The Smarmy Carny

Ferrell as Harold Crick

Stranger Than Fiction looks to be a crisp comedy with roles well-suited for Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, and Dustin Hoffman. It's due out November 10, in time for the Thanksgiving Hollywood push. Based on the trailer and other media I have seen thus far, I have placed it on my List of Movies to See (until I see it, of course).

Karen "Kay" Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is a depressive author who is suffering from writers block because she can't figure out how to kill off her main character, Harold Crick (Will Ferrell). Harold Crick is an IRS agent with OCD who lives alone, eats alone, and sleeps alone. Unbeknownst to Key, Harold is a real person, and he begins to hear Kay narrating his life as she writes it.

Harold visits a professor of English literature, Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who gives him advice about how to interact and react with the narration and developing storyline.

Finally, Key has a breakthrough and figures out how to kill him. As she foreshadows the events in her book, Harold is alerted to his imminent death. After hearing Kay on a talk show, he sets out to find the author narrating (and controlling?) his life.

Also in the movie are Maggie Gyllenhaal as Ana, the love interest and Queen Latifah as Penny, Kay's assistant.

See the trailer for Stranger Than Fiction. Be sure to visit Sony's Stranger Than Fiction site (and click on "Enter the Site") to experience this well-developed site. (Kay narrates your cursor's movements as you navigate the site.)

Even though it was just a click away, I finally discovered Lists of Bests, which is part of the 43 Things family. Read more about my 43 Things at Random Fodder.

Lists of Bests allows you to create and find lists of products, places, goals and people. From the Pulitzer Prize to the Oscars and beyond; you can start the list yourself or find existing lists. For example, I have already added myself to several lists, such as:

• Academy Award's "Best Picture"
• Roger Ebert's "The Great Movies"
• 50 States of the USA

You can also start your own personal lists like "My Top 10 Favorite Books," "My Films for Computer Geeks," etc. There are three types of lists: award lists (lists of particular award winners), definitive lists (lists from other publications that are set in stone), and personal lists (created and edited only by you).

The most fun part about Lists of Bests is that when you add or create a list to your profile, you can easily check off your progress item by item. Especially useful is that, when I checked all of the Academy Award Best Picture winners that I had seen, those movies were already checked off in the "Roger Ebert's 'The Great Movies'" list when I visited it.

Here are the lists I have completed:

Here are the 5 lists I am still working on, but closest to completing:

What are you waiting for? Go get started today!

See Dick run. See Jane run. See Spot explaining the theoretical physics behind black holes and time travel.

That's right — Stephen Hawking is slated to write a tehoretical physics book with his daughter aimed at children.

Of course, the planned children's books will not be a straight, dry telling of the facts, but his daughter, Lucy Hawking, says that it will read more like Harry Potter, without all the magic involved.

This project really should come as no or little surprise. After all, Hawking is one of the few theoretical physicists to attempt (let alone accomplish) the feat of ::amazon("0553380168", "explaining theoretical physics in laymen´s terms")::.

As any rational person should realize, The Da Vinci Code is fiction, and not much else. It's just ::amazon("1400079179", "a novel")::, just ::imdb("tt0382625", "a movie")::. Why, then, are many Christians up in arms over the story, if that's all it is? The answer is simple, as Massimo Introvigne points out:

People who ask this question usually have not read the page of The Da Vinci Code titled Fact, where the author, Dan Brown, asserts that "all descriptions of [..]documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate" and are based specifically on the fact that "in 1975 Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments, known as Les Dossiers Secrets" which reveal the story of the Priory of Sion.

Some Christians are arguing that The Da Vinci Code is a positive because it is getting people to think more about early Christianity. In reality, I think that the only thing people will really think about early Christianity is, "Is that true?" This surface-level response to mainstream entertainment will not provoke further discovery of Christ and the actual events of early followers. In addition, many non-Christians will likely believe the fictional "facts" and incorporate them into their already wavering view of Christianity, religion, and God.

So, all things being equal, feel free to believe everything you read/see in The Da Vinci Code if you also readily believed all the "facts" given in movies such as National Treasure, too.

