Moe Lane

(via Ain’t It Cool News, via Nodwick) Mind you, I’ve never read the comic…

“I, Frankenstein” comic morphing into movie

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Director Patrick Tatopoulos, “Underworld” co-creator Kevin Grevioux and Death Ray Films are teaming to bring the comic book “I, Frankenstein” to the big screen.

“I, Frankenstein” is an upcoming Darkstorm Comic written by Grevioux that brings together classic monster characters, including Frankenstein’s Monster, the Invisible Man, Dracula and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in a contemporary film noir setting.

The Monster, for example, who has evolved and learned how to control his anger, is now a private investigator. Dracula, meanwhile, is a kingpin of crime, and the Invisible Man is a secret operative.

…but I am an absolute sucker for mashups like this, as my enthusiastic embrace of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies might suggest.  Noir works particularly well with horror, as Kim Newman demonstrated with his Chandler/Lovecraftian “The Big Fish” (found in The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club) and Tim Powers sorta-kinda did with his Cold War espionage/urban fantasy book Declare (you will enjoy that book, particularly if you are Catholic).  The image of the Monster dressed in a cheap suit and askew fedora appeals; it has a certain iconic feel to it that I can’t help but respond to.

Hopefully, it won’t suck.

It’s a fairly good takedown of said column, but there was just this one point of Ed’s that I want to address:

At least this is better than some of your colleagues’ attempts to justify their position by holding up threats as badges of honor. That’s the “I must have been right because I got hate mail” response, after a dumb column provoked even less intelligent response from readers. All that means is that really stupid people read the column and couldn’t deal with disagreement in a cogent and rational manner, which has nothing to do with the source material. Threats prove nothing other than the intellectual level of the person who uses them.

Sometimes, that’s the goal. Not that it was Milbank’s, of course – but if you’re out there trying to illustrate that a particular group or faction can’t be trusted to come in out of the rain, it’s kind of handy if they obligingly send in proof about why you were right.

Besides, they splutter very entertainingly, sometimes.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

I’m not exactly taking the day off, but I’m not really taking it seriously, either. It’s Sunday. Light and fluffy works for me.

For example:

Via American Elephants.

We used to call these people ‘slackers,’ back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Actually, we probably called these people ‘high school students,’ but that’s probably not their fault. Anyway, a couple of kids and a mortgage apiece should clear that right up for them…

Moe Lane

Fun, but long, day.

Bad To The Bone, George Thorogood

…would be a better title.  Because at least half of the stuff on that list could be solved by simply going there and looking, for a given value of ‘simply.’
Moe Lane

PS: I’m going to regret pointing this out, no doubt: but people seem to get exercised about this homeopathy thing.

Just like Bush.

We are not going to the Bash-the-Jews Durban Review Conference after all:

US boycotts UN racism conference

Washington has confirmed it will boycott a UN forum on racism in Geneva next week because of differences over Israel and the right to free speech.

The state department said the proposed text of the conference’s guiding document remained unacceptable despite having been amended significantly.

Not very surprising, although I’d like to clear up something for the BBC. There has not been any sort of internal debate “raging” in the United States over this issue. The American people have consistently shown their support for Israel, and that hasn’t changed. What had happened was that various fringe groups in the United States had been pushing as hard as they could for some sort of flexibility in the language that would create a rhetoric crack in the pavement for future Israel-bashing behavior. This, of course, failed miserably: anti-Semitism is, after all, the bigotry of choice of the mediocre who wishes to think of himself as superior. Not sure why that is: nonetheless, we’re not going to this travesty.

I’d say “better luck next time,” except that I don’t even remotely mean it.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

This one:

(Via AoSHQ)

They’re flogging this sucker, which has an aspect ratio that can fullscreen standard cinema on a flatscreen TV without black bars. Interestingly, they’re still making the old kind; of course, given the way that the price is carefully not mentioned, that’s not too surprising.

My wife and I differ on whether this represents a brilliant viral advertising ploy. She pointed out that I am after all writing a blog post explaining this: point taken, but they still probably should have mentioned the TV thing at some time during the shootout.

Moe Lane

…music, food, a bottle of wine, and my mom watching the kid so that the wife and I can enjoy the first three.  Well, 2.5 of the first three.

Meanwhile, here’s a Bryan Adams video.

Summer Of ’69

…I note that Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists: A Novel is out, and that The Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon: A Novel will be coming out soon.  My (lovely, long-suffering, and very patient) wife loved the previous two books in the series (The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists: A Novel & The Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab: A novel): she’ll be happy to hear that there are more available/scheduled.

Really, without her forbearance this site would not be permitted to exist…

The good news is that the Dutch rescued some pirate victims:

Dutch forces free pirate captives

Dutch commandos have freed 20 people who had been captured by Somali pirates after the raiders attacked a Greek-managed tanker, Nato says.

The captives, Yemeni fishermen, were freed as the Dutch forces captured seven pirates in the Gulf of Aden.

The bad news is that the Dutch military is apparently saddled with some fairly onerous restrictions on how to deal with hostis humanis generis-type situations.

The pirates were set free, the Associated Press news agency reports, because under Dutch law they could not be held at sea under the circumstances in which they were captured.

Not to be bloodthirsty or anything, but there’s a fairly obvious answer to that.

Moe Lane

PS: Hush, ye lurkers. You wanted “I got this,” right? Well, that attitude is part of what you get when you get that.

Crossposted to RedState.

That was essentially Rob Simmon’s response to Jim Geraghty when the latter called him up to get his reaction to the news that Sen Chris Dodd (D-CT) received only five in-state donations this quarter.  Simmons also went on to opine that he was pretty sure that he himself could get more than five in-state donations that day.

Which, given the way that Dodd polls these days, may not be not a brag.

Crossposted to RedState.

Head’s-up from @jaketapper, who notes that this all started when the woman purchased a bottle of wine.

Lawyer: Iran convicts US journalist of spying
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI – 8 minutes ago

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — An American journalist jailed in Iran has been convicted of spying and sentenced to eight years in prison, her lawyer said Saturday, dashing any hopes for her quick release.

Roxana Saberi, a 31-year-old dual American-Iranian citizen, was arrested in late January and initially accused of working without press credentials. But an Iranian judge later leveled a far more serious allegation, charging her with spying for the United States.

She appeared before an Iranian court behind closed doors on Monday in an unusually swift one-day trial. The Fargo, North Dakota native had been living in Iran for six years and had worked as a freelance reporter for several news organizations including National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corp.

The Obama administration is currently attempting to get Ms. Saberi out of the clutches of the Iranian regime; which is good, because said regime has a problem with the way it treats its female journalist prisoners. As in, it’s worth your life to be one and in their clutches.

And yes, I should have been yelling about this more years ago.

Moe Lane

PS: If the Obama administration is prepared to make the quiet yet firm statement – as publicly or as privately as they like – that they’re prepared to go retrieve Ms. Saberi if that’s what it takes I think that I can see my way clear to not giving them too hard a time about it.

Crossposted to RedState.