Things That Made Me Happy These Last Two Weeks, Weeks 170 & 171

[glenniebun]

• Scott, astute_reason and I saw The A-Team last Monday, and our lives were changed forever. It could very well be the greatest achievement in the history of motion picture arts & sciences. Hypermasculine yet not distasteful, it's pretty much the Platonic form of Shit Blowin' Up Real Good, which isn't something I typically go for but is so damned gleeful here that I almost couldn't stop laughing. It starts out ridiculous and only gets more absurd as it goes on.
• Before leaving for the movie, I checked my mail and found the Deluxe Edition of Michael Giacchino's Star Trek. Now, while I definitely see many of the points raised in the dead-horse-abusing online threads and share some of them, all in all the music has a far better presentation here than it did on the original CD a year ago--I'm particularly drawn to the additional variations on the softer material on the first disc, material that adds far more depth to the entire score than was apparent before. Not that there aren't new action (or action-building) tracks also! "Trekking Down the Narada" has barely left my head since the first time I spun the set, and "Hangar Management" is just as great as I thought it was during the film...though I do wonder why the use of the Alexander Courage fanfare at the end of that track isn't noted along with its other uses.
• Speaking of Star Trek, this new poster for "Space Seed" is just magnificent.
• Speaking of cool genre-related art: a professional cartographer has applied his talents to a detailed map of Lost's Island. (Q&A here.) (Spoilers for the entire show, of course.)
• If this ain't romance, I don't know what is.
• I love stories about ongoing efforts to keep up with media deterioration; there's a lot of excellent work being done at the Library of Congress. I particularly like the comments about analyzing documents as unobtrusively as possible, so that the document is kept as pristine as possible for the benefit of methods not yet devised.
• I may be woefully late to the party, but the MythBusters program is indeed quite awesome...so here's one of the hosts singing "I Will Survive" as Gollum. You're welcome.
• Of the untold number of gimmicked Twitter accounts, I think Feminist Hulk may be my favorite.