Remains of the Day

What is the sound of one country screaming?

Not much happens in the video below, but it's the audio that matters. This is a shot of Vancouver during that moment when Canada won the Olympic men's hockey gold metal game in overtime.

[via Scrawled In Wax]

Though I work at Hulu, part of the vanguard in the transition from linear programming to a video on demand world, I'm not immune to the power of collective experience. Part of me misses those days before DVRs and PPV and HBO and VCRs, when you could only catch movies on network TV live. The other people around the country watching that exact moment with you were invisible but palpable, and every moment of the movie seemed more important because of that.

Thus the huge value that accrues to events that still demand live viewing in this world where synchronous viewing has become so unnecessary. Sports leagues are sitting pretty.

Dad?

One of the funnier chatroulette shots.

How the news is reported

James sent me this breakdown of how the news is reported on television about a week ago. He's my early buzz detector as it came to me in a Very Short List newsletter today. Spot on, hilarious to boot.

Recognition is the first step in reform. Will we vote with our eyeballs? As with government, we get the news we deserve.

Bundling

James Surowiecki, as he usually does, provides a good overview of a topic that many people never think about, and that is bundling in cable pricing. He's right that most people prefer the convenience of bundling and that in an unbundled world, it's not certain that prices just wouldn't be reshuffled to maintain overall profits for cable companies, but in the current environment, where cable subscriptions are still increasing and profits still high, there is an opportunity at the margins for enterprising customers to try to mix and match their own entertainment lineup for cheaper.

As long as they remain a minority, companies won't bother trying to rejigger their prices and packages to catch them. It's not an endeavor for the lazy, though, as it can require buying special boxes, plugging computers into TV's, subscribing to multiple services, etc.

I'm glad that the convenience of bundling still works for most people, though. One of the simple benefits of Hulu is its aggregation model, which is just a form of bundling. It's one reason that even content providers who want to maintain their own online distribution presence should consider joining us, and one reason I think most online sellers with their own storefront would benefit from a simultaneous listing on Amazon.com.

The Late Night Melee

I was in mourning over the collapse of the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight, but the Conan drama this past week has filled the void in my heart for televised combat.

I've been able to watch this battle with more detachment than emotional angst as late night talk shows no longer have the same cachet they once did. s for many of my generation (and Hulu's popular video list bears this out), the talk show hosts that resonate most are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Toss in Sportscenter and my after-work, sit-on-the-sofa-and-eat-my-dinner dance card is full. It was more understandable when Letterman and Leno battled so fiercely to gain the vacated Johnny Carson throne given Carson's status as Hollywood royalty and the limited fraternity of late night personalities back then. Now there are so many late night talk shows (where there were once two or three late night talk show hosts of note, now we have not just Leno, Letterman, and O'Brien but Kimmel, Fallon, Ferguson, and Daly) and so many other TV shows period, not to mention time-shifting with DVRs and internet video viewing that the idea of The Tonight Show at 11:35pm as a sacred institution feels dated.

But I'm still a big Conan fan, and I can understand his reverence for that chair. Like most younger people and a lot of "pure" comedians, I've never found Jay Leno to be funny or his interview style to be particularly effective. TV interviews in general are a depressing affair, a setup for celebrities to pitch their latest project at the request of some PR department. The questions are light-hitting, pre-screened, and spoon-fed, and no one does that like Leno. With his huge collection of vintage cars and motorcycles, his real-life caricature of a face, the oddly insecure way he delivers jokes during his monologue (never content with the first laugh, he almost always follows the punchline by repeating it or explaining it to try to grab another laugh), he's like an alien to me, like nobody I know.

Conan, coming off his days writing for The Harvard Lampoon, SNL, and The Simpsons, has a comic sensibility more in tune with my generation. I never felt comfortable with his move up to 11:35pm to present his more absurdist comic style to what people like to generalize as "Middle America" but which I'll just call the Leno crowd. I liked Conan the way he was at 12:35, loose and free, but if The Tonight Show was what he wanted, I was glad he was getting it. But my fears seemed to be confirmed by the early ratings on the show, which weren't what Leno was pulling in the same time slot. The few times I watched him, he seemed himself and yet not himself. Something, it was hard to pinpoint what, was missing.

