Seriously! If you already voted, then don’t vote because that’s illegal and stuff. But otherwise you should totally go vote! Get in line if you have to! Voting is important!

In the meantime, although I of course recommend you vote for Barack Obama, if you cannot bring yourself to vote for him, I heartily recommend Jeff Boss for the Presidency. Despite the fact that Mr. Boss is clearly a sort of a crazy person, his platform still manages to be better and more specific than John McCain’s.

And if you don’t want to vote for a man you’ve never seen, you can see him rocking the “suit and baseball cap” combo outfit on his Senate campaign page. Yes, Jeff Boss is running for both President and Senator of New Jersey at the same time! That is because Jeff Boss has work ethic, man.

(via MetaFilter)

From The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis #34.

Never try to start reading a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comic halfway through. It will only lead to sorrow.

(this post by non-MGK author Dan Solomon)

Yesterday in Seattle, a man drove his pickup truck onto his friend’s roof because "he got a wild hair".

I know some of y’all might be quick to judge the man in question because, okay, that’s really stupid, but I want to hang out with him, like, twice a month. I want to go watch cover bands with him and drive thru Taco Cabana at 3am. He’s like a real-life Jim Anchower, and America needs more like him. I bet he’s the most fun uncle ever.

Also, it’s often said that the key to good journalism is detail. The fact that this guy was listening to the Spin Doctors as he drove onto the roof makes me love him entirely. Do you think he was air guitar-ing or playing the drums on the steering wheel as he went? Was it Pocketful of Kryptonite or is he the sort of fan who keeps a copy of 2005’s comeback album, Nice Talking To Me, in the cab at all times?

Also, how is none of this on YouTube? If he’s half as good on camera as he sounds on paper, we need to give him his own reality show.

This year’s Republican Party platform includes support for abolishing adjusting for inflation when accounting for the federal budget.

In short: the Republican Party officially wants to pretend that inflation doesn’t exist.

Sigh.

X-posted to Say It With Pie.

When it’s being used as a comparator-slash-lesson by real estate salespeople.

It’s not every country that will knight a penguin.

1. Expecting that the follow-up to The Dark Knight is going to be a film adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns.
Michael Doran had a piece on Newsarama that started some of conversation about how the logical sequel to The Dark Knight would have to be an adaptation of Miller’s mini-series, in order to complete the three-act structure of the films. Which makes a little bit of sense, if you say it in a really authoritative voice (or, maybe, if you can mimic Bale’s bat-growl), but is actually kinda silly. One, the Nolan pictures aren’t a trilogy and don’t need to be. Two, one of the main things that made them work is the cast, which would have to be dumped entirely in order to skip ahead twenty years. And three, everything that makes The Dark Knight Returns work doesn’t exist for this version of Batman.

See, the thing that makes The Dark Knight Returns effective is the idea that, after a spectacular crime-fighting career, explored over decades of stories in the various Batman titles, he left an indelible mark on Gotham City and cast a huge shadow that’s still felt decades after his retirement. His return is a huge deal, something that rattles Gotham to its core.

But the Batman hasn’t had that kind of career in the Nolan pictures. He’s been at it for maybe a year, if you figure that he hadn’t caught the Scarecrow yet and Wayne Manor hasn’t been rebuilt after the first movie (just enough time for Rachel Dawes to change the way she looks entirely), and if he were to suddenly vanish, twenty years later it’d be, "oh, remember when there was a guy who dressed like a bat and fought crime for a couple months a really long time ago? That was fucked up." You have to have the context of Batman as a legendary figure who changed the city forever for his return to be a big deal. Otherwise, he’d be running around opening shopping malls and struggling to get press. Twenty years is a long time.

And you can’t just set it earlier, maybe five years down the line, when his name’s still familiar and you can keep the cast, because it wouldn’t have any real impact. It’d be like Jay-Z coming out of retirement a couple years after The Black Album and underwhelming everybody. People would think he just, like, got busy and forgot to fight crime for a while.

And all of this leaves aside the fact that most of the major characters in The Dark Knight Returns don’t even exist in Nolan’s films. There’s no Robin, no Catwoman, no Superman, no Ronald Reagan… You’re left with old-guy Batman beating up old-guy Joker. There’s no point. The Dark Knight is hurtling toward half a billion dollars at the box office- there’s going to be a sequel, and it’s going to be pretty conventional. It’ll star Christian Bale as Batman in that nebulous late-20’s/early-30’s stage, he’ll fight a villain who hasn’t been in the series yet, and it’ll make another gazillion dollars.

2. Spamming LiveJournal political discussion groups with vaguely-coherent rants intended to convince people that their stereotypes of Russia are wrong.
So, like, Russia fought a war this weekend, and it was backed up by a dedicated set of blogging troops, out to win the war over the hearts and minds of the people of the world. Mostly on LiveJournal, because LiveJournal is owned by a Russian company and is the number one blogging service in the country. And those bloggers wanted the rest of the world to know that their troops were peacekeeping forces out to stop the genocidal Georgians from slaughtering the South Ossetians at George Bush’s command. But if you’re trying to convince the world that Russians are not the propaganda-spouting antagonists that much of the Western world has seen them as, spouting propaganda about the "peacemakers" actually serves to work contrary to your point.

