V to make a comeback on NBC

“reworked” GI JOE Public Service Announcements

Crazy ‘The DaVinci Code’ web-puzzle thing

Quicktime of Gollum’s acceptance speech at the MTV movie awards

So Sammy gets an 8-game suspension, meanwhile we went to go see a Louisville Bats game last night, and who should be leading off for the Bats? None-other than the last (caught) bat-corker in major-leagues, Wilton Guerrero. Guerrero has bounced between teams since 1997 when he was playing for the Dodgers, then went to the Expos (where he played with brother Vladimir Guerrero), then to the Reds in 2001, then to the Florida Marlins, and then to the Expos again, and then finally back in Cincinatti.

I just found these two great baseball-info sites:

Baseball Library – a great overall view for ballplayers, including a listing of notable events in the players career.

Baseball Reference – a great site with scads of info (batting, fielding, etc), including a player’s salary history. Includes such Bats favorites as Corky Miller and Gookie Dawkins (note that you can also sponsor a players entry for $5)

update: corking is great, but why not use racquetballs?

You may or may not remember me linking to a blog called Dear Raed written by a purported Iraqi citizen under the moniker of “Salam Pax” a while back, but for those of you who do…

Salam Pax’s real identity was quite a mystery — was he a CIA plant? A real citizen? Something else? Well, it turns out that he is very real, and a very real Iraqi citizen — at least according to this story by Peter Maass on Slate. It doesn’t give away Salam’s real name, but certainly lays out some backstory on him and his connection to Maass. Further, The Guardian UK will be publishing a column by Salam Pax fortnightly (every two weeks, for those of you who didn’t know that — and you know who you are). The first column appears here. The Guardian also has a good interview with Pax here.

Justin frankel wrote WinAMP, the worlds most popular MP3 player. He also wrote Gnutella, an intriguing decentralized file-sharing system that became the basis for Morpheus, BearShare, etc. He works for Nullsoft, which is owned by AOL. He recently wrote and semi-published a cool little instant-messaging app called W.A.S.T.E.. It was all open-source goodness, but apparently AOL didn’t like that, and removed the release from their servers. An encrypted, non-centralized instant messaging app competing with AIM? NEVER!

Well, it would seem that frankel has had enough. i can’t say i blame him. i’m sure there are plenty of people out there that would respect his wishes and allow him to write code at his will.

I don’t know if i’d really want to buy a ghost in a jar, but its probably safe to say that if i had one, i’d want to sell it.

If you don’t win that bid, you can always just buy one off the shelf.

Then again, you could just make your own.

Next week — are you a ghost looking for a jar?

thanks to jason (via m@) for the ebay link. thanks to memepool for the style.

If you are a baseball fan, it’s your civic duty to vote. keep in mind that the winning league this year gets home-field advantage during the world series.

Ye olde Federal Communications Commission is set to vote on easing media ownership rules today. They are considering removing the 28-year-old ban on a single company owning both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city (small cities are exempted). Other changes include increasing the percentage of the national audience a single company may reach from 35% to 45%, and allowing a single company to own up to 3 channels in a regional market.

The folks that come out to protest this thing are as varied as I’ve ever seen — the NRA standing next to womens groups, etc. They come out in bulk, too — apparently both the email and voice mail systems were crashed at the FCC due to extremely high volume. Something on the order of 500,000 piece of voice and email.

Is it just me, or most of these rules in place because of the ignorance of most Americans? I’m not quite sure on that position, though. Time and time again, it has been shown that if you throw enough information at a person (or a society) that they will be blindsided. When the market feeds on the consumer (as it does in most broadcasting), the free market system becomes a bit like a meat market. The average citizen doesn’t have the time or energy to keep up with the varied, shifting winds of media companies. I’m not crazy about constricting business to safeguard our freedom of speech, but in this case, I think it is much needed. A monopoly of steel, oil, or technology is one thing — but a monopoly of information is the most dangerous of all.

a simple chart of proposed rule changes (by the way, that existing 35% cap — yeah, Viacom and News Corp (FOX, et al) are already over the limit with 39% and 38%, respectively.

