Vendredi soir, TF1 rediffusait deux épisodes de sa série américaine Les Experts : Manhattan avant de retransmettre en direct la troisième hebdo de Secret Story 2009. Dès 20h50, les deux épisodes en [...]

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La fête nationale américaine précède de dix jours la fête nationale française. Dans les deux cas, pétards et feux d’artifice sont de sortie, l’occasion pour HowStuffWorks de s’intéresser à ce que contiennent ces éléments pyrotechniques festifs. [HowStuffWorks]

In the past, I have been very rude about DC’s obsession with creating story platforms at the expense of actual, you know, stories. I was particularly snotty about the Batman crossover Battle For The Cowl being a shameless money grab…. everything I’ve come to despise about modern ‘event’ comics, a story that existed solely to set up other stories.

All that being said… now I have to eat some crow.

Not about Battle For The Cowl, I hasten to add. It was one of the most unnecessary DC crossovers I’ve seen in a while — and I was around for Genesis and War of the Gods, so that’s saying something.

However, I’m a Batman guy from way back. As I’ve said before, I always have to look at what’s going on in the Bat books…. even if I’m not buying them, I have a ridiculous need to stay current with the goings-on in Gotham City. (When I mock comics fans for treating issues of their favorite superhero book like they are actual news dispatches, continuing to read stuff they hate because they can’t stand not knowing what’s going on, I assure you, I do not exclude myself. My only excuse is that I’m getting a lot better about not spending money on doing that.)

But sometimes this lunatic compulsion to always know what’s up with Batman pays off. Because, having followed all the “Batman: Reborn” launches this month, I find myself largely nodding and saying, okay, good job, DC. Those look to be shaping up as some fine Bat comics in our future. Even the one from Judd Winick, which frankly shocked me considering how much I despised his last run on Batman.

I’m going to go down the list one-by-one, but here are some general thoughts to start with.

I have been a Batman fan for forty years, from the Adam West days on up…. so I’ve seen a lot of different versions. I was around for the first time Dick Grayson took over for his mentor, right after the whole Knightfall business in the 1990’s.

I liked Prodigal quite a bit, but it was clearly a one-shot story, and it had a lot less dramatic weight because we all knew it was just temporary.

This time around, the Dick Grayson-as-Batman concept has got a lot more power, for a couple of different reasons.

For one, the scope is bigger. Characters across the DCU are involved in it — the JLA, the ancillary supporting cast — and at least in the books themselves, those characters are all treating it as permanent. This isn’t the ’substitute for a little while’ story that we usually get when editors decide to put a new guy in the superhero suit, like we saw with James Rhodes as Iron Man or John Walker as Captain America… or, for that matter, with Dick Grayson’s previous turn as Batman in Prodigal. This is being portrayed more like the way DC rolled out Wally West taking over as the Flash, as a full-on reboot of the Batman titles.

It’s all very well for us to sit on the sidelines and sneer, “Well, whatever, it’s never going to stick, Bruce Wayne will be back in plenty of time for the next Batman movie.” I’ve done my share of that kind of jaded bitching myself (and to be honest, I still fully expect DC to walk this back within eighteen months.)

But the more I see of Dick Grayson as Batman, the better I like the concept. If Bruce Wayne never came back, I think I’d be okay with it, in the same way I was okay with Wally West replacing Barry Allen.

Secondly, the way this is set up, it’s not just a passing-of-the-torch legacy story. It’s got a really intriguing premise — it’s not just Dick as Batman, but also Bruce Wayne’s illegitimate son Damian as the new Robin.

And here again I’m having to chow down on some more crow. I disliked Damian enormously when he showed up — both the character, he came across as a little ass, and the concept itself. I found it difficult to believe that Talia kept him a secret for ten years, or however many years it would have to be. (Damian is ten, according to the latest issue of Batman and Robin.) Even with the elasticity of comic-book chronology and taking the most forgiving  approach possible to assembling a timeline for these events, that puts Bruce Wayne as pushing fifty at the time of Final Crisis, so it’s best not to think about it too hard at all. Because if you count up Dick’s time as Robin, then add his solo years at college and with the Titans, then follow that with Jason Todd’s turn as Robin that led up to Death In The Family, followed by Tim Drake’s time in the Robin suit and all those adventures… and remembering that Batman’s first encounter with Ra’s Al Ghul happened while Dick was at Hudson University, well, even if you posit that Bruce and Talia spent a hot weekend in the Himalayas somewhere between the panels of “Daughter of the Demon,” the best estimate I can manage is still putting Bruce Wayne within shouting distance of AARP membership at the time of “Batman R.I.P.”

…Sorry, veered off down a nerd rabbit trail there for a moment. Sometimes I can’t help myself. Anyway, like I said, best not to think about it — and I’m not going to let continuity quibbles get in the way of enjoying these books. The important thing is that now that Damian is installed as Robin, I’m finding that the idea really works.

We fans forget sometimes, with our habit of looking at these characters as real,  that conflict is what drives a story.  No matter how offensive Damian might be to us, the bottom line is that his presence here makes for some great drama. The idea of Robin as a brat who needs redemption is interesting… but what really sells it is the idea that it’s Dick Grayson’s Batman — himself untried and untested– that has to help him find that redemption. So we’ve got a Batman and Robin who have to learn not just how to be the new Batman and Robin, but also find out exactly what they’re made of underneath the Batman and Robin roles as well.

The reason that’s such a smart move and works so well is because doing it this way means it’s not just about genuflecting to the legacy any more, not the way it would have been if they’d kept the Tim Drake character in the Robin suit. Do that and it’s just Prodigal again with better art. This is a whole new thing.

I’m a sucker for the redemption story where the hero has to reach within himself and face his own flaws head-on to pull out the win… and here it’s built right in to the premise for both Batman and Robin. I love that. (That said, if we’re still seeing asshole Robin a year from now, it’s going to have gotten very tiresome. I’m hoping there’s a real plan here and not just a riff.)

I also really like the editorial approach I’m seeing so far. Not surprising, since it’s the approach I like in all my superhero books: Tell individual stories and keep things self-contained. “Batman Reborn” is plastered across all these relaunched titles, but they’re not part of a crossover. They’re each doing their own thing. I’ll tell you flat-out that this was much more attractive to me as a comics-buying customer — in other words, I bought more of these issues because I was intrigued and wanted to see more, not because I felt forced to by a mega-crossover storyline that skipped from one title to the next. Moreover, the stories aren’t buried under a ton of Batman lore from the past — things move, stuff happens. Every one of these relaunch issues I’ve looked at over the last couple of weeks has been a good jumping-on point. That pleased me as well.

All that’s the overview. Let’s look at the individual books.

Batman by Judd Winick and Ed Benes was a pleasant surprise. I’ll level with you — I was annoyed with myself for forgetting to tell my retailer to cancel this title from my pull list, because I absolutely was not going to spend any more money on Judd Winick superhero comics. Between Winick’s Outsiders and his first run on Batman, I was done.

But since the shop pulled it for me, I felt obligated to buy it, and be damned if I’ll buy a comic I don’t read. So I looked at it and I decided Brian was dead-on in his assessment — this story was way better than Battle For The Cowl and rendered it moot besides.

The bulk of the book is exposition and setup, but it’s good setup, it works. We see the explanation for why Dick Grayson ends up as Batman, and more, we see why he thinks it’s necessary. (I think our other Greg was wondering about that, and that explanation is here.) I especially liked that the impetus for Dick taking on the Batman identity came from Alfred, particularly Alfred’s line, “They’ll want to have one of their costumed parades. A half mile of spandex and body armor all lined up behind an empty coffin with a cape draped over it. No.” In other words, Dick is Batman now because he knows Bruce Wayne would have wanted Batman to go on. It’s not so much about Gotham needing a Batman — though I think it’s pretty clear that it needs a hero– as it is about Dick (and even Alfred) needing that hero to be Batman, so they can at least feel like Bruce Wayne’s life meant something. That rang true to me. I can buy that, it doesn’t feel contrived. (Certainly, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than the rationale behind putting Jean-Paul Valley in the role back during “Knightfall.”)

That’s most of the issue, setting that all up. The last few pages are leading up to next issue’s confrontation with the Scarecrow, which I guess is supposed to be Dick’s initial outing as Batman. So even though I still don’t care for Ed Benes’ art — he’s got that whole over-rendering, squinchy-eyed 90s thing going on — nevertheless, I’ll keep it on the list for now.

*

Red Robin was one of the weaker entries in this new wave of launches, but I still liked it okay.

This is Tim Drake’s new home, apparently, and it’s an ongoing, not a mini-series, so I gather it replaces Robin in the Bat-family of titles.

I have some quibbles. My biggest one is, why would Tim choose “Red Robin” as his new heroic identity? He’s never read Kingdom Come. Because apart from that tenuous connection to a story that came out fifteen years ago, it just is annoying. The costume is not that great, the name is dumb — in fact, I keep thinking of the burger chain, so I guess it’s a good thing the first story arc is set in Europe.

