But I'll give him this much: he's the first Minnesota pol in a long time whose national ambitions haven't been met with gales of derisive laughter.

Rudy Perpich made noises about running for president back in the late 1980s, and he might have been taken seriously had it not been for his growing reputation for "goofy" (read "big") ideas. Some of these ideas, like the Mall of America project, were vindicated; others, like his proposal to transport an entire Bavarian castle to Minnesota, not so much.

Later, Paul Wellstone talked about running in 2000 as a sort of Diogenes of Sinope, who would try to keep the real contenders focused on the issues he felt were important.

And the less said about Jesse Ventura, the better.

So let's acknowledge that Pawlenty is a credible candidate (not a strong one, in my opinion). But as a credible candidate, he's got a big hairy problem in the form of the latest Rasmussen poll of Minnesota voters:

Only 38% of Minnesotans say they'd vote for him in a 2012 election, while 50% say they wouldn't, and another 11% are undecided.

Those numbers are brutal enough -- after all, Pawlenty is a second-term governor, a known quantity. But keep in mind that Rasmussen is notorious for over-sampling Republicans by two or three percent in their polls; as a result, Rasmussen is nearly always an outlier. So Pawlenty's real numbers are probably even lower than that.

Right now Pawlenty is going around the country telling people that as a red governor from a blue state, he can compete in traditionally Democratic strongholds. But if he isn't even competitive in Minnesota, that's going to be a very hard sell. Pawlenty may want to shore up his poll numbers at home. Because if he doesn't, his campaign might be over before it begins.

The lack of comment threads did not discourage faithful reader Brer John, who sent an email-borne missive to the city's Hominid Investigations Bureau (pictured above), which eventually made its way to me. Brer John takes issue with my rather casual comment that:

Wow! What a spectacularly bad idea. We ran them into extinction, can't we just let them rest in peace?

John replies in part:

Just because they were on the playing field near the same time and only one of us remains doesn't show a causal relationship between our presence and their demise. I note that Homo Heidelbergensis disappeared from Europe about the same time Neanderthalensis makes the scene. You don't hear me saying Neanderthals popped a cap into Heidelbergs' collective ass, do you?

Any number of events (or combinations thereof) could have dropped the Neanderthals without any help at all from the Sapiens. Before you call Homo Sapiens the perp in this case ("I suppose you're all wondering why I called our entire species into this drawing room.") you'll have to make a convincing case.

Sorry, Mr. Mason, you're not getting your client off that easily. While I'm not aware of any track record for Neanderthal aggression against fellow hominids, homo sapiens have a 10,000 year-long rap sheet of mayhem to answer for.

I agree it's a largely circumstantial case, but a strong one.

First, as Jared Diamond and others have noted, Neanderthals disappeared in less than a thousand years after coming in contact with our species. And even a cursory look at our species' long and illustrious history will convince you that whenever we encounter members of a technologically inferior civilization, the result is always the same: displacement, enslavement, and eventually genocide.

Second, the Max Planck Institute genome study has kicked a huge hole in the genetic intermingling theory.

This was supposedly our kind and gentle way of disposing of the Neanderthals: we welcomed them into the family, and the Neanderthal DNA quietly faded away into our much larger gene pool.

Put less elegantly, we fucked them out of existence. Not the worst way to go, right?

But without the evidence that we were doing the wild thing with the Wild Things, that theory falls apart, and we inevitably fall back on two possible scenarios: we either a) entered their territory and pushed them out of their land, dooming them to death, or b) entered their territory and slaughtered them all.

I'm looking hard at Door Number 2, but either way Homo Sapiens are responsible.

Look, I'll leave this in the hands of the jury. I'm sure that if your client is acquitted, he'll devote the rest of his life to finding the real killer, no doubt a mysterious one-armed hominid that no one else happened to see.

It used to be the wildest science fiction, the topic of late-night bull sessions in the dorm room.

It should have stayed that way.

But now, geneticists at the Max Planck laboratories in Leipzig have nearly reached their goal: they have almost completed the first draft of the Neanderthal genome. And you know what that means:

The best way to clone Neanderthals may be to create stem cells that have their DNA. In recent years, geneticists have learned how to take skin cells and return them to a state called pluripotency, where they can become almost any type of cell in the human body. Church proposes to use the MAGE technique to alter a stem cell's DNA to match the Neanderthal genome. That stem cell would be left to reproduce, creating a colony of cells that could be programmed to become any type of cell that existed in the Neanderthal's body. Colonies of heart, brain, and liver cells, or possibly entire organs, could be grown for research purposes.

"I'm convinced that if one were to raise a Neanderthal in a modern human family he would function just like everybody else," says Trenton Holliday, a paleoanthropologist at Tulane University. "I have no reason to doubt he could speak and do all the things that modern humans do."

