I had occasion to see the abbreviation AI5 today, and I thought "Wasn’t that that cheesy science fiction show with Daryl Hannah?" Then my retrieval system came up with the tagline: "VR.5 is real." Then IMDb told me it was Lori Singer (whose character was called Sydney, I surely hadn’t remembered). And that it featured Tony Head, too.

Sarah: And Penn Jillette and Adam Baldwin. Man, remember VR? And jetpacks?

As previously reported here, Pluto has no business being called a planet. 2003 UB313 gives us yet another chance to rectify the situation.

In at least some cases, texting profanity in response to a (legitimate) marketing SMS message has the same effect as sending an explicit opt-out request. I’ll be sure to publish any surprising excerpts if I can get my hands on a list of what constitutes "profanity."

Apparently Joss won’t be at DragonCon after all (there are actual comments ostensibly from him on the Whedonesque page). This sucks, but the suck is somewhat mitigated by the fact that we would have missed his scheduled panel anyway.
Update: It’s looking more and more like Universal has committed Joss to be there. We’ll be missing that last panel either way, though.

Joss talks about just about everything. Even though I haven’t been especially impressed by Veronica Mars, I’m interested that he enjoys it. I admire Mars creator Rob Thomas, and I find it pleasantly reinforcing when a person whose work I admire admires the work of someone else I admire. He talks about Serenity, but he said nothing that I didn’t want to know before seeing the film.

Harper’s enumerates a number of decidedly un-Christian behaviors of the most professedly Christian nation (we’re more professedly Christian than Israel is Jewish, f’r Chrissakes). The author calls it a paradox; I’m inclined to call it hypocrisy, or maybe just ignorance of what Christ is reported to have taught.

The article is nominally about the return of Sarah Jane Smith, but also includes such tidbits as these:

• David Tennant does appear at the end of the first series (presumably we get to see Eccleston’s regeneration),
• Stephen Fry will write (has written?) an episode for the second series, and, perhaps best of all,
• Tony Head will guest in the second series!

In "the most important find of [its] sort in more than 70 years," 20 silver goblets, plates, and trays collected by their owner (or maybe a looter) into a wicker basket and stashed in a public bath stairwell have been separated and cleaned off.

Clearly I’m out of touch with the world of fine arts, as it never would have occurred to me that at least one Symphony Orchestra is a preserve of sexist idiocy. Somehow the musicians’ "artistic expertise was being disregarded" in the "premature conclusion of the search process."
The coverage has that quality of vague that always indicates to me that nobody’s on the level. The musicians cite unspecified "concerns" (which I have to interpret as "you can’t make us follow some girl," since surely any substantive shortcoming would be bruited far and wide), while on the other hand we have Baltimore Symphony President Glicker: "Glicker expressed confidence that she would achieve a smooth relationship with the orchestra through ‘her personality on the podium. That’s pretty compelling,’ he said. ‘And she has great people skills. I’m hoping that’s going to win the day.’"
Her personality on the podium? People skills? I suppose conducting a bunch of egotistical gifted children does require good people skills, but why not say "her technical prowess is world class, and we’re lucky to have her," if it’s true? And if it’s not true, why would you hire her? Merely because "She has the ability to sit down one on one with a patron or potential donor and make that person very comfortable"? You need that ability in your Orchestra staff somewhere, but does it really have to be at the conductor position? Or is there a glut of world-class conductors (or it’s just not that hard), so they have the luxury of choosing based on schmoozing ability?
Maybe the next Grisham-esque thriller genre will deal with the cut-throat world of symphony conducting, so all this can be presented to us in an easy-to-grasp form. Hell, for all I know, such works already exist.

CNN reviews a raft of upcoming movies based on comic books and graphic novels. All indications are that Alan Moore no longer has anything to do with film adaptations, and has severed ties with DC because of their inability to maintain that separation.