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Midway through Bill Clinton's first year as president, Time magazine reported that among the new president's problems was "a staff that has almost no White House or executive experience," pointing to then-political director Rahm Emanuel as a prime example.

Fast-forward 15 years: President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Emanuel to serve as his chief of staff. With years of high-level White House work under his belt, not to mention the connections and clout that come from having been one of the most powerful members of Congress, it would be quite a stretch to say that Emanuel lacks the experience to effectively serve Obama. So this time, some in the media have a different complaint. As CNN's Anderson Cooper put it, Emanuel is "probably the ultimate Washington insider. ... [T]he critics will say, well, look, if Obama is talking about change, why is he having a Washington insider?"

So: Emanuel was insufficiently experienced to serve as political director in 1993 -- and now we're to believe that he's too experienced in Washington to serve as chief of staff? What gives? Was there a brief window in 2003 in which Emanuel's level of experience was just right? Or is there something strange about the media's assessment of President-elect Obama's staffing decisions?

That Time assessment of Emanuel in 1993 was not unique. For 16 years, there has been near-universal agreement that the Clinton administration's early struggles (real and perceived) were in large part due to a lack of White House and Washington experience on the part of Clinton's staff.

Clinton hadn't even taken office before USA Today reported in December 1992 that the "limited Washington experience" of the incoming White House chief of staff, Mack McLarty, "raises the specter of Jimmy Carter's inexperienced inner circle." Six months later, Newsweek noted that McLarty's "lack of familiarity with Washington ways is now considered a political liability." The influential journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover later wrote that the choice of McLarty had been "a major surprise and the brunt of considerable criticism, on grounds that McLarty, like Clinton himself, was inexperienced in the Washington meat grinder."

By mid-1994, when a staff restructuring resulted in Leon Panetta's appointment as chief of staff, an Albany Times-Union editorial was typical of media reaction:

[Clinton's] sudden shuffle of White House staff is the latest evidence that he has finally grasped a central fact of Washington political life: It's not the place for the inexperienced, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

[...]

He's also learned that the chief of staff position is no place for a neophyte. It takes someone with Mr. Panetta's credentials as an insider to fill this pivotal post. That's all the more true at a time when the White House is trying to push through key health care and welfare legislation.

During a January 2001 look back at the Clinton presidency, Nightline host Ted Koppel summed up years of conventional wisdom: "The new president had put together a staff with virtually no experience in governing from the White House" -- something Nightline made clear was a mistake.

When President George W. Bush chose Andy Card, who had served in senior White House roles in two previous administrations, as his chief of staff, the selection -- along with decisions to put other longtime Washington insiders in key positions -- was received favorably by the news media.

Three days into Bush's presidency, CNN's Bill Schneider told viewers that "Bush is now surrounded by a lot of insider Washington deal makers, who have a lot of experience; like Dick Cheney and Andrew Card, his chief of staff; Paul O'Neill at treasury, and Donald Rumsfeld at defense. I think, a hard line and a smiling face and a willingness to make deals -- that could be a formula for success." A month later, The Washington Post ran a 2,000-word profile of Card that emphasized the benefit of Card's experience and portrayed him as bringing efficiency and order to the White House.

So, the history is clear: President Clinton was lambasted by the news media for not having enough old Washington hands on his staff; President Bush was praised for choosing veterans of previous Republican administrations.

Which brings us back to the present, and to the bizarre spectacle of journalists and pundits blasting Barack Obama for choosing staff members and Cabinet secretaries who are experienced and qualified.

Here, for example, is MSNBC's Chris Matthews, noting that Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, John Podesta, and Rahm Emanuel either have or are reported to have roles in Obama's transition or administration:

This is what you do when you don't have elections. You simply promote the people ... who had the deputy jobs. You can do this in any bureaucratic state. You could do it in the old Soviet Union, do it anywhere you have a bureaucracy. You don't need to hold elections to promote deputies to the top job when it comes time, right? You don't need elections for this crap, do you? ... You just keep promoting people from within in any old, tired bureaucracy. That's what you do.

This is nothing short of insane.

Eric Holder, reportedly Barack Obama's choice for attorney general, did indeed have one of the "deputy jobs" at the Justice Department -- in the Clinton administration, not the Bush administration. It's a pretty safe bet that if we didn't have an election a few weeks ago -- if the Bush administration were continuing indefinitely -- Eric Holder would not be the next attorney general. It's an even safer bet that Rahm Emanuel would not be chief of staff. Much of the nation may wish the Bush administration never happened, but it did. None of the people Matthews mentioned are being "promoted from within" -- not a single one.

