OK, spam has officially become a problem. I logged on this morning to find a buttload of spam comments clogging up this humble weblog. It only took a few minutes of research to find MT-Blacklist, a spam-fighting plug-in for Movable Type. Took me a little longer to get it installed, but in all the process took less than an hour, and it makes it a lot easier to delete spam from Movable Type. If you're thinking about blogging with Movable Type, well, Orson sez check it out.

"It ... feels like 9/11 programming all over again."

But that's just one unnamed music executive's opinion. According to the Los Angeles Times, MTV is banishing a short list of music videos to the overnight hours. At least eight videos, including clips from Britney Spears, Maroon 5, and Blink 182 that expose lots of female flesh — but no nipples! — as well as one with political undercurrents from Incubus, have been consigned to the late-night schedule following the shocking visibility of one of Janet Jackson's tits during the Super Bowl halftime show.

I don't necessarily cry for Britney Spears. But I guess music video directors can consider themselves put on notice that conservative is better, in both politics as well as MTV programming. What's really silly about this is that MTV isn't even bound by FCC decree — the government has been repeatedly shown to have no power to control so-called "indecent" programming on cable channels. In other words, they caved.

Did anyone else notice that, at the Grammys, song lyrics that were edited from the MTV-ready Outkast music videos were present in the (presumably CBS-approved) live performances? And I don't have time to go off on a rant about how relatively inoffensive the new Britney video is compared to the stuff that passes for original programming on the channel because Jon Stewart's on. Bye.

Greg Tate's piece in the new Village Voice is the best take I've seen yet on Cold Mountain's near-complete avoidance of slavery as a topic for discussion.

My understanding is that the part of North Carolina where the film takes place would have been largely devoid of black folks anyway, and not necessarily ideologically tied to the institution of slavery. But the way that Minghella uses the few slaves and ex-slaves who show up in the story seems designed in itself to minimize them. You could argue that this is the film's mindscreen, reflecting a general inability of the film's characters to see blacks as real people, but I think it reveals an unwillingness on Minghella's part (I can't comment on what Frazier did since I haven't read his book) to engage with this story on a level — any level! — that might have helped give it some heft; hell, even the notoriously easy-to-impress Academy seems to think this lacks much in the way of a social conscience.

Like Tate, I count myself as a big fan of both The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, so I'm not just trying to beat up on Minghella; the film isn't loathsome in its shortcomings, but it is frustrating because the people who worked on it are so goddamned talented.

The Pentagon backs an Exorcist theme park, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Director William Friedkin on his own Iraq experience: ""We were guests of the Baath Party, then run by a guy who looked like Groucho Marx, and every morning I trained my Iraqi guides to salute his picture by chanting, 'Hooray for Captain Spalding!'"