In an unprecedented sighting, a killer whale takes on a great white shark who approaches too close for comfort to the whale's pod, which includes a new calf.

Black & Blue Films (Dead Cert) is currently in post-production on yet another horror film, Devil's Playground, which stars Danny Dyer (Severance), Jaime Murray ("Dexter"), Janet Montgomery (The Hills Run Red, Wrong Turn 3), Craig Fairbrass, Shane Taylor, Craig Conway, Steven Berkoff, Lisa McAllister, Bart Ruspoli, Del Henney and Jack Healy. Directed by Mark McQueen, a hardened killer searches for a cure to the illness causing a zombie apocalypse across the globe, and that is slowly turning him into one. Check out the first still and a long synopsis below.

I know some people who are crazy for karaoke, but I can't imagine any of them going homicidal over the pastime. Not like the half-dozen or more people in the Philippines who've murdered fellow singers as part of a decade-long crime trend dubbed the "My Way Killings." A popular New York Times article reports on the killings, which are based around the controversy of a single song, Paul Anka/Frank Sinatra's "My Way," and now I'd love to be exposed more to this world of machismo-based karaoke. So moviemakers, get to work on...

My Way: Killer Karaoke

The title/subtitle combo fits best with a documentary, and really the story would best be told in the non-fiction format. I guess I wouldn't mind a minimal, realist Filipino drama, particularly one directed by Brillante Mendoza (Serbis; Kinatay). Yet for the full details, including the history of the crimes and responses from all kinds of Filipinos, from police to men who fight over karaoke to outsider perspectives, I think a doc is the best method.

Filed under: Documentary, Foreign Language

Continue reading Pitch of the Day: 'My Way: Killer Karaoke'

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Word broke today that Google will announce something of a Twitter-killer tomorrow. But unless the thing plays well with Facebook and Twitter, we don't give it much of a chance.

Even then, we're skeptical.

Truth is, Google hasn't ever been very good at launching new consumer products. Gmail is big, but its no Yahoo Mail. They love Orkut in Brazil, but its user base is dwarfed by Facebook's 400 million monthly active users. Google Wave? Hah!

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• HGTV Brings On Blogging Mom Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com
• Twitter Isn't Afraid Of You, China And Iran
• Enough, Google -- Just Buy Twitter Already

A man was murdered in his Dubai hotel room by a hit squad that operated with European passports, police say. Sounds like the plot of a novel, but this is reality and the hunt is on for the killers of top Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

A Palestinian man murdered in his Dubai hotel room by a hit squad, the police say, that operated with European passports. Sounds like the plot of a John Le Carré novel, but this is reality and the hunt is on for the killers of top Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

A Palestinian man murdered in his Dubai hotel room by a hit squad, the police say, that operated with European passports. Sounds like the plot of a John Le Carré novel, but this is reality and the hunt is on for the killers of top Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

A week ago we asked readers to tell us how they're using Google Wave in their daily lives, and despite a bit of "ha! no one's using Wave!" snarking on the Twitter, we got lots of interesting responses.

Unsurprisingly, most Wavers use it as a real-time wiki, but some take advantage of features unique to Wave, like inline and private replies, public tags, and gadgets. I featured the most unique use cases I got in a brand new chapter just added to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The following is the text of the just-published Chapter 10, which describes ways in which a few people who don't work for Google are using Wave to get things done—with screenshots.

So far you've learned the finer workings of Wave in great detail, but there's a big difference between understanding how to swing a hammer and building a house. In this chapter, you'll meet regular people who are already getting things done with Wave in their daily work and life. You'll learn the Wave techniques they've developed through trial and error, and the specific Wave features they use to get certain jobs done. Finally, you'll create wave templates you can use and reuse for your own purposes.

Take a look at some real-world case studies of Wave in action.

Wave as a Group To-do List and Daily Work Log

Justin Swall runs Swall's Associated Services, a small company which provides computer repair and consulting for small businesses. Justin uses Wave as a daily to-do list that he and his co-workers update to track who has done what. He makes use of the "Copy to New Wave" feature to transfer undone items from one day to the next, as shown in Figure 10-1.

Here's Justin's Wave workflow: every day he uses a fresh wave that contains that day's tasks, ordered by priority, and what time they're due. Over the course of the day, Justin's group updates the wave to reflect the current status of each task.