That is, until this past week, when, after rumors of NBC's proposed reshuffling surfaced, he finally seemed to say, "F*** it, this is how I feel." This was his Jerry Maguire manifesto moment. All the resentment over the shifting of Leno to 10:00 (poaching premium LA guests) and now the shifting of Leno back to 11:35 honed Conan's humor to a razor's edge, and with the end of his time at NBC all but sealed, he seemed liberated of the burden of The Tonight Show mantle. It is ironic, if not tragic, that what is likely the last week or two of his time at NBC will see his strongest ratings. It must be at least some consolation to have Kimmel and Letterman unleashing on Leno this week on his behalf (Letterman's dislike of Leno is not surprising, but it was only via Bill Simmons that I learned that Kimmel has held Leno in nothing but disdain since Leno and his team told everyone that was anyone to blacklist Kimmel's show when it launched).

His resurgence this week reminded me of the Apatow movie Funny People. Many people found the movie's sudden plot shift partway through the movie disconcerting, but what I enjoyed was Apatow's depiction of the sadness behind the humor of the standup comedian, the pain and spite and anger that drives the court jester. Failure, jealousy, pettiness, pride, ego - all of these are the fuel that comedians use to power their craft.

That dynamic has been on given full demonstration by Letterman, Leno, Conan, and Kimmel this past week. Not only has it been compelling to watch late night show hosts take off the gloves and throw verbal haymakers at each other, it's been surreal to watch Conan tearing into NBC from his show airing on...NBC. Just tonight, Leno for some reason had Kimmel on his show for 10@10, and Kimmel tore into Leno, and Leno seemed either strangely oblivious or gracious, it's not clear which. I was reminded of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.

Ultimately, it may work out for the best for all involved, even if Conan has to drop off the air for some period of time. If Conan walks across town to Fox, he may get to come back with a renewed vigor on a network more suited for his comedic style. What's more, at Fox he might be able to come on the air at 11pm, a half hour before The Tonight Show which would likely be helmed by a reinstated Jay Leno. Given that the current plan was to bump Conan a half hour behind an 11:35pm Leno show, that would seem a satisfying reversal for the man they call Coco.

Weeeeiiirrrddd

Last night's opening segment of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart cracked me up and puts the revelations from Game Change in perspective, though I'm still going to read the crap out of it. It's difficult to tell how readers are receiving it as the reviews for the book on Amazon are skewed by dozens of 1-star reviews from users who haven't read the book but are angry that a Kindle version wasn't issued. Amazon does show when a user was a verified purchaser of a book; it would be useful someday if they could allow you to see only the average rating and reviews from that subset of readers.

Also, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are up in widescreen on Hulu now. We had to work through that workflow with the Comedy Central folks, but we were able to retain captions in the widescreen files which was important for us.

Treme

Teaser trailer for Treme, the upcoming HBO series from, drum roll, the creators of The Wire. It is said to be about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans, but given that David Simon is behind it, the series will likely be about the entire political-social ecosystem of that area.

Alicia and Stephen

Monsieur Colbert gives Alicia Keys an assist on "Empire State of Mind."

At the start line of the NY Marathon this year, as we stood at the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, waiting for them to release our wave, they had someone sing the National Anthem and God Bless America, and then they blasted Jay-Z and Alicia's majestic "Empire State of Mind" over the loudspeakers. We were all so pumped up that when the pistol shot fired to start us, all thoughts of not going out too fast were tossed aside and carried away by the stiff winds that morning. We all blasted through that first mile up the bridge in record time; I'd pay the debt for that some 17 miles later.

When I hear that song, I'll always think of that moment at the foot of the bridge, thousands of people hopping and vibrating in place, all overflowing with anticipation and nervous energy.

Believe it or not

A TV theme song should set your mind in the right mood for the show to come, like candles for a romantic dinner or Drew Brees' Marine-inspired team chant before the Saints take the field.

This oldie, backing the sudden freeze frames over medium close-ups to allow for the actor credits to unfurl with a glow effect, is a great example.

Art forms America produced

Quote from this interview with Neal Adams on Hulu:

If you scratch a French fellow who is interested in this sort of thing, he will tell you that America is responsible for three forms of art: jazz, musical comedy and, guess what, comic books.

What about obesity?! Is that not an art form?

