So Indiewire, Hollywood Reporter and Variety say that the new Star Wars film is quite good. I remain a firm cynic. Of course, if there’s extra violence, this could mean a graphic and painful death for Jar Jar Binks. Which I applaud. (via GC Daily)

For the most part, we’re big fans of editors. We firmly believe that they are sexy people, among the most underappreciated people ironing out the English language. Beyond functioning as a seminal second set of eyes, a good editor can save a writer’s ass (often with the writer unaware), tear an inflexible hothead a new one, or encourage a dispirited voice. Hell, we wish this blog had a damn editor so we’d refrain from rampant grammatical mistakes. (And please, dear readers, if you ever want to fact check our asses — as opposed to Xeroxing them — then we invite you to weigh in.)

Unfortunately, even a pan from a dependable river has its dregs. We refer our readers to the Cinetrix, who has revealed the horrors of bright and talented people being dumbed down by the pivotal magazines of our time, let alone criticized by readers who don’t appreciate the phrase “semaphore of pulchritude” in a major magazine.

Bill Bradley, assistant managing editor at the Nashville Tennesseean, noted recently that a Tom Colleen, Vandy resume story was changed, but the changes weren’t sports-related. And then there’s the Washington Post‘s desperate stab to draw readers: keep the stories shorter and add photographs. Which solves two problems in one go: you can cut down on editorial workload and give the people who hate fancy phrases the paper they want all in one go!

For our own part, we still plan to throw around the ten-cent word every now and then. And, yes, Mr. Birnbaum, that includes “jejune.”

But we still can’t help but wonder if there’s a happier medium between a well-edited paper and an independent site that shoots from the hip.

Robert Sheckley, whose combination of comedy and science fiction is criminally underrated (and whose work inspired Douglas Adams), is in critical condition in Russia. Apparently, Sheckley went to Odessa to attend a science fiction writing forum and suffered from a respiratory insufficiency. What’s worse is that there seems to be a major struggle to get Sheckley into a state clinic.

I certainly hope Sheckley pulls through.

Spurned on in part by Maud, here are some statistically improbable phrases from certain books:

• Absalom! Absalom!: “monkey nigger,” “balloon face,” “dont hate,” “right all right all right”
• American Psycho: “little hardbody,” “wool tuxedo,” “her asshole,” “urinal cake,” “clock reservation,” “drink tickets,” “spread collar,” “dry beer,” “pocket square”
• Atlas Shrugged: “furnace foreman,” “young brakeman,” “tower director,” “transcontinental traffic,” “superlative value,” “best railroad”
• Beloved: “men without skin,” “white stairs,” “baby ghost”
• Blindness: “black eyepatch,” “white sickness,” “milky sea,” “emergency stairs”
• Brick Lane: “multicultural liaison office, “tattoo lady,” “ignorant types,” “girl from the village”
• Cloud Atlas: “steely gate,” “our dwellin” (Only four come up, despite the presence of the “Sloosha’s Crossin'” section!)
• Concrete Island: “overturned taxi,” “route indicators,” “metal crutch,” “feeder road,” “paraffin stove,” “bruised skin”
• The Corrections: “country ribs”
• A Death in the Family: “her trumpet”
• Empire of the Senseless: “red sponge”
• Gravity’s Rainbow: “pig suit,” “rocket field,” “firing site,” “runcible spoon”
• The Great Gatsby: “old sport”
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: “fucking wallet,” “green fluid”
• I Am Charlotte Simmons: “ilial crest,” “very hide,” “sobs sobs sobs sobs,” “compressed his lips,” “library tower,” “depressed girl,” “camper top”
• Mrs. Dalloway: “solitary traveller”
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: “porch with the begonias,” “insomnia plague,” “banana company,” “ermine cape,” “eating earth”
• Oryx and Crake: “fridge magnets”
• The Recognitions: “tall bellboy,” “small man with beer,” “plexiglass collar,” “distinguished novelist,” “weh weh,” “bull figure,” “hand mounting,” “youthful portrait,” “yetzer hara”
• Revolutionary Road: “rubber syringe” (Well, who else referred to it so obliquely?)
• Slaughterhouse-Five: “old war buddy”
• The Sot-Weed Factor: “bit oft,” “poet exclaimed,” “our barge,” “ocean isle,” “silver seal”
• This Is Not a Novel: “died mad”
• Tropic of Cancer: “rich cunt,” “guys upstairs”
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: “man with the guitar case,” “vinyl hat,” “macaroni gratin,” “telephone woman,” “cooking spaghetti,” “vacant house”

Patricia Storms serves up a pictorial response to the Great Oprah Debate.