[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 …

[funny] Good / Bad / Meh Things To Say During Sex … ‘Madre Mio!’

[comics] Batman Sues Batman Over Batman … apparently there is a town in Turkey called Batman which is located on the Batman River in the Batman Province… ‘There is only one Batman in the world…’

[comics] Barack Obama: The 50 facts you might not know … ‘He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics.’

[comics] The Trial of the Sober Dog … the comic strip from Nick Abadzis which is currently being published in the Times is also available online (the link above will send you to the first episode – the current one is here).

[funny] Next on BBC1: Armageddon …

[comics] Salman Rushdie: Comic Fan … ‘The Satanic Verses author owns oil paintings of Spider-Man and Wolverine, signed by Stan Lee. Also, he collected comic books as a kid, but, sadly, his father threw them away. “They’d be worth so much money now if he hadn’t done that. You know, 1950s and sixties Dell Comics, and Marvel; it would be worth a fortune,” he said.’

[life] An Affair To Remember … a sad and fascinating article discussing the emotional, moral and practical issues around older people having sex in care homes … ‘And his sputtering cell phone call reporting the scene he’d happened upon would have been funny, the manager said, if the consequences hadn’t been so serious. “He was going, ‘She had her mouth on my dad’s penis! And it’s not even clean!’ ” Bob’s son became determined to keep the two apart and asked the facility’s staff to ensure that they were never left alone together. After that, Dorothy stopped eating. She lost 21 pounds, was treated for depression, and was hospitalized for dehydration. When Bob was finally moved out of the facility in January, she sat in the window for weeks waiting for him. She doesn’t do that anymore, though: “Her Alzheimer’s is protecting her at this point,” says her doctor…’

[funny] Matt Webb’s 100 Head Cattle Drive 2008 … go help Matt achieve his dream …‘I like small plastic cows. I don’t know why. I haven’t owned any until today. For many years I have wanted a herd for my home. Perhaps 100 or so. Yes, 100 would do nicely. DO NOT ASK ME WHY. (I think it would be a neat thing.) … A promise: IF I GET 100 × SCHLEICH HOLSTEIN OR FLECKVIEH COWS, I WILL DONATE £500 TO A CHARITY CHOSEN BY MAJORITY VOTE.’

[comics] Help me find my next favorite graphic novel. … great list of comics from Ask Metafilter … ‘All-star Superman just wrapped up and it was fantastic. Easily the best “new” comic I’ve read.’

[comics] Philip Bond does John Romita Snr …

[comics] Sea-Monkeys Only $1.25! [more…]