You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him. You would, however, place a harmless insect in the box. You have orally informed us that you would in fact place a harmless insect such as a caterpillar in the box with him. [content redacted] […] In addition to using the confinement boxes alone, you also would like to introduce an insect into one of the boxes with Zubaydah. As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, then, in order not to commit a predicate act, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death. [content redacted] so long as you take either of the approaches we have described, the insect’s placement in the box would not constitute a threat of severe physical pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his positioin. An individual placed in a box, even an individual with a fear of insects, would not reasonably feel threatened with severe physical pain or suffering if a caterpillar was placed in the box.

—Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, August 1, 2002.

At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building. Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure. The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level. The room where he had been interrogated by O’Brien was high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as deep down as it was possible to go.

It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a metre or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him.

For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O’Brien came in.

‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.

‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’

A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.

‘You can’t do that!’ he cried out in a high cracked voice. ‘You couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.’

‘Do you remember,’ said O’Brien, ‘the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.’

‘O’Brien!’ said Winston, making an effort to control his voice. ‘You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?’

O’Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He looked thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an audience somewhere behind Winston’s back.

‘By itself,’ he said, ‘pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable – something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.’

–George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

* Snake’N’Bacon, Adult Swim, May 10th, 12:45am.

* George A. Romero is planning to publish (not sure if that means “write” or “put his name on”) two Dead novels. This is harder to get excited about after Diary of the Dead and his previous foray into print zombie fiction, the comic book series Toe Tags, but hey, who knows.

* Ben Morse reviews Daniel Clowes’s Eightball #23: The Death Ray and ponders how preexisting moods can impact the impact of art.

* Go, look: Willow concept art by Moebius and others, featuring the below ideas for #1 STC crush warrior woman Sorsha. (Via Monster Brains.

* This T-shirt would be awesome enough as is even if my cat Felix wasn’t built JUST like an AT-AT so that seeing an AT-AT’s skeleton is like x-raying Felix. (Via Topless Robot.)

SPOILER WARNING

* First of all, the Ewoks do not suck. “The Ewoks suck” is the kind of thing Star Wars nerds who are insecure about being Star Wars nerds and feel like they have to be tough guys about it–the worst, most insufferable kind of Star Wars nerds–say in lieu of whipping their dicks out and measuring them and yelling “see?!?!” The Ewoks are awesome. They look like teddy bears and fight like the Viet Cong. If given the choice between living among humans for the rest of my life and living among Ewoks, the choice would be it’s not even a choice. Ewoks every time. What I’m saying is that the Ewoks are better than you.

* Second of all, fun episode. I like Miles–he brings a different tone to the show in terms of how his character works, something a little harder to get a handle on thanks to both how he’s written and how Ken Leung performs him. For example, like every single other character on the entire show and approximately 90% of all the characters in nerd-centric fiction, he has daddy issues, but he doesn’t play them in the hard-exterior-surrounds-wounded-puppy manner everyone else does, not even after an entire episode dedicated to pushing him into that place. My read on him is that the combination of not having a father/being told his father rejected him and his mother with being able to hear the thoughts of dead people makes him has just made him think life is all some big cosmic joke, so why bother? Leung plays this like he honestly could say “fuck this” and walk right off the show at any moment. It’s intriguing.

* I think his best moment in this episode was when he returned his money to the grieving father, not to do the right thing by the guy, but to lay down the hard truth on him. He didn’t seem to derive any schadenfreude or pleasure from it, which is what saved it from being too on the nose–he just sort of spat it out and split, like his own internal hardness forced him to do it but he couldn’t contemplate deriving any kind of satisfaction from it (either out of cruelty or out of being a better person and returning the stolen cash). I didn’t anticipate the scene working out that way, and it was a pleasure.

* In his Lost recap this week, Todd Van Der Werff points out that this episode felt like it came from an earlier season. We have a first-time flashbacker for the first time in a while, and the forward movement on any of the show’s mysteries is pretty minimal. Back in Season Two or so, having an episode where one of the biggest revelations is that some redshirt got killed by electromagnetism would be par for the course, but nowadays everything’s jam-packed. I kind of liked that throwback feel.

* The other revelation this episode, besides the kinda non-revelation that Daniel was in Michigan, is that one of the dudes from the new set of plane-crash castaways is somehow in on the mysteries and working against Widmore and his forces, and is also using the “what lies in the shadow of the statue” catchphrase. I assumed this means he’s working for Ben, but a lot of my friends (and a lot of Internet speculation) argue that there’s a third party at work here. I’m not sure why that conclusion’s being drawn–but during the show I complained that whoever that guy was, him and his cronies should have just killed Miles if they wanted to make sure he didn’t go to work for Widmore, and now that the third-party theory has been suggested to me I think that’s the best available evidence that he isn’t working with Ben. Ben’s dudes would have shot Miles from across the street.

