I learned on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio this week that the Canadian single-payer health-care system came about after its successful adoption in a single province, Saskatchewan. It's this fact of history that makes me think progressives should be directing much more money and support to groups like the single-payer movement in California, organized around support for SB 810.

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.

Saturday links.

* Fox News caught stage-managing 9/12 protestors.

* Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, speaking to fellow members of his Conservative Party: "Fifty years from today, Americans will revere the name, 'Obama.' Because like his Canadian predecessors, he chose the tough responsibilities of national leadership over the meaningless nostrums of sterile partisanship that we see too much of in Canada and around the world."

* Also at TPM: new polling data suggests that resistance to health care reform peaked at the emergence of the town hall disruptions, suggesting this strategy may have backfired for the Republicans.

* Also backfiring on the Republicans: everything. More here and here.

* Game of the weekend: MagnetiZR.

* Cynical-C catches Kids in the Hall parodying Glenn Beck over a decade in advance.

* Collapse IV, "Concept Horror," is a free download.

* Between 2010 and 2050 each $7 spent on basic family planning can reduce emissions more than a ton; to achieve that same level of reduction using low-carbon tech would on average cost $32 per ton. Via Donkeylicious.

* Great find: Virginia Woolf's fan letter to Olaf Stapledon. Via Kim Stanley Robinson's New Scientist piece on British SF.

Required viewing: YouTube episodes from Prisoners of Gravity, an early-'90s Canadian television show on the history and practice of science fiction. Also via MeFi.

Other links:

* This post on the Golden Age of Blogging from 11D is circulating pretty widely, and generally comports with my sense of things as a longtime C-list blogger. The first-mover advantage in the blogosphere is hard to overstate, yet this is one of its more overlooked characteristics; it's still possible to "break through," but much harder, and it's nothing like it was in the glory days of 2001-2003. I often wish I'd started earlier.

* Is C-list too generous? Is there a D-list?

* Of course the real problem with this blog is its utter lack of focus, as will now be demonstrated forthwith.

* 200 Characters from Dick Tracy, 1931-1977.

* U.S. gets second-to-worst grade on emissions from the WWF. The worst? Blame Canada.

* Dear Plagiarist.

* 200-year-old cipher cracked; Jefferson pwned.

* The psychology of scams. Via Schneier on Security, via this AskMe on the Craigslist check kiting scam in Canada, via Neil.

* Worst case scenarios: A bar examinant's $400,000 student loan debt (and admittedly poor history of repayment) has blocked their ability to practice law in the state of New York (and therefore ever hope to pay the loan back). Via Steve.

* And good news from India: Delhi's high court has decriminalized homosexuality. Via MeFi.

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.

Canada ignores request to bar Bush.

I'll have a short piece in the Indy tomorrow about my experience in the crowd at the Mall, so for now I'll limit myself to a few comments and some photos. We left Arlington a little later than we'd hoped—around 8:30—and so there was really not much chance to get into the Huge Crowd by the reflecting pool. (You can see in one of the photos just about as close as we got—past the Washington Monument there was just no going.) We settled in instead on 17th St NW right at the edge of the road, which turned out to be the perfect spot: not only was it right in front of a screen, but the cops were trying to keep 17th St clear and so no one was able to crowd in front of us.

There was a lot of waiting involved, but it was an amazing experience, if only to see Aretha Franklin belt out the best version of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" ever (land where my father died—she, too, sings America); to hear the loose live mic going out over the Mall for nearly the entire event; to see hilarious closed-captioning typos like "[CHEESE AND APPLAUSE]" and "♫ Threat ring"; trying to get an "underrated!" chant started after Jimmy Carter's first appearance; and to hear Rev. Lowry's show-stopping benediction:

'Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen'...

And, you know, Obama. And Obamaniacs. I say this in the article, but it felt like liberation.

Now, of course, the real work begins.

Some of my best photos are of some nearby protesters, which I'll have a separate post about. But for now, here's a picture of our basic view:



A few of the people we shared the moment with:















Canadians! Who let them in?

Son of news roundup.

* Burger King is pushing the viral marketing hard lately, following up its gag body spray with a Facebook application that gives you a free hamburger for every 10 people you unfriend.

* Speaking of body spray, here's an interesting study suggesting it's not about the smell.

