I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow again today, and my adoration of Polly Perkins is confirmed. And here’s why. (Spoilers, of course.) First and foremost, she is a woman who stands on her own two feet. Her career is important to her and by all evidence she’s pretty good at it. On second viewing, the triangle created by the skills of Polly, Dex, and Joe is fairly obvious: Polly notices, Dex analyzes, and Joe acts. Time and time again, Polly’s the one who notices things first. She makes contact with Doctor Jennings. She finds the scrap of map that Dex left behind. She figures out that the staff is important. She realizes the purpose of the rocketship. ...

Does anyone (I’m looking at you, Harvard affiliates) happen to have floor plans for San Simeon hanging around? I know I could get a peek at ‘em if I were at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (original), and I know that Thomas Aidala’s Hearst Castle, San Simeon has some. So I could always just snag a used copy, but I figured I’d plumb the depths of the Lazyweb first.

Jim Lehrer: “And if any of you audience people yak during the debate, I am going to come down there and whip your ass.” Or something like that. {{ double-space-with-newline }}

On CNN, they’re citing unnamed conservative blogs as feeling Bush had a mixed performance. It’s amusing to watch blogs get co-opted into the spin. General feeling of positive for Kerry from the CNN talking heads. Maybe the Corner; they’re pretty dubious about how Bush did. CNN thinks Bush looks annoyed. Fox is not calling either man the winner. Fox picked up on how tired Bush looked and how much he sighed. Not to mention annoyed. They don’t know if it was effective or not, but Ceci Connelly is calling the expression sour. They’re admitting that Bush looked shorter due to the framing. Spin is fun.

SpaceShipOne has successfully completed its first qualifying flight. Piloted by Mike Melvill, it reached altitudes of over 63 miles. SpaceShipOne now has two weeks to reach that altitude again; if it succeeds, Scaled Composites will win the X Prize. Words fail me; my delight is manifest. Space!

Sometimes the technology is so damned close, but it’s not quite there. Ulysses is like that; now that I’ve tasted it, I want the perfect version, but I don’t think I can quite use it as it is. OK, so: as a writer, I don’t use most of Microsoft Word. Mostly I want is something I can type into. It needs to do spell checking. It needs to be able to save style information with the document, because I want to be able to mark headers and bold text and so on. It needs to be able to export the style information in a format which InDesign can handle, since that’s what I use for layout these days. It needs to be able to do smart quotes and hyphens. ...

One reason I’m fairly confident Kerry will win: he has the best ground game (original). I’ve been assuming that get out the vote efforts were a major component of the DNC’s strategy this election for a few reasons; most obviously, I’ve just seen a lot of activity oriented towards getting people to the polls this year. More importantly, though, I watched John Kerry win in Iowa because of an absolutely perfect get out the vote operation run by Michael Whouley (original). Any campaign with Whouley at the center is going to be one that has a good ground game, regardless of anything else. ...

It occurred to me this weekend, while I was contemplating buying a dozen Powers graphic novels, that we’re probably not more than five years away from solving the comics life span conundrum. (Namely, the vast mass of the history of comics is not available for reading; you can’t go back and check out Grant Morrison’s early Marvel Universe work, for example.) But let’s say we live in a world in which all comic book pages exist in digital form, which is a world we may well live in already if that’s a useful step in the printing process. So DC puts up a web page, which allows you to select a comic book title and a range of issues within that title. Click “Buy” and the pages of those issues are assembled into a single file and sent off to the print on demand printer. ...

The extended edition Return of the King DVDs will include (original): 2 disc 250 minute movie cut Commentary by the director and writers Commentary by the design team Commentary by the production team Commentary by the cast (with split personality dialogue between Gollum and Smeagol) Tolkien documentary From Book to Script documentary Designing Middle-Earth documentary Big-atures documentary (?) 2 WETA documentaries Costume design documentary Horse Lords documentary Cameras in Middle-Earth documentary Documentary on completing the trilogy Music documentary Soundscapes documentary 2 documentaries about the end of it all Cameron Duncan documentary Two Cameron Duncan short films, “DFK6498” and “ Strike Zone” Mumakil battle multi-angle feature Abandoned concept: Aragorn battles Sauron feature Photo galleries (2,123+ images) Tracing the Journeys of the Fellowship map feature New Zealand as Middle-Earth map feature That’s a hunka hunka burning DVD. Via Twitch (original).

The Men of Action game, invented by Rob MacDougall: Pick a historical figure; let’s say Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman’s Men of Action! Describe the ensuing campaign. Go.