HBO has apparently decided Flight of the Conchords was so great they might as well make it again, this time about the young Rolling Stones.

Friday night! Let's linkdump.

* If you sent a letter to Whole Foods about the John Mackey Wall Street Journal editorial, you probably got a response tonight. I'd post what I received, but the small print at the bottom instructs me I cannot:

This email contains proprietary and confidential material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, use, distribution or disclosure by others without the permission of the sender is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive for the recipient), please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of the message.

I certainly appreciate their crafting a non-apology apology for my sole use. I don't know how Daily Kos got a hold of it.

* NJ-GOV blogging: TPM, TPM, FiveThirtyEight.com.

* Also in Jersey news: Bob Dylan hassled by local NJ cop.

* NC-SEN blogging: Everyone hates Richard Burr.

* Airlock Alpha speaks the truth: it's obviously too early for another Battlestar Galactica reboot.

* 'Amusing Ourselves to Death': Huxley vs. Orwell.



* From Betsy to Rush to Sarah Palin to Chuck Grassley to your own old relatives forwarding you crazy shit.

* SF on HBO?

* Joe Siegel's heirs have won rights to a few more early Superman stories.

* Whitney Phillips at Confessions of an Aca/Fan tracks down the provenance of the recent Obama/Joker/SOCIALISM graffiti. Of course, it was 4chan.

* Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won't sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?

Just a few links.

* I'm only going to say this once, media bloodsuckers: Leave Bruce alone.

* Pink Tentacle has your vintage alien landscapes from Kazuaki Saito.

* The Dollhouse situation and what Joss Whedon should do next.

I would like to see what kind of wonderfully dense, risk-taking project Whedon would come up with when he is not hampered by the current conservative climate at the networks, which these days want most story lines to wrap up by the end of the hour. Can you imagine what a Whedon show on HBO, Showtime, FX or AMC would look like?

...

My point is this: Whedon needs to make his next show on cable. End of story.

Ironically, this is also what Joss should have done this time, and the time before this one.

* Florida Power & Light and a real estate developer have announced that they will build the first solar-powered city in the U.S., a community of 19,500 homes, offices, retail shops, and light industry whose electricity will come from the world’s largest solar photovoltaic plant. The new city will be called Utopia Prime Future One Alpha City Babcock Ranch.

#2: culture!

* How HBO changed TV.

* Is Sarah Connor canceled?

* Europe names crew for simulated mission to Mars. Devotees may remember that this is strikingly reminiscent of the first episode of The Twilight Zone.

* Examined Life is your crash course in contemporary philosophy.

I'm not suggesting that Taylor set out to sandbag or ironize her subjects in "Examined Life." In fact, I'm quite sure she didn't. But as with Taylor's previous film, "Zizek!" (whose subject, the Slovenian madman Slavoj Zizek, appears here at a London garbage dump, claiming that mankind isn't alienated enough from the natural world), the movie has a philosophical element of its own that is not free of guile. By conducting her conversations in public spaces, and removing her interlocutors from desks and offices and book-lined studies and other appurtenances of intellectual authority, Taylor introduces a degree of playfulness and unpredictability that becomes the movie's M.O. Trying to rehabilitate the concept of revolution while rowing in the Central Park lake, post-Marxist philosopher Michael Hardt literally runs aground on a half-submerged boulder. I'm far more sympathetic to Hardt's intellectual project than I should admit, but, really, what can you say?

* The great American novel v. women. (Or maybe that's the other way around.)

* Alan Moore v. comic book films. More Moore here and here.

* How they marketed Watchmen: a look back at the original solicits from 1986.

* Gary Westfahl: Why Science Fiction So Often Fails to Predict the Future. Another thing Suvin makes clear in his very good book on science fiction is that if you're expecting science fiction to predict the future you're asking the wrong questions.

* The Indy just announced the winners of their 2009 poetry contest, and once again Jaimee was one of the judges.

* And Neil sends along some optical illusion fun.

HBO's next great series, Americatown, takes place a few decades in the future, when a rapidly collapsing America has caused waves of U.S. immigration overseas. Via Kottke.

Salon has a review of Alan Bell's upcoming Six Feet Under follow-up, the vampire-themed True Blood.

I wasn't especially impressed with this video of Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman shopping for CDs at Borders, but that doesn't mean I'm not pretty excited about news of Schwartzman's HBO pilot.

Scripted by somebody named Jonathan Ames, the comedy project stars Jason Schwartzman (“Rushmore,” “Shopgirl,” “Marie Antoinette,” “The Darjeeling Limited”) as a writer who, reeling from a break-up, starts pretending to be a private detective.

I've had that idea. Not the show—the pretending to be/becoming a private detective.

Hercules at AICN has a host of reviews for the David Simon Wire followup, Generation Kill. Sounds promising.

TV news: HBO has ordered a pilot from The Wire's David Simon on post-Katrina New Orleans—sounds perfect—while NBC has posted the first of this summer's Office webisodes.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

The last few weeks we've been Netflixing Jericho, the canceled / saved / soon-to-be-canceled-again post-apocalyptic drama from CBS. Like Lost and Heroes before it, the show functions in many ways as a testament to the greatness of HBO—what would have been a fantastic twelve-episode cable series is merely pleasantly diverting on a network. After a few episodes, the diminished production values, a lot of filler, and the necessity to always hew as close as possible to dramatic convention really began to weigh on me. (Things do pick up again a bit by the final third of the season, and by the end I was actually rather fond of the show—but it's definitely a guilty pleasure.)

I mean, it's pretty good for the networks—about as good/bad as a typical season of 24—and I'll definitely check out the second season, but despite all this Jericho just doesn't do what it set out to do. Which is really too bad, because by the end of the fourth episode I was pretty sure I was watching the best network TV show ever.