Ghost in the Machine

Sounds and Furies.

In today’s trailer bin, Guillermo del Toro tries to out-Bay Bayhem in the new trailer for Pacific Rim, a.k.a. Monsters vs. Robots, with Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Ron Perlman, Rinko Kikuchi, Clifton Collins Jr., Burn Gorman, Willem Dafoe, and GLaDOS. Hrm, ok. This looks ridiculous, and I’d rather just see a straight-up Del Toro Cthulhu film, but I suppose this’ll do until the trouble gets here.

If giant robots aren’t your bag, how about some Faulkner? For his directorial debut, James Franco aims to bring to life As I Lay Dying, also with Tim Blake Nelson, Danny McBride, Logan Marshall-Green, Richard Jenkins, Ahna O’Reilly, and Beth Grant. Haven’t read the book myself, but this might be interesting — I’d have gone with a different font, tho.

Starbuck, Riddick; Riddick, Starbuck. After misfiring several years ago with The Chronicles of Riddick, David Twohy and Vin Diesel apparently set to remake Pitch Black again, given the new trailer for Riddick — also with Katee Sackhoff, Karl Urban (who’ll presumably explain what happened since end of the last film), and a bunch of creature fodder (Dave Bautista, Bokeem Woodbine, Jordi Molla, Noah Danby, Nolan Gerard Funk). Er…this looks…no.

Meanwhile, Foley artist Toby Jones discovers working on a Dario Argento-style giallo film isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in this trailer for Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, with Tonia Sotiropoulou, Cosimo Fusco, and Suzy Kendall. Looks like somebody’s seriously bucking for that Sound Editing Oscar…

Presumably sick of playing second fiddle to Kevin Spacey on House of Cards, Robin Wright sells her persona to Harvey Keitel and Danny Huston in this look at Ari Folman’s The Congress, also with Kodi Smit-McPhee, Sami Gayle, and Christopher B. Duncan. Wasn’t expecting traditional animation after the intriguing set-up.

Elsewhere in the Cineplex, Rachel McAdams is falling in love with time travelers again in the trailer for Richard Curtis’ About Time, with Domhnall Gleeson, Bill Nighy, Lindsay Duncan, and Tom Hollander. I like the cast, I like Sliding Doors, but I still haven’t forgiven Curtis for Love, Actually, so this, as with the last two above, will likely be a Netflixer.

And, since I somehow missed this last month, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke check in again with Celine and Jesse in the official trailer for Before Midnight. Vaguely spoiler-y, in that this basically tells you what happened after Nina Simone in Paris nine years ago. But hopefully the journey is the reward with this one.

The Final Countdown.

Her? As you’ve likely already seen by now, the Arrested Development Season 4 Trailer has hit the Interweb, and Vulture has gone over it with a fine-toothed comb. Also, here’s a good site to bone up on the first three seasons’ in-jokes. Steve Holt!

Commuting – and Evolving – Together.

“As many as 35,000 stray dogs live in Russia’s capital city…Taking the subway is just one of many tactics the strays have come up with for surviving in the manmade wilderness around them. ‘The street is tough and it’s survival of the fittest,’ says Poyarkov. ‘These clever dogs know people much better than people know them.’”

ABC News takes a gander at the subway dogs of Moscow, who, for reasons of survival, seem to have figured out the system better than most tourists. “Moscow’s strays have also been observed obeying traffic lights, says Vereshchagin…Sometimes a pack will send out a smaller, cuter member apparently realizing it will be more successful at begging than its bigger, less attractive counterparts.”

In very related news, a new study finds that, since domestication many moons ago, dogs and humans have been evolving along parallel lines. “The study shows that dogs split from gray wolves about 32,000 years ago, and that since then, domestic dogs’ brains and digestive organs have evolved in ways very similar to the brains and organs of humans…They found both species underwent similar changes in genes responsible for digestion and metabolism, such as genes that code for cholesterol transport.” This must be the reason Berk loves him some gummi candy.

This Charming Man of Steel.

Recent immigrants, tyrants and serial killers have all had their turn. Now Brazilian artist Butcher Billy — the same fellow who did the Legion of Doom ones — reconfigures the Justice League as post-punk/new-wave icons. Click through for Robert Smith, Siouxsie Sue, Johnny Rotten, and Billy Idol.