Justin says:

During the day either the initial wave is edited (usually by me) to add additional items to the list, and everyone else uses inline replies to update when items are completed, or if additional information needs to be conveyed back and forth. At the end of each day I copy the day's wave to a new wave, change the date to the next day, remove the items that were completed the day before, add new items or notes to the list, or move items from secondary to primary. Wash, rinse, repeat.

By creating a new wave that carries over the outstanding tasks left on yesterday's wave, Justin leaves behind a daily work log that he can reference later.

Justin prefers Wave to discuss tasks because it's a single, hosted conversation.

For various reasons, Outlook tasks never seemed to work for us. Emailing is a nightmare (I either keep thinking of more things to add to the list and end up sending out five or more messages by morning, or I'm so afraid of doing that I keep it open as a draft so I can keep adding to it then forget to send it at all).

If you're interested in using Wave to manage projects beyond daily tasks, see the later section in this chapter, "Wave for Project Management."

Wave as an Event Planner

Wave is a fine productivity tool, but it also can help you have fun, too. Fifteen-year old Sean Cascketta uses Wave to organize weekend get-togethers with his classmates.

Sean explains:

If I'm formatting a Wave for organizing an event, it usually comes with a basic list of the details (like who, what, where, etc...) as well as a Yes/No/Maybe gadget, which is perfect for these events as we can both constantly check on the RSVP status of people, and they can use the status feature to give any extra details (like if they're bringing along some party favors, electronics or such).

Sean used Wave to create an invitation to a viewing of The Goonies, as shown in Figure 10-2.

Brunch-lover Jed McClure uses Wave to organize his weekly "Brooklyn Brunch Club," a group of friends who brunch somewhere different in Brooklyn each week, and RSVP whether or not they can make it.

Jed describes the process:

We have a pretty dedicated group of brunchers here in Brooklyn, and many brunch options. But the onerous task of coordinating usually ended up resulting in people getting left off the email list. With Google Wave, the idea was to maintain a permanent Brunch wave, where people in the group could check in with and see where the next brunching would happen, and then reply if they were going to try to make it. We also set up a map widget and filled in all the spots we like to hit, to help when making suggestions (and to avoid the dreaded brunch rut).

The Brooklyn Brunch Club wave consists of maps, inline discussions debating which brunch place to hit up next, and a Yes/No/Maybe gadget to collect RSVPs, as shown in Figure 10-3.

Jed says:

So far it has worked pretty well. The threaded nature of the dialog means that it needs to be 'pruned' after each brunch, so that the relevant info remains at the top of the wave. And also train people to look in the history for past brunch details.

With maps and Yes/No/Maybe built in, party, vacation, brunch, or any event planning is one of Wave's most obvious use cases.

Wave as Holiday Gift List Tracker

Hal Wilke has two young children, and when the holidays approach, he gives gift suggestions for his kids to their grandparents. This past year he and his wife used Wave to share and update the list.

Hal explains:

We always email Christmas lists to Grandparents, and then get emails back sometimes to me, sometimes to my wife. Or phone calls at odd times telling us what they bought, so we have to track notes that we write about the phone calls. It was much easier this year [in Wave] because the grandparents could edit the wave as they purchased gifts, and we did not have people buying duplicate gifts, and didn't have to track multiple lists of purchased gifts. Pretty cool that the grandparents were cool with using Wave.

The kids' gift wave included Hal's wife, but Hal used Wave's private reply feature to discuss a surprise gift for her with the kids' grandparents, as shown in Figure 10-4.

Wave for Collaborative Meeting Notes

One of the most common suggested uses of Wave is taking collaborative notes[1] during meetings, classes or conference sessions, and Indiana University employee Manjit Trehan does just that. Manjit's meetings usually have about 10 people attending, and four or five are in Wave, taking notes.

Instead of everyone co-editing a single blip, Manjit separates agenda items into their own individual blips.

Manjit says the process evolved from trial and error:

What I learned after a few meetings [of taking notes in Wave] is that it is best to enter one agenda item per blip. This allows a separate thread to progress below each item. Say we are meeting about ordering some hardware, and there are three open items to be discussed. Vendor selection, Installation schedule, and deployment schedule. Each of these would end up in a separate blip.

Manjit says meeting note waves can get lengthy, but he created a sample meeting wave with separate agenda blips, shown in Figure 10-5.

