Running Down the Wind - The Post's great Richard Leiby is more negative about the new/last Warren Zevon album, The Wind, than I, or at least sounds more negative, but his review is fair and knowledgeable. ("As the years rolled on, he released some good albums that not many people bought, and that's too bad. But he isn't the type to tolerate phony praise or pathos, so we'll offer none for "The Wind.")

Leiby calls the album "uneven," which is true enough. Having listened to the VH1 stream now for days, "uneven" is the word I'd use too. I might even be inclined to say that you should pick up Life'll Kill Ya and My Ride's Here first - though I gotta tell you, you should have gotten them already. "Don't Let Us Get Sick," from Life, remains the one I'll sing to myself when the day comes, though the sweetness and modesty of "Keep Me In Your Heart" ("for awhile"), the last song on The Wind, will put it on many sad lips.

Bible or Bigotry? You Make the Call - Speaking of Passion passions, Salon reports that disagreement between the leaders of Conservative Christian and Jewish organizations over the film "is already testing the resolve of one of the most unorthodox political and interfaith alliances in play today: the bond between conservative Christians and Jewish groups, who have come together in recent years over their strong support for the state of Israel."

On its Web site, the National Association of Evangelicals recently posted a statement about "The Passion," which included a passage that rankled some Jewish leaders: "There is a great deal of pressure on Israel right now, and Christians seem to be a major source of support for Israel. For Jewish leaders to risk alienating 2 billion Christians over a movie seems shortsighted."

Now let's think about this for a second. Fundamentalist organizations have become strong supprters of Israel because they believe the Bible decrees that the Jews must retake the Land of Israel. In return for this service, the fundamentalists expect the world's Jews to get one last chance to convert to Christianity before the Second Coming or burn in everlasting hellfire, but - politics, strange bedfellows, you know. The point is, according to the fundamentalists, the Bible says, "Gotta make sure the Jews get Israel."

And they're going to throw this injunction over for a movie? Doesn't that amount to "We don't care what the Bible says, you were shirty about this movie, and anyway, you guys killed Christ. So there!"? That's what I call values clarification.

I have no idea if Gibson's movie would fit my definition of antisemitic or not. (I have a pretty good idea of how many people care whether it fits my definition.) I instinctively side with the artists in cases like this, but the world has not lacked for antisemitic artists. And I can understand why honest conservatives and Christians, reflexes conditioned from years and years of being called bigots of one sort or another, would instinctively resent what looked at first blush to be one more spate of highly-publicised carping by Official Victim Group spokespeople. In practical terms, a cooling of the Christian Right's enthusiasm for all things Ariel Sharon would be a godsend for foreign policies I favor. But the ease with which some of Gibson's defenders slide from anger toward specific critics to vague imprecations against entire groups (Israelis, "contemporary Jews") is instructive.

Ick Factor Overload - I've spent enough space on this site inveighing against what I take to be false, politically-motivated accusations of antisemitism (against war skeptics) that the real thing can be a bit dumbfounding when it crops up. And crop up it does, in this skeevy "analysis" by Mark Landsbaum of the furor around Mel Gibson's forthcoming Passion film. (Link via Letter from Gotham.) This part's creepy enough:

As any Christian with a casual familiarity with the Gospels is aware, Jesus' death was predestined by God and directly resulted from the plotting and insistence of Jews and Jewish leaders, including Judas Iscariot, the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, King Herod, high priests Annas and Caiaphas, and ultimately was carried out on orders from the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Jewish mob that there was no reason to kill Him.

Jesus Christ, to coin a phrase. You don't suppose the fact that "the Lord . . . gave his only begotten son" in the land of Israel had anything to do with the large number of Jews hanging around, do you? Just on a hunch, I'm thinking that if the Incarnation had taken place in, oh I don't know, Thailand maybe, Jews would have played hardly any role at all. But consider the astonishing dimensions of what the Gospels tell us took place in Jerusalem. In the dependency of an empire, the local power brokers who had achieved some comfort and status in that distorted polity were willing to play rough against possible threats to their phoney-baloney jobs. And - wonder of wonders! - local power brokers were able to whip up a crowd! What a uniquely Jewish infamy, huh?

(W.H. Auden, more of a Christian than Mark Landsbaum is ever likely to be, put a much kinder construction on the role of the Sanhedrin in the Passion, and a sterner judgment on Pilate: the Sanhedrin, Auden pointed out, believed Jesus a blasphemer, a serious crime indeed. He claimed, to their mind falsely, to be the Messiah. Pilate on the other hand put an innocent man to death because it was the easy thing to do.)

