2006 has been a year of many goodbyes so far. The West Wing, Will & Grace, and more. Today on Today is Katie Couric's last day, and I made sure to clear my schedule to watch her. You see, 15 years ago I tuned in on her first day, a stand-in role when Deborah Norville was on holiday. Cutey Katie was such a hit so quickly that Deborah ended up on permanent vacation.

So I am about to catch the second showing of Today on a west coast station. If you didn't see the show, don't worry. Entertainment Weekly has blogged it.

Tomorrow I may come back and make some comments on Meredith Vieira's first day. [Note: I just learned that Meredith doesn't start until after the summer hiatus. I'm an idiot.]

X-Men: The Last Stand took in $120.1 million last weekend, the biggest opening box office weekend in history, surpassing the $115.8 million Spider-Man 2 earned in 2004.

I told you it was an amazing film.

Barry Bonds today surpassed Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list.

He hit number 715 off Byung-Hyun Kim of the Colorado Rockies.

Let's put aside the controversies for one day and celebrate a great sports moment. Regardless of steroids, here is a magnificant achievement. Only #756 will top it, and that will probably be it for our lifetime.

Few movie moments make me cry, and most of them are about innocence. The response of innocence to a moment of enlightenment: Nemo's astonishment at hearing of his father's heroism. The courageous disregard of pragmatic considerations in living an innocent life: Will Ferrell's pure-hearted obliviousness to the ridicule around him in Elf.

I didn't expect to cry at X-Men: The Last Stand, but I left the theatre shaking nonetheless.

After the second film, I realized the emotional superiority of the X-Men movies to all other science fiction films I had ever seen. But the third installment of the king of the comic book film franchises left me dumb with shock at the gashes it carved out of my expectations, especially the way it burns through main characters like blades of grass in a prairie fire. A last stand it certainly seems to be.

Here is a story of the struggle to contain uncontrollable power, and the things it can make us do that we will regret with horror forever. Sometimes civilization run amok unintentionally creates these titanic energies, but more terrifying are the capacities we sometimes find, with astonishment, inside us. Can mental discipline deliver us from their fury? Can ambition? Can love?

Although it commands archetypal terrain, the strength of the X-Men phenomenon lies in our intimacy with the characters, and Stephanie Zacharek at Salon.com thinks director Brett Ratner rushes through the relationships without giving them a chance to sing. That may be true: there are a lot of characters, including some new ones--that is, new to anyone who hasn't read the comics--that seem to exist only as pawns for Magneto. And some of the character arcs are left a bit thin, such as Rogue's determination to be like everyone else and the callous hypocrisy with which Magneto discards one of his most loyal lieutenants after a fateful event.

On the other hand, some of the new faces are compelling, especially big blue hairy Beast, a rough-and-tumble mutant monster who also has the intellectual sophistication and eloquence of a diplomat. Beast is new to the movies, but it seems like he has always been here. And when the end credits rolled I was startled to discover that he is brilliantly played by Kelsey Grammer: certainly not a role you would expect from him.

If you are an X-Men purist, however, the film will infuriate you. The director has been merciless in picking and choosing events and plot points from the X-Men universe in order to craft a successful film. So be an adult and appreciate X-Men: The Last Stand for the compelling adventure it offers; don't expect rigorous faithfulness to your cherished comic books.

X-Men: The Last Stand is also driven by a fantastic score that I am determined to go and purchase. And if you are one of those people who stick around to watch all the credits once everyone else has left the theatre, you won't regret it.

"...life is where you get your answers questioned."

-- Bill Moyers in a speech to the to the Hamilton College graduating class in Clinton, NY.

I feel particularly bad about including something about American Idol on my blog, mainly because I have never watched the show and have tired of reality TV in general. But Dean Baker of Beat the Press has an interesting analysis of the Idol voting mechanism.

Dean explains why it is that the votes are always so close on the show. He observes that the phone lines are often jammed, and that there are therefore far more people trying to vote than those who actually get through to record their choice. He shows how this means that each contestant will almost always receive very similar final numbers.

Remember, on American Idol, you dial a different telephone number to vote for each candidate, you don't choose from a ballot when you get connected. It turns out that this makes all the difference.

If there are two phone numbers, one for Catherine and one for Taylor, they will each have the same amount of line capacity. This means that if the total capacity for each phone number is one million callers over a one hour period, then only about 1-million votes will be recorded for each contestant. But if there are 2-million people out there trying to vote for Taylor and 10-million for Catherine, then Catherine's 8-million extra supporters will mean nothing in the final vote tally. Catherine's millions of voters who can't get through will not have their votes counted and the numbers will come out very much the same.

