Given the sheer quantity of flak stirred up by the BBC's putative "100 best" list of Great Britons, it was inevitable that someone would put together a list of the 100 worst. And it surprises me not at all that a handful of individuals appear on both lists.

Fifty Penn Place in Oklahoma City is not your average mall. For one thing, it's vertical: retail and restaurants occupy the lower levels, office space fills up the tower. What's more, it's mostly devoid of chain stores. Instead of the usual panoply of Bed, Bath and Boredom, 50 Penn Place offers a place for beautiful women (I assume unbeautiful women are turned away at the gate, since I've never seen any there) to see the latest manifestations of, say, Stuart Weitzman's shoe obsession.

And there's Full Circle, a bookstore that sprang from the loins of a drugstore turned nightspot, moved simutaneously uptown and downstairs, and competes very nicely, thank you very much, with Messrs. Barnes and Noble and those other out-of-town guys. I was there today to see an old friend try his best to injure his carpal tunnel by signing as many books as people would be willing to haul away. And since Brian A. Hopkins is now a Known Factor, and an honored one, in the realms of horror and dark fantasy, quite a few of those books made it past his pen and through the door. Apparently I'm not as forgettable as I thought I was, because he spotted me quite a distance from the table, though mercifully he seemed to have forgotten my pseudonym from those days. I filled up the holes in my Hopkins collection, we traded stories, and eventually I got the heck out of the way so the next fan could get a chance and the woman behind the checkout (beautiful, of course) could collect forty bucks or so from me. It's an experience I hope to repeat when — not if, but when — he wins that Nebula award.

The announcement came last month:

And now come the winners. Who knew Bernie Ebbers was just the latter-day incarnation of Holden Caulfield?

Phil Donahue's new MSNBC show is barely outdrawing infomercials these days, and to add to the general level of mirth, now John Bono's Big S Blog ("Migod, what a big S!") has inaugurated the Donahue Show Death Watch. If you'd like to speculate as to just how long America's News Channel (yeah, right) can keep this fossilized specimen of Sixties cluelessness alive, feel free to play along.

Perhaps in answer to DC Comics' Batman: The 10-Cent Adventure, which came out last winter and sold an amazing 700,000 copies, Marvel has shipped Fantastic Four #60 (actually #489, but who's counting?) with a startling cover price of nine cents and a temporary revision of the mag's long-time slogan to "The World's Cheapest Comic Magazine". Even ignoring the effects of four decades' worth of inflation, this is less than the price of issue #1 in 1961, which sold for a dime.

As usual, Canadians suffer from the exchange rate: they have to shell out a whole fifteen cents for this issue. And of course, as an unreconstructed Sue Richards (née Storm) fan, I'm happy to pay even regular retail. But you haven't bought a comic book in years and years, so what you want to know — apart from "Why is this greyhaired hack blogging about this sort of thing when there's a war on, fercrissake?" — is: "Is it a good story?"

I think it is. In fact, I think it's worth 25 times the price. Which is what you'll pay for #61 (#490) next month, if Marvel's promotional mavens have been sufficiently prescient.

It's called Sick Day. Think of it as The Real World with physiological, not just behavioral, toxicity. Will it come to the States? How desperate do you think the networks are? (Two words: Desmond Pfeiffer.)

(Muchas gracias [sort of]: JunkYardBlog.)

The mysterious voice(s) of In Arguendo, with a sentiment we are proud to echo:

This item was titled American Idol Finals!!, and no, I didn't watch that either. Frankly, if I want to see relentlessly-mediocre people who are in way over their heads, I can always tune in C-Span's Congressional coverage.

There is no longer any doubt that small, decentralized terror cells like those of the al-Qaeda network can wreak serious havoc in a short time. But did they win the early battles only to lose the war?

Of course they did. American resolve is famously implacable, and American military might is unequaled. But the third force in this triad — American culture — will prove to be the decisive factor.

Even the late, unlamented Osama bin Laden would have to admit it. However much he may have railed against the evil modern West, he never would have stood a chance using the tools of medieval Islam, and he knew it. And Western mores, which much to the annoyance of European Community types are de facto American mores, have already gotten a foothold in Islamic countries, and no amount of haranguing by the mullahs and the military will dislodge them. The burqa will be just as obsolete as the codpiece, and in retrospect just as silly.

So the larger war is already won. We must still remain on guard while the last of the medievalists empty out their curiously-modern weapons, and the necessity of replacing a few regimes is still on the agenda, but the hearts and minds of millions of Muslims enslaved by the perversity of their leaders are already starting to turn our way. There will probably always be hard-line Islamic fascists, but they will be banished to the margins, not by American forces, but by the insistence of a Muslim people anxious to join the rest of the twenty-first century.

If you think, as I have, that Michael Eisner's tour of duty at the top slot at Disney has been at best sort of Goofy, you'll be pleased to know that Eisner's days are numbered, and the numbers are low.

Aimee Deep, who broke this story, adds this little historical note:

Come to think of it, I don't miss any of those guys either.

Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, famed for his nostalgic looks back at lost youth, apparently had a taste for present-day youth as well. A tipster informed the Tribune that Greene, a few years ago, had met a teenaged girl through his column, and the two subsequently had had an affair. The newspaper confronted Greene with the story, then asked for his resignation.

Evidently I'm not cut out for journalism; I get the chills just talking about vaguely sexual matters with twentysomethings.

(Muchas gracias: Pejman Yousefzadeh.)

Update, 4:40 pm: "Good riddance," says Spoons.

Gregory Hlatky, in praise of the Three Stooges:

I am compelled to point out here that the sole American firm among the Big Five, AOL Time Warner's Warner Music Group, is not mentioned by Mr Hlatky, and with good reason: they do even less for classical music than their four rivals.

I saw Koyaanisqatsi during its first release in 1983, and it scared me, or at least left me decidedly off-center. On the face of it, the film seemed easily dismissable as neo-Luddite Technology Is Evil stuff, but no such conclusion is ever reached; if anything, the incredibly-detailed cinematography of technology both amazing and mundane comes across as equal parts condemnation and glorification. And the score by Philip Glass is a true masterpiece of minimalism, shifting imperceptibly in synchronization with one's brain waves. I left the theatre, made a copy off cable the first time it aired, and duly put it out of my mind for the next couple of decades, managing to miss Powaqqatsi, the sequel.

