Evolution of the Batman Logo

Wrote Clive Thompson:

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I didn’t realize how often DC artists had tweaked the logo for Batman. Here’s a poster by Breen that tracks all the changes.

As the designers write …

The early evolution is slower than you'd expect. From 1939 to the early 1960s, the bat-symbol changed mostly in proportion — wings got wider, then narrower, then wider again. The head appeared, disappeared, grew prominent, shrank back. Artists tweaked wing points from five to seven to nine without much consistency. Printing technology was crude enough that fine details often vanished on the page anyway.

Then 1964 changed everything. The bat landed inside a bright yellow ellipse, and suddenly the logo had presence. The version refined in 1966 — with the wings curving outward to fill the oval — became the definitive Batman emblem for an entire generation. It held that position for over three decades.

There are some super weird ones!

DC's alternate universes — Elseworlds, the Dark Multiverse, one-shot specials — are where the bat-symbol gets truly strange. Batman: Holy Terror reimagines Bruce Wayne as a priest, and the emblem reflects it. Batman: Digital Justice #4, the first fully digital comic book ever made, carries its own distinct symbol. The 2017 Dark Nights: Metal event spawned an entire gallery of corrupted Batman variants — the Dawnbreaker, the Drowned, the Merciless, the Devastator — each with an emblem designed to feel wrong, like a bat-symbol from a universe where Batman lost.

The 100 Best Novels of All Time

[The title page of the first edition of "Middlemarch" (1871-1872), named the best novel of all time]

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The Guardian asked authors, critics, and academics to help compile a list of the best 100 novels of all time.

Selecting a book will show you who voted for it; then click on the voter's name to see their other choices.

I've read 59 of them in their entirety.

I started but failed to finish 7 of the remaining 41 titles, most notably the seven volumes of "In Search of Lost Time," the first volume of which, "Swann's Way," I've begun at least five times, never coming close to its conclusion.

Perhaps I'll give it another try.

4K Video of Cat-5 Super Typhoon Sinlaku

Photographs captured by a Japanese weather satellite in April 2026, remastered and transformed into this video by Seán Doran.

Sinlaku was the strongest tropical cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere since 2021 and the strongest storm overall so far this year.

The Mariana Islands, Guam, and Micronesia all suffered widespread damage and the storm has so far claimed 17 lives.

taken.

This web page shows how much data your browser collects that websites can use to "fingerprint" your device — even without cookies.

It identifies your device with enough specificity to distinguish it from most others on the internet.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

How to read X posts if you don't have an X account

I happened on this slick trick in a comment on Hacker News.

Instead of https://x.com/bookofjoe, use https://xcancel.com/bookofjoe

Above left, what you'll see.

Very cool!

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Note added 4:50 p.m. today, Monday, June 8, 2026: I just checked to make sure it still works and it does.

Be patient: It takes a couple seconds to do whatever internet voodoo is necessary to take you to the "dark side."

Nissin Cup Noodles FTW!

The classic, the pioneer of microwave noodles remains atop the heap.

I've had a zillion varieties but Nissin still takes the top prize because:

1. They're the fastest

2. They taste great

3. They're cheap

4. The container never leaks

VANTA concurs, as you can clearly see in the video up top.

Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is...

... do you, Mr. joe?

That's the only possible conclusion I can draw from the fact that I found the highly acclaimed/awarded films "One Battle After Another," "Marty Supreme," and "Project Hail Mary" all horrible.

"One Battle After Another" received widespread critical acclaim and won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, among several others. It took all I had to watch until the end — 2 hours and 42 minutes!

"Marty Supreme" received great reviews and was a box office success, but proved too much for me to endure and I quit watching well before the end, which occurred 2 hours and 30 minutes after its start.

"Project Hail Mary," which I had waited patiently for to stream and watched on Vision Pro so as get the best possible (6K!) viewing experience, got highly positive reviews and to date is the second highest grossing film of 2026. I stopped watching after an hour — no way could I bear the boredom of an additional 1 hour and 36 minutes.

