Oh wow, one could expand it outward to compare Ivy with a variety of super-figures whose relationship with "law and order" is, at the very least, ambivalent. The first one I thought of was the Punisher, but one could even go back to the early days of Superman himself.

I also like how Infantino seems to have known the principle articulated by John Ford (as played by David Lynch in The Fabelmans); "When the horizon's at the bottom, it's interesting. When the horizon's at the top, it's interesting. When the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit!" 2/end

I like how Carmine Infantino on The Flash and other books used to put urban settings in the deep background; it may have been a labor-saving device, but someone once pointed out that they evoked cityscapes as viewed from the suburbs. 1/2

It certainly is, but this is also a possible source - the sculpture "Thoughts and Desires" in Ariana Park at the UN Palace of Nations in Geneva. (I suspect the sculptor will soon be getting some phone calls asking where HE got the idea from....) az-art.gallery/en/mammadov-...

I strongly suspect one reason no conglomerate will try to make things right with Moore is because they don’t like the precedent it would set for their relations with other creators; they’ll have to be nicer to EVERYBODY.

I'm guessing AFI felt it unseemly to honor more than one of those films, though. 2/end

AFI sometimes gives "special awards" to foreign films, often to something likely to place in the "best picture" Oscar nominees. This year there seem to be four films - Accident, Choice, The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value - with a chance of being nominated for both "international" and "best". 1/

Is this what whoever said "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake" had in mind?

Austin?

I bet some of the guys who'd avoid playing "female mode" are the same people who'd bristle over this essay:

WELCOME TO THE DRACULA PAPRIKA DISCOURSE!!

(meme from tumblr, not my own, original link seems to be dead now)

One suggestion I'd make with #3 is that the writer and/or the director should be a woman of color (if they're two different women, then at least one should be a woman of color). This might actually be necessary for #4 to be done properly.

Don’t forget if the Institute of Museum and Library Services doesn’t get funded next year, many public libraries won’t be able to fund ILL anymore. Write your legislators to support IMLS funding, please!

Is he interested in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events? If so, this might be a fun disc; most of the songs originally appeared on the Snicket audiobooks. The Gothic Archies is basically Stephin Merritt along with Snicket's alter ego Daniel Handler.

Re: the presence of Italians on the Supreme Court, from Randy Newman's "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" - "...but I defy you, anywhere in the world, to find me two Italians as tight-assed as the two Italians we got."

I mean, can you even imagine ChatGPT saying (as Bubbles does in this QC strip) something like "I thought to myself, 'Surely that could not be the case. It would be too on-the-nose," instead of just delivering a blandly, confidently sociopathic "hallucination"? 2/end

Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel
Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness
James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia; The Big Nowhere; L.A. Confidential; White Jazz)
N. K. Jemisin's New York duology (The City We Became; The World We Make)

Special mention: Terry Pratchett's novels with Ankh-Morpork

Thanks for the alt-text; I couldn’t tell on my phone that that was an aisle at first, and thought it was a close-up of an item of food of some sort. I was trying to tell whether it was pizza or sushi!