Nice summary by Kos.

Serenity.

I tagged along with best friend Jane to the premiere up at Universal
last night.

You laugh, you cry, you get scared.  The whole deal.  Eat popcorn and enjoy.  It’s Joss Whedon, people.  The guy can write in three-emotion layers in the middle of chase scenes.  If he felt like it, he could make you feel ennui, schadenfreude, and hyggelig, all while something enormous blows up.

The writing is the Joss level of brilliant you’d figure,
and his direction is eye-popping and full of surprises.  There’s even some stuff I think readers of this site will particularly dig.

It’s a world.  And the world is very cool.  Most fun I’ve had at a movie this year.

With all the bad news and grumbling on this site, for once here’s a bit of good fun.

UPDATE: The answer is YES.  He just did.  See the additional update, below.

Genuinely curious now. 

As Rita takes aim on the Texas gulf coast, will Bush soon declare an emergency in Austin, hundreds of miles inland?

I’ll be watching the White House press release site to see.  I’m still trying to understand this.

Incidentally, the emergency declaration for the Florida Keys — identically worded to the pre-landfall Katrina declaration, effective August 26th — was not for Tampa or Orlando, but for the area around the actual, um, Florida Keys.  Go figure.

If you don’t know what started this whole line of thought, click here.

And for the love of god, please read the whole thing before jumping to
conclusions, sending angry letters, or pointing to August 29th
documents.  You’ll save yourself a lot of time.

Finally, although I shouldn’t have to say something so obvious: of
course I am hoping the storm will dissipate.  I wish no one ill and
take no joy in asking this.

But this is a sincere question.  Let’s watch and see how they handle
the declarations in a slightly less incomprehensible fashion this time.

UPDATE: Mere hours after I posted this, the White House declared the entire state of Texas part of the hurricane Rita emergency.  The entire state.

Amarillo, almost 600 miles inland from the impending landfall — farther inland than the southern tip of Illinois was from Katrina — has now been declared as a federal hurricane emergency.  Rural Dallam County is almost as far inland as Topeka freaking Kansas.

What the bloody hell is going on here?

What would the Bush administration have to do to alienate their base?
Allow hundreds of CEOs to drown needlessly
552   55.5%
Torture innocent Christians at Abu Ghraib
231   23.2%
Ignore briefings warning "Bin Laden determined to attack Vince Gill"
111   11.2%
Provide insufficient armor plating for monster truck rallies
100   10.1%

Ah, but how is the government preparing for the possibly imminent pandemic of Avian Flu?

New poll at left.

Light blogging here for a week or two.  Book deadline looming.