With the third Qatsi film, Naqoyqatsi, due this fall, MGM has issued the first two films separately on DVD, and bound them together as a promotional two-pack. (I paid $22.99 at Best Buy for the set.) No doubt the DVD would look better than my old Beta tape, but at least part of the motivation for buying this thing, apart from getting to see Powaqqatsi at last, was to see if my interpretation of the film, such as it was, stood up after all these years, or if I was just young and dumb and full of it.

And there are still no answers, nor, says director Godfrey Reggio in an interview tucked into the Special Features section, are there supposed to be. The film is supposed to open the mind, not fill it up with some particular agenda; if there are questions, the film has done its job. On that basis, Koyaanisqatsi must be considered a roaring success. And Glass' score still haunts me. (Yeah, I know, Glass can be repetitive. So is hip-hop. But you don't hear anyone complaining about hip-hop, probably because it's Authentic Ethnic Street Gibberish and therefore cherished by Relentlessly Multicultural types, under penalty of face-loss. Give me Glass any day. Steve Reich, even.)

If you haven't seen the first two films, I urge you to take a look for yourself. If nothing else, you'll get a look at the source material for almost every music-video cliché you've ever seen.

The "Red vs. Blue" stuff invented for the benefit of clueless TV anchordrones has turned into a cultural measuring stick, and too often We the People are using it to beat upon each other.

The ever-thoughtful Geitner Simmons dissects this phenomenon today in Regions of Mind. "This isn’t, or shouldn't be, a caste society based on one's geographical location," says Simmons. "But a lot of people, in the blue-state region as well as the red-state camp, certainly act as if they would like it to be."

Well, maybe. My one remaining chat haunt attracts mostly people in the Tri-State Area. (And what's with that name, anyway? Are the other 47 states forever separate from the Connecticut-New York-New Jersey axis, and separate from each other?) I occasionally catch some flak from newbies, surprised to hear a voice from "deepest Oklahoma, where the wind comes rushing up your shorts," or something like that, but the regulars don't have any problem with me — especially since I've actually visited them in their element and was quickly able to persuade them that yes, we do have running water here, and no, I don't have to remove bison residue from the front yard on a regular basis.

Stephanie Losi gauges the distance between Then and Now:

I didn't go to my tenth, or my twentieth. Or my thirtieth.

But while I'm easily Googleable, the result of six years on the Web and eight or nine on Usenet, the searcher will quickly discover that whatever my putative Internet savvy, I have gone on to do nothing. And what's worse, I'm damned good at it.

The producers of The Riot Show, an amateur video shot in central Connecticut by evidently-bored high-school students, would like you to know that they're not ripping off MTV's Jackass.

They probably don't carry as much insurance as MTV, either.

Russell Wardlow, in his capacity as Mean Mr. Mustard, takes us out to look at the ravers:

I manage eight days a week as a depressed sourpuss, and I've never had so much as a milligram of E. And believe me, you don't want to see me done up as some sort of Mutant Gothboi. But "cohesively sour, bad-tempered and generally unhappy"? I am there, Jack. In fact, I am there so long I should charge these guys rent.

Most of what gets posted here is ignored, not so much for reasons of quality, or the lack thereof, but the simple fact that this particular site doesn't have the reputation of the better-known blogs. (Of course, since it's been up far longer than most of the better-known blogs, maybe it is reasons of quality, or the lack thereof.) Still, once in a while, something I write resonates in sections of the blogosphere, and this, from 27 June, is one such item:

Contrary positions were staked out, and eventually a consensus was reached, which, I suppose, proves that there's always room for irrelevancy, though it does support Jesse Walker's premise that Coulter fans have much in common with fans of boy bands. And I read enough issues of 16 and Tiger Beat during my, um, formative years to understand the concept of a non-sexual object of desire.

Of course, Mr Walker reminds us, "Coulter's merits or demerits as a writer, thinker, and human being have nothing to do with whether anyone thinks she's cute," and that's true as far as it goes, but after sixty years or so of pervasive, even invasive, television, it must be said that superficial aspects of appearance count for something. Sometimes they even inspire fantasies, and not always pleasant ones, either.

(Disclosure: I am not, to my knowledge, anyone's object of desire, sexual or otherwise.)

From Andrea at Ethereal Reflections:

Yea, verily.

Arts & Letters Daily is dead.

Long live Philosophy & Literature.

Is the National Junior Honor Society elitist? A Connecticut middle-school principal seems to think so:

And this year, there will be no NJHS chapter at this school, ostensibly because the faculty adviser transferred out, but it seems pretty clear to me that this guy has had too many sips of Berkeley Kool-Aid; he did everything but suggest that students not qualifying for the Honor Society were suffering from impaired self-esteem.

I was sufficiently incredulous to ask an actual teacher for a translation, and here's what I got:

We?

Well, the Sixties are over. The principal in question "acknowledges" that he's taking a "bold step"; I guess sliding right off the edge of the cliff requires a certain level of boldness. Me, I'm suffering a certain level of sickness just thinking about it.

Update, 7:23 pm: Expanded the teacher's remarks to improve clarity.

It's hidden behind the Premium wall, but there's an interesting piece by Suzy Hansen in Salon.com this morning which follows up on the fallout from New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka's blither about how Somebody Blew Up America. The remarks I found most pertinent were those by former United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky, who offered this:

I don't know, really. Inevitably, the Cantos (which I haven't so much as looked at in thirty years, but which now I feel compelled to tackle once again) reflect Pound's personality and his politics, but by no means does this constitute a qualitative judgment; no one (perhaps save Robert Fisk) writes from within a vacuum.

There is, I believe, a romantic notion on the political left to the effect that artists, simply because they are artists, are necessarily more in tune to the ways of the world than the rest of us, and the Baraka debacle is probably not enough to dispel that notion. Baraka's politics, ultimately, are of little interest; only the poetry matters. And Somebody Blew Up America, as it happens, strikes me as not so great a poem; were it a great poem, its positive qualities, I believe, would ultimately outweigh its political posturing. Ezra Pound might have appreciated the situation.

"You would cry, too, if it happened to you," chirped Lesley Gore in "It's My Party".

"Like hell I would," retorts DragonAttack at RockSnobs, because...well, because that's the way boys are.