* Also, Ilyana is another “shadow of the statue” catch-phraser, and she claims to be working for the family of one of Sayid’s victims, and what do we really know about them that we didn’t learn from Ben? So maybe the third-party theory is correct. On the other hand, remember the blonde German lady Sayid dated for a while before they mutually betrayed and shot each other? I’m pretty sure she really was working for Widmore, no?

* I think the Kate/Roger sequence of events was surprisingly rich. On the one hand, Roger is right–Kate was involved with everything that’s happened to poor little Ben. But on the other hand, he’s kind of accidentally right–that is the kind of thing that only a paranoid drunk who believes the worst of everyone (including his own kid, when he hasn’t been shot and kidnapped) would think about a lady who gave blood to save his son’s life then tried to comfort the dad when the kid went missing. And on a third hand that I’ve grown for the purposes of this paragraph, it’s another instance of Sawyer’s caution and Juliet’s pessimism proving out over Kate’s “we’ve got to DO SOMETHING”ism–she could have simply kept her head down and let Sawyer run the show as he saw fit, but instead she’s pretty much fucked them without even trying. It’s downright Jackish, is what it is.

* Oh yeah, Dr. Marvin Candle/Pierre Chang is Miles’s father, duh. At least they made the reveal funny: “That douche is my dad” takes away a bit of the anti-climax sting.

* Is it just me or is Hurley becoming less of the common-sense audience stand-in and more of the “I’m too slow to follow this show” audience stand-in?

* Clip show? Boo!

* It was indeed a technical error caused by a sole employee that de-listed some 57,310 books from Amazon’s sales rankings over the weekend, rather than a sinister Rod Dreher-orchestrated plot that required account cancellations to rectify or something.

* Supposedly terrible comic book movie update: Tom Spurgeon is a Punisher War Zone skeptic, while Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken is a The Spirit believer. I think I’m going to have to see them both and make up my own mind. While loaded.

* Trent Reznor is interviewed by Digg founder Kevin Rose using the top 10 reader-submitted questions as voted for by Digg’s users. Lots of interesting stuff in there about navigating competing and emerging business models as an artist in a time of uncertainty and technological transition; I think the insights are useful whether you’re in Nine Inch Nails or doing comics.

* Tom Spurgeon spots a new John Hankiewicz mincomic in collaboration with Jeremy Onsmith, Fine Tooth Comics.

* The House Next Door’s Melissa Tuckman interviews documentarian Ondi Timonder, the director of the splendid Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown Massacre documentary Dig!

* Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.

* Finally, the Best of Bowie Loves Beyonce!

Remember: The prettiest stars are always in your Bowie Loves Beyonce tumblelog.

* This is so delightful to me: Curt Purcell interviews Josh Simmons. If you’ve been reading my recent reviews of Josh’s minis, I think you can imagine that there’s a lot to talk about.

* Yesterday it was discovered by the Internet at large that Amazon had somehow and for some reason tagged pretty much any book touching on homosexuality in any way as “adult” and therefore removed it from all-important sales rankings, a blow in terms of both searchability and marketability, not to mention common decency. Instantly I saw people posting about how they were canceling their Amazon accounts and stripping links from their sites, but it seemed to me so clearly a case of either a technical or personnel fuck-up rather than a conscious decision to smear the queer at a company level that I figured publicizing its ridiculousness was all it was appropriate to do. (The initial reports of customer service reps more or less defending the move struck me as the actions of employees who didn’t really know what was up and offered an explanation based on what they assumed must have been happening as though it were a conscious decision on a company level.) Sure enough, today we’ve seen Amazon begin relisting a lot of the books, and various conflicting but convincing explanations emerge regarding how coding glitches, hackers, “let’s you and him fight” meta-trolls, and/or bureaucracy are more likely culprits for the move than Jeff Bezos catching a bad case of the Maggie Gallaghers. Gawker has one theory, while Patrick Nielsen Hayden and his collection of relevant links have more.

* Fantagraphics offers a sneak peak of some of its upcoming projects, including an odds’n’sods collection from Paul Hornschemeier and a Steve Ditko collection.

* Did I already know that Dan Nadel is working on Art Out of Time 2 and forget it, or is that news? Very, very welcome news? That really is the book that launched a thousand other books and opened a couple thousand eyes, although Craig Yoe will pop up in your comment thread and make cryptic statements to the contrary if you say so, bless him.

* It’s come at last. At last it’s come. The day I knew would come at last has come at last: Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken reviews Dragonball: Evolution. His subsequent shame spiral into alcohol-induced unconsciousness is mercifully left to your imagination.

* Bryan Lee O’Malley talks about Scott Pilgrim and the classic video games that influenced it to Kiel Phegley.

* Tim O’Neil reviews Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, and John Paul Leon’s Earth X, noting what the book’s differences from Ross and Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come say about the differences between the Marvel and DC Universes. Hint: the central figure of Marvel is a soldier, while the central figure of DC is a savior.

