Ridley Scott, whose sophomore-try Alien and junior-stretch Blade Runner are distinctly adventurous masterpieces, almost returned to sci-fi with John Logan's version of I Am Legend. With a budget nearing $200 million, the film was scuttled and we know the end result. A Will Smith vehicle. We all had to at least watch it once.

http://www.horrorlair.com/scripts/IAmLegend.txt

"Alterations in the Game had a major impact on the functioning of the entire commune. Although it is true that in many ways the Game's brutal honesty upheld for a long time the highest standards of morality, when it became difficult for members to disagree with Chuck Dederich and other leaders in game formats a significant part of Synanon's system of checks and balances was lost."

Cheaper cars = many more cars = more cumbustion =

Humans in the distant future will laugh at our era's solutions to the pivotal problems of our age.

Masters of the sub-universe, Goldman Sachs looks as if it simply games out no-loss situations in 'proper' precentages that have the potential to trigger collapses at its own reward (nothing new or self destructive until the edges of the market are pushed). While buying into full range mortgage securities, cash-swap defaults to 'insure' them, staking other banks to take similar positions and also having them insured (in this case Societie General), and then making trades planning for a housing collapse, it became Goldman's best interest to destroy AIG by both being paid its 'insurance' and retaining control of the securities. By carefully observing its structure from a puppetmaster level, Goldman survives and thrives while massive shops like Bear Stearns and Lehman are revealed as mere amateurs whose planning and percentages skewed slightly too positive. If this activity remains legal and underwritten by our Government, there will be no end to this exotic envelope pushing. Greed will destroy our species. A metaphor would be building a plane that breaks the sound barrier but is always destroyed attempting it, the occupant's survival only possible if the military steps in to rescue. Sure we broke the sound barrier, but did we? The U.S. spends taxpayer's dollars insuring the smart and help liquidating the dumb.

sectional quotes from a brilliant narrative in the NY Times:

“Al probably did not know it, but he was working with the bears of Goldman,” a former Goldman salesman, who requested anonymity so he would not jeopardize his business relationships, said of Mr. Frost. “He was signing A.I.G. up to insure trades made by people with really very negative views” of the housing market.

By July 2007, when Goldman demanded its first payment from A.I.G. — $1.8 billion — the investment bank had already taken trading positions that would pay out if the mortgage market weakened, according to seven former Goldman employees.

On Nov. 1, 2007, for example, an e-mail message from Mr. Cassano, the head of A.I.G. Financial Products, to Elias Habayeb, an A.I.G. accounting executive, said that a payment demand from Société Générale had been “spurred by GS calling them.

On Aug. 18, 2008, Goldman’s equity research department published an in-depth report on A.I.G. The analysts advised the firm’s clients to avoid the stock because of a “downward spiral which is likely to ensue as more actual cash losses emanate” from the insurer’s financial products unit.

Is Lost a satire of television writing? The so-called finale disclaimer/cop-out:

“Obviously not every question’s going to be answered,” Mr. Cuse said. “We felt if we tried to just answer questions, it would be very pedantic. Apart from that, we also really embrace this notion that there’s a fundamental sort of sense of mystery that we all have in our lives, and certainly that is a huge part of the lives of these characters.”

“To sort of demystify that by trying to literally explain everything down to the last little sort of midi-chlorian of it all would be a mistake in our view,” he added. (In “Star Wars,” midi-chlorians were life forms existing inside all living things; that the “Lost” creators might explain the real-world implications of their fantasy world by referring to another fantasy world is perhaps part of the reason that the series has lost viewers.)

was to have his reviled song "In The Mood" played at his funeral.

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Operation Sandy tested the feasibility of launching rockets from the sea, and its testing of a V-2 launch from the steel-deck of the USS Midway was its first success. The V-2, spoils of the U.S.'s conquering of western, coastal Germany and its Peenemund rocket testing base, was the only model shot from sea. The newsreel link is unavailable on YouTube and is excellent.