Friday Mad Science: Microsoft's New Tablet and the Genius of Kurt Busiek, George Perez, and Ed Brubaker

Before I get started this week, let me just say up front that this site is not for everyone.  If you read through this and hate it, by all means leave a comment.  

But.  

If you find yourself reading and hating and reading and hating and reading and hating, and we start arguing in the comments...  at that point, it might be time to reassess your commitment.  

'Nuff said.

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I read the first part of Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America this week and the first year or so of the George Perez/Kurt Busiek run on The Avengers, and I enjoyed both tremendously.  For those in the know, that’s the first Winter Soldier arc and the first of two volumes marked “Avengers Assemble!”, both of which were in TPB form in the Milford, CT, library. 

Avengers Assemble, Volume 1 (TPB).
I really, really liked this book.

Avengers Assemble! was especially satisfying.  I’ve liked what Brian Bendis has done lately with some of the New Avengers stuff—pre-Siege, at least—but I found Busiek’s run to be more authentically “Avengers” in the classic style, especially in that it had a lot of the old school team in it.  At this point, I kind of wish Marvel would pull Bendis off of The Avengers and give it to somebody who juggles big teams and big team action a little better—like current Amazing Spider-Man scribe Dan Slott.  One of the best things about the Busiek run is that he introduced and used so many great B-List characters from the Avengers back catalogue, dudes like Justice and Firestar (yes, the one from the old ‘80s TV show).  Dan Slott picked most of those guys up when he wrote Avengers: The Initiative, and I loved that book.  It would be awesome to see him get back in the saddle and get the Avengers back to the kind of big-ticket cosmic action that guys like Busiek seem to do so well.  Bendis, for all the great dialogue that he writes, always seems to fall a little flat when it comes to the Event-level stuff.  In fact, I could do with fewer Events and more just plain-old serialized storytelling.

For what it’s worth, I also think I need to put Captain America on my pull list, at least while Brubaker is still writing it.  Brubaker’s work is terrific, and reading Winter Soldier has reminded me how much I enjoy it.

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Microsoft is introducing a new tablet computer, and right now the thinking is that it’s primarily a way for the company to showcase its new Windows 8 operating system, the operating system that’s designed for tablet and touch-screen computing.  Bottom line, Microsoft seems to think that the end of the desktop computer is pretty much here, and for what it’s worth, they’re ready to move on.  I don’t know if I can agree with that—based solely on the fact that having a real computer makes doing real work easier.  Which is to say that you can play on the web and watch movies on a tablet, but if you need to write a letter or run a electric load flow analysis, it really helps to have a full keyboard, a mouse, and a full-sized screen regardless of how much computing power your tablet has available. 

That doesn’t mean that I think Microsoft is making a mistake with either the tablet or its strategy with Windows 8.  The tablet market definitely looks like the future.  But if that’s true, then the best thing that the new Microsoft table has is its in-built keyboard, and that doesn’t even rely on touch-screen software.  With that said, I’d very much like to see some more competition—and more effective competition—in the tablet market, so at least for me, it’s hard to see how the new product’s launch is anything but an unalloyed good.

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Wednesday was the summer solstice.  That’s interesting basically because Sally and I got married on the winter solstice nine and a half years ago.  So we’re almost through our first decade!

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Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei was back in the news this week.  You may recall that I showed some pictures of his work that I saw on display at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC.  Anyway, Mr. Ai’s company has been under threat of a lawsuit in China for alleged fraud and tax evasion, a charge that most western observers have accepted as little better than a trumped up excuse to persecute Mr. Ai for his criticism on the Chinese state.  This week made news because Mr. Ai’s company actually sued the Chinese government for harassment, and the suit has been allowed to go forward, but Mr. Ai himself has been barred from the trial.  This has led to some calm but definite protesting in Mr. Ai’s hometown, all of which is unusual in the PRC.

Personally, I find the whole spectacle fascinating.  On the one hand, it makes me proud and happy to see this kind of thing and acknowledge that it doesn’t happen (much) in America.  But then, too, I think it’s kind of a cautionary tale.  Repression can begin as a subtle thing.  That’s why you have to fight it from the outset before it gets out of hand—as it clearly has, at least for Mr. Ai.

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I liked this article on amateur fashion photography.  Sally likes to shoot photographs and has several really nice cameras.  Reading this makes me think I need to get her some lights and a plain white backdrop as well. 

I have no intention of hiring a model for her, but that’d be an interesting experiment.

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Slate.Com ran an interesting article yesterday explaining why so many spammers claim to be Nigerian.  I’d always assumed that it was because they were from Nigeria, but apparently that’s not it at all.

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I don't know the first thing about Rick
Scott's politics, but I can tell you that I
like his hair cut.

Finally, Slate is alleging that presidential candidate Mitt Romney has asked Florida Governor Rick Scott to tone down his talk of Florida’s recent economic success.  This apparently highlights one of the problems that Republicans feel like they are having this year, namely that Republican governors have been largely successful stimulating growth at the state level, and that this is likely to make the Democratic President’s reelection campaign a lot easier.  You may recall from last election that many observers assumed that regardless of who won, be it Obama or McCain, that President would only win one term due largely to the extended nature of the then-forthcoming downturn.  Studies have shown that incumbent presidents generally win or lose on the perceived strength of the economy at the time of the election, so bottom line, Romney needs for Americans to at least think that the economy is bad in November.

The interesting thing about this election cycle, at least to me, is the way that Obama has lately been targeting specific interest groups of voters in order to create wedge issues and peal voting blocks off from the pool of potential swing voters in an election that is, on both sides, largely centrist.  Which is to say that Obama looks like he’s trying to insulate himself from the economy by picking policies that appeal to different groups that otherwise might have considered voting Republican.  Gay rights, contraception, immigration policy, etc.  It’s a strategy that’s only possible in a closely divided country with a winner-take-all representative system (like the Electoral College), but as I’ve said here before, I also think it’s going to work.

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Well, that’s about all I got.  Have a good weekend.