A few other late-night links.

* Philip Roth has surrendered to television on behalf of the novel.

"I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it's going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range."

* Chris Ware in the New Yorker.

* If Harry Potter Was Made in the 1980s, and Starred David Bowie.

* 'Man who threw feces in courtroom draws 31-year sentence for robbery.' Live and learn.

* The Telegraph covers the laws of internet discourse.

7. Pommer’s Law
Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”

* Scientology convicted of fraud in France. See also.

* Will D.C. let J.J. Abrams have a crack at Superman? After the success of the Star Trek reboot this seems like an obvious move—and it would certainly be better than all their other attempts so far.

* Is your city recession-proof?

* Why your dryer sucks. More here.

* And Ezra Klein puts the politics behind the public option very well:

For the real liberals, the public option was already a compromise from single-payer. For the slightly less radical folks, the public option that's barred from partnering with Medicare to maximize the government's buying power was a compromise down from a Medicare-like insurance plan. For the folks even less radical than that, the public option that states can "opt out" of is a compromise from the straight public option. Access to the public option will be a political question settled at the state level. It is not a settled matter of national policy.

In many ways, this is a fundamentally conservative approach to a liberal policy experiment. It's only offered to individuals eligible for the insurance exchanges, which is a small minority of the population. The majority of Americans who rely on employer-based insurance would not be allowed to choose the exchanges. From there, it is only one of many options on the exchange, and only in states that choose to have it. In other words, it has been designed to preserve the status quo and be decided on the state level. Philosophically, these are major compromises liberals have made on this plan. They should get credit for that.

Monday night!

* On the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, Kotte catches Moon Fever (and there's only no cure). The Nation celebrates the Gil-Scott Heron way.

* 21 artists who changed mainstream comics (for better or worse).

17. Chris Ware
Though he’s philosophically more in line with the alt-comics community, Chris Ware draws so much media attention, and his books sell so well, that his work is arguably more mainstream than any current superhero title. Ware’s innovations in comic-page design—which include temporal shifts conveyed by complex diagrams and frames within frames—were inspired by Art Spiegelman’s ’70s experiments and by Richard McGuire’s seminal Raw story “Here.” But Ware marries his fetish for design with a singularly sardonic voice and a God’s-eye perspective on his characters, creating an overall tone that’s like a turn-of-the-century circus poster crossed with the post-war angst of literary lions like John Updike and Richard Yates. Ware’s influence is mostly seen among the younger alternative crowd and contemporary commercial artists, but his use of staccato pacing and visual repetition has popped up in a number of superhero comics over the past decade as well.

* Is Harry Potter no longer a ticket straight to Hell?

* Steve Benen remembers the day Medicare enslaved us all.

* Aliens in vintage postcards.

We saw Harry Potter and the Title I've Never Really Cared For last night. I don't have time for an especially long review, but I'm curiously of two minds about it. Visually I think it's by far the most disappointing of the adaptations—David Yates gives every scene a washed-out, sickly color that, whatever his artistic intentions, is completely ugly, and there is almost none of the manic Hogwarts exuberance that characterizes the earlier films. (This time around Hogwarts is pretty much just a really old, dank castle with the Cloisters' unicorn tapestry inside.) The script, too, tinkers with the original book in ways that are almost always to the story's detriment, with foreshadowing so blatant it's practically trolling the film itself—and several of the child actors seem alternatively bored with the material or unable to pull off what is required of them. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the film? Quite a bit, actually; there are a few really nice moments that are genuinely funny (as opposed to kid-funny or Harry-Potter-fan-funny) that by themselves almost single-handedly drag the film back towards "good." None of the other films, for my money, have been able to hold a candle to Alfonso Cuarón's Prisoner of Azkaban—the only film in the series that I'd suggest is an objectively great film—but this one is good, or at least good enough.

Tuesday Miscellany.

* Sarah Palin's controversial proposal to create a "Department of Law" with the power to block ethics claims against the president is turning a lot of heads this morning.

* I really want to read 1Q84.

* Swine flu: now more popular than Viagra.

* Steve Zissou: scientist.

* Another That Makes Me Think Of from Ze.

* We Are Wizards, a Harry Potter fandom documentary, with appearances from Brad Neely of Wizard People Dear Reader fame. (via @austinkleon)

Monday night roundup.

* Best news ever: LucasArts will be rereleasing its classic games over Steam. Highlight of the first round, coming Wednesday: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Dare we hope, at last, for X-Wing? Also: Day of the Tentacle? A little more at Slashdot.

* io9 highlights ugly SF covers. I sort of love them all.

* Also at io9: teaser photos for Harry Potter 6.

* A world without nukes? Obama and Medvedev have reached an agreement to cut nuclear arsenals by a third. It's something Obama's had on his mind a long time.

* 13 Facts about Dollhouse episode 13. Minor spoiler alert.

* And the world's worst airline, last seen trying to make people pay to use the bathroom, just got a little worse.

