19 injured in shooting in Mothers Day parade in New Orleans.
Pakistan moves on after election despite claims of vote rigging.
Cyberattacks against U.S. corporations are on the rise.
The city of Detroit has a $162 million negative cash flow problem.
The Tigers lost to the Indians in ten innings.
South Korea warns of “grave measures” if the North won’t talk.
Rhode Island passes marriage equality.
Barges explode in Mobile, Alabama.
Body pull from river may be missing student.
High-tech $100 bill coming in October.
The Tigers beat Kansas City 7-5.
It’s a day late, but I couldn’t get a signal.
On 3 April 1973 when Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.[1][2] The prototype handheld phone used by Dr. Cooper weighed 1.1 kg and measured 22.86 cm long, 12.7 cm deep and 4.44 cm wide.. The prototype offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge.[3]
My first cellphone was the Uniden bag phone that was in the Pontiac, mounted on the floor between the front seats. I still have it, keeping it as a part of the car’s historic preservation.
Since then I’ve progressed, so to speak, to a Samsung phone with a slide-out keyboard so I can text. I have yet to try or even consider a smartphone.
So, what was your first cellphone and when did you get it? Or are you still wired in?
HT to NTodd.
President Obama heads to the Middle East.
Seven Marines killed in Nevada training exercise.
Rescue workers reach 19 trapped miners in Poland.
Cyprus bailout deal collapses over taxing savings.
Computer networks crashed in South Korea.
The assault weapons ban is out of the gun control bill in the Senate.
South Carolina — Mark Sanford and Elizabeth Colbert Busch get primary wins for Congress.
Far Less Hokey and Weird — Recovering conservative wunderkind Jonathon Krohn returns to CPAC.
Does being back at CPAC, the annual gathering of conservatives from all over the country, feel weird?
That’s the question I got everywhere I turned these past few days. I suppose it was a natural question to ask, seeing as I had been a high profile speaker at the conference in 2009 as a thirteen year-old conservative wunderkind, before renouncing conservatism last year. So my return this year was an object of fascination to many.
The answer to the question is: No, it didn’t feel weird. I mean, I guess it should have, but it didn’t. In a way going back to CPAC seemed like going back home and visiting your old libertarian friend from high school: it’s pretty predictable, there’s a familiarity to the situation, you know the kind of stuff she’s going to say, you never know exactly how (or why) she says the stuff she says (and neither does she, in all likelihood), and so long as you don’t talk politics and just listen, you’ll be fine.
Still, there definitely were differences between this year’s CPAC and the conferences of the past, which may signify larger differences in the conservative movement more broadly.
Last time I attended CPAC, I remember seeing the Ron Paulers in full force. As soon as Congressman Paul (R-TX) arrived, it was like something out of A Hard Days Night: security had to escort Paul to the green room and then back out of the building afterwards. The room was packed whenever he came on stage, but, to be honest, his Young Americans for Liberty group seemed kind of too far-out for a lot of people — even though they came in force the second time I went, even bringing along a pair of those inflatable Sumo-wrestling suits for their booth (don’t ask…I know I didn’t).
This time around, Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), his “Stand With Rand” campaigners and today’s YA for Liberty all seemed far less hokey and weird, and much more a part of the mainstream.
The sleeker, more polished member of the Paul political franchise, Rand showed himself to be a more than capable campaigner. With his new (and free!) Stand With Rand t-shirts, buttons, wristbands, and campaign signs (which all look strangely like the cover art one might see on a White Stripes album) Rand Paul brought down the house at CPAC with arguably the best speech of the convention to one of the biggest (if not the biggest) crowd of the weekend. His insistence upon using the “stand” line over and over again (“stand for righteousness,” “stand with me”) gave it the sound of a campaign announcement or stump speech, while the abundance of overly-enthusiastic Paul staffers gave it the feel of a convention speech.
But most interestingly—to me anyway—was the fact that while the base of the Paul family’s support is almost entirely composed of young people, most of the Young Republicans I spoke to who voted for Rand in the straw poll actually told me they had never been (and still aren’t) fans of Ron Paul. When I asked them their reasoning, the almost universal reply by a country mile was: Rand is more polished and electable.
