I know lots of people are heeeyuge Stephen King fans. One would think that I fall squarely into that camp, however, for some reason I missed the Stephen King boat. It’s not that I don’t like him, actually what I have read by him (his short stories, The Gunslinger series, and his book on writing) I’ve really enjoyed.

It’s just that, well, there is no excuse really. His oeuvre is massive and it’s difficult to jump into the King pool when he seemingly writes a new book every six-months. Still, I’ve watched the movies based on his books and have enjoyed them a lot, even the crappy made for television movies.

So where should I begin? Some suggest The Stand, but it’s nearly 1,000 pages. Others have suggested The Talisman, a book he wrote with Peter Straub. A Canadian filmmaker named Mathieu Ratthe has loved that book so much he’s been dying to make it into a movie.

But the movie rights for The Talisman were bought by Steven Spielberg back in 1984 and he has never really made a move to direct or produce a film version of that story. So what’s a Canadian filmmaker to do? He ponies up some funding and puts together a four-minute scene from the movie in hopes of attracting attention.

“My main objective for creating this piece,” Ratthe says “is to demonstrate my directing ability and my vision to the producers who own the rights to the story: STEVEN SPIELBERG & KATHLEEN KENNEDY.”

And attention he’s got. For a low budget effort, this is pretty good. He called in some favors and was able to get actor Cameron Bright (Birth, X-Men: Last Stand) to play the lead and even got an FX company that worked on 300 to do the effects.

Several efforts have been made to make this a movie, most recently in 2003 by screenwriter Ehren Kruger, but most who have read that script thought it was shoddy. TNT was going to make a six-part miniseries based on a retooled version of Kruger’s script, but that was scrapped due to budgetary concerns.

It’s doubtful if this will get the filmmaker a meeting, but if there is justice or karma or whatever makes the world go round, Ratthe will be rewarded for his efforts here.

Should Spielberg take a chance on an unknown filmmaker? Sometimes passion is all it takes. Well, passion and talent. You have to have talent. Based on his other film, Mathieu Ratthe has some good chops, as they say.

The Talisman tells the story of a twelve years old kid who must go on a fantastic quest in search of the Talisman, in order to save his dying mother. I should also say that Whitney was the first to find this story and since then it’s simply blown up appearing on just about every major movie website. Thanks Whit!

And just in case someone were to challenge that fact, the good people at ArtGarfunkel.com have posted a list of every book he read from 1968-2007. I mean, wow. He even has a highlighted favorites list. Click here to see the whole thing.

The old maxim about not judging a book by its cover somehow seems succinct here.

What everyone has lost sight of in the madness of the New Yorker’s satirical cartoon of Sen. Obama dressed as Osama and Michelle Obama dressed as a member of the Black Panther Party is the actual article about Obama’s swift rise to power.

It’s a long article, almost 18-pages, which is enough to think that no one commenting on the <sarcasm> insane reprehensibleness </sarcasm> of the magazine’s cover won’t actually read the damn thing. Which is a shame, for it’s a thoroughly researched and enlightening portrait of an ambitious/ruthless politician knocking on the door to the nation’s highest political office.

As Nate from FiveThirtyEight put it, “Well, no shit he’s ambitious. For any American to go from a relatively unprivileged childhood (or a privileged one for that matter) to be on the doorstep of the Preisdency by the time he’s age 46 requires a perfect storm of luck, intelligence, and ambition. Obama has ample amounts of each.”

He goes on to say that after finishing the article, it’s more notable for what it doesn’t say about Obama. In that he’s sort of a boring politician - not driven to ascend to the White House by some Oedipal complex (like Dubya) or the desire to get blow jobs (like Clinton).  He’s just. Sort of. Ambitious.  And unafraid of tossing those aside whom he has no use for anymore.

The upside is that he is intelligent, without being an academic; he’s not radical by any means (hence the irony of the cover); and finally, he is in no way corrupt.  Something of a bonus considering how utterly corruptible and morally bankrupt the last president has been.   Though I suppose Dubya’s legacy shouldn’t enter into this article.

