Thursday!

* Is Tim Pawlenty the candidate to beat in the 2012 Republican primary? Some followup here and here suggesting maybe not.

* I liked this post from Matt Yglesias on the Alan Grayson "scandal" and rhetorical moralism in American politics.

* Matt also thinks TMBG needs more science studies.

* Winds shifting: Reid promises a public option. But Orrin Hatch has declared that bills with less than 70 votes don't count.

* Stephen Joyce has lost his lawsuit with English professor Carol Loeb Shloss. Tim is glad.

* Wes Anderson is coming under fire from his fans for apparently signing a pro-Roman-Polanski petition. People I admire really need to stop signing petitions.

* Classic old-school video game The Incredible Machine is now a $10 download.

Short Sunday links.

* Can't The Hobbit catch a break?

* Mars may have more water than previously suspected.

* I really hope They Might Be Giants isn't joking about upcoming albums called There Goes Your Liberties and Here Comes the Syndicalists.

* Why can't writers talk extemporaneously?

* And William Safire has died.

Fact: America loves They Might Be Giants.

TMBG updates a classic with "Why Does The Sun Really Shine? (The Sun Is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma)." (via)

The view from my iTunes. I got this idea from Fred at occasional fish.

1. In iTunes, select View Options under the View menu.
2. Turn off everything but “Artist.”
3. Select all and copy.
4. Search and Replace the word “track” with nothing.
5. Paste the results into the Wordle.net Create page.

Here's mine...

The Telegraph has the fifty best cult books. I'm really not sure about a definition of "cult" strained enough to encompass On the Road and To Kill a Mockingbird, but aside from that it's a pretty solid list with a surprising number of personal favorites. Calvino! Adams! Hofstadter! Vonnegut! Someone in a club tonight has stolen my ideas. (via)

* Strange Maps, back from too long a break, knocks it out of the park with a bunch of entries, including this map of the Apocalypse.



* Drawn! has a music video for the best song on the latest They Might Be Giants album, "We're the Mesopotamians."

* Philadelphia Weekly interviews "The Magnificent Anderson" and his co-writers on The Darjeeling Limited (which I spoiler-reviewed if you missed it).

* And, in the New Yorker, John Updike reviews the Charles Schulz biography everyone else in America has already reviewed.

In order to keep my nerd accreditation I had to buy the latest They Might Be Giants album on iTunes, The Else. A couple of the iTunes reviewers were extremely enthustiastic, calling it the best album since Apollo 18—but unfortunately it's actually the worst TMBG album so far. John and John's career has always been dangerously close to a snakehead eating the head on the opposite side, and with The Else they may have finally crossed the line into self-plagiarism, if not outright self-parody.

The album has only one really good song, the last track: "The Mesopotamians," about a Beatlesque pop band from Ancient Mesopotamia.

"We're the Mesopotamians / Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh..."

Buy that song and skip the album.