The Brooklyn Museum plans to exhibit art forgeries next year. The curator said, “‘The idea of connoisseurship’ — how scholars examine a work of art in order to determine its authenticity and proper attribution — ‘has a lot of general appeal.'”

There are disputes over the authorship of two popular Christian poems. “My client wants to preserve for all time the knowledge in the public that his mother wrote this poem,” states one lawyer, and some of us have to ask what the real point of that knowledge would be–credit or money?

Tony Snow, commentator and former press secretary for the president, died of cancer at 2:00 a.m. this morning at Georgetown University Hospital. He was 53. I think if talk radio commentators were stereotyped as being like Tony Snow, few people would have room to complain about them. He was a great man.

Let me add that I hope to him in heaven. I believe he was Catholic, and I heartily disagree with the doctrine of the Catholic church, but I’ve heard Tony talk about life and dealing with cancer a few times and I believe he understood the gospel.

You know, I never feel much when public figures pass away. I don’t know them, even if I admire them, so I don’t feel more than a bit of disappointment, if that. So why am I crying now?

More on Tony Snow at World

You run across all sorts of things, surfing the web. Tonight, for no particular reason, I’ll share with you the story of Margaret, the Maid of Norway, a girl who lived only seven years and did nothing at all remarkable, but is nevertheless renowned in the folklore of two countries.

I realize there’s no reason you should be interested in her story, so I’ll attempt to lure you in by notng that Margaret’s story is the backstory to the movie Braveheart.

You’re aware, aren’t you, that, fine as it is as a rousing piece of manly cinema, Braveheart is, from a historical point of view, a load of haggis? The costumes are wrong. The chronology’s mixed up. The battles are inaccurate. And the politics are skewed.

At the beginning of the film, you’ll recall, William Wallace’s father (his brother too? I forget) rides off to a meeting with King Edward I of England, where all the Scots in attendance are treacherously hanged. Such an incident may have happened at an earlier time (it can’t be proven one way or the other), but it didn’t happen to Wallace’s father, and that wasn’t what started the conflict between Edward and the Scots. Continue reading Margaret, the Maid of Norway →

“More important than its homages to Hollywood classics may be WALL-E’s status as an example of the kind of films Hollywood rarely makes anymore: well-crafted stories for a mass audience.“