* Chris Butcher explains what’s up with those (to my eyes) obviously cockamamie New York Times bestseller charts for graphic novels. The problem, he says, has to do with the fact that the “final sale” in the bookstore market is from store to customer, while the “final sale” in the direct market is from Diamond to store, and how that discrepancy creates glitches in the way the chart is tabulated.

* Monster Brains notes the upcoming release of Knowing Darkness, a book containing Stephen King-based art by the likes of Bernie Wrightson, Lord of the Rings creature designer Gino Acevedo, and Monster Brains mastermind Aeron Alfrey himself.

* Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman call out the Obama Administration’s attempts to preserve, if not expand, certain Bush Administration policies regarding such issues as state secrets and indefinite detention, particularly at the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan. One of the theories that Greenwald notes–that in order to preserve some vestige of inter-partisan comity the new administration is doing whatever it can to prevent investigations and prosecutions of the past administration even if that means giving its active and ongoing imprimatur to that administration’s practices–is to me a) the best explanation and b) a terrible excuse.

* Renee French: still creepy.

* Attention Marvel: Please let Jon Vermilyea draw Venom.

* I deeply want someone who was around back then to tell me that this shot of Howard Chaykin and his amazing friends circa the early ’70s is what all gatherings of comics culture looked like back then.

* Shaggy has my favorite take on James Dobson’s admission of defeat in the culture wars.

Very bad person James Dobson admits defeat in the culture war. I can’t even BEGIN to tell you how much this made my day.

KEEP AMERICA EVIL!

* David Mazzuchelli, Seth, Jerry Moriarty, and Tom Gauld are going to be at MoCCA this year. My Bowie sketchbook just had a mild heart attack.

* Thomas Lennon says The State DVD box set is finally coming out on July 14th. Again, I’ll believe it when I see it. And I’m still disappointed by the music clearance situation–as good as Craig Wedren is as spoofing music, it was the use of the real thing to which the original series owed so much of its satirical power. But still, it’s The State DVD box set.

* Chris Mautner talks to Drawn & Quarterly’s Peggy Burns about the new Diamond minimums and how they’ve affected the company’s titles like Or Else and Crickets. I think this is the first time I’ve heard that Gabrielle Bell’s Lucky has also been canceled. I also think it’s the first time I’ve heard an unimpeachable alternative-comics big like Peggy push back quite this forcefully against the notion that there’s something uniquely terrible about the death of the alternative comic book given the inevitable print-publishing apocalypse generally.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Jeffrey Brown’s Funny Misshapen Body, a sentence which will sound funny each and every time I write or read a variation on it. I got this book in the mail yesterday and put it down on the couch, and the next thing I knew the Missus was three quarters of the way through it. She said it’s very, very personal, even for Jeff, which is saying something.

* I enjoyed Curt Purcell’s post on how genre fans come to appreciate even the crappy parts of their favorite genres because they associate them with the good parts, as well as CRwM’s down-comment response that the problem is subsequent artists appropriating good and crappy parts indiscriminately as fanservice.

* Sin City 2 is still with the Weinstein Company. ADDTF sincerely regrets the bullshit rumor. (Via Arrow in the Head.)

* Tales Designed to Thrizzle #5 now in stock!

* Bart Beaty reviews Laurent Cilluffo’s New Wanted. It looks very good.

* Josh Simmons does creepy paintings, too.

* Apparently when Au Revoir Simone’s Heather D’Angelo isn’t playing keyboards and pursuing an astrophysics degree at Columbia (for real), she’s drawing the bejesus out of David and Goliath.

* Anders Nilsen Sure Can Draw update: Anders Nilsen sure can draw.

* Sexy Velma? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

SPOILER ALERT

* I feel bad for last night’s episode because I’d allowed my expectations to be super super super high. It was gonna be a Ben episode, indeed a Ben and Locke episode. It was co-written by Brian K. Vaughan and Deadwood vet Elizabeth Sarnoff. The Monster was gonna be involved somehow. We were gonna get some flashbacks to Ben’s past on the Island. Probably a lot of mythology stuff would be revealed, probably something involving the Temple. The two best actors on the show were going to get a showcase. You’d get payoff for Ben’s murder of Locke. And on and on and on. In the words of Todd Van Der Werff last week, “If that is not the greatest episode in the history of television, it will be a letdown.”

* And so, contra Todd this week, I think it was a letdown. Not a huge one or anything–it just wasn’t THE BEST EPISODE EVAR, nor even the best episode of the season, nor in my view even one of the best episodes of the season. It was just good, very good at times but not at all times.

* The big problem, for me, is Ben. Listen, I think Ben is one of the all-time great television characters, and I think Michael Emerson is serving up one of the all-time great television performances. As I’ve said in the past, compare and contrast the mid-season-two emergence of Emerson’s Ben as the show’s Big Bad with that of Kenneth Welsh’s Windom Earle in Twin Peaks and you can see how the former show basically became what it was to become with the character/actor/antagonist’s introduction while the latter gave up the ghost.

