* The WGA strike is all over but the shouting. E!’s Kristin Dos Santos talks to people who work on Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and a bunch of shows I don’t care about regarding how many episodes they expect to shoot and get on the air during what’s left of this season.
* Roy Scheider died. A long time ago one of Steven Wintle’s Horror Roundtables was about Oscar-worthy performances in horror movies, and I totally whiffed. Like Jason Miller in The Exorcist, Scheider in Jaws was just an astonishingly likeable, no-frills, lived-in character. I love him in that movie and I’m sad he’s gone.
* Steve Gerber died. I remember him best as the creator of Thundarr the Barbarian and his companion Ookla the Mok.
* Time Warner is going to be knocking New Line Cinema down a few pegs. Kristin Thompson has the scoop on how this move pertains to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
* Although this Maul of America post is way too credulous when it comes to the emotional power of the human drama in Cloverfield, it’s certainly a welcome addition to the all-too-small canon of anti-The Host criticism as it calls bullshit on the egregious slapstick-grieving scene and the pat political subtext. (Via Matt Zoller Seitz.) Also, big ups to the post for picking out this admittedly very cool, Charlie White-esque still from The Host by way of illustration.
* Monster Brains gives a shout out to Shawn Cheng, Zak Smith, and Nicholas Di Genova’s monster-combat jam webcomic On the Road of Knives.
* Finally, here is how I first discovered the Wu-Tang Clan: The astonishingly intense video for the astonishingly charismatic Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s astonishing all-one-verse song “Brooklyn Zoo,” my favorite hip-hop track of all time.