I got a couple good pointers from people regarding my questions about Memento yesterday; the best two, by far, are these questions (with answers) posed by EW to director Chris Nolan, and this thread full of questions and answers on greenspun.com. (Those of you with good eyes will notice that the place the latter thread originated was on Beth’s site, the same Beth mentioned in my copyright notice on every page of this site.) My questions also brought an old high school friend out of the woodwork, which was cool. (Hi, Steve!)

D’ya know what bothers me most about states that make big hoo-hahs about passing laws banning the use of hand-held cellphones by car drivers? That there seems to be pretty good evidence that it’s no safer for drivers to use hands-free cellphones; the problem appears to be the attention that talking on the phone diverts from driving, not the technology used to have the conversation. My personal favorite is this Associated Press article, which states in the second-to-last paragraph that the above-linked 1997 New England Journal of Medicine study “found that the chance of an accident was four times greater when a driver was using a handheld cell phone” (bold added by me). It found no such association specific to handheld phones — it found it for all cellphone use while driving, including hands-free units.

Remember the relatively horrifying monkeyfishing article I pointed to a few weeks back? It turns out that parts of it were totally fabricated. What’s more, Slate now has to go back through Jay Forman’s other articles, and there appear to be other (less significant) details that have been made up.

Genius — the Asian American Journalists Association has put together a compendium of the various ways the major press outlets have referred to FuckedCompany.com in print, from “F*ckedCompany.com” to “F—edCompany.com” (yep, that’s two dashes) to “(expletive)Company.com”. (Thanks to Heather for passing this one on.)