But I think you run into difficult, dangerous territory as storytellers when one of your main characters lies about everything all the time.

It’s not just that Ben takes “unreliable narrator” to soaring new heights when it comes to doling out information about the Island/Others mythology, both because he’s the show’s primary source on that score and because he just lies his ass off constantly. It actually starts to become an impediment just in basic character-based drama terms. In his post this week, Van Der Werff points out how difficult a task Emerson has in that he himself likely has no clue whether or not he’s telling the truth at any given time, because the writers often haven’t decided yet, so he therefore has to say everything as though he could be full of shit or perfectly sincere. That’s rough enough on our ability to process a narrative when it’s just a question of whether or not, I dunno, the Temple is half mile inside the walls, but it really plays havoc on our ability to get a handle on the emotional center of the character, and by extension, sometimes that of the story.

In this particular episode we saw that take place in Ben’s separate conversations regarding Locke’s death and resurrection. To Locke, he says that he believed Locke would rise again–he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t be until he saw it happen (like Doubting Thomas–callback!), but he had faith that it would happen and he was glad that it did. To Sun, he says he had no idea Locke would come back from the dead–he’d never seen anything like that happen, and the fact that it had scared the shit out of him. Naturally, given the nature of Ben and the nature of the writing done for Ben per Van Der Werff’s observation, he says both these contradictory things with his trademark blend of utter sincerity and unctuous weaseliness. Which one is true? Who the fuck knows? That’s undoubtedly part of the pleasure of Ben, but without enough context clues for us to figure out which is real and which is bull, it becomes extremely difficult for us to figure out how Ben is feeling when various things happen to him later on.

Case in point: Ben’s final scene with the Smoke Monster and “Alex.” It seems to me that we’re probably supposed to feel like Ben really does feel terrible about his role in his daughter’s death, particularly his Peter-style denying of her. Certainly that’s what the flashback material involving his kidnapping of Alex from Rousseau years ago would imply. Therefore it’s reasonable to believe that he’s genuinely traumatized when the Alex simulacrum shows up, slams him around, and tells him to tuck his tail between his legs and jump whenever Locke says “frog”–it’s not just that he resents no longer being King Shit of Turd Island, it’s that having the message delivered in the form of the daughter he failed and betrayed really did devastate him.

However, we’re so accustomed to seeing Ben pretend to care about someone, only to immediately turn around and choke them to death or whatever, that I spent the whole sequence feeling like 90% of his reaction was a put-on. Obviously inside the smoke monster he’s got no audience to play to, and it’s reasonable to assume that some part of him really does feel bad that he got his daughter killed. But before he falls into Smokey’s chamber and he’s telling Locke that he’s here to be judged for his role in Alex’s death, and after his “this is your life” routine inside Smokey ends and “Alex” shows up and he’s all walking toward her crying and apologizing like Norman Osborn taking off his Green Goblin mask and thanking God for Peter Parker’s intervention in that weird scene at the end of the first Spider-Man movie–it felt like he was bullshitting. And if he wasn’t, that’s a problem for the creators of the show, because it’s precisely at moments like these that the audience really does require some kind of certainty, some kind of true north, in order for the emotional impact of such scenes to really come through.

I mean, what was the point of Ben telling Caesar that Locke was forcing him to go on the boat ride if he was just going to turn around and kill the guy the second he tried to stop them from leaving, which is precisely what the lie about Locke coercing Ben would lead him to do? Unless Ben was deliberately trying to provoke a confrontation and give himself an excuse to plug another potential alpha male, which I admit is well within the realm of possibility, it was just lying for lying’s sake. And I can’t be the only person who had this sort of exchange in mind later on in the episode when trying to figure out whether or not I should feel bad for Ben’s heartbreak when his dead daughter smacks him around.

My point (and taking this long to get to it is going to be kind of ironic to you when you see what it is) is that in narrative terms, Ben’s dialogue is a waste of time. We can’t trust a word he says, so it’s useless to us in terms of both the emotional and plot-based information it conveys. Sure, it establishes that Ben is a manipulative liar who can’t be trusted, but, uh, duh. At a certain point it becomes a character-sized version of the liar paradox: Ben Linus is false. Where can we go from there?

* That said, this episode still had much to recommend it. I particularly enjoyed Locke’s newfound devil-may-care confidence, something he gets to display maybe every other season or so–my hope is that he won’t get fooled again and this smiling, cocksure Resurrected Locke has learned his lessons and finally knows he’s the real deal. Kind of like Gandalf the White versus Gandalf the Grey, if you will.

* There were also some lovely images, as almost always. I was rather smitten with that long shot of Ben and Locke walking on the main Island’s dock. Again, it’s not the kind of shot the show usually goes for.

