Bail-Out Overview

Let us be perfectly clear: somewhere between $700 billion and &1.8 trillion of your tax dollars are going to bail out companies that are in trouble because the rich smart men who ran them made bad decisions. Bad decisions they could make because they were not regulated -- there was no oversight. There was no oversight because they insisted oversight would hurt the economy.

I'm betting it wouldn't have hurt it $700 billion worth.

Those rich smart men will now retire with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses, while you pay for their mess. For bonus points, the text of the bailout act states that there is no oversight over the funds being distributed. Which, as we've seen, works out so well.

In the past, capitalism punished bad decisions. No longer. So, we can socialize the national banking system, but not health care. Aces.

For some historical context (admittedly partisan in analysis, but the facts of record are all accurate).

For the Very Simple Explanation of what exactly happened in a way you can explain to your Grandma, Ezra has this.

For an alternate reasonable solution, you can read Ezra's discussion of this fella.

Do economists like this plan? Noooooooooo.

Whoops, props meeting. Enjoy the New Century!

LEVERAGE Facebook page is live.

Maintained by the Charming Network Overlords, will be the source of LEVERAGE-y goodness. Photos on the site are primarily from the first shot episode, but mid-season air date: "The Bank Shot Job". Written by stalker-boy favorite Amy Berg.

Pictures of Ike

(AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

The Doomed Pulp Novel is post-apocalyptic/flooded city in nature, so I've collected a fair number of these type of photos. Worth a spin, if only to be reminded of some scale issues. That is, Nature has us in both weight class and reach, and we had best smarten up. (h/t Oliver Willis)

Caligula For President

Ugh. I can actually hear gears grinding in my head as I change writing styles. Well, some recommendations should ease us into it.

Our friends at Boing Boing point out that Cintra Wilson has a new book forthcoming -- Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny. Caligula has returned to lead us into the new century. An excerpt:

You are going to need me, because on the subject of nepotism and dynasty, I must issue a dire warning. I prophesy that young George Prescott Bush III could present a direct threat to my divine authority in 2016.

Jeb Bush should have eaten George Prescott while he was still small enough to swallow whole. This boy is very handsome; he has thick black hair and speaks Spanish. He looks like Enrique Iglesias in a Turnbull & Asser suit. It is my opinion that he will be groomed to emotionally manipulate stadium crowds of fearful, lower-class young Jesus- lovers into a weeping, Elvis-worthy sexual panic, in concert with an organized, psychological operation of relentless global PR carpet bombing of a price and magnitude ordinarily associated with Exxon. The full weight of the Bush legacy's war chest will finally buy the love and total complicity of the cool youth vote: early- adopters, the extreme-sports community, and/or what ever the godforsaken future of Facebook- and MySpace-style social networking holds. A brave new frontier of image-making will mold young George Prescott into one part Che Guevara, one part young Ronald Reagan, and six parts Napoleon.

Combined with his family's patented banana-republic- style tilting of electronic voting machines, George Prescott will be unstoppable.

So, here's a little trick I picked up over the centuries: Take pains to ensure that he becomes addicted to hookers, OxyContin or anonymous gay sex in public men's rooms.

I believe this is the duty of all Americans who do not wish to hand over their children at birth to be trained as bullet- polishers for Halliburton.

Go get him, all you hot, hot, American whores, drug fiends and daring young homosexual men. Go get George Prescott.

I've given out more copies than I care to admit of her book of essays, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. I consider it one of the essential primers on moving to Hollywood. I was't a huge fan of her novel Colors Insulting to Nature, as it's basically exploring the same themes but through the lens of some very spun characters. The reviews are all solid, however, and my lack of enthusiasm is plainly biased by my fondness for essay-length writing.

In the Comments: your favorite essay-style book. Non-fiction, no short story collections. Does David Sedaris-style memorium count? I don't know. You hash it out in the Comments.

Serbian speaker?

Anybody who is or knows a Serbian speaker -- have them ding me at kfmonkey@gmail.com.

Blue Beetle, BOOM! and Genius

MINOR SPOILERS

While I wait for my script co-ordinator to process the new draft, some quick comic business. OH, and I'll be totally abusing the Amazon links, because I'm learning how they work.

BLUE BEETLE #29 with MATT STURGESS

... is a goddam home run.

Don't get me wrong, Will Pfiefer did an excellent job, and I'm always a fan of Baldeon's work. But damn, Matt Sturgess has written the book I dreamed of doing once we finished the origin story.

