Pun Salad

• Are you ugly? Stupid? A jerk? Well, frankly, I'm a little surprised, because just about all our other readers are good-looking, smart, and pleasant. Anyway, you may be interested in checking out a Lore Sjöberg article titled "Ugly? Stupid? A Jerk? Relax, Your Worries Are Over." Hint: it involves the magic of offsets!

• Rosie O'Donnell's 9/11 conspiracist lunacy continues to grate. If you're interested in a standard refutation, Popular Mechanics has the goods. Slightly more interesting (to me, anyway) is thinking about the mentalities involved. What do Rosie's thoughts look like? I mean, the Red Queen thought it was an accomplishment to believe six impossible things before breakfast; Rosie easily beats that.

  I could go on. But Bill Gnade has posted a debunking which is close enough in substance, and much better in execution, than anything I would do myself.

• Apparently the NYT did a stupid review of Brian Doherty's history of libertarianism, Radicals for Capitalism, where one of the shots was:

  The book fails to ask why people who claim to love freedom have so often had a soft spot for those who would deny it to others.

  David Boaz has a good review of the review, but I simply want to point out that there should be some sort of cosmic law that would make it physically impossible for the former employer of Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews to print such a sentence. Have they no shame?

This movie is based on a Hong Kong cop movie, Infernal Affairs that I blogged about back in November 2005.

It gets the full Hollywood Important Movie treatment here, directed by Martin Scorsese, with huge stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin, all pretty much dripping testosterone. And, oh yeah, it also won a pile of awards, including Oscar for Best Picture.

I suppose it might be possible for these guys to make a bad movie, but this isn't it.

A surprising amount of stuff is carried over directly from Infernal Affairs, so if you're in the mood to do a compare-and-contrast, it's kind of fun. Boston gangsters, cops, and the psychologically corrosive nature of undercover work have a great deal of similarity with their Hong Kong counterparts.