Remains of the Day

Review: Million Dollar Baby

[No definitive spoilers, but to discuss this movie, I have to hint at elements of the plot, and so sticklers for seeing a movie without any foreknowledge, and I generally include myself in that class, may wish to stay clear. I don't reveal any more than any other review of this movie, but just a friendly warning.]

The problem with Million Dollar Baby, and the reason I didn't feel a single tear at the end, or even my eyes watering, was that it over-sentimentalizes when it doesn't need to. In a boxing movie with tough/soft voice-overs (I recall one description of Hilary Swank's upbringing that read something like: "She grew up in Missouri in a small town somewhere between nowhere and goodbye"), another heaping teaspoon of sugar is unnecessary.

The character Danger, an awkward, gawky beanpole who speaks like Sean Penn in I Am Sam, is one character I would have axed. Morgan Freeman's voiceover describes Danger as "all heart," but he grated on me like Jar Jar Binks. His over-acting pricks like a bur, and he doesn't illustrate anything other to represent courage against another boxer Shawrelle's cowardice. Both are cartoonish in their extremity of character. Hilary Swank's family also felt to me like caricatures of heartless white trailer trash.

Another needless exaggeration in this movie concerns a momentous fight late in the movie. The extent of foul play and the lousiness of the officiating is beyond that in a WWE event, and it's difficult to stomach. It feels like a missed opportunity to highlight the contrast between the cruel oppression of society (Maggie scrapes together funds waiting tables) and the regulated violence in the ring. Boxing has always been one of the most lyrical of sports, where a man can choose to confront his enemies head on, and so to see that order collapse drains the moment of some pathos.

It's a shame because the boxing is more realistic than that of any other boxing movie I've seen, and the characters Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) and Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) are two of the most likeable characters in movies this year. Hilary Swank's performance is pitch perfect. Her unique face, angular cheekbones and wide eyes, is both tomboyish and feminine, and it conceals nothing. She is well-suited to playing earnest, honest characters. There is no guile in Maggie Fitzgerald, and it's clear to the audience how she melts Frankie Dunn's heart and convinces him to train her. Dunn has an estranged daughter who returns the letters he writes to her weekly (I suspect this type of persistence only occurs in the movies), but even if that storyline weren't present you'd understand why Eastwood would respond to Maggie's courage and desire. She's the most endearing character I saw on screen this year.

Eastwood plays the role he's perfected in his later years, that of the guy with a tough exterior but a soft center. We've watched him on screen for nearly his entire career, much of it playing the toughie, so we feel a greater affection for this new persona; it feels as if he's earned it over many decades. I could have sat in the theater watching Swank and Eastwood on screen together for hour after hour.

The movie looks gorgeous, with deep, lush blacks contrasting with the fluorescent, almost garish lighting of boxing rings and hospital hallways. Many characters seem to materialize out of shadows, legs first, the face last, as if emerging from their own secrets and inner longings.

Million Dollar Baby was written by Paul Haggis and adapted from stories in Rope Burns : Stories From the Corner, a collection by F.X. Toole.

Which one is not like the others

Jason's hobby/fun site CelebSafari was featured as Yahoo's Dec. 21 pick of the day (you'll have to scroll down to it; no permalinks or anchors). One line in the description reads "Can you spot the supermodel in this trio?" and links to this photo taken at Sundance last year.

I'll give you a hint: I'm not the supermodel. You might think that caption would sting a bit, but I got to hang out with a supermodel, so I'm really not too sore over the whole thing.

P.S.

Can't link directly to it, so I'll just copy and paste from IMDb News: Golden Globe-winning comic Ricky Gervais has fulfilled his lifetime's ambition - he is writing an episode of The Simpsons. The British Office star will also voice a character in the popular animation show, which will be made next year, although he is keeping the episode's plot a secret.

Josh Greenman proposes new punctuation: the sarcasm point
It looks like ¡

Mash-ups of the Beastie Boys and the Beatles: The Beastles

Sin City trailer
Robert Rodriguez has managed to remain faithful to the look of the comic book, and, umm, Jessica Alba, umm, yeah

The New World trailer
Hey, another Terence Malick-directed movie. The opening music and video had me wondering if I was watching The Thin Red Line again

Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first?

betterPropaganda's staff picks for top downloads of the year
Good site for legal MP3 downloads

Brian Whitman of MIT's Media Lab fed Christmas classics into his program Eigenradio, which extracts the most important frequencies and beats from music, to create the conceptual album A Singular Christmas

Scissor Sisters

I caught the Scissor Sisters at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Sunday evening, after another great home-cooked meal by Angela (coq au vin, a classic French dish). When I emerged from the cab in front of the concert hall, it was snowing. Or hailing. Or someone was pouring bags of salt out of an apartment overhead. And it was really cold.

Through a few hops of the social network, I ended up attending the concert with Chris and her friends. I had met Chris once or twice in Seattle, but in typical New York big city small world fashion, we ended up attending a concert together and catching up over beers afterwards. Six degrees barely covers six short city blocks in NYC.

DJ Sammy Jo (the Scissor Sister's personal DJ) and VHS or Beta opened. I really dug DJ Sammy Jo, who has a catchy, danceable pop sensibility. VHS or Beta sounded like the Cure, but more punk. The Scissor Sisters were crazy. They love New York, where they as a band were born, and New York loves them back. They once opened for VHS or Beta, and now the tables were turned.

After the concert, the temperature had dropped even further, into the low teens, and a light coat of snow dusted the streets, like powdered frosting on a chocolate donut. We shivered our way to the nearest pub, and after that, sprinted to subway stops to disperse across the city back to our respective holes.

My apartment was an ice chest, and it still is. I have really tall windows lining the entire side of apartment facing the street, and they might as well be screens so much cold air seeps through. I tried a ceramic space heater and promptly popped the fuse. Looks like it's time to layer, and I now look forward to the sunshine of southern California with genuine longing.

snowflakes

Cool little adventure cam for recording sporting events from a 1st-person perspective

AllofMP3.com to double its rates Jan 15, 2005
This, coming on top of the MTA fare hike in NYC, means my cost-of-living in 2005 is already increasing, and I haven't even finished with 2004

On your honeymoon, why not treat your wife to a breast enlargement and botox at the same time?

