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Posts tagged ‘watchmen’

I even spared you the joke about the “bitter aftertaste of Fred Motz nuts”

Hurm.

I don’t mind sharing geek culture with the masses, but I find it difficult to explain (even to friends) how weird it is to see “Watchmen” stuff everywhere. It’s like, my adolescent fever-dreams have escaped to manifest themselves as novelty keychains, or collectible limited-edition coffees.

Thankfully Bully, the little stuffed bull, eases my pain with his selction of delicious “Watchmen”-themed ice-cream.

Personally I think the “comment of the thread” award was won almost immediately by RAB who wrote:

The bowl is empty. The scoop is falling from my hand. I am eating the ice cream. I am bringing the groceries home. I am paying the cashier. I am seeing the ice cream in the freezer case for the first time. The scoop is falling from my hand. The morality of my diet escapes me.

Rounds of applause all around – and since “Watchmen Ice Cream” was too delicious a challenge to ignore, I leave you with my humble suggestion:

Classic New-York banana, with a hint of salt-water tears

BlogFox Braindump!

I don’t have a lot of insightful, funny, lengthy stuff to post, but rather a bunch of odds and ends that don’t lend themselves to lengthy discourse… hence – fear my braindump:

Watchmen Updates – What’s that on the Horizon?

no, no metaphors here

Is it a settlement? No. Not quite. Lots of good updates on Watchmen lawsuit happenings over at Film Esq. – my favourite lawblog du jour.

The Coles notes is that everyone who prophesied a quick settlement after the Dec 24th order (cough, cough) may want to take a mulligan. Fox appears to be going for the jugular looking for the court to grant their permanent injunction before any discussion of how many zeros they would like on their publishers-clearing-house-sized novelty cheque. So much so that they’ve waived their injunctive claims on any other aspect of this case (I have no idea if they had anything of value there anyway… but lawyers tend not to jettison any potential avenue of attack unless they smell blood in the water… you only need so many butter-knives to compliment your fully gassed-up chainsaw).

On the other side of the coin, I’m not entirely sure what Warner’s is thinking, or doing, since I haven’t seen any of their recent documents. But since I read judge Feess Dec 24th order, I’m still a little fuzzy on their master strategy anyway unless it involved filling up a pool with gold coins Scrooge-McDuck-style, and the putting said pool on the back of a gold truck and driving the whole shooting match over to Fox with a nice gift basket.

And maybe cushioning the basket with some nice decorative grasses.

And wads and wads of bills.

Rodney Perkins is doing a fantastic job of breaking down the (still somewhat perplexing) shenanigans in far more detail, and unlike me, I bet he doesn’t accidentally wring up accidental $10 charges every time he uses PACER:

Seriously, Who’s Watching the Watchmen Lawsuit?

You've come a long way, baby

Dear Fox,
Eat All the Dicks
Daniel O’Brien

Like lots of other bloggers, I was shocked to come out of my post-Christmas turkey induced coma to the news, broken by Michael Sieply in the New York Times, that Twentieth Century Fox has succeeded in at least some of their lawsuit against Warner Brothers relating to “Watchmen” – a ruling which now puts the proposed March 7th release of the film in jeopardy.

Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do.
– Bob Dylan

Like lots of comic fans, my initial reaction was annoyance – I’m a tremendous fan of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons original work, and have been looking forward to the film with equal parts anticipation and dread. My bio notes that I’ve been hired three times to write about comic books for very disparate magazines (all three of which stopped publishing before my first columns ever saw print). It’s a testament to the depth and breadth of “Watchmen” that I was able to reference it in all three of my initial columns despite the very different audiences and focus of each. It’s one of my “hook” books to introduce adult readers to comics when they ask me to “recommend something” (although I do occasionally suggest that on first reading one can skip the supplementary text-pieces, and “tales from the black freighter” sub-plot – both of which have caused friends of mine to “stall” and not finish the book).

My frustration quickly turned from Fox to the larger press given that since Justice Feess dropped his December 24th surprise order no one was actually reporting on what the case was about, except in vague banalities like “contract dispute”. For copyright and computer law I’ve been a little bit spoiled by resources like Groklaw – wherein within moments of legal documents being available they have been widely made available and dissected into plain English by eagle-eyed legal beagles. Eaglebegles. Leaglebles.

I can’t offer that, but since no one else seemed to be looking into this, I spent yesterday morning digging through the Byzantine labyrinth of PACER (the US courts electric document filing system) to bring (hopefully) a little meat to this discussion.
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