As thrilled as I am that the Return of the King DVD is finally out today, there’s something slightly sad about the finality of watching the masthead on the official Lord of the Rings website change — and knowing it will now stay this way for as long as the site still exists.


Partial lordoftherings.net screenshot, 7:54 AM today

Full lordoftherings.net screenshot, 1:23 PM today

There are no more new Rings movies to look forward to, nothing that will be “in theaters soon” or “available soon.” All three parts of the trilogy have reached the final stage of their journey: “On DVD and VHS.”

(Of course, there’s still the Return of the King Extended Edition — reportedly coming out in January — which, with more than an hour of additional footage, will be almost like a whole new movie unto itself. So at least that’s something.)

Anyway, I’m so over it. I can’t wait to stop at Target en route home from the bus stop, and buy ROTK. Woohoo! :)

P.S. According to this report from TheOneRing.net, New Line Cinema is reportedly “looking at first releasing the [Extended Edition] in theatres, and…a ’super-trilogy’ Tuesday [is] under consideration.” YAAAAAY!!!

Hat tip to Tiger Trojan for pointing out this interview with Mike Williams:

Petros Papadakis: “If you had to say right now, Mike, what is the possibility percentage-wise of you coming back to SC?”

Mike Williams: “If the NFL doesn’t work out [which it now almost certainly isn’t going to] and if the NCAA does reinstate me, I would say the possibility of me coming back to SC is probably 95% considering my little brother is about to be a freshman there next year.”

WOOHOO!

The L.A. Daily News, however, offers mixed signals about what comes next:

Former USC receiver Mike Williams, hoping to piggyback into the NFL on Maurice Clarett’s antitrust lawsuit, will file a suit of his own, his agent said Monday after Clarett’s case was overturned by an appellate court.

But in a contradiction to Williams’ pending lawsuit, USC coach Pete Carroll said Williams would attempt to get reinstated by the NCAA in order to play for the Trojans next season. …

“We’ve been preparing for this outcome for a while. Mike was aware of this possibility,” Carroll said. “He’ll now look to get reinstated into college by the NCAA. The process is under way, but it will take awhile.

“We’re counting on the NCAA to understand the uniqueness of this situation and give Mike the opportunity to come back to school.” …

[Mike Azzarelli, Williams’ agent] said Williams would attempt to return to USC as a last resort if all his other avenues to the NFL are closed.

“We have not looked at that at all,” he said. “There’d be no reason to address that until July or August.”

Hmm. Call it the fog of football.

According to the L.A. Times, Williams would have to apply not only for reinstatement of his eligbility, but for a waiver of academic requirements:

Williams dropped his classes in February and is not attending summer school. Noel Ragsdale, USC’s faculty athletic representative, said she could not comment specifically about student-athletes’ situations. But she said that institutions can seek from the NCAA a waiver of academic eligibility requirements for a student-athlete. The process is separate from that used for reinstatement.

As for the question, pondered in this space before, of whether USC would want Williams back, CNNSI’s Stewart Mandel wonders:

Williams didn’t exactly leave the program on good terms — he made some critical comments about his teammates to the student newspaper, for one, and those close to the program say the bad blood runs deeper than that. However, if it means Williams getting a chance to play football next season and USC getting the top player in the country back, I think they’ll find a way to settle their differences.

Williams’s statements in his interview with Papadakis seems to suggest that that “settling” is already underway:

Papadakis: “Talk about your relationship with your old teammates from USC. If you came back, what do you think that would be like?”

Williams: “Naturally, there would be some awkwardness because some of the guys haven’t been around me. At the same time, there are guys who have been there for a few years and have been around me, so for the most part, it would be well-received. For the receiver group, those guys are always like, “you were supposed to stay and teach us stuff and if you come back you can still do that,” so guys like Steve and Whitney want me back. I talked to Leinart and he’s like, “come on, man, you’ve got to get back here. Stop acting like a you-know-what.” You know how Leinart is. I talked to Holmes, I talked to a lot of guys. I talk to my old roommate Frostee Rucker, I talk to him a lot and he’s real adamant about it. It’s good to know that the guys who have been there for a few years would want me back. I’ve talked to Coach Carroll a few times, I’ve talked to him this past week, him and Coach Kiffin, I talked to them in great detail. Coach Carroll said it would be a great thing for the alums and fans if it worked out that I came back. Being well-received is not one of my main concerns because if I came back, I would be coming back to win a national championship, I wouldn’t be coming back to be a university idol.”

