LinkMachineGo

[comics] Great Comic Panels #1: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. [Related: DK2 — DC’s PR Site for Dark Knight Strikes Back]

Yes... you always say yes to anyone with a badge... or a flag... no good. ...it's way past time you learned what it means to be a man.

‘You sold us out, Clark. You gave them the power that should have been ours. Just like your parents taught you. My parents taught me a different lesson…lying on this street… shaking in deep shock… dying for no reason at all. They showed me that the world only makes sense when you force it to.’

[war] Afghans Taste Freedom — Smokehammer reports from Kabul. ‘…children play happily in the dust. Half an hour ago I helped an excited group skin a dead taliban fighter and turn him into a kite.’ [via As Above]

[tv] PopBitch vs. Trisha … ‘Following last week’s Diary entry on Popbitch regulars terrorising the Trisha Online message board for the emotionally vulnerable, events have taken a sinister turn. Hacked off with the pranksters pretending to be potential daytime-TV fodder, Anglia TV webmeisters threatened to call the police. They then traced some of the imposters’ email addresses, got in touch with their employers and warned them that they were using company time to mess with the minds of important chat show people. Which all seems more than a little heavy-handed and unnecessary.’ [Related: Trisha Message Board]

[war] Why we must show the dead — Media Guardian on publishing pictures of war victims … ‘Sometimes you publish a picture to prove that something has happened. The saddest, most powerful picture I ever helped to get into the paper was of a dead woman hanging from a tree in Bosnia. There she was in everyday clothing, as though she had stepped straight out of Marks & Spencer, hanging from a branch. What struck me most was how normal she looked.’

[war] Black Hawk Down — excellent documentary website covering the journalism on which the book and film are based … ‘The Battle of Mogadishu is known today in Somalia as Ma-alinti Rangers, or the Day of the Rangers. It pitted the world’s most sophisticated military power against a mob of civilians and Somalian irregulars. It was the biggest single firefight involving American soldiers since the Vietnam War.’

[books] Top 10 literary hoaxes … ’10. The Hitler diaries — In 1983 a German magazine bought 62 volumes of the ‘lost diaries’ of Adolf Hitler. These had supposedly been discovered by farmers after the plane in which the diaries had been dispatched, shortly before Hitler’s suicide, crashed. They contained such fascinating snippets of Hitler’s domestic life as “on my feet all day long” and “must not forget to get tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva Braun.”‘

[war] John Simpson: The first man of Kabul — Martin Bell profiles the “liberator of Kabul”. ‘As for John Simpson’s politics, I have no idea (and should not have) what they are. I’d guess they are ever-so-slightly right of center. Unlike so many war zone wanderers, he is not a natural-born rebel and iconoclast. Indeed, I once shared a platform with him at the Cheltenham literary festival, where he described himself as an “establishment creep”. That’s another of his qualities: an ability to disarm his critics with self-deprecation. It’s quite common among the big beasts of TV news, and an excellent defence mechanism. I used to use it. “Dad”, asked my daughter Catherine one day, “Why do you put yourself down so much?” “Quite simple,” I answered. “I do it myself, because if I don’t there are plenty of others who will do it for me”.’

[books] I Want to Go Ahead and Do It — old NY Times review of The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer … ‘[Schiller] …watches as Gary Gilmore’s ashes are let loose from a plastic bag to blow over Provo. The bag surprises Schiller. The bag is a bread bag, “with the printing from the bread company clearly on it . . . a 59-cent loaf of bread.”‘

[comics] Not a Hoax! Not a Dream! Not an Imaginary Story! Dr Doom’s reaction to 911…

DOOM! BY HIS EMOTIONS BETRAYED! TERROR IN A TEARDROP!

[via I Love Everything]

[profile] Sir Paul McCartney: Give War A Chance — McCartney on his reaction to 911: ‘It’s like we used to live with this thing every Christmas in London, where the IRA would say, “We’re doing a bombing campaign.” And we’d go, “How irksome, I hope it doesn’t hit me when I’m shopping.” After the New York attack, my attitude was like, screw you man, just screw you. I’ve got kids living in London. Are you gonna do a bombing campaign? How dare you? If you want to take my kids out — well, screw you. Come and talk about it, right in my face baby.’

