Watching I Saw the TV Glow, with its highly unsettling lunar energy, prompted me to revisit "Cerebus".

I now clearly see a somewhat embarrassing tendency in myself—one of many—that's found expression in a number of ways, such as my curiosity about what happened to M. Night Shyamalan between The Village and Lady in the Water. Occasionally the arts furnish examples of creators who seem to be at the top of their form and then simply collapse. All the gas suddenly goes out of their career and they never recover. The great American comedy director, Preston Sturges, experienced a sudden career implosion like that. Shyamalan did. And so did Canadian indie comic star Dave Sim, who used to be one of my favorite artists of all time.

cw: lengthy discourse about Dave Sim's "Cerebus", his dabbling with the nature of godhood and gender in the comic, and its disintegration into a soup of bigotry)

I was reflecting earlier while washing dishes about the George W. Bush "Axis of Evil"—remember that? It was so awful. Plainly he was trying to outdo Ronald Reagan, who had pointed to one "focus of evil in the modern world". (Now there's a curse for you.) Bush Jr. proclaimed that some collection of evils, multiple foci of evil I suppose, was the "Axis of Evil". the points weren't collinear but never mind, they constituted an axis.

Now...that points to an awkward property of the original "Axis of Evil", i.e. the Axis Powers of World War II. They too were a collection of non-collinear points, pretending to be an axis. The Axis only made sense in terms of two partners, and the Third Reich was very unreliable when it came to equal partnerships. Germany and Japan, separated by great distance, were the obvious two points of the axis in reality, but...that's probably not how it was perceived at the time.

Why was George W. Bush copying a Third Reich slogan anyway?

~Chara of Pnictogen

Both our active Twitter accounts, Chara's / Kara's account and Mono the Unicorn's, have been summarily suspended. The end of an era! I am a little surprised it took this long.