o to be a blogger

1. Here's some good news for next year: a whole lot of interesting-sounding movies. Including: a Neil Gaiman adaptation. A new Coen Brothers comedy (say no more). The Ghostbusters remake (hope it's better than the original, which I recently tried to rewatch and turned off after ten minutes). A new Jane Austen adaptation, of Lady Susan (though the movie title is Love and Friendship, which is something else), starring Kate Beckinsale, who's always much better in period costume. Spielberg does Roald Dahl's The BFG, it is to tremble. Tina Fey in a comedy (?) about a woman war correspondent in Afghanistan. A bio-pic about the Lovings, as in Loving v. Virginia. A bio-pic about LBJ. A Disney animated film called Zootopia. Meryl Streep as Florence Foster Jenkins, the worst opera singer of all time. And that's just some of the ones that particularly interest me.

2. Cryptic but interesting article that's either arguing that The Silmarillion undercuts The Lord of the Rings or that it doesn't undercut The Lord of the Rings. I'm not sure which position the author is taking.

3. Survey to determine how fannish you are. I particularly like the trivia questions whose real answers sound even more improbable than the fake answers, like "Complete the organization's name 'The Society for the Prevention of ____________ in Science Fiction Magazines'". Not all the questions have straight-forward correct answers, however.

4. Sarcasm alert: If Joss Whedon were an anti-feminist conservative. Leaves out Dr. Horrible and Much Ado, because those are anti-feminist.

5. I'm giving away the punchline in my link text: The calculational power of typographical errors.

6. And a serious one: Slave labor peels your shrimp.