* Tom Spurgeon on how Christopher Handley’s lawyer wove a white flag rather than allowing the CBLDF and other interested parties to fight for Handley’s (and our) First Amendment rights:

I don’t know whether to be furious at the lawyer for pressuring his client into a plea based on an estimate of his own skills to try the case given that he had access to consultants who would throw themselves off a building to stress a case like this can be won, curious as to what the hell Handley was facing that was worse than a 15-year potential jail sentence if the charges had been fought, or just generally dismayed that what should be the fundamental right to spend our private team reading whatever the heck we want that doesn’t harm people in its creation might be decided through decisions like this one.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that along with whatever hideous precedent this might set for the comics world at large, it’s also destroying a specific man’s life for the crime of purchasing comic books. Just a horrible, horrible story.

* Happy 1st Birthday, Top Shelf 2.0! You can see all my meager contributions to Top Shelf’s webcomics portal right here.

* I find Jeff “Doc” Jensen’s Lost ramblings to be like listening to some crazy guy on a street corner scream about the Illuminati, only worse because Jensen doesn’t have insanity as an excuse to wonder (as he does in the column I’m about to link to) whether when the show uses the contraction “can’t” it’s actually a reference to Immanuel Kant. That said, he’s assembled a pretty solid list of 10 mysteries the show really ought to solve on-screen in its final season, with a promise of a longer list to follow. The list is derived from reader submissions and is generally the kind of fan-reaction-media thing the show’s creators appear to pay attention to, so there’s the chance it could do some actual good. He also links to the true origin of a certain notable landscape feature from the show, which was kind of cool to find out. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Maybe They’re remaking Alien, more likely they’re working on a prequel, either way Terminator Salvation has pretty badly soured me on this sort of thing and demonstrated that remakes/reboots/prequels/sequels aren’t worth doing unless you have a crew with vision, which is kind of a “duh” but still.

* B-Sol reviews The Last Man on Earth, the initial, Vincent Price-starring adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, in the context of its status as an antecedent to the “modern” horror era ushered in by Night of the Living Dead. He’s got me intrigued.

* Ryan Kirk’s Shelf Porn may be the most impressive set so far, but I’m saying that in large part because it appears to have the most overlap with my own.

* Normally political comics don’t do a whole lot for me, but I enjoyed this preview of False Witness! The Michele Bachmann Story, an upcoming series about the, shall we say, outspoken conservative Representative from Minnesota. For starters, the sub-Chick-tract look and feel of the thing dovetails neatly with the apocalyptic, conspiratorial rantings of its subject. At the same time, it’s by local writers and artists emphasizing a local angle–arguing that the Minnesota press hasn’t informed the public about Bachmann’s years-long trail of bizarre extremist statements–that I hadn’t heard before, giving the project a unique feel compared to your average national-level broadsides. (Via Talking Points Memo.)

* Torture Link of the Day: Major General Antonio Taguba says the images of prisoner abuse and torture the Obama Administration is attempting to suppress include photos depicting soldiers raping male and female prisoners.

* I’m posting this video discussion of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin’s debut album God Fodder not because it’s a great video (it really isn’t) nor because I endorse this fellow’s dismissal of Ned’s subsequent albums (CRAZYTALK–Are You Normal? is one of my five or ten desert island discs), but simply because I just never hear anyone talk about Ned’s Atomic Dustbin EVER. Someone should really listen to that lead bass guitar, which is used in a way beyond even what New Order did, and rip that sound off shamelessly. (Via Recidivism.)

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