Fans of Philip Pullman’s marvelous His Dark Materials trilogy, about which I’ve blogged previously, should enjoy this newest trailer for the forthcoming Golden Compass movie.
I like Lyra’s scowl as she says “I don’t want to.” Lyra shouldn’t be played too sweet!
Turns out J. Michael Straczynski is supporting Ron Paul! (Conical hat tip to Lew Rockwell.)
Maybe he noticed that all the other candidates had tiny incisions at the bases of their skulls ….
There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power governments, and tyrants, and armies cannot stand. – JMS
1. I’m back from the Misesfest (appropriately held next to Grand Central Station, which Mises used to cite as an example to illustrate Austrian methodology). Great conference! My contribution, “Mises as Radical: Retrospective on Rothbard’s Thesis,” is now online.
A few other items:
2. One of the two NYC hotels I stayed in (the less fancy one) had the following sign posted in the passenger elevator: “This is not a passenger elevator. It is unlawful for any person other than the operator or those necessary for handling freight to ride on this elevator.” A law not rigorously enforced, I guess.
3. I’m sad to see that Laissez Faire Books, whose catalogues I’ve been getting since I was an undergraduate, is going out of business. But on reflection it’s not surprising; I realise I haven’t ordered anything from them for quite a while, and I suspect that’s true of many others as well, and for the same reason – in the age of the internet it’s just not as crucial a resource as it used to be.
4. On the science-fiction front, check out some major spoilers for Galactica: Razor (conical hat tip to Norm Singleton) and rumours of a brand-new Dune movie.
Hey, preview for BSG season 4.
Galactica fans: as mentioned previously, a series of out-takes from Razor, next month’s BSG event (they’ll be included on the DVD but not in the televised version), are being made available, one per week I guess, on the BSG website. The first one is now up; go to this page and click “watch flashbacks.” (You may need to turn off your pop-up blocker.)
The clips deal with flashbacks to the first Cylon war and feature Adama as a young rookie pilot – pretty well played by Nico Cortez, who not only looks plausibly enough like a young Adama but, crucially, nails the voice.
SPOILER ALERT:
The dialogue referencing the Cylons’ “building some kind of superweapon” on a “chunk of ice in the ass-end of nowhere” is perhaps a nod to the original series’ episode “The Gun on Ice Planet Zero.”
The Guardians of the Universe are a DC Comics outfit; they’re the high-handed blue-skinned hobbits who run the Green Lantern Corps from their home base on Oa (whenever it’s not being destroyed). The more modestly-titled Guardians of the Galaxy are a Marvel Comics outfit; they’re a bunch of superheroes from their future, their powers the result of adaptation to different planetary environments.
Yet I’m pretty sure I remember a DC story from the 70s (I have the vague feeling that it might have been this Superman novel, though if so, Maggin really ought to have known better) in which the blue Oan dudes were called, and in which the plot in fact turned on their being, the Guardians of the Galaxy; the villains somehow separated a chunk of the Milky Way from the rest of the galaxy (pretty powerful villains, I guess; who they were I forget), resulting in the legalistic silliness that it was no longer part of the galaxy and so no longer under the Oans’ jurisdiction.
That’s a mistake, of course; but on the other hand, the Corps doesn’t seem to concern itself much with affairs outside this galaxy. Well, how do you guard the whole universe with only a few thousand employees?
In unrelated news, did those watching Bionic Woman last night notice that the show playing on the television when Jaime enters the room was Galactica?