The interview occurred in conjunction with the launch of the Astonishing X-Men motion comic on Hulu, the first miniseries being Gifted, scripted by Joss Whedon. The problem with earlier motion comics was that they were just a series of Ken Burns-esque pans against stills that seemed to have neither the benefits of holding a comic book (e.g. the ability to control one's pacing through the material, the fun of seeing how the artist uses the page layout to control the flow of one's eye) nor the joys of actual motion pictures (those should be apparent to all who love movies).

This new Astonishing X-Men motion comic adds an axis or two of motion (heads bob, lips move, eyes blink, etc). It is an improvement, reminiscent of some 80's cartoons (Voltron comes to mind) which weren't truly full motion but which contained just enough to qualify to be called cartoons.

So...

Ann Shaff examines the ascent of the word "so" among this technology-raised generation.

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Pics from some lucky person who received the Mad Men season 3 press kit.

The season 3 premiere is this Sunday at 10pm. I will be planted in front of my TV then, yes.

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Can you measure grit? Maybe so.

Many books and articles have been written recently about how genius is overrated and hard work underrated, so that idea isn't the interesting point here. The idea that a survey can assess a person's grit with some accuracy is a bit surprising. Let's get this to be a standard test in the NFL so I can use the data in my upcoming fantasy football draft.

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My So-Called Life is on Hulu now. Among the most beloved of the "one and done" shows in my lifetime, I'm looking forward to catching up on it online.

Sports Guy, we love you

Eric (our CTO) and I are both card carrying members of Sports Guy Nation. So it's extra special whenever he posts any reference or link to Hulu.

He tweeted about an episode of Miami Vice on Hulu:

Go to the 42-minute mark of this Miami Vice clip: http://tinyurl.com/lkfome ... Has there ever been a better use of a song in TV history?

With over 100K followers on Twitter, he has some influence, and so that ep of Miami Vice is creeping up our Most Popular Videos list, up to page 4 at last check, which is pretty strong for a random library episode of a show that isn't new to the service.

Here's a direct link to just the music reference he mentions:

This song was used later to end another TV episode to great effect, the "Two Cathedrals" episode of The West Wing. That was actually the season finale of the second season of the show. It's one of my favorite West Wing episodes.

Here is a reciprocal link for Bill Simmons: his new book on the NBA comes out this fall.

Sunday

I saw Up in 3-D at the El Capitan last night. It's the richest, most moving script from Pixar yet. Animation lovers will love the references to Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky.

I will be curious, when it comes out on Blu-Ray, to see it in 2-D also, but this is probably the most polished 3-D movie I've seen to date. There is a level of control with digital animation that allows the 3-D effects to be extremely precise, with much less of the distracting blurring that makes other 3-D movies feel like gimmicks.

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So, did Susan Boyle win in the finals of Britain's Got Talent? Go see for yourself.

I keep forgetting you don't have to sing to be on that show. The finals are like America's Best Dance Crew vs. American Idol.

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Last survivor of the Titanic dies. I knew she was ready to pass on after she dropped that blue jeweled necklace into the ocean.

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Nadal loses at the French Open. Massive upset. This makes Robin Soderling the future answer to a trivia question. Djokovic is out, too. Federer, the door is open. This is your best, and maybe last chance, to walk down that red clay carpet and on through.

***

In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reports that we are likely in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. By the end of this century, nearly half of Earth's species may be extinct. The suspected cause is the pace of human activity.

Miscellany

Toy Story 3 teaser trailer. What jumps out at me now is not the technology of the digital animation, which is commonplace, but how quickly we recognize our old friends Woody and Buzz and friends. Consistency of character is the magic sauce here.

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Cool--Hulu Desktop made it into Uncrate. I have a secret list of ambitions for Hulu, and most of them consist of getting Hulu featured in things I follow in my own daily life. Some others: getting mentioned on The Simpsons, by Oprah, by the President, and in the lyrics to a hip-hop song. Getting Jason to get one of those black and white dot photos in the WSJ.

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Useful little site: copypastecharacter.com

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Mad Men Season 3 episodes may be squeezed by 2 minutes to accommodate more ads. Damn this recession.

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Eastbound and Down Season 1 is coming to DVD in June. Can't wait. I love me some Danny McBride, like I did Will Ferrell before his overexposure.

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How they shot those Where Amazing Happens commercials for the NBA where classic plays are gradually painted in, one player at a time.