Fun: 137 uncomfortable plot summaries. Some highlights:

ALIENS: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.
BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Teenage serial killer destroys town in fit of semi-religious fervor.
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF: Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement.
SERENITY: Men fight for possession of scantily clad mentally ill teenage girl.
GROUNDHOG DAY: Misanthropic creep exploits space/time anomaly to stalk coworker.
HARRY POTTER: Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right.
JFK: Family man wastes life for nothing in crusade against homosexuals.
JUNO: Teen fails to get abortion, ruins lives.
JURASSIC PARK: Theme park’s grand opening pushed back.
KILL BILL: Irresponsible mother wants custody of her child.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
RAMBO III: The United States provides arms, equipment and training to the terrorists behind 9/11.
RED DAWN: Despite shock-and-awe tactics, a superior occupying force is no match for a tenacious sect of terrorist insurgents.
STAR TREK: Over-sexed officer routinely places crew in danger.
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE - Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
SUPERMAN RETURNS: Illegal immigrant is deadbeat dad.
TERMINATOR: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.

Via MeFi.

America is a country that no longer reads: Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series currently occupies all four of the top four spots on the New York Times a bestseller list. In other news, America is a deeply unserious place. [UPDATE: See the comments for some correction on this. The Freakonomics posted is actually fairly lightly sourced and he never actually says which bestseller list he saw.]

Surprisingly busy today, but I do have some links:

* As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince delayed until July.

* The market for sport utility vehicles is starting to look a lot like the housing market, spreading pain to consumers, automakers and dealers.

* ...but SUVphiles should take comfort that it's not yet looking like the housing market in Detroit:

The fact that a home on the city's east side was listed for $1 recently shows how depressed the real estate market has become in one of America's poorest big cities.

And it still took 19 days to find a buyer.

* Out: the carbon crisis. In: the oxygen crisis.

* Good news on the solar front: two large solar projects are being announced in California, which when completed "will produce as much energy as a small nuclear reactor or a large coal plant."

* And yet another airline not to fly: American.

Federal regulators announced Thursday they will seek fines totaling $7.1 million against American Airlines over maintenance issues and problems with its drug- and alcohol-testing programs.

Voldemort, Jokerized: The first trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is out, and clearly it's got The Dark Knight on the mind...

This is absolutely ancient, so ancient that I somehow either completely missed it the first time or else saw it but unwisely decided not to bother—but on the advice of one of summer students we watched the first Harry Potter movie with the "Wizard People, Dear Reader" parody track, and the results did not in any way disappoint.

YouTube's got it for you, all synced up and ready.

Congratulations to J.K. Rowling, who lasted nearly six months before hinting that she'll write an eighth Harry Potter book after all.

Gary Kamiya has a nice comparative look at the film adaptations of Beowulf and Lord of the Rings, including some interesting words from the man himself:

In a famous allegory, Tolkien compared the author of "Beowulf" to a man who, inheriting a field full of ancient stones, used them to build a tower. His friends, recognizing that the stones had belonged to a more ancient building, tore down the tower "in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions." What they did not realize, Tolkien ends, was that "from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea."

Tolkien's point is that the fantastic elements in "Beowulf" are ancient archetypes that have deep roots in human beliefs, fears and wishes -- myths, in other words. And in "Beowulf," he argues, these myths are an essential part of a tragic tale whose theme is "man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time." The greatness of Beowulf derives from the fact that it is a poem created in "a pregnant moment of poise": It is balanced between a Christian worldview, in which death and defeat are ultimately themselves defeated by Christ, and a Germanic, pagan one, in which fate rules all and man's courage alone confers nobility. It is, Tolkien writes, not a primitive poem, but a late one. The pagan world is already past, but the poet still celebrates its vanished power. The fact that a poem written more than a thousand years ago was itself looking back at a lost world gives the poem an uncanny double resonance to the modern reader: "If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo."

Meanwhile, elsewhere at Salon, Andrew Leonard is concerned about inconsistency and arbitrariness in wizarding law.

Everyone is linking to this story about the British school whose ranking jumped from the bottom 25% to the top 5% after reorganizing the entire curriculum around a Harry Potter theme. I wonder if Accio theory would work on my students...

Some good links from SF Signal this morning, including a promising trailer for the infinitely prolonged I Am Legend and a fantastic 1979 essay from Stanislaw Lem on the nature of sci-fi that declares Philip K. Dick "a visionary among the charlatans":

The peculiarities of Dick's worlds arise especially from the fact that in them it is waking reality which undergoes profound dissociation and duplication. Sometimes the dissociating agency consists in chemical substances (of the hallucinogenic type—thus in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch); sometimes in "cold-sleep technique" (as precisely in Ubik); sometimes (as in Now Wait for Last Year) in a combination of narcotics and "parallel worlds." The end-effect is always the same: distinguishing between waking reality and visions proves to be impossible. The technical aspect of this phenomenon is fairly inessential—it does not matter whether the splitting of reality is brought about by a new technology of chemical manipulation of the mind or, as in Ubik, by one of surgical operations. The essential point is that a world equipped with the means of splitting perceived reality into indistinguishable likenesses of itself creates practical dilemmas that are known only to the theoretical speculations of philosophy. This is a world in which, so to speak, this philosophy goes out into the street and becomes for every ordinary mortal no less of a burning question than is for us the threatened destruction of the biosphere.

