Saw this in the Dawn Treader while waiting for Vu's flight to get in, had to get it. Could this be the world's most perfect comic? Superman vs. Terminator.

Don't give up hope for more Sarah Connor?

Wednesday!

* Reports that Justice John Paul Stevens has hired fewer-than-usual clerks for the 2010 Supreme Court term are now confirmed: he's only hired one clerk, signaling a likely retirement in the near future.

* Seinfeld nostalgia is in full effect; FlowingData has your map of character connections.

* How to Talk to a Wingnut: Decoding Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

* Today's must-read op-ed: Bob Hebert on Texas's apparent execution of an innocent man. Even more striking than the fact of the terrible error is the look at the basic cognitive biases at work in the criminal justice system:

When official suspicion fell on Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to change. Whereas initially he was described by neighbors as screaming and hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children saved, he now was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to the girls.

In short: "If he were innocent, they wouldn't have arrested him."

* Behind the scenes of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

* Harlan Ellison and Terminator.

* And the Hartford Courant has your photo of the day. Our public servants hard at work.

Sunday links 2.

* For all you IJers out there, Infinite Summer has your David Foster Wallace humor minute.

* Hate crime protection for the homeless? Hate crimes are, in general, a very thorny legal issue, but in light of so much violence directed specifically at the homeless it makes sense to see them as a class in need of additional protection.

* Terminator 4 was so good they're going to make Terminator 5.

* Polling headline of the week: 'GOP's Rating with Latinos Falls to Margin of Error.'

* Rachel Maddow on the success of astroturfed right-wing protests since the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000. Via Cyn-C.

* And Eric Holder is still inching towards prosecution of the Bush administration, though in terms of scale and scope the proposed investigation remains far too cautious.

MMLD #2.

* The recession comes home to Randolph: they're closing our beloved Pathmark.

* A musical tribute to "Ozymandias" from Handsome CD Plus Three.

* On everybody's lips: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Links to reviews here and here. I look forward to having time to read this c. 2017.

* "Do It Again: One Man's Quest to Reunite the Kinks."

* Comics Should Be Good is running a month-long "iconic panels" series all month long to celebrate Marvel's 70th.

* And Joss Whedon says they should have renewed Terminator instead.

Saturday!

* The headline reads, "Boy Hit By Meteorite."

* Some comics about mental illness.

* Banksy has an official show in Bristol.

* And you know Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is really gone when its creator explains how the cliffhanger would have been resolved.

[I]n the actual footage of the show, we see that Derek doesn't recognize [John.] So, by jumping into this future, he has erased his existence in a certain way, and we see that. We see that nobody recognizes him... If we had gotten a third season, I should say, we definitely would have explored what it all meant, but I think there's a great moment where we see Allison [Summer Glau], and John's look to her is very meaningful. I think that also would have been a great thing in terms of dramatic potential. Like I said, the show has ended, and it would all be speculation, and I really don't want to raise anybody's expectations.

Via io9.

Fresh from ruining Terminator: Salvation, Christian Bale's ego is already hard at work ruining Terminator 5.

Claiming unnamed "industry sources," Bleeding Cool says that the sequel to Salvation will see resistance leader John Connor himself travel back in time to try and stop the robot takeover of the world - but that he'll be abandoning America to come back to 2011 London.