* The editing during Ben’s confrontation with Desmond and Penny was genuinely thrilling, wasn’t it? The urgency of it all made Ben’s reasoning sound all the more childish and absurd: He just matter-of-factly plugged a guy carrying groceries and is about to execute an innocent woman who has nothing to do with his actual enemy because “your father is a terrible human being”? It seemed to me that the brutal beating Desmond inflicted on him was just a physical embodiment of Ben’s own realization that he was behaving in a completely unsupportable and terrible fashion. Plus, it was a satisfying twist on our expectations for Ben not to have killed Penny, which I think everyone assumed happen and moreover everyone assumed to be the reason for what everyone assumed would be Desmond’s return to the Island. On the other hand, of all the things Ben could have chosen to tell Sun to apologize for on his behalf, I feel like not actually killing someone would have been pretty low on the totem pole.

* So (if Ben can be believed, which, see above) he really didn’t remember the presence of the castaways back in the ’70s. This raises a question about Richard, who has no such Temple-healing-based memory loss, doesn’t it? It seems like he’s the power behind the throne no matter who’s nominally in charge, maneuvering Ben to dethrone Widmore and doing the same thing with Locke and Ben years later. So will the “you knew all along???” confrontation I once expected to take place between the castaways and Ben now happen between Ben and Richard?

* I’m kicking myself for giving so much mental and blog airtime to the “we’re in an alternate timeline because there’s still Dharma stuff hanging up in New Otherton” theorizing. It’s not something I ever would have given any thought to if I hadn’t read it on the Internet, and if I’m being honest I think I did remember still seeing plenty of Dharma logos amid all the Others’ buildings in the past, so hunting for a zebra based on those hoofprints has me feeling the fool. Oh well, you win some, you lose some, and some get disrupted by the smoke monster.

* Was it me or did Ben recognize Christian’s name, and presumably the import of that name?

* I liked how in the brief time Lapidus spent away from the new castaways, some new kind of crazy alliance with its own inscrutable catchphrases popped up. That shit happens all the time around here!

* I also really liked that Caesar has already gone the way of the dodo. I don’t care how many times Lost introduces major characters only to kill them off–I fall for it every time!

* So do you think the last shot of the season is going to be “meet Jacob” or what?

I was in the Kmart in Penn Station trying to buy batteries but all the registers went down, so tensions were running high in the line. This big burly middle aged Noo Yawkuh guy started getting into it with this youngish kid in his 20s and the girl he was with, I guess maybe because they both tried to get on line at once. Clearly the older guy was being an unnecessarily belligerent dick, trying to intimidate them. Eventually the older guy yelled “faggot” at the kid. I look at him and say “classy.” He goes “what, are you one too?” Suddenly I hear “I absolutely am, sir” coming out of my mouth. He says “Sorry,” kind of shocked-like, and he repeats it a couple other times as I turn away–it sounded like he wanted it to come out sarcastic but that he was also kind of sorry that he called someone a faggot in front of an actual faggot. Eventually he manages to add “Kiss him and make it better, I don’t know what to tell ya,” to which I just reply “awesome” and roll my eyes. Then he threatened to hit the other kid, and there were all these cashiers and managers circulating–I thought they were going to get security but they might have just been trying to figure out what to do about all the busted registers. Finally I gave up on trying to buy the batteries and left.

What I WISH I had said to him instead of my awesome final reply of “awesome” was “Your revolution’s over, sir. Condolences! The bums lost!” As gross and ugly as it was to have this dickhead call someone a faggot and then continue to crack wise about it even after I “came out,” I just felt so, so good and so sure that his time is coming to an end, and it’s just a matter of time.

* The new issue of ToyFare Magazine is out, and with it a new Twisted ToyFare Theater containing the debut of maybe my favorite TTT character ever, Golden Age Spider-Man. I think this was the most fun I’ve ever had writing a TTT.

* When I posted about the Eisners yesterday I neglected to congratulate The Comics Reporter, The Comics Journal, Comic Book Resources, and Comics Comics for their nominations in the journalism category. The former three publications have all paid me to write for them at one point or another, and Comics Comics is pretty good despite their woeful neglect in that department. I enjoy them all.

* This video interview with Paul Pope encapsulates a lot of the things I love about Paul, most of which have to do with the fact that he’s stylish (which is to say he cares about style) in a way that isn’t very stylish in altcircles these days.

* Matt Furie has posted a heaping helping of recent work. Go check it out. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Apparently Sin City 2 is no longer with the Weinsteins, maybe, possibly? Expect much rejoicing among genre-film fans given Los Bros Weinstein’s handling of such pix in the past. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Tom Kaczynski draws a Morrissey concert.

* Scott Horton reports that Senate Republicans are threatening to block various Obama Administration nominees unless Obama quashes the release of Bush Administration memos authorizing torture. (Via Eve Tushnet.) Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald notes that he, Keith Olbermann, and various high-profile Daily Kos posts are attacking Obama from the left on privacy and secrecy issues, abuses of which obviously go hand in hand with the authorization and implementation of torture.

