Word: golem
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...shouldn't take a small publisher, based in Canada, to bring baseball to American comicbooks, but it has. Fortunately, James Sturm's rousing, brass-band-and-hoopla wonder, "The Golem's Mighty Swing" (Drawn & Quarterly; 108 pgs; $11.95) is more than equal to the task...
...life - eating at Joe's restaurant, but in the back, and sleeping on the bus. They survive on their faith in baseball. After several bad breaks, Noah gets persuaded to try a gimmick. They put a ringer from the Negro League in a costume and introduce him as the Golem of Jewish legend. Fishkin, the team's pinch-hitter, explains the legend: "a golem is a creature that man creates to be a companion, a protector or a servant. But only God can grant a creature a soul and inevitably golems become destroyers." And so, as it must, disaster befalls...
...mixes Jewish mythology with the mythology of baseball as a way of exploring the myth of America. It's a big subject, and not an easy one. You can tell when the baseball-as-America metaphor gets used as an easy trope by a literal player-hater. But "The Golem's Mighty Swing," has the beauty, universality, thoughtfulness, and sweep of baseball at its best...
...protagonists. They create a comic-book crusader known as the Escapist, an unabashed projection of Kavalier's revenge fantasies. A young artist with Harry Houdini's ability to pick locks while holding his breath, Kavalier has escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia by hiding in a coffin containing the mythic Golem of Prague, and yearns to make enough money to help his family flee Adolph Hitler, or Attila Haxoff as Kavalier's overly cautious boss at Empire Comics insists on calling the dictator...
...their report in Nature, Lipson and Pollack admit their "primitive replicating robot" is far from the mythical medieval humanoid, or golem (after whom they've named their project). For one thing, it doesn't actually replicate--it can't make robots that make new robots--nor does it learn from its environment. But, as Rodney Brooks of the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab points out, it's a "long-awaited and necessary step" to creating machines that are truly lifelike...