As part of an operation called, honest-to-Jeebus, "Tirimisu" [sic], Professor Nikola Kezic is teaching our favorite stingers to sniff out TNT by combining it with sugar to get them used to the subtle hints of explodeyness underneath. Like the alcohol aftertaste in an Italian dessert

So, hold up a sec...could THIS be the real reason bees are mysteriously dying? They've developed a taste for dynamite?

Or is there a preemptive counterattack already underway by the folks who put the landmines there in the first place? I don't claim to know the truth, but...

I hear there's some buzz about it.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHH!

(h/t Gallen_Dugall)

Gary Busey - the actor, the icon, the massive headcase - has a thing he does called "Buseyisms," where he'll draw a little picture, come up with an acronym that's usually amateur philosophy 101 (LOVE - Living On Victorious Energy) and sell it to you, with or without his autograph on it.

I think he may be running out of ideas.

Playing word games is supposed to head off senile dementia, but unfortunately for Gary, I don't think it cures any other kind. Or maybe that's fortunate - like The Iron Sheik, Busey is finding new career juice in being insane, and I'm pretty sure he knows it.

Hey, look who shows up for this one!

Meanwhile, Edmonton, Alberta is discussing a giant Wolverine statue - that was proposed as a joke initially, but, well, you don't joke about stuff like that when rabid fans are around. (h/t Canadian.Scott and 10glfan59)

And Fox finally figured out the Japanese brush-style posters were popular, so they're going into overkill mode. These two look more like painted-over photos than the previous ones.

Trailer after the jump.

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(not the actual logo)

The press conference should be starting right about now. Post your reactions below as it happens.

For those who don't want to follow along live and just want highlights, we'll have it all in a list later on. Will update this thread with the best streaming links when they are found.

Here's one. It's also supposed to be live on Spike TV.

Top picks from today's Blu-ray haul...

The Last Stand - About half of this movie has the Arnold Schwarzenegger you remember: profane, terse, hammy and incongruously cast as a small-town American sheriff. The other half is a boring-ass heist movie in Las Vegas with Forest Whitaker as the FBI guy who you know isn't going to catch the bad guy, because obviously our Ahnuld has to do that. Is it worth a rental for only fifty per cent of it being fun? You decide. Or make somebody else pay for it.

Captain America (1990) - Legendarily bad, but sometimes you have to see for yourself. Years before Chris Evans was a star, hack director Albert Pyun directed J.D. Salinger's kid as a Cap who barely dons the costume. This was the same era of the Fantastic Four movie that was never released, David Hasselhoff as Nick Fury and Dolph Lundgren as the Punisher (even these were great achievements compared to the versions of Daredevil and Thor who sullied a couple of Hulk TV movies). Kevin Feige should reunite them all for a Marvel Zombies feature, IMO.

True Blood: The Complete Fifth Season - I don't watch it. Are they lame vampires or cool vampires? I do like it at Comic-Con when they sponsor a press lounge and serve alcoholic energy drinks.

Howl's Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro - Totoro's a classic and Howl is one of my least favorite Miyazakis (that could just be the dub I saw - Christian Bale's Howl voice was as annoying to me then as his Bat-voice is to some now), but these still belong in your collection as gateway drugs for people who hold outdated stereotypes about anime in their heads. Debuting in Disney Blu-ray, both feature new HD transfers and original language tracks.

Parker - Jason Statham plays Donald Westlake's pulp antihero the same way he plays pretty much every role - he's a tough dude with an honor code doing one last heist. Things go fabulously well and the plans are all followed to a tee...KIDDING! Of course he gets double-crossed and it all goes south, but Jennifer Lopez arguably gets the worst of it, playing an ostensible female lead who gets turned down by the Stath in favor of a younger girl. In Hollywood, that's a fate worse than death.

The ABCs of Death - 26 short films, most of them twistedly funny (the one super-serious one is an unfortunate tonal misstep) and all involving death and a different letter. If you've ever seen Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation, this is basically the live-action version. Perfect for attention spans that have been impaired by alcohol; as such, it's ideal for a TR giveaway I'm going to have for four copies later in the week.

There's more, but those are my highlights. What are yours?

The Justice League of America- The most elite super hero team of them all, if only for being home to arguably three of the six biggest super hero icons in the form of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. (and if you're wondering who the other three biggest icons are, that's easy; it's Spider-Man, the Hulk and now Iron Man. And that's just because even your grandma knows who they are. It's that simple.) Debuting in 1960, the instant success of the JLA led to the Silver Age of comics in earnest, which eventually led to the Fantastic Four and the birth of the Marvel Universe as well.

And for the first twenty three years or so of their existence, the League was the hardest club to get into, like one of those nightclubs in Vegas where everyone looks douchey, but everyone wants to get into anyway, just because they think it makes them look cool to be there, and they can then tell everyone they got in. Unlike their Marvel counterpart team the Avengers, the League rarely let new members in, and if you actually ever left the team, they even made you re-apply (ask Wonder Woman: after she quit they made her take trials to come back. And she's freakin' Wonder Woman.) In their first twenty-three years, the original founding seven-member team expanded to nine new members only. Almost all new additions to the team were characters that had been around awhile and had earned some kind of status. Arguably only the Red Tornado was a flat-out nobody when he joined, and he was kind of created to be an android mascot for the team in a way.

This all changed in 1984, when the original Leaguers retired, and let an assortment of all new lame-o characters join the ranks as their replacements. No one had heard of Gypsy, Vibe, Steel and Vixen before, and no one really wanted any of them as members of the once prestigious JLA. (Only Vixen really had a significant hero career afterwards, kind of like Gina Gershon after Showgirls.) Those new characters would be shuffled off pretty damn quickly, but the precedent had been set, and the JLA had opened the doors to their once exclusive team. The proverbial floodgates had been opened, and over the next two decades, the League would welcome fifty-seven new members, many of whom simply did not deserve to be on the team still labeled as the "World's Greatest Super Heroes" on the cover.The following are perhaps the characters most unworthy of ever being members of comicdom's premiere super team.

