Musto a Must, Klawans on Cronenberg, Saul Bass does Star Wars

I love Marilyn Monroe. And I love that Michael Musto has spoofed the Lohan as Monroe photo shoot. You really owe to yourself to check out the slide show if you haven't seen these.

Wikipedia is struggling to figure out its economics. Perhaps it should consult itself? Kidding. I respect that they're trying to avoid that route.

Andrew Bird is blogging for the Times about songwriting.

A.S. Byatt believes the Orange Prize is sexist.

Sarah Michelle Gellar will star in an adaptation of Paulo Coelho's monster international hit, Veronika Decides to Die. Meanwhile, the character Buffy, living a graphic life happily without Gellar, thankyouverymuch, has had a lesbian experience.

Ray Pride has a link to supercritic Stuart Klawans' consideration of Cronenberg's very...Cronenbergian short "At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World," his contribution to Chacun son cinema, which I'm quite interested in seeing.

Yardley on Roget:

You're likely to find a copy of Roget's Thesaurus or one of its innumerable derivatives in the reference library of anyone who writes English well and -- perhaps more revealing -- in the library of anyone who writes English badly. It is at once an immensely useful compilation of synonyms that enables writers to identify the exact words they need, and a crutch leaned upon by journalists, speechwriters, graduate students, academics and others who sometimes are more concerned with sounding learned than with actually being learned.

For precisely this second reason the thesaurus has been a source of controversy ever since Peter Mark Roget brought out his first edition of 1,000 copies in May 1852. Though Roget's motives in compiling the thesaurus were scholarly and, so Joshua Kendall argues in this biography, therapeutic, some critics were quick to point out, accurately, that a book such as this encourages laziness and glibness rather than diligence and precision. My father, an elegant prose stylist, regarded Roget's with scorn and tried to discourage his students, not to mention his children, from using it. As for myself, I find it an immensely useful tool for recalling words that have slipped from my totally fallible memory, but I like to think -- I certainly hope -- that I do not use it in the service of mere pretentiousness.

I love this video. Someone envisioned what Star Wars would have looked liked if the opening credits had been designed by Saul Bass. (via Blue Kitchen, a cool blog I came across today)