I will not attempt to list the problems in The Da Vinci Code. It is, after all, just a movie. For more information on The Da Vinci Code and its fallacies, check out these informative pages:

• Da Vinci Answers — Josh McDowell's podcast discussing The Da Vinci Code
• "The Da Vinci Code FAQ, or Will the Real Priory of Sion Please Stand Up?" — Massimo Introvigne
• "The DaVinci Scam" — Terry Paige, Houghton College professor
• "The Da Vinci Scam • Decoding Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code"
• The Da Vinci Code Discussed — The Life

One interesting fact regarding the filming of the movie: Westminster Abbey refused to allow filming on location, stating "theologically unsound" premises in the book. Filming was moved to Lincoln Cathedral, whose bell "Great Tom" was silent for the first time since World War II during filming on August 15 - 19, 2005.

How to . . .

If you're anything like me and you frequently take public transportation, spend your lunch hour in mall food courts, or have textbooks that require book covers, you'll find FlapArt to be a valuable product. FlapArt really is merely a book cover, but with a twist for the mentally twisted. Michelle Watters is the genius behind these wonderful covers:

Awhile ago, my husband Brian said "wouldn't it be funny if you were sitting on the subway reading a book and on the front cover it said, How to Murder a Complete Stranger and Get Away with It? Imagine what people around you would think, especially when you finally finished the book".

There are quite a few various book covers available, including these ones:

• How to Murder a Complete Stranger and Get Away With It
• How to Make your Grandmother a Porn Star
• The Nutritional Benifits of Nose Picking
• How to Overcome Nymphomania
• How to Steal From Your Employer and Get Away With It

I'm not sure how these FlapArt covers will work for you . . . either it will help keep strangers at bay, or it will be a conversation starter. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell which of these contradicting results you'll get, which is disconcerting. I'm sure plenty of people will purchase FlapArt to start conversations, and others will buy FlapArt to keep that talkative old lady on the subway from even thinking about telling you of her day.

Either way, FlapArt is sure to give you personal gratification, knowing that even if you're reading a bit of ::amazon("0802844375", "Alvin Plantinga")::, people will think you're reading about "How to Make your Grandmother a Porn Star."

Inspired by the death today of the Saturday's Simpleton theme, I remembered one of the best resources for simpletons: the Darwin Awards.

By now, most people are familiar with the Darwin Awards. If you're one of the few who are still unfamiliar with the Darwin Awards, here's the official explanation:

In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species' chances of long-term survival.

You can read ::amazon("0452291925", "The Complete Darwin Awards")::, which includes 400 stories of Darwin Award nominees!

Entries include "Chimney-Cleaning Grenade," which teaches us to never weld a hand grenade to a chain . . . and not because the chain is dangerous. About a year before ::wikipedia("Characters_of_Lost#Leslie_Arzt", "everyone learned on Lost that old dynamite sweats nitroglycerin")::, the man in "Do-It-Yourself Landmine" learned it first.

There are plenty more to read on the site, and I suggest you read through some of the many selections if you haven't already.

This week's site is What Should I Read Next?

Though the interface is clunky and the results are questionable, the idea is fun. You add a list of your favorite books and the site suggests some additional reading material for you. If nothing else, brainstorming a list of your favorite books is worth the trouble.

One awful thing about the site as it is currently set up is that when you search, you get just one result. Thus, if you search for a book with the word Love in the title by an author whose name you have forgotten, typing "Love" in the title field returns only one entry: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. This is almost certainly not the selection you were searching for. Even more distressingly, if you leave the title field blank and enter "Kurt Vonnegut" in the author field, you still get only one result: Slaughterhouse 5. It would be much more useful to display a list of Vonnegut classics to select all at once.

One nice feature is the ability to pick and choose which of your favorite books you use to generate your list each time. You can pick only the sci-fi comedy books to see what type of results you get, or you can choose to select all of your favorites for a grab bag of suggestions. I find that the results seem to be much more useful when selecting a large number of favorites. Selecting one book rarely brings up additional books by the same author, for some strange reason. It seems perfectly natural to me that if I select a Douglas Adams book that I might want to read more of his work.

Perhaps I'll write to the site with some of these somewhat-constructive criticisms. What Should I Read Next? has the potential to be something big — no, something huge. Despite my issues here, I visit there regularly, and I suggest you do the same . . . particularly if you're looking to build a reading list for yourself.

As for my issues with the site, I encourage you to read the post comments. Andrew Chapman, who is affiliated with What Should I Read Next, has posted a response to some of my complaints. It's certainly worth reading.