I saw The Last Samurai on Tuesday — the new one, not the 1990 one, although I gotta say that one looks interesting. John Saxon and Lance Henriksen together again! But I digress. Not particularly to my shame, I am a Tom Cruise fan about fifty percent of the time. I think he can be a superb actor; I also think that he spends at least half his movies chewing scenery. You just never know. This time around, he bothers to act rather than over-emoting, and that means that a fairly typical movie about Americans encountering a different culture gets to be better than it should be. That, plus Ken Watanabe, who makes a huge difference as a credible intelligent rebel lord. ...

Look, I’m the most cynical guy in the world, and I can let go of all the annoyances of bad Christmas music and overcrowded stores and equitable gift-giving and so on. It’s happy day! It’s happy season! Merry Christmas, y’all.

The easily amused, and that would be me, will enjoy this translation (original) of Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. It is, of course, in blog format. Wait. No, it isn’t, it’s in online journal format. Ah, how the trends change. Via More Like This (original).

The roster of Antarctic blogs continues to grow: sandwichgirl.com (original), Polar Cafe, The Seventh Continent, and Sarah Kaye’s letters. Soon they’ll be writing New York Times articles about the phenomenon.

The New Rosetta Stone — parody or a serious challenge to Dave Sim for the misogyny crown? I honestly can’t tell. My theory is simple and is, essentially, an analogy. By projecting the characteristics of “woman” onto a character which is more straightforward and more readily understood by the general population, I wish to make the behavior of “woman” comprehensible. I offer to you Spider Man as the best model for “woman.” My argument is sixfold: ...

Speaking of God, may I point out that it is just pathetic that the National Parks Service is putting creationist texts on sale in the Grand Canyon park bookstore? Not to mention the rest of the fundamentalist ideology-mongering revealed in this article. Edit: there’s been a bit of backpedalling. Unclear how much.

This story about getting Darth Vader’s autograph is the best autograph story ever. You have to admire an evil that has such excellent attention to detail. Luke was just darned lucky that Vader turned from the dark side; if he’d stayed true to his path the Rebels wouldn’t have had a chance.

Our mashup for the first of December (did you remember to say “rabbit” three times?) is Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. It’s all about man versus nature, with themes of ecological awareness and man competing with man as side dishes. Great book, even if there’s controversy (original) about what exactly happened up there.

Beth Bartel’s iceblog! (original) comes to us straight from Antarctica, and how cool is that? See also Antarctica 2003 (which has wrapped up) and Life on the ice (original) (which has not). Felix Salmon’s sister, Rhian, is still blogging from down there — here’s a quick link to just her entries (original) — and I found 75 Degrees South (original) via Rhian. Plus Shackleton diaries (original). Man, Antarctica is a hotbed of blogging. (Props to Metafilter.)

In honor of that New Zealand flick I’ve been reading about in all the popular newsmagazines, we’ll mashup The Hobbit today. It’ll be kind of a relief to do a story that has something that more or less resembles the typical adventuring party for once. It’s one of those big adventuring parties I remember from massive sprawling college AD&D games, but it’s still an adventuring party.