Rushmore... in space!: “I’d like to do a movie in space,” Wes told AccessHollywood.com on Friday at the Hollywood premiere of his latest film, the animated Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox. “If possible I would like to try to actually shoot some of it on location in space. That’s my preference.”

Fifty years of space exploration. Via MeFi.

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.

Junk we left on the Moon. (via Gynomite)

Took a long nap today. That wasn't bad. Here are some links.

* Lots of speculation today about what sort of health care bill could actually come out of the reconciliation sausage factory. Meanwhile, the always-wrong Politico is once again reporting Obama will back off the public option entirely.

* Game of the night: Canabalt.

* Classic SF of the night: John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There" (1938), the inspiration for John Carpenter's The Thing.

* Man Men has already been renewed for a fourth season.

* Cheney '12!

* To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again. Lawrence Kraus, formerly of Case Western, writes about the possibility of one-way trips to Mars in The New York Times. Taking the neg is this Metafilter commenter:

Yes, you have to bring them back. Otherwise, what's the point of the trip, to prove that you can shoot people into space to die? We already know how to do that.

Yes, helplessly listening to people die on Mars would certainly be horrible. But if we could keep them alive, or better yet, independent and (quasi-)sustainable, that would be amazing. And, I think, worth the risk and costs.

* Four-year-old Fantastic Four franchise to be rebooted already. In the future franchises will be rebooted before the first film even comes out.

io9 has caught space-elevator fever—and there's only one cure.

The LRB blog highlights the little-known second sentence spoken on the Moon, as well as the last, while 3 Quarks Daily remembers the Apollo 11 Plan B.

In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.

Abstruse Goose has a very fun map of how far various television shows have gotten from Earth. Via Bad Astronomy.

Friday Friday.

* New York in the 1940s: a great Flickr set.

* Change we can believe in: President Obama has vetoed the Mutant Registration Act.

* Problems with secrecy in comics' direct market.

* Homages to Ditko in the New Yorker.

* Failed Anti-Batmans.

* Ecocomics: a new blog devoted to the intersection of economics and comics regarding such questions as supernatural disaster insurance, the construction industry in the Marvel Universe, how Two-Face funds his crime sprees, and where the Canadian government get the money from to keep making super-soldiers.

* 'The God That Failed:' why we don't live in space colonies.

Nightime links.

* Change we can believe in: 'Obama Administration Set to Fire Its First Gay Military Linguist.' Obama's lack of leadership on gay issues, DADT first and foremost, is really startling—especially given that a majority of Americans already believe DADT should be repealed.

* At one point news of a new Ron Moore sci-fi pilot would have gotten me very excited; I was so young, once. Airlock Alpha says Virtuality most likely won't make it to series.

* Lots of things have been said about A-Rod, but this pitch tipping thing seems like a big, big deal if true. Black Sox scandal big.

* The Complete Book of Space Travel.

* As any nerd can tell you, there's a new Star Trek movie opening this weekend. io9 has your basic primer, while Slate prefers a history of the Klingon language. If you're looking to bone up on Trek, Memory Alpha might be your best bet.

* The MPAA thinks educators shouldn't get a DMCA exemption to use decryption software to show clips in class. Instead, they should use a camcorder to tape the clip off the TV. What could be more easy?

In the words of media literacy researcher Martine Courant Rife, that's like typing up a quote from a book, taking it outside, chiseling the words in a rock, photographing the rock, scanning the photo, and running OCR on it. And for what?

I don't want anyone to panic, but apparently there's a space storm alert. Stock up on guns and water and meet me under Lincoln's nose at Mt. Rushmore. If everyone listens to me we'll be fine.

Two more Watchmen links: the credit sequence—which is decent but which didn't thrill me quite like it did others, probably because I'd read exactly what it would be like in advance—and the real-life smiley face on Mars. Via io9 and AICN.

The review thread is still going strong, too, for those with more thoughts on the film.

#2: culture!

* How HBO changed TV.

* Is Sarah Connor canceled?

* Europe names crew for simulated mission to Mars. Devotees may remember that this is strikingly reminiscent of the first episode of The Twilight Zone.

* Examined Life is your crash course in contemporary philosophy.

I'm not suggesting that Taylor set out to sandbag or ironize her subjects in "Examined Life." In fact, I'm quite sure she didn't. But as with Taylor's previous film, "Zizek!" (whose subject, the Slovenian madman Slavoj Zizek, appears here at a London garbage dump, claiming that mankind isn't alienated enough from the natural world), the movie has a philosophical element of its own that is not free of guile. By conducting her conversations in public spaces, and removing her interlocutors from desks and offices and book-lined studies and other appurtenances of intellectual authority, Taylor introduces a degree of playfulness and unpredictability that becomes the movie's M.O. Trying to rehabilitate the concept of revolution while rowing in the Central Park lake, post-Marxist philosopher Michael Hardt literally runs aground on a half-submerged boulder. I'm far more sympathetic to Hardt's intellectual project than I should admit, but, really, what can you say?

* The great American novel v. women. (Or maybe that's the other way around.)

* Alan Moore v. comic book films. More Moore here and here.

