This white-hot LA Times piece on Tom Cruise and Scientology is filled with awesome details. For instance:

Maureen Bolstad, who was at the base for 17 years and left after a falling-out with the church, recalled a rainy night 15 years ago when a couple of dozen Scientologists scrambled to deal with “an all-hands situation” that kept them working through dawn. The emergency, she said: planting a meadow of wildflowers for Cruise to romp through with his new love, Kidman.

“We were told that we needed to plant a field and that it was to help Tom impress Nicole,” said Bolstad, who said she spent the night pulling up sod so the ground could be seeded in the morning.

Then there’s this strange phrase:

For years, the property has been home to Golden Era Productions, where Scientologists work around the clock producing videos, audio recordings and e-meters, to be sold to church members. Rinder said nearly all of the members at Golden Era have signed billion-year contracts to serve the church.

A billion year contract? They’ll still be working for the Church long after Xenu has devolved into an inferior warrior/spirit life-form.

Christian Lowe reports how things can be good one day and then terrible the next. Heartbreaking.

Wesley Smith has an excellent post showing a prime example of how the media gets cloning wrong. It’s good stuff.

Chris Anderson has an excellent entry on The Probabilistic Age: the emergence of market-driven intelligence. I’m not 100 percent convinced in the inherent goodness of probabilistic systems, but they are frighteningly efficient.

This may be the most charming sports story I’ve seen in 10 years:

Mavericks guard Darrell Armstrong was so happy his beloved Washington Redskins beat the Dallas Cowboys that he grabbed a microphone before Sunday night’s game against the Minnesota Timberwolves and hollered, “How ’bout those Redskins!”

It’s going to cost him $1,000.

Dallas coach Avery Johnson announced the fine during his postgame news conference and team owner Mark Cuban later verified it was legit, much to the chagrin of a disbelieving Armstrong. The money will all go to charity, with Johnson saying the Cowboys would decide the recipient.

The Redskins wrapped up a 35-7 victory over the Cowboys shortly before the Mavericks left the locker room to play the Timberwolves.

As part of the pregame ceremonies, guard Devin Harris wished the crowd a happy holiday. Then Armstrong, who wasn’t scheduled to speak, asked for the microphone. He added his holiday wishes, then made his fine-inducing proclamation, a twist on a famous line by former Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson.

A mixture of laughter and boos followed, even from German import Dirk Nowitzki. Cuban laughed, too, and joked with Armstrong about it when he returned to the bench.

The Danny should send Armstrong something nice for the holidays.

The prelim numbers are in for this weekend and–surprise!–King Kong outgrossed Narnia by almost $20 million during the Friday-to-Sunday period. (Note these are the studio projected numbers; my guess is that Kong drops by maybe $2 million in the final tally on Monday; Universal has probably pushed this number to get Kong over the $50 million mark just so they can run a big ad in Variety tomorrow.)

Anyway, as you’ll remember, I was always skeptical about the notion that Kong was going to be a super-gigantic blockbuster–Titanic (or Gone with the Wind)-sized monsters simply cannot be foreseen. But, as our initial rough math showed, it was all but impossible for the second-week Narnia to outgross Kong on its opening weekend. Erosion rates for movies that open at 3,200+ theaters (and Narnia was up over 3,600) are notoriously steep. Narnia declined by 52.4 percent from its opening, leaving it in no position to challenge even a Kong which opened at the bottom of the range we predicted for it.

This was never even close.

Moving along, I want to point people toward the truly impressive per theater average for Brokeback Mountain—which is doing $109,485 per screen. That’s huge. It’s been 10 years since a live-action movie has done a per theater number like this. [see Update] It’s very impressive and the people at Focus should be thrilled.

That said, I’m still skeptical that Brokeback will find a mainstream audience. Look at the other live-action movies at the top of our list of all-time highest-averages. You’ll see Bulworth, Punch-Drunk Love, I Heart Huckabees and other films which were critical darlings but couldn’t even cross the $30 million mark in total box office. The highest total gross of one of these high-average movies is Moulin Rouge!, with $57 million.

Anyway, it will be interesting to watch Brokeback‘s numbers in the coming weeks to see if it follows in the path of a medium-sized hit, such as Edward Scissorhands, or becomes a hot-house flower, such as Huckabees.

Update, 12/19/05: Galley Friend J.E. emails in to point out that the average I cited above for Brokeback Mountain, $109,485, is from last weekend, when the movie was only playing on five screens. This weekend it expanded to 64, and the average dropped to $34,188.

Unlike my good friend Art Vandelay, I know nothing about architecture. Which leaves me only with personal taste–which is to say, dangerously unarmed. As a rule, I tend not to gravitate toward anything modern, but my goodness, I just can’t get The Cira Centre out of my head. It’s amazing and simple and beautiful and somehow, the perfect complement to 30th Street Station.

Go and drink in some of the photos so far.

I should mention that Ross Douthat’s piece on the abolition of Limbo is one of the best essay’s I’ve read in the last 12 months. You’ll be cheating yourself out of something wonderful if you miss it.

It’s so good that it will, at least for a moment, make you want to clutch Susan Sontag to your chest.