Wave for Project Management

You've already seen one way to use Wave as a daily task tracker; you can also manage a more complex group project in Wave. This very book, produced by a team of six people-including the authors, our copyeditor, designer, tech lead, and project manager-used Wave to track and manage its production process.[2]

Create a project workspace in Wave using an agreed-upon tag and a saved search for waves with that tag. For example, when we started managing the book project in Wave, our group decided that every book-related wave would get the "cwg" tag (short for CompleteWaveGuide.com). Each of us also saved a tag:cwg search and referred to it to see only project-specific waves, as shown in Figure 10-6.

When you're managing a project in Wave, create a new wave to discuss each topic, task, or facet of the project. For example, for this book project, we used one wave per chapter to discuss chapter-specific questions and edits. For each new edition, we'd clean out the chapter wave of old blips, and start anew, knowing that old conversation was still archived in the wave's playback should we need to see it. We kept other separate waves to draft the style guide, discuss pricing, and see cover image revisions.

Wave as a Conference Backchannel

A smart use of wave tags works well in public waves as well as private ones. Tagged public waves make it easy for anyone to find a relevant place to discuss news or a current event, as it happens, in real-time. In fact, many tech-savvy conference organizers publicize a unique tag for its attendees to use when they post status updates to Twitter or photos to Flickr about the event. Attendees can use that same tag in Wave to create and add to event-specific discussions, too. (Those who aren't at the event can eavesdrop on those public waves, ask questions, and add to the discussion from afar.)

For example, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in November of 2009, I (Gina) gave a keynote presentation called "Making Sense of Google Wave,"[3] and invited attendees to wave about it using the public, agreed-upon conference tag w2e. Before I took the stage, I started a public wave and tagged it w2e so that anyone who searched for with:public tag:w2e could discuss my keynote or any other session they attended, as shown in Figure 10-7.

This technique has been used at events beyond Web 2.0 Expo; bloggers at both eComm Europe[4] and the MediaWiki conference[5] noted that attendees used Wave to take minutes, discuss sessions in real-time, and collaborate on notes.

(Watch a video of the 15-minute "Making Sense of Google Wave" keynote at http://goo.gl/7cK3.)

Wave for Breaking News

The live, real-time nature of Wave makes it a natural fit for collaborating on breaking news as it happens. In fact, when Seattle police were on the hunt for a man suspected of shooting four cops, the Seattle Times used a public wave to rapidly publish updates about the manhunt[6] and solicit information from reader in the process, as shown in Figure 10-8.

Granted, most people aren't conducting a manhunt for a suspected killer, but we all have a reason to broadcast and get live updates on events as they happen to us-like when your sister-in-law goes into labor, or Aunt Martha's undergoing surgery, or Mom in New York is worried about how close the forest fires are to your home in San Diego and whether you've been evacuated.

Wave for Q&A

Wave's inline reply feature makes it a solid choice for having conversations that require back-and-forth on individual points: like an interview. Question and answer interactions can happen very easily in Wave, because the interviewer can start a wave with multiple questions. Then, the respondent can reply to each question inline, and the interviewer can optionally follow up to the response right below it without disrupting the flow of the series. The result is a readable Q&A in the correct order, as shown in Figure 10-9.

Create Wave Templates for Reuse

If you create waves with the same formatting and gadgets often, create a "template" wave for reuse to save yourself repetitive work. For example, if you plan a recurring event in Wave, create a new wave, and format your event title, description, and details area to your liking, and add the Yes/No/Maybe and maps gadget. Save that wave in a "Templates" folder you create.

Then, the next time you need a wave to plan the event, open the template, and select "Copy to new wave" from the timestamp drop-down. Fill in the details for the event in the new copy.

Public Wave Templates

Googler Pamela Fox did just that and made her templates public and read-only, available for anyone to copy for their own purposes. Visit the read-only, public wave which lists her templates at http://goo.gl/GNUw, like the event planner wave template shown in Figure 10-10.

