* Bettie Page is in a coma. I had the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Page a while back and it’s one of the high points of my professional life. Not only was in-her-prime Bettie a contender for the title of “sexiest woman in human history,” but her sexiness was almost antithetical to the antiseptic, angry, emaciated “sexiness” that is today’s norm. I wish her nothing but health and happiness.

* They’re gonna make a Bourne sequel based on a non-Bourne Robert Ludlum novel, The Parsifal Mosaic. Based on the description, there are a couple of ways they could go with this, depending on what aspects of the set-up they choose to emphasize.

* Speaking of Bourne, Jon Hastings responds to my lengthy post comparing the Bourne and nu-Bond series. I find that even while I agree with many of his specific observations, the conclusions he draws from them–that the action scenes are hard to parse, that there’s no sense of space in them–are more or less the opposite of mine. But it’s a free country, no matter what those dastardly CIA types are up to. (Also, Rambo is my favorite movie of any kind so far this year, Jon.)

* This riff on the technologically ensured inescapability of bad news about the economy reminded me a lot of the bit in World War Z about “Land Warrior” communications link-ups between the soldiers and the effect that has on morale when your fellow soldiers start getting eaten by zombies. (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.)

* Speaking of Coates, he spots and participates in an ongoing multiblog debate regarding the use of torture in…World of Warcraft. I noticed this back when Bruce Baugh blogged about it–the deliberate slaughter of non-combatants, as well–but to me it just scanned as “well, yeah, you’re playing a member of an evil death cult.” Some players seem to hold that point of view as well, but others are upset about it on moral, storytelling, and/or gameplay grounds varyingly. Bruce?

* I think it’s pretty amusing that Rich Johnston is treating the fact that writers of event tie-in titles must conform to the wishes of the writer of the main event like it’s news, especially when his specific contentions regarding the difficulty therein are being expressly rejected. But at least he’s running the correction, which is more than he did with me when I was administrator of Wizard’s message board and he wrongfully accused us of banning him, then promised a retraction when I busted my hump figuring out why he couldn’t access the board and fixing the problem for him, a retraction he never issued.

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