Kottke posted a great dissection of the Kobe to Shaq alleyoop spot, noting how it contains evidence of just how dysfunctional Kobe and Shaq's relationship already was at that time.

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Jeffrey Toobin profiles Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in The New Yorker. Toobin opened my eyes to just how much Roberts has already shifted the Supreme Court right during his short tenure. Roberts may be Bush's most unpublicized but lasting legacy.

Still, there is no disputing that the President and the Chief Justice are adversaries in a contest for control of the Court, and that both men come to that battle well armed. Obama has at most one more chance to take the oath of office, and Roberts will probably have a half-dozen more opportunities to get it right. But each time Roberts walks down the steps of the Capitol to administer the oath, he may well be surrounded—and eventually outvoted—by Supreme Court colleagues appointed by Barack Obama.

I loved Toobin's book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.

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If Obama is Spock, then is Kirk John McCain?

And so, dear reader, we married her

ABC is joining Hulu. It's a thrill for us to welcome them and a big day in our company history!

Between that deal, and our TV campaign, and the concurrent development of many projects for Hulu, and staying up late to communicate with some of our developers in China, and an add-on session of two months of physical therapy for tendinitis of my Achilles, my posts here have been few and far between. May, I promise, will be better. 2009 has assaulted me like a young Mike Tyson and it hasn't let up.

My last physical therapy session (or at least I hope it will be so) was yesterday. I am still not 100%; when my therapist asks me to balance on one leg and do calf raises, it's clear which leg I suffered the injury on. But I am going to attempt to start running again. The NY Marathon is Nov. 1, and my goal is to finish it. I can't run even one mile today without my Achilles flaring up, and the weakness in my left leg calf and ankles has led to shin splints on just that leg, but I'm not ready to throw in the towel on any activities.

The one year anniversary of my Achilles rupture is coming in just over a week. It has been a tough year. You don't realize how much being active contributes to a healthy and happy state of mind until you're knocked out of commission for so long. At therapy yesterday, I jumped up and hit the ceiling at the office. It felt like a celebration.

I am convinced that a big reason for the rupture last May was that I had just completed a two week dosage of the antibiotic ciprofloxocin for a sinus infection. I went to run the Santa Monica 5K on a Saturday, then to play basketball on Monday, and pop went the tendon.

The FDA has since issued a health warning regarding the increased risk of tendon rupture from the usage of the class of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones: Ciprofloxocin and Levofloxacin being the two most well-known, along with Ofloxacin, Pefloxacin. They cause something called tendon cytotoxicity--in layman's terms, they weaken your tendons. I wasn't told this when I was given my prescription at the drug store, but do a search on Google on this topic now and you'll find plenty of documentation.

If your doctor prescribes one of these for you, I'd first ask if another antibiotics are really necessary. If so, ask if an antibiotic that's not in this class is a reasonable substitute. Doctors like fluoroquinolones because they're broad spectrum, but ask me if I'd rather have a lingering sinus infection or a year's worth of pain and immobility and lingering tendinitis and weakness from a total Achilles rupture. If you have to take one of those fluoroquinolones, I recommend swearing off any physical activity until a few weeks after you've completed your dose. You'll feel fine and think it excessive, but believe me: it's not worth the risk.

How did I get from ABC joining to Hulu to issuing health warnings? You can tell what's top of mind for me these days. Let's treat both of these as good news: Hulu adds a valued partner, and I'm out of therapy and back on the road to health, running shoes laced.

The answering machines lives on

Recently someone posted about how the ubiquity of cell phones has neutered movie plotlines dependent on lack of communication for dramatic suspense (if someone knows which post I'm referring to, let me know; for the life of me I can't remember where I saw it). For example, Romeo and Juliet would've never ended tragically if the two of them could have texted each other rather than having a messenger try to deliver the news of the faked death ("Drnking drug to fake death for 2 and 40 hrs. Not rlly dead! Meet @CapuletCrypt? <3<3<3 -J")

So screenwriters depend on poor cell phone reception or destroyed cell phones to try and extend the useful life of communication barriers as a plot device.

The plot device that bothers me the most is the use of old-school answering machines to incite conflict. Every time a character comes home with a loved one and then presses play on one of those old-school answering machines, unwittingly playing a suspicious or incriminating message out loud before they can hit the stop button, I picture a lazy screenwriter at the laptop thinking of how to squeeze a plot turn into one page of script. I barely know anybody who still has a landline, let alone one of those answering machines. Mobile phone voicemail just isn't as convenient for a screenwriter, though, so the answering machine lives on.

