Discovery Channel is running this Who's History's Greatest American poll / program. I'm a bit, er, nonplussed by the list. It includes a few deserving names -- Franklin, Lincoln, Roosevelt -- but they are far outnumbered by completely ridiculous names. Check out the top 100 for some annoyed laughs.

It's got Maya Angelou but not Herman Melville, Tom Cruise but not Orson Welles. It's got John Edwards! Dr. Phil! Madonna! Ellen DeGeneres?!

And now here's the list of the top 25 finalists, which includes Lance Armstrong, Oprah Winfrey, Rosa Parks, Billy Graham, Elvis Presley, Bob Hope.

Anyway, the voting apparently starts on June 19th, so I'm going to need everyone to vote for Ben Franklin (or Washington or Lincoln or Edison if you must), because this could really just be really embarrassing.

If you'd like a glimpse and description of Heinlein's old CO house of the future, see here.

Mark Helprin, author of the second greatest book ever written, has returned to novel writing after a decade with Freddy and Fredericka. This book includes royalty parachuting into the US; Nabokov fans are cautiously hopeful.

Here's a funny blog post (including ever-amusing IRC speak) about the new Star Wars movie.

Stuff like this is always minor league creepy to me.

Robert Cringely, information tech historian or whatever the hell he is (or whoever he is -- some kind of shared pseudonym like Michael K or Monty Cantsin?), poses some interesting questions re: the Apple - Intel announcement. I still can't decide if this is actually a huge deal like so many have said. But if Cringely is right -- and sometimes he is -- then it's almost sort of like revolutionary.

Movies

*The best movie of the year so far is Crash (a new Crash, not the Ballard story about chromium death-porno or whatever). I thought at first I would hate this movie because of its fixation on race and intolerance and all that Time Magazine shit, but it manages to get above its subject with a great script. It also has that roving-perspective technique used in Short Cuts and Magnolia, which is an excellent way of reducing any single actor's chances of ruining it.

*About that new Star Wars movie: is it just me or did the sword fighting seem really poor in this one?, awkward and tentative, like they were still learning the choreography, or hadn't practiced much since Phantom Menace (which is about the only area in which the first prequel is superior to this one). Check out this fan-movie for instance and compare. Or just about any Chinese martial arts movie -- compare to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or Hero or House of the Flying Daggers.

*George Romero's Land of the Dead opens June 24. After seeing the trailer I remain hopeful. Hopefully he saw what the Dawn remake did.

*Batman Begins, the new Batman movie, looks promising. But no Joker? This is annoying. Batman without the Joker is like Superman without Lex Luthor: the story misses the core of the character, the parallax that can only be had through the perspective of his arch-nemesis (which is to say, the Joker is cool). Looks like they've kept the deco architecture at least, without which I would probably refuse to watch it. And it's directed and co-written by the guy who did Memento, so that's a thing right there.

*Fantastic 4 looks similar to X-Men in most meaningful ways. I've never had much interest in that comic, but Dr. Doom is a cool supervillain, and looks good in the trailer.

*Speaking of superhero movies, the much-anticipated Watchmen movie is finally officially dead according to scifi.com. I guess my hopes for a Rorschach movie spinoff are therefore also dashed. (Guess I'll have to make my own RL version....) It probably would have sucked anyway (cf League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).

*High Tension: this is a French movie that's been out for a while in Euroland, and while I don't usually pay much attention to things in weird languages (this release has been dubbed into English just to make it a bit worse), just look at this screenshot. Of course French things are often visually impressive while substantively vacant.

*Quentin Tarantino's next project will be Grind House (and not Friday the 13th or Casino Royale or Inglorious Bastards or Beverly Hills Cop 4). Or else not.

Television
Looks like CNET has consumed tvtome, exalting it with their hugely valuable tv.com domain. It's sad when useful tools steer suddenly toward the suck-ditch. This site is already less useful with its new flimsy, less informative interface.

