Marionette

One of K.'s students said that Bush, during the last debate, looked like a ventriloquist's dummy: like Karl Rove was crouching below the podium, making him answer questions he didn't really understand. This might not be far from the truth.

Salon.com has a debate picture of our "President" from behind that clearly shows an odd pucker in his jacket. To many, it looks a lot like a radio transmitter taped to his back, with a wire curving up over his right shoulder to his ear. This is pretty thin evidence, granted, and I'm probably contributing to yellow (or at least eggshell) journalism by repeating it, but it's fascinating if true, to quote Howard Cosell's head from Futurama. And it would explain a lot of the weird pauses.

Alternately, I'm willing to entertain Puppet Masters-type hypotheses.

Immanentize the eschaton, boys.

( Independent verification of the pic. )

[ObSF: Interface by Stephen Bury (aka Neal Stephenson and his uncle).]

Linky dinks

Whatnot:

• Jeff Katz at New Line has written a 20-page treatment for Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash. Hail to the king, baby.
  
  
• N is a brilliant and totally free Flash game, reminiscent of Lode Runner but powered by a nifty physics engine. You're a little ninja collecting little gold boxes to extend your 90-second lifespan while avoiding well-meaning but poorly programmed robots. The muted geometry of the visual style is very appealing, there are 300 levels (grouped into 60 five-episode levels)), and the ninja dies in wonderfully undignified ways. Download! Play! (N.B.: The difficulty level ramps up steeply as you play, but it resets every 10 episodes. If you're as frustrated by episode 9 as I was, know that it will get easy again in episode 10.)
  
  
• Zoom is a nifty collaborative art project, which elysdir has likened to Escher's Metamorphosis—with the axis of travel being into the page instead of side-to-side.
  

In other news, I successfully installed 256MB of SDRAM in K.'s laptop today, tripling her available memory. I feel so handy. 128MB really isn't enough for OS X; the poor little Chiclet was relying far too heavily on virtual memory, which slowed everything down. Now it's quite zippy.