Mostly I read the Warren Ellis shit, since Alan Moore buried himself in his coffin and Grant Morrison is taking six months of butt scratching between each issue he produces.

I think you've got the right idea.  Event fatigue got me to quit reading most of the Marvel books a few years back, and it's about the same for the DC books right now.  This New Krypton shit, while an interesting idea in theory, has in its practice convinced me to drop the Superman books (though I might pick up Secret Origin just because I like Gary Frank so much).  I haven't given a crap about Green Lantern since about halfway through the Sinestro Corps War, either; I want to look forward to Blackest Night but I have the good sense to know it's going to turn out to be the exact same thing, a story with a good hook that gets bogged down in twenty different tie-ins halfway through and just kinda fizzles.

More of the same in Batman -- I'll pick up the O'Neil and Gaiman stuff, because hey, O'Neil and Gaiman, and I'll continue to follow the Dini and Morrison stuff, but fuck Battle for the Cowl and Oracle and all the other minis.

Even Jonah Hex, which for awhile made a pretty good antidote to the men-in-tights DC books, has gotten stale.  In the end, there's really only one Jonah Hex story, and they're about out of ways to tell it.

It just feels like there's a dearth of ideas.  I keep reading interviews with DiDio where he talks about how exciting the idea of taking Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman out of the picture for awhile is, like they didn't fucking just do that TWO YEARS AGO.  Meanwile, cover prices are creeping up in an already niche market during a goddamn recession.  In just over a year we're going to be in an odd-numbered decade, and I think at this point it's safe to predict that history's going to repeat itself and the bottom's going to fall out of the comics market again.

Anyway.  Some quick off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts on what I'm reading and what I really should stop reading:

BOOKS THAT ARE PRETTY CONSISTENTLY GOOD:
Stuff by Morrison
Stuff by Ellis
Stuff by Millar
Stuff by Busiek
Booster Gold
Madman
(EDIT: The Walking Dead)

BOOKS THAT ARE PRETTY CONSISTENTLY OKAY:
The Spirit
Thunderbolts
Tales of the TMNT
Echo
Army @ Love
Doctor Who
DMZ

BOOKS THAT AREN'T THAT GOOD LATELY AND I AM READING MOSTLY OUT OF HABIT:
Action Comics/Superman
Jonah Hex
Green Lantern/Corps
JSA
Transformers
Project Superpowers
Eternals
Various Bongo titles (though Simpsons Winter Wingding had a pretty good Dini/Lee story)
The Brave and the Bold

...kinda on the fence with TB&TB; I liked Waid's run and I think I'm curious enough to stick around and see what JMS does with it.  Speaking of JMS, I like his Thor, but it belongs in a "Books that are good when they actually fucking come out" list, along with Rasl, Love and Rockets, and hey, I notice there's a new Buckaroo Banzai this week.

Need to remember to drop Black Panther, too.  Of all the fucking things, they're doing the "new Black Panther" story AGAIN?  That was the jump-the-shark of the LAST series.  I mean, I expect T'Challa to be back under the cowl around the time the cartoon starts up on BET, but still.  Hudlin's run was good for maybe the first dozen issues; everything since then goes under the "out of habit" heading.

Anyway.  That's a list off the top of my head, but I think it's going to help me.  I need to spend less money on comics, or at least less money on comics I don't actually like that much.

Thanksgiving was all right.  Kept it low-key, just with Dad's family this year.  Dad and I watched Gonzo afterward.

Moving on to Black Friday: didn't leave house today.  (Well, Brad and I picked up some breakfast burritos, but I didn't leave the house AFTER that.)  My opinion is and always has been that Black Friday is completely fucking asinine and no amount of savings is worth the bullshit of putting up with it.

Well, now I'm reading that somebody got trampled to death at a New York Wal-Mart.

Seriously, fuck everybody, everywhere, who is involved in any way with this fucking insanity.

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

This is why the rest of the world hates us.  Humanity at its very ugliest.  And the sick bastards running this stupid and arbitrary once-a-year, supplies-are-limited game to line their own profits are encouraging this feeding frenzy.

And clearly they're not doing enough to protect the poor bastards they hire.

Wal-Mart has successfully resisted unionization of its employees. New York State’s largest grocery union, Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, called the death of Mr. Damour “avoidable” and demanded investigations.

“Where were the safety barriers?” said Bruce Both, the union president. “Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner? This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart.”

Each and every single person involved in this, from the lunatics breaking down the doors to CEO H Lee Scott, deserves to be torn to shreds by a pack of wild dogs.

