Via Jonathan Ross’s Twitter

Even Bono thinks Clive Owen is hot, evidently.

Sorry we disappeared yesterday. We had chores to do.

BTW, isn’t a shame that comics don’t have word balloons on the covers any more?

William Shatner, beloved blowhard, pitchman, voice-over actor, and the man who made the phrase “Get a life!” famous as a nerd icon, would like to run for Prime Minister of his native planet, Canada:

The 77-year-old star said: “My intention is to be Prime Minister of Canada, not Governor General, which is mainly a ceremonial position.”

Shatner revealed his lofty ambition in response to a letter from a fan who urged him to put himself forward for the Governor General of Canada.

The Governor General is appointed by the monarch - which in Canada is currently Queen Elizabeth II - to perform the constitutional duties of the sovereign on her behalf.

In his letter, Shatner regretfully added: “I must, with my deepest thanks, turn down your honourable intent to advance me as Governor General. Besides which, I don’t have time to be Governor General.” Despite his busy schedule, the actor is confident he has what it takes to run the country, explaining: “As Prime Minister I can lead Canada into even greater exploits.”

While there is some potential that this is an errant thought and not a planned career change, the idea of the non-aggressive, harmonious people of Canada being led by Captain Kirk does lead down fruitful paths of reverie. One could imagine Kirk and his exploration team landing on Bloor Street, and the ensuing conversation with Spock over the communicator.

“Captain, sensors indicate a Grade 4 civilization, organized around the concept of a sporting competition involving men propelling themselves on ice while striking a small rubber disk with a curved stick. The game usually involves the ritual consumption of a beverage with intoxicating effects by the supporter of each team.”

“Spock, such a peaceful people should be left unaffected by Federation politics.”

“Captain, according to my data, the people of Canada are also known for their attractive women.”

“In that case, I’d better run for Prime Minister.”

I remember summer!

Via Sleestak.

Now that we’ve all woken up, let’s talk meta. Let’s talk THE BLOGGING LIFE AND THE TOOLS THEREOF. The other day Marc-Oliver gave a nice shout out to dedicated daily bloggers, and highlighted Dirk’s truly ghastly schedule, which sometimes requires him to wake up at 10 pm. Ours isn’t that bad — for some reason our best hours for blogging are between midnight and 4ish, but we can’t do the vampire thing — we have to be up well before noon. We dunno how Tom does it, but once we were on a panel together and he said it took him an hour or so to do TCR, which, given his great powers of focus and discipline (which we lack), we can see.
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Looks like we have a new mystery on our hands.

That and so much more after the jump….

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Better than Gordon Ramsay? Better than Snapped? Maybe. Destroyed in Seconds is one of those “YouTube on the small screen shows” that strings together clips of disasters and so on. But the disasters are all shot with great clarity, and the commentary is brief and informative. We watched a mini-marathon last night and it all began to blur together a bit (and we broke out in hives from anxiety) but stuff like a daylong fire at a Dutch fireworks factory or the Castle Bravo nuclear test in the Bikini Islands never lose their power to appall and amaze.

Most of the events on this show, if written into a comic book, would be utterly unbelievable. BUt they are all too real. Like this footage of the guy who spent 18 months turning a bulldozer into a Death Race 3000-like tank made of steel plates and concrete — which he then used to rampage against the people he thought had done him wrong.

Alarming headline: Astronauts tinker with urine-to-water machine
Even more alarming lede:

Astronauts tinkered Sunday with a troublesome piece of equipment designed to help convert urine and sweat into drinkable water, which is vital to allowing the international space station crew to double to six.

This weekend, we caught a Halloween evening screening of MY NAME IS BRUCE. For those not following the saga, this Dark Horse-produced film tells the Galaxy Quest-like story of a town — beset by an ancient Chinese demon — that decides to kidnap B-movie icon Bruce Campbell to fight said demon.

Now, as many of you know, I am one of the biggest Bruce Campbell groupies on the planet and the prospect of spending Halloween with Bruce filled me with the rapture. The One True Bruce was at the screening and answered questions before and after the movie in his inimitable quick and sarcastic manner, to delightful effect. It was, to be honest, a hoot.

As for the the movie? Written by Mark (Battlestar Galactica) Verheiden and directed by Bruce himself, it was…well. It was a vanity project to give you more Bruce than you could ever possibly want. And that kind of made me sad. To be sure, there were moments of genuine drollery, and Bruce gave the expected physical, scenery-stomping performance and looked handsome and bad-ass in a quite satisfying manner.

