A PARTIAL LIST OF SHADOWY ORGANIZATIONS WHOSE NAMES BEGIN WITH "THE" AND THEIR OBJECTIVES:

• The Alliance of Twelve: World domination through profitable arms distribution
• The Army of the One: World domination through monotheism
• The Army of the Twelve Monkeys: (1) World destruction; (2) (alt.) zoological freedom
• The Champions: World domination through Kenny and Johnny Bananas making fun of people
• The Comet Empire: Galactic domination through collision
• The Company: World domination through viral contamination, mutant superpowers
• The Covenant: World domination through profitable arms distribution
• The Dharma Initiative: World domination through science experiments
• The Dollhouse: World domination through method acting
• The Legion of Doom: World domination through trying to blow shit up
• The Others: Peaceful separatism through armed self-preservation
• The Ring: World domination through software
• The Sopranos: Northern New Jersey domination through intimidation
• The Syndicate: World domination through superannuation
• The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: World domination through failed ideology

YOU WANT A REVIVAL? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THIS REVIVAL! Allegedly, plans are afoot for a revival of A Few Good Men to make its way to the Great White Way next season, and they're looking for a star to assay the Lt. Kaffee role (played by Cruise on film, and played by, inter alia, Bradley Whitford, Timothy Busfield, and Tom Hulce on Broadway). Any suggestions of folks who'd work for the principal roles?

ETA: The NYT says producers have expressed interest in James Franco and Justin Timberlake for the Kaffee role, and a commenter there notes that Rob Lowe recently did the role in London.

PRISON OF ELEMENTAL EVIL: A prison ban on all Dungeons & Dragons-related materials has been upheld, and the rationale "that playing the game promoted gang-related activity and was a threat to security" was upheld as reasonable. As someone who has played D&D in the past, as a general rule, D&D players and gang members are mutually exclusive circles in the great Venn Diagram of life.

WHAT, NO SABBATH? In an effort to increase synergy, the Iron Man 2 soundtrack will apparently be all AC/DC, basically a greatest hits album.

I AM OLD: The fact that there is a Runaways movie (authorized, with Joan Jett as executive producer) has been kicking around in my brain for a while now, but I just read this very morning that Dakota Fanning is playing Cherie Currie. Ick. I do not want to see this playing this. So I'm taking myself -- erstwhile and occasionally nostalgic fan of '70s and '80s hard rock -- out of the movie's target audience.

Incidentally, I take issue with the casting of the band. By using fresh-faced Kristen Stewart, Fanning, and Scout Taylor-Compton as Jett, Currie, and Lita Ford, they're missing the thoroughly discomforting truth at the heart of the Runaways. This was a band that actually looked and seemed like runaways* -- reckless, feral, ragged, dead-eyed, more Larry Clark than Malcolm McLaren. I just hope the movie won't gloss over the seediness of the whole enterprise, not just the standard music-industry stuff, but the particular and peculiar image this band's management built.

*Though, obviously, they weren't -- for example, I just read on Wikipedia that Jackie Fox, the bassist in the lineup for the first couple of albums, was a great student who ultimately graduated from Harvard Law.

THAT IS THE SOUND OF A THOUSAND TERRIBLE THINGS HEADED THIS WAY: During the weekend in the comments, Lou W. introduced us to the unit of measurement known as a "PM" -- "to measure the delta between level of anticipation and amount of suckitude," wherein 1.0 PM measures the degree of disappointment which the release of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace presented upon its release in 1999.

Lou suggested that Prince's "fight song" for the Vikings represented 400 millPM (or, 0.4 PM, depending on which abbreviations you prefer). I think Aaron Sorkin's "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" is at least at 0.6-0.7 PM, and Snakes on a Plane was closer to a 0.3 PM. (On the scale, 0.0 PM reflects a cultural work that exactly met expectations -- I Love You, Man perhaps -- with anything exceeding expectations like The Dark Knight going into negative territory.)

I've got nothing else this morning; let's fill out the scale.

(I GOT A MESSAGE FOR YOU): I'm not quite sure what the purpose is of a greatest hits collection in the era of iTunes, but that's not going to stop my from being a little bit happy about a 23-track Pavement compilation being released this March.

And very happy about a worldwide Pavement reunion tour in 2010, even if few of the dates are stateside.