Lots of saved links today. Here's the first batch.

* V is a hit. But is Obama an evil lizard for outer space? Acephalous reports.

* Michael Bérubé talks this year's terrible academic job market.

* North Carolina mayoral races in Charlotte and Chapel Hill are getting some national attention.

* Congratulations, Atlanta, America's most toxic city.

* What do kids call LEGO pieces? Via Kottke.

* Legal outrage of the day: The Supreme Court has indeed said that prosecutors are immune from suit for anything they do at trial. But in this case, Harrington and McGhee maintain that before anyone being charged, prosecutors gathered evidence alongside police, interviewed witnesses and knew the testimony they were assembling was false.

The prosecutors counter that there is "no freestanding constitutional right not to be framed." Stephen Sanders, the lawyer for the prosecutors, will tell the Supreme Court on Wednesday that there is no way to separate evidence gathered before trial from the trial itself. Even if a prosecutor files charges against a person knowing that there is no evidence of his guilt, says Sanders, "that's an absolutely immunized activity." These innocent men were in jail for twenty-five years; naturally, the Obama administration is backing the corrupt, lying prosecutors who put them there.

Someday, baby, I'll build you that LEGO dreamhouse.

Speaking my language: LEGO zombies. Via Boing Boing.

Other stuff.

* Jaimee has a piece in the Indy Green Guide this week comparing dueling energy initiatives in the North Carolina State Legislature.

* Begging as labor: Alex Greenberg thinks it over.

* Science fiction's most evil corporations.

* Hope for Dollhouse? 'Prison Break return disappoints,' scoring 75% of Dollhouse's regular audience in the Friday night death slot.

* Making Samuel Beckett.

* The Brick Testament has reached The Book of Revelations.

* "Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism," by Terry Eagleton. Via MeFi.

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

*Think Progress says "Obama’s Immunity For CIA Agents Still Leaves Prosecutions Of Senior Bushies On The Table." People need to accept that Obama's going to let us down on this. He told us he would. He will.

* Your taxes at work. See also.

* A major EPA ruling this week declared carbon dioxide a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. More analysis at the Oil Drum.

* Imagine finding yourself aboard a burning ocean liner. An increasing number of people are trying to put it out -- and they stand a good chance, if they can get access to the fire axes and hoses. Unfortunately, some rich old fat guys are sitting in deck chairs blocking the equipment, enjoying drinks and appetizers, and every time the other passengers try to get them to move, the rich old fat guys say they don't really believe in the fire, and even if it does exist, it probably can't be put out so we should just trust in the new lifeboat being built. And, sure enough, there on the deck is a guy is a brilliant, somewhat unworldly professor, busily sketching a design for a new lifeboat as the smoke billows in larger and larger clouds.

That's a pretty fair analogy for the situation in which we find ourselves, and for the role geoengineering is playing in the climate debate.

* The Wire series bible.

Links.

* 60,000-piece LEGO diorama of the Battle of Hoth. Outstanding.

* David Lynch Twitters.

* Top green moments from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, at HuffPo.

* Arnold Schwarzenegger, who proudly told the nation in 2004 that he joined the Republican Party because of his deep and abiding respect for Richard Nixon, apparently thought about bolting the party last year.

* And MetaFilter has your updates on quick fixes for global warming.

LEGO and the City. (Thanks, Steve!)

During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York.





More at the link.

Lots of links to dump today. Here's a preliminary batch...

* There's a new Springsteen album out today, which all right-thinking people have undoubtedly already purchased on iTunes. Slate and Salon both have Boss-centric coverage in celebration.

* The banking crisis has brought down the government of Iceland. More here.

* At one point, The Simpsons was funny. Eye on Springfield has proof. Via Kottke.

* Regional pizza styles of the U.S.

* LEGO Vipers. Oh, BSG, I can't stay mad at you.

* Favorite photos of George W. Bush. My favorite is probably this one, which I've linked to before, but they all have their charms.



You're doing it wrong...

The rest of us still have to wait a day, but LEGObama has already been inaugurated.

So those are mine. What are your imaginative Urtexts, dear readers?

For me, a few runners-up:

* Superman (really, Superfriends)
* Star Wars (naturally, but less than you'd think)
* the Adam West Batman TV show
* Back to the Future II

and maybe most crucial of all

* the LEGO Space franchise

That last one might be more important than even these.

Potpourri.