But it gets worse:

One might imagine contemporary Jews could be a tad sensitive about their ancestors' roles in the plot and murder, even though Jesus and His followers also were Jews.

The sheer atavism boggles. The notion that contemporary Jews are either likely or have any reason to feel any particular sensitivity about what happened in Jerusalem is the sort of stupidity only an astounding meanness can explain. But first:

Indeed, Christ took upon Himself all the pain and punishment for all the sins of mankind -- past, present and future -- so we can be saved eternally. It was no small moment in the story of man. But if critics like the Anti-Defamation League have their way, how much more diluted will this all-important message be?

Dude! The ADL can't possibly dilute it more than you're doing in your own article. The Passion was supposed to happen! Have all the stadium-goers carried their John 3:16 signs in vain if even writers for Baptist publications aren't going to check the text? Getting all peevish about the "descendents" of individuals who played a necessary role in making that happen is about as diluting as it gets.

"Descendents" is in scare-quotes for a reason. Individual "contemporary Jews" are as likely to be "descendents" of those who strewed Christ's path into Jerusalem with palm fronds, or those who were off in Galilee or Bethlehem or wherever just gettin' on wi' their shite (to quote Trainspotting) during the Crucifixion and had no idea or interest in what was going on in the provincial Capital.

Okay, nothing I've said here is not intuitively obvious to anyone with half a brain - it's our old enemy collective responsibility in one of its more durable forms. Now and then it's worth reminding ourselves just what's wrong with it, though. And I've always thought that Christian animus toward Jews for "killing Christ" was possibly the stupidest group hatred going, for reasons that I'm pleased to see you can find in a later article on the same site:

DALLAS (BP)--Jewish people are right to object to charges that they are responsible for the death of Jesus 2,000 years ago, according to Southern Baptists' coordinator of Jewish ministries. Jim Sibley of Dallas stands strongly against all forms of anti-Semitism as contrary to the teachings of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and an assault on the revelation of Holy Scripture.

Later in the article:

"When you ask who is responsible for the death of Jesus, the question has several right answers," Sibley explained. Among the possible answers he finds legitimate are:

-- the Father -- He sent the Son to die.

-- the Son -- He said, "No man takes my life from me. I lay it down."

-- the Holy Spirit who led Jesus to the cross.

-- all of us because it was our sin that nailed Him to the cross.

To be true to the biblical narratives, Sibley believes it also could be said that the leadership of the Jewish nation in collusion with Roman leaders were responsible for his death.

Specific people with specific interests in a specific situation, yes. Plus all of the theological reasons that are supposed to make Christians profoundly relieved that Christ was crucified.

If the Bible had to be read as condemning all Jews ever after for the role of some Jews in the Passion, we would need to reject the Bible. If it were then proven that the Bible and that condemnation were unambiguously and irrefutably True, we would need, like the Mimi Rogers character in The Rapture, to renounce God Himself and accept the consequences of doing so. Fortunately, renouncing Mark Landsbaum will suffice.

Annals of Un-REASON - In one of Justin Raimondo's strangest outbursts, his column today condemns that nest of warmongers clustered around Reason magazine:

God, how I hate that magazine, which falsely claims to be "libertarian." There's hardly a lie spread by the War Party that they aren't willing to swallow: as far as editor Nick Gillespie and his crew are concerned, as long as they have the right to do the drugs of their choice and live out their "alternative" lifestyles, little else matters. Could anything be more repulsive?

Uh, has Justin been getting into Andrew Sullivan's stash of hormone pills or something? There are all of two editors on the staff prone to mutter mealy-mouthed neolibertarian justifications for Bush Administration "security" policy - Charles Paul Freund and Ronald Bailey. (It should be noted that each of these fellows are quite good writers if you can keep them off neo-imperialism.) By my count almost the entire rest of the reason staff count as peaceniks. Jesse Walker? Julian Sanchez? They're my Stand Down buddies. Jacob Sullum, Tim Cavanaugh, Brian Doherty, Nick Gillespie himself - all out-and-out war skeptics. (Matt Welch continues to keep his Iraq opinion cards hidden.) All this is crushingly obvious if you spend any time around Reason's website at all - which Justin or someone at Antiwar.com does, since the week doesn't go by that the site links a Reason article on its front page. It's linked at least five Nick Gillespie essays in the last year. Hell, Gillespie gets linked more than I do, and nobody's called me a warmonger lately.