Gamer spends $26,500 on a virtual land in computer role-playing game

"Earlier this year economists calculated that these massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the African nation of Namibia"

I finally watched the finale of The Apprentice stashed on my DVR. Really long, and not too suspenseful; everyone knew Kelly would win. If you're one of the final two contestants and Trump sends George along to follow you instead of Carolyn, you're screwed. The most interesting moment came when Trumps COO Matthew Calamari (like the appetizer?) stood up to advise Trump on which contestant to choose and choked up under the pressure of the moment, stuttering incoherently for a bit before Regis mercifully sat him back down. I really wanted Trump to fire Calamari on the spot, it would have been awesome, but alas, the show concluded conventionally.

"No down lineman" defense

The Monday night football game is on in the background. Late in the 2nd quarter, New England has gone into an innovative defense: they have no down lineman, only a series of linebackers standing a few feet from the line of scrimmage. Some rush, others drop back into coverage. Not the 4-3 or the 3-4; call it the 0-7. So far, it's held. Of course, the offense is being played by Miami, this year it's conceivable you could play without any defensemen at all and still stop the Dolphins.

If Michael Lewis had written Moneyball about a football team, it would have to be the New England Patriots. They don't overspend on stars, and their coach Bill Belichick is known for reading work by economists.

UPDATE: Hey, the Remains of the Day front page jinx struck again. The Pats choked away a late 11 point lead and lost 29-28 to the lowly Dolphins.

Website defaced

Someone defaced my weblog this afternoon, leaving people to find nothing but a black screen with some red text at the top:

This site is defaced!!!
NeverEverNoSanity WebWorm generation 15.

Just lovely. Comment spam, graffiti, defacers--someone needs to invent some roach traps or rat poison for our digital homes.

Review: The Aviator, Kinsey

In Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, Howard Hughes springs from his mother's bath fully formed, like Athena from Zeus's head. His mother teaches him to spell "quarantine" and instructs him of the dangers of typhoid, cholera, and other diseases carried by the colored folks. He's born out of this moment, a fully-formed neurotic, and this moment serves to explain all the eccentricities he displays throughout the rest of the movie. Or does it?

The scene reminds me of the flashback scenes in Ray, or the childhood scenes in Kinsey, these moments that are supposed to be the sources of the adult we face in the rest of the movie. These moments almost always feel like biopic cliches, but I'm not sure Scorsese's heart is in that early scene enough to make it so. For one thing, it's such a short, odd introduction, with strangely incestuous overtones, that it seems barely adequate to explain why Hughes grew more and more neurotic about germs as he aged.

The screenplay, Scorsese, and Dicaprio play Hughes as a series of emotional peaks, one dramatic explosion after another. In every scene, he's spending himself into greater debt, flying planes higher and faster, shouting at one of his minions to tail someone, chasing one gorgeous woman after another. The energy, and the occasional flashes of humor, are palpable. It's a feverish, manic electricity that I always associate with Scorsese movies, that seemed to arise from the pavement of New York streets at night in Taxi Driver, or Mean Streets. Or, if you ever watch an interview with the man, from Scorsese himself.

Dicaprio is a first-rate actor. Tabloids document his crazy offscreen life, but onscreen he submerges himself in every role without a hint of ego. All Hughes' mental energy and worries seem to concentrate in the constant furrow between Dicaprio's eyebrows. Only two things play against Dicaprio, and they're related. One is his role in Titanic. If you could rewrite his career and remove that role from his resume, it might help to remove the second peculiarity about him, and that is his youthful countenance. I can't help thinking that Dicaprio will look like he's in his early twenties for decades, until one day he'll suddenly look like he's sixty. His Howard Hughes looks so young and wispy, especially standing next to Cate Blanchett's Katharine Hepburn (Blanchett's portrayal of the famous actress and her unforgettable manners of speech is a gas, almost worth the price of admission by itself).

The movie hints at some quality of Hughes that attracts endearment from women as diverse as Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner (besides his money). Is it the single-minded devotion he brings to aeronautics? Perhaps. There's a wonderful moment early in the movie, when he turns all his attention and charm on a cigarette girl, as if she's one of his airplane models. And he purchases some tabloid photos of Hepburn and Spencer Tracy even after she leaves Hughes. But he seems much more charming to his key personnel, especially his financial manager Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) and his chief aeronautical engineer Glenn Odekirk. They tear at their hair every time Hughes pushes them further, but you sense they love to be stretched to heights they never imagined they'd reach with their own limited visions.

The movie fails to help the audience understand Hughes inside out, and perhaps that's an unrealistic aspiration for biopics. Movies that strive to make historical figures coherent always take liberties with the truths of their life (e.g. A Beautiful Mind, Ray). People are just too complex to summarize neatly in two hours, and it's entirely understandable that someone like Hughes, who went crazy at the end of his life, would be even more difficult to dissect than others. It's one reason many people consider the best biopic to be 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, which almost seems cubist. If a biopic captures the spirit of a person on screen, I'd consider it a success, even if the person's actions lack a graspable internal logic. The Aviator is more true to that ideal for biopics than most. The way each scene encapsulates some major dramatic action on the part of Hughes is done to abbreviate his life in favor of evoking his accomplishments and energy.

And of course, Scorsese remains one director whose movies I'll always see. His camera, always in quest of a revealing psychological shot or pan, never fails to fascinate. And he's a movie lover to an extreme; in one scene, he depicts a Hughes' dinner side of peas colored blue because that's how they would've looked in old two-strip Technicolor. I don't think he's capable of making a "studio" film, even if he tried. It's just not in his nature. The elderly couples on either side of me walked out before the movie concluded. Perhaps they were expecting the usual uplifting Hollywood biopic. When you see a Scorsese movie, you know who the hell made it.

Kinsey is a martyr to our diversity (mostly sexual; at one point in the movie his wife finds him sitting in the bathroom, his blood dripping down on the white tile). In that way, he seems uniquely an American hero. Laura Linney and Liam Neeson are exceptional, perfectly cast for a movie in which they portray a couple that is more open-minded than can be expected, even of liberal intellectuals. Their faces, unconventionally handsome, are portraits of emotional generosity and strength. Recall Linney forgiving Sean Penn at the end of Mystic River. Peter Saarsgard is always intriguing. Saarsgard's face, especially his eyes, are simultaneously sleepy and alive.

My favorite parts of Kinsey revolve around Kinsey and his assistants' method of interviewing subjects on their sexual habits. To make subjects feel comfortable discussing such private, intimate moments of their life, Kinsey teaches his assistants a highly non-judgmental, neutral, and even friendly style of questioning. After the 2004 election, when everyone was judging everyone else (even those who held themselves above the fray were judging the judgers, as I'm doing now), the extreme openness of Kinsey, his wife, and his assistants feels like an intellectual rejuvenation.

Not surprisingly, I wasn't as fond of the screenplay's attempt to tie Kinsey's life's research to his relationship to his father. The flashbacks to his youth and the over-the-top portrayal of Kinsey's father by John Lithgow are unnecessary. The interviews with some college couples and even his own sexual difficulties with his wife are enough to establish that America was a sexual cloister in which Kinsey's sexual studies seem even more revolutionary than they would today.

It's freaking cold in NYC

FASB approves rule requiring companies to expense stock options
Makes sense. Won't change affected companies at all, but sometimes perception is reality, so their stock prices may take some temporary hits.

Time's Person of the Year 2004: George W. Bush

A Xmas pop culture icon: the Christmas Story leg lamp, shipped in a crate marked fra-gi-lee

Smart drugs: steroids for brains?
Side effects may include enhanced memory

The O.C. Chrismukkah Yarmuclaus - festive fashion for Jew and Gentile alike
Too bad they're sold out and won't ship until Jan 17, 2005

Video of the Honda ASIMO robot walking and running
It looks like the robot is sprinting towards an outhouse while in danger of pooping its pants

Over the past 25 years, Americans are smoking less but eating more, which may be why everyone is fatter

Holiday sale--everything must go

Aaaaarrrggghh

Le Viaduc de Millau is freaking gorgeous
It's the highest bridge in the world. I wonder if people are allowed to bike across it.

Apple and Motorola to collaborate on a cellphone
That will certainly help me to resist the siren call of the Moto Razr V3, which I really don't need.

Study links sleep with weight loss
Just remember, the next time I'm sleeping in, I'm actually working out, in a way. So good when happy things correlate.

Another posthumous 2Pac album
Okay, this is really getting creepy. Has anyone been as prolific from the grave?

I'm still catching up from the weekend. Last week, TiVo stepped up efforts to crack down on "misuse" of it's brand name. It's probably a futile effort. Customers own a company's brand to a greater extent than most companies realize, and enforcing grammatical use of your brand name is not going to alter their perceptions. The best thing TiVo can do is to focus on what it does control, namely its pricing, feature set, etc. It's quite sad that a company of its stature doesn't recognize that. TiVo still has the best interface of any DVR on the market (I'm stuck with a lousy Time Warner Cable High Def DVR interface that sometimes makes me cry), but I have severe misgivings about the company's future given how many other companies are simply integrating TiVo-like (oops) similar functionality into other products, e.g. set-top boxes. Meanwhile, TiVo seems to be focused on innovation on behalf of advertisers and networks instead of end users, completely the wrong way to innovate when you're a consumer products company.

Yahoo! Video Search

Boy band video

EPIC 2014
All fairly familiar but interesting until the name Googlezon is brought up. That's just ridiculous.

Thomas Bartlett offers up his top 10 albums, singles, and 25 free downloads of 2004.

Did anyone else notice the Evanescence debacle at the Billboard Music awards last week? Eric and Christina caught it on television while I was out searching for poker chips in Whistler village, but it was replayed when I returned to our ski lodge. Amy Lee performed My Immortal live, with an orchestra backing her. To make life easy, she sang in a lower key, and the orchestra played accordingly. At the end, however, when the band joined in, they were playing in the normal key. Cacaphony ensued. Amy Lee couldn't stop shaking her head, struggling to hear the right key, and at song's end, she just looked at her band, shook her head, and said, "Wow." How does something like that happen?

Deck the Hall with trendy alternative bands

Last Thursday, Eric and Christina took me to The End's Deck the Hall Ball, a concert sponsored by Seattle's 107.7 and held at Key Arena. The lineup read like a list of bands that would appear on the soundtrack of The O.C., or Zach Braff's Garden State followup soundtrack. The bands playing at the concert, in order of appearance (ascending order of popularity, I suspect), were the following:

Snow Patrol
Keane
The Shins
The Killers
Franz Ferdinand
Modest Mouse

Here's a set list for each band, along with iTunes links to each song

Each band was limited to about 40 minutes, which was fine for many of the bands who only had one CD or about 40 minutes worth of material anyhow. Christina and I missed all except the last two songs by Snow Patrol. We were downtown and planned to take the monorail over to Seattle Center, only to discover it wasn't running. Unlike NYC, there is no subway system, and the one bus that could have taken us there waited while we sprinted nearly two blocks to catch it, and then it shut its doors and left us in the dust just as we reached it.

Keane turned out to be three people. A lead singer, a keyboardist, and a drummer. No bass?! Not on this night, though the keyboardist had what appeared to be a Mac laptop sitting next to him, its screen flipped open and illuminated. Maybe the bass player was being piped in via some audio chat software. They didn't seem like rock stars, the lead singer being as friendly as he was. Some pretty emo-Britpop or whatever it's called, though the lead singers vocals were pumped out at too high a level.

The Shins sounded great.

The Killers are a blast to watch live. They've embraced their inner rock star, and "Somebody Told Me" is a great single. Sure, it all sounds vaguely reminiscent of stuff from The Cure, New Order, and a dozen other bands, but if we held every band to the standard of an original sound, we'd all be curmedgeonly rockists.

Franz Ferdinand look like a bunch of guys who used to get beat up in high school, except they all wear hip suits with skinny ties, so at least they were hip ahead of their time. Really catchy guitar riffs. I'm terrible with musical genres. Someone told me they qualify as post-pop. I have no idea what that means, but I picture a pop lying in bed, smoking a cigarette.

Modest Mouse was extremely subdued. Between the first several songs, not a word was uttered. Sasquatch, the Seattle Sonics mascot, joined the band for one song to play the tambourine. Or perhaps I'd just inhaled too much secondhand pot. A large flock of people left halfway through their set, either out of exhaustion or boredom, or both.

