Bad Scenes in Great Movies and Great Scenes in Bad Movies (from the Onion).
Greencine primers on Cinema. Greencine, for those who don’t already know is a cerebral film site.
A good discussion of the China/US currency dispute. Apparently last week the US Senate passed overwhelmingly a threat of 27% tariffs if Chinese doesn’t reform their currency. Beside the fact that China will never comply, it calls attention to how appallingly ignorant our politicians are about macroeconomics. As a commenter pointed out, it’s our way of pointing out to our lenders that our IOU’s isn’t worth the money it’s printed on.
On a related note, Daniel Drezner on the difference between economics and political science.
The New pope criticized John Kerry. It will be interesting to see if Benedict’s rise will mean another purging of Catholic universities.
Thomas Bleha on why the US is falling behind in broadband penetration .
Terry Teachout has remarkable thoughts about emerging new genres and what old artists should do:
Artists (and arts administrators) who were temporarily fooled into converting to the twin gospels of more-is-better and bigger-is-better are now starting to see how grossly they were misled by the mass-media promise of infinite plenty. It occurs to me that the conditions under which today’s artists grew up will someday be seen as a prolonged aberration from the historical norm, one that is now being corrected with a vengeance. I doubt, to take just one example, that every good-sized city in America is prepared to support a full-time resident professional symphony orchestra, much less an orchestra and an opera company and a theater company and a ballet company and a museum. This sad but inescapable fact explains why so many regional orchestras are now devoting most of their time to accompanying pop singers, and why so many regional museums feel obliged to fill their galleries with imported blockbuster shows from elsewhere. The balloon has burst.
Scott Esposito on a William Vollman reading:
The reading was held in the back of the store among Children’s books. It was, to say the least, an interesing juxtaposition, William T. Vollman reading a story about Nazi war crimes beneath an inflatable Walter the Farting Dog. It made me think about what kinds of stories are read to children, and I briefly imagined what a Children’s book by Vollman would be like.
Freakonomics: What the Bagel Man Saw. Apparently this is also a bestselling book on economics.
Planet planet, a feed aggregator. This sounds like a great idea. Wouldn’t it be great if somebody packaged it into a plone product?