Double ration aujourd’hui, avec ce petit dessin qui était initialement prévu pour un magazine.

Sans même entrer dans le vif du sujet, Bottomless Belly Button, roman graphique de Dash Shaw, en impose par ses mensurations : 720 pages, un dos de 5,5 cm sur lequel on trouve une foultitude d’infos, bref, une sacrée bête. Acclamé meilleure bande dessinée indépendante de l’année aux USA, le pavé édité par Fantagraphics arrive aux éditions Çà et là pour 30 €, un an après la sortie du tout aussi imposant Château l’Attente.

Mais rien à voir ici avec de la fantasy médiévale, Bottomless Belly Button flirte du côté de la chronique sociale iconoclaste à travers les aventures de la famille Loony, qu’on croirait presque sortie d’un film de Wes Anderson, genre Famille Tenenbaum. Il faut dire qu’après 40 ans de mariage, les parents Loony annoncent leur divorce, et réunissent tout le monde dans la maison familiale. Fantaisie parmi d’autres, Peter, le cadet de la famille, apparaît la quasi-totalité du bouquin sous les traits d’une grenouille – même s’il nous a fallu un quart du livre pour comprendre que ses narines n’étaient pas ses yeux ! –, en écho à sa position de loser que ce soit sur le plan professionnel ou sentimental. Lui, comme les autres, va vivre un séjour riche en rebondissements tapant au cÅ“ur de ses complexes. À la fin, tous les personnages auront évolué de façon perceptible.

Varié et hétéroclite, tant sur les thèmes que sur le plan visuel, avec des mises en pages éclatées pour rythmer les différentes parties et de nombreux jeux graphiques avec des onomatopées d’ambiances “musique à fond” et de mouvements “emmêle”, les 720 pages se lisent d’une traite. Pourtant, Bottomless Belly Button aura du mal à séduire ceux pour qui les histoires qui mènent en voyage dans la psyché des personnages ne font ni chaud ni froid. Reste qu’en la matière, grâce à ses trouvailles graphiques et à sa façon de traiter de façon simple les choses complexes, le roman graphique de Dash Shaw est ce qui s’est fait de mieux cette année !

Les images sont © Dash Shaw.

Un peu de poésie pour commencer ce joli mois de décembre avec un dessin que j’avais déjà diffusé il y a quelques années.

If this thing were coming from any source other than the legendary Eldar Murtazin of mobile-review, we'd go ahead and assume this was a knockoff nabbed off eBay for a few bucks -- but amazingly, we think it's the real deal. The dead-on-arrival burgundy slider with gold accents looks like it could've been part of a reinvigorated l'Amour series (or something along those lines), clearly putting styling at or near the top of its priorities -- but it also steals the 6260 slide's totally capable guts, which means it features a 5-megapixel camera, tri-band 3G, and a 480 x 320 display. If they had to choose between this and the 6260, the right model came out on top -- but we gotta admit, it's so far outside Nokia's styling comfort zone that we find it tolerable in a really sick, twisted way.

[Via Daily Mobile]

Filed under: Cellphones

Canceled 5-megapixel Nokia slider almost looks like a fake originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Haaaa, vous vous en foutez royalement mais je suis très content donc encore une fois je vous fait partager mon bonheur

ça y est, y a 2 mins j’ai pris ma place pour LeWeb 08 la messe du web.
Je peux pas vous dire pourquoi j’ai payé que 10% du prix parce que sinon mon contact risque d’être assassiné dans la seconde.