As for the cover, yeah it’s provocative and certainly makes for easy water-cooling fodder. But its downside is that the discussion seems to end at the cover and not what’s on the inside of the magazine. Which is a shame because Ryan Lizza has really done his homework. Can’t wait to dive into this one again on my lunch break.

Of all the books I’ve borrowed, there’s one book that holds a seminal place within my personal canon. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has not only made me friends (there’s something about the idea of a city franchise that’s an instant bonder with new acquaintances) but it actually got me my first job (the magazine was doing a story on Second Life, a virtual reality program inspired by the cyberpunk novel). The book was slow to start and the ending was close to nonsensical, but everything in the middle was nothing short of genius and I would be lying if I denied that Stephenson holds a special place in my heart.

Above is a video of Stephenson giving a lecture on literary genres at Gresham College in London last May. It’s a pretty interesting topic and if you’re a “SF kind of person” you will get a kick out of Stephenson’s referral to anything not of the SF world as the “mundane”.

[Neal Stephenson Lecture on Genres]
(via BoingBoing via Beyond the Beyond)

So just to counteract the last list of bloggers we gave you from Playboy, here is a list of the most influential. It’s a good list, even if we don’t think that the Huffington Post is a blog or Arianna Huffington is a blogger. Neither is true and I wish that the new media would stop with those descriptors. Still, Huffington should be #1 for what she has created with her internet media company. It’s nothing short of amazing.

Deceased literary icon Kurt Vonnegut has a new book coming out entitled, Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of 12 essays about war and peace.  Included in the book is a letter written to his father in 1945 explaining his stint as a German POW at Dresden, which of course, formed the basis for his most famous work Slaughterhouse Five.

I had the chance to see Vonnegut speak back in 2000 and to this day it remains the singular best literary experience of my life.  His speech was both witting and life affirming, everything you would expect from the man.  All I can say is that he convinced me Hamlet was the greatest work ever produced and afterwards I’ve always appreciated lemonade, hammocks, and the dots on Indians foreheads that much more.

But back to his letter, which was recently republished in the June 14 issue of Newsweek.  Read the entire thing, it’s great and really captures the feeling of being a POW.

Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations—the floors were covered with cow dung. There wasn’t room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year’s Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn’t.

Under the Geneva Convention, Officers and Non-commissioned Officers are not obliged to work when taken prisoner. I am, as you know, a Private. One-hundred-and-fifty such minor beings were shipped to a Dresden work camp on January 10th. I was their leader by virtue of the little German I spoke. It was our misfortune to have sadistic and fanatical guards. We were refused medical attention and clothing: We were given long hours at extremely hard labor. Our food ration was two-hundred-and-fifty grams of black bread and one pint of unseasoned potato soup each day. After desperately trying to improve our situation for two months and having been met with bland smiles I told the guards just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came. They beat me up a little. I was fired as group leader. Beatings were very small time—one boy starved to death and the SS Troops shot two for stealing food.

Author Chuck Klosterman went to Germany to teach a college class.  He asked 100 college students which Americans interest them the most.

Here’s what happened: I’m teaching a class on twentieth-century popular culture at the University of Leipzig. I don’t know why the school asked me to do this, but it did. And it turns out that any seminar on U. S. consumer culture is extremely attractive to every non-American kid majoring in American studies, because ninety-six students signed up for the class in the span of three days. Due to the size of the classroom, I was forced to immediately reduce this number to twenty. I was unsure how to do that fairly, so I decided to give them a competitive online essay test before the first day of class. The question was this: “Who do you consider the most interesting twentieth-century American — not necessarily the most historically important, but the individual you find most personally compelling?” The responses were well written, habitually understated, and devoid of any pattern whatsoever.

Klosterman then goes on to include his findings, among them: Michael Jackson was the most frequently mentioned person, Dave Grohl got a vote but Kurt Cobain did not, Jared Leto (Jodran Catalano!) got one mention, the only presidents mentioned were Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, George Gershwin received the second-most mentions, and so forth.

He mentions that this test was interesting because it demonstrated how American culture and mass media has proliferated our culture to the point that it is impossible to tell the difference between what information is interesting and what information is available.

