Neil Patrick Harris has a TV-heavy resume. Now he’s just landed the lead in Smurfs: The Movie for Sony. Harris won’t have to walk around as a blue-tinted Avatar, either. The Raja Gosnell-directed film is a mix of live action and animation, and Harris is the lead live action character. Filming begins in April, when he’ll be on hiatus from CBS’ How I Met Your Mother.

That article’s headline claims he’ll play the “lead Smurf”, but the text you just read says he’ll be the lead “live action character”, meaning he’ll be either Gargamel or Papa Smurf, depending on how you’re reading it.

[via Deadline, which I just realized is Nikki Finke's new-ish outfit]

IVINS then inquired about SSA [redacted] present state of health and proceeded to state the gross facts regarding a motor vehicle accident (MVA) writer was involved in back in August 2004. SSA [redacted] has never disclosed the facts or circumstances of this accident with IVINS on any occasion, or any other individual at  USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked].

If I’m understanding this correctly, Ivins researched and memorized a dossier of his interrogator before or during the course of questioning (which, I gather, took place over a number of sessions). To what end, one wonders. It seems to me that Ivins was aware, at least to some extent, of his eccentricities. Did he do it just to fuck with them? Did he, perhaps, hold himself up against Kevin Spacey’s ultra-brilliant but severely disturbed character in Seven, who commits a vile, heinous murder in accordance with each of the seven deadly sins? The comparison alone is enough to make the skin crawl.

One wonders what the interrogator must have felt at that moment, having what sounds as though might have been one of the most disturbing moments of his life retold to him by a mad scientist with a God complex.

That’s all fine, unless one of those fingers is an obsessive, depressed sexual deviant who also happened to be a cross-dresser (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Here’s a short list — culled from his FBI file published by The Smoking Gun — of reasons Dr. Bruce Ivins probably shouldn’t have been allowed to hang around labs with Bacillus anthracis inside. Now, the case could be made that none of these things taken alone is enough to condemn the man’s personality (who doesn’t like to slip on some ladies panties from time to time?), but the volume of Ivins’s peculiar habits is a little much to ignore:

• He had a decades-long “obsession” with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, because he was turned down for a date by one of its members in the early 1960s, while doing his undergraduate work at the University of Cincinnati.
• He “[did] hold grudges” including one against the New York Yankees, for no particular reason, and was a bit of a sports conspiracy theorist, having commented several times that he thought most soccer injuries were “dives” for penalties.
• He had a weird sex life, such as it was — into bondage, blindfolds, etc. and had a stream of pornographic materials and “stained” — nahmean? — underpants flowing through his home, landing in the trash, where they were picked up by FBI agents (I’d hate to be the sucker on that detail).

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” which posits (and I apologize for butchering Gladwell’s work by way of brevity) that a small number of individuals command a great degree of clout when it comes to shaping dialogue, fashion, disseminating information and even spreading disease. The argument applies, though imperfectly, here: the concern should never have been how much Anthrax there was around, or how many people had access to it, but who, precisely, those people were. Obsessive sex-freaks, perhaps, need not apply.

[via Caffeine Plus Nicotine Equals Protein]

[via Peter Combe at a tale of a few cities]

On the one hand, you’d be a cold bastard not to feel a little sympathy:

American officials have said they intend to let the Haitian justice system take its course.

They obviously didn’t know what they were doing and one must wonder if their thinking was clouded by a sense of divine entitlement, given their surprise at the outcome of, as stated, trying to traffic unidentified children across international borders with no paperwork whatever.

But for those same reasons, I’m inclined not to feel sorry for them at all, becuase that last sentence is written just as well in the pejorative:

These people obviously didn’t know what the fuck they were doing and, frankly, one must wonder if their odd-duck of a preacher instilled in them a sense of divine entitlement, given their surprise at the repurcussions of child trafficking, committed knowingly or not.

Full disclosure: I’ve had some experience with American missionaries in the developing world, and to say I’m left unimpressed by their world view is something of an understatement. My experience has been — and forgive me for the generalization, but it seems to hold up most of the time — that their breed of humanitarianism easily forgets the “human” part of it. Put differently, spend a little time among missionaries and you’ll find pretty quickly that within them the notion of cultural supremacy is alive and well. I suspect a situation like that in Haiti would accelerate that phenomenon.

Given that as a backdrop, you can (sort of) understand the thought process of these folks, which more or less boils down to “we know best”.

That obviously didn’t hold up this time. It really doesn’t hold up ever, except most of the time, nobody notices because nothing drastic is happening.

So forgive me when I say, with the deepest of sympathies to these peoples and their worried families*, if you go to a place with the intention of deploying “your way” with no respect given to local (and in this case, international) practices, customs, laws, governments, etc., you kind of deserve to get pinched for it. Can a guy from Amsterdam roll into East Bumfuck, Wisconsin, roll up a spliff and start puffin’ away? Certainly not. Yet these sorts of Americans run all over the world as if the rules were theirs to write. Sorry guys, it just doesn’t work that way.

*or whatever

But Mediaite points out why these guys probably aren’t going to starve: the real money is in public appearances. And nobody’s playing that game better than Paul Delvecchio, who is said to be charging $10,000 a set to DJ. Beat that beat back Pauly D; you’re gonna need somewhere to store all that cash.

John Edwards has a sex tape. I don’t see why we wouldn’t cover this again, so thats it for now.

Also, by way of Animal New York, we’ve learned that the Hipster Grifter will be blogging for Animal New York. IMHO, she bageled her first post.