There's also a link to what is probably the best indexed ever, as well as the only worthwhile comment on the whole "Dumbledore is gay!!!" fiasco that I've seen:

Just when you thought J.K. Rowling was trying to suck up to the Christians, she goes and outs Dumbledore.

Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, just one of the many bootleg Harry Potters profiled at the New York Times. Here's the summary of the one that is plainly the best, Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon:

Harry becomes a fat, hairy dwarf after being caught in a “sour and sweet rain”; he loses all his magic and can get it back only by obtaining the magic ring. After he does, Harry becomes a dragon that fights evil. Voldemort has an even more powerful brother who makes trouble for Harry.

Via the MetaFilter Archie thread that keeps on giving: Harry Potter and the Eurocentrist's Tone.

What is worse is the costume of the Asian women. Cho, Padma, and Parvati Patil wore "garb" to the Yule Ball. What were described in the book as "shocking pink dress robes" become a sari for the twin Indian girls, and a cheongsam for Cho. These girls are not, like Viktor or Fleur, actually nationals of other countries; they are English, and I found myself totally abandoning suspension of disbelief when they showed up to dance in the sort of clothes I think teenagers of all stripes are known for avoiding: the ones that connote traditionalism and otherness. It's not like we need the extra cultural artifacts to figure out their Asian status. It was totemization and exoticism, plain and simple. Boo.

The Patil sisters are treated in a fairly objectified manner in book and film alike, with little said about them other than that they are the prettiest girls in their year. Their twinness is also a little unnerving as it leads me to thoughts of indistinguishability and male fantasy. Additionally, Parvati is, to my knowledge, the only character to have been portrayed by different actors in different films (aside from Dumbledore, played by Richard Harris, who passed away) which certainly casts a pall of indistinguishability over her. The IMDb entry for the two films in which she is portrayed by different actors also lists her name with different spellings... Patil and Patel. I'm not sure who to blame for that.

And we're back. A number of people asked me if my bosses at TIP made me take the blog down for the month I was teaching, and the answer is no—it was my own call, based upon the near-certainty of my teenage students reading my blog and bad things happening as a result. (Discretion is the better part of valor, etc. etc.)

In any event, we're back, and I have nearly a month's worth of backed-up links to upload in a single hugely massive and largely incoherent posting. So here goes nothing:

* Jaimee's teacher and friend (and former BCR contributor) Isaac Cates has a new blog, Satisfactory Comics, as do my good friends Eric the Red and Jason Haserodt, currently about a third of the way through their 3000-mile bike trip across America.

* While I was gone Tim had a thought-provoking post up about the 9/11 generation that I wanted to gesture towards as well.

* I don't care what sort of reviews it gets, I'm going to see The Darjeeling Limited as soon as I possibly can. The first trailer's out.

* On the subject of Harry Potter, I feel like I regrettably missed the moment to comment on it, so I'll just point to a slightly spoilery sentence from the Salon review that basically says it all:

As for the ending, and the strange, widespread and literarily autistic obsession with who does and doesn't die in it, suffice to say that some sympathetic characters are killed and that everything -- the configuration of the horcruxes, the true colors of Severus Snape, the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort -- turns out in the only way it possibly could if you thought about it for more than two seconds.

If you're feeling especially literarily autistic, however, J.K. has even more unnecessary epilogue for you to chew on.

* There's also something to Megan McArdle's take on the economics of Harry Potter, in which she argues that it's J.K. Rowling's failure to ever really think through the world she's created that keeps the franchise from ever reaching the heights achieved by J.R.R. Tolkien or even C.S. Lewis.

* The State is finally coming to DVD. Toothbrush! You came back to me! And you've started a family.

* Joyce Carol Oates reviews Austerlitz, among other things, in the New York Review of Books, while Geoffrey O'Brien takes on the conclusion to The Sopranos.

* Here's the full text of Alan Moore's awesome proposal for the ultimate D.C. Comics miniseries, Twilight of the Superheroes.

* Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks.

* The American Canon of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, Vol. II.

* They solved checkers.

* Douglas Adams, "Is There An Artifical God?"

* The Murakami Dictionary.

* Post-mortem photography, the absolute creepiest thing the Victorians were up to.

* Awesome maps (as always) from Strange Maps: China's alleged 1418 world map and Inverted World.

* A Brief History of the Lobotomy.

* Say a prayer for Bat Boy, wherever he is: The Weekly World News has shut down.

* Carl "Tinker" West: the most influential New Jerseyan you never heard of.

* Conventional wisdom has it that people who commit suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge travel from around the globe to end their lives in San Francisco Bay, but a new study of death leaps shows that the average jumper is a 41-year-old white man from the Bay Area.

* And, last but not least, some games to waste time by, especially now that you can't play checkers anymore: The Four Color Problem and Gravity Pods.

If you've actually read this far, the only suitable reward is this photo of my Phantom Fiction class, the TIPiest bunch of TIPsters who ever TIPed. You'll note the devil horns; I taught them that.

(Accidentally.)