Great rhymes in an infuriating case as Jasiri X looks at the plight of Troy Davis, who is scheduled to be executed in Georgia on Sept. 21:

Davis, who was convicted of murdering a white police officer mostly on the strength of a single witness, has what could be his final appeal before the Georgia parole board on Monday. I don’t mean to send you off to the weekend on a depressing note, but if you’ve got some free time and feel so moved, you can call the office of Larry Chisholm, the District Attorney who signed Davis’ death warrant, and ask him to request that it be withdrawn at 912-652-7308.

Someone who knows more than me about this may think differently, but is it really that surprising that Captain America made slightly more money overseas than it did in the United States? America has roughly 4.5 percent of the world’s population. American movies tend to make a lot of money abroad, particularly superhero movies. Iron Man, a movie about a decadent Western arms dealer who helps blow up a bunch of Afghanistan before having a conversion experience, made $582,443,126 at the international box office. Spider-Man 2, which is in some ways an explicit response to September 11, made $410,180,516. Compared to that, beating the Nazis is about as uncontroversial a plot as a movie can have.

And even if the uber-American branding of the main character was the first thing people considered before the plot, there’s not any evidence that America is so despised that people would stay away from a nifty-lookin’ diversion just because the hero is not just American, but an embodiment of American power. In the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey, countries that are big potential U.S. markets all had reasonably favorable attitudes of the U.S.: in Britain, the U.S.’s favorability rating is 61 percent, in France it’s 75 percent, in Brazil it’s 62 percent, in Japan it’s 85 percent, and even in places like China (44 percent) and Mexico (52 percent), it’s not as if the U.S. is uniformly reviled. We’re in less good shape in Turkey (10 percent), Pakistan (12 percent), and the Palestinian territories (18 percent) but these are much bigger concerns for our foreign policy and national security than for our trade policy, including movies. As long as American superheroes don’t behave in totally geopolitically offensive ways, they’re probably going to do pretty well, here and abroad.

I’ve long wanted to check out To Riverdale and Back Again, the live-action Archie movie NBC made in 1990, and thanks to some work by trusty reader David Crockett, I finally got to watch it.

The movie is every bit as bad as I expected it would be. Veronica has her father re-route the Concorde to Riverdale. Lauren Holly has a delightfully awful blonde wig to play Betty, who is apparently teaching school and writing cheesy fiction. Reggie runs a delightfully awful ’80s aerobics gym. Jughead is a quivery shrink who redeems himself by public acts of deeply white hip-hop. It’s weird, rather than endearing, that the characters are mired in the same old fights and rivalries that consumed them 15 years later, and it would have been more interesting to have the movie be a thought experiment in how they’d change as they grew up. It does, however, involve a pretty heartwarming scene of civil disobedience and a terroristic white chauffer!

But it’s also just a funny little refugee from an earlier era of comic book movies that seems to assume what readers-turned-audiences wanted in their adaptations was artificiality. There’s no real attempt to make these characters seem realistic or to have proportional reactions to events. Josie and the Pussycats, which had a much better cast than this, but a scenario that was as goof-tastic and over the top as possible (and also really terrible-looking costuming). I wonder if the intervening 20 years have made folks realize that you could just treat Archie comics as a realistic, straight-forward, if sweet, story and make a really great teen movie based on them. Certainly the Sabrina television show worked because it took that approach and added just enough magic to make it clear that the rules and stakes of the world were different, but not the human anxieties.

Because I am a crazed workaholic and without True Blood on, I need something to keep me busy and irritated on Sunday nights, I hope you’ll join me and the awesome Libby Hill of Television on the Internet on the blog at 8 p.m. on Sunday to watch and snark the Emmy Awards.

So, animal rights are not one of my top voting issues, but isn’t it a little weird to say that you don’t need any special skills to take care of a tiger? Or 40-odd other animals who aren’t in their natural habitats? It seems less than awesome to have a bunch of zoo animals be the subject of wacky mishaps as a way for a distant dad to bond with his kids:

I’ve written before that I feel some anxiety about the way Community has treated Dean Pelton, turning him into a collection of freakish fetishes rather a person with an actual sexual orientation and capacity for relationships. From the way NBC is marketing Pelton’s role in the new season, I’m worried that they don’t see that as a problem — in fact, that they see it as an asset. Take the clip introducing John Goodman’s character, vice dean of Greendale’s air conditioning repair program:

Seriously, we’re meant to think it’s funny that Goodman’s character’s threatening Pelton with what sounds suspiciously like sexual assault: “Now you’re going to feel my power, straight through you from nostril to rectum”? And it’s supposed to be funny that the Dean is so sex-starved that he wails, “I forgot everything you said before rectum”? Apparently, these are the talking points, or at least they’re trickling down, since Goodman’s now describing his character as having “[the dean's] privates in a vice.”

Community‘s been as good as it has by pairing delightfully weird humor and scenario with a commitment to fully fleshing out a wide range of characters, male and female, white and people of color, young and old. It’s weird that the two gay-coded characters we have are the most stereotypical, least-developed folks on the show. If they keep taking the Dean in this direction, Magnitude’s going to look like a progressive option.

The bridge is yours.

-Reading Rainbow is coming back for iPad!

-The Sail Barge industry just got a big boost from science.

-Richard Schiff will boss around Kristen Bell and Don Cheadle. And I will subscribe to Showtime so I can watch him do it.

-I don’t really feel compelled to smell like Tim Allen.

-Breaking down the Nielsen ratings — with puppets!

This post contains spoilers through the first three parts of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. As always spoil beyond that in comments if need be, but please label your comments for folks who are reading along for the first time. And for next week, let’s read Section 4, “The Straylight Run.”

It struck me reading this section of Neuromancer that I sort of like Wintermute, and would quite like to introduce him — if, as Wintermute’s choice of avatars suggests, he is in fact sort of inclined to present himself as a man — to Jane from Speaker for the Dead. Creating aliens and artificial intelligences that are plausibly not simply people, but people you actually somewhat like, while also making them decisively other is tremendously challenging. It’s also a necessary precondition for a discussion about whether and to what extent robots and artificial intelligence deserve rights that will actually engage the readers’ emotions, so between Wintermute and Dix, Gibson’s rolling.

Dix’s explanation of the AI’s primal urge to learning is moving:

Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.

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It’s not like Apple is new to banning apps from its store — it’s axed pornographic applications, the Financial Times’ app for not abiding by the rules about subscriptions, etc. Now, it’s come down on an app that describes the environmental degradation and worker exploitation that can go into the production of smart phones, in part on the grounds that it violates the rules against applications that “contain fraudulent of misleading representations”

It seems like MolleIndustria, the company that makes the App, should fight at least that grounds for the banning. It would be bad for there to be a precedent that Apple gets to control which allegations about the conditions under which their phones and other products are made are considered fraudulent or misleading. Wired’s article about the efforts of Foxconn, one of Apple’s main Chinese manufacturers, and the company’s efforts to improve conditions for workers, is a balanced look at the ways our phones get made. But it’s also pretty clear that Apple and Foxconn responded to outside audits and pressure. There’s no company so trustworthy that it deserves sole control over how it’s described. Apple should only keep the “fradulent or misleading representations” rule if determinations as to what falls under it are made by a neutral rotating panel.