Movie Theaters and CDs and MP3s as mere marketing tools

Sasha Frere-Jones reads in recent concert ticket bonus offerings the completion of the transition of recorded music from standalone product to mere advertisement for concerts.

If you buy a top-price ticket to one of No Doubt’s upcoming shows (between $50 and $150, roughly), you will receive a free download of the band’s entire catalogue. This makes sense, as touring is the one verifiably healthy part of the music business. Prince will release a new three-CD bundle on March 29, available exclusively at Target for $11.98. That may seem like a rollback to bargain prices of yesteryear (even though one of the CDs is by Prince’s protégée Bria Valente), but it’s more likely that Prince is seeing into the future—again. In 2004, he gave away a copy of his “Musicology” CD to everyone who attended one of his concerts, making concrete what is now almost axiomatic: recordings have become advertisements for shows.

As anyone who follows the movie industry knows, theatrical releases long ago became the most expensive commercials in the world for selling DVDs which generate most of the profits. Many movies don't even make back their production costs during their run in theaters, but investors count on sales of $17 DVDs to cover the shortfall and then some (international sales help, too, but DVD was the gamechanger.

Concert ticket sales have made up for the erosion of recorded music sales due to piracy. If DVD sales for television programming go down due to piracy, TV folks don't have an obvious backup plan like musicians have with concerts. If advertising can't cover TV production costs and DVD sales disappear, I suspect we'll all be watching a lot more reality TV.

It's one reason I want to see Hulu succeed, to provide an alternate revenue stream to continue to subsidize the production of shows in genres other than reality TV, which really isn't my cup of tea.

From days of long ago...

Voltron, Defender of the Universe! If I could go back in time to speak to my elementary school self, I might tell him, as he sat there in the living room after school, watching an episode of Voltron, that someday he'd work at a company that would bring the show to another generation through the Internet.

Also new to Hulu, Felix the Cat.

Slums to riches

The best part of the interview below is when Ryan Seacrest asks one of the young kids from the Slumdog cast a question, and he doesn't reply. Another boy standing in the back row explains, "He doesn't speak English."

Ryan Seacrest then asks, "Can one of you translate?"

Another of the actors jumps in, "He doesn't speak English."

The other critical information revealed in this interview is that Freida Pinto is single and hasn't been asked out via her agent despite the movie's popularity. Sadly, I did a search on my iPhone for "Freida Pinto agent" and got zero results.

Complaining about the Oscars is some sort of national pastime, but one that's always exasperated me. If you don't like the Oscars, the movies they nominate, don't watch! The Oscars, like the Hall of Fame in baseball, are voted on by a select and insular group of people, so if your tastes don't align with those voting in each category, it's futile to expect anything to change. Saying you don't like the Oscars doesn't earn you any exclusive indie cred; that bandwagon is full every year and has been for years.

Honor the movies you enjoy by going to see them and telling people you know to see them. I grew up watching the Oscars with my family and have always looked forward to them. It's one of the few events left on TV outside of sporting events that people gather to watch live. I am sad when they show the montage of the recently deceased, excited to hear familiar musical cues from famous scores or see montages of classic movie scenes, and happy when someone I admire wins the golden naked guy statue. Sure, there's plenty of room for improvement in every telecast--what was with the odd acting award presentation process this year?--but there are usually enough fun moments (Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman dancing, Ben Stiller channeling Joaquin Phoenix channeling Ted Kaczynski) to keep me coming back for another dose the next year.

Miscellany

The new tv show Lie to Me is based on the real-life research of Dr. Paul Ekman into facial behaviors, or how muscles of the face reveal underlying psychology through microexpressions that are nearly unconscious or involuntary.

Ekman's system is called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and its companion is the Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary (FACSAID). I first heard of Ekman's work through a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker titled "The Naked Face".

You can purchase the training system for $260. Maybe it will pay for itself through your weekly poker game?

--@--

Chase Jarvis offers 5 tips for shooting better pictures with your iPhone. He also recommends two apps for the iPhone, CameraBag ($2.99) and Pano ($2.99), both of which I use and enjoy.