(Matthews, by the way, was unconcerned about hiring officials from former administrations when George W. Bush was doing the hiring: In 2001, he praised Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell as "real heavyweights in terms of experience.")

Matthews' MSNBC colleague Pat Buchanan is very much on the same page, repeatedly complaining that the incoming Obama administration will be filled with "retreads." Yes: Pat Buchanan, born and raised in Washington, D.C.; educated at Georgetown; a veteran of two GOP White Houses and himself twice a candidate for the presidency; a 20-year fixture on cable news -- that Pat Buchanan is complaining about too many "retreads."

That was a common theme on MSNBC, where longtime Washington insiders Chris Matthews, David Gregory, and Christopher Hitchens -- among others -- suggested that the choice of former Clinton administration officials was contrary to the idea of "change":

[BULLET] Chris Matthews: "The possibility that Barack Obama might pick Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state has a lot of people asking, 'Whatever happened to change, the change we can believe in?' "

[BULLET] David Gregory: "Is this change you can believe in? The Obama team is going to face these questions about big-time Clinton administration people into the fold now in some of the biggest jobs in the Cabinet. Eric Holder certainly fits that bill."

[BULLET] Christopher Hitchens: "This is the woman who, if you were for change that you can believe in, whichever change it was, you were voting against. ... [I]t's Clinton redo, not just Rahm Emanuel. Whatever this is, it's not change."

This has been a sentiment expressed commonly in the media, nowhere more frequently than on MSNBC, but the suggestion that bringing on former Clinton administration officials -- even Clinton herself -- is inconsistent with a desire for change is pure bunk. Asserting such inconsistency requires some deeply flawed assumptions: that everyone who worked in the Clinton administration is alike; that the Clinton and Bush administrations pursued identical policies with identical effectiveness; or that the desire for "change" is simply a desire for change in the types of people who hold government jobs.

People want a change in policy and a change in effectiveness. They want a change from George W. Bush, of whom disapproval is near-universal. The idea that 67 million people voted for Barack Obama because they disliked the Clinton administration is ludicrous. It ignores the wide and deep disgust with the direction Bush has taken the nation and the stunning incompetence with which he has done so. And it overlooks the obvious fact that people voted for Barack Obama because they like him and they like his policy positions.

But there is no evidence -- none -- that the nation as a whole has a deep desire to shun some of the people most qualified and experienced for administration jobs simply because they worked for Bill Clinton. Hard-core Republicans and Washington journalists may have such a desire, but that's about it.

The whining from journalists about Clinton alumni in the Obama administration is even sillier when you consider that they would presumably criticize Obama if he chose people without prior White House experience, as they criticized Bill Clinton. So the only way Obama can escape criticism is if he hires a bunch of people who worked in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Perversely, after two straight elections in which the American people convincingly rejected failed Republican rule, the punditocracy would be less likely to criticize Obama for abandoning his promise of change if he retained the services of the very Bush administration officials who screwed up the country so badly in the first place.

No piece of transition news has rankled the chattering class as much as the rumored selection of Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state -- not, in most cases, because they think her unqualified, but because they just don't like her. Christopher Hitchens, for one, lashed out at the news on MSNBC, leading the cable channel to treat his comments as though they were both surprising and important. They are neither. Hitchens hates the Clintons. Maybe not as much as he hates Mother Teresa, but there is little doubt that he hates them. Christopher Hitchens criticizing a Clinton is roughly as surprising as a Boston native speaking ill of New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.

Despite the fact that there is no indication that anyone outside of its own studios cares what Christopher Hitchens has to say about the Clintons, MSNBC has played his comments over and over again, and even invited him back on the next day to interview him about their previous interview of him. Host David Gregory explained MSNBC's obsession with Hitchens' comments by insisting -- all evidence to the contrary -- that "everybody is talking about" them.

Hitchens' bizarre comments about Hillary Clinton included his claim that he has never heard that she is respected by military leadership -- a claim that, if true, merely confirms that Hitchens knows far too little about Clinton for his assessment of her to be taken seriously. And he claimed that in 1993, Hillary Clinton instructed her husband not to intervene in the Balkans because she was afraid that it would interfere with her health-care initiative -- but the book he cited to support his claim does not do so.

As Media Matters' Eric Boehlert noted this week, the media has been essentially alone in their anguish about Clinton serving as secretary of state:

The press represents nobody but the press on this topic. Meaning, the press has no political cover on this story because there's no partisan angle to the SoS story, which means their long-running Clinton hatred is just sort of out there, exposed for all to see.

Think about. It's been virtually impossible to find any senior members of Congress--Republican or Democrat--who publicly oppose Clinton as the SoS, which in and of itself is rather astonishing.

And within the liberal blogosphere, where one might expect there to be vocal opposition to Clinton since so many within the netroots opposed her during the primaries, most A-list writers have been extremely quiet in terms of airing opposition.

[...]

So, if you're keeping score at home, that means the Obama White House is in favor of Clinton, Republicans in Congress are in favor, Democrats in Congress are in favor, and liberal activists are, essentially, in favor. (And so are most Americans.)

In the early stages of the last two administrations (both the result of "change" elections), the media made much of the importance of new presidents bringing on old hands with White House experience. Suddenly, they portray such moves as inconsistent with the idea of "change." There are really only two possible explanations for this inconsistency: They are blinded by their hatred of the Clintons, or are desperate for something -- anything -- to use as an excuse to criticize Obama.

Either way (or both), they look like fools by coming down in favor of inexperience. America is a nation at war, with stock and housing markets that are falling faster than a flock of turkeys dropped out of an airplane, a broken health-care system, and countless other problems -- and the punditocracy thinks Barack Obama should refuse to hire anyone who worked in the most successful administration of the past several decades. Incredible.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/78677?ns=guardianpageName=Science%3A+Nasa+veteran+offers+tips+to+British+students+on+how+to+walk+in+spacech=Sciencec3=The+Guardianc4=Space+exploration%2CSpace+%28Technology%29%2CHigher+education%2CScience%2CEducation%2CUK+newsc5=Not+commercially+useful%2CEducation+Weekly+Education%2CTechnology+Gadgets%2CHigher+Educationc6=Ian+Samplec7=2008_11_22c8=1122134c9=articlec10=GUc11=Sciencec12=Space+explorationc13=c14=h2=GU%2FScience%2FSpace+exploration" width="1" height="1" //divpBritain may be scorned for refusing to send humans into space, but from next week it will have the next best thing: its own university course on how to be an astronaut./ppStaff at Leicester University have called in a former Nasa astronaut, Jeff Hoffman, a veteran of five space shuttles, to teach the course which will offer instruction on how to survive in space, coping with the psychological demands of long-term space travel and how to conduct a spacewalk without dropping your toolbox./ppHoffman, who took part in crucial spacewalks to fix cameras aboard the Hubble space telescope in 1993, will join Leicester as a visiting professor but will maintain his position in the astronautics department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology./ppThe government is reviewing its long-held opposition to human spaceflight and an announcement is expected weeks before the European Space Agency reveals at least four new recruits to its astronaut team. Britain has never had an astronaut train through ESA because its funding covers only robotic missions and ground-based astronomy./pp"There's a strong student interest," Hoffman said. "If Britain continues with that policy, these students will still be able to work in other capacities at the European Space Agency."/ppHoffman will draw attention to the future exploration of the solar system, which is likely to see humans working alongside robotic rovers that could be sent out from a moonbase to conduct experiments at remote sites. /ppThe Leicester course begins as the UK prepares for a high-level meeting of European science ministers, at which human space exploration will be discussed./ppMartin Barstow, head of physics and astronomy at Leicester, said: "I'm fed up with the way the UK keeps dodging the issue of being involved in human spaceflight. Our students don't need to be loaded with that baggage. /pp"They still have aspirations to be astronauts and they still want to get involved in the space industry, so why should the UK government's attitude be a handicap?"/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/spaceexploration"Space exploration/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/spacetechnology"Space technology/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/highereducation"Higher education/a/li/ul/divdiv class="guRssAdvert"a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yessite=Sciencecountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227317660410112201400459684"img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yessite=Sciencecountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227317660410112201400459684" border="0" //a/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a

John Duffield, the chairman of New Star Asset Management, made the first cut in his £20 million-a-year cost-savings drive yesterday as he forced out Stephen Whittaker, his joint chief investment officer and a 28-year veteran of fund management.

Every time I scroll through my list of ‘Friends’ on Facebook, I inevitably come to the same (somewhat depressing) conclusion: I have absolutely no idea who many of these people are. This is mostly my fault - my standards have always been pretty low when it comes to accepting inbound requests, and I never kept up with assigning them to appropriate Friends Lists. But there’s also the fact that Facebook doesn’t do much to automatically differentiate between friends and acquaintances (while it does filter your News Feed based on who it thinks you’re interested in, there isn’t a way to automatically generate a list of “good friends” versus everyone else).

