• A nice piece on the 10th-anniversary release of Takashi Miike’s “Audition.” Don’t read the story if you haven’t seen the film. But do see the film, and try to be utterly unprepared.
• A somewhat useless overview of Joel and Ethan Coen’s oeuvre. The online headline:  “Just accept the mystery.” (In the print version:  “Mystery in the making.”) To headline a piece “Just accept the mystery” is to say, “I don’t know what to make of this.” Which begs the question:  then why write about it? (And yes, before you email me, I realize that an editor headlined it.)
• Douglas Brinkley reviews the new Clinton presidency book, Taylor Branch’s “The Clinton Tapes,” and decides that “our country benefited from his robust leadership.” Which makes me pause to wonder if he hasn’t slid from book reviewer to partisan advocate. An interview with the author by NPR’s Terry Gross coincided more closely with my own remembrance:  some real accomplishments, matched with a dogged determination to filter everything through the prism of personal crisis — the president’s own. If Clinton was, to use Brinkley’s assertion, a “political genius and a dazzling player with cunning pragmatism and spot-on observations,” why didn’t his mirror ever tell him how Monica Lewinsky and Jennifer Flowers and Whitewater and Lincoln Bedroom donations and lying under oath and on and on would be used against him to the detriment of us all? This doesn’t sound like “robust leadership.” It sounds like Shakespearean tragedy.
• Finally, the California section — now slimmed down and appearing only once a week like a diminished doppelganger of its namesake — carries a story about the success of San Francisco’s city-run universal health care effort. This is typical of the smart effective program’s the city has seen under Mayor Gavin Newsom, and reflect why I’m supporting him for governor.

How Star Trek effects used to be done — with papier mache and masonite.

Today’s LA Times features a full-page sales ad from Borders, one of the surviving chains offering books, music, coffee, and other things aimed at people who like books, music, and coffee. The sales ad promotes “educator appreciation week!” (Exclamation point theirs.) “Current and retired educators save on purchases for personal or classroom use.” Cool.

That discount equals “30% off list price of almost everything!*” (Asterisk theirs.)

So of course my eye tracked down to the spot the asterisk points to. In type so small that I doubt most book readers can read it, I found this:

Yes, it’s too small for my iPhone to capture it well either. Here’s what it says:  “…Excludes previous and online purchases, special orders, gift cards, newspapers, magazines, comics, coupon books, eBooks, digital downloads, self-publishing programs, Smartbox products, Rosetta Stone software, shipping, and all electronics, including but not limited to the Sony Reader and the Zune. Also excludes all Dean & DeLuca and Starbucks cafe items and products….”

I count at least 17 product categories excluded above.  So… what does “almost” mean?

The link to our previous listing seems to have been rendered inoperable. We will keep you apprised of this exciting opportunity.

Business for sale.

Famous public school located in scenic Los Angeles seeks new operator. Situation presents great business opportunity for right operator. Estimated annual revenue of $27.6 million with simplified accounts receivable. (Single large client supplies all revenue.)  New management strategies, customer-service processes, and the right rebranding could yield significant results. Success will require a nuanced communications strategy with local customer base and key stakeholders. Current management unlikely to provide transition assistance.

Last week, Pere Ubu guru David Thomas kindly emailed me to say he’d make sure that I got the new Ubu disk, as well as the recent CD he produced for 15-60-75 (the Numbers band), in the mail.

The Numbers’ disk arrived two days ago and I’ve just started to explore its deep soulful blues.

Today in my mail, there was the new Pere Ubu disk. In a hand-addressed bubble mailer. With the hand-written return address of… Steve Mehlman, the drummer.

This has just gotten better and better.

 By way of reminder, here are some of the things I’ve written in the past about John Edwards:

• “…a hypocritical ambulance-chaser of the first order“
• I compared an ingratiating telephone fundraiser as a “honey-voiced southerner… who does her best to ingratiate herself with fellow good ol’ folks. (In other words, John Edwards, with fewer $400 haircuts.)
• a “charlatan” who “used his wife’s cancer as the backdrop for [his] first campaign video while [he was] booking ‘consulting time’ with another woman.

Edwards’ checkered history leads me to ask, as a reporter for Newsweek did today, why he is still raising — and spending — money on a presidential campaign. Last I checked, that race was held almost a year ago (and Edwards wasn’t in it). But somehow he has banked $3.7 million in donations and continues to spend it.

I have known many public servants in my life. The vast majority of them work long hours in enormously frustrating situations in service to ideals they hold close to their hearts, striving to make a better life for people. Every time you confront cynicism about politics and government, it’s not because of those people — it’s because of people like John Edwards, a self-aggrandizing phony who preys off people’s misery.

A “noted naturalist” has suggested letting the panda die out:

Conservationists should “pull the plug” on giant pandas and let them die out, according to BBC presenter and naturalist Chris Packham.

“Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac,” Packham told Radio Times magazine.

 

With some scientists, the panda has suffered backlash since at least Stephen Jay Gould’s book “The Panda’s Thumb,” in which Gould complained that the animal, which is capable of a far more diverse diet, is dying out because it insists on eating only bamboo leaves. There’s a price to be paid for being picky, and recently conservationists have been picking up that tab.

I greatly doubt that’s going to stop any time soon. In the war for survival, the panda has the best survival tool:  marketability. Despite what some over-educated eggheads might make of its irresponsible overindulgence, the panda’s cuteness is irrefutable. For that reason and for all that that entails — in World Wildlife Fund brochures and children’s plush toys and effusions like this one — the panda will be here long after the chacoan peccary has slunk from existence.

His heirs are filing claims to many of the characters co-created by Jack Kirby.