So if you ask for the "menu" in a French restaurant, you will get the special meal; not a list of individual items to be ordered willy nilly.

Good to know!

(I feel like I did know this at some point..)

I just read Ballard's follow-up memoir The Kindness of Women and it's fantastic.

Eh. It's been a decade since I read it, but my overall conclusion was, it's a lot less fantastic if you're one of the women in question. About the most interesting part of it, for me, was mapping the little fibs it's speckled with: for a memoir, it's remarkably untruthful on some of the details.

(Then again, that was part of the weird/creepy appeal of Empire of the Sun as well. Mrs. Vincent is a lot ickier when you realize that she's loosely based on his own mother.)

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne

I love that movie, but I think most of that has to do with my gigantic crush on María Casares. I tried watching another Bresson film afterward... err, I think it was the one about Joan of Arc... and didn't even make it half way through.

We Tell Stories.

Mashing up classics-inspired-stories with...GoogleMaps. It's interesting.

We Tell Stories.

I've worked on a bunch of similar projects with Google Earth and various literature or culture classes. On the plus side, Google Earth is way more fun than Google Maps. On the minus side, I don't get Penguin-Putnam's money.

When people speak French, this is what I think of.

it's a lot less fantastic if you're one of the women in question. About the most interesting part of it, for me, was mapping the little fibs it's speckled with: for a memoir, it's remarkably untruthful on some of the details.

That's a pretty backhanded dismissal. If you're calling him sexist you ought to take the time to make the case. Also, it's listed as a novel.

In any event, it's very well written so I'm not sure what standard you're holding him to.

Basic feminist standard. In its -- okay -- memoiristic novel format, it doesn't have a chance to pass the Dykes to Watch Out For test, but, much of the point of it seems to be that women are merciful sex objects (or else they die, and that might be kind of a sex object too). Which, that's really tiresome, especially when you're the sex object.

I'm sure we could chalk a fair proportion of it up to his being a product of his time, but it still really tiresome.

I love this!

I AM A GENIUS OF UNSPEAKABLE EVIL AND I WANT TO BE YOUR CLASS PRESIDENT.

Warner Brothers buys the option for the book proposal by Josh Lieb, one of the many brilliant Daily Show writers.

"The premise centers on a chubby 13-year old boy who everybody assumes is the dumbest kid in the seventh grade. He really is an evil genius and the third-richest person on the planet, with a secret compound beneath his unsuspecting family's modest suburban home. He hides his identity to keep himself safe from his enemies and because he can't legally claim his empire until he turns 18."

I remember reading an interview with M. Night Shyamalan where he was talking about where he got his ideas, and he came up with something along the lines of "There's a kid in the class, the dumb kid, but what if he really isn't dumb? What if he's really the smartest kid in the class? Why would he need to keep that a secret? And there's your movie."

I guess there really are no new ideas under the sun...