Ferry? With that long blond hair and I think it was definitely Eno.

I didn’t see them, but I was under the impression the motion-capture/CGI (live action doesn’t seem the right term) Jungle Book told the story in a very different way than the sixties animated film, and I know Pete’s Dragon was a big departure (forgot—or completely missed—that they redid Cinderella).

Many, if not most, of those resistance civil service accounts are fakes (I know AltNatlParks or whatever has a penchant for British spelling) either from sympathetic outsiders or simply pranks. Honestly I think some combo not pinning one’s hopes to twitter and minimizing/regulating exposure to twitter is the best bet.

I’ve seen “Jurassic Bark” a few times, but I’m definitely not “mature enough to be able to handle multiple emotionally manipulative scenes of dogs dying.”

People still are losing or winning during campaigns, though.

“I like the…unusual flavor of Thunderbird wine.”

NBC also likes to send its rejected shows out as in-flight entertainment.

To be fair given that it’s Star Wars it makes sense there’d be a fair number of orphans.

One issue with this is that we’re largely working backwards on “successful candidate”—all of those candidates seem robotic and uncompelling because they didn’t win, not vice-versa. Evidently Carter was praised as “the charisma candidate” back in the seventies, which seems kind of ludicrous now (“malaise forever!”) but…

White Teeth is a very fun read (and linear!).

I had no idea this was a common trope in fantasy—to me it read as a sort of speculative extrapolation of a lot of multiethnic cities that are in the former Ottoman Empire (places like Bosnia being the most obvious, but also places like Istanbul).

Hmm, I guess this is contrarian month for me—I actually imagined this one taking place in a sort of hyper-advanced but still kind of run-down 1970s.

A lot of big art books for me this year:

Also be prepared to be bored out of your skull for long, long stretches of the book.

He has some interesting ideas about alien abductions in general in, I think, The Demon-Haunted World. He notes the similarity of a lot of alien abduction stories to the accounts recorded by Catholic saints—visitations by neotenic humanoid creatures, often with a sexual component. It points less to repeated encounters…

I first heard about the Hills by seeing Cosmos on VHS as a nerdy kid (“You too? Now that I cannot believe Jean-Luc!” you exclaim) so I started out as a skeptic, but Sagan’s offhand suggestion—that it was perhaps some kind of shared dream—was almost as freaky and fascinating to me.

Gandhi is way more like a classic movie epic à la Lean than a modern Oscar-bait epic. Gandhi all the way.

If one’s going to make a Victorian TV show it should be about Gladstone vs. Disraeli, not Victoria herself.

Colm Meaney uses The Commitments as his go-to example for real Ireland, in contrast to the American (and Irish-American) romantic and folkloric stereotyping that we usually get on this side of the pond.

Saw The Red Turtle today—much better than the trailers, which promise pretty circle-of-life uplift. The film’s far better shaded than that, though—like in any good Dutch master painting, though, there’s something more to the prettiness, a reminder of temporal breaks even within the cycles of nature. Knew it would be…