BoiFromTroy has more.

Stay tuned, as they say.

The Leader of the Free World is under attack!!!

Where are Tom Ridge and the Secret Service when things get really serious? :)

P.S. About those cicadas, the Baltimore Sun notes, in a column called “Rare occurrences in space and time,” that it has been 1,207 years since “Brood X cicadas were flying and breeding during a Transit of Venus.” That would be May 22, AD 797.

This fantastic piece of too-much-time-on-somebody’s-hands research immediately brought to my mind a more practical question: if I do decide to travel to Chicago to see the transit of Venus next month, might I also be able to see cicadas — which, like the transit, are not visible in Phoenix — and thus experience two fascinating natural phenomena in one trip?

Alas, no, reports the Chicago Sun-Times:

Cicadas aren’t expected in the Chicago area until 2007, but the eastern Illinois counties of Vermilion, Edgar and Clark may see some of them this year.

Hmm… how much would a train or bus ticket to one of those counties be? :)

UPDATE: Unfortunately, those counties are quite a ways from Chicago. Danville, in Vermilion County, is the closest decent-sized town, and a Greyhound trip there would take more than 5 hours each way — obviously not feasible for a one-day visit to the Windy City.

But on the bright side — “bright,” that is, if seeing a disgusting swarm of insects is really to be considered a positive thing — Brood XIII will be emerging in northeastern Illinois, northern Indiana and southern Michigan just around the time that I am graduating from Notre Dame Law School in 2007. Perhaps they’ll show up for commencement! :)

The reviews are trickling in, and they suggest that The Day After Tomorrow is both a bad movie…

Hilariously awful in most places, with an incoherent script and questionable acting, “Day After” will come out on Friday and the question will be: Can innumerable, mind-numbing special effects, nearly all of them created on a computer and placed in what can only be called a random order, overcome sheer inanity?

…and bad science:

Oh, the plot. Global warming causes the Gulf Stream to shut down. This current normally brings tropical warmth northward and makes Europe much more comfortable than it should be at its northerly latitude. The heat stays stuck in the tropics, the polar regions get colder, and the atmosphere suddenly flips over in a “superstorm.” The frigid stratosphere trades places with our habitable troposphere, and in a matter of days, an ice age ensues. Temperatures drop 100 degrees an hour in Canada. Hurricanes ravage Belfast. Folks in Japan are clobbered by bowling-ball-size hailstones. If we had only listened to concerned scientists and stopped global warming when we could.

Each one of these phenomena is physically impossible.

Start with the Gulf Stream. Carl Wunsch, a professor of physical oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knows more about ocean currents than most anyone. He thinks the nonsense in The Day After Tomorrow detracts from the seriousness of the global-warming issue. So he recently wrote in the prestigious science journal Nature that the scenario depicted in the movie requires one to “turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth’s rotation, or both.”

The stratosphere will become the troposphere when all three laws of thermodynamics are repealed. Hailstones can’t reach bowling-ball size because their growth is limited by gravity. Hurricanes can’t hit Belfast because the intervening island of Ireland would destroy them.

Heh. [It always goes back to Northern Ireland. -ed.]

Violating all three laws of thermodynamics? It sounds like this movie may rival The Core in terms of bad physics!

Of course, I plan on going to see it anyway. :)

Submit your ideas to the Late Show’s online Top Ten contest: Top Ten Least-Exciting Drudge Report Headlines.

AFP reports:

Senator Hillary Clinton said she could support John McCain, a leading Republican senator, as the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate in November’s presidential election. …

“I’ve spoken with Senator McCain and he assures me he’s not interested, but you know, we’ll see what happens.”

UPDATE: In an almost two-week-old column that I just noticed, Andrew Sullivan muses that a Kerry-McCain ticket is “still highly unlikely, but recent events make it far less so.”

Of course, considering that Hillary has been trying to position herself as a hawk, wouldn’t a Clinton-McCain 2008 ticket make more sense?

That’s the ticket… :)

Via InstaPundit and The Independent, another case of despicable sexual abuse by soldiers. But hey, at least this time it’s multilateral.

