Happy Halloween, Dullards!

PASTE (Don't eat it.)

PASTE magazine is offering a Radioheadesque name-your-price promotion. Fill out this form and you get to decide how much a 1-year subscription is worth to you.

The minimum price for 11 issues of decent pop journalism and 11 quite-good-in-a-KCRW-kinda-way CD samplers is one US dollar. Coincidentally the maximum price, unless you are a sucker, is also one US dollar.

The perfect excuse

You may have heard about the fake news conference in which FEMA employees posed as reporters to ask softball questions about the SoCal wildfires. Now FEMA regrets the whole thing, of course.

Now comes this from a FEMA guy:

"I did not have good situational awareness of what was happening."

This is my new catch-all rationale for everything I do wrong:

• Pulled over for speeding? "Officer, I did not have good situational awareness."

• Forgot to get milk at the store? "Honey, I did not have good situational awareness."

• Rushed our country into war with shaky intelligence? "My fellow Americans, I did not have good situational awareness."

It just about covers everything.

Clinton still saying the right things

Clinton vows review of executive power, would possibly cede some of it. Getting warmer....

Possible Dullard costume for Halloween

Halloween (pretty much my favorite holiday) is only a week away. This year, I'm thinking of being scary Larry Craig, the disgraced senator from Idaho. I may wear this mask, dress in a suit with a flag pin on the lapel, and walk around with a boarding pass.

See you in the restroom! (Related post here.)

UPDATE: The costume went over pretty well at a Halloween party I went to on Saturday. It required explanation now and again, but once people got it, they laughed. Curiously, one party-goer asked, "Are you dressed as a Republican?" I responded, "Yes, but which one?" It turned out she had never heard of Larry Craig or his bathroom brouhaha.

dot.tunes

Just putting this here so I'll remember it, and it may be of interest to the 20% of our readers who work at Gracenote: the DOT.TUNES software and plugins allow you to stream your iTunes collection to an iPod Touch, iPhone, web browser, or even gaming console. Pretty spiffy.

The kraken deconstructed

The role of the giant squid in literature gets its due in this essay, which traces the great beast from Greek mythology to "SpongeBob Squarepants."

Bring the boys back home

Clinton pledges to end war "immediately" upon taking office.

She just became a much more interesting candidate to me. I'm still not voting for her in the primary on principle, though. Counting GHWB's veep stint, there's been either a Bush or Clinton in the Whitehouse since I was 12. I don't want that continuing until I'm 48. That's just insane.

Pete Doherty meets Paul McCartney

Macca interviewed by slovenly British ne'er-do-well.

Today's Coolness: Moths

From Neatorama, the World’s Weirdest Moths.

Possible Dullard Feat of Strength

Ride a bike through Times Square. David Byrne shows you how in this clip best viewed with Quicktime.

Stephen Colbert is a NYT op-ed columnist

And so can you!

Gatorland rebuilding

Of note to anyone who grew up in Orlando: Gatorland Breaks Ground On New Complex After Devastating Fire

Man I loved that place when I was a kid. More than Disney World and Sea World put together. But that was probably because we went to Disney too much -- every damn time relatives visited, we had to go to Disney. None of my stupid cousins wanted to go where the action really was: Gatorland and the Mystery Fun House.

You Blade Runner! You shut up now!

I didn't get a chance to vote in the poll, but I did see the Final Cut of Blade Runner the other night. It's basically a cleaned up version of the Director's Cut from 1992, which Ridley Scott wasn't actually directly involved with: a better-looking unicorn dream sequence, cleaned up stunt-double insertions. More of a refinement than a radical reworking, but it looks great.

Oh, and Batty clearly says "I want more life, FATHER" this time. That makes more sense thematically, but just isn't as cool.

Wonder what the Vegas odds are that there'll be a final final cut in 2019?

Anyway, the Final Cut is clearly superior (just for the remastering of picture and sound, in addition to the small fixes) to the "Director's Cut," and both are a vast improvement over the theatrical release. But I can't get behind the unicorn scene. Something else that raised the question of whether Deckard was a replicant rather than implying rather unequivocably that he is, would have been preferable.

If you're a big enough fan of the movie to have read this far then replacing your Director's cut DVD will be worthwhile, especially once the hi-def wars have been settled. It's coming out in a variety of interesting editions (miniature hover car! origami unicorn!) in time for xmas.

Q&A with Wes Anderson

An interview at the Onion A/V Club, pegged to Anderson's new movie, "The Darjeeling Limited." Here's the trailer.

Stephen Colbert is ... America!

And so can you! Excerpts from the Stephen Colbert book are now available.

Ebony and Ivory voted worst duet in history

Sounds about right. All due respect, Sir Paul.

David Byrne Journal

David drives cross-country, doesn't find an excellent place for a fist fight.

When was your first time to rock?

A writer at MSNBC had a good idea for an essay but took too long recounting his first concert, a Pat Benatar show in Phoenix.

We'd love to hear about your first time with live rock 'n' roll. Tell us the performer, approximate date, venue, summary of the show and assessment of it based on the Dullard rating system of rocked, sucked or so-so. I'll start:

PERFORMER: The Who, with opening act the B-52s
DATE: Fall 1982
VENUE: Tangerine Bowl, Orlando
SUMMARY: Part of the Who's first "farewell tour" with the band still in "here's one from the new album" mode. Sponsored by Schlitz beer in a time when such corporate tie-ins were still somewhat shameful. The B-52s opened and were not greeted warmly.
RATING: Rocked. Sure, this wasn't "Live at Leeds" but it was still the Who, or at least three-fourths of them.

Those aren't your memories

Yet another cut of "Blade Runner" is hitting screens in the big cities, with a mega-DVD release to follow. It's all tied to the movie's 25th anniversary. This NYT article explains everything — and includes semi-spoilers, in case you were the last person still wondering whether Deckard was a replicant.

UPDATE: Check out the trailer for the "final cut" version. There's still enough time for L.A. to look like this by 2019 — if it doesn't already, except for the endless rain.