And while it’s frankly delightful to see the nuttier online conservatives get a chance to kick it like it’s the 80’s again with big bad Russia as the enemy- seriously, it’s like the online political ranting equivalent of the Police’s reunion tour, playing venues that didn’t even exist when they were on the charts- I do feel it’s probably necessary to remind right-wing bloggers who are unable to see any amount of nuance in a situation like the one between Russia and Georgia that neither side is the hero or the villain, because it’s the real world and that shit is complex. So while I hesitate to interfere at all with their Red Dawn fantasies ("Wolveriiiiiiiiiiines!"), it’s probably for the best that this whole thing seems to have come to a relatively stable conclusion, at least until the next one.

3. Releasing an iPhone app for $1,000 called I Am Rich.
Well, mostly it’s just in bad taste, but boy, is it in bad taste. Like you’re not conspicuously consuming enough just by waving your iPhone around, you need to have a useless application to prove how little you value money? That dude should have created one called I Am Feeding Starving Children and donated the money to charity if he wanted to get his name in the news. At least then it might have been good press. 

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)

EDIT TO ADD: You know, I am horribly shocked that nobody here seems to know about Best Of Craigslist, which is how you find about things like this guy, or the guy who wants to lease out his banana slugs, or especially the guy who wants to fuck a girl while she plays Super Mario Brothers and come during the fireworks at the end of the level.

I am about to invent a new drink, or possibly bake a very oddly shaped cake. I shall call it “Death by Saturn”. Fudge will be involved somewhere, although where I shall procure it on a Friday night in the middle of the crime-ridden ghetto I call home I am uncertain.

Part of my job involves keeping on top of the latest news in astronomy, and as such sometimes I get to hear about a lot of very unusual developments in the field. Some of it is cutting edge science, and some if it… well, it’s good for a laugh.

This conspiracy theory has been doing the rounds for a year or so, but it has been resurfacing again lately. It originated with this essay.

It suggests that NASA’s Cassini project, which involves a probe orbiting and documenting Saturn and its moons, will conclude in a deadly final act – NASA will plummet the probe into Saturn, where it will detonate and ignite the planet in a glory of nuclear fusion.

Saturn becomes a new sun, frying Earth in the process – but providing the potential of new life on one of its moons for those with plans to escape and found a New World Order.

It is called “The Lucifer Project”.

Serving suggestion

Cassini’s four year mission reached its conclusion this month, which is why all the crazy is popping up on the internet again. HEAD TO THE HIGHLANDS, DOOM WILL SPARE NONE!

I could attempt to debunk Project Lucifer myself, but Ian O’Neil at Universe Today has already done a sterling job.

NASA appears to have no plans to Lucifer it up a notch; in fact they recently announced that while Cassini’s original mission has come to an end, they now intend to begin another mission, to study Titan and Enceladus in even greater depth.

I’m curious, collective internet-brain – has a story involving something like Project Lucifer appeared in anything you’ve read over the years? I have a sneaking suspicion that I have seen this very plot in a comic or short story previously, but I can’t put my finger on it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to do some science. With self-raising flour. And an ice-cream scoop.

(FYI: The image in this article is an artist’s impression of Galileo burning up when falling into the Jovian atmosphere (the conspiracy nuts say this was NASA’s first attempt to create a new sun) by David A Hardy)

This has been a guest post by Wendy White, not MGK (some people seemed confused in the comments of Will’s last article). Honestly, would MGK need to ask people where that plot was lifted from? HE PROBABLY WROTE IT.

You can find Wendy at Solar Whelk, hiding from the REAL oncoming apocalypse which involves magnetised hammers, Bruce Willis and an episode of The Days of Our Lives.

Jesus Christ are purity balls creepy.

To the fine folks of Muslims Against Sharia (located in the well-known Islamic enclave of Omaha, Nebraska – not that I am questioning their Islamic credentials, because god knows if there’s one thing moderate Muslims like doing, it’s defending Michael Savage). They’ve seen fit to issue a drive-by comment, reprimanding all of us who might believe that Omar Khadr be given such trivialities as “due process” and “an actual trial.”

And yes, it is a shame that Sgt. Christopher Speer was killed in Afghanistan. I mean, sure, the “eyewitness” accounts of Omar Khadr killing Sgt. Speer with a grenade might have been tampered with and were uncertain in the first place, but we know that Khadr’s father was definitively a bad person and most of his family aren’t pleasant either, so it’s obvious that he too is a bad person. It’s genetics, you see.

So welcome, Muslims (Definitely Not White Conservatives, Actual Muslims) Against Sharia! We hope you have a lot of fun here.