Young actor's murderer still on the loose - could this be the beginning of a spree?

I have recently received insider information from an actor working in New York, that Heath Ledger was killed by the Joker. Ledger was recently quoted as saying that playing the part of the psychotic Joker in the upcoming film, The Dark Knight, put such a strain on the actor that he could not sleep at night.

Ledger told The New York Times last year that Heath Ledger stressed a little too much over the role.
The interview was done in London during the filming of Batman.
'It is a physically and mentally draining role (his Joker is a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” he said cheerfully ) and, as often happens when he throws himself into a part, he is not sleeping much," Heath Ledger told The Times.

“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”
[Link]

So there you have it. Now the Joker's started killing people out here in the real world. Well, kind of the real world. New York City anyway, not LA, or Tokyo or one of those DC cities. A proper Marvel city. I'm starting to see it more and more. Life drifting into the broad strokes of a comic book: pencils by Jack Kirby, inks by Chick Stone, and fuck sake let's say it, script by Stan Lee.
And that might be putting too precise a point on it. The inks aren't always by Chic Stone, and sometimes the pencils are by Steve Ditko. But regardless, like in the Mighty Marvel Age of the 1960s what we're seeing around us is a world shaped by the artists. A world that is running a few steps faster, and a fews steps deeper than what the writers are picking up or getting down.

Things are starting to happen which lead me to think that the dread iron system, whose shadow we have been cowering under since the birth of our New American Century, when on September the Eleventh the assault on the hearts, minds, and rights Americans began, but what I'm trying to say, is maybe that's ending now.

Yeah, so this is the thing. I might be fooling myself, and even if I am, its okay I need the break from the bleak. But I really am starting to think that maybe things are getting better. I really don't want to jinx it, but maybe the brutal and much loathed system, will just break. Fall apart like a poorly thought out Rube Goldberg machine. Not so bad. Weeds are springing up through the cement. Tree roots cracked it but the dandelions have the flowers now.

But it seems this is a transition period; reality is becoming less fixed, and change starts to happen faster and faster. New technologies are rippling into ever facet of life and every field of thought. And so the world starts to look more like a comic book. But I've said that already, so let's go to some examples:

Okay Tom Cruise is a lot of my evidence. I don't know when you first realized that he's a super hero, but for me it was a picture I saw on some tabloid last May that looked something like this,
I believe here he's pictured riding towards Avengers Mansion shortly before his falling out with Hollywood types he once considered nearly family. So far Tom Cruise seems a lot cooler than Tony Stark, who he was originally on the team to replace. Perhaps since Tom Cruise thinks he can move things with his mind, and did overcome his dyslexia through hard work, his mental powers make him more appealing than a gadget hero like Stark's Iron Man.
[Tom Cruise taking ‘Mission’ to Tribeca]

Also if you watched the latest Tom Cruise bit to hit the web, (but not the news, copyright is still ironclad for them) you may have gotten the impression that Tom Cruise's legacy will overshadow that of Scientology. I think he is using his mental powers and personal energy to summon forth something. And his image is starting to represent that something more than the dying cult he is presently apart of.
[Watch the Secret Scientology Tom Cruise Video]


And if Tom Cruise is our superhero, we know we're in the Marvel Universe since his arch villains are a shadow band of hackers known as Anonymous who have vowed to destroy Scientology. Sometimes, over the top is exactly the spot you need to hit. Seems like this could actually start some commotion.
[Message to Scientology]

I'll try to start posting more comic art and more evidences of this most enjoyable turn of events. And hopefully as my world outlook has been brightened, the stories I find and share will be a bit more upbeat from now on. But no promises.

Vid Lists

I've decided to start making video playlists on youtube. Making playlists with iTunes really has changed how I listen to music, so I'm excited to see how this new medium and application feel when squished like clay against my head and hands. I'm anticipating the limitations. So far I've made 4 playlists, and I'm planning to stick with these for awhile and try to grow them.

MY VIDEO PLAYLISTS

Free Drug Pipe w/ iPhone

Found this image on the Apple website over X-Mas. I guess that drug pipe shown next to the iPhone has Bluetooth and wireless crapability. Apple must know their demographic at least as well as their competition does.

"Sometimes I feel like all science is doing now is reverse-engeneering Jack Kirby..."

Is there a word for that unsettling experience of walking by some street corner you've walked by a thousand times before and noticing the building that was always there had been torn down, replaced by some shiny new thing--and now that the old thing is gone, you realize you can't really remember what was there before? I feel like that's happening around us all the time.
[pulphope]

===

I had a strange sense of seeing a foreign object, realizing I couldn't fully grasp it's significance to my future-self, but knowing one day in the future it would be significant. One day, the iPhone will return to me. One day I would be holding one of my own, never knowing how I ever got along without it before.

Over at the table sits Dean Haspiel, chilling with Heidi MacDonald and JahFurry. Dean and I start talking about Jack Kirby (not the first time). We talk about comics, the glory of them, making them, inventing them, loving them. We talk about science fiction in comics, about Jack Kirby and his particular type of science fiction. "In comics, there's no budget," I hear myself saying, "just your paper and your brush and your imagination."

