Morning Coffee (1/3/14)

Happy Friday!

If you missed it late last night, here's the Veronica Mars movie trailer.

Inside the Design of the New Times Square New Year's Eve Ball

Fascinating: The Quest for a Natural Sugar Substitute

Nice: The Church has approved Mayan language Mass.

I have never before felt I had so much in common with Sarah Hyland.

If Lisa Frank Designed the Game of Thrones House Sigils

What Would Lorelai Gilmore Do?

Minimalist Disneyland Posters

Morning Coffee (12/31/13)

Happy New Year's Eve! I'll be around tomorrow so I'll probably post as usual, though it might be a bit later, if I manage to sleep in on my day off.

Carly Rae Jepsen is taking over as Cinderella in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway show and . . . I don't know, maybe she'll surprise us and be great, but I'm very glad I saw it with the wonderful Laura Osnes instead.

This story is completely fascinating: The Welfare Queen

Finding Gillooly: What Happened To Figure Skating's Infamous Villain?

How To Tell If You Are In A Noel Streatfeild Novel

"Take it. Take the bagel and run."

Love In The Time Of Hollering: The Age Of Enthusiasm

Ballerina and YA novelist Sophie Flack dishes on dancing Nutcracker for years.

Here's Sutton Foster, Anna Kendrick, and others singing together at the Kennedy Center Honors. Happy New Year!

Morning Coffee (5/8/13)

This is really important: My marvelous boss Maureen Johnson wrote about gendered book covers and hosted a contest for gender-flipped covers of well-known books. The results were pretty amazing.

Headline I did not expect to see this morning: Gary Oldman, Marion Cotillard Star in David Bowie Video

There exists a news broadcast in Latin. Why didn't anyone TELL me?

This slideshow of Gatsby covers is great.

The trailer for the new season of The Killing makes me ridiculously happy.

The Cinderella cast album is out this week, and you can listen to it streaming here. I saw the show last month and loved it. Highly recommended!

Warner Bros. is making a new D&D movie, so . . . that's a thing that is happening.

Terrifying Vintage Workplace Safety Posters From the Netherlands

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

(Sorry. I couldn't resist.)

We've known for a while that NBC was doing a one-time live broadcast of The Sound of Music, but now the first casting news is out: Carrie Underwood will star as Maria von Trapp. I've known this for ten days and still haven't decided how I feel about it, though I think I'm cautiously optimistic. I honestly don't know whether she can act, but at least she can sing. A lot will depend on who they cast opposite her, which is quite a puzzle. I've discussed it with a few friends and none of us can come up with any obvious candidates. (If you were the network who already had Matt Bomer in your employ, and you were going to stage a musical, wouldn't you pick one with a major role for him? But I digress.) Scandal's Tony Goldwyn played the Captain at a benefit recently, and . . . I would not object if they went with him. But we'll see.

In general, though, I've seen a lot of outrage about this adaptation, and I just don't share it. That realization sort of surprised me, since The Sound of Music is my favorite movie ever. But the movie is an adaptation of the stage show, and there have been countless productions of that. (And, of course, the show itself was an adaptation of a real person's memoirs.) This NBC version (which, for the record, is being billed as a production of the show, not a remake of the movie) is just another in a long line. It doesn't take anything away from the movie. Julie Andrews will still be there on your DVDs, I promise. So while I think there are a lot of ways that this version could go wrong, I don't think the fact that it's based on the same show as my favorite movie is in itself a negative. I am in favor of more things being like the things I like! So I'm eager to give this Sound of Music a chance.