Yesterday's televisual event went as well as can be expected (as Wallace, from Wallace and Gromit would say). However, when you're trying to make the case for there being no reason why the significant stories of our times cannot be told using the simple elements of the strip cartoon, citing as examples a memoir of being a child during the Islamic revolution, and a personal account of  9-11 and its aftermath, and then the superheroes are entered into evidence, at that point you're going to have to plead guilty.

It happened while my mind had momentarily wandered. The same thing happened last week while we were negotiating the travel agency fiasco with a person in a position to effect a solution. A detail in the awful narrative gave me a story insight. I suddenly realized that I had dropped out for a few seconds and the wife of my bosom was now doing the negotiating. I brought it up later and she said, 'oh, everybody knows when you've left the building."

The show is The First Tuesday Book Club which airs the first Tuesday of every month on ABC tv here in Australia. They shot fifty minutes and have to cut it down to thirty. My fellow panelists were  Nicki Greenberg, Bruce Mutard and Sophie Cunningham, editor of Meanjin Quarterly. It should air in a few months, and there may be a longer version online

Nicki had her wee baby girl with her. here is Campbell easing the little one off into noddyland. You will find him surprisingly good at this sort of thing.


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The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

(link thanks to Bob Morales)

Comics Scholarship—Mississippi Style

If the last century saw the state of Mississippi as the cradle of the blues, this century may see the region’s University Press of Mississippi set the course for modern comics scholarship. Although there is a lot of academic and critical interest from journals such as Comic Art, The Comics Journal and comics-centered blogs, the concept of comics scholarship is still frequently seen as an oxymoron.