The F Scale, designed in the heady days of 1950, is intended to "estimate...fascist receptivity at the personality level." Now we all know about intentions, and my personality is anything but level, but I took the darn thing anyway, and scored a 3.23, which is fairly near the middle of the scale.

(Muchas gracias: AC Douglas.)

I made some noises to this effect last year:

The buzz on the new Swept Away is, um, not good, which might suggest to the suggestible that Madonna and the Mr. should quit doing films together. The ever-contrarian Wing Chun has other ideas.

It seems to me that the ideal time to conduct audience surveys for commercial radio is right about now, while NPR affiliates are repelling listeners with their semiannual hat-in-hand bit. (I don't know what the PBS pledge schedule is; here in Oklahoma, it seems to run from January to December.) I am aware that it is necessary to take these measures to keep the stations going, and I have a whole shelf of station-branded mugs accumulated over the years, and so far I have never lost a parking space as a result of pledge drives, but there's still something a trifle disquieting about the entire process.

No, I don't know how to replace the pledge drive. I suppose I could slip Diane Rehm a couple of bucks when she comes to town in a couple of weeks, and if anyone is taking contributions to buy Click and/or Clack a Toyota Land Cruiser, I'm in, but I suspect we're stuck with what we have for the time being.

"Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses," said Dorothy Parker. I never believed it, myself; I mean, it wasn't that I actually made passes at girls who wore glasses — scarcely if ever did I make a pass at anyone irrespective of eyewear — but I knew of no instance where a pair of glasses actually made someone less attractive.

Now it turns out that Mrs. Parker may have been correct after all. I refuse, however, to budge.

(Muchas gracias: This link was swiped from Donnaville; Donna's got the looks, she's got the glasses, but alas, she's got no individual item links.)

Christopher Hitchens, of all people, heads west in a Corvette (what else?) to find the mystique of Route 66, and he tells the tale in the November Vanity Fair. A few pertinent observations, first near St Louis:

Regarding Oklahoma City:

Around Amarillo:

To harp further on radio:

Go read the whole thing. If nothing else, you'll get a glimpse of what it's like to feel superior to an entire region, something I've never been able to manage in forty-nine years and visits to thirty-odd states. I've driven this route a few times myself, at least the western four-fifths of it, and yes, some of it seems a bit dispiriting at times, but I don't believe that civilization ends at the east bank of the Hudson, either.

"Norton Womble, reporting live from the scene of a sniping in suburban Washington. Now back to music, starting with Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust', right here on 99.7 FM."

Jim Romenesko's Media News is reporting that the late, lamented Arts & Letters Daily can no longer be considered "late". The site, along with other assets of ALD's parent company, has been acquired by The Chronicle of Higher Education, and founder Denis Dutton will return as editor. Debut of the new ALD is scheduled for Friday, 25 October.

Three, maybe four cheers.

People have been sick of the baby-boomer generation for some time now, though few seem quite as annoyed as TeeVee's Philip Michaels, who writes:

I'm not about to give in on the music question — the lamest sub-Spectorian girl-group opus is about three orders of magnitude better than anything you'll ever hear out of Christina Aguilera — but otherwise, I'm shutting the hell up.

Okay, you've got an English class to teach, more literary than grammatical this semester, and one of the books you have to cover is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What's first on your list of things you need to make this work? Enough copies to go around? Tom Sawyer as a prerequisite? If you're in Portland, Oregon, at the very top of the list is, of all things, sensitivity training. That whirring sound you hear is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, subterranean pinwheel.

How in the world did we ever get to this sorry state? Erin O'Connor explains:

It's not just Twain's expense, either; to the extent that our children are herded through this "multicultural" charnel-house, they are deprived of the opportunity to make up their own minds, to learn how to decide for themselves what a book like Huckleberry Finn — indeed, any book — really means.

(Muchas gracias: John Rosenberg.)

Those of us who blog swear by, and occasionally at, our templates. Yes, I know, I did this site for years with no content-management system (and, some might say, no content either), and there are still manually-maintained blogs out there, but the point seems relatively inarguable just the same, and I assure you, I didn't spend a great deal of time reinventing the wheel every day. Data-entry types, of course, are hopelessly tethered to various Templates of Doom.

Then again, that's all computer stuff. Do other more-or-less-cultural activities have the same need for ready-made, fill-in-the-blanks packages? Michael at 2 Blowhards is persuaded that there's some sort of PBS Documentary Kit out there, and all you need are the following:

Time to set free the Ken Burns within you, say I.

(Update, 10:26 pm: Reformatted slightly, but no textual changes.)

Apart from the usual Hollywood distortions, I know nothing about bullfighting. I've never been within five hundred kilometers of Pamplona; I skipped Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon; I haven't seen Almodóvar's Matador. I didn't even pick up Herb Alpert's "The Lonely Bull" until three years after its release. Repeat: I know nothing about bullfighting.

Your standard animal-rights types will be more than happy, I'm sure, to tell me that it's nasty and horrid and brutal and such. On the other hand, Jesus Gil, who has actually toiled in this particular vineyard, finds it eminently defensible:

If that's so, why are they almost always killed?

I still don't think I want to see one of these things up close and in person, but it's always nice to hear the other side for a change.

If I remember correctly, the oldest woman ever to appear in a Playboy pictorial was fifty-five. (This would be Nancy Sinatra; how does that grab you, darlin'?) Still, there are names on the magazine's wish list who will never be removed no matter how old they get, and one of those names belongs to Sophia Loren, who reportedly is miffed for being offered only £100,000 for doffing her designer duds. This does not mean that if Hef ups the ante, she'll do the deed, but the sheer thought of it — well, do I actually want to see a 68-year-old Italian woman in a reasonable semblance of her birthday suit?

If you've read this site for more than twenty seconds, you already know the answer.

This is something I've pondered myself once or twice, with results so inconclusive they don't even deserve to be called "results". From Lactose Incompetent:

I can usually distinguish bad writing — give me ten minutes and I'll give you paragraphs full of it — but spotting good writing is a trickier business. Not as tricky, however, as producing it:

I wish I had the temerity to describe what I write as having "style".

But I do understand the "hodge-podge" bit: sometimes I think I'm doing the prose equivalent of Peter Schickele's Quodlibet, in which every single musical phrase is lifted from some other, presumably better work.

Hmmm...

J. Jonah Jameson dumping on Spider-Man again? Well, yeah. But, as Bryan Preston points out, the ol' web-spinner gets about the same sort of press as your average conservative Christian: if it's at all positive, it's probably grudgingly so.

