For Christmas, Galley Brother B.J. sent me the Clever Coffee Dripper and allow me to proselytize: It is awesome. It cuts the Gordian knot created by needing a single-serving but not wanting French press. But it’s not just convenience–because the slurry has time to steep, the coffee is actually superior to normal drip.

I highly recommend it.

Light blogging here the next couple weeks, but I’ll be posting at the Standard from Iowa and New Hampshire.

A holiday tradition like no other: The expansive NORAD network which was built to win the Cold War is turned to a more pleasant purpose–tracking St. Nicholas as he makes his way across the globe.

Wasn’t it Ann Coulter who argued (in jest?) that we need a more nuanced gays in the military policy, where gay women could be out, but gay men had to neither ask nor tell?

Anyway, here’s a heart-warming video about a lesbian Navy couple getting to share the ceremonial first kiss as one of their ships docks. Whatever you’re expecting, you’re going to be surprised. (Via Ace.)

Galley Friend Jay Cost argues for the old way of choosing presidential nominees. And it is awesome.

An instant classic.

In regards to my post about Miller and Nolan, Santino and I were chatting and he picked up on something which I had noticed, but didn’t want to say out-loud. I’ll let him explain it in his own words:

So. Theory.

 At the prologue screening, we got a t-shirt. It looks like this:

Now, this is a kind of stylized take on the Bane mask in Nolan’s movie. (They also had a stylized take on the Batman logo; I didn’t get that one.) But it reminded me of something else. I was thinking, thinking, let it go, got back to thinking … and then it hit me:

That’s not the best image from the book, but it’s the best one I found on Google Image. (I think the image that it most resembles is about midway down page 99 of the 10th anniversary paperback edition of The Dark Knight Returns.) Point is: It looks like the mutant leader.

So let’s consider what we know:

I kind of missed the Golden Age of Neal Pollack. By the time I finally listened to all my writer friends who idolized him and tuned in, he’d moved on to daddy blogging, so I never go to experience him at his ironic height. This must be what it was like, because it is high-level awesome. Some samples:

Christopher Hitchens and I were friends for 40 years, plus another five when we were enemies. He took ideas so seriously that if he disagreed with you on a matter that he deemed important, he’d literally throw you in a ditch. It was 1972, the height of our mutual virility. He and I went to a pub to celebrate his most recent intellectual victory over the establishment press. I intimated that sometimes women could be funny on purpose. Even back then, the thought enraged him. Hitchens threw a drink in my face, pressed a lit cigarette into my neck, and hit me over the head with a barstool. The next thing I knew, it was two days later and I was lying hogtied and naked beside the M5. Hitch had already severely damaged my reputation in a vicious essay in the Guardian. But that’s how he operated, and that’s why we loved him.

University, as you know, is the only time in one’s life when anything really worthwhile happens. I met Hitch there. The first time I saw him, he had a bird on each arm and a woman by his side. She beamed as he read aloud passages from “Homage to Catalonia.” He looked up.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“I’m your housemate,” I said.

“Are you in favor of the war in Vietnam?”

“Of course not.”

Hitch put down the book and took a swig of cheap Scotch.

“Good,” he said. “Because I refuse to fraternize with men who are afraid to be intellectual heroes.”

And:

Much ink has been spilled, of course, about the legendary friendships Christopher forged with other writers throughout his life. For a time in the 1980s, he, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and I lived together in London. Hitchens rented us a six-story flat so we could swap partners more easily. Many was the time we passed the bottle until dawn, bemoaning Thatcher’s England, Reagan’s America, and also some stuff about the Middle East. Sometimes Hitchens would bring over a dissident writer who was fleeing oppression in his native country, and we’d all make fun of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, then remove our pants to compare our manhoods. We were so middle-aged and foolish then, so committed to the struggle.

Read it all. The best thing Salon has published since Cintra Wilson’s magnum opus on Svetlana Khorkina.

I’m glad to see that someone else has done a frame-by-frame review of the DKR trailer. In so doing, Gamma Squad makes a really, really awesome catch: The pearl necklace Selina Kyle tries on is the pearl necklace from Crime Alley.

In all the run up to DKR, it never occurred to me that Nolan might use Selina Kyle as an actual villain.

Hotness.

For no particular reason I’ve been re-reading Frank Miller’s Batman stuff–Year One, his Christmas one-shot, and Dark Knight Returns. A couple thoughts occur to me:

1) What none of the Nancy’s reading Frank Miller out of the comics A-list last month bothered to do was grapple with this: His writing in Year One and Dark Knight Returns is probably the the signal achievement in comics since Schuster and Siegel decided to come up with an all-powerful super man. Miller’s writing is breathtakingly confident, beautifully lean, honed to within an inch of its life. Go back and look at some of those pages and you’ll be blown away by how wonderfully they hold up. But they weren’t just the best pair of books in the history of the medium–they were the most influential, too. It is impossible to conceive of what the world of comics would look like today without them.

2) One of the interesting aspects of Nolan’s Batman movies is how he takes bits and pieces of comics and uses them in the construction of his own ideas. His Joker was taken from Brian Azzarello, for instance. He takes the final moment of Batman Begins from the last page of Miller’s Year One. There’s a shot in the new Dark Knight Rises trailer from Knightfall. He’s really mined the source material, but in the very best sense. Because he’s not recycling them–he’s using them to explore his own Big Ideas.

3) So what’s the Big Idea in DKR? That’s what I’m most interested in and I’m guessing we can find out once we know the answer to the following question: What does Bane want?

But in the meantime, I’ll hazard a guess. TDK was a movie about the liberal order, and what happens when it encounters an illiberal threat from the outside. I wonder if the Occupy Wall Street theme shown in the new trailer, and Bane’s talk about “the fire” rising, means that Dark Knight Rises will be about the liberal order confronting an illiberal threat from within.