P.S. Speaking of the U.N., isn’t it ironic that, whereas our government’s push for war in Iraq clearly was not motivated by oil (or at least, that’s what I’d tend to conclude when we control the Iraqi oil fields yet gas costs $2.06 a gallon), at least some of the war’s opponents clearly were motivated by oil? I’m eagerly awaiting the inevitable apologies (and demands for Kofi Annan’s resignation) from the “no blood for oil” crowd… still waiting…

Earlier, I posted that today had been “fairly uneventful.” That was true for me, but not, as it turns out, for my better half. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the saga of Becky of the Nine Toenails and the Carpet Deodorizer of Doom.

P.S. Becky’s characterization of her reason for going grocery shopping isn’t quite right. But I guess we’ll call it poetic (bloggetic?) license…

Glenn Reynolds has a good post, with good links, about the Libertarian threat to Bush, and other related topics.

From the macro to the micro: I wouldn’t be surprised if Becky’s dad — a normally reliable Reagan Republican — votes Libertarian (or some third party) in November. He’s not at all happy with Bush and the war right now. And this is Arizona, a battleground state.

Of course, this notion of possible Bush weakness among libertarians and Republicans only serves to underscore what a truly terrible choice John Kerry was, and is, for the Democratic nomination. Either Edwards or Lieberman could have realistically won these people’s votes; Kerry’s best hope is that they’ll vote Libertarian or stay home.

It’s a damn shame we picked such a bad candidate when it turns out our opponent was going to be so vulnerable.

Becky and I are regular American Idol viewers, watching the show just about every Tuesday and Wednesday — the only exceptions being when we’re at the dog park or otherwise occupied — and discussing/debating its results on an ongoing basis. But I have thus far refrained from blogging about Idol, partly because I didn’t want to burden myself with the self-imposed responsibility to provide running updates, and partly because I figured my audience, as a whole, probably was not all that interested. (Although I may have been wrong about that, judging from the comments on my last post.)

But now it’s crunch time, and I can’t ignore the show in this space anymore. Tomorrow night, the finalists go head-to-head, and Wednesday night, the winner is announced. What’s more, I’ve got to post about it because, as my late grandfather Tom Loy — God bless him — once famously declared before announcing for the umpteenth time that he wanted to leave the hospital, “I’m going to say something unusual.”

Except, what I’m going to say actually is unusual: Diana DeGarmo will be the next American Idol.

That goes against the conventional wisdom, which says her fellow finalist Fantasia Barrino is more talented, has more personality, and is a shoo-in to win tomorrow night’s vote. The oddsmakers say Fantasia is a 0.26 to 1 favorite, while Diana is a 3.4 to 1 underdog. MSNBC’s Kim Reed says of Diana, “America already has one Kelly Clarkson. Do we really need another belter with a nondescript personality?”

Ouch. But I’m inclined to agree with MSNBC’s resident Diana rooter, Linda Holmes, who writes that Fantasia is an example of the “strange phenomenon in music known as She Is Wildly Talented But I Can’t Stand Listening To Her Sing.” (Alanis Morissette, anyone?)

Diana, on the other hand, is not only talented but thoroughly pleasant-sounding, as well as pleasant-seeming and entirely likable, unlike the sometimes obnoxious Fantasia. She’s a cute, sweet, 16-year-old Southern girl, as lovable and huggable as a teddy bear — not a velvet teddy bear, like last year’s winner Ruben Studdard, but a teddy bear nonetheless. You can’t help rooting for her; she’s the kind of girl you want to see succeed in everything she does.

That’s why I want Diana to win, and why, barring an awful performance tomorrow night, I will vote for her. But that’s not why I think she’ll win. I think Diana will win because she has a bigger fan base and a broader appeal. This year, moreso than last year, American Idol has proven to be at least as much a popularity contest as a talent competition, and notwithstanding Reed’s diss, I think Diana wins the popularity side of things hands-down.

Some of the reasons for this are not so pleasant. There is the racial element — which, as Ruben’s win last year proves, is not necessarily decisive, but is nevertheless relevant. It is probably especially relevant for Fantasia, who is a 19-year-old teenage single mom. That shouldn’t matter, and it certainly doesn’t matter to me, but stereotypes being what they are, she seems much more likely to push people’s “unconscious racism” button than the lovable, velvet Ruben was.

