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So, there were no “zingers” (as John McCain said on Larry King). I don’t think Kerry’s really a home-run king; he’s a solid RBI hitter, and, to continue the metaphor, he brought in the runs tonight. Bush, on the other hand, seemed to foul-bunt about half the pitches. (OK, metaphor over now.) Despite an entire program about his favorite topic, the war on Tara terror, Bush frequently appeared bewildered and lost, trying to pluck his train of thought from the air in front of him. He also seemed unable to listen with patience and grace while Kerry spoke; he came barely short of sighing on several occasions. When rebutting, his quintessential conspiratorial lectern-lean turned, over the course of the evening, to a crumpled bunker-dive behind the podium, as Erin pointed out. He looked cowed, tired, frustrated and stubborn, looking for a rock—or Iraq—to hide under.

USA Today:
“A scientific review that appears in this month’s edition of the journal Psychopharmacology reports that half of all adults experience drug-withdrawal symptoms when their coffee or soft drink supply is cut off.”

So: Manga. It’s being read by everyone but regular comics readers, and being bought everywhere but comic stores (Go with the generalization, please, so I don’t have to qualify every statement from here on out). We could go on and on about what it means to the market, if anything; about what the market did, is doing, and will do to chase after those sales, and how many copies AMBIGUOUSLY-SEXED POP STAR GOES A’COURTIN’ sells over IDEALIZED MALE POWER FANTASY, but that would require, you know, math and stuff.

[…]

What I do want to talk about is the pure dose of alien culture manga’s had on how I consider comics, pop, and “visual fiction”– it’s literally been like finding a hidden bookstore on the moon or something. The last three, four years have been a learning experience to say the least.

I couldn’t have summarized this conversational piece on manga better if I’d tried. Which I won’t.

Oh, one more choice quote:

Fashion, tastes, accessories, fads– The sun rises and sets on the whims of Japanese girls. Wouldn’t it be great if the Stan Lee of Japan wasn’t a hyperbolic carnie huckster raising a boy-army of misfits and pop junkies, but a nervous, shy, post-schoolgirl still obsessed with boy bands and losing weight, leading all of the other unpopular girls to stuff their backpacks with phonebook weepies? Mayu Shinjo is the Bizarro-Stan. AntiStan!

Stop calling it a debate!! IT’S NOT A FUCKING DEBATE!!

Jesus christ, if tonight’s farce can be called a “debate”, then what you’re reading right now
is an essay.

Thanks, Amar. I like to think of tonight’s spectacle as a mock debate. Meaning, it mocks the idea of a debate. President Lincoln is spinning in his grave (or, possibly, another dimension).

Feedreading News Flurry

Employ a grain of salt in your consideration of course, but CacheLogic claims that P2P traffic is blowing everything else away in terms of ISP bandwidth. Yes, including HTTP. Also interesting: BitTorrent makes up more than half of P2P traffic. (This means either the few geeks willing to put up with BT’s foibles are consuming all the bandwidth in the world, or there are lots of people out there willing to put up with BT.) The P2P Weblog has the story.

“Life is a game of patterns and chance, and those who play well, will
win.” An eight-minute Flash (comic? essay? movie?) about Scrabble
called Craziest by Liz
Dubelman. Great stuff!