Captain Jack Will Make You Sad Tonight

There are times, when I’m about five beers in, when I say to myself, “You know who might be fun to go drinking with? John Barrowman.” And there are other times, when I’m more like nine beers in when I say to myself, “You know what might be fun? Going to New York and seeing that Spider-Man musical. I bet with enough whiskey, it’d be fun to watch Spider-Man dance!”

And there are other times, when I surf the Internet, when I find things that make me think I should quit drinking altogether. Like video of John Barrowman. Singing and dancing. With Spider-Man. In public.

Oh yes. This is a thing that has happened to me. And now, after the jump, it is going to happen to you.

Brain Bleach: Marvel Legal Department Edition

Look out! Next he'll be after your wimmenz!

Sherry Singer and Indie Sing were the two international trade lawyers working for Marvel Comics in the ’90s (and they were ladies, we feel obligated to mention by the mandate of the site), who took a look at the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a book full of customs regulations, and realized that “dolls” were taxed 12% on import, while “toys” were taxed only 6.8%. The difference between the two was that a doll “represented only a human being,” while “toys” were ”monsters, robots, angels, basically anything that isn’t “only representing a human.” Probably, at some point in the past, some American doll manufacturer had felt threatened by overseas competition, and had lobbied the government to put a tax on imported dolls.

There’s also a link at The Mary Sue to a podcast that explains how the case turned out, so click on over there to find out the resolution.

Ones And / Or Zeroes: Nook Comics, Part 2

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part 2 of our review of buying and reading comics on the Nook Color in its new version 1.4.1 software release. You can find part one here. You can find an anxious walrus reporting crimes here.

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Look: one thing you’re never gonna get past reading a comic on the Nook is the size of the screen. At about seven inches of widescreen diagonal, it’s 2/3, maybe 3/4 the size of a standard printed comics page. That’s not the fault of the Nook platform; it is what the thing is. But given that limitation, the images are clear – either they’ve pulled in digital originals or they made a damn good scan. When held in the vertical position, you get a complete single page that’s imminently readable unless you’re farsighted or worried about being seen occasionally squinting like a furious masturbator on the city bus.

The problem here is the splash pages. When the Nook is held vertically, you get, like I said, one comic page, which means you only get half the splash. If you rotate the Nook, the page reloads into a two-page view that shows you everything, but is imminently unreadable. You can zoom in using the standard poke-your-fingers-and-spread-them as you know from the iPad and dating virgins in high school, all the way to full original page resolution. And you can drag the page around with one finger, as in other table apps or dating slutty skanks in college.