As a very peripheral side-note to the still-unfolding story of the Virginia Tech tragedy, I can’t help keeping a weather eye out for the return of the killer nerd meme that got loose in the wake of the Columbine killings: the anti-social, trench-coated video game freak who finally snaps. So far sightings of the meme have been relatively …

Posting will be sparse for a couple of days while I deal with my responsibilities as a tech conference-goer.

In the meantime snack on my review of the “new” book by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin, stitched together by his son Christopher out of various manuscripts he left behind. I wasn’t necessarily expecting to love it — I’m …

In this week’s Time Joel Stein profiles Adam Brody, the actor who made nerds hip on a TV show — The O.C. — that no actual nerd ever actually watched. We learn, among other things, that Brody isn’t really all that nerdy in real life:

“I’m a fake intellectual,” he says while wearing giant sunglasses and eating his first meal of the

…

— Ed Norton is Bruce Banner in the new Hulk flick. Sure, that could work.

— Ain’t It Cool has a pretty plausible-sounding early review of 28 Weeks Later, which almost sounds like it gets — more than the original did — what’s cool about the premise. Silent empty London, a contemporary geopolitical subtext, and hot hot …

It was either that subject line or ‘Where’s LaBeouf?’ I think we’ll all agree that I chose wisely.

Yes, per USA Today, Shia LaBoeuf (I will never stop spelling that wrong) is in Indy 4, alongside Ford, Cate Blanchett, Sean Connery, and (please, I hope) Karen Allen (does she really have anything better to do?). Even though he was born 5 …

That subject line is supposed to be a “play” on the novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, a searing midcentury indictment of American corporate culture. I’m just clever as clever today.

Anyhoo, here’s the first image to come out from the upcoming Jon Favreau/Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man movie:

Click over to Ain’t It Cool to see it …

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. I wrote an obituary-slash-tribute for him here. You can almost smell the smoke rising from the ears of all the literary journalists racing to get their Vonnegut eulogies up online. Very sad, though at the same time it’s hard to imagine a writer better-prepared to face death than Vonnegut.

I almost kind of …

Webby nominees are here.

There was a time, in the mid-90s, when I worked in Web production, when it almost seemed like the Webbies were going to turn into something you could care about. I even went to the ceremony one year in New York City. eBay won for best auction site, but nobody from eBay was there to accept, so the guy I was …

Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind is on my desk, and I have to decide whether to read the damn thing. In case the hellstorm of hype hasn’t reached you, this is a highly-praised fantasy novel, Rothfuss’s first and the first of a trilogy. I want it to be good. I’m also mindful that it’s 661 pages long, and I don’t want to die …