I have frequently wished for good writers to rewrite movies with good premises but bad execution. At last, here’s a taste:
Line from Revenge of the Sith: “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything’s soft… and [touching her skin] smooth…”
Line as rewritten by James Lileks: “I hate sand. I was born on a planet of sand. It got in your eyes and your food and your clothes. It stank with whomprat piss. It was in your shoes when you woke in the morning and it was in your sheets when you went to bed at night. You grew up a slave, you grew up in a world of sand.”

The Phantom Edit was good, but needed to be even more invasive. Will someone please make these movies good? Maybe as a silent movie: put music over the awful dialogue and put some good dialogue up on cards?

Take a gander at a repro Levittown kitchen and maybe you’ll spot my penguin-theme ice bucket. Well, Mine doesn’t have the original nice lid.

If you’d like a taste of being an audiobook reader without having to move to New York, maybe you’d like to volunteer at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library. Sure, you might end up reading the grocery ads, but they’ll be the best-read grocery ads ever.

The "Family Research Council," a religious political extremist outfit, now believes that the minority’s right to filibuster presidential nominees should be removed. Seven years ago, the mouth was on the other foot.
If you’re feeling strong, and your blood pressure isn’t susceptible to dangerous increases, I heartily encourage you to check out more of Media Matters for America.

Did you know that the military has professional reading lists? The Army one was the first I found, and looks quite interesting. The Air Force one looks a bit slimmer, however.

Sesto Senso has lots of super-luxury personal products, including the best selection of Demeter fragrances I’ve seen! Anyone want to smell like waffles?

An entertaining archive of detective novel covers— almost seems like the sort of thing I may already have posted about. A little extra content in case I have: I visited a little bookshop near Powell’s City of Books that had a display of 50s and 60s naughty book covers that were strangely similar to any other pulp of the time! Quite worth a visit!

So there was this article in the Stranger about how if only the county had less stringent food safety rules and if downtown merchants were only less cranky about people using the sidewalk in front of their stores, Seattle could have a vibrant street food scene. Which may or may not be true, what with the general disposition of Seattlites being what it is, we rarely get real vibrant around here. But it got me to wondering: do counties with less stringent food safety rules have noticably higher rates of food poisoning? I haven’t yet found a county-by-county comparison, but I did find a states-level map of food poisoning, and whee-doggies, Washington state has a problem! Let’s hope it’s due to food-safety laggards outside of King County, or all the inspections are for naught!

Despite my misgivings, David Tennant will be the new Doctor. I’m loving the Eccleston series (even the darkness) enough that I’m optimistic about Tennant.

A story on NPR this morning about synesthesia and synesthetes got me to wondering whether sun sneezing is simply a more common form of synæsthesia (I’m varying the spelling to attract more search engine traffic). So, if you’re a synesthete, please drop me a line and let me know whether you also sneeze in bright (or dim) sunlight. I won’t do anything with your email address except possibly ask a follow-up question. Nothing personally identifiable will be published in my summary of results.