It’s marginally less likely that crooks over there will point at him and laugh. “Red Robin? And I suppose Chuck E. Cheese is right behind you?” (I can’t be the only one who thought of that.)

Why not make Tim Drake the new Nightwing? That makes more sense to me. Everybody moves up a step in Bat-seniority. And that seems to be the premise Chris Yost is trying to sell in the first issue, especially with the scene where Dick is explaining to Tim why he chose Damian to be Robin. It would be the most natural thing in the world after Dick tells Tim, “You’re not my protégé, Tim, you’re my equal, my closest ally, you’ll be okay,” for him to follow that with, I’ll have my hands full with Damian. I was counting on you to take over as Nightwing.

But he doesn’t say that. Instead there’s a contrived little spat with Damian and Tim huffs off in a huff. Cut to the new Red Robin busting heads in Europe.

So that’s my main quibble. I don’t like the new outfit or the new name, and I think the setup was awfully ham-handed. But once we’re back to Tim in solo action it works better, and I like the last-page reveal of Ra’s Al Ghul, back in business and targeting Tim.

I don’t mean to slight artist Ramon Sachs, it’s just that I’m pretty much a story guy. Mr. Sachs does a nice job here and I like seeing guys who ink their own work. The art’s just solid straight-up superhero work, however; it’s not particularly breathtaking, though it’s certainly not bad.

Overall verdict? I didn’t like this enough to put it on my list, but right now I’m interested enough to come back next month, at least. Writer Chris Yost has one more issue to sell me on this title. I always liked the premise of Nightwing and that seems to be the niche this book wants to fill, the grown-former-sidekick tale. Because of that, I’m willing to hang in there past the overture, but not much longer than that.

*

Since Paul Dini’s not on Detective any more, he gets two new titles to make up for it.

Gotham City Sirens by Dini and artist Guillem March serves as sort of a replacement for both Catwoman and Birds of Prey, I guess.

Sadly, it can’t hold a candle to either one of those. This was the only one of the lot of new Bat books that just left me completely cold. I really wanted to like it, too… I generally like what Paul Dini writes when he’s left to himself, I expected good things.

But the whole book just felt kind of generic to me, starting with the opening scene where Catwoman breaks up a mugging (quick, show of hands — how many of you out there can name twenty other superhero stories that opened with that scene? Protagonist on a rooftop hears a scream and goes to check it out, etc., etc.) Dini doesn’t even give us a twist on it, it really is the standard introduction of the heroes by way of stopping a mugging.

Not much going on in the rest of the issue to make up for it, either. Catwoman has a little trouble with her mugger and is helped out by Poison Ivy, and then they go back to Ivy’s place (which is really the Riddler’s place, but Ivy’s taken it over.) Then Harley Quinn happens by and the three girls decide to set up shop together.

My main problem with all this was that I couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that always wants to note various holes in the story. If Selina’s still feeling weak from her recent physical hardships, what’s she doing bouncing around rooftops? Why would Selina be the one to offer a partnership to a pair of psychos like Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, especially since it’s noted a few pages earlier by both Ivy and Selina herself that they don’t get along? “Gotham’s not safe for any of us on our own” strikes me as a really weak rationale to hang this premise on. And so on. The whole issue from first to last had that sense you get from a bad TV pilot, the feeling that the characters are only doing certain things because the writer needs them to in order to get things moved from point A to point B.

I did like the art, though Guillem March strikes me as an artist who’s still finding his way.

His anatomy is shaky at times, and I could have done without a lot of the gratuitous cheesecake shots, but I suppose those are pretty much a given when you have “Sirens” as part of the title. On the other hand, I loved his faces, they’re wonderfully expressive.

Nevertheless, as a first issue, this didn’t really work for me. I doubt I’ll be back next month, despite the mildly interesting idea for a cliffhanger.

Batman: Streets of Gotham fared quite a bit better, at least with me.

Basically, this is the book for the people who were enjoying Paul Dini’s run on Detective with Dustin Nguyen. Dini picks up without missing a step practically right where he left off with “Heart of Hush,” and except for Mr. Dini’s determination to make us like Hush as a villain (not working on me, sorry) this is a good solid Batman story. There are nice bits with Harley Quinn, who is used much better here in a walk-on than she is over in her own new book, and also with Commissioner Gordon, though the chronology of when Gordon decided to accept this new Batman is getting a bit muddy…. it makes me wonder, once again, if DC editors ever talk to each other.

The villain of the piece is Firefly, and Dini treats him as a compulsive serial arsonist, giving us a much crazier Garfield Lynns than we’ve seen in the past.

(Rather like Donald Sutherland’s character in Backdraft, if you ever saw that one.)

Anyway, I liked this story quite a bit. That by itself would probably have persuaded me to put this book on my list, but additionally we also get a backup story — Manhunter, by Marc Andreyko and Georges Jeanty.

For an old-school DC guy like me, this was a wonderful treat. I love the idea of comics with lead and backup features, always have. And this particular backup is a really good fit for the title (I got absurdly sentimental about a Bat book having “Manhunter” in the back again, even if it’s not running in Detective.) Apart from all that, I have been following the new Manhunter’s adventures in trade and enjoying those stories a lot, so it’s a pleasure to see that DC’s found the character a home.

I suppose I should stop calling Kate Spencer the ‘new’ Manhunter since I think five trade paperbacks’ worth of solo adventures and a stint in Birds of Prey makes this particular Manhunter the most successful version DC’s ever had, even if you count all the variations on Paul Kirk as being the same one. Anyway, this story is largely setting up Kate’s new status as a Gotham City D.A. and catching up new readers on what she’s all about, but Andreyko and Jeanty manage to get some action in there as well. One of the things I like about an eight-page chapter format is that it forces the writer and artist to really work at not wasting space, there’s no padding here. But it doesn’t feel cramped or rushed either.

Overall I think Batman: Streets of Gotham might end up being the sleeper hit of the new era of Bat books. All the others are getting a bigger marketing push, but this is a really well-crafted title and it deserves a little love. It’s the first time in quite a long time I felt like I got my money’s worth from a single issue of a comic book. Here’s hoping all involved can keep it up, they’re off to a good start.

*

Detective Comics is, as you’ve no doubt heard by now, the home of the new Batwoman.

This book is in the same format as Batman: Streets of Gotham, a lead and a backup, so this is another title that gets my inner DC fanboy to smile in pleased recognition.

Everyone’s talking about how gorgeous the art from J.H. Williams is, and I have to agree. Every page is stunning.

But I enjoyed the story as well. Sometimes I think people forget just how good Greg Rucka can be when he’s doing straight-up crime fiction. It was a well-constructed first act, it felt like a complete piece even though this was just about introducing the new Batwoman to readers and bringing everyone up to speed. Thankfully, Rucka gets right to the action and does his introductions on the fly rather than screwing around with a lot of backstory and exposition.

The backup feature starring the Renee Montoya Question was nice too, though not quite as well-executed as the Manhunter 8-pager over in Streets of Gotham. Story by Rucka, again, with a serviceable art job from Cully Hamner. I think everyone who was a fan of the O’Neil/Cowan Question book will enjoy this strip, though it wasn’t quite as new-reader-friendly as I would have liked. I can see why DC paired the two Greg Rucka features together, I guess, though I’m sentimental enough to wish that Manhunter was over here in Detective and the Question was running in Streets of Gotham. But that’s just me having a bout of fanboy OCD.

I did have one gripe, though I’m not sure exactly who’s responsible for it — I suppose DC’s production department. But I really wish someone in editorial would think through the page layouts and ad placement so we don’t have the last page of the lead feature butting right up against the first page of the backup, especially since the “Continued” caption tends to get lost in the computer coloring without a box around it– and the backup features don’t start off with a big splash panel. In the old days, there’d be a break, some sort of buffer between the lead and the backup — an ad, a letters page, something. Otherwise, it makes it look like it’s all one story, it’s disconcerting. But that’s just a minor complaint, and certainly not something that will keep me from coming back next month and every one thereafter for as long as Greg Rucka and company are turning out stories like this.

*

And that brings me to the clear headliner of the bunch. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely on Batman and Robin.

I’m not nearly as high on Mr. Morrison’s work as my colleagues here at CBBG, and I thought the “Batman: R.I.P.” storyline ended up as a bit of a mess. I was really expecting not to like this book very much; I was worried that we were going to get the meta-self-referential Grant Morrison that did “R.I.P.” and Final Crisis.

Instead, what I’ve seen over the first two issues of Batman and Robin is some of the best straight-up superhero comics I’ve run across in years. This is the joyous adventure-fiction-writing Grant Morrison, the fellow that did all that fun stuff on JLA and New X-Men. I found myself grinning ear-to-ear by the time I hit page eight of Batman and Robin #1 and saw that choreographed double punch to the face that sends Mr. Toad into the drink.

Which is not to say that this story doesn’t have its dark, disturbing, Gothic moments. It’s Gotham City, after all. But the sense of adventure — I keep coming back to that word — that suffuses the whole enterprise is just palpable.