What's a "Culture Representative"? At Tufts University in Medford (pronounced something like "Meffuhd"), Massachusetts, it's a reserved minority slot in the student government, intended to ensure that those who have been historically underrepresented have some sort of voice and some sort of recourse against abuse.

Enter Rob Lichter. Writing in the Tufts Daily, he disclosed the existence of a previously-ignored minority:

Jeff Jacoby, in an op-ed in The Boston Globe, is sympathetic:

Meanwhile, Lichter and other conservatives at Tufts continue to pursue a Culture Representative position, motivated by the not-exactly-unspoken desire to undermine the whole system. There's a faint hint of "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" here, but nobody said the process was going to be either easy or pleasant.

(Muchas gracias: Erin O'Connor.)

Dr. Earl Leathen Warrick, one of the "founding fathers", if you will, of Dow Corning, has died in Orange County, California.

Warrick, born in 1911 in Butler, Pennsylvania, devoted his career to polymers and elastomers; he invented silicone rubber and held, singly or jointly, 44 US patents.

It was a failed experiment, though, that perhaps brought Warrick his greatest fame. During World War II, Warrick and fellow researcher Rob Roy McGregor were trying to work up a synthetic rubber that could serve as a workable substitute in the wake of wartime shortages. "3179 Dilatant Compound" really wasn't suitable for tires or weatherstripping, but it did have quite a bounce to it, and they took it home to the kids. Dow Corning had no particular interest in selling children's playthings, so it was left for some astute marketing type to buy up lots of the stuff, seal it into little plastic eggs, and spread it across the land, where you and I eventually spread it across the Sunday funnies.

You can still buy Silly Putty today; in fact, you can buy Dow Corning's original 3179 Dilatant (call it Sensible Putty) directly from their Midland, Texas facility — if you're prepared to order at least two 50-lb cartons.

It's called Help Us Silence Hollywood, and it's getting some play in blogdom. The crux of this particular biscuit:

Various examples follow. There's little to dispute in the description — for every David Duchovny, just this far from a Ph.D., there are likely dozens of Melanie Griffiths who barely escaped Krispy Kreme — but I'm not signing off on this thing. Hollywood types have the same Constitutional rights to make blithering, idiotic statements as the rest of us. Here in the Land of Blogorrhea, our job is to fact-check their asses, not to silence them.

(Muchas gracias: Rachel Lucas, who reproduces the complete text of the petition.)

For years, I have cherished the delusion that the true bird of love is the swallow. What was I thinking?

How is this possible? "Madison...is now the second most popular name for girls in the United States." So reports Kevin Lauderdale, and by "now" he means "born in the year 2001."

There are, evidently, a lot of parental units out there who really liked Splash, or are hoping their daughters grow up to be Moxie. I mean, what other possible explanation is there?

The quest for Newer and Cooler Stuff isn't doing us a whole lot of good, says Trinity:

[Mental note: This is not the place to mention my nifty little phone that plays "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Even at under $20.]

"Anti-anti-lock brakes". I like that. There's something vaguely disquieting about turning a major driving function over to a bunch of microchips; I still get slightly queasy at the thought of cruise control, fercrissake.

I'm not giving up my cupholders, though.

The embattled archdiocese of Boston, having been unable to settle some 450 claims of sexual abuse by its clergy, is now on the verge of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

There are distinct advantages to a Chapter 11 filing. Existing civil lawsuits will be suspended; no new suits can be filed. But there is also a downside: the filing will be widely construed as an admission of liability by the archdiocese, and their financial records will be opened to the public for the first time. Some church properties — notably, the chancery in Brighton, to include Cardinal Law's residence — are likely to be turned over to the court to pay claims against the church.

Cynics, of course, will scoff. "They're already morally bankrupt; this just takes care of the money."

(Muchas gracias: Bill Peschel.)

In Chicklit's Paper Jam, Anna Carey reports on a small English publishing house with a narrow but clear focus: Persephone Books Ltd, which puts out high-quality editions of "forgotten books by female writers" and distributes them through its own Web site (and its own store in a former betting shop in Bloomsbury).

Given the sheer number of titles published each year — easily a hundred thousand in the United States alone — a lot of good books will inevitably fall through the cracks, and the number of undiscovered classics hiding in the crevices must be fairly huge by now. Persephone so far has retrieved 38 of them, and while this isn't a quantity likely to upset the descendants of Mr Barnes and Mr Noble, it's definitely a worthy effort, especially since, in the words of the founders, the books are "guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget." Such a deal.

On the off-chance that some of you aren't reading Cinderella Bloggerfeller, I point you to the latest exposition from Cindi's bloggergänger Dr. Dinah Dienstag, unexpectedly appearing on a Thursday for once. (I doubt there will be a name change to "Donnerstag", but you never know.)

This time, the good Doctor brings us a list of Essential Clichés, bits of cant which simply can't be overlooked by anyone seeking to make his mark in the murk of Post-Modern Criticism. Or something like that. In the midst of all the pseudo-literary bushwa circulating these days, it's kind of hard to tell.

Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Truly, the end is at hand.

As anyone who's used a recent Windows machine knows, certificates aren't necessarily what they're cracked up to be; the presence — or, for that matter, the absence — of digital signatures may turn out to be meaningless.

By no coincidence, something similar is true in one's life away from the computer as well. Alexandra at Out of Lascaux might have the potential to be a truly great teacher, but so long as she's lacking the appropriate signatures, we may never know:

The National Education Association, which aspires to be a Great and Powerful Professional Organization, has the urge that typifies almost every G.P.P.O.: they wish to define the profession in their terms, and their terms only. Included in those terms, of course, is the desire to restrict the profession to those who have had the proper indoctrination.

Not that the indoctrination necessarily does anything to enhance actual teaching. Alexandra continues:

And, of course, how to complete the paperwork before and after you act.

I am neither educated nor trained, but I can certainly tell the difference between the two, despite my complete and utter lack of certification. (Those of you ready to hit the Comments link to tell me that I am indeed certifiable — well, I already knew that.)

Andrea Harris slaps down the tragically hip:

Yeah, all those nonconformists look alike.

(Aside to Ravenwood: Yeah, it's a strange title. Blame Shania.)

If anyone still cares, Azra Akin, Miss Turkey, has become the new Miss World.

