Hallo, Eschaton readers! Thanks for dropping by, hope you find the carpets to your liking, and so on. I’m writing more about culture and film these days than I used to, because I’m fairly burned out on politics, but you’ll still find the occasional political post if you happen to stick around. Also: hope you like Asian cinema. Hm. Back then, I was not so subtly making the point that Eric Rudolph was a terrorist and wondering why Fox News would forgive those who supported him. The point still holds. I’m pretty gratified to see CNN calling it like it is today: ...

I’m trying out Brad Choate’s cool new anti-spam plugin (original). If you have trouble commenting or sending a trackback, please drop me a line. If you’re reading this on Livejournal, ignore it.

Damn it. No more Boston Legal this year (original). Sure, I can understand the decision, but I’m very sad about it.

Pros: Drew Barrymore, Red Sox, Nick Hornsby. Cons: Jimmy Fallon. So that was a pretty easy call. Alas, Fallon did not rise to the honorable occasion of working on a Red Sox movie. Thus, I got about what I expected out of Fever Pitch — a light, airy romantic comedy with some Red Sox bits that made me mist up. It’s got most of the spirit of being a Boston fan about right. There’s a Boston Dirt Dogs T-shirt, they knew it was important to make a big deal about Ted Williams at the 1999 All Star Game, and so on. There’s a jarring scene where Fallon’s “summer family” of season ticket holders get all anxious about the Curse of the Bambino, though, which pissed me off something fierce. The Curse is a mythical publicity tool that mostly sells Dan Shaughnessy books. Perpetuating it at this stage of the game is hackneyed and lazy. ...

The Independent Film Festival 2005 is coming: April 21st through April 24th. Tight schedule. Just about all the narrative movies look good, and I hear great things about the documentary Murderball (original). I’m also intrigued by The Fall of Fujimori (original). OK, let’s rough out a schedule, here… Friday 5:15 PM, Somerville: Abel Raises Cain (work permitting) 8 PM, Somerville: Blackballed (Rob Corddry stars) 10:30, Brattle: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things Saturday 2 PM, Coolidge: Spew: The World of Competitive Debate (original) ...

To my disappointment, the Boston Underground Film Festival’s copy of Able Edwards (original) was flawed or scratched or something and they were only able to show the first fifteen minutes of the movie. It was a keen enough fifteen minutes, though. I could have sworn I’d written about this movie before, but I can’t find the post in the archives. Able Edwards is a thinly veiled Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse becomes Perry Panda) who is cloned after an ecological disaster in order to revitalize Disney. Er, revitalize Edwards Corporation. According to other reviews, the cloned Edwards suffers an identity crisis of some sort. Regrettably, we didn’t get that far. ...

Mitt Romney still isn’t going to be the Republican Presidential nominee in 2008. I know he’s the trendy choice, but barring a significant shift in the party, he doesn’t stand a chance of getting past the primaries. He’s got to tack too far to the left in order to effectively govern in Massachusetts, and that’s On the way into work this morning, I heard a commercial from Mitt about stem cell research (original). This is a very topical issue in Massachusetts right now; our House and Senate just passed bills concerning this research which explicitly allow both embryonic stem cell research and something called “ somatic cell nuclear transfer.” ...

Wow (original). See, if you mix Google Maps and Craigslist, there’s a lot of data out there, see. Also: wow.

I converted this blog over to Wordpress 1.5, out of curiosity. For some reason, the front page takes about ten times longer to load in Wordpress. I probably won’t be switching any time soon.

A few months ago, Ryan of the Dead Parrot Society debunked the claim that certain photographs of an execution on Haifa Street, in Baghdad, were taken from close range. Ryan is the online producer for a Washington State newspaper; he has experience with news photography and the ability to ask real photographers questions. So he did. He found out that the photos in question were almost certainly taken from a distance. This hasn’t stopped Powerline and Michelle Malkin from continuing to perpetuate the myth that the photographers were standing right next to the execution. ...