Comment spam

I've been getting crushed by comment spam the past week or so. Several hundred a day. Really, really aggravating, even though cleaning it up usually requires just a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. It just feels like you've been digitally violated.

Guess it's time to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type. BTW, I know two rights don't make a wrong, but if someone were to hang a few comment spammers by their thumbs, well, I wouldn't rush to help them down.

Review: Ocean's Twelve

Christina's group at Microsoft hosted a company morale event this morning. Those with corporate experience recognize that as renting out a movie theater and paying for the popcorn and admissions. The twist in this case was that they actually rented a multiplex, so we had our pick of movies playing there. We all opted, of course, for Ocean's Twelve.

The tagline is that "twelve is the new eleven," but you get the feeling that no one wanted to make the new eleven. After all, the heist film is its own Hollywood genre, and Soderbergh and company checked that off their list last time. How to bring something fresh to the oeuvre, keep Warner Bros happy, and get the studio to foot the bill while the stars hang out at Clooney's villa at Lake Como? That's a master caper in and of itself.

Ocean's Twelve is a post-modern heist movie. What it isn't interested in is presenting another of those airtight heists that stands up under a fastidious audience, scrutinizing every frame for implausibilities. Right from the start, Soderbergh makes this clear. Terry Benedict finds Tess (Julia Roberts) and then proceeds to visit every member of Ocean's 11, all over the world. Apparently none of them were considerate enough to call each other to warn each other that Benedict is coming, but it allows Andy Garcia the opportunity to drop in on each of them unawares and for us to see their reactions.

One of the most endearing elements of Ocean's 11 was how it embraced its star power and used it unabashedly. George Clooney is a charming movie star, and he essentially plays one on screen (okay, he's a thief, but he's a thief that looks and speaks and acts like George Clooney). We didn't want Cary Grant to play a cowboy, we wanted him to play Cary Grant, and we don't want George Clooney in a batsuit, we want to see his face. Brad Pitt in designer suits? Casey Affleck playing...okay, he's Casey Affleck, as usual. The whole time I was watching Ocean's 11, I couldn't stop thinking of how much fun all those actors had working on the movie together.

Ocean's Twelve just blurs that line between actor and role even further, and in one amusing plot twist, nearly erases it altogether. Clooney and Pitt still finish each other's lines and speak in hip, and everyone looks good in their wardrobes. The movie winks at us in offering a gang of thieves that looks like this, but we're winking back: do you want your policemen to look like Paul Giamatti or Catherine Zeta Jones? Is that a mug shot of George Clooney?

Clooney accuses another character of violating Rule No. 1, and this movie seems to violate Rule No. 1 of heist movies, which is to show everything on screen. You can try and outwit the movie using onscreen clues, but don't waste your time. Just enjoy the company, admire the clothing, and take in the European scenery. Ocean's Twelve is an expensive, star-studded indie film. It may not be what heist aficionados expected, but I bet the poker nights at Clooney's place in Lake Como were a hell of a lot more fun than your regular Sunday night game. In fact, if they have footage of some of those (I saw someone in the movie running around with a Canon XL1 or XL2, documenting proceedings), they could issue that as Ocean's Thirteen.

Klein, Cartier-Bresson, Rutgers, and Macchio

I went New York holiday sightseeing Saturday with a friend. We went by Rockefeller to purchase a Christmas ornament at the Swarovski booth. I could have sworn the Christmas tree at Rockefeller was much taller in years past. Perhaps I've just grown taller?

Our next stop was the Met. One of the exhibits we visited was the compact photography exhibit "Few Are Chosen: Street Photography and the Book, 1936-1966". It's not a large collection, but it contains work from my favorite photographer, William Klein, and a few of my other favorites, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. They had old, old copies of the books Life is good & good for you by Klein and The Americans by Frank behind glass cases, but not a copy of Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment, an out-of-print book I'd love to own. The image to the left is perhaps Cartier-Bresson's most famous, "Behind Saint-Lazare station, Paris, France, 1932."

After a Xmas-tree ornament-hanging party Saturday night, James and Angela took me to Blue 9 Burger in the East Village. Good burger, often referred to as the NYC equivalent of In & Out, but not quite that good. A burger with a bit of grease or fat? That's okay, much better than a dried out patty. I always feel guilty eating burgers with Angela because she orders them without the meat; it's the anti-Atkins burger. I'm not sure what you call that. The man behind the counter said, "Oh, you want grilled cheese."

Sunday, I took the train out to New Jersey to meet up with Scott and Ruby and their golfing buddies for a round at the Rutgers course. We lucked out with a sunny day after the previous day had nearly brought snow. I haven't golfed since the end of September, which just means that I hadn't grooved my already ugly stroke. The first nine holes, I felt like a beginner to the game. I could barely remember how to grip my clubs, and I shot a 55, one of my ugliest nine holes in years. Then I shot a 39 on the back nine, maybe my lowest nine hole score ever (from holes 10-18 I went triple bogey, par, par, par, par, par, bogey, bogey, birdie) and actually had a ten or eleven foot putt for eagle on the 18th, a par five I reached in two. What a schizophrenic round.

It was my first round of golf since moving to NYC, and I now have a sense for what's involved: a long train ride out of Manhattan, with clubs in tow. Not the easiest thing in the world, but doable. I need to get in my rounds with Rob before he becomes a father (of twins, no less!). I know enough new parents to know what that means for one's free time.

Yesterday night, I went with friends to see It's Karate Kid! The Musical. With tickets costing $15 and set in Teatro La Tea in a community center on a somewhat sketchy street on the lower East side, I was fairly certain as I walked in that I wouldn't be seeing Sarah Brightman as Ali. And yes, at least a third of the audience were friends of the cast. This buyer be warned.

Now, Karate Kid is a movie that could be adapted almost straight up and serve as a comedy. It's a much-adored cult classic (at last check, a new first print of the DVD was selling for $99.99 on Amazon). I even remember seeing it in theaters with Tim Rush and his parents back when parents had to take my friends and I out to see movies. But this adaptation chose to dial the spoof up to 11. Almost every character in the musical was gay except Ali and Mrs. Larusso, who was bisexual. Picture Mr. Miyagi as a black drag queen, and his magic hand-rubbing-chiropractic-magic-move administered while seated on the back of a moaning Daniel Larusso and you'll have a good sense of what type of play this was. Don't bring your child if you don't want to be answering "What does [insert sexual obscenity] mean?" all night. The entire show is built on a conceit that doesn't hold up from start to finish (and I never picked up on any latent homosexual overtones in the movie; Top Gun, sure, but Karate Kid seemed fairly asexual to me), and the dance moves and music don't even attempt to aspire to Balanchine or Gilbert and Sullivan. The dialogue and lyrics were often difficult to make out as speakers fired the songs out in all directions in a somewhat echoey room. But the show has its moments. My personal favorite was "Miyagi's Lament," a rap tune that I'd love to get on tape.