I had some thoughts on Oliver Willis' piece on the porn industry, and on Susanna Cornett's comments thereto, and by the time I'd turned them into something vaguely resembling readable text, I had a couple of screens full of screed, which after not enough polishing is now available as The Vent #320.

The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam is missing two paintings today; thieves gained access from the roof, dropped into the building, and made off with two of Van Gogh's early works, valued at somewhere between millions and priceless.

Swiped were View of the Sea at Scheveningen (1882) and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884).

"What is it about Southerners and mayonnaise?" asks Kevin McGehee, and he's not kidding:

I estimate that over the past four decades, I have uttered some variation on the theme of "Hold The Mayo, Dammit" literally a thousand times, so I can relate.

And remember: revenge is a dish best served with tangy Miracle Whip^®.

I know from nothing about Encover, Inc., but its name, at least, strikes me as aggressively bland. Floyd McWilliams, who actually saw the name affixed to an office, is a bit blunter:

Is it even English? I keep wanting to give it a French twist (ahnh-ko-VAY). Doesn't help.

Tongue presumably firmly in cheek, the estimable Dr. Weevil proposes a revision of Beethoven's Fidelio suitable for those sensitive souls in the European Union, in which Leonore, horrified when she realizes that she's actually pointing a pistol at Pizarro — "A gun? What are we, crass Americans?" — tosses away the weapon, leaving the way clear for Florestan to be stabbed to death and subsequently venerated as the first martyr of the gun-control cause.

Come to think of it, this might also work at the Berkeley People's Opera.

Unlike some of my fellow infidels, I don't get horribly bent out of shape when someone utters the dreaded C word during Christmas — uh, during the, um, holiday season. Sometimes, though, it takes The Onion to settle the holiday hash. Quoth Jim Anchower in The Cruise:

Yeah.

Have a Happy Ass Day, y'all.

I have always suspected that Departments of Women's Studies have nothing to do with me, except to the extent that I am considered a threat because of my membership in the half of the species with the external genitalia. Okay, fine. Maybe some people need to designate enemies before they can find friends. It never occurred to me, though, that we might be better off without those studies.

It has, however, occurred to James Lileks:

"Here Comes Peter Cottontail" is evidently more menacing than I had imagined.

But belligerent bunnies aside, all this makes me wonder what a "Men's Studies" curriculum might be like. Certainly the three-hour lab for home beer production would be inadequate, and the wisdom of Vince Lombardi can be exhausted in a few paragraphs. I am reasonably certain, however, that at no point will any of the instructors suggest, even for a minute, that women are capital-E Evil.

Have Playboy Playmates become androgynous? Not quite. But there is, apparently, a marked trend away from the hourglass: over nearly half a century of centerfolds, the average bust and hip sizes have dropped somewhat, while waistlines have actually increased. What's more, although the average height has gone up, as it has in the general population, the average weight is essentially unchanged over the study period.

I'm not quite sure what I think about this. I do know that present-day Playmates, however attractive they may be, tend to be about my daughter's age or below, which has the effect of making whatever enjoyment I derive from their photos seem inevitably somewhat creepy, a situation Steely Dan would have understood.

On the other hand, Miss January 2003 is thirty-five (link possibly NSFW), by a slight margin the oldest woman ever to appear in the magazine's signature feature. (Of course, I read the articles first.)

Chapter 12, Section D, Paragraph 5-7b:

Do not attempt to wake a sleeping student by lobbing a Koosh Ball in his/her general direction. If you miss, you look foolish; if you hit, you get sued.

And in either case, you will probably not get your Koosh Ball back.

(Via Fark)

In days of old when knights were bold and tinsel not invented, snow right before the 25th of December was viewed as an annoyance and an impediment to travel. Which, of course, it was.

Nowadays, by which is meant the last sixty years, almost everyone is dreaming of a white Christmas, and entirely too often those dreams come true: we're going to be staring at half a foot of snow before the reindeer make that last pass over the housetops.

Women I know on the East Coast will sneer at the mention of a mere six inches, but there's at least a measurable chance that the car nearest to them on a frozen road will be occupied by an individual who actually might know how to drive on the the damnable stuff. We don't get odds that good here on the Lone Prairie. Come to think of it, hardly anyone here knows how to drive in July, either.

And if you must listen to "White Christmas," Bing is good — Bing is always good — but the Drifters, in this instance, are better.

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason Magazine reports that after all these years, sales of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, despite the Chinese switch to Pinyin notation (rendering him "Mao Zedong") and Mao's switch to Death Mode, are still strong. The little (three by five) red book, distributed all over China and occasionally elsewhere, is printed in, um, San Francisco, California. I don't know if it contains pictures, but as John Lennon once (well, twice, actually) pointed out, if you carry such, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

Is it my imagination, or is the new Kentucky license plate truly the smarmiest automotive excrescence since fuzzy dice?

George Roy Hill (no relation) is gone. The director of crowd-pleasers like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, which won eleven Academy Awards between them, he was equally at home with difficult material (say, The World According to Garp).

For me, the best thing he ever did was the gentle comedy A Little Romance, in which an American student in Paris (Diane Lane, all of fourteen years old) and a French kid (Thelonious Bernard) find themselves mad about one another and, courtesy of a romantic fable spun for them by that charming old rogue Laurence Olivier, obsessed with getting themselves to the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, that their love may be forever sealed.

Many years after this 1979 film, I briefly entertained the fantasy of doing likewise with the person not yet (un)known as She Who Is Not To Be Named, despite a gnawing suspicion that at the precise moment when we started to pass beneath the bridge, when according to the legend the Kiss of Eternity must be delivered, she would gaze up at the Palace and holler, "Who let the Doge out?"

Which of course would have sealed the deal anyway, but I didn't realize that at the time.

The first entry (1 January 1660) in the blog-based version of the Diary of Samuel Pepys is up. The adaptation, by Phil Gyford from the 1893 Wheatley edition, manages to be both mind-numbingly obvious and wonderfully audacious at the same time: if you've read Pepys before, well, you're reading him again, but it's a genuine kick to see this seventeenth-century text in a twenty-first-century milieu, and Mr Gyford deserves great heaping volumes of kudos for this undertaking.

The site, incidentally, runs on Movable Type. No, not Gutenberg's.