The strength of the book has always been the nuts and bolts of superheroing. Matt's now exploring what it's like to be a 16 year old Hispanic superhero with a secret identity in El Paso. He's managed to pull in the Minutemen, illegals, and the media all in a non-preachy way. Characters have specific viewpoints, but they're not always what you expect, and all very credible. Matt's seemlessly taken over the book, but improved it with his mad plotting/structure skills.

Not to mention, he brings the funny. I'm kind of giddy that I get to watch the Paco/Brenda train wreck from the outside now, like a fanboy. He gets all the characters, their voices, their tone. I can't wait to see what he does with La Dama.

I cannot accentuate this enough -- I read BB #29 three times in a row.

An interview here has Matt discussing his plans for his run, which I hope is at least as long as mine. Rafael is continuing on the book, of course, and somehow manages to top himself every issue.

BLUE BEETLE POST-GAME

I would have loved to do a proper wrap-up when issue #25 dropped. But, you know -- dead-zone. You want to write the long article, the whole "running a TV show" thing gets in the way -- and you realize a short note was probably smarter in the first place.

Kieth taught me ten years of comic writing in one. Cully's character design is iconic, and that includes all the non-costumed side characters. Rafael made me look better than I am (Issue #17, kids). Joan Hilty talked me out of three bad ideas and into two good ones, for a net +5 on the Editing Score and therefore a big win.

We wanted to establish a new superhero for younger readers, and add a different viewpoint to the DCU. Something you could give your 12 year old nephew to read without first forcing him to complete a degree in DC Continuity.

A lot of people hated us, then some of them liked us, and then some of them loved us ... while a lot of people still hated us. Those people can go pound sand and collect Final Crisis variant covers. The BB fans were supportive, enthusiastic, and it felt good to see all the positive reviews roll in by the middle of the run. And I genuinely like the BB fans. They are the good-natured, "Comics Should Be Fun" folks. (Hell, even the Goons liked it by the end of the run.)

Special thanks to the Comicbloc humans for a safe forum haven.

End of day, Jaime Reyes is going to be every young kid's Blue Beetle, much like the Green Lantern of my nephew is John Stewart. And Jaime's a damn fine Blue Beetle to have.




BOOM! goes online

Although the Farscape news is pretty great -- yeah, yeah, I was on that train pretty hard -- what's fascinating right now is that BOOM! has put a bunch of their back-issue anthologies online for free reading. They're uploading a page a day. They all have RSS feeds, too, very progressive, even if still bound to the hated portrait layout. I've got stories in most of these, somewhere ...

Ninja Tales, "Desert Sun" starts here.
Zombie Tales, "Memento Mori" is here.

GENIUS

I wrote a blurb for Marc Bernardin's Monster Attack Network, and have always been a fan.



Well, he's stepped up with a new book that's... fine, I'm not going to do it justice. Here's the one-liner:

"What if the greatest military mind of our generation was born an angry 17-year-old girl in South Central L.A.? And what if she decided to secede a few blocks of her 'hood...through force?"

This earns the best possible compliment one writer can give another.

Fuck you, Marc.

Shocking, adult, conflicted, and all off an inspired high concept. Read about it here, read the amazing reviews, and go vote for the damn thing so I don't have to finance it myself so I can read the entire arc.

All right, time to proof some dialogue. Product links below, if you're interested, for the whole 25-issue BB arc

Oof

So, this whole "simultaneously prepping one movie, shooting another and editing a third for 16 weeks in a row" thing is precisely as life-eating as previously described. Aces. The entire goddam point of my career was to avoid a day job ...

Not dead, and now that I've written my second ep of the season, fairly caught up. Blogging to resume normally this weekend, if only because the American Carol stuff has gotten so idiotic I can no longer ignore it.

Readability Test

BB 17 part(2) - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: BB 17 part(2)

It Takes a Thief

It Takes a Thief is up on Hulu. Go, drink in the splendor of the glory days of TV, when shows could be summed up with one elegantcatchphrase ("I'm not asking to to spy, I'm just asking you to steal.") and characters didn't muck about with all this emo shit, but stuck to the job of driving the damn plot where we writers needed it to go. Tasty!

And if you spot some of these grifts popping up on Leverage, ummm -- homage. Yeah, that's it. Homage.

In the comments, any and all Mannix/Alexander Munday/Girl from UNCLE/Rockford fan fic.

(h/t Lee Goldberg)

"... a thing"

I would argue that as soon as your web-only musical about a supervillain is referenced on a group blog of University professors discussing Disraeli, you have, indeed, won the Internets.

Also, to continue the discussion raised by my staff Friday -- has Felicia Day now officially ascended from being one of the Geek Princesses to Queen of the Geeks?

Add your general chaos and reactions below.