Be nice, Justin, or I'll tell everyone about Antiwar.com's secret weblog.

Gillespie's own reaction, plus reader comments, is on Reason's not-so-secret weblog.

A Fanboy's Conspiracy of Silence? - Very little discussion in the comics blogosphere about Gaiman and Kubert's 1602. Except me. And whoever I missed. Since 1602 was promoted as a big-deal event with megastar creators, isn't that . . . strange? Unless nobody else liked it either and didn't want to say!

(Sean Collins' quickie verdict: wait and see.)

No Blogging for You! or anyway not much. Tomorrow night is gaming and tonight is prepare for gaming. Things to do to fill your time until then . . .

As noted yesterday, Warren Zevon's final album, The Wind, is now streaming in its entirety from VH1. Go go go!

To twist a cliche, Glenn Reynolds misses the forest for the twigs. After musing, shrewdly, "Put [today's UN bombing] together with the mortar attack on (presumably pro-Saddam) Iraqi prisoners the other day and it almost makes me wonder if there's a third force at work here." Yeah it does, doesn't it. Maybe more than that. But then he tears around the blogosphere for anti-UN jibes instead. That's keeping your eye on the warblogger ball.

Which reminds me, Hesiod's theory that INC people might have been behind the bombing of the Jordanian embassy last week seems far from the worst theory going, and may have its application here. As a "wilderness of mirrors" thing, though, the problem of guessing at the UN bombing culprits goes beyond the question of who dislikes the UN. We also don't know if the bombers hope their attack will chase the UN away, or draw it further in.

Team Comics Held Hostage, Day Umpty-Ump. Eve Tushnet, still not on Journalista's Semi-Comics Blogger sidebar list, despite her having turned into something close to a three-quarter comics blogger in the last month. That said, Journalista proprietor Dirk Deppey has a fascinating follow-on to an Eve piece about the structure of comic book narrative. Dirk: "McCloud managed to boil down a good, working definition of comics into a single sentence. I'll go him one better and reduce it to just five characters: 1+1=3." Then he explains what he means. Good stuff.

DVD Buzz: Suddenly everyone's talking Daredevil: The Movie, since it's out on disc now. Johnny Bacardi likes it. John Holbo likes it not. (Link via Electrolite.) Jacob Levy likes it better than John Holbo. Which reminds me that Sean Collins has argued that Daredevil was a better movie than Spider-man. I don't agree, but it reminds me that Sean's wife, as he noted on his blog, is in the hospital for anorexia nervosa treatment and he misses her. Which reminds me to send my best wishes to Sean and his wife for a speedy recovery and to urge you to do the same.

Salam on the UN bombing.

The annual return of Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column.

Forager23 on markets, information and the practical benefits of free expression. And pizza.

If I Were in Charge - Design Your Own Hell looks entirely too satisfying. I ain't touching it. But you, knock yourself out. Link via Franklin's Findings, into which this blog seems to be irreversibly transforming.

Fan Mail from Some Finder - Avram Grumer e-mails that "I've been saying for several years that [Finder] is the best comic currently being published." However, he says I made a bad call on the Gene Wolfe affinities:

I got to meet Carla Speed McNeil at last year's Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art festival, and asked her about Gene Wolfe. Turns out she's not a fan; got partway through Book of the New Sun and gave up. She may have gotten far enough through that she got "Ascians" from there, or she may have gotten it somewhere else.

I say she's a Gene Wolfe fan in waiting. It took me a false start before I finished New Sun after all.

By the way, there are free Finder stories on the Lightspeed Press website, includding the short, funny and wordless "Fetch." I mean, come on, people, she's making it easy for you here.

Why I Keep Writing About Castillo - Guy walks into a bar. Or a store, or a movie theater, car dealership, hair salon, rental office, gym. Guy gives the guy behind the counter money and gets his chosen good or service in return.

Another quiet miracle of civilization. Whatever the one guy bought, he clearly valued it more than the money he gave up for it. Whatever the other guy sold, he wanted the money more than he wanted to keep the item. The exchange is made and both are incrementally better off than they were before. The item simultaneously purchased and sold may be diapers or diamonds, flowers or a fare, a gift, an indulgence, a necessity. The money exchanged for it will in turn become diapers, debentures, meals or messages, any of the untold things and experiences that sustain or enrich our experience, that make life possible or worth living.