The Pleasures of the Void.

“I slid the blackout door closed behind me, eased down into the water, and touched a button that switched off the lights. I was floating in total darkness and silence…For what must have been the first 15 minutes, I wondered what I was doing there…Then a transformation began…My brain went a little haywire. When the storm passed, I found myself in a new and unfamiliar state of mind.”

To kick off his new Slate column “Anything Once,” friend Seth Stevenson finds himself reveling in the sensation of sensory deprivation. “I emerged in a profound daze. I spoke slowly and quietly, like a smooth-jazz DJ, to the person at the spa desk who inquired how my session had gone. I felt more rested than if I’d slept for 16 hours on a pile of tranquilized chinchillas. Outside, colors were saturated; sounds were vivid. I had to try this again, as soon as possible.”

For Every Bullet, a Story.

“It can be hard to dredge up a private agony for a public purpose — that, I suppose, is why I didn’t talk about my own history for so long, and why many other people are so reluctant. But gun violence touches people all over this country: from Boston to Akron to Seattle to Manchester, Illinois. And it’s the stories of the people whose lives are changed that can help to permanently change the debate, and thus make our country safer.”

In a powerful and revealing essay for The New Yorker, college friend and former Mayors Against Illegal Guns manager Arkadi Gerney reveals his own personal gun story. “Every day, an average of thirty-three Americans are murdered with guns. Another fifty or so die in gun suicides and accidents. And another two hundred or so are shot and injured. That’s a lot of stories.”

The Place Beyond the Weetabix.

Hey Girl, one of America’s most memeable stars has gotten memed again: Ryan Gosling won’t eat his cereal. Clever, clever — I’m surprised no one’s thought of this sort of thing before.

Fat Cats.

“‘We’ve come up against an unforeseen circumstance…’ said majority leader and Budget Committee chaircat Sen. Creamsicle (D-ND), stretching out to his entire length and repeatedly kneading the chamber carpet. ‘I think I speak for most of my colleagues when I say that, while it is extremely important we continue the legislative work at hand, we must first give this warm and bright beam of light the due consideration it deserves.’”

Well, now nothing’s getting done. From a few years ago, Cat Congress Mired in Sunbeam. “Our lawmakers were elected to serve the common cat, not their own self-interests,” Big Stripey said. “With over 6 percent of the population stray, millions more going hungry or only getting dry food, and the dogs next door developing a very real litter of puppies, we need action now for the sake of our kittens and our kittens’ kittens.”

America By Coach.

“You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach.”

Deadspin’s Reuben Fischer-Baum conjures up a map of the highest-paid public employee in each state, and, yes, it’s usually a coach. By way of comparison, the college players actually bringing in all the revenue get…nada.

400 (PPM) Blows.

“The news that CO2 is near 400 ppm for the first time highlights a question that scientists have been investigating using a variety of methods: when was the last time that CO2 levels were this high, and what was the climate like back then?…By drilling for ice cores and analyzing the air bubbles, scientists have found that, at no point during at least the past 800,000 years have atmospheric CO2 levels been as high as they are now.”

Carbon concentration in the atmosphere veers dangerously close to the dubious milestone of 400 part per million. (The revised reading came out at 399.89.) “For the previous 800,000 years, CO2 levels never exceeded 300 ppm, and there is no known geologic period in which rates of increase have been so sharp. The level was about 280 ppm at the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, when the burning of fossil fuels began to soar.”

The Worlds’ Ender.

In the trailer bin, Asa Butterfield gets trained for interstellar war by a grizzled Harrison Ford and a tattooed Ben Kingsley in the first trailer for Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, also with Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, and Abigail Breslin. Eh, seems a bit big and busy for this particular book, but I guess Ford should gets his reps in before Episode VII.

Meanwhile, Simon Pegg’s plan to get the lads together for a pint or twelve is muddled by an altogether different alien invasion in the first trailer for Edgar Wright’s The World’s End, closing out the trilogy started by Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Along for the ride: Nick Frost (naturally), Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, David Bradley, and Rosamund Pike. I’m in.

