Random Thoughts

Fellow Comic Book Blogger Trash Heap's brother has been jailed in Australia and will be deported soon. His crime? Protesting. Non-violent, peaceful, protests against the war-profiteering of Halliburton. Apparently, non-violent and peaceful protests are now a "threat to national security" even in Australia. Looks like Bush has exported his twisted version of democracy to at least one country. Hang in there, John. Keep us updated on your brother's situation.
Update: John updated to let us know that there isn't any more information, but there are some good pictures there, so go look and wish John well.

Speaking of neo-con style democracy, the NY Times covers the so-called "Freedom Walk", including this gem: One man who registered for the walk was detained by a Pentagon police officer after he slipped a black hood over his head and produced a sign that read, "Freedom?" The man was removed from the Pentagon registration area, handcuffed and taken away in a police car. Yeah, sure, "freedom". Bush style. Any dissent is removed immediately.

As long as we're talking about crimes, it appears that Yahoo is guilty of helping Chinese officials convict a dissident journalist who is going to prison for ten years.

Moving on to the less serious, the Webcomic Wiki is up and running, and has a lot of useful information. This is completely unrelated to the Comic Book Series Wiki that I started.

TangognaT tells us more about LibraryThing.

Only 3 more days to Holy Pasta Week:

Sep 15-19 is "Holy Pasta Week"
Plan your menus now.

And remember, Pastafarianism is about keeping ID out of science classrooms (or, if included in science classrooms, then FSM must be taught alongside ID). Don't lose sight of the goal while you are having fun.

365 Tomorrows will have a new piece of short fiction every day for a year. It started August 1st. There is an RSS feed if you prefer to keep up with it that way. Via Boing Boing.

Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged. This qualifies for comic book companies as well as tech companies. Via Scoble.

Hurricane Thoughts:

25 Mind-Numbingly Stupid Quotes About Hurricane Katrina And Its Aftermath. Particularly offensive are #2 and #13.

Worse Than Rathergate. What happens when reporters accept an easy-to-disprove lie from an "anonymous" source? Unless it's against Bush, nothing.

Political Wire points to two articles that give a pretty solid overview of the whole mess that was made of the hurricane relief efforts.

Mark Evanier praises the one government department that got everything right in the hurricane. Remember this? That was that department trying desperately to warn the nation.

LEGO fans can give donations to the Red Cross that will be matched by LEGO.