Voluntary exchange. Commerce, the market. Properly understood, it is as much a human right as speaking freely, assembling peaceably, worshipping as you choose or keeping your own counsel in the face of accusation. The right to seek those who will give you what you want in exchange for what they want.

This right too was traduced in the Castillo case, which is not just about comic books and free expression but free trade, too. Because Jesus Castillo was cheated. "Free" trade means free of force - violence or the threat of same - and fraud. These turn voluntary exchange into pillage or swindle.

Jesus Castillo was swindled. The State of Texas defrauded him by sending a representative under false pretences. The State of Texas came in bad faith, like a jay. Among the safeguards Keith's Comics put on their "adult" material - separate racking, warnings, prohibition on access by minors - the most important was this: if you didn't want Demon Beast Invasion more than you wanted the money in your pocket, you wouldn't buy it. A sure, deliberate barrier, albeit one requiring a certain responsibility on the part of the purchaser. His pocket full of someone else's money (the taxpayers of Texas), the undercover officer trespassed against that barrier.

Cheater. And for what? Pictures, word balloons and captions which no one needed to see who did not wish to see.

It's long been a commonplace that the state, by nature, claims a monopoly on force. Increasingly, it arrogates to itself the right to commit fraud too - for the best of reasons or the best reason it happens to have today. It's one more creeper on the bush of government that needs to be kept pruned.

More Castillo - Eugene Volokh weighs in and then updates. He thinks the Texas Court of Appeals may have made an error, or may just write sloppily-worded opinions. He's also trying to get a copy of the comic in question. No, Eugene! Get Finder instead! Even if you're not paying. All work and no play makes Jack a dull lawblogger. Julian Sanchez responds to Ampersand and the two continue the debate in his comments. Julian follows up with a damn near magisterial consideration of merit and censorship.

Ampersand has more Castillo-related links.

Music Notes - If you fire up RealOne Player and navigate to the CD Listening Lounge, you can hear the whole of Liz Phair's new eponymous album in streaming audio. It's her first record in five years; I like it a lot. Mrs. Offering says she's read some people claim "it's too poppy." This is like complaining that Nadia Comenici sure jumped around a lot.

Your essential questions first: is she still a naughty lyricist after all those years on the Mommy Track? My heavens, yes. This becomes clear long before you get to the chorus of "H.W.C." She's also still funny and has that reflexive wryness - attempting to seduce a boy toy in "Rock Me," she sings to him "You don't even know who Liz Phair is." (And later, "I wanna play X-box on your floor.") Do her songs still have the hooks? Oh yes indeedy. Try, um, practically anything on the CD.

She's a lot more than naughty and funny, though. "Friend of Mine" is an acute breakup song, while "Why Can't I" knows as much about the beginning of a relationship. Best of all, she can make married love sexy ("Favorite").

Meanwhile, Artemis Records offers a cut from Warren Zevon's forthcoming testament, The Wind, called "Dirty Life and Times." I like it - very rootsy and in a good range for his voice. He lived to see his grandchildren born too. Does that rock or what? VH1's (inside)OUT site promises to offer a streaming version of the entire album starting - why, that would be tomorrow. Also, a video, "Beg, Borrow or Steal" from the same page.

A less rueful pleasure: You can see the video for Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom" on the same site. And you should!

Return of the Spree Graph - Here we go again, alas:

CHARLESTON, West Virginia (CNN) -- Investigators in the killings of three people at Charleston-area gas stations last week are questioning 100 people they consider suspects in those shootings, Kanawha County Sheriff Dave Tucker said Monday.

"We have 100 suspects at this time, and they're being interviewed as we speak now," Tucker told reporters Monday afternoon.

I didn't like this movie the first time.

On the blog front, John Cole's Balloon Juice has some coverage, as does fellow West Virginian the Hillbilly Sophisticate.

