Category: Not-politics

Wanted the movie vs. Wanted the comic: Whoa.

I mean, I get that movies often diverge from their subject material.  And the author Mark Millar is apparently cool with what happened here, so I’m not disapproving.

But still: compare Wanted the movie with  “Wanted” the comic book series.  It’s impressively different, even by Hollywood standards.  Not quite American Hero / Wag the Dog territory, but still impressive.

H/T: Backward Compatible

Huh. Moneyball.

I may actually have to read the book now. I don’t do sports books, mostly: but Ace made Moneyball sound interesting, in a quasi-gaming sort of way.  God knows that my particular segment of the counterculture has led the way in obsessing over stats.

As for the movie, “screwball comedy that has little to do with the book” is probably the only way that could go.

They’re remaking the Taking of Pelham 123?

Count me in with Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg: this is just plain dumb. If the horrible remakes of Rollerball and Death Race 2000 taught us anything, it should have taught us this: don’t remake Seventies dystopia movies – which The Taking of Pelham One Two Three most emphatically is.

I’d say “What next? Are they going to remake “The Warriors?” – except that I’ve yet to catch that one, actually. But if they do, it’ll still probably suck.

Ooh. Pretty new site, with pretty, old ships.

It’s called Age of Sail, and it looks like a historical blog discussing precisely that.

I came into Age of Sail fiction from the science fiction end of it, actually: reading S.M. Stirling and David Weber got me reading Patrick O’Brian and C.S Forester (I’m currently halfway through A&E’s Horatio Hornblower series, and enjoying it muchly).  And then, of course, there’s George MacDonald Fraser’s The Pyrates, which is required reading for anybody who loves old Hollywood swashbucklers (and who doesn’t).  So I guess I’m explaining why this is going on the blogroll…

Moe Lane

PS: OK, one last one: Naomi Novik.  For all your “Napoleonic warfare novels with dragons added; only, and this is really important to note, adding the dragons doesn’t make the whole thing suck horribly, or indeed at all” needs.

Swiss now require clothes on German hikers.

Via The New Ledger:

Swiss ban Germans from nude hiking in Alpine town

A SWISS village is trying to ban an army of invading nude German hikers who have invaded their picturesque corner of the Alps.

Officials in the town of Appenzell have introduced a fixed fine for people found hiking in just a pair of sturdy boots and a rucksack after a German nudist organisation promoted “nature” walks for its members.

Continue reading Swiss now require clothes on German hikers.