And a new study in the U.K...found that men who used Lynx deodorant, Axe's British-brand cousin, were seen as more attractive by females than men who used a "placebo" deodorant with no fragrance.

But: the women just saw videos of the guys in the study—they couldn't smell them. Meaning that Axe actually works by making you feel more attractive. If you feel more attractive after soaking yourself in an aerosol version of car air freshener, you may not be the most urbane man to begin with, which leads to the second part of the study's results:

Women rated the fragranced men as more attractive when the sound on the videos was off, but had no statistically significant preference when the sound was on.

* Obama to team up with Spider-Man. Which wanted criminal will he pall around with next?

* Zipcar comes to Duke. More here.

* Larry Flynt says porn needs a bailout. Via MeFi.

* Creative billboards.

* Malcolm X on a Canadian game show.

* The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.

* It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. Gary Lutz on the sentence, via the too-sporadically-updated Black Garterbelt.

* And will The Dark Knight win Best Picture? Eli Glasner says it just might.

Potpourri and remainders.

* Is Dollhouse doomed? 7 Trouble Signs. Yes, it is doomed, and not just because of the Friday Night Death Slot—it's a comparatively weak premise that's already been messed with by the network and which requires Eliza Dushku to be a much better actress than she is. Despite attempts to put a brave face on, it's evident that Joss has a disaster on his hands:

2. Work stoppage. Production was actually halted. Twice. Once for script issues on the fourth episode, and once for the sixth and seventh. Whedon said in a blog, "To get a sense of how completely turned around I was during this process, you should know there was a scene with Eliza and the astonishing Ashley Johnson that I wrote and shot completely differently three different times, with different characters in different places (actually I wrote it closer to eight times), and none of it will ever see air." Really? The creator of the show had to reshoot something three times, and it still didn't work?

Don't get too attached to Dollhouse. Bring on Dr. Horrible: The Series.

* Nate Silver previews the 2010 Senate race and concludes "Even if momentum has swung somewhat against the Democrats by 2010, they remain in a strong position to gain seats in the Senate."

* Unexpectedly, applications to grad school are down, despite the economic downturn.

On Friday, David G. Payne, associate vice president of ETS for college and graduate programs, said that the “current hypothesis” is that the credit crunch is discouraging some people from considering graduate school, especially if they think they will not receive substantial financial support from the programs they might consider.

It also seems likely that more and more students are seeing themselves as simply maxed out when it comes to student debt, regardless of the larger credit crunch.

* Ten ways Canada is not more progressive than the U.S. #2 seems particularly important at the moment.

2. The Monarchy: Related to #1, the head of state in Canada is still technically the Queen of England. While this is generally just a curiousity for Americans to good naturedly rib Canadians about, this past week it made a huge difference. The Queen’s representative, the Governor General of Canada, made the decision that allowed Prime Minister Harper to hang on to power when the left (and nearly two-thirds of Canadian voters picked someone to the left of Harper in the October 2008 election) finally found a way to get together and form a coalition.

* And, via MeFi, the 40 greatest lost icons In pop culture history. Does Letterman still use "Buttafouco" as an all-purpose punch line?

Stephen Harper has managed to stave off his day of reckoning by successfully requesting a suspension of Canada's Parliament.

Random linkfest.

* Coup in Canada! Somehow the Liberals and New Democrats finally managed to pull their heads out of their asses and kick Harper out.

* You had me at Planet of the Apes. Just don't screw it up this time. More at CHUD.

* Matt Yglesias: If you’re not following Shaq’s Twitter feed you’re not really living in the contemporary world. He’s moved us all the way to Web 4.0.

* Flight of the Conchords Season 2 is coming.

* Jon Stewart speaks truth to power MSNBC.

* Life with perfect memory.

Debate Day 3. So what are people talking about?

* The head of John McCain's transition team lobbied for Saddam Hussein. Really. Really.

* The Supreme Court has refused to hear the case of Troy Davis, set to be executed in Georgia in the absence of forensic evidence (no weapon, fingerprints, or DNA) and solely on the word of nine witnesses, seven of whom have since recanted their testimony and another of whom is the other primary suspect in the case. More at MeFi.

* Rats-leaving-a-sinking-ship Watch: Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for Bush-Cheney '04, walks away from Team Maverick™.

