Over at Journalista!, The Comics Journal’s Dirk Deppey takes a very long and well-reasoned stab at the problems Marvel Comics faces in cementing its dominance in comics’ Direct Market while expanding outward into the very different bookstore market. It’s a fascinating series. (Permalinks to the earlier portions are found at the top of the most recent essay.)

See, when I got up this morning, I knew — I KNEW — that today was gonna suck.

Legend Gregory Peck Dies

Jun 12, 1:11 PM EST

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Gregory Peck, the lanky, handsome movie star whose long career included such classics as “Roman Holiday,” “Spellbound” and his Academy Award-winner, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has died, a spokesman said Thursday. He was 87.

Peck died overnight, Monroe Friedman told The Associated Press.

Peck’s craggy good looks, lanky grace and measured speech contributed to his screen image as the decent, courageous man of action. From his film debut in 1944 with “Days of Glory,” he was never less than a star. He was nominated for the Oscar five times, and his range of roles was astonishing.

He portrayed a priest in “Keys of the Kingdom,” combat heroes in “Twelve O’Clock High” and “Pork Chop Hill,” Westerners in “Yellow Sky” and “The Gunfighter,” a romantic in “Roman Holiday.”

His commanding presence suited him for legendary characters: King David in “David and Bathsheba,” sea captains in “Captain Horatio Hornblower” and “Moby Dick,” F. Scott Fitzgerald in “Beloved Infidel,” the war leader “MacArthur,” and Abraham Lincoln in the TV miniseries “The Blue and the Grey.”

Peck’s rare attempts at unsympathetic roles usually failed. He played the renegade son in the Western “Duel in the Son” and the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in “The Boys from Brazil.”

Offscreen as well as on, Peck conveyed a quiet dignity. He had one amicable divorce, and scandal never touched him. He served as president of the Motion Picture Academy and was active in the Motion Picture and Television Fund, American Cancer Society, National Endowment for the Arts and other causes.

“I’m not a do-gooder,” he insisted after learning of the Academy’s Jean Hersholt humanitarian award in 1968. “It embarrassed me to be classified as a humanitarian. I simply take part in activities that I believe in.”

Peck died at his Los Angeles home overnight, with his wife, Veronique, at his side, Friedman said.

“She told me very briefly that he died peacefully. She was with him, holding his hand, and he just went to sleep,” Friedman said. “He had just been getting older and more fragile. He wasn’t really ill. He just sort of ran his course and died of old age.”

Well, shit.

TV news pioneer David Brinkley dead

June 12 – David Brinkley, who gained fame as half of NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley anchor team and for more than a half-century loomed large in the newscasting world he helped chart, has died at the age of 82, it was reported Thursday.

BRINKLEY’S DEATH was reported by the Houston Chronicle and ABC News, both of which said he died from complications from a fall.

Brinkley, who was born in Wilmington, N.C., on July 10, 1920, was described as “the elder statesman of broadcast journalism” by former President George H.W. Bush. But Brinkley spoke of himself in less grandiose terms.

“Most of my life,” he said in a 1992 interview, “I’ve simply been a reporter covering things, and writing and talking about it.”

He stepped down as host of ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley” in November 1996 but continued to do commentaries. He left amid a rare controversy, and an apology: Late on Election Night, after a long evening, he had said unkind things about President Clinton on the air, calling him a “bore.”

Clinton sat for an interview for Brinkley’s last show anyway, and after Brinkley apologized, told him: “I always believe you have to judge people on their whole work, and if you get judged based on your whole work, you come out way ahead.”

I don’t really know why this makes me sad, but I always liked watching Brinkley on Sunday mornings with my dad. He seemed, on television, like he always knew more than his guest of the day, a bemused smile on his face while he did the interview.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Judge Says Nizzle-Shizzling Not an Offense

LONDON (Reuters) – A judge has ruled that the lyrics of a rap record urging the listener to “shizzle my nizzle” and referring to a “mish mish man” did not constitute an offense.

Presiding in the case of UK rap artist Andrew Alcee against the Heartless Crew, High Court Judge Lewison ruled that not only were the lyrics not necessarily offensive but that they may as well have been in a foreign language.

Alcee is claiming that a remix by Heartless Crew of the Ant’ill Mob’s 2001 garage hit “Burnin” constituted “derogatory treatment” of his copyright because the lyrics contained references to violence and drugs. “This led to the faintly surreal experience of three gentlemen in horsehair wigs examining the meaning of such phrases as “mish mish man” and “shizzle my nizzle,” the judge said.

Dismissing the claim, he added that despite extensive surfing of the Internet in search of illumination, he had been unable to establish whether the words complained of in the rap were actually references to violence and drugs.

This is the greatest news story of all time.

(found via the “Durst Watch” column on donewaiting.com)

TiVo Compiles, Sells Users’ Viewing Data

Digital video recorder maker TiVo hopes to make a buck out of its customers’ viewing habits, by selling the data it collects to broadcasters and advertisers.

TiVo will sell second-by-second audience viewing data and a quarterly Commercial Viewing Report that will tell when TiVo users skip advertisements, the company has announced.

Information for the detailed analysis is derived from data collected when TiVo boxes make their daily call to retrieve programming information, the company said. The data is anonymous and is compiled to provide statistics about activity by many users, according to TiVo.

Great. Thanks to our TiVo, we’ll see an increase in cheap Japanese cartoons about hamsters, imported British flea market shows, and hammily-acted scifi shows. Just what the world needs.

This is kind of freaking me out.

First ‘net-schooled lawyers pass California bar exam.

June 4 — Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. The first graduating class of Concord Law School sat at their computers last month, awaiting their bar exam results — which were supposed to be posted online at 6 p.m. Instant messages and e-mail flew back and forth, just as they have for four years among this unique, tight-knit group of would-be lawyers.

REFRESH. REFRESH.

Four hours later, the first 10 graduates of an Internet-based law school were still waiting to find out whether they had passed the test they need to practice law. A glitch at the California State Bar’s Web site was preventing the results from being available.

Among the 10: A stay-at-home dad. An earthquake engineer. A mother of two who 10 years prior sold off her independent movie studio to raise her kids. A small-town surgeon. And a former AT&T; systems analyst. As they waited, they fired messages back and forth, hoping one of them would manage to get the results and pass them among the group.

After four years on trial as the first class of the newfangled online law school, what’s four more hours?

…

Concord is not perfect: To begin with, the school isn’t accredited by the American Bar Association. The ABA has no provision for approving schools that offer their entire curriculum online, a spokesperson said. That might hurt some graduates’ careers, as some jobs require applicants to hold a degree from an ABA-accredited law school, and some states insist on the ABA seal of approval before graduates can take the bar exam.

Concord is accredited by the California Bureau of Private Post-Secondary and Vocational Education, which is only recognized by the California State Bar. So while interested students can earn a law degree from virtually anywhere, they can initially practice law only in California.

A few states, such as New Hampshire, have reciprocity agreements with California — meaning those who pass the California bar are automatically entitled to sit for the Vermont exam. Jascob, who lives in New Hampshire, said he might take that route so that he can practice law in his neighboring state.

And of course, not all Concord graduates passed the bar exam on their first try, though 6 out of 10 compares favorably with percentages at other law schools. Overall, 50.2 percent of first-time takers passed the California test, which was administered in February.

And in related news, which made Val gasp involuntarily when we saw the news:

Some Bar Scores Are Wrong

Dozens of newly minted lawyers around the country may soon find out they are not lawyers after all.

The National Conference of Bar Examiners, which produces the 200-question multistate portion of the bar exam taken in almost every state, last week warned bar officials in 48 states that the scores of all 20,204 law students who took the test in February are being recalculated because of a clerical mistake.

“Students are scared about taking the bar exam anyway, so it’s terrible to be thrown into doubt,” said Alan Michaels, associate dean at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

“The scoring error was detected and every jurisdiction is affected,” said Erica Moeser, president of the national conference. “The error is being corrected” as quickly as possible and states are being notified, she said. The problem was discovered at the beginning of May….

If Ohio is any sign, few would-be lawyers will be prevented from taking the oath. A total of 551 students took the bar exam in February and 294 passed.

Last week, the Ohio Supreme Court notified 28 applicants that their status may change due to the error. By last Thursday, it was determined that 27 of those 28 passed, according to information released by Ohio Supreme Court Clerk Marcia Mengel.