It also comes to my attention that I've been remiss in linking to the latest of Dan Meth's pop-culture charts.

Sorry about No-Post Monday; my summer course starts tomorrow and I'm scrambling to get everything ready. I have a few links before I declare this No Post Tuesday.

* Eliza Dushku is twittering that Dollhouse renewal talks are going on as we speak. A better indication than if they weren't.

* Miscellaneous Star Trek links:

* A fairly well-known story about TOS and MLK.
* Ultimately, then, “Star Trek” was prescient not for its futurism, with the Enterprise crew using communicators that look like flip-phones, but for exploring a universe absorbed with pop-culture history. David Hadju on Star Trek and popular culture.
* Continuity errors as honeypot.
* "Star Trek sucked so bad I can’t even think of a title for my rant."

* The secret history of Jughead's hat.

* Goonies reunion video.

* Larry David is Woody Allen as Larry David in Whatever Works.

* Apocalypse and the academy in The New Yorker.

* And some sad news: Craig Arnold is now believed to have died while traveling in Japan.

American Stranger has a long-form take on the question he posed the other night in my living room: What have been the great cultural innovations since the 1990s? Are there any?

Question of the night (hat-tip: Ryan): What have been the great cultural innovations since the 1990s? Are there any? We struggled for an hour tonight to find something more noteworthy than "YouTube" or "text messages/status updates." These are platforms more than cultural forms.

"Blogs" (as cultural form, not platform) come closest, but even these really originate in the homepages of the '90s...

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?

This thread from YayHooray (via MeFi) is easily the coolest thing I've linked to this year and possibly the coolest thing I've linked to in the entire time I've been doing this, with all the great flowcharts and infographics you've come to love from years on the innertubes. Some highlights:

this week's blog icon, the LEGO anatomy chart
probably next week's blog icon, the gummi anatomy chart
the week after that, sci-fi awesomeness
the interstate highway system as a subway map
your digestive system as a subway map
area codes in which Ludacris claims to have hoes
Sarah Palin pregnancy decision map
the map of Zork that doubles as my desktop
New Jersey invites you to come and see it all
extinction timeline, 1950-2050
narrative map of classic Choose Your Own Adventure novel The Cave of Time
risk perception and actual hazards
a chart of how Americans spend their money that seems to strongly argue for a national salary cap around $100,000
a map of the United States expressed in terms of proximate distance from Knoxville, TN
the Indo-European family tree (and again)
a visual guide to the financial crisis
a flowchart history of Cubism

Keep in mind those are just highlights. This is can't miss.

I stole the blog icon for this week from this io9 post asking "Does Obama's Win Mean A Dark Knight Oscar?" I take it up because this dichotomy has been fascinating me for the last few weeks: what does it mean that the two most important pop-culture icons of 2008 have been Barack Obama on the one hand and Heath Ledger's Joker on the other? What does this remarkable level of cognitive dissonance say about us, and our moment? I don't know if I've got the time to write it—I'm supposed to be reading for my exams—but there's definitely a paper in there somewhere. As the tag says, it's been a funny year.

With just one day before this long presidential election is really, truly, and finally over, here's a collection of presidential pop culture from Again with the Comics.

Random links in anticipation of the big speech tonight.

* Wikipedia's page on the crucial compound unobtanium. Via kottke.

* A brief history of tabloids.

* Geographically misplaced statues of pop-culture icons.

* McCain gets prickly with Time.

There's a theme that recurs in your books and your speeches, both about putting country first but also about honor. I wonder if you could define honor for us?
Read it in my books.

I've read your books.
No, I'm not going to define it.

But honor in politics?
I defined it in five books. Read my books.

* 9 very cool bridges.

* Have we hit Peak Tequila?

* And Banksy visits New Orleans.

Nuke Pop, a large archive of pop-culture images about nuclear war, is only one of many resources at Paul Brians's large collection of Science Fiction-Related Materials. Cool site. (Via Rob Latham)