The Goobles Find Atlantis!!!

Imperius Rex, people! Google Earth has found Atlantis. Google denies this, of course, but they are big fat primary-colored liars who want all the winged-footed hotties for themselves.

Taking her ball and going home

I'm not usually one to spend too much time prognosticating on plot resolutions, because I like to be surprised. But because I'm a bit sick and am feeling a little snotty both literally and figuratively, I would like to note that in a post on November 13 I wrote this, about how the whole "100,000 Kryptonians on Earth" thing in Superman/Action/Supergirl could possibly solve itself:

Either the world ends, or they all die in a General Lane Kryptonite attack, or Superman improbably convinces them all to behave forever, or somebody finds them an empty but perfectly inhabitable planet orbiting a yellow sun that they can all go be powerful and autonomous on. Ok, that one is probably the most plausible. But that seems a little anti-climactic.

Ok so nobody "found" them anything, but in this week's Action Comics #873 (supposedly a Lex Luthor Faces of Evil thing that had very little Luthor in it but whatever), that bitchy Alura-El (or Alura Zor-El? How does that work?) picked up the giant chunk of the Arctic Circle that New Kandor was sitting on and built a planet out of that Kryptonian crystal crap and put it in orbit around our sun, opposite Earth so that we'd never see each other, because neener neener meanie cooties. Also I don't think that's how orbits work and the gravitational pull of New Krypton would probably end all life as we know it, but hey, better than a bunch of beligerant Kryptonians flying all up in people's grills I guess.

On a related note, do you ever write down the plot summary of a comic book and think, "what?"

Also...

Jet packs for everyone! (Can't find an embed link for this, grr.)

I stand corrected

While I haven't made much mention of the recent Detective Comics "Hush" (or whatever it's actually called) storyline here on the blog, I've talked about it several times on the podcast, including giving the closing issue a Last of the Week award this past week for the very sweet Bruce/Selina nub nub bit, as well as Selina's lovely turn of monetary revenge against Tommy "Hush" Elliot for being so very shitty to her. The primary criticism I've had against the story has, of course, been the absolutely preposterous bit about Hush holding Catwoman's actual beating heart hostage in a Dr. Freeze-created machine, while Mr. Terrific and Dr. Midnite improbably kept her alive elsewhere.

But apparently, this is not preposterous at all.

See, this actual young lady lived in such a predicament for FOUR MONTHS, and just went home this week. Of course, she didn't have her original heart kept alive and returned to her, but that's not really what was getting at me anyway. So color me humbled, and more edumacated. Yay science!

But I still think the energy signature thing is dubious.

Pressing question that I'm too lazy to Google

Despite that fact that I was totally the shit in science in like eighth grade (seriously I was totally that girl until calculus got involved), I don't know the answer to this: is an "energy signature" a legitimately useful thing, or is it ubiquitous comic book schmiency bullshit? Or C), is it a sometimes legitimately useful thing in specific situations that is used by comic book writers in bullshitty ways all the damn time? I'm guessing that one. Anyway, your insight is welcome.

You can get anything you want

Good news! Very helpful reader Steven Stahl sent me the link to the Alice and Carlo the physicist Large Hadron Collider comic that I and a lot of people had trouble finding, called Alice and the Soup of Quarks and Gluon. You have to download it as a PDF, and it's rather large, but no doubt worth it. Especially now that we're not all dead from man-made rifts in space-time.

Go ask ALICE, when she's ten feet tall

In a previous life, I spent a week at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, and my clearest memory is that the cafeteria's soda fountain dispenses the world's foulest Cote du Rhone pinot noir. But I'd blocked out even that until this weekend, when it was all over the news that CERN is firing up its 17-mile radius Large Hadron particle collider to recreate the Big Bang and either reveal the secrets of the universe or destroy it with mini black holes. Personally I'm all for balls-out science, so I vote that it's worth the risk.

Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning it here is that "the team working on one of the four major installations in the tunnel — the ALICE, or 'A Large Ion Collider Experiment' — produced a comic book featuring Carlo the physicist and a girl called Alice to explain the machine's investigation of matter a split second after the Big Bang." I've been looking all over the webs for this, but all I've found is the rap. If you turn anything up, let me know.