What is it with all these 2+hour-long movies, anyway? 

90 minutes, like in the old days, oughta be enough to get your message across.

And no, I'm not thinking of a song — as you will have noted, I've already done that.

'London Spy'

Here's a terrific 2016 5-part BBC series I happened on recently.

No car chases, no gunfights, no drones.

Very, very different from most spy thrillers in that there's little violence and technology, instead a slow unpeeling of layer after layer of misdirection and subterfuge and one surprise after another.

Thoroughly engrossing and absorbing.

Also an absolutely terrific cast.

Wikipedia has much more if you don't mind knowing before watching, or if you prefer not to/can't watch.

THE HARD WAY

Nearly thirty years ago the letter to the New York Times Magazine pictured above stopped me in my tracks.

Harry London's World War II commanding officer's credo may well be my favorite quote of all time.

It has served me well.

Try it, adopt it — you might like it.

The End of my Affair with Bodum Double-Wall Mugs

It occurred last week when I noticed that one of them had leaked, such that coffee remained in the air space between the two layers of glass.

I guess I'm getting clumsier as I get older because my rate of cracking these beautiful, delicate mugs has increased from never to every few months in the past year or two.

As you can see in the bookofjoe Premiere Video©®™ up top, the mug that's leaking has a hole in the inner layer of thin glass just below the handle. 

When my one remaining intact mug gives up the ghost, that will do it for me.

I'm reverting to my venerable Snow Peak double-wall titanium mugs, now over 40 [sic] years old, veterans of trekking in the Himalayas and hiking in New Zealand that work as well as the day I bought them.

'The Moment' — Charlie XCX FTW!

Full disclosure: I'd never heard of Charlie XCX until I happened on this film while looking for something to watch.

No doubt I just lost half my readers, those who have no interest in spending time on the site of someone who's that out of it.

I hear you!

But I digress.

I watched the 2026 film on Prime Video last night and enjoyed it immensely: it's a documentary of sorts, featuring real actors like Rosanna Arquette and Alexander Skarsgård playing members of Charlie XCX's team as it prepares for a concert video.

Very witty, funny, and droll all rolled up together.

Below, Charlie XCX performing "Boom Clap."

470 million views since it was uploaded to YouTube.

Quantum Foam

I see the term "quantum foam" every now and then in a poem.

Up top, as good a picture as I've ever seen of what it looks like IRL.

Perhaps "unreal life" would be a better locator....

Stóri Dímon — My First Icelandic Cheese

You never forget your very first.

In this case it happened yesterday so one would hardly think such a thing possible absent Korsakoff syndrome.

I happened on the cylindrical wooden container at Whole Foods, browsing as I was in the cheese department.

Never saw cheese from Iceland before so I studied the box.

It was all in Icelandic and I saw that somewhere along the line Reykjavik was involved — that's the only word I could read.

I bought one.

Impossible to tell what's going inside from the outside.

Still cheeses run deep.

There was only one thing for it: enter.

And so I did.

What I saw is what you see below.

You can't see, though, that the cheese was nicely yielding to my knife.

It's a veined cheese somewhat similar in appearance and consistency to Saga Blue, a mild cheese out of Denmark which is closer to Brie than to the more potent veined cheeses of other countries.

Stóri Dímond is creamy with a faint bite, not nearly as intense as that of Cabrales or the classic blue–veined cheeses of France.

Smooth, very silky mouthfeel.

Quite nice and a definite keeper.

I had my Crack Research Team©®™ delve deeper into the subject of Icelandic cheese and learned that about 100 different cheeses are produced in the tiny nation of 400,000 people.

The team also found an Icelandic company that ships a variety of Icelandic cheeses globally.

There is no question that the Icelandic cheese space is worth exploring in more depth.

I do so like the Ice.

Spam comments

Once upon a time, on an internet far, far away, the first thing I'd do every morning is go into my Comments section and delete on average 10-20 spam comments that had come in overnight while I was sleeping.

