For my birthday, I got the amazing Kino Buster Keaton boxed set. 11 DVDs, 11 movies, 20 short features, and a ton of archival material. Much of yesterday was spent in front of the television basking in it. And lemme tell you, Keaton was one ironic fellow. The Playhouse has him playing every single role in a stage company, plus the audience, with as many as nine Keatons on screen at once. Being Buster Keaton, indeed.

Coyote says don’t be a dick. Are you gonna listen to him, or what? (Via felisdemens.)

Baen’s taken that final step over the edge; they’re now publishing a book which goes beyond right-wing military fiction to embrace the Patriot movement. A State of Disobedience, by Tom Kratman, opens with a gem of a screed: For the Republicans, however, the Democratic dream was a nightmare: thought control through linguistic control, micromanagement of the economy by those least suited to economic power, social engineering under the aegis of the most doctrinaire of the social engineers, disarmament of the population and the creation of a police state to rival that of Stalin or Hitler, at least in its scope if not by design in its evil. ...

House of Flying Daggers is the latest movie from Zhang Yimou, the guy who directed Hero. Depending on how much you counted on Zhang Yimou to keep making beautiful art movies, it’s either the final step in his commercialization or a slam-bang action movie without all that complex flashback stuff. Either way, those who complained about the politics of Hero will hopefully be relieved to find that House of Flying Daggers is light on the political subtext. ...

The ways in which this is not perfect are very few, very few indeed. P’raps my favorite thing is the comment back in the original post. “When I was really into Buffy I remember thinking everything in The Waste Land secretly applied — it’s good to know it can shift fandoms so well.” “Well, I was thinking that, more to the point, the poem doesn’t apply — the essence of the parody is in mapping possibly the most influential poem of the 20th century, with its World War themes and excessive literary references and multiple phrases in foreign languages, onto a children’s book series written by a woman who can’t even conjugate her pseudo-Latin…” ...

TiVo will be providing video on demand (original) soon. That’s cool; it’s another step in the process that leads to the question, “Why do we care about scheduled TV programs at all?” Doesn’t look like it’ll cost more than the usual subscription. That probably won’t last, though; the free stuff is from IFC, which needs to promote its programs. Someone like (say) HBO doesn’t need the same publicity — we already all know about The Sopranos. ...

You must condemn X. You must condemn Y. “Islam is proven evil by the failure of mainstream Islam to condemn terrorism.” (Never mind that this is untrue to begin with.) The problem is fairly obvious; the question is how to get ouf of the trap. How do we avoid falling into the belief that failure to condemn implies approval? Everyone does it.

Heck, I’ll take a shot at this one (original). First off: media whore is a pejorative term. Yes? Yes. Second: Erick Erickson didn’t call Cindy Sheehan a whore. He did call her a media whore. We can hopefully pretty much stop pretending he didn’t mean to be insulting, right? Third: if there’s something wrong with Cindy Sheehan using her access to media outlets to promote a particular commercial or ideological message, then there are a lot of people from all sides of the political spectrum who ought to be condemned. ...

Movable Type 3.2 beta? Yep. Working OK? Yep. Getting a real workout? Nah. By the way, SpamLookup (original)? Keeps spam comments away even when you’re completely neglecting your blog. It’s awesome.

There’s a pantheon in Boston sports, with a clearly defined roster: Bill Russell, Bobby Orr, Larry Bird, and Ted Williams are the definites. People argue for Carl Yastrzemski, and it’s hard to object to that one. It’s players who were the best of the best and who spent their careers with a Boston sports team. Championships matter, but Williams and Yaz are in the club, and they never won one — so maybe things like being the only player ever to win two Triple Crowns, or being part of the 1969 Impossible Dream season, maybe those matter too. ...