The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Katherine Farmar:

My favourite Kennedy conspiracy is the one from the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins, to wit: eight other assassins and attempted assassins of American presidents, led by John Wilkes Booth, persuaded Oswald to shoot Kennedy rather than himself so that their own actions would be given historical significance.

It took me a while to figure out why Oswald was the one the writer seized on: apart from the fact that his act comes exactly in the middle of the assassinations (there were four before him, and four afterwards), his is the only assassination of the nine featured in the show that has no motive attached to it. The sequence in which the other assassins talk to him is preceded by the chilling and powerful "Another National Anthem", in which the assassins recite their reasons over and over again: "I did it because..." But with Oswald, there is no "because", or at least not one that he claimed; he never claimed responsibility, and he died soon afterwards, which gave the assassination an air of mystery.

(The first JFK conspiracy theorist was Oswald himself, who claimed he was a patsy.)

There's a script called YouTube cleaner, which hides all comments automatically. It stopped working a while ago when YouTube started changing their templates frequently and the scripter couldn't keep up, but it's been updated recently and now it works like a charm. It also removes related videos and promoted videos (which I find really distracting). And any or all of these features can be switched back on at will, which is handy for those rare occasions when you do want to read the comments.

Now if only somebody would do something similar for Veoh. Commenters on Veoh make commenters on YouTube look like Fellows of All Souls...

Alice In Sunderland is fandabbydabulous. One of the best graphic novels ever -- the kind of thing that can't be done in any other medium. It's very hard to describe it because it's unique: it spirals and jumps around in time, telling stories that connect to other stories that cast a new light on the stories he was telling fifty pages ago. Even if you have no interest in Lewis Carroll or Sunderland, it's a fascinating exploration of the unexpected ways in which things are connected to each other -- and if you're not interested in Lewis Carroll or Sunderland when you start reading, you will be when you're finished.

(I will add one caveat: in the early pages there's a slightly tedious recitation of a speech from Henry V illustrated by a serious of unfunny visual puns. This is more of a throat-clearing exercise than anything else, and doesn't add much. Skip it if it bores you: there's better stuff on the way.)

Has anyone mentioned David Petersen's Mouse Guard? Animal fantasy, richly imagined and gorgeously illustrated.

I've been greatly enjoying Andi Watson's Glister. Glister Butterworth lives in Chillblain Hall in the village of Gravehunger Moss; she attracts strange happenings, like that time when her teapot turned out to be haunted by a dead novelist who wanted her assistance in finishing his last novel, or the time when Chillblain Hall overheard a local bigwig describing it as an eyesore, got into a snit, and went walkabout. Charming and funny and suitable for all ages.

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