Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
Remember “an exceptionally simple theory of everything”?  The proposal that had some nice symmetric diagrams that the press picked up on?  It fit into a recently trendy mathematical topic, the picture was vaguely cool, and the guy behind it spent most of his time surfing and skiing.  Great story.
Turns out his theory doesn’t work [...]

By Thoreau
Jim’s post about messages in Burn Notice got me thinking about messages in media more generally.  People will often look at a book, a TV show, a movie, a song, or whatever, and complain that they find messages that are sexist, racist, politically correct, homophobic, pro-gay, liberal, conservative, pro-war, anti-war, pro-capitalist, Communist, anti-environmentalist, alarmist, [...]

Mostly, when I’ve watched Castle, it’s made me think Joss Whedon is underappreciated as a director of actors, since I think he got more out of Nathan Fillion than the current bunch does. But Mo at Sin Aesthetics argues that Castle has figured out how to “create tension and jeopardy in action genre [media] without [...]

By Thoreau
24 is down to the final 10 hours of the final season.  There have been a lot of ups and downs, but as it draws to an end let’s just have some fun.
First and foremost, in tonight’s episode, I had to laugh when the Evil Machiavellian General was told that Jack Bauer is on [...]

Get a fucking grip, would you people?
Yes, it is fun to believe that Crazy Colonial Christian Republicans, hopped up on Glenn Beck and Your Babylon 5 Species Name Facebook widgets, came this close to starting the Second American Civil War but for the timely intervention of federal law enforcement. And you know, maybe it happened [...]

By Mona
Digby the Estimable is contributing to Salon, and today she addresses herself to the perorations of the most recent addition to the CNN pundit pantheon. I mean, of course, that sage and sober political philsopher, Mr. Erick Erickson, Esq., who has posited that: At one time in recent memory, there served on the Supreme [...]

And after the huge war between Amazon and Macmillan over “dynamic pricing,” The Trade of Queens is $9.99 on Kindle out of the gate. I approve, but if I’d known I could’ve blogged less.

I was about a year late realizing that the fifth book in Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series was available. So that means I’ll get to read the sixth and final (officially) book right after I get done with Book Five. That will be nice.
On the other hand, the extra lapse between when I read the [...]

By Thoreau
In the final scene of Lost, the camera will swing around, and you will see that the set is in Hawaii…and then it will pull back and you’ll realize that Hawaii is in Lake Victoria, in waters  belonging to….KENYA!
Hey, it wouldn’t be any weirder than the rest of what’s happened on Lost.  And it [...]

My schoolfriend Johanna has a cool article about fight-choreography for the theater in the Tufts alumni magazine.
GayProf critiques the racial and gender politics of “Burn Notice.” I take his points, and even so, the show represents an advance over its spiritual ancestor, “The Equalizer.” Even I, even in the 80s, eventually realized that the Equalizer [...]