Some thoughts about Andrew Breitbart.

Oh. Oh no. Stop. Please.

No más.

I’m so far removed from the world of popular culture that not only had I not seen a single movie nominated for Best Picture. Not only did I not know what films had been nominated for Best Picture. But I didn’t even know the Academy Awards were/had taken place.

And to think there was a time in my life when I watched probably 120 movies a year.

I feel less awful about it, however, reading Galley Friend Mike Russell’s live Tweet stream from his coverage of the alt-universe Academy Awards telecast. It’s unbelievably funny. Sample awesome:

Harvey Weinstein’s public apology was a nice surprise, though I’m not sure he needed to throw “Shakespeare In Love” under the bus like that
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The breaks where they cut to Cintra Wilson live-blogging the show have improved since Camille Paglia showed up
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Jonathan Winters, 87, reprising all his movie roles in one staccato 2-minute marathon. Amazing. Standing O when he got to THE LOVED ONE.

When Olympia Snowe announced her sudden retirement yesterday, President Obama put out the following statement:

For almost three decades, Olympia Snowe has served the people of the great state of Maine.  Elected to the state House in 1973, Olympia went on to be the first woman in American history to serve in both houses of a state legislature and both houses of Congress.  From her unwavering support for our troops, to her efforts to reform Wall Street, to fighting for Maine’s small businesses, Senator Snowe’s career demonstrates how much can be accomplished when leaders from both parties come together to do the right thing for the American people. Michelle and I join Mainers in thanking Senator Snowe for her service, and we wish her and her family all the best in the future.

Translation: If you were going to retire anyway, why didn’t you just vote for the fucking healthcare bill? We all know you wanted to. Bitcah.

Bobby Jindal is fantastic in this video. But the expressions on the faces of the other two Republican Bright Young Things are priceless. It’s high school all over again.

That’s the Ernst Riser sequence and it is epic.

Start with this essay by Rod Hilton, passed along by Galley Friend A.K. It’s about the best order to watch the Star Wars series for someone who’s never seen any of the movies. And the case for IV, V, I, II, III, VI is quite compelling:

George Lucas be­lieves that Star Wars is the story of Anakin Sky­walker, but it is not. The pre­quels, which es­tab­lish his char­ac­ter, are so poor at being char­ac­ter-dri­ven that, if the series is about Anakin, the entire series is a failure. Anakin is not a re­lat­able char­ac­ter, Luke is.

This al­ter­na­tive order (which a com­menter has pointed out is called Ernst Risterorder) inserts the prequel trilogy into the middle, al­low­ing the series to end on the sen­si­ble ending point (the de­struc­tion of the Empire) while still be­gin­ning with Luke’s journey.

Ef­fec­tively, this order keeps the story Luke’s tale. Just when Luke is left with the burning ques­tion “how did my father become Darth Vader?” we take an ex­tended flash­back to explain exactly how. Once we un­der­stand how his father turned to the dark side, we go back to the main sto­ry­line and see how Luke is able to rescue him from it and salvage the good in him.

The prequel back­story comes at the perfect time, because Empire Strikes Back ends on a huge cliffhanger. Han is in car­bonite, Vader is Luke’s father, and the Empire has hit the re­bel­lion hard. De­lay­ing the res­o­lu­tion of this cliffhanger makes it all the more sat­is­fy­ing when Return of the Jedi is watched.

But wait–there’s more! Hilton proposes an alternate sequence: IV, V, II, III, VI.

Look closely. You’ll see what he’s done there. I’m not going to spoil his reasoning. You should read the whole thing yourself.

Hilton’s most mind-blowing reveal, however is way at the top. And it’s this:

For people that couldn’t care less about the prequel trilogy, I suggest Harmy’s De­spe­cial­ized Edi­tions. They are 720p blu-ray discs (AVCHD discs ac­tu­ally) that are the result of “Harmy” from The Orig­i­nal Trilogy forums painstak­ingly re­con­struct­ing the the­atri­cal re­leases of all three films uti­liz­ing a wide variety of video sources as well as custom mattes.

And . . . I’m spent.

If someone is already sitting on a Harmy edition blu-ray . . .

Courtesy of Galley Brother B.J. Best surprise–the guy from Starship Troopers starting in the defensive secondary.

There’s a lot of really interesting things about this NYT infographic: How the relative size (adjusted for inflation) of the leaders during the tech bubble was so outsized. How the changes at the top of the leaderboard were so rare for 60 years, and then began to cluster.

But the thing which I found most surprising was the total number of “largest companies” in the last 90 years. I would never, ever have guessed that the answer was “12.”