[comics] Stephen Frears drawn to Tamara Drewe … ‘Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds’s comic strip about a journalist who ruffles feathers in a rural writers’ retreat, is to be turned into a film by Stephen Frears. The director of The Queen and The Grifters is reported to have cast former Bond girl and St Trinian’s graduate Gemma Arterton as the title character, a newspaper columnist whose recent nose job transforms her into a seductive flirt, to the chagrin of the quiet village’s womenfolk.’

[apollo] The Giant Apollo 11 Post … Kottke does a big round up of Apollo 11 links of interest on the internet.

[apollo] How Michael Collins became the forgotten astronaut of Apollo 11 … profile of Michael Collins and his experience of Apollo 11 …‘Minutes later, Columbia swept behind the Moon and Collins became Earth’s most distant solo traveller, separated from the rest of humanity by 250,000 miles of space and by the bulk of the Moon, which blocked all radio transmissions to and from mission control. He was out of sight and out of contact with his home planet. “I am now truly alone and absolutely alone from any known life. I am it,” he wrote in his capsule. […] Such solitude would have unnerved most people. But not Collins. He says the emotion that he experienced most during his day alone in lunar orbit was that of exultation.’

[funny] So I Had Sex With A Piñata – From Photo’s on TV … (if i had a Tumblr this would have been on it) … [via DYFL!]

[apollo] Remembering Apollo 11 … fantastic – as always – photo gallery from The Big Picture.

[comics] The Comic-Book Guide to SIM Hacking … report from the Register – you can download the comic here.

[books] An Interview With Michael Lewis …

‘When I write a long magazine piece that gets attention I feel like it’s more widely read now than it was ten years ago, by a long way. In fact, it feels excessively well read. Twenty years ago I might get a couple of notes in the mail and I’d hear about it maybe at a dinner party. And that would be the end of it, and it would go away very quickly. Ten years ago it would get passed around by email, and it would seem to have a life to me that would go on a little longer. Now the blogosphere picks it up and it becomes almost like a book: it lives for months. I’m getting responses to it for months. And I don’t think the journalism has gotten any better. It’s just the environment you publish it in is more able to rapidly get it to the people who are or might be interested in it.’

[comics] Go Look: Eight page preview of David Mazzuchelli’s new comic Asterios Polyp and a slideshow of Superheroes Decadence by Donald Soffritti (a look at what happens when comic heroes and villains get old).

[comics] The X-Men Universe Relationship Map … ‘Dashed Line – Signifies one of the parties is from an alternative reality.’ [via DYFL?]

[batman] What Batman Needs…

[comics] Alan Moore’s Youngblood Proposal … more notes from Moore on how to revamp some of Rob Liefeld’s Awesome characters … ‘Before I get onto the details of the first issue, however, I’d better run through some of my thinking on the restructuring of both the book and the Youngblood team into something at once new and at the same time “classic,” whatever that means in a field that produced Brother Power, the Geek…’

[apollo] Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual To Apollo 11 … fun idea – a Apollo 11 manual done as a DIY Car Maintenance Guide … More on the manual from the Register: ‘Of course, the book doesn’t actually invite you to wander down to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and pop the spark plugs out of the original command module, but it does offer “an insight into the hardware from the first manned mission to land on the moon”.’

[doom] Doomwatch … calculating what we should be scared of today .. ‘Right now, the Daily Mail thinks you should be quaking in your boots about: murder, swine flu, iran, north korea, thatcher.’

[swineflu] Pig Death Flu Apocalypse Virus … Tom Reynolds — a London Ambulance Man — on Swine Flu … ‘Our call rate has gone from the normal 4,200-4,500 calls per day to around 5,200-5,700 in the last few days. This is an increase of around 26% Rather obviously this is having us run ragged.’

[apollo] Apollo 11 Moon Landing … another collection of material on the Moon Landing – this time from the Guardian … Tim Radford: ‘Above all, it was a moment of human drama, played out with fragile, gleaming technology against a backcloth of infinity.’

[comics] Grant Morrison Tells All About Batman and Robin …

One of my all-time favourite Batman panels was written by Haney and drawn by Jim Aparo and shows Batman strolling down the sunlit streets of Gotham, checking out the mini-skirted girls and accompanied by the line to end all lines: ‘Yes, Batman digs this day!”