* Wolverine co-creator Len Wein, who basically invented the X-Men franchise as we know it and also edited Watchmen, has suffered a catastrophic house fire that destroyed many of his possessions and took the life of one of his dogs. This is just awful. The long and the short is that there’s nothing for fans of Wein’s work to do about it just yet. Robot 6 and Tom Spurgeon have comprehensive link round-ups.

* The Eisner Award nominees have been announced. It’s nice to see them get rid of a bunch of categories, like the “Best Single Issue” one that enables Brad Meltzer to be referred to as an Eisner Award-winning writer, but then again this forces all the nominations for Acme Novelty Library #19 to be shunted into categories for Chris Ware specifically rather than for the book itself, and a world where Acme #19 can’t win an Eisner as Best Something isn’t so hot a world, although hey, that’s a lot of nominations for Chris Ware, which is terrific. Anyway, I look forward to Sammy Harkham’s concession speech when Dark Horse MySpace Presents wins Best Anthology.

* I’m going to jump on the bandwagon with Jog and Spurge by saying that Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings is a rigorously observed, beautifully drawn, painfully angry book that you should buy now that it’s coming out in softcover tomorrow.

* Here’s a fun interview with Garbage Pail Kids artist John Pound, the man behind the immortal Shrunken Ed. (Via Jason Adams.)

* CRwM says “it’s high time for a little elitist disdain” when it comes to horror movies:

Imagine how different the genre would be if fans told filmmakers that every time they were going to kill a bunch of people, they should have a dramatically and intellectually convincing reason to do so.

* Helena Bonham Carter is apparently in the upcoming Terminator sequel. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, but I loved HBC back before this serial homewrecker became the muse of Tim “phoning in the goth nonsense” Burton and she looks not unlike the Missus, so I thought Arrow in the Headl’s choice of photo to illustrate their latest story on this was equal parts hilarious and delightful.

* Beck Cloonan Sure Can Draw update: Becky Cloonan sure can draw.

* I liked this interview with Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan about her personal style. (Via Largehearted Boy.)

* Ta-Nehisi Coates wonders if the dividing line between honest lust and demeaning misogyny in hip-hop and rock lyrics lies between “I want to” and “I’m going to.” This strikes me as quite insightful.

* This isn’t the sort of thing I get to say every day, but in the past 24 hours I’ve come across three very funny examinations of murder. First up: A recent episode of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, which worked some pretty rough chuckles in an episode-long chronicle of the fall of the Cinco Brothers, the snake-oil salesmen/inventors responsible for all of the horrible products featured in the show’s spoof ads. A lot of it is the usual ridiculous Tim & Eric lo-fi/surreal nonsense, but there are also some pretty spot-on send-ups of post-Scorsese/Tarantino tough-guy rise-and-fall crime movies, and some vicious jabs at the unthinking, violence-tinged misogyny of the media. Hiring shock-jock Tom Leykis to play and/or parody himself in an episode centered around the murders of a trophy wife and a prostitute was particularly inspired.

* Next: “Don’t Murder Your Friends,” a routine from comedian Jen Kirkman in which she muses on how the difference between murderers and normal people is that they a) don’t check the impulse to kill when it occurs to them and b) if they’re lucky, they don’t come to regret it either. From there she segues into a pretty horrifying urban legend that isn’t any less creepy for the fact that she’s picking apart how unrealistic it really is. (Via Said the Gramophone.)

* Finally, and you’ve probably seen this already: The Onion News Network (now featuring actual former CNN anchorwoman Bobbi Batista!) takes a look at Close Range, the hot new first-person-shooter video game that consists solely of shooting people in the face at point-blank range. There’s so much to unpack here I hardly know where to begin, but here are two potential points of departure:

1) I would happily play this game–and guess what, I can!;

2) the piece slowly ratchets up the horror from pistols that blow a comparatively neat hole in the target’s face to shotgun blasts that split their skulls in two like smashing a watermelon, but it’s not until they present an interlude where animals are the targets that the gruesome hilarity of it all becomes almost unbearable. If the sight of a realistic, adorable horse’s face being blown in half doesn’t get you, the way the ostrich’s tubular neck sways and swivels like a firehose as blood spurts out after it’s decapitated by a close-range blast will.

To be honest, I’ve been a little bit soured on the Onion since I spent a little time working for them and saw how the sausage gets made–comics fans, if you think your average Marvel or DC deal is unfavorable, you ain’t seen nothing yet–but I think this bit is not just funny, but profound.

* And here’s a good reason why. The state of the beast: The Army uses live pigs to test anti-explosive armor. (Via Pterodactyls.)