Certains d’entre vous seront ils là ? C’est laquelle la bonne soirée avant LeWeb ? Où sont passé les éditions 04, 05, 06 et 07 ? Merci d’avance pour vos réponses.

ps : pour les amateurs de web2.0, de geekeries… qui trouve que Tapahont a baissé en qualité, je vous promets que dans quelques jours, je relance tout ça, j’avais besoin de temps d’adaptation mais là j’ai comme l’impression que j’y suis presque.

ps2 : J’ai aussi reçu ça aujoud’hui, mais on en reparle après que mes collègues de travail aient testé

Trutap, a leading UK mobile startup which made the TechCrunch 40 list in 2007, is letting go almost 80% of its 30 staff after failing to hit its window for a second round of funding. A skeleton staff will keep the social apps Java application for mobiles available prior to a sale or new investment, only a month after its re-launch. The startup was orphaned after its first investor Tudor Ventures, a hedge fund hit hard by the economis crisis, put in a rumoured $6m but could not come back for a second funding round. And today the UK startup scene was also hit by news that review site Reevoo is putting a fifth of its staff jobs on an “at risk” list.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Lonmin, the third-largest platinum producer in the world, has begun the process of shedding permanent-employee positions.

The new rocket-propelled grenade RPG-30 anti-armor weapon recently unveiled in Russia has a sneaky trick to help it get past active defensesmdash;it fires a tiny decoy rocket flying ahead of the...

via MacNN:

Following in the wake of its one-day Black Friday sale, Apple has posted another single-day special at the online Apple Store. For the duration of Monday only, all products at the store should be eligible for free shipping, regardless of expense. The deal is also not exclusive to the US, and applies to stores such as the ones in Canada, France and the United Kingdom....


More...

New York Times:
CNN Pitches a Cheaper Wire Service to Newspapers  —  CNN, in the afterglow of an election season of record ratings for cable news, is elbowing in on a new line of business: catering to financially strained newspapers looking for an alternative to The Associated Press.

pThe open source Linux kernel has been ported to Apple's popular iPhone. The port is still in early stages of development, but the developers hope that it will pave the way for bringing Google's Android platform to the device./ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081201-linux-iphone-port-could-pave-the-way-for-android.html"Read More.../a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/wB9zHlTN6ysuOeI2BuSm5bHtNYA/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/wB9zHlTN6ysuOeI2BuSm5bHtNYA/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=PQYR9AsR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?i=PQYR9AsR" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=4Y4OE8bd"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?a=R0tfAYUT"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/arstechnica/BAaf?d=41" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arstechnica/BAaf/~4/rGlqCWpahhM" height="1" width="1"/

Japanese pitcher Junichi Tazawa moved a step closer to signing with the Boston Red Sox after rejecting offers from three other major league teams.

Johnson Johnson will buy breast-implant maker Mentor to boost its presence in the cosmetic and reconstructive medicine sector.

We left SFO at 11am yesterday, and got into BOS at 3am. The delay in the middle was at ORD: O’Hare. We arrived at 6pm to find that our 7pm flight had been delayed to 9:10. After going to dinner at the Macaroni Grill (chosen after tweeting a request that was answered nicely by Todd Storch), we parked our butts at the gate, where the departure time kept moving back until it was nearly 11pm. For a long time there was no gate agent at all. But the board behind the counter kept rolling the departure time outward. I finally became one of those travellers who stretches out and sleeps with head on knapsack.

The plane for our flight never arrived, so United put us on another one with fewer rows, which made for even more fun. I felt sorry for whoever didn’t get to Chicago on the plane we couldn’t take.

I did sleep for the whole flight to Logan, then got to bed at 4, and up at 6. Now I’m back in the saddle, at my desk in our apartment.

The biggest relief here is Internet speed. On the road everything seemed slow. The hotel in Morgan Hill, CA barely cleared dial-up speed. The house where we hung out was okay (about 500k up and down), but seemed to take forever to bring anything up. My Sprint data card outperformed every wi-fi connection I encountered.

Here at the apartment we have 20Mb symmetrical service from Verizon FiOS. The hub-router thing craps out a lot, but otherwise it’s rock-solid and makes Net access into a relatively wide smooth highway. The only better connectivity I’ve experienced is at universities.

