• The graphics on this one might not be astonishing, but the idea of supermassive black holes being flung from collisons at galactic cores is probably cool enough on its own to sustain interest. I love how science writers drop line like “these objects can have masses equivalent to one billion Suns” the way I might say “they usually cost around $9.99″.
• Sticking with astronomy for a second, allow me to point out a couple of recent hits from APOD. There’s the photo of what should be called the “Dragonhead” Nebula. There’s the video of the sun exploding. And then there’s the one they claim is of ‘fogbows’, but which everyone who ever read Kirby comics knows is a friggin’ BOOM TUBE.
• While we’re in space, I would be remiss to not mention the story about Voyager either having a glitch, being taken over by aliens, or possibly becoming self-aware. Get your V’ger jokes ready and lock up the bald women, I guess.
• Moving away from space, let’s talk about connections¹. I think the first thing that really made the “six degrees of separation” thing real for me was seeing the chart that came with that King Crimson box set, showing how all the members of Crimson were related to basically everything cool in music. From there it was a short step to the notion that all the cool people are connected by a small number of steps. Hold that thought. I know I’ve mentioned my love of Lapham’s Quarterly before, but this chart showing connections between famous people of letters might be my favourite single page yet. Who knew you could connect John Ruskin to Harriet Beecher Stowe in two steps? Or Byron to Hemmingway in as few? And I just love what’s happening in the bottom right of the chart.
• This link isn’t really for me, but I bet some of the audience will appreciate it. Everything’s supposed to be on Tumblr, right? So there must be a gender-flipped equivalent…
• Well, that’s a pretty solid response to anyone who says graffiti is always just vandalism. Warning–you can get lost in that link for quite a while if you’re not careful. (Anyone know where in Toronto that Banksy one is?)
• Once again Hollywood attempts to adapt Dick. I am prepared to be unimpressed. (No, I’m not even pretending to have an open mind any more.)
• I am, however, trying to keep an open mind about the forthcoming adaptation of (former HGPA member) Bryan O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books, despite Michael Cera’s undeniable punchability. If you’ve read the books, you might be interested in a photo-tour of some of the real places in Toronto that show up in the books².
• If you don’t know how to remove hiss, crackling, and popping, from an audio file with something like Audacity or GoldWave, then there’s no point in trying to listen to SCOOBY DOO AND THE MYSTERY OF THE STRANGE PAW PRINTS over at Mr. Kitty’s Crazy Music Emporium right now. If you do, it will take about two minutes to make the audio listenable, and you can marvel at how Frank Welker’s voice is instantly recognizable across decades. Whether you listen or not, you should go over now to experience the cognitive dissonance of Cyrillic Scooby.
• Buy this book. You won’t regret it. That is all.

1. I can’t even type that without hearing O Fortuna in my head.
2. I recently had a chance to drive around some of the less public places that serve as settings for stuff in the books, in a short tour given by the guy who is the real-world analogue of Wallace from the books. Because, you know, all the cool people know each other.

This means that I slept in, and that upon waking I was allowed to relish the rare opportunity to lie about in bed and read something without needing to rush off to something or other.

Since it is a mini-bachelor holiday, the idea of pulling something Playboy-related off my “to be read” shelf seemed to be appropriate. I refer, of course, to the marvelous three-volume collection Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons.

I picked this up earlier this month on a Beguiling run, and it’s been sitting on the shelf taunting me ever since–despite what you may think, this life of temporary unemployment hasn’t exactly been full of reading leisure time.

I could talk about who Wilson is, but let’s be honest here–even if you don’t think you know who he is, as soon as you see a couple of the images you’ll know who he is. I think it actually might be impossible for anyone currently an adult to have not seen his quite distinctive art style in several places, and I suspect that most people actually reading this blog will already be familiar with him and his work. I mean when you’ve been published regularly in several venues for more than half a century, people know you even if they don’t know it.

I could talk about the wonderful production job Fantagraphics did on this collection, but it’s probably more useful to point you to the page at their site for the book, which has an embedded video that shows off the set and some of the feature, or to point you to the production notes at their blog, which has lots of design porn info and photos.

All of that, though, is secondary to the contents of the books. This morning I went through the first volume (“1957-1973″) and enjoyed it tremendously. I’ve picked out a couple of early favourites to show you below, and Fantagraphics has made a PDF preview available with another 20+ images (there’s one overlap between what I picked to show off, and their preview.) If the quality of the other two volumes matches what was in the first one, I’ll be thrilled with this purchase. I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading the second book before sleep tonight.

