It’s been a heck of a ride, hasn’t it?
Congratulations, we’re living in the future now.
(Incidentally, now that the old year is officially past, we’ll start doing those end-of-year/end-of-decade wrap ups, because we weren’t going to jump the gun. We have to have some rules around here, don’t we?)
So enjoy, have a happy, and don’t forget to watch 2010 on TCM later tonight.
It really is the year of the nerd, isn’t it?
Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the executive producer of District 9, as well as the upcoming Mortal
Engines,
The Adventures of Tintin, and The Hobbit, has been made a Knight Companion of New Zealand, which entitles him to the honorific “Sir”.
The award was given in recognition of Jackson’s efforts in jumpstarting the New Zealand film industry as well as for his artistic achievements.
Now when the crew of the Enterprise addresses him as Sir, they can really mean it.
Patrick Stewart is on the list of people to be knighted by H.R.M. Queen Elizabeth II this New Year’s Day, and in the U.K. will henceforth be known as Sir Patrick.
Stewart is known to comics fans for, among other things, playing Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men movies and Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He is also a fan of comics, having contributed an introduction to a Transmetropolitan collection, optioned the film rights, and having made his desire known to play the role of Spider Jerusalem in any screen adaptation of the property.
He is also a noted Shakespearean actor, having been a long-time member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and most recently performing as Cladius opposite David Tennant’s Hamlet.
It may be a skip week for the rest of the comics industry, but not here at ComicMix, where we bring you the conclusion of a story over a year in the telling!
Read the giant-sized finale of Lone Justice: Crash! by Robert Tinnell and Mark Wheatley right now!
Or if you’re just joining us, start at the beginning!
And if you want to read it in paper, the first issue of Lone Justice will be coming out from IDW in February, followed by a trade paperback of the Harvey-nominated EZ Street in March!
Missed this one last Tuesday: while everybody else in the world was being good while awaiting the arrival of jolly old St. Nick, the folks on Wall Street were taking a different tack…
Lord Vader had no comment on rumors that he was stepping down as CEO of Microsoft to take on a new position at Goldman Sachs, possibly due to impending litigation from News Corporation which claims he is an employee of their subsidiary 20th Century Fox and is still contractually obligated to them.
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou; Art by Alecos Papadatos; Color by Annie Di Donna
Bloomsbury, September 2009, $22.95
Ever so often, there’s an object lesson that proves the saying so many of us like to make: that comics aren’t just for adventure stories, that they’re suitable for any kind of story. If we’re lucky, those paradigm-breakers are also really successful – and [[[Logicomix]]] is both of those things. It’s a major graphic novel on an unexpected topic – the life of Bertrand Russell, with a strong emphasis on his work attempting to create a solid foundation for mathematics, and thus all of learning – and it’s been quite commercially successful, alighting on bestseller lists occasionally and moving a surprising number of copies.
Logicomix, though, is also a piece of metafiction – the first character we see, on the first page of this graphic novel, is co-author Doxiadis, talking to the reader about this very story, and introducing us to co-author (and logician/computer science professor) Papadimitriou, and then to the art team, Papadatos and Di Donna, and their researcher, Anne. The authors and illustrators return to the stage – very literally, in one case at the end – several times in the course of the graphic novel, mostly to explain the details more carefully, and, occasionally, to lightly debate with each other about the meaning and import of the story.
After that bit of throat-clearing, Logicomix starts up in earnest…with another frame story, in which Bertrand Russell arrives to speak on logic at an unnamed “American University” on the eve of WWII, in 1939, and finds himself interrupted by protestors who want him to stand up unequivocally for pacifism, as he did during The Great War. Russell instead launches into his speech, which forms the narration boxes – and occasional interludes – for the rest of the graphic novel, as the panels depict first Russell’s youth and then his early mature years, as he worked on the foundations of logic.
Here’s a fun find– the Hockinson High School Drama Club presenting a live adaptation of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
What do you think?
I’m trying to avoid declaring an end-of-year window closing bankruptcy, wherein I just close every window and never look back, and then keep no more than ten tabs open.
Okay, twenty.
Thirty.
Stop me before I ctrl-click again.
How repetitive humor works.
Ah, Internet. You always know how to make each day a bit more surreal. (Found here.)
You may have seen the ads on your local Fox station: the big meanies at Time Warner Cable might keep you from watching Fox networks. The problem is that the ads are filled with fibs and fertilizer.
The negotiations have nothing to do with the main Fox broadcast network, which actually airs all the shows mentioned in the ads (House, American Idol, The Simpsons, Family Guy and the NFL broadcasts). What’s being renegotiated are what Time Warner Cable is actually paying for Fox’s cable channels, such as FX, SPEED, FUEL TV, Fox
Movie Channel, Fox Reality Channel, Fox Soccer Channel, Fox Sports en
Español, and FS Arizona, Florida, Houston, Indiana, Kansas City,
Midwest, Southwest, West, and Prime Ticket, SportSouth, and Sun Sports.
In fact, Time Warner Cable CAN’T lose the Fox broadcast channel, that channel has must-carry status– a status that Fox has lobbied very hard to get for Fox News, by the way.
Fox is attempting to raise the prices they’re charging cable companies to carry their networks and are bundling the networks together so you have to carry all of them or none of them, and they’re not telling you that’s what it’s about. I’m sure that if Fox kept their rates constant, TWC would have no problem paying the same rate– but Fox appears to be tripling the rate.
Ah, and I now see notes that indicate that if no deal is reached, Fox will pull all of their programming, broadcast and cable both. That should be fun when their licenses come up for renewal.
Observant folks will note that this is the same strategy Rupert Murdoch talks about when he says that he’s going to pull all of News Corporation content from Google unless they pay him. To which we say: go ahead.
It gives that Fox show Lie To Me an interesting double meaning, no?
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
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