Quick Hits

• Earlier tonight, we had misplaced a piece of art I bought from Jeff Lemire a couple of months ago (it's a variation of what was in the window of The Beguiling, a prominent Toronto comics store, two Christmases ago). Fortunately, it didn't take too awfully long before we found the artwork, but it does give me the opportunity to link to his blog, which is overloaded with great artwork. If you don't know, Lemire is the creator of the Essex County trilogy from Top Shelf, which is well worth your time. He's also a new dad.

• Like just about everybody else who watched the Oscar show, Mrs. Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk and I were quite surprised with the way the traditional "In Memorium" montage. In case you didn't see it, Queen Latifah sang while various screens on the stage showed movie people who had died during the previous year. Unfortunately, the cameras were spending so much time panning around and moving in and out through the screens that it was often hard to catch exactly who it was we were supposed to be commemorating. Possibly to make up for that confusion, the Academy has posted the actual montage that the screens were showing. Mark Evanier has embedded it in a post on his blog, so you can see who exactly it was that we were intending to honor. He's also got a list (more extensive than you might've guessed) of people who could've been included but, for whatever reason weren't.

• Just following up from the other night, Dean Grose, the mayor of Los Alamitos who sent out an e-mail depicting the White House lawn as a watermelon patch, has decided that maybe he can't fulfill his duties as effectively as he had been doing now that much of the world has seen the racist drivel that he likes to forward to his friends. (He's still hanging on to his city council seat, though.) And he's still standing by his claim that he hadn't intended the joke to be taken in that manner and was surprised when it was. Who could've known there was any kind of pre-existing negative stereotype about African Americans and watermelon?