‘…presumably, I say, you would no longer say things like “Give the coon a crack on the way out”? He looks baffled. “Course I would. Cos we’re all laughing, all enjoying ourselves.” He tries to explain why. “We’re all enjoying ourselves, and the coon wouldn’t be on his own … there’d be a party of black … whatever. I’d say: ‘Give the coon a crack on your way out, it’ll make you feel good.’ Well, it wouldn’t make you feel good. You wouldn’t dream of giving the coon a crack on the way out.” Eventually he gives up. “It’s a joke, you cunt.” “Cuckoo!” says the clock.’

• Notes from Vox Politics Event … ‘[The] blogging ‘community’ are broadband users while the citizenry of the internet use dial-up… interested to see how this will develop. [I think this is total bollocks, personally]’
• Euan Semple was blogging from the UK Houses of Parliament … ‘I’m sitting in the Grand Committee room in the Houses Of Parliament using the first ever wifi network allowed in the building.’
• Sashinka: ‘What is The Palace of Westminster like inside? Quite a lot like a cross between an ever-so-slightly run down private school and the rather English headhunting firm I lasted at for less than a year: lots of green and cream paint, old oak, and the desire, if only the governors could raise the finance, to repurpose parts of the building in a more contemporary way. Lots of people in suits having conversations in corridors.’
• Gavin’s Blog .com … ‘Packed room and lots of laptops with wifi!’
• Blatant Optimism … ‘The most notable soundbite: Weblogs are going to be politicising rather than democratising.’
• Parliament goes Wireless for Bloggers’ Summit … ‘[It is] believed to be the first time any national parliament has set up a wi-fi zone, although the security implications mean that the wireless internet zone will be dismantled after the meeting.’

• Grant Morrison Exclusive To DC … ‘DC Comics has just announced that Grant Morrison has just signed a two-year exclusive contract with them. There is no news on how this affects his existing Marvel work. The superstar writer is supposed to be working on a Vertigo project with Frank Quitely which will be announced officially in Chicago. He’s also working on a DC Universe book…’
• Comments at Morrison’s Panel from Comic Book Resources: ‘The conversation inevitably shifted to “New X-Men,” which Morrison will be leaving as of #154 and will be destroying the Marvel Universe in issue #150 and #151! He also says that his final issue can be seen as the end of the X-Men if one so wishes.’
• Comments on Barbelith about GM’s Plans: ‘Marvel’s going quite rapidly to shit, innit?’

‘The lunar module curved gently down over the Sea of Tranquility, the drama heightened by the calm, almost casual voices of the astronauts and the mission controller at Houston.The casualness was deceptive: from 500 ft. above the surface and all too aware that an error could lead to irretrievable disaster, Aldrin brought the spacecraft down under Armstrong’s direction. At the moment of approach Armstrong’s heartbeat rose from its normal 70 to 156. Yet his voice was calm and flat: “Contact light: engines stopped? The Eagle has landed.” The landing was perfect.’

• Reliving Comics’ Days of Infamy … ‘Sen. Estes Kefauver, the ambitious committee chairman, showed Gaines a cover of a comic book and threw this when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife-style comment hardball: “This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up, which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?”‘
• Coloring the Comic Books … ‘Women, meanwhile, ran the gamut from the masochistic 1940s-era Wonder Woman (who spent way too much time being tied up) to the vapid Invisible Girl of the Fantastic Four in the 1960s. In one early comic book, she chirped: “I can’t wait to surprise Reed with the new miniskirt costume I’ve been designing!” But Invisible Girl later morphed into Invisible Woman, a sharp character who now runs the Fantastic Four corporation…’

‘…the rumour, mentioned by a slew of people, over the shouting match that went down at San Diego Comic Con between Joe Quesada and Grant Morrison. Or rather from Joe to Grant, one phrase “You owe me!” being the most repeated on the convention floor the day after. Quesada had found out about the DC exclusive deal and he took it out on Grant with expletives that were definitely MAX labelled.

Reports indicate that Grant kind of shut down and went into a mini-coma, but did give out one response “Fuck You, Fuck your company, and Fuck your boss who’s the biggest arsehole I’ve ever met.”‘

‘305. ARGUMENT FROM MONTY PYTHON
(1) Graham Chapman appeared in a film that made fun of Jesus.
(2) Graham Chapman died of a horrible, incurable disease.
(3) Therefore, God exists.
(3a) And has no sense of humor.’