"They didn't let John McCain pick the person he wanted to pick as VP," Dowd declared during the Time Warner Summit panel. "When Sarah Palin got picked instead of Joe Lieberman, which I fundamentally believed would have given John McCain the best opportunity in this race... as soon as he picked Palin, that whole ready versus not ready argument was not credible."

Saying that Palin was a "net negative" on the ticket, he went on: "[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that."

* The Oliver Stone W film comes out this weekend. Here's an interview from the Times, where Stone doesn't hold back.

Stone has said repeatedly that if Bush had fought on the ground in Vietnam he would never have gone to war against Iraq (he also maintains that if Bush had been president during the Cuban missile crisis, “we would have been in a nuclear war. Definitely. Wiped out. We wouldn’t be here talking.”). So I ask him what he makes of John McCain. After all, the Republican presidential candidate was both a supporter of ousting Saddam and a long-time resident of Vietnam’s “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp.

“I think McCain’s a very special story because he was never a soldier,” Stone says coldly. “He’s said he never saw the results of his own bombing. I saw the damage we did, I saw the corpses, the decay, I smelt the flesh, I saw people who’d been napalmed, people who’d been killed by shrapnel, mutilated. I saw horrible things. McCain was a prisoner and he has a siege mentality. He doesn’t see a balanced portrait of cause and effect – there’s something missing in the man, mentally."

* Nouriel Roubini says the economic hurt has only just begun.

* Biden says we'll win West Virginia. And he has a little bit of fun with it.

According to NBC's Mike Memoli, Biden asked the crowd in St. Clairsville, Ohio, "Which way is West-By-God-Virginia?" He then said, "I want to send a message to West Virginia -- we're going to win in West Virginia! ... We're going to shock the living devil out of y'all!"

* The latest CBS/NY Times poll says we'll win everywhere.

Obama 53 (48)
McCain 39 (45)

* They're still yelling out awful things at McCain/Palin rallies.

* And the Paradise Up North continues to hang with a bad crowd.

The-End-of-the-World-as-We-Know-It Watch.

* There's only one way out of the financial mess: spend, spend, spend. Democratic lawmakers are said to be already on this, with a special December session planned following the likely Obama victory next month. The bill is likely to focus around infrastructure, and that's good, but it needs to be green infrastructure—as I wrote last week, a "green recovery" is our best bet to fix both the economic and environmental crises in one go.

* The food crisis is reaching cataclysmic proportions in the Caribbean, with Cuba limiting sales and poverty-stricken Haitians forced to literally eat dirt to survive. Michael Pollan argues in the Times that food will be a central issue for the next administration despite its receiving almost no attention in the campaign.

* The situation in Iceland continues to astound. Britain has declared Iceland a terror-sponsoring state (seriously) as a pretext for seizing control of Icelandic assets within the U.K., while there's some talk that Russia may bail them out, presumably in exchange for Arctic access. I hope Matt's right and Canada eats Iceland before things get too crazy.

* But don't lose your heads—Stephen Hawking assures us that if we manage to survive the next 200 years, we'll be just fine.

Midday links.

* MTV cut down a rainforest to film a series of the world's most trivial show, Road Rules/Real Word Challenge.

* Will the collapse of the financial markets delay professorial retirements and thereby destroy my chances of tenured employment? Phil Gramm will pay for this.

* The Department of Homeland Security has partnered with Sesame Street in a desperate bid to completely evacuate its last shred of credibility. Godspeed.

* The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a $1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation's aesthetic-industrial complex since the $850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.

* That one was a joke, but the NEH has announced grants of $25,000 for the development of multidisciplinary courses on the "Enduring Questions."

* Toronto may ban the coffee cup, or else tax it into oblivion.

* 'Showdown or Shutdown at the Star-Ledger.' Who mourns for Northern New Jersey's finest journalistic institution?

* A brief history of the Cylons.

Funny-but-incredibly-juvenile (and not at all safe for work) diversion of the night: hit Canadian "reality" show Kenny vs. Spenny. Of course there's clips at YouTube, including the best episodes I've seen, "First One to Get a Stain Loses" and "Who Can Handle More Torture?"

Overheard: "Think of NAFTA as a giant cow that eats in Canada, gets milked in America, and shits in Mexico."

Perhaps I'm wrong when I write that Obama is the liberal Ronald Reagan. Perhaps, in fact, he is the American Pierre Trudeau. I ran this by a Canadian friend tonight and her response, for what it's worth, was "He wishes."