Friday finds

Everybody knows that the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was supposed to end with an enormous pie-throwing fight in the War Room. Here’s why it was changed, and how the original ending played, as described by the film’s editor, Anthony Harvey.

Who’s the poet laureate for your state?

This is the year for John (and Dan) Fante. Is America ready? 

Fifty years of Naked Lunch.

The Online Museum of Wingnuttia, aka The Big Pail O’Fail. What an awful time for our country.

Hoo boy, now that is an embarrassing moment.

Your summer reading list of summer reading lists.

Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? and The Wrecking Crew, is reviving The Baffler, the business and culture magazine he founded in 1988. Commodify Your Dissent, a collection that showcases the magazine’s most provocative articles, will give you an idea of what’s to come. 

“Especially with these valve amplifiers that we really love, it gets to the point where they suddenly start really working, and the valves start to really glow and glow, and they might even explode. That’s when it’s starting to get good.”

Scottish castle magic.

Trying to visualize Dejah Thoris.

Poppies grown in Australia account for roughly half of the legally produced opium in the world. Who knew? And wallabies are eating the poppies and creating crop circles as they wander in a narcotic haze. No wonder they call the place Oz.

“Some of the things Bill told me on the tapes I have never repeated, except to my wife. One thing I can partly tell now that he is dead. When he entered the CIA, in 1951, he beat the polygraph test that all prospective agents have to take. (Always willing to risk.) He was determined to protect a family member from an embarrassing disclosure, and he did. I asked him how he accomplished that. ‘I guess that if you think you have a right to tell a lie, it will not register as one.’ At least it did not with him.”