A Fanboy's OTOH - I also picked up Neil Gaiman and Adam Kubert's much-anticipated 1602 this week, the miniseries in which "the Marvel Universe starts happening at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign." It's a supherhero book after Dirk Deppey's heart: if there's a complex theme in there to distract one, I couldn't find it. Unfortunately, I kind of missed them, those complex themes. Having read American Gods and the entire Sandman library, I'm quite sure Gaiman knows what they are. (Perhaps we should enter 1602 into the "case against" evidence in the ongoing work-for-hire trial.) The dialogue is problematic, including one awful stretch between Clea and Dr. Strange near the beginning. Gaiman's trying to freight speech with too much exposition for one thing; for another, he never quite gets the handle on making his characters sound simultaneously like a) Elizabethans, and b) people talking. Pacing is a mess: they're introducing too many characters too quickly. (Nick Fury, Dr. Strange and maybe Matt Murdock would have been plenty in Book One.) As for Adam Kubert's art, it's . . . nice. Nothing revelatory. It actually looked better on web preview pages than it does in print.

Fury is the character who translates best to the milieu - he could almost be the shadowy advisor, Sir Francis Walsingham, from the 1998 movie, Elizabeth. (Hm. Someone ask Gaiman if this is how the whole thing got started.) The Elizabethan Peter Parker seems, at least as of issue 1, to be the most misconceived. He's got Parker's name, flat head and pointy chin, but nothing of his essence.

I was bored. Perhaps the subsequent issues will prove out, but right now I have only a critic's interest, and that mild, in what they might contain, not a reader's.

You Think You've Got Problems - The Jesus Castillo case is bad, but it could be worse. Afghanistan's supreme court has recommended that "two journalists from a weekly newspaper that published articles some people consider blasphemous be put to death.

. . . The 10-page recommendation to the judiciary, seen by IWPR, gives detailed citations from the Koran and hadiths to support its ruling, and quotes from portions of the two articles that criticized Islamic practice. The decision also cites a cartoon illustration to one of the articles, which shows a monkey evolving into a man slumped over a computer, accompanied by the words, "Government plus religion equals cruelty."

per the Pak Tribune. (Via Journalista.)

Afghanistan is clearly another of those anti-modern Islamist hellholes we should invade and - oh yeah. I forgot.

A Fanboy's Finder Find - I think I'd seen the odd mention of Finder on various comics blogs, which is probably what made me flip open the copy of issue 32 on the new books rack at Beyond Comics Friday night. I was instantly won over. My initial acquaintance: a three-page spread of a tribal boy returning from a hunt with some dead crows and being admonished by his grandmother for wasting bullets on "trash-eaters." He's too old to be hunting that kind of game, she chides. He defends himself by arguing that the crows drive out gamebirds, so surely he must have been doing some good, but grandma's having none of it. These are all males, she complains, and "If there's too much of something, it's the girls you have to kill."

That's a hell of a note. I was instantly won by the lack of sentimentality, the matter-of-fact acceptance of hunter values in a notoriously Bambi-oid industry, the shrewd way the boy, presumably the central character, is kept off-center and oblique in the compositions, while the grandmother is strongly framed, and that ruthless and unsettling last line.

Then I got the book home, and found that the very next page places us in a domed city with humans and humanoid animals, flat-screen TVs that keep broadcasting even when shattered and an upstairs-downstairs ecology of aboriginal servants and euro (apparently) masters, all setting up a storyline clearly based on the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping with the protagonist barely discernable.

I was mystified but hooked. So yesterday I bought the first Finder collection, Sin-Eater Part I, at Montgomery County's other great comics store, Big Planet Comics in Bethesda, and read the whole thing yesterday.

I love this book. For those long familiar with the title, forgive me while I enthuse. I realize I'm seven years late to this particular party, but I wasn't even reading comics seven years ago. Some things take time. Finder is a black&white science fiction comic written and drawn by Annapolitan Carla Speed McNeil. The author definitely knows her Heinlein. Unless I miss my bet, there's a lot of Gene Wolfe and Samuel R. Delaney in her background too. Very possibly Robert Silverberg's "Nightwings" impinges. The protagonist, Jaeger Ayers, is a "Finder," a combination tracker, detective and con artist. He semi-not-so-secretly has a lot of Marvel's Wolverine in him - he's a small, hairy wild man who heals quickly and fits poorly into polite society, adamantium skeleton and reflexive belligerence not included. (Wolverine is the only superhero who comes up in two interviews with Speed McNeil that I read today, and he comes up in both of them.) The other Wolverine, McAllister, the great creation of William Messner-Loebs, is in there too. (She quotes a passage directly.)