[conspiracy] Unmasking the Mysterious 7/7 Conspiracy Theorist … BBC News on a supposedly pursuasive conspiracy theory about London’s 7/7 bombings … ‘In the absence of a public inquiry into the 7 July bombings, conspiracy theories have filled the vacuum. One of the more inflammatory involves a man hiding behind an Arabic-sounding pseudonym taken from a sci-fi film starring Sting. […] The 56-minute homemade documentary opens with a view from space and the words: “A message from Muad Dib”.’

[twitter] OMG: Tweeting parliament … Simon Hoggart Twitters From Parliament … ‘15.00 Go to toilet myself. Ignore sign reading “peers only”.’

[books] Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair … notes from a talk the three writers gave in London last night … ‘Alan Moore discusses deadlines, and the frenetic life-style involved in popular writing. To be a periodical writer becomes your life. [..] Alan Moore says “Stuff leaks in from the future.” Alan Moore talks about sleep deprivation. Alan Moore says that craft becomes less conscious.’ [via Moleitau]

[pop] Jonathan King remembers the late Michael Jackson … [thanks Phil]

I shall always cherish his first words to me 35 years ago – “Jonathan King – I’ve always wanted to meet you”.

[tweets] Jon Ronson (posted on Twitter): ‘dennis neilson did the Braille translation of my book, Them.’

[movies] Michael Mann Interview … the director of Public Enemies interviewed in the Guardian … ‘Public Enemies is the first movie to attempt to disentangle the Dillinger myth from the facts – until now every other filmmaker has, so to speak, printed the legend – and one wonders, in retrospect, why it took Mann this long to get around to it, so well matched are the gangster’s story and the themes and concerns that have animated Mann throughout his career.’

London Blamed For Jackson Death … #michaeljackson

[1984] Caught On Cam: Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair … ‘There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.’ [via a Smursh of Pete]

[moon] The Moon Landings … The BBC Archive looks back at the Apollo Moon Landings … ‘This BBC Archive collection tells the story of the Apollo moon missions, how they got off the ground and why the missions came to an abrupt end. Through over 40 years of radio and TV broadcasts, we meet some of the men who made that incredible journey and the reporters who brought their stories into our homes.’

[comics] Swamp Thing #21 – The Anatomy Lesson … The classic second issue of Alan Moore’s groundbreaking run on Swamp Thing available as a PDF. (But what a shame about the weak digital recolouring in this reprint) … ‘He should have let me finish. He should have listened. Then I’d have been able to explain the most important thing of all to him. I’d have been able to explain that you can’t kill a vegetable by shooting it through the head.’

[comics] Steve Bissette on the Creation of Swamp Thing #20 … Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 … a long multipart post (including many pages from the script!) on the first issue of Alan Moore’s run Swamp Thing. It’s an interesting issue – it was produced under considerable deadline pressure and has never been reprinted much because it’s a transitional issue as Moore deals with the plot the previous writer had left him with and sets up stage for the next issue – The Anatomy Lesson. [via Metafilter]

Random YouTube Insult Generator … ‘I found the journey of the protagonist both humorous and enlightening. Just kidding. This video is nut sack sweat.’ [via Metafilter]

[curtis] Charlie Brooker on Adam Curtis’ latest projects …

TV industry! Here’s a little bombshell for you. From now on, all of Curtis’s work will be produced first and foremost for the internet. It will be hosted at bbc.co.uk/adamcurtis (coming soon). Go there to find a trailer for It Felt Like A Kiss. An hour-long cut of the whole thing will be placed on the site on the last day of the Manchester International Festival (MIF). It will also host his next two projects: “A long thing about our complicated relationship to the Congo over the last 100 years and how our idea of nature as a sacred yet terrifying realm has risen up during that same time.” That will be followed by a piece about “the political and cultural ideas that underlie the internet – and the idea that we are all linked in an interconnected web – out of which can come a new form of democracy.”

[tv] Adam Curtis’ Blog … the BBC documentary maker behind The Power of Nightmares and The Way of All Flesh starts blogging … ‘This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives.’