In Which I Get Excited About Seeing The New Wallace and Gromit Short

The last legitimate Wallace and Gromit installment, A Close Shave, is over a decade old and my hope is that A Matter of Loaf and Death will cleanse my palate of the middling, feature-length W&G --- which Dreamworks evidently mucked with, and mucked up, much more than I'd thought. According to this Telegraph piece on creator Nick Park:

[T]he experience of working for a big, pushy American studio left a sour taste in Park's mouth. He found the experience stressful. It didn't suit his nature. This, after all, is a man who is happiest when out bird-watching with his binoculars in the English countryside. 'I would get these notes saying, "Shouldn't Wallace have a cooler, more modern car?" and I would say, "No, you're missing the point. The irony doesn't translate. It's cool because it's not." Having made three half-hour films already, I was in a position where I could say, "No, Wallace wouldn't do it." There is a false assumption that if things look old-fashioned children won't relate to it. Well, my favourite programme as a child was Dad's Army.'

Itchy The Killer

Atul Gawande's latest article in the New Yorker sounds like an awesome horror story. Phantom limbs, the nervous system and the science of pyschotic, compulsive and self-mutilating itching:

For M., the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, "this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid." She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.'s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night--and all the way into her brain.

WoooOOOOOaaaaahhhh!

[via Jonah Lehrer, a bastard who isn't linking to the New Yorker article]

I'm Out for Justice, Steven Seagal!

Steven Seagal must think he is Above the Law. Anthony Pellicano—the private investigator on trial for wiretapping and racketeering charges that stem from duties he reportedly performed for clients like Seagal—has been accused of threatening journalists. And yet the direct-to-DVD action star and friend of mystical dogs remains Out of Reach.

Pellicano is alleged to have had Anita M. Busch (a reporter who was working on an article about Mr. Seagal for The Los Angeles Times) Marked for Death—placing a fish and a rose in her car along with a bullet-size hole in the windshield. (It's unclear whether Pellicano made the threat of Attack Force personally or via a hired Shadow Man.) Bernard Weinraub, a journalist for the The New York Times who has worked with Busch, was reportedly Under Siege by associates of Mr. Pellicano, as well, but the Flight of Fury doesn't stop there. Two months after the Busch incident, Ned Zeman, a reporter working on another article about Mr. Seagal, this one for Vanity Fair, found himself Under Siege too, Dark Territory for any journalist. According to The New York Times, while Zeman was driving, a man pulled up, aimed a gun at him, said, “Stop,” and pulled the trigger. Not Out for a Kill, the man's gun was empty, but he did say, “Bang," suggesting Zeman would not be Hard to Kill.

Mr. Pellicano has not been charged in connection with the Zeman incident, leading me to suspect that Seagal may be the crazy idiot responsible for all these threats. Shame on you, Steven Seagal!

ALSO. One particularly strange footnote to the whole proceeding, as reported by the Times, is that Pellicano's former audio technician and close associate, Wayne Reynolds, told the court he now works for Vanity Fair publishers Condé Nast. The NYT's David Carr writes:

I later checked and, indeed, Mr. Reynolds has a Condé Nast phone number in New York (he did not return my call) and is listed in the company directory. Now, Mr. Reynolds may be a whiz with technology — he testified with a great deal of specificity about the black boxes used to record intercepted calls — but his testimony raised a troubling question: why would Condé Nast hire him?

This one is duh: To protect themselves from Steven Seagal!

Each Penny Cost 1.67 Cents To Mint, Report Pun-Loving Journalists

The Seattle Times, The New York Times, The Oakland Tribune, The San Diego Union-Tribune, this blogging guy ... they all love employing "Stop Making Cents" when describing the current status of the penny. Namely, that it's so expensive to make one relative to its value that the U.S. Mint has lost over $115 million in under a year making them and that there is now a Federal ban on melting pennies, nickels and dimes down for scrap.

Other annoying pun options for discussing this situation include: "The Penny Stops Here" from The Washington Post, "Common Cents" from Time magazine and most recently (and tolerably) "Penny Dreadful" from The New Yorker.

If only there were someone with a good idea about what to do, who was also capable of something funny ... someone like Obama's wonky economics advisor Austan Goolsbee! "Now That a Penny Isn’t Worth Much, It’s Time to Make It Worth 5 Cents"!? Now, that's a funny title! (And it also happens to be a good way around the Lincoln-penny loving sentiment as covertly supported by the nefarious zinc lobby. It's really too bad that some monied weirdo will just rally all the Thomas Jefferson enthusiasts who love those 2006 forward-facing nickels. Sorry, Goolsbee.)

Is Wind Energy Getting FERC'd On Powerlines?

Judged exclusively by reporting from UPI and elsewhere this February, it had seemed like the recent attempts by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to ensure affordable electricity prices and resolve discrimination in regional power markets would be a good thing for the wind industry. But, as Jeff Beattie of The Energy Daily reports, the American Wind Energy Association is reversing their initially happy assessment of the new FERC rules:

[W]ind developers—whose projects are awaiting interconnection in large numbers—say the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission did not go far enough and that major cost allocation issues must be more forcefully addressed before the so-called “interconnection queuing” problems will be fixed.
The order, approved Thursday at a FERC monthly meeting, stops well short of ordering regional transmission organizations (RTO) or independent system operators (ISO) to take any specific steps to revise the interconnection queue processes.
[...] In a written statement, Rob Gramlich, policy director for the American Wind Energy Association, said FERC needs to encourage RTOs and ISOs to conduct cost allocation studies to spread new interconnection costs more broadly among market participants. The current system unfairly saddles the new generator with large and unpredictable costs, slowing development of wind and other renewable power projects, he said.
“The underlying cause [of interconnection backlog] remains unaddressed—the rules of the road still require the next car on the entrance ramp to pay for the whole highway,” Gramlich said.

Some of the problem seems to be that as little as a quarter of all power generation projects submitted to grid operators end up being built, and that the ISOs and RTOs lack the staff to perform the requisite "system impact studies" to determine how new plants could effect their grids. The FERC's main recommendation so far has been a “first-ready, first served” policy by which RTOs and ISOs could shuffle interconnection queues after evaluating which projects were likely to succeed. With only sketchy details on how grid managers might make these judgments, the FERC seems to be offering an open window for graft and corruption. The policy also sounds designed to preferentially treat firms with excess capital to throw into initial design phases, which I'm willing to bet are predominantly of the monied and well-entrenched coal and natty gas variety.

[Link to The The Energy Daily article. Subscription required.]