References

• ↑ When to use Google Wave, Google.com
• ↑ How to Manage a Group Project in Google Wave, Lifehacker.com
• ↑ "Making Sense of Google Wave": Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009, Web2Expo.com
• ↑ How to Use Google Wave for Collaborative Conference Notes and Conversation, Emerging Tech Talk
• ↑ MediaWiki conference uses Wave to work on minutes, Mediawiki Wave
• ↑ Another Google Wave Use: Manhunt, TechCrunch.com
• 
  
  

TweetDeck is rolling out an update to its popular desktop Twitter application, TechCrunch Europe reports.

TweetDeck is making more media accessible through TweetDeck. For example, you can watch a YouTube video directly in TweetDeck, instead of opening YouTube in a Web browser window.

In this regard, TweetDeck is erasing your need for a browser. It saves you the trouble of opening a new page or tab for small pieces of media. Obviously, you still need and want a browser, but maybe far down the road TweetDeck becomes a browser. (Twitter apps on the iPhone already do this.)

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Microsoft's "Next-Generation Newspaper" Looks Like TweetDeck
• Google Launching Twitter-Killer For Gmail!
• That Luddite At The New Yorker Has Never Even TRIED Twitter

Ahead of the rainy season there are huge concerns over shelter, sanitation and human rights. The US has a responsibility to help

Last month actors and human rights advocates Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte, along with the Reverend Jesse Jackson sent a letter to Congress and the Obama administration calling attention to "serious mistakes that have unnecessarily delayed the delivery of medical supplies, water, and other life-saving materials." The letter was also signed by some 90 scholars and Haiti advocates. (Disclosure: I also added my signature).

The letter asked for, among other things, "A public announcement as to what measures our government will take going forward to make sure that the mistakes of the first two weeks are not repeated."

Although the aid delivery situation has since improved, there are still major deficiencies and it is not clear what our government's plan is to prepare for the rainy season, which can begin as early as the end of February; and the hurricane season, which begins in June.

The Washington Post reported on 2 February that there are "hundreds of thousands of desperate people who apparently have not received food and shelter." The medical aid group Doctors Without Borders reports "increased cases of diarrhoea and skin rashes from the poor sanitary conditions of living outside" and warns that "rains could bring more serious diseases like typhoid, measles or dengue."
"Measles is the leading killer of children,'' says Unicef spokesman Kent Page. "In the conditions of these makeshift camps, if there was to be a measles outbreak it would spread like wildfire.''

The UN is calling for donations to a $700m agricultural investment fund, since the March planting season is approaching and farmers will need tools, seed, fertilisers, and other inputs. Irrigation and riverbanks have also been damaged. The majority of Haiti's population still lives in the countryside, and many grow food for subsistence and local markets. An estimated 482,000 people have migrated from Port-au-Prince to rural areas since the earthquake, which will put further strain on the countryside.

On the positive side, the Haitian government, in collaboration with the UN, has begun a programme of immunisation "including rubella and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccines for children under seven and diphtheria and tetanus for older children and adults," although press reports indicate that these fall far short of needs and will have to be expanded quickly. USAID reports about 70,000 households have received tents or other shelter material, out of about 260,000 needed.

Shelter for the hundreds of thousands of homeless is a most urgent need as the rainy season approaches, and sanitation is also important to avoid the spread of water-borne diseases. USAID is arguing that we should "think outside the tent," and begin to build more permanent structures, but the Haitian government says they need tents first. Since there are recurring aftershocks that could persist for months, anything but earthquake-resistant structures would appear dangerous, especially to shell-shocked survivors of a devastating earthquake. On the other hand, tents will be problematic for the rainy and especially hurricane season, depending on the level of flooding.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that 33 cents of each US government dollar to Haiti goes to the military. There are already 6,000 US troops in Haiti, in addition to the 12,500 UN troops, and Washington has talked about deploying 20,000. This is clearly overkill. The AP reports just one cent of each US dollar is going to the Haitian government. This is also a serious problem. Haiti needs a government, and years of US and private efforts have destroyed most of it. Haitian government revenues, not including grants, are just 10% of GDP, more than 50% lower than most poorer countries in Africa, such as Rwanda, Mozambique, Niger and Burundi.

USAID is currently funnelling millions of US taxpayer dollars into questionable organisations such as Chemonics, Development Alternatives, Inc (DAI), and its own Office of Transition Initiatives, which has been involved in shady political activities in various countries where the US was opposing democratically elected governments.