Update: Another arrival today: Paul Greengrass of Bloody Sunday and United 93 dramatizes another bad day on Earth in the first trailer for Captain Phillips, a.k.a. the true story of Somali pirates vs. the MV Maersk Alabama, with Tom Hanks, Catherine Keener, Max Martini, Yul Vazquez, Michael Chernus, Chris Mulkey, Corey Johnson, David Warshofsky, John Magaro and Angus MacInnes.

Update 2: Also in this week’s queue, a red-band trailer for The Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis, based on the memoirs of Dave Von Ronk and starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Garret Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham, and John Goodman. To be honest, this is barely indistinguishable from the one making the rounds in January, but I’m not averse to double-posting for the Coens.

And finally, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney experience mechanical difficulties at the ISS — er…was ammonia involved? — in the first teaser for Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity. I’ve been looking forward to this one for awhile, but I gotta say, all the noisy explosions in space vex me. It’d be a much more powerful trailer if you couldn’t hear any of that.

Mighty Ray Young.

“Harryhausen’s fascination with animated models began when he first saw Willis O’Brien’s creations in KING KONG with his boyhood friend, the author Ray Bradbury in 1933, and he made his first foray into filmmaking in 1935 with home-movies that featured his youthful attempts at model animation.”

“Ray has been a great inspiration to us all in special visual industry. The art of his earlier films, which most of us grew up on, inspired us so much.” “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no STAR WARS” — George Lucas.

“THE LORD OF THE RINGS is my ‘Ray Harryhausen movie.’ Without his life-long love of his wondrous images and storytelling it would never have been made – not by me at least.” — Peter Jackson

“What we do now digitally with computers, Ray did digitally long before but without computers. Only with his digits.” — Terry Gilliam.

“I think all of us who are practioners in the arts of science fiction and fantasy movies now all feel that we’re standing on the shoulders of a giant. If not for Ray’s contribution to the collective dreamscape, we wouldn’t be who we are.” — James Cameron

The Master stops motion: R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen, 1920-2013.

Things I’ve Learned from the Archives, 2003-04

Hello all. Even though the Ghost has been silent over the past fortnight, I’ve been continuing to bang around on the insides over that time. As I said back in early March, I’ve been working on repairing and improving the post-Geocities archives around here — although, since it’s taken me all of two months to re-categorize and tag the 2004 posts, I kinda wish I hadn’t started this little project.

But, oh well. It’ll be grand once it’s all completed. And to be fair, I’ve also fixed the less post-intensive 2010-2013 period since the last update, so perhaps the next few sections will go faster. (Only five more years to go…) In any case, things I’ve recently (re-)learned:

Howard Dean is a total lockity-lock for the 2004 Democratic nomination.

Ok, never mind that. But with five months before Election Day, John Kerry is up by 11 over Dubya. Hey, he’s totally going to win this thing. Hope is on the way! It’ll be a landslide, a new progressive era. (That is, unless the swift boat on the horizon and the terror terror terror somehow flip the script…D’oh.)

Election 2004 post-mortem: “[O]ur standard-bearers now appear to be Hillary Clinton (about whom the country has already made up its mind), John Edwards (whom I still admire, but he couldn’t carry his home state), and Barack Obama (who’s probably too inexperienced to make much headway in 2008.)”

Now it’s all said and done, this post was right — Frodo was likely getting a PhD.

Darren Aronofsky is making Batman: Year One or Lone Wolf and Cub. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman are making a horror movie. Shekhar Kapur is directing Arthur C. Clarke’s Foundation. Stephen Soderbergh is making The Fantastic Four. Michael Mann is making a film about the Battle of Britain. Bryan Singer is re-making Logan’s Run. Chris Columbus is making Namor. Quentin Tarantino is making a low-budget Casino Royale with Pierce Brosnan. Joe Carnahan is making Mission: Impossible 3 with Kenneth Branagh, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Scarlett Johansson. John Woo is making Metroid and/or He-Man. Michael Bay is making Superman.

The debt ceiling hijinx, the Budget Control Act, the sequesters — It has all been proceeding to plan.

Jean Claude Van Damme will be playing Steve McQueen in a remake of The Great Escape. Matt Damon will be playing the Sub-Mariner. John Cusack will be playing Nite-Owl in Watchmen.

