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Brain prism: one mind, many links

My brain is all over the place today, so no real new content today. Instead, some links and turgid commentary.

Here is an article [EDIT: link no longer exists] about those lovely comedy chaps, Mitchell & Webb. I’ve previously shared my love for their TV show (and their radio show is excellent too), and now everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon. (The author might be trying to start a Little Britain backlash, which seems a little harsh, even if their comedy isn’t as funny as in the first series; they can’t help being popular and people enjoying their material, even if it is now only dressing up in silly outfits.)

Empire does a nice in-depth [EDIT: They did, honest. No longer there, even though it’s a search result.] look at the Oscar nominees, helping me for my predictions/hopes, which I’ll post tomorrow. I’m usually pretty bad at predicting the Oscars and tend to go for my favourites over what I know will win, but that won’t stop me getting it wrong again.

Greg Rucka talks about OMAC over at Newsarama. I enjoy Rucka’s work (the Atticus Kodiak novels are very enjoyable, and Queen & Country made by 100 List) but I do feel hesitant about picking up this when it’s part of the DC Countdown event. See if he can persuade you.

As you may or may not know, Marvel has changed its rating system. Scott at Polite Dissent mocks this ever so elegantly in this post.

It was via Polite Dissent that I learned of Suspension of Disbelief, a new blog that checks the facts in comics books, and they’re off to a good start.

Logan threatens physical violence on my personage for not reading Y: the Last Man. That’s the way to get people to read good comics, Logan. (Only kidding; thanks for the recommendation.)

I was saddened to see that the Iranian blogger was sentenced to 14 years; the Committee to Protection of Bloggers [EDIT: blog no longer there] is still on the case.

In news of a more bizarre and less serious note, an odd man sues Sean Connery for living in an apartment that caused damage to his apartment and playing loud music, even though Connery doesn’t own the other apartment, and hardly spends any time in New York anyway. Meanwhile, a woman is suing Hewlett Packard for secretly progamming expiry dates in their ink cartridges. The world is a very strange place sometimes.

Then there is the bizarre case of a cancer charity refusing a donation from Jerry Springer – The Opera due to a threatened protest by a religious group. I’m so dumbfounded by this, I can’t think of anything clever or funny to say.

In a case of ‘don’t look up to someone for too long or you might hurt your neck’, Kevin Smith disappointed me in this scan of a Stuff magazine piece, where he defends his right to drive an enormous, gas-guzzling SUV with the excuse that he wants to keep his kid safe. I really hope he was being facetious, as he usually is in print, but it doesn’t appear to be, and using the same hive mentality to justify damaging the environment as all the other people who drive those stupid cars is rather sad for someone who is usually smart.

Finally, a bizarre thought that goes a bit serious. I live in London, which means that when I walk past a phone booth, I see postcards advertising prostitutes (these cards are also known as tart-cards), which are basically photographs of naked women, with perhaps some small stars to cover nipples and orifices. I thought, for some reason I can’t quite remember why, that it might be a good idea to take the cards off the phone booth walls (being a nice chap and wanting to protect little kids, and to try and keep London a better place to live), scan them and post them on a blog (with the phone numbers removed) in order to highlight the issue. This sounds a little frivolous, now that I write it down, and it turns out that it’s a little more serious than I initially thought. With 14 million cards being put in phones a year (according to this item), and the people who put the cards in the booths (called tom-carders) threatening violence to people who remove them (there is a scheme called Adopt A Phone Box [EDIT: there was a scheme, but the webpage no longer exists], organised by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, where people take down the cards after the tom-carders have put them up) and the debate over whether it’s better to have prostitutes working via this method or having to walk the streets (even though most prostitution is run by ruthless vice gangs), it becomes a little more complicated. It still sounds like the idea might work, if only because people love to look at naked women so the site would get a lot of hits but, just to show that I’m way behind, you can get a book on the subject already.

I told you my brain was all over the place. Congratulations if you read this far.

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