I think this one might have been my absolute favourite from the first volume–it’s from very early in the collection:

Upon seeing this one, which is amusing enough in it’s original context, I couldn’t help but think that it also makes a fairly stinging movie review:

This one caught my fancy because it reminds me of the small Alan Moore “shrine” I had in the old house, and which I will presumably get around to setting up in this one someday.

The vast majority of the images in the first volume are full-page, full colour¹, but not all of them. There are a few examples of line art, often two-to-a-page. This is one of those, and one that addresses a theological problem that has served as source material for a lot of jokes:

There are also some full-page line art pieces. I quite like this one–it tweaks my Malaclypse The Younger buttons, you know?

And now, off to bed and a review of the second volume.

1. Actually, Hefner notes in the intro to the first volume that he restricted Wilson’s palette, but the images aren’t black and white, or one colour washes, or anything.

You should read the whole piece, but here’s a couple of choice quotes:

If “spreading the wealth” is socialization, our system is already socialized, with the “haves” paying for the “have-nots” by a tax on the wealthier group. This explains a $15 aspirin, $10,000 to $15,000 antibiotic bills, and bills for heart surgery of $250,000 or more.

We resist “socialized medicine” from the federal government while oblivious that we have embraced socialized medicine delivered -after profits – by the insurance industry.

or

Rationing of medical care in a non-profit system should be based on society defining what services should be provided, not on restricting care on the basis of income, as in a profit based system.

or

Unless personal selfishness can be refocused to the common good, health care in the United States will remain with irrational rationing and inappropriate and financially unsustainable socialization by insurance, drug and medical supply industries

The other aspect of the debate I can’t believe is how the “socialist” label is used as a mindless scare tactic. I mean, as a good Canadian I don’t see what’s wrong with socialism anyway, but there’s something particularly hypocritical in the apparent American attitude towards the notion of socialism…

(click here to view)

Matt Wuerker Politico.com Nov 12, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

What you’re seeing there is the first panel from a strip in Feiffer’s Explainers. Click to read the rest of the strip.

Then marvel at how exactly on point is appears to be for the current world (OK, that reference to the Soviets needs to point to China or somewhere, but setting that aside), considering that it was published in 1960–almost 40 years ago.

I had to look this up for a discussion today, and decided to share it with you guys. Go buy the book!

• Did you see the story about the scientists who unfroze the blob of 120,000 year old life in the Arctic? I can’t do my usual thing of making the news sound like a creepy SF or Lovecraftian story, since the actual article takes core of that–especially the bit about how the scientists think “their laboratory revenant may be related to indestructible super-aliens”. Hell, why not just call them shoggoths?
• I see where science has invented an even blacker black than the last blackest black. I am totally ready for this to become productized as fuligin, so that I can start buying some T-shirts.
• I’ve never been even vaguely interested in cigarettes, but I do like these ads from the 60s–they are kind of like the boiled down essence of advertising to men. I particularly like the last one, as it plays into my whole book thing.
• I kind of feel sorry for Paul Krugman–he keeps thinking it’s possible for the populace, and the pedagogues, to learn from history. And, all Obama’s apparent skill aside, I suspect he’s doomed to disappointment.
• And in the absolutely most insane true story I saw this week category, the clear winner is the one about the unassuming German librarian who survived a plane crash, a fall of over 3km (no chute!), and then a 10 day jungle hike with a broken collarbone. What are the odds of that fall being survived, and the compound that with the odds that the lucky survivor would be hard-core enough to walk out of the jungle with a broken collarbone. Damn. Of course if I were her, I would probably never take another chance on anything again–I’d assume my lifetime quota of luck was completely used up.
• I know it was a joke to Mark Thomas, but I kind of think there’s a serious argument to be made for the notion of an age of consent for religion, at least as a kind of thought experiment. That’s some powerful memetic crack there, and there’s something fundamentally wrong about laying it onto someone who hasn’t finished their mental development enough to make responsible decisions about it.
• While I’m picking on religion, let me pull out a little bit of Feynman. I love his statement that he likes questions and being unsure, but I especially love his snap on creation myths as being “too provincial”–that’s a solid burn, and one that I intend to use later.
• I love stories about “unbreakable” ciphers being cracked, and I love stories about real-world historical mysteries, so a story about a professor stumbling on a historical cipher and working it out is pretty much right up my alley.

