Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart
Richard Gleaves has seen the first ten minutes of the Atlas Shrugged movie and lived to tell about it. (See also this.)
At the moment, my main hope for this movie is that it will be successful enough to prompt someone else to remake it. But we’ll see.
I’m back in the frozen north (relatively speaking).
Various items, in no particular order:
1. The following proposal appeared on the Nov. 2, 2010 Alabama ballot:
Proposed Statewide Amendment Number One (1)
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of Alabama of 1901, to provide that the provision in Amendment 778, now appearing as Section 269.08 of the Official Recompilation of the Constitution of Alabama of 1901, as amended, which prohibits the payment of any fees, charges, or commissions for the assessment and collection of any special ad valorem tax on taxable property levied by the county commission pursuant to Amendment 778 (Section 269.08) shall only apply to any ad valorem tax first levied and collected pursuant to Amendment 778 (Section 269.08) for the tax year commencing October 1, 2006. (Proposed by Act No. 2009-286.)
Evidently the measure failed by 568,861 to 459,917 – which means that 459,917 people not only thought they understood what the hell the proposal meant, but cared about it enough to vote for it.
2. From an AP story about a cruise on Lake Nasser:
The cruise includes several classy touches, like cocktails at the start of the trip as the ship sails past the Tropic of Cancer, the northern boundary of the tropics. Then as the awesome statues of Abu Simbel rise out of the waters on the final day the triumphal sounds of Verdi’s Egypt-inspired opera “Aïda” burst out of the ship’s speakers.
Because, y’know, nothing says “class” like modern music blaring kitschily at you to jerk you out of the moment as you’re trying to look at ancient monuments.
3. In an interview with Olbermann last month, Nancy Pelosi warned that if the Supreme Court’s horrifying defense of free speech in Citizens United were to enable corporate fatcats to pull off a Republican victory, it “would mean that we are now a plutocracy, an oligarchy.” As opposed to what we’ve been for the last two centuries?
4. A recent “Quote of the Day” from my local newspaper:
“Adventure is not outside man; it is within.” — George Eliot
That would be a great tagline for Fantastic Voyage.
5. Damon Root mentions my post on Lane.
6. Check out how you can promote the cause of market anarchy by buying Christmas music.
Wild, Wild West was a terrific series, and one of the first science-fiction westerns. (I’ve long suspected that the show’s “James T. West” played a role in transforming Star Trek’s James R. Kirk into James T. Kirk.) Then it spawned two awful tv-movies, and finally a still more awful theatrical movie. At this point, is there anyone who could possibly revive it and restore its tarnished glory?
Yes.
The forthcoming dvd for the most recent series of Doctor Who includes two extra scenes, which as it happens are also available – at least for the moment – on YouTube, so watch ’em while you can.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there’s a beverage dispenser on the spaceship that Douglas Adams describes this way:
When the ‘Drink’ button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject’s brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no one knows quite why it does this, because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Steven Moffat pretty clearly had this passage in mind when he wrote the first scene below. It takes place between “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below”:
If you’re worried about Amy’s fate at the end there, recall the opening of “The Beast Below”:
The second extra scene takes place between “Flesh and Stone” and “Vampires of Venice,” immediately after Amy’s failed attempt to seduce the Doctor:
I caught “Last of the Time Lords” on BBC America last week – and they’d cut out the following scene!
Now admittedly that scene doesn’t really advance the plot; but still, I would bet it’s the one scene that fans best love and remember from that episode. (Plot isn’t everything.) And of course BBC America offers its viewers no announcement that they’re watching truncated versions of episodes.
There’s a new Galactica series in the works, to take place between Caprica and BSG, featuring Ensign Bill Adama in the early years of the Cylon War.
The next Star Trek movie will feature one of the following five original-series characters: Harry Mudd, Trelane, Gary Mitchell, the Talosians, or the Horta. I guess I’m hoping for and/or expecting Gary Mitchell, because: Mudd is too silly, Trelane is too much like Q, the Talosians are too entangled with a specific Christopher Pike plot thread that the last film seems to have averted, and the Horta strikes me as not having, um, legs beyond its original story. (But if Abrams does use Mitchell, it’ll be one more case of his channeling Of Gods and Men – the $150,000 libertarian fan film that featured the destruction of Vulcan and the creation of an alternate timeline stemming from the moment of Kirk’s birth, three years before Abrams’ film did all those same things.)
There might be some Star Wars sequels (CHT AICN) on the (fairly distant) horizon, but will probably “not have anything to do with the Skywalker Clan” and may take place “as far as 100 years or 1,000 years in the Star Wars universe future,” presumably to avoid conflicts with the Expanded Universe stories.
The good news is that The Hobbit will film in New Zealand after all. The bad news is that this result was achieved by government micromanaging industrial relations to keep a big corporation happy. (And no, if it’d been micromanaging industrial relations to keep a big union happy I wouldn’t have liked it either.)