Phone Hangups — Ian Bogost laments that you can’t slam down the receiver on a Smartphone.
When I was a kid, we had a bright yellow, rotary Western Electric model 554, the wall-mountable companion to the 500 desk set. Before answering machines, caller id, *69, and eventually smartphone address books allowed us to screen calls quickly, a ringing phone was a pressing matter. It could mean anything: a friend’s invitation, a neighbor’s request, a family emergency. You had to answer to find out. Telephones rang loud, too, with urgency and desperation. One simply did not ignore the telephone.
In the context of such gravity, the hangup had a clear and forceful meaning. It offered a way of ending a conversation prematurely, sternly, aggressively. Without saying anything, the hangup said something: we’re done, go away.
My father took great pride in hanging up our model 554 phone violently when something went awry. An inbound wrong number dialed twice in a row, or an unwelcome solicitor. Clang! The handset’s solid mass crashed down on the hook, the bell assembly whimpering from the impact. The mechanical nature of telephones made hangups a material affair as much as a social one. A hangup is something your interlocutor could feel physically as much as emotionally, and something you couldn’t downplay either. Like slamming a door or yelling at a child, hanging up a phone couldn’t be subdued or hidden.
Unlike today’s cellular network, the public switched telephone network was robust and centralized thanks to monopoly. Apart from flukes like my son depressing the hook switch, a disconnected landline call is almost unheard of. By contrast, it’s not possible to hang up on someone via smartphone with deliberateness, because it’s so much more likely that the network itself will disconnect of its own accord. Every call is tenuous, constantly at risk of failing as a result of system instability: spectrum auctions, tower optimizations, network traffic, and so forth. The infrastructure is too fragile to make hangups stand out as affairs of agency rather than of accident.
Today a true hangup — one you really meant to perform out of anger or frustration or exhaustion — is only temporary and one-sided even when it is successfully executed. Even during a heated exchange, your interlocutor will first assume something went wrong in the network, and you could easily pretend such a thing was true later if you wanted. Calls aren’t ever really under our control anymore, they “drop” intransitively. The signal can be lost, the device’s battery can deplete, the caller can accidentally bump the touch screen and end the call, the phone’s operating system can crash. The mobile hangup never signals itself as such, but remains shrouded in uncertainties.
Bird Foodies — Ethan Kuperberg eavesdrops.
Two jay birds, a crow, and a raven sit on the branch of a large tree. Dusk.
EURASIAN JAY: I was thinking we could all go for thistle seeds tonight.
BLUE JAY: Oh, thistle seeds. Cool.
EURASIAN JAY: Something wrong with thistle seeds?
BLUE JAY: No, that sounds great. It’s just that I had thistle seeds for lunch, so…
EURASIAN JAY: Do you want something else then?
BLUE JAY (sighs): What I want is for you to know what I want.
EURASIAN JAY: Jennifer, please. We have guests.
Silence. Various feather rufflings.
RAVEN: Courtney and I would be down for some carrion.
CROW: Carrion is exactly what I feel like right now. How’d you know, babe?
RAVEN: I just know you, babe.
EURASIAN JAY (coughs): Do you want carrion, Jen?
BLUE JAY: You know I’m vegan, right? Vegans don’t eat carrion.
EURASIAN JAY: Oh, that’s right. You’re vegan. Weird, because I thought vegans aren’t supposed to eat insects.
BLUE JAY: That was like two months ago. I’ve recommitted since then. You try being vegan, it’s harder than it looks.
EURASIAN JAY: Somebody get her a medal.
RAVEN (stretching): Carrion’s pretty good, Jen.
BLUE JAY: I don’t eat carrion. I don’t want carrion. Carrion is off the menu.
Silence. Someone chirps.
BLUE JAY: Why don’t we go to that bird feeder on Elm?
EURASIAN JAY: That place will be packed at this hour.
BLUE JAY: Then we’ll wait. It wouldn’t hurt us to wait. And talk.
All grumble.
EURASIAN JAY: I don’t see what the problem is with thistle seeds.
RAVEN: Here’s the problem: some of us like flavor.
BLUE JAY: Thank you, Steve.
RAVEN: What about some snails? Have you guys ever had invertebrates?
CROW: College boy over here.