Maciej Lampe is the future of the New York Knickerbockers. And there was a time when Isiah Thomas’s tenure as GM seemed bright.

Chuck Hagel and Lindsey Graham saw the GOP’s current predicament coming a long time ago.

Star Wars Episode III will be subtitled “The Creeping Fear”.

The cast for Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins will apparently include Viggo Mortensen (as either Ras al Ghul or Rachel’s dad), Chris Cooper (as Commissioner Gordon), and Cillian Murphy…as Harvey Dent.

This site not only used to have more readers. It even used to get hate mail.

Continue Reading Post a comment Blog Nation

Follow the Bouncing Dot.

“‘We are trying to understand how human motor performance changes with age,’ the researchers say. ‘We believe that research should be done in collaboration with people—with people like you who are interested in learning about themselves and helping research.’”

An online Harvard experiment tries to guess your age by evaluating your mouse-clicking ability. Hard to say how good it is, really. It deemed me thirty — eight years too young — but then again, with blogging and gaming both ranking high among the extra-curriculars, I probably use a mouse more than most people too.

The Empire’s Last, Best Skeptic.

“In a statement from his three children, they said he ‘is one with the Force’ and thanked their father’s fans and friends for their longtime support. ‘Every time we find someone’s lack of faith disturbing, we’ll think of him.’”

Somebody had to speak truth to power: Richard LeParmentier, best known as Admiral Motti, 1946-2013. “The Pittsburgh-born actor worked regularly throughout the 70s and 80s, appearing in such films as Octopussy and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

The Sun Will Still Be Shining.

“‘According to the space agency, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) ‘captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths.’ The video features images from the past three years, ‘at a pace of two images per day.’” Today’s Moments of Zen: Three Years of the Sun in Three Minutes.

Only Loves Sprung from Only Hates.

Also in today’s trailer bin, a UK teaser for Joss Whedon’s guerrilla adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, featuring a number of the usual Whedon suspects, among them Clark Gregg, Nathan Fillion, Fran Kranz, Reed Diamond, Amy Acker, and Alexis Denisof. (An earlier, peppier US trailer — without the benefit of that awesomely ethereal and catchy cue from Anna Karenina — is here.)

This reminds me – I didn’t post it earlier because the trailer was so drab, but Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey has also brought forth another version of Romeo and Juliet, with Hailee Steinfeld, Douglas Booth, Damien Lewis, and Paul Giamatti. Steinfeld was a real find in True Grit, but I’m otherwise not seeing the point of this.

Bad News Cuomo.

“For reasons both similar and different, the governor and the real estate/Wall Street/ low-wage employer wings of the Democratic Party in New York would like to see the Working Families Party disappear. The WFP is the most persistent threat to the power of business interests in the Empire State, and the governor doesn’t want anyone to point out that he governs as a centrist on economic issues and a liberal only on social issues.”

In The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel calls out Andrew Cuomo’s sad attempt to use recent corruption scandals as a pretext to bury the Working Families Party. “The Millionaire’s Tax, Paid Sick Days, the minimum wage, Rockefeller Drug Law reform, the Green Jobs Act, the emergence of the Progressive Caucus in NYC, the inclusionary zoning rules, the passage of the Wage Theft and Domestic Workers Acts — each of these, in ways large or small, got a boost from the electoral savvy and relationships that the WFP shows day after day across the state.”

Most progressive-minded folks in and around the New York area already know this, but just in case and since the Governor is clearly gunning for 2016 and beyond: Andrew Cuomo is not one of us. He’s just another ambitious centrist-Dem type who harbors no real values of his own, and who will do whatever it takes to keep moving up the political food chain — which usually means doing whatever the people holding the bags of money want him to do. Note the paragraph and links from Buzzfeed below.

“His recent rhetoric aside, Cuomo has staked out a relatively conservative record on economic issues, from cutting programs cherished by many in his own party and battling public workers, to eschewing progressive taxation and moving to silence Occupy Wall Street protestors. Such an agenda has helped Cuomo win favor with the well-heeled business and donor community in New York, influential conservative editorial pages, and Republicans, all adding up to very high approval ratings[.]“ Simply put, he’s emphatically not the candidate progressives should rally around in 2016.

