legal

Tuesday various

  • Anybody wanna chip in together and buy Miramax?

  • I mean, I’d be happy to write Errol Morris another letter like this if you think it would help. (I love how Weinstein asks Morris for casting suggestions to play himself.)

  • Well that’s just weird: Barack Obama and Scott Brown are cousins. [via]

  • Texas bans a children’s book because they thought it was written by a Marxist. Not only is that pretty dumb, they were also wrong. [via]

  • And finally, are there aliens already among us? Inside us?

    Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth — which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation — has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.

    Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television — which uses a far weaker signal — and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.

    “Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.” [via]

Thursday various

  • I was sad to see that J.D. Salinger had passed away. I think John Hodgman said it best: “I prefer to think JD Salinger has just decided to become extra reclusive.”
  • I’m much more sad to hear the terrible news about Kage Baker, who has apparently lost her battle with cancer and has only a few weeks to live. I haven’t read a lot of Baker’s books — just the first two in her Company series — but she’s a real gifted talent taken much too soon.
  • Today in banning: first, a Wisconsin jail bans Dungeons & Dragons:

    Singer was told by prison officials that he could not keep the materials because Dungeons & Dragons “promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling,” according to the ruling. The prison later developed a more comprehensive policy against all types of fantasy games, the court said. [via]

    And a California school district bans the dictionary. [via]

  • In much happier news, a story of a Haitian man rescued from beaneath the rubble 11 days after the earthquake — “and hours after the government declared search and rescue operations to be officially over.”
  • And finally, Zack Handlen watches the horror movie Orphan so the rest of us don’t have to:

    …just playing creepy music and panning over a room isn’t creating mood, it’s giving the production designer a clip reel…

Wednesday various

  • I don’t know…when the bank seizes the wrong house, changes the locks, tacks a foreclosure notice to the door, and leaves 75 pounds of fish to rot for a week, do you really think the homeowner’s suit has no merit? If nothing else, he should press charges for breaking and entering. [via]
  • I’m just a little late to this, but: the Guardian considers the worst books of the last decade:

    To remember only achievement and worth is to ignore the vast majority of our cultural experience. It helps create that strange cultural telescoping that makes us think that the past was always better; that odd warping of collective memory that enables us to recall even the 1970s fondly.

    There’s some truth to this, I think. Of course, I do like at least a couple of the books he mentions as worst of the decade. (Oracle Night does approach self-parody, but it’s the last time I truly enjoyed Auster, and I found it a genuinely haunting book. His Man in the Dark, ostensibly about the past decade, was much, much worse.) [via]

  • Jonathan Lethem: “Ian McEwan has a great line where he says, ‘Book touring is like being an employee of your former self.'”

  • NPR looks at The Big Bang Theory and the male gaze:

    But the changes in this particular show make for a great example of the fact that you don’t just avoid empty, cliched versions of women (or men, and I am looking at you, Sex And The City) because they’re offensive or infuriating or anything like that. The best creative reason to avoid them is that they make your show bad. Making Penny real has opened up all kinds of comedic possibilities that haven’t transformed it into life-changing art, but have made it into a very good half-hour sitcom… [via]

    I started watching the show over my holiday break for the first time, and I’ve very quickly caught up. (I watched this week’s episode last night.) I liked the first season (and even the pilot) considerably more than Linda Holmes did, but she’s not at all wrong about Penny. What makes the show work is that these are very real, well developed characters, and it suffered when she alone wasn’t.

  • And finally, for the couple of Doctor Who fans in the audience, John Seavey offers a reconsideration of the Fifth Doctor.

Thursday various

Monday various

  • I watched George Romero’s The Crazies this weekend. While it was interesting, I think I like the movie that John Seavey describes more than the one I actually saw:

    It’s not a particularly cheerful movie; this is Romero at his most nihilistic, during the Vietnam era, suggesting that maybe insanity is endemic to the human condition and if we really were being driven mad, we might not notice the difference. But it’s also clever, tense, and filled with some haunting and evocative imagery, and it has some good acting from the principals. I recommend it.

    Still, I can’t in all honesty not recommend the film. It’s maybe not Romero at his very best or most polished, but it’s never uninteresting.

    I wish I could say the same about the trailer for the remake, which looks a lot more like just a generic zombie movie.

  • You stay classy, Gore Vidal. [via]
  • “Beaten stiff competition”? Oh, I see what you did there, you naughty thing. Who’s the best Bad Sex writer now?
  • “Come to New York: your chances of getting killed here have gone down significantly!” [via
  • And finally, speaking of New York… [via]