I saw Superman Returns last night. It was one of the most powerful and important films I’ve ever seen. Please, do yourself a favor and go see it. Even if you think it’s not the kind of film you’d enjoy, you may find yourself surprised by its high production values, compelling script and remarkably humorous (and human) star.
Dell said Wednesday that it would offer free recycling of any of its machines, regardless of whether their owners were buying replacement systems from Dell.
That’s good news for folks with obsolete Dell boxes lying around. I think I might know a few folks. 
I haven’t really been following the flap about Kos. But Billmon’s lengthy wrap-up seemed smart. The closing ‘grafs are particulary worthwhile:
The Lieberman Dems don’t hate and fear Kos and the Daily Kos “community” because they are too far to the left. They hate them because they represent an emerging power center within the Democratic Party that they don’t control — what’s more, one that is now much closer to the public mainstream on the central issue of our time (the Iraq War) than they are. The overriding concern for the neolibs, I think, is not that Kos and the netroot activists will lead the party off to the far-left fringes, but rather that they are willing, even eager, to form alliances with conservative nationalists like Jim Webb (the Va. Senate candidate) who’ve been forced out of the GOP because of their opposition to the neocons and their insane schemes…. Add in the cheerful brutality with which Kos and Jerome have skewered the consultants and the DLC Dems, the primary defeat now looming over Joe Lieberman’s head, and the rice bowls that could be broken if the old system of campaign graft is abandoned, and it’s easy to understand why the long knives are out. Whether the grown ups (Peretz, Lieberman, Hillary) actually set the Swiftboat in motion, or just watched approvingly (“Who shall rid us of this meddlesome blogger?”) as their hatchet boys did what comes natural, is almost irrelevant. The important thing to understand is that we have reached the point where the Dinos and their media allies are willing to use Rovian tactics against anyone who challenges their entrenched position — even someone like Kos, who is hardly the second coming of Henry Wallace or George McGovern. Whether that’s good or bad for the Kossaks I don’t know — I suppose it depends on how much credence you give to Gandhi’s old saw: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” In the real world — and in imperial America, too — the truth is that sometimes they ignore you, then ridicule you, then fight you and crush you like an overripe eggplant. We’ll see if that’s true this time. Either way, though, it looks like the battle between the netroots and dino Dems is going to get very down and dirty indeed.
Fascinating.
Al Gore. Bender. Futurama. Global warming. Short. Funny. Viral.
We went on a nice early-season hike in the Cascades this weekend to Silver Lake, which is above the abandoned mining town of Monte Cristo on the Mountain Loop Highway. There’s something fascinating about old buildings returning back into the forest — a reminder of just how impermanent human efforts can be.
The lake, although still snowed in, was pretty nice too.
… even when it rains for four days straight and you don’t see the sun at all. Actually, makes it feel quite a lot like Seattle.
I had forgotten just how green it can be here. Especially when the clouds are dark and the new leaves still have the last fading electricity of spring still them.
I’ve never been inside a Wal-Mart, and fates willing, never will be. But still, I read with fascination Michael Pollan’s article in today’s NYTimes about the coming entry of Wal-Mart (!) into the organic foods business.
As Pollan points out, there is both good and bad in this. Nobody will be able to deride organic as “elitist” anymore. Wal-Mart’s purchasing power will be voting in favor of reducing pesticide use. But,
To say you can sell organic food for 10 percent more than you sell irresponsibly priced food suggests that you don’t really get it — that you plan to bring business-as-usual principles of industrial “efficiency” and “economies of scale” to a system of food production that was supposed to mimic the logic of natural systems rather than that of the factory.
In other words, get ready for an explosion of organic factory farms, and seeing more organic food imported from halfway across the world — and therefore soaked in petroleum.
Interesting times.