Bloggasm

Ok, I get the premise to this, and I’m not as pissed off as some folks, but apparently Dave Eggers has (politely) asked lifetime McSweeney’s subscribers to become yearly subscribers. The premise to this is that with only $100 needed for the original lifetime subscription, the magazine is quickly losing money by now since they’ve already put out 22 issues. So they’re saying, “Yeah, we didn’t think we’d last this long.”

But they’re giving them the option at least. I dunno, they’re pretty upfront about it.

via ed

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Related posts: Stephen King to publish new Richard Bachman book, Interview with Kassia Krozser from Booksquare

In what can only be described as an extreme fit of geekery, Clive Thompson calculates the number of vampires in the Buffy universe and the rate for which she would have to slay the vampires to keep them from overpopulating the earth.

He bases the premise off a mathematical study (pdf) that concludes that vampires can’t exist because they would exponentially grow until humans no longer exist.

It seems like every week we hear about a humiliated intelligence official who is forced to admit that he or she doesn’t know the difference between a Shia and a Sunni. Neatorama has published a quick outline that hopefully a lot of people will read just so they can get a grasp on some of the actual facts regarding the war:

Like Christianity, Islam is home to a spectrum of sects espousing different beliefs and practices. And just as Christianity can be divided into two large groups - Catholic and Protestant - from which other subsects have emerged, so too with Islam: Shia and Sunni.

Unlike Christianity, whose major split wouldn’t occur for nearly sixteen centuries, Islam split almost immediately after the death of its founder, the Prophet Muhammad (circa 570 - 632 CE). The rift stems from a disagreement among Muslims over who was the rightful successor to Muhammad.

I’ve been a fan of Eddie Izzard for years, he’s one of the smartest and well-informed comedians working today. Unfortunately, his film work has been less than satisfactory, what with My Super Ex Girlfriend and even Mystery Men, where he played the villain.

Nonetheless, I was excited to hear that he was starring in a new show on FX called The Riches. In it, he’s the husband in a family of gypsies who wander the country as conmen. In the opening scene, Izzard’s family crashes a high school reunion, and he pretends to be one of the classmates, bullshitting them in a Wedding-Crashers style.

But Izzard’s character has a midlife crisis of sorts, not sure if he wants to live this life forever. In an unfortunate series of events, he partially–and accidentally– causes the death of a rich married couple, and decides then and there to move into their new mansion and pretend to be them.

It’s a richly-textured show, often funny but also incredibly dark. The scene where Izzard comes upon the couple whose lives he takes over, the wife is dead and the husband is still alive with a branch protruding from his chest.

For a pilot episode, this looks like it could warm up to be an incredible series. It comes on at 10pm EST on Mondays on FX, give it a try.

Jonathan Lethem’s short story, “Lucky Alan,” is live at the New Yorker

I was as astonished as anyone that the movie 300 managed to make $70 million in its opening weekend. I mean, I knew the movie had some hype to it, but I thought it was mostly within the comic and film geek world.

It turns out that the small comic book company Dark Horse Comics, wasn’t very prepared for the onslaught of book sales following the movie’s success. Which is kind of silly really since this wasn’t the first time they’ve had a comic book of theirs turned into a movie.

On the heels of my musings about 300’s “gateway” potential, and its record-breaking weekend at the box office, ICv2 is reporting that Diamond, the book’s exclusive distributor to both the direct and mainstream markets, was out of stock of the $30 hardcover as of last Thursday, March 8th. In this case, though, the finger of blame doesn’t point at the much-maligned monopoly, but rather at the publisher, Dark Horse, who once again has a hit movie tie-in (Hellboy, Sin City) but is faced with a shortage of books to fully take advantage of it.

The company quickly sold out of its 15,000-copy print run, and their next shipment will barely cover the back orders. If they don’t act quickly, they might lose out on a lot of the 300 craze and lose a lot of potential profits as well.