life is short

Dood! In a huge nostalgic blast from the past, Mark Snow's doing the score to some French film called Coeurs. Ain't It Cool News has clips.

Strangers: A visual record of one-night stands that never happened

Mmm, pretty boys. Oh yeah, the concept itself is rather interesting.

An annotated and illustrated description of a trip to El Bulli, restaurant of Ferran Adria, mad food scientist and gastronome extraordinaire. There's a really great piece in Bourdain's new book about Adria, and it's lovely to finally have some pictures to go with the descriptions of this strange fantastic food.

This is seriously kind of awesome, because I've always wanted to screw Focus on the Family out of a ton of money and get a whole bunch of free stuff. I'm not too interested in something like, say, A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homsexuality but they have a whole Narnia section, which includes the DVD. No books, alas, otherwise I'd be all over it.

[edit:] Did I mention the limit of free stuff they'll send you at one pop is $100? Have at!

I thought that YouTube was really for regurgitating old Daily Show clips and showing people fortunate enough to have broadband the wonder of dancing cowboys on ice, but really, it's for stuff like this: slacker decides to travel around the world. Someone gives him the idea to do incredibly dorky white-boy dance everywhere he goes. Guy makes video. It sound so dumb when I describe it like that, but it's one of the most joyful things I've ever seen. Watch it. It'll make your day better. I promise.

Warren Ellis on how the chambara form is used by George Lucas.

And the more I think about it, the concept of the Jedi as itinerant wandering do-gooders makes much more sense than a bunch of stodgy old bureaucrats in a building on Coruscant.

Adrienne and I had a discussion about Joseph Campbell and Star Wars the other day, and about how much George Lucas really is like Quentin Tarantino: such great influences, but unbelievably shitty output given said influences.

* Amanda Marcotte speaks of the silliness of the real-life fight club, and woman (generic) as a stand-in for capitalist conformity and those who enforce it. There is also talk of Lacan in the comments. I know very little about Lacan in an academic sense, but in my Atwood and Ondaatje class there was a girl who sat in for two weeks and expounded upon language as a phallocentric endeavour and Ondaatje and especially Atwood's attempts to come to terms with it all and create agency within it. Or something like that. It's been a while. All the while I was looking at her and thinking "Guh. You are so hot because you can talk about stuff like this." (see also Adrienne's definition of theory sex) So now every time I think of Lacan, I think of HAWT. </shallow>

* Maciej Ceglowski takes George Will to task for objecting to bilingual ballots. I always hate it when there's not an Anna Quindlen column in the back of my Newsweek, because inevitably I'll get bored and read Will's column, which is so tetchy and conservative I can't make fun of it. As Maciej notes, there is an almost-literal grandmother clause that indicates if you've been in this country long enough, you can take the citizenship test in any language you damn please. And I deeply resent the implication that my grandma, a woman who fought Communist soldiers to keep her sewing machine so she could support her daughters, has less right to be here and/or vote than some idiot native who probably couldn't even pass the citizenship test.

* Enough of that. Have a grilled cheese pan with an image of Jesus on it. And a picture of Judi Dench and Ewan McGregor dressed up in bizarre costumes.

Curious. Vatican looks at rehabilitating Judas's image

Of course, this becomes a pointless argument when one considers that God, as an omniscient being, knew that Judas would betray Christ, and therefore Judas had no free will in the matter. Milton and Tolkien both made arguments about free will, but damn if I can remember them, because now that I'm out of school I am dumb.