And that should do it.

Well, it appears the mainstream media has caught up with me¹.

The Sunday Book Review in the New York Times reviewed the book this weekend. It was the cover review. Here’s an excerpt:

Of course, representing any Feiffer strip with a quick quotation really doesn’t do it justice. His garrulous, neurotic characters yammer on and on, their logorrhea half the fun (and often taking up more than half the space). A mouse in the clutches of a cat shouts: “Go ahead! Eat me! Play into their hands!” The cat meekly responds, “Can’t we just accept our given roles?” There follows an elaborate back-and-forth about established mores, class systems and man’s paternalism toward animals, which so flummoxes the cat that he loses his appetite and leaves. Whereupon the mouse mutters: “Weakling — wishy-washy. I would have eaten him.” And the kicker: “What can you expect from liberals.”

Feiffer’s basic scheme was to mine the humor of social and political blather — to show, in a funny way, how people talk and talk but never connect. In our current age of blogs, compulsive confessionals and nightly shoutfests on Fox News and MSNBC, it’s no surprise that so many find him prescient.

The Time piece also includes some samples from the book.

But, the NYT isn’t the only place that’s noticed. Check out the Boston Globe:

Feiffer’s work for the Voice was genre-changing. He brought adult sensibilities into the comics, mixed elements of theater and dance with cartoons, interwove the personal and the political, and freed cartoon drawing from both the literal and the cute.

So, do you believe me now? Or did I just lose all my indie cred?

1. …he said arrogantly.

</crotchety>

Seriously, though, there’s a wealth of great stuff out there today–no one could read everything being produced, and just keeping up with the ones I quite like requires some effort. Part of my “morning rounds” of the internet includes opening a set of around 25 tabs to read the latest in the daily webcomics I follow, for example.

But, back in the 90s, I had one weekly web comic (we didn’t call it that then, since it was a print comic that happened to also appear on the web) I made of point of keeping up with. It was originally a strip in the university paper at my alma mater, and was drawn by a McLaren (no relation, that I know of). The strip was called The Parking Lot Is Full, and it had a twisted sense of humour and irreverence that often (but not always) lined up nicely with my own.

The full archives are online, even though the comic has been dead for five years now. You can even still buy the print collections.

Here are two of my favourites from back in the day–these are ones I cut out of the paper and kept pinned to the wall, along with the one funny Wizard of Id strip.

From September 19th 1997:

From February 6th 1998:

1. Remember kids, Red Meat didn’t appear online until 1996.

• I believe I have to mention the opening of Knol, Google’s attempt to take on Wikipedia with “authoritative articles” that have specific owners, rather than the anonymous wisdom of crowds. I admit, I have no idea how this is going to play out. I suspect, though, that the way Knol is setup to allow authors to reap advertising dollars from the articles will have unintended consequences of both a spammy and litigious nature.
• Yes, I would love to win an Asus EEE (so loved by Stephen Fry) custom painted by Donato Giancola, such as the one offered by Tor.com in this contest. Sadly, it is only open to people inside the 50 States of Bushland (and the District of Columbia). Still, allow me to mention it for the benefit of any Yankee friends who might not have seen the contest.
• If you thought that the Ritalin Calvin & Hobbes ending was depressing, you probably don’t want to see the ending of Peanuts.
• Today’s HGPA lunch conversation included some discussion of the sad, sad case of a Kiwi girl formerly named “Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii“. As Miller said, people in New Zealand are just crazy.
• OK, let me get this straight: this guy had a blood alcohol level more than eleven times the legal limit in Canada, and around twice the level generally considered lethal… and he’s fine? Damn. I wonder if they’re sure he’s Bulgarian, because that sounds almost Lithuanian.
• If I hadn’t watched the whole McFarlane-Gaiman wars, then this wouldn’t be nearly as amusing as it actually is.
• Not the most convincing argument, but it did make me laugh. As did these. Again.
• Well, now that we can see what’s happening the contest to replace the Hockey Night In Canada theme, I’m torn between my desire to support the classic theme, and my desire to see what would happen if Hockey Scores wins the contest. What if 30 seconds of cats meowing and babies crying did win the Hockey Night in Canada song contest?
• So, is it true that “rising cost of gas + credit crisis”==”less disposable income and discretionary spending”==”the end of niche markets”? I hope not, since I am deeply embedded in a couple of those niche markets, but on the other hand, there are certainly some I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of. Still, all in all, I’m much more Long Tail than I am blockbuster, so if this thesis holds the world will become much less interesting to me. (Of course, I think that even if the main thrust of the thesis is true, it misses a whole axis of Internet driven low-cost entertainment/retail. Things like web comics, Jonathan Coulton, Shadow Unit, or Spreadshirt, to chose some random examples, would all flourish even in the “dying” niche market the author proposes.)
• So who are the people who can look at the raw numbers and still think voting for Bush was a good idea? And more to the point what’s their logic system?
• Why is everyone writing about the fish pedicure like it’s shocking? The whole body fish spa is a lot more squicky, and that hasn’t been news for a year.

