_Queen and Country_, vol 4, Operation: Blackwall

Art is from the Amazon page for this book.

I read this one on Sunday and Monday of this week. I read one volume of this series a while back and liked it; this one, also, doesn't disappoint. The art is pretty muddy, though, and if I didn't know Greg Rucka, as a writer, was a good bet, I probably would have put it back down.

Hated the cover art, which is really a bad thing for a comic.

I didn't have trouble interpreting the art after I tried, but at first glance it's hard to tell which character is which. This is a black-and-white book. The art is pretty evocative, eventually, but it takes a little work to read it.

Queen and Country books are about workaday British spies, and this one has the Service being used to save a prominent businessman from blackmail. The story is nicely handled and ties in with the main character's personal life well.

Predicting the Passing of Polymathy

A detail from Hercules slaying the Hydra, from Wikimedia Commons.

I can't support polygamy or polyamory, but I'd love to be considered a polymath. This article talks about how hard it is to be a true polymath these days. My favorite quote from this though is a sidelong reference to Mensa, which is described there as "a club for people who score well on IQ tests."

Speaking of polymathy, I like to check out Danny Yee's Pathologically Polymathic blog now and then. You may recognize its format from the venerable Robot Wisdom linkpost page.

Remembering the Death Star

The idea that Stormtroopers are people too never gets old for me. This vid from CollegeHumor does that with a twist on 9/11. Found via MetaFilter. Don't miss lines like "You're all drones. Especially the drones!"

_The City & The City_, by China Mieville

I'm a big fan of China Mieville's, but nearly all of that is due to my boundless affection for _Perdido Street Station_. His two other books in the same world, _The Scar_ and _Iron Council_...they're less a trilogy than three books in the same setting...didn't thrill me to the same extent; their darkness was leavened with less light and less heart.

_The City & The City_ is something different. It's tied more closely to the real world, while still being strikingly odd. It's basically a detective novel, set in a pair of cities that are intertwined. It's not just a case of a city that was split by a political boundary; it's two cities that share space but studiously avoid each other. The residents of one city encounter their counterparts every day...but they pretend not to see each other...and this social barrier is raised to taboo status and enforced with terror.

This book has its dark moments, but is much lighter than the other Mieville books I've read.

*SPOILERS*

I kept expecting a monster, alien, or wizard to pop up, given the general weirdness of the setting and knowing Mieville's proclivities...but it never happened. There are some hints that maybe there are high-tech, inscrutable artifacts to be found in the city, tied up with the origin of the split societies, but our protagonist never establishes whether these are real or rumor.

My only complaint about this book is that I thought we might get to find out why or how the cities were split in two (my bet was on aliens from about third of the way in) but we don't. However, I feel like any answer would have been anticlimactic. I liked the air of mystery. We did get to find out some of the secrets of the Breach, and that'll have to do, I think.

_Runaways: Dead End Kids_ by Joss Whedon

I picked up this graphic novel at the library because it was by Joss Whedon of Buffy fame. It collects issues 25-30 of the Runaways series, and I didn't find the story arc very complete or compelling. It didn't stand on its own very well. By the end, I knew that the Runaways had apparently killed their parents, who had done something bad, but I didn't feel sufficiently sympathetic toward the Runaways to forgive them for that heinous crime. There was time travel. There were child super heroes of the past. There wasn't enough to make me want to read more volumes in the series.

_Ultimate Spider Man_ vols 15 and 18, by Brian Michael Bendis

I like what Bendis has done with Spider-Man in the Ultimate books, and I've been reading whatever volumes I bump into in the library. Since I know a lot of Spider-Man continuity anyway, I don't find this to be a problem.

With the Ultimate Spider-Man taking Spidey back to younger days, we get a lot of fun interactions between Spidey the teen hero and older denizens of the Marvel universe. And there's a lot of focus on how heroing messes up Peter Parker's life. Notable in these two volumes are a relationship between Peter and Kitty Pryde, a sequence where Flash Thompson is kidnapped by mercenaries who think he is Spider-Man, and in vol. 18, a great scene where Peter tells Aunt May about his secret life.

Aunt May comes off really well in this updating, as a smart, funny, strong older woman who has problems of her own. She's relieved to learn Peter = SM: "You don't know this but I - I was kind of obsessed with why this Spider-Man was so close to my life. Why was Spider-Man alwasys in the neighborhood? Why was Spider-Man there when Ben died? Why is he at your school? And now I see it's no mystery, it's just how unbelievably careless you are."

This leads to a sequence where Peter retells one of his superhero fight scenes...to his Aunt. This lets Bendis' dialogue skills really come out. Peter's voice is great as he talks about fighting some guy with weird black-hole powers that even geeky Pete doesn't understand.

Peter: "These spots...he controlled them and they seemed to be maybe little balck holes, or little doors of antimatter, or little -- I don't know - he could toss black spots onto things and push objects and himself through them."

May: "I - I can't even fathom what you're talking about --"

Peter: "I know. I know. That's my point. You'd need to be a genius doctor of particle physics to even know the terms that describe what was happening and how they defied all of those terms and laws."

May: "Black spots?"

Peter: "I'm standing here and - and he's standing allt he way over there and I'm trying to find out what is happening and all of a sudden I'm being punched in the back of the head ... by him!"

I was charmed by how this sequence brought home the surprises of a superpowered encounter and Peter's point of view. I feel like comics readers lose some of that wonder after the fiftieth supervillain of the week shows up, and this sequence restored some of that.

Lily and play dough

Lily loves purple, so I made her some purple play dough. Photo is from 9/12/09.

UPDATE: This is the play dough recipe I like to use.

_Rising Stars_ vol 3 by J. Michael Straczynski

This volume was good, but the joy was lessened by reading it out of order. I'd read vol 1 some time ago, I think, and I don't think I've ever seen vol 2. Lots of interesting concepts are thrown out.

I think this is one of those books one should definitely read. It takes place in its own universe and has a single set of superheroes who share an origin and are all connected rather Highlander-style -- if one dies, the others get more powerful. That's not nearly as cheesy in the book as it sounds.

The book heads for a somber place, but ends on a positive note without chickening out.

*SPOILERS*

A superhero's run at the Oval Office is described, but an important plot point kind of falls by the wayside when the fellow goes to many pages of trouble to get help from someone who can talk to the dead, to help him win the election by knowing all the darkest secrets of Washington, then inexplicably fails to win, twice. He only uses his blackmail knowledge after he later gets elected, but there's no explanation for why he doesn't use it to get elected. Maybe it's more moral to blackmail elected politicians into cooperating with your policy agenda than to blackmail them into getting you elected?

The power-fantasy of an enlightened despot -- if only a hero took power, we'd be saved-- isn't allowed to go very far, though, before the military betrays the heroes and destroys them in a big apocolyptic finish to the book.

Wow, this is more negative than I intended. The last bit of the volume kind of soured me on the whole thing. The point of view changed completely and I didn't much like that. The whole series, in retrospect, was about the attrition of the group of superheroes, and that couldn't be other than sad, but it ended rather well.

Open-source camera project, Frankencamera

Here's an interesting open-source hardware project...Frankencamera, a digital camera that you can program. It allows people to add algorithms to their cameras. Not something I would have thought of, but the article describes some interesting uses...like digital video that is taken in low-res, but includes the occasional high-res still, whose details are propagated to the other images for digially-enhanced resolution.