Thursday!

* I'll be posting this year as a HASTAC Scholar at the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboatory. My first post is about status update activism of the sort that is all over your Facebook newsfeed today.

* Speaking of health care, Olympia Snowe now runs your health care.

* LRB makes an impressively desperate bid for my attention with Fredric Jameson's review of Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood alongside reviews of Inglourious Basterds and Inherent Vice.

* Madoff-mania: The SEC—which he claims he was shortlisted to chair (!)— now admits it badly mishandled multiple investigations of his company. Still more here.

* Kevin Carey nicely notes the difficulty inherent to blogging about a book you're two-thirds through with. Another post or two on Infinite Jest soon. The total collapse of blogging at A Supposedly Fun Blog is one of the great disappointments of Infinite Summer, I think.

* Hiding adjuncts so the U.S. News rankings can't find them. Meanwhile, this year's Washington Monthly undergraduate rankings leave Duke out of the Top 25.

* So you've invented a board game. (via)

* 68 Sci-Fi Sites to See in the U.S.

* And Gawker declares the Michael Cera backlash has officially begun.

Gawker reports Michael Cera has finally signed on to the Arrested Development movie. They employ a cute picture to illustrate this fact.

VQR has thrown open its archives. Virilio on bunkers. BLDGBLOG on bunkers. The tragedy of the anti-commons, otherwise known as capitalism. And Michael Cera flips out.

More.

* The headline reads: "UFO over Germany official." Via Posthuman Blues.

* More important, a different headline reads: "Arrested Development Movie finally a go?" Sadly, the article is mostly about Jeffrey Tambor threatening violence against Michael Cera, not about news of any actual deal.

* The stimulus bill gives a boost to the credit power of small colleges, probably good news for a lot of folks (not least of all budding academics, if only incidentally).

* As is pretty well-known, Republicans in the House managed to vote unanimously against economic recovery because they are unbelievably massive tools. Luckily, nearly everybody has finally figured this out, except of course a handful of red states and of course telvision news producers, who still give Republicans twice as much coverage despite their having almost no power or relevance.

More on the Republican Party's massive-tool nature as events warrant.

* While we're on the subject of Republicans, Steve Benen has a pair of good posts, one about the one line Republicans can't cross—disagreeing with Rush Limbaugh—and the other a reminder for 2012 about the legitimacy of widespread claims of "voter fraud". I don't even want to get into the whole stupid thing about Obama's tie.

Is Michael Cera holding up the Arrested Development movie? Say it ain't so!

You had me at 'Michael Cera's Secret Film Project.'

Completely unserious links.

* Ask yourself: What would Don Draper do? What would Joan Holloway do?

* Take the Zombie Survival Quiz. I got a Z+.

* Behold the Hand Drawn Map Association.

* Three's a trend: Is The Dark Knight cursed?

* Two good posts from Cosmic Variance: Obama backing off of plans to cut NASA’s budget and what will the Large Hadron Collider find?

* And is Michael Cera the greatest comic mind of this generation, "the Bob Newhart of the 21st century"? You know where I stand on this.

Roger Ebert says Juno is the best film of 2007, while blucarbnpinwheel says it's just okay at best. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm inclined to trust Ben, especially insofar as we apparently had the exact same reaction to Napoleon Dynamite right down to the Rushmore comparison. (Although in fairness to N.D. I have grown a little more fond of it in retrospect and upon a subsequent viewing.) In Ebert's plus column, he does note the greatness of No Country for Old Men, which I've been meaning to write about but am having trouble improving upon the Candleblog review: Holy crap. I was just punched in the face by the Coen brothers. Every single individual moment of this film is perfect. I am in awe. How dare they make this film?

But Ebert maliciously and incorrectly snubs by omission The Darjeeling Limited, obviously my choice for best film of Oh Seven, almost as if he's deliberately trying to provoke me into a blind rage. Winner: blucarbnpinwheel!

I'm still hoping I like Juno, though. As I believe I've mentioned before, literally everything Michael Cera does makes me laugh, so the outlook is good.

I ripped on Judd Apatow for Knocked Up, so it's only fair to admit that I found Superbad pretty hilarious. The difference, of course, is Michael "George Michael Bluth" Cera, who I found hilarious in everything he does, despite/because it's the same thing over and over again. Next up: Juno, which blessedly looks to be more of the same.