From the excellent resourceFireflyMovie.com – News comes a set report from Joss Whedon: Today was (as I think you know) the first day of filming of Serenity. Which is pretty big for me (it felt weird to START with Mal’s death, but scheduling isn’t my area). It was a blast. Sean said it was like school was back in session after summer vacation, which I have decided to take as a compliment. Gina did a happy dance (and there are few happier sights than Gina doing a happy dance). We’re still flying. And the best part is, that’s not even…

Steve just stopped by with a present for David: a totally cool and retro Namco game controller for the TV. Pac Man, Dig Dug, Galaxians, Rally-X and Bosconians. Complete with cheesy graphics and wacky sounds, too. We’re not about to run out and drop a lot of ducats on an expensive game system, we’re perfectly happy being Luddites on this. They’re stupid good fun. And I just realized something: “Retro” is probably related to “retarded.” Well done me. Also, we’ve decided to head off to see the new “Harry Potter” movie. I continue to get hits for the “homing hippogriffs”…

Yes, it was available at Borders. Yes, the counter guy was puzzled; he’d never heard of it. Yes, I grabbed it with a little “glee!” sound. Happy birthday to David. Hope you like the Firefly DVD! (we watched one of the never-aired episodes, “Trash.” Heh. And there are two more. And extras. And then maybe a movie will come out someday. Because they rolled film today.

CBS has confirmed that it will air The Amazing Race 5 during the summer of 2004, beginning on July 6, as it originally planned. Thus, CBS chairman Les Moonves’ trial balloon regarding the possibility of delaying TAR5 for the CBS fall schedule, which he trotted out during the network’s “upfront” presentations in May, has been punctured. Yay! More confirmation. And tomorrow, the cast bios go live.

Yahoo!!!

I was thinking the other day about the entertainment industry – as in why do we have one, for instance. Why do we pay $11 to see movies – is it the witty banter, glamourous settings and costumes, thrilling plots? No, for the most part, it’s because we like to see stuff blowin’ up: But according to Richard Ouzounian, who runs the Youngstown Warren Film Commission, the town is a virtual film set waiting to happen. It has an airport, complete with a new terminal and 9,000-foot runway, which handles only four flights a week. It has a 2,016-bed prison…

Okay, this was funny. Not only did the Onion spoof science fiction fan conventioneers, they used Farscape as the example, and they spelled the character names right (and got the episode titles and numbers right, too) BURBANK, CA—Paulette Osley, 24, a moderately attractive fan of the Sci-Fi Channel series Farscape, had her self-image inflated to dangerous levels during the three-day ScaperCon 2004, according to Pepperdine University professor of psychology Wes Martin. It’s not real, of course – there’s not a Scapercon 2004 this year. But it’s affectionate. Gotta give the Onion props.

CBS has finally put a teaser page up for

John Cleese and Tim Curry have joined the cast of upcoming animated picture “Valiant. What is it? I hadn’t heard of it before, but based on this, it probably will not suck one tiny little bit. The animated comedy tells the story of a wood pigeon named Valiant, who overcomes his small size to become a hero in Great Britain’s Royal Air Force Homing Pigeon Service during World War II. Cleese plays an Allied pigeon who gets trapped behind enemy lines. Curry voices a character who is devoted to the pigeons’ destruction as part of the enemy’s Falcon Brigade, the…

The big screen movie version of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” may do just that, even if John Malkovich joins “Galaxy” cast. He plays a heretofore unheard of character created for the movie by Douglas Adams in the screenplay he wrote before his death in 2001.