Interesting news this week regarding casting for 300 director Zack Snyder’s upcoming adaptation of Watchmen. If you haven’t heard: recent Academy Award nominee Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) is slated to portray the enigmatic vigilante Rorschach; Billy Crudup (Almost Famous) has been tagged for the role of the godlike Dr. Manhattan; relative unknown Matthew Goode (Match Point) takes on the pivotal role of Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias; Patrick Wilson (who also appeared in Little Children) will play the Nite Owl; Dean Morgan (Grey’s Anatomy) stars as the cigar-chomping Comedian; and statuesque actress Malin Akerman (Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, Entourage, the upcoming Invasion) steps into the stilettos of the comparatively plain Silk Spectre.  (more…)

Good question.

It’s been a quiet few weeks here at Shaking Through World Headquarters for a number of reasons. The first and most important is that I recently changed jobs, leaping headfirst into a very demanding new role that has consumed pretty much every waking weekday hour (and quite a few weekends) since late May. The precious few free hours I’ve had have been spent with my wife, either catching up with each other or working to resolve a sticky home-repair situation.

Meanwhile, Laurence Station, my partner in Shaking Through, has had his own family issues to deal with, along with assorted things having to do with restoring his New Orleans home. Our frequent contributor The Gentleman has been around, doing whatever it is he does, and he’s even sent me a post or two for editing and posting on the site. But I just haven’t had the time.

Anyway, I’ve finally got a little breathing room: Some staffing issues have been resolved, and things are slowly settling down. I hope to be able to post content on a more consistent basis than has been the case lately; we’ll see how it goes. Meanwhile, thanks for your patience.

A poll conducted by ESPN and ABC News finds that 52 percent of baseball fans hope Barry Bonds doesn’t break the home-run record of 755 set by Hank Aaron in 1974. No surprise there — if there’s a more polarizing figure in any sport these days, I’d be hard-pressed to name him or her. The poll also finds that black fans are more than twice as likely as whites to root for Bonds — 74 percent to 28 percent. And 37 percent of black fans believe Bonds used steroids (compared to a whopping 76 percent of whites).

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From the Baffling Ideas That Just Might Work Desk comes news that Antwan “Big Boi” Patton of OutKast is set to collaborate with the Atlanta Ballet for a work to be performed next April. According to the ballet company’s site, it will also include artists from Big Boi’s Purple Ribbon label. I’m sure it’ll be interesting (being an Atlanta resident, I’ll probably go).

But one shudders to think of the ramifications should this become a hip-hop trend. Anyone for ballet versions of The Blueprint or Kingdom Come – or even The Grey Album? An interpretive dance program based on Get Rich or Die Tryin’, a la the Billy Joel/Twyla Tharp musical Movin’ Out? Or worse yet, a new reality show where Flavor Flav auditions dancers for his new modern dance troupe? “Hit me up with a pas de deux, boy-ee!”

By now you’ve probably heard that Courtney Love intends to auction off the effects of her late husband Kurt Cobain. In a recent interview she described her house as “a mausoleum” and says she still wears Cobain’s pajamas to bed. “How am I ever going to go form another relationship in my lifetime wearing Kurt’s pajamas?” she asks.

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From the It Was Only A Matter of Time Desk comes a report that a book collecting Sting’s song lyrics will be released this fall, entitled (simply enough) Lyrics by Sting. “Over time, the meaning of a song can continue to reveal itself,” his lordship says in a press release. 

Nothing against Sting’s body of work, seriously, but I think we’ve pretty much absorbed everything there is to be mined from grandiose lyrics like those to “Synchronicity” (parts one and two) or “Russians” or “Love is the Seventh Wave” or “Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot” or … you get the idea.

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From Wired magazine, an incredible story about how the CIA rescued a handful of escaped American staffers during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis by posing as a Hollywood production company.

It gets better: “Studio Six” was location scouting in Iran for a science-fiction film based on a book by Roger Zelazny, with early sketches done by comics legend Jack “King” Kirby.

Mere days after a hip-hop advocacy group headed by Russell Simmons requested that record labels, radio and television delete three commonly used terms from broadcasts of rap performances, a similar organization has come forward to ask the hip-hop community to refrain from using offensive terms that have graduated into the mainstream.

“It’s high time that we in the rap and hip-hop scenes send a clear message to the world, and stop using words that demean us as a community,” rap artist Hoodie, spokesman for the Coalition of Rappers Against the Appropriation of Colloquialisms by Caucasians (CRACC), said at a press conference on Thursday. “I’m talking about terms like ‘bling-bling,’ ‘off the chain,’ ‘gettin’ jiggy wit’ it,’ and ‘U can’t touch this,’” he said.

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By now you’ve heard — or at least heard about — the infamous Alec Baldwin voicemail message, which TMZ posted online yesterday. On it, Baldwin angrily berates his 11-year-old daughter Ireland for missing their scheduled phone call, threatens to fly from New York to Los Angeles (today, April 20) to “straighten her out,” accuses her of playing games with and humiliating him, and calls her a “rude, thoughtless little pig.” Just this morning, I’ve heard quite a few people say that they can never look at Baldwin in the same light again after hearing the tirade. To which I have to say: Hold the phone.

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I always thought The X-Files was overrated, and I’ve never liked its stars, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. To this day, any possible appreciation I might conceivably have for their current work is marred by the memory of seemingly constant bickering about how miserable they were to be locked into the show that made them famous. Not that either one of them has landed a lot of work after the series ended — gee, do you think there’s any correlation there?

 Now Gillian Anderson (here’s a photo of the only time she’s ever looked even remotely attractive) is back publicly badmouthing the very show that made anyone care what she might ever have to say. Even as Duchovny seems to be endorsing the idea of another X-Files movie, his dour co-star is haughtily bitching about how much she hated the whole experience. 

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