This post at Golden Age Comic Book Stories got me thinking about the late great Virgil Finlay. Here’s a smattering of his work. First up is a painting that you can actually buy if you’ve got a spare $11,500 sitting around. I think the title is “Sean Connery takes the brown acid”:

Here’s a couple of covers from Famous Fantastic Mysteries:

The B&W spaceman illustrations below are from the Golden Age Comic Book Stories article (click here to see the full set).

So the venerable G5 tower of power has been having some disk issues lately. Program hangs, system hangs, general weirdness. Did a little troubleshooting, and it went beyond what disk utility or even Disk Warrior could fix. Finally cracked the case so I could move the drive to a firewire enclosure for more testing, and found the retainer clip for the drive broken off, and the drive itself sticking out 1/2 an inch or so from the bay. Here are some pictures of the broken retainer after I removed the drive:

Here’s the drive bay area at the back of the machine. The add-on drive in bay B is just fine, and shows what the retainer should look like. The retainer above shows what you don’t want to see inside your machine. Here’s a closer shot of the retainers:

Did some searching around and didn’t find any other reports of this issue out there. My biggest question is whether it was a catastrophic failure (drive seizing up and busting the retainer in one violent blow), or a long term stress fracture from the drive vibrating under normal use? Anyone else seen this happen to their older G5 towers?

Due to a change in Philippine customs policies, the importation of books into the Philippines has come to a halt. Robin Hemley writes the long version of the story at McSweeney’s, and there’s additional coverage here. It seems a customs official asked an importer to pay duty on a shipment of Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Even though duties on books are pretty clearly prohibited by the Florence Agreement (an international treaty the Philippine government signed in 1950), and even though duty on books has never been required before, the importer paid. Now Philippine customs wants duty on all book imports. From Hemley’s article:

Customs Undersecretary Espele Sales explained the government’s position to a group of frustrated booksellers and importers in an Orwellian PowerPoint presentation, at which she reinterpreted the Florence Agreement as well as Philippine law RA 8047, providing for “the tax and duty-free importation of books or raw materials to be used in book publishing.” For lack of a comma after the word “books,” the undersecretary argued that only books “used in book publishing” (her underlining) were tax-exempt.

Until this gets resolved, my book of Ferdinand Marcos Bass fishing anecdotes will have to remain on hold.

(Via Komikero Comics Journal.)

(Via stuka’s found.)

Leading with the best one this time…

There’s a whole series of these at Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog, and they’re Bat-tastic:

Batman

…forgot to pay the electric bill. Again.

Just an assortment this time.

Ideal for owners of wall crawling pets in need of exercise:the Defendius Labyrinth chain lock. Not so effective if you have a minotaur at the door though.

(Via Toolmonger.)

Found at tofuttibreak.tumblr.com

Gotta love the evil ventriloquist’s dummy motif. Pretty sure this one predates the Twilight Zone episode.