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.

Rest in peace, Patrick Swayze.

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die: Sen. Ted Kennedy has died.

One of my very few trips to the principal's office came about as a result of an elaborate joke I was telling about You Can't Do That on Television's Mr. Shitler. Rest in peace, Les Lye. (Sad news via MeFi.)

Saturday morning links!

* RIP, Walter Cronkite.

* Fox is apparently trying to screw the Futurama voice cast, though there are some hints that this may just be an ill-conceived publicity stunt. For what it's worth Variety seems to think it's legit. Why does Fox hate nerds?

* I think it would be great to have a Kindle, but Amazon keeps making it harder and harder for me to buy one. Yesterday they unpublished two books by George Orwell without warning, deleting the books from the Kindles of those who bought it.

* On teaching Infinite Jest.

* And Pat Buchanan, it must be said, is a terrible human being.

I'm not an especially big fan of Michael Jackson—like a lot of people my age I have strong memories of Off the Wall and Thriller and not much else—but nonetheless I feel shaken by the asshat snark explosion you see in things like the first MetaFilter obituary thread. There's recognizable whiffs of both racism and queer panic in these kneejerk reactions, but also, I think, a simple human meanness. Even if you believe every terrible allegation made against Jackson—every last one—he remains in the end an incredibly tragic figure drained dry by a celebrity culture that completely and contemptuously devoured him. Whatever he did or didn't do—and who knows—like the rest of us he didn't choose the life he lived, beginning with an abused and ruined childhood that left him psychologically broken and, to use the favored euphemism, "weird."

If we have a modicum of generosity, we can only pity him. I simply do not understand this impulse to moonwalk on his grave.

The L.A. Times is now confirming Internet reports that Michael Jackson has died.

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 links.

* Today, we are all already losers: Ed McMahon has died.

* TPM is reporting that Waxman-Markey may go to vote in the House this week after all.

* Beautiful demolished train stations.

* The dizzying fall of MySpace.

* Graphical Overview of Same Sex Marriage Debate, v. 1.3.

* What was once the most secret British government document is released to the public on Tuesday. The Government War Book, used during the Cold War, set out in great detail exactly what would happen in the days before nuclear weapons were fired. Much more here. Via MeFi.

Thursday again! How does this keep happening?

* Today is the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. MetaFilter remembers.

* Planetary #27 finally on its way. October.

* New Hampshire officially passes marriage equality. It looked for a while like nitpicking from the governor's office might actually kill this; very glad it didn't.

* Country first: Lindsey Graham admits he puts the Republican Party before the good of the nation.

* In the wake of Dr. George Tiller's assassination, a frequent Fox News guest has put photos and addresses for the last two late-term abortion providers in the country on the Web.

* Obama speaks in Cairo.

* E.J. Dionne on the corporate media's continued rightward slant. More from Steve Benen.

* The recession: a global view. It's important to remember how good America actually has it—and that the current level of hardship in the States is, relatively speaking, not even all that bad.

* Here comes heath care. Donkeylicious says Team Edwards has something to crow about here. Maybe, but the health-care justification for Edwards's (and later Hillary Clinton's) candidacy long past viability was always weak—the plan you campaign on is never the plan that gets passed.

* And sad news: Bill, killed. Early reports declare David Carradine a suicide.

Rest in peace, Bea Arthur. Now the world's just a little less Golden.



(image found via a Google Image Search whose results may shock and appall you)

Sad news: J.G. Ballard has died.

Lorne has sung his last song. Andy Hallett was just 33.

Wednesday links.

* Scandal at UConn! The Plank says the story is peanuts; this sort of corruption is endemic to the NCAA.

* Cover Stories From the Most-Requested Back Issues of The American Prognosticator (1853–1987).

* Duke University professor and civil rights icon John Hope Franklin has died.

* Upright Citizens Brigade parodies Wes Anderson. Bastards!

* A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of the Second World War.

* The first unambiguous case of electronic voting machine fraud in the U.S.?

* Solitary confinement as torture.

* Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it. How could the Romans think in terms of centuries but we can't think past a single business cycle?

* Lots of people are linking to this letter from an AIG bonus recipient. The merits of the contracts aside—I've said before they should be enforced unless fraudulent or predicated on fraud—but I don't think he helps his case much when he puts a number on it. His one-time after-tax "bonus" is more than I would have made in thirty years of adjuncting.

* David Brin wants to "uplift" animals, i.e., make them sentient. This is exactly why people don't take science fiction seriously; it's totally crazy, pointless, and cruel and it wouldn't even work...

A few links I've missed over the last few days.

* xkcd discovers the secret origins of the Kindle.

* RIP, Philip Jose Farmer. More here, especially about Venus on the Half-Shell, the book he published under the name Kilgore Trout. It's not half-bad.

* 'Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights.'

* Spider-Man is taking a job at McDonald's in these tough economic times.

* And Joss Whedon explains why DC Comics movies don't work. He's right and wrong about this; there's something to be said for the "pain" thesis, but mostly it's a failure of writing and directorial ambition, compounded by corporate cowardice...

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

Rest in peace, John Updike. Remembrances from the New York Times, AP, Salon, NPR, and MetaFilter.

Rest in peace, Ricardo Montalban.

God bless America (22 January, 2003)

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.
The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.

The Guardian has poetry from that late Harold Pinter. Here's another political one from Lenin's Tomb.

American Football

Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

Links for your post-Christmas blues.

* In the future, all movies will have lightsabers.

* Rest in peace, Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt.

* Barack Obama is stupendously ridiculously popular.

* Al Franken is not quite so popular, but he's looking like Minnesota's next senator.

* Confidential for Mac users: the weird inability to change location in Finder dialogues is easily rectified.

* In the zeitgeist: people living life backwards.

* 95 Old School Games You Can Play Online. Via MeFi.

* So you're saying we need Batman? (Thanks, Kate!)

Afternoonery.

* Support for renewable energy technology to fight global warming is weakening in the face of worldwide economic problems and the true scale of the carbon reductions required, a survey published today has suggested.

Figures presented at the UN climate talks in Poznan, Poland, show that climate experts have less faith in alternative energy than they did 12 months ago.

* Grist reviews 2008's most essential book on shit.

* DFW's last book will be published next year, based off the Kenyon College commence speech he gave in 2005. Devotees may recall that this speech was the basis for my MetaFilter obit post.

* Everyone's in love with this evolved Mona Lisa. More evolution fun at Pharyngula and MetaFilter.

* Everyone's in love with Macs.

* Don't miss Metallica's latest music video, a prophecy of zombie disaster originating with the Tungska Event.