It must be recalled that Washington, in collaboration with Canada and France, destroyed the Haitian government and wrecked the economy by cutting off international aid from 2000-2004, in order to overthrow the elected government. Thousands of supporters of that government were killed after the 2004 coup, and many imprisoned, including officials of the elected government. All this happened while UN forces were occupying the country. There was little outcry from Washington-based human rights organisations.

So human rights will also be an issue in the months and years ahead, as Haitians organise to have a voice in the reconstruction efforts and the future of their own country. This is especially true given that the country's largest political party, Fanmi Lavalas, was excluded from the last national elections in April – leading to an 89% boycott according to the official count – and from the (now rescheduled) elections that were planned for this month.

For all of these reasons, the US Congress and civil society will have to play a watchdog role. However, it will be difficult to get people to disturb the public relations efforts of the Obama administration with regard to Haiti. The Washington Post reports that the administration's Haiti operation "could advance US diplomacy in a region long suspicious of US intentions."

"I think that the United States will look very magnanimous," says Cresencio Arcos, a former US ambassador to Honduras and now a senior adviser at the National Defence University's Centre for Hemispheric Defence Studies in Washington. "Haiti is good for the United States, to show its humanitarian side," he said. "It's perfect for this administration, which is Democratic and liberal."

• Haiti
• US foreign policy
• International aid and development
• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• Human rights
• United States

Mark Weisbrotguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Olivia Munn gets physical in tight booty shorts (Click here)

Blake Lively in a tiny bikini will melt your eyeballs (Click here)

Maria Sharapova looks even hotter in a tiny red bikini (Click here)

Marisa Miller unleashes her drop dead sexy body (Click here)

Wow, Jennifer Aniston has one hell of a killer bikini booty! (Click here)

Yeah, Sophia Bush may actually be sent from heaven… (Click here)

Melissa Giraldo’s new photoshoot will leave you in awe (Click here)

Whoa, Brittney Berault oozes some serious sex appeal (Click here)

Eliza Dushku looking like her usual ultra hot self (Click here)

We so need more Lucy Liu bikini pictures like these ones (Click here)

Supermodel Brooklyn Decker is all legs baby! (Click here)

Padma Lakshmi makes cooking a freaking hot affair (Click here)

Bar Refaeli sure knows how to pose in a tiny bikini (Click here)

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a "Twitter-killer" feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users can currently broadcast status messages via the Google Talk feature. The main difference between the current offering and the new feature is that status messages aren't available in a timeline format. With the new "Twitter clone," they will be.

Sponsor

UPDATE: While we're still waiting for an official response from Google's PR team, we've been invited to an event at the Googleplex tomorrow "to see some innovations in two of our most popular products." The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific time - stay tuned tomorrow for RWW's live coverage of the event!

This is the current option for updating statuses in Gmail:

Google's new tools, however, will better integrate with Google's multimedia sites, YouTube and Picasa. (Currently, Google Talk users can share YouTube videos via chat, which prompts a miniaturized version of the video to pop up above the chat in progress.) Users will also be able to see "a stream of status updates from people they choose to connect with."

We're contacting Google for more information and will update this post as we learn more.

In the meantime, however, we're wondering how this feature will integrate with other status-sharing sites. Will Gmail/Google Talk's new feature act as Google's first steps into developing a social media client (like Tweetdeck) in its own right?

The new feature could start appearing on users' screen as soon as this week. If you had this tool, would you use it?

Would you use a Google Twitter clone?(poll)

Discuss

Nicholas Carlson / Silicon Alley Insider:
Google Launching Twitter-Killer For Gmail!  (GOOG)  —  Google could launch a Twitter-killer as soon as this week, the Wall Street Journal reports.  —  Google already allows Gmail users to update their status.  The prompt reads, “let people know what you're up to, or share links to photos, videos, and Web pages.”

Google could launch a Twitter-killer as soon as this week, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Read the rest of this story »

The Unknown.  Mark Waid (writer), Minck Oosterveer (art). Boom! Studios.  $24.99.  Hardback, slipcover edition.

Mark Waid and Minck Oosterveer’s The Unknown starts very strong.  Strong enough that by the second page I knew that unless things really went off the rails at some point, that I would be reading straight through until the end.  And I did.  Even though I was sitting at my desk and totally uncomfortable, rather than curled up on the sofa.  It’s a pretty good book that can keep me reading the whole way through without moving to a more comfortable location.

