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A couple of weeks ago, the Sunday Mirror ran an article claiming that Bush and Blair were arguing. The Mirror is a tabloid and not exactly trustworthy; however, there were elements of the story which might prove true later on: Presidential advisers in Washington wanted Mr Bush to be the sole leader to make a Christmas visit to troops in Baghdad and urged Downing Street to postpone any visit. The US refused to co-operate on security arrangements for a Christmas visit by Mr Blair, who is going to spend the festive season with his family in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh. ...

Curt Schilling, Internet-savvy Boston Red Sox pitcher, has taken to commenting on blogs. If you ask me, which nobody did, I’d say it’s important to take his actions in our little corner of the Internet as the actions of a man who’s experimenting. People express themselves on the Internet every day. First-time blog commenters make mistakes; everyone has to get used to the culture of a particular web board when they start reading it. ...

I made a couple of changes to improve load times and rebuild times ( thanks, Ginger, and man are you ever right). I’m no longer bothering with “Recent Entries” on the sidebar, cause like anyone ever used those. I also killed most of the sidebar on the category archive pages and replaced it all with a full list of entries in that category. And there’s no full category archive pages anymore, because that didn’t scale very well. ...

The RNC wants MoveOn to apologize (original) for letting an ad comparing Bush to Hitler slip into their contest. Enh. I don’t particularly think MoveOn needs to apologize; they can if they want to, and people can form whatever opinion they care to form as a result of that decision. The only person who has the right to ask for an apology here is Bush. Last time I heard, he was a big boy, and surely doesn’t need us to act on his behalf. After all, cowboys do their own work. ...

Al Giordano, who has been there and done that, explains how press protection works (original). This is a post that a lot of bloggers should read, because Giordano went through a libel lawsuit focusing on his online news site and won. He knows exactly what he’s talking about. He’s also trying out an interesting experiment (original) involving blogs and investigative journalism. I’ll be keeping an eye on it; he’s been publishing online for quite a while now, and is one of the more experienced people working on blog/journalism crossover.

Whoops, let’s add one to the Best of the Rest list: Down With Love, easily the best romantic comedy of the year. (I thought Intolerable Cruelty suffered from being written by people who were not the Coen brothers, despite being a fun trifle.) Witty and charming and full of banter, plus it took itself (and its genre) exactly seriously enough.

“There’s a hell of a lot of suffering and ‘injustice’ in the world, but no one besides Muslim Arabs (and non-Arab Muslims they’ve recruited) seem to be responding in this way.” Ah, Steven (original). Shining Path, Aum Shinrikyo, FARC, the Basque terrorist groups, Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Tigers of Tamil, 17 November, and of course our own homegrown militia groups. Oh yeah. And I heard there was some kind of terrorist group operating out of Ireland these days. ...

OK, now I know what that protective order was. Here’s the PDF (original). It’s just the procedure the parties need to use if they want to protect portions of their evidence from public view. Sony, for example, may not wish their script for Underworld 2 to be available just yet. Now they can introduce it into evidence without pesky people like me getting their hands on it.

I’d been thinking it wasn’t a great year in film, but looking back on it I was dead wrong. It was, in fact, a superb year in film. The disappointments of the Matrix sequels and The Hulk (which I liked, but it should have been so much more) kind of cast a pall on the summer for me, I think. And I wanted Demonlover and Bubba Ho-Tep to be excellent, and neither of them really made me get up and dance. Metaphorically speaking. So I started putting together my favorite movies of 2003 list. I wound up this kind of decent list, but I wasn’t all that excited about it, and then I went back to look at my reviews from the blog. That reminded me of what I said in February and what I said in August and I got a lot more cheerful. This is the list of my ten favorite movies of 2003. I didn’t see every movie I wanted to see, so I can’t claim it’s the ten best movies of 2003. I’m also being a little liberal about foreign flicks; if it was made in 2002 but was released in the US in 2003, or if it hasn’t been released in the US yet but I saw it in 2003, I’ll count it as a 2003 movie. Foreign movies from 2001 and earlier don’t make the cut, though. (Apologies, thus, to Vidocq, Battle Royale and Audition.) Enough preamble; on to the lists. It’s my personal favorite ten movies, plus other movies I thought were really worthwhile but not quite good enough to crack the top ten, plus some movies I wish I’d seen but missed.

The Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection is why one should be in the habit of saving one’s photographs. Well, if one is Charles Cushman, at least; most of us don’t have his eye. Amazing collection. (Via Electrolite.)