Too Big to Countenance.

“Today, the nation’s four largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — are nearly $2 trillion larger than they were before the crisis, with a greater market share than ever. And the federal help continues — not as direct bailouts, but in the form of an implicit government guarantee. The market knows that the government won’t allow these institutions to fail. It’s the ultimate insurance policy — one with no coverage limits or premiums.”

Joining ranks across the partisan divide, Senators Sherrod Brown and David Vitter introduce legislation aimed at ending Too Big To Fail: “The senators want the major banks to increase their own tangible equity so that shareholders, and not just taxpayers, take responsibility for their risky actions. They want the banks to have greater liquidity by holding more assets they can immediately turn into cash in a financial crisis. They say they want to keep Wall Street banks that enjoy government backing from gaming the financial system with credit derivatives and other risk-inflated schemes, which even JP Morgan Chase’s own employees failed to catch until too late.”

Naturally, the banks will be fighting this with everything they have, and Goliath usually wins these fights in Washington. They’re already leaning on one of their favorite Senators, Chuck Schumer, to block Brown from ascending to Chair of the Senate Banking Committee. Nonetheless, the progressive-conservative alliance here suggests, at the very least, a new wrinkle in the game.

In related news, companies are also wheeling out the Big Guns to threaten the Securities and Exchange Commission over potential new corporate disclosure rules for political spending — namely, making businesses disclose their campaign donations to their shareholders. Seems innocuous enough, but of course, “[t]he trade associations lining up in opposition to the rule amount to a roll call of the most politically influential — and highly regulated — industries in the country.”

Back in the Game!

It’s been forty long years and we’re starvin’: So I didn’t do the usual annual NBA playoff picks this year, partly because I don’t have much knowledgeable to say about matchups like Denver v. Golden State and Atlanta v. Indiana, and mainly because, more than even most years, my bracket would be clouded over in fandom and I don’t want to bring the jinx. Suffice to say that I’m greatly enjoying the Knicks’ first year of serious playoff contention in fourteen years — basically the entire life of GitM(!)

Even with 2012-2013′s scoring leader (Carmelo Anthony), the six man of the year (J.R. Smith) and a gaggle of seasoned, savvy veterans (Chandler, Kidd, K-Mart, Camby) on our squad, the 2013 NBA Championship clearly remains Miami’s to lose. Still, here’s hoping we at least get a chance to take on the reigning Heat in the Eastern Conference finals. So far, so good — The Knicks go into Boston, a team that swept us two years ago (albeit with Rondo), having defended our home floor for the first time since 2000. Say go New York go New York go…

You May Say They Were Dreamers…

“Like many of his peers, Havens was a songwriter…But Havens also knew a great contemporary song when he heard it, and made his name covering and rearranging songs by Bob Dylan and the Beatles. ‘Music is the major form of communication,” he told Rolling Stone in 1968. “It’s the commonest vibration, the people’s news broadcast, especially for kids.’ Richie Havens, folk singer, troubadour, and opener of Woodstock, 1941-2013.

“Bob radiated a passion for justice, and with joyful fervor he inspired everyone around him to share his belief in, and commitment to working for, a more democratic and just society. Through a long and varied career, Bob took on many roles and causes – but all of the chapters in his remarkable life were connected by his essential decency, kindness and compassion.” Bob Edgar, former Congressman, campaign finance activist, and president of Common Cause, 1943-2013.

Adjuncting Gets Even Worse.

“Allison G. Armentrout, an adjunct instructor at Stark State College, doesn’t get paid by the hour. She earns $4,600 to teach two English composition courses…On a recent week, she spent three hours preparing for her lectures, close to six hours in the classroom, and 16 more grading assignments for a grand total of about 25 hours. So she can breathe a sigh of relief because she won’t lose her job: She came in under the college’s new 29-hour-a-week wire designed to keep her ineligible for health-care coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

Leave this academic factory, you’ll find me in the matinee: Compounding life in the Nine Circles of Adjunct Hell, more and more college and universities are trying to game the system so they don’t have to pay for adjuncts’ health care coverage. Because if you’re going to exploit your desperate, over-educated workforce like it’s a Gilded Age factory floor, why not go all the way?

