Pun Salad

• Via BBSpot, a very funny Wired column in which Lore Sjöberg offers up his perfectly believable explanations of why he was querying the Google for things like "hot lemur on tarsier action".

• As a matter of fact, it looks like you and I should read just about everything by Lore Sjöberg. And not just because I like looking up the HTML encoding of ö. Even though he looks like a young Charles Manson, I'm sure he's just a nice Scandinavian-extracted kid at heart like you and me. Well, me.

  And he's an excellent writer too, like you and me. Well, you.

• UNH's own Shawn Macomber has been paying attention, and reports that the French are really unpopular.

• And if you're a geek looking for decorating ideas at home or office, here are some great ones. (Via GeekPress of course.)

(Yes, movie weekend is beginning a bit early at Salad Manor, due to a well-deserved day off.)

Every so often I'm surprised by a better-than-expected movie, and this is one of those. The director, John Singleton, coaxes great performances out of every actor involved. The script features clever dialog, and doesn't skimp on characterization in favor of mindless violent action. (Although there's plenty of that, fortunately.) It's beautifully shot.

The idea is that four adopted sons of a saintly ex-hippie (played by Fionnula Flanagan) is murdered in a convenience store robbery. The brothers (Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Gibson, André Benjamin, and Garrett Hedlund) decide, with varying levels of enthusiasm, to try to figure out whodunnit. And, guess what, they do, with lots of ensuing mayhem.

It's not a great ad for the Detroit Police, however: only one unambiguously honest cop is shown. They're apparently unaware of several outbreaks of mini-warfare in the city until they're long over. And they've got no problem with beating on people under interrogation.

I put off seeing Fantastic Four due to lackluster reviews, but I read this comic a lot in college, so how long could I resist?

The good: Michael Chiklis is just about perfect as Ben Grimm, aka The Thing. He's the centerpiece of the movie, and rightfully so, since he was always, at least to my college-age mind, the most interesting of the quartet. And the special effects are pretty good.

And it was nice to see Stan Lee in a cameo. How cool must that have been, to—even in a movie—actually talk to the superheroes you helped invent?

The not-so-good: everybody else, including the venerable Dr. Doom. I mean … they're practically teenyboppers in this movie! Reed Richards was graying around the temples because he was, um, mature. (In this movie, it's due to the accident that gives the group their powers.) No doubt the script doctors claimed that having heroes and villians older than 29 would have hurt the box office. Feh!

And the dialog is beyond wooden.