Deep Thought of the Day

Rum makes a better basis for cakes and sweetbreads than bourbon.

On Cold Mountain and Gone with the Wind

Am I the only one who finds it a little disturbing that the best Civil War films -- nearly all Civil War films, for that matter -- have an objectively pro-Southern slant to them? This is more true, of course, of GWTW than Cold Mountain, but still. There is a film that needs to be made, if not of the Civil War, then of the Reconstruction years, from an explicitly pro-Northern perspective. If Nathan Newman's recounting of the era is accurate, a great tragedy centered around Ulysses S. Grant could easily be written.

Movie Review: Enchanted

It was either this or Beowulf (non-3D version); and as tempting as a nude CGI Angelina Jolie may be, I was strangely not that enthused about the movie. But as far as Disney-approved satire goes, Enchanted is pretty entertaining, I must admit. It succeeds mainly on the strength of Amy Adams' performance, which is incredibly sweet and has more depth than a movie like this deserves.

Of course, if I were to write a Disney satire movie, I'd probably use this list as a jumping off point.

Good News!

The paper I co-authored with my professor and a classmate on the Law of the Sea Convention will be published in the next edition of Environmental Law and Policy.

In other news, Y. and I had a great Thanksgiving. It was the first big meal with both her parents and mine, and it went swimmingly. We also went home with an extra turkey -- Y.'s mother had gotten two turkeys expecting the 10 or so people in attendance to eat both, which, suffice to say, was not the case. So the usual 3-day turkey diet will be about 7 days for us.

Urinetown

I saw it last weekend with Y. at the University of Maryland, and while it was delightfully acerbic, as advertised, I would have enjoyed it more, perhaps, if it weren't also an apparent harbinger of things to come.

The Paranoid Style in Google Video

I'm currently collaborating on a paper about the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the Senate, finally, may soon ratify. The main thing holding it up has been anti-UN reactionaries, who recently have producing bizarre ads opposing ratification such as this one:



It's a pack of lies, of course, but also weirdly entertaining, I must confess.

Pain in the RSS

I like Google Reader a lot, but one of the annoying things about it -- perhaps this is true of other RSS software -- is that I will often get a post reacting to a post before I get the original post itself. So, for example, this morning I read Tyler Cowen's critique of Dani Rodrik's progressive trade vision, then read, an hour later, Rodrik's post on... his progressive trade vision. Maybe I'd be better off living backwards, like T.H. White's Merlin.