Do the Post-Racial Thing

'Do The Right Thing' still asks burning questions - washingtonpost.com:

"'White people still ask me why Mookie threw the can through the window,' Lee said in an interview. 'Twenty years later, they're still asking me that.'

'No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.'"

I guess to get to a post-racial America we'd need folks of all colors to both have the compassion to understand why and not have the life experience that makes it so they don't even have to ask. We are not there yet.

The Specials

'Doctor Who: The Next Doctor' review - Sepinwall on TV - NJ.com:

"'I'm The Doctor,' goes a familiar refrain from David Tennant early in 'Doctor Who: The Next Doctor,' the latest installment of the British sci-fi institution.
'Doctor who?' his new friend Rosita asks.

'Just The Doctor,' he explains patiently, having been through several hundred similar gags about the difference between the title of the series and of its main character.

'Well, there can't be two of you!' she objects, before introducing him to the man that she knows as 'The Doctor.'"

Wow. I must've been busier than I realized. This completely snuck up on me! I was thinking it was still months before the last Tennant specials showed over here, but "The Next Doctor" is tomorrow and "Planet of the Dead" is next month.

Libraries 4 Life

Gov. Ted Strickland Responds to Library Outcry in New Letter | Cleveland Leader: "Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, who proposed cutting state funding to library's by 50 percent, has responded to the enormous outcry by libraries and his constituents in a letter posted to his website just moments ago."

Sad. A community without is a decent library is not a place I'd want to live.

Score

Ran out to see what my neighbor is selling at the garage sale tomorrow and picked up six dvds for $10. Spidey 2, Army of Darkness, Shaun of the Dead, The Abyss, Bourne Supremacy, and Monsoon Wedding. The last may seem like one-of-these-is-not-like-the-others but I recognized the director's name from the upcoming Amelia biopic so I thought it could be advance scouting. Plus, it couldn't hurt to get at least one that the missus'll watch with me. Bonus: got back inside just in time to see Ortiz go yard. That's timing.
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Plantations of RI

RI closer to changing state name over slavery - Yahoo! News: I lived in RI for eight or so years and never had a clue its full name is "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations."

They Were There First, The Ocean's Not For Me

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Many sharks 'facing extinction': I'm terrified of sharks. It doesn't help that a neighbor relayed a "how about that?" story that pretty much makes it impossible for me to go in the ocean ever again. My neighbor saw some of those planes with the propellers that tilt-up flying low over the beach and it turned out that one was being piloted by a friend of his who is currently on active duty. The friend told him he saw two huge sharks maybe 50-60 feet from a pier where there were bunches of people in the water who were, presumably, blissfully unaware of the presence of giant fracking sharks nearby. This story is tangential to the link; I'm not actually advocating shark extinction. I'm just saying, stay out of the water.

Library Schooled

A Literary Legend Fights for a Ventura County Library - NYTimes.com: "'Libraries raised me,' Mr. Bradbury said. 'I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.'"

A Little Pre-Father's Day Bizarreness

GET MORE AT ManBabies.com!

Looks like a Slitheen.

Gypsy Curses

Top Ten Gypsy Curses in Film and Television « Cinematropolis: Seeing the trailer for Drag Me to Hell got me thinking, "it's been a while since we've seen the gypsy curse in action." I started wracking my brain trying to think of other examples, but the only other ones I could remember were Angel, the gypsy fortune teller machine in Big, and Lon Chaney's Wolfman. Yet, the gypsy curse seems like such a famous device it must be more common. That's when I went searching and found the Cinematropolis link, which arose from the same prompting. Aside from King's Thinner, which I'd forgotten, I don't think I'd even so much as heard of the other references. (I'm not convinced the X-Files one is accurate and am years removed from having watched and episode of The Simpsons.) There must be other notable gypsy curses, perhaps in comic books, that I'm forgetting? For some reason Abbott & Costello keeps coming to mind, but dang if I can recall why. Maybe there was a gypsy in A&C Meet Frankenstein?

Sci-Fi's Doing Just Fine

Science fiction's vital contribution to the life of English | Books | guardian.co.uk: "If you measure the health of literature by its impact on language, than [sic] there's no genre in better condition than SF"

Rassilon

io9 - Your First Look At Doctor Who's Next Big Guest Stars - doctor who - Exciting and spoilerly pic.

"It Came Out of Nowhere!"

 woot shirt
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FF X-Post Take 2

Not Dead Yet

autAuto-Tune Community Reponds to the Death of Auto-Tune -- Vulture -- Entertainment & Culture Blog -- New York Magazine: Hold the phone, you can't declare auto-tune dead when I just got around to making it a tag for posts here at TC! Plus, they use it in the rap game? Who knew? I thought it was just for Cher ("Do you..ou...ou belie.ie..ieve in life after love?") and the kids that do the news with it on youtube!

Payback

Red Sox Rally To Go 8-0 Vs. Yankees -- Courant.com: Lots of baseball left, as they say, but my inner baseball card collecting 9 year old who remembers years like 1980 when we had a team full of players I loved (Fisk, Yaz, Rice, Evans, Hurst, Lynn, etc.) got smoked by the hated Yanks again and again ... that kid, he's loving this.

Chimpocalypse Now

A chimpanzee apocalypse in Tanzania?: Scientific American Blog: Heading towards a world populated exclusively by humans, cockroaches, and fire ants.

Little x-blogging experiment here ... I added this link to my friendfeed and want to see how an embed of that into this post flows -- or doesn't.

The Reader

The Reader: I'm catching up, slowly, on some of the films I'd hoped to see last year that there was just no time for ... The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire, Quantum of Solace in the bag, There Will Be Blood, Burn After Reading, No Country For Old Men pending... and tonight I think I saw what will prove to be the best of the lot, though I'm holding out hope for No Country (only the Coens, I suspect, could fashion something decent out of a novel by that overrated gobshite McCarthy).

Champie!

A 'lake monster' caught on film at Lake Champlain : Tetrapod Zoology: Champie, drowning dog, or log?