It is not a day without politics, though: Here’s my 2012 presidential candidate pick unless/until someone better than Gary Johnson — some Rand hero, perhaps — comes along. As usual, I’m not saying he’s perfect, but compared to the past, we could do worse than smart, market-friendly, anti-drugwar, and from the coveted and seducable interior West.
Speaking of 2012 and long-term political planning: Roland Emmerich (and the scriptwriter of Saving Private Ryan) will apparently be adapting Isaac Asimov’s revered sci-fi novel Foundation in big-budget 3D IMAX Avatar fashion. I have no idea if the result will bear much resemblance to the novel, which would basically entail multiple segments with different sets of near-identical, bland bureaucrat characters talking about how to run the galaxy through implausible centuries-out statistical planning (the “psychohistory” modeling that tantalized a young Paul Krugman). It would be funny if it were just three hours of IMAX 3D bureaucratic meetings, just to teach audiences a lesson.
But if ever there were a man, however absurd, who we can count on to turn a novel into something gigantic, eye-popping, and ridiculous, it is Roland Emmerich. On balance, I declare this: very good news. Bonus: The greater the emphasis on explosions, the fewer children come away with a Krugman-like fascination with centralized economic planning.
Pure geek addendum: It will be interesting to see if Trantor, in a bit of unfair reverse-chronology, gets likened by viewers to Coruscant, in much the same way that a hypothetical Lensmen movie, if it gets made one day, will probably strike people as being too much like next year’s Green Lantern movie.
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