"T2" is thus also the first and best instance of a paradoxical law that appears to hold true for the entire F/X Porn genre. It is called the Inverse Cost and Quality Law, and it states very simply that the larger a movie's budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be. The case of "T2" shows that much of the ICQL's force derives from simple financial logic. A film that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make is going to get financial backing if and only if its investors can be maximally -- _maximally_ -- sure that at the very least they will get their hundreds of millions of dollars back [11] -- i.e. a megabudget movie must not fail (and "failure" here means anything less than a runaway box-office hit) and must thus adhere to certain reliable formulae that have been shown by precedent to maximally ensure a runaway hit. One of the most reliable of these formulae involves casting a superstar who is "bankable" (i.e. whose recent track record of films shows a high ROI). The studio backing for "T2'''s wildly sophisticated and digital F/X therefore depends on Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreeing to reprise his Terminator role. Now the ironies start to stack, though, because it turns out that Schwarzenegger -- or perhaps more accurately "Schwarzenegger, Inc.," or "Ahnodyne" -- has decided that playing any more malevolent cyborgs would compromise the Leading Man image his elite and bankable record of ROI entails. He will do the film only if "T2"'s script is somehow engineered to make the Terminator the Good Guy. Not only is this vain and stupid and shockingly ungrateful [12], it is also common popular knowledge, duly reported in both the trade and the popular entertainment media before "T2" even goes into production. There's consequently a weird postmodern tension to the way we watch the film; we're aware of what the bankable star's demands were, and we're also aware of how much the movie cost and how important bankable stars are to a big-budget movie; and so one of the few things that keeps us on the edge of our seats during the movie is our suspense about whether James Cameron can possibly weave a plausible, non-cheesy narrative that meets Schwarzenegger's career needs without betraying "T1"'s precedent.

The Great David Foster Wallace on Terminator 2. (Via Candleblog.) I've said before: T2 can only be understood as a parody of the Terminator franchise as a whole.

Saturday!

* The first of the last three Pushing Daisies is on tonight. Bryan Fuller's not satisfied, and not done with the story yet.

* Alien prequel on the way.

* More on the sci-fi future that failed from CNN.

* Related: Star Trek as religion.

* Scenes from trailers that aren't in the finished film. I suspect I would have liked Terminator Salvation a lot more if the "This isn't the future my mother warned me about" scenes had been retained.

* Wondermark has a good riff take on Terminator-style action franchises: 1, 2, 3.

* Tales of the New Frontier: a web comic set in a mythical alt-history Kennedy administration.

* 'Jesus Killed Mohammed': Christian dominionism and the U.S. military.

* Brace yourselves for Toy Story 3.

* Weekend games: Heavy Weapons, Panic Breakout, Fail-Safe, and Redstar Fall Pro.

* And this just in: Delaware still sucks.

"If anybody thinks [bringing Summer onto Dollhouse] hasn't occurred to me already then they have not met me," he says. "I mentioned it to her before [SCC] was canceled. I was like, 'You know, we should get you in the 'house.' But first we have to come up with something that works." And casting her as a doll would not work, insists Whedon. "Summer would be perfect to play an active, but she's done that [type of role] a lot," he says. "I'd rather see her play someone who talks too much. The most fun I have is when I get somebody who's good and comfortable at doing something, and then I make them do something else. Summer said to me, 'I would like to play a normal girl before I die of extreme old age.'"

Wednesday!

* I have a review in the Indy this week of Lucas Hilderbrand's Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Keywords: copyright Constitution Buffy pornography Superstar Mystery Science Theater 3000.

* Cases for and against Buffy without Joss.

* Sarah Connor creator: I won't be back.

* Some days I think Marvel just doesn't get women. Via MeFi.

* theauteurs.com: Streaming video of Criterion Collection films. (via Vu)

* And the year of Senatorial madness shows no sign of ending: Joe Sestak intends to unseat Arlen and Burris's scumbaggery is caught on tape.

Tuesday night linkdump.

* Glenn Beck, jackass.

* It's not commonly known, but the Supreme Court actually deals with more than just abortion.

* Somedays I doubt James Inhofe's ability to rule fairly without undue influence from his own personal race, gender, or political preferences.

* Against empathy: The Terminator for the Supreme Court. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

* Sonia Sotomayor, intellectual lightweight.

* The New York Times teases the coming superbrain.

* Red Bull is a hell of a drug.

Monday night.

* What went wrong with Terminator Salvation? There's been some loose talk that T4 isn't all that bad, but this is incorrect. It is that bad. It's worse. Via MeFi.

* Speaking of bad scripts: On Lucas's original script for Star Wars. Also via MeFi.

