By now you’ve probably heard that Hasbro has gotten Facebook to shut down Scrabulous—perhaps, a little bird told me, after the creators of the latter turned down an offer somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars. Well, whatever. I am all about intellectual freedom and whatnot, but I find it hard to sympathize with such blatant idiocy and thievery among the Scrabulous guys for turning down a deal in favor of just getting sued.

Unfortunately, this means that we, the play-by-post Scrabble players of the web, get saddled with crap in the meantime. Those of us not really willing to keep track of Facebook games and Scrabulous.com simultaneously and separately are now left with Wordscraper (an ugly version of Scrabulous that requires you to make your own board) or Hasbro’s official Scrabble game developed by EA, now in beta (which just about everybody seems to agree sucks). The official Scrabble game has annoying animations, a board that is unnecessarily colorful to the point of being hard to read, glitches when typing words in with the keyboard, only one word list (omitting the one that uses British spellings), and other stupid input and interface errors. Granted, it’s called a “beta” for a reason, but we had just gotten used to Scrabulous working out its own bugs! Well, here’s some free advice, Hasbro: Take to heart the scathing input on your own Facebook forum, and rip off Scrabulous’s interface just a bit more—you know, just the part where it’s simple and loads quickly. Show that you learned something from this besides just that there’s money to be had on Facebook.

I almost forgot to link to this excellent story (via Boing Boing):

Public schools in Barnegat were locked down briefly after someone reported seeing a ninja running through the woods behind an elementary school.

Turns out the ninja was actually a camp counselor dressed in black karate garb and carrying a plastic sword.

Police tell the Asbury Park Press the man was late to a costume-themed day at a nearby middle school.

And as long as we’re talking ninjas, I highly recommend a short video up at ONN, “Ninja parade slips through town unnoticed once again.”

Gotta say, I am impressed that Jim Davis has a good enough sense of humor about Garfield Minus Garfield that he’s helping publish a book of the strips. On the one hand, I’d like to think this says something about the future of parody and user-altered content—on the other hand, though, it’s probably just free money for Davis, so I guess he’s really got nothing to lose.

On the one hand, I’m kind of glad that I waited until this series was finished before reading it—my memory for plot details is patchy at best, and if I’d had to read this parceled out over six years, I have no doubt I would have had even more trouble keeping track of the hordes of minor characters and intrigues than I did. At the same time, I wonder if I would have felt even more of an emotional impact at the end if I’d undergone the journey over a period of years rather than a couple weeks. But I digress. Vaughan is an excellent writer: his dialogue is tuned and sharp and his characters are all too human; I really like Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan’s art (which is saying something, since I often spend far less time on visuals than I do on words). I didn’t get the same feeling of de-emphasis on the cause of the plague that killed the world’s men that Jason did, but perhaps that was just given the short period in which I read it. I agree with him, however, that this is the type of story I love to see told in serial medium like comics and TV: stories that are plotted from a beginning to an end.

(I see from the Wikipedia entry (which contains spoilers) that a film is planned to shoot this fall and come out next year, based on a draft by Vaughan (rewritten by the film’s director, D.J. Caruso). There is a rumor that Shia LaBeouf (Transformers,Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) will play Yorick—all I have to say to that is: “Monkeys…why’d it have to be monkeys?”)

From: bromee
Subject: Steve Jobs is not cancer-free

Boy eats cats daily
[URL redacted]

(I just don’t know…does eating cats give you cancer? Cure your cancer? Who clicks on a link about eating cats? Don’t they know Steve Jobs is a pescetarian? What does this have to do with the iPhone? Anything?)

HBO’s new mini-series from the creators of the Wire lays on even more jargon without explanation. I was unable to find a comprehensive guide, so I made my own. Here is a list of jargon from the recently aired episode 3 with my definitions. In order of appearance:

Sit-Rep: Situation report, basically the status.

Hitman Victor: radio code for a Humvee in Bravo company. (Hitman is the radio call sign for the company with a number designating platoon ie. Hitman 2 is the second platoon, Hitman Victor 2 is the second humvee.)

Helo-hot: Missile fired from a combat helicopter such as an apache.

Interrogative: Radio code prefacing a question

BDA: Battle Damage Assessment

MSR: Main Supply Route

Klicks: Kilometers

Oscar Mike: On the move

SOP: Standard Operating Procedure

Danger close: friendly units are within 600 meters of a proposed artillery target

Fire mission: artillery mission

NJP: Nonjudicial punishment ie discipline

Chaos: radio call sign for General Mattis

Mikes: minutes

T72s: an Iraqi tank

ROE: Rules of Engagement, rules for engaging civilian targets

RTD: Return to Base

RCT1: Regimental Combat Team 1

Cas Evac: Casualty Evacuation

Generation Kill is the new HBO mini-series brought to you by David Simon and Ed Burns, creator of The Wire. Based on a book by Evan Right, this series follows a company of reconnaissance marines taking part in the invasion of Iraq.

