* Over at Robot 6, I pointed out the Frank Miller/Victor Davis Hanson connection (via Rodrigo Baeza), linked to the Kramers Ergot 7 minicomic (via Blaise Larmee), and continued riding the Con War train into Pulitzer Junction.
* Today, my Marvel.com Strange Tales Spotlight shines on Jay Stephens.
* And eff it, I’m linking to my interview with Brian Chippendale for Providence’s website one more time. If n’ Oof is going to be 700 pages long, did you know that?
* TJ Dietsch’s list of The 12 Weirdest Horror Movie Theme Songs at Topless Robot is solid gold. I figured nothing would top Burt Bacharach’s “Beware of the Blob,” but then I didn’t count on “The Ballad of Harry Warden.”
* Kristin Thompson presents Hollywood blockbusters: weapon against the trade deficit!
* Real-World Horror: A group of prominent pop and rock musicians have joined together to demand that their music stopped being used to torment prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. No one saw the irony of using “March of the Pigs” to torture people?
* Wow, that really is a great Nova sketch.
* Finally:
Its a wild world. You can travel to the US city of your choice with your cowboy hat and your stirrups and have a gun fight in a back alley. You can sign up with Blackwater Inc and go murder woman and children in Iraq and get good health benefits as well. Grab a job at the Pentagon or a private firm piloting robotic drone bombers in Afghanistan, 10 points for a grandma! 20 for a pregnant lady! You might even hit a Terrorist! Air conditioned office, ergonomic chairs, free coffee! Hell, sign up to print those huge signs that folks with lots of extra time and solid legs hold outside of family planning clinics, photos of bloody, melted, gnarled, oozing aborted fetuses. Drive home after a long hard day of life-saving life-affirming work to eat a good rare steak, dripping red juice. Beat your kid. Feed the dog. Swing by the church to check out the choir boys. You can sleep under a bridge with homeless families near a halted condo development, or you can peep under a different bridge to see a sanctioned village of sex offenders, each with a scarlett letter stamped on their forehead. You can pray in a circle of your friends around your sick daughter as she dies of treatable diabetes, a display of failed Magic/Kung Fu. You can listen to radio hate-seller Rush Limbaugh spew violence that we can only hope will turn inward on his vacant icy soul, causing a massive, prolonged, agonizing heart attack. His already bloated body writhing in an unseen torture, as his inner demons “blow off some steam”. He can broadcast the grunts, the groans. I will turn on my receiver, I will amplify his final address, the hospital gets caught up in paperwork but he will live on in some fashion.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Brian Chippendale begins his review of The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu #34.
I have “The Ballad of Harry Warden” on my iPod and whenever it pops up when my iPod’s on shuffle I spontaneously explode with joy. And song, of course. Joy and song, and laughter. It’s a delight.