“What is happening — and I’m finding this even with just two classes—because of the grading load, I’ve been put in a position twice this semester where I’ve just had to lie about the number of hours I actually worked. I don’t want to have to make a choice between having a job or not.”

Bad Girls, Angry Gods, Rainy Nights, Dead Men.

I have yet to see Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, but it seems like it’d make a decent double feature with this one: Emma Watson leads a pack of ne-er-do-well teens into the mansions of LA’s idle rich in the first trailer for Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, also with Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga, Georgia Rock, and Leslie Mann. Eh, ok. On the bright side, this doesn’t have to be very good to be far better than Somewhere.

Back from the recent unpleasantness in New York, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) makes a Faustian bargain with Loki (Tom Hiddleston) to save Natalie Portman and/or Earth from the clutches of Christopher Eccleston in first trailer for Alan Taylor’s Thor: The Dark World. Returning for more Asgardian shenanigans is pretty much the entire cast from the first film, including Anthony Hopkins, Idris Elba, Tom Hiddleston, Rene Russo, Ray Stevenson, Jaimie Alexander, Kat Dennings, and Stellan Skarsgard.

The inimitable Tony Leung does his best Neo impression in the rain in our first look at Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster, also with Zhang Ziyi. This is a lousy teaser, and the muddy, gray jump-cuttiness of it all is inauspicious for the director’s first foray into martial arts. But, hey, Tony Leung.

Ryan Reynolds (nee Hannibal “Blade 3” King, Deadshot, Green Lantern) looks for a comic book hit at last, while Jeff Bridges channels his recent Crazy Heart/True Grit turns to make a mortgage payment or three, in this ho-hum trailer for Robert Schwentke’s R.I.P.D., also with Mary Louise-Parker and Kevin Bacon. Looking like highly derivative MIB territory here, and Schwentke — the director of Red — does not inspire confidence.

Kepler 62, A Home Away from Home.

“‘This is the first planet that ticks both boxes,’ Dr. Charbonneau said, speaking of the outermost planet, known as Kepler 62f. ‘It’s the right size and the right temperature.’ Kepler 62f is 40 percent bigger than Earth and smack in the middle of the habitable zone, with a 267-day year. In an interview, Mr. Borucki called it the best planet Kepler has found.”

Of late, astronomers have been finding new planets all the time, including one right in our cosmic backyard. Still, these two seem special: NASA has found two of the most Earth-like planets yet in Kepler 62f and Kepler 62e, 1200 light years away.

“The Kepler 62 system resembles our own solar system, which also has two habitable planets: Earth and Mars, which once had water and would still be habitable today if it were more massive and had been able to hang onto its primordial atmosphere.”

Man of Emo.

On the heels of Zod’s recent demands to Earth, Zack Snyder, Christopher Nolan, and co. release a new trailer for Man of Steel, with Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Russell Crowe, Ayelet Zurer, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Antje Traue, Lawrence Fishburne, Richard Schiff, Christopher Meloni, and Harry Lennix.

I dunno…Of course we don’t want to see the same movies as in the past, but much like Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, the tone feels off here to me. Superman isn’t Batman. He’s not particularly angsty, usually, and imo should just be the Last Boy Scout. I’m not sure I much like this Most Dangerous Catch walkabout stuff they have him doing. (And that stilted Russell Crowe voiceover doesn’t inspire confidence either.) But we’ll see.

Twisting Sister GIFstered.

As found here while checking to see if the WaPo had reviewed last Saturday’s Le Corsaire at the Kennedy Center — they seem to have caught up with ABT earlier in the week — a fan-made GIF of Gill rocking her fouettes, again and again and again…

No Stranger to Jedi.

I’ll be honest. This rather egregious plot hole has been bothering me ever since Episode III. Now, at long last, witness Artoo’s real message to Obi-Wan.

Yes, We Tortured.

“‘[I]t is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture’ and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it…The use of torture, the report concludes, has ‘no justification’ and ‘damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.’ The task force found ‘no firm or persuasive evidence’ that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means.”

