All this mishigoss and out-of-hand anxiety about Frank Miller’s Spirit movie got me thinking about my favorite non-Eisner Spirit story of the ever: Alan Moore and Daniel Torres’s “Last Night I Dreamed Of Dr. Cobra,” a stunning, melancholy short piece the two did for Kitchen Sink Comix’s The Spirit: The New Adventures way back when that is so magnificent and brilliant I get something different out of the experience each time I read it. The perfect bookend to the Spirit’s — or any other superhero’s — career, it might actually be Moore’s best short story.

Luckily for us all, an awesome dude with way more time on his hands than I has posted the entire out-of-print story for your perusal.

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Somewhere there’s an amazing paper just lying in wait for an enterprising grad student: why the shit Americans love goddam vampires so much. Awesome dude Guillermo Del Toro has joined in the recent trend (Twilight, True Blood, etc) by signing up to write a vampire book trilogy for William Morrow.

First book, “The Strain,” hits bookstores next summer.

Story will revolve around an invasion of New York City by a vampiric virus. Series will trace the roots of the vampiric race back to its Old Testament origins.

Del Toro will no doubt use his superhuman ability to never sleep to pen the three full-length novels while piloting two (TWO!) of the most anticipated film sequels of all time. In all seriousness, his co-writer on these is going to be a busy man.

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Like so many other kids that gre up in the late 70s/early 80s, I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Bigfoot. Nothing bordering on obsession or anything close to that level, but when things liek the recent press conference hoax come around, there’s always a little part of me that gets excited and hopeful.

At any rate, I’m sure this is old, old news, but the following video clip is pretty much the cleanest video footage I’ve ever seen - or remember seeing, at least. It’s that same classic footage we’re all familiar with, but it’s been enhanced somehow and just looks better than when I used to see it via rabbit ears on my 19″ TV growing up.

You can also look at the footage as one long, stabilized animated gif here, which is way cool.

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The aggressive funky 80s vibe of High Powered Boys seems in be in the same vein as fellow French disko mavericks Justice, Alan Braxe, and, of course, the magnificent o.g.s Daft Punk. Essentially, it’s really more music to get drunk, sweaty, and horny to in some loud club late at night than in the comfort of your own headphones.

Still, the cover of the Boys’s new 10-inch “Sounds of Cain” is the best album cover I’ve seen in quite some time. More metal than metal, really.

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A pair of British archaeologists claim to have solved the mystery of Stonehenge. Apparently they have some hard evidence it was a pilgrimage site where people went to try and get healed. Nifty.

Although I’m going to stick with what I personally believe to be the true history of Stonehenge:

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Thanks (theoretically…) to Dan for the link!

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Here’s a fun list of amazing coulda beens…which I guess makes it fun-ish since none of these ever happened and we’ve been showered with 95-98% celluloid crap for the last couple decades.

Anyways, excerpted from this equally awesome sounding book.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune

“A lot of people have tried to film Dune. They all failed,” stated the opus’s author, Frank Herbert – after David Lynch’s noble effort reached the screen in 1984. A more promising adaptation was proposed in the mid seventies, with Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky overseeing production designs by H.R. Giger, British artist Chris Foss, and French comic book artist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud. Among Jodorowsky’s more outlandish ideas was offering the role of Emperor Shaddam IV to Salvador Dali, at a previously unheard-of salary of $100,000 per hour. Perhaps unsurprisingly, financing on the film fizzled. However, the two extant adaptations – Lynch’s, and a successful 2000 miniseries – will be joined, in 2010, by a third, with The Kingdom director Peter Berg at the helm.

Side note: Pink Floyd was actually slated to do the music for this, which would only have made it more insane…

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The survey size quoted here seems a little bit small, but still, the findings aren’t: out of about 1,100 kids ages 12-17, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found 97% of them play video games.

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!!!?!?!!!?

Kahne also looked at games’ effect on civic engagement, anything from political involvement to raising money for charity. He found that those who spent the most time playing video games weren’t any less likely to be involved in their communities.

The survey did, however, find that those who played games in face-to-face social settings were more likely to say they were committed to civic participation.

Mimi Ito, an anthropologist who studies the use of new media, said more research is needed to explain this phenomenon. But she speculates the ties that gamers make with “real-life local friends” stimulate civic engagement.

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