So yeah, the Washington Post, Obama & Malcolm X? :

Maybe, as the link above mentions, it’s just some kind of web display flub but uh…?  K.

First off, via Rich Johnston @ Bleeding Cool, I found this post re: the return of the refrigerator.  It probably won’t make sense if you’re not a comic geek, but the references are in the post and the whole story is very interesting.  Not to mention all the conversation/thought/paper fodder re: the role of women as creators & characters in comics.  Oh look, here’s the handy wiki page for Women in Refrigerators.  Oh, and the original site itself.  Duh!

So yeah, when I saw the scene I thought it was rather tasteless – but hey, I’ve thought many of the black lantern/zombie things were tasteless.  Making Donna Troy kill her own (zombified) child?  Making Katana do the same?  Yeaaaaaaahh.  Not cool.  So yeah, refrigerator scene.  Check that out.

THEN.  When you feel like reading some more, check out Valerie D’Orazio’s (ex (?) DC assistant editor, and assistant editor on Identity Crisis in particular) series of blog posts about her time in comics.  It’s a fascinating look at the chauvinism and banality of the comic industry. And god dammit I want to know WHERE DID CHAPTER 6 GO!?

Drawing on my vast amount of industry insider analyst drunken guesswork, I suspect that it will either be:

• really good for Marvel : better funding & distribution
• really bad: content restrictions, editorial mucking about in attempt to capitalize on certain properties
• really, really bad: one business insider comment (see here, Dan Vado’s reaction)  I saw suggested shutting down the publishing wing as a possibility.  Evidently Disney killed a magazine they were publishing with circulation over 200k, and no Marvel book has circulation over the low 100ks beyond very special events (death of Captain America maybe?) AFAIK.

Now, I think #1 is the most likely turn out.  Because I’m a hopeful kind of guy.  Also because Disney has a decent history of leaving owned properties alone to do their own thing (Miramax?).  Also because you don’t buy a goddam comic company and stop making comics.  WHO DOES THAT?  Even if they turn out shitty comics with Mickey hugging Wolverine, they’ll still be turning out comics.

I’m thinking that Disney wants to get a lockdown on tweenage boys like they do on girls (man, I bet they wish they had Twilight! hah!).  Evidently Disney has a boy targeted TV channel (I did not know this), but it mostly runs sitcoms (this probably explains why I did not know this – as the person who mentioned this said “boys don’t care about sitcoms like girls do”), with some Marvel licensed stuff.  So now they’d be able to really fill the shit out of that channel with boy-targeted comic stuff.  Because fabricated music-oriented-autotuner-fests just don’t do it for boys like they do for girls.  Thank cultural evolution for that I guess!

I’ll take my giant robots with a helping of super-heroes please, hold the whiny blonde bitches.

Andrew Sullivan posts an exchange from Rush’s show where you can see how crazy he’s gotten.  Look, I remember hearing the guy at a friends house pretty regularly as a kid, and he’s always been crazy.  But, you know, it was a mild kind of crazy – or at least that’s all my young mind could pick up on.

This shit is real crazy son.  Subtle crazy, but still crazy.

I don’t see how he can have any pretense at being any kind of serious commentator, or even a serious Republican…but maybe he’s ok with that.  Maybe he’s incredibly self aware and the entire thing is an act almost beyond the bounds of Colbert to satirize.

Comment #1 on the root link:

So this guy is NOT a republican because he doesn’t want the US to torture people? OK Rush. Once again, proving to the world, you’re an idiot.

I think it should be obvious by now…but people still adore the guy.  Is it just because they are angry?  Are they clinging to whatever presents itself?  I mean, there’s always going to be that fringe, but the Right fringe is getting BIG.  Is it bigger than the Right itself these days?

Sounds like a good argument for a 3rd political party finally…Dems/Reps/Trolls ftw.

When allofmp3.com was functional, I bought many albums at their lower-than-that-magical-pricepoint of $.70 or so per album..that was sweet.  But alas, nothing gold can stay.

The bullshit iTunes price of .99/track & 9.99/album (although I think that is tweaked a little by now) and Amazon’s .99/track & ?6.99-9.99/album is just too much.  I can buy 2 used cds at those prices.  and frequently do.  It is in no way worth $6-10 for something that provides no physical medium or physical art/textwork to digest. I can’t see how the record labels fail to see this.  They save MASSIVE amounts of money on not producing & distributing the physical medium – how can they think it would be a value to us to pay close to the same price?

But once that number comes down…I mean I can see like $2.00-3.00 for old albums and $3.50-4.50 for new realeases, that would be ok too.  Once those numbers come down to something closet to what I think most people already subconsciously realize is “worth it” – THEN the online music sales are really gonna blow up.

Because everyone loves a good deal.

And you, fucktarded record labels, are dying.  So – have some money and survive, or sure as many people as you can and desiccate.  Your call.

Good thing her mom’s not the VP in a re-election year or we probably would have seen the country’s biggest shotgun wedding huh?

I don’t *think* it’s fake.  I kind of hope it is.  Fucking bizarre.

I only add “bastard” because it’s technically true.  I completely disagree with all negative connotations associated with the word: single parents can raise wonderful and loving children.   Good luck to Bristol though with that (now?) power-hungry manipulator for a mommy though.  Then again, I’m sure she’ll never have to want for money, so she’s already massively better off than most other young, single mothers.

Excerpt:

So let’s clarify some misconceptions…

It’s all a hoax.

The lawsuit is very real. It was filed in August of this year.  Here’s a write-up from the Courthouse News Service from the day it was filed.  Here’s a copy (pdf) of the complaint.  If this is a hoax, Milburn, her family, and her attorney are going to great lengths to pull it off. Yes, her complaint likely paints what happened in a light quite favorable to her, and unfavorable to the police.  But I’d be very surprised if the major components of the complaint weren’t true.

This happened two years ago.  Why are you posting about it now?

The incident happened in August 2006.  The lawsuit was filed in August of this year.  Milburn’s attorney tipped off Houston Press reporter Chris Vogel, who wrote about the case yesterday.  I saw Vogel’s story, and blogged about the case today.

This is just one version of events, from Milburn’s lawyer.

Yes, and I made that clear in the post.  After I put up the post and talked to Vogel on the phone, he posted a response from the police officers’ lawyer, William Helfand.  You can read that here.

Here’s what isn’t in dispute:  Milburn was wrongly targeted during a prostitution raid.  The police were looking for white prostitutes.  Milburn is black.  She was apprehended by plain-clothes narcotics officers who emerged from a van as she stood outside her home.  She resisted.  The police have acknowledged they targeted the wrong house.  Three weeks later, Milburn was arrested at  her school, in front of her classmates, for “assaulting a public official.”  At some point, her father was arrested on a similar charge.  The judge declared a mistrial on the first day of Milburn’s trial.  According to Vogel, she’s scheduled to be tried again in February.

Milburn and her family are now suing the police officers who apprehended her.  They claim she was severely beaten during the raid.  According to the compliant, two hours after the raid, Milburn’s parents took her to a hospital, where doctors documented a host of nasty injuries.  I haven’t seen documentation of the hospital stay or the injuries, but if that’s all included in the complaint, I would assume it exists.

I called the Galveston police department and the Galveston district attorney’s office for comment.  I haven’t yet heard back from either.

Anyway it’s Erica Pratt. Some links to bits of her story here and here.