The Awesome List: Indiana Jones, Giant Monsters, Albert Einstein’s secret doomsday device, and the Return of TV

Indy's hat and jacket

IndianaJones.com has a new featurette about Indy's iconic look and trying to recreate it for the new movie.

Indy's trailer

Apparently, the teaser trailer for Indy and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be attached to The Spiderwick Chronicles when it hits theaters on Thursday. I also saw something on IndianaJones.com earlier today about the trailer's TV and 'net debuts, but I can't find it now. Either I've gone stupid (entirely possible) or the info was released prematurely or is being changed. I'll let you know which once I know.

Giant Robots are stupid.

According to TechRepublic.

Oh, wait. No, they're not.

Says Jeremiah Tolbert.

Three Days to Never

According to Bookgasm, Tim Powers' Three Days to Never contains all of my favorite things: "hidden histories ... spirits, spies, talking disembodied heads, dybbuks, time travel, Charlie Chaplin’s quest for magical power, Albert Einstein’s secret doomsday device, and about a million other awesome things." So totally sold.

Welcome back, TV.

With the WGA strike all but officially over, TV Guide has a new strike chart up predicting when we'll start seeing new episodes of our favorite shows. Here are the ones that interest me:

Battlestar Galactica: Returns April 4 with first half of 20-episode final season. Production on second half could start as early as March. Airdate for those TBD.

The Big Bang Theory: Expected to shoot 5 to 7 new episodes to air in April/May.

Burn Notice: Production on Season 2 expected to get underway in late April. New episodes could start airing as early as July.

Chuck: No new episodes until fall.

Grey's Anatomy: Expected to shoot 4 to 7 new episodes to air in April/May

House: Expected to shoot 4 to 6 new episodes to air in April/May.

Jericho: Seven episodes remain. No additional episodes expected for this season.

Lost: Six pre-strike episodes remain. Six additional episodes could air this season.

Men in Trees: Eleven pre-strike episodes remain. No additional episodes expected this season.

The Office: Expected to shoot 5 to 10 new episodes to air in April/May.

Private Practice: Slim chance it could return with 4 or 5 new episodes this season. Either way, it'll be back in the fall.

Pushing Daisies: No new episodes until fall.

Scrubs: Four pre-strike episodes remain. Four additional episodes will likely be shot; unclear whether they'll air on NBC or go straight to DVD.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Five pre-strike episodes remain. Future beyond that TBD.

Links du Jour: Mummy 3, film noir, and downloading comics

Adventure

• The Mummy 3 is in the works. Looks like Jet Li will be the bad guy and it's being written by Smallville's Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, which is all fine. Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) is directing and that's okay too. I'm just concerned that Stephen Sommers' producing credit means that we'll still get cheap, video-game-quality special effects for it. But maybe that's Cohen's call and I just don't know enough about how movies are made. Actually, if it is Cohen's decision to make, I'm very happy about that because the effects in his other adventure movies have been pretty darn cool.

Mystery

• In his review of the new releases of Double Indemnity and the 3-volume Film Noir Classic Collection, Stanley Crouch of The Slate also gives a nice overview of the film noir genre and why it became so popular in the late '40s.

Horror

• Sometimes I wish I lived in LA. Then I could go to the Elk's Run release party to celebrate the collected edition of this excellent graphic novel.

Science Fiction

• Siskoid's Blog of Geekery should be called Blog of Awesomeness. He's been reviewing every episode of Star Trek, including the cartoon series, and is up into the movies now. I'm hoping he keeps it going through Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and the others. He also sprinkles in plenty of comics posts for variety. This is a blog I'm going to have to go back and read from its beginning.
• Grant Gould's got another Learn to Draw installment on StarWars.com. This one on drawing R2-D2.

Comics

• There's a conversation going on right now about the ethics of downloading comics for free. Tom Spurgeon summarizes my feelings on it exactly.

Writing is Hard

• Just discovered a cool site called First Writer with lots of advice and resources for beginning writers. They help find agents, publishers, contests, magazine markets, and lots of other stuff.

Stuff Nobody Cares About But Me

• Men in Trees has been renewed for another season. Yeah, it's a girly show, but it's got great dialogue and interesting characters. I like it as much as I liked the first couple of seasons of Gilmore Girls, and that's a lot. (In that same link, Lost and Grey's Anatomy have also been renewed, but those are news to nobody.)