I put the prices there because I know some people don't like to pay for any apps, but if there's one thing I urge people to do this year it's to pay for things that provide value, even if they're things you can obtain illegally for free. Whether it's software or music or movies, with the Internet it's easier than ever to reward people directly for work you appreciate. When apps for the iPhone cost less than a Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwich, there's really no excuse. Do the right thing, fight the recession, reward people who do great work that improves your life.

Two other iPhone photography apps that I recommend: Photogene ($2.99) and QuadCamera ($1.99). The iPhone camera is not going to win any prizes for picture quality, but the use of these apps should improve your snaps noticeably. Your Facebook and Flickr friends thank you in advance.

--@--

Speaking of iPhone apps, I've reached the nine page, 144 app limit. I don't use all the apps all the time, so it's not a problem to delete a few, but the limit seems somewhat arbitrary, and at some point in the near future I can see having more than 144 apps that I'd use semi-regularly, or at least often enough that I wouldn't want to have to be deleting and installing apps all the time.

Paging through nine pages of apps doesn't exactly play to the iPhone's interface strengths (some ability to group apps or nest them in folder would be handy) but it's certainly not unusable.

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Amazon's Universal wishlist feature allows you to add products from other websites. Not sure when this launched, but it's an idea I recall being bandied about at Amazon many years ago.

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Metacritic compiles top 10 lists from movie critics across the land (they need to fix their HTML header as it still reads 2007 Film Critic Top Ten Lists in my browser tab). I'm still waiting for their year-end compilation graphic that assimilates all these top ten lists into a master best-of list. I'm not sure if they're producing it again this year, but I hope they do.

The new Simpsons title sequence

New and in widescreen for the HDTV generation...

Feedback loops

The one advantage of running a Super Bowl ad in this day and age is the availability of near instantaneous feedback through the internet.

Text messages, tweets, e-mails, and phone calls started rolling in as soon as our ad aired on Sunday.

Just tonight, our ad ran again on American Idol. I happened to be home when it came on, and as soon as it was over I did a quick search on Twitter for hulu. Eight of the nine newest tweets were about the ad:

Lost and Found and Lost

Short comic strip on Lost that sums up the seemingly fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants scripting which gives so many viewers a love-hate relationship.

I've long since given up hope for any explanation that ties all the seasons together and that explains all the oddities on the island. I just hope this season doesn't get so bogged down in time travel machinations that it transforms potentially interesting characters into chess pieces. Last season redeemed the show by recalling my empathy for the core characters, but thus far this season I sense reversion to the tactic of mythology misdirection which feels like an artificial way to extend the series.

This made me cry

From Sports Guy's running diary of the Super Bowl:

9:26 -- Neil Rackers' PAT makes it 20-14 with 7:33 remaining. So long, Steelers' cover. In other news, congrats to Hulu for landing a Super Bowl ad. My baby's all growns up! My baby's all growns up! I love Hulu. Any video channel that streams complete "White Shadow" and "Miami Vice" episodes is good by me.

Alec in Huluwood

Hulu's first TV commercial, the first TV ad I've ever worked on, debuted on the Super Bowl tonight. It's the capper to what must be the most memorable weekend of my life. It feels like I've lived 7 days in this weekend, perhaps because I've gotten a total of 2.5 hours of sleep the whole time.

I'm going to go collapse now in the airport shuttle.

Super Bowl ads

Check out this year's Super Bowl ads at Hulu, and vote for your favorite. I have to do this myself! Below is a new widget our DP team built that you can use to watch the ads here, if you'd like.

The West Wing

The West Wing makes the leap from fiction to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.

Pay the man his money

Lionsgate (with an assist from AMC) inked Matthew Weiner to helm two more seasons of Mad Men in a deal estimated at $9 million.

Worth every penny.

Goofy moment from the Inauguration

As soon as I watched this moment of the Inauguration, I knew it would be on The Daily Show, but that doesn't make it any less amusing. Here's the bit I'm referring to:

Uh, thank you?

From TV Squad:

Hulu is the greatest thing to happen to the Internet since girl-on-girl pornography.

The writer goes on to complain about the Edge Shave Gel ad featuring four bikini models. I'm so confused.

Blagojevich = Clay Davis

Most fans of The Wire can't help but connect newly arrested Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich with the HBO show's corrupt politician Clay Davis.

But the similarities may be more uncanny than you thought. Davis's patented "sh*********t"? Blagojevich may have used it himself!