[history] Inspired by Tom… here is some of my Internet History…

Usenet: Voting yes to the creation of rec.arts.comics.alternative in 1994. [This is the earliest thing I can find… always the comic geek!]
More Usenet: I admit to liking Punisher Vs. Archie in 1995…
First Webpage: Grant Morrison Comixography on Wraithspace. [The archived page is from 1999 but I started to compile the list in 1995]
First Website: The Grant Morrison Comixography. 1996-2000. Requiescat In Pace. Later became TimeMachineGo.
First attempt at a Weblog: Vision Thing in 1999. [Lasted two days!]
First Useful Website: Recently Updated UK Weblogs. Later merged into GBlogs.

[war] Simpson of Kabul — the Guardian profiles at John Simpson and does a brief history of war correpondants such as Max Hastings… ‘Hastings, then a 38-year-old reporter for the Evening Standard, single-handedly “took” Port Stanley when he walked alone through the British lines on the last day of the Falklands war. Hastings, son of the war correspondent Macdonald Hastings, said: “I thought, if I can walk up that road and get there first and survive and not get shot, I can bore everybody to death for the next 20 years talking about it.” Other correspondents called him “an insufferably pompous, bumptious egotist”.’ [Related: Steve Bell on John Simpson]

[reaction] Oliver Stone’s Chaos Theory — Stone discusses 911 and a film on terrorism…. ‘You show the Arab side and the American side in a chase film with a ‘French Connection’ urgency, where you track people by satellite, like in ‘Enemy of the State.’ My movie would have the C.I.A. guys and the F.B.I. guys, but they blow it. They’re a bunch of drunks from World War II who haven’t recovered from the disasters of the sixties?the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam. My movie would show the new heroes of security, the people who really get the job done, who know where the secrets are.” And who would that be? His eyes roamed, searching and sad. “I don’t know yet.”‘

[war] The Liberation of Kabul … eyewitness report from John Simpson. ‘As we walked into Kabul city we found no problems around us, only people that were friendly and, I am afraid, chanting “kill the Taleban” – although as we understand it there are not going to be that many Taleban around. It felt extraordinarily exhilarating – to be liberating a city which had suffered so much under a cruel and stifling regime. It was 0753 local time (0323 GMT) and Kabul was a free city, after five years of perhaps the most extreme religious system anywhere on earth.’

[books] The lost children — more on Philip Pullman from the Sunday Times. ‘…he can’t say all the classic children’s books perpetuate unblemished childhood. What about Enid Blyton’s Famous Five who often unearthed adult wrongdoing? Here, Pullman makes a remarkable confession: such realism is taboo today. “You can’t have your heroes and heroines going off by themselves to camp on an island. The publishers wouldn’t let you do it. There are all sorts of health and safety problems, paedophiles and goodness knows what else. The fear is that children are so stupid they’ll copy what they see in books. “So in order to give children adventures now, you either have to set it in the past when that sort of thing was allowed, or in another world where the rules are different. But you can’t do it realistically.”‘ [via Haddock]

[film] Hollywood’s hottest fifty-something — an interview with Terry Zwigoff … ‘This woman called me last week from New York. She said, “We’re doing an ad for Gap, and we want you to be in it.” I said, “To be in it? What do you mean? You want me to direct?” “No, we want you to be on the billboard, wearing Gap clothes. We’re doing this series of hip young film-makers.” I’m thinking, are they trying to make fun of me? Do they know what I look like? So I said, “I’m not young, I’m 53! I don’t wear a backwards baseball cap, I’ve got white hair on my arms! I’m about as unhip as they come!”‘

[profile] Leader of the pack — brief profile of American journalist Seymour Hersh … ‘Why aren’t there more reports like Hersh’s? “I don’t know,” he says. “You know, after September 11 Washington is a very unhappy and increasingly anxious town. We’ve got a very acute strategic problem. When they took out the World Trade Centre we had to get the response right and we didn’t get it right. The word for Washington now is ‘scary’ – it’s impossible not to get something for a story here.”‘ [Related: Escape and Evasion by Hersh]

