The Long Goodbye

I've always felt that this movie poster, by longtime MAD Magazine cartoonist Jack Davis -- and, yes, it was actually used in the film's promotional campaign -- perfectly captured the spirit of Robert Altman's freewheeling 1973 adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel.

If Only It Were That Simple ...

Obviously this gorilla's scheme for world domination is doomed to failure. If he really wants to bend us foolish humans to his will, he should check out The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as well ...

I was a fan of the original series, which was quite groundbreaking in its own way, so it's interesting to see this test for an animated version that never got off the ground. The writing seems a bit clunky and obvious compared to that of the show, but one hopes that would have gotten ironed out had the cartoon been picked up, and the character design and animation aren't bad, at least by tv standards, and manage to capture a bit of its predecessor's flavor, even if, when all's said and done this still remains only an interesting curio.

All Dialogue Verbatim

This was an actual conversation between a father and his daughter that I overheard while having a beer at Rolf's. The images are of course from Luc Besson's film, Leon (The Professional in the U.S.), starring Jean Reno and a very young Natalie Portman, and were altered using plasq's Comic Life program.

On Exactitude in Science

...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

Jorge Luis Borges. A Universal History of Infamy (1935)