Well, I don't know what else to call this post. First, Gatsby casting stories. From Deadline:

Leonardo DiCaprio is playing Gatsby, by the way. How he'll bring his trademark Scowl Of Constipation to the character remains to be seen. Carey Mulligan plays Daisy.

So Daisy is a 12 year old in a New Wave synth band? If you're going full waif it's a reminder of Mia Farrow's performance in the 70s version, which means . . . Leo as the modern-day Redford? It could be good, but the track record isn't too comforting. The seventies version was long and inert; the 1949 version, with Alan Ladd as Gatsby, was short and stillborn and just plain odd. There was a 1926 version, but it's lost. All we have is the trailer.

Anyway. What's Argo? You hear Ben Affleck is directing something about the Iranian hostage crisis, and you flinch. It's a fascinating and harrowing story, but nowadays we'd be obliged to have sympathetic "students," one or two bad guys on their side, and one or two evil CIA guys on our side, and it would play out as one of those he-said-shahid-said stories where everyone's equally at fault. As it turns out, it's . . . a comedy?

The story gets even better, for comic nerds, anyway:

The story is here, on Wired's old-and-busted archive section. But let's get back to Gatsby for a moment. You may have read this story:

Yes. Well. There's some confusion about that. All the obits for the house seem a bit uncertain whether it was the inspiration for Daisy's house, or Gatsby's mansion; some sites insist that Swope had it built for him by Stanford White in 1902, which is ridiculous for two reasons: Swope was 20 in 1902, and Stanford White was a better architect than the house would suggest. (The New York Times was also doubtful White had anything to do with it.) But stories and myths get attached to grand houses, and you can imagine people thinking it might be so, wanting it to be so, and finally believing that it must be so. The confusion is summed up best by this piece, which states this at the top:

Later, the author notes:

Can you detect the main reason people don't believe the book had anything to do with the mansion? It's tricky, so put on your thinking cap and give it a try.

By the way, if all this Gatsby talk has put you in the mood to go back to the romantic Roaring 20s, why not play the NES video game, Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari? It's right here.