Haunting the Web Since 1999
Grim [expletive deleted] tidings…With last night’s episode (and this season’s marvelously malevolent Big Bad, George Hearst [Gerald McRaney], on the verge of running riot), we’re already halfway through our last full helping of Deadwood. (You can keep up on its historicity here.) The silver lining? That puts us ever closer to Season 4 of The Wire (this year’s target: the school system), which HBO has only just begun to tease.
Now Playing Magazine publishes a spoiler-filled preview of Battlestar Galactica‘s Season 3, and it appears [mild spoiler] another jump forward is in the offing for the season premiere this October. I expect Dubya-levels of incompetence from President-figurehead Gaius Baltar at this point.
Hullo again, Gareth & Tim? According to the NY Post, the British cast of The Office will be visiting the US Office (minus David Brent, although Ricky Gervais is currently writing an episode for the Carell version.)
Barnard Hughes, 1915-2006. A veteran stage actor, Hughes is probably best known in my generation as Grandpa in The Lost Boys (“One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach, all the damn vampires“), although I remember having a certain fondness for the goofy Mr. Merlin as a little kid, a short-lived show that somehow made it to Belgian TV.
“From his first day on his own, he was not someone who could be reduced to a type, a symbol, or made to stand for a cause. Against all odds he had in fact achieved what the country promised him: ‘life,’ on his own terms; ‘liberty,’ seized, acted out, taken from him; ‘the pursuit of happiness’ — which, at the end of his life, meant firing a revolver in the air.” In an Independence Day-themed commencement speech reprinted in Salon, rock critic Greil Marcus riffs on the American Dream, using The Sopranos‘ Vito Spatafore and Theodore Rosengarten’s The Life of Nate Shaw as examples. The latter is a favorite book of Columbia’s Eric Foner (although he didn’t list it here), and it seems likely that he (or possibly Marcus’ fellow Dylanologist, Sean Wilentz) was the guy who recommended it.
“Gratuitous, hurtful, unnecessary! Lamentable, injurious, downright unthinkable! Shame the f**k on you!” As Season 3 begins, the NY Times examines the recent machinations surrounding the cloudy future of Deadwood, while Salon‘s Heather Havrilesky vents her frustration in the town’s distinctive argot. [Save Deadwood!]
“If I bleat when I speak, it’s because I’ve just been fleeced.” A la Farscape, Deadwood will get two two-hour specials to close out the story after Season 3 (which begins on Sunday.) Four hours? Well, ok, better than nothing, I suppose. Some ancient Italian maxim fits our situation, whose particulars escape me.
Will Deadwood be dead wood after three
The cast of Battlestar Galactica, Simpsonified. (Via Freakgirl.)
“‘We have had other hot — I hate to use that word — videos that generated a lot of buzz,’ said Rob Kennedy, executive vice president of C-Span, which was founded in 1979. ‘But this is the first time it has occurred since the advent of the video clipping sites.’” Kicking Youtube and iFilm aside, C-Span decides it wants to make some money on the Colbert Correspondents’ Dinner.