Lately there have been lots of pilots / screeners leaking through the cracks in the fortress. I've looked at a few of them:

*Prison Break: some guy gets himself sent to prison in order break his death-row brother out. The twist is interesting: prison escape plots typically begin *inside* said prison, but in this one protag has time to prepare from the outside first. What's not interesting is the clutter of peripheral characters they've leavened it with -- the prisoner's family, his lawyer, etc. I'd say it overall looks mildly promising.

*Global Frequency: the Warren Ellis comic brought to the small screen in yet another bid for the still-vacant X-Files position. Not terrible, not great, but it didn't get picked up anyway, so whatever then.

*Robinsons: Lost in Space: another failed pilot -- a remake of Lost in Space. It seemed somewhat promising if a little thin on the backstory.

Games

I played a bit of the Battlefield 2 demo. It's a fun game but the vehicles kind of ruin it (just as they did for Battlefield 1942). Also the weapons feel pretty unrealistic -- when I fire a rifle I expect my ears and my shoulder to know all about it.

Chrome Specforce is a recently announced first-person shooter by Techland built on an enhanced version of the Chrome engine. The original Chrome was not great but not bad, especially as it came out several months before Far Cry -- but what made it interesting was that it was written in Java. That seemed to defy the prevailing wisdom regarding 3d applications, especially 3d games: that only C/C++ or assembly could perform well enough. There have been Java versions of open-sourced id games -- Java Doom, Java Quake II -- and there's an opensource 3d rendering engine called JMonkey, but as far as I know Chrome is the only example of a commercial Java FPS (it won the 2004 Duke's Choice Award at JavaOne).

Books

I hate to dwell on _Angels and Demons_, but the reason why a book like that is problematic for society (eegh, the 's' word) is that millions of people read it and think they've learned something, then go around spouting bullshit memes into other ears, etc: "Did you know that antimatter could destroy the Earth? And they've got a big box full of it in Switzerland!"

I don't read many fantasy novels (which is to say series, because nobody seems content with single volume fantasy novels), but George R.R. Martin's current series is pretty good (lacking all the elves and goblins that have plagued that genre since Tolkien). Anyway, the new one is finally about to roll out.

This is just... weird. "Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words 'democracy' and 'freedom' from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors."

Maybe capitalism does destroy moral values. Although it's ironic that a Communist critique points it out.

Jump to save the planet! Hell, it can't be much worse than the Kyoto Accords.

I feel compelled to note that several episodes of the new Dr. Who series have swerved clear of the suck-ditch. The end of the most recent episode was especially enjoyable with its army of Daleks and the implication of their cold brutality (I'm sick of being encouraged to feel sorry for them). One thing the new series' primary writer (Russell T. Davis) has done well is colligate the Doctor's long history with the Daleks in writing dialog exchanges between them: it's gratifying to watch the monsters start to panic when the Doctor shows up ("The Doctor has initiated hostilities!"), and Eccleston does a good job of looking gleeful while baiting them -- almost like a lion tamer. I think I've noted before the value of the arch-nemesis.

Amazon has now added Google AdWords to its search results lists. "Generating additional revenue from Sponsored Links," their website claims, "allows us to offer lower prices to you." Um... sure it does. But just because they're allowed doesn't mean they do.... Barnes and Noble does not have these ads. Just saying is all.

If anyone knows where I can purchase a gigantic mouse pad please let me know. I want 15% - 25% of my desk to be mouse pad. I'm considering applying some felt to a pizza box lid.... I'd like a round one though.

How is it even remotely possible that the Supreme Court can permit the government seizure of private property for the use by private business? (Read the story in case you live in some kind of weird impenetrable bubble.) I don't find this shocking in the usual sense of "Those clowns have done it again" or "Damn that thieving government"; this is a revolutionary and terrifying shift in the attitude of the U.S. government toward the U.S. governed. I'm literally hearing the Imperial March right now.