Meezoog, an Israeli startup backed by veteran VC Yossi Vardi, is looking to help differentiate between acquaintances and close friends. Today the company has launched its own social network at Meezoog.com that attempts to determine how strong the connections are between users by analyzing their relationships on other sites across the web (it also asks you to manually input your relationship with each friend, but this isn’t required). The site presents a number of “paths” connecting you with each friend in a manner similar to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, that helps users determine the degree of “social trust” they have with each user. At this point it’s too early to tell how well the system works, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Besides its social network, Meezoog also plans to offer Facebook and OpenSocial applications that allow users to estimate the nature of their connections with their friends, even if they aren’t on Meezoog’s network. This cross-network analysis is probably the company’s best shot at success - while Meezoog may be able to establish its standalone social network in some regional areas, it will have a very hard time directly competing with established networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Other companies have tried to do similar social connection strength mapping, including Linking Universe.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Two veteran actors to depart beleaguered soap 'Days of our Lives'div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/WikinewsLatestNews?a=NDN8N"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/WikinewsLatestNews?i=NDN8N" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/WikinewsLatestNews?a=wMHrN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/WikinewsLatestNews?i=wMHrN" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/WikinewsLatestNews?a=p4SZN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/WikinewsLatestNews?i=p4SZN" border="0"/img/a /div

Researchers are using Guitar Hero to help train amputees who will use electrical signals from their residual muscles to control next generation bionic arms. From IEEE Spectrum: In mid-October, Johns Hopkins University researchers Robert Armiger and Jacob Vogelstein traveled to RP 2009 partner Duke University, in Durham, N.C., to test the system on its target demographic, in this case Iraq veteran Jon Kuniholm. Kuniholm’s right hand was lost to shrapnel three years ago. About to finish his Ph.D. at Duke’s Center for Biologically Inspired Materials and Material Systems, Kuniholm has been a volunteer for the DARPA program for the past two years and is the outspoken founder of the Open Prosthetics Project, an open-source Web site, independent of DARPA, that aims to make prosthetic-arm technology as open source and collaborative as Linux and Firefox. With electrodes attached to his residual arm, Kuniholm was able to operate the frets using signals from the muscles there. “It’s fun,” says Kuniholm, who achieved the highest score reported by the experimental subjects: 70 percent. Kuniholm says that while Air Guitar Hero is the only game so far that requires individual finger movement to train an amputee to deal with those muscles again, the real success is in striving for a realistic goal. “You’re doing something simple,” he says. “It’s not rocket science. But you have to do it fast and you have to time it right.” For Those Without Hands, There's Air Guitar Hero...br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=a7b85bed196f41fbff6e919117879d09amp;p=1"img style="border:0;" src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=a7b85bed196f41fbff6e919117879d09amp;p=1" border="0" //a

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/95177?ns=guardianpageName=Science%3A+To+infinity+and+beyond%3A+University+of+Leicester+launches+astronaut+coursech=Sciencec3=guardian.co.ukc4=Science%2CSpace+exploration%2CEducation%2CUK+news%2CLeicester+University%2CEducation+degree+courses+%28Education+subject%29c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CEducation+Weekly+Education%2CHigher+Educationc6=Ian+Samplec7=2008_11_21c8=1122069c9=articlec10=GUc11=Sciencec12=Space+explorationc13=c14=h2=GU%2FScience%2FSpace+exploration" width="1" height="1" //divpBritain may be scorned by other nations for steadfastly refusing to a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/spaceexploration"send humans into space/a, but from next week it will have its own university course on how to be an astronaut./ppStaff at the a href="http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/news/press-releases/2000-2009/2008/11/nparticle.2008-11-21.4852004914"University of Leicester/a have called in former a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/hoffman-0313.html"Nasa astronaut Jeff Hoffman/a – a veteran of five space shuttle missions – to teach the course, which will offer instruction on how to survive in space, coping with the psychological demands of long-term space travel and a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/nov/20/astronaut-space-repair-solar-panel"how to conduct a spacewalk without dropping your toolbag/a./ppHoffman, who took part in crucial spacewalks to fix cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, will join Leicester as a visiting professor but will maintain his position in the astronautics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology./ppThe UK government is reviewing its long-held opposition to human spaceflight and is due to announce its conclusions by the end of the year. The announcement is expected weeks before the European Space Agency reveals at least four new recruits to its astronaut corps. /ppA British astronaut has never trained through Esa because the UK's funding of space only runs to robotic missions and ground-based astronomy./pp"There's a strong student interest in this despite the fact that the British government has not supported human participation in spaceflight," Hoffman told the Guardian. "If Britain continues with that policy, these students will still be able to work in other capacities at the European Space Agency."/ppHoffman will draw particular attention to the future exploration of the solar system, which is likely to see humans working alongside robotic rovers, which could be sent out from a manned moonbase to conduct experiments at remote sites. /ppThe Leicester course begins as the UK prepares for a high-level meeting of European science ministers at which human space exploration will be discussed./ppMartin Barstow, head of physics and astronomy at Leicester, said: "I'm fed up with the way the UK keeps dodging the issue of being involved in human spaceflight. Our students don't need to be loaded with that baggage. They still have aspirations to be astronauts and they still want to get involved in the space industry, so why should the UK government's attitude be a handicap?/pp"Only a very few people are ever going to become astronauts, even if the UK was fully signed up to human space flight. Most people won't get to do it, but they will become highly qualified physicists and engineers and will get involved in the space industry in different roles. What we want them to come out with is a real grasp of practicalities of living and working in space and what we need to do in the future."/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/spaceexploration"Space exploration/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/universityofleicester"University of Leicester/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/educationdegreecourses"Education degree courses/a/li/ul/divdiv class="guRssAdvert"a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yessite=Sciencecountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227295035310112119280460919"img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yessite=Sciencecountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227295035310112119280460919" border="0" //a/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a

