I’m perhaps irrationally angry about how much coverage that Gloucester High School “pregnancy pact” story got last week all over the web, merely based on the statements of the high school principal, and often sensationalizing the fact that one of the fathers was a 24-year-old homeless man, as if that was the worst thing of all. It turns out that the principal is now “foggy in his memory” of how he heard about it. TIME could have covered that story much more responsibly.

I’ve already linked to boston.com’s awesome The Big Picture blog once, but I have to do it again. Check out the animated photographs of dust devils moving across the Mars surface.

I’m an Obama supporter and all, but while I think his modified US Seal is kind of cute, it also sort of smacks of dictatorship – as in, “I’m remaking America in my image.” He should drop it.

Update: He dropped it.

Quentin Tarantino is at it again: in a recent interview being released as a DVD extra next month, he stated that his upcoming war film, Inglourious Basterds , will be released in two parts, a la Kill Bill. If you include Grindhouse , that makes it three double movies in a row.

Quentin Tarantino is at it again: in a recent interview being released as a DVD extra next month, he stated that his upcoming war film, Inglourious Basterds, will be released in two parts, a la Kill Bill. If you include Grindhouse, that makes it three double movies in a row.

An interview with literary scholar Steven Moore, who is writing a lengthy “alternate history of the novel” and “history of the alternate novel.” Here is an interesting excerpt where he defends difficult literature:

[I]nnovative writers have always faced opposition, but 50 years ago, an educated person would have been apologetic if he had never read Ulysses; after 2000, you had people like that bog-trotter Roddy Doyle saying Joyce wasn’t worth reading, as though it showed good sense not to have read Ulysses. Instead of being embarrassed at not making it past page 25 of Gravity’s Rainbow, some people were proud to have seen through that charlatan so quickly. These conservative critics seem to hold a “family values” attitude toward literature, believing that anything outside of the mainstream of fiction should be shunned, and that if a novel couldn’t be read and appreciated by your average Joe or Jane, then it was a pretentious waste of time. Of course you don’t have to like Joyce (or Pynchon or Gaddis), they’re certainly not for everyone, but to dismiss them as pretentious frauds and to glorify simpler, more traditional fiction struck me as an example of the growing anti-intellectualism in our country, right in step with schools mandating that evolution was just a “theory” and that creationism should be taught alongside it in science classes.

(thx, stephen)

Trailer for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Brad Pitt ages backwards, yo.

Here’s an excellent and simple graph comparing the differences between Obama’s and McCain’s tax proposals. Kevin Drum comments:

Bottom line: If you’re really rich and think that George Bush’s tax cuts for the rich didn’t go nearly far enough, John McCain is your man.

Keith Schofield’s music video for The BPA’s ‘Toe Jam’ feat. David Byrne & Dizzee Rascal is hilarious and clever. It features many nude people, but it is endearingly sort of safe for work.

Update : Just FYI, The BPA is Fatboy Slim’s new alias.

Keith Schofield’s music video for The BPA’s ‘Toe Jam’ feat. David Byrne & Dizzee Rascal is hilarious and clever. It features many nude people, but it is endearingly sort of safe for work.

Update: Just FYI, The BPA is Fatboy Slim’s new alias.

Trailer for Religulous, Bill Maher’s upcoming documentary about religion. If you watch his HBO show, you know that he views all religions, from Scientology to Catholicism, with the same amount of skepticism and contempt. Much of the trailer takes the easy route and focuses on fringe extremists – it’ll be interesting to see if he aims higher in the film.

Animal haircuts hair hats. (thx, flea)

Cops in Vancouver are getting smart: they are putting out realistic cardboard cutouts of cops holding radar guns to discourage speeding. Sometimes there’s a real cop behind one, sometimes not. (thx, sio)

«< Trailer for Religulous    Animal haircuts »>

Animal haircuts hair hats. (thx, flea)

I was mostly bored watching these top 9 video clips in Jeopardy history, until I got to the slow pan in the “Contestant Faints” one.

boston.com has an awesome new daily feature, The Big Picture, that covers recent news stories with a series of high-resolution and often beautiful photographs. Consider me subscribed. (via kottke)

Check out this video of highlights of John McCain’s speech last night and the extremely negative reaction from the cable news networks, including Fox News. McCain is the master of the forced smile.

Photograph of a sunset on Mars, sent by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on May 19, 2008. (via bb)

An English instructor at an adult education college addresses the issue of whether “the idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth.”

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

I have a copy of Deschooling Society on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to read for years now.