"Look at all that stuff Kirby came up with, " he says. "Kirby just INVENTED on paper, he didn't bother to build any of it. He already thought of it. It was enough to just think of it -- he was just blueprinting the future..."

"Sometimes I feel like all science is doing now is reverse-engeneering Jack Kirby," I say.

And we sit there in silence a bit. The thought of Jack Kirby's imagination tends to make cartoonists' conversations taper off into quiet introspection. The place was full of people but the noise of Jack Kirby in my head drowned it all out--exploding, psychedelic Kirby visions, weird twisting pipes on Orion's cycle, the chrome curves and jet-exhaust vents on the underbelly of the Fantasticar, Darkseid's Omega Beams, with all their strange, Cubist trajectories, Seriphan and his collapsing Super Cycle, the silent corridors of the Red Ghost's lunar hideaway, High Father's staff, Machine Man's extending arms and dismantleable magenta body parts, his bug-like red eyes, his impassive stare-- the images paraded along an infinite mobius strip of their own, like the marching red ants in the MC Escher print.

"All the iPhone is is a retarded Mother Box," I declare. Dean nods, knowing.
[pulphope]

I finally got to look at the iPhone, like the iPod Nano, it's a 2010 device existing with a halo of improbability around it here in 2007.

WikiVandal Scries Future, Apologizes

Apparently, the wiki entry for wrestler Chris Benoit was edited to include information about his wife's death, hours before the police were aware. Sounded to E.C. not to be true. But the poster has come forward confessing it was a joke that just happened to be real.

This is not the last time that Wikipedia will historicize something before it happens. It's power and scope will set it loose from the timestream.

A million vandals at a million keyboards can write tomorrow's headlines.

Maps

The VEIDT Alert Map
Possibly the greatest thing ever. It's like being in the JLA Watchtower, the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, and Adrian Veidt's house all at once.

BBC; BAGHDAD: Mapping the Violence
It's great that now we can take sad news and visualize it to get a better sense just how sad it is. It's like reading 50 newspaper articles.

Say Goodbye to Your Right to Assemble

THE MARTIAN HEAT RAY HAS COME TO EARTH, AND SOON IT WILL BE GOING TO IRAQ

The U.S. Military has certified the Active Denial System for use in Iraq. ADS is a microwave based ray gun to be attached to a hummer for use in crowd control.

According to Wired Magazine, December 02006, Say Hello to the Goodbye Weapon:

The beam produces what experimenters call the "Goodbye effect," or "prompt and highly motivated escape behavior." In human tests, most subjects reached their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds.

The ADS was developed in complete secrecy for 10 years at a cost of $40 million. Its existence was revealed in 2001 by news reports, but most details of ADS human testing remain classified. There has been no independent checking of the military's claims.

We can also say goodbye to public speech as we know it. Today's military uses the weapons of tomorrow's police force. Make no bones about it, this technology will be used against Americans on American soil within 10 years. The tear gas of WWI was eventually turned on American citizens by their own government. This will be no different. Except with this technology a government can suppress public dissent almost entirely. Imagine what the protests of the 1960s would have looked like if Richard Nixon's government had this technology.

Eventually, the heat rays will trickle down into the untrained hands of your local police. In June 2006, after the Supreme Court decided to allow no-knock searches, John Tierney wrote an editorial for the New York Times on the 'SWAT Syndrome,' the militarization of small town police forces through over armament.

Of all the excuses for weakening the Fourth Amendment, the weirdest was the one offered by Justice Antonin Scalia last week in a Michigan drug case.

He wrote the majority opinion allowing police officers to use evidence found in a home even if they entered without following the venerable rule to knock first and announce themselves. To reassure traditionalists, Scalia declared that unreasonable searches are less of a problem today because of ''the increasing professionalism of police forces.''

Well, it's true that when police show up at your home in the middle of the night, they're better armed and trained than ever. They now routinely arrive with assault rifles, flash grenades and battering rams.

So if your definition of a professional is a soldier in a war zone, then Scalia is right. The number of paramilitary raids has soared in the past two decades as cities, suburbs and small towns have rushed to suit up SWAT teams.

Eventually small cities and towns will want their very own death rays, and Raytheon is always ready to lend a helping hand. They have developed their own smaller, commercial version called The Silent Guardian.

More from the Wired article on the Active Denial System:

Eye damage is identified as the biggest concern, but the military claims this has been thoroughly studied. Lab testing found subjects reflexively blink or turn away within a quarter of a second of exposure, long before the sensitive cornea can be damaged. Tests on monkeys showed that corneal damage heals within 24 hours, the reports claim.

The beam penetrates clothing, but not stone or metal. Blocking it is harder than you might think. Wearing a tinfoil shirt is not enough -- you would have to be wrapped like a turkey to be completely protected. The experimenters found that even a small exposed area was enough to produce the Goodbye effect, so any gaps would negate protection. Holding up a sheet of metal won't work either, unless it covers your whole body and you can keep the tips of your fingers out of sight.

Wet clothing might sound like a good defense, but tests showed that contact with damp cloth actually intensified the effects of the beam.

System 1, the operational prototype, is mounted on a Hummer and produces a beam with a 2-meter diameter. Effective range is at least 500 meters, which is further than rubber bullets, tear gas or water cannons. The ammunition supply is effectively unlimited.