And that should do it for tonight, since I’m not likely to top the closer.

That’s a sample page from a book I’m really enjoying reading at the moment: The Explainers by Jules Feiffer. (You can see some other sample pages at The Comics Reporter, or even cooler check out the slideshow on Flickr.)

Here’s how the publisher describes the book:

In 1956, a relatively unknown cartoonist by the name of Jules Feiffer started contributing a strip to the only alternative weekly published in the US, a small radical newspaper called The Village Voice. His strip tackled just about every issue, private and public, that affected the sentient American: relationships, sexuality, love, family, parents, children, psychoanalysis, neuroses, presidents, politicians, media, race, class, labor, religiion, foreign policy, war, and one or two other existential questions. It was the first time that the American public had been subjected to a weekly dose of comics that so uncompromisingly and wittily confronted individuals’ private fears and society’s public transgressions. Explainers is the first of four volumes collecting Feiffer’s entire run of weekly strips from The Village Voice. This edition contains approximately 500 strips originally published between 1956 and 1966 in a brick-like landscape hardcover format.

Here’s some of what Spurgeon says:

His work of this period is human in an unblinking sense, in that it makes you grapple with weakness and foolhardy macho and shallow befuddlement and never dares nod or wink at the audience in service of some sort of face-saving heroism, some nobility of bearing. Scarily, Feiffer also reminds us that many of these same crippling states of mind were those running the country. It’s great to finally read these strips, as uncomfortable as we may be with the reality it defines: the post-War hangover and Cold War flu from which we still have the sniffles today.

So many of these strips are pure gold–perfectly capturing some aspect of life at the time (and in many cases timeless aspects of living). Perhaps even more disturbing to realize how little some of this stuff, especially the social and political stuff has changed.

I read about 20 pages every night in this thing, and at least a couple of times find myself stopping to laugh, or reflect. Everything else aside, you’ve got to respect the intense distillation of each strip. They’re like perfect short short stories; vignettes that capture character and a social moment.

It’s actually quite hard to resist just tearing through the whole thing, but I think I’m getting more out of it with the rationing.

You can hear an interview with Feiffer, about the book, here.

I’ve been vaguely aware of Feiffer for some time–I think I probably first became aware of him more than a decade¹ ago, when I noticed the poster² in Neil Gaiman’s³ ground-floor bathroom. I liked the poster enough to do some research on Feiffer, but it never turned into any purchases until recently, when on a whim, I picked up Passionella. I liked that well enough–I wasn’t mad for Feiffer or anything, but it was decent.

And that was enough to make me an easy mark for The Explainers, when it came out a couple of weeks ago.

And now The Explainers is so good that I’m going to have to start acquiring all the other Feiffer stuff that Fantagraphics has.

1. I remember it as having been there from the first time I visited Neil’s place, but that was probably 15 years ago now–surely Fantagraphics wouldn’t still be selling it after that long? Maybe it came along later and I retro-remembered it.
2. I always liked that poster. I should totally buy one–$15 is a steal.
3. KLANG!

Why not?

More details at the YouTube page–here’s the first bit, but there’s much more:

Performed for us live (at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, 1978), and rotoscoped – a process that traces back the live action frame by frame and turns it into animation. The original live action was shot with 5 cameras – 2 high, 2 low and one hand held. The music from “The One That Got Away” blared in the background as Tom sang karaoke style different lyrics on each take. Two strippers, Donna Gordon was the choice, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make a 5 1/2 minute live action short which we turned into animation. A total of 5,500 frames were caricatured and then re-drawn, inked by Mike Cressy and painted by hand onto celluloid acitate to produce this film.