Anyway, good to be back. Now off to work.

pIt's a question you've probably asked. Why is it that when you are looking for a house, driving slowly down a darkened street straining to see the numbers on the fronts of the homes or on the mailboxes at the end of the driveways, you automatically turn down the car radio? Why do you need silence when focusing, concentrating? You do so, I suppose, because you instinctively know that music and voices are a distraction. You know on a subconscious level that you cannot focus as well on the task at-hand when there is noise in the background. Noise is a distraction./p pI find that when I am writing, and especially writing something that requires deep thought and consistent logic, I need to remove background distractions, whether that means I turn down the music playing from my computer or close the door to my office to drown out the sounds of squabbling or playing children. I do this without thinking about it. As I strain to collect my thoughts and to put words to them, I automatically turn down the music (as I did just now). I am often surprised, when I have finished my writing, to find that the music has been turned off or the door has been closed. I may have no recollection of doing so. It must be a natural reaction./p pMany years ago I heard a sermon, one of the few I remember from my younger days, in which the pastor suggested that we try turning off the stereos in our cars, especially when we are driving alone, and spend the time thinking or praying. He had apparently developed the practice of praying aloud when driving alone. It earned him some bemused looks from other drivers who saw him talking, apparently to himself, but because he found it a beneficial practice he swallowed his pride and continued to talk to God. I guess this was in the day before bluetooth headsets; today it seems as if every driver is talking to himself. I often make a decision--and it has to be a deliberate decision since I am accustomed to pressing the "play" button immediately after starting the car--to turn off the radio or MP3 player when I drive. I have found such times extremely valuable. My mind can process things and mull things over far better where there is silence. This is particularly true if the song I might be listening to is one that is familiar to me as then, whether I am aware of it or not, I tend to sing along. It is hard to think deeply when singing!/p pIn our culture we have allowed ourselves to become notoriously busy. And all the time, while we are busily going through life, there is a great deal of "noise" in the background of our lives. It may be music that plays when we drive, when we work and when we play. It may be a television that is turned on every time we have a few minutes to spare. Perhaps when we find fifteen empty minutes between picking the kids up from school and beginning to cook dinner we watch an episode of emJudge Judy/em or catch a re-run of emThe Simpsons/em. The background noise may be a Blackberry that constantly beeps and buzzes as it receives emails or stock quotes, even when we are far away from the office. It may be a cell phone that keeps customers or employees in contact with us even on weekends and holidays./p pIt seems to me that, as society continues to move in its current direction, and as we become ever more "wired," Christians have to be increasingly deliberate about moderating and perhaps removing some of this ever-present background noise. If we are to be thinking people, people who think deeply and deliberately about spiritual matters, we simply cannot allow our lives to be overshadowed by the noise of technology./p pI wonder how much we miss because of our busyness. I am often challenged to think just how much of life I miss while I check my email for the seventh time in a given evening or while I follow along online with a football game that I really don't care about. Technology, it seems, is a great distractor. Technology sticks its foot in the door of so many areas of my life. When I sit down to read to my children we may be interrupted by a phone call. As we head outdoors to play, I may do a quick check of my email and spend fifteen minutes typing out a reply that could easily wait until the next day; and then, while I play with the children, I am distracted, mulling over what I might have or should have said. Maybe we duck out of church before the time of fellowship is complete so we will have time to get home, make a sandwich and fluff the cushions on the couch before kickoff time./p pTruthfully, I cannot think of anything that distracts us so fully and completely and consistently as technology. For too many of us, technology is a master and not a servant. It is our owner, not our possession. We let it run and rule our lives. We allow technology to determine the course of our lives, taking us where it leads. We determine our schedules with TV Guide in one hand, a Blackberry calendar in the other. We invest countless hours in online friendships, many of which are shallow and insignificant, while ignoring people in our local churches and communities. Perhaps while ignoring even our own families./p pTechnology is a great servant but an evil master. Technology is proof of the greatness and grace of God and something we ought to be thankful for. But why, then, have so many of us allowed it to rule and govern our lives? Why do we allow it to play such an important, transcendent role in our lives and in our families?/p pIt may be as simple as escapism. Technology, and especially its many applications to entertainment, provide unparalleled opportunities to escape from reality, even if only for a few minutes. Through technology we can leave the drudgery of our lives to listen to music that glorifies freedom or to watch television or film where what happens is far more thrilling than what we experience at home and in the office. The purpose of much of modern technology is to allow us to take our entertainment with us no matter where we go. MP3 players allow us to take thousands or tens of thousands of songs with us in the car or on the train. Video iPods allow us to escape from work or school for a few minutes by watching (ironically enough) emThe Office/em or unlimited amounts of pornography. Portable DVD players allow us to keep the children quiet in the car while we take a vacation. No matter who or where we are, we can use technology as a brief escape./p pPerhaps we use technology to hide. Maybe we hate to be alone with our thoughts. We have become so accustomed to constant noise that, like a baby who can only sleep in a room with a white noise machine softly humming, we can barely stand the sound of silence. Maybe we have lost the ability to think or even the desire to think, and so we anesthetize our intellects, we lull them into inactivity, by replacing them with noise./p pMaybe we need constant noise from the cell phone or laptop so we feel like we are accomplishing anything. Perhaps we have bought into the lie that we need to be accomplishing something significant--something that either pays the bills or leaves us with another bill to pay--at all times. And so we take phone calls during dinner and answer emails in church. We check email compulsively and work while we should be resting./p pOr it could be that we prefer the anonymity and safety of online relationships, relationships that allow us to be almost exhibitionist in what we reveal about ourselves, all the while hiding behind a mask of secrecy. We would rather tell our deepest secrets to strangers on the other side of the continent, strangers we know only by their online personas, than find and nurture deep and lasting friendships close to home./p pWe are busy. We are distracted. Too often we hide behind the noise. As Christians we need to ensure that we are mastering the noise, not allowing it to master us. We need to be in control of our cell phones, Blackberries, laptops and inboxes. We can and often should use this technology, but we must now allow it to control us./pa href="http://www.monergism.com/freeshipping.html"img src="http://www.adgrab.org/www/images/mbbanner468.jpg" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?a=zJ8GO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?i=zJ8GO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?a=wKZ4o"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?i=wKZ4o" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?a=cUuMo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?i=cUuMo" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/challies/XhEt/~4/471340698" height="1" width="1"/

