L&O Forever

Not a joke: The Law & Order Channel might actually happen.     1 comment(s)  

Oh, bestill my throbbing heart!

Honestly, L&O is the only reason I turn on the television at all these days.
      ...posted by Elle on November 26, 2003 9:03 AM

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 TTT:EE

I enjoyed the Two Towers release just fine when it came out.

This fellow reviews the Extended version in some detail and declares it much, much better than the theatrical release.

I planned to get it anyway, but now I'm excited about it. :)

Polytropos: The Two Towers: Extended, Enhanced, Redeemed

Watching it doesn’t feel like seeing the same movie with some added bits. It’s like watching the real movie for the first time.

...The upshot, when all is said and done, is that I am both delighted and angry. Delighted for obvious reasons, but angry because it is one hundred percent clear that this is the movie that Peter Jackson made: the complete aesthetic product as it was intended. When you see how much more smoothly the movie flows, and how many key explanations and character details are in it, there can be no doubt. The theatrical release was a compromised version, a lesser affair, and it’s a travesty that Jackson was made to do damage to his creation before they’d put it in theatres.

Well then. We'll be buying it soon, I imagine.     2 comment(s)  

It is absolutely a much better movie in this edition. We loved the Fellowship extended edition but this one is world's better. I can't go back to the original version at this point.
      ...posted by Andy Affleck on November 25, 2003 4:29 PM

I think the one thing keeping me from buying these two 4-disc sets is that I'm concerned come this time next year (or a little later) that they'll release a set with all three movies that has even MORE stuff on it than the extended sets have now. I'd hate to shell out the money now, and then wish I'd waited.
      ...posted by Chris on November 25, 2003 10:57 PM

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 Audio of Supreme Court arguments

In the positive column, here's a nice historical project for the public good:

Interview with Jerry Goldman [Creative Commons]

Jerry Goldman is determined to archive every recorded oral argument and bench statement in the Supreme Court since 1955, when the Court began to tape-record its public proceedings.

Goldman, a professor of political science at Northwestern, founded the OYEZ Project in 1989 "to create and share a complete and authoritative archive of Supreme Court audio."

This month the OYEZ mission takes a new step forward with the release of hundreds of hours of MP3 versions of their archived audio under a Creative Commons license.

Of immediate interest only to scholars, I suppose, but a great public service nonetheless.

Who knows what people will be able to synthesize from a much more easily-perused public record.  

 FOIA failures

Derek Willis relays some interesting bad-government behavior:

The Scoop :: Tales from the FOIA Crypt

From the National Security Archive's audit of federal agency responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests: "In January 2003, the Archive filed FOIA requests asking for copies of the '10 oldest open or pending' FOIA requests at each of the 35 federal agencies that together handle more than 97% of all FOIA requests. Six agencies still have not responded in full, more than ten months later and despite repeated phone contacts."

So, meta-requests get stalled too.