I got nothing to say about the Oscars this year except for extended bitterness regarding David Cronenberg. That’s OK! kniedzw found an Oscar pool widget, and I thought that was cool, so I set up one of my own. Go here, make your predictions, and wait. The winner will get to be the sponsor of this blog for a week. I hear that’s a big thing.

Sadly, until this Audacity bug is fixed, I’m gonna have trouble getting the Doc Savage podcast underway. At least it’s a known issue.

So, steampunk. It’s a loose, poorly fitting excuse for a genre. The Wikipedia entry reveals that pretty definitely. You got your computer parables, you got your obsession with steam, you got your fantasy tropes. You do not got decades of cheap adventure novels defining the genre. We make do with what we have, thusly. Let us assume that the class warfare aspect of steampunk does not appeal to our prospective player as a primary focus of the campaign. I’m keeping the steam-powered automata-driven London, cause come on, how cool is that? The task at hand becomes finding a premise that makes good use of the setting. Doing Scotland Yard operatives is easy but then the setting is just background, rather than integral. ...

Seventeen years ago, I spent a month in the People’s Republic of China on a youth tour. There were 40 Western teens — mostly from the United States — and 20 Chinese teens on the tour. We travelled together for a month, from Beijing down through Shandong Province; we climbed Tai Shan, drifted along the Huang He by boat, stayed in Wuhan for a few days, and finally wound up in Shanghai. It was an amazing experience. ...

Rep. Boehner was elected House majority leader. This is kind of the most amusing outcome; it’s both a validation of the assertion that the Republican members of the House were too corrupt and a demonstration that the right-wing blogs aren’t much more effective than the left-wing blogs when it comes to Capitol Hill. Intriguingly, Shadegg dropped out after the first ballot, throwing his support to Boehner. Thanks for campaigning for him, bloggers: looks like he was basically playing kingmaker rather than really running. You could view that as a win in that he’ll have a chunk of influence, I suppose. ...

Bush said we shouldn’t make man/animal hybrids; like a lot of people, I was wondering what he meant. I was pretty sure there was some kind of scientific research going on that involved gene therapy, possibly stem cells. It smelled like something prompted by the religious right. Yep. (original)

Is there anything you would like to tell us about the Academy Award nominations (original) this year? “It’s not the first time a Cronenberg movie has gotten a nomination.” Really? Wait — Spider didn’t get nominated. Was it M. Butterfly? “No. Movies about gender issues are in the spotlight this year; M. Butterfly was 1993.” That’s kind of unfair. Hillary Swank’s Oscar for Boys Don’t Cry was in 1999. “OK, yeah, I’m just being catty. Anyhow, it wasn’t any of those Cronenberg flicks. Nor was it Naked Lunch.” ...

The liberal blog community just had the limits of its power defined. I expect the argument about whether the Alito cloture vote represents an improvement over the Scalia vote or an embarrassment (original) will continue for some time. Either way, a lot of it was about the 2006 and 2008 elections. Meanwhile, over on the other side of the aisle, the conservative blog community has decided to set up their own power-defining moment. The Republican members of the House vote for their floor leader on Thursday; it’s a three way race between Roy Blunt, John Boehner, and John Shadegg. Shadegg is the reformer. RedState wants Shadegg (original), Glenn Reynolds is making non-endorsement endorsements, and so on. ...

Everyone and their cousin is gonna be linking to this, but here’s the Newsweek article (original) on the internal struggle over presidential powers in the Bush administration. It’s a blatantly biased article. Illustrating an investigation of internal debates with a picture of an Iraqi being tortured? It’s my bias, though, and I find the article strokes the pleasure centers of my political brain.

The Brattle Line (original) is the Brattle Theater’s new web board. I’ll be poking around there.