“They ['enhanced interrogation techniques’] did work. They kept us safe for seven years.” – Dick Cheney, 2009

“I fought the war in Oklahoma…I was an instructor… first at Altus, Oklahoma and then…at Frederick, Oklahoma, and…just remember, there was not one Japanese aircraft got past Tulsa.” – George Gobel, 1969

Two months into this reviewing-the-blogosphere thing, and I’m starting to suspect that I’m ready for a break. When I find myself resorting with a straight face to anything resembling the same superficial kiddiesnark that this feature was created to spank, I should probably swear off subjecting myself to the land of comment threads for a [...]

Interesting to learn that we’ve detected chemicals in space that taste like raspberries. If we ever discover alien life, maybe we can jump right over the human race’s traditional enslave & exploit model and go directly to eating them.

Once a week I devote this space to a quick survey of the comics blogosphere, with its bizarre mixture of interesting commentary, bonejarring leaps of logic, childish flamewars, creative spelling and pithy quotes. I’ll return to that survey format next week, but this time let’s focus on a single issue.

Last week, Tom Spurgeon posted a [...]

It’s nice to see how the comics world has reached out to Len Wein and family after the recent house fire that cost them a beloved family pet and destroyed a lot of treasured keepsakes. Thanks to Mark Evanier and friends, there’s now a central checklist available of the comics written by Len since the [...]

The dvd release of The Spirit, Frank Miller’s 103-minute exercise in pissing on the memory of his betters, goes on sale this week.
But that doesn’t mean you have to buy it.

Bear in mind that in these uncertain economic times, there are ways in which your entertainment buck might better be spent. There is, for instance, [...]

Nobody inspired a disgruntled preamble here this week – no tantrums over some famous creator expressing a personal opinion, no screaming debates over the entitlement fantasies of property thieves, and if the recent back-and-forth over how to make a buck off the internet has been fairly zzzz-inducing, it’s still been a discussion in which all [...]

Years ago, when my oldest child was still in the single-digit age bracket, she heard some mention of the Ku Klux Klan on TV and asked me what that was. It was one of those moments that parents dread, and the split-second silent agonizing that followed is still vivid – how could I reveal to [...]

I’m sorry to hear that inimitable artist Frank Springer has passed away. I don’t have much to add to the concise and insightful obits by Mark Evanier and Tom Spurgeon, so I’ll just note that I always admired Springer’s work because it was so idiosyncratic and eccentrically powerful. His influences were always up front, and [...]

Yes, there are innovations even more useless than Twitter.
For $29.95 you can own a crock pot that plugs in to the dashboard of your car. At last, we can have piping-hot cauldrons of food bubbling away on the seat next to us while zipping down the road at 70 mph.
Allegedly being marketed to long-haul [...]