[comics] Excellent interview with Neil Gaiman in January Magazine … On Sandman: ‘At the time that I was doing it, I was very much hoping that it would change things for the medium of comics. Looking back on it, I don’t think an awful lot. It did an awful lot for Sandman in that graphic novels are still out there, they still sell 80,000-odd a year, year in, year out in America alone. But what I was definitely hoping would happen was the same kind of thing that happened when I read Alan Moore was doing on The Swamp Thing. I went: Well, hang on. Here is someone writing stuff for adults and writing stuff with as much imagination and verve and depth as anything else out there: any other medium out there. I wasn’t going: Oh, I want to write Swamp Thing. I was going: Oh, I want to create my own one of these. It will be interesting to see if in a few years time, the generation that was raised on Sandman do actually start creating more literary and more interesting comics.’ [Related: Gaiman’s Website, link via Sore Eyes]

[distraction] Swear-o-Tron — takes the strain out of verbal abuse … ‘…big dog’s cock…’ [via Pete’s Weblog]

[film] Shallow Hal — Salon previews the next Farrelly Brothers film … ‘Hal (Jack Black) is a pudgy, not overly good-looking guy who, after taking the advice of his dying dad, nevertheless thinks he’s entitled to the most gorgeous babes. He and his pal Mauricio (Jason Alexander) spend most of their time comparing notes on which women are most perfectly suited to enter their dazzling orbit. They succeed with virtually none of them, of course, and can’t accept what they have on the rare occasions when they do. (Mauricio rejects his knockout of a girlfriend because her second toe is longer than her big one — this from a man who tries to disguise his baldness with what looks like a yarmulke of iron shavings.)’

[war] Things that jumped out at me while reading the Observer today …

Two months on, the new battles at Ground Zero — ‘…Ground Zero is all crooked, cruel ruins bayoneted on to steel mesh. Under the harsh glare of floodlights, the arm of a heavy crane lifts another limb of incinerated steel from the dunes of rubble. There is a flare, a burst of flame – for the buried fire still burns white-hot – and a pall of ghastly black smoke rises into the night, blocking the view of the illuminated Empire State Building. The stench of the plume is sickly-sweet; everyone knows what it is but no one says so. Only: “this is how Auschwitz must have stunk only diluted,” as one police forensic scientist remarked. “Fifteen hundred degrees down there,” says a fireman, “and still burning”.’

Bin Laden taunts the West: ‘I’m ready to die’ — ‘The full transcript of their discussions has yet to be released but it is clear they were wide-ranging. Bin Laden was, according to Mir yesterday, in “high spirits”. “He’s very healthy and he laughs a lot. Previously he was very softly spoken. Now he speaks like an experienced orator, he is very hard-hitting… There’s a big change in that man.”‘

Britain placed under state of emergency — ‘…will pave the way for indefinite imprisonment of foreign nationals who the Government suspects are terrorists, and comes less than 24 hours after warnings from America that Britain is a top target for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network. The move reveals the seriousness the Government places on the threat to Britain. Such orders can be used only in times of war or when there has been an event that puts the security of the nation at risk. Whitehall sources said the order would not be reviewed ‘for at least a year’.’

[furthur] “We are all doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives – we are always acting on what has just finished. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means.” — Tom Wolfe quoting Ken Kesey’s philosophy in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. [Related: Author and hippie icon Kesey dies]

[comics] Jack The Ripper: From Hell … a Master Mason comments on From Hell — the film and comic. ‘As unlikely as it may seem, From Hell is not simply a product of Hollywood greed or opportunism. It is based on a remarkable “graphic novel,” of the same name, by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell. Graphic novels, a fairly new phenomenon, are pricey novel-length comics, most often published in quality paperback format and usually aimed at a teen or adult audience. From Hell, an engrossing retelling of the Jack the Ripper chronology, is possibly the most prominent graphic novel yet published. It weighs in at over 500 pages of a detailed story, with an additional 42 pages of notes and annotations, where Moore explains some of the more obscure details of Ripper history and gives reasons for choosing among the dozens of competing theories of who did what when. This is important to note because, despite the reputation of comic books for shallow plots and characters, From Hell, the graphic novel, is a multi-layered story that is more akin to the complex novels of Thomas Pynchon than to the simple comics of Walt Disney.’ [via I Love Everything]

