I didn’t really think Alex Pareene laid a glove on Aaron Sorkin. Until this:

The show is so confused about what McAvoy is and who he works for. Is McAvoy supposed to be Wolf Blitzer? He seems to be Joe Scarborough hosting a network evening news broadcast on CNN. Except he’s also very obviously Keith Olbermann.

It’s like one of those right-side body shots to the liver, where everything’s fine and then the other guy just drops.

Because I just got an email informing me that this gentleman is now following me.

He’ll probably buy three copies of my book once I tweet it. All hail social media.

Walter Kirn has an extraordinary essay in the latest New Republic. I cannot recommend it highly enough. About his life in (and out) of the Mormon church, it is by turns wistful, haunting, touching, and beautiful. It’s both a plain-spoken account of a man losing his faith and a powerful act of witness on behalf of that faith.

As you may have noticed, I have neither a talent nor an appreciation for autobiography. But Kirn’s mini-memoir is shorn of vanity and, more importantly, yoked to the service of something larger. So much so that it feels more like art than essay; as if Paul Simon had spun it during his middle-age.

Enjoy.

Tomorrow. 7:00 p.m.

Non-IMAX, but I take what I can get.

Meanwhile, to whet the appetite: Alexandra DuPont and Santino, from the last time around.

Bill Mudron doesn’t know me, but he’s a friend of my buddy Mike Russell (and he once inked a comic short I wrote and MR drew). But I just found out that Mudron, in addition to his other work, draws the most insanely cool maps you’ve ever seen. Of Hyrule and the Mushroom Kingdom. Suitable for framing. Overflowing with awesome.

Courtesy of Galley Friend A.W.:

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

The answer turns out to be “a lot of things”, and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). I sat down with some physics books, a Nolan Ryan action figure, and a bunch of videotapes of nuclear tests and tried to sort it all out. What follows is my best guess at a nanosecond-by-nanosecond portrait . . .

Don’t miss it.

I mentioned earlier the weirdness of Romney defending his decision to not release more of his tax returns by retorting that Obama hasn’t released Fast and Furious documents–which is a strange argument since Romney clearly believes Obama should release more Fast and Furious documents.

Now the Romney campaign has sent out a press release saying, “If Bain is so bad, why did you take $120,000 in campaign cash [from them]?” The gist of Romney’s argument being that Bain gave $120K to Obama and he took the green, so how bad could Bain really be.

Which is fine; it’s a clever argument. Except for one thing–the Romney campaign has been attacking Obama for taking big money donations from fat-cat businesses who (the inference is) profit by gaming the system. Sample Romney press release:

“If you’re a political donor to Barack Obama, you’re going to do fine because you’re going to get a payoff. If you’re a middle class worker, you’re in jeopardy, you’re facing a layoff. ” (7/15)

Which puts Romney in the same place with Bain that he is with his tax returns. Instead of making a coherent argument on his own behalf, the Romney campaign pounds the table and says, Tu quoque. Which traps them, because either Bain is perfectly admirable and all Americans should be proud of the company, or Bain is just another business looking to buy influence so it can profit by gaming the system. (For instance, I don’t know how credible this story is, but here’s an allegation that Bain was taking taxpayer money in New Mexico for the kind of government program most conservatives probably find wasteful and distasteful.)

My suspicion is that over the course of a long campaign, eventually these sorts of rhetorical problems can catch up with a candidate–especially if he’s not a particularly deft and intuitive politician.

The Romney operation must have better answers than tu quoque. If they don’t, then they’re really rolling the dice on the November vote being a pure up-or-down referendum on Obama. Maybe that will work out for them. But that can’t be a high-percentage play.

Passed along by Galley Friend A.W.: The renewable energy potential of various Jedi masters.

Sample unfuckingbelievable:

The energy it takes to lift an object to height h is equal to the object’s mass times the force of gravity times the height it’s lifted. The X-Wing scene lets us use this to put a lower limit on Yoda’s peak power output.

First we need to know how heavy the ship was. The X-Wing’s mass has never been canonically established, but its length has—16 meters. An F-22 is 19 meters long and weighs 19,700 lbs, so scaling down from this gives an estimate for the X-Wing of about 12,000 lbs (5 metric tons).

Next, we need to know how fast it was rising. I went over footage of the sc ene and timed the X-Wing’s rate of ascent as it was emerging from the water.

The front landing strut rises out of the water in about three and a half seconds, and I estimated the strut to be 1.4 meters long (based on a scene in A New Hope where a crew member squeezes past it), which tells us the X-Wing was rising at 0.39 m/s. . . .

It goes on from there, achieving multiple levels of awesome.