Oh, and Clear Channel owns 1200 radio stations nation-wide after radio deregulation, and you wonder why radio sucks? Why don’t you just go and ask Rocky and Troy.

I’d like to point your attention to the Katy Dixon Memorial Birthday Gallery to view pictures of the get-together.

And yes, Hulk-Hands will always be funny.

I just happened to notice that the 76th Annual Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee is on ESPN 2 right at the moment. yeah — they are even doing rolling color commentary — and it’s LIVE. for every Mike Tyson in the world, I’m glad to see there are people spelling archaic words on a major cable sports channel.

update: i just saw the opening of this program on a replay — and the US Secretary of Education just asked for “God to Bless each and every one of you…” or some such. The funny ha-ha? The kid who won was of Indian decent — and his parents were too. They might worship God, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

i’ve always been a fan of comics and more specifically, graphic novels. i owe this to Hunter, no doubt. i regularly check things out from the main branch of the Dixon Free Semi-Public Library. well, back in 2002, when Top Shelf Comics had there main distributor go kaput, leaving them in the lurch for fifty-large, i thought i’d get off my freeloading arse and buy a copy of Alan Moore’s spectacular From Hell (yes, the basis for the movie of the same title). Turns out Top Shelf was flooded with orders and I now have a copy of a great book of my own that I will no doubt read over and over.

Fast-forward to today (or last week, really), and I get an email from Warren Ellis (via his Bad Signal mailing list) that Fantagraphics, a publisher of many, many comics and graphic novels (read more here) was having problems — due in good part to yet another distributor fall-through among other problems — I, the foul-weather purchaser, sprang into action.

‘What did I buy?’ you ask. Well, let me say that I found quite a few things that I wanted when I was at Chicago Comics with Nick and Hunter. One of the most striking things was this book entitled Ssssh!. I won’t attempt to explain it any better than my link does — but I loved it. For whatever reason, I didn’t buy it. Well, I get home, do a little searching on google for “Sssh” (how many S’s should I use? I dunno!) and “Jason”, and as you might expect, I came up with diddly-squat. Well, I fumbled over to ArtBomb (a graphic-novel intensive review/exposure site pointed out to me by h\m/d a while back. I can’t remember exactly why I went there – it may have been on suggestion of Warren Ellis as there was a free, online comic he raved up. Well, anyway, what should be #2 on their “BOOK FEED” list? That’s right, Ssssh!. Hey, cool, I’d love to own that. Hey, I wonder if Fantagraphics carries that…. Hah! They do (good luck browsing their inventory for it, though. Just put in “Jason” in their search engine). Oh, wow — you can get the original Norwegian version in hardcover for $5 more! Awesome. So yeah, I bought that and his first book, Hey Wait! which garnered great reviews. Yeah, I’ve never read anything other than the wordless “Ssssh!”, but I thought I’d take a shot in the dark to help out a community that I’ve profited (non-monetarily, mind you) from for quite some time. My note in the “comments” field when ordering the books from Fantagraphics: “here’s to saving your ass! good luck!”

Now, I could have ordered Ssssh! from Amazon, if I wanted to. But that’s not what Fantagraphics needs — they are trying to get rid of overstocks that they’ve printed directly. Also, *technically*, Amazon doesn’t have the Norwegian hardcover, but whatever — I figure my support is more direct that way.

You want to know who is published by Fantagraphics? Well, here are some of the most recognizable:

Chris Ware
Dan Clowes – of Ghost World fame.
Peter Bagge

and last, but certainly not least:

Robert Crumb – you know, Fritz the Cat and all that stuff, but quite possibly the reason that alternative comics even have a place in this world.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. Go and check out Fantagraphics and see if there is anything you want, and further, check out ArtBomb for reviews/inspiration/etc.

update: Warren Ellis has summed up the whole Fantagraphics issue quite well in his column Brainpowered over at Artbomb. Check it out, it’s an interesting read.