This parody of Clerks called Heroes pulls in Captain America and Dare Devil in the place of your two favorite wage slaves. Fun for Kevin Smiths fans and comic book fans.

…oh, I guess there’s a big overlap in those two groups…

The Nobel e-Museum provides a Conflict Map showing wars during the last century with a really cools Shockwave© app.

The owner of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston is closing shop and has posted Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores. Scroll down to a section titled The Crepuscule … or click through here. (I may as well reproduce the whole thing since there is no telling how long a recently closed independent book store’s web site will remain.) It’s quite a rant and a little paranoid, but he makes a point I’d like to discuss:

…which allows the likes of Barnes & Noble and Walmart to write off the losses of a store in Massachusetts against the profit of another in California, while paying taxes in Delaware—for making ‘competition’ a joke and turning the free market down the dark road toward state capitalism. … giving tax breaks to chain stores, thus killing the personality of a city—for producing the burden of tax codes only accountants can love…

Normally, I’m a big fan of competetion and fall more on the love side of everyone’s love/hate realtionship of big box retail, but he’s make a good point here. Is it fair that Wal-mart and B&N are allowed to undercut competition in one part of the country? or get tax breaks that aren’t offered to small-medium local businesses?