Rap impresario Russell Simmons puts out a magazine called One World. If you see this title and assume from it that Mr Simmons is contributing to the ongoing homogenization of world culture, you might want to think again: the cover of the December/January issue features rapper Lil' Kim in a burqa, but she's got it bunched up around her shoulders, and underneath — well, already the complaints are coming in from the arbiters of Islamic culture.

In point of fact, this is a lot more than Lil' Kim usually wears, but I doubt that this particular argument will carry much weight at your friendly neighborhood mosque.

There is a marked dearth of home-schooled youngsters — that is to say, zero — in the National Honor Society. Not a reflection on the students; it's just that NHS has chapters in schools, and that's that.

Now there's an honor society for home-schooled kids who excel. In 1999, the first chapter of Eta Sigma Alpha was founded in Houston. Now the organization is going national: it has spread to at least ten states and more than twenty chapters.

Why bother, you ask? Membership in NHS scores points on college applications; membership in Eta Sigma Alpha, which has standards even higher than NHS, will eventually score points for the home-schooled. And it's one more step toward burying that stereotype of home schooling as a tool of fundamentalist Christians to ensure that their spawn grow up pious and dumb.

(Muchas gracias: Mrs. du Toit.)

Penn and Teller live in the deranged metropolis of Lost Wages, Nevada, which means that they don't have to seek out showbiz: showbiz looks for them.

Once a year, Penn puts out a list of films, bands, acts, and whatever he watched during the previous year, not so much because he thinks we should care but because it fits in with his need to document everything. The 2002 list, for some reason, is smaller than 2001's.

Teller? He didn't say a word. Go figure.

I used to throw the Charleston Evening Post into ninety-one yards six days a week. It wasn't much fun, but it did teach me the importance of drudgery as a means of putting coins in my pocket, and besides, I didn't have to get up at three in the morning to throw The News and Courier.

As in many other cities, co-owned morning and evening papers were fused into one. But if this fuzzes up the family tree a bit, well, one thing is clear: the original Charleston Courier put out its first edition on 10 January 1803, and today's Post and Courier is celebrating its 200th birthday. As a former reader and, um, independent contractor, I tip my hat to the paper that did as much as any single publication to teach me to read, both the lines of type and the messages in between.

Composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim with a lyric by Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, "The Girl from Ipanema" was a huge hit (#5 in Billboard) in the States in 1964, in a recording by Stan Getz and João Gilberto for Verve, with Jobim himself at the piano and Gilberto's wife Astrud on the English-language (by Norman Gimbel) vocal. The picture it paints in the mind is vivid indeed, but it never occurred to me to assume that there was a model for it.

Now comes word that The Girl herself, Helo Pinheiro, now 55, will appear on the cover of Playboy's Brazilian edition in March, alongside 24-year-old daughter Triciane. I simply have to get a copy of this — for historical purposes, of course.

Tom Carson's seriously-wacko novel Gilligan's Wake isn't quite as Joycean as the title implies, though the opening section, in which the narrator, claiming to be one Maynard G. Krebs, discovers that he's not hanging with the Beats by the Bay after all but is in the Mayo Clinic's Cleaver Ward, overseen by the stern Dr. Kildare F. Troop, is riddled with enough entendres, double, triple and fourple, to live up to Finnegan's standard.

From then on, it's every storyteller for himself. A Navy man tells tales of WWII-era PT boats with Quinton McHale and Jack Kennedy; a millionaire describes his role in the rise of Alger Hiss and his all-too-loveless marriage; his wife recounts life in West Egg during the Jazz Age and a friend named Daisy; a star of B (and occasionally C) pictures meets up with the Rat Pack; a young woman from Kansas finds fascination at the Sorbonne; and somehow all of their lives are intertwined by the machinations of an evil genius — a professor, in fact.

As a metaphor for 20th-century American history, Gilligan's Wake works better than it has any right to. Audacious and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, it's a glorious confection, with a high incidence of "What the hell was that?" Lots of brain candy, though the flavoring masks empty calories here and there; I don't see this becoming America's answer to Tristram Shandy or anything, but it's a good way to spend a three-hour tour.

First it was Joe Strummer of the Clash.

Then it was Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees.

Who's next?

Bigwig knows, and he's truly sorry. Really.

First, the dictionary definition:

Now maybe it's just me, or maybe it's just a sign of the times, but I never hear this word from someone who is actually trying to perform the act described in definition 1. Where I do hear it, mostly, is from people complaining that some religious — um, "faith-based" — organization is doing this, possibly with government money: "Don't look, Ethel! They're proselytizing!"

Now the First Amendment, quite properly, restricts the government from pushing one denomination or another, and if tax money is going into this sort of thing, complaints are in order. But what has happened is that the very word that describes the process, however innocent, has acquired a negative connotation, and those who aren't inclined to think kindly of religious groups in the first place (and I'm discovering that there are more of them than I thought) are more likely to use it, not as a description, but as a bludgeon.

And so the language is further debased, and another thoughtcrime is entered into the dictionary of Newspeak.

Technically, bloggers do not deconstruct: they fisk. And while the technique of fisking owes much to Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction, it owes nothing to Derrida's penchant for revisionism: texts are fisked because of what they say, not because of what we think they ought to say.

This week at NRO, Mark Goldblatt, last seen turning out a scathing novel about African-American culture, takes apart both Derrida and Derrida, the hagiographic documentary now playing at a theater near you if you don't live within a thousand miles of me, and he's almost gleeful in his, um, deconstruction:

I've always aspired to some form of post-postmodernism myself, and generally fallen flat.

What would Derrida think about fisking? I don't know, and Goldblatt doesn't say, but I suspect that he'd take exception to it, if only because the fisker bases his interpretation on the assumption that the author of the text being fisked actually intended it to read that way, whereas Derrida, I surmise, would be predisposed to assume that there is some deeper subtext somehow being missed. And I'd take exception to that, since most of the Truly Fiskable seem devoid of depth; indeed, some meet the qualifications for bas-relief.

(Muchas gracias: Cinderella Bloggerfeller.)

In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech from the Lincoln Memorial, a speech which forever will be designated by its most stirring phrase: "I have a dream."

The speech, which Dean Esmay has thoughtfully reproduced today, is a stark reminder of the way things used to be, a benchmark by which we can measure how far we have come — and how far we still have to go.

There's little more I can say, though I'll point you toward my visit to Selma, Alabama two summers ago, a trip which in retrospect is starting to look like a pilgrimage.

