Linkage XIII

TomKat's TomKitten I don't follow celebrity stuff... much. The whole Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes romance strikes me as rather silly and somewhat creepy. But at Slate, Dana Stevens has a hilarious breakdown on the Cruise's (or Cruise's-to-be) plans to have their baby Scientology style. If these people weren't celebrities, this would be downright scary stuff.

Two Timely A recent discovery among my bookmarks from past surfing sessions is Query Letters I Love, a site maintained by people in the Industry on which they post really, really crazy, weird and lame movie script query letters. Two of my favorite recent posts covered a script about a gang of specially trained priests hunting down a group of children who have accidentally opened the gates of Hell, and then another about a psychiatrist who discovers she is the subject of an ancient Hebrew prophecy which also involves four women who are supposed to be in their sixties but look much younger and who may be hiding deeper secrets. Who says there are no original ideas in Hollywood?

Smurfageddon This has been bouncing around the 'net for a week, but I still find this UNICEF produced short film showing Smurfs as war victims, um, deeply misguided. I'm a pacifist, but this is just silly. Stuff like this makes John Bolton seem sane.

Shakespeare = Sir Henry Neville There is a whole sub-industry of people who try to figure out who really wrote William Shakespeare's plays, going off the assumption that this rather simple and unsophisticated theatre man lacked the experience and access to have written about the themes addressed in his plays. Brian Weatherson notes the latest alternative, Sir Henry Neville, whose movements and background seem to fit the work's background better than Shakespeare's. But what is more interesting is that people continue to wonder about this.

Another Way to Stick It to the Man? Worried that surveillance cameras are watching you in public spaces? Troubled by being the subject of facial recognition scanners? BoingBoing has the answer, hoodie sweat shirts which can turn into masks. But Michael Froomkin suggests that wearing masks in public my be illegal in the United States!