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Wired talks about a new multiplayer game: Using high-resolution satellite and geographic data, Rekonstruction will let players work together and against one another to rebuild a parallel Earth that has been devastated by an asteroid strike. I love their premise.

AO Scott in the NYT likes the new “summer guilty-pleasure movie about surfing”, “Blue Crush”:

But still, it’s hard to resist being swept up in “Blue Crush,” not least because David Hennings’s shimmery photography carries the breeze and spray of the island right into the theater. The movie is also the latest example of a subgenre that might be called feminexploitation. (Earlier examples include “Bring It On” and “Charlie’s Angels.”) The idea is to find heroines who are strong, tough, capable and resilient, but who also look fabulous in bathing suits and other revealing attire. The audience appeal is theoretically universal. You can ogle Anne Marie and her friends or you can aspire to be just like them, or even a little of both. Whatever gets you stoked, dude.

And it also includes this zinger of a movie reference: “The romance that follows is basically that of a gender-reversed ‘Dirty Dancing’: Anne Marie gives Matt surfing lessons (for which he overpays her) and begins to worry that he is using her.”

Nerve magazine on infidelity: “Marriage, according to Brandt, follows a four-to-five-year curve of Infatuation, Attachment, Disillusion and Dissolution…. We don’t need a how-to book on being bad better. We need the guilt, the mystery, the corrosion of our heart and its rebirth.”

Nerve magazine reviews the classic 1980 summer camp flick Little Darlings:

Her seduction is deliciously to the point: “What’s your name?” [Exhale] “Mine?” [Inhale] “Yeah, yours: I already know mine.” [Exhale] “What’s yours?” [Inhale] “Angel. Don’t let the name fool you.” [Exhale] “Randy. Don’t let the name fool you.” Turns out he’s staying just across the lake (not to mention the wrong side of the tracks).

Randy is played by Matt Dillon, who went on to even more absurdist sexual romp in Wild Things, which is available through NetFlix.

AO Scott in the NYT on M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, Signs:

The lesson that “Signs” imparts — have faith! — is ubiquitous in the culture, from the pronouncements of certain politicians to television shows like “Touched by an Angel.” (This version might be called “Mauled by an Alien.”) The movie’s fuzzy pop-spiritualism carries a disturbing implication. Unless you have faith (in something tactfully left unspecified), it says, you are putting the integrity of your family and the very lives of your children at risk, and you no longer deserve to be called father — as if skepticism, or indeed any but the most literal-minded expression of belief, were a form of child abuse.

Of course, even as an atheist, I’ll be the first to admit that a world where “happens for a reason and that we are therefore not alone” makes for much better movies.

The Bulwer-Lytton fiction awards challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The 2002 winner:

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not
quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it
hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going
bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of
annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

And the sentence that started it all:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

And you thought my blog was annoying….

The NYT has a fascinating editorial page biography of Philip K. Dick: “This Generation Needs a Paranoid’s Paranoid”.

The NYT movie review for Tadpole, in which a teenager develops a complicated taste for (older) women, includes this clever turn of phrase to describe his feelings: “milky ardency”.

Ever wonder what the USS in front of ship names on Star Trek stands for? Starship Enterprise from wikipedia explains: “The USS Enterprise was once referred to as the ‘United Space Ship Enterprise’, but ever since has always been ‘United Star Ship’. Since Starfleet is unrelated to the United States armed forces any similarity between this awkward phrase and the American warship prefix ‘United States Ship’ must be strictly coincidental.”

Do you use sesquipedalian words like sesquipedalian? Then check out this word list. Lucubriation of galimatias and other omphaloskepsis can result in ultracrepidation.