Saturday night, and I can't stop reloading the blogs to see how health care is doing. Image at the right via kate.

* The White House press corps does not believe you have not heard of V.

* Democratic congresswomen shouted down by Republicans. Matt has the video, and it's pretty astounding.

* Krugman: "There’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980."

* Kurt Vonnemutt.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Mars. Related: 1924, the year Navy radiographers were asked to listen for communication from Mars.

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.

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.

As promised, some Sunday links.

* Jon Stewart had odious liar Betsy McCaughey on his show Thursday night, and you should watch it; video at Crooks & Liars. Kevin Drum says Stewart shouldn't have had her on at all; I think the video made McCaughey look terrible and in that sense was an important public service.

* Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.

* Mandatory pre-Mad-Men reading: Pandagon's defense of Betty Draper.

* Have we reached Peak Crazy? Fox forces Glenn Beck to take a vacation.

* Responding to Krugman, Glenn Greenwald considers whether Obama has lost the trust of progressives. More on the latest polls showing progressives' loss of faith from Steve Benen, while Matt Yglesias ponders the meaning of GOP approval numbers that "appear to be stuck near some kind of theoretical minimum" and TPM reports Sarah Palin winning the all-important Birther primary.

* Margaret Atwood blogs her book tour.

* Cynical-C has the trailer for Michael Moore's next film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

* Lt. William Calley has apologized for the My Lai massacre, though the MetaFilter thread suggests there may be significantly less here than meets the eye.

"In October 2007, Calley agreed to be interviewed by the UK newspaper the Daily Mail to discuss the massacre, saying, "Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I'll talk to you for precisely one hour." When the journalist "showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions", Calley left."

* Also at MetaFilter: SIGG admits to misleading the public about its water bottles and BPA.

* Inglourious Basterds as alternate history.

* Game of the night: Max Damage.

* And the Smart Set looks at The Martian Chronicles in the context of 1960s optimism and the New Frontier. My Writing 20 for the spring ("Writing the Future") begins there as well (though with Star Trek instead of Bradbury) before veering off into The Dispossessed and, later, Dollhouse.

Presenting Kim Stanley Robinson's favorite Mars novels.

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.

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?

Space News!

* 'Moon could hold water for lunar base.'

* 'New Mexico's Spaceport America is two steps closer to becoming a reality and not just a dream.'

* 'Report urges timetable for human mission to Mars.'

(via Mac)

Late night links.

* Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions.

* It's good to live in a country without nobility or hereditary office.

* Are you a film addict? I am 55.2% yes.

* John Updike considers Mars.

* Matt, Josh, and Ezra consider the fillibuster and the extent to which we should just dump the damn thing.

* Coleman has gone to the Minnesota Supreme Court (a majority of whom have apparently been appointed by Tim Pawlenty) to ask that improperly rejected absentee ballots not be counted in the recount. I've looked, but I haven't actually found any sort of legitimate reason why he thinks ballots that were improperly rejected should stay improperly rejected, other than "I might win that way." Some commentary at TPM.

* Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen. We're so very screwed.

Devil Girl from Mars, the film that "inspired" Octavia Butler to write science fiction. Via SF Signal. Butler:

I'm going to talk a little bit about the effects of the media on me and on my work. It's impossible to begin to talk about myself and the media without going back to how I wound up writing science fiction and that is by watching a terrible movie. (Laughter) The movie was called, "Devil Girl from Mars," and I saw it when I was about l2 years old, and it changed my life. (Laughter) It was one of those old 1950s movies in which the beautiful Martian woman arrives on earth to announce that all the Martian men have died off and there are a bunch of man-hungry women up there. And the earth-men don't want to go. As I was watching this film, I had a series of revelations. The first was that "Geez, I can write a better story than that." And then I thought, "Gee, anybody can write a better story than that."

There's some good stuff about the Parable series in the "inspired" link, if you're a Butler fan.

Olbermann: 'This is man-on-the-moon.'



Atrios has another referent.

Hugely cool news for S.F. fans: AMC (having already proved its chops with Mad Men) is planning a series based on the Kim Stanley Robinson novel Red Mars. There are a few more details at io9 and the Hollywood Reporter.

I've talked a little bit about KSR's Mars novels before, but suffice it to say I think they're just fantastic, and they've changed my thinking about politics, Utopia, and ecology in some pretty important ways. Let's hope AMC can catch lightning in a bottle twice.

Forget about the water on Mars: According to Aviation Week, they've found something even more "provocative." More at Universe Today and MeFi.

Friday, Friday.

* Massachusetts has repealed the 95-year-old law that has been used to block out-of-state gay marriages, removing the last major barrier to nationwide legal challenges of marriage discrimination.

* There's water on Mars (but don't try to drink it). And there's a liquid lake on Titan, too.

* Also in legal news: Bush's claims of absolute executive privilege have been smacked down in the courts. Score another small victory for the rule of law, and start writing up that Karl Rove indictment.

* Garfield without Garfield book announced.

* The Los Angeles City Council has passed a year-long moratorium on new fast food restaurants in South L.A. (More at MeFi.) Food in this country, as we've talked about many times, is in crisis—but this is a symbolic gesture, not an actual policy.

* Also in food news: How Sysco came to monopolize most of what you eat. Also via MeFi.

* And now you can watch the growth of Wal-Mart across America. Locusts. Zombies. Plague.

culturemonkey has been a bit quiet this summer as its primary contributors have been flung far and wide—but I'm hoping the site will become active again as we slide back into another school year. Towards that end I've finally put up the second half of my long post on Žižek's critique of ecology, trying to think through some of the issues Žižek raises. (Here, if you missed it, was Part 1.) It's pretty long and more than a little bit sprawling—and the best stuff in it is all from Kim Stanley Robinson—but at least it starts off talking about the vast political problems of trying to terraform Mars.

Having just this week finished my first trek through Kim Stanley Robinson's seminal Mars trilogy, I can't help but feel these pictures of the surface of Mars from the European Space Agency are a special shout-out just to me. A few more here. Via MeFi.

Random Science Monday!

* At most movie theaters, there's more popcorn in a medium bag than in a large tub.

* We could grow asparagus on Mars.

* Is the universe fractal?

* Optical illusion creates fake speed bumps. Via Neil F.

* In the future, we'll get all our energy from giant, man-made tornadoes. We're saved! Via MeFi.

* Compared to the tornadoes, mutant bacteria that excrete oil seem almost mundane.

Have I mentioned lately what a good blog The Big Picture is? Here it is with some great Mars porn.

Is there life on Mars? Maybe, maybe not, but it looks like they found water.