* Incoming Energy Secretary Steven Chu hates coal. I sort of love this guy.

* The Battlestar Galactica webisodes have started up again.

* "Would you rather be a novel or a poem?" Answer wisely and you could go to Oxford. Via Bookninja.

* Every so often the veil of ideology drops.

* Classic albums get LEGOized.

* 'Whedon: Dollhouse Problems Are My Fault.'

* Ron Moore's promising-sounding Virtuality may never see the light of day.

* The natural history of mythical creatures.

The awesome LEGO anatomy cutaway I'm using for this week's blog icon is actually available as a full-size print from Moist Productions. I ask you, world: who among you loves me $59 worth?

This thread from YayHooray (via MeFi) is easily the coolest thing I've linked to this year and possibly the coolest thing I've linked to in the entire time I've been doing this, with all the great flowcharts and infographics you've come to love from years on the innertubes. Some highlights:

this week's blog icon, the LEGO anatomy chart
probably next week's blog icon, the gummi anatomy chart
the week after that, sci-fi awesomeness
the interstate highway system as a subway map
your digestive system as a subway map
area codes in which Ludacris claims to have hoes
Sarah Palin pregnancy decision map
the map of Zork that doubles as my desktop
New Jersey invites you to come and see it all
extinction timeline, 1950-2050
narrative map of classic Choose Your Own Adventure novel The Cave of Time
risk perception and actual hazards
a chart of how Americans spend their money that seems to strongly argue for a national salary cap around $100,000
a map of the United States expressed in terms of proximate distance from Knoxville, TN
the Indo-European family tree (and again)
a visual guide to the financial crisis
a flowchart history of Cubism

Keep in mind those are just highlights. This is can't miss.

Tuesday, Tuesday.

* Global warming may increase kidney stones. Now will you act, America?

* Shutting down coal plants makes kids smarter.

* Can the human species be sophisticated (mature) enough to keep in mind a looming challenge (decarbonizing the energy system, which will happen eventually anyway) even as it deals with a real-time problem (avoiding energy-related economic turmoil)? An interesting two-part discussion at the New York Times Dot Earth blog.

* LEGO Futurama.

* And pictures from the wedding I attended in Jersey this weekend are up at my Flickr account.

Inside the secret LEGO vault (the happiest place on Earth).

Just a few hours ago I saw George Lucas trying to seriously downplay expectations for Indy 4:

George Lucas has gone out of his way to lower expectations. He said: "When you do a movie like this, a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming. And it's not. It's just a movie, just like the other movies.

"You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up."

He added: "You're not going to get a lot of accolades doing a movie like this. All you can do is lose."

But now I see him talking the movie up in a big way:

"I haven’t even told Steven or Harrison this," he said. "But I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie. I can see it working out.

"And it’s not like Harrison is even old. I mean, he’s 65 and he did everything in this movie. The old chemistry is there, and it’s not like he’s an old man. He’s incredibly agile; he looks even better than he did 20 years ago, if you ask me."

Conclusion: This movie cannot fail. Even the patented George Lucas reverse-Midas touch can't screw this up. Via AICN.

Plus: LEGO Indy.

72 Views of the Tower of Babel. Like all my best links, via MeFi.

LEGO chess sets.

Forty years of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There's a lot of links at the site, including Kubrick at the premiere and One: A Lego Odyssey.

I'm back, and I've got pictures from San Francisco—but not right now. Right now all I have time for is a quick link to the LEGO Zissou Society.



Links and photos tonight...

Monday night and the feeling's right.

* If you haven't been back to the now-infamous Statue of Liberty post, I've updated it about twelve times with a ton of new images. According to Google Analytics, that page's been viewed over 26,000 times, which is pretty incredible.

* BarackObama.com has video of the Ted Kennedy endorsement, which looks to be an even bigger deal than I'd hoped.

* Schlumberger, the oil-field-services giant that has acquired microwave technology intended to free petroleum from oil shale, won’t bring the technique to western Colorado immediately.

...

The Green River Formation of western Colorado, eastern Utah and southwest Wyoming contains the equivalent of an estimated 1.8 trillion barrels of crude oil, enough, Raytheon said, to meet current U.S. demand for 250 years. We're saved!

* And it's a good thing too; today is the 50th anniversary of history's greatest invention, LEGO, which like everything else is made from sweet, sweet oil.

* Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair: the desert reclaims the town of Kolmanskop in Namibia. Via grinding.be.