Salon: Obama proposing an investigation of torture allegations.

That's not necessarily as good a thing as it sounds:

A common view among those involved with the talks is that any early effort to prosecute Bush administration officials would likely devolve quickly into ugly and fruitless partisan warfare. Second is that even if Obama decided he had the appetite for it, prosecutions in this arena are problematic at best: A series of memos from the Bush Justice Department approved the harsh tactics, and Congress changed the War Crimes Act in 2006, making prosecutions of individuals involved in interrogations more difficult.

Instead, a commission empowered by Congress would have the authority to compel witnesses to testify and even to grant immunity in exchange for information. Should a particularly ugly picture emerge, the option of prosecutions would still theoretically be on the table later, however unlikely.

In Obama's camp, there is a sense among some that such a commission would essentially mean letting Bush get away with crimes. "People have called for criminal investigations," one person familiar with the talks told me this summer as plans got under way. On Wednesday, a person participating in the talks confirmed that some people involved in the planning felt strongly that the commission would amount to "bullshit" and that Bush officials should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

But few think prosecutions are realistic, given the formidable legal hurdles and the huge policy problems competing for Obama's attention. Among them is the complicated task of closing down the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, which Obama advisors say is a priority. Some observers outside the Obama camp are also questioning how much Democrats really want exposed with regard to interrogation, since top Democrats in Congress were briefed in secret on some of the harshest tactics used by the CIA and appear to have done little, or perhaps nothing, to stop them.

NYT has more on the potential for investigations and Bush's likelihood to continue stonewalling even after he's out of office.

This is a hell of a position to be in: Obama can't spend all his time investigating the previous administration, but there needs, NEEDS to be accountability for the things it's done that are literally criminal.  Or, as the man himself put it:

“If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” Mr. Obama said, but added, “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.”

Dixville Notch votes Democratic for the first time in forty years.  We're off to a good start.

SUCK IT, LIEBERMAN.

I think Bill Maher would appreciate the irony in saying that Religulous preaches to the choir.  It's a funny movie, and has some good things to say, but the people who need to see it are the people who will refuse to see it.  (Or will walk out halfway through.  The guy at my comic shop said a group of Mormons left in the middle when he saw it, and he nearly stood up and applauded.)

It's all a little cursory.  My favorite bit is where he talks to a neurosurgeon; I wish they'd gone into more detail about what goes on in the brain when people are praying.

I also quite liked the bit about the Jesus story predating Christ by a thousand years or more.

My angle on religion, and something I'd have liked to see explored further, is that these stories and myths have value, but shit goes south in a hurry when people take them literally.  You all know I love superhero comics, and I've often pointed out that they're a modern heroic mythology -- there are a lot of perfectly good morality tales in Batman (a friend of mine has said that TAS helped shape his worldview when he was a kid), but YOU DON'T LITERALLY DRESS LIKE A BAT AND METE OUT VIGILANTE JUSTICE.

Apple's given us some pretty good keyboard shortcuts based on physical proximity -- putting the major Edit functions on Z, X, C, and V was a great damn idea.

Putting Close next to Quit?  Not so much.

Yes, Cmd-Q makes a fuck of a lot more sense than Alt-F4.  And due to the close association of closing a window and quitting a program, putting the two functions side-by-side is a good idea for human memory association.

But it's a BAD FUCKING IDEA for ACCIDENTALLY QUITTING OUT OF THE PROGRAM WHEN YOU ONLY MEANT TO CLOSE ONE TAB.

If I hit Ctrl-V instead of Ctrl-C, that's usually easily fixable (generally with Ctrl-Z).  Quitting out of a program is only easily fixable if you put up a "Are you sure you want to quit?" prompt -- which, the 99% of the time I DO quit the program intentionally, is obnoxious.

Google announces its own WebKit-based browser, Chrome, with a comic by Scott McCloud.

CNet has a much shorter, much more boring feature rundown.

...So apparently I can't go for a bike ride at 11 at night without somebody asking me to fix their computer.

Wonder Woman trailer.

I can't be the only one who sees the "suiting up" bit in the beginning and thinks of, well...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsGfMX-6XaM
(Skip to 3:50 or so in; NSFW.)

(EDIT: You know, you can totally see Taarna's bush when she gets out of the water, but it's nowhere to be seen when she's sporting that G-string thing.  Does the movie perhaps skip over the ritualistic shaving prior to the ritualistic donning of the mystic warrior garb?)