[books] Driven by daemons — excellent profile and interview of Philip Pullman …‘He is emotionally involved. He sits in the shed and makes it up and he weeps, yes, weeps copiously at the tragedies that unfold. He frightens himself and upsets himself and makes himself laugh. If the story evangelises, it isn’t him that’s doing it. It is merely his nature to admire qualities such as courage, kindness, intellectual curiosity, inclusiveness and open-mindedness, and to deplore cruelty, intolerance and fanatical zealotry, but he wouldn’t dream of writing stories to promote that world-view. If stories teach, that is not his conscious intention. “It’s craftsmanship. Your aim must be to tell a story as well as you can, shaping it and bringing the emotional currents to their… peak of emotional swishing about. You turn the raw materials, and all those loose bits of imagination and experience and memory, into something that stands up like a table with four legs and that doesn’t fall over when you put your elbows on it.”‘

[school] Bullies Reunited …‘Bullies Reunited is a site for those of us who spent our schooldays tormenting, ridiculing and psychologically disturbing other children who were smaller, weirder, younger, poorer – or, indeed, richer than ourselves. Kids who wore glasses. Kids who walked a bit funny. Kids who needed go to the toilet too often.’ [via I Love Everything]

[tv] Turner’s Lost Love, CNN, Has A Doomsday Plan in the Can — great story on Ted Turner and CNN’s “end-of-the-world video”… ‘Turner, it seems, has been a doom-and-gloom kind of guy from the very day in June 1980 when he launched the cable network. He said then, as only he could, “We gonna go on air June 1, and we gonna stay on until the end of the world. When that time comes, we’ll cover it, play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ and sign off.” Ten years later, I’m told, Turner used CNN production facilities to create what he called his “end-of-the-world” video. Sources tell me it consists of a recording of “Nearer, My God,” over footage of a waving American flag. Turner is said to have ordered the tape locked away until it was determined that the world was about to end. “It was like a sign-off tape that you often see in the middle of the night,” says one source. “But to Ted, it was a sign-off forever.”‘ [via Follow Me Here]

[film] Go Ahead, Pinko Liberals, Make My Day … Guardian interview with John Milius. ‘The second world war has replaced the western as a morality play, as a venue where these things exist. The western is no longer the western; we’ve changed our attitude towards the Indians, the frontier, the open spaces. So the second world war is a much better place to say, “Here’s what you should measure up to be.” It’s no longer Shane. It’s Sergeant Rock.’

[tv] A Taxi Ride to Success — interview with Rob Brydon from Marion and Geoff … ‘Marion and Geoff was a series of exquisite ten-minute monologues delivered by Brydon in the character of Keith Barrat, a Welsh minicab driver. Keith spoke to us via a video camera mounted on the passenger side of his dashboard – mostly about his wife, Marion, his two children, Alun and Rhys (‘little smashers’), and his wife’s new partner, Geoff, the pharmaceutical salesman of the year. In the face of dreadful domestic and professional disappointment, Keith was endlessly optimistic – which only seemed to confirm the depths of his despair. “Beautiful day,” he would announce brightly, before looking up through the windscreen at the sky and adding, “Bit overcast. But Mr Bluebird’s on my shoulder.”‘

[tea] Stupid Christmas Gift Ideas from LinkMachineGo… for the tea drinker in your family. ‘Your favorite sipping spot isn’t always equipped with a place to park your soggy tea bags. This 12 oz. ceramic mug has a built-in bag holder. use it to carry your fresh tea bag to a favorite spot, brew your tea, then tuck used bag into pocket and sip your tea while its hot.’ [via The Daily Chump]

[comics] The Best of the Marvel and DC Comp Boxes — Mark Millar does brief reviews of last months comics… Millar on Marvel’s Alias: ‘Ah, Bendis. I love you. Who else would have Luke Cage shagging the title character up the arse in the opening issue of a new Marvel comic? I haven’t read issue two yet, but the buzz seems to be really building on this so I’m looking forward to it.’ [Kinda Related: JinxWorld]

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