Fantastic Mr. Fox concept art. Via Drawn.

Wednesday night, post-Zizek-lecture links.

* President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday. Probably the best of a bad set of options.

* How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology. I have to confess they have my number on Chinese/Japanese/Thai, not eating fast food, and delicious, delicious Samoas—but my love of pizza and PB&J proves that beneath my leftist facade beats a deeply reactionary heart.

* Already linked everywhere: Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer.

* Ezra Klein: Four ways to end the filibuster. Related: Steve Benen, Harold Meyerson, Kevin Drum.

* GOP Death Spiral Watch: Lindsay Graham censured by the South Carolina GOP for acknowledging the existence of climate change.

* Salon: Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl is possibly the best movie about family, community and poultry thievery ever made.

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.”

Tuesday links.

* I do feel a bit like my characters from one movie could walk into another one of my movies and it would make sense, whereas people from other peoples’ movies would probably feel a bit uncomfortable there. Wes Anderson interviewed in Interview. There's also a profile in this week's New Yorker, apparently, though it's not online. (via Rushmore Academy)

* Case Studies of Comic Book Medicine. More here.

* Graduating during a recession can have a lifelong impact on your earnings.

* Also from Yglesias: Cable monopolies are killing your internet access.

* Infinite Thought has Engels on entropy.

Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.

The quote is from 1833's The Dialectics of Nature, and goes on to suggest a kind of eternal return:

It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of beings conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation; a cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes. But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space, however many millions of suns and earths may arise and pass away, however long it may last before the conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and to pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.

* And Boing Boing has your Scooby Doo/zombie apocalypse mashup of the day.

Wednesday night quadruple threat.

* Maybe my favorite science story ever: A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the [Large Hadron Collider] before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. I love this story so much I don't care that they're only half-serious.

* Why Are Insurers Exempt From Antitrust Laws? Ezra Klein investigates in light of Harry Reid's statements on the Senate floor today.

* Wes responds to his FMF critics. (Via Eli Glasner)

* One thing that's being lost in all this discussion of the Saudi proposal that oil-producing nations be compensated for declines in oil demand is, as Jaimee reported for the Indy not that long ago, energy companies in the U.S. want the same thing.

Fantastic Mr. Fox Director of Photography Tristan Oliver is sorry for saying mean things about Wes Anderson. APOLOGY NOT ACCEPTED. Let the tar and feathering continue apace.

We're off to sample Detroit today. While we're waiting for showers to finish here are a few links I never got around to yesterday.

* Dollhouse 2.3, which I haven't seen yet, ticked upwards in the ratings, managing this week to beat reruns on ABC. Related: Ten TV Spin-offs That Were Better Than the Original Shows includes Angel—I agree in the main—Daria, Xena, DS9, and, The Simpsons. Also related: Flashforward is falling fast, endorsing Bill's thesis that the show is blowing it. Related and ridiculous: "Is science fiction becoming feminized?" Mary Shelley will be heartbroken.

* Josh Marshall on the Nobel: [T]he unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration. More from Steve Benen.

* Something, something, something, Detroit.

* The big Moon bombing appears not to have gone so well. Did the aliens step in?

* Iceland, an epicenter of the last financial crisis, looks to recover with data centers that offer free air-side cooling.

* The L.A. Times discusses the Fantastic Mr. Fox directing controversy. (via)

* Some bad news: Universe To End Sooner Than Thought.

* And more bad news: time has not ceased its unrelenting march.

Thursday!

* Is Tim Pawlenty the candidate to beat in the 2012 Republican primary? Some followup here and here suggesting maybe not.

* I liked this post from Matt Yglesias on the Alan Grayson "scandal" and rhetorical moralism in American politics.

* Matt also thinks TMBG needs more science studies.

* Winds shifting: Reid promises a public option. But Orrin Hatch has declared that bills with less than 70 votes don't count.

* Stephen Joyce has lost his lawsuit with English professor Carol Loeb Shloss. Tim is glad.

* Wes Anderson is coming under fire from his fans for apparently signing a pro-Roman-Polanski petition. People I admire really need to stop signing petitions.

* Classic old-school video game The Incredible Machine is now a $10 download.

One exam down links.