The funniest moment, though, came when Scott told us at intermission that the actor playing Johnny Lawrence was the same guy that Scott had just beaten up at a restaurant a short while ago. Supposedly this guy and his friend were being extremely rude to Scott and his date, and so Scott had gone out to the sidewalk and chucked this guy into a car. In Scott's version of the story, the actor was the big guy, and his friend was a short bald guy.

After the second act of the show, Scott was certain this was the guy. So I looked up his bio in the program, and it turns out that this actor had most recently directed and starred in several Saturday cartoons for Fox, the Kids WB, and PBS, and was gay. When I'd first heard the story of Scott's altercation I was picturing the big guy as Vin Diesel, and it turns out he was a gay drama student. I'm going to blame the lighting--trendy New York restaurants are dark, so dark you can't tell if you're drinking red wine or tap water, beating up a bouncer, or one of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy Fab Five.

Sprinkles

Eliot Spitzer to run for governor of New York

Another article about how streets are safe the more you remove signs and lights and other traffic engineering debris. It forces drivers and pedestrians and all who use the road to make eye contact and watch out for each other. I first mentioned this topic before after reading an article in Salon on the same issue. I liked this passage from this latest article:

"To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you."

With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.

The article also offers six suggestions for how to build a better intersection:

1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road - not signs and signals - dictates traffic flow.

2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the intersection is.

3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also the pedestrian areas.

4. Do it in the road: Cafés extend to the edge of the street, further emphasizing the idea of shared space.

5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, rather than commonly ignored signs.

6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by texture and color.

I forwarded Derek the article since he first introduced a lot of these concepts to me. He noted that these progressive techniques would probably take years to make it to the States, if ever. No engineers and their lawyers would risk trying something like that in the U.S.; we're far too litigious a society. It's a shame.

Ricky Williams is attending college in a town called Grass Valley. I'm not making this up.

Chappelle's Show - Season 2 on DVD comes out Feb 8, 2005. Already an instant comedy classic.

M3Power

No, not that M3, though it's pretty powerful. This one. James gave me one and vouched for its effectiveness, and I must admit, it's sweet. A battery allows the razor head to vibrate while you shave, leading to a smooth, close shave. I'm addicted, though it's somewhat wasted on a guy who'd take six years to grow a beard. Makes a great stocking stuffer.

And she has the same name as Trump's ex-wife, too

I haven't kept up with The Apprentice much this year, having only seen half an episode until Thanksgiving, and I'd nearly forgotten that shows simple pleasures. You would have thought they'd have candidates of a higher caliber this year, but then over Thanksgiving we got to see the beautiful sight of Andy slipping some designers a few $100 bills as a so-called "cash incentive" a la a grateful Charlie Sheen at a strip joint. And then this past week, Ivana stripped down to her underwear for $20 to sell candy bars, and still lost to her opponents Jen and Sandy, who dressed up as "M&M girls" (Mars had to be thrilled to discover their mascot was a pair of girls dressed as cheap hookers). Jen and Sandy's reward for winning was to fly to Chicago and meet Bill Rancic, whom they had to pretend to be thrilled to meet. Bill apparently is a business mogul now--upon greeting the pair, he quickly dispensed with informalities and said, "Let's not waste any time. Should we go strategize? That's what I love to do." In his leather chair, he doled out bits of Apprentice wisdom: "You have to make your own case in the boardroom." "Work hard, do whatever it takes." Actually I'm making all of this up, I can't remember anything he said it was so vapid.

Carolyn is still awesome ("This person is going to run one of your companies. Would you hire a stripper?" she hissed in the boardroom), but one day I'd love for her to just turn to Trump and just chew him out in the boardroom for even considering hiring any of these young fools to run any of his companies. I don't know much about the remaining candidates, but I don't really care for any of them, which I suppose is okay. The stars are Trump and Carolyn, and to a lesser extent senile George, who's quite possibly senile, and however solid the candidates, the editors of the show will frame them at their worst. Reality television producers are like funhouse mirrors--you could be Mother Teresa and they'd find footage of you badmouthing a leper.

Now that I live in NYC, I see Apprentice contestants everywhere. A few weeks back Kate was up visiting and we saw some short girl in the midst of a glamor photo shoot in Central Park. Kate and her old NYC roommate recognized her as this year's Stacy. Nick from season one was one of the first people I saw when I was apartment-hunting. Raj is apparently dating Jen C., who lives in Rahul's building. I guess things never worked out between Raj and Robin, the boardroom receptionist.

Who has set women back more, the formerly successful business women who dress up like sluts to prove their business skills on The Apprentice, or the ladies on Desperate Housewives? I finally caught an episode of the latter, Tivo'd from this past Sunday, to see what the hubbub was all about. Not only was the episode boring, but I didn't find a sympathetic character in the entire show. This is what housewives are like? What community do they live in?

I'd heard about the one who's sleeping with her teenage gardener (Eva Longoria). In the episode preview, apparently she and the gardener were caught planting produce together by her mother-in-law, who then ran into the street and got run over by a car. This episode she tried to feign sympathy while her mother-in-law lay in a coma (I've never met anyone in real life who was in a coma, but TV and movies give me the impression that they occur with great regularity), and she had a fit when she heard her lover confessed to a priest, who she subsequently spoke with to confirm the solidity of vows of secrecy.

The boy who ran over the old lady? Her mother helped him cover up the crime by leaving the car in question unlocked in a seedy neighborhood until someone jacked it (an idiotic plan with more holes than the plot cares to resolve), only to discover that her son was an unrepentant devil.

Another mother (Felicity Huffman of the more flattering Sports Night) couldn't stand trying to raise her four young kids and became addicted to their ADD medicine. At episode's end she just left them and drove off.

