Apparently Calista Flockhart fainted when she heard the news that Robert Downey Jr. had been arrested for drugs again. Fainted. Has any woman actually swooned with emotion since, like, 1885? I suppose when you’re that tiny, any disruption in your trickle of blood flow is enough to bring on a collapse. (It’s horrible, but I found this really funny: “Everyone ran over and tried to revive her. David’s face was pale but Calista, who is usually very pale, was as white as a sheet.” Of course she’s pale, she’s a skeleton.)

Have you been following the David Horowitz story? He’s a journalist and “conservative provacateur” who sent ’round an advertisement attacking the notion of slavery reparations to dozens of American universities. When many of them refused to print it (or did print it and then published apologies), he accused them of censorship and claimed that his real point had to do with the First Amendment and the liberal press. It’s become a real headache for a lot of college papers and some of them are even revising their advertising guidelines. (For the record, my alma mater was among those who declined to print it.) Anyhoo, another Salon writer decided that if Horowitz is gonna try to paint the conservatives as the real defenders of the First Amendment, he’d put it to the test. So he devised an ad that said “God is an abortionist” and sent it to several prominent conservative universities. Needless to say, only one out of eleven printed it. I wonder what Horowitz would say about that?

You know, in my History of Film class in college, the professor defined a “high-concept” movie as one where the plot can be summed up in 20 words or less. Giving that definition, I wonder where “One Night at McCool’s” fits. Every advert I’ve seen for it only says one thing: “Liv Tyler washes a car.” I predict this film will bomb at the theaters yet do a reasonably good business on video, simply for the teenage-boy-wank factor.

Uh oh. A judge has ruled that “Irish” is an ethnic slur. A woman in Vermont tried to get “IRISH” on a license plate and was denied. If this catches on in other states, half of Notre Dame‘s student body are going to have to get new license plates. And what about our mascot? We’ll have to change the football chants! This is catastrophe in the making.

Heh. Okay, so Amazon is selling Red Hat Linux 7.0 Deluxe Edition. Check out the reviews at the bottom of the page though. How funny is that? Even funnier is the fact that Amazon refuses to remove them.

Meg pointed to “Tips for Dating Emotional Cripples.” Let’s see, I’ve experienced the musician, the best friend, the long-distance boy, the artist, and the punker. (That sounds like a lot, but really it’s only two people. The categories overlap a lot.)

I sent Snookums a link to the hacker page and he responded, “YOU are the hacker around here these days.” I said I wasn’t, and he added, “Who’s the one upstairs hacking while I cook dinner eh?” He’s got me there.

Celebrity spotting. (Scroll to the bottom.) Congratulations again, Max!

I’ve been reading Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews for a while now, ever since I saw it mentioned on Ironminds. It’s sorta like a weblog that keeps tabs on the media. Today I was reading about a plagiarism case at the Indiana Daily Student. I clicked on a link for a related story, and my eyes immediately widened at the byline. It was by sister’s ex-boyfriend! He took over my job at the local paper back home in Indiana after I graduated. Lucky bastard…

Heh. “Why would you get a boring old gray box when you can get a precious little see-thru one like this instead?” I couldn’t agree with this woman more. Mine’s blue though. 🙂

Someone has apparently written a sequel to “Flatland”, the 1884 book by Edwin Abbott Abbott. I loved the original. It was recommended to me in high school by my Calculus teacher and I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever read. It’s all about A. Square, who lives in a two-dimensional world on an infinitely large plane. In a vision he visits the worlds of one-dimension (a line of points always travelling) and no-dimensions (just a point). Then he himself is visited by a sphere, which takes him into Spaceland and shows him the possibilities of even more dimensions. Apparently the sequel, called “Flatterland”, features A. Square’s great-great-granddaughter, Victoria Line. She is shown “spaces with infinitely many dimensions, spaces with none, spaces with fractional dimension, spaces with finitely many points, curved spaces, spaces that get mixed up with time, and spaces that aren’t really there at all.” In other words she is invited to see the surfaces and worlds imagined by recent theoretical mathematics and physics. Awesome…