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Today’s Halloween art comes from Jose Ladronn and HIP FLASK. Ladronn was born in Mexico and won a 2006 Eisner Award for his work on HIP FLASK: MYSTERY CITY.

Keep those cards and letters coming, folks…it’s getting spooky out there.

An incredible new Gecko-like glue is said to be the stickiest yet. Using some fancy-schmancy system of carbon nanotubes enhanced with curly strands of carbon, the new glue is 10 times stickier than a gecko’s feet. The substance’s adhesive qualities can also be measured in a unit we all understand:

A 1-inch (2.5-cm) square of the adhesive can support the weight of a 220-pound (100-kg) man climbing up a vertical surface, but it can be easily lifted and reapplied, an ideal material for, say, a Spider-Man suit.

“That is not real. What we do is real,” said Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, referring to the comic book superhero’s wall-climbing prowess.

Way to be snotty, science head. Like you don’t want to sleep on a Rhino mattress.

For the entire cast, check out UGO.

He may have worked with Count Basie and Frank Sinatra, but jazz composer Neal Hefti will likely be best remembered for a piece of music: The Batman Theme. Hefti passed away last week at the age of 85. You can find his obit in the Washington Post here.

Not only did Hefti create The Batman Theme, but he also was responsible for another classic TV tune, The Odd Couple Theme.

(Sadly, we spent like a half-hour looking for the “nanananana fishing” clip from The Simpsons, but couldn’t find it. Shame.)

FYI: The above album is actually still available from Amazon.

UPDATE:

Posted by Mark Coale.

Are we the only person who is on some kind of spam list for folks in Dubai selling expensive construction equipment (cranes and bulldozers)? With PICTURES? We are excited as anyone by the idea of looking at pictures of 80-ton cranes, but how on earth did we get on this list? Is this some kind of Al Qaeda front or a variation on the Nigerian scam? WTF?

PS: We’re on the road again, this time for R&R — more posting later.

Sorry about that media blackout yesterday. The Marriott Inner Harbor in Baltimore is a fine hotel with wonderful bedding and a friendly staff (as well as SHOWER CAPS, a recent bugaboo at SBM), but the Ethernet modem in our room cut out every time out the computer went to sleep — necessitating a 10 minute phone call to Indiana or somewhere every time to reset the modem. After we turned down a generous offer to send a repairman to the room at 1 a.m., a bathroom break resulted in another modem failure and we just had to give up. It was weak, we know, but we’re only human. At least we got the charges taken off the bill.

The sad part is that we could get the Wi-Fi from the nearby Holiday Inn on our iPhone, but not on our PowerBook. Ah, the joys of modern life.

Puttering around here on various projects, like PW Comics Week, a general sense of sadness is overtaking us. Adding up today’s postings, it turns out that in Hollywood, messing with one detail of a beloved comic book classic is enough to give a director flop sweats; whereas removing the structures that made one of the most powerful, haunting and profound novels ever written in English powerful, haunting and profound, is dubbed “giving it that graphic novel sensibility.”

I do not think that word means what you think it does. And I think we’re in for a long haul.

[Above image: one of Rockwell Kent’s immortal illustrations for Moby Dick.]

Sad days in the world of pro wrestling, especially if you are a fan of the Lucha Libre style.

On tonight’s 75th Anniversary CMLL show in Mexico City, Blue Panther, one of the most accomplished luchadors of the modern era, shockingly lost his mask in the main event against Villano V.

If you think comics nerds get upset when some Silver Age “B” level villain gets a costume change, you should see how Lucha loving wrestling nerds are reacting to this shocking development. Imagine if Batman was killed not by the Joker or Ra’s Al Ghul, but by The Signalman or The Cavalier?

As the Beat would likely say in this situation, “We need to go lie down.” We know there are plenty of comics folks out there who dig the Mexican wrestling (since we used to supply them with tapes back in the day), so our condolences go out to them too.

Posted by Mark Coale

We love the expression on sometime-comics creator Rosario Dawson’s face here. She’s all like “Yup. It’s all real. I DO have a fabulous complexion.”

That’s the only explanation, right?

Posted by Mark Coale

If you’re are like me, you are watching the Olympics, which is shorthand for bouts of gymnastics interrupted by endless play by play, minutely detailed, microscopic examination of women’s beach volleyball.

Seriously, how is this even a sport? I mean, we all know the answer to that, but why is it a sport that has every single game covered?

Or uncovered as the case may be.

