Ephemera 2009 (5)

-- Hijinks Ensue made me laugh my ass off this week.

-- In the most recent Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Aquaman and the Atom have shrunk down to cellular size to fight nanomachines killing Bats from the inside. At one point (and please, savor every moment of this sentence) Aquaman uses his telepathy to summon a lymphocyte to act as his mighty seahorse within Batman's bloodstream.

After the chase, the following exchange occurs:

AQUAMAN: (to cell creature) Good boy! You were magnificent! Yessss, big hug.
ATOM: He's not hugging you. "He" is merely interpreting you as a foreign body, to be surrounded and destroyed.
AQUAMAN: Sure FEELS like a hug to me. And since we found you in Batman's bloodstream, I think we'll name you "Platelet."
ATOM: Except that's a lymphocyte.
AQUAMAN: "PLATELET" IT IS!!

Please, make this version of Aquaman the DCU version. Pleeeeeeeease.

And for those of you who have written in: I am indeed gratified by the unexpectedly large role Jaime Reyes as Blue Beetle has played in the new kid-friendly Batman animated hit. Or, less subtly, I am gratified by the role a character whose book has just been canceled is playing on the hit animated show starring another character who's just been killed off.

Synergy: You're Doing It Wrong.

-- Courtesy Kevin Church: Backflip on a Big Wheel.



-- Scoreboard. Filthy Hollywood Sodomite Socialist Liberals = Very Fucking Good Selling Things in the Free Market. Pious Big Business Tax Break Lovin' Conservatives =Very Fucking Bad at Selling Things in the Free Market.

Capitalism: You're Doing It Wrong.

-- Mike Nelson's Guitar Fridays are inspired by one of my favorite series of posts over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, their Sunday Battleship Blogging.

-- They're also reviewing/commenting, chapter-by-chapter, Herring's From Colony to Superpower, which I'm in the middle of reading. I ... cautiously recommend it.

-- I will be installing Boxee on a Mac Mini this week and will report back.

-- D Pet Hotels: Upscale Pet Hotels: I walk by it every day. I believe we now owe the Third World one free suicide bombing.

-- I bought six of these. It's not OCD, it's simple practicality.

-- You know what? Science is really important, not just because "science" is important, but because learning to think about the world in that way -- hypothesis, experiment, review based on empirical data -- is really, really important. Having a creationist President is an actively bad thing, not because I give a shit about whether he understands evolution*, but because that sort of intellectual laziness permeates both government policy and culture.

-- Game Designer/writer Jeremy Bernstein suggests that this season of Lost requires us to come up with a phrase for a TV show that has unjumped the shark. He suggests "going back to the island." I concur and will join others in pointing out that two more seasons of The Adventures of Daniel Faraday, Two-Fisted Action Physicist, along with Snarky Sawyer and Enigmatically Hot Juliet on the Island of Pulp Time Travel woud be just fine, Jack/Kate free.

-- Seamus Heaney FTW. In the Comments, your favorite poet. And yes, even Manly Men should have a favorite poet. Especially Manly Men Who Drink.







* One does not "believe" in evolution, any more than one "believes" in atomic theory. The same understanding of science that makes your cell phone work brings us evolution. Call your mom = Australopithecus. Suck it up.