* Soundtrack for The Cloud Photographers, the Wes Anderson film Wes Anderson never made. I love this.

* Show us your birth certificate, Joe. Put the ID back in BIDEN.

* All your High Holy days belong to Glenn Beck.

* If Environmentalists Made Star Wars. This is early promotion for END:CIV, the film that asks: "If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?"

* Also in environmental news: the Yes Men distributed a fake version of the New York Post that actually had factual information inside of it today.

* Doing it wrong: Immigrants’ advocates have been complaining for months now that the Obama administration is cracking down hard on illegal immigration while doing nothing to help legalize their situations and create a workable immigration system.

* “This fellow is a man in his thirties,” he said, “a research physicist with us out here. As far as I can tell, he’s perfectly normal in every way except for a lot of crazy ideas about living part of the time in another world–on another planet. Washington sent him out to do a key job, and until a few weeks ago he was going great guns. But lately he’s out of contact with the work so much and for so long that something’s got to he done about it.” Isn't this the plot of Adam Strange? (via MeFi and Boing Boing).

* And from the Onion: 'George W. Bush Chuckles To Self Upon Thinking About How He Was President Of The United States For Almost A Decade.'

Wes Anderson scandal! Fantastic Mr. Fox cinematographer Tristan Oliver has told Empire Magazine that Anderson essentially directed the film over email.

Wednesday!

* Reports that Justice John Paul Stevens has hired fewer-than-usual clerks for the 2010 Supreme Court term are now confirmed: he's only hired one clerk, signaling a likely retirement in the near future.

* Seinfeld nostalgia is in full effect; FlowingData has your map of character connections.

* How to Talk to a Wingnut: Decoding Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

* Today's must-read op-ed: Bob Hebert on Texas's apparent execution of an innocent man. Even more striking than the fact of the terrible error is the look at the basic cognitive biases at work in the criminal justice system:

When official suspicion fell on Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to change. Whereas initially he was described by neighbors as screaming and hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children saved, he now was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to the girls.

In short: "If he were innocent, they wouldn't have arrested him."

* Behind the scenes of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

* Harlan Ellison and Terminator.

* And the Hartford Courant has your photo of the day. Our public servants hard at work.

Wednesday!

* Whole Foods boycott update: consumer opinion towards the Whole Foods brand is tanking and two unions have joined the boycott. Hard to see whether anything is actually being accomplished, though. I must confess I bought a pack of Smart Dogs there last week.

* Jason Schwartzman seems to like Fantastic Mr. Fox much more than I'm expecting to.

* Please feel free to politicize my death.

* And my hometown mall had an exciting day today.

The trailer for Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox is up at Yahoo, doing little to answer the burning question of whether this will be a bad, stop-motion parody of Anderson or the most completely awesome movie ever.

Happy Monday. The summer is dying. We have to face it.

* With the Institute for Gifted Youngsters shut down I returned to Infinite Summer blogging over the weekend with a post on maps and territories.

* The issue of Polygraph I contributed to on study, students, and the university is available from Amazon, or will be soon.

* Time-lapse video of the construction of Disneyland at (where else?) Boing Boing.

* Colin Marshall sings the praises of my favorite film, Rushmore.

Because thousands of a certain generation's cinematic lives have been changed by this film, its territory is best approached with caution. Mine, however, happens to be among those thousands, 1998 marking as it did the opening of my prime window of cultural absporpton. Cinephilic teenagers of the 1960s had The 400 Blows, Breathless, Dr. Strangelove; cinephilic teenagers of the 1970s has Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Taxi Driver; cinephilic teenagers of the 1980s had Repo Man, Blue Velvet, Stranger than Paradise; cinephilic teenagers of the 1990s had Rushmore.

*Revisiting the Rosenhan experiment. Via MeFi.

* And fair warning: Toy Story 3 will break your heart.

USA Today has another first look at The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Via you-know-who.

Still photos from Wes Anderson's next film, the stop-motion-animated Fantastic Mr. Fox. Also Wes-related: the Wes Anderson mixtape (by Wes Anderson).

