1. I caught a TV news report about the Writer's Guild of America writer's strike. They showed a demonstration near Rockefeller Center in New York City where folks like Tina Fey were chanting this old chestnut:

"What do we want? More money!
When do we want it? Now!"

With all that writing talent, shouldn't they have been able to come up with something better? (Note: this joke was written by Caryn.)

I've often wondered (naively, perhaps) if New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus's personal political views are expressed in the publication's selection of reviewers for books about history and current events. According to this well-reasoned article by Jim Sleeper from Talking Points Memo Cafe there is a clear neo-conservative slant, specifically a slant towards political critics who believe that "hate America" liberals are to blame for our nation's current problems. Is this true?

They have got to be insane. Amazon's new E-Book Reader, the Kindle, is now out on the market. It's generating a lot of chatter from OUP Blog to Engadget to Gizmodo to O'Reilly to Silicon Alley Insider to Newsweek, where Steven Levy goes on at some length about the way this device may shake up the mess that is book pricing:

LitKicks is moving to a new software platform. Because our old server was having a lot of trouble keeping up with demand, we were forced to begin this transition before the new site was complete. We will be reassembling the entire site over the next few weeks, and offering some exciting improvements when we do -- please be patient and don't give up on us!

Every once in a while the New York Times Book Review publishes an article for the ages, and Jim Harrison's thoughtful appreciation of Charles Bukowski's poetry, which takes the form of a review of the new collection Pleasures of the Damned: Poems 1951-1993, might be one. Harrison wisely begins by speculating that Bukowski's poetic vision was grounded in his physical homeliness, in the "acne vulgaris" that scarred his young face.

HBO's new feature movie PU-239 is based on a short story by Ken Kalfus, whose dark comedy A Disorder Peculiar to our Country was one of my favorite novels of 2006. PU-239 is no kinder to its characters than Disorder, but this time the setting is post-Soviet Russia and the stakes are higher: a young husband and father is exposed to a toxic dose of radiation in a nuclear power plant accident, and when the bureaucrats who run the plant refuse to compensate him so that his wife and son can survive his eventual death he steals a tube of plutonium and travels to a city bazaar to attempt to sell it -- he doesn't care to whom -- by holding up a cardboard sign reading "PU-239".

A local black marketeer and amateur criminal sees him and demands "Pu? What is Pu?". This obnoxious young criminal seems hardly capable of handling a nuclear sale, but other options are slim, and the radiation-sickness victim and the young thug begin working together to find a buyer. The horrific results are funny to watch ... until you think about how much damage is done. That combination of wit and utter human devastation appears to be a Ken Kalfus signature, and while some reviewers of this new film have compared it to A Clockwork Orange (because of the brutality of the prowling thugs who work the local black market) a better reference point might be Harold Pinter. As in a typical Pinter play, the characters are so morally isolated that they can barely communicate with each other. The plutonium seller wants $30,000 for his stash, and his criminal associate naturally increases this to $50,000 but then eagerly attempts to complete a sale for $8000. Nothing matters, nobody is listening to anybody else, and by the end of this movie nothing is solved and a whole lot of terrible new problems are created.