Month: January 2005

Blowback.

“Sometimes, words have consequences?” So do actions, Mr. President. The CIA has at last uncovered an indisputable link between Iraq and terrorism…Unfortunately, we created it. “[A]s instability in Iraq grew after the toppling of Hussein, and resentment toward the United States intensified in the Muslim world, hundreds of foreign terrorists flooded into Iraq across its unguarded borders. They found tons of unprotected weapons caches that, military officials say, they are now using against U.S. troops.” (Apparently, we were too busy not finding WMD to spend any time securing these conventional caches.) My, oh my, this administration has really done a bang-up job of making Americans safer, haven’t they? Just think how safe we’ll be after four more years.

Titan A.E.

Score one for the ESA: The Huygens probe successfully lands on Titan and broadcasts images from the surface for five hours (a.k.a. much longer than expected.) (See, NASA? It’s much easier to pull these types of missions off when you don’t have to convert from standard to metric and back.) And now, for Europa… Update: 2020 Hindsight has done an exemplary job today of covering the details and implications of the landing.

Great Caesar’s Ghost.

Quite a bit of new comic-to-film news today: Hugh Laurie and James Marsden join Superman as Daily Planet editor Perry White and Richard White (Lois’s non-Super love interest) respectively, the Dark Knight cradles Katie Holmes in this new EW pic from Batman Begins, and 20 seconds of the new FF trailer appear online (along with this shot of The Thing, also from the new EW.) I know I keep piling bad vibes on this project, but really, the litany of hard-to-discern FX shots coupled with the “Kick out the Jams”-style whiteboy-angst-metal does nothing for me.

A Little More.

In no surprise to anyone after the seemingly somewhat abbreviated RotK:EE, PJ announces a probable “Ultimate Edition” of LotR, to be released in a few years. The UEs would include more deleted scenes (not re-integrated into the films), more documentaries, and the blooper reels. (I wouldn’t expect to see any of this until well after both Kong and the pending format wars.)

In my country, there is no problem.

Somebody tell Tuscon. “The State Department is insisting that, contrary to the impression you might get from all that vitriol spewed by Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat Sagdiyev on ‘Da Ali G Show,’ Kazakhstan is not a ‘a wild den of misogynistic dog-shooting Gypsy- and Jew-haters,’ as faux Kazakh journalist Borat once put it, but rather a perfectly nice country with little record of anti-Semitism.”

The Fil-A-gonath!

Long have I desired to look upon upon the waffle fries of old. Just before the holidays, I’d heard from a few Carolinians in and about the city that, yes, there was in fact one Chick-Fil-A in Gotham. And, sure enough, this morning I found it, in NYU’s Weinstein Hall at the northeast corner of Washington Square Park. (Alas, it was closed until Tuesday, when the new NYU term starts — and it looks like there may be intermittent security attempting to keep displaced non-NYU Southerners like me away from the quality chicken products.)

Silicon Council.

Seen and taken from Cliopatria, Crooked Timber holds an online symposium on China Mieville and Iron Council, which includes informed essays by John Holbo, Belle Waring, Henry Farrell, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, John Quiggen, and most notably, Mieville himself. I haven’t gotten through all of these yet, but there’s some really good stuff here, including Mieville’s nuanced analysis of the great Tolkien-Moorcock divide in fantasy writing. (I for one think that, when it comes J.R.R.T., Moorcock is full of it, as is Phillip Pullman.) Of Mieville’s books, I most enjoyed Perdido Street Station and most admired The Scar. Iron Council was a good read in fine phantasmagoric Mieville form, but I ultimately thought it was too self-conscious in its historical agenda — At times I felt I was reading J. Anthony Lukas’s Big Trouble by way of Mervyn Peake. I appreciate what Mieville was trying to do…I just don’t think he quite pulled it off.

Uprising.

“‘Cause we’re moving right out of Babylon, and we’re going to our father’s land.” On what would be his 60th birthday, the late, great Bob Marley will be exhumed and reburied in Ethiopia, his “forefather cornerstone” and spiritual home of the Rastafari. Said his widow, Rita Marley, of the move, “How can you give up a continent for an island? He has a right for his remains to be where he would love them to be. This was his mission. Ethiopia is his spiritual resting place.”