The world of Jaeger appears to be one of those far-future "kitchen sink" worlds - it's not our time, but artifacts from our time have been recovered, including songs, books and social patterns. People say "Jeezus" but worship multiple gods. Lesbians run bookstores but clans control commerce. The genre can feel like a cheat sometimes, a "future lite," but it doesn't here. Artwise, Speed McNeil has clearly been to school on Japan if not in it. Not to say she draws faux-manga figures - she doesn't - but that she favors stylization over absolute naturalism. She's great at drawing old people and kids. She writes excellent dialogue and her characters are like a magician's trick boxes - they keep seeming to open all the way only to turn out, later, to have some additional hinge to them accessing some further recess. You think you can see clear through but then discover they contain white doves, or something furred and clawed.

She can be a problematic letterer, particularly in the early stories. That's about the worst thing I can say.

I am really resenting the money I sank into Demon Beast Invasion now, boy - I could have Sin Eater: Part Two already.

Apparently distribution can be a problem with this title. Note that you can get all the trade collections and single issues from Lightspeed Press. And by god you should.

Not a Visual I Needed to Have, Thank You - Intro text to an Instapundit item: MARK STEYN DIVES INTO ARIANNA HUFFINGTON.

This is not quite as bad as the unbidden images that accompanied the news, years ago, that John McLaughlin and Martha Stewart were dating, but it's bad enough.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 168 pounds; 34" waist, let out. A slight uptick from last week, weightwise, a slight decrease in waist size, to the extent that that means anything. Still at Level 3 on my personal Fitness Scale. Speaking of which, Loyal Reader Chrissy Rockwell can relate, writing:

My fitness plan is totally centered around if I'd rather be Phoenix for halloween (which takes a lot more work as it's a one piece outfit), or Marvel girl with the green mini dress and the yellow mask.

Chrissy did have good tips about where I should look for spandex body suits. Be afraid, world! Be very, very afraid.

On the exercise front, I just may have largely licked my leg soreness issues. To recap: terrible delayed onset muscle soreness centered in my quadriceps has plagued me after leg workouts ever since the winter. The Last Hope plan I settled on for the rest of this month was

o Ice right after lifting, and continuing several times a day thereafter.
o More protien, including a protien shake right after lifting.
o Work through it - don't baby the legs until the pain goes away. Continue a normal schedule of cardio routines, and walk as much as possible. Get the blood pumping.

This was the first week I actually did three weight and three cardio workouts, per the BFL program Avram is on. And the legs were not so bad. I worked out my lower body Tuesday night, had a shake and some ice, slept, had more shakes and ice the next day. I figured out that I had been getting under 100 grams of protien a day, even with nuts. That's fine for the sedentary, but if you're training you should get between .7 and .8 times your body weight in protien grams, so they say. That's 120-130 grams in my case. I did a 20-minute Heavyhands routine Wednesday and walked two miles on my lunch hour Thursday. (It was hot!) Legs tightened throughout Wednesday and hurt pretty noticeably Thursday, but the pain dropped noticeably Friday. That's relief by Day 3, which is earlier than I've been used to. Friday night's indoor Heavyhands workout was kind of lame, but I managed one. I did another full leg workout Saturday afternoon. Today, A definite post-workout fatigue but nothing unmanageable.

It's possible that I was going about "recovery" all wrong - that doing no legwork as long as possible was prolonging my discomfort rather than vitiating it. This week will answer a lot of questions in that regard.

But you have to wonder about recovery, at least the militant "you mustn't exert yourself" version. After all, send the suburban boy to the farm for the summer and he'll come home stronger even though he works dawn till dusk every day and never gets much recovery time. Same with the recruit in boot camp. Recovery must be a trickier concept than I was content to think for awhile.

A mild worry: a regular regimen of protien shakes constitutes a toe-dip in the supplement-enthusiast pool. I don't want to end up spending hours in GNC wondering which L-Taurine packet to buy and all that. The Myoplex Light chocolate fudge shake is genuinely yummy though. Less mild worry is that the extra protien means extra calories.

James Landrith, who kindly thanks me for the inspiration, has lost 25 pounds in 6 weeks. He expects to lose the remaining 25 of his goal in another 6. I expect his weight loss to slow to the point that he loses about half of that over the same period, but if I'm wrong, I'll be very happy for him. Not insanely jealous. Or anything.