RAVEN: I’m trying to be helpful.
BLUE JAY: Hey, we all like nuts. It’s been ages since I’ve had a good nut. I know a great tree.
EURASIAN JAY: Why don’t you guys get nuts and I’ll get thistle seeds?
BLUE JAY: That ruins the whole point of eating together, David.
Silence.
Doonesbury — Twits galore.
The FCC is proposing to take WiFi national, blanketing the country with free service to places the current coverage can’t reach.
The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has rattled the $178 billion wireless industry, which has launched a fierce lobbying effort to persuade policymakers to reconsider the idea, analysts say. That has been countered by an equally intense campaign from Google, Microsoft and other tech giants who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor.
The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.
The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient’s heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.
If approved by the FCC, the free networks would still take several years to set up. And, with no one actively managing them, connections could easily become jammed in major cities. But public WiFi could allow many consumers to make free calls from their mobile phones via the Internet. The frugal-minded could even use the service in their homes, allowing them to cut off expensive Internet bills.
Google and Microsoft are very much in favor of this plan. Cell phone providers like Verizon and AT&T not so much. They argue that the spectrum should be sold to them so they can make money off it.
This is roughly equivalent to the Rural Electrification Administration set up by FDR during the Depression to get electrical service to parts of the country that didn’t have it in the 1930′s. The government, much to the chagrin of private utilities, stepped in to provide the service when the private companies would not because they didn’t see a profit in it.
In the end, everybody got something good from it; the rural areas got power and the utilities got new customers after the government did all the heavy lifting. The same thing will happen here: cheap broadband will help the public, and Verizon will still find a way to make a buck. They always do.
CLW ponders the way technology promises a bright future for us if only we can overcome our human nature to make the worst of it.
Back in 1995 I was fortunate enough to be one of the executives in the room when Bill Gates introduced his landmark “Internet Tidal Wave” memo. It changed the direction of the company instantly and led the way to the huge success Microsoft saw in the dot com era.
If you read that memo, it’s filled with a bunch of business-related content. But in the chat we had with Bill that day, just the few dozen of us in a circle of chairs around the room, he talked much more as the visionary. He saw the Internet changing the world, and it was a glorious vision. Not all of it was right.
One thing I remember distinctly was how he was sure that addresses on the Internet would be SO much simpler. At the time we had addresses for documents that were like \\mcp\intel\dev\user\files\userfile.doc and he was saying “it’ll all be so easy, they will all be simple, like just ‘amazon.com’” Well, all that really changed was the direction of the slashes (from “\” to “/”), they are all still just as long and silly, maybe even more so…
One thing he did say that day that was right about addresses was that soon everyone would have their internet address on their business cards, and they’d even be shown in TV advertising. I remember the audible chuckle through the room. He was right, within a year it was pretty common on TV ads.
But the thing that stuck with me the most from that day was how elegantly Bill talked about how the availability of nearly limitless information would make the world a better place. With everyone able to get to all kinds of great information from anywhere, so many things would be better.
Commerce would be so much better because everyone would have “perfect information”. No longer would I be limited to what I found on my local store shelves. No longer would the little store in a tiny town be able to take advantage of people because they had no other options. And sellers would have easy entry to the market that included the entire world. What he didn’t see was people killing brick and mortar stores by using them as showrooms for Amazon. Or the rampant scammers and phishing schemes. In short, the dark side of e-commerce. He didn’t realize that by removing the barriers to entry — whether those barriers were in starting a business or to your inbox — it made it easier for the bad guys and harder to tell them from the good guys.
He also said politics and elections would be much fairer with everyone’s voice able to be heard, people able to seek out great information, and it would be impossible for just a few people to own the information channels. At the time, most people got their information from a very few sources: the major TV networks, a few major newspapers. He was sure more information would make elections better. He even waxed philosophically about these things called “weblogs” where people could easily post their thoughts, and that would make sure everyone’s voice got heard.
What he didn’t see was the way having two million sources to choose from wouldn’t expand people’s information, but drive them into the corners where they are most comfortable. He didn’t see that having incredibly easy access to publishing would give voice to people who, frankly, were better off hidden. The conspiracy theorists, the vile and degrading, the truly hateful, and the trolls. And given human nature, we wouldn’t turn away from them, we’d be drawn to them like gawkers at a car wreck. And he didn’t see that a huge number of people don’t want to have to figure things out, they want to be spoon-fed, and that there are plenty of people willing to do that.
