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Tuesday various

  • Peter Jackson adding more female roles to The Hobbit? On the one hand, I’m all for this. More strong female characters all around, yes, thank you. On the other hand, there’s a part of me that wants to shout, “But it’s not in the book!” On the other other hand, I find myself surprisingly unenthusiastic about the whole thing. Maybe I’ve just had my fill of Peter Jackson Tolkein movies.
  • Speaking of Tolkein, though, apparently the Eye of Sauron is at the center of spiral galaxy NGC 4151. Who knew? [via]
  • How I Passed My U.S. Citizenship Test By Keeping the Right Answers to Myself. [via]
  • In this post, Mark Evanier relayed something that several people had told him via e-mail — namely that “Map-makers sometimes include phony names and places on maps in order to identify when someone plagiarizes their work.” I’d never heard of this practice, but apparently it’s quite common.
  • And finally, people will tell you — professional writers and editors will tell you — don’t respond to negative reviews. It’s a losing game, even if you think you’re right. Even if you are right. But one thing’s for certain: you should never, ever, ever respond to a negative review like this. [via]

Thursday various

  • There’s water on the moon. What are we waiting for? [via]
  • I have to admit, when people talk about Doctor Who continuity, I just laugh and laugh and laugh. Case in point, the tempest in a teapot over how many regenerations the Doctor gets. Russell T. Davies, who recently changed it to 507, says:

    There’s a fascinating academic study to be made out of how some facts stick and some don’t—how Jon Pertwee’s Doctor could say he was thousands of years old, and no-one listens to that, and yet someone once says he’s only got thirteen lives, and it becomes lore. It’s really interesting, I think. That’s why I’m quite serious that that 507 thing won’t stick, because the 13 is too deeply ingrained in the public consciousness. But how? How did that get there? It’s fascinating, it’s really weird. Anyway, that’ll be my book in my retirement!

    Frankly, I sort of feel about it the same way I do when I read arguments like this, that Stephen Moffat’s characters are all Mary Sues. That’s an interesting and amusing idea, but it sort of ignores the fact that he — and in the case of the 507, Davies — is creating the show. It’s not fan fiction, it’s canon.

    And it was a canon that was ridiculously, horribly, gloriously, convoluted when they were both just fanboys watching it from behind the couch.

  • Kate Beaton on Dracula:

    Here we have Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a book written to tell ladies that if you’re not a submissive waif, society goes to hell and ungodly monsters are going to turn you into child killing horrors and someone is going to drive a bowie knife through your heart/cut off your head/etc. As you deserve! Thanks Bram! I wrote it down so as to remember it.

    There’s a little more going on it the book, but yeah, she’s not wrong.

  • Money Talks Louder Than Ever in Midterms. Looking at how campaign finance works now, thanks to decisions like Citizens United. It isn’t exactly pretty. [via]
  • And finally, Terry Gilliam’s next movie? No, not that Don Quixote adaptation he refuses to let go of? A filmette for NASCAR.

    With this and the recent Arcade Fire concert webcast — as well the opera he’s reportedly going to stage — Gilliam does seem to be picking some very weird, much smaller projects. Maybe he’s just trying to keep busy until some new kind of funding comes along?

Monday various

  • The Tea Party is a movement without a compass? Who could have guessed?

    In an unruly, unpredictable and chaotic election year, no group has asserted its presence and demanded to be heard more forcefully than the tea party. The grass-roots movement that was spawned with a rant has gone on to upend the existing political order, reshaping the debate in Washington, defeating a number of prominent lawmakers and elevating a fresh cast of conservative stars.

    But a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process. [via]

  • Astronaut Uses Foursquare to Check In To Space Station. Oh noes! Does this mean one of his followers is going to use this opportunity to rob NASA? [via]
  • Can we just stop with the Battlestar Galactica spin-offs for a while? Personally, I like what I’ve seen of Caprica — just a handful of episodes, but then, I never did finish watching the original Ron Moore series — but with this new series planned to “take place 10 years into the first Cylon war,” I can’t think of another sci-fi universe that’s been this over-explored. Outside, say, of Dune.
  • An angry Leonard Nimoy writes to Gene Roddenberry in 1976. It’s funny, today blooper reels are pretty much par for the course on any television DVD set, but I can see Nimoy’s point.
  • And finally, could the world be heading towards a frightful kimchi shortage? [via]

Thursday various

Monday various