Rather short Infinite Summer post from me this time around as I put together all the things that need to be put together for my late-summer stint as an instructor at the Duke University Institute for Gifted Youngsters. Like last year, posting will be somewhat slow the next three weeks; I'll mostly be posting only in the very early morning, at night, and on weekends, with occasional daytime posts here and there whenever I'm able to commit a little time theft.

With IGY on my mind, I was really struck by footnote 76, which provides as good a summary as you'll find of the inner life of anyone stamped "gifted" when they are young, not just Hal Incandenza but also my IGY students and me and most of the people who have become my close friends over the years and maybe you as well:

Hal Incandenza had been thought for a while as a toddler to have some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder—partly because he read so fast and spent so little time on each level of various pre-CD-ROM video games, partly because just about any upscale kid even slightly to port or starboard of the bell curve's acme was thought at that time to have A.D.D.—and for a while there'd been a certain amount of specialist-shuttling, and many of the specialists were veterans of Mario and were preconditioned to see Hal as also damaged, but thanks to the diagnostic savvy of Brandeis's Child Development Center the damage assessments were not only retracted but reversed way out to the other side of the Damaged-to-Gifted spectrum, and for much of the glabrous part of his childhood Hal'd been classified as somewhere between "Borderline Gifted" and "Gifted"—though part of this high cerebral rank was because B.C.D.C.'s diagnostic tests weren't quite so keen when it came to distinguishing between raw neural gifts and the young Hal's monomaniacally obsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his very life were in the balance to please some person or persons, even though no one had ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted or precocious or even exceptionally pleasing—and when he'd committed to memory entire dictionaries and vocab-check software and syntax manuals and then had gotten some chance to recite some small part of what he'd pounded into his RAM for a proudly nonchalant mother or even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-was-concerned-pretty-much-out-there father, at these times of public performance and pleasure—the Weston M.A. school district in the early B.S. 1990s had had interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competitions called "Battle of the Books," which these were for Hal pretty much of a public turkey-shoot and approval-fest—when he'd extracted what was desired from memory and faultlessly pronounced it before certain persons, he'd felt almost that same pale sweet aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace, made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second prize, ever.

The incredibly slippery slope from this sort of childhood precociousness to adult dysfunction is something we've talked about here once or twice before in connection with the films of Wes Anderson, whose thematically similar The Royal Tenenbaums pops up around the fringes of IJ discussion quite a bit. And we can see now what a hard-luck case I really am: thirty years old and I'm still a student, still chasing the same damn high.

Most of the rest of what I'd have to say about today's spoiler line was already covered in my post last week on DFW, addiction, and suicide, for which Joelle is something of an exemplary case. This weekend's pages were pretty much all Joelle, all the time, not that I'm complaining. She's an interesting character and somehow able to bring us closer to the mind of Himself than anyone else we've met thus far.

Tuesday Miscellany.

* Sarah Palin's controversial proposal to create a "Department of Law" with the power to block ethics claims against the president is turning a lot of heads this morning.

* I really want to read 1Q84.

* Swine flu: now more popular than Viagra.

* Steve Zissou: scientist.

* Another That Makes Me Think Of from Ze.

* We Are Wizards, a Harry Potter fandom documentary, with appearances from Brad Neely of Wizard People Dear Reader fame. (via @austinkleon)

Dan Meth's report on upcoming '80s toy-nostalgia films contains some surprises, including John Carpenter's ALF and a Wes Anderson movie I hadn't even heard of yet.

Toy Movies

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Animation | TV & Movie Spoofs

A second round of late night shouldn't-have-taken-that-nap links.

* Why GM failed; link roundup from Kottke.

* A.O. Scott vlogs the awesomeness of Rushmore. Via TRA. It's vlogtastic.

* Mrs. Santorum is a very lucky woman.

* The headline reads, "Secret US Nuke Site List Accidentally Published Online by US Gov." Whoops!

* Handicapping the 2012 Republican field at Open Left.

* The median number of tweets by a Twitter user is one. This and other Twitter bubble factoids via MetaFilter.

* J.D. Salinger sues to block the publication of the unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel. I feel torn here between my liberal attitude towards copyright and my sense that said sequel can only be an abomination.

* “It’s remarkable, what we’re unable to do as a country": Wire creator David Simon on BBC Radio 4, via Edge of the American West.

* Monkey astronauts.