Garrison Dean of io9 wasn’t happy, not happy at all. The problem was that the trailer for Roland Emmerich’s new disaster movie, 2012, was a bit of dud. I mean, come on, this is a movie about very large things blowing up and here they were showing “dialogue.” So Garrison Dean did something about it. He recut the trailer to a., put it in the style of the ’70s disaster movies, and b., cram it with about a million times more ass-kicking awesomeness than the original. Here is the result (and here is the stodgy original for comparison purposes).

[Props=Film Drunk]

As a followup to this post about this video featuring Arizona state Senator Sylvia Allen (R) casually stating — during a meeting about opening up uranium mining in Arizona — that the Earth is 6,000 years old, Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy points out an extra-delicious irony:

The irony, of course — and there’s always irony when creationism is involved — is that she’s talking about uranium mining, and it’s through the radioactive decay of uranium that we know the Earth is billions of years old. And she also praises technological achievements!

[Props=Sullivan]

I know we’re all sick and tired of hearing about Sarah Palin, but Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has a must-read piece on Godsilla (Godzilla + Wasilla = Godsilla).

That’s why the strangest part of the Sarah Palin saga will always be her loathing of the media. She never failed to remind us that she didn’t like being “filtered.” She only wanted to talk directly to us, her listeners. Yet the reason Sarah Palin continues to have any kind of political force at all in this country is because of the media “filter.” The media helped refine and define her Dada statements and arguments into something that briefly sounded like a coherent worldview. Yesterday morning, Gov. Palin excoriated Andrea Mitchell for “not listening to me” in an NBC interview. You have to go back and watch the clip before you can apprehend that Mitchell was indeed listening. It was Palin who was speaking in half-expressed thoughts and internal contradictions.

The Andrea Mitchell interview she refers to perfectly captures Palin’s odd love/hate relationship with the media. Throughout the interview, she seems exasperated, tired, and borderline contemptuous, as though she’d like them to all just go away. But it’s not as though she was surprised outside her place of work by a gaggle of reporters. She summoned them up to East Bumfuck, Alaska to film her dragging fishing nets out of the sea (message = I’m a worker, not a quitter). It’s surreal.

The 2009 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced — this is the contest wherein entrants are required to write the worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel. Many of the entries are variants on “It was a dark and stormy night,” as this was indeed the opening sentence of the novel Paul Clifford, penned by the contest’s namesake, Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873).

Below are a few of my favorites. Many more can be read here.

Runner-up, Detective:

The dame sauntered silently into Rocco’s office, but she didn’t need to speak; the blood-soaked gown hugging her ample curves said it all: “I am a shipping heiress whose second husband was just murdered by Albanian assassins trying to blackmail me for my rare opal collection,” or maybe, “Do you know a good dry cleaner?”

Tony Alfieri
Los Angeles, CA

Runner-up, Fantasy Fiction:

Towards the dragon’s lair the fellowship marched — a noble human prince, a fair elf, a surly dwarf, and a disheveled copyright attorney who was frantically trying to find a way to differentiate this story from “Lord of the Rings.”

Andrew Manoske
Foster City, CA

Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mention:

No man is an island, so they say, although the small crustaceans and the bird which sat impassively on Dirk Manhope’s chest as he floated lazily in the pool would probably disagree.

Glen Robins
Brighton, East Sussex, U.K.

“The Earth has been here 6,000 years — and I know I’m going on and on, and I’ll shut up — it has been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with. And we need to get the uranium here in Arizona, so this state can get the money from it.” – Arizona state Senator Sylvia Allen (R).

By the current standards of the Republican party, this doesn’t even qualify as a gaffe.

[Props=Crooks and Liars]

Gawker was so convinced that the English translator used for Russian President Medvedev’s press conference with President Obama was actually Borat that they did an audio comparison. The conclusion? Listen for yourself, but I think we have a match.

Okay, I’ve given it more than 24 hours, and Sarah Palin’s resignation speech still makes no damn sense. I don’t mean that it doesn’t make sense in the Larger Picture or in the Grand Scheme of Things (i.e., is it or is it not a brilliant political gambit?). I mean that the speech itself just plain makes no sense.

Take this bit (all quotes are from the official transcript):

Life is too short to compromise time and resources… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out.

No, Sarah, keeping your head down and plodding along is how actual governing gets done. The quitter’s way is what you are doing. You know, quitting.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the speech is her repeated reference to herself as a lame duck simply because she’s decided not to seek reelection. To define herself as a lame duck though she’s only slightly more than halfway through her term is to admit that in her view the only function of the governor is to work for reelection.

And it’s not just that the speech has no internal logic or flow. The actual sentences are often incoherent. Take this one:

I’ve never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to do this – to make a difference… to help people. So I choose, for my State and my family, more “freedom” to progress, all the way around… so that Alaska may progress…

I’m well aware that this is how she sounds when she goes off-script, but that sentence, ellipses and all, is something Sarah Palin* actually wrote down. She composed that sentence. She may have even revised it, tweaked it, polished it until it shone. So can someone please explain to me what it would mean to choose more “freedom” to progress, all the way around?

Of all the voluminous commentary on this event (Andrew Sullivan has a nice roundup), I think Josh Marshall nailed it when he said that “the decision was apparently so rushed and sudden that there was not enough time to come up with a plausible cover story or to get out the word about what it was.”

In terms of her motivations, Laura Chase, who managed Sarah Palin’s first campaign for mayor in 1996 before having a falling out with her, has the most intriguing take. Speaking to the New Republic, she doesn’t believe for a minute this business about Palin being “done with politics.” She believes that it’s all about ego.

She wants to be president now that she has a following. … The thing is with Sarah, she craves adoration. And the people that were sitting there at those rallies adored her. They would walk across coals for that woman. … Once you have a taste of that–it’s like a wild dog getting a taste of rabbit. You never ever go back. Nothing is ever the same, tastes as good …

________________________________________________
* I’m with Ezra Klein on the speech’s authorship: she wrote this one herself

Well, the MSM dropped the ball again. All they got out of the big announcement was the fact that Sarah Palin is resigning. But how could they completely miss this bombshell? (5.45 in the clip below)

Now, despite this, I don’t want any Alaskan dissuaded from entering politics after seeing this real climate change that began in August . . .

Okay, she’s a bit off on her timing, but the important thing is that a prominent Republican is on-board that ‘real climate change’ exists. This certainly is an historic occasion. Soon she’ll be on board with the whole dinosaur thing.

Also, I thought it was a brilliant touch to underscore her commitment to not become a lame duck governor by having actual live ducks squawking loudly in the background throughout her speech. Actually, those ducks were lucky — I think we all remember what happened to the last birds featured in one of her appearances.

Oh Keyboard Cat, will you ever get old?

J.D. Salinger has won his case against a Swedish writer who wrote a sequel to Catcher in the Rye.

A Swedish author whose new book was promoted as a sequel to J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” cannot publish it in the United States because it too closely mirrors Salinger’s classic without adequate parody or critique, a judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts issued her written ruling in Manhattan after considering arguments in a lawsuit brought by the 90-year-old reclusive author against the publishers of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.”