The Lasso of Truth

This should be good

Sarah Palin says she's considering a Presidential run in 2012 and I'm thinkin'...

How much fun will the debates be, with her and the Big O?  One snippy little comment in that lilting flirty tone and a saucy wink to the camera, and Barry will be left sputtering and dumbstruck.  I predict he calls her "little lady" within 15 minutes of the first appearance.

And Mamma Grizzly will have chocolate eclair for dessert every single day.

The Maker of Monsters

I have always had a deep appreciation for the macabre and the chillingly terrifying.  Landscapes and characters built in darkly fantastical and enchantingly abhorrent themes, have always captured my imagination in a way that more subtle thematic nuances never could.  Tim Burton, for example, does a fantastic job of transforming any story into a Gothic nightmare of quirks and oddities that defy normality without descending in ridiculousness.

Another darker, and even more compelling, artist in this genre is Guillermo del Toro.  Where Burton dwells on the humour in darkness, del Toro plunges into it's horrifying beauty and bone-chilling ferocity.  Pan's Labyrinth was a dramatic introduction into this world of monsters, both mystical and real, and although Hellboy II was a screaming failure, del Toro's Tooth Fairies were enough to ignite in me, a host of long-repressed childhood nightmares.

Which is why I am eager to see his treatment of The Hobbit.  With Tolkien's compelling narrative and del Toro's visually stunning fantasy elements, I anticipate a thoroughly satisfying movie experience that will leave me checking under the bed for weeks afterward.

h/t

To flee the shark-infested land

In the current economic and in light of the recent fervor with which governments of any stripe feel free to impinge on every aspect of your daily life, wouldn't it be tempting to just unmoor from everything and float away..?

What if you could just move—not just you, but everything you own, including your home, and, if your neighbors agreed with you, your whole community? What if you could move all of it where no government would bother you at all, and you could make a new, better society?

[..]

Seasteading, Friedman insists, should be of interest to any philanthropist who wants to preserve and protect a wider and more secure human future. As he writes in his book-in-progress on seasteading, “The ability to experiment with a new system will produce both internal benefits to the pioneering seasteaders and external benefits to the world. Seasteaders will be able to choose a society which is in harmony with their values. And each society will serve as an experiment, to see how its system works in practice.”

Read the whole thing.