- Boy, when Mark Twain called you an idiot, he didn’t fool around. “…scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link” indeed!
- New York woman falls, rips Picasso painting. Well that’s embarrassing! Gawker [via] has more.
- The Chinese have re-named a mountain “Avatar Hallelujah Mountain,” after the James Cameron movie. Because of course they have.
- S.C. Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer Compares Helping Poor to Feeding Stray Animals. They sure do know how to pick ’em in South Carolina, don’t they? [[via]
- And finally, a lovely quote from China Miéville:
The truth is different. Chrononauts litter no less than any other tourists. The past is a dump, each epoch a tip of its futures’ rubbish. There are no police: only overworked binwomen and binmen endlessly shovelling junk into timefills. They slog uninterrupted: the detritus is all over the place, and unnoticed by us natives. We stub our toes every day on things discarded from times to come.
movies
Monday various
- Would you have spotted the fraud? I’m not convinced I would have. A good reason to avoid any unattended debit or credit card reader. [via]
- Mark Evanier further defends Jay Leno:
What I don’t get is why some people think Leno had a moral obligation to retire and disappear. They didn’t like that he did that 10 PM show. They didn’t like that he was willing to do the half-hour show at 11:35 when that was proposed. They don’t like that he’s going to take back a show that he and his crew didn’t want to give up in the first place. I know some of you don’t think the guy’s ever funny but you oughta try what I do. If I don’t like a performer, I don’t watch him. It’s just as effective as if he did disappear and it saves a lot of time.
- Speaking of Leno, he’ll apparently be hosting this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner. I guess it’s better than Rich Little, but not by much.
Then again, Leno’s hosted the event before (in 2004), and, Stephen Colbert’s 2006 appearance notwithstanding, they haven’t really been known for making memorable choices for host. Anybody remember Yakov Smirnoff’s routine from 1988 or Elayne Boosler’s from 1993? Me neither.
- Last week on Twitter, I joked that in the new movie Extraordinary Measures, Harrison Ford is entirely computer-generated. By law, Brendan Fraser’s co-stars must be at least 35% CGI. Turns out I maybe wasn’t so far from the truth: Ford’s character didn’t exist in real life. I guess they figured he’d be more convincing as a Nebraskan than as a Taiwanese.
- And finally, speaking of Twitter, the first live tweet from space! [via]
A quiet Friday
I think I know what happened to those hours I seemed to lose the other day. They somehow got added to this Friday morning and afternoon, which, for the longest time, just would not end. This evening, though, I’ve just been lying about the house, more or less dog-sitting, while my parents are seeing South Pacific on Broadway. I could joke that I only see Broadway productions starring Angela Lansbury, since in the past year I’ve managed to see her in both Blithe Spirit and A Little Night Music. But the truth is, I much preferred having a quiet night at home. I fried up some eggs and a little leftover Chinese food for dinner, read a few stories in Poe’s Children — having finished Interpreter of Maladies on my train ride home — and watched a couple episodes of The Mighty Boosh and In the Loop.
All in all, a very pleasant, albeit low-key, evening.
Right now, I’m lying here on the bed with the dog beside me, waiting for my parents to call if they need to be picked up at the train station. The dog seems a little miffed that a) they’re not home yet, and b) that he isn’t yet asleep. He does have a schedule to keep, after all.
That’s one way of putting it
Nathan Rabin on the little-seen (and it seems with good reason) movie Tiptoes:
Casting [Gary] Oldman as a dwarf is like a well-meaning liberal producer making a film version of A Raisin In The Sun in the early ’60s with Peter Falk in blackface in the lead role.
Thursday various
- A whites-only basketball league? That’s actually sort of laughably repugnant, to the point where you just assume it has to be a hoax. “We don’t hate black people. We just wish there wasn’t so many of ’em, and they weren’t such gosh darn awful people.” [via]
- Bloomsbury seems to have a problem with black people, too, at least on their book covers. You’d think they’d have learned, after all the controversy over Justine Larbalestier’s YA novel Liar last year, but apparently not.
As Small Beer Press suggests, “Your task this week: buy a book with a person of color on the cover.”
- Meanwhile, Anderson Cooper Rescues Injured Boy from Haiti Earthquake Riot.
- Push is being made into a TV series? Actually, you know, I think this could maybe actually work. As I noted back when I first saw it, Push had an intriguing world that it didn’t do a whole lot with. (Besides filming it in scenic Hong Kong and giving Dakota Fanning an opportunity to film the least convincing drunk scene ever.) There’s room to do something more interesting here. [via]
- And finally, if you’re not reading Letters of Note, you’re missing out on great finds like this.