Mindless Ones

STARTS TODAY!

TO BE CONTINUED….

Starting this week, a brand new weekly Cindy & Biscuit strip, exclusive to Mindless Ones. Who are Cindy & Biscuit? Why don’t you find out for yourself?

And don’t just take my word for it. Look here and here for further proof!

And check back next week to find out what exactly they did with their weekend

Danny Noble’s cartoon diary of abstinence. You can also read her Monday Morning strip here.

Click here to see the rest of the week

There are many, many reasons why I might be considered an idiot, but if you were going to make a list – and believe me, I’ve made a few such lists in my time – then I’ve got a fair idea of what the top three should look like.

I’ll spare you numbers one and two for now, but number three is easy. You see, I must be an idiot, because I don’t think I understood mortality until I watched Transformers: The Movie for the first time. Yeah, Transformers, “robots in disguise” that turned into planes and cars and tanks, and had their own crappy TV show. That was where my first intimation of mortality came from. Told you I was an idiot.

The realisation that all of this would one day stop had never sunk in at Sunday School, where the focus was more on old stories than on the possible absence of narrative. It hadn’t made any impression on me when various distant relatives had died – they had seemed like minor characters in my story, and their deaths didn’t truly register with me at the time. It didn’t even really occur to me in the early parts of Transformers: The Movie, despite the fact that whole planets were being destroyed and beloved characters were being gunned down like so many extras (with all weapons having been switched from tickle to mangle between TV series and movie, naturally). But OPTIMUS FUCKING PRIME, my favourite toy and childhood hero, dying on-screen, in an astonishingly drawn out manner? Yeah, I felt that, and it scared the living shit out of me.

See, here? One day your sentence will be up. Full stop. Story over. The end.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to Simon Furman in a minute!

Boosted for our new readers. Welcome, new readers!

For the audio recording click here

Gary: Hello there this is Gary Lactus and I’m here with Bobsy

Bobsy: Hello

Gary: and we’re just about to phone Grant Morrison to intervew him about his new book supergods. It’s not a comic it’s a book. It’s Part memoir…

Bobsy: …part biography of the superhero in comics and part meditation on what “superhero” means, not just to us geeky chaps, but out there in the wider world

Gary: Right, and Bobsy will be doing much of the interviewing for he has read the book and I have not.

Bobsy: I’ve read a proof which is a bit different to the final copy, which I’ve read most of, so I don’t know how accurate some of what I’m saying is but we’ll go with that.

Our hotline to Grant Morrison!

We chat with the supergods after the jump

For the transcript click here

Here’s a recording of a Grant Morrison interview concerning mainly his new book Supergods.  Bobsy did the interview with small interjections from Gary Lactus.  Here’s the nice picture on the back of the book:

Lovely

Thanks to Grant and the folk at Jonathan Cape for their help in setting up this interview.  Apologies for sound quality.

EXPECT:

Inadequate speakerphone with buzzing!

Intrusive street noise!

Phone line breaking up!

Phone and recording device falling over!

We need to do a transcript which will appear here soon but we thought you might want to hear the whole thing.

Click to download
[audio:https://mindlessones.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Grant-Morrison-Interview.mp3]

If you’re new here you might want to have a look around. We have lots more thoughts on Morrison’s work.

Amy Poodle on the Invisibles for The Comics Journal
Illogical Volume on the Filth
Batman annocommentations (probably quite different from anything you’ve read elsewhere)
Seaguy annocommentations
Amy Poodle on All Star Superman

And that’s just the tip of a very big iceberg.

Danny Noble’s cartoon diary of abstinence. You can also read her Monday Morning strip here.

Click here to see the rest of the week

Bullshit ain’t about lying, not according to philosopher Harry Frankfurt from Princeton University. It is, however, still concerned with falsehood.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Great, an’ all, and all very right sounding, but it’s not the definition you’ll likely get from the man on the street. So if we don’t fully grasp bullshit, then God help foreign readers when it comes to its close cousin “bollocks”, that most British of swearwords.

More bollocks over the jump

Danny Noble’s cartoon diary of abstinence. You can also read her Monday Morning strip here.

Click here to see the rest of the week