(via Alex DeCampi)

Allow me to recommend that you use some of it to check out the archives at Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s clobberin’ time!!!

You might ask “what the hell is that”?

Well, in the site’s own words:

This website, now in its ninth incarnation since being launched in 06.1998, is an extension of a personal art collection of various artists interpreting their favourite literary figure/author/character

There are at least a couple of hundred portraits there, and the list of contributing artists is awesome, especially for anyone familiar with modern comics art. The list of subjects is, if anything, even more fascinating.

Here’s a couple of scaled-down teasers that link to the site’s pages for the images:

After the jump, seven more of my favourites, all linking to their respective pages.

By the way, anyone who can claim with a straight face that they identified all nine portrait subjects from the images (i.e. no clicking through first, no looking at the link addresses in the status bar, no using image properties, etc.) can claim a free beer from me sometime.

…and that’s another feed for my feed reader.

Here’s wishing a hearty Merry Christmas to everyone who reads Homo Sum.

(The image above links to a wall-paper sized version. It’s from here originally.)

And why are they so apposite and topical?

(click to see the full strips)

I can’t help myself–one of the things that completely crack through my stern and manly¹ exterior is the “uniformed old men with dignity” thing. I see that guy, who’s probably a hundred years old, clearly making a conscious effort to maintain his rigid posture² and wearing even the simplest uniform with such unassailable dignity, and I just melt.

When I go to Remembrance Day ceremonies, I try to go to the ones held by currently serving military (in Halifax this means going to the ones at the Memorial rather than the ones at the Cenotaph) just so that I don’t see the surviving veterans making the effort to memorialize their comrades–I have been known to be reduced to tears³ just by seeing this kind of thing on television.

Anyway, this got me thinking about what other things are capable of sneaking through my security and puncturing my emotional Achilles’ Heel.

There are lots of things that can get a smile or an “Awww” out of me⁴, ranging from little kids meeting parents at the airport through to elderly couples holding hands on their walks, but I’m not talking about that stuff. I’m talking about the stuff that can actually reduce me to tears.

Other than the above mentioned thing, there were traditionally only three things that could dependably do this:

1. Self-sacrifice by innocents, typically including children or animals.
2. Children being placed in frightening or tragic situations that they are incapable of understanding
3. Children shouldering responsibility that is “beyond their years”

So, if the family dog falls into the river while saving the kids, that could get me. A child finding a dead parent and thinking they were asleep, and trying to wake them while becoming more and more scared, would definitely get me. The end of Old Yeller definitely gets me.

It’s interesting to me that all of these things relate, in one way or another, to innocence and the loss thereof. Apparently that area is my Achilles Heel. I wonder what that’s about. (I do note that one of the few things that a Manly Man is traditionally allowed to cry over is the death of a pet, particularly a dog. There’s got to be some connection.)

(Since becoming a parent there are other things I can’t deal with, including basically any story where we see a parent’s grief at something happening to a child–ER, and the dead baby of the week is right out–but this is fairly balanced by having much more complex reactions to all kinds of other works. A startling example is Joyce‘s Smoking Poppy, which is a completely different read as a parent than it was before.)

Knowing this about myself, I am usually capable of preparing myself for emotional reactions, since it is rarely a surprise that you run into these kinds of things in entertainment. Occasionally, though, I get blind-sided.

For instance, I have been watching a lot of animated movies lately, since I try to fill Sarah’s 15-minutes-a-day of TV time with a cycle of movies and cartoons (this is my plan to avoid the traditional problem of kids wanting to watch the same thing over and over again). Most of these are films I’ve seen before (many when I was a kid), although I have also run into some gems that I somehow overlooked. I just ran into one of those gems, which functioned as essentially the Perfect Storm for my weaknesses, and I was completely unprepared for it.

I don’t know how I managed to avoid seeing, or even knowing anything about The Iron Giant until this recent viewing, but man, there is nothing quite as embarrassing as watching a movie with your three year old daughter and having her turn to you and ask why you are crying like a little baby⁵.

We have the giant, who is functioning effectively as just as much of an innocent as any child or animal. We place him in a situation where he doesn’t understand what’s happening, or why he’s being attacked, we have him overcome his instinctual reactions and then decide to sacrifice himself to save the very people who were attacking him… And you know, I was actually OK though all of that. Right up until the “Superman!” moment.

And then I lost it.

