World War Z, the movie.

Link to the trailer.
I enjoyed the book, but am dreading this movie.  The book just seems so filmable – it's all broken out into neat looking-back episodes linked by one interviewer, and it all knits back together into a larger tale of despair and triumph.  That's a pretty cool literary trick to pull off in an over-worked pop monster genre.  There's even enough material for a sequel or two.

So why turn it into a Brad Pitt vehicle?  I mean, you could take just any old zombie story, stick Pitt's face on it, and have your summer thriller right there.  This is shaping up the same way I, Robot and Starship Troopers did a few years ago: "Hey, we just acquired rights to a top-notch book.  I know, let's junk the story, keep the name, and plug in some hack writing!  For no apparent reason!!!  It'll be cool."  After all, those boring movies where they stick to the book never make any money, right Peter Jackson?  And just look at how those follow-the-book Harry Potter movies all flopped.

Prediction: it'll be an overall middlin' not-quite blockbuster, open and close in about a month, and be largely forgotten by fall.  Residual fondness for the book, plus a big name and flashy effects will make for a weekend or two of box office sales, but without the original story it won't have any legs.

Because it's the story that gives a movie legs.  They had a great tale to start with here.  By the looks of that trailer, this one hasn't been improved a bit by the production meat grinder.

Or hell, I could be wrong about all this and it'll turn out to be a great classic for the ages.  Meh, it's only a zombie book.

ps: ooooh, re-written by the same guy who screenwrote Prometheus.  This is looking really bad.

Nah, he's just a roadie.

Just a roadie, not an actual creep.
OK, sometimes it's hard to tell.

Hey Coyote

Concrete Blonde has a song for you.  And it's almost as good as this one.

We live in the 21st Century.

And certain politicians are having trouble dealing with this fact.
It's time for them to get over it.

Radio is dead. Long Live Radio!

Article on the death of terrestrial (i.e., non-satellite) radio over at Fast Horse.  It's mercifully short, so read the whole thing and come back.  I'll wait.  In the meantime, let's have a musical interlude:

OK, interlude over.  It is an interesting and valid point Reinan makes, and for the radio mass market there is no easy answer beyond "our business and programming models are failing, we need to try something else."

But there are some bright spots on the dial.  There are some stations that are very focused on their local audiences or, more regionally, on their audience niches.  Here are a few examples:
WWOZ, the New Orleans jazz & heritage station.
KLEB, a funky little Cajun AM outlet.
WGSO, hyper-local New Orleans news and commentary.  Guaranteed to make you mad, occasionally.
WSM, 50KW clear channel rootsy country music to the eastern half of the U.S.
WQRZ-LP, "Katrina Radio," an odd mix of local music and oldies, and oh yes, hurricane reporting as needed.  Which is, it seems, all too often in these parts.
WOYS, "Oyster Radio," playing a Jimmy Buffett-tinged mix of salt water and beach town music to (surprise!) a seafood industry and beach town audience.

All of these are as focused as a local microbrew, and all are somewhere between chugging along OK to succeeding wildly.  The reason why is simple: they're putting out something with flavor and spice, and they're not putting out homogenized crap.  They know their audiences and build content for them.  They take chances, and take feedback.  Anything less is just laziness, and a recipe for failure.

Will they succeed in the long run?  Dunno, but they're doing better than the "yet another pop / oldies / sports talk" stations are doing.  They'll be around a while.

Really, tar's not that bad.

But only because I use tar almost daily to make backups and deliveries.  Honestly, it is a pretty cryptic line command.  Nowhere near the problems people always have with sed or awk, however.

From over at xkcd.  If you are still scratching your head, there's always Explain xkcd.

More interesting than you might expect.

Over at PhD Comics, part of the Two Minute Dissertation series: Mystery Tubes in a Stick Bug's Guts.

Mysteries everywhere.  Makes me want to break into song.