I'm guessing Teri Hatcher is a divorced housewife raising her daughter alone. She's trying to seduce some guy in her neighborhood. She convinces him to take her to a hotel overnight, a plan she discusses with her daughter; open communications with your kids are the key to a healthy mother-daughter relationship (her daughter even helps her pick out a seductive outfit, telling her, "It's been years since someone's seen you naked, mom." Wow, do families really speak like this in the burbs today? That's more shocking to me than the Monday Night Football skit). She discovers that this guy has wads of cash and a gun in his kitchen cabinets, so she sneaks into his house to check it out, whereupon she falls through his bathroom floor a la Tom Hanks in The Money Pit. The guy won't tell her what the money and gun are for, and they seem ready to break off their courtship, until he comes by and offers to answer any questions she might have. Apparently that's enough for her as she then jumps into his arms and they make love against the wall, as people do in the movies.

There are two other women, one played by Nicollette Sheridan, another by an older lady, who are or were living together. They steal things from each other. The older lady gets killed at the end for having blackmailed another woman in her neighborhood.

It's possible, but extremely difficult, to maintain interest in a fictional television show where none of the characters are likable. Reality television is different; there's some wonderful schadenfreude to be had from seeing our fellow man degrade themselves in the pursuit of success. I guess the most sympathetic character I saw on the show was the gardener. After all, Eva Longoria is pretty hot. Besides that, the rest of the characters present unflattering portraits of suburban housewives, and that's a shame, because I've met plenty this past year while traveling from one friend's sofa to another as a houseguest, and all of them were good people.

And I was disappointed that Terrell Owens didn't appear. Didn't I hear he was on this show? If he comes back, maybe I'd watch.

Link fondue

In this week's New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes on the danger of relying too much on modern visualization technology, especially mammography. I was intrigued to learn that the U.S. Air Force made zero definite Scud kills in the first Gulf War, despite spending million of dollars on a device called the LANTIRN navigation and targeting pod.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now provides the National Digital Forecast Database weather information in XML format, for free.

The hot new getaway--Libya.

According to PNC Bank, over the twelve days of Christmas, the goods and services given to you by your true love were probably purchased offline, not over the Internet, and those 12 drummers drumming might have come from India.

A Kosher credit card that won't work on the Sabbath. I wonder, do you have to be Jewish to apply, or can gentiles play, as with JDate.

Netflix Friends, a service by which Netflix members can recommend movies directly to each other, is getting some blog-play. So frustrating that so many sites have developed all sorts of recommendation services, yet none of them connect. I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Amazon, IMDb, here on my website, but none of those connect. Someday, we'll have a standardized way to represent our opinions on movies in XML, and all these networks will link up via web services, and I'll actually have interest in signing up to use all these new services.

BTW, though I've grown disillusioned with numerical ratings for movies, I do enjoy looking at the demographic breakdowns of IMDb's movie rankings. For example, Alexander's most popular ratings, on a scale of 1 to 10, are 1 and 10. And nearly 70% of the votes for You Got Served are 1's; that might be the least user-acclaimed movie of 2004. Oh wait, no, the most user-panned movie of 2004 is Daniel - Der Zauberer, a German movie whose plot summary on IMDB reads: "Evil assassins want to kill Daniel Kublbock, the third runner up for the German Idols."

Odd tidbits

"If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac."

By and large, law enforcement personnel in American end up sending impounded Macs needing data recovery to the acknowledged North American Mac experts: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Evidently the Mounties have built up a knowledge and technique for Mac forensics that is second to none.

By the time they find out if cell phone EMF is bad for human health, it will be too late for those of us first generation guinea pigs. I just hope later generations appreciate the courage and sacrifice it took for us to plow forward in the face of such mortal uncertainty.

Footage from a tiny camera mounted to the back of an eagle
So that's what it looks like to fly like an eagle.

I'm not sure when this came out. Inspired by BMWFilms, Mercedes Benz made its own online shortmercials, including this one, The Porter. It doesn't seem possible that it would be about what it sounds like, but yes, it's about a hotel parking valet and includes this scintillating line: "I am no spy. I am no thief. I park cars." Sure, no one may take their Mercedes on car chases, as in BMWFilms, but to show a CLS just driving down the street and in and out of parking garages at about 30mph is far from pulse-pounding. Mercedes first short, Lucky Star, featured Michael Mann directing Benicio Del Toro, was at least hammy ("We're on you like white on rice") and humorous, in a cornball way (it's a faux trailer for a movie about a really lucky guy, which Del Toro is in real life, don't you think?). You'll have to scour the web using Google to find a copy--perhaps Mann and Del Toro ordered Mercedes to pull it.

Review: Show Me Love

Show Me Love (its original Swedish title being Fucking Åmål) is a cult favorite. At least, I think it is. I don't remember how I heard of it, but it was in my Netflix queue, and it floated to the top and landed in my hands, like a warmed plate out the top of the stack at the front of a buffet line. Somehow, I lost the Netflix sleeve for the movie, so I put it in last night without the faintest idea what it was about. The tag line--Jag ska aldrig mer bli ihop med nån. Jag ska bli celibat--remained opaque to me, though I must admit, my Swedish is quite rusty.

The movie didn't begin with any menu, it just began playing, the video not anamorphic but some grainy letterbox confined inside a 4:3 box, all shot in over-saturated DV, the audio an unimpressive Dolby mix that sounded almost mono. Was this a student film I'd ordered by mistake?

Well, whoever recommended the movie to me was right. It's a gem, and not because of the plot I'll summarize thusly: a Swedish teenage lesbian love story. Okay, maybe that's too summary. Agnes, a social outcast, is gay and in love with Elin, the high school class vixen, who's beautiful and bored out of her mind living in the dull Swedish suburb of, well, fucking Åmål (I guess I knew some Swedish after all). Strange circumstances bring them together, but will their puppy love survive the cruel and intense pressures of conformity at school and home?

The movie is rough around the edges, and under too much scrutiny or extrapolation much of it doesn't hold up (how much of teenage and high school life ever does?), but within its boundaries it's a rush of the maddening, obsessive angst and compulsions of teenage emotional life, trying to find its balance. Listening to Alexandra Dahlström curse and scream in Swedish, you realize that undirected teenage anger is a universal language. There's a moment, a kiss, that is set up beautifully, and the payoff registers like an adrenalin spike. The movie has a sly wit: it includes a literal coming out of the closet (a water closet, that is). And even the subplots and intersecting lives of peripheral characters are painful reminders of various archetypal stories of high school drama. This movie doesn't seem especially eager to solicit our sympathies for anyone in the movie, and thus any that it does manage to elicit feels earned.