In those days boj got about 15,000 page views per day and thus had a far greater virtual surface to present than today, when I happily average 500 page views daily.

The thing is, bookofjoe1 (this is bookofjoe2 in case you hadn't noticed it in the URL) was formatted by me in such a way that the names of the 10 most recent commenters were prominently displayed in a column on the home page.

It offended me that longtime sidebar pals were displaced in favor of all manner of junky and stupidly named occupants, so I got them out of there ASAP.

Nowadays I get perhaps one spam comment a month, most recently this past Sunday on this post (top).

The great thing is that with the current layout, commenters aren't identified on the home page and you have to click the Comments link at the bottom of a post to see them.

Thus, I don't bother deleting them because prolly only a couple people on the planet other than the spammers will do so.

What's old is new again: Kodak Charmera

Wrote Mark Frauenfelder in Recomendo: 

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The Kodak Charmera is a thumb-sized digital camera that clips onto your keychain and shoots gloriously lo-fi 1.6-megapixel photos and video.

My daugher has been taking amazing shots with it — the grainy, slightly washed-out images have a nostalgic, early-2000s digicam vibe that mocks the clinical perfection of phone cameras.

One catch: without a microSD card, it only stores 2 photos, so buy a cheap card to make it truly useful.

Check out the r/toycameras subreddit for lots of photos from the Charmera and its ilk.

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How do you spell "retro?"

$34.99.

2 AIs tried to help me: 1 succeeded.

I'll compress two+ hours of repeated rage-inducing TechnoDolt©®™FAILS into the following account.

1. I bought a Das Keyboard 4 with super-loud clicky key press noises because I wanted a blast from the past: I had a Das keyboard 20 or so years ago but tired of the effort required to type along with the noise, and since then I've used silent Apple keyboards.

2. Only when it didn't work after connecting it to my MacBook Pro and asking Perplexity Pro why not did I learn there is a specific version made for Mac and a different version for Windows/PC. I had no idea that was the case. Investigation revealed mine is a Windows/PC version. Much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair and screaming ensued.

3. Once I calmed down, I asked Perplexity if I could use my version with my MacBook: it replied "Yes," and added that I'd need to remap the keyboard. OMG. That's so far above my TechnoDolt©®™ pay grade I'd have to wear shades to have any clue. I did realize this was not as simple as switching from Google Maps to Apple Maps but rather required some degree of computer savvy.

4. Nevertheless, I persisted. After around two hours of multiple FAILS/dead ends, I gave up.

5. But I was REALLY annoyed!

6. $200 for what?

7. Fortunately for me, the next thing I'd intended to do was go running; the two+ hours of dead ends meant it was now 10° hotter and the sun was beating down instead of the shady run that would've happened two hours earlier. By persisting with the keyboard follies, I could delay my run, which I dislike intensely, even more!

8. I took a flutter on Google Search's recently built-in Gemini AI and asked it the same thing I did with Perplexity.

9. Pictured up top, where Gemini triumphed almost immediately after I asked for help because my Das keyboard wasn't showing up on my MacBook: Check Your Adapter

10. I was using a generic USB-C to USB adapter set-up (below, top) up to that moment. I dug around in my cable drawer and darned if I didn't have the recommended Apple USB-C to USB-A adapter (below, bottom).

11. I replaced the generic adapter with the Apple version and OMG onscreen instructions appeared in the form of the MacBook's "Keyboard Assistant" that guided me to an easy-peasy setup that took under a minute — and my Das keyboard worked!!!

Bottom line: don't waste your money ($17/month) on Perplexity Pro — go with the freebie from Google, which is right there on the main search page and doesn't require you to open a separate app.

'Euphoria' — Season 3

Now that all eight episodes are available I've started binging them, the only way I can keep track of what's happened in previous episodes.

Watching as they appear once a week no longer works for me: I can't recall stuff that happened yesterday, much less seven days ago.

