politics

Monday various

  • Need a little extra bees and honey in your sky rocket? Cockney rhyming slang to be added as an option to some East London ATMs. Silly merchant bankers!
  • An interesting article on the new graphic novel version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, although I’m not so sure about the whole “comic books are the anti-book” sentiment that seems to be running through it. [via]

    • It may be time for me to revisit Bradbury’s original novel, especially in light of the man’s own sometimes puzzling pronouncements about it in recent years. I love Ray Bradbury maybe more than any other writer, and it’s possible he’s earned his curmudgeonly ways, but it can be a lot easier to love the words than the man.

  • Still, the man’s an absolute darling compared to, say, Lord of the Flies author William Golding [via]

  • Dear Tom Ridge: too damn little, too damn late. I didn’t even like you all that much when you were my governor.

  • And finally, John Scalzi has been getting some flack in certain circles for his write-up of design flaws in the Star Wars universe, but the man isn’t wrong. (Even the six-year-old me, who can’t help but pester, “Well, maybe the Sarlaac isn’t native to Tatooine,” has to accept that.)

Sunday various

  • Well here’s a shocker: a zombie apocalypse really would wipe out mankind. So say Canadian researchers, anyhow, and I’ve learned to trust Canadians on matters zombie-related. [via]
  • From the “Are You Sure That Isn’t from The Onion Department”: “College Grad Sues College Because She Can’t Find a Job.” [via]
  • I had real problems with Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica near the end — not as much as some people, maybe, but still enough that I have yet to finish watching the final season. (It’s telling how much I wasn’t enjoying it that I was able to stop, months ago, midway through the cliffhanger mutiny episodes, and not really feel compelled to continue.) But how can it not be too early for yet another remake? The elements that Moore didn’t adapt were the cheesy Star Wars-ripoffs of the original show. Who, besides maybe Glen Larson and Dirk Benedict, is crying out for that? And so soon?
  • Fox News gets okay to misinform public:

    In its six-page written decision, the Court of Appeals held that the Federal Communications Commission position against news distortion is only a “policy,” not a promulgated law, rule, or regulation.

    Well that’s reassuring.[via]

  • And finally, uniting all robots under a single operating system? Yeah, that couldn’t possibly go wrong… [via]

Saturday various

  • I have to say, even on a simple design and aesthetic level, I pretty much hate this new Twilight-inspired cover for Wuthering Heights. And that’s even before you throw in all the kind of sad cross-marketing with Stephanie Meyer’s books — which, as near as I understand these things, are pretty bad:

    Quite what Emily Brontë would make of it all is anyone’s guess, although she would probably be quite gratified to actually have her name on the latest editions of Wuthering Heights – like her sisters, in her early career she adopted a male-sounding name, Ellis Bell, to overcome the prejudice against women writers. There’s a fair chance, though, that she might be spinning in her grave at the thought that her work is best marketed with the intimation that it is a pale imitation of Stephenie Meyer. And that’s not a course of action which is to be encouraged, given the latest publishing fad for mashing up classic texts, re-inventing them as gory horror stories, and flogging them to the Twilight generation.

    I must add, however, that I have no great fondness for Wuthering Heights, which I quit reading about halfway through. Like Jessa Crispin, I worry about young girls swooning over Heathcliff just about as much as over Edward. These are not exactly healthy relationships, ladies.

  • I liked Eat Pray Love both more and less than I expected to. It’s often wildly self-indulgent, whiny, and desperate in its new-agey-ness, but those are all complaints the book levels against itself throughout, and it’s often incredibly engaging, so… But honestly, I don’t know if I’m up for a sequel.
  • I can’t say I agree with all of Quentin Tarrantino’s picks for top 20 films (since 1992) — I think Unbreakable is underrated, and arguably Shyamalan’s best movie, but masterpiece of our time? Not hardly — but he thinks intelligently and not at all pretentiously about movies. Here’s a man just madly in love with the medium, warts and all. (Also a man, if I’m not mistaken, physically morphing into Charles Nelson Reilly.) [via]
  • Every time I read an interview with director Eli Roth, I feel like I’m getting one step closer to breaking down and finally watching Hostel. The movies he makes don’t really appeal to me, at least on the immediate and visceral level, but he speaks passionately and intelligently about them and the genre.
  • And finally, via Gerry Canavan comes this (I wish) surprising statistic: 62% of Republicans say the government should stay out of Medicare. Which really does “[illustrate] the profound levels of ignorance that currently interfere with the debate over health care…”

Tuesday various

  • Is the future of Twitter in code? Orangeman? [via]
  • Though I don’t like it, I’m not diametrically opposed to five-day-only mail delivery. But I’d be screwed if the post office shut down all services on Saturday. That’s the only chance I get to check my post office box, and usually my only chance to mail anything like issues of Kaleidotrope. (Act now if you want a copy then?!) [via]
  • Ah literary ice creams… If only.
  • Homeless Offered Free Airfare To Leave NYC. I’m not really sure what to think about this. On the one hand, it’s an effort to reunite the homeless — many of whom I’m sure are teenage runaways — with family members, who may be better equiped to care for them. On the other hand, it’s shipping the homeless problem out of state to save some money and make them somebody else’s problem.
  • But on a somewhat happier note… It’s not often you read the phrase “aerospace engineer turned composer,” but I enjoyed reading about these failed London musicals [via]:

    A common complaint in the reviews for Too Close to the Sun is that the show doesn’t even fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category – that rarefied realm which made Gone With the Wind and Imagine This instant classics of a sort. Crucial to such flops is a sense of failed grand ambitions, which is why the burning of Atlanta in the first was as hilariously inept as the evocation of life in the Warsaw ghetto in the second. To enter the annals of true awfulness, you need to stake a greater claim on the imagination than was ever going to be proffered by a chamber musical about the waning hours of an American novelist. It would have still been a hard sell on the West End if Elton John had written it. (That, by the way, is not a suggestion.)

Wednesday various

  • There’s an interesting — albeit pretty spoiler-filled — post on gossip and character in the writing of Stephen King over at Fantasy Magazine‘s blog.

  • I can’t say I’m surprised the centerpiece of the George W. Bush Library will be a handgun…

  • New Zealand has some weird ideas about advertising. First, there were New Zealand Air flight attendants and pilots in nothing but body paint, and now a bleeding billboard to promote traffic safety.

  • Toonlet seems like a neat idea, but I’m not so sure about the “you hereby grant to Toonlet a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty free, worldwide license” clause in their terms of service. [via]

  • And finally — “It’s made of pure plotdevicinum.” I really enjoyed this Bad Transcript of Star Trek, more so than the actual film, I think. [via]