Ran across this interview with Joss Whedon. Contains spoilers for the next season of Angel. It also contains what I find an interesting exchange:

IGNFF: Did it surprise you the reaction that the lack of widescreen for Buffy season four on DVD got here in the U.S.?

WHEDON: People were upset, right? I haven’t seen the season four package … it contains a disclaimer from me as to why it’s not in widescreen, that I wrote. It’s on it, it comes with it. It’s not a widescreen show. We shot it in a TV ratio, and I am very, very specific with the way I frame things. To arbitrarily throw

According to this BBC report, a Boeing 727 went missing from an airport in Angola sometime last month, and has yet to be found. On the one hand, it underscores that Africa is really big, but I really wonder if there are as many places with infrastructure support for a 727 as the article implies. Since one of the reasons the (presumed-) kidnapped pilot was down there in the first place was to determine whether the plane was air-worthy, I wouldn’t be surprised if the thing has crashed in the middle of nowhere, to be found several decades hence when that chunk of the middle of nowhere is getting razed to put in a strip mall.

Sorry, no prostate jokes, though I do find the fact that the head of the UW Medicine department wanted to watch my prostate ultrasound pretty funny (he didn’t make it back in time, since the doc who was actually doing the ultrasound opted not to leave me lying on the table waiting for the boss to show up). There’s another story that I think is moderately funny, but I tell it only to people who actually know me, and Sarah’s already heard it.

At the clinic today, I had to hang around for an hour to make sure the four injections into my belly fat didn’t go horribly, horribly wrong; and since the usual magazines there aren’t really suitable for killing time (and I didn’t know I was going to be in the group with the side-effect injections, so I didn’t bring a book), I looked through the January Esquire, where I found Ten Things You Don’t Know about Women, which seems to be a regular feature, written by a different celebrity woman each month. In January, it was Cheryl Hines, of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. I’ve stolen the text and put it in the extended entry information, in case Esquire makes the original go away (or if you don’t want to look at their ads). From this, and from the current installment, I feel like I learned more about the guys these particular women date than about women as a class.

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I’m confident that everybody who reads this also reads memepool, but I will nevertheless point to the Rotten Library. Their summary of everybody’s favorite money-draining cult pretending to be a religion (I won’t name the beast, lest it look in my direction, but you can find it under Religion. Kathy Griffin calls it Somethingology) is brief, to the point, and right on the money.

The wonderful Sara Ryan mentions in her blog a piece by Sara Paretsky called Truth, Lies and Duct Tape, about bad shit that has happened in publishing and libraries and the culture in general. It’s not real cheering.

According to this article (and why would the Sci-Fi channel lie?), there will be a Firefly DVD release, with at least some commentary, including the three unaired episodes. Also, hold on to anything that might come loose, it looks like a movie is in the works!

Being unable to rid myself of yesterday’s Bush quote from the calendar, I’ve been trying to find out what the context was. I haven’t been able to find it (he made the remarks before he was in office, but (I think) after he had been appointed), but I did find these remarks, which seem likely to be along the same tack. For instance,

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had a good discussion. I had a very good discussion with Vicente Fox. And Secretary Abraham had a very good discussion with his counterpart from Mexico. Mexico has to make the decision as to whether or not they will be willing to allow foreign capital to explore for oil and gas in their country. That’s the Mexican decision to make.

I encouraged the President to begin allowing foreign capital to explore for natural gas in Mexico. It would be to our benefit. Gas is hemispheric. An MCF of gas found in Mexico is beneficial for the United States and Canada, even though it’s found in Mexico. And the Vice President and I have had discussions with Prime Minister Chretien about exploration for natural gas.

A good energy policy is one that understands we’ve got energy in our hemisphere and how best to explore for it and transport it to markets. So, you bet, we’ve continued discussions with Mexico, as well as Canada.

He’s still clearly an idiot, but he’s been coached better. I encourage anyone who is looking for a reason for suicide to browse through the white house news releases. I have glimpsed only the merest fraction of the horror that is there, and it’s, well, horrific.

Also, apparently, The White House didn’t exist before January 2001. What if I want to know what that other guy did in office? Do we lose all those handy records of Executive Orders and press releases and whatnot every time the administration changes? I rather hope not. It sucks enough if they’re off somewhere else. It would suck quite a bit more if that stuff’s completely inaccessible.

I have this calendar that purports to contain stupid things people have said, or written (it was an xmas gift). Most of them are clearly typos; granted, they’re sometimes funny ones, but not necessarily indicative of stupidity. By far the majority of the truly stupid things are quotes from W. Today’s, for instance: “Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.” Usually it’s possible to tell where exactly his brain disconnect happened, and thereby figure out what a person familiar with the language might have said, but this reveals a breathtakingly profound thinking disability.

According to this review, the Funeral Home scent is a mixture of “Carnations, cigarette smoke and old oriental rugs[.]” Hmm.