* How they marketed Watchmen: a look back at the original solicits from 1986.

* Gary Westfahl: Why Science Fiction So Often Fails to Predict the Future. Another thing Suvin makes clear in his very good book on science fiction is that if you're expecting science fiction to predict the future you're asking the wrong questions.

* The Indy just announced the winners of their 2009 poetry contest, and once again Jaimee was one of the judges.

* And Neil sends along some optical illusion fun.

A few more missing links from the last few days.

* What sort of game are Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld playing? First the pilot for Curb Your Enthusiasm is a preemptive parody of Comedian, several years before the fact—now Jerry Seinfeld has signed with NBC to do a reality TV show that sounds like nothing so much as Curb Your Enthusiasm.

* Supermen of Pre-Golden-Age SF.

* How they made The Godfather.

* Is Switzerland the next Iceland?

* The Milky Way Transit Authority.

* Simulation of a black hole destroying a star.

* And is the FiveThirtyEight.com brand ruined?

V-Day links.

* I feel stimulated, and I bet you do too. Here's Arlen Specter with your partisan post-mortem.

"When I came back to the cloak room after coming to the agreement a week ago today," said Specter, "one of my colleagues said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' My Republican colleague said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' I said, 'Are you going to vote with me?' And he said, 'No, I might have a primary.' And I said, 'Well, you know very well I'm going to have a primary.'" [...]

"I think there are a lot of people in the Republican caucus who are glad to see this action taken without their fingerprints, without their participation," he said.

Your modern Republican party.

* The headline reads, "Large Banks Are on the Brink of Insolvency." You heard it from Brad Miller first.

* Heath Ledger fans want the Joker retired in honor of Ledger's turn in the makeup.

"When Michael Jordan retired, they withdrew the number 23 jersey as an honor. It’s the same thing with Heath.”

Yes, it's exactly the same.

* Space debris. Via Cynical-C.

* Images from Watchmen. Clock's at 11:59...



* Paul Auster, science fiction writer.

* Joss Whedon, cultural humanist.

* And Henry David Thoreau, vegetarian.

Vegetarian ideas figured prominently in 19th-century intellectual circles. Though practicing vegetarians remained outside the mainstream, as they do today, vegetarianism itself was intriguing, its arguments compelling. Thoreau, for instance, was not a strict vegetarian, but he did believe that the vegetarian diet was “the destiny of the human race.” Not because animals were cute and fuzzy and therefore ought to be saved from brutality, but because they were dirty and difficult and expensive. “The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness,” he wrote in Walden, “and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.” You can stand around in the forest, waiting to spear, skin, and roast a bunny for your next meal, but…why?

I had a nasty case of food poisoning or something last night—fever, chills, the whole bit. But now I'm back and quite literally better than ever. A few links to celebrate my recovery:

* Early reviews of Dollhouse remain mixed. We'll know tomorrow....

* This YouTube clip (via MeFi) captures just the barest sliver of the greatness of the Conan DVD commentary. It is our civilization's highest cultural achievement.

* The trailer for the new Tarantino is out.

* How to teach non-canonical material responsibly in a composition class: lesson plans from Scott Eric Kaufman on Dark Knight and Watchmen.

* Two satellites have collided in orbit. Apparently that's never happened before. More from MeFi.

* Happy birthday, Charles Darwin. More from Satisfactory Comics.

Thursday links while I should be doing other things. Also, for the tiny handful of Final Crisis fans out there&mash;spoiler alert.

* DC is pretending they've killed off Batman. It's adorable.

* Was Che Guevara "a type of Batman"? So claims Benico del Toro.

* Superuseless superpowers. Via Kottke. "13th Bullet Bulletproof" made me laugh.

* In my email: the Wikipedia page for the hilarious sounding but actually fairly tragic Boston Molasses Disaster.

Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was... Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings — men and women — suffered likewise.

* Earth from space. Just another awesome post from the Big Picture.

* Obama's people: portraits of 52 top members of the Obama team.

* Did the Victorian novel make us better people? Will computer screens kill literacy? What's going to happen all the white people? And is there life on Mars?

Games for a Friday night: Evacuation and Too Many Ninjas!. Via MeFi.

Linkdump!

* The headline reads, "Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected."

* Probably the stupidest thing ever published in the L.A. Times: a bald anti-science assertion that deadly allergies don't exist.

* 'Going Under': Doctors addicted to drugs. Via MeFi.

* Valuating Facebook in terms of Whoppers.

* I don't know if I'm more worried that my insomnia will lead to paranoia or Exploding Head syndrome.

* News that by this point will surprise no one: Arctic melt 20 years ahead of climate models.

* Legislation has been introduced for a post-Bush truth and reconciliation commission. This is something that is sorely needed, and I hope the Democratic leadership puts its full weight behind it.

* Blago: owned. More discussion here.

* The literary world is abuzz with news of Jack Torrance's latest, All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.

* Cory Doctorow on writing in an age of distraction.

* Things not to do: buying a $1000 house in Detroit. Big ups to Cleveland, which is apparently turning into Detroit.

(Thanks to Bill for some of these!)