Assortment

-- With its trailer for next year's live-action Aladdin movie, Disney also revealed that the Genie would be played by Will Smith. The late Robin Williams famously voiced the character in 1992's animated version. Left unanswered is the question of just what the heck the live-action version is supposed to bring to the story that the original movie and hit Broadway show have not. Unanswered, of course, in public -- because the answer is about how much green Big Blue will bring in.

-- A young girl wore a green dress to her school picture day. No worries, except that this was one of those elaborate kind of school picture shoots in which the subject stands in front of a green screen so he or she can be shown in front of a variety of different backgrounds. In this case, though, the green dress was close enough to the tint of the green screen that in each picture, the girl's dress appeared to be part of the background. Even at her young age, she knows how to dress for every occasion.

-- Kurt Russell is taking on an intriguing double role in his upcoming movie Christmas Chronicles. According to the promo poster at this link, he is apparently playing Dan Haggerty as Haggerty plays Santa Claus. I'm apprehensive; the movie is produced by Chris Columbus who has been known to insert some weird things in his Christmas movies.

-- If this blogger is right, then 15% of all human experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now. This is because there are so many more people on the Earth now than there have been in previous times; as the population shot up then the amount of things that people experienced during the current time frame shot up as well. The hat tip is to Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, who says at his post on the subject, "This should cheer you all up" about the way that increasing population has obviously increased overall human productivity. And perhaps it does cheer me up -- although there's something to be said for skipping some of our national experiences over the last decade or so.