Your Salon readers are probably the ones who want the democrats to win. It's the rest of 'em we've got to worry about. I can't watch Recount yet, but perhaps its coming out now will piss off enough people to get them out.

your writing. You are indeed an inspirational genius. Thank you so much for lending your considerable talents to lighten up the drudgery of my life. Seriously. I really enjoy your column. Your description of the Andromeda Strain was all I really needed to hear to know that Benjamin Bratt's career is in the toilet. Seriously, my weekends of late have been crap, so thanks for the wry humor. People that take themselves so seriously, like BW, make me weary. Can't she just please go away, she and Dennis Miller? Please go, you're finished, stop the torment.

There is no way I can watch "Recount" without going all Elvis on my television.

Excellent.

Havrilesky, still apparently on a sugar high from her binge last week, hasn't gotten stable enough to catch what happened. Of course, realizing what happened would require familiarity with the original movie.

The 1971 movie, like the book, was a deadly-serious techno-thriller. Crichton did for the novel what he wished he could do to his patients; scare the hell out of them and make them tremble at his every word. At the same time, he showed that a squad of Nobel prize winners completely missed what a lowly physician (obviously Crichton's stand-in) recognized; the nature of the Andromeda organism. It stayed tense because it didn't go for comic-book effects or garish performances, using something close to real science and requiring the audience to think. It was cast effectively but cheaply. The only "big" actor was Arthur Hill; the putative lead actor, James Olson, wasted the rest of his career playing TV villains, a pretty poor reward.

The A&E remake (and let's not pretend it hasn't been seen; Part 1 is out there and available somewhere) gets rid of that seriousness. It substitutes gory scenes of people dying and going murderous (like those popular crappy zombie movies, only these zombies move fast). In the original you sympathized with the dull but dedicated scientists. In this one they are mere narrators to the real focus, the Grand Guginol outside of the Wildfire facility.

It's not surprising. Crichton is only the latest person in Hollowwood to sell out his integrity. Remakes and pastiches are all the entertainment megacorporations can produce now, and they can't even do interesting remakes. No wonder Havrilesky would rather watch (gakkk) reality shows.

is living proof that you can get into a great med school, be at the top of your class and still have incredibly poor reasoning abilities. Some of the whacko stuff that guy thinks.... gives me chills to think that my doctors did less well than him in school. I'm not just talking about unsound global warming theories - I'm more astounded by the real fringe crazy crap.

Still, Jurassic Park was a fun movie.....

But you really seem to have an organic hatred of Michael Crichton. The original book and movie were pretty damn good. The book "Terminal Man" was even better and guess what his halfassed crazy things back then have been in real medical practice recently. So he was about 35 years ahead of his time.

Also one would think that the anti-intellectual luddites at Salon would love the cautionary tale "Prey" about the evils of nanotechnology. In fact the one common theme of Crichton is that technology for the most part is bad becasue people are bad, careless, greedy and vain. Which could be on the masthead for Salon.com. So what's your real complaint? Not enough references to reality TV, It's not 'Lost' therefore it is shit? Or do you just hate sci-fi that isn't soap opera chick TV dressed up as sci-fi like 'Sex in the Battlestar Galactica'?

Really enjoyed that one.

If it weren't so brilliantly written, I'd probably be hanging myself now. Any single article that manages to trash both Barbara Walters and Michael Crichton in service of a grand theme, while leaving time for some good old-fashioned self-hatred, deserves a gold star in my book. I can almost forgive the author for misunderstanding Lost.

I anxiously await Crichton's next novel, to see what seedy backstory he'll have cooked up for Ms. Havrilesky. Perhaps she'll find herself even not human; my money's on a mutant dung beetle.

My, what a confessional moment: "compiling complicated analyses of deeply trivial televised entertainments, I can be like a beacon unto all of the overeducated but ultimately shallow and unfocused young people out there."

If that's how you really feel about your work, it's time to stop doing it.

Perhaps it would be helpful for you to go back and take a course in the basics of aesthetics and literature. It's connecting with other human beings in a way which is rich for them, even though the mode of expression is not always the most profound. If you can't see the beauty of both Bach and Brown (James), you're narrow-minded.

But that's not all of it, is it? You're having a "Tonio Kröger" experience, Thomas Mann's character who is torn between his artistic nature and his bourgeois upbringing. You can't quite decide that what you do is serious enough work, can you? That probably means it isn't. And your curse will be that if you do go into "serious" work, you will forever be drawn to the fun and charm of the other path.

Poor you. But people are dying in Baghdad, so try to work it out on your own time.

I am so looking forward to recount on HBO, partially on the strength of Heather's analysis and partially on the strength of the actors invovled.

However, the real strength of the entertainment as a Historical Document will come when the white letters on black screen come up at the end of the piece.

The one that says that after the court case a hand recount was performed by various media outlets, and at not time did Al Gore's vote total rise about George W. Bush's.

I think it's an interesting point to remember, that George Bush did steal the election, but that he didn't have to.

Irony.