Potpourri

* Jacob Remes explains May Day.

* My Joss Whedon zombie essay from PopMatters is out in Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion today. Last night I submitted my abstract for the upcoming Politics of Adaptation conference on Cabin in the Woods, drawing me ever closer to total Joss Whedon scholarly completism.

* Roundtable on Non-Western SF, at Locus.

* A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that “liking” a Facebook post is not free speech. To repeat my own Twitter quips, yeah, because it doesn’t cost money.

* New polling shows Amendment One will likely pass after all.

* al Qaeda’s discovered our only weakness: our insatiable love of porn.

On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.

Buried inside them was a pornographic video called “Kick Ass” — and a file marked “Sexy Tanja.”

Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence — more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group’s most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.

* Hungry for good nerd press, Netflix is teasing it might resurrect Jericho.

* Five anarchists arrested by FBI for trying to blow up Cleveland bridge with fake bombs given to them by FBI.

* Aetna, according to the report, cited exclusions and said it would not cover the claim because Scott developed breasts after she changed sexes. N.J. transgender woman wins battle with insurance company to have mammogram covered.

* …legal chicanery has reached such high levels that the SEC is toying with the idea of going after it directly.

* And somebody page Nick Bostrom: Entire Observable Universe Modeled Using French Supercomputer.

Stat of the Day, Insane Wyoming Legislative Survivalists Edition

…via MetaFilter.

Population of Wyoming: 568,158.

Crew of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier:
Ship’s company: 3,200
Air wing: 2,480

568,158 / 5,680 = one out of every 100 Wyoming citizens will serve aboard its aircraft carrier.

‘Jericho’ Was Right!

State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States. Via @mikemccaffrey.

The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.

Um.

Wednesday Night Whoa!

Early morning Wednesday.

* We finally saw Up! tonight. All I can say is if the first ten minutes don’t break your heart you have no soul.

* Blackwater founder Erik Prince has apparently been implicated in a huge swath of crimes by a former employee and a Marine working with the company, ranging from tax evasion and money laundering to weapons smuggling to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence to crimes of war and even to the murder of federal informants. (See MetaFilter for more.) My now-incredibly-timely review of Master of War is getting bumped up accordingly and will probably be online (updated) at Independent Weekly in a day or so. This is all pretty shocking, even by Blackwater standards.

* In not-completely-frakked-up news, Bill Clinton did a good thing today, a win for just about everybody but infamous douchebag of liberty John Bolton.

* More on the Olbermann/O’Reilly saga from Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, and David Sirota. While I appreciate that he finds himself in a tough spot here, Olbermann is not doing himself any favors with his behavior; making one type of statement on-the-air and another off makes it very clear what is going on, and makes him look like a fool.

* The 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies. Outraged to see Galaxy Quest only squeaking by at #95. And 12 Monkeys quietly buried in the 80s? Nonsense.

* “In Which I Ruin Rashomon For Everyone, Forever.”

* And your short pictorial history of robots.

Friday Afternoon Linkblogging

Friday afternoon linkblogging!

* 28% of Republicans claim to believe Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and another 30% “aren’t sure.” Results for the South are even worse. So it’s official: our national discourse is completely broken.

* Entertainment Weekly asks: Was 1984 the greatest year in movies ever? I’ve always been partial to 1999: Rushmore, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, Magnolia…

* Vanity Fair has your sketchbook history of the drug war.

* Steampunk monkey nation.

* Jericho may be returning once again as a TV movie to wrap up loose plot points. My recollection of the finale was that there weren’t very many loose plot points left, but your memory may vary.

* Chris Hedges: “The Rise of Gonzo Porn Is the Latest Sign of America’s Cultural Apocalypse.”

* And Scientific American explores the quiet end of the Neanderthals.

On Link Dumps

I know I said I was going to cut back on link dumps, but in my defense I have been busy. I’m likely remain fairly busy (and therefore link dumping) until I get back from the inauguration, at which time I’ll be able to devote more time and energy to blogging. In theory, anyway.

Anyway, the link dump.

* Bastard Tetris: the version of Tetris that does openly what all the others just do secretly. (Thanks Jacob!)

* Things to say during sex.

* Another call for a Bush administration truth and reconciliation commission. Via Yglesias, who has more on the subject, as does Steve Benen.

* Big ups to Will Wheaton, who Twittered yesterday: Best thing I’ve heard all day: “We’re in the final 100 hours of the Bush administration.”

* Douglas Wolk has Watchmen for dummies.

* The stimulus package needs more trains. More from Yglesias.

* What’s in the stimulus for higher education? I could use a second yacht.

* Republicans continue to have trouble with the fact that 24 is not based on a true story.

* Name your child “Adolf Hitler” and you’re labeled a prat, and that’s the game.

* How many AAAAAs in KHAAAAAAAN? In honor of the late great Ricardo Montelban, Boing Boing reports. Via Bill.

* Is the world a giant hologram?

* And they’re going to make a movie out of Jericho. (Failed-)TV-show-to-movie is officially the latest trend—things used to run the other way.

Now That the Strike Is Over

Now that the strike is over, we will be spared the agonizing struggle of having to think for ourselves. TV Guide has the skinny on when your favorite TV shows will return, via MeFi.

I did see with some excitement at io9 that Jericho comes back this week, so my own hypocrisy on this point should not go unnoted. And I did skip down to “O” on that long TV Guide list to see when The Office will be back, too. I’m not made of stone.

For what it’s worth, Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Diary notes that the Writers Guild has declared a “huge victory,” but others are less sanguine.

Jericho

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”

The last few weeks we’ve been Netflixing Jericho, the canceled / saved / soon-to-be-canceled-again post-apocalyptic drama from CBS. Like Lost and Heroes before it, the show functions in many ways as a testament to the greatness of HBO—what would have been a fantastic twelve-episode cable series is merely pleasantly diverting on a network. After a few episodes, the diminished production values, a lot of filler, and the necessity to always hew as close as possible to dramatic convention really began to weigh on me. (Things do pick up again a bit by the final third of the season, and by the end I was actually rather fond of the show—but it’s definitely a guilty pleasure.)

I mean, it’s pretty good for the networks—about as good/bad as a typical season of 24—and I’ll definitely check out the second season, but despite all this Jericho just doesn’t do what it set out to do. Which is really too bad, because by the end of the fourth episode I was pretty sure I was watching the best network TV show ever.