[books] Philip Pullman answers your questions … ‘I am a devout believer in the complete democracy of text. It sounds to me as if you think reading is surrounded by rules and prohibitions and commands. It isn’t! Not a bit of it! Once a book is in your hands, ITS INTERPRETATION BELONGS TO YOU. You can read it in any way you like, and take away any meaning that makes sense to you. That’s the great freedom of reading.’

[life] You Choose: Pessimistic (though generally accurate) life advice vs. Optimistic (though generally accurate) life advice … ‘Everybody Shits and Farts’

[comics] Pat Mills – The General In Charley’s War … Mills is interviewed about Titan Books reprints of Charley’s War. On Joe Colquhoun: ‘. He could convey so many subtle moods, characterise everything and everybody in the most exquisite detail. That is such a gift and I do feel it needs wider recognition. He was such a modest man, too. When I finished Charley, I offered him Slaine. But he said – no. He said he had no imagination! But he had such empathy, such compassion, such insight – if that’s not imagination, I don’t know what is. I truly believe he was a genius. Sometimes I would not even look at his finished art because I could lose an entire day just staring at the detail in his work. I’m sure many readers did the same.’

[comics] What If… Matt Groening had done the art on Watchmen instead of Dave Gibbons? … from Springfield Punx … [via Forbidden Planet’s Blog]

[politics] Looking: Epic Win … [more…]

[tech] Dec. 8, 1993: Location, Location, Location … A brief history of GPS from Wired. ‘…after Korean Airline Flight 007 wandered into Soviet territory in 1983 and was shot down with a loss of 269 lives, even the military thought there might be distinct advantages to sharing the GPS system with civilians.’

[books] Gonzo’s back! … an interview with Ralph Steadman about Hunter S. Thompson … ‘Steadman didn’t go with Thompson on the fateful trip to Vegas, but he was there in spirit. “He thought of taking me, but in the meantime he’d met this lawyer called Oscar Acosta,” he laughs. “They had a lot in common, drugs-wise. So that’s why he decided not to take me. And anyway, as he said, ‘I might need a lawyer!'”‘

[tv] Watching: YouTube – Ludwig … [more…]

[comics] On Twitter: Warren Ellis’ Adoring Readership … [more…]

[funny] The Charlian … Charlie Brooker takes over the Guardian’s front page … On his incompetence: ‘It recently took me 21 days to get round to replacing the lightbulbs in my kitchen, which for several weeks had been blowing one-by-one until finally the room was plunged into darkness. For 21 days I had to feel my way into the room like a blind man, then prop open the fridge door in order to have enough light to be able to see. Your eyes get used to it after a while. So does your brain. It became a routine. Soon opening the fridge felt as natural as flipping the light switch. Standing there, chopping onions in the artificial gloaming, all felt well with the world. It took an incident with a broken glass on the floor and a shoeless foot to nudge me in the direction of the nearest lightbulb stockist, and even then I instinctively used the fridge as an impromptu lamp for another two days before re-acclimatising myself to the concept of ceiling-based light sources.’

[ lolcats] Don’t Worry, I’m From Tech Support … [more…]

[comics] Watchmen Unmasked … Occult symbolism in an Alan Moore comic. Really?! … ‘On the morning of September 11th, 2001 A.D., I was not working. On my day off, my mother phones me at 7:00 PST to wake me up: “Something incredible is happening”. When the first tower came down, I saw the beast more clearly than I have ever seen it, and yes, for a moment it looked just like a giant octopus driving this giant building straight down DIRECTLY THROUGH THE PATH OF GREATEST RESISTANCE LIKE A NAIL. And I thought, “It’s Chapter Twelve of Watchmen. It’s a stunt, a gag, a hoax. Someone has done this thing to fool us all again. Who? WHO HAS DONE THIS THING TO ME?’ [via BeaucoupKevin]

[comics] The End … Michael Lewis on Wall Street – twenty years after he wrote about it in Liar’s Poker …

‘This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. “The investment-banking industry is fucked,” Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. “These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It’s like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: ‘Holy shit, I’m wrong!’”‰” Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. The investment banks were not just fucked; they were extinct.’

[twitter] Tony Benn is on Twitter … ‘I have been waiting for my website to be updated for a while. I feel this could be a decent stop gap. It is a little like a blog.’

[comics] Watchmen Condensed …

[books] The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell … Andrew Orlowski tears into Malcolm Gladwell and fans … ‘Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it’s reassuringly predictable. The most famous book Tipping Point, takes an epidemiological view of social trends and throws in a bit of network theory. You won’t draw anything more profound from this than “we’re all connected” – gee! …’

[tv] Every House Episode Ever … [via Robot Wisdom]

Sidebar: Diction – Doctors are smart. You can show this replacing regular words with Doctor words.

Wrong: “Dammit House, you’re such a whiny bitch!”

Right: “Dammit House, your self-flaggelistic nihilism and anarchistic negation is just compensation from your hidden vulnerability!”

[movies] Michael Caine reveals Italian Job ending … ‘The star says he would have saved them by “switching on the engine”, burning off petrol until it righted itself. “I crawl up, switch on the engine and stay there for four hours until all the petrol runs out,” he said. “The van bounces back up so we can all get out, but then the gold goes over…”‘

[blogs] A List of all BBC Blogs … surprisingly small list of blogs for such a large media operation.

[comics] Batman R.I.P.? A Dozen Dark Knight Deaths …‘Batman is more than a character appearing in a comic book. He – as Bruce Wayne – is known to millions around the world as the hero of Gotham City. His movie has almost made a billion dollars this year. The value of Batman/Bruce Wayne to DC Comics and Warner Bros. is beyond measure. We’ll let you figure out what that means in terms of how “dead” Batman may be here, in the broad view.’

[news] Brighton and Hove Argus Headline Boards …‘King Alfred is Dead’ [via Qwghlm]

[questions] Live Feed of Questions and Answers from text118118.com … fascinating real time look at what messages a text message Question and Answer service gets … ‘Q: How many seconds is it until christmas 2008? A: There are only 108,000 seconds before christmas. thx’

[comics] Love & Rockets Covers … collection of covers from the comic book… [via Mondo a-go-go]

[funny] Hitler’s BNP membership gets leaked … ‘The neighbours are going to find out aren’t they?’

[life] I Have Seen The Truth And It Doesn’t Make Any Sense [via] …

[funny] lolgriffin … ‘I HAD A MEMBER DATABASE BUT I LOSTED IT’

[speccy] JSSpeccy: A ZX Spectrum emulator in Javascript … runs slowly but nicely implemented … ‘I’m really typecasting myself here. If there were an international “Person most likely to write a Spectrum emulator in Javascript” award, I’d have taken it for the last five years running. So here it is…’

[comics] Fantastic collection of photos tagged Comic Book Hearings from Life Magazine in 1951 … sadly it doesn’t give any information on who is in the photos but I’m assuming it’s Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver’s Senate subcommittee hearing on juvenile delinquency and comic books. More from Life’s Archives: Frederick Wertham, Adam West on the set of Batman, Adam West and Bert Ward as Batman and Robin, Batman on the cover of Life.

[comics] 75 comics being made into films … they are really digging through the comic archives for film properties. The Hands of Shang-Chi: ‘This kung-fu crazy character emerged from Marvel comics at the height of the early 70s martial-arts boom and the stories incorporated Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith characters. Ang Lee is in the producer’s chair with Forbidden Kingdom stunt arranger Woo-ping Yuen set to direct, but most of the news on the project is pretty old.’ [via Robot Wisdom]

[comics] Save The Squid: Hope …