I tend to look askance at all things related to the Super Bowl, if only because they peg the Hype-O-Meter and it's a pain in the neck to have the device recalibrated afterwards. On the other hand, some of the peripheral statistics are occasionally amusing.

For instance: The California Avocado Commission predicts that during the Bucs/Raiders clash, some 40 million pounds of the green stuff, mostly in the form of guacamole, will be polished off by America's couch potatoes. That's gonna take a lot of chips.

For those keeping score: The biggest month for avocado consumption is May, what with both Cinco de Mayo and the Memorial Day weekend to keep us busy.

In a lifetime of fifty years, give or take a few weeks, I have spent maybe a total of six days in New Jersey. And while some fascinating things have happened to me in the Garden State — how many people can say that they've trodden the Boardwalk at Seaside Heights in wing-tips? — its contribution to what I am is necessarily fairly small. (Well, yes, there was that meeting with Susanna Cornett, but she's not really from New Jersey, if you know what I mean, and this is where I got my first real-life glimpse of SWINTBN, but she's not really from New Jersey, if you know what I mean.)

Nick Gillespie, who edits Reason magazine, really is from New Jersey. And this, he says, is what it means:

Come to think of it, it's not all that different from growing up in South Carolina, another state routinely maligned by people who really should know better, or living in Oklahoma, yet another.

Something I noticed:

Cartoonist Bill Mauldin said that in 1947, when he was twenty-five. Of course, he'd been through a lot more than most of us: he'd enlisted in the Army at eighteen, and when he wasn't toting a rifle, he was drawing cartoons for the newspaper of the 45th Infantry Division. When the 45th was dropped into the middle of World War II, Mauldin found himself in Europe, where the Stars and Stripes started carrying his stuff, bringing him high praise from the enlisted men and, at one point, a world-class ass-chewing from General Patton. Back home after the war, he took up editorial cartooning, which he'd probably be doing right now if pneumonia and Alzheimer's hadn't killed him off this morning.

Bill Mauldin was 81 years old. I'd like to think that Willie and Joe, his two WWII dogfaces, lived long and happy lives themselves.

Jerry Springer has been characterized as a sleazeball TV host for so long it's hard to imagine how his public image could possibly get any worse.

Well, it can. Replace, if you will, "sleazeball TV host Jerry Springer" with "Senator Jerry Springer".

That sound you hear is the popping of the third seal.

(Muchas gracias: Kevin McGehee.)

Well, maybe not. But Record Industry Association of America CEO Hilary Rosen, who has done more to destroy the Big Five music firms' relationships with artists and consumers than a whole server farm full of Napsters, is leaving her post at the end of this year, and her replacement, as yet unnamed, is bound to have a better, or at least less pathological, grasp of the situation.

I just wish she was taking Jack Valenti with her.

In 1903, having detected a demand for safe, quality, affordable wax crayons, Binney & Smith Company, 81-83 Fulton Street, New York City, introduces a box of eight for a nickel — Black, Brown, Orange, Violet, Blue, Green, Red, and Yellow — and devises the name "Crayola". The rest, as they say, is history, and if you grew up in the States, it's likely part of your history too.

(Oh, those fat Besco crayons that were flat on one side so they wouldn't roll away? Also a B&S product, hence the name. Hard to chew, though.)

Keith Bradsher, the New York Times hack who spewed out that anti-SUV book last year, is apparently going wider with his campaign: his publisher has kicked in a few bucks' worth of underwriting to Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of Car Talk, the popular NPR radio show. (I caught the first sponsorship announcement on show #304, this weekend.) By no coincidence, the brothers had been conducting a campaign they call Live Large, Drive Small, which needs (and, frankly, deserves) no explanation.

Much is made of the fact that SUVs, being taller, have a higher center of gravity, and therefore are more likely to roll over than real cars. Now real drivers — "On the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers," explains Volkswagen — are aware of this and conduct themselves accordingly behind the wheel. Your basic leftist, on the other hand, resents the very idea that different people have different skill levels, and seeks to replace it with criteria of a more political nature. Out here in the Real World, we tend to think that if some idiot goes too fast around a curve and rolls his expensive new toy, well, the word "idiot" is pretty much self-explanatory. Proponents of the Nanny State, however, demand that we be solicitous of idiots, and in fact encourage them to employ solicitors when idiocy produces undesired results.

As usual, most of the proffered "solutions" do nothing for the problems they imagine. Changing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards will have exactly zero effect on the vehicles already on the road. If they seriously wanted people to get into smaller, more fuel-efficient automobiles, they would push for a substantial (at least $1.00 per gallon) increase in the gas tax. But they won't do that, because it would affect everyone with a gas tank, including themselves; what they really want to do, of course, is to punish Those Other People.

In the long run, what does all this mean? Backlash, baby, backlash. When all is said and done, Keith Bradsher may wind up selling more sport-utility vehicles than Cal Worthington ever imagined.

Alexandra, poking her head Out of Lascaux, poses a perfectly reasonable question:

That's some of it, I think; if he did one-hundredth the volume and charged one thousand times as much, he'd probably get more positive reviews from the cognoscenti, who believe with all their sniffy little hearts that anything owned by someone who has a big-screen TV to watch the Green Bay Packers can't possibly have any merit whatsoever.

I snagged a 2002 Kinkade calendar once upon a time, and reported on it as follows:

Yeah, I know, everyone reads Lileks anyway, but I just loved this particular bit:

I'll be sure to ask for it at the Piggly Wiggly.

Sudden flash of insight: Once Iraq is, um, subdued, the most productive thing we can do is open up the society to Western wackiness. Wouldn't you just love to see the first Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Baghdad?

I tell you, this Lileks guy makes you think.

Some rejected TV series, courtesy of Mimi Smartypants:

And, of course, So Much More.

Back in 1991, the Chicago White Sox moved to a new facility. What made this move unusual was that the new ballpark was given the name of the old ballpark: in effect, Comiskey Park moved across the street.

The Sox aren't going anywhere, but this year and the next twenty-two, they're playing in something called "U. S. Cellular Field", in exchange for $68 million. That's the plan, anyway; given the ongoing shakeout in the wireless-telephone industry, the likelihood that there will even be a "U. S. Cellular" in 2025 strikes me as really low.

Of course, there are options even then.

