One exam down links.

* Soundtrack for The Cloud Photographers, the Wes Anderson film Wes Anderson never made. I love this.

* Show us your birth certificate, Joe. Put the ID back in BIDEN.

* All your High Holy days belong to Glenn Beck.

* If Environmentalists Made Star Wars. This is early promotion for END:CIV, the film that asks: "If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?"

* Also in environmental news: the Yes Men distributed a fake version of the New York Post that actually had factual information inside of it today.

* Doing it wrong: Immigrants’ advocates have been complaining for months now that the Obama administration is cracking down hard on illegal immigration while doing nothing to help legalize their situations and create a workable immigration system.

* “This fellow is a man in his thirties,” he said, “a research physicist with us out here. As far as I can tell, he’s perfectly normal in every way except for a lot of crazy ideas about living part of the time in another world–on another planet. Washington sent him out to do a key job, and until a few weeks ago he was going great guns. But lately he’s out of contact with the work so much and for so long that something’s got to he done about it.” Isn't this the plot of Adam Strange? (via MeFi and Boing Boing).

* And from the Onion: 'George W. Bush Chuckles To Self Upon Thinking About How He Was President Of The United States For Almost A Decade.'

The Onion: 'Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care.'

"Both parties understand that the current system is broken," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday. "But what we can't seem to agree upon is how to best keep it broken, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever. It’s a very complicated issue."

Three more.

* Big media hype for the new show from The State alums, Michael and Michael Have Issues.

* 'Smoke Monster From Lost Given Own Primetime Spin-Off Series.'

* Train v. tornado. Place your bets.

Thursday night links.

* Artists and the recession.

* Tough day for celebrity: Farrah Fawcett has died, and Michael Jackson has been rushed to the hospital with cardiac arrest.

* Superhero roast from 1979, starring Adam West and Ed McMahon. Surreal. Via @filmjunk. (No Superman?)

* Towards the personhood of whales: 'Whales Might Be as Much Like People as Apes.'

* 'Twitter Creator On Iran: "I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful." '

* In Tehran, state television's Channel Two is putting on a "Lord of the Rings" marathon, part of a bigger push to keep us busy. Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it's two or three films a day. The message is "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Let's watch, forget about what's happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past. Look ahead.

Tuesday night roundup.

* Just posted to MetaFilter for the first time in a long time: Tomorrow, Obama will extend federal employee benefits to same-sex partners. But is it too little, too late to mend the growing rift between Obama and gay rights advocates, especially after last week's controversial (to say the least) DOMA brief? From my perspective it's a very small first step in the right direction, but very small—until the Lieberman-Baldwin Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act passes Congress it won't even cover health benefits.

* Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles.

* Alex Pareene's new blog reports that everyone is trying to kill you.

* Let UNC tell you how old your body is. More here and here.

* Busted-up Pokémon.

Saturday night's all right for blogging. After the first few links we even get to some stuff that's not about Watchmen.

* Walter Chaw's Watchmen review goes to many of the same places as my own, albeit in a more thoroughgoing way:

Freeze any frame of the film and find in it the panel that inspired it. With each section separated by grabs from the covers of the comic book's initial run, fanboys should have no quarrel with the fidelity of the piece--but the reaction to the picture will likely continue to be fairly muted, as devotees of the graphic novel didn't exactly appreciate it for its slickness and sexiness. I'd hazard that what attracted people to the book is that Moore's vision is one of absolute respect for the power of the image in molding human history. Snyder does seem to understand this in restaging the Kennedy assassination with one of his masked heroes as the culprit, drawing a line pure and true from Zapruder's inauguration of film as history to the comic-book medium's inextricable hold on the collective imagination-in-formation. The power of Moore's work is that it takes the divine and, like Milton's mission, explains the ways of these gods to men in terms that men can understand: they're corrupted by their power and governed by their avarice and the essential baseness of being human. This sentiment is all but jettisoned, alas, by the time Snyder recasts the pathetic victories of sexually-reawakened schlub Night Owl (Patrick Wilson) and paramour Silk Spectre (a severely overmatched Malin Akerman) as triumphant victories. Watchmen--filthy with its director's now-trademark ramping technique--sees itself as a superhero adaptation of a human book. The failures of these characters are just weaknesses our übermenchen must overcome, not the foibles and hubris that lead to their downfall--and ours.

