• The website for Hot Fuzz has just gone live.  The Academy might as well put away their ballots now, this will be the movie of 2007.
• Wired has a list of the best shoestring sci-fi of 2006.
• Darwin’s Graveyards: ...every contemporary ethical dispute is really a debate between Charles Darwin and Pope John Paul II, especially in his encyclicals Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae. One either regards man as a complicated bag of cells wrapped in skin, whose only law is the biological imperative of vitality, self-preservation, and procreation; or one sees man as created in the image and likeness of God, whose innate and divinely bestowed dignity absolutely forbids any metaphysically significant division in human society between fit and unfit, strong and weak, white and black, Aryan and Semite, Greek and Jew, adult and fetus, those new born and those near death.
• Watch Chris Marker’s La Jetee (the inspiration for 12 Monkeys) via Google Video. Via
• Bootie has a CD’s worth of the year’s best mashup tracks for your downloading pleasure.  Make sure you grab the bonus tracks.  “Super Freak” plus “Girls On Film”?!?  Sounds good to me.  Via
• The Twilight Sad will be releasing a new album entitled Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters in March on FatCat Records.  Two songs from the album can be heard on the band’s MySpace page.
• Stereogum lists their most anticipated releases of 2007.
• The Foxglove Hunt—a collaboration between Ronnie Martin (Joy Electric) and Rob Withem (Fine China)—have just posted a track to their MySpace page, and it’s chock full of 80s goodness.

So it’s finally here, a real honest-to-God cinematic version of my all-time favorite comic book character, the Silver Surfer.  It’s not his own film—that’s been supposedly lurching through development hell for a number of years—but rather, he’ll be appearing in the second Fantastic Four movie, Rise Of The Silver Surfer.

The official teaser trailer for the sequel is now on-line, and features quite a lot of silver surfing action, as the Surfer arrives on Earth and is pursued by the Human Torch.

Overall, it doesn’t look too bad, and the fanboy in me is positively all a-twitter.  The Surfer looks a little too T-1000-ish for my taste, but given the fact that he’s, well, covered in silver, I suppose that’s unavoidable.  And I wish they’d shown him showing off a bit more of the Power Cosmic than he does—all he really does is pass through solid matter, including his own board (which I suppose he could do with the P.C., but I don’t think he ever did that in the comics—yes, I’m a dork).  An energy bolt or two wouldn’t have hurt matters, but I suppose you have to save the big guns for the big screen.

I hope that the Surfer isn’t the villain of the film.  In the comics, the Surfer is actually the herald for the planet-eating monster Galactus, tasked with finding planets suitable for his master to devour.  The Fantastic Four are instrumental in reawakening the Surfer’s nobility, enabling him to rebel against his master and fight for Earth.  I hope that particular bit of character development is there, that the Surfer’s nobility—arguably his defining characteristic—is left intact.

I guess we’ll find out on June 15, 2007, when the movie arrives in theatres.

The “Godfather of Soul” has passed on.  Rest in peace.

More on Pan’s Labyrinth and Guillermo Del Toro: If my child watches my movies by accident, they will not try to think the world is a safe place, which it’s not. Children should know the dangers of the world and not be neurotically isolated from them. Via

Jeffrey Overstreet reviews Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men: The film may not be an immediate box office sensation, but its powerfully convincing spectacle is likely to make it a lasting sci-fi classic on par with Blade Runner.

Jeffrey Overstreet offers a few thoughts on Christmas Day, 2006.

You can always count on the fellas from CHUD to offer up entertaining lists.  This year, Nick Nunziata and Devin Faraci offer up their “Worst Of…” lists.

Wired’s 2006 Foot-In-Mouth Awards, pulling together the best (or worst) technology related quotes.  How much do you want to bet that Sen. Ted “Tubes” Stevens made the list?

My wife often likes to poke fun at me whenever I indulge in my geekier side, regardless of whether it’s related to computers, anime, music, bad ninja movies from the 1980s, etc.  And yet, I contend that she has no reason for doing so, as she is often the one who enables such behavior.

