I’m hereby abandoning hopes of posting any of the 87 things I had wanted to post before getting on the bus for the ceremonial voyage to Peoria, where I’ll be for the next couple of days spending the holly daze with my parentals and watching a Doctor Who DVD marathon with my mom.
In the […]

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The official/final trailer for The Golden Compass is out, and the more I see of this film the better it looks. I am somewhere between guardedly optimistic and completely geeked out.

 
Also, here’s a nice little featurette called “Defining Daemons,” which looks at the animal companion-spirits that accompany the characters on their journeys.

 
Personally, I […]

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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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Something I’ve been meaning to post for a couple of weeks now … I’ve long thought that Monica Kendrick is the best music writer at the Reader and the spot-on writeup she turned in just before Yoko Ono’s appearance at the recent Pitchfork Music Festival only reinforces that notion:
9:00 Yoko Ono
For decades her name […]

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POLITICS: In “Hillary’s Labor Problem,” Joe Conason points out that Hillary Clinton’s top political strategist, Mark Penn, is the CEO of a union-busting law firm. “Having started in a tiny, two-man polling operation in a New York City mayoral campaign, he is now the CEO of Burson-Marsteller Inc., one of the planet’s largest P.R. shops, […]

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COMICS: For once I’m starting out with the comics section, in honor of the fact that Salon has added Opus by the mighty Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County, Outland) to their repertoire. Oh, happy day. Here’s the first installment. Along with my favorites This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow and Tom the Dancing Bug […]

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This way-clever video, which I found on YouTube, uses short snips from various animated Disney films to provide an entertaining education on the nature of copyright, fair use, and the public domain.

 
The daunting reality is that copyright has way gotten out of control in recent years — where once upon a time copyright lasted […]

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Green Day’s cover version of “Working Class Hero” by John Lennon was released May 1 as the third single from Instant Karma: the Campaign to Save Darfur, Amnesty International’s album of Lennon covers by various artists to raise awareness about the human rights catastrophe in the Sudan. All proceeds from the album will go to […]

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I posted a little over a week ago about the forthcoming Crowded House album, Time on Earth, from Neil Finn and his bandmates.
But there’s even more Finn news: Last week also saw the U.S. release of a new solo album from the other Finn brother, Tim Finn — the founder of Split Enz and […]

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The White House is claiming that oops, they managed to lose a whole bunch of critically important emails, but as any decent techie knows, deleted emails aren’t really deleted. Someone better sit poor Karl Rove down and explain to him about file recovery utilities.
Speaking of recovering things thought lost forever — scientists have recovered […]

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I owe Joe. My. God. for turning me on to musical comedian (comedical musician?) Roy Zimmerman, whom I hadn’t heard of before — but he’s smart as paint and reminds me a little of Barry Crimmins.
Anyway, here, for a warm-up, is “What if the Beatles Were Irish?”

 
And here’s the one Mr. My. God. linked […]

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• Preznit Bush is stonewalling and hurling threats of a constitutional showdown over subpoenas. Ocelopotamus say: Call. His. Bluff. If he refuses to obey the rule of law, commence the impeachication.
Meanwhile, over at Crooks and Liars, we read this:
President Bush kept making the point over and over that allowing his staff members (i.e. Karl Rove) […]

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Worldwide, the winter of 2006-2007 has been the warmest since record keeping began in 1880, according to a new government report.
A variety of desperate schemes to save the planet from global warming are being considered by NASA and other organizations — including a man-made volcano that spews sulfur into the atmosphere; a “sun shade” […]

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