It helps to have a little background in Islam when reading The Satanic Verses, but unfortunately, I didn’t. The Internet can do wonders, though, and I managed to fill in the largest gaps in my education relatively quickly. It turns out the Satanic Verses in question are ones that assert Muhammad once acknowledged the existence and power of three pagan goddesses but later changed his mind, claiming to have been tricked by the devil. Aside from dealing with that sensitive subject, there are a whole slew of other aspects that many Muslims found offensive, such as calling Abraham a bastard and having a set of prostitutes named after Muhammad’s twelve wives.

Manowar’s 2007 release “Gods of War” is alternately laughable, despicable, powerful, and pathetic. A band that took all of the satirical fictional excess of Spinal Tap and made a career of trumping it, this is not new territory for them at all. It’s amazing that they’re still capable of displaying the same level of clichéd raw and brutal intensity on the same tired and trite themes of blood, death, and warrior prowess 25 years after their first album. It’s also awesome.

Le Prince’s disappearance on September 16, 1890, is entirely unexplained and entirely unfortunate. He boarded a train to Dijon, France, shortly before a planned emigration to New York, where he hoped to promote his inventions, but he was never seen again.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) is perhaps the prototypical inventor, famous for the extremely wise words that “genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

I wrote Michael Moore off.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is what did it. I kept seeing references to scenes in the film about members of bin Laden’s family being allowed to leave the country, and connections between Bush and the Taliban, and hints at other wacko conspiracy theory stuff that really did not appeal to me. I am all about showing the human cost of a given course of action, and revealing hypocrisies, and doing all those other things that amount to one of the noblest aims of art, which is “speaking truth to power.” Moore, however, with his penultimate film, seemed to be doing anything but. Instead of cutting through the powerful smokescreen of propaganda, it seemed as though he was more than willing to create his own pack of lies, half-truths, and misdirection. Only his was “okay” because it was created to work against the bad guys. Or something.