Unlike most series which run around 45 minutes/episode, these are around 75 minutes long, more like a movie.

Thus, one a day is optimal for me, unlike my standard 2/day for most series.

But I digress from my main point, which is that I'm finding this season as good or better than the previous two, a very high bar.

Most reviews of Season 3 have been negative, saying it's way too dark, over the top, and jumps the shark into exploitation and its ilk.

Me, I subscribe to the Mae West view: "Too much is never enough."

Bring it!

'Without matter there is no space or time'

So stated Albert Einstein in 1921.

More: "It was formerly believed that if all material things disappeared out of the universe, time and space would be left. According to relativity theory, however, time and space disappear together with the things."

Up top, the song I'm hearing....

Who wants to be involved in my first-ever crowdsourcing/'wisdom of the crowd' post?

I DO!

joe, you idiot: you're supposed to turn this over to your readers!

Ok, Ok....

Look at the five (5) photos above taken by my Crack Photography Team©®™.

I chose one to appear in tomorrow's 8 am post.

Let's see if you agree with my selection.

Hold on — isn't it important when making a choice here to know what the context is?

Is it about my beloved calico cat Vanta or instead does it have something to do with the two horizontally placed white connectors?

Answer: the latter.

If enough peeps like this feature, I may make it a regular one.

If enough of you hate it, for sure it will become a frequent flyer in this space!

PressReader

First I ever heard of this news aggregator was when it appeared in my email inbox Sunday.

Long story short: It costs $29.99/month for all-access from anywhere in the world and brings you up-to-date news as it originally appeared where it was published.

Tell you what, it's more user friendly and has much greater scope internationally than Apple News+ which costs $12.99/month.

Google News, one of my first stops daily, is free and once you get its "For You" feature up and running, fast and informative.

À chacun son goût.

bookofjoe's Favorite Thing: Multicolor Pen

Sure, we all had these when we were kids but since then the Japanese have taken the concept to a whole new level.

I took a flutter on the one pictured above and below and I'm charmed by its whimsical shape and functionality.

Much better than the ones I remember, it's a ballpoint that writes smooth as silk in red/blue/green and black ink (1 color at a time).

Lagniappe: It's also got a mechanical pencil that appears when you click the pocket clip.

Besides the one pictured above with a transparent green barrel, there's also a less flashy white iteration (below).

Pretty impressive for $6.80-$6.99.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

Kids' Dream Jobs 1920-2026

VibeCheck

Last week while making and posting YouTube Shorts to my channel, I noticed a new feature on the YouTube app: VibeCheck.

I figured this was a riff on vibe coding so I passed it by but then curiosity got the better of me so I made a terrible video and then asked for a VibeCheck.

Up top, the results.

Long AI analysis short: what this feature does is encourage homogeneity and concordance with what most people like.

That's the opposite of what I'm about: I'm always trying to create conditions favorable for a sudden appearance of a rabbit popping out of a hat.

Smoothing down edges to make things go down easier, to mix a metaphor, is the opposite of my intent.

PASS.

Current Weather According to Mark Rothko

The site's collection of 89 paintings are "each tagged with a color register, temperature, and mood so the search engine can match it to your moment, no matter where you are in the world."

Doritos Protein Nacho Cheese FTW!

I was superstoked earlier this year when I read about new Doritos Protein chips.

Constant readers will know that a large part of my diet consists of junk food: always has and always will.

My five basic food groups are beef jerky, instant microwave noodles, candy, popcorn (from BjornQorn) and caramel corn, which deserves its own distinct group separate from candy and popcorn.

After months of waiting, the new Doritos chips have arrived.

Crunchy fun story short:

• SWEET & TANGY BBQ are just that: quite good... but the tangy translated to just a bit too hot for me to eat the entire bag.

• NACHO CHEESE hit the spot: just right.

Of interest: both flavors don't seem nearly as addictive in their protein incarnations as in their original formulations.

At stores everywhere.