1. Yes, I am totally serious. I am a manly man. If something can even manage to cut my steel-hard skin, I bleed 100% pure testosterone.
2. I’ve never stood that straight. And that’s with steel-hard skin to hold me up!
3. Quiet, manly tears, natch.
4. Remember, despite what you are reading here, I am definitely a Real Man. (I do like the occasional quiche, though.)
5. A stoic, manly, baby, of course.

Yes, that’s correct. Apparently there is a BaldGuyz corporation making products just for… well, “bald guys”. As time goes by I am falling more and more into their target audience.

I think these boxes look pretty funny though.

* * *

I wouldn’t actually buy BaldGuyz products, but as an engineer I think I am duty-bound to actually buy these things as soon as they become available around here:

Nexcare 3M Duct Tape Bandages are bandages made to look and feel like real duct tape. The packaging says they provide “heavy-duty protection for minor cuts and scrapes”, and are longer in length to accomodate the meatier fingers of a workin’ man.

(from Strange New Products).

I think their slogan should be “It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds you together!”, but that might only work with relatively small segment of the population.

This would be a great product for a manly man who fell through a window opening while installing a window, onto a ladder covered with broken glass (from the not-quite-installed window), and then rolled down a brick wall to land in a pile of broken glass.

* * *

Back in April I was already excited about the pending release of Justina Robson‘s new book Living Next Door To The God Of Love. I’m still waiting, with some anticipation, for that one.

I got some additional anticipation today when I learned that Pyr are planning to release Robson’s first two books Silver Screen and Mappa Mundi into the North American market. Since reading–and greatly enjoying–Natural History (on a recommendation from Gwenda) I have had it on my to-do list to track down those earlier books in their original UK editions, but no easy opportunity had presented itself. Now I don’t have to do that. They’re coming to me. Yay.

* * *

I shall have my complete Calvin & Hobbes on Tuesday.

* * *

I must be getting dumber as I age (or possibly as a result of baby induced lack of sleep) because even with the big ol’ clue of the title, it took me a couple of paragraphs to get what Dawkins was doing in this new Prospect piece:

Gerin oil in strong doses can be hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in their heads, or see illusions which seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their reality. An individual who reports high-grade hallucinogenic experiences may be venerated, and even followed as some kind of leader, by others who regard themselves as less fortunate. Such following-pathology can long postdate the leader’s death, and may expand into bizarre psychedelia such as the cannibalistic fantasy of “drinking the blood and eating the flesh” of the leader.

About as subtle as a frozen salmon headsmack, but I laughed.

* * *

I did a lot of pattern recognition and image processing stuff during my undergrad days, and I’ve continued to be interested in those areas. As a consequence, I for one welcome our newly evolved compression overlords. (That’s a pretty damn impressive showing for a practical application of the whole genetic programming thing. Now, if they can “breed” a better way of finding matches in that kind of database, I’ll be really impressed.)

* * *

And finally, so really good political news.

The government has been ordered to release the really nasty Abu Ghraib pictures that they’ve been sitting on.

A federal judge Thursday ordered the release of dozens more pictures of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib, rejecting government arguments that the images would provoke terrorists and incite violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said that terrorists “do not need pretexts for their barbarism” and that suppressing the pictures would amount to submitting to blackmail.

“Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command. Indeed, the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are armed,” he said.

You go, Alvin!

I’d love for it to be true that these pictures and videos would 1) put Abu Ghraib back into the news cycle at all, and 2) incite even more people to demand an accounting. I am guessing that there must be people who weren’t outraged by the photos we did see, but who will be outraged at seeing/hearing children being sodomized by agents of their government. (I would take Sy Hersh’s word, but if you wouldn’t, you can apparently check the videos.)

You might think it weird to see discussion of torture, and torture of children no less, in an “upbeat” post, but the point isn’t that it happened, it’s that there are still judges who make decisions based on what’s right, and not on partisan political bases. I find that, and the snippets of the judgements in the article, quite uplifting.

The judge said the pictures were important because they were the best evidence of what happened and because they “initiate debate, not only about the improper and unlawful conduct of American soldiers, `rogue’ soldiers, as they have been characterized, but also about other important questions as well.”

You go, Alvin! Again!

There is, of course, a downside.

An appeal of Hellerstein’s ruling is expected, and that could delay release of the pictures for months.

And, of course, should the appeal end up at the Supreme Court, well…