Samsung's Omnia is nice enough to find a good home in many a professional's pocket, but in terms of overall desirability it doesn't quite compare to the iPhone or G1. Why, then, did Verizon price the thing $50 higher than its alternate-platform competition? Your guess is as good as ours, but at least the company didn't take long to see the error of its ways, dropping the handset under the magic $200 mark just a few days after the early-adopters got done paying too much for theirs. We're thinking Verizon might have been targeting the $249 Touch Diamond, but really that could do with a price cut of its own. $199 seems about right for an Omnia, so you go right ahead and click on if you want; we'll wait for the higher-res one, thanks.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Verizon drops Omnia to $199, hopes you'll pay attention now originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Plaxico Burress arrived at a police station early Monday morning, where he was expected to be charged after accidentally shooting himself in the right thigh.

TOKYO (Reuters) - An Internet firm specializing in crystal balls, tarot readings, I-ching and horoscopes is raking in business as Japanese seek reassurance about the future in the midst of a global financial crisis.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/technologyNews?a=3latGWG5"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/technologyNews?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/technologyNews?a=bUh26hgq"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/technologyNews?i=bUh26hgq" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/technologyNews?a=PuzI0jkI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/reuters/technologyNews?i=PuzI0jkI" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reuters/technologyNews/~4/nmbbGPbYYR4" height="1" width="1"/

BP's Russian joint venture, TNK-BP, confirms that its under-fire chief executive Robert Dudley has resigned with immediate effect.