The retailer's global operations vice chairman will replace 29-year veteran Lee Scott as CEO.

Posted by Dennis Sellers

ASK Video Interactive Media, a creator of software tutorials on DVD, is now shipping Level 3 of a four-part tutorial DVD series for Logic Pro 8 music production software. In this third level progression in the series, ASK Video veteran Mike Baggley brings his engineering and music chops to Logic...

This is the one-hundred and eighty-first in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the previous one-hundred and eighty.

Let’s begin!

COMIC LEGEND: Marvel once did a special G.I. Joe comic made up of a comic by Todd McFarlane that was deemed unacceptable by Marvel only a few years earlier!

STATUS: True

Reader Billy Ray asked me about this a ways back (towards the end of last year), but I could not really help him out, as I did not have the issue in question either until recently.

As it turns out, this certainly was quite an interesting situation.

Some readers might recall that Todd McFarlane was slowly breaking into Marvel Comics in the late 1980s, and among the work he did was a fill-in issue of G.I.Joe, specifically #60.

What is NOT as well known, however, is that McFarlane actually drew the NEXT issue, as well!

For whatever reason, though, McFarlane’s issue was deemed unacceptable, so venerable veteran, the late, great Marshall Rogers was brought in to draw the issue, and that was G.I. Joe #61.

Rogers WAS asked back, as he would go on to draw two more issues of G.I. Joe in the next couple of years.

By 1994, the title was no longer the top seller it was in the mid to late 80s, when it was routinely Marvel’s top selling comic book (it even had a spin-off comic, G.I. Joe Special Missions). So with #155, Marvel ended the book.

However, in the time between #61 and the book ending at #155, a funny thing had happened, the young, inexperienced fill-in artist, Todd McFarlane, had gone off and become a major comic book artist superstar!

So now, somehow, the same pages that were considered unacceptable in 1987 were good enough to be published, for the first time, in a G.I. Joe Special, coming two months AFTER the cancellation of the series!!

Here’s the Phil Gosier drawn McFarlane homage cover.

Here, for your amusement, is a side by side comparison of five pages from McFarlane’s unaccepted take on Larry Hama’s script and Marshall Rogers’ accepted one.

Rogers did seem to do a better job.

All in all, though, it’s a weird situation through and through.

Thanks to Billy Ray for the suggestion!

Now, for something a bit different this week.

I’ve gotten enough suggestions involving Madelyne Pryor that I could get four or more urban legends just out of covering the story behind her creation and subsequent usage, but at the same time, it is a bit difficult to answer ONE of them without, in effect, answering ALL of them, so I’m just going to answer all of them at once here.

COMIC LEGEND: The Madelyne Pryor in Avengers Annual #10 was the first appearance of the Madelyne Pryor who married Cyclops.

STATUS: False

COMIC LEGEND: Madelyne Pryor was meant to be Jean Grey with amnesia.

STATUS: False

COMIC LEGEND: Madelyne Pryor became a clone of Jean Grey in an attempt to deal with the whole “Cyclops is married to Madelyne while hanging out with Jean Grey” deal.

