I have this kind of self-important rule about not seeing movies of books I really like. (When T and her dad went to see Atonement over Christmas I saw Juno instead, which, incidentally? Schmaltz for hipsters.) But I will make an exception for the Coen brothers.

Steve Gerber, creator of Howard the Duck and Omega the Unknown and writer of some awesome and weird Defenders comics, died on Sunday. Gerber is one of those figures who seem to have occurred at the wrong moment: in the fifties he could have worked with Harvey Kurtzman at EC and seen his stories illustrated by Bill Elder; in the eighties he could have helped draft the Creator's Bill of Rights with Scott McCloud and Dave Sim and published Howard the Duck with Eclipse or Aardvark-Vanaheim. Instead he was a 1970s fan-turned-pro, like Roy Thomas and John Byrne, and he worked for Marvel, and he probably had very little chance at happiness in that situation, but fortunately for us all he was too ornery to turn into a bitter old drunk and instead he fought. If he hadn't appeared, no one would have filled his strangely shaped spot, and comics today would be different and worse. Tom Spurgeon has a lovely obituary.

What would Wittgenstein have said about that weird "too many men on the field" penalty they called on the Giants the other night? Joe Buck and Troy Aikman discuss.

If you can watch this all the way to the end without getting even a little choked up, I don't think I can be friends with you.

If Microsoft gets its paws on Yahoo, it'll be a disaster for both companies. The reason Microsoft hasn't managed to build a decent online presence in, what, twelve years is not that there are no smart people there. It's that Microsoft is constrained by the need to protect its shrinkwrap software business. Windows and Office bring in maybe $50 billion a year (revenues), at absurd profit margins. Google wants to replace those megabucks with the (much smaller) ad revenues from cloud-computing services like Google Docs. Microsoft's efforts at competing are half-assed and hamstrung, because MS doesn't want successful network services. (This is also why MS uses its crappy web browser's huge market share, gained by exploiting a monopoly, to retard the development of web standards: they want the web to suck.)

If the deal goes through, Microsoft's interests become Yahoo's interests, and one of the first great web companies will be conscripted into a rearguard action against the web itself.

Copy-editing the primaries: In the wake of John Edwards's departure from the Democratic race, Obama and Clinton both released sucking-up statements aimed at securing an endorsement from the cheery populist.

Talking Points Memo, Real Clear Politics, and Politico all include this sentence in Obama's statement: "John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this -- that two Americans can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose." (Emphasis added.)

Of course, Obama meant to say that two Americas can become one -- an attempt to connect Edwards's "two Americas" theme with Obama's own message of unity. (Indeed, that's how Obama's website has it.) But someone -- a sleep-deprived Obama staffer, perhaps? -- added an extra n, and now it looks as though Obama was paying some kind of weird tribute to the Edwardses' marriage.

Your linguistic update for the day: I have always opposed the colloquial use of deconstruct as a fancy synonym for thoroughly analyze. It makes me think of the Village Voice's arts section, and not in a good way. Deconstruction properly refers to a specific and rather abstruse school of critical reading in which texts are examined not for their meanings or methods but for their internal contradictions and lacunae. As a rule of thumb, if a person hasn't gone to graduate school in the humanities, he or she probably isn't deconstructing anything.

But when a usage is employed by Joan Didion, that usage has, by definition, become acceptable and probably admirable. So as of now we can all go to town, deconstructionwise.

Indianapolis, why don't you sing? I am reading This Is Your Brain on Music, which is fascinating but also tantalizingly inconclusive. I suspect that reflects the current state of neuroscience -- we know just enough about the brain's mechanics to have our interest triggered, but not enough to satisfy our curiosity. I'm still waiting to learn why perhaps the most thrilling of all neuromusical experiences is hearing a song you love successfully transposed into a different genre. E.g. this, via Emily Gould.

Maybe you were thinking that a fitting way to end your week would be to watch Lou Reed and Pavarotti, backed by a full orchestra, singing "Perfect Day". If so, you're in luck.

