Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
The Naples museum park on fire early this morning. Four buildings were damaged by the fire complex which includes business incubation offices and the science museum. Photograph: Controluce/AFP/Getty Images
This looks so amazingly dramatic, the way the sky has turned red. Destruction as beauty.
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Batman to the rescue: a man dressed as the caped crusader walked into Trafalgar House police station in Bradford and handed over a wanted man. The suspect had been sought by police in connection with a number of alleged offences and a member of the public dressed in a full Batman outfit took him to the station on 25 February. Photograph: West Yorkshire Police/PA
Sometimes, real life likes to offer something like this up to just to check that you’re paying attention.
Yeah, I’m not quite sure what happened to my reading habits this month; I have the feeling that there are books that I’ve read and entirely forgotten in there, for some reason – I normally read more than this, even with the amount of work/stress and everything that’s been going on [UPDATE: I did, indeed, forget something: Sasha Issenberg’s Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which was more dry than I’d been looking for]. Admittedly, there’s the book I still haven’t finished yet – Hana Rosin’s wonderful The End of Men – that could kinda/sorta be counted, I guess? Otherwise, though, as you can tell, I’ve been leaning heavily on the “Decompression Pulp” this month – El Sombra by Al Ewing being some kind of genius example of the idea, and a ridiculously fun, intentionally trashy story of one man who has barely escaped certain death out for revenge against, essentially steampunk Nazis; it’s really rather great – and trying out Star Wars novels for the first time ever because the high concept of Scoundrels (Pretty much “Hey, it’s Ocean’s Eleven, but Han Solo is George Clooney!”) is somewhat irresistible (The novel is slightly more resistible, it has to be said; it’s not bad, but it’s also nowhere near as fun as it should be).
Supergods was a re-read for work, but also spun out of reading an ARC of Glen Weldon’s really great Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, which I loved when I read and find myself appreciating even more the more I think about it afterwards. It’s the tone, I think; it’s just so very right for something like this. The End of The Line book was a light read because I was in the mood for some good punchy political writing, which this… isn’t, really. It’s another “almost, but not quite” entry. Basically, I find it difficult to wait for the inevitable “Definitive Book of The 2012 Election” to come along. I mean, we’re due one soon, right…?
It’s been a week, people.
I don’t mean that in the literal sense – Well, I do, I guess; I am talking about the last five days of work, which is technically a week in the work sense if you want to be technical and all. But what I really mean is, it’s been a rough week; I got sick last weekend through what was nothing more than just overwork and overstress and exhaustion, and then that just didn’t really have a chance to go away, because I had the kinds of deadlines and workloads in front of me that I had to break my “No Work On The Weekend At All” rule in order to just keep my head above water… which meant that, robbed of the chance to destress for a couple of days, I was just under-powered and increasingly overwhelmed all the time this week.
That happened at the time when I had to go a couple of bigger-than-usual stories – interviews, really – for Wired (One about streaming video and the growth of the audience on tablet devices, and another about MonkeyBrain Comics and their new print titles) that had particular hand-in deadlines that couldn’t be switched or changed, as well as an increased workload for Newsarama because of the death of Batman’s sidekick (Instead of the one front page news story for them per week, in addition to my daily blogging duties, I had two and a half: here, here and here) and my regular Time essay, which was also connected with the deceased Boy Wonder. In almost every case, the work-as-handed-in and the work-as-published were considerably different, due to the editing process that’s almost always a good thing but also means that there’s a bunch of stuff that was written and didn’t see print this week, moreso than usual.
(For those curious about my workload: There’re also daily blog posts for Digital Trends, another handful of Wired pieces – including some that still have to run, and I think are showing up this weekend? – and the final Food or Comics for Robot 6 from this week, too. I also had to do the Comix Experience store catalog from scratch last weekend, which was a bear this month for some reason, and the Wait, What? podcast, which remains the highpoint of my work week.)
All of which is to say: I know, I know; I’ve been very quiet here lately, but it’s not by choice, I promise. Just as I owe people emails (Sorry, Adam, David and Lauren – Soon, I promise!), I owe this blog all kinds of attention. Hopefully, things will be less crazy this upcoming week, and we’ll get back to something resembling normal service. We can but hope, right…?
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
If dogs ruled the world. Dachshunds sit in their positions for the performance installation Dachshund UN, where the dogs were used to mimic a United Nations Commission on Human Rights meeting in Toronto. Australian artist Bennett Miller created the show to question humanity’s potential for creating a universal justice system. Photograph: Michelle Siu/AP
Oh, man. Look at Sengal. Who’sa cutest widdel political figures? Who is? You are! Yes you are!
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Little gymnasts stretch themselves on wooden bars during an exercise session in the gymnastics hall of a sports school in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province in China. They have been in professional sports training since the age of two and their daily schedule involves four hours of athletic training a day. Photograph: William Hong/Reuters
Part of me wanted to make a “Look at them torturing those poor children!” joke, but the truth of the matter is, this is weirdly nostalgic for me; I remember that my own school had a gym with those bars lining the walls, and that we’d have to climb up and down them all the time, with teachers searching desperately for “exercises” that little six year olds could actually manage to do without complaint.
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
It’s tough at the top! Engineers with a head for heights are seen carrying out safety checks on the rides at Thorpe Park in Surrey. Photograph: Mikael Buck/Rex Features
Just this one photo reminds me just how scared of heights I actually am.
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Stacked chairs sit in St Peter’s Square ahead of Pope Benedict XVI’s last public audience on Tuesday morning in Vatican City, Rome. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
There’s something weirdly melancholy and old-fashioned about this picture that I love.
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Buddhist monks hold candles as they walk around a Pagoda on Makha Bhucha Day at the Dhammakaya Temple in Pathumthani,Thailand. Makha Bhucha day is observed on the full moon of the third lunar month and commemorates the day when 1,250 monks gathered to be ordained by the Buddha. Photograph: Porchnai Kittiwogsakul/AFP/Getty Images
This looks like the world’s grooviest alien invasion movie ever, with the pagoda looking the way it does…
It’s one of those weeks where, try as I might, work is bleeding into the weekend – I worry that next weekend may be the same, which is particularly depressing, as it means no days off for the foreseeable, and also that I’ll probably have to skip ECCC after all – and, completely lost in the swamp of stuff I had to do last week, my Time piece appeared on Thursday. At the request of the editor, I am switching formats towards a more “Why [X] is [Awesome/Terrible/Better Than That Other Thing]” approach, starting with a piece about why Superman deserves more respect as a concept. Unsure how this one went, and unsure how much of that unsurety – which has to be a word, right? – is down to me and how much down to discomfort with the format. File under “We Live, We Learn, We Move On,” I think.