NYTimes has the most misleading headline of this political season: “Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy.”

Last year it was Copyright Infringement High, now it’s Copyright Infringement Elementary:

How do you think E. B. White feels about this?

The top has played an important role in modern history. Without top hats, we wouldn’t have had the Civil War, World War II or Guns n’ Roses. Since the top hat’s impact on important human events is often overlooked and underestimated, here’s a collection of pictures of famous people wearing top hats:

Abraham Lincoln:

UPDATE: I’ve added a few more famous people to our top hat collection:

Bob Dylan:

Beep beep beep beep beep beeeep beeeep beeeep beeeeeep beeeeeep beeeeeeep beeeeeeeeeep.

Dasani, Coke’s water brand, has a line of drinks called Dasani Plus which includes Cleanse + Restore, Defend + Protect and Refresh + Revive. They’ve got some fruit in them. Anyway, the weird part is that they include both the word “plus” and the symbol “+” in their names, making their full titles Dasani Plus Cleanse + Restore, Dasani Plus Defend + Protect and Dasani Plus Refresh + Revive. It seems like an odd titling inconsistency.

This reminds me of my confusion about (and a little bit of anger towards) the naming of the 101 Dalmatians Sequels. First we had One Hundred and One Dalmatians, then a re-make titled 101 Dalmatians (we’d forgotten how to spell numbers, I guess), then a sequel titled 102 Dalmatians, and another sequel titled 101 Dalmatians II. They couldn’t come to an agreement on how to number sequels, so they just did, you know, whatever?

In fairness to Disney, 102 Dalmatians was a sequel to the remake, while 101 Dalmatians II was a sequel to the original, and they probably felt some obligation to maintain independent numbering systems, but I only blame them further for oddly deciding to do sequels to both a remake and an original in reverse order. They brought this bizarre inconsistency on themselves.

Writing for Dreamworks sounds difficult and frustrating. Via Metroblogging.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m curious!

It’s been a long time since I posted anything about Amy Pressman, but I just noticed a webpage confirming that Suzanne “Suziey” Block will be playing the title character in the independent film Finding Amy Pressman. Read more about it at the bottom of the original Amy Pressman post.

Beware of the leopard.

I saw a trailer for Blindness the other day and was startled by the fact that someone appears to have made a less compelling version of Children of Men. Instead of being about a world where people can no longer have children, it’s about a world where people can no longer see… and they both star Julianne Moore.

Seems kind of lazy; Children of Men only came out two years ago, did they think we’d forget?

Repo! The Genetic Opera is a forthcoming rock opera featuring a world where organs are financed and then, when the debts cannot be repaid, are repossessed. Yuck. It’s like a cross between Urinetown and Repo Man.

The best trailer ever… if only I knew ANY Japanese. Via Yes But No But Yes.

For some reason, this line about Doug’s 1st Movie in Ebert’s review of The Matrix pops into my head every few months:

What happens then to the billions who have just been “unplugged” from the Matrix? Do they still have jobs? Homes? Identities? All we get is an enigmatic voice-over exhortation at the movie’s end. The paradox is that the Matrix world apparently resembles in every respect the pre-Matrix world. (I am reminded of the animated kid’s film “Doug’s 1st Movie,” which has a VR experience in which everything is exactly like in real life, except more expensive.)

That always sounded funny.

Unlike the much classier list of 1,0001 Movies You Must See Before You Die posted by CrazyMonk, Wikipedia provides a list of mainstream films featuring unsimulated sex. I’ve seen none, though I did at one point have an acquaintance who owned a copy of Alice in Wonderland (A Musical Porno) and I was scheduled to, but ultimately did not, see Shortbus.

UPDATE: I actually own Pink Flamingos, but haven’t gotten around to watching it yet.

The poster for Towelhead isn’t nearly as good as the poster for Baghead.

Baghead has my favorite movie poster of the year:

Reminds me of this picture that Nacho used to have on his Friendster page, which would probably have made a better movie.

In the film Howard the Duck, it took eight people to play Howard.

MSNBC has a schlocky Dateline documentary called Into the Woods about “[a] brave high school girl tries to outfox her fugitive kidnapper after being held hostage for ten days in an underground bunker.”

Now, of course there’s also the award winning Sondheim musical of the same name:

It’s understandable how you might confuse the two, and Daniel Kells noticed that Time Warner Cable had in fact done just that:

There’s going to be some very unhappy musical theater geeks tonight (and some very unhappy fans of pedophile kidnappers).

Remember that scene in Contact when they first decode the visual aspect of the alien signal, and it’s footage of Hitler, which somewhat understandable freaks out many of those in attendance? Well, what if it wasn’t aliens playing with a quirk of television broadcast-signal history, but was instead the first wave of a space-based Nazi resurgence?

It could happen:

Via YesButNoButYes.

It’s possible that we finally have a contender for the Snakes on a Plane of 2008 — Cavegirl starring Thora Birch:

Two hundred thousand years ago, teenage girls wanted the same as teenage girls do today, teenage boys! However one amongst them shunned such basic instincts. She wasn’t into teenage clubs, teenage music, teenage fashions. She had more important things on her mind. She had battles to fight, wars to win, evil to conquer. She’s young, she’s fierce. And it’s a shame she doesn’t care about fashion ’cause she’s got great legs. She’s Cavegirl.

It’s based on a 2002 British TV show of the same name, and not the 1985 movie of the same name. How could this fail?

Lore Sjoberg has departed from his spate of ratings-based videos and has done rehashing his most recent Wired column:

I strongly preferred the ratings-based videos, but this one was worthwhile for the drawings of Internet-type people (and Jeanne Tripplehorn, sortof):

Jason Kottke





Jonathan Coulton


Wil Wheaton


Jeanne Tripplehorn (on the side, there)

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My current background image is from Safety Last with Harold Lloyd: