Heretical Link Sausages

• In a surprisingly sensible move — given its historical reasons for existence — the Académie Française is doing away with some previously officially sanctioned diacriticals in the name of rationality. Of course, that item appears in a paper that prints the name of the current Premiere League leader with three silent letters... in the middle of the word...
• Over at the IPKat, there's a piece on commercialization of myth-making methods that, I'm afraid, founders a bit on two bad assumptions: That Lucas's references to Campbell's theory of myth were accurate descriptions of his method and not just post hoc rationalizations, and that Campbell's "theory" of myth is good anthropology and/or literary analysis. Umm, not so much, to any of these assumptions.

  More to the heretical point, Star Wars is uniformly badly conceived, and — with the exception of parts of Episode V — it is badly written and relies upon idiot plots. If that's "mythic" or "mythmaking," I think we're missing something. My theory has long been (for nearly forty years) that each grey cell of anyone in the Star Wars universe can be devoted to one of two things, and exclusively so: Rational thought, or the Force. Sadly, this explains an awful lot about how predictably stupid the various plots for galactic domination are... and, perhaps, the absence of a true Trickster archetype (which is pretty universally present in mythologies on this planet).

• From the Department of Unintended Irony, consider this article on the dubious "ethics" and "user mistreatment" of many pirate websites... posted at T0rr3ntFr34k. The earnestness is astounding — but, given that it's primary season, not even the most simultaneously self-righteous and self-defeating that I've seen in the last couple of days.
• R.I.P. Edgar Mitchell. We're running out of men who've touched the ground off the Earth.