Former Atlantic star Matt Yglesias writes:

“Definitely the whole time I was employed at The Atlantic I never once returned a voicemail. I figure that anyone who’s really eager to get in touch with me will email me.”

A restored version of the BBC Pride & Prejudice is coming to blu-ray (sans zombies).

The screencaps on Amazon suggest that a very nice job has been done, not only remastering the print but even better–restoring the aspect ratio to the native film it was shot in, as opposed to the grotesque 4:3 which it was broadcast in. Take a look:

By the by, my local Fox affiliate is now broadcasting Seinfeld re-runs in similarly remastered, gorgeous hi-definition. Before they had simply stretched the old 4:3 versions, making Jerry, Elaine, and the gang look like fun-house versions of themselves.

The Gormogons has a nifty map showing global connectedness–the measure being how long it takes to get from any given point on the globe to a major city. Interestingly enough, Greenland seems to be, far and away, the least connected place on earth.

I’ve flown over (actually, past) Greenland a bunch of times, but until last fall, it had always been at night. Anyway, last October I had a window seat as we passed the the island during the afternoon and it was wild. Giant, giant mountains, a sprawling coast, and no signs of life whatsoever. Could have been Middle Earth.

Another fantastic issue of Wired is out. Lots of great stuff to read, include this fantastic piece about Penn and Teller and the neuroscience of magic.

I just wish Ricky Jay made an appearance.

If you were somehow caught on the bleeding edge with HD-DVD, Santino has amazing, awesome news for you: Warner Bros. is offering a program to swap out your HD-DVDs for Blu-ray discs for $5.

Just click here.

Best part: You don’t even have to given them your old HD-DVDs!

It’s win-win-win. WB deserves a ton of praise for this.

Of course he is.

I suppose a medium can’t be responsible for its users. I get that as an intellectual proposition. Tens of thousands of incredibly stupid–or even morally repugnant–people have written books, but we don’t hold the book responsible as a format.

But for some reason, I think Twitter might be different. It seems to attract more–much, much more–than its share of users who combine vapidity and vanity in ways that are embarrassing even by the standards of the internet.

As part of my restitution to Mickey Kaus I’m trying to keep tabs on some of the long-lost members of his Enemies List^TM, thus this fantastically puerile and revealing quote from Sasha Frere-Jones’s semi-profile of Lady Gaga:

Lady Gaga and I share preferences, especially as far as well-written pop music goes, and I am thrilled to see Communism and Rilke getting ink.

There’s more.

There’s a minor epic Harry Knowles rant about the new Wolverine movie over at AICN in which Knowles goes ape over the new Emma Frost character spot for the flick (you can see it here).

It’s such a perfect confluence: Knowles getting his geek flame going on a subject of relatively minor importance. And even better, Knowles is simply wrong on the geek facts. It’s pretty clear he actually doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

And yet . . .

The new Wolverine looks dreadful–maybe a half-step up from the Catwoman spin-off. Which is fine, except that it looks like they are going to screw up Emma Frost.

Frost is, for my money, the most interesting character in the Marvel universe. Probably the second most interesting character in all of comics. (This is going way, way into nerd territory.) For the un-initiated, her story goes something like this:

Raised in an upper-upper class home, Frost is a Choate kind of girl who develops mutant abilities as a teenager. She becomes a mid-level telepath, kind of a JV version of Charles Xavier. As she grows up circumstance and her own inner narcissism lead her to disdain normal humans and she becomes a villain known as the White Queen.

Like Magneto, the White Queen is more about staking a claim for species and class superiority than she is about taking over the world. But after many years as a bad-guy, she falls in love with one of the good-guy X-Men, Cyclops.

And here’s where her character gets really interesting: Frost is honestly in love with Cyclops; but for Cyclops, she’s basically the rebound girl (after the death of Jean Grey). Yet Frost is a smart cookie and very self aware. She knows that she’s not his first choice–and that she’ll have to give up her super-villain lifestyle to be with Cyclops. And she decides to do it anyway.

So in the later comics, we have Frost as part of the good-guy X-Men, even though she not-so-secretly disdains them. Because, as Woody Allen once said, the heart wants what it wants. Her conflict concerning all of the above comes closer to approaching middle-brow art than just about anything else in comics these days. (See Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run for a good bit of it.)

And then there’s the movie. In which Frost story seems to have been, well, re-imagined. It’s like turning Bain into a mindless goon with 15 seconds of sreentime in the final Schumaker Batman.