Fantasia can also seem a bit arrogant and standoffish at times. That, in itself, is a legitimate reason to dislike her, but I suspect that being an arrogant black woman — nay, an arrogant black teenage girl with an out-of-wedlock child backstage — may make things a bit worse. Again, it shouldn’t, but it may.

Of course, Fantasia has made it this far, so the public obviously doesn’t hate her. But until now, it didn’t take a majority of the votes to advance; you just had to avoid being the lowest vote-getter of the night. (And Fantasia just barely avoided that fate twice — in the show’s two most unjust votes, when the other two black women, Jennifer Hudson and La Toya London, where voted off.) This time, I think she will not be able to avoid elimination, because I don’t think she will be able to win 51% of the vote.

(Notwithstanding the above commentary, I disagree with Elton John that the show’s results have been fundamentally racist. I think race is one of many elements that inevitably come into play, but it is by no means the be-all and end-all of Idol voting, or the central reason for Jennifer’s and La Toya’s evictions.)

In the end, though, I think Diana will win on her own merits, not on the basis of Fantasia’s flaws or the audience’s alleged latent racism. As I said, Diana is altogether cute and lovable. She’s also quite talented. Don’t confuse Diana with John Stevens, who was painful to listen to by the end, or Jasmine Trias, who never should have gotten as far as she did. Diana is not only popular, she’s also good. Not great — not as good as Clay Aiken — but good. She’s not merely lucky to get this far; she deserves it. And she’ll deserve the win, too.

Diana has also been picking up support as the show has gone along. When this year’s Clay wannabes — alleged teen heartthrobs Jon Paul Lewis and the aforementioned Mr. Stevens — were knocked out of contention, 22-going-on-30-year-old George Huff didn’t inherit their fan base; Diana did. Without a hunky nerd to cheer for, teenyboppers everywhere turned their attention to the remaining contestant who reminded them most of themselves: Diana. (It didn’t hurt that she was singing better week after week, to the point that judge Randy Jackson began to lump her in with Fantasia and La Toya as the show’s best singers, and Simon Cowell admitted he was wrong in previously saying she was too young for the competition.) I think the same thing will happen with Jasmine’s fan base this week: Hawaii will go with DeGarmo.

Although Fantasia has brought down the house with her singing more often than anyone else in the competition, Diana has proven that she is perfectly capable of doing so as well, and she has improved greatly from week to week. If she is totally outclassed tomorrow night, she won’t win; with a few notable exceptions, American Idol voters have generally made the right choice when the talent gap is clear, and I think they would certainly do so in the final. But if Diana holds her own against Fantasia — which I think she can — her infectious smile and adorable personality will put her over the top.

There is one possible fly in the ointment for Diana, however, which might matter if the vote is Florida-close (as the contest between Clay and Ruben was last year). Shiloh High School in Snellville, Georgia, where Diana is a junior (a junior!), is having its graduation tomorrow night. Many of her friends and supporters will be at the graduation, cheering for their other friends, instead of watching Diana on Idol and speed-dial-voting for her over and over again. Some have selected “designated callers” to vote on their behalf, but one wonders whether those designees will be as enthusiastic as Diana’s teenage friends would have been about voting for her 50, 75, 100 times each. And for those who are that enthusiastic, one wonders whether they wouldn’t have voted for Diana the same number of times anyway. In the end, I suspect the graduation may cost Diana a few hundred or even a few thousand votes. Will it make a difference? Probably not, but who knows?

Anyway, I look forward to watching tomorrow night’s show. Alas, I’ll miss the results show — but for a good cause, as Becky and I will be at the awesomely cool Lord of the Rings Symphony in Phoenix. :) We’ll tape the finale and watch it (or at least the end of it) later that night.

P.S. The governors of Georgia, Diana’s home state, and North Carolina, Fantasia’s home state, are cheerleading for their native daughters.

Today has been fairly uneventful so far, but every day for the rest of this week promises some sort of special occasion or something to look forward to:

Tuesday: Return of the King DVD comes out! Buy it. Watch final round on American Idol. Vote for Diana.

Wednesday: Tape American Idol results show. Go to Lord of the Rings Symphony in downtown Phoenix. Go home, watch American Idol results show on tape.

Thursday: Becky’s mom’s birthday. Possibly watch new Return of the King DVD (finally!) in the evening.

Friday: “The Day After Tomorrow” debuts.

Saturday-Monday: Zak siblings in town for Memorial Day and birthday celebration.