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I now believe that Hollywood is in imminent danger of being destroyed by an angry God. It’s an unavoidable side-effect of reading the fall 2004 TV pilot roundup. It’s nice to know that Seth MacFarlane (“Family Guy”) is working on another animated show. I did not particularly want to know that Rob Lowe is in a pilot in which he plays the in-house doctor at a Vegas casino. Nor do I have much hope for the premise “Animated show about Siegfried & Roy’s Vegas act, told through the eyes of the animals.” Or “Suburban mom uses psychic powers to solve crime.” ...

Compare and contrast: “Are we going too soft in Iraq? Some people think so. It seems that way to me, too, though I’m reluctant to make a judgment at this distance. But in my lifetime, at least, the United States has generally erred by not being violent enough, rather than by being too brutal.” That’s Glenn Reynolds, April 30th, 2004. “It was American soldiers serving as military police at Abu Ghraib who took these pictures (original). The investigation started when one soldier got them from a friend, and gave them to his commanders. 60 Minutes II has a dozen of these pictures, and there are many more – pictures that show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners. ...

t.rev is cranking out some excellent stuff in the comment thread below. In a war, you have a large set of actors and a much larger set of actions taken by said actors. Some actions will be heroic, some will be atrocities, many will be just grim violence, and the vast majority will be mind-numbingly tedious. Some actions will be essentially unobserved (no one will survive them), most will be observed by a handful, and a tiny fraction will be observed and communicated on a wider scale. ...

From AICN: Aaron Sorkin, giant-brained creator of “Sports Night” and “The West Wing,” has now gotten the greenlight from New Line to produce his spec screenplay for “The Farnsworth Invention,” which depicts a 22-year-old genius from Utah who invented television in the 1920s, according to Friday morning’s Variety. This project has long been a part of Sorkin’s agenda, so one assumes Sorkin will still return to TV at some point to oversee his long-gestating proposed series — a backstage show-within-a-show kind of thing depicting the the creators of a fictional late-night comedy show that bears more than a passing resemblance to “Saturday Night Live.” ...

Remember: commemorating Pat Tillman and his death is OK. Commemorating soldiers who didn’t give up millions of dollars to fight is wrong. Also, photographs of anonymous coffins are an invasion of privacy in some fashion that does not apply when you’re talking about former NFL players. Finally, the people of America must be protected at all costs from the evil liberal media, which wishes to use the deaths of soldiers in Iraq for political gain. The people of America, sadly, are not capable of thinking for themselves. They are so damned emotional that the liberal media can play any tune it likes on their heartstrings. ...

This week’s mashup is another xiombarg suggestion, Full Metal Jacket. Seems timely.

Here’s something I didn’t know: in 1974, Portugal’s forty-eight year old dictatorship was overthrown bloodlessly. There’s more detail, not as well written, here (original).

So you hand out a bunch of disposable cameras with stickers on them. The stickers say “take a picture, pass the camera on, mail it here when it’s out of film.” It works (original).

Arlen Specter won the Pennsylvania primary (original) over Pat Toomey by a very narrow margin. This is a loss for the hard right wing of the Republican Party. It may or may not translate into a boost for the Democratic Senate candidate; 48% of those who voted against Specter said they wouldn’t vote for him in the general election, but a lot of those people are going to come back to the fold. ...

The Atrocity Archives is pretty enjoyable if you’re part of the vanishingly small target audience. I like espionage novels, and I’m a computer geek who knows a fair bit about the history of the field, and I like H.P. Lovecraft, so the book worked for me. But man, it’s dense-pack fiction. You need to know who Turing was and it helps to understand what a device driver is and you ought to be steeped in sysadmin/programmer culture and the espionage bits build on the work of Le Carre and Len Deighton. ...