STATUS: True

COMIC LEGEND: Madelyne Pryor and Cyclops were intended to stay married and live happily ever after.

STATUS: True

As has been established in more than one installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed (here and here, for two), Chris Claremont likes to work in the names of people he’s fond of into his comics. I think it’s a neat little thing he does.

However, his fondness for doing this has led to some confusion when it comes to Madelyne Pryor’s origins.

Claremont was a fan of the folk band, Steeleye Span, and of their popular lead singer, Maddy Prior.

I do not believe Claremont was a personal acquaintance with Ms. Prior, but I could be wrong there.

In either case, in the pages of Avengers Annual #10 (one of the first comics written specifically to address what a writer found to be a bad story by a different writer - in this case, Claremont addressing his distaste for how Carol Danvers was written out of the Avengers), Claremont featured a young girl named Madelyne Pryor as a minor background character.

A few years later, Claremont introduced a new character named Madelyne Pryor as a love interest for Scott Summers, Cyclops.

The two characters were not meant to be the same people - just the same name. That said, I’m sure someone will ultimately come up with a way for them to be the same person. Claremont actually even joked about the confusion in an issue where he had the little girl show up again (wearing the same clothes) as a mental manifestation by Pryor, only singing one of Steeleye Span’s more popular songs!

When introduced, Madelyne Pryor caused a lot of anxiety among the X-Men for her great resemblance to Jean Grey, as well as the fact that she had been in a plane crash at the same time Jean died in outer space.

However, Claremont’s intent with that stuff was strictly to be a really weird coincidence, so Cyclops and the X-Men would always be left wondering, “COULD she be Jean?” But in Claremont’s intention, she was not related to Jean Grey at all.

Claremont’s plans were for Scott to marry Madelyne and have a child and be in, more or less, retirement from that point out, only showing up for major events/emergencies (similar to how Claremont used Alex and Lorna and others during the early days of the All-New, All-Different X-Men). Claremont got to start the first part of his plan, the marriage and the baby part, but events out of his control led to his plans not working out.

Marvel decided to bring Jean Grey back from the dead and put her on a team with Scott Summers and the rest of the original X-Men. Part of that story involved Scott flying away from his family when he hears Jean is alive.

To Claremont, this was a major problem (and most readers agreed that it did not make Scott look too cool).

So ultimately, to deal with a story that he had no part of, Claremont decided to play along and help out X-Factor by revealing that oops, yes, Madelyne WAS a clone of Jean Grey. And now she is an evil villain named the Goblin Queen!

And bam, now she’s dead, so Scott and Jean can be together without having to feel bad - Scott’s wife was not REALLY his wife - she was a clone designed to marry him so that they could bear a child together, and now she’s dead anyways, so smooth sailing on the Scott/Jean love boat!

Maddie is (perhaps) appearing right now in Uncanny (perhaps) back from the dead! Good timing, as Jean is currently dead!

Thanks to Mike (who asked a couple of these), Jason and a few other readers over the years that escape my memory for the Maddie suggestions!

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com.

See you next week!

Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be President, declared Arianna Huffington from the stage at Web 2.0 Summit, the day after the election. In The Web and Politics session, moderator John Heileman explores the new world of running for office--and governing once you win--with Huffington, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and veteran politico Joe Trippi. Politicians...

Communications veteran Vic Beck has joined S4 Inc. as the Director of Communication Planning and Strategy. An award winning communicator, Mr. Beck will provide strategic communication consulting, insight and strategy to S4 clients in the commercial and government sectors. (PRWeb Nov 21, 2008)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/11/prweb1642124.htm

Are you a veteran lead designer with a strong interest in the webby side of the gaming world? Because we’re looking.

Basically, we want someone to own the user experience top to bottom. Ideally, this person is someone who has both good system design chops and also a strong ability to craft user experiences. The full description is at the link!

pimg src="http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/news2001/21209/egm.jpg" align="left" hspace="5"/Yesterday, publisher Ziff Davis announced it will cease distribution of the paper version of PC Magazine -- but is its lone remaining print magazine, veteran game periodical Electronic Gaming Monthly, far behind? According to a New York Times report, Ziff Davis CEO Jason Young is not confident in its continued publication, either. Buried in the story about PC Magazine is this snippet, which doesn't feature any direct quotes from Young: "Mr. Young said the company .../pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=KLqSN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=KLqSN" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=u7DxN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=u7DxN" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=aAjxN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=aAjxN" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GamasutraNews/~4/460062550" height="1" width="1"/