I converted this blog over to Wordpress 1.5, out of curiosity. For some reason, the front page takes about ten times longer to load in Wordpress. I probably won’t be switching any time soon.

A few months ago, Ryan of the Dead Parrot Society debunked the claim that certain photographs of an execution on Haifa Street, in Baghdad, were taken from close range. Ryan is the online producer for a Washington State newspaper; he has experience with news photography and the ability to ask real photographers questions. So he did. He found out that the photos in question were almost certainly taken from a distance. This hasn’t stopped Powerline and Michelle Malkin from continuing to perpetuate the myth that the photographers were standing right next to the execution. ...

Pym Fortuyn’s party is collapsing, which is no great surprise when you get right down to it. Fortuyn himself was assassinated this summer, right before the Dutch elections, which did not prevent his party from becoming the second largest party in the Dutch government. But without Fortuyn at the center of the party, it’s dissolved into squabbles and factionalism. What this says to me is that Fortuyn was never a politician. He was a charismatic figure who was able to assemble a coalition by force of personality, but he wasn’t a politician. His party had no strength at the core, no ability to function without him. ...

The great thing about weblogs is that sometimes people will write down the things you were thinking about in such a clear and cogent fashion that any need for you to write about them is utterly eliminated. Thus, I give you Maciej’s essay “ Dabblers and Blowhards.” In theory, there’s an entire class of annoying bloggers I’ll never have to write about again. In practice, I’ll get frustrated every four months or so and post something irritated and someone will say “Dude, what did you expect?” But it’s nice to have dreams.

Now, that’s pretty close to being a government. Good news. It’ll be interesting to see who winds up in the cabinet. More specifically, it’ll be interesting to see who gets to be the oil minister. The Kurds want it, but they probably got the right to have their own independent army (people keep saying militia. It’s got tanks and artillery (original); it’s an army in my book), so maybe they gave up the ministry. And what happens to Kirkuk?

Huh.

I was going to watch Infernal Affairs last night but then I said “whoa, Bryant. Cut back on the noir. There’s been nothing but for a while; maybe it’s time for a break?” In service of purging the noir obsession from my system, let’s get the last two movies I saw at the Brattle L.A. Noir series into one post, shall we? It’s especially convenient since they were a double bill. Sounds like a plan. ...

There’s a blog for everything. Papabile (original) is the one that follows the election of Pope John Paul II’s successor.

Warren Ellis said this in his [newsletter](http://web.archive.org/web/20180719030020/http://web.archive.org/web/20180719030020/http://www.warrenellis.com/badsignal.html/ (original)/) (original): It’s hard to do melody in comics. I’ve been messing around with it for years, trying to duplicate My Bloody Valentine or Pixies effects in comics, and it’s hard, verging on the impossible. I got close to it sometimes in The Authority: there’s a point in an old Dr Feelgood song where Lee Brilleaux yells “Eight bars on the old joanna” and Wilko Johnson’s guitar clangs like a fucking fire alarm for thirty seconds, and I got close to that in the second story arc — just closed my eyes and ran with it and cannibalised poor Hitch. But rhythm is easier. My basic trick is working three balloons or captions a panel, five panels a page. Bang bang bang. Five panels makes the page just slightly asymmetrical, puts a little flourish in there. Drop back to four/four. Nine-panel grid becomes breakbeats, if you cut the text back. Half the toolbox is in Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright. I stole all my pauses from manga. There’s a trick they use, that Scott McCloud explicated best in Understanding Comics — when they pause, they whack at least two of the panel borders out to bleed, so the picture extends off the edges of the page and is no longer contained by gutters or panel flow. It says that, in this panel, time has stopped. Sticks down. Pause. It’s the long second in the back end of my current favourite single, Queen Adreena’s “Pretty Like Drugs,” where the music stops and all you can hear is Kaite Jane Garside saying “Pretty Like Druuuugs” and everything else is frozen around that moment and you stop breathing. ...

Part of a government! Seriously, it’s a good start.