Category: News

Some days, the headlines just write themselves.

Brad Guigar’s Evil Inc. comic strip was bound to be noticed by the people at Fox Business News sooner or later, it’s their kind of company. So yesterday, Brad was interviewed by the standard Fox News panel of a blond guy, a brunette guy, and a blonde woman on their show Happy Hour yesterday. Since Fox won’t let you embed video– I guess they really need the traffic– you can watch it on Brad’s site.

Now if you want scary, I suspect there are more people reading Brad’s strip daily than are watching Fox Business News…

The Brooklyn (New York) Public Library has removed Tintin au Congo from its shelves. If you want to read the graphic novel, you’ve got to ask for it and risk that “what are you, a bigot?” glower from the librarian.

In an act of insane political correctness, somebody looked at the tome and bitched about how Africans are portrayed as monkeys. So instead of actually reading the damn thing, the librarians protected their professional butts and pulled the book. If you want it, you’ve got to make an appointment to see it. 

This isn’t the first time such a fate fell on Hergé’s popular munchkin. Borders, the always-on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy mega-bookstore chain, moved Tintin au Congo from the graphic novel section to their adult section. Hey, that’s where I go for my racist children’s fiction.

Stevie Spielberg, the well-known racist director of Amistad and Schindler’s List, remains on track to release his Tintin movie in 2011. Co-written by Doctor Who show-runner Steven Moffit, the movie stars the obviously insensitive Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Cary Elves, and Andy Serkis.

No word on whether the Brooklyn Public Library and Borders are going to hide the works of Mark Twain.

On this day in 1921 the Great Bird Of The Galaxy, Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, was born in El Paso, Texas. Gene was known as a writer for Dragnet, Naked City, Have Gun, Will Travel, The Lieutenant, The Questor Tapes, Genesis II, Planet Earth, and Strange New World.

Oh, all right, Star Trek, Earth: Final Conflict, and Andromeda. And even a few comics series– don’t tell me you don’t remember Gene Roddenberry’s Lost Universe from Tekno Comics?

He died in 1991 and his ashes are in orbit now, so when we say the Great Bird Of The Galaxy watches over us, we aren’t kidding. Thanks again for letting us all play in your world.

First, we had the worry about if the cops would tell us about a zombie outbreak.

Then it was the math paper prescribing what to do when zombies attack.

Now, we’re getting foreign policy prescriptions about zombie nations written by professors at Tufts.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and he ponders what would different systemic international relations theories predict regarding the effects of a zombie outbreak:

Now, some would dispute whether neoconservatism is a
systemic argument, but let’s posit that it’s a coherent IR theory.  To
its credit, the neoconservatives would recognize the zombie threat as
an existential threat to the human way of life.  Humans are from Earth,
whereas zombies are from Hades — clearly, neoconservatives would argue, zombies hate us for our freedom not to eat other humans’ brains.   

While
the threat might be existential, accomodation or recognition are not
options.  Instead, neocons would quickly gear up an aggressive response
to ensure human hegemony. 
However, the response would likely be to invade and occupy the central
state in the zombie-affected area.  After creating a human outpost in
that place, humans in neighboring zombie-affected countries would be
inspired to rise up and overthrow their own zombie overlords.  Alas,
while this could happen, a more likely outcone would be that,
after the initial “Mission Accomplished” banner had been raised, a
fresh wave of zombies would rise up, enmeshing the initial landing
force — which went in too light and was drawn down too quickly — in a
protracted, bloody stalemate. 

I’m waiting for the feminist theory of zombies any day n– whoops, never mind, Annalee Newitz has been there, done that, and eaten the brains. Maybe we can do something with Sarah Palin…

Finishing off the roll, here are the last of our photos from this year’s Chicago Comic-Con:

(more…)

Finally, the (almost) last of our photos from this year’s Chicago Comic-Con:

(more…)

Via Cynopsis Digital: Google is now enabling authors
and publishers who sign off under various
Creative Commons licenses to
distribute their works for free using the Google Books platform. The highest profile comic-book that would be immediately eligible for inclusion would be Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now comic miniseries from IDW Publishing.

The
Creative Commons organization has been busy this year launching programs
like the

Attribution-ShareAlike agreement with Wikipedia that enables
interoperability between Wikipedia licenses. This new alliance allows
independent writers, artists and publishers, both existing Google
Partners and
non-partners, to distribute, commercialize and protect the reuse of their
works. It’s a flexible license built for the digital age, with settings
that authorize creative remixes and mash-ups that give credit where
credit is due.

Books that have been made available under a CC license
have been marked with a matching logo on the book’s left hand navigation
bar, allowing users to download the books and share them freely. “If
the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers
can even create a mashup ­- say, translating the book into Esperanto,
donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on
YouTube,” writes Xian Ke, Associate Product manager, Google Books in
a

blog post.

Google says representatives of the
Book Rights Registry
intend to allow rightsholders to distribute CC-licensed works for free,
pending court approval of a settlement. In the meantime, Creative Commons
proponents such as

Lawrence Lessig have make their works available on Google Books using
the CC licenses.

The title is a killer: When zombies attack!: Mathematical
modelling of an outbreak of zombie infection (Infectious Disease
Modelling Research Progress 2009, in: J.M. Tchuenche and C. Chiyaka,
eds, pp133-150).

Abstract:

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

Kudos to Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad, and Robert J. Smith? (yes, his last name is Smith? with the question mark) for doing the hard work. So when the zombies come and the cops don’t warn us, we know we’ll have to act quickly. Don’t listen if they say <a target=”_blank” href=”

rel=”noopener”>they’re not unreasonable.