Free Comic Book Day hijinks in Australia as a store owner dressed as the Amazing Spider-Man and a team of Jedi Knights stop an evildoer who tried to take off with a valuable X-Men comic!
“Everyone in the store thought it was a play, that it was street theatre of some sort. It wasn’t until I said ‘call the police’ that people started to realise.
That just made my day.
The extremely disturbing story of the serial killer Rodney Alcala. UCLA fine arts grad, former student of Roman Polanski, Dating Game Contestant. He has now been sentenced to death, and is believed to have committed as many as 125 murders.
When Alcala was caught hiding out under the assumed name Berger on the East Coast, a conviction for brutally raping a child in California was not a guarantee of a long prison sentence. California’s state government of that era had embraced a philosophy that the state could successfully treat rapists and murderers through education and psychotherapy.
He served as his own attorney, and has spent the last 30 years gleefully manipulating the justice system.
In September 1977, he got a job at the Los Angeles Times as a typesetter. “They hired him, with his name, having kidnapped and raped an 8-year-old,” says prosecutor Murphy. “How did he get a job there? He was using his name. It wasn’t like he was using an alias. He was a convicted child molester and registered sex offender.”
Stan Lee is being sued by a law firm for non-payment:
Lee, 87, former chairman of Marvel Comic, comic book writer, editor, actor, producer is facing a heavy lawsuit for money over due to Lavely & Singer.
One lawyer from the firm claims that Lee refused to pay them for legal works that was done for him since 2007 for his creations of Spider-Man and X-Men.
Former Pirate Bay scalawag looks into micropayment scheme.
“The money you pay each month will be spread evenly among the buttons you click in a month,” said Peter Sunde.
“We want to encourage people to share money as well as content,” Mr Sunde told BBC News. “It’s a test to see if this might be a working method for real micropayments.”
The price of a “free” web is your privacy. NO, we do not collect or sell info at my websites. I wouldn’t know how, anyway.
Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.
Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.
Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you.
So you’re not just being watched, you’re being traded. The currency has changed.
It costs THIS MUCH to run the supposedly free, information-wants-to-be-free-so-lets-not-pay-the-people-who-work-to-provide-the-content internet:
BusinessWeek’s Spencer Ante got ahold of Digg’s financial statements. They are frightful, even for a startup. Last year, the company took in $4.8 million and spent $7.6 million, for a loss of $2.8 million. In the first nine months of this year, losses grew almost as fast as revenues: Digg took in $6.4 million and spent $10.4 million, resulting in a $4 million loss. At an annual clip, that’s more than $5 million out the door a year.
And sad financial news at YouTube:
According a recent report by analysts at the financial-services company Credit Suisse, Google will lose $470 million on the video-sharing site this year alone. To put it another way, the Boston Globe, which is on track to lose $85 million in 2009, is five times more profitable—or, rather, less unprofitable—than YouTube.
Enjoying the taste of all that free? Isn’t it yummy.
Old news. Wow, I need to clean up my system.
A boo-hoo blogger scammed thousands of readers with a story about a terminally ill baby.
She is actually Beccah Beushausen, a 26-year-old social worker from the Chicago suburb of Mokenka who says she didn’t know how to free herself from the web of lies she wove.
“Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand,” she told the Tribune. “I didn’t know how to stop. … One lie led to another.”
Novelist/jockey Dick Francis dead at 89. This article covers the Grand National loss that led him to a writing career. Also, interesting tidbits about who may have been the talent behind the bestsellers:
Mary was a crucial part of the thriller-writing ‘team’. Although partly paralysed by polio and suffering chronic asthma and bronchitis, she researched all the books – in the process becoming a computer expert, photographer, accountant, painter and wine buff, even qualifying as a pilot for the book Flying Finish…
In 1980, Mary told me: ‘Yes, Dick would like me to have all the credit for them, but believe me, it’s much better for everyone, including the readers, to think that he writes them because they’re taut, masculine books that might otherwise lose their credibility.’
…Mail on Sunday reported that Mary was ‘evasive when asked bluntly whether she is the true author.
She said equivocally, “It is not exactly true to say that I write Dick’s books … I could get him to write you a letter and you would see he can write”. The amount of sharing we do is, to my mind, sort of private. We would really like people not to press us too hard on this”.’
This looks like junk science to me, but what the heck. A study of a handful of people seems to indicate that exposure to luxury makes people greedy. Because, yeah, after one Chanel suit, I confess I want two.
“Results . . . suggest that when primed with luxury, people endorsed self-interested decisions that could potentially harm others,” the researchers said in the study.
“Luxury-primed individuals tend to make decisions that are self-interested and arguably unethical.”
New French internet piracy law in effect.
Illegal downloaders will be sent a warning e-mail, then a letter if they continue, and finally must appear before a judge if they offend again.
Artist sues store for selling “defective” art supplies:
Macias, who said in the suit he is known for “vibrant” art, claims the degradation of his pieces has harmed his reputation and that total damages far exceed $75,000.
“(Macias) fears, as time passes, evidence of such damage and deformity will begin to appear in other of his paintings and art,” according to the suit filed Thursday.
One for the Japanophiles. A lovely story about an American man who takes care of a small, dying Japanese town and its inhabitants:
It is one of thousands of withering Japanese villages. Home to more than 100 residents in the 1950s, Tsuchikure has seen its young people move away in search of jobs and never return. After eight years without a death, it had four villagers die this year; three are in the hospital and one-fifth of the houses sit empty.
A review of a biography of the talented Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Highsmith was all too aware of the demons that fueled her writing. At 26, on New Year’s Eve 1947, she wrote a 2:30 a.m. entry in her journal: “My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.”
Reform movement for English libel laws:
Science journalists and academics are among those who have complained vociferously about the current libel laws in England and Wales, with the case of bestselling science writer and broadcaster Simon Singh becoming a cause célèbre for the libel reform movement.
A 2008 article written by Singh for British newspaper The Guardian included critical observations of the effectiveness of chiropractic and the evidence for the effectiveness of its treatments. A writ from the British Chiropractic Association soon followed, with the BCA alleging that Singh had impugned its reputation.
Italian police uncover stash of stolen fine art in the collection of a defunct dairy company:
Italian courts have ruled that Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi bore the brunt of responsibility for the 2003 collapse of Parmalat. The daily and juice multinational was brought down by billions of dollars of debt in fraudulent bankruptcy. Many small investors losing life savings were among some 40,000 defrauded bondholders.
Sordid art: not everyone enjoys the work of painter Tracey Emin.
In the modern age, we are surrounded by man-made ugliness. And artists, who used to devote their efforts to idealising the human form, to recording the charms of nature and bringing order and beauty to our sorrows, are no longer interested in those tasks.
Galleries of contemporary art are filled with the debris of modern life, with subhuman figures purposefully designed to demean and desecrate the human image and with ludicrous installations that mean nothing at all.
The young Harry Potter actors: a softball story about their future, with vid. I like these kids.
His co-star Rupert Grint, 21, who plays Ron Weasley, says he has no doubt that Harry Potter will be the “biggest thing” he will be involved with.
“I make the most of it and enjoy it,” he says.
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