A “nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” headed by two former Members of Congress (Republican Asa Hutchinson and Democrat James Jones) offers an in-depth investigative report on our national post-9/11 torture regime.

“The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been ‘the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.’”

Of course, we have known all this for awhile now. And yet, just as with the folks who brought us the financial crisis, there has been zero accountability coming from Obama’s Justice Department or anywhere else. Instead, our powers-that-be have been too busy trying to round up purported public enemies like Bradley Manning and Aaron Swartz.

And yet, as this report unequivocally lays out, the evidence of an American torture regime, planned and carried out after 9/11 at the highest levels of government, is indisputable. For the rule of law’s sake as much as for the values we purportedly stand for, we still need a reckoning.

Where Worlds Collide and Days Are Dark.

“Here I am, standing outside Winterhold, watching the snow blow in gusts down the path. There’s that bridge to my right, and that mill to my left, and the docks beyond the bridge. I hear a dragon somewhere. I still have no idea what else is up in the mountain behind the city, despite having sojourned to its peak multiple times. I’ve still never collected all of the types of blood that one demon asked for…There’s still so much of Skyrim left to see, and so much Skyrim left to play. But I’ve probably seen enough.”

Onward to the next adventure: With the announcement that there’ll be no more xpacs, Kotaku‘s Kirk Hamilton says farewell to Skyrim. To be honest, I haven’t even started Skyrim yet. I borrowed my father’s copy many moons ago, but I’ve been daunted by the scope of the game — and afraid of the inevitable timesuck it will generate — since it came out. As Alan Sepinwall noted of the currently-unfolding Golden Age of Television, it seems to get harder and harder to keep up with all the great pop culture out there at the moment. Not enough time in the day.

The Literal (and Semiotic) Seuss.

The original Buzzfeed post from whence these came seems to have been airlocked, but the images have survived at LinkMachineGo and elsewhere: What Dr. Seuss Books Are Really About.

Or for a longer but equally goofy answer, see Louis Menand in The New Yorker, circa 2002: “The Cat in the Hat was a Cold War invention. His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time…is readily appreciated: transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. But he also stands in an intimate and paradoxical relation to national-security policy. He was both its creature and its nemesis — the unraveller of the very culture that produced him and that made him a star.”

The Secrets Beneath.

“The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment has detected three events with the characteristics expected of dark matter particles…A statistical fluctuation of the experimental background is likely to produce three or more events resembling this result a little over 5 percent of the time. However, all three of these events have energies more like those expected of a low-mass dark-matter particle, something that should happen by chance only 0.19 percent of the time.”

There are older things than Orcs in the deep places of the world: Symmetry Magazine checks in with the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment happening a mile beneath Minnesota. As I’ve mentioned before, I came close to spending a summer in high school standing around a similar underground science project, searching for neutrinos. “The year 2013 should be an interesting one in the search for dark matter.”

For Want of a Spreadsheet Check…

“This error is needed to get the results they published, and it would go a long way to explaining why it has been impossible for others to replicate these results. If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.”

As Mike Konczal of Rortybomb explains, the Reinhart-Rogoff paper “Growth in a Time of Debt,” which argued that high debt-to-GDP ratios stymie growth and has been one of the key economic foundations for recent deficit hysteria, turns out to be fundamentally flawed.

“This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession,” embraced by both Paul Ryan and the Washington Post. And it’s totally upside down. As Konczal says, “[t]he past guides us…it tells us that a larger deficit right now would help us greatly.”

Update: Dean Baker weighs in. “If facts mattered in economic policy debates, this should be the cause for a major reassessment of the deficit reduction policies being pursued in the United States and elsewhere. It should also cause reporters to be a bit slower to accept such sweeping claims at face value.”

You’re Blowing It, Campbell.

Ehrmagerd: Since everyone needs a laugh or two today, Mad Men and Community‘s Allison Brie re-creates favorite Internet memes. Given her two-show stardom, You Had One Job doesn’t work here. But doesn’t her cheesy name make Brie perfect for an Xhibit recursion? Yo dawg, I heard you liked Brie…

Keep Running Strong.

