Some Tuesday-morning bagel bites for you …

In case you’re wondering what Barack Obama might look like with a small engine or wind farm on his head … after being attacked by the Evil Spellbinder in the employ of certain right-leaning but largely illiterate online communities … well, just go read this for your morning moment […]

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And now for something a little on the lighter side — and a nice follow-up to Valentine’s Day.
ABC’s “All of My Heart” + Brideshead Revisited = high school drama club heaven, circa 1982. Possibly the best combination since peanut butter and chocolate … the British horror of peanut butter notwithstanding.
(Note: This may not be […]

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This one:
I guess all I’m really saying
is how I think you’re wrong here
and some things are worth the chaos
that they come along with
— Trembling Blue Stars, “Letter Never Sent” (which has a bridge worthy of Neil Finn)
 

(First installment in a possible recurring series … feel free to share your own favorite tear-jerking lyrics in the […]

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I just updated the News page over at The Head of Orpheus, the Russell Hoban Web site I maintain, so I figured I might as well cross-post the info here as well (with a few slight formatting tweaks).
Autumn 2007 is shaping up to be a great season for Hoban fans, with Russ’s next novel My […]

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1,850 U.S. citizens were recently killed in an entirely preventable disaster.
It’s been a while since I’ve updated this record — 37 days, to be exact. On July 18 I started keeping count of the 50 U.S. citizens who die every day because they can’t afford health care, according to this statistic.
So in a little […]

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Steven Moffat has won his second Hugo award for writing a Doctor Who episode — this time for the Season Two episode “The Girl in the Fireplace.” And well deserved, in my book. “The Girl in the Fireplace” was a beautiful script and a real standout in Season Two. (Moffat previously won for the “Empty […]

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Scary stuff: There’s a lot of buzz and speculation that starting just after Labor Day, the Bush administration is going to be rolling out a major PR campaign to pave the way for war with Iran. See here and here for starters. Grand Moff Texan at DKos says the Bushies will be using the same […]

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Out, damned spot! Fox News caught red-handed, laundering entries on Wikipedia. Keep on scrubbing, Lady MacFox, but those stains belong to you always.

The GOP’s California strategy: winning the 2008 election by undoing California’s winner-take-all electoral system. Once the state goes piecemeal, the Repubs gain at least 20 electoral votes from safe GOP districts.
Arianna Huffington looks […]

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This is brilliant. Peter Smith at the Huffington Post has a proposal for renaming the new I-35W bridge in Minneapolis that will replace the one that collapsed: “For a while there, back when the Republicans held the White House and both houses of Congress, they were naming things after Ronald Reagan everywhere. Airports. Aircraft carriers. […]

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“Iraq hasn’t even begun”: Writing in the LA Times, Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University, examines the long-term consequences of the debacle in Iraq, and concludes, “Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.”
Digby on the […]

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Scary quote of the week: In an article from the LA Times about the sad passing of another indie book store owned by a wonderful old eccentric — which is kind of like losing one of the last 12 rare rhinoceroses or something – anyway, toward the end of that article, we read this:
Dowdy […]

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I saw Sicko Tuesday night, and it did not disappoint. The main impact for me is this: Watching this film makes it unavoidably clear that we as a nation have been completely duped, conned, and as the kids say, “pwned,” by those who’ve spent millions to convince us that universal healthcare is too expensive, can’t […]

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It was a big week for Doctor Who news in the wake of the Season Three finale on the BBC this past weekend. Some of the major revelations include the Doctor’s most recent companion Martha Jones taking a break from the TARDIS, and Catherine Tate (who appeared in the 2006 Christmas special) signing on as […]

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Nicole at Crooks and Liars puts it well: It’s ironic to be celebrating Independence Day during a time when we have a virtual King who defies the law with impunity, and is not held accountable to the people he governs. Revolution? What revolution?

Also at C&L, what a TV newscast looked like on July 4, 1972. […]

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