Case in point: this Christmas, we opted against getting too many gifts for eachother, as we’d already spent a healthy sum on some much-needed home furnishings (and an iPod).  Instead, we decided to give eachother a few “fun” gifts.  So what do you suppose was waiting for me under the Christmas tree?  Suffice to say, it wasn’t home improvement gizmos (that’s what I have in-laws for).

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If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’ve recently become a huge fan of pMachine’s ExpressionEngine content management system.  However, I’m still very much a newb when it comes to really taking advantage of EE’s capabilities (which, from all indicators, are legion).

Thankfully, there are a number of resources to help folks like me, starting with pMachine’s own extensive documentation and discussion forums.  Then there are various EE-powered blogs such as CollyLogic, Bartelme Design, and Veerle, that in addition to showcasing some great design, also contain numerous EE-related articles, tips, and tutorials.

Now you can add the newly-launched Jambor-ee to that list of resources.  In addition to a blog, Jambor-ee will also be publishing periodic issues, ALA-style, that contain tutorials, interviews, etc.  And to round things out, Jambor-ee also contains a showcase of EE-powered sites and an EE-related job board.

All in all, Jambor-ee looks like a fantastic resource.  If you’re already an EE user, it’s definitely one to add to the bookmarks.  And if you’re not, it might just give you a better idea as to why EE users are so passionate about this particular CMS.

• The new trailer for 300, Zack Snyder’s rendition of Frank Miller’s acclaimed graphic novel.
• A trailer for Grindhouse, the new double feature from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.  From the looks of things, the boys have taken the exploitative indulgences of Kill Bill and Sin City to brand new heights.
• A trailer for Offside, the latest from Jafar Panahi (The Circle).
• You Don’t Know Jack—the computer trivia game that once used to suck many hours from my life—has returned in online form.  And it’s as irreverent and crass as ever, the way it should be.  Via
• Brett Karch nearly lost his leg when the cannon he fired as part of a football game ceremony exploded.  Now, he’s now being threatened by folks in his hometown because they’re afraid that the cannon firing—a decades-old tradition—might be done away with in light of his injuries. Um, WTF?!?
• One of the coolest features of the Nintendo Wii is its “Mii Channel”, which is sort of like an avatar-creation utility that can be used in conjunction with various Wii games.  When my brother brought his Wii over on Thanksgiving, our entire family spent time creating Miis for each one of us.  Kottke took it one step further: a “Celebrity Mii” contest, the results of which have just been posted.

• Dave Shea has redesigned Mezzoblue, taking a number of cues from magazine design: ...I took a lot of cues from magazine design when putting together this site. The layout, typography, and photo-derived colour schemes owe their existence to flipping through back issues of some of my favourite cooking mags. Via
• Wired’s has a “First Look” at the new Photoshop CS3 beta, complete with screenshots.  I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t been able to check it out for myself, maybe over the holidays.
• Roger Johansson lists 10 must-have features for the next version of IE: Some of us had great hopes for Internet Explorer 7. We were hoping that it would offer great support for Web standards, perhaps even on par with that of the leaders in the Web browser arena. Our hopes were slowly smothered as IE 7 moved from beta-beta to real-beta to release-candidate to release version.  I hope those folks in Redmond are paying attention.
• The Bible Experience is a new audio recording of the New Testament that features a number of actors participating in the readings.  The highlight?  It has to be Samuel L. Jackson as God.  An Old Testament version is in the works, with plans to release it next fall.  Christianity Today has more details.
• Cover Browser brings you the worst album covers of all time.  Some of these are oldies but goodies, and some are brand new (at least to me).  All of them are simply awful, insipid, disturbing, tasteless, and/or ugly (and maybe NSFW). Via

As a former Star Trek: The Next Generation junkie, this fills me with glee to no end: Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley Crusher) is reviewing classic ST:TNG episodes for TV Squad.

Not only do you get all sorts of behind-the-scenes info and trivia (because he was, you know, there on the set and stuff), but Wheaton’s reviews are witty and engaging and full of just the right mixture of fond nostalgia and snarky humor.  Several of his quips and anecdotes have had me doubled over.

Of course, if you don’t know the difference between a Constitution-class starship and an Excelsior-class starship, your mileage may vary.  But if you do, enjoy.