Syriana , a character-driven spy thriller about the political and financial machinations surrounding the international oil trade, is too taut for its own good. It’s one of those movies where the filmmakers deliberately leave out information so that the viewer is aware of the conspiracy swarming around but can’t quite figure out what it is and how each character is involved.

Think Progress is reporting that White House Press Secretary Scotty McLellan hasn’t given a public press breifing in 19 days, right before an article was published saying that he might be stepping down. He was never as talented as Ari Fleischer anyway. If it’s true that he’s out, who will replace him for the shittiest job in the world?

The Democratic National Committee is considering a proposal to have an early presidential primary in Nevada around the same time as New Hampshire and Iowa. They are also considering Colorado instead of Nevada, in addition to a Southern state. It is kind of silly that the a Midwestern and Northeastern state have so much influence over the primaries, especially considering their non-representational populations.

Nachoworld writes about the most recent version of the Common Census cultural influence map of the U.S. I wrote about this last month, noting that there wasn’t enough data then to get an accurate representation of cultural influence. As Nacho notes, things are looking a lot more accurate. They also have some maps of local influence, such as this one of the New York City area.

Wikipedia’s entry on R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet 12-part (so far) song-cycle. For the first time in my Wikipedia history, I strongly doubted the authenticity of the article while reading Chapters 9 and 10. My brother informs me that they are all too true. I’ll watch his DVD copy sometime during Thanksgiving.

Jack Schofield of the Guardian holds a vote for the Top 20 Geek Novels. I’ve read 10 of them and intend to read a few more, so I guess that makes me a geek. On Slashdot, where I found this link, people are complaining about the lack of Flatland or anything Tolkein. Ah Slashdot, once the master of the geek domain, soon to be living under the shadow of digg.

And while we’re on the topic of geeky lists: IGN’s Top 100 Video Games Ever. I actually love this list, especially because even though I stopped playing video games for massive quantities of time after my first year in college, I’ve still been able to play 15 of the top 20 games. And it makes me want to go play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night again.

SCOTUSblog links to Jeffrey Toobin’s somewhat unbiased article in the new New Yorker on the resilience of Roe v. Wade. The landmark case gets so much coverage these days that it’s difficult to remember its fascinating history. Read the article if the only thing you know about Roe v. Wade is that it prevented states from banning all abortion.

OK, so maybe Las Vegas is in critical need of a cultural overhaul. This week’s CityLife cover story is a reader-polled Best of the Las Vegas Valley compilation. I’ve been looking forward to this issue since I first heard about it soon after I moved here in September. Boy, am I disappointed.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , the 4th installment of the Harry Potter story, was my least favorite book at that point in the series, and the same can be said about the film adaptation that was released this weekend. Like it’s dead-tree counterpart, the Goblet of Fire film is at turns boring, messy, aggravating, and nonsensical. When I finished the book, I thought that it still had a chance to become a good movie, and indeed the action scenes worked very well on the big screen, but the overly long movie suffered from the same problems as the overly long book.

I got an email from my brother yesterday imploring me to watch the latest episode of South Park. I used to watch the show when it first started airing in 1997, but I’ve since stopped because the scripts tend to be unfunny and seemingly thrown together, with an offensive concept or two to bind the whole thing together. But my brother said this episode mocked Scientology and R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” song-cycle, both of which have been the source of much of my amusement, so I had to watch.

Roman Vassilenko, the press secretary for the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Washington D.C., defends his home country against Borat’s mocking portrayal. “[W]e have a lot of things to offer the people to see and enjoy ranging from ski resorts to drinking the fermented horse milk – yes, we do drink that.” See, Borat? It’s fermented horse milk, not fermented horse urine.

Today’s an interesting day for the Berkman Center (my employer). After releasing an OpenNet Initiative report that details how the Tunisian government censors, filters, and controls Internet information, a couple of Berkman fellows (Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon from Global Voices) are hosting a session called “Expression under Repression” at WSIS – and the Tunisian authorities aren’t happy about it.