Link Love

1. I don't want virtue to exist anywhere.

2. Skilled Trades Seek Workers. "With the shortage of welders, pipe fitters and other high-demand workers likely to get worse as more of them reach retirement age, unions, construction contractors and other businesses are trying to figure out how to attract more young people to those fields. By 2012, demand in fields like welding is expected to exceed supply. Their challenge: overcoming the perception that blue-collar trades offer less status, money and chance for advancement than white-collar jobs, and that college is the best investment for everyone."

3. James Bowman on Dark Knight. "I have heard the convergence of Batman and the Joker compared to that between John Wayne and Lee Marvin in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But Ford was telling us that people want to believe heroism grows out of reason and law and civilization but that it really doesn't. Instead, it is a throwback to the most primitive honor cultures before there were any law or civilization, which are things that cannot be contracted for. The Dark Knight tells us the opposite..."

4. K-Punk on same. ". . . the emphasis on deception in The Dark Knight is one of the themes that connects it with Nolan's previous films, and Batman's climactic act of self-sacrifice is precisely an act of deception. It takes place at the level of signs: what he must give up is his reputation, his good standing in the eyes of the Gotham public. The act of deception doesn't conceal an underlying good act - it is the concealing that is the good act itself."

5. Scott Duguid responds to K-Punk. "Although my appreciation of his rather garlanded Joker (and of the Dark Knight in general) is not unreserved, you're correct to say that the strength of Heath Ledger's performance consists in his playing the mask. What sanctions that, however, for me is the mask's transparency. The misapplied make up is not an extension of the rictus, as with Nicholson's Joker; rather the mismatched smear points us to the face, as do other tell tale signs (splodges of pink flesh under the white, the rather deep ridges of wrinkles). The message is: the face is the mask. And hence no backstory, or, which is to say the same thing, no locatable history of trauma (which again is to say, cause)."

For someone as skeptical of authenticity as I am, the last two were especially interesting.