This is what I’d hoped we were going to get when DC announced All-Star Batman and Robin four years ago. It’s not the least bit campy or silly, but somehow what Grant Morrison has constructed here is really evoking that same let’s-go! vibe that I first got from the 1966 Batman TV show when I was five years old… but he’s doing it such a way as to please the adult comics fan who’s looking for an engaging story.

I certainly don’t want to minimize the contribution of Frank Quitely on the art side of things. Every page is a joy to look at; the body language alone is amazing. Every character has an individual posture and carriage, each person in the story stands and moves in a unique fashion. Take a closer look at these cover poses, look how the way each character is standing tells us about what kind of people they are.

Oddly, considering that this is not the traditional Bruce Wayne Batman and Dick Grayson Robin, nevertheless Morrison and Quitely have somehow managed to do what I’d think is one of the purest, classic Batman stories I’ve seen in a long time. All the elements are there: A grotesque scary villain. An eerie mystery that’s going to call for detective work. A desperate police department lights the Bat Signal. An impetuous, eager Robin and a thoughtful, cautious Batman. Character moments for Commissioner Gordon and Alfred. Fisticuffs.

And yet it all feels amazingly fresh and new, because all this is set against the backdrop of the character premise I talked about at the beginning, of Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne’s search for redemption.

It’s shaping up to be a great ride. I’m definitely on board for it.

*

And that sums up the current slate of Bat-titles. I hope sales bear out this approach because I’d love to see a lot more of this kind of thing from DC. I’d like to see the Bat office stick with this direction for a while — especially since this is the first time in several years it(...)

Secret Story 3 : La quotidienne du 03/07/09 - vidéo

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MX_50540rk&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] La fête nationale américaine précède de dix jours la fête nationale française. Dans les deux cas, pétards et feux d'artifice sont de sortie, l'occasion pour HowStuffWorks de s'intéresser à ce que contiennent ces éléments pyrotechniques festifs. [HowStuffWorks]

Designer du stade olympique de Pékin, l'artiste Ai Weiwei s'est imposé ces derniers mois, comme un véritable contestataire du régime. Attentif aux luttes sociales, après s'être lancé dans un combat pour la publication d'une liste des victimes du séisme du Sichuan, il appelle aujourd'hui à une grève de l'Internet afin de protester contre les contrôles des autorités. Dans le paysage chinois de 2009, l'homme est d'une essence inclassable. Ni dissident professionnel, ni chantre de la « Nouvelle Chine ». Ai weiwei est le co-designer du Stade national, l'emblématique Nid d'oiseau des Jeux olympiques. Mais cet artiste hors champ est aussi un acteur social engagé et son blog cogne à posts raccourcis sur tout ce que le système peut sécréter d'injustice et d'arbitraire.

Sa dernière facétie est d'avoir appelé aujourd'hui ses compatriotes à une « grève de l'Internet ». Parce que, depuis quelques mois, les « autorités chinoises ont considérablement renforcé leur contrôle, fermant des milliers de sites et de blogs sous le prétexte fallacieux de lutter contre les contenus pornographiques ou malsains ». Dernier épisode en date, la volonté de Pékin d'imposer un logiciel de contrôle vendu avec tout ordinateur vendu en Chine, décision qui a suscité la colère d'une majorité d'internautes chinois et contre laquelle Washington est parti en guerre. L'appel d'Ai Weiwei à la "grève" avait peu de chances d'être entendu. Alors qu'il se félicitait il y a encore peu que son blog, l'un des plus célèbres de Chine, soit le seul au ton aussi violent qui ne soit pas bloqué, l'artiste raconte que le couperet est tombé début juin au moment du 20e anniversaire de Tiananmen. Il est aujourd'hui hébergé à l'étranger et n'est plus accessible en Chine. Des photos y montrent le provocateur faire un doigt d'honneur place Tiananmen ou avec l'inscription « fuck off » sur son torse nu devant le célèbre portrait géant de Mao...
Un combat pour la mémoire des élèves morts dans la catastrophe du Sichuan Les mois précédents, Ai Weiwei avait déjà du ferrailler avec la censure pour son dernier combat. Parce que les autorités se refusaient à publier la liste des élèves morts dans la catastrophe du Sichuan de mai 2008, Ai Weiwei avait entrepris de leur offrir cette mémoire volée. En menant sa propre enquête. « J'avais d'abord pensé à une oeuvre artistique en hommage. Puis, j'ai décidé de changer de registre. M'entendre dire qu'une liste d'enfants morts est « secret d'Etat » était insupportable ». Ai Weiwei a d'abord lancé une campagne de harcèlement téléphonique des cadres locaux. Puis il a engagé des dizaines de volontaires pour sillonner la campagne meurtrie, visiter les familles, relever les noms des écoles, des classes, des élèves. « Ils ont eu un courage fou car les autorités locales les considèraient comme des agents secrets. C'est hallucinant».

Dans sa grande maison où il vit avec une quarantaine de chats à distance de l'agitation du centre de Pékin, les murs des bureaux où s'activent architectes et designers sont recouverts de vertigineuses listes de noms de jeunes victimes du séisme. Elles ont été publiées avec constance sur le blog d'Ai Weiwei, et les censeurs du Web se sont employés à les effacer avec la même assiduité. « Comment la police peut-elle harceler et intimider des parents qui ont perdu leurs enfants, qui ont tout perdu ? se demande Ai Weiwei, cette double peine est terrifiante ». Pour lui, il est évident que le séisme a révélé de sérieux problèmes de construction. Le combat semble avoir porté ses fruits, puisque Pékin s'étant décidé au bout d'une an à publier le compte des petites vies brisées : 5 335 morts ou disparus. Mais à l'aune du travail déjà réalisé, Ai Weiwei estime le bilan à plus de 6 000.

Lire la suite sur le blog d'Arnaud de La Grange, correspondant du Figaro en Chine
Va, lis et reviens

•  Sur le site d'Arte un entretien avec Ai Weiwei

• Un article sur les dernières provocations d'Ai Wewei: une photo où il pose avec le mot « Fuck » écrit sur son torse et une autre où il fait un doigt d'honneur place Tian'anmen...

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You knew it was on deck, and at long last, here it is. Your one and only shot (okay, so maybe that's a gentle stretch) to tell the world -- and Palm, since it's a part of the world -- exactly what you think about the Pre. Since going on sale to the general public just under a month ago, some analysts have suggested that some 300,000 or so units have been moved. We're quite confident that at least some of that bunch have their eyes peering at this here post, so we'd like to formally ask for your opinions in comments below. Is there anything you'd like to see changed on Palm's Pre? Is the build quality up to snuff? Is webOS everything you thought it'd be (and more)? Is the QWERTY keyboard doing it for you? Do you wish it supported something that it doesn't? Unleash your wrath below -- we'll keep your true identity a secret. Maybe.

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How would you change the Palm Pre? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You knew it was on deck, and at long last, here it is. Your one and only shot (okay, so maybe that's a gentle stretch) to tell the world -- and Palm, since it's a part of the world -- exactly what you think about the Pre. Since going on sale to the general public just under a month ago, some analysts have suggested that some 300,000 or so units have been moved. We're quite confident that at least some of that bunch have their eyes peering at this here post, so we'd like to formally ask for your opinions in comments below. Is there anything you'd like to see changed on Palm's Pre? Is the build quality up to snuff? Is webOS everything you thought it'd be (and more)? Is the QWERTY keyboard doing it for you? Do you wish it supported something that it doesn't? Unleash your wrath below -- we'll keep your true identity a secret. Maybe.

Filed under: Cellphones

How would you change the Palm Pre? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

La fête nationale américaine précède de dix jours la fête nationale française. Dans les deux cas, pétards et feux d’artifice sont de sortie, l’occasion pour HowStuffWorks de s’intéresser à ce que contiennent ces éléments pyrotechniques festifs. [HowStuffWorks]

Source : Gizmodo (s'abonner)

C'est assez étonnant de voir un programme de télé réalité gagner des téléspectateurs dans ses premières semaines... Pourtant en une semaine, le "22h30...

aka*kirara has added a photo to the pool:

A very belated Thank You to the ever so sweet Spunkster~ I received these for my birthday a couple of months ago and tried taking photos of it then~ but was never happy with the result and my setup... until now. My photos don't do this secret set justice, it is prettier IRL.

aka*kirara has added a photo to the pool:

Cherie is beyond spoilt!~

A very belated Thank You to the ever so sweet Spunkster~ I received these for my birthday a couple of months ago and tried taking photos of it then~ but was never happy with the result and my setup... until now. My photos don't do this secret set justice, it is prettier IRL.

84/365 Toy Project

The Great Xbox 360 Robbery
Comment by: The Swearing Gramps
Nominated by: Mr Pappzy lurves Orange Soda

Don't worry. Microsoft will get em all back within a year or so.

