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Wow, life in these United States sure is funny. One minute you're watching dashing rebels storming a tyrants compound while Sara Sidner dodges celebratory, lethal bullets, the next there's a dinky but baffling earthquake, and then what about that hurricane? And then this happened.

News roundup and some personal notes on the rioting.

One red-eye flight from Burbank later, and I've had the most uninterrupted sleep I've gotten in two weeks. It will take another 10 hours to really get normal, but for that I've got to hang on until the weekend. YOU CAN DO IT! I'll have more emblematic con thoughts tomorrow, but for now a few shout outs:

As the temperature outside hits 312 degrees Kelvin, I sit here in the cool subterranean basements deep in Stately Beat Manor, keeping watch over the reportage coming east from San Diego. While scanning the umpteenth cosplay photo, I got to thinking... perhaps our readers would care to look behind the curtain and see how we actually conglomerate the myriad data feeds which stream into our data center.

It's been a furious few weeks of action here at Stately Beat Manor and around the comics intertubes as everyone scrambles to cover the DC Relaunch and What It Means. I've been as obsessed as anyone, although some of the fruits of my labor have yet to be posted. And of course, San Diego Comic-Con is just around the corner (less than four weeks) so things are about to get even busier and even crazier is such a thing is possible. And it is.

WARNING: EXTREMELY NERDY MAC CONTENT -- proceed at your own risk. As you know, I've been complaining about computer problems for a few months now, with tedious frequency -- but not as tedious as seeing a spinning beach ball is to me. Basically, every morning when I started up my iMac to get to work on The Beat it would take anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour for the beachball to stop spinning and all the programs to start responding. Unbearable, right? You bet!

Every once in a while, we have to clean out some spam comments that have wormed their way past the Wordpress interface, and sometimes cleaning them out is a difficult task, because, more than any other group, spammers seem to really GET what we're trying to do here. For instance, Kidney Disease wrote:

Via Dylan Horrocks.

After things here yesterday got a little too real, I'd like to get back to just talking about cool and wonderful things. Like Jaume Plensa's new installation at Madison Square Park, entitled "Echo." The 44-foot high fiberglass resin sculpture depicts the head of a 9-year-old girl caught in a meditative state. Set among the fresh green of early Spring, it gladdens my heart every time I see it.

I realize as I'm trying to assemble today's comic news that my mind wasn't really on it for some reason. Although 9/11/01 is the day that changed the world in sad and horrible ways, it was also a sad and horrible time for me, my friends, my family and my home. The sense of closure I feel today following the death of bin Laden is a powerful one, but it also brought back so many memories of that time.

Please like us on Facebook! And then stand by for the two biggest shockers of the year!

What is normal, anyway?