Wes Phillips

Apparently there was some sort of awards ceremony in LA last night, but news of it has only just reached Brooklyn. I stopped caring about the Oscars years ago (pretty much around the time I became a voting member of NARAS and realized how little the Grammies had to do with musical quality), but I never cease to be amazed by how much they seem to matter to other non-film-industry people. Mark Evanier has a nice essay about the post-ceremony media frenzy—and he totally pwns Tom Shales.

Need I say more? I think not.

"These things used to be roomier," Huckleberry grouses.

German scholars think they have deciphered the 3600 year-old sky disc of Nebra. I'll believe almost anything, so long as James Spader doesn't smack himself in the forehead and say, "I just remembered—I do speak ancient Egyptian!"

Lovely essay on Greene's friendship with a genuine Foreign Office undercover agent. Peter Edmund James Leslie was an ex-Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, owned shares in a diamond mine, worked as an arms salesman, and served as a Vice-Consul—in others words, he was the very template of a Graham Greene protagonist.

Nanopaint that blocks cell phones? Yowsah!

Chapter one: vasopressin and oxytocin did it.