Surprisingly unobjectionable Oscar nominations this year. Yes, Two Towers more or less got stiffed. However, I’m rather glad to see Christopher Walken get a well-deserved nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and I’m glad to see John C. Reilly get the same on sentimental grounds even though I haven’t seen Chicago yet. (Note: Bill Condon wrote Chicago. Good talent involved in that there movie, and hey, Condon got nominated for Best Screenplay Adaptation!) I’m also very pleased about the Best Actor nods to Michael Caine and Nicholas Cage. And they noticed Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven. ...

EMI/Capital has purchased a clue and is reissuing Warren Zevon’s back catalog (original). Plus bonus material, including an entire unreleased album from his early days. I think it’s wonderful news, if a little belated. (By way of Jim Henley.)

Eugene Volokh provides me with an excellent launching point for some stuff I’ve been mulling over lately. He’s discussing recent polls which may show that the British public is not behind the US war on Iraq. In his wrapup, he says “I hope British public opinion is not being accurately reported here. But if it is, then just reflects the errors of the British public, not the errors of a hawkish policy.” ...

News of the surprising: Sci-Fi Channel is gonna be airing a Riverworld pilot (original) on March 22nd. Alex Proyas, director of Dark City, is producing. The only notable name I see is Emily Lloyd. No Richard Burton in the story, either.

I dunno, it’s like I feel some weird obligation or something. Saith Professor Reynolds: “essentially a pro-democracy, anti-dictator — and hence pro-war — student organization…” It’s kind of hard to tell, since that’s a pretty terse argument, but I think that’s a fallacy of composition — he’s pro-war, as a consequence of his anti-dictator and pro-democracy stance, so everyone who’s anti-dictator and pro-democracy must therefore be pro-war. But since he doesn’t lay out the steps, preferring to just leap to the conclusion, one can’t be sure.

A long time ago, in the heyday of Webrings, I thought about setting up a link exchange along Nomic lines, but I was too lazy and never got around to it. BlogNomic is sort of like that, except it centers on weblogs. If I was a diehard Nomic player I’d get involved in this but I should keep reminding myself that it’s all I can do to get through a game of PbEM Diplomacy without losing interest.

Felix Salmon has the only blog I know of coming to us live from the Antarctic, unless you count Big Dead Place (original), which is a pretty interesting site. But not every interesting site is a blog, even if it posts cool stories. Word to the wise, yo. Actually, I don’t think it’s Felix Salmon posting the Antarctic stories, now that I look at it again. It’s someone named Rhian. One imagines there’s a story there, but it’s opaque to me… until I spend five seconds with the site and learn that Rhian is Felix’s sister. The Internet: tomorrow’s personal transparency today!

Four or five episodes in, and by my reckoning, Mister Sterling has pretty much jumped the shark. Wasn’t much of a shark, at that. There was a lot of promise in the premise of a Senator appointed to fill out a term who turned out to be an independent, but it’s squandered by making him a Democrat in independent clothing. So far, other than a quick list of issues in the first episode, there’s really nothing about him that doesn’t follow the liberal line. Which isn’t a bad thing per se, but don’t tell me he’s an independent thinker. Heck, his true blue Democratic staff anointed him as “the guy we always wanted to work for” last episode. ...

You gotta love these little self-fulfilling prophecies. The New York Sun tells us, in the course of arguing that anti-war protests should be forbidden, that “His [Thomas Friedman’s] point was that if terrorists strike again at America and kill large numbers of Americans, the pressure to curb civil liberties and civil rights will be ‘enormous and unstoppable.’ What we took from that was that the more successful the protesters are in making their case in New York, the less chance they’ll have the precious constitutional freedom to protest here the next time around.” ...

Weird gaming idea of the day: You hand out character sheets that are folded up like origami, and instruct the players not to unfold them. They start out with the stats and skills and self-knowledge that are visible on the outside. At various points in play, you instruct them to make certain unfolds. New information is thus revealed, and put into play. If you wanted to randomize things a little, you could use a cootie catcher, but I’m not sure the associations are right. ...