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Via Wired we find this NYT article, to which I say Duh!

Fiore brings us candidate Arnold in Pumping Irony

At Working for Change, Joe Conason looks at how the right has embraced Arnold. Can you say relativism? Read it here.

This article on CNN came via a link that read "One Dead in Amish Tomato-Tossing Prank". I couldn't resist.

Terry Teachout enjoys a Monday Matinee of The Adventures of Robin Hood over at About Last Night. Futurballa is also a big fan of the Swashbuckler, and Errol Flynn movies in particular. The sword fight between Flynn and Basil Rathbone on the beach in Captain Blood being a favorite movie moment, followed closely by the sword fight between Rathbone and Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro and the fight between Rathbone and Flynn in the aforementioned Robin Hood is also a ton o' fun. It's all about Basil Rathbone. And by the way, Futurballa has also been known to sneak out and catch a matinee on a weekday.

In the "news of the wierd" department, Aaron Haspel has this rather odd story of Ivy League Oddness. Glad I was in the public university system.

And finally this little snippet via Crooked Timber

"From a Guardian article bemoaning the decline of national cinematic traditions comes the following catalogue of national characteristics as revealed in film:

The Japanese, haunted by feudal warlords and ancestral ghosts. The Italians, preoccupied with fascism, communism and huge family meals. The Spanish, grappling with catholicism, beggars and a taste for the surreal. The repressed, puritanical, Swedes. The French, who adored infidelity, bourgeois dinner parties and murders in provincial towns. The British, engaged in an interminable class struggle. The Russians, the Poles and the Czechs, evading the communist censors with sophisticated comedies and metaphorical allegories. And, of course, the Americans and their obsession with rugged individualism, the wild frontier and the 'American dream'."

Did you notice that the characteristics of both Spanish movies (grappling with catholicism and a taste for the surreal) and French movies (bourgeois dinner parties) actually are both attributable to Luis Bunuel?