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Enjoy this really freaky story about mind-controlling wasps, you sick bastids.

The appopriately named Agitator reports that the law firm of Covington & Burling will provide pro bono assistance in Cory Maye’s appeal to get off death row. Announcement here. For more about the case, check out the Agitator’s previous posts.

VM contributor and all-around good guy Tom Spurgeon recently posted a neat review of a Superman comic on his comicsreporter.com site. I don’t read much in the superhero genre anymore, but I’ve been a comics reader since I was a little kid. I’ll flip through issues on the newsstand, trying to figure out what happened to characters I used to read about, but that’s about it.

What I found interesting about this review was Tom’s discussion of writers’ tendency to approach superheroes from an ‘adult’ viewpoint. As he puts it:

I’ve long wondered if the problem with Superman is that his creators, going back to John Byrne twenty years ago, have written from what intrigues them about the character as adults rather than what might have interested them as a child. [. . .]

I think of all the big, iconic characters, Superman might suffer most for that now decades-old shift in approach. The other popular, franchise-bearing superheroes — Batman, the X-Men, Spider-Man — at their conceptual core all traffic in emotional states that are of interest to teenagers, to those who fail to outgrow the teenager’s worries and concerns, and to those who don’t mind revisiting them. Beyond the spectacle he provides, Superman’s appeal rockets past adolescence to more of a little kid’s boundary-driven view of the world. Superman is the strongest. He’s the fastest. He’s the toughest. Kids grasp at Superman for the reason they read biographies about LeBron James and Alex Rodriguez and wish to visit the observation deck of the Sears Tower. Superman is the best, and the world gets filled in between what we know about ourselves and what we can figure out about him. It’s a much longer trip to see things from point of view starting out in our adult world than it is to get to the teenager’s insecurities and feelings of omnipotence. This may be one reason some of the best Superman stories are almost automatically written, or, as legend has it, penned by those working through some basic issues in therapy.

I think this is a nice companion to the Stagliano piece below. Go visit Tom’s site somedarntime.

A few days ago, I finished reading The Other Hollywood, an oral history of the porn industry, by Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne. If you’re into the subject, it’s a pretty impressive book, even though the 1990-present era receives short shrift.

The quotes selected by the book go a long way to avoid the heavy moralizing that most people bring into their views on the industry. The worst example of that tendency was in Martin Amis’ porn article for Talk Magazine a few years ago. That piece went with the “those poor, manipulated girls” angle, in what I assume was an effort to shame porn-consumers. This isn’t to say that McNeil & Osborne portray the women in the industry as happy-go-lucky. The book has all sorts of horror stories, with self-delusion and self-destruction duking it out.

One of the aspects of the industry that’s always intrigued me is the issue of how performers deal with the day-to-day. I mean, a lot of life in one’s 20’s and 30’s is at least partly devoted to finding a person to have sex with. So, when your “job” is getting laid, exactly how does you balance the rest of your time? What do you do, exactly, when your mental approach to sex is that of an occupation? Where do you find intimacy? (I don’t mean this in a “those poor girls” way; I’m more curious as to what substitutes for sex in that currency)

All of which gets me to the strangely profound closing quote of the book. It’s by John Stagliano, known for his Buttman gonzo video series. Following the death of his girlfriend Kristi Lynn in a car wreck, Stagliano went into a deep depression, and ended up going down to Brazil and almost deliberately getting himself infected with HIV (the details are in the book).

Subsequently, he and an HIV-positive performer fell for each other, got together, and went on to have an HIV-negative child. It’s an oddly touching story, an island-of-misfit-toys romance in an environment where romance is in short supply. Stagliano, as I said, gets the last word, and it’s a doozy:

I was getting f***ed-up the other night watching porno movies. And I thought, this is how you write a movie: You set up this whole scenario where some guy’s doing drugs, he’s about to go too far and OD, and just before he does, he looks at the camera and says, “F*** you, people! You live by a whole different standard than I do! I have this life in front of me that inspires me. Every one of you has done something at some point to f*** up your life — get a little too drunk, do too much cocaine. That’s life, right? And you’re judging me?”

I used to judge these people, and I never knew what was going on inside them.

You know, they’re experiencing life in a certain way that I don’t know about, but I need to know about. We want to push ourselves to experience life and to enjoy it: to be a race car driver, or do drugs, or get f***ed in the ass and risk getting HIV — it’s all the same fucking thing. Pushing yourself to experience life to its fullest necessarily involves risk. And if you sit in your room and never do anything — like my mother wanted me to do because she was worried that if I left the house I’d get hit by a car — you’ll never know what it’s like.

Maybe it’s genetically programmed, like women holding back sex. We’re genetically programmed to say, “Wait a second — oh, it feels good to go around that curve really fast, but I’m gonna crash.”

