Who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman?

Just two days after Action Comics #1 sold for a million, Batman beats Superman by 75,000 dollars. Most of the news outlets are reporting with some glee the 10 million percent inflation since 1938, but a lot weirder is the 1000 percent since the early eighties, when either comic could be had for the difference between the two records. And just a mere 10 years after that, prices had gone up enough that by publisher's(mostly image) clever attempts at cutting print runs and driving up cover prices with exclusive foil-embossed covers, which are now worthless. I own a couple, but thank god I never cared enough about wetworks or WildC.A.T.S. to fall for that. Even more horrible, the four million near mint copies of the death of Superman, bought by would-be collectors the last time the news reported on comics, that awful story won't even be scarce in the twenty-third century.

The trouble with Tribbles

I ran across an old star trek episode recently, and it was a lot better than I remembered. Aside from the above, most of what I remember from the show is the crew showing up on the same planet until Kirk fights, makes out with an alien or gives a hammy speech about freedom, while Spock raises an eyebrow and says: 'That's illogical' But it was an actual well-thought out TV episode with good writing, good acting, etc. It checked out as one of the best on the wikipedia page. I immediately sought out one of the worst, which was indeed terrible. But the ratio is pretty close to 50/50. There's such a thick layer of nerds, irony and self-parody on the whole franchise that you'd almost forget that it actually was pretty revolutionary, I mean the show is from the sixties and there's a black woman and an Asian dude as valuable crew members. Sure, they're secretary and driver, respectively, but still. Being produced by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball might have had something to do with that.

It could have been good

This hilarious piece of irony is courtesy of youtube of course. Girl Talk is a musician who splices together dozens of songs in to two to three minute compositions to make something new, he has not been sued successfully so far. He features prominently in the documentary Rip: a Remix Manifesto, also on youtube. But the most interesting interview in that documentary is with Clinton's erstwhile 'copyright czar', who claims that the government had 2 plans for the future economic development of the United States: the first option was to throw enormous amounts of money at making the economy green, thus creating an eco-bubble which, after bursting, would leave the United States the greenest country in the world, the second option was to export all manufacturing to the third world and base the economy of future on controlling ideas through the U.S. copyright system, which countries would have to adopt to get the manufacturing contracts. They picked option two, and now that it's failed, option one is the only possible way forward until nanotechnology takes off.

Scientology is not a hollywood player

Ouch. I had the pleasure of seeing the last half hour or so of this extravaganza and didn't even care enough to hate it. It was terrible and no fun whatsoever, but still not nearly as bad as I expected. Maybe I just have a high tolerance for sci-fi, but I can't really see the difference with other bad would-be blockbusters that just don't manage to get from bad to so bad it's good. It's a great target for people who despise scientology, but otherwise it's a a waste of time. Boring and stupid, financed by cultists, but not incompetent enough. The most positive thing to come out of this is the realisation that scientology, or any religion for that matter has no grip on art, no matter how much pull you have in Hollywood. Great news for all aesthetes, we probably won't have to sit through god-awful more L. Ron Hubbard adaptations any time soon.

Statuesque

Fantastic. Only in Japan does a cartoon get enough respect to merit a statue. It's kind of tragic how many statues there are of forgettable politicians, religious leaders and lame abstractions of universal concepts, and how little of fictional characters. The only one that springs to mind is the statue of Peter Pan in London. There ought to be more. There's an obvious reason why fiction is a lot more inspiring than reality, it is meant to be a story after all. But why this disqualifies the average fictional character form their own statue is beyond me. It's not as if a representation of a 19th century statesman makes as much of difference to a park as imagined. Unless you make a study of it, would you recognise a statue without reading the inscription? I think it's absurd to think of a representation of a figure in reality as less real than a representation of figure in fiction. The existence of the statue itself is an attack on the authenticity of the figure.