He’ll need more dilithium crystals, Captain…Following news that Chris Pine has been offered the role of James T. Kirk and that Eric Bana will play the villain (“Nero”) in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, Simon Pegg joins the Enterprise crew as Montgomery Scott. Ooh, that’ll be fun. Perhaps we’ll get Nick Frost as a Redshirt? Update: And another. John Cho, best known as Harold of Harold & Kumar, will suit up as Sulu. Update 2: And now McCoy…Karl Urban.
Month: October 2007
Teleport Authority.
By way of Freakgirl, the trailer for Doug Liman’s Jumper is now online, starring Hayden Christiansen, Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, Diane Lane, Michael Rooker, and Tom Hulce. As I noted in this 2006 Comic-Con post, the book by Steven Gould is a concise, clever and well-thought-out take on teleportation…but I don’t remember a second jumper, or Jackson’s character being nearly as menacing. (Perhaps he’s still ticked about the whole Episode III thing.)
Rainbow Connection | Pop Song 360.
As noted in countless Woeful State of the Industry pieces over the past week, In Rainbows, the new Radiohead album, is now available for download directly from the band. (I figure I’ll give ’em ten bucks.) Also, it seems R.E.M. is premiering a new song on Anderson Cooper 360 tonight. The song, “Until the Day is Done,” will be featured in a CNN ecodocumentary, Planet in Peril, later this month. (If you’ve watched the Youtubes of the Dublin rehearsal shows a few months back, you’ve already heard it.) Update: 160kbpgate for Radiohead?
Two Basestars were approaching…
Sci-Fi teases the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica and, if nothing else, it looks like Dean Stockwell will be back for the crew’s post-Watchtower adventures. (Oh, and Starbuck…worst backseat driver ever.)
The Polar Express.
A brand new trailer for The Golden Compass materializes online, and apparently Christopher Lee (Magisterium Big Bad), Freddie Highmore (voice of Pantalamion), and Ian McKellen (voice of Iorek) have all signed up for duty in Chris Weitz’s film. They join Dakota Blue Richards, Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman, Eva Green, and Sam Elliot (the latter as Lee Scoresby, but reeking of The Big Lebowski.)
Better Dead than Red.
“As political scientist Jacob Hacker has argued, the basic obstacle was nothing less than the government’s failure to have adopted a comprehensive health insurance plan decades earlier. As a result, the system that emerged by 1994 entailed such a crazy quilt of private interests — corporations, small firms, insurers, doctors, unions, HMOs, and so on — that moving all Americans into a new framework without worsening anyone’s situation had become virtually impossible.” Slate and Rutger University’s David Greenberg summarizes the history of health care reform, and of the epithet “socialized medicine.” “[T]he idea of government-run health care dates to the Progressive Era. Originally called ‘compulsory health insurance,’ it enjoyed favor in the 1910s among many quarters, including the American Medical Association…But as the debate heated up, doctors began to worry that it would hurt their incomes, and they banded with business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers to oppose reform. American entry into World War I tabled consideration of the issue, and the postwar Red Scare, Starr notes, ‘buried it in an avalanche of anticommunist rhetoric.’“
The Dancer Upstairs.
Ok, this one’s a bit creepy. By way of Webgoddess, watch the rotating dancer to ascertain whether you’re left-brained or right-brained. I’m pretty right-brained, it seems (which makes sense, since I’m both left-handed and left-footed). But, if I changed tasks while the dancer was on — say went to click another window or focused on the list at left, she’d sometimes switch direction. Weird…well, I just hope my right-brain knows what my left-brain is doing.
Dont give me that do goody good bulls**t.
Score another one for legalized corruption (and lament anew what passes for Democratic leadership these days): Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tells private-equity firms they don’t need to fear a tax hike this year. “[P]rivate-equity firms — whose multibillion-dollar deals have created a class of superwealthy investors and taken some of America’s large corporations private — hired dozens of lobbyists, stepped up campaign contributions and lined up business allies to wage an unusually conspicuous lobbying blitz [against a tax hike]…Several prominent lawmakers expressed surprise to find that the managers’ profits, known as carried interest, were taxed as capital gains, for which the rate is usually 15 percent. That is less than half the 35 percent top rate paid on regular income.“
Tie Another One to your Back.
For the R.E.M. fans among us, Stereogum has compiled Drive XV, an Automatic for the People tribute album to commemorate that record‘s fifteenth anniversary. (The album’s site also contains thoughts on the songs by Mike Mills and, as a special treat, an essay, Sweetness Followed, by Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog and Pop Songs ’07.) AftP came out the fall of my senior year in high school and, as I said in my top 50 REM songs post of a few years back, it hasn’t aged with me as well as I’d hoped. (In fact, I’d probably put both Monster and Up above it these days.) Still, while “Man on the Moon” and “Everybody Hurts” may be well beyond played out (and “Nightswimming” might be getting there), the mournful record also features “Drive” (still an amazing video), “Sweetness Follows,” and “Monty Got a Raw Deal,” all minor-key dirges which resonate now as they did then. In any case, I’m looking forward to seeing what the bands here came up with.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.
“For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.”
By way of Little Bit Left, a new site by a Columbia colleague that’s well worth adding to the blogroll, the NYT surveys the sad plight of the modern ABD. (I’ll be 33 at my current expected finish date, seven years after starting, and my cohort’s attrition rate has been significant, so it seems the stats bear out in my case.) “Those who insist on dissertations are aware that they must reduce the loneliness that defeats so many scholars…’It’s easy, especially in our field, to feel isolated, and that tends to slow people down…There’s no sense of belonging to an academic community.‘” Oh, I dunno…Berk and I often have very scintillating conversations…progressive citizenship, New Era consumerism, socks, squirrels, you name it.