Late Night

  Word on the street is that we're getting some snow here in the Northeast.   NYC may get as much as three feet in a historic...

You know how sometimes being a snoopy Lois Lane leads you to discovered things you wish you hadn't? Or how innocent symbologist Robert Langdon...

(Photo from and © American Virus) When I moved to Los Angeles in the 80s, I lived in West Hollywood at the height of the...

How a stop for a bit of hearty breakfast can change your life.

We mentioned this in our official MoCCA report for Publishers Weekly, but if there is one must-read this week, it's The Cartoon Crier from The Center for Cartoon Studies. Distributed as a lovely free paper at MoCCA, you can now read it in Issu form at the link. But we must warn you. DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE NOT SAD. Because it will make you sad.

About once a year, we give Stately Beat Manor a really good going-over — tossing out unwanted pamphlets, moving some stuff into storage, organizing permanent additions and so on — and after doing so we write a post with our thoughts about storage and hoarding and so on. This is that post, c. 2011. I assume most of you reading this are borderline hoarders, like The Beat. Your shelf porn resembles a splatter film. You have more longboxes than you do pieces of silverware. Your home contains at least one Billy. You have at one time -- perhaps even at this very moment -- made use of some kind of software to catalog your collection even if it was just Excel or Google spreadsheets. You know the drill.

This weekend I suffered the technocrat's greatest nightmare and dunked my iPhone. It's currently sitting in a bag of rice and soon I will find out if my life is over or not. In the meantime, for someone who is attached at the metacarpal to her iPhone, this past weekend was very interesting. For instance, I had to find my way to someplace I'd never been. Instead of relying on GPS when I got out of the subway, before leaving the house I had to look it up on a map and print it out. And then pull out a paper and look at the map when I arrived. It was like a Geico caveman commercial.

Speaking of Vermont, Beat Spy Inky Jen passed along this epic photo of a huge Batman carved from the icy terrain spotted by a passing motorist/blogger. (Click link for larger image.)

Once I was paid to review websites. In a magazine. And look what was cutting edge in 1997 in the pages of CMJ Monthly.

Oh yeah, that's how the Federation rolls.

Take one part Kanye West's completely solipsistic Twitter feed. Add in one part abstruse New Yorker cartoons. Result: comedy.

So according to I Watch Stuff, Christopher Nolan got the idea for INCEPTION from a Don Rosa story featuring Donald Duck and the Beagle...