In typical Klosterman fashion, though, he does a reverse-double-take and manages to posit that American culture is both interesting and uninteresting.  Truly, he should be a politician, because every essay he writes ends with him taking both positions of an argument.  Or as I like to call it: “It’s a klosterman.”

Can’t end this post without mentioning the funniest bit in the entire thing.  This is probably only interesting to Ryan Adams fans, unless of course it’s interesting to everyone (see a poorly executed klosterman).

Someone selected Ryan Adams. This made me happy for two reasons. The first is that I suspect Adams is something of an underrated semi-genius, and I like the fact that he’s more appreciated in places where nobody cares whether or not Paul Westerberg hates him. The other reason is that I think there’s probably a 98 percent likelihood that Ryan Adams will read this sentence, put down the magazine, walk over to his four-track, and immediately write a psychedelic country song titled “Hey Little Leipzig Girl (I’m Glad You Dug Those Whiskeytown Bootlegs),” which I will be able to listen to on the Internet forty minutes from right now.

Boston.com has rolled out a new photo blog during the past month called, appropriately enough, The Big Picture.

For those who were fascinated by Life Magazine or National Geographic as kids, and let’s be honest who wasn’t?, what Alan Taylor is doing over at the digital domain for The Boston Globe is nothing short of amazing.

Andy Baio of WAXY interviewed Taylor to get some behind the scenes information regarding one of the best new blogs on the internet.

Tell me a little bit about your curating process. Are you browsing the wire randomly for amazing photos and building a post around it, or do you start with the story you want to tell?

A little of both. Browsing the wire is really fun, and leads to some incredible finds. If there’s a specific story I want to tell, I’m at the mercy of what I can find. Sometimes there’s a lot, other times, not. For instance, I’m dying to do some “daily life” entries about Iran, but the wire feeds I have available have almost no images from there at all, other than photos of Ahmadinejad — but that’s not what I’m after. I try to stock up for a rainy day too. I have some stored searches, some favorite photographers, some perpetually interesting subjects, and so on. I’m trying to automate the gathering as much as possible.

How’s the response been? I’ve seen the buzz in the blog world and the over-the-top positive comments in every one of your posts.

Yeah — totally unreal. Over-the-top positive response. More than I expected for sure. Internally, externally, everywhere, people are being really thankful to me. I need to make sure (with some link-love in my upcoming blogroll) that the response gets directed to the photographers as well. I’m just a web developer with access to their photos and a blog — they’re the ones out there working hard to get these amazing images. “Photographers” here is a loose term, encompassing photojournalists, stringers, amateurs, scientific imaging teams and more.

Taylor spends about 2-3 hours putting together a post, which usually includes a collection of photos and a short background blurb.  He posts 3 times per week on current events like Sadr City, the floods in Des Moines, Ethiopian food shortages, The Boston Celtics victory parade, California wildfires, etc.  What he does is surf the wire for the best photos and puts together a collection. The technical side of how he does it is fascinating as well, but you should really read the entire interview and go look as his blog.

It’s not hard to believe that a programmer has tapped into one of the best innovations in online publishing this year.  It’s just a shame more newspaper sights aren’t trying new things.  [The Big Picture]

I still regret not being able to take a writing/lit class with George Saunders when I was at Syracuse.  Saunder’s is totally ace.  His short story collection, Pastoralia is a hilarious read.  Anyway, I didn’t know he was writing for the New Yorker until today.

Saunders has a great idea for a television show.  Everybody on Earth thinks they have superpowers, except they don’t. We’ll call it “Antiheroes.”

People jump off buildings and rather than flying they sprain their ankles, et cetera.  Saunders goes on like this and then he drops this quadruple paragraph stretch, which just double punched my funny face with the force of Chuck Norris.

Soon, in a plot twist, people begin losing even their normal abilities. A Japanese woman forgets how to speak Japanese. A Texas mother forgets how to chew, and that her kids are supposed to wear pants. Her husband also loses an essential ability he’s always had, which is: whenever he wants to have an affair, he just has it. It’s like he totally forgets he’s married. After these affairs, he manifests a secondary ability: forgets he’s had the affair, doesn’t feel the slightest bit guilty.