* The Spider-Man newspaper strip has retconned the Spider-Man-was-never-married retconned. Please adjust your interest in Spider-Man accordingly.

* Scandal at Oxford! The university's first female professor of poetry has resigned nine days into her tenure amidst allegations that she organized a smear campaign against one of her opponents for the job.

* Five ways to tell if your life is a Wes Anderson film. Via Rushmore Academy.

Friday night links of variable goofiness.

* Ze Frank has your optical illusion of the night.

* Lateral thinking interview questions from Microsoft.

You have two jars, 50 red marbles and 50 blue marbles. A jar will be picked at random, and then a marble will be picked from the jar. Placing all of the marbles in the jars, how can you maximize the chances of a red marble being picked? What are the exact odds of getting a red marble using your scheme?

* My friend Jay explains the story behind his possession of the world's most badass scar.

* Who ate all the Neanderthals? Oops.

* Which of our own closely held beliefs will our own children and grandchildren by appalled by?

* Also: classic sci-fi box office adjusted for inflation.

* Jacob directs our attention to the growing threat of Transforminators.

* Bo Obama, Dog Superhero.

* Wes Anderson, the YouTube Channel.

Wow, so Terminator Salvation is pretty terrible. There are about forty-five seconds of compelling footage when You Know Who is on-screen; the rest is barely even a movie.

Here are my thoughts.

* Was that badass-but-nameless woman supposed to be Sarah Connor, who last we heard was absent from her empty grave? If not, she really should have been.
* Skynet needs to study both military tactics and military strategy.
* In particular, it should consider how effective two or more Terminators could be in situations where one Terminator might potentially be vulnerable, if only to dumb luck.
* Skynet also needs to consider its ultimate goal or goals, which, if I may offer one criticism, appear to make no sense.
* Where was Derek? Where was Derek?

Good morning, world.

* Michael Steele wants you to know that Republicans are done apologizing for the ruinous policies of the last eight years. Love it or lump it, chumps, they've turned the page.

* "Calling Utopia a Utopia," by Ursula K. Le Guin.

To define science fiction as a purely commercial category of fiction, inherently trashy, having nothing to do with literature, is a tall order. It involves both denying that any work of science fiction can have literary merit, and maintaining that any book of literary merit that uses the tropes of science fiction (such as Brave New World, or 1984, or The Handmaid’s Tale, or most of the works of J.G. Ballard) is not science fiction. This definition-by-negation leads to remarkable mental gymnastics. For instance, one must insist that certain works of dubious literary merit that use familiar science-fictional devices such as alternate history, or wellworn science-fiction plots such as Men-Crossing-the-Continent-After-the Holocaust, and are in every way definable as science fiction, are not science fiction — because their authors are known to be literary authors, and literary authors are incapable by definition of committing science fiction.

Now that takes some fancy thinking.

* And Sarah Conner's showrunner says goodbye.

Good shows are cancelled every year; smart shows, worthy shows, shows which move their viewers to write blogs and have viewing parties and create action figures and bury executives’ email accounts under thousands of messages. I miss Deadwood and The Wire and Arrested Development but thank God that I still have Rescue Me and The Office and a recently renewed Party Down written by ex-T:SCC writer John Enbom.

Bad shows are cancelled, too. And certainly there are those who did not like what we did and had their own vision for what a Terminator TV show should be. It’s easy to look at low ratings or cancellation as “failure” and for those who believe we’ve gone about this all wrong I’m sure today’s news will only serve to confirm a world view that I would never try to change. We’ve written the show as best we can, executed it to the best of our abilities, and sent it out in the world knowing that we worked out asses off to do something that wouldn’t be a waste of anybody’s forty-three minutes.

Is Terminator canceled? Yes. No. No one knows. Ask again later.

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.

The final Terminator: Is this a joke? That was the last episode ever? Come on, Fox, the show got decent-enough ratings before you moved it to Fridays, and anyway, you can't end a show like that.

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. And it gets worse: the robots are already eying the Moon.