Of course, there will always be some difference in the vote count, because some people will take milliseconds longer than others to actually record their vote. But this is mainly because of technical reasons that are out of their control. So if Taylor wins, it might not be because he was more popular, but just because the etheric milliseconds went his way.

Now I am really angry.

This morning I wrote about a story from the New York Post that indicated Iran had passed a law reminiscent of Nazi Germany that would force religious minorities to wear special clothing.

The story was from an Iranian columnist called Amir Taheri, and ran in Canada's National Post yesterday. It appears to have been picked up and then commented on in the New York Post, where I saw it.

Now the paper is running a denial from the Iranian embassy in Canada that such a law was ever passed.

I am angry because this morning after I read the story I told friends who will worry about this all the way to their overseas destination. They are travelling today and probably won't learn the truth until tomorrow or Monday.

I am angry at the paper. How could the National Post allow such a provocative story to make it into their pages? Don't they have any oversight? Don't they hire editors?

For anyone who was wondering if the National Post is a real newspaper or not, my experience today would indicate the negative.

But rest assured, Canada does have a real newspaper. It is called The Globe and Mail, and they have real journalistic coverage of this story that actually subscribes to the principles of balance and checking your sources. In the story, the only Jewish member of the Iranian parliament denies that such a law was introduced.

With Da Vinci mania sweeping the Western world like a wizard on a Firebolt, there could hardly have been a more lucrative time for a public printing of The Gospel of Judas.

The Gospel of Judas is not a modern story written for shock value, but a newly-restored ancient text that provides an alternate (to say the least!) view of the teachings of Christ. The premise is that Judas wasn't a bad guy after all: he was part of a divine plan for Jesus to be sacrificed, aided and abetted by Jesus Himself.

Before the current manuscript was unearthed, our deepest knowledge of The Gospel of Judas came from 1800-year-old critiques of this rogue text by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons. Irenaeus was one of the central early Christian apologists whose primary claim to greatness was his attempt to establish a single, canonical Christian text. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John owe their prominence and general acceptance largely to the efforts of Irenaeus.

Irenaeus criticizes Gnostic authors who "declare that Judas the traitor... alone knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fabricated work to this effect, which they entitle the Gospel of Judas."

The New York Review of Books is running a review of The Gospel of Judas this week, entitled The Betrayer's Gospel. The review provides an engaging overview of the discovery and content of the manuscript, its politics, and its relationship to Gnosticism and the Christianity that we know.

Read it, and resist the impulse to declare a new conspiracy theory that might make gazillions of dollars for some opportunistic scholar.

Hollywood's most attractive 50-year-old is out of a job.

The Associated Press is reporting that ABC has cancelled "Commander-in-Chief."

In this week's issue of the New York Tims Book Review, Pete Hamill dissects a new book by David Remnick, a collection of his articles from The New Yorker.

At the top of this blog, you will notice that I have left myself a licence to use this space for "excerpts." And here is one from Vladimir Nabokov, many of whose works have been made available in English by Remnick.

"In art as in science there is no delight without the detail. . . . All 'general ideas' (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers shortcuts from one area of ignorance to another."

Picture and caption thanks to Wacky Neighbour.

Sylvester is the newest addition to our family. He is a mini Daschund whom Jenni and Michael found at an animal rescue centre in the Bay area.

From the first, Sylvester made himself right at home. He has his own sweater for when he gets the shivers and likes to look people in the eye. He is very friendly.

There was a comment today on Slashdot that summarizes in clear language the big, contemporary issues around copyright law. It is from a discussion about the Recording Industry Association of America shutting down another peer-to-peer file sharing group.

Read it here.

I keep delaying the upgrade to my Movable Type application, which means that I have to remove manually the comment and trackback spam that comes in through the normal course of bloglife. I have gotten used to this daily chore and I don't really mind it, so you might say I have become accustomed to a certain mix of spam types and spam publishers on my screen every day.

Which is what made today's difference so startling.

Here is a representative sample of the trackback spam keywords that appeared today:

association of vineyard churches
buy viagra
mt lebanon baptist
cheap phentermine
baptist information
nipple chains
emmanuel baptist church
buy cialis
evangelical council for financial accountability
online gambling
evangelical lutheran
tramadol
apostolic churches
exotic piercing
texas holdem

I have never received church spam before. Don't you think that there are some very intriguing synergies going on there?

Wouldn't it be fun to write a Dr. Seuss story incorporating all of those keywords? And these are only the ones that I could bring myself to allow to be associated on the search engines, however tenuously, with my blog postings, if you know what I mean.