John Coleman, the man who gave us The Weather Channel, says if global warming advocates will not stand for a debate with credible scientists who oppose their theory, then he’ll sue Al Gore for financial fraud.

“Since we can’t get a debate, I thought perhaps if we had a legal challenge and went into a court of law, where it was our scientists and their scientists, and all the legal proceedings with the discovery and all their documents from both sides and scientific testimony from both sides, we could finally get a good solid debate on the issue,” Coleman said. “I’m confident that the advocates of ‘no significant effect from carbon dioxide’ would win the case.”

Coleman has been critical of the climate change hype you see everywhere and how his cable channel, now owned by someone else, has encouraged the hype. “In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society,” according to the Business & Media Institute.

“A new study by The Nielsen Co. found that the PG-rated movies with the least profanity made the most money at the U.S. box office,” reports the AP. The study shows that parents carefully screen for language in the movies they bring their kids to see. Also web chatter helps most movies, but apparently it doesn’t help horror movies.

Andree Seu blogs on how easy it would be to adapt Biblical stories for the screen.

“Okay, so what does a Christian film look like?” one of you asks over lattes at Starbucks, your pens poised above blank sheets of paper.

“It tells it how it is,” replies Johnny. “The Christian is nothing if not a prophet of truth.”

I wish I could remember the title of a book one of my college English professors said was the best story from Jesus’ time period he had read. It something like Ben Hur, a story about a man or boy who lived around 30 A.D. and meets Jesus at one point in the story. It was juvenile fiction, but I don’t remember any more than that.

Some British literature professors say literature has no value, according to a new book by Rónán McDonald, The Death of the Critic. It’s “a polemic in favour of the critic as a ‘knowledgeable arbiter.’ In McDonald’s account, it is a reason for sharp regret that no one cares any more about ‘the critic.'”

In a section on blogs, online reviews, and the prominence of reader groups, McDonald “argues that the demise of critical expertise brings not a liberating democracy of taste, but conservatism and repetition. ‘The death of the critic’ leads not to the sometimes vaunted ’empowerment’ of the reader, but to ‘a dearth of choice.'” Not that critics just have better taste than everyone else, that their judgments are purely subject to their whims. Critics should have the knowledge to help us see the value of some books over others. “McDonald proposes that cultural value judgements, while not objective, are shared, communal, consensual and therefore open to agreement as well as dispute. But the critics who could help us to reach shared evaluations have opted out.”

I’ll try to put something substantive on the blog later today, but let me counter Lars’ sickness posts with a declaration that I have arrived. My life is indeed complete now. My people inform me that I have donated one gallon of blood (O negative) through my local non-profit org. Blood Assurance. There’s no need to thank me.

I felt considerably better last evening, and thought maybe it would all be done by this morning. But I woke up to find myself weak and coughing. Haven’t even had the energy to read much today.

On the upside, I’ve completely lost my appetite.