Oh, and before anyone just assumes Vibe is #1...he's not even on the list. It's sometimes just too easy to pick on Vibe.

10. The Silver Sorceress & Blue Jay

Originally created as analogues of Avengers Scarlet Witch and Hank Pym over at Marvel, these two characters first appeared in an issue of Justice League of America way back in 1971. Marvel had just the year before introduced the Squadron Supreme, which were thinly veiled alternate Earth versions of DC's Justice League heroes. Wanting to show that two could play at that game, in 1971, DC themselves introduced three characters who were alternate versions of members of the Avengers: Silver Sorceress, who strangely seemed to wear brown and gold and not a shred of silver(at least Scarlet Witch wore scarlet); Blue Jay (a combo of the shrinking Ant Man and Hawkman); and Wandjina, an aboriginal God who was essentially a pastiche of Thor. In their first appearance, they were manipulated into fighting the JLA, who they were tricked into thinking were villains after their alternate Earth was destroyed in a nuclear holocaust.

These three characters didn't appear again for fifteen years, until they showed up in the third issue of the Keith Giffen's revamped Justice League series, seeking to destroy all nuclear weapons and save our Earth from the fate that destroyed theirs. Wandjina soon died, but Sorceress and Blue Jay joined the League since they have nowhere left to go really, their Earth being nuked and all.

Sadly, these characters never really grew beyond just being poor man's copies of more popular Marvel characters, and Silver Sorceress was killed off a few years after her return in one of those annual Justice League crossover events, since those things always needed someone to fill the role of cannon fodder/sacrificial lamb. Usually the characters no one cares about are the ones that are the first to go (see: Vibe.) Or just maybe no one was threatened by her helmet that looked like little floppy bunny rabbit ears.

Blue Jay more or less went into limbo soon after, where he stayed for another fifteen or so years, before making one last appearance in James Robinson's Justice League of America title, just prior to the New 52 relaunch. Blue Jay decided at the end of that story to fly off into the Multiverse, searching for a world that might appreciate him more than the main DCU Earth did. Good idea Blue, nobody really cared about you around those parts anyway.

Shouldn't she be called the gold and brown Sorceress? And girl...them floppy bunny ears aren't working for ya.

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Marvel's Avengers Assemble, which is what the live-action movie was called in English-speaking countries where they have fonder memories of John Steed and Emma Peel, is the newest Marvel cartoon, and the first episode is now available to watch free. Granted, if you're like me and don't use iTunes much, it's still a pain - upgrade the software, restart the machine, create a new account, update your credit card info all for a cartoon - but I soldiered on. And will be royally screwed if they snuck a Human CentiPad clause in all umpteen of those damn boxes.

It seems to be roughly based on movie continuity but with some differences. The Stark Tower looks the same, the team roster too (Falcon joins in this first episode). Yet Modok is a known threat (though Red Skull is presumed dead, but not for long) and the Avengers have broken up over what seems to be the shared agreement that Tony Stark's kind of a prick.

Also, Hulk stays Hulk - he's never puny Banner in this episode, but he is slightly more articulated than in the movies.

It's got some good cliffhangers - a major character seems to get killed off right off the bat, and another one comes close at the end of the episode. For very little kids, this might not be the first Marvel toon to show.

And if you can't get Samuel L. Jackson, Chi McBride is a damn good lower-budget Nick Fury. Too bad they didn't get Werner Herzog to actually be Red Skull.

They look like this, of course

Nothing like a good callback joke. Why, a good callback joke is better than booze!

Seriously, though, Russia's doing killer robots. Although the ones they're demonstrating look totally joystick controlled, like drones, to me.

Video after the jump of robots from 2009 (thanks earthmanny!) uploaded by "russiadefence" with suitably threatening music. They look like headless Johnny Fives. Think they've figured out the heads and arms in the last four years?

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It certainly would like to position itself that way. And what with the numerous leaps of science-logic in movies like Star Trek Into Darkness, a nitpick-proof sci-fi flick sounds intriguing (I thought Gravity could be it, but y'all managed to effectively pick the nits in that trailer). Here, I too have questions. Such as...

-A mission to one of the moons of Jupiter? What could possibly go wrong...apart from your intelligent computer trying to kill you and a black oblong turning you into a giant space baby? Nothing else? Okay then. You don't maybe wanna try for Mars first?

-Is this a found-footage type of movie? Because those work best when there aren't any famous people in the thing. Sorry, but don't try and tell me this is some compilation of actual space broadcasts when I know good and well that Sharlto Copley is alive and well here on earth where he's getting ready to pimp Elysium at Comic-Con again.

-Does it basically turn into a rip-off of Alien there at the end? Or worse, Apollo 18? Or am I being deceived by extra clever marketing and editing?

Watch the trailer after the jump and you can decide. I'll be catching this at the LA Film Festival next month.

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You know you've got it made when a poem you wrote in college gets published in multiple limited editions. In this case, The Dark Man is significant because it's the first time Stephen King write about Randall Flagg, the antichrist figure from The Stand.

Augmented by creepy illustrations from Glen Chadbourne, it's a simpler tale of a faceless man walking on down the road, and the dark secrets he hides. I put the term "prequel" in quotes because I'm tired of people misusing the term - if it was written before The Stand, it's not a prequel, but a predecessor.

And somehow I never get tired of decaying amusement parks as horror settings, which is fortunate, because authors don't either.

You can preorder your copy directly from Cemetery Dance Productions. A look at the many variant covers after the jump...

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