Key to all of this is that he didn’t see that making information free also removed its value. Gone is investigative journalism and the foreign bureau, replaced with TMZ. Gone are literally all the good newspapers, replaced with a million news aggregator web sites each slanted in the direction you choose. And gone is a world where people were likely to run into people or opinions they don’t want to. Everyone is just hiding in their own silos.
Maybe this explains why Washington is broken. Maybe it explains all the hate on both sides of every argument. And maybe it’s hopeless, destined only to get worse as information flows at a faster and faster rate.
I hope not.
It’s very telling that with every advance in human communication – from the classic Greek theatre to the internet – the first thing that usually happens is that someone figures out a way to separate other people from their money; the second is to sell pornography. For every “great big beautiful tomorrow” promised by GE and Walt Disney, there’s someone sending you an e-mail from Nigeria.
Technology can improve our lives immeasurably, but it also highlights the ying and yang of our very human nature.
U.S. and Afghan forces clash, leaving five dead.
Bombs target Shiite sites in Iraq, killing 26.
Cyber attacks on 6 banks interrupt service for a lot of customers.
Two people were killed in a shooting at a VFW hall in Winter Springs, Florida.
The Dolphins lost in OT for the second week in a row.
Tropical Update: Hurricane Nadine keeps on going and going; there’s a new disturbance in the North Atlantic; Tokyo gets hit by Tropical Storm Jelawat.
The Tigers beat the Twins; the magic number is one.
Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit.
From the New York Times:
IPhone users grew more annoyed all week. When they used Apple’s new mobile maps, they found nonsensical routes and misplaced landmarks. Bloggers and talk-show hosts mocked the sometimes bizarre errors.
Apple’s new mobile maps show the Washington Monument across the highway from the actual monument, which appears correctly in the satellite view.
Nine days after the maps’ release, the Washington Monument was still on the wrong side of the street. But something else changed.
Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, released an apologetic letter to customers on Friday, making the remarkable suggestion that they try alternative map services from rivals like Microsoft and Google while Apple improves its own maps. “We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers, and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better,” Mr. Cook wrote.
I just wish someone would come up with a way to find my phone when I put it down somewhere in the house and forget where I left it. (It doesn’t help trying to call it and listen for the ring when I’ve set it on “vibrate.”)
Power is restored in India after two days of massive blackouts.
Tea Party candidate wins a runoff for the GOP senate nomination in Texas.
The House and Senate leaders reach a deal on not shutting down the government.
Polling shows President Obama has an edge in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania,
Going to pot — Australian authorities made a record drug bust, seizing the stuff being shipped in terra cotta pots.
Tropical Update: Invest 99L could head toward Florida… or not.
The Tigers lost to the Red Sox in a rain-shortened game.
Power is restored in India after two days of massive blackouts.
Tea Party candidate wins a runoff for the GOP senate nomination in Texas.
The House and Senate leaders reach a deal on not shutting down the government.
Polling shows President Obama has an edge in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania,
Going to pot — Australian authorities made a record drug bust, seizing the stuff being shipped in terra cotta pots.
Tropical Update: Invest 99L could head toward Florida… or not.
The Tigers lost to the Red Sox in a rain-shortened game.
Syria — Assad is losing out in the country.
Blackout leaves half of India in the dark.
NASA’s Curiosity nears Mars.
NBC steps on its own coverage with a gold medal promo on “Today.”
R.I.P. Tony Martin, 98, crooner.
Tropical Update: Something to keep an eye on…
The Tigers lose again to the Red Sox.
Syria — Assad is losing out in the country.
Blackout leaves half of India in the dark.
NASA’s Curiosity nears Mars.
NBC steps on its own coverage with a gold medal promo on “Today.”
R.I.P. Tony Martin, 98, crooner.
Tropical Update: Something to keep an eye on…
The Tigers lose again to the Red Sox.
Sounds Familiar — Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic remembers those old tech sounds.
Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.I heard that sound again this week on Brendan Chillcut’s simple and wondrous site: The Museum of Endangered Sounds. It takes technological objects and lets you relive the noises they made: Tetris, the Windows 95 startup chime, that Nokia ringtone, television static. The site archives not just the intentional sounds — ringtones, etc — but the incidental ones, like the mechanical noise a VHS tape made when it entered the VCR or the way a portable CD player sounded when it skipped. If you grew up at a certain time, these sounds are like technoaural nostalgia whippets. One minute, you’re browsing the Internet in 2012, the next you’re on a bus headed up I-5 to an 8th grade football game against Castle Rock in 1995.
The noises our technologies make, as much as any music, are the soundtrack to an era. Soundscapes are not static; completely new sets of frequencies arrive, old things go. Locomotives rumbled their way through the landscapes of 19th century New England, interrupting Nathaniel Hawthorne-types’ reveries in Sleepy Hollows. A city used to be synonymous with the sound of horse hooves and the clatter of carriages on the stone streets. Imagine the people who first heard the clicks of a bike wheel or the vroom of a car engine. It’s no accident that early films featuring industrial work often include shots of steam whistles, even though in many (say, Metropolis) we can’t hear that whistle.You could feel two things trying to come into sync: Were those things computers or were they actually me and my version of the world? Everyone knew what it sounded like and how big the changes it signaled were.
When I think of 2012, I will think of the overworked fan of my laptop and the ding of getting a text message on my iPhone. I will think of the beep of the FastTrak in my car as it debits my credit card so I can pass through a toll onto the Golden Gate Bridge. I will think of Siri’s uncanny valley voice.
But to me, all of those sounds — as symbols of the era in which I’ve come up — remain secondary to the hissing and crackling of the modem handshake. I first heard that sound as a nine-year-old. To this day, I can’t remember how I figured out how to dial the modem of our old Zenith. Even more mysterious is how I found the BBS number to call or even knew what a BBS was. But I did. BBS were dial-in communities, kind of like a local AOL. You could post messages and play games, even chat with people on the bigger BBSs. It was personal: sometimes, you’d be the only person connected to that community. Other times, there’d be one other person, who was almost definitely within your local prefix.
Click on the link to take a stroll down sounds’ memory lane.
Green and Gay — An iconic comic book star comes out.
Green Lantern, one of DC Comics’ oldest and most enduring heroes, is serving as a beacon for the publisher again, this time as a proud, mighty and openly gay hero.The change is revealed in the pages of the second issue of “Earth 2” out next week, and comes on the heels of what has been an expansive year for gay and lesbian characters in the pages of comic books from Archie to Marvel and others.
But purists and fans note: This Green Lantern is not the emerald galactic space cop Hal Jordan who was, and is, part of the Justice League and has had a history rich in triumph and tragedy.
Instead, he’s a parallel earth Green Lantern. James Robinson, who writes the new series, said Alan Scott is the retooled version of the classic Lantern whose first appearance came in the pages of “All-American Comics” No. 16 in July 1940.
And his being gay is not part of some wider story line meant to be exploited or undone down the road, either.
“This was my idea,” Robinson explained this week, noting that before DC relaunched all its titles last summer, Alan Scott had a son who was gay.
But given “Earth 2” features retooled and rebooted characters, Scott is not old enough to have a grown son.
“By making him younger, that son was not going to exist anymore,” Robinson said.
“He doesn’t come out. He’s gay when we see him in issue two,” which is due out Wednesday. “He’s fearless and he’s honest to the point where he realized he was gay and he said ‘I’m gay.’”
It’s another example of gay and lesbian characters taking more prominent roles in the medium.
In May, Marvel Entertainment said super speedster Northstar will marry his longtime boyfriend in the pages of “Astonishing X-Men.” DC comics has other gay characters, too, including Kate Kane, the current Batwoman, The Question, and married characters Apollo and the Midnighter.
And in the pages of Archie Comics, Kevin Keller is one of the gang at Riverdale High School and gay, too.
Must Be Miami — Carl Hiaasen takes a look at the face-eating zombie.
All of us who live in Florida struggle to explain this bizarre place to distant friends and family.The task got somewhat easier after the 2000 presidential election, which showcased the state’s unique style of dysfunction to a vast international audience. Since then, people who live elsewhere seem not so easily mortified by anything that happens here.