Copy-editing the election: First, the unwelcome return of a familiar error. Joe Klein, writing in Time:

With the terrorist threat diminished, is it worth spending $9 billion a month to referee the eternal Mesopotamian ethnic differences?

Klein is talking about the struggle between the Sunni and the Shi'a, and about the Kurds' fight for control of Kirkuk. Only one of these is an ethnic difference. (The incursions of Persian terrorists from Iran have an ethnic dimension, but Klein has already dismissed these as a contributor to the turmoil in Iraq.)

Second, from the NYT editorial page:

Mrs. Clinton followed up with her strange references to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson — and no matter how many times she tried to reframe the quote, the feeling hung in the air that she was denigrating America’s most revered black leader.

There is nothing technically wrong with this. The word denigrate simply means to criticize unfairly. But am I alone in thinking that its usage in this context leaves a bad taste? Washington mayoral aide David Howard got in trouble for using the word niggardly, which unlike denigrate is etymologically innocent of any connection to blackness.

The estimable Ty Alper explains the lethal-injection controversy, now under consideration by the Supreme Court:

If executions do resume, and the courts do not force states to reconsider the three-drug protocol that they all employ, inmates will continue to be paralyzed before they are killed. (The first drug in the protocol is supposed to anesthetize, the second one paralyzes, and the third one kills.) Many people do not know about this aspect of lethal injection. They hear witnesses describe lethal injection as “peaceful,” but don’t realize that such executions have literally been staged to look that way.

According to John Marcotte, "'One More Day' isn’t the stupidest Spider-Man plot Marvel has unleashed on the public. In fact, it’s not even in the top five."

The Spider-Mobile: Try to wrap your mind around the sheer number of ways that a car driving on the side of buildings violates the laws of physics — even the relaxed type of physics one encounters in comic-books. How would it get from the ground to the wall in the first place? How can it move from one building to the next? What happens if a two-ton car is being supported by a one-inch plate-glass window? I don’t know the answers to these questions and I suspect that Gerry Conway and Ross Andru don’t either.

Oh and in case you forgot, Spider-Man has the coolest mode of transportation ever invented: web-swinging. Putting Spider-Man inside a car is like putting Aquaman inside a plane.

We're at one of those moments in the Democratic primary campaign when bloggers can explain what's going on better than mainstream reporters or pundits. Here, then, is an anonymous poster at Talking Points Memo, and here's Daniel Radosh. Update: And here's Zack's hero Matthew Yglesias.

Timothy Noah on the Hillary "experience" meme:

Clinton's claim to superior experience isn't merely dishonest. It's also potentially dangerous should she become the nominee. If Clinton continues to build her campaign on the dubious foundation of government experience, it shouldn't be very difficult for her GOP opponent to pull that edifice down.

Check out this segment from Hardball (via TPM), and savor the sound of the Reagan coalition coming unglued.

This is just sad....Hillary is now reduced to making jokes about having had sex with John McCain in a desperate bid to show voters she's a human being.

Yes, I'm back!

"One of the more extraordinary stories of the Obama campaign has been playing out behind the scenes over the past week as the candidate has been working on a daily basis to try to calm things down in his father's homeland and his grandmother's home, Kenya, where a contested election has led to riots."

Friendblogging: Ty Alper will be on C-SPAN's Washington Journal tomorrow at 9 a.m., talking about the Supreme Court's lethal injection case.

The Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist:

Believe me, I sympathize. You are in possession of a truly incredible breakthrough that offers the prospect of changing the very face of science as we know it, if not more. The only problem is, you’re coming at things from an unorthodox perspective. Maybe your findings don’t fit comfortably with people’s preconceived notions, or maybe you don’t have the elaborate academic credentials that established scientists take for granted....

Happily, we are here to help. It would be a shame if the correct theory to explain away dark matter or account for the origin of life were developed by someone without a conventional academic position, who didn’t really take a lot of science classes in college and didn’t have a great math background but was always interested in the big questions, only for that theory to be neglected because of some churlish prejudice. So we would like to present a simple checklist of things that alternative scientists should do in order to get taken seriously by the Man. And the good news is, it’s only three items!

I have got some Obama fever over here. And also kind of a throaty cough.