Hey Americans, Why The BBQ? Why? Why? Why?
Comment by: monkeysaresilly
Nominated by: (Zombie) Jolan

I doubt there was any actual symbolism with the cookout. Can you imagine Franklin and Jefferson hanging out, having their slaves slather ribs with some secret Liberty sauce, going,
"I do say Benjamin, this meat is delectable! Note how the tomato-based marinade perfectly symbolizes the blood shed from our fallen brothers in the great fight for freedom. We roast it, just as we *fired* upon our hated redcoat rivals!"
"You're an idiot, Tom."

President of Russia in Erotic Game
Comment by: Leave it to Japan to come up with craaazy ideas. A woman president.
Nominated by: Dangeresque the Observer

Leave it to Japan to come up with craaazy ideas.

A woman president.

Toast Your Cursed Existence With The Legendary Lich King Stein
Comment by: The most ornate container you will ever pee into because you couldn't abandon your raid.
Nominated by: svenhoek: Still Happy Pitt Won!

The most ornate container you will ever pee into because you couldn't abandon your raid.

Congrats! You Win An Xbox 360 With A Messed Up Slot
Comment by: zach a mac rack alack
Nominated by: (Zombie) Jolan

Well, Molyneux had to exaggerate it somehow, and in this case it was the functionality.

Video Game Question For The Advice Columnist
Comment by: Southrncomfortjm
Nominated by: NeoStarr

Here's what you do: you ask the kid (1) what he learned at school that day and then you ask him (2) what he learned at his friends house. If the answer to (1) is "nothing" and (2) is "how to get a prostitute to blow me and then get my money back without the cops catching me" then you *might* have a problem. However if answers to both (1) and (2) are "nothing" then you have a perfectly normal boy.

Want to nominate comments? Send to tips any insightful or funny comments you read from other commenters. (Read: NOT YOURSELF). Be sure to include the post's URL, the commenter's page, the actual comment and your commenter page.

Here's a handy guide to commenting. Read it, learn it, live it, love it.

Happy 3rd of July!

We think this visualization of UX diagram creates more questions than it answers…which makes it interesting.

Yea! Whitney Hess has captured the best and brightest of resources in her post So you want to be a UX designer.

We’re hip on these magnetic pieces of wireframe goodness…

Sticky Note fruit. Really, there’s nothing more to say about this…except AWESOME.

How many of these tools do you still have? Check your standing at the Museum of forgotten art supplies.

And now we’re all waxing nostalgic about the Sony Walkman.

Got a great idea for a mobile app or business? Enter the sidewalk.com / Citysearch contest.

Our dream is to host UX Week 2010 in this amazing thing.

Speaking of Love Boat, what was missing from your last sexual experience? If your answer was “charts, graphs, and other quantitative data,” then this application is for you.

What’s the shape of your ‘hood? Flickr photos reveals the emerging boundaries of where we live.

GOOD asks “can augmented reality finally make it easy to do the right thing?”

Which prompts the rest of us to ask “what the hell is augmented reality?” Here’s a look at two augmented reality experiences, and why they might matter.

For super-duper alternate-reality, check out Keith Loutit’s Little Sydney project, which has us oooing and ahhing over the tilt-shifty view of life.

And as a compelling alternative to the hustle-and-go, Dave Gray’s been making pocket universes on Flickr.

Thinking about heading out into the stratosphere? Start by reading about spacesuits.

What’s the difference in Pixar vs. Dreamworks Story Development? The secret revealed.

And finally, we leave you with some hot and spicy library porn…sure to put the fireworks to shame!

Happy Independence Day!

One of the advantages of working at Google is that you get to see neat products and features before the rest of the world does. But that can also be a disadvantage. Sometimes I’d like to talk about a fun Gmail Lab or a new Calendar feature but I’m honestly not sure whether the outside world can see the new feature. I don’t want to leak something that the outside world can’t see, so I usually I play it safe and end up not talking about any Gmail Labs, for example. I’d enjoy giving more Gmail tips but I also don’t want to show my actual email that might contain secret stuff.

I think I’ve figured out a way to solve this issue. I’ve created a new Gmail account, siliconvalleyuser (at) gmail.com. Let’s say it belongs to John Q Public, a power user living in Silicon Valley. Feel free to send John non-Google-related emails about fictional events: “Hey John, want to come to the party on Saturday?” or “John, here are those pictures from the fireworks this past weekend.” or “Hey John, I saw in the newpaper that you won the California lottery--congratulations!” Then when I want to do a screencast or demo some power feature of a Google account, I’ll have some realistic email to show.

Just one note: please don’t email anything to John about Google. I get way too much email about Google already, and the purpose of this account is to show different features of Gmail or Calendar. To keep this email address completely separate, I created a filter that deletes any emails that mention Google or me:

Again, please don’t email about Google-related stuff, but feel free to email John about interesting fictional things at siliconvalleyuser (at) gmail.com! I’m hoping that I can do some blog posts or videos with good tips.

Quelques images de la candidate de Secret Story 3, Angie, gros seins nus sous la douche !!!!!! ..

Détecter des neutrinos passe-muraille pour percer les secrets de la matière

Au menu du Zapping du 3 juillet : Cauet retourne la méthode, Enquête d'action, 30 millions d'amis, Men in white, Attention à la marche, Des chiffres et des lettres, Secret Story, Do you do you scopitone, Soir 3, Le 4ème duel et Le meilleur de la saison.   (...)

Au programme de cette grande soirée Secret Story : de l'émotion, des révélations, de la générosité, de l'amour, du paranormal, mais pas de surprises quant au nom du garçon éliminé : c'est bien Martin qui sort de la maison des secrets après une seule semaine de compétition.

Ce soir, c'était le troisième direct de Secret Story, présenté par Benjamin Castaldi. Jonathan et Martin étaient nominés et, à l'issue de l'émission,...

There are some events that are simply too overwhelming and terrible to confront immediately How should fiction tackle subjects as immediate as the expenses scandal or Bernard Madoff's fraud? Which novels and plays - from Dickens to David Hare - have best captured current events? Ferdinand Mount on what makes politics work in literature

At some stage in their lives, writers of all sorts hear the call to write about the political events of their own time. They may think of it as a moral duty, an undertaking that it would be cowardly to resist, or they may think of it simply as an intriguing challenge. But for one reason or another, they take the plunge. They do not often tremble on the diving board. Is trying to make literature out of politics different from other kinds of writing? Are there peculiar dangers or interesting possibilities in tackling a subject so immediate, so familiar to your audience as the dodgy dossier or the expenses scandal? They may already have passionate views on the subject. Are there artistic dangers when you preach to the converted (preaching against the converted is more likely to endanger your personal safety)?

It is all very well to take the decision to engage, easy to choose your theme, what Henry James called your donnée. But as James never tired of pointing out to his friends and inferiors - HG Wells, Edith Wharton, Hugh Walpole - it is what you do with the donnée that counts, how you handle the material, which bits you select and which you leave out, what you are trying ultimately to achieve. The danger in choosing a political theme is always of not working it through properly, of revealing the thing in all its miserable nakedness as a book or poem or play about Iraq, or unemployment, or abortion, and nothing more than that. The audience becomes aware that the author is a kind of unlicensed intruder whose motives are too gratingly ulterior. The nest collapses under the cuckoo's weight. The problem is not so much the bad faith which intellectuals agonise about. The problem is bad art.

Take Harley Granville Barker's play Waste. Barker was perhaps the most intelligent English playwright of the 20th century. No one thought more deeply about stagecraft or playwriting, or especially about Shakespeare. At first sight, Waste looks like a richly wrought and carefully conceived piece. That is what entices talented directors in every generation to revive it. Yet however you produce it, it never quite comes to life, even in Sam West's fine recent production at the Almeida. The critics were not, I think, quite able to put their finger on why it didn't work. It certainly was not because of the actors: Will Keen was magnificent as the icy but passionate Henry Trebell and Phoebe Nicholls affecting as his sister. The themes of the play - political hypocrisy and abortion - are certainly not outdated. What several critics hazarded was that modern audiences could not be expected to warm to Trebell's obsession with his bill to disestablish the church. This was dismissed as a fusty theme with no relevance to our lives. Yet audiences have warmed to themes no less fusty, for example the supremacy of the church in the time of Henry VIII, as tussled over in A Man for All Seasons. Disestablishment mattered intensely in 19th-century politics and it has, as a matter of fact, resurfaced in church debate today.

The fault in the play is a rather different one. Barker simply tells us too much about the Disestablishment Bill, the arguments for and against, the difficulties of getting it through parliament, all those things that are the bread-and-butter of political life. He is too conscientious. He lacks the ruthlessness of the great artist. Disestablishment needs to be treated simply as a conflict about which the characters are passionately concerned but the precise details of which need not detain us. That is the lesson that Alfred Hitchcock taught so brilliantly. What he called the McGuffin is selected as the main driving force of the film, the holy grail, the object of everyone's frantic search, but to define it too exactly would only slow us down and might undermine our faith in the whole enterprise.