Jason Kottke has decided:

And not just bacon, either.

(Disclosure: I know the guy who wrote the item linked below. He's not a blogger. He doesn't even play one on TV. But he has a genuinely-warped sense of humor, honed by the desperation that befell him after he deserted the front lines during the Peloponnesian War.)

Who has the top basic-cable series? Fox News? Lifetime? MTV? Not even. You want audience, you go to Nickelodeon. Half animated, half might-as-well-be-animated, the Big Orange Blotch dominates the segment like no other.

Of course, this means a lot of audience research, and some shows inevitably don't make it.

The end begins this way:

This is the opening paragraph from Harlan Ellison's 1972 short story Hindsight: 480 Seconds. A planetoid is approaching the solar system; it will not reach Earth, but will graze the Sun, ripping into its corona and spraying radiation for hundreds of millions of miles. As you'll remember from your grade-school science, the Earth lies just within the first hundred million.

And so the cities were melted down and the peoples gathered together and the ships built, and everyone on Earth would be moving to new homes in the galaxy — except for Haddon Brooks, who offered to remain behind and chronicle the eight minutes between the collision with the Sun and the end of all life on Earth.

In Ellison's story, everyone knows that the end is coming — they've had plenty of warning — and the departure from Earth is orderly and organized. But suppose there wasn't plenty of warning. Dr Geoffrey Sommer of the Rand Corporation think-tank opines that it might be better that way, that it might be better if the world did not know what was to come:

This might apply just as well to presumably more concrete threats — or, in the wake of this past week's increased terror threshold, less concrete threats. Are we better off not knowing? I'm not entirely sure what I think about this. Given my standard anxiety levels, which are considerable, I'm inclined to believe that news of certain impending death within X time period (as distinguished from certain impending death, period, which is presumably unscheduled as of now) might be quite enough to push me over the edge, in which case it would be a kindness to put me out of my misery.

Or perhaps I may find the eloquence of Ellison's Haddon Brooks at the very end of his report:

(Muchas gracias: Susanna Cornett.)

I haven't posted anything on the proposed World Trade Center replacements, mostly because everything I know about architecture could be slipped into the corner of a thimble and still leave room for all my good romantic advice and the souls of half a dozen managers at 42nd and Treadmill.

And maybe it's just as well, since according to Nedward, architecture is so riven with jargon and nonsense that hardly anyone, to include its practitioners, understands it anymore:

There's a lot to be said for Mies and "Less is more," but sometimes less just isn't more. And while some contemporary buildings around town seem perhaps a trifle baroque, especially considering the age of said town (114 years doth not an eon make), entirely too many structures look like Stalinist housing for the proletariat. If that's the alternative, I want gargoyles, I want turrets, dammit.

The original twin lights to the heavens that were turned on in the wake of September 11th were far more inspiring, I think, than anything solid so far proposed for WTC replacements. I hope that those lights will inspire someone who can draw, and that the newest additions to the New York City skyline will not only stand tall, but sparkle.

When there is breaking news — real breaking news, as distinguished from the parade of ephemera that is routinely pitched as such on television — the first commandment becomes "Get pictures!" And get pictures they will — even someone else's.

During Columbia's last mission, the first pictures came from WFAA-TV in Dallas, an ABC affiliate which has an agreement with CNN. When CNN went live with the story, they used WFAA's video. At a couple of points, so did Fox News, though Fox had no prior arrangement with WFAA. As an experiment, CNN sneaked a small logo into the far corner of the screen, and watched with bemusement as it appeared on the Fox monitor.

Is this actionable? Probably not. Satellite feeds are all over the place, and keeping them out of "unauthorized" hands is likely more trouble than it's worth. And cooperation is not unheard of: during the unfolding of 9/11, all the major networks agreed to share whatever they had. CNN, in fact, considers the Fox action during the Columbia disaster to fall within the bounds of fair use, but it would have been nice if they'd asked first.

Guys of a certain age and/or a certain mindset have no use for Barbie, except as part of a punchline. "But Daddy, she's so popular!" "Popular? How so? Every friend she has, you have to buy for her!" We don't really relate to Barbie: we pop open a Foster's and throw a couple of shrimp her way, and that's that.

So I'm naturally mystified when a Barbie Collectibles catalog shows up at my mailbox. I think, "Well, yeah, those old dolls with their period outfits, they probably bring a few bucks these days." But I don't throw it away, and after a couple of days I work up the nerve to see what all is being offered.

And holy mother of pearl, will you look at this stuff! Serene enough for Merchant-Ivory, hotter than Beyoncé, seemingly every conceivable fashion idiom of the last thousand years clings to that 39-21-40 shape. And while the cynical side of me thinks, "Yeah, this is a way to get someone to pay ninety-five bucks for a doll, fercrissake," I have a sneaking suspicion that outfitting a workaday Barbie for a seven-year-old girl probably isn't any less expensive.

Maybe I ought to get the Lady Camille. "Champagne-colored jacquard, lace-trimmed chiffon and strands of faux pearls envelope this dainty figure in the absolute splendor of [the Neoclassical] period of art." Okay, she just stands there. But she's got The Look, and I don't argue with The Look. Not now, not ever. I don't care if it's Mattel; it's swell.

Arguably no corporation screams so loudly about the rights of intellectual-property owners as The Walt Disney Company, which is why it is so delicious to see them embroiled in a suit over royalties.

Shirley Slesinger Lasswell and daughter Patricia Slesinger inherited the merchandising rights to A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh character. They licensed the characters to Disney many years ago. While Disney pays the bills for stuffed plush and apparel and such, they've never paid any royalties for Pooh videos, computer games and software, on the basis that these items were not specifically mentioned in the Disney-Slesinger contract.

Having been caught once myself by this sort of argument, I suppose I should feel some sympathy for the Mouse House, but at some point in the proceedings, somebody at Disney actually tossed out a bunch of pertinent legal documents, following which the company moved to block the jury from hearing about it. The California Supreme Court has now rejected that motion.

Disney, as a matter of course, doesn't much like paying for things. You may remember their last animated feature, Treasure Planet. (Actually, you probably don't; it was a box-office disaster.) Basically, it's Robert Louis Stevenson in space, just one more Disney effort to wangle something copyrightable out of public-domain material. But God forbid it should ever go in the other direction.

There is a dubious tradition of referring to action movies by some sort of abbreviation: Men in Blac