Are you living in a failed state? Find out by taking this one-question pop quiz!

1. Consider this scenario: "On your way to work, you zip past a red light and are immediately nabbed." Does the word "nabbed" mean:

a) "gunned down by a local militia who didn't like the look of your own militia colors" b) "arrested by a religious police organisation run by students who were trained in a refugee camp in a neighbouring country. They don't care about you ignoring the red light, but you spend the night in a makeshift cell and are flogged in the public square for not wearing a long beard or a veil." c) "mobbed by starving kids who think you're a UN aid convoy, because nobody else can ignore a red light without a) or b) occurring." d) "blown up by a car bomber passing the green light from your left." e) "fined € 25 and told to pay more attention in traffic."

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At last, an internet meme that's actually significant! These, apparently, are the 110 most banned books (somewhere, presumably in the US). Make the ones you've read in full bold. Make the ones you've read in part italic. I've underlined the cases where I don't quite remember if I have read them myself or if I've become acquainted with them through citation or adaptation (in one variant, you must underline the ones you'd like to read, but I was more interested in the "uuuhhhhh" ones):

#1 The Bible #2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain #3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

4 The Koran

#5 Arabian Nights

6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift #8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (Prologue) - I've read the Prologue in full but not all the tales. #9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne #10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman #11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank #14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert #15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker

18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin

19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding -- I'm going to, Adam, honest.

20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne

21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin -- I'm going to, Adam, honest.

#25 Ulysses by James Joyce #26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio #27 Animal Farm by George Orwell #28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell #29 Candide by Voltaire

30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

31 Analects by Confucius

#32 Dubliners by James Joyce

33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

35 Red and the Black by Stendhal

36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx

37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire

#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle #39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence #40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair

44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding

47 Diary by Samuel Pepys

48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy #50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey #54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus

55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X

57 Color Purple by Alice Walker

58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke

60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck

#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau

#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais

68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

69 The Talmud

70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau

71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence

73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

75 Separate Peace by John Knowles

76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck

78 Popol Vuh

79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith - Why is this banned?

80 Satyricon by Petronius

#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl #82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

83 Black Boy by Richard Wright

84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu

85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George

87 Metaphysics by Aristotle

88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin

90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner

#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin

95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig

96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown

#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines

102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau

103 Nana by Emile Zola

104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Only very small bits, mind. Basically I've leafed through my father's copy. #107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck

109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark

110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Looks like I've read more from the very most banned than from the tail of the list.

Today's experiment has been succesful beyond my wildest dreams. I now know that I can't do that. I tried to color the comic with Ecoline, a transparent water-based range of paints that used to be used in professional comics in the Netherlands in the 1970s and '80s. Then, the art was colored at published size, on a blueprint of the line art. Now, like many other products, it's falling into disuse, and I thought I'd learn about it while the product was still available at all.

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For every item that I've crossed off my to-do list for the week, two new ones have sprung up. For the past year (actually longer, but it only began to be harmful in the past year), I've put work first before anything else. It's that mindset which allowed me to complete a long story with regular updates, full page format, full color. But it's also caused me to neglect a lot of stuff - from correspondence to replacing household items to actually making concrete plans for the next couple of months. And now it's all coming home to roost. The reason I mention this here instead of on my Livejournal is that some of it actually affects other areas of the job, like reprinting old minicomics and sending them to people who have them on order. I'll get to it this week. However, it sometimes helps to poke me a little bit because that takes me out of my hyperfocus... eventually. So don't be shy about dropping me an urgent email reminding me to do this, that or the other, should the need arise.

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Reader Martin Diehl responded to Monday's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic, writing:

As I looked at nitpik1 ... I saw a surprising visual bonus, a utilikilt! LOL. It's all in the details!

Utilikilts

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This week, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan will answer nitpicks from readers. I will also take the opportunity, in these non-canonical strips, to experiment with my tools a bit.

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Jeroen, Sidsel and I saw Lais perform in a packed Oosterpoort tonight and they sure didn't disappoint. Considering that, on the basis of their four records, I consider them to be among the very best European music has to offer, that's high praise indeed. They were backed by a guitarist, bassist, drummer, keyboardist and accordionist, and that backing group sounded a lot better on the new material than the big production I mentioned in my review of the album.

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If there was a festival whose bill consisted of Kaizers Orchestra, De Kift, Krang, Stuurbaard Bakkebaard and, oh, I don't know, maybe Tom Waits headlining, I'd probably go. Even though I really, truly, madly, deeply hate festivals.

Today's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic concludes the Rite of Serfdom storyline! And of course, there's only one way a story like this one can end: with a banquet! I wanted to get back to my Euro-comics roots, so I put in some references to other classic comics from the European continent. See if you can find them.

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There are only a few days left before the end of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan storyline The Rite of Serfdom. A while ago, I asked readers to post their nitpicks about the story on the Message Board, so that I could devote a series of special episodes to resolving them. People have responded, but too many of the nitpicks were submitted through other channels like email or MSN. If you have posted nitpicks that way, please repost them in the message board. Otherwise I may forget or lose them. I will try not to, but the best way to get your nitpicks answered is to post them in the message board, allowing me to simply print out the thread on Friday and start working on the ones that I can answer in a comic. The thread is still open for new nitpicks as well.