* I’m late on this, but I’m sure you’re already aware that there was a horrible spree of mass shootings over the past few days. Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Wong, frustrated by the loss of his job and feeling like a fish out of water, killed 13 people in Binghamton, NY before killing himself. Richard Poplawski, motivated by racist, anti-Semitic, and (for lack of a better term) “gun-nut” far-right conspiracy theories regarding the Obama Administration and the government in general, killed three police officers in Pittsburgh, PA before surrendering. And James Harrison, distraught after discovering his wife with another man for whom she announced she was leaving him, killed his five children (aged 7 to 16) and himself in Graham, WA.

* The International Committee of the Red Cross’s report on doctors and medical officers who participated in the systemic torture of inmates throughout the CIA’s secret prison system has been leaked.

Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said.

Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had “condoned and participated in ill treatment.”

The New York Review of Books’ Mark Danner broke the story; you can download the full report here.

* Dave Kajganich, who’s writing the screenplay for the upcoming theatrical adaptation of Stephen King’s It, briefly talks to Dread Central. The gist is that the flashback/flashforward set-up will be ’80s/’00s (or ’10s, I guess) rather than ’50s/’80s, but beyond that it’ll be rated R, “we can really honor the book,” the usual Zack Snyder litany. I wish him well, but it’s a mightily ambitious book in scope and in envelope-pushing–I think we can all think of at least once scene that doesn’t stand a chance of making it into an R-rated theatrical release–and will likely prove tough to pull off even before you consider King’s mostly woeful track record with such things.

* Remember that bitchy email from the studio behind Let the Right One In regarding the iffy subtitles for the film’s DVD release? Turns out it wasn’t an internal communication, but an actual email to a concerned citizen! That makes it even weirder and more annoying. (Via The House Next Door.)

* Jeffrey Brown has been talking process a lot at his blog; his latest post offers a peak at how he scripts.

* My pal TJ Dietsch is saying all the right things about Punisher: War Zone.

* Tom Spurgeon’s gigantic Sunday posts are virutally always worth your time. This week’s installment spotlights ten different kinds of out-of-print works you can find and puchase cheaply online. I think Tom intended the post to be seen as an eye-opener in terms of the economics involved, but for me, the avenues he advocates–involving strips, gag cartoons, editorial cartoons, children’s books, art books, “cartooning,” and other non-“comic book/graphic novel” areas–is inspiring and intriguing more in terms of the content than the cost. I’ve been a story-focused comics reader for as long as I’ve been reading comics, and investing time and energy (money notwithstanding) in nice fat cheap old collections of, say, a New Yorker guy exercises a very different part of my comics-reading brain than does an altcomix graphic novel or a superhero serial. I’m starting to feel like enough of a grown-up that I wouldn’t feel like I was wasting money by grabbing a few books just to look at the pretty pictures and marvel at the execution rather than get a rewarding beginning/middle/end read out of them.

* As a bonus, there’s an undeniable pleasure to be had in tracking down images that pressed themselves on your brain as a child long before you had the ability to contextualize them, and then looking at them again knowing what you know now. The closest experience I’ve had to a lot of what Tom talks about is when I bought the Scary Stories Omnibus at Borders for $10 a few years ago. Those watery Stephen Gammell illustrations are still among the scariest visuals I’ve ever seen, and the frisson of experiencing them all over again, of being able to pick up that hardcover off the bookshelf in my own home and flip through it at my leisure, was delightful.

Part I

Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love / Banstyle/Sappys Curry / Two Months Off / Crocodile / Beautiful Burnout / Will and Amira [with Gabriel Yared] / Pearl’s Girl / Doot Doot [as Freur]

Part II

Jumbo / Mmm Skyscraper I Love You / Boy, Boy, Boy / Dirty Epic / Cowgirl / Small Conker and a Twix/You Do Scribble / Most ‘ospitable / Born Slippy.NUXX / Please Help Me

DOWNLOAD BOTH PARTS HERE

Underworld is my favorite band.

* After spending the ’80s in struggling new wave bands called Freur and Underworld (the group’s original, more traditional iteration), then taking time off to work with the art and design collective Tomato with whom they are still affiliated, musicians Karl Hyde and Rick Smith hooked up with a much younger DJ named Darren Emerson. Together they created some dance singles under the names Lemon Interrput and Steppin’ Razor, selling them out of the back of a van at gigs. By 1993 they were releasing singles as Underworld again, leading up to their re-debut, 1994’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman.

* Emerson eventually left the band, leaving Hyde and Smith to continue as a duo beginning with 2002’s A Hundred Days Off. After the completion of their most recent album, Oblivion with Bells, DJ and frequent Underworld remixer Darren Price joined the group for their live performances, which are heavily improvisatory. I guess they like Darrens.

* Hyde, the band’s singer, assembles his lyrics in large part from snippets of overheard conversations.

* Perhaps in part because of the prominence of the songs “Born Slippy.NUXX” and “Dark Train” in the film Trainspotting, “cinematic” is an adjective frequently used to describe Underworld’s fairly epic form of dance music.