The actors, teenagers themselves, especially the two leads, are very natural, and the lewd DV cinematography contributes to the pseudo-documentary feel. There's a good chance this is the first and last Swedish teenage lesbian love story I'll ever see on film, and if so, I'll have fond memories of the genre, like having your first and only taste of gelato in Florence.

Tivo Christmas

Why not timeshift Christmas?

Batman Begins one sheet

Teaser poster for Batman Begins, which comes some 13 years after Batman Returns, except it's a prequel, from when Batman looked like Christian Bale, later letting himself go a bit to evolve into Michael Keaton, who worked out a bit to become Val Kilmer, and finally aged gracefully into George Clooney. I'll tab his Adam West phase as his decline into middle age--he should have stuck with the more flattering dark suit instead of the light blue, which made him look fat.

Free credit report, once a year

A new law allows U.S. consumers to receive one free credit report a year from each of the 3 major credit bureaus.

The good news: starting Dec. 1, consumers in the U.S. will be allowed to receive — for free — one credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus every 12 months, thanks to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act. It's a new benefit that should be exercised at least once a year, particularly if you're going to be applying for, say, a new mortgage. Once informed of a discrepancy, the bureaus have 45 days to fix the problem, but generally do so within 10 to 15 days.

This new entitlement will roll out gradually across the country over the next nine months, with consumers in Western states beginning first. The Midwest will go live March 1, the South June 1, and the East and U.S. Territories on Sept. 1. The three major credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — have set up a toll-free phone line (877-322-8228) to handle requests, or you can send a written request to Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, Ga., 30348-5281.

But the fastest way — not only to receive your report but also to dispute inaccuracies-- is a new website, annualcreditreport.com. Don't be surprised when the site asks for personal information for security purposes (it's safe to provide it). You'll then be sent to an authentication page for the bureau you select, in which you'll be asked more questions-- about recent transactions and the size of outstanding loans. Again, providing answers is safe. The one thing to beware, however: once you've been authenticated, your report will pop up onscreen; if you close the window, it's gone, and so is your freebie for the year, so print it out immediately.

One other bit of good news: you don't have to pull your free report from all three bureaus at once. So if you want to be truly vigilant about monitoring errors, you can spread your requests throughout the year. And the bureaus may even eventually iron out the lapses in their system that lead to mistakes in the first place.

Nate, Heather, Bialystock and Bloom

This was the week I turned in my grad school app, and so I've come up for air. I've allowed myself to leave the computer for more than just bathroom and food breaks, and it's been a literal breath of fresh air. Walking the streets here is so invigorating, perhaps because everyone walks at such a brisk pace. I've never been to a city where so many people walk faster than I do.

I haven't run since the marathon, but Tuesday night I played two hours of pickup basketball with some bankers down in SOHO in a church gym. I heard about the game through a friend of a friend, who connected me with her friend, who heard about the game through his friend. And it turns out that I knew this guy (the friend of a friend of a friend) from a summer camp from 1992. Six degrees of separation in this world, but with over one and a half million people living in Manhattan alone, you can eat through six hops in one subway ride.

Running a marathon? Not much help in the sprinting of full court basketball. In fact, I venture to say that the benefits from running a marathon translate best to, well, running a marathon. Running up and down the basketball court, I almost passed out at one point, but it was a good feeling. Anywhere in the country, you can find a pickup hoops game, and it has to be one of the most foolproof ways to immediately see other guys for what they are. Pickup hoops is like a truth serum of some sort. It bares people's souls (and yes, some i-bankers do have souls, contrary to popular opinion). Like hunting in Hemingway's day, I suppose.

Wednesday, an old high school friend came to town. I haven't seen Nate since the early to mid 90's, and I also finally got to meet his wife Heather. Nate is as I remember him, and he still has a sharp memory. I enjoyed hearing news of former classmates and having Nate fill in missing names and events from my high school days. Heather is amazingly sweet, and they were kind enough to tolerate this NY novice as a pseudo tour guide. We visited Rockefeller and the newly lit Christmas tree, Central Park (where I learned from Nate and Heather that John Lennon got shot outside the Dakota building which is on the West side of the Park), the Plaza Hotel (where Carmela and Meadow Soprano took their annual mother-daughter tea, and where Tony stayed when Carmela booted him out of the house), and Times Square.

Nate and Heather were also kind enough to treat me to see The Producers. I actually knew very little about the show, only that it was THE SHOW to see when Lane and Broderick were playing it. I'd also seen a scene or two as played by Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. It was much funnier than I anticipated, a type of meta-Broadway show.

Just after I made it home that evening, I got a call from Bill, playing in NYC that night only, at the Paramount Hotel. So I retraced my steps up to Times Square and caught up with him at the hotel bar.

I've also ventured out more this week for food. My favorite eatery nearby is Wichcraft, the sandwich shop companion to Craft and Craftbar. Wichcraft's sandwiches are tasty. Really tasty. The shop name is apt.

Union Square is host to a whole series of holiday tents where artisans are hawking crafts and clothes and the usual assorted junk. I walk past most of it when getting off the subway without wasting a glance on any of it, but today I stumbled on a soup vendor. The smells called to me and summoned me. What better to repel a late autumn, early winter cold snap than a bowl of hot sweet corn chowder. Tasty. I haven't visited the Soup Nazi yet, but if his soup tastes like this, then I'll shut up and place my order promptly. No questions asked.

Thanksgiving 2004

I had a great Thanksgiving feast at James and Angela's place last Thursday. I've thrown a few pics online. Angela, as anyone who knows her can tell you, is highly detail-oriented, an overachiever, and so the most memorable thing about the whole dinner was that she used some leftover woven paper from her wedding and printed up menus to put on every place setting. So classy--I saw them and immediately rushed home to change into my tux.

I finally tried Angela's brown sugar/butter sauce. James had been raving about it, and holy moly it is sinful, but in the best sense. I poured it over my baked sweet potato and experienced that side dish in an entirely new way. James had two such sugar bombs, and we had to inject him with insulin and carry him to the sofa afterwards.