Malcolm Gladwell on The Colbert Report

Here's the interview. Gladwell tolerates Colbert's usual constructed preening with a bemused detachment.

Old interview with David Simon

An old but good interview with David Simon (The Wire) in The Believer.

Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

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My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

***

There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time—hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor—but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually. Bringing those pieces of America that are obscured or ignored or otherwise segregated from the ordinary and effectively arguing their relevance and existence to ordinary Americans. Saying, in effect, This is part of the country you have made. This too is who we are and what we have built. Think again, motherfuckers.

West Wing, the real world edition

In the TV show The West Wing, Leo McGarry, an old friend of Josh Lyman, asks Josh to go listen to a man speak. McGarry wants Lyman to help this man run for the Presidency. Lyman is skeptical, but he treks out to a VFW hall in New Hampshire and listens to this candidate speaking to a hostile crowd. And when he hears the man speak, this man named Jed Bartlet, he is converted.

From Chapter 1 of Newsweek's Secrets of the 2008 Campaign:

Barack Obama had a gift, and he knew it. He had a way of making very smart, very accomplished people feel virtuous just by wanting to help Barack Obama. It had happened at Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s, at a time when the school was embroiled in fights over political correctness. He had won one of the truly plum prizes of overachievement at Harvard: he had been voted president of the law review, the first African-American ever so honored. Though his politics were conventionally (if not stridently) liberal, even the conservatives voted for him. Obama was a good listener, attentive and empathetic, and his powerful mind could turn disjointed screeds into reasoned consensus, but his appeal lay in something deeper. He was a black man who had moved beyond racial politics and narrowly defined interest groups. He seemed indifferent to, if not scornful of, the politics of identity and grievance. He showed no sense of entitlement or resentment. Obama had a way of transcending ambition, though he himself was ambitious as hell. In the grasping race for status and achievement—a competition that can seem like blood lust at a place like Harvard—Obama could make hypersuccessful meritocrats pause and remember a time (part mythical perhaps, but still beckoning) when service to others was more important than serving oneself.

Gregory Craig, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., was one of those Americans who wanted to believe again. Craig was not exactly an ordinary citizen—he had served and worked with the powerful all his life, as an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy in the 1980s, as chief of policy planning at the State Department in the Clinton administration and as a lawyer hired to represent President Clinton at his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in 1999. He had seen the imperfections of the mighty, up close and personal, and by and large accepted human frailty. But, like a lot of Americans, he was tired of partisan bickering and yearned for someone who could rise above politics as usual. A 63-year-old baby boomer, Craig wanted to recapture the youthful idealism that he had experienced as a student at Harvard in the 1960s and later at Yale Law School, where his friends included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. In the late fall of 2003, he was invited to hear a young state senator from Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate. Craig was immediately taken with Barack Obama. "He spoke 20 to 30 minutes, and I found him to be funny, smart and very knowledgeable for a state senator," Craig recalled. Craig was so visibly impressed that his host that evening, the longtime Washington mover and shaker Vernon Jordan, teased him, saying, "Greg has just fallen in love."

Josh joins the campaign, Jed Bartlet becomes President of the United States, and Josh is appointed deputy chief of staff.

Netflix Instant Play finally available for Macs

Via Microsoft Silverlight. Rolls out tomorrow and requires Intel-chipped Macs.

This isn't just a hulu hoop, it's the circle of life

One more season of Mad Men done tonight, and we settle in for another long wait for the next season, keeping our fingers crossed that Matthew Weiner will be back.

Jon Hamm hosted SNL yesterday, and to nobody's surprise participated in a Mad Men segment. The best bit was the moment spoofing Don Draper's legendary pitches, which are my favorite part of Mad Men. Here it is, complete with music lifted straight from the Kodak Carousel pitch from the final episode of season one.

Negative ads, a long and distinguished history

If you think today's political ads are negative, check out some historical political tv ads. Here, for example, is perhaps the most famous ad of all time, the Daisy Girl ad, created by the ad agency DDB and run just once on TV by Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.

LBJ crushed Goldwater in the election.

Of course, while McCain hasn't shown an ad with Obama flying a plane into the Empire State Building, we still have a week and a half to go and McCain just had his worst polling day yet. If the McCain campaign goes that route, I suggest Obama run an ad of McCain wandering around the White House in his pajamas, drooling and mumbling incoherently, while elsewhere Palin stands in her enormous walk-in closet flipping through one of several hundred designer suits mumbling, "Ooh, you betcha!"

