The morning seems to have flown by. Maybe that's just because I stayed in bed for an extra ninety minutes though 
Happy invoicing!
- The 5 Weirdest Changes Ever Demanded by Comic Book Editors - "We’ve all had those moments reading our favorite comic books where we notice something crazy. And I mean really crazy, even by comic book standards. An unexplainable retcon, heroes acting out of character or, horror of horrors, facts are wrong!?! Our knee jerk reaction is to blame the artist or writer for this madness but sometimes this strangeness comes straight from the top and there’s no one to blame except the top brass at editorial." Including cutting down the number of times Wonder Woman was bound in chains (“Miss Roubicek hastily dashed off this morning the enclosed list of methods which can be used to keep women confined or enclosed without the use of chains”) and banning exclamation marks.
- Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath - "Neuroscientist James Fallon discovered through his work that he has the brain of a psychopath, and subsequently learned a lot about the role of genes in personality and how his brain affects his life."
- Control of Space Invaders and Other Electronic Games - From Hansard in 1981, George Foulkes introduces a private member’s bill to control arcade games: ”The machines that have a target of the highest previous score obtained particularly attract a youngster to play them again and again in an effort to beat the previous record… There are second and further generations of more advanced machines to hook the kids if the attraction of the present machines should fade, including one with a three-dimensional effect.” I assume he meant Battle Zone.
- My Brother’s Secret - "Dale always wanted a traditional life with a traditional family. But he found happiness only when he decided to live and love the way he wanted—even if that meant hiding the truth about his sexuality from our parents, right up until his death." W. K. Stratton on the life, and death, of his brother, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1990.
- 1946 New York Subway Photographed By 17-Year-Old Stanley Kubrick - "Before he went down in history as one of the greatest film directors of all time, 17-year-old Stanley Kubrick was known for something else – New York City subway photography. Over two weeks in 1946, Kubrick worked for LOOK magazine to capture the everyday lives and intimate moments of the people of a bygone era."
- The life, death, and rebirth of BlackBerry’s hometown - "It’s a little after 5:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and I’m sitting in a freezing rental car outside the BlackBerry headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario, looking for signs of life. Five years and several billion dollars ago, these buildings would have been full, and the windows would have been dotted with busy silhouettes. But today, it’s a ghost town." But even if BlackBerry doesn’t survive, its home town is now home to many technology businesses because of its influence.
- For Years, The Washington Post Tried to Interview a Cow - Not American journalism’s finest hour: ” In 1912, an unnamed Washington Post reporter asked Pauline Wayne, President Taft's cow, if she was milked by a stranger without her consent, as had been reported… "I wasn't milked on the White House lawn by a strange man," The Washington Post—the venerable institution that would later come to break the Watergate scandal and win 48 Pulitzers—quoted her, a farm animal, as saying.”
- Farewell, My Lovely! - E. B. White’s wonderful paean to the Model T Ford, from 1936: ”It was the miracle God had wrought. And it was patently the sort of thing that could only happen once. Mechanically uncanny, it was like nothing that had ever come to the world before… During my association with Model T’s, self-starters were not a prevalent accessory. They were expensive and under suspicion. Your car came equipped with a serviceable crank, and the first thing you learned was how to Get Results. It was a special trick, and until you learned it (usually from another Ford owner, but sometimes by a period of appalling experimentation) you might as well have been winding up an awning.”
- The End of Gangs - "Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on Southern California's streets they have been vanishing. Has L.A. figured out how to stop the epidemic it set loose on the world?"
- The Rudiments Of Wisdom Encyclopaedia - "Thousands of cartoons covering almost everything there is to know!" I used to enjoy Tim Hunkin’s cartoons in the Observer magazine in the 1970s and 1980s, and here they all are!
Happy invoicing!
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