- PETA really doesn’t know how to pick its battles, does it?
- The feminist movie of 2011? Would you believe Thor?
- Klingon language helps man deal with dyslexia [via]
- Kevin Clash has been listening to Adele recently. Uh oh. Is Elmo going to get all maudlin now?
- And finally, literary devices. I think we could all use the Great Golden Hammer of Hyperbole from time to time.
star trek
Wednesday various
- The AV Club on Priest:
It’s as if the filmmakers realize they’re wasting everyone’s time, so they at least want to take up as little of it as possible.
- German TV reveals that Osama Bin Laden was killed by Star Trek rebels.
- Meanwhile, Teacher who vowed not to shave until bin Laden was caught or killed finally shaves. [via]
- Guy who created Mike Tyson’s tattoo suing to stop release of The Hangover Part II.
- And finally, I haven’t watched it regularly in years, if ever, but I’m still a little sad to hear that Good Eats is ending. [via]
Tuesday various
- Behind the Scenes of Star Trek: the Next Generation. Exactly what it says on the tin.
- Earth from Above: a collection of aerial photography. There are some stunning shots here. [via]
- Jeff VanderMeer on best-of-year lists:
…when I see a book title or author I don’t recognize on a year’s best list, my immediate reaction isn’t usually “WTFâ€, but instead, “Excellent! A chance to find some new, shiny thing that I might love.â€
- Hate captchas? Maybe simple logic questions are the better solution. [via]
- And finally, a history of Soft Skull Press. It’s nice to know something good has come out of a Kinko’s. Maybe that’s why the people behind the counter have almost never been of any help to me: they’re too busy building their independent press empires. [via]
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]
That’s one way of putting it
That’s what revenge is, at least partly: the attempt to create structure in a senseless act by giving it a story arc, and by giving yourself agency inside that arc. It’s not just “everyone I loved was horribly murdered,” it’s “When the people I loved were murdered, I became a ruthless killing machine, and devoted myself to finding justice.” The difference between News At 11 and a miniseries.