Real-life politics is full of McGuffins. That's the trouble. What occupies the obsessive attention of the Westminster world tends to be an imbroglio so complex and in many respects so absurdly trivial that it does not translate easily into art. In 1986 the Westland affair caused Michael Heseltine to stalk out of the cabinet and set off the internal conflict that destroyed the Conservative party for two decades, perhaps the worst civil war in the party since the reform of the Corn Laws. Initially, what the argument centred on was whether Mrs Thatcher had illegitimately manipulated the cabinet agenda; then it shifted to whether her allies had leaked a letter of advice from the solicitor general in defiance of long-established convention. For days, debate revolved furiously round this point, leading eventually to the forced resignation of the home secretary. Yet it was a pure McGuffin, because apart from the relative insignificance of the letter it was doubtful whether any such convention existed. In any case, to become absorbed in the actual details, as we all were, is to become a journalist. The artist simply seizes on the McGuffin and runs with it. He is interested only in the specifics that illuminate his theme.

Considered as literature, the perfect text is often one that offers no clear answers. In Little Dorrit, for example, what exactly is the nature of the debt which William Dorrit is imprisoned for non-payment of? What precisely does Mr Merdle do to make his mountains of money? What is Daniel Doyce's brilliant invention that the Circumlocution Office refuses to support? Dickens offers us the barest minimum of information about such things. Indeed, we are told that "nobody knew with the least precision what Mr Merdle's business was, except that it was to coin money". It is his marvellous mysteriousness that makes all his investors feel so privileged to be allowed to put their money with him, from his fellow millionaires down to Pancks the rent collector, who assures Arthur Clennam: "I tell you, Mr Clennam, I've gone into it. He's a man of immense resources - enormous capital - government influence. They're the best schemes afloat. They're safe. They're certain." The point is that Pancks has not gone into it, any more than the just-sentenced Bernie Madoff's willing victims went into his business. The suspension of disbelief is the first secret of the fraudster's art. And it is precisely by denying the reader all those financial details that you would find in a modern bestseller about Wall Street that Dickens breaks through to a finer truth.

Merdle is based on the real-life Madoff or Maxwell of his day, John Sadleir, an Irish banker and MP, who took poison after his enormous swindles had been exposed and was found dead near the Spaniards' Inn on Hampstead Heath while Little Dorrit was being written. What fascinated Dickens was Sadleir's utter lack of flamboyance or personal magnetism: he was a cold, sallow-faced, wrinkled bachelor who appeared to take no pleasure in his fortune or in human company. Merdle too, we are told, did not shine in company. Just like Madoff in Florida, he seems to have reassured investors by his combination of relentless hospitality and personal inconspicuousness.

Dickens's urge to fictionalise and politicise real contemporary events was both immediate and passionate. While he was writing Little Dorrit, he wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts that he remained "a Reformer heart and soul. I have nothing to gain - everything to lose (for public quiet is my bread) - but I am in desperate earnest because I know it is a desperate case". Not only does the book satirise the appalling ease with which fraudsters could relieve the public of huge sums, it is also directed against two other scandals of the day: the injustice of imprisonment for debt and the maladministration in Whitehall which was responsible for hardship and delay at home and disease and death in the Crimea. All three scandals were red-hot at the time - the Crimean war was still going on - and although specific prisons reserved for debtors no longer exist, all three issues remain red-hot today, substituting only Madoff for Merkle and Iraq for the Crimea.

Dickens's techniques were much resented by the Sir Humphreys of the time. His satire was said to be unfair and exaggerated and to take no account of the real problems of governing the country. I remember, when I first read Little Dorrit, feeling that the Circumlocution Office was a rather crude caricature. That was before I had any direct experience of the higher bureaucracy. Re-reading Little Dorrit now, I am struck rather by the brilliance of the description of Clennam storming the Circumlocution Office to try to find out why William Dorrit is still in the Marshalsea after so many years. After several false starts, he is directed to the room of Mr Wobbler in the Secretarial Department: "He entered the apartment, and found two gentlemen sitting face to face at a large and easy desk, one of whom was polishing a gun-barrel on his pocket-handkerchief, while the other was spreading marmalade on bread with a paper knife." I might have found this fanciful if I had not once entered a private secretaries' room in Whitehall at a quiet time in the parliamentary recess and found one of the inmates with his ear to Test Match Special while another in his braces was aiming paper darts into a waste-paper basket.

In a larger sense, Dickens communicates his political message by transcending it. We never lose the sense of the Marshalsea as a grim, enclosing institution, but what anchors it in our minds are the ways in which the inmates have made a home and a society out of a prison. We share Dickens's exasperated affection for all Dorrit's pompous self-deception, just as we too are carried away along with the punters by Mr Merdle's air of knowing the secrets of the financial universe.

Here perhaps we begin to glimpse an essential condition for turning politics into literary art: that our affections have to be engaged, even against our best intentions. If the monsters are to be real, they must seduce us a little. I remember one or two complaints that either David Hare and Howard Brenton or Anthony Hopkins, or a combination of the three of them, had made the monstrous colonial press baron Lambert Le Roux in Pravda too devilishly attractive. To mount an effective attack on press corruption, the argument went, he should have been unmitigatedly repellent. But, like it or not, in real life the Beaverbrooks and the Murdochs are attractive, albeit in a piratical, reptilian way. It is often only this menacing charm that conceals the tycoon's inner dullness. That is partly how they got where they were, and that is why Pravda succeeds so brilliantly and in its heightening is truer to life. To fail to see this is to fail to see the boundary that separates agitprop both from literature and from life.

In David Hare's most recent play, Gethsemane, the characters again appear to be based on recognisable real-life models: the cabinet minister whose husband is in trouble with the law, the minister's rebellious daughter, the oily fixer who thinks he is running the prime minister like a puppetmaster. But the characters don't seem to have much juice in them, or to have been conceived with any affection, even of the unwilling sort. The satire seemed rather inert. Is this perhaps because it is difficult to denounce Tony Blair and New Labour for betraying the party's old ideals, when the whole point of Blair's successful pitch for power was that this would be the first Labour administration which would not try to impose the party's ideals on the public? Or is it rather that the problems of defining and delivering the didactic message prevent the play from breathing its own air?

How exactly should a "political" playwright conceive his mission? Ibsen, we know, took it as an insult when he was congratulated and thanked for the help he had given to the women's cause. He told the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights in 1898: "I have never written a poem or a play to further a social purpose. I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than most people seem inclined to believe." He added in characteristically grumpy vein: "I am not even very sure what women's rights really are." I am indebted for this quotation to an essay in these pages by AS Byatt who said, it seemed with some surprise, that each time she reads A Doll's House, she finds Nora less and less sympathetic. But that surely is why it is a great play. The cramping social restrictions which deny women a proper life operate all the more perniciously upon a wilful, difficult temperament. The play is about Nora, not about woman's place in modern society, just as Macbeth is about Macbeth and not about kingship in 11th-century Scotland. Nora needs to be played not by someone who instantly rouses our sympathy but by one of those actresses who are so good at playing irritating women, like Peggy Ashcroft and Juliet Stevenson. The same is true of Hedda Gabler, superbly done by Eve Best in a recent production.

The word to describe what I think must be avoided is "portentous". That word is derived from "protendere", to stretch forth, and it's that effortful stretching forward to bring out the politics which pulls the work out of shape. The leading American novelists of the past 30 years are much admired in Britain for their willingness to tackle what Melville called "mighty themes", especially what they see as the mightiest of all, which is the state of America. Every time they sit down to write, they have their sights set on the Great American Novel, described by the literary editor John Walsh as "the big one, the single perfect work of fiction that would encapsulate the heart of the US, interpret its history through the light of a single, outstanding consciousness, unite the private lives of the characters with the public drama of its politics".

But is this what a novel should be doing? Over the years, I have certainly enjoyed most of the novels of John Updike and Philip Roth and Richard Ford, and quite a few of Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. Yet I cannot disguise the sensation that creeps over me halfway through most of these novels, that the message is being over-inked. Something is being said about American society - its racism, or its anti-semitism, or its solitary bleakness, or its greed - but it is being said too loudly and too often to allow the book to breathe. Something is also being said about the Kennedy years, or the Nixon years, or the Reagan years, as though human life and culture took its cue from whoever happened to get elected president. There is not enough sense of human existence going on independently of political events or social trends, little sense in particular of human relationships; for relationships, especially those between men and women, appear to have the life smothered out of them by that "single outstanding consciousness", invariably a man's.

Let me offer, by way of contrast, Alice Munro, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Annie Proulx. As Elaine Showalter points out, "serious women writers are much less likely than their male counterparts to celebrate themselves", and as a result they are much less likely to be celebrated as Great Writers. Yet their reach is no less large, their wit no less wicked, and their sympathies no less broad. There is nothing "domestic" about their scale. I would argue that their best books are more fully realised as works of art because they manage to deal with all the big themes without being overwhelmed by them. And I find more human relating in a single short story by Munro, recently awarded the international Booker prize, than in 500 pages inflated by the great Bellows.