But then again, I’m a sucker for a good detective story, especially one with a strong female protagonist.

The plot, sans spoilers, is simply that Catherine Allingham is the world’s greatest detective, and she has a new case.  Catherine quickly (and pretty cleverly) finds herself a good right hand man in James Doyle and they set off to Vienna to solve the case of, and recover if possible, a missing box.  Catherine takes the case because she believes it will put her on a path to solving the only mystery she has yet to solve – The Unknown (i.e. what comes after death, if anything).  Catherine is correct that the case is more than it seems and what follows is a madcap deadly chase for Catherine and James that involves everything from mysterious faceless killer bodyguards to high speed train fights to potentially the very door to the afterlife itself.

Waid accomplishes a lot very quickly in The Unknown introducing us to Catherine, her mission, her sidekick, and why she has this particular fascination with what comes after death, beyond the sheer challenge of it, and also why she hallucinates (or why we should all believe she does).  Yet as a reader you don’t feel like you’re being fed “the set up” because it’s so enjoyable and flowing and flawless and interesting.

The book is like that in its entirety, with the exception of one blip in issue #3 when ‘the villain’ monologues his role in ‘all of this’ and of course his plan.  It’s a trope we all see, and expect, and it’s forgivable here, but given the quality of the book as a whole I expected a bit more nuance and subtlety from Waid.

Overall Catherine is a great female character to me in that although she feels very three dimensional, she also feels like she could be a man just as easily as a woman – which is a style I tend to like when used well in fiction.  The idea that Catherine and a male character will act differently based on their individual skills and knowledge, but not so much based on their gender.  Used incorrectly of course, as we’ve all seen it done numerous times, you end up with a paper thin character that you can’t understand or get behind.  But a character built as Waid has built Catherine, serves to help you question what gender is and what makes men and women so different and so not different both within fiction and in the real world.  In the end, I like that Catherine’s dialogue (and behaviors) could generally just as easily come from a man as a woman, and yet Catherine still feels entirely specific and personal as a character.

these are the first two pages of issue #1, a nice set up for the character and the overall tone of the book.

James Doyle is also well rendered and I thought they worked well as a team – as a hero and sidekick of sorts, or perhaps more accurately as a modern day Holmes and Watson.  I particularly loved that Doyle looks like a big dumb jock and is anything but, further confounding expectations.  I also thought that in four short issues Waid really managed to not only make me care about the characters but to make me believe completely that they care about each other.  The affection on the page between the two is palpable, without ever becoming romantic or cloying.

My only real complaint with the writing and characterizations (other than the villain monologue in #3 previously mentioned) is that both Catherine and James feel a little too strongly like Mary Sue/Marty Stu tropes.  Each being a little too perfect and badass and flawless.  I mean, even Batman has a flaw (he’s a dick).  I would have liked just a little more depth in that regard.  Nobody is adventurous, and brilliant, and beautiful, and thin, and rich, and athletic, and not a complete pain in the ass to be around etc.  It’s a bit much, for both of the characters to be so perfect.  I ended up loving them anyway, but in a perfect (no pun intended there) world, I'd like them both to show just a little more reality, humanity, and fallibility.

Oosterveer’s art overall, is wonderful.  Any given page is beautiful, but more importantly the storytelling is solid and clear.  I’m one of those people that gets a bit sick of the beautiful drawings for beautiful drawings sake alone.  I’m much more interested in the writing and art working together to tell a great story, and for real clarity in that endeavor.  Waid and Oosterveer absolutely succeed in that, and as a bonus there’s a lot of beauty along the way as well.  In Gail Simone’s intro to this edition (the hardcover edition complete with built in bookmark) she makes a specific mention of Oosterveer’s ability to convincingly and dynamically render a fight with a monster aboard a train hurtling through the Austrian countryside.  And she's right to point it out, I think this is the kind of storytelling that sometimes gets lost in even good mainstream comics these day, the subtlety of storytelling sacrificed for the ‘big moments’ and I was excited to see Oosterveer manage both here without losing anything.  Most impressive to me however is Oosterveer’s ability to juggle the very real world feel of the book with Catherine’s hallucinations and the more otherworldly aspects, mixing them together nicely into a fluid cohesive world.