You know, like Kristi Lynn did.

The Superbowl was boring. The game played like a midseason inter-conference game. The officiating sucked ass. The commercials were almost uniformly boring and unfunny, except for the MacGyver Mastercard ad, and the town full of stuntmen.

The Diet Pepsi ads, in particular, were awful. That said, if you check out the “video rejects” link at the grotesquely named “brown and bubbly” site (shouldn’t they have gotten Sir Mix-A-Lot for that instead of Puffy?), you might have a laugh or two. At most.

On the plus side, the Steelers covered the spread, so my double-or-nothing bet (carrying over from last year’s Superbowl) is expunged. And Amy’s “Frito Pie” chili was the bomb.

I listened to Howard Stern honor Grandpa Al Lewis this morning. He contended that Grandpa should’ve gotten co-billing with Betty Friedan on the front page of the NYTimes. He mentioned that the Munsters was the greatest TV show of all time.

I, on the other hand, was much more of an Addams Family fan. I have no idea if we can draw conclusions about someone’s character from that, the way fans of the Three Stooges are qualitatively different than Marx Bros. fans.

So I’m putting it to you, dear reader! Which is it? The Munsters or the Addams Family? And why?

Radley Balko has a piece in the Washington Post about Salvatore Culosi, that unarmed optometrist who was accidentally shot to death by a SWAT team:

Fairfax apparently serves all of its search warrants with SWAT teams. But officials and county residents need to ask themselves if they want to live in a community in which routine police work and vice warrants are carried out by officers armed with gear more appropriate to a battlefield. Their answer may determine whether Salvatore Culosi represents an accident or a trend.

“Grandpa” Al Lewis, who once delivered the greatest radio ad-lib ever, died Friday night at the age of 95. Evidently, he worked as a basketball scout, so ESPN.com carried his obit.

Brokeback to the Future.

There’s a neat cover article on BusinessWeek this week about how GDP methodology misses the impact of R&D and other knowledge-based expenditures. The writers contend that outdated methods of measuring the economy have made government stats pretty useless. More to the point, they argue that factoring in this “dark matter” will alter our view on the trade deficit.

While showing that the economy is stronger than the accepted stats show, the missing info also explains why the recent recession was worse than it appeared:

Factoring in the knowledge economy also helps us understand why the recession of 2001 seemed worse than the official statistics showed — and why the recovery was so slow. According to the published numbers, the six-month recession of 2001 was so mild the business sector actually grew at a modest 0.4% pace that year. By 2003, however, more than 3 million private sector jobs had disappeared.

One reason for this disconnect is simple: Corporations hacked back their budgets for R&D, advertising, training, and so forth. Yes, that canceled out a ton of high-paying jobs, but had no direct effect on GDP. Remember that R&D and other intangible business investments are not currently counted as national output. Therefore, when a company laid off an engineer doing long-term product development but kept selling the same number of its old products, GDP stayed the same. Productivity even went up, because fewer workers were producing the same amount of output. And if that laid-off engineer went to work, say, building houses? National output might even have risen.

I have no training as an economist (if you’re looking for that stuff, go to Jane Galt and Dismally, and follow some their blogroll links), so I can’t make any substantial assessment about the thesis. As a layman, it seems to hold up with some of my observations about the business world. I mean, the shift of expenditures from capital projects to R&D mirrors some of what my day job is about.

I work on a magazine about outsourcing in the pharma/biopharma industry. The “lesson” of the industry (and of industry in general) is, “If you don’t do it well, don’t do it in-house.” There’s a lot of business-speak about “core/critical competencies,” “skill sets,” etc., but the key is the use of outsourcing/contract service providers to handle tasks that a company is either unable or unwilling to do on its own.

Often, this can boil down to a company’s decision to avoid a massive capital expenditure on a drug facility. While the finished in-house facility may be able to produce Drug X at a lower unit cost than a contract manufacturer could, the resulting tie-up of capital has to be factored into the equation. Also, the flexibility of working with a contractor can trump the fixed costs of running that in-house facility when there’s not enough demand for Drug X.

This isn’t to say that big companies (in my industry) are all abandoning their in-house manufacturing processes. In the last few weeks, Amgen’s made a bunch of announcements about plowing billions into its own facilities. But they’re also pretty darn confident in their sales projections for their products.

But a lot of pharma outsourcing is conducted by smaller companies that know they can’t invest in manufacturing. They have to develop intellectual property, and I’m not sure how that gets evaluated, especially if they don’t have a product on the market yet.

Anyway, just like with that post about News Corp.’s wireless strategy, I find this stuff fascinating. If you do, then read the article.

And if you wanna take up any points with the author, go to his blog entry about it.