“The Marathon was the old, drunk uncle of Boston sports, the last of the true festival events. Every other one of our major sporting rodeos is locked down, and tightened up, and Fail-Safed until the Super Bowl now is little more than NORAD with bad rock music and offensive tackles. You can’t do that to the Marathon. There was no way to do it…Now there will be. Someone will find a way to do it. And I do not know what the race will be now. I literally haven’t the vaguest clue.”

Charlie Pierce reports in from the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, which to-date have killed three and injured over 140. “Horror has no shelf life anymore. Everybody knows already. Everybody’s a newsman. Everybody’s in showbiz.”

Obviously, yesterday was horrible. Let’s mourn our dead and help our wounded. Let’s honor our first responders and civilian heroes like Carlos Arredondo, the “man in the cowboy hat.” Let’s figure out exactly what happened here and bring the perpetrators to justice. And then, let’s hold our heads high and work to live our lives without fear.

In other words, Keep Calm and Bost On. As I said this past 9/11, we can’t afford to collectively lose our minds again after these sorts of attacks. That’s exactly what purveyors of terrorism want us to do — That’s the entire point. You can see it in Iraq, where 55 died yesterday from car bombs. You can see it in all the ways we fell astray from our fundamental American values after the last attack on our home soil (notwithstanding mass shootings like Tuscon, Aurora, and Newtown.)

When we were tested in this regard after 9/11, we failed in far too many ways. Let’s all try to do better this time. We must love one another or die.

Update: What Martin Richard said.

“You’ve Only Made 0 Friends.”

Sometimes your computer, cellphone, and whatnot just don’t know how to let you down easy: Screenshots of Despair, the Tumblr.

M is for Martians.

He may not have drawn Cthulhu, but as Brain Pickings recently pointed out, the late Edward Gorey did once illustrate War of the Worlds. “One of Gorey’s inimitable pen-and-ink drawings adorns the beginning of each chapter. Here is a taste.“

London Falling.

“[M]aybe they’re all working off out-of-date history books, and think they’re invading the nerve centre of an empire covering a quarter of the globe. In the event that the nation’s favourite Time Lord ever fails to repel them, the Daleks are going to be deeply embarrassed to discover that all they’ve won possession of is a slightly rainy archipelago full of financial services professionals and sarcasm.”

With that Douglas Adams-y pronouncement, Londonist offers a handy Google Map of all the places in London where Doctor Who has saved the city. “We’ve also, because we’re nice like that, colour coded them by which Doctor it was that defeated them.”

There’s No I in Teamocil…

“I’m a HUGE fan of Arrested Development. Once I heard that each episode in the new season was going to focus on a different character, I thought it would be fun to create a series of art doing the same.” In anticipation of Season 4, artist Josh Cox creates a series of Arrested Development throwback album covers. I probably would’ve more explicitly riffed off this for the above one.

A Home Next Door in Centauri Bb.

“The triple star system of Alpha Centauri is only 4.3 light-years — about 25 trillion miles — away. The possibility of an earth-like world orbiting our nearest neighbor has been a kind of holy grail of astronomy —- and something taken for granted by countless SciFi authors.”

Hey neighbor: Astronomers find an Earth-like planet just next door in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our sun. “Indeed, Alpha Centauri Bb is the first planet with an earth-like mass ever found orbiting a sun-like star.” That being said, prospects for life — or colonization — seem, for the time being, remote. “Unfortunately for any hope of finding life on this world, it orbits only about four million miles away…This would make Alpha Centauri B more than twenty times larger in the planet’s sky than the sun is here on earth…and more than 500 times brighter and hotter.”

Can’t Start a Fire Without a Spark.

Katniss and Peeta discover winning isn’t everything in the first teaser for Francis Lawrence’s Catching Fire, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sam Claflin, Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright, and Amanda Plummer joining Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Banks, Liam Hemsworth, Stanley Tucci, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Paula Malcomson, Willow Shields, and Toby Jones.

I thought the first film was an admirable attempt at recreating the book that was mostly hamstrung by the fact that we were no longer privy to Katniss’s interior monologue. And the second volume, with its straining for a reason to get back in the arena, is probably the weakest of the trilogy. Still, this is a very promising teaser – It’s fun to watch Sutherland and Hoffman, two pros of different generations, adding heft to the proceedings.