So, we just sat through “Whitney,” which does for sitcoms what Ted Bundy did for lawyers. It made us wonder: what shows were so bad that networks didn’t try them. Turns out there’s a lot more than you’d think.

The deserted barracks of the Soviet Red Army

In this week’s “around the web” segment, ThisBlogRules (or TBR for all you acronym lovers) visits the creepy, deserted, and downright dirty barracks that once housed the Soviet Union’s Red Army. We also examine how forensic science solved some of the world’s most infamous crimes. It’s all right here, in this week’s (unnecessary dramatic pause) “around the web” special.

Ah, who on God’s green earth doesn’t love and adore Marvel Comics. Just think of all the awesome superheroes they launched into mainstream pop culture. We have Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Captain America and Thor among many, many others created by the American comics company since it first cropped up way back in 1939. Recently, graphic designer Marko Manev honored Marvel Comics by designing minimalist posters representing these beloved super-powered crime-fighters we all know, love and wish we could be.

by Will Conley

This is Part Two in a series of five posts about real librarians who are way, way cooler than you. Now then, where were we? Ah yes.

Last time, boys and girls, we talked about St. Lawrence the librarian, the Christian who not only didn’t mind being grilled like a New York strip steak…

…but actually supplied cooking advice to his pagan torturers while on fire. Fastforward a century and a half, and the power relationship between Christians and pagans is the exact opposite…

by Will Conley

This is Part One in a series of five posts about real librarians who are completely and utterly badass. We at This Blog Rules are looking at you, and we’re thinking, “This reader looks like he hasn’t read a book since 1995. Well fuck him. If he can’t get his ass to a library every couple of decades, we’ll bring the library to him — except without the dust and that homeless dude rolling his daily cigarettes in a corner study station.” Thus was born this series. We hope you enjoy it.

Librarians come in three popular flavors:

Boner-inducing, dust-farting and Noah Wyle.

That selection seems a bit limited to us. We submit for your consideration a fourth kind of librarian: the prodigiously indestructible-nadded.

And no, we’re not talking about Conan the Librarian. He’s fake by two degrees. We’re talking about real, live librarians whose testicles or ovaries could balance the Encyclopedia Britannica on the Scales of Justice.

History is studded with librarians who thumped their hefty baby-coders onto the proverbial chopping block in the name of truth, justice, the church, poor people, gay people, and the right of all people to upend a urinal and make everyone call it art.

Take this patron saint of librarians and archivists, for starters…