I’m a little late to the party on this, and I’m reticent to go too political in this blog, but this piece of overthinking is too good and right up our alley to go unremarked.

By the way, this isn’t the last time I’ll discuss LisaNova, who I think is a very interesting cultural figure about which you can say quite a bit. But without further ado:

The amazing original clip and a bit more analysis after the jump . . .

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[Overthinking It Magazine is the weekly feature where we give you articles you'll like all the more since the sabbath gives you an extra minute to ponder them. It may not replace your Sunday morning tryst with the newspaper of record, but we promise it will give you lots to overthink about. Oh, and if you're in a newsreader, click through to the site. I spent precious time on that graphic. --Ed.]

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Have you seen the May 5 cover of Time Magazine? Christopher Lambert has seen it, and it’s difficult to tell whether he’s amused or not.

Hey, he’s Christopher Lambert — the man doesn’t have a ton of range. But he does know how to chop someone’s head off.

And now, apparently, so do the season’s Democratically ordained Princes of the Universe, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Oh, I know the temptation is to dismiss the citizenry of the overthinkingit phantasmagoria — guys like Connor MacLeod of the clan MacLeod (who has a lifetime membership) — but if current trends continue, you’re likely to hear a lot more of this guy in the darnedest places.

The cover, and the future, after the jump –

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By now, you may have come across a real gem of a Web site — Garfield Minus Garfield. The premise: show Garfield cartoons without any of the talking animals. The result: A creepy bachelor talking to himself, which is a necessary and oft-ignored background element for the Garfield mythos. As the site puts it:

“Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.”

I’m kind of jazzed that this stuff is sweeping around the Internet — this whole piece is really brilliant, and I don’t have to belabor it so much as just point you in the right direction and ask you to leave a comment in the forums.

But as great as “Garfield Minus Garfield” is, I don’t think it holds a candle to Lasagna Cat, which I dare to say is the best use of the Internet as a medium I’ve seen since homestarrunner.com perfected the flash cartoon. Video after the jump. more »

[I'll get back to wrapping up my "No Crying In Baseball" series next week, but for a bit, I want to start a new series -- books I fantasize about writing someday. I'll probably come back to this intermittently. It's a blog series I've always wanted to write. –Fenzel]

So, my boy Bill Bryson wrote a new book about some old subject matter: Shakespeare: The World As Stage, part of the Harper Collins Eminent Lives series. Harper Collins describes the series as “Brief biographies by distinguished authors on canonical figures.” I recommend the series for pleasure reading (it’s a soft recommendation), but that’s not what this post is about.

I like Bill Bryson a ton — mostly for his writing style guide: Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting It Right, which is the most fun you will ever have reading an index of words that isn’t by Ambrose Bierce. He’s got a witty, comfortable, conversational style, and he doesn’t bullshit you. That, of course, makes it difficult for him to write a biography of Shakespeare, because, as Bryson goes into very early in the book, most biographies of Shakespeare are bullshit. more »

Probably NSFW. Who cares? [via]

Now that Oscar season is over, so is the battle for my favorite filmic facepalm, and it belongs to generally competent New York Times movie reviewer and easy target* A.O. Scott. In his piece bemoaning the influence of the Oscars on Hollywood, he wrote:

“Releasing ambitious, serious films into theaters has become a brutal blood sport.”

It isn’t that outlandish on its face, because it’s the kind of thing we’re used to hearing at this point, but maybe we should question why we’re used to hearing it, because it really is very silly. more »

Based on the past press coverage of Anna Nicole’s legal woes, one might get the impression that J. Howard, her aging wealthy husband, left her a vast amount of his estate in his will and that the litigation that made its way up to the Supreme Court was about the J. Howard estate. But Anna Nicole’s litigation woes were for the most part, not about probate at all. J. Howard actually did not leave her anything in his will: his son, Pierce, was the sole beneficiary of the estate. more »

“I really don’t care much about riches, but I do care about achievement. That’s all that matters.”

—J. Howard Marshall II

This isn’t a post about Anna Nicole Smith. This is a post about J. Howard Marshall.

He is, of course, the man who married Smith and willed her his ginormous estate. But what did he do for the first 89 years of his life? As it turns out, a hell of a lot.

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