I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land. (Jon Stewart)

Noir

They're filming bits of War of the Worlds (two dudes named Spielberg and Cruise are working on it) in Brooklyn and NJ.

Weblog of a casino cheat

Even if you don't live in NYC, this list of essential American film noir from the Film Forum is really cool. I caught Mildred Pierce there--good good good.

When trends gain enough momentum to go mainstream, that's when Microsoft jumps in

Giambi brothers admit to having used steroids while in the major leagues
The clouds around Barry Bonds darken, but until he's proven guilty, he's innocent. I think that's how it works in this country. Personally, I'm not convinced that steroids actually help a baseball player. In football, yes, but baseball? I read a convincing case from a baseball-crazed physicist who argued that steroids wouldn't aid a hitter. Since only stories about good hitters or successful players using steroids make the news, the public may have an unjustified bias towards thinking steroids are helpful. What of all the lousy players (Jeremy Giambi being one) and minor leaguers who never make it who used steroids? Sosa and Bonds could hit tape-measure home runs even when they were skinny. Perhaps steroids helps to stave off the effects of aging, allowing guys like Bonds to retain their skills later into their careers.

GQ's 100 funniest jokes of all time

Damn academics

"From Sunday through Friday our football program has exceeded all expectations in every way," [Notre Dame] athletic director Kevin White said at Tuesday's news conference. "The academic performance is at a fever pitch. It's never been better. Tyrone has done some wonderful things. But again, on Saturday, we struggled. We've been up and down and sideways a little bit, a little bit inconsistent."

Yeah, it's a real shame that football players at Notre Dame have to actually be students. At least the Athletic Director was honest about his priorities. Some people say that college sports are more enjoyable to watch than pro sports, that it's a purer game. I don't believe that in the case of college football and even to some extent with college basketball. Having read more than enough stories about football players being passed through classes mysteriously or receiving cars and cash for phantom jobs, and having seen the graduation rates at the schools ranked in the top 25 at the end of each college football season, and I can't help but think of college football as a free farm system for the NFL, or a semi-pro league where schools profit from their athletes for almost nothing. The NBA and NFL would love to not have to pay for a minor league, the way pro baseball or hockey teams do, so they continue to try to restrict the age of incoming players.

Of course, Notre Dame is easy to pick on because they signed a contract with NBC, so every one of their games is televised nationally. I doubt any none-Notre-Dame-alums are grieving over the Golden Dome's misfortune. At least Notre Dame maintains higher academic standards for their athletes than the ones the NCAA requires, unlike many other schools. Anyone who thinks that doing that doesn't hurt the quality of their football team is naive.

At Stanford, the minimum academic requirement for all incoming athletes was a 3.0 GPA and an 1100 SAT. Does the student body in the cheering section care about that when Stanford's getting killed by UW or USC or Cal in football? Probably not on Saturday afternoon, but I don't think most students go there to be associated with a winning football team. If I ever become one of those forty to sixty somethings still buying season tickets to my alma mater's college football games and sitting in the stands wearing a diaper, living and dying on the play of a bunch of 19 and 20 year old boys, just shoot me. It's a sign that my college education probably didn't do me much good.

I personally wouldn't have anything against paying college basketball or football players (I'm assuming these are the NCAA's top two revenue-generating sports). Doing so would be explicit acknowledgment that some schools bring in athletes purely to improve their record on the field and to sell lots of tickets, and that those schools have little interest in providing that athlete with much in the way of an education. Some people have no desire to do anything but play sports, even if the odds against achieving that are slim, and if schools are going to exploit that, at least let those kids share in the revenue they bring in ticket sales and television/bowl revenues. Last I checked, Coach K wasn't working for free dorm housing and a scholarship.

Of course, the problem with doing so is that it would blur the purpose of universities. If you want those athletes to be students, I think you have to have some minimum academic requirements for entering students. If someone is totally unprepared for the academic rigor of college, they shouldn't be dumped into school solely to give the fans in the stands a warm, fuzzy feeling on Saturday afternoons, especially if they'll be working the Krispy Kreme donut machine as soon as their college playing days conclude. If they're solely there to win games, then that part of the school is essentially serving as a sports organization, a minor league semi-pro team. That brings me back to wondering if the NBA and NFL would ever do the right thing and just sponsor minor leagues instead of leaving that to universities.

Yeah, I didn't think so either.

The Chamber of Fear, aka Detroit

Okay, I'm really late with this, but I finally watched a Tivo of Detroit vs. Cleveland from Thanksgiving Eve. Lebron was ridiculous, scoring 43 points while guarded mostly by Tayshaun Prince, the best on-ball defender in the NBA last year. It was the way he scored that was so impressive, taking the ball aggressively to the hoop, using left hand and right. Of course, Ben Wallace wasn't inside to enforce a perimeter around the paint, but still.

"He hit some hard shots," said Tayshaun Prince, who was outscored 43-4 in his matchup with James. "He's the hardest guy in the league to guard. His speed, quickness and athletic ability are unmatched."

This is a good sign for Lebron. Many thought he was extra motivated to prove to Larry Brown, the coach who benched him most of the Olympics, that Brown was wrong. Jordan had that killer instinct, like whenever he felt slighted by an opponent or a coach, or even if someone implied that someone was better than he was. Think of the 35 he dropped on Drexler in the NBA finals Game One, or the 51 he dumped on the Knicks when Jeff Van Gundy implied that Jordan conned players into thinking he was their friend so he could pound them on the court. I was at that last game, and when Jordan hit that last jumpshot to go over 50, he shouted at Van Gundy with a look of pure death. Gave me the chills.

If Lebron has that type of mean streak, we're in for some good times. Good times.

Depth edge detection and rendering

This would be a cool camera to own, even if I really didn't have any use for depth edge detection and rendering. Also, when I was back in Seattle last time I ran into Jeff Bezos at a wedding, and he mentioned having seen a camera demo at MIT in which a camera would take three photos of varying exposure and then intelligently use parts of each photo to form a final picture. It would be a form of simultaneous bracketing and would be extremely useful in high contrast situations. No more having to burn and dodge in the darkroom, or selecting odd-shaped areas in Photoshop with the magic lasso.