Take the dreadful case of the naked cannibal.
I’d be willing to bet that in no other city but Miami would the following quote appear matter-of-factly in a crime story: “Rudy was not a face-eating zombie monster.”
Those words come from a high school friend of Rudy Eugene, who chewed the flesh off a homeless man’s face on Memorial Day weekend. Eugene first removed his own clothes and then tore off the trousers of his victim, 65-year-old Ronald Poppo.
The gruesome biting attack, reported by passers-by, took about 18 minutes. It didn’t end until Eugene was shot dead by a policeman and physically separated from the gravely injured Poppo.
All this occurred on a Saturday morning on a ramp of the MacArthur Causeway, practically within fast-break distance of the American Airlines Arena where the Miami Heat plays.
Doonesbury — Vetting.
Sounds Familiar — Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic remembers those old tech sounds.
Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.I heard that sound again this week on Brendan Chillcut’s simple and wondrous site: The Museum of Endangered Sounds. It takes technological objects and lets you relive the noises they made: Tetris, the Windows 95 startup chime, that Nokia ringtone, television static. The site archives not just the intentional sounds — ringtones, etc — but the incidental ones, like the mechanical noise a VHS tape made when it entered the VCR or the way a portable CD player sounded when it skipped. If you grew up at a certain time, these sounds are like technoaural nostalgia whippets. One minute, you’re browsing the Internet in 2012, the next you’re on a bus headed up I-5 to an 8th grade football game against Castle Rock in 1995.
The noises our technologies make, as much as any music, are the soundtrack to an era. Soundscapes are not static; completely new sets of frequencies arrive, old things go. Locomotives rumbled their way through the landscapes of 19th century New England, interrupting Nathaniel Hawthorne-types’ reveries in Sleepy Hollows. A city used to be synonymous with the sound of horse hooves and the clatter of carriages on the stone streets. Imagine the people who first heard the clicks of a bike wheel or the vroom of a car engine. It’s no accident that early films featuring industrial work often include shots of steam whistles, even though in many (say, Metropolis) we can’t hear that whistle.You could feel two things trying to come into sync: Were those things computers or were they actually me and my version of the world? Everyone knew what it sounded like and how big the changes it signaled were.
When I think of 2012, I will think of the overworked fan of my laptop and the ding of getting a text message on my iPhone. I will think of the beep of the FastTrak in my car as it debits my credit card so I can pass through a toll onto the Golden Gate Bridge. I will think of Siri’s uncanny valley voice.
But to me, all of those sounds — as symbols of the era in which I’ve come up — remain secondary to the hissing and crackling of the modem handshake. I first heard that sound as a nine-year-old. To this day, I can’t remember how I figured out how to dial the modem of our old Zenith. Even more mysterious is how I found the BBS number to call or even knew what a BBS was. But I did. BBS were dial-in communities, kind of like a local AOL. You could post messages and play games, even chat with people on the bigger BBSs. It was personal: sometimes, you’d be the only person connected to that community. Other times, there’d be one other person, who was almost definitely within your local prefix.
Click on the link to take a stroll down sounds’ memory lane.
Green and Gay — An iconic comic book star comes out.
Green Lantern, one of DC Comics’ oldest and most enduring heroes, is serving as a beacon for the publisher again, this time as a proud, mighty and openly gay hero.The change is revealed in the pages of the second issue of “Earth 2” out next week, and comes on the heels of what has been an expansive year for gay and lesbian characters in the pages of comic books from Archie to Marvel and others.
But purists and fans note: This Green Lantern is not the emerald galactic space cop Hal Jordan who was, and is, part of the Justice League and has had a history rich in triumph and tragedy.
Instead, he’s a parallel earth Green Lantern. James Robinson, who writes the new series, said Alan Scott is the retooled version of the classic Lantern whose first appearance came in the pages of “All-American Comics” No. 16 in July 1940.
And his being gay is not part of some wider story line meant to be exploited or undone down the road, either.
“This was my idea,” Robinson explained this week, noting that before DC relaunched all its titles last summer, Alan Scott had a son who was gay.
