Asides

They’re really, seriously making “Battleship: The Movie”. And you thought comic book movies were bad? (On the other hand, Funny or Die has a great “What other movies could they make?” post, which happens to include Clue(do): When your family is more prolific than the Kennedys’ and more secretive than the Knights Templar, reunions can be a tedious affair. Especially when the mysterious, estranged patriarch is discovered dead before dinner can be served. Now in two days the Von Clu family must try to find a killer without murdering each other first. (Will be a quirky reboot of the storied Clue franchise) ...

Jeff Goodell, for Rolling Stone: Climate Change and the End of Australia: As the Big Dry dragged on, rainfall declined in the southern part of the country, where most of the people live and the majority of the food is grown, fueling the risk of catastrophic bush fires. The reasons for this change in rainfall patterns are complex, but many climate scientists believe that the Big Dry was driven by subtle shifts in the structure of Australia’s atmosphere caused by the dramatic buildup of carbon pollution. “The storm track, which brings rain-bearing weather to Australia, has shifted a few degrees south,” says Karoly, the University of Melbourne scientist. “Rain that had fallen on southwestern and southeastern Australia now falls on the ocean.” Global warming, in other words, shifted the continent’s vital rainfall out to sea. ...

Horrible Bosses: Jason Bateman, Jason Sudekis, Jennifer Anniston, Kevin Spacey, and Colin Farrell - and that’s only the part of the cast you’re likely to recognise just by name. Nimble and adept, modern and unflinching with enough to keep the laughs going, this comedy provides some light relief without compromising or requiring you to switch your brain off. ★★★

History diversion: Today I learned… the “Founding Fathers” of America might not have been so pure in their motives after all: As Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, a new and frustrating biography by Willard Sterne Randall, shows, Allen is hard to write about. He poses a challenge not so much because he is different from more famous Founders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin but because he resembles them perhaps a bit too much—in ways most Americans prefer not to think about. ...

Alan Kohler: A Surplus of Political Stupidity: We are about to get a lesson in the absurdity of political discourse: the government is going to be accused of ‘breaking a promise’ if a global downturn prevents the budget from returning to surplus by 2013, or if it sensibly decides to put off the carbon tax. In normal life, we adjust according to circumstances. A company, for example, might decide to do something next year, but if things change the board will meet again and put it off. If they didn’t, they’d be sacked. ...