Vu and kate both get at this deep in the comments to my original post as well.

* Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman says Watchmen is a "great film" and then spends the rest of the post explaining why it isn't.

* The headline reads, "Watchmen's first day disappoints." You're telling me!

* John Scalzi argues for a statute of limitations on spoilers.

Television: One week (because it’s generally episodic, and that’s how long you have until the next episode)

Movies: One year (time enough for everyone to see it in the theaters, on DVD and on cable)

Books: Five years (because books don’t reach nearly as many people at one time)

To my mind the whole "spoiler" hysteria needs to end; suspense is an overrated aesthetic in all but the rarest cultural productions.

* Husband, Wife Unaware They Are A Comedy Team.

* I suffered from this for years without knowing there was a name for it besides "being a college student."

* Another picture of a grown-up Calvin and Hobbes for your collection.

* The economy and literature: Will this crisis produce a Gatsby? More at MeFi.

* Does the financial crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? David Harvey on the credit crunch and class.

* Abandoned places: a LiveJournal community. (Thanks, Eli!)

* And attention would-be humanities grad students: there are no jobs. None.

Link dump #2. So many open tabs.

* The Case against Candyland. Playing games with Jaimee's nieces and nephews has taught me this lesson too—the games we used to play are terribly unfun.

* 'Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed To Understand His Reference To Savage Sword Of Conan #24.'

* Also in the news: 'Blagojevich Claims Behavior Was Just Elaborate Plan To Surprise Patrick Fitzgerald With Senate Nomination On His Birthday.'

* Remember when Conservapedia was sort of hilarious? PZ Meyers catches them with a very disturbing post that reads like a hitlist of Democratic senators.

* The bad news: Climate change may choke the oceans for 100,000 years. The good news: Damage to the rest of the biosphere may be limited to only 1,000 years. A little more from the sporadically blogging Alex Greenberg.

* The Space Adventures of Krypto, Superbody's dog.

Nearly 30 years of tense relations between the U.S. and Iran came to a dramatic end this March when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed that his country's suspected nuclear program was in fact a covert operation to build "Ali Baba and the 40 Loops"—the largest, most thrilling roller coaster in the Middle East.

In a globally televised address before the United Nations, Ahmadinejad unveiled the 500-foot-tall steel coaster, which he called a "very real threat" to anyone not interested in having a blast. Via Srinivas.

After enduring eight years of near constant trauma, the United States is, at long last, ready for equality.

The Onion: 'Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress.'

Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.

"Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, 'Things are finally as terrible as we're willing to tolerate," said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. "To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you."

Added Obama, "It's a great day for our nation."

Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another contributing factor to Obama's victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American.

Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday's election.

Via Vu. See also: 'Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job.'

The Onion is on the scene with news of an election upset in the making.


Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

It's funny because it's (still!) true, but it might be more funny if it weren't true...

The Onion explains the bailout. Via NeilAlien.

Now Obama's email has been hacked as well. Details at The Onion.

Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.

An Onion flashback: 'CBS To Release Own Version Of NBC's The Office.'

"You can't just take a show that good, throw in a new set of actors, and expect the same results," said Jennie Tan, who runs a popular fansite for the NBC show. "CBS just has to accept that there will simply never be another character like Michael Scott, ever."

The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all, sources reported Tuesday.

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters. The Onion reports.

* Feet of clay: The untold story of Arthur Miller's fourth son.

* "Every movie I make is about someone who can't fit in, can't make things work or is dealing with failure." The Guardian's very short piece on the Venice premiere of The Darjeeling Limited tells us something new: the film will apparently be accompanied by a 12-minute prequel short called "Hotel Chevalier."

* Fucking Yankees, Reports Nation.

The Onion: "Giuliani To Run For President Of 9/11." Sure, it's from February—but it's still funny, and exactly right.

"People talk about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but did either of them happen to be mayor of New York in September 2001?" Bedford, NH resident Helen Rolfe said. "Giuliani was. To me, that speaks volumes about this man."