The trailer for Before Sunset, the upcoming sequel to the wondrous romantic film Before Sunrise.
It may be too much to hope that the new film is as good as the first…but I’m all about holding out hope.
Conflicting….impulses….
My strong skepticism and general contempt for all manner of “psychic” or “spiritualistic” tomfoolery comes squarely into conflict with my desire to give people a reason, any reason, to visit the Buffalo/Western New York region as I read this article about Lily Dale, NY.
But then, the Buffalo area (specifically, Amherst) is also the home of CSICOP. So, you know, you don’t have to be full of crap to enjoy a visit to the Niagara Frontier.
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O to have Lived in a Time of such Wonderment!
One reason I wish I’d been born a decade or two later: when I was making a regular practice of being dumped by members of the other gender, the news was always broken to me in person.
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The man in this picture is an archaeologist, and he is looking over a newly-discovered stucco relief of a Mayan deity in a likewise newly-discovered Mayan city. Many artifacts have been recovered, along with the realization that “Looters had missed the artifacts by inches”.
Fascinating.
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Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Here’s another word I hate:
Am I the only one….
….whose eyes glaze over every time Sherry Palmer appears on 24? I mean, for all the continual griping amongst fans about Kim Bauer (“Mountain lions and survivalists and wife-beaters, oh my!”), at least she has shown some character growth, and her story arc this year has been at least fairly interesting. But Sherry? Ugh. Here the show is getting pretty damned exciting — a madman on the loose with some kind of super-duper-virus with which he could kill millions just by smashing the vial — and then, last night, in pops Sherry Palmer with some kind of scheme to achieve power again, dredging up a subplot from earlier in the season that was pretty dull to begin with.
Assuming David Palmer is still around in Season Four, I hope Sherry is at long last done away with.
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Yet another reason why I’m glad I live in Buffalo
This New York Times story paints a pretty bleak picture of climate trends in the American West:
“Continuing research into drought cycles over the last 800 years bears this out, strongly suggesting that the relatively wet weather across much of the West during the 20th century was a fluke. In other words, scientists who study tree rings and ocean temperatures say, the development of the modern urbanized West ? one of the biggest growth spurts in the nation’s history ? may have been based on a colossal miscalculation.”
I occasionally see predictions that there will be wars over water at some point in the future. It seems strange to me that we’d have wars over a substance that covers something like seventy percent of the planet’s surface, but then — we are talking about humanity, here. We don’t really need much by way of an excuse to have a war or two.
(via Making Light)
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Oh, come on. It isn’t THAT bad.
Not at all, really. No, it’s not as good as it used to be, but it was already sliding a bit even when the Big Head was still in charge and it’s generally still been of high quality this year.
I am, of course, talking about The West Wing.
I was noodling about Bartlet4America, when I discovered Don’tSaveOurShow.org, a site devoted to promoting the cancellation of The West Wing. Lord, people, get a grip — Aaron Sorkin isn’t God. The more of his stuff you watch, the more his bag-of-tics becomes obvious; and he was frankly lousy at crafting a serial drama. Plotlines would come and go; characters would disappear for no reason whatsoever (Mandy?); favorite snippets of dialogue would turn up again and again (“I got screwed with my pants on”, “I’m a whole new woman”, “We don’t have time to do one thing at a time”, et cetera).
Not to beat up on Aaron Sorkin, because I love the guy’s writing. I own both of the West Wing script books currently in print; The American President is one of my favorite movies; and so on. But there’s no way that The West Wing has completely fallen apart. So come on, people, let’s rein in the histrionics. We still got a thing to do. Yeah.
(And I realize it’s cool to see your site mentioned in Big Media, but really — there’s not as much cachet in getting mentioned by one of Entertainment Weekly‘s corral of crappy critics as you might think.)
(UPDATE: I wasn’t really clear in that last paragraph. It was DontSaveOurShow.org that got mentioned in EW, not me. They have a scan of the article over there, if you really want to read Ken Tucker being boring and snippy.)