(no subject)

1. Took me a lot of scrolling to refind this article on FB, where someone had posted it. (As an aside, people spam a lot of garbage on FB, and cats and puppies...lots and lots of puppy and kitty porn.)

Michelle Williams - Gwen Verdon Emmy Interview

( article excerpt below the cut )

2. Yet another pseudo-psychologist has determined a way to categorize human beings by personality type. What's Your Type Can Make You a Better Communicator.

( article excerpt )

The personality test is sold to companies for $300 dollars, and she uses it for marriage counseling. So don't look for it online.

I'm skeptical.

Here's the scientific article that the WSJ journalist links to : Four broad temperament dimensions: description, convergent validation correlations, and comparison with the Big Five

Which makes me even more skeptical.
( how they got their samples and data )

3. Don't retire early, don't buy a home and don't be a lawyer if you want to be happy...

Sigh, well two out of three ain't bad...but seriously, now they tell me?

(Technically speaking, I'm not a lawyer -- or a practicing one. I'm a contract specialist -- not the same thing. A law degree is not required for my job, most of the people I work with do not have one. They all have finance, economics and engineering degrees, which amuses me daily. One has a political science degree.)

( Don't be a lawyer...now they tell me, couldn't have mentioned this back in the 1990s? )

3. That ART SPIEGLEMAN Article that wasn't published because of how he referred to a certain individual that was elected to the White House.

Created in New York by Jewish immigrants, the first comic book superheroes were mythic saviours who could combat the Nazi threat. They speak to the dark politics of our times.

Back in the benighted 20th century comic books were seen as subliterate trash for kiddies and intellectually challenged adults – badly written, hastily drawn and execrably printed. Martin Goodman, the founder and publisher of what is now known as Marvel Comics, once told Stan Lee that there was no point in trying to make the stories literate or worry about character development: “Just give them a lot of action and don’t use too many words.” It’s a genuine marvel that this formula led to works that were so resonant and vital.

The comic book format can be credited to a printing salesman, Maxwell Gaines, looking for a way to keep newspaper supplement presses rolling in 1933 by reprinting collections of popular newspaper comic strips in a half-tabloid format. As an experiment, he slapped a 10 cents sticker on a handful of the free pamphlets and saw them quickly sell out at a local newsstand. Soon most of the famous funnies were being gathered into comic books by a handful of publishers – and new content was needed at cheap reprint rates. This new material was mostly made up of third-rate imitations of existing newspaper strips, or genre stories echoing adventure, detective, western or jungle pulps. As Marshall McLuhan once pointed out, every medium subsumes the content of the medium that precedes it before it finds its own voice.

Enter Jerry Siegel, an aspiring teenage writer, and Joe Shuster, a young would-be artist – both nerdy alienated Jewish misfits many decades before that was remotely cool. They dreamed of the fame, riches and admiring glances from girls that a syndicated strip might bring, and developed their idea of a superhuman alien from a dying planet who would fight for truth, justice and the values of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Barely out of childhood themselves, the boys’ idea was rejected by the newspaper syndicates as naive, juvenile and unskilled, before Gaines bought their 13 pages of Superman samples for Action Comics at 10 bucks a page – a fee that included all rights to the character. Not only was Siegel and Shuster’s creation the model for the brand new genre that came to define the medium, their lives were the tragic paradigm for creators bilked of the large rewards their creations brought.

Here's the article explaining why it was refused.

( Read more... )

So, the UK Guardian published it instead -- ensuring that it got far broader readership than it would have with Marvel. This is true, by the way, it went viral. By refusing to publish it -- the Marvel Chair made it political and underlined it, and ensured far more people read it. I'd never have read it otherwise. Honestly, how many people will actually read the Foilo edition of the Marvel comics? Maybe 1 million if that? You'd think the marketing people would know this?

4. The Crown's New Cast Describes the upcoming season