Tuesday, February 08, 2005
- More Bhagavad-Gita than Stan Lee, behold the coming of...Pavitr Prabakhar, the Indian Spiderman! (As in Desi, not Native American. ;))
Personally, I think Pavitr's harem pants have much more zap than Peter's clichéd old superhero tights. [via Begging to Differ]
Spider-Man India interweaves the local customs, culture and mystery of modern India, with an eye to making Spider-Man’s mythology more relevant to this particular audience. Readers of this series will not see the familiar Peter Parker of Queens under the classic Spider-Man mask, but rather a new hero – a young, Indian boy named Pavitr Prabhakar. As Spider-Man, Pavitr leaps around rickshaws and scooters in Indian streets, while swinging from monuments such as the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal. Mumbai’s (Bombay’s) first web-swinging Super Hero will be joined by a reinterpretation of the classic Spider-Man villain, the Green Goblin -- reinvented as a Rakshasa, an Indian mythological demon. [Gothamcomics.com] - Remember last year's study by Dahl and Moretti that claimed male children are beneficial for marriages, e.g., parents of daughters are more likely to divorce? Well, a recent study seems to point to an inverse relationship between motherhood and maternal longevity, and a Finnish study says mothers of sons die earlier. Hmm. [Scientific American]
- Welcome back, Galois: after a too-long hiatus, Gabriel Rosenberg returns to the blogosphere with his delightfully thoughtful and inspiring posts on same-sex marriage, civil rights, and more.
- Can you copyright public space? Marginal Revolution tells us corporate entities are increasingly perpetuating this trend:
The Eiffel Tower's likeness had long since been part of the public domain, when in 2003, it was abruptly repossessed by the city of Paris. That's the year that the SNTE, the company charged with maintaining the tower, adorned it with a distinctive lighting display, copyrighted the design, and in one [fell] swoop, reclaimed the nighttime image and likeness of the most popular monument on earth. In short: they changed the actual likeness of the tower, and then copyrighted that. As a result, it's no longer legal to publish current photographs of the Eiffel Tower at night without permission.
MR also points to a post about the copyrighting of The Chicago Bean; which comes as a surprise to me, since this past summer I had no trouble photographing the Millennium Park Cloud Gate sculpture, and I saw no signs or guards warning off shutterbugs. Perhaps the tripod tipped off the security guards that the image might be used for commercial purposes?
farkleberries Links du Jour 55