But given “Earth 2” features retooled and rebooted characters, Scott is not old enough to have a grown son.
“By making him younger, that son was not going to exist anymore,” Robinson said.
“He doesn’t come out. He’s gay when we see him in issue two,” which is due out Wednesday. “He’s fearless and he’s honest to the point where he realized he was gay and he said ‘I’m gay.’”
It’s another example of gay and lesbian characters taking more prominent roles in the medium.
In May, Marvel Entertainment said super speedster Northstar will marry his longtime boyfriend in the pages of “Astonishing X-Men.” DC comics has other gay characters, too, including Kate Kane, the current Batwoman, The Question, and married characters Apollo and the Midnighter.
And in the pages of Archie Comics, Kevin Keller is one of the gang at Riverdale High School and gay, too.
Must Be Miami — Carl Hiaasen takes a look at the face-eating zombie.
All of us who live in Florida struggle to explain this bizarre place to distant friends and family.The task got somewhat easier after the 2000 presidential election, which showcased the state’s unique style of dysfunction to a vast international audience. Since then, people who live elsewhere seem not so easily mortified by anything that happens here.
Take the dreadful case of the naked cannibal.
I’d be willing to bet that in no other city but Miami would the following quote appear matter-of-factly in a crime story: “Rudy was not a face-eating zombie monster.”
Those words come from a high school friend of Rudy Eugene, who chewed the flesh off a homeless man’s face on Memorial Day weekend. Eugene first removed his own clothes and then tore off the trousers of his victim, 65-year-old Ronald Poppo.
The gruesome biting attack, reported by passers-by, took about 18 minutes. It didn’t end until Eugene was shot dead by a policeman and physically separated from the gravely injured Poppo.
All this occurred on a Saturday morning on a ramp of the MacArthur Causeway, practically within fast-break distance of the American Airlines Arena where the Miami Heat plays.
Doonesbury — Vetting.
The internet has been around for about twenty years (or longer if you believe Al Gore), and Google has been around since 1998. So you would think that George Tierney, Jr. of Greenville, South Carolina, would have figured out that when you go on the internet and say really terrible things to people, your expectation of privacy is, well, pretty much shot to hell. Especially with one of them Twitter doohickeys.
(See what I did there? That’s called a “Google bomb.” Come and get me, George Tierney, Jr. of Greenville, South Carolina.)
The internet has been around for about twenty years (or longer if you believe Al Gore), and Google has been around since 1998. So you would think that George Tierney, Jr. of Greenville, South Carolina, would have figured out that when you go on the internet and say really terrible things to people, your expectation of privacy is, well, pretty much shot to hell. Especially with one of them Twitter doohickeys.
(See what I did there? That’s called a “Google bomb.” Come and get me, George Tierney, Jr. of Greenville, South Carolina.)
Stealthy move — U.S. stations stealth fighters near Iran.
New photos show work is going on at North Korea’s nuclear site.
Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese activist who escaped from house arrest is under U.S. protection in Beijing.
Mitt Romney has a solution for the high cost of college: borrow the money from your parents. Seriously.
The House passed CISPA, the new cybersecurity bill, even though a veto is promised.
George Zimmerman remains out on bail despite having over $200,000 in cash.
Would you eat at a place called “Fuku”?
The Tigers remain in the slump, losing to the Yankees.
Stealthy move — U.S. stations stealth fighters near Iran.
New photos show work is going on at North Korea’s nuclear site.
Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese activist who escaped from house arrest is under U.S. protection in Beijing.
Mitt Romney has a solution for the high cost of college: borrow the money from your parents. Seriously.
The House passed CISPA, the new cybersecurity bill, even though a veto is promised.
George Zimmerman remains out on bail despite having over $200,000 in cash.
Would you eat at a place called “Fuku”?
The Tigers remain in the slump, losing to the Yankees.
Israel is feeling insecure as it nears its birthday.
A Delta flight was quarantined when it arrived in Chicago, but it’s been cleared.
New accusations of debauchery surface at the Secret Service.
The House passed a cybersecurity bill despite a veto threat.
The Florida Supreme Court rejected 25 death penalty appeals.
The Florida Panthers are out of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
The Tigers dropped their fourth in a row.
