- io9 was just too much of a time-sink for me to pay attention to it with any regularity, but calling it “the David Itzkoff of the Internet“… Whoa. Those are some harsh words.
- Applying every Photoshop filter, in order, to an image yields some interesting results. But I’m more amused by some of the Photoshop geeks in the comments who seem to recognize at a glance specific filters and wonder if some were skipped or duplicated.
- I am so over Gordon Ramsay.
- I have a great fondness for I Claudius (and an abiding suspicion of all remakes), but this remake seems especially unnecessary. How do you take what was a 13-hour miniseries and tell the same story in only two or three hours? Then again, the idea was floated last year, too, with a different director attached, so it’s altogether possible it will never happen. (It has been tried as a feature film before…)
- Newspaper Uses Twitter to Microblog 3 Year Old’s Funeral sounds like a rejected Onion headline. Sadly, no. I’m sure there are many valid uses for social networking sites like Twitter as journalism tools, but this really doesn’t seem like the place to start.
- Roger Ebert on why he gives movies “too many stars.” It’s an honest and considered response. I can usually understand Ebert’s ratings even when I don’t agree with them. (I think Congo is a terrible movie, for instance, but I totally see what motivated Ebert to give it three stars.)
- From Publishers Lunch, I learn that “Nicholas Sparks’s new novel, for publication in September 2009, is being written simultaneously with the author’s own adaptation of that story as a starring film vehicle for Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus.” Leaving aside whatever you might think of either Sparks or Cyrus — I’m pretty uninterested on either count — there’s something weird about adapting your own novel for the screen as you write it.
- Apparently, my last name is most common in New Zealand? I’ve never been, but that just doesn’t seem right. Then again, I tried “Coopersmith,” for which my last name is all the time mistaken, and that’s overwhelmingly in the U.S. and Canada.
- The Church of England to Charles Darwin: Dude, our bad. Nobody tell Sarah Palin, or she might want to invade the U.K. (Whose BBC America you can actually see in Alaska!)
- In her defense, Sarah Palin probably didn’t know she was quoting an avowed anti-Semite in her vice presidential acceptance speech. But then again, there’s not a lot Sarah Palin does seem to know. (And most disturbing, she’s unwaveringly certain about what little she does know.)
- And I hate to over-generalize, but seriously, have the Republicans no shame?
The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.
I can never understand why anybody feels to need to remake things that were essentially perfect the first time. There is something in that mentality that I simply cannot wrap my brain around.
If you’re adapting your novel for film as you write it…aren’t you writing a screenplay?