Friday!

* The ping-pong match in the press over the public option continues. Nobody can figure out whether or not Pelosi has the votes, whether or not Obama supports an Olympia-Snowe-style trigger, or just what will happen with the cloture vote in the Senate. Ezra Klein compares the likely House and Senate bills, which leads Matt Yglesias to suggest a best-of-both-worlds approach. Meanwhile a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll shows that public support for the public option remains steady at around 60%, which would be important if the Senate were a properly representative body.

* Lots of buzz today about Neill Blomkamp's next film after District 9, described by SCI FI Wire as a balls-out sci-fi epic.

* 'A Mid-Atlantic Miracle': Keeping public university costs down in Maryland.

* A judge has ruled the war crimes case against Blackwater/Xe will go forward.

* 'Living on $500,000 a Year': Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns. John Scalzi compares Fitzgerald's income and lifestyle to a writer's today.

* Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for president? This would take "fair and balanced" to a whole new level.

* And your entirely random chart of the day: The Population of Rome Through History. Via Kottke.

Science fiction based on the fall of the Roman Empire. What may be more important here, I think, is the way most of our ideas of democracy (and what happens to it) seem to be based upon the fall of the Roman Republic. More and more it seems to me that on some level U.S. democracy is ideologically infused with a sense of futurity that pulls it towards a collapse into empire—as if for many people it's not worth fighting against the encroachments of the state, the expansion of the executive branch, or the evacuation of actually existing representation in government because, well, it's bound to happen eventually anyway.

Random Friday morning links.

* Strangeusa.com is a clearing house for weird and uncanny events across America, including hauntings in Durham and UFO sightings in my hometown. (via)

* A look back at the first issue of Wired. (via)

* Who are the best female science fiction authors?

* Detailed city-planning model of Ancient Rome. (via)

* Glimpses of South Asia before 1947. (via)