I’ve seen the first three episodes and it is interesting so far but it is hard not to compare it to the Wire. The construction of the show has a lot of similarities to the Wire; you are presented with a large cast of characters that can be tricky to distinguish at first, the dialogue is laden heavy with jargon and slang and devoid of any exposition, and scenes are scattered with dark humor and critical perspectives on large institutions (such as the Army, Marine Corp, US. Government.) Later season of the Wire went all out with having ensemble casts, and though Generation Kill has pulled back on that a bit to a set of core characters, it still seems to want cover a lot of people in only a few hours which so far looks like we won’t get to go much in depth with any of the characters. I’m still hungry for a replacement to Wire and though this won’t fill that need completely it is definitely worth checking out. Generation Kill also happens to be one of the few shows I’m following this summer, the others being The Middleman and AMC’s Mad Men which just started this week.

With all the Batman-related links I’ve got to clear out, you’d think I was some sort of obsessed, er, batfan. Truth be told, I’ve really just been meaning to link to this awesome article over at Scientific American for over a week now. If you’ve ever wondered what it would take to become Batman—aside from more money than God—you could do worse than to talk to E. Paul Zehr, the associate professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Who also, as it happens, has been practicing Chito-Ryu karate-do for over twenty-five years. And, not coincidentally, is writing a book called Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero, which is due to come out this fall.

As Professor Zehr points out, it’s not becoming Batman that’s hard—you could do it, given enough time, practice, and drive—Zehr pegs it at about 10-12 years to achieve the same level of physical conditioning and expertise in martial arts; although, if you also account for the fact that Batman tries not to kill anybody, that number goes up to 15-18 years.

What’s far more difficult, however, is remaining Batman. As Zehr says:

How would all those beat-downs have affected his longevity? Keeping in mind that being Batman means never losing: If you look at consecutive events where professional fighters have to defend their titles—Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ultimate Fighters—the longest period you’re going to find is about two to three years. That dovetails nicely with the average career for NFL running backs. It’s about three years. (That’s the statistic I got from the NFL Players Association Web site.) The point is, it’s not very long. It’s really hard to become Batman in the first place, and it’s hard to maintain it when you get there.

There are also (as Jason pointed out to me) plenty of other, non-physical side effects inherent in being the Dark Knight. Such as slapping around your boy wonder. No. That’s not a euphemism.

So how likely is it that we could have a potential Batman among us? Zehr gives a rough estimate: multiply the percentage of billionaires in the world and the percentage of Olympic decathletes in the world. So, let’s give this a try.

According to Forbes there are presently 1,125 billionaires in the world (a substantial jump from the first listing, in 1986, which had just 140, and quite a jump from 1916 when there was just one). The youngest is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, at 24 (there’s still time, Zuck! Get training now and you could be Batman by the time you’re eligible to run for president).

As of this writing, the US Census Bureau’s world population clock puts the total inhabitants of the planet Earth at about 6,712,463,068. So, the percentage of billionaires on the planet is about 1.68×10^-9 or 0.00000000168%.

The number of decathletes is a little harder to track down, but the 2008 Beijing Olympics website says that the targeted number of participants in Olympic athletics events (which includes but is not limited to the decathlon) is 1,100. That may be a generous number, but it’s pretty darn close to the number of billionaires, so let’s say “close enough.” The percentage of Olympic decathletes on the planet is then about 1.64×10^-9 or 0.00000000164%.

Multiplying the two of those together yields our percentage of people who could be Batman: 2.75×10^-20. Or 0.0000000000000000000275%. That’s a pret-ty small percentage of people. So, out of our world population used above, how many potential people could be Batman? Good news! 1.85×10^-10, or 0.000000000185 people.

So, as that devilish villain mathematics would have it, it’s extremely unlikely—nigh on impossible—that Batman walks among us. But while there may be no Batman today…have faith in the children. Remember, little Timmy and Suzy, if you work hard and eat all your vegetables, you can grow up to be Batman some day.

Trust me: you don’t even want to see the paperwork on the chances of a single alien child crash-landing on a planet whose yellow sun happens to give him superpowers.

New strain of AIDS
Cure for AIDS officially announced
Michael Jackson auctions himself on Ebay!
Mccain sex tape surfaces
Fox Mulder no longer attractive
Jesus Christ to star in next series of Big Brother

I started watching The Middleman when it began airing for two major reasons: 1) it’s based on a comic book and 2) said comic book is written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who was also a writer on a little show called Lost. The Middleman bears a superficial resemblance to Men in Black (and—gasp!—a novel I was working on last year): young aspiring artist Wendy Watson is recruited by a mysterious guy known only as—you guessed it—the Middleman to help fight off aliens, zombies, and evil masterminds bent on taking over the earth. Possibly using gun-toting gorillas. While it might seem like strange fare for a “family” channel, what with references to sex and frequent bleeped-out swears for comic effect, the show maintains a wacky fun vibe chiefly because of its enthusiastic leads: Matt Keeslar as the all-American Navy SEAL turned planetary hero and the charming Natalie Morales (whom I failed to resist as my new TV crush) as the sarcastic and plucky Wendy. The plots are often silly (the last episode featured aliens masquerading as a boy band), but enjoyable, and the writing is at times sharp enough that it might slide right past you without your noticing. Having read that the show’s ratings are not performing as well as they should be gives me even more reason to mention it to anyone looking for a fun summertime TV show.

Bonus: two of my favorite PSA promos for the show.