1. Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, brought to the attention of most by Roger Ebert's recent rave, is apparently going to see the light of day a couple of days from now on the Reel 13 Web site.

["Nina Paley dedicated five years to make her original film, Sita Sings the Blues. Using 2-D animation techniques, Paley weaves the 1920's music of blues singer Annette Hanshaw into a story of modern-day heartbreak mixed with a Hindu epic tale. But after being shown at dozens of film festivals and winning awards and critical acclaim, she still can't distribute her film through normal channels, because although the recording rights for the music—integral to the movie—have expired, the copyright for the songs themselves have not."]

2. Pictures at an Exhibition. Douglas LeBlanc examines the weird results when the left tries to make sympathetic art about the Christian right. (h/t: Andrew Sullivan)

["My first preview of at photographer Jona Frank's book of portraits about Patrick Henry College occurred through Mother Jones, where it appeared alongside image galleries on phone sex operators, Aryan outfitters, and women in Afghanistan. (Mother Jones' photo galleries reflect a wide variety of topics, but I'm mentioning the ones it promoted alongside the photos from Frank's second book, Right: Portraits from the Evangelical Ivy League.)"]

3. Cold Water Commentaries: Ronald D. Moore and the End of Speculation. Cultural Learnings' Myles McNutt wishes the Battlestar Galactica show runner would lay off stamping out everyone's fun.

["Effectively, Moore has thrown cold water on the theorists, the prognosticators, the obsessed Battlestar fans who spend more time trying to figure out where the show is going than they do considering where the show has been. And while I wouldn't put myself within the group who is solely concerned about the series' forward momentum, I am someone who likes to have a complex framework for heading into upcoming episodes, and to be honest I feel as if Moore has somewhat betrayed that principle."]

4. Belated Weekend Viewing: THE CHARLIE BROWN AND SNOOPY SHOW. Jaime Weinman resurrects one of my most-cherished childhood memories. (I seriously thought I was the only person who remembered this series.)

["The solution The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show used was not to have any new scripts or dialogue created for the episodes: they used only material that came directly from the strip, with new lines added only when they absolutely couldn't avoid adding something. Most of the specials drew heavily on the original strips, but they usually added linking material to create a full half-hour story; this show was just a lot of comic strips re-done in animated form. There were short sketches, usually stringing together individual strips with a similar theme, and longer sequences based on long multi-week stories from the strip. They'd already done two specials with this format: A Charlie Brown Celebration and It's An Adventure, Charlie Brown (which included animated versions of such famous stories as Charlie Brown's baseball-shaped rash and Charlie Brown being hunted by the EPA for biting the kite-eating tree)."]

5. The Interpreter. An oldie, but a goodie. Does a remote Amazonian tribe disprove everything we think we know to be true about human languages?

["The people, members of a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Pirahã, responded to the sight of Everett—a solidly built man of fifty-five with a red beard and the booming voice of a former evangelical minister—with a greeting that sounded like a profusion of exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering scarcely discernible, to the uninitiated, as human speech. Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. It is a language so confounding to non-natives that until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived among the Pirahã, as Christian missionaries, in the nineteen-seventies, no outsider had succeeded in mastering it. Everett eventually abandoned Christianity, but he and Keren have spent the past thirty years, on and off, living with the tribe, and in that time they have learned Pirahã as no other Westerners have."]

Quote of the Day:

Image of the Day (click to enlarge): There is no day that Peanuts cannot improve.

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.