The lights and darks in the book are great, giving the book real depth and showing off Oosterveer as a talented inker as well as penciler.  The color palette by Fellipe Martins (with Renato Faccini and Andres Lozano helping out on the fourth issue) is strong and well suited to the dark tone of the book.

My one complaint about the art – and anyone that has read this book and knows anything about this column, knows exactly what is coming – why do I have to constantly be staring at Catherine’s boobs?  I don’t get it, and I don’t like it.  It tells me nothing specific about Catherine (I guess I can make the leap that deep down she’s really insecure and needs to show off her tits to get attention) but that leap flies in the face of everything Waid has shown me about the character, so I’m not certain he wants me leaping to that conclusion.  I personally found it distracting and a trick that is quite frankly well below this book’s caliber.  It doesn't help that the other minor female characters in the book also display heavy boobage and extremely low cut outfits whenever they show up, which tells me that this is less about the characters and more about how the artist likes to draw women.  And I'm not really a fan of that, as many here might guess.  It's certainly not over the top in a way that prevents me from being able to enjoy the book and overall I'd say the female body types presented are more interesting and realistic than the way your average plastic superheroines are drawn these days, which counts for something.  However, I can admit to being a little frustrated by it, and if I'm completely honest, I almost didn’t buy this book because of the rampant boobs and clothing choices (in part because I didn’t want to have to have this exact paragraph if I ended up writing about the book for my column).  It’s also the reason The Unknown sat on my shelf unread for so long even after I committed and bought it...nearly four months ago.

Is it a deal breaker?  Of course not, the book is good and I’m choosing to overlook it, and I'm glad I overlooked it long enough to finally start reading it, but I can’t help but wonder about the why.  Why does a book this good really need that?

Regardless of unnecessary low cut tops and boobs run a bit rampant, I definitely recommend the The Unknown to anyone that likes detective tales, adventure tales, strong layered female lead characters, or anyone just looking for good comics.

The Unknown by Mark Waid and Minck Oosterveer from Boom! Studios is available in hardcover format only at $24.99.  It’s a beautiful edition – with an illustrated slipcover and a silver embossed hardcover, but considering that the only extras beyond the collected four issues are an intro by Gail Simone, a covers gallery, and a ribbon bookmark, it’s a bit steep.

The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh also by Mark Waid and Minck Oosterveer from Boom! Studios (which I have not yet read) is scheduled to be released in similar hardback format in June 2010, and the last issue of that second miniseries (#4 of 4) came out January 27th, 2010, and individual issues, if not still available at your local comic book shops, issues are available directly from Boom! Studios.

iBank 3.5.5iBank is a personal and small business financial manager designed to manage bank accounts, credit cards and investments, analyze income and expenses with live updating charts, and plan your financial future with budgeting and forecasting. Wrapped in a beautiful Aqua interface, iBank 3 is a robust financial application able to meet the needs of the casual spender to online day-trader.

iBank can directly connect to your bank to download transactions and the new .mac-enabled iPhone webapp allows you to enter transactions on the road. Other new features allow you to track your loans, see your account balance through time and flip through your transactions with Cover Flow.

iBank 3 is the Quicken killer you've been waiting for.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 3.5.5:

• Fixed security calculation bug with Move Shares action
• Improved QIF importing for split transfers
• Improved importing categories with • in the name
• Fixed nasty bug where deleting an investment account wouldn't preserve other accounts' balances
• Fixed bug where cleared balance wouldn't update after an import
• Fixed bug with ROI summary total in Reports
• Fixed bug where stale Scheduled Transaction values could be used in a Forecast
• Fixed bug with some move shares calculations
• Fixed bug where "Div" wasn't properly recognized for QIF imports
• Fixed ROI calculation when Move Shares is involved
• Fixed issue where QIF export assigned wrong account type to investment accounts
• Fixed issue where QIF export split transactions weren't compatible with Quicken
• Fixed issue where QIF export did not always include transaction types
• Fixed issue where Cash accounts were not exported to QIF with correct type
• Fixed issue where account info list wasn't added to QIF export
• Fixed bug with Capital Gains report and Move Shares

REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.5.1 or later.
PRICE$59.99
DEVELOPERIGG Software, LLC
DOWNLOADS84377
DOWNLOAD NOW (26 MB)
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These are things that everyone was doing since birth - dastardly evil things! Number 1 is a real killer.