Amazon is trying to persuade publishers to sign onto an ebook subscription service. Depending on the price and catalog, I could be persuaded to pay for something like this. On average, I purchase at least one Kindle book per month and frequently more than that. If Amazon makes something like this part of its $79 Prime service, the cost would likely be a wash for me and i may be more inclined to read books that I might not otherwise purchase individually. And I could still purchase the physical version of a book if I so chose.

I’m skeptical that publishers will go along with a subscription service, at least initially. The model is simply too different from the traditional sales paradigm to which they are so accustomed. But Amazon is probably one of the few companies that has a halfway decent chance of turning this idea into reality.

I wonder how many Congresspersons will be finalizing their fantasy football teams on their BlackBerries during Obama’s jobs speech. Whatever the President proposes is likely to be modest and likely to garner scant GOP support. Republicans might go along with an extension of the payroll tax cut just to deny Democrats a line of attack during the 2012 campaign, but tax cuts probably aren’t enough to revive the economy. Unfortunately for the millions of unemployed, Washington lacks the vision to do anything meaningful that might bring create jobs. The best we can probably hope for at this point is that the economy skirts recession and resumes its anemic recovery.

Writing about politics is not much fun right now. Perhaps I can at least look forward to a Packers win tonight.

Here’s yet another story about people with disabilities controlling robots with brain waves. What makes this article so charming is the scientists’ naive hopes for how their inventions will be used. They actually think us poor gimps will use said robots as proxies to visit sick relatives from our sickbeds. After our robot-assisted revolution is complete, I’m going to visit these scientists in their holding pen, read this article to them, and then laugh maniacally for a few minutes. The ones who start crying will be sent to the combat pits to face my gladiator-bots.

As much as I love Star Wars, I wasn’t really interested in the forthcoming Blu-Ray collection. I already own all six movies on DVD and I don’t see any reason to give George Lucas any more of my money. But after reading about how Lucas is using this release to tinker yet again with the films, I’m even less interested. For the most part, I didn’t mind the changes that were introduced in the Special Editions back in the late Nineties, so I don’t consider myself a reactionary fanboy. However, at some point, Lucas lost all perspective.

In the latest version of Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader unleashes a cheesy,  overwrought “Noooo!” before he kills the Emperor. Ick. Just…ick. ROTJ wasn’t a great movie, but that scene of Vader’s salvation of himself and his son is so effective in the original because he doesn’t utter a word. To add that terrible “Noooo!” is to turn that scene into the worst kind of B-movie schlock. I’m all for directors using technology to realize their true vision for a film, but changes like this insult the audience’s intelligence and cheapen the film’s impact. I simply can’t get behind that.

Comic book geeks are debating the merits of DC Comics’ reboot of its entire line of superhero comics, which begins this week. DC hopes the reboot will attract new readers who have previously shied away from comics that have decades of continuity. Imagine starting to watch Lost in the middle of its fifth season and trying to figure out the plot and the characters’ relationships to each other. That kind of serial storytelling is amplified in comics a hundredfold, making it difficult for new readers to understand exactly what is going on in Justice League #578. The reboot solves that problem by wiping out the continuity and starting every series at issue #1. Comic book geeks being comic book geeks, many of them are outraged that DC is tampering with storylines that they’ve followed for years.

I’m not a huge DC fan, so I don’t have strong feelings about the move. I am curious to check out a few of the 52 titles to see if they grab my interest (like Justice League and Batman). But I’m much more interested in the forthcoming season 9 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.