Vamps; New Yorker Article; Capt. America

Having one of my favorite meals -- Leftover spaghetti with lots of Parmesan Cheese but no sauce, and raspberry juice to drink. Tomorrow I am taking the day off work and we'll be driving up to Michigan to go to my high school 20th reunion. Meanwhile...

• This is the website of author Pam Keesey. Ms. Keesey specializes in writing on female vampires. (I happen to have her book Vamps: An Illustrated History of the Femme Fatale right here.) I like the Theda Bara pic she has on the front of her site. I don't know exactly what happened to that guy, but I guess if you gotta go, at least you should go happy...

• A&LD listed a good New Yorker article on Wikipedia. Excerpt: What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? When I showed the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. “Obviously, this was the work of experts,” he said. In the nineteen-sixties, William F. Buckley, Jr., said that he would sooner “live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” On Wikipedia, he might finally have his wish. How was his page? Essentially on target, he said. All the same, Buckley added, he would prefer that those anonymous two thousand souls govern, and leave the encyclopedia writing to the experts.
• Here's an excellent essay on Captain America. And this is one of the reasons that I just love Stan Lee: When the original Avengers decided it was time for them to all go their separate ways, Captain America was chosen to lead the NEW team, one composed of three former criminals who now sought to make up for their past crimes: Hawkeye (formerly an Iron Man villain), Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch (both former members of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants). Stan Lee loosely referred to this group of “Cap’s Kooky Quartet.”