Shameless plugs, still more ID crap, and TIFFing (i.e., mostly links)

* A review, written under great duress*, of the finally-arriving Tropical Malady and Rep this time around, folks. The latter features a breathless paean to early Cronenberg, whose latest -- the allegedly rad A History of Violence -- I'm gonna have to see next Friday like a regular schnook. On tap for next week's column: mini retrospectives of Serbian doc-head Goran Radovanovic, Peter Watkins, and David Lynch, who'll be returning to the city that so fractured his little mind.

* Still more ID crap: the embarrassment of pro-evolution riches flying around lately has been a dastardly way for me to feed into a particular obsession. Furthermore, after The Onion's lead, they're now getting funny. The Daily Show has dedicated the whole week to covering the divide, though so far they've been disappointingly...well, not even-handed, exactly. (The debate, remember, is over whether they are scientific equals.) But it seems like they've been uncharacteristically blowing an easy kill, as well as nixing a rarified opportunity to deflate the junk science in front of a wider audience than most anti-IDers could ever acquire. Sigh. Maybe they're saving it for the final show. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, in a review of Chris Mooney's new book The Republican War on Science, threw his hat in the ring, in turn alerting readers to the NCSE's brilliant retort: a list of pro-Darwin scientists titled Project Steve. Also, better late than never to send you Christopher Hitchens' way, who lends his impassioned, straight-and-narrow worldview to the particularly pungent non-science. If all this isn't enough to sate you, then you can additionally pick up the latest Skeptic Magazine, which contains no fewer than four (4) impassioned, rationalized take-downs, including ten full pages devoted to the startling quackery of William A. Dembski. (Update: Holy shit! Dembski popped up on an otherwise useless panel discussion on The Daily Show! Dude: drop the false analogy wherein Mount Rushmore is equal to anything natural.)

* Choose your blogging Toronto International Film Festival goer! Mike D'Angelo, as ever, is terribly reliable. However, it seems that Jeremy "I Don't Sleep" Heilman gets the Most Prolific trophy, with full, multi-paragraphed rantings popping up throughout the day. The Onion A.V. tag team of Scott Tobias and Noel Murray have hardly been slouches, though, tossing off insightful entries at a fair clip. If you're out for more than simple advance notes on the season's biggies, head over to Michael Sicinski, who tends to spring for more avant-garde/un-distributable/short-form titles, even if he's been understandably lax on capsulizing them up. And, as always, there's Roger.

* Consider: a badly compressed DVD, a skipping player, and a train ride writing session unfairly aborted by a combination dead battery and the train's electrical problems. Must re-teach my onetime-luddite self to write longhand.