Seriously, I would like to have been at the meeting where they fashioned the regulation decreeing that women in this “sport” must wear bikinis. It’s especially puzzling when men wear baggy shorts and tank tops.

No one is getting fooled here.

Some emotion came with today’s Russia/Georgia game, even if the Georgian players were ringers from Brazil. As you can see from the above, they also have a little jiggle in the caboose, which would totally disqualify them from any other team on earth.

If people are going to be so fascinated by women’s sports, I would like to propose that we find new sweethearts, namely, the softball competitors. (There is no men’s softball in the Olympics.)

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The anthrax matter – and the timely suicide of its purported mastermind — is crazy enough to keep conspiracy theorists going for the rest of Chris Carter’s natural life. However, could there have been an even MORE sinister scheme behind the goings on at Fort Detrick? Over at the TCJ message board, Mort Todd points out that one side effect of the weapons-grade anthrax that was mailed to various media outlets in the fall of 2001 was the destruction of a repository of priceless information:

What it doesn’t say is that he also is suspected of sending a letter to American Media Inc., publishers of The Star, The Globe, National Examiner, and The Sun and, for a short time, Cracked magazine (way after my reign). This lead to the death of a photo editor and since all the film to print the magazine, from 1958 to 2000, was stored there, it had to be destroyed because of contamination.

Now this may be cheered by some, but there was some great art by John Severin, Jack Davis, Will Elder, All Jaffee, Bill Ward, Steve Ditko, Gene Colan and many other titans of the comics industry!

[…]So we have a complete wack job being paid by our government to handle some of the deadliest substances ever created, and now it turns out that, on top of everything else, he ruined CRACKED. Whose nightmare are we living in, and how in God’s name do we wake up?

When actor James Doohan — best known for his role as the Enterprise’s beloved and crusty engineer Scotty on STAR TREK — died in 2005, it was announced that his ashes would be rocketed into space. A fitting final resting place for someone who often went into that final frontier.

In 2007, a portion of Doohan’s ashes and those of about 200 others were sent up in a rocket that parachuted back to earth. However, just the other day, the remains were once again sent up in a privately funded rocket, this time with the expectation that they would go into orbit. However, it didn’t quite work out.

The ashes of “Star Trek” actor James Doohan, along with those of astronaut Gordon Cooper and 206 others who paid to have their remains shot into space, didn’t quite make it to their destination after the privately funded rocket carrying them broke apart after launch Saturday night.

According to news reports, the malfunction in the two-stage rocket was caused by a fuel leak.

The Web page of the ashes-to-space service called Explorers Flight was updated Saturday night to read: “The Explorers Flight mission appears not to have reached orbit tonight.”

Insert numerous Web jokes about how if Scotty had been the engineer, that thing would NEVER have broken apart.

Last week, beat pal Jimmy Palmiotti shared the above link with us, and we enjoyed it mightily.

And then we got to thinking about the days when Bollywood musicals and their rapturous innocence were a secret underground thing. You had to live near the Indian cinema or near an Indian neighborhood to even know about them, Benny Lava.

Once upon a time you had to have cool friends who told you about a cool new remix or Sammo Hung or confess that they collected Fischer Price little people. And when you learned about such things you were in a secret little club and you felt cool about it. But it didn’t, like, take over your life.

And then came the Internet. Then came Taiwanese legislature brawls all over the place.

Is nothing sacred? Is nothing secret anymore?

The other day The Beat was walking around the Lower East Side with her gal pals of many years, and we observed how many fun times we’d had in the past. Granted we’re all old and out of it, but nobody seems to be going to the kinds of secret clubs and raves we used to enjoy. I mean now it’s all one big mailing list. Our pal Elim did point out a secret place to get great food that we’d never heard of, but we’d sooner die than reveal it here on the Internet.

We’ve sort of posted about this before, on and off. And our alarm was heightened when we awoke the other day to an interview on the Brian Lehrer show with a lady named Maggie Jackson who wrote a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age and she mentioned how we’re “trapped on the surface” of everything and now lack the comprehension skills to analyze anything. We’ll drink to that because this post has already veered seriously off course aside from an overwhelming feeling of overall dread about everyone knowing who Sammo Hung is and having to dig deeper and deeper and deeper to get to the cool. God help us, we’ll probably die trying, Benny Lava.

The Beat has a soft spot for THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, okay?

We’ll be on the road for a few days for some semi-R&R. That means we’ll be blogging, and reading email but only for a few hours a day instead of all day all the time. Hopefully all hell won’t break loose again.