I love movies but holy leaping jebus I can't stand the people who make them. I watched a bit of the 100 Movies 100 Quotes thing the other night, which was mildly amusing (until the "Rescue Me" season 2 premiere came on and fixed my priorities), but it was infested by so many banal, insipid remarks from Hollywood douchebags that I spent most of the time yelling at my television. For instance, one genius informed what he must have felt was a slack-jawed audience that Gollum really wanted *power*, and that the ring represented that *power*. Ah.... Now I get it! And then Patrick Swayze said something. And then said something else! And then they let him keep on saying things for like minutes!

The other thing that annoyed me was that many of these film quotes are only indirectly from movies, e.g. "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers". This is a quote from Tennessee Williams. I know -- I've read the play. Another: "Houston, we have a problem" is a quote from real life. But then we have Rob Reiner explaining, "lines said in reality become heightened by being in a movie". Ah, I see. So Apollo 13 wasn't all that significant until Hollywood made it into a movie. Okay, Rob; hopefully someday somebody will make a movie about *your* life so that somebody else can give a shit about you.

So then anyway.

I'm all in favor of mega-engineering projects like orbital rings, and if it takes environmentalists to get it done, then so be it (hell, they're pros at leaching money from FedGov and UNGov).

Thanks to the Supreme Court, private property may now be seized by local governments in order to increase tax revenue. These guys think Justice David Souter's property isn't quite pulling in the cash at the moment; perhaps a hotel would do better than his house there…..

This Tom Cruise they've got out in Hooliwood is all high on the "War of the Worlds" bully pulpit; he's been sniping about the evils of psychiatry to anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves within range (and setting up Scientological IEDs along Wilshire Blvd no doubt). Cruise is just playing good soldier, since psychiatry is an old Adversary of the CoS; in fact it could be argued that *psychiatry* is reason the CoS exists at all.

And now for some historical summarizing...

*Dianetics* was a self-help book written by a broke SF writer named L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was apparently always broke before Scientology, and always looking for a way to make some cash -- pulp magazines didn't pay all that much for SF stories back then (and still don't). So he cobbled together what he knew about several branches of psychoanalysis (especially Jungian), mixed in some stuff from the then in-vogue General Semantics (mainly from Korzybski, in whom Heinlein was also interested at the time), and structured it in the manner of self-therapy.

It was mostly bullshit. But some people seemed to get something out of it and were willing to pay L. Ron money for more. Queue snow-ball effect.

Whether they felt they were watching too many of their own profits being leached away, or they honestly felt Dianetics was dangerous to its practitioners, the medical and psychiatric establishments, as well as legions of parallel detractors, took aim on Hubbard and loosed nukes. They filed enough lawsuits to drive anyone into their own system of therapy, and threatened to take away the last few pennies from a guy barely making two ends of an ARC meet. (That's a Scientology joke.)

In an effort to build a First Amendment bomb shelter, Hubbard founded a church to house his book. And then more people came.

Perhaps it's ironic that CoS is now loony for lawsuits, that they employ very vocal detractors against psychiatry, harass and intimidate whatever people or groups they perceive as threats. Or perhaps its fitting that they fight fire with fire, employing the available tools for what they perceive to be necessary ends. And maybe it only stops when we all each found our own churches, and restrict our communication to only our own congregations. I know I've got mine in blueprints right now. (It involves guns and kool-aid -- I stick with industry proven methods.)

As to L. Ron Hubbard, I don't believe most of the anti-CoS hype. I know that Robert Heinlein had a high opinion of him and considered him a good friend -- and in practically any matter I'll take Heinlein's opinion seriously. While not a "hard" SF writer, and not the equal of Heinlein or Asimov, Hubbard wrote some good soft SF books (Final Blackout, Battlefield Earth, the Mission Earth series), and that's usually enough for me to forgive any personal wackiness. He also founded and left money to the Writers of the Future contest, which helps new writers get established in pro SF (and is judged by some of the very top SF people in the field, most or all of them *not* Scientologists).

I didn't watch the President's speech last night: my cable has been out due to lack of payment (I just forget to pay them -- do you think I'll be charged for the two days of darkness?); but I doubt he mentioned the Kelo eminent domain ruling by SCOTUS (aka the Nazgul). That's why it's important to buy the tee-shirt.