"I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties," says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. The law does not define what a human being is, but legal scholars are debating questions of human rights in cases involving genetic engineering. "This is a species-altering event," says Andrews, "it changes the way we are creating a new generation." How much does a human genome need to be changed before the individual created from it is no longer considered human?

But if the Neanderthal has the legal status of a human being, how do you get away with cloning it in the first place?

I'm just cynical enough to believe that if we noble homo sapiens sapiens are capable of persecuting, enslaving and mass-murdering whole swaths of our own species because of trivial differences like skin color or religion or ethnic background, reintroducing the members of an entirely different species is going to open up all kinds of fantastic new opportunities for cruelty, exploitation and genocide.

As a species, we are simply not mature enough, not wise enough, to use this technology responsibly.

I know, I know, that's never stopped us before. But I wish we'd think this one through first. Our species has blood on its hands -- a lot of it. As Shakespeare understood:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

Macbeth, Act II scene ii

The movie's plot (such as it is) concerns the hunt for "the lost jewels of the Czar" which, for no adequately explained reason, have been hidden in the warehouse of the Empire Transport Company of Los Angeles.

In typical serial fashion, various thugs, goons and ne'er-do-wells take turns stealing the jewels from each other, with the stalwart hero periodically bursting in through the door just in time to get the crap beaten out of him (in fact, he is knocked unconscious so many times I began to worry that he would suffer permanent brain damage).

Anyway, the goons are at the beck and call of a mysterious genius called The Whispering Shadow, who uses the futuristic technology of television to spy on his enemies and / or his own henchmen, no matter where they are. With his sinister television machine, he is also able to project a -- well, a whispering shadow! -- of himself in the vicinity of anyone with whom he wishes to communicate. Again, this being a serial, his conversations usually start with "You fools!" and end with "Do not fail me again!".

But what's interesting here is the screenwriter's misunderstanding of what sending and receiving images remotely would really be like. The idea that a television receiver could simply peek in on any location seems laughable today, but to the public in 1933 it probably did not seem quite as far-fetched.

Similarly, the Whispering Shadow's ability to project an image of himself to a location miles away is also an understandable misreading of television's potential. Without seeing it in action, the idea of television probably seemed vaguely spooky; the actual technology, when it emerged, was less fearful and more easily contained than imagined.

After the war computers carried the same mix of awe and dread that television had. And in movie after movie the notion of a thinking machine was taken far too literally. Computers were invariably depicted in the movies as unformed -- or deformed -- reflections of human sentience. Mechanical minds went bonkers on a regular basis in the movies: from Alphaville to 2001: A Space Odyssey to Westworld to The Demon Seed, a computer had to do little more than pop a vacuum tube in order to go on a killing spree.

(I will exempt Colossus: The Forbin Project from this list of insane computers; after all, Colossus did exactly what it was programmed to do. Created to protect the human race from the risk of nuclear war, Colossus simply carried its orders out to the letter -- enslaving the human species in order to protect it from its own destructive impulses.)

As computers became more common, however, the fear that they were plotting against us began to subside. But as always, new technologies provided us with new things to be afraid of. Which is why Sandra Bullock found herself at the mercy of the dial-up era Internet in 1995's The Net.

But lest you think technophobia is something new, remember that Mary Shelley's 1817 novel Frankenstein was inspired by the discovery that electricity seemed to have an eerie effect on the dead; when an electric charge was applied to a corpse it would often make strange, convulsive movements. One study described the body of an executed criminal suddenly sitting upright when a big jolt of electricity was run through it. To the 18th century reader, this would have seemed like messing around with the divine spark, engaging in the sort of alchemy that Dr. Frankenstein recklessly applied to his creation.

But of course the grand prize for technological anxiety goes to the Egyptian king Thamus. As related in Plato's The Phaedrus:

They say that there dwelt at Naucratis in Egypt one of the old gods of that country, to whom the bird they call Ibis was sacred, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. Among his inventions were number and calculation . . . and, above all, writing. . . . To [the king, Thamus] came Theuth and exhibited his inventions . . . when it came to writing, Theuth declared: "There is an accomplishment, my lord the kind, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom." "Theuth, my paragon of inventors," replied the king, "the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it. . . . Those who acquire [writing] will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.

Will I see it on opening day? I think I will.

Maybe I'll see you there.

What Jones offers us instead is a portrait of a brilliant and decent man, ravaged by cancer and approaching the end of his life, who has found meaning and solace in the things that really matter.

Gene Siskel, we learn, once told him his middle name should be "Full Disclosure", and that was certainly true; but the fact that Ebert is still disclosing -- past the point where many would no longer want to be -- is a testament to the character of the man, and a gift for many of us who grew up seeing his familiar face, and reading the words he wrote.

So in honor of Roger, here's a segment from a 1982 edition of "Sneak Previews". It's great to see Siskel and Ebert back when their show was in its prime, and as a bonus we're treated to a couple of clips from Wayne Wang's terrific debut Chan Is Missing.