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. ...

Pym Fortuyn’s party is collapsing, which is no great surprise when you get right down to it. Fortuyn himself was assassinated this summer, right before the Dutch elections, which did not prevent his party from becoming the second largest party in the Dutch government. But without Fortuyn at the center of the party, it’s dissolved into squabbles and factionalism. What this says to me is that Fortuyn was never a politician. He was a charismatic figure who was able to assemble a coalition by force of personality, but he wasn’t a politician. His party had no strength at the core, no ability to function without him. ...

The great thing about weblogs is that sometimes people will write down the things you were thinking about in such a clear and cogent fashion that any need for you to write about them is utterly eliminated. Thus, I give you Maciej’s essay “ Dabblers and Blowhards.” In theory, there’s an entire class of annoying bloggers I’ll never have to write about again. In practice, I’ll get frustrated every four months or so and post something irritated and someone will say “Dude, what did you expect?” But it’s nice to have dreams.

Now, that’s pretty close to being a government. Good news. It’ll be interesting to see who winds up in the cabinet. More specifically, it’ll be interesting to see who gets to be the oil minister. The Kurds want it, but they probably got the right to have their own independent army (people keep saying militia. It’s got tanks and artillery (original); it’s an army in my book), so maybe they gave up the ministry. And what happens to Kirkuk?

Huh.

I was going to watch Infernal Affairs last night but then I said “whoa, Bryant. Cut back on the noir. There’s been nothing but for a while; maybe it’s time for a break?” In service of purging the noir obsession from my system, let’s get the last two movies I saw at the Brattle L.A. Noir series into one post, shall we? It’s especially convenient since they were a double bill. Sounds like a plan. ...