A couple of years ago I happened to read no fewer than three American novels about estate agents: Ford's The Lay of the Land, Smiley's Good Faith and Tyler's Digging to America. You can see why the theme occurred to them all: the restlessness and impermanence of a people always on the move, the eating up of the land, the churning of homes into money. All three novels are highly readable, yet in the Ford the theme seemed too relentlessly forced, whereas Tyler and Smiley managed to deliver the message, if message there was, without being enslaved by it. I do not mean to imply merely that the women's novels achieve lightness, though they do. They are not just soufflés that have risen. They are aircraft that fly with a full payload.

At first sight, the theatre of Bertolt Brecht might seem to defy my contention that the politics must somehow be absorbed for the piece to succeed as a work of art. Surely the whole point of Brecht is to disdain artifice and give us the political message full-frontally. But Brecht simply takes another route to a similar destination. Yes, he puts his political anger nakedly before us, but he also presents it in a highly stylised way, like a Japanese play. This famous Verfremdungseffekt is only another way of transforming, a variant of the art that conceals art. It is certainly not to be belittled because it is a different way.

When I argue that the work needs to escape from the message or to transcend it, I am not seeking to erase the message or to deny that it may be perfectly valid. I see here twin fallacies that mirror one another. The first is what might be called the "agitprop fallacy": that the work is of value only in so far as it promotes the message and that a work which lacks any political purpose is worthless because it evades our moral responsibility for the state of the world. That, I think most people now agree, is a narrow and misguided view of both life and literature.

The mirror image of the agitprop fallacy is the belief that art should steer clear of politics and that any work which is inspired by political passion is flawed and lessened. We might call it the "art-for-art's-sake fallacy". This seems to me to relegate politics to a uniquely underprivileged role, reminiscent of the convention supposed to operate at Victorian dinner tables that certain topics, such as women and religion, were not to be mentioned. Political themes and passions surely have every right to muscle in on the act. The question remains what role they are to perform? What effect do they have or should they have on the world?

One point of view is that baldly expressed by Shelley in the closing sentence of his Defence of Poetry: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." That famous phrase appears to assert that it is poets who are the advance guard of reform, the trumpeters at the head of the column. Yet the sentences just before this thumping conclusion qualify it. Shelley tells us that "an energetic development of the literature of England . . . has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national will." So poetry doesn't always come first, it may happen alongside. Nor is it necessarily the case that poets think up the new stuff all by themselves. "The electric life which burns within the words" of the most celebrated writers of the present day may not be all their own work. In fact, "they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age." Poets are "the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present." In Shelley's formulation, they sound almost like spirit mediums, not responsible for the messages they give voice to.

At first sight, Shelley appears to be contradicted by Auden's equally famous axiom in his "In Memory of WB Yeats": "for poetry makes nothing happen: it survives in the valley of its making". Which sounds as if poetry is and should be cut off from the real world. Yet Auden too qualifies his utterance. At the end of the verse, he tells us that poetry "survives, / A way of happening, a mouth". So ultimately Shelley and Auden are not that far apart. What poetry does is give voice to the spirit of the age. It speaks for our hopes and fears, our sense of outrage or despair. I rather like the medieval poet's term "my plaint" - from plango, I beat, hence I beat my breast, hence I lament. The poet is the village breast-beater, the counsel for the plaintiff.

This giving-voice may have consequences in the real world. It may incite people to do things, it may unify them, give them hope or consolation. In old age, Yeats himself looked back on a public life sporadically concerned with political causes:

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

Did words of mine put too great

strain

On that woman's reeling brain?

Could my spoken words have

checked

That whereby a house lay

wrecked?

And all seems evil until I

Sleepless would lie down and

die.

But this insomniac reverie is a medley of the public and the private. Yeats is thinking not only about his responsibility for helping to incite the Easter Rising but also about his affair with the mentally unstable actress Margaret Ruddock and about the abandonment and loss of his beloved Coole. Life of all sorts flows through literature; there is no special reserved status for politics.

Nor is there any standard time-relation between the political cause and the literary outflow. Political passion may flow hot and strong and instant, notably in writing about war. The war poems of Sassoon and Owen came straight from the western front. Their disillusion and disgust were as direct and unmediated as had been the enthusiasm of Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke at the outset of the war. Tennyson wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in only a few minutes after reading the account of the disaster in the Times. There was a similar instant response to unemployment and hardship, in both the 1930s and the 1980s. The anti-Thatcher songs were not slow in coming.

Sometimes those who might seem best qualified to write directly about politics feel under no compulsion at all to do so. Goethe was for 10 years and more chef de cabinet to the Duke of Weimar, more or less prime minister of the little duchy. Yet his political experience does not find much immediate reflection in his work. Certainly he does not tell us a great deal about his encouragement of the textile and mining industries in Weimar or his reforms of the school system there. I do not mean that as a writer he was impervious to the outside world. On the contrary, as a young man he was a leader in the passionate romantic movement across Europe, patented in Germany as Sturm und Drang. In later life, he was a leader in the rediscovery of classicism which also spread across Europe in architecture and painting as well as in poetry and drama. His attitude towards Germanness developed in parallel with his stylistic development, all these sides of him being brought together in that extraordinary broken-backed masterpiece, Faust. Yet you would not think of Goethe primarily as a political poet or playwright, and you would not be surprised to be told that he had spent his whole life living by a millstream and had taken no part in politics at all.

Sometimes, too, one is struck by the complete absence of literary reaction to great events, by a silence that may seem more awesome than speech. The two greatest Italian poets of the 20th century, Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti, both fought in the first world war on the Italian front, which was just as horrific as the western front, the trenches just as muddy, the slaughter as terrible, the senselessness even more evident, and the mountain terrain infinitely harsher. Yet Montale published only one, rather elegiac and personal, poem about the front, and Ungaretti's war verse, which remains very popular in Italy, tends to look for lyrical transcendence in the moonlight over the mountains and soldiers bathing in the river.

In prose too, the horrors of the Italian front were passed over in near-total silence, until Mark Thompson's wonderful history, The White War, came out last year. There was one glorious exception to this long silence, and that too was written by a non-Italian, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. I thought, in a superior way, that I had grown out of Hemingway, but when I re-read the book recently I was recaptured from the first page. What I now know from reading Thompson is that A Farewell to Arms also gives a pretty good account of the war, being closely based on Hemingway's experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver. When the narrator comes to his famous denunciation of the cruel and senseless nature of the war, it is not glib but fully earned.

There are some events that are simply too overwhelming and terrible to confront immediately. That may be more or less what Theodor Adorno meant by his well-known declaration that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". For some unlucky nations, writing recent history is too raw, too painful, too embarrassing. It may take years for writers who have been through such terrible times to find the proper voice to write about them. Often the literature does not "accompany or precede", as Shelley claimed. It lags a long way after. A Farewell to Arms was not published until 1929, more than 10 years after the events it describes, and the same year as other classics of the Great War: Goodbye to All That and All Quiet on the Western Front. Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer came out the following year.

The horrors of the Holocaust were known and undeniable as soon as the camps were liberated and the living skeletons stumbled out in front of the newsreel cameras. But it was years before memoirs and novels began to explore those horrors. Sometimes this was because the writers could not face reliving the experience. Sometimes it was because publishers thought that their readers did not want to face it. Primo Levi wrote most of If This Is a Man in 1946, only a year after being freed from Auschwitz, but only an amateur publisher would take the book and it sold a mere 1,500 copies. It was not until 1958 that Giulio Einaudi brought it to a wider audience.

It has taken longer still for German writers to confront the Hitlerzeit. In the end, the task has been left to the generation who were either children or not born at all in those years, so that the sins they are writing about are not their own but those of their fathers and grandfathers.

In Britain, we have been energetic in writing about the misdeeds of other peoples, but we have had our own Great Silence. During the years immediately after the union flag was hauled down, first in India then across the rest of the British empire, there was a remarkable reluctance to think or write about the imperial experience. It was old hat, an embarrassing joke. We told ourselves that the whole thing had really had remarkably little impact on us. Then, quite without warning, the outpouring began, in novels and memoirs, and radio reminiscences and huge TV series. The outpouring seemed to be all the more heartfelt for having been so long delayed. Our sudden eagerness to recall the Raj and every other outpost of empire was also pushed on by the appearance, equally unexpected, of writers of brimming talent from every quarter of the imperial diaspora. In some years, it seemed there was scarcely a native British writer on the Booker shortlist. In fact, native British writers began to look rather dowdy and provincial, as though excluded from (if not actually deaf to) a globalised culture that revelled in diversity and displacement. It was almost like a reverse colonisation.

There is something rather impressive about these Great Silences. They seem to be observed by some mutual agreement that is itself tacit. They are like the silences observed on Remembrance Sunday, except they last 10 years rather than two minutes.

