffles.