Saturday Cliffs Notes……

Brass Balls – Alec Baldwin is a speaker at one of the BEA author events I announced this week and Vroman’s Bookstore blog linked to a great McSweeney’s piece recreating his famous monologue from Glengarry Glen Ross. Read it here, it’s hilarious. My favorite quote? Take care of the class hamster? Fuck you. Which reminds me, my McSweeney’s came in the mail today. Yipee! It’s got three collections, but the hardback is titled, Where to Invade Next, with a big American flag. I vote for Youngstown, OH.

NY ComicContents – I’ve got a few things about The Con, I think I can leak tomorrow, so stayed tuned. Perhaps some guest stuff but certainly some VIP ticket info. Scroll down to see the list of store where you can buy tickets. Will any bookstores sell tickets? McNally or BookCourt? I didn’t formally ask them, maybe that’s why they aren’t, ok, I’ll add that to the to-do list.

Lego my Lego – Check this out from Wired’s blog, Lego is building a MMO (massively multiplayer online game) that allows players to live among the Lego sets they’ve created! It sounds amazing. So basically Any structure or vehicle you may construct out of the MMOs virtual blocks, you can also export to LEGO who will allow you to purchase traditional LEGO sets that are exact replicas of what you've created in-game. Also on Lego’s, I was having a bad week this week (something about pissing off all of the comic industry news outlets tends to wear one down) and I got into the car Thursday (The Editor-in-Chief and I carpool) and there was an Imperial Landing Craft Lego set sitting on the passenger seat for me. It must be love. It’s awesome, the wings move and everything.

Viral Vid - The first NYCC Viral vid by It's Just Some Random Guy is now up to 23,000 views! Nice. Visit it and share it, please! I want to get to 100,000! Also, last night I got the enxt vid. it's great, I can;t wait ot get it out there.

Borders New Store Layout – Friend and indy bookstore owner Karl Pohrt reviewed the new Borders store concept on his blog here. It’s a great perspective from Karl – it’s sort of like Ronald McDonald writing a review of a Whopper excep Karl isn’t a clown. Far from it. I mean he is entertaining, but.…damn I need to pick better analogies. Honestly it’s very insightful.

To Hell with Helvetica – Watch the documentary Helvetica last weekend. It was good, within the context that it is a full length documentary about a font. But my favorite line was from a stereotypically snobby German guy and when asked why he didn’t like Helvetica he replied, “I don’t know, what is it about bad taste that is ubiquitous?” I need to work that into sentences more often.

The Kennedy Mystique – I mentioned reading Rock On by Dan Kennedy a few months ago, well I came across a video he made for his first book, Loser Goes First, that is a hoot – as we say in the Midwest. It’s like 6 minutes long, but worth watching.

- L