I haven’t read Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World is Flat. However, if these are actual lines from the book, I may need to, just for the experience: As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: “The playing field is being leveled.” What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat! ...
Comic book covers tend to be designed to get people to pick them up and buy them on impulse. If you think of your primary audience as being familiar with the characters, for instance, having an apparently dead hero on the cover is usually a good selling point. If, on the other hand, you’re just trying to convey “Action and Adventure Await,” I don’t think you can do much better than these covers from 1939-1942 Fox Comics. :) ...
Dave’s Long Box reviews one of the more accomplished villains in the DC Universe: Kobra. He sounds a lot like Cobra Commander from GI Joe, but competent. (He beats up Batman.) Of course, you couldn’t get much less competent than Cobra Commander; his enemies weren’t exactly rocket scientists, yet they beat Cobra all the time. (Actually, now I’m wondering. Did GI Joe have a rocket scientist? And if they did, would he have been called Booster?) :) ...
They revived the character of Slam Bradley in Detective Comics? Why?!?
…a Bono, Up and Back, the Gilligan cut… John Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey on what you say when there’s little new under the sun. :)
The Mows, by Jay Dyke…
You know, I kind of remember this, but I have no idea why I never attended it when I was in Blacksburg. Maybe I was always broke by that time? Nah, it’s only $20. :) I wonder why the site shows up as black with black text, though.
A rambling read, exploring the Indus Valley to the Exodus to Tanelorn, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal City. Courtesy of Fantastic Metropolis
A review of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, from The Revealer. Sample quote: In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: “Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings.” And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy. ...
Apparently McDonald’s ad company wants to pay rappers to mention the Big Mac in their songs. (Yeah, I checked the date, and they would have been a bit early for April Fools. Now that doesn’t mean the Daily News didn’t get fooled.) Rappers could get $1 to $5 every time their song is played on the radio. I wonder if that would include Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s song It Takes Two. After all, this was one of the lines: “I like the Whopper, f*** the Big Mac!” ...