* “Pink Floyd with beats” is a phrase I’ll use to describe them in a pinch.

* Underworld’s music is very, very good as an accompaniment for travel by train or car. I interviewed them once and they told me everyone tells them this. Maybe it’s because of the warmly propulsive beats, maybe it’s because Hyde’s lyrics themselves are often recorded during travel.

* Their music feels blue to me, whatever that means.

* They’re the best live act I’ve ever seen by a comfortable margin.

* “Born Slippy” is that “shouting lager, lager, lager” song.

I got to know Underworld during my first semester of college, thanks to the Trainspotting soundtrack and the “electronica” boomlet. I think they are my first post-adolescent band in that regard. I’ve listened to them more or less constantly since then. Normally this is where the whole “soundtrack of my life” tag would go, and not without good reason, but I think referring to Underworld’s music as “cinematic” gets it all wrong. While it is indeed dramatic, frequently anthemic, it doesn’t help craft your life into a story of some kind, a narrative with beginning, middle, and end, playing out on the screen of your mind–it emphasizes and heightens the emotional content of this moment, whether you’re dancing to it at a concert or listening to it while staring out the window of a train or playing it behind the closed door of your bedroom, with someone or without someone. Underworld is an utterly immediate band.

This two-part mix is pretty simply a collection of many of my favorite songs of theirs, with one or two additions or subtractions for cohesiveness’ sake. If you’d like more, two excellent, wide-ranging collections are already out there: Everything, Everything, a live album from the final tour of the Hyde/Smith/Emerson era, and Underworld 1992-2002, a two-disc greatest-hits-type compilation of all the singles from that decade. I’d also recommend their latest album, Oblivion with Bells–if you liked Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and thought “I want more of this,” that’s a record for you.

I hope you enjoy the mix!

* New Love & Rockets Free Comic Book Day comic featuring the following cover and a story from Gilbert Hernandez called “Chest Fever,” the title of the Band’s best song? Shit yeah.

* Triptych cover for Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps #1-3? Oh, indeed. My God the rainbow of Lanterns is a wonderful idea. I do apologize on behalf of Ed Benes, however. Star Sapphire LOL

* Josh Cotter announcing the completion of Driven by Lemons and March Hare? Good golly. Here’s the cover for Lemons.

It also looks like I’ll be interviewing Josh for The Comics Journal, so look out for that.

* A new Abstract Comics blog in preparation for the Andrei Molotiu-edited anthology coming soon from Fantagraphics? This one literally made me pump my fists in the air with glee. This is like pure pleasure for me.

* Torture part one: Here’s an update on the ACLU’s efforts to get the Obama Justice Department to release the Bush Justice Department’s memos giving torture the green light.

* Torture part two: Here’s a video of and an article about a woman being flogged in public by the Pakistani Taliban for the crime of coming out of a guy’s house.

“Please stop it,” she begs, alternately whimpering or screaming in pain with each blow to the backside. “Either kill me or stop it now.”

A crowd of men stands by, watching silently. Off camera a voice issues instructions. “Hold her legs tightly,” he says as she squirms and yelps.

[…]

The woman’s brother is among the men pinning her down…

(Both links via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Boy, recent events sure have exposed the lurid eschatological delusions of significant segments of the political and opinion establishment, huh? And only two months into the new administration! It’s not a good look. I’ve seen enough comparisons to the Joker and references to the mustachioed dictator hall of fame that I’m left wondering where they’ll go when he tries to pass climate change legislation or institute universal healthcare. Darkseid and Elizabeth Bathory? I’ve learned from bitter, bitter experience that politics are not the place to apply the lessons you think you’ve been taught by heroic fantasy, or by the aspects of history that most closely resemble heroic fantasy.

* Will Wilkinson:

Marijuana is neither evil nor dangerous. Scientists have proven its medical uses. It has spared millions from anguish. But the casual pleasure marijuana has delivered is orders of magnitude greater than the pain it has assuaged, and pleasure matters too. That’s probably why Barack Obama smoked up the second and third times: because he liked it. That’s why tens of millions of Americans regularly take a puff, despite the misconceived laws meant to save us from our own wickedness.

* Ezra Klein:

As a policy wonk, I think marijuana should be legal, but should be regulated, heavily taxed, and subjected to various restrictions on advertising, age, etc. That said, I think it’s important to say that it shouldn’t just be legal for reasons of profit but for reasons of pleasure. It’s a public good for people to derive enjoyment and relaxation from a harmless and private pursuit.

* Jim Henley:

In my case, Will stands in for the numerous friends we all have who either were or are recreational drug users – mostly marijuana smokers but also dabblers in other drugs – who, today, lead perfectly “productive” lives, as conventional society measures productive. It’s a great evil to waste untold billions of dollars and ruin millions of lives, and end numberless thousands of others around the globe, in the name of a futile war based on lies.

I’ve learned that last part from bitter, bitter experience too.