While the rest of the world has been busy enjoying the beautiful game, mostly ignoring the ugly corruption in the sport’s governing body as long as there was good soccer to watch, US authorities were unraveling a 24-year scheme of bribes and self-enrichment. Fifa’s grafters probably thought the US was too dumb to take them down. I mean, just three years after the corruption allegedly began, US Soccer willingly wore denim uniforms in public. That seems pretty dumb. But just add that to Fifa’s list of humiliations: they’ve been done in by blue jeans-wearing cowboys who think a ‘football’ is an oblong ball best carried or thrown through the air.
In the Forest Hills domain of Battleworld, Lord Michael Korvac governs over all, ruling with an iron fist, keeping his subjects in line by any means necessary.
From Marvel PR for Korvac Saga. I have to say, a good way to make Battleworld feel less impressive and far more ridiculous is to have domains named after suburbs of New York.
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The worst thing that could happen to Medium is it becomes the final destination in the world of hot takes. All the takes that no one took might be taken up by the place that takes everything. Takes are long-winded, dispassionate, needless opinion pieces commissioned by content sites so there is fresh content. Takes don’t spark conversations, but they can result in comments. (The ‘don’t read the comments’ jokes of recent years breaks my heart as someone who always loved the responses and community that emerged from writing online.) There is no community around takes, although there might be something of a community of people who write takes.
Here’s the key marketing message; this is a “one-nation” government, David Cameron is saying, through the mouth of the Queen. But, given that he spent the election campaign suggesting that five million of her subjects should have no say in lawmaking if they voted for the wrong party, Her Majesty may feel this is a bit rich. Critics would say that the one nation is actually England, given that that is where the vast majority of Conservative MPs come from.
I don’t even think Charlie Brooker could write an episode of Black Mirror this bleak
I… am speechless
what in hell?
The BBC has been casting envious glances at Channel 4′s “poverty porn” for a while – see this interview where the BBC2 controller waxes lyrical about Benefits Street, for instance.
Looking at the article, what I’m guessing has happened here is that someone is saying “let’s make a show about the working poor and how hard you have to work to make a living” and then someone else is saying “OK, that’s not very sexy though, let’s do it like The Apprentice”, and they haven’t fitted the pieces together and realised how fucking horrific and callous those two ideas sound together. Or they have and don’t care, of course, because it’s edgy.
And it fits with the nation of voyeurs, net curtain twitchers, finger-waggers and tale-tellers we seem to have become.
In which Nightcrawler does Weird Tales; Iceman does Back to the Future; we want a vacation home in Dave Cockrum’s brain; Bamfs are terrible; the 1983 Iceman miniseries is straight-up bananas; parents just don’t understand; and Rachel will take literally any excuse to talk smack about John Ruskin.
X-PLAINED:
Vanisher
Nightcrawler #1-4
Bizarre Adventures #27
Iceman #1-4
The Well at the Center of Time
The downside to hanging out with pirates
A shark wizard in a tiny loincloth
Better living through sound-effect awareness
Boggies
The key to a classic Nightcrawler story
Earth-5311
Bamfs
The full extent of Rachel’s Smurfs knowledge
Cretaceous Sam
Sehv
Illyana Rasputin’s porn collection
The Drake family
An exceptionally unlikely girl next door
The definitive Miles’s Mom anecdote
Marge Smith / Mirage
White Light
Idiot
Kali (but not that one)
Two generations of Officers Ratchit
Pornography no one wants to see
Death by time travel
Oblivion
Night Man (kinda)
Our ideal cross-media adaptations
NEXT WEEK: X-Men ’92, with Chris Sims and Chad Bowers!
You can find a visual companion to this episode on our blog!
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X-Plain the X-Men recaps two minis I read as a kid. The Iceman mini was actually reprinted in the British Secret Wars comic, with a third of a U.S. issue every British issue. It was very, very odd to me at the time.