Today, he goes out, has an affair. But right in the middle he remembers he’s married. Lori’s a nice girl—why must he always do her wrong? Sexually, he performs not so great. His partner’s also sad. Her superpower is: whenever she has a sleazy affair, the guy’s always at least adequate in the sack.

When he gets home, Lori’s at the table, mouth full of chips. The kids are running around the yard in their underwear. What gives? No wonder he cheats on Lori.

Nothing, anywhere, is getting done. There’s great fear in the air. What fools we were, to take our basic abilities for granted! How wonderful life was, back when we still knew how to drive cars, button shirts, call for takeout, paint a series of watercolors depicting various views of our summer house, find our damn summer house in the first place.

[via]

Whenever I watch one of those Pygmalion type of movies, where the intelligent, fiery and adorably optimistic wallflower is turned into a sexy bombshell (see: just about every Hollywood movie) because logic dictates that you can’t be both sexy and smart if you’re a women, I inevitably shudder in revulsion.

(Non-random aside: Rachel Leigh Cook was fine damn it as the dorky art student! Why did Freddie Prinze Jr. have to get all up in her business and turn her into generic white girl?)

Thankfully, ladies, Newsweek is here to tell that it is indeed okay to be smart and sexy.  We’ve known it all along, but now that Newsweek says it’s okay to be a geek, we don’t have to keep this secret in the closet any longer.

The Nerd Girls may not look like your stereotypical pocket-protector-loving misfits—their adviser, Karen Panetta, has a thing for pink heels—but they’re part of a growing breed of young women who are claiming the nerd label for themselves. In doing so, they’re challenging the notion of what a geek should look like, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personas, or by simply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and more traditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and high heels. In fact, calling them “nerd” is no insult at all—the Nerd Girls have T shirts emblazoned with the slogan. The crew includes Cristina Sanchez, a master’s student in biomedical engineering (and a former cheerleader) who can talk for hours about aerodynamics. Caitrin Eaton, a freshman, asked her boyfriend for a soldering iron last Christmas. Juniors Courtney Mario and Perry Ross giggle when they talk about what fascinated them most about “No Country for Old Men”: how did the assassin’s air gun work?

See, smart and sexy.  Glasses are not necessarily included, but they are a nice touch.  Like Tina Fey above.

These girl geeks aren’t social misfits; their identities don’t hinge on outsider status. They may love all things sci-tech, but first and foremost they are girls—and they’ve made that part of their appeal. They’ve modeled themselves after icons such as Tina Fey, whose character on “30 Rock” is a “Star Wars”-loving, tech-obsessed, glasses-wearing geek, but who’s garnered mainstream appeal and a few fashion-magazine covers. Or on actress Danica McKellar, who coauthored a math theorem, wrote a book for girls called “Math Doesn’t Suck” and posed in a bikini for Stuff magazine. Or even Ellen Spertus, a Mills College professor and research scientist at Google—and the 2001 winner of the Silicon Valley “Sexiest Geek Alive” pageant. They tune in to shows like “GeekBrief.TV,” a daily Web series hosted by 26-year-old Cali Lewis, and meet friends at Girl Geek Dinners, the first of which drew more than 600 women. However they choose to geek out, they consciously tweak the two chief archetypes of geeks: that they’re unattractive outcasts, and that they’re male.

I wish these ladies had come along when I was in high school or college.  Strangely, the Nerd Girls have their own reality show coming out … so the synergy between the “trend piece” and the reality show seems appropriately suspicious.

And yes, we realize that including a salacious picture to accompany the article sort of defeats the purpose of not objectifying women but what can you do.  They’re smart and sexy!  For me, it’s all about Natalie Portman who wrote a Harvard thesis on neuroscience or something.  But Tina Fey could make me laugh so that has it’s bonus points too.

Thoughts on sexy and smart women?  This is a trend I can get behind, instead of championing boring and insipid like Paris Hilton or LiLo.

[Revenge of the Nerdette]