And the silences teach us something that is useful beyond their immediate context. They teach us that in whatever sense you choose, broad or narrow, local or global, politics is as fit and necessary a subject for writing about as anything else in life. But it is not therefore an easier subject. On the contrary, it is often much more difficult and requires reserves of tact and(...)

When Germany was divided during the cold war, nature took control of the deserted border area. Today it forms a reserve as fascinating as the country's recent history

When I told friends I was setting off to explore the former border that once separated East and West Germany, several of them, even the German ones, scratched their heads and dug out their maps to find out where it ran. Unlike the Berlin Wall, the infamous symbol of the cold war that separated West Berlin from East, the much longer border that ran through the heart of Germany, has been largely forgotten.

German nature lovers, however, are well aware of the scar left by the iron curtain, once one of the world's most heavily fortified borders. For four decades up to the end of the cold war in 1989, around 600 threatened species of animal and plant life were given a free rein in a no man's land overshadowed by minefields, metal fences and watchtowers. The legacy is a unique and extraordinarily rich chain of ad hoc nature reserves running for nearly 1,400km in a gentle zigzag from the Vogtland region, near the German-Czech border in the south, to the Baltic Sea in the north, now interlinked to form a grünes band, or green belt.

It is an impressive living monument to recent European history that is accessible to walkers and bikers. Eckhard Selz, a ranger and former East German from the Harz national park, summed it up over a bowl of pea and sausage soup atop the Brocken peak, one of the highlights of the route: "The division of Germany was a travesty that robbed people of their freedom, but a positive side effect was the way the sealed border allowed nature to flourish."

It has created a treasure trove of wildlife, including black storks, wild cats and winchats, a range of rare mosses and wood grouse. The newcomer is the lynx, which has been successfully reintroduced to the region since the border came down.

In four days we hiked around 100km of the green belt, starting at the Torfhaus visitor centre in the Harz national park, just outside the picturesque former mining town of Goslar. It was organised for us by the Harz tourist board and the Green Belt initiative, who will arrange guides, luggage transfers, routes and accommodation, allowing you the freedom to concentrate on the surroundings. Alternatively you can do the hikes alone. The paths are well marked and the local tourist offices on the route are stocked with plenty of maps and information about activities.

In Torfhaus, our guide, biologist Jens Halves, offered everything from reflexology foot massages in the park's cool mountain streams to tours that trace the past journeys of Hans-Christian Andersen and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to reconstructing the lives of the 18th- and 19th-century charcoal burners who lived in the forest and served the steel industry.

In Goslar - home to the delicious Gose beer that is brewed with a high concentration of malt and the region's soft and mineral-rich water - we stayed at the Kaiserworth Hotel, once a 15th-century cloth traders' guild house. The following day our rucksacks were picked up by a luggage taxi for delivery to our next destination while we set off on foot to the charming town of Hornburg. A room in the local museum details the West German town's precarious proximity to the iron curtain, including a model of the automatic spring guns that the East German authorities installed at the border. Triggered by movement, they sprayed would-be escapees with bullets.

"It was like living at the edge of the world," said Hinrich Schüler, our guide, who worked as a forester on the border and recalls the day in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. He and his colleagues had to act rapidly, cutting paths through the forest and laying temporary roads for the thousands of Trabants and pedestrians rushing from East to West. Now the towering 69-year-old was accompanying us on a brisk walk through a forest in Lower Saxony into the 1,030-year-old village of Osterwieck in the former East.

Osterwieck has received millions of euros in grants over the last 20 years to help restore its stunning collection of 400 half-timbered houses. But much of the former East is revealed in the many abandoned homes of the thousands who have been forced to leave because of lack of work.

In Ilsenburg we spent the night in a former East German army barracks, now the swish Berghotel, from where we trekked in drizzle through the pine and rock landscape of the Brocken along the distinct border patrol path, constructed out of perforated slab concrete, that runs like a seam for practically the entire length of the former border.

"The Brocken is to the Germans what Ben Nevis is to the Scots," explained Friedhart Knolle, a national park geologist.

The 1,141m mount was also a favourite haunt for British tourists as far back as the 1830s, when they were lured by the promise of the Brockengespenst - the Brocken spectre - an illusion formed, it is believed, by the thick fog and the shadows of climbers cast upon it. The seminal role it played in the history of broadcasting, when the 1936 Olympics were transmitted from the world's first television tower here, is explained in a museum at the summit.

The GDR authorities turned it into a military zone, out of bounds for all Germans, so today it is one of the most potent symbols of German partition and reunification.

A 19th-century narrow-gauge steam railway, the Brockenbahn, took us downhill to the pretty town of Schiercke (in the former East), close to our next destination, the town of Braunlage (former West). At the foot of Wurmberg mountain there, slalom skiers were once instructed to concentrate on curbing the end of their runs lest they ended up cruising into the forbidden East.

Hartmut Dörge, a former customs officer on the West German border who now gives tours of the area around Braunlage, pointed out the gaps in the heavily-fortified fences where foxes, rabbits and badgers were able to tunnel their way through.

Our walk took us past a brook, just 1m wide, that was pedantically split down the middle by the international border, a house in the forest where secret agents once met and a former East German army barracks turned asylum seekers' home.

Dorge gave me a piece of the metal mesh border fence as a souvenir before handing us over in the pretty town of Hohegeiss to our next guide, his former colleague Manfred Gille. He led us on a steep path through a spectacular pine forest that was so thick and dark it would have been the ideal setting for a Grimm fairytale. In a clearing near the East German village of Sorge, he pointed out how the tilling of the earth in search of landmines inadvertently churned up seeds and helped a wealth of birch and pine saplings to take root all along the former border. There are still bare patches, however, where industrial weed-killer sprayed by GDR authorities to ensure unbroken views of their borders, have killed all the nutrients.

Gille recalled a bizarre encounter he had with a Westerner who fled to the East, saying he was sick of the capitalist system: "He clung to the fence, rattling on it and crying 'Let me in!' while ignoring our suggestions that he should think twice about what he was doing."

At the Ring of Memory near the village of Sorge (which, fittingly, means "woe" in German), landscape artist Hermann Prigann's sculpture of naked concrete pillars encircled with charred wood piles celebrates how the forest has enveloped the former border area.

We met Inge Winkel, the mayor of the 120-soul village, who admitted she still stuck to the border patrol path for fear of stepping on an undiscovered landmine if she strayed into the forest. She stood at the fence marking the first of the two metal fortifications that once separated Sorge from the West and dwelt on a detail that has haunted her for years. "It's the highest quality steel, especially chosen by a regime that needed to keep its citizens locked in, otherwise they'd have run away," she said.

We ended our four-day journey in Eichsfeld, a Catholic enclave that is famous for successfully defying the regime, and rested our weary limbs on a bench at the former border - a gift to the green belt initiative from none other than the man who had initiated the monumental changes, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Way to go

Getting there

Air Berlin (0871 5000 737, airberlin.com) flies Stansted-Hanover and Stansted-Berlin from £48 rtn inc tax.

Border trail

German tour operator Wandern im Harz (0049 5322 559603, wandern-im-harz.de) arranges hikes along the border trail from April to November. Hikes last four to six nights; the four-night tour costs €230pp, including hotel accommodation, transfers to and from the nearest railway station, breakfast, packed lunch, introductory talk, map, information material, luggage transfers and SOS assistance, but no guide.

Further information

Harz Mountains Tourist Board: +5321 34040, harzinfo.de. For details of the wider route across Europe: greenbelteurope.eu.

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Anyone who has spent any time simply browsing the Internet for interesting things to read quickly realizes that while the Internet is certainly filled with interesting and fascinating websites covering all sorts of useful topics, it’s also overrun by countless rotten websites that promote things like racial hatred, anti-semitism and even encourages fanatical censorship.

Sound hard to believe?

While here at MakeUseOf, you’ll always find lots of great advice about cool websites, such as Aibek’s list of 40 unusual websites you should bookmark or his other article on 5 cool websites to procrastinate at work, in this article, we’re going to take a stroll down a few dark alleyways of the Internet; and carefully take a glimpse at the seedy underworld that exists there - like a growing, cancerous lump that you didn’t realize was there until it was too late. These are a list of 4 websites that you shouldn’t ever bookmark.

Taking Pot Shots at Rotten Websites

Revealing the slimy side of the Internet is dangerous business. Many people reading this may actually secretly hold some of the views or beliefs expressed on some of these websites. In the end, whenever you label anything as “rotten” - you’re going to tick certain people off. With that said, it’s also critically important in the world we live in to acknowledge and accept that hate exists in many forms all around us. And yes, some of us (myself included) have, at one time or another, allowed hatred toward a group of people to exist inside of us. Then, a day comes when you meet one person who falls within that category of people that you’ve built stereotypes in your mind about. That one person blows all of those stereotypes away - and suddenly you realize that the hatred you’d formed for that group is baseless and without any real foundation.

