Hollywood is too stupid. Now the phenomenally untalented Keira Knightley will get a chance to suck while trying to play Anna Karenina. It is as if she hadn’t made enough money slaughtering Pride & Prejudice and now has to supplement her income ridiculing a masterpiece of Russian literature. I have no idea what kind of an idiot makes these casting decisions. Not only is this woman an anorexic* (which makes her completely unsuited to playing this particular role) but she is also as non-Russian looking as one can get.

I believe that both Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina are pretty bad as works of literature go. But they are not as bad as to deserve Keira Knightley.

On Friday, I’m planning to drag myself to the movie theater for the first time in over a year and watch Cloud Atlas. Of course, it will mean that I’ll have to stare at the ugly and talentless Tom Hanks for almost 3 hours but I’m almost resigned to that. Good movies or even not completely horrible movies hardly ever come to our theater in Southern Illinois. We’ve had some idiotic anti-Obama documentary run here for months. And that was the only documentary our theater has offered in years. The only reason to watch Hollywood movies is for the special effects, and Cloud Atlas looks like it will have quite a few of them.

If you watched Cloud Atlas already and want to tell me it sucks, please don’t. I have very little motivation to go to the movies as it is. But if you want to tell me it is great, then please do. I don’t want this to become yet another failed plan to get myself to the movie theater.

* Anorexics were not considered beautiful in XIXth century Russia. This type of woman was:

I think the semester is getting to everybody. My colleagues have started a long email exchange on whether creationism is anti-scientific. The most recent contribution from a colleague at the Law School is that rejecting creationism is anti-scientific because the truly scientific method gives equal consideration to all theories. Another colleague agreed that creationism is “a strong competing theory” for evolution and has to be taught.

This entire debacle was started by somebody inviting us (college professors) to a talk on creationism by a homeschooled student where we would “defend our faith and glorify God in  the process.” Given that we are a state university and are not normally allowed even to mention our political preferences in personal emails sent out from the university server, people started to wonder why this kind of religious propaganda was suddenly allowed to be sent out to everybody through the university email.

Thanksgiving break can’t come soon enough.