Around The World In Eighty Links

I've spent so much time on the war thing I didn't notice my email box was o'erfilling with great stuff. I'll dispense with the headline/commentary/snark format and just dump a whole lot of links here quickly.

New Terminator trilogy planned with 2009 start; will follow adult John Connor in his war against the machines in post-Armageddon earth. No Arnie, no Cameron, but it's to be scripted by the guys who did T3, which was pretty decent, considering.

More Mickey Maus Censorship: Glenn Beck was censored from reporting on the story by his employers/information suppression professionals, on the pretext that a single word of his translation of the video was erroneous. And yet he'd checked the translation of that word four times.

Jewish Kossack Quits Daily Kos Over Site's Nonstop Jewbashing: Welcome to the Grand Old Party, pal.

Washington Post: Radical Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Who Voted Against *Any* Military Response After 9/11 (Meaning-- against Al Qaeda and the Taliban), is, objectively, according to straight news reporters, "no lefty bombthrower." So glad the WaPo cleared that up for us.

View's Joy Behar: Large Families "Snort Up Oxygen."

Although Newsweek admits McCain's perserverence in a NV torture dungeon displayed courage, it also finds similar, though not quite equal courage, in Hillary Clinton's political calculation to tolerate Bill's flagrant adulteries. Strong, brave.

Speaking of that, given that Mike Wallace is now asking Mitt Romney about whether he and his wife had sex before marriage, perhaps it's time for the MSM to begin asking Hillary Clinton if Bill strayed because she wasn't blowing him enough, no?

And speaking of that: Oral sex linked to throat cancer. Great. Like it wasn't hard enough already. Now we've got to listen to whining about cock-polyps.

News you can use for your Cthulhu game: New Guinea police exchange bullets with human-sacrificing cultists. No word on whether or nor any Tcho-Tcho were involved.

Private rocket's payload lost somewhere in New Mexico -- meaning James "Scottie" Doohan's remains were not beamed up into orbit as planned.

Quadruple amputee leads police in high-speed pursuit; actually escapes! I figure he used his teeth for the steering wheel. Not sure I want to know how he worked the gas and brakes.

Bety's Page and Jules Crittendon suggest that American kids should start learning about war, and not merely about dates. But a real appreciation for the difficulties of war and the strategies for success. It may be too late for this generation to have a realistic understanding of war, but perhaps not for the next.

Finally, I think, a state court has ordered a man who donated sperm so that a lesbian couple could conceive (well, not conceive together, techincally) to pay child support!

Unbelievable.

Post-finally: A newspaper columnist decries the "fallacy of proof" as regards global warming. That is, it's a fallacy to provide proof, or ask for proof, when it comes to such an Important Issue which Every Reasonable Person Knows Is Vital To Saving Our World And The Polar Bears Even Without Proof. Orson Scott Card tag-team this idiot, and not in the hot, sexy, combined Man-Power way, either.

Thanks to dri and JackStraw and maybe a couple of others I missed.

Nerd Heartbreak: Galactus, a 100 foot tall alien space giant devourer of worlds, will not be a 100 foot tall alien space giant in the new FF movie.

Why? Because some cat at the studio named Rothberg had declared that no giant robots will ever appear in a film his studio makes. That's why famous, and cool, baddies the Sentinels are inexplicably absent from all X-Men movies.

So, because Galactus is a giant and sort of looks robot-ish (though he's not), the FF film will depict him as... a giant stormcloud.

You know, Star Trek (Original Series) always used to depict Planet Threatening Terrors as clouds, but because it was a lot cheaper to show a cloud than, say, a 100 foot tall alien space giant.

So rather than making use of CGI technology where, for a change, it would actually do some good, we're going back to cloud-looking things.

Clue to Rothman: Clouds aren't scary. Nor are they particularly interesting to look at.

I don't know the plot of this film, so maybe Galactus himself isn't scheduled for an actual appearance. Maybe this is just supposed to be some sort of avatar of his, projected far ahead of his body, to scout out the planet for its edibility.

But it's a letdown, and will end up costing the studio a lot of money. The first FF was decent, if a bit tepid, and this one could have made the franchise a bona fide moneymaker (if a modest one -- the FF ain't Spiderman or Batman, for Beyonder's sake).

Instead of a huge fight with a huge alien, there's going to be a cosmic threat in the form of heavy fog with a chance of rain.

This guy's a bonehead. He's doing movie after movie about mutants and dudes made of rock and fire, but, you know, giant robots are inconsistent with his artistic integrity.

Thanks to Amish.

posted by Ace at 05:11 PM

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