Here at MakeUseOf, writers are from a very wide range of nationalities, religions and other groups. Every day, we collaborate and work together to present readers and the Internet community with unique ways they can “make use of” the Internet. In the spirit of that borderless cooperation, it’s time to break down a few more walls and expose some of the hate-filled or fanatical content that exists on the Internet today.

Jew Watch - A Zionist Conspiracy or Anti-Semitism?

One thing I’ve noticed about most “hater” websites is that they try their hardest to come across as educated, professional and scholarly. It’s sort of like they think if they throw enough sugar on the whole mix, people won’t realize the level of rotten website they’ve just landed on. Jew Watch was founded by James Stenzel, and is touted by the site’s “librarian” Frank Weltner of St. Louis, Missouri, as an “oasis of news for Americans who presently endure the hateful censorship of zionist occupation.”

In reality, this is one of the worst rotten websites on the web, not so much a “news” site, as it is a conspiracy theory site filled with empty propaganda and some of the most shoddy research in history. While the primary publicist and author at the site, Frank Weltner, points out that he doesn’t believe “all jews” are bad -  Jew Watch is built around the strange theory that there is a well-organized, elite wealthy group of Jews trying to take over the world. This paranoid conspiracy theory mirrors other common ones such as MJ-12, the Illuminati, and many others. In the end, this fear-mongering does nothing more than encourage hatred toward an entire population based on nothing more than their heritage.

Hatebook - Like There Isn’t Already Enough Hate in The World?

We live in a world where there are shootings, domestic violence, child abuse and so many other atrocities, it seems inconceivable that someone would come up with the idea that what the world needs is a social network based on “hate.”  That’s exactly what HateBook is all about.

HateBook is a Facebook copycat social network where anti-social folks can join together and celebrate their hateful behaviors. On HateBook, they can either tell secrets (or even lies) about someone. The concept of this particular rotten website is that the “enemies of your enemies are your friends.” In other words, if you’re able to find out who else hates the person that you hate, you can essentially team up against them. They even have a label for such groups called “hate-clans.”  How lovely.

ChildCare Action Project - A Cover for Orwellian Style Censorship

As a writer and an avid reader, I have an especially strong aversion to censorship. I am, in fact, a religious person - but I also abhor zealous religious fanatics who turn spirituality into a badge of righteous indignation toward all things they deem “improper”. What is improper, exactly? By whose terms and by whose culture should those limits be drawn from? Certainly what’s considered moral in the U.S. may not be so in India or China - and vice versa. So, who gets to decide?  Apparently, the founders of the CAP Project have given themselves that honor regarding the movies that people watch.

This fanatically religious organization wouldn’t have made the list of rotten websites if it simply provided full reviews of the parts of movies that some parents may consider “objectionable” for their children to watch. However, this organization takes it a step further and also offers W.I.S.D.O.M. rankings. These are rankings on whether the film has wanton violence, impudence or hate, sexual immorality, drugs or alcohol, offense to God, or murder or suicide.  While these rankings sound semi-reasonable, the reasons they offer for degrading a film are ludicrous and a bit disturbing. For example, the site degraded the children’s film “Narnia” for attempted murder and planning of murder, a tame scene of childbirth, lying, and “unholy” mythical beasts and magical themes. Say what?  Look, when I was a kid, I stood up with all of the other children and clapped for Tinkerbell to magically come back to life, and I turned out okay! Sort of…

88Tube - Just Innocent White Pride or Tasteless Hate?

As usual, I saved the best (or I guess I should say “the worst”) for last. For those who don’t know about it, 88Tube is a white supremacy website where proud white dudes can express pride in their heritage by sitting in front of their computer watching such enlightening and uplifting videos as “Adolf Hitler talking to German Youth”, “The Revival of the Klu Klux Klan”, and “All Heil to the Great Nazi Power!!” Oh yeah - those sure make me proud to be white… Ugh.

Reviewing these rotten websites filled with either religious or racial fanaticism sure makes it apparent that we live in a very disturbing world, filled with people who are disillusioned - or maybe just delusional. In either case, the ease with which such ideologies can proliferate throughout the Internet is something every honorable citizen of the world should be concerned about.

Have you ever come across fanatical websites on the Internet? What were they and how did you feel about them? Share your own opinions in the comment section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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One of Michael Jackson’s former British bodyguards claims that he had a secret girlfriend. Matt Fiddes declines to identify her, and also talks at length about Michael’s drug addiction. Problem is, the guy seems to be lying. Sky news has a short clip of their interview with him, and he comes across as dishonest. At several points he has pronounced pauses and “um”s combined with looking downward, one of the classic signs of searching for something to say. And Fiddes doesn’t say anything that hasn’t already been reported in the media in terms of the drug use.

Michael Jackson’s former British bodyguard says the star had a girlfriend in the months before he died, and recalled “confiscating” bags of prescription medicine from the singer out of fear that he might die. Matt Fiddes, a 30-year-old martial arts expert from southwest England, laid full blame for Jackson’s death on doctors who supplied him with prescription medicines, which many suspect lead to heart failure. Fiddes said the doctors had Jackson’s “blood on their hands”.

Fiddes was introduced to Jackson by magician Uri Geller about a decade ago, according to his interview with CBS News’ partner network Sky News. “I never witnessed him actually taking drugs but I knew they were there, and I confiscated packages, and Uri did too,” said Fiddes. “Uri confiscated injection equipment from his room… Uri would scream at Michael, you know, intensely, to stop doing this but we were getting pushed out (by the doctors).”

“We went to great efforts to keep the doctors away. But as soon as we said anything and it got back to Michael, Michael would have a screaming fit that we were interfering with his private life, that he knew what he was doing,” said Fiddes, adding that he believes the star was “in denial.” ... “As far as I’m concerned they have Michael’s blood on their hands,” he said of the doctors. “They know what they’ve done and there’s people out there who could have helped, could have stepped in, but didn’t do for financial reasons.” ... Fiddes said Jackson was not a “druggie,” and did not use illicit narcotics like cocaine, but that he was addicted to pain killers.

Fiddes would not name Jackson’s alleged secret girlfriend, but said she was “someone special” to the global pop star, and that they had known each other for some time. “I’m not going to name who she is but I think the family were aware that there was someone special in his life who he loved and adored and had his ups and downs with.

“I don’t know how long they’ve been a couple. I know she’s been with him for some time in different capacities but… it’s up to her if she wants it to come out or the family to speak about this very private information.”

[From CBS News]

I’m assuming the person Fiddes is referencing is Grace Rwaramba, one of the Jackson children’s former nannies. It’s been rumored off and on for years that they were secretly together, though nothing ever came of it. But that would make sense given Fiddes comment about Jackson being with the secret girlfriend in “different capacities.”

It sounds to me like this guy is doing nothing more than repeating rumors – both those about Michael’s health and person life. He’s jumping on board and capitalizing while he can, like a lot of other people have done and will continue to do. He seems shifty and like he’s working far too hard to answer relatively simple questions. Especially considering you’d think the guy had talked about Michael a lot lately – this stuff shouldn’t take so long to come to him. He also paints himself in a really heroic light, in terms of trying to save Jackson and keep him away from drugs, while castigating others. It’s like he pulled out the most recent “News of the World” and decided to repeat pages 4 -6 and see if anyone bought it.

Asuka Masamune, champion de la ligue nationale de kendo pour lycéens, mais aussi ceinture noire de judo et de karaté, cache un terrible secret : il est un otomen ! Pour ne pas décevoir sa mère, il a toujours chercé à refouler sa nature profonde. Cherchant à réaliser sa virilité en refoulant son « cÅ“ur de jeune fille », il va hélas finir par tomber amoureux de Ryô Miyakozuka, la nouvelle élève du lycée. Dès lors, son cÅ“ur s'emballe et... Voici la comédie romantique...

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back its first photos of the moon. The photo above was taken near the moon's Mare Nubium region. The man in the moon is just outside the frame. From NASA: Older craters have softened edges, while younger craters appear crisp. (The image) shows a region 1,400 meters (0.87 miles) wide, and features as small as 3 meters (9.8 feet) wide can be discerned. The bottom (faces) lunar north. LRO's First Moon Images Previously:Lunar junk - Boing Boing Secret museum on the moon's surface - Boing Boing Lunar home designer - Boing Boing Alan Shepard's lunar golf - Boing Boing Lunar vehicles that didn't make the cut - Boing Boing Lunar "ark" proposed - Boing Boing...

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back its first photos of the moon. The photo above was taken near the moon's Mare Nubium region. The man in the moon is just outside the frame. From NASA: Older craters have softened edges, while younger craters appear crisp. (The image) shows a region 1,400 meters (0.87 miles) wide, and features as small as 3 meters (9.8 feet) wide can be discerned. The bottom (faces) lunar north. LRO's First Moon Images Previously:Lunar junk - Boing Boing Secret museum on the moon's surface - Boing Boing Lunar home designer - Boing Boing Alan Shepard's lunar golf - Boing Boing Lunar vehicles that didn't make the cut - Boing Boing Lunar "ark" proposed - Boing Boing...