Jeremy Scharlack points readers to an anti-carb-control article on Kiro5hin. It's a mixture of good and bad points. Worst: it's not at all clear the author, McBain, knows what the Atkins diet actually says. Example:

However, even these expensive supplements will not make up for eating fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes. Thousands of phytochemicals are present in such foods and heal a multitude of illnesses. Removing phytochemicals from your diet will negate any such benefits, even if you take nutritional supplements.

There is also evidence that whole grains can improve insulin sensitivity.

Which makes me glad that Atkins and other low-carb diets in fact allow fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes in increasing variety and quantity as the dieter progresses. Once again the familiar phenomenon of the "two Atkins diets" - the actual Atkins diet, and what people imagine to be the Atkins diet.

Next week: Weight Loss for Geeks.

Iraq is still messed up. Hadn't mentioned it in awhile. Here's an acronym proposal to go with SNAFU and FUBAR:

FUBBAS - Fucked Up But Boring As Shit.

That's Iraq news now. Of course, that applies only if you're fortunate enough to have no immediate connection with the appalling farce, like loved ones on the scene or yourself on the scene or yourself and loved ones on the scene.

For instance, Salam reports that his friend G. (our fellow blogger, G. in Baghdad?) got beaten up by US troops last week - "his sin: he looks Iraqi and has a beard."

Salam and blogger G. desperately want the occupation to succeed, but the evidence of Salam's own eyes makes it hard to hope. Salam's latest Guardian column demonstrates that he continues to be, for now, the most important journalist in the world.

Demon Blog Invasion, After-Action Reports - Dirk Deppey had a lengthy and reasoned commentary on Ampersand's responses to the issue that contained a couple of passages I found particularly interesting. First, he quotes an interview with cartoonist Toshio Maeda:

"At that time [pre-Urotsuki Doji], it was illegal to create a sensual scene in bed. I thought I should do something to avoid drawing such a normal sensual scene. So I just created a creature. [His tentacle] is not a [penis] as a pretext. I could say, as an excuse, this is not a [penis], this is just a part of the creature. You know, the creatures, they don't have a gender. A creature is a creature. So it is not obscene -- not illegal.

"Drawing intercourse was, and is, illegal in Japan. That is our big headache: to create such a sensual scene. We are always using any type of trick."

To the extent you consider "tentacle rape" comics more disgusting than mimetic porn comics, Maeda is essentially saying that restrictions on the latter substantially caused the former: the return of the repressed as interdimensional slime.

Dirk notes that Maeda disclaims any intent to imbue the work with the various lofty qualities the CBLDF's experts discerned at trial. Here we come up against some standard problems in criticism and critical theory though - does creator intent mean anything?

(There's also the question of whether the Supreme Court's Miller decision retains even minimal coherence and cogency if one accepts the core principles of poststructuralism to any appreciable degree. If everything's just another text, where does that leave redeeming literary, artistic, social and scientific value. At that point you can claim justification to censor practically anything or almost nothing.)

I have now put myself through the first chapter of Demon Beast Invasion #2. There is more "nonconsensual sex the protagonist comes to enjoy" than you find in mainstream American porn (corporate porn avoids rape fantasy like the plague) - about as much as one found in the pirate romances of the Rosemary Rogers era. Of course, Romemary didn't do tentacles, just rakehells.

A Fanboy's Question Question Answered - Team Comics^® pitches in to tell me just how didactic Steve Ditko's Objectivist comics were. See

Franklin Harris
Forager23
The Wild Bunch
Johnny Bacardi

Bruce Baugh e-mails

I've read some of the Mr. A and Question pieces in a Fantagraphics album from back when, and yes, they are preachy even by Silver Age standards. Or rather they're about as preachy as O'Neill/Adams and the like, but there's often nothing else. There's just enough action to set up the dialogue, and then it's all dialogue, and a couple of blows at the end. The rhythm is like one of those Golden Age JLA or Silver Age LSH stories where the team splits up into three groups and each one has a fight, and then they all team up for the fight and the end, except there's a speech or an exchange of speeches instead of a fight.

Kevin Maroney said he would post his own thoughts to his LiveJournal this weekend, which is still in progress. (In the meantime, he has an interesting consideration of the esthetics of science fiction on film and an account of last Sunday's Whisperado show/mini-blogfest.)

If I missed anyone, let me know, please.

Fox-y Bloggy - This site will be Fair and Balanced through today, demonstrating that, despite what you may have read on Blah3, it's not just left-wing bloggers who have taken up the F&B cause.