OF A GOLDEN AGE

. . . Really?:

The slightly insane but entertaining zenith of this cheesy melodrama was the 1985 publication of the graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, a morality play about racial discrimination in which passages from the Bible are quoted and the leader of the X-Men, Professor X, is crucified on top of the World Trade Center.

From the aptly titled “Wolverine is Ridiculous,” today on Slate.

Selections of this article are making me laugh like a crazy person.

According to his new biography, Wolverine has been, at various times, a Canadian cowboy, a ninja, a private eye, a secret agent, a bootlegger, a mercenary, a bodyguard, a caveman, a victim of the Holocaust, a Vietnam vet, a World War II vet, a corrupt cop, and a lumberjack.

And this last one:

Oh, and he’s saddled with five children. (One died in utero, one is an evil clone.)

Oh, Rands . . .

The problem with explaining Twitter to the uninitiated is, well, you have to say Twitter. A lot. Then you end up saying “tweet” or “twittersphere” or “twoot” and then you flash back to the embarrassing conversation with your Mom when you tried to explain what a blog was.

“No no no Mom . . . it’s an important thing.”

“What is?”

Sigh. “A blog.”

I don’t have an existing tag for Twitter since I don’t like or use it (beyond following Graham Elliot and fake Christopher Walken in my Google Reader), but autocomplete suggested “twee” and that made me smile.

In this post you see how one of my newspaper underlings assumed I knew the state flower of a place where I’ve never lived.

Today, someone asked me what the origin of Murphy’s law is. I said I didn’t know, and he said, “That just seems like something you’d know.”

The New York Times has a story on the Kindle and how it affects our ability to judge others by their covers, so to speak:

Michael Silverblatt, host of the weekly public radio show “Bookworm,” uses the term “literary desire” to describe the attraction that comes with seeing a stranger reading your favorite book or author. “When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person,” he said.

I have had this same thought more times than I can recall. When someone you see is reading your favorite book! Or something radically different that sounds so interesting! Andy has this giant collection of really glossy gorgeous food books and I love sitting in his apartment flipping through them.

While looking for a particular Gary Snyder poem to show Scotty I ran across this perfect description:

You have to be careful writing about Gary Snyder, because he’s such a Zen guy you get the feeling anything you write will be vastly inferior to silence.

Earlier this week I linked to Stanley Fish’s column on headlines. Later that day, a good example popped up on frog design:

Will the Real Brand Owner Please Stand Up?

This relates back to the classic game show To Tell the Truth, where three panelists would all claim to be a certain individual and answer questions. At the end, the celebrity judges guessed which they believed to be the real thing, and the announcer said, “Will the real ________ please stand up?”

Usually the best questions involved jargon or industry knowledge the panelists were supposed to have. The major entertainment value was in the really gifted fakers who managed to hoodwink all the judges. One of the more famous guests now is Frank Abagnale, who appeared in 1977 — then his 1977 appearance was recreated by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie Catch Me If You Can.

Of course, the syntax was mimicked by Eminem in whatever that song is, “Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?” And, in turn, by Weird Al in his mocking medley “Angry White Boy Polka.”

Stanley Fish’s new column is an interesting rumination on headlines and the allusions they contain.

Another recent Post story (April 7) concerns a Staten Island pastor who stole $850,000 from his church and spent it on plastic surgery and botox treatments. (The Post just loves stories about wayward ministers, rabbis and priests.) The front page headline was “Friar Tuck.”

Literally, “Friar” is an adjectival modifier of “Tuck.” What kind of tuck did he get? A friar tuck. But Friar Tuck is also the name of a key character in the Robin Hood legend, and in most versions of the story he is not ministering to a flock, but consuming great quantities of wine and food.

In an episode of Sex and the City there is another play on Friar Tuck but it is not appropriate.

(Perhaps needless to say . . . it rhymes with the original.)

Caustic Cover Critic posted on a new Penguin collection in collaboration with Magnum, an international photography coop:

These six books, for the most part classics of non-fiction or reportage, each use a dramatic Magnum photo on the cover, and have no text on the front (the title/author circles you can see below are removable stickers). The barcodes on the spines are a little bit ugly, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Emphasis mine.

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is one of my favorite, favorite books, and the Penguin-Magnum cover is stoic, attractive, and topical. The Perry Smith quotation on the back reads, “I thought Mr Clutter was a very nice gentleman . . . I thought so right up to the time I cut his throat.” The ellipsis conceals where Smith remarks that Clutter was soft spoken.

Detective John Munch on Homicide:

Not everyone has your bon vivant attitude. Lives of quiet desperation can be very appealing.

Jesse Eisenberg goes way back, and he is the best kind of awkward and charming in Adventureland.

Kristen Stewart is pretty good. She is also startlingly beautiful. This kind of role, where she is conflicted and a little bit flaky and troubled, is perfect for the way Stewart uses facial expressions and eye movements — she’s done this very well since appearing in the movie adaptation of Laurie Anderson’s novel Speak.

Ryan Reynolds, Martin Starr, Bill Hader, and the other supporting cast are good. Kristen Wiig, whose Penelope shtick on SNL really grates on me, does not venture outside of that persona here.

It’s a good movie, especially resonant on that existential time right after college.