I love seeing camaraderie among our elites, so I was heartened by this picture from the G-20 summit.

After all, our president wouldn’t be giving us the thumbs up unless everything really was okay. He was a community organizer, so he’s never going to forget–even for a minute–about the tough economic times ordinary working Americans are facing.

Yet at the same time, that picture reminded me of another one from the recent past.

Alas, even that enlightened moment of bliss ended in tears. But then, these kinds of things usually do.

Didn’t Battlestar Galactica teach us anything?!?!

Comes a movie about the brave hippies who made a small concert in upstate New York into an event that would define a generation. And put the world on notice.

Also, the protagonist is gay, but closeted.

So WWTDD is passing on a rumor about a certain legit actress may agree to do porn. Too many Galley Friends to mention would be thrilled by this. But what interests me is the cloak-and-dagger way in which the porn shoot would be handled: Namely that it would be released as if it were a stolen sex tape with the payment made in the form of a lawsuit settlement:

The plan I heard says the tape will be released in two parts, a total of six hardcore scenes, claiming it was made during her trip to Mexico with Sam last September (here). The guy will remain anonymous. . . . she is being offered millions, upfront, locked away for now but paid later while calling it a lawsuit settlement.

This is all speculation from a blog–I doubt it will come to pass. This time. But surely someone will do this eventually, won’t they? The money could be very good and the stigma of porn and sex tapes seems sufficiently diminished that surely some legit actress (or general, all-purpose celebrity) will do a back-door (so to speak) porn gig in this manner at some point, no?

That is, unless it’s already been done.

KSK is there when Giselle and Bridget and Tom make up. And so is Tommy from Quincy:

You think Jetah would have a fackin’ threesome this hawt? He’d prawbably just head to Jersey and go fack Mariah Carey and Jordana Brewstah! THIS IS WHAT I IMAGINED THE SUPER BOWL FARTY TWO AFTAH PAHHHTY WOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE IF THAT DAHHHHKIE HAD CAWLED A FAY-UH GAME!

They also have the latest Howie Long Chevy ad:

Seriously? The fucking Honda Pilot? Why don’t you just buy a station wagon, for Christ’s sake? And then go suck some anonymous truck stop cock, because that’s clearly what you really want to do.

Frankly, I was shocked to learn you got the Pilot. A pussy little V-6 truck with shitty gas mileage, man-step, and heated steering wheel? Sure. That’s you. But a family vehicle? No way. I never figured you for the family type.

Forget for a moment that Kate Sebelius didn’t pay her taxes–who does!

What I’m mystified by is this: Sebelius writes, “In July of 2006, my husband and I sold our home for an amount less than the outstanding balance on our mortgage.”

Wasn’t July 2006 just about the height of the housing bubble? How could you sell a house then for less than the balance on your mortgage?

Nothing but the best and the brightest!

A lot is being made about the heroic-heretical nature of the NYT’s magisterial Freeman Dyson profile. And that’s not to be dismissed. But on a broader level, it’s always fascinating to see what native genius–real genius–looks like. Read about Einstein or Descartes or that sort of giant and you invariably come across stories like this one from Dyson:

His older sister Alice, a retired social worker still living in Winchester, remembers how her brother “used to lie on the nursery floor working out how many atoms there were in the sun. He was perhaps 4.”

Or this:

On his own in the school library, he read mathematical works in French and German and, at age 13, taught himself calculus from an Encyclopedia Britannica entry. “I remember thinking, Is that it?” he says. “People had been telling me how hard it was.”

Or this:

taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.”

It’s depressing, but important, to realize that actual geniuses are different from mortals. They’re simply different creatures.

Not content to charge users extra for Blu-ray discs, Netflix is now raising their Blu-ray premium. Engadget says that Netflix is raising it by 20 percent among pricing tiers, but that’s slightly misleading, because that 20 percent is the raise of the total monthly cost. The Blu-ray premium itself anywhere from 100 percent to 900 percent per month, depending on your plan.

That seems, to me at least, kind of outrageous. I balked at even the $1 per month Blu-ray premium when I discovered that only about 3 of the movies in my 75-movie queue were available on Blu.