From Maine to Japan

From a very old Japanese manga that was--roughly--based on Batman and Robin. There's something about Robin's face, like he's seriously thinking this one over, that gets me.

Which reminds me that I've been meaning to post some random panels from romance comics here! There's something delightfully campy about the old 50s and 60s romance comics, and I also have fond memories of reading them in the attic of my grandparents' house, where my uncle kept a box of them. I'll have to do that sometime soon...

Next week I head to Chicago for the annual National Communication Association convention--my chance to catch up with old mentors, fellow students, and co-workers, and attend a few academic panels in the process. To give some indication of the range of topics and approaches available at this convention, I've culled a few titles here and there. Some I can understand, some I can not. :)

--Gossipy Talk in Organizations: When the Water Cooler is Virtual
--Hip Hop Goes to Washington: Boundary Work and Symbolic Capital in the Congressional Hearing on Hip Hop
--Let’s Talk About Sex: Methodological and Theoretical Issues in the Field of Family Sexual Communication
--Resuming a telling: well-prefaced turns after a parenthetical sequence
--HooCooks for HappyFeet: Discourses of stable and changing selves on the Appalachian Trail
--The Angst of Ambivalence, Child-like Dependence and Phallic Weakness in the Songs of Kris Kristofferson
--The Public and Scary Science: Biotechnology to Synthetic Biology

And my personal favorite, which I would go to if I weren't having to catch a plane at the time:

--I Can has Community: Translating and Writing about Norms and Language in a LOLcat Fan Group