‘I think today’s comic books are perfect reflections of their times: conservative, unambitious and self-congratulatory. A howling lack of imagination or direction runs through the mainstream, but that’s about to change. It’s easy to sense the upcoming wave. Reading most comics today is like wearing dad’s slippers and smoking his pipe – it’s an illicit thrill to be sure but not much of one…’

• Independent Obituary: ‘…she certainly did not mind discussing with me her relations with Hitler and his various henchmen, and her time in prison. She knew Hitler intimately as a friend, describing him, almost with tears in the eyes, as a man of unusual sensitivity and tenderness (“You should have seen his hands, the delicacy, the beauty of them, and, oh Jim, his blue eyes . . .”), who hated cruelty (“He cannot have known what went on in the concentration camps” and “I know for an absolute fact that he never watched the films taken of the deaths by hanging with piano wire of the abortive putsch on his life in 1944”).’
• Diana Mosley, Unrepentantly Nazi and Effortlessly Charming … ‘The death of Diana Mosley brings to an end one of the most curious questions of British upper-class etiquette: how does one deal socially with an unrepentant Nazi?’
• The Myth of the Mitfords … ‘A starring appearance at a Nazi rally might be thought a difficult thing to live down, but Lady Mosley – or “Lady Diana Mosley”, as she somewhat oddly insisted on calling herself – contrived to manage it. Much of her later life, in fact, consisted of a stalwart defence of the indefensible – or rather not, as she seemed never to have experienced the slightest qualm that she had anything to be ashamed of.’

‘[Flagg!] succeeded because it was worth the work. The complex subplots involving Brazil, Chicago, and Mars built to a series of meaningful major storylines, which drove home the moral points of the series. The characters were interesting, layered, and mostly likable, even if they were hard to keep straight sometimes. And the whole series added up to a complex commentary on patriotism, greed, and the flawed nature of heroic human beings, all of which became clearer the more you read (and reread). The first year, in particular, still functions as a terrific novel when read in one gulp — all the plot threads build to a harsh, violent climax.’

• How I became the Baghdad blogger … ‘I spent a couple of days searching for Arabs blogging and finding mostly religious blogs. I thought the Arab world deserved a fair representation in the blogsphere, and decided that I would be the profane pervert Arab blogger just in case someone was looking.’
• Salam Pax on the BBC’s Today Programme — requires Real Player.
• Webchat with Pax … On the Internet in Iraq: ‘…the US would use the internet for email attacks: everyone who had an email in Iraq got an email telling you to cooperate with the coalition forces, to stay at home. All the military commanders got their phone numbers changed because for hours when they picked up their receivers they’d get a voice message saying “don’t fight, go home” from the coalition. ‘

‘Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else — something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end.’

‘…the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves.’

‘You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then, again, it might not.’

‘They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them. They’re mopping when I come out the dorm, all three of them sulky and hating everything, the time of day, the place they’re at here, the people they got to work around. When they hate like this, better if they don’t see me. I creep along the wall, quiet as dust in my canvas shoes, but they got special sensitive equipment detects my fear and they all look up, all three at once, eyes glittering out of the black faces like the hard glitter of radio tubes out of the back of an old radio.’

‘Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him. He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel; scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage license (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him. A little green light flashed in his eye, signaling a right turn he had resolved never to make.’

‘I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just plain nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out towards me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime.’

‘In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come.’

‘At almost one o’clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top. The escalators rose toward the mezzanine, where my office was. They were the free-standing kind: a pair of integral signs swooping upward between the two floors they served without struts or piers to bear any intermediate weight. On sunny days like this one, a temporary, steeper escalator of daylight, formed by intersections of the lobby’s towering volumes of marble and glass, met the real escalators just above their middle point, spreading into a needly area of shine where it fell against their brushed-steel side-panels, and adding long glossy highlights to each of the black rubber handrails which wavered slightly as the handrails slid on their tracks, like the radians of black luster that ride the undulating outer edge of an LP.’

‘It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton. On April 1, the world’s great powers came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island named Fernando Poo. By the time international affairs returned to their normal cold-war level, some wits were calling it the most tasteless April Fool’s joke in history. I happen to know all the details about what happened, but I have no idea how to recount them in a manner that will make sense to most readers. For instance, I am not even sure who I am, and my embarrassment on that matter mates me wonder if you will believe anything I reveal. Worse yet, I am at the moment very conscious of a squirrel – in Central Park, just off Sixty-eighth Street, in New York City – that is leaping from one tree to another, and I think that happens on the night of April 23 (or is it the morning of April 24?), but fitting the squirrel together with Fernando Poo is, for the present, beyond my powers. I beg your tolerance.’

1. The Flash
2. Superman
3. Paradax (Strange Days)
4. Diabolik
5. New Gods (by Jack Kirby)
6. Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery
7. Emma Frost, The White Queen (X-Men)
8. Cyclops (X-Men)
9. Billy the Cat (and Katie) (DC Thompson)
10. Marvelman (by Alan Moore)

‘Al Jean: We have a show coming up where Marge writes a novel and gets endorsements from writers playing themselves, including Tom Clancy, Thomas Pynchon-

IGN DVD: How did you get him?

Al Jean: We got him. (laughs) He was really nice.

IGN DVD: Oh well of course, he’s not seen, right?

Al Jean: He’s wearing a paper bag over his head, but it is his voice.’