Saturday night.

* The first eight minutes of the ABC V remake. Some of this footage you've probably seen before.

* Canuxploitation!: your complete guide to Canadian B-film.

* Dollhouse ratings dip back down again after a week off. My thoughts on this week's episode here; in general I thought it was very good but not as good as everyone else seems to want to think. The show, never all that certain what it wanted to be about in the first place, is showing serious strain from being pulled in so many different directions at once. Is it a critically acclaimed loss leader or is it supposed to have high ratings? Is it an Eliza Dushku vehicle or an ensemble show? Is it serial or episodic? Are its characters tragic or villainous? Is it a feminist critique of late capitalism or a machine for generating sexy girls in miniskirts?

* Glenn Greenwald considers why debt matters for domestic spending but not for military spending.

Beltway elites have health insurance and thus the costs and suffering for those who don't are abstract, distant and irrelevant. Identically, with very rare exception, they and their families don't fight the wars they cheer on -- and don't even pay for them -- and thus get to enjoy all the pulsating benefits without any costs whatsoever.

* And, via Vu, Žižek explains hipsters.

Tuesday night.

* I've had to remove the Amazon ads from the sidebar due to Amazon Associates now being taxed in North Carolina. I don't know yet if I'll bother replacing them with anything—they weren't bringing in that much money. Direct donations still of course accepted.

* After something of a slow start with too many hi-I'm-reading-because posts, Infinite Summer is finally starting to heat up with good posts today on IJ and the Kenyon Commencement at Infinite Summer and Infinite Zombies.

* Promo for Dollhouse episode 13. Remember how I said Fred was now positioned to be either the show's new lead or else next season's Big Bad?

* Did the failed Watchmen adaptation hurt book sales? Occasional Fish has gathered some links suggesting it might have.

* Letterman couldn't resist some jokes at Palin's expense last night.

* New B-movie, coming this fall: They Saved Jackson's Brain!

* Things you may not have known about the late Robert McNamara: he was the one who told the world about the hydrogen bomb buried in the swamp outside Goldsboro, NC. (Via Dave F.)

* The New Organizing Institute is having a mock election running superheroes for DC mayor. Of course I'll be voting for Superman, but the Green Lantern's wholesale ripoff of the Obama aesthetic gives me pause.

* Also in superhero news: You're a fun-loving, high-maintenance girl that grew up in a New Jersey suburb. You live close enough to New York City to want the clothes and the cosmopolitan lifestyle, but you're not brave enough to move away from you over protective parents. What's a girl to do? If you're Zoe, you marry the first God of War that crash lands in town during a life or death struggle with his evil adversary! But, what happens when even an all-powerful God can't exactly measure up to your elevated expectations? Jersey Gods.

* ASCII Portal.

Monday links.

* I have only the deepest feeling of solidarity for the members of my generational cohort who are struggling with student debt. And I'm not saying my hurt feelings should form the basis for national policy. But I have to confess that on a purely emotive level I will be pretty royally pissed if this whole "forgive student debt" movement somehow manages to get off the ground. I'm very conflicted about it: forgiving student debt would help a whole lot of people, including close friends and family, and would really cost me nothing but regret. I am not incognizant of my privilege or my luck, nor I am unhappy with where my choices have taken me—but on a basic, visceral level, I'd feel cheated, and I know I wouldn't be alone.

* And speaking of other people's poor life choices: WTFSalon?

* Grouches of the world, unite.



* Identical Twins Escape Death Penalty With "Evil Twin Defense." I'm 95% certain this is just viral marketing for the Arrested Development movie.

* How to survive a B-movie.

* How much would it cost to build the Death Star? (last two via Gravity Lens)

* And your world in charts: this recession isn't like the others.

Every science fiction fan has a foundation for their nerdity. It is their Urtext. For me—and I take no particular joy in admitting this—there's no question that it is Star Trek. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and I watched more or less every episode of Star Trek produced before the day I came to understand the show's structural limitations sometime during the mid-'90s.

But if my nerdy nature can have a second foundation, it's undoubtedly Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which I remember as vividly today as the day I read them a decade and a half ago. It's only partially an exaggeration to say that for me all theories of history are but footnotes to Asimov. (If it's good enough for al Qaeda, it should be good enough for everyone.)

Asimov Wiki
Timeline of the Robots/Foundation Universe
A favorite commentary, and a followup.

Now, I wouldn't recommend that any of you necessarily read these books now; I suspect Asimov's magic only really works on thirteen-year-old boys. But I bring this up because there's word that a Foundation movie is finally going to be made, and it's clearly going to be awful. The director attached, Roland Emmerich, directed Independence Day, the Godzilla remake, The Day after Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC. On his entire IMDb page only Stargate and The Thirteenth Floor (producer's credit) fills me with anything less than total dread. B-movies are great, but Foundation shouldn't be a B-movie. If anything, it should be a HBO series...

Wrong Side of the Art: a blog devoted to a huge "collection of movie posters specializing in cult/horror/exploitation/B/sci-fi and basically any other genre to which one may refer as 'shit'." Not to mention blaxploitation, naziploitation, nunsploitation, and bruceleeploitation. Some of the images are not safe for work, of course.

Via Cult Media Studies.