What I've Been Doing

Ripping off Nick Hornby, or for those of you who don't know who that is, an article from the believer. Structure and order. Man I love those two things. Especially the way the all fall apart when things start to tumble on down. Its a truely gratifying experience.

Comics!

Joker- Sure sure I've belonged to the cult of destruction long before the joker has entered onto the ideological patchwork that is my inner self, but nothing quite brings it out like him, and driving through smoke. So a little man named Brain Azzarello wrote this book called Joker. Guess who it is about.

People are torn over this book. Some call it the greatest Joker story ever told, moreso than Alan Moore's "Last Laugh" I have to say that some of thous people have a point. For those who read 100 Bullets Azz's primere comic series you'd know that he can really make a psychopath into something spectacular. Lono who starts the series as little more than blood lust filled pit bull has emerged as one of the most complicated figgures in the book. Well done. More on him later. Like in a diffrent post. The Joker book is diffrent.

For one thing it isn't cannon. So those of you who don't know everything about batman, or you only know things from the cartoon's this book is for you. It takes place outside of the main universe and sort of does its own thing off in funkytown. For everyone who knows everything there is to know about the cannon? Well the DC univerise is in the process of ending and batman is self destructing so really go take a chill pill. Not everything needs to be cannon.

The book is increadble, no really. It is certainly one of Azz's finest works. Paticulalry the exchange between the Joker and Two-Face. By exchange I mean mostly the middle of the book, when Joker first tries to get Two Faces...no go read it. I don't care if you don't like graphic novels go do it. Now.

Magazines:

Yeah I know they still chisel those things into stone! Weird eh? So I took my lunch time on monday and I read a good portion of the September/October issue of Forgeign Policy which informed me that I would miss bush once he was gone.

Yeah so guess why I bought it.

Unfortunatly the article is right. We might just miss him once he wanders off. One of the things I noticed about bush critics is the fact that they often times sttod unopposed to their hatred of him. It is hard to argue for bush. Especially while he would stand in front of the country and do the speach impediment thing. The thing is though is that conservatives are smart. They know how to lie down and wait...well some of them do. Now all the suddent we have alist of bullet points that aren't so easy to shout down.

The news is partly to blame, and the people who watch the news are also partly to blame. The news believe the general populace is to lazy/stupid to handle anything other than beheadings and sex, and they are pretty close to being right.

My favorite point that the article made is the fact that while Bush may be criticised for not doing more about china he did a whole lot for the geographic region. He shored up our alliance with Japan, cozyed up to vietnam, and started to make friends with India. He did all that on top of starting a pragmatic relationship with china. In essence we have both china and north Korea boxed in which is pretty snazzy.

This is a really good magazine by the way, or at least this issue was. It had a suprising article on counterfit drugs. Yeah people are counterfitting drugs like viagra and vallium. That makes sense of course. However, a lot of these counterfitters have started going after the big money. See charity organizations will often times buy generic brand drugs to distribute in africa to help out the general state of pandemic that is going on over there. The thing is though is that sometimes those drugs are only 15% strength, just enough to pass normal tests for active ingreadiants. Other times the drugs are little more than chalk and tap water.

At one point over 70% of the drugs in Nigeria were counterfit or substandard. 70 fucking percent. Yeah I didn't bother with an exclamation point. I am saving that particular punctuation mark for Dora Akunyili who, nearly single handedly, brought that number down to 16%! Yeah she gets another one! Next time someone says that one person can't make a diffrence you can now call them a fucking idiot. Someday you will thank me.

The last thing I really payed atension to out of the magazine is an article called The Secret History of Kim Jong Il, the man currently dictating North Korea. The man who wrote the article was a teacher to North Korea's social elite and had an intimate working with Jong's family throughout Jong's life.

Lots of the magazines articles are availble online but as you may have guessed they are only availble to subscribers.

Lucky for you there is a free photo essay which is arguably more interesting.


Movies Watched:

Battles Without Honor or Humility: Police Tactics

Dark Knight

Random things on the net

http://www.lulu.com/content/4956212

http://comics.ign.com/articles/933/933940p1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Zamyatin