Stephen Colbert to appear in Amazing Spider-Man #573

I didn't even realize that Stephen Colbert is running for President in the Marvel Universe, but now he's making his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #573.

There will be a variant cover featuring Colbert swinging through the city with Spider-Man in tow (as seen to the left).

This is sure to get play on The Colbert Report, and I'll try to remember to link to the clip once it appears on Hulu.

In the meantime, I'm surprised by how many serial comic books are still in circulation. I suppose they serve the same purpose as patent applications, allowing Marvel to license properties out for movies and toys. The stories themselves matter little now, which is ironic since Hollywood turns to comic books for story franchises. Comic book characters are like pre-existing concepts which, in their built-in awareness, offset enough marketing spend to justify hanging just about any plot on them.

The Wire, the complete series, on Blu-Ray

On Dec 9, the complete run of The Wire, all five seasons, comes out on Blu-Ray. Those of you who watched The Wire don't need my endorsement. Those who haven't and own a Blu-Ray player? Treat yourself to a holiday gift of the best television series, or telenovel, ever.

It's called a carousel

My favorite moment from season 1 of Mad Men is in the last episode: Don Draper's presentation of an ad idea to Kodak for its new slide projector.

"It let's us travel the way a child travels. Around and around and back home again, to a place we know we are loved."

Joan Holloway

Any guy who watches Mad Men will understand why I share this clip of Christina Hendricks of Mad Men, better known as Joan Holloway. I don't know how accurate Mad Men is, but if it is, they don't make office managers like they used to.

Taco truck, where art thou? Also, some Hulu updates

We launched a bunch of new features to Hulu at around midnight, debugged for a while, and then just before 3am the late night crew here hopped into cars and rushed over to hit our late night go-to spot, the taco truck near Vons in West Los Angeles. Taco trucks do a poor job of branding. They have no names, only locations, and they are all referred to just by the generic name of their classification: taco truck.

That truck typically operates from 10pm to 3am, but on this night, it was not there. You know the economy is bad when even the taco trucks are impacted.

So we went to Izzy's Deli in Santa Monica and celebrated our labors until 4 in the morning.

Some of the new things you'll find on Hulu:

• Discussion boards
• Channels, including new ones like anime (Naruto or Mushi-Shi, anyone? Death Note?) and Food and Leisure (Giada!)
• Improved queue management, including the option to separate out subscription alerts from expiration alerts
• Show recommendations - at the bottom of each show page, we recommend other shows you might like based on what people are viewing.
• New TV and Movies homepage layouts

There are other subtle changes, some of which you may notice as you browse around the site.

Two other cool Hulu news bits: the latest issue of Wired magazine has an article on us, and Tina Fey mentioned Hulu when accepting the Emmy for 30 Rock as best comedy series on Sunday night. It's probably the closest I'll ever come to having Tina Fey say my name. Good enough.

We're also still working hard on adding and replenishing our content library. Here's the season three premiere of Heroes.

Okay, I will go collapse now.

Chairlift gets uplift

[via Buzzfeed] Every time a new iPod is introduced, Apple features it in a commercial set with music from some obscure indie band that rides the publicity to newfound fame.

The lucky winner this time around? Chairlift.

View the new iPod nano ad.

Mad Men's one mistake

From Panopticist: Mad Men gets all the details right--except one:

...everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.

Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica.

Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor” has become one of the most widely used fonts in the world, if not the most widely used. No respectable designer would ever choose to use Arial, except in small sizes on the web, where its ubiquity must be catered to. The use of Arial indicates that Mad Men’s designers, so fussy about everything else, don’t consider the closing credits to be worthy of their oversight.

Going back to your old documents and finding Arial in them is like seeing your horrific hairdo in that high school yearbook photo.

A fresh take on reality programming

From one of the sites in my blogroll, This Blog Sits At The, a fresh look at the qualities of reality TV.

Reality programming is instructive. Pam and I watch Project Runway. I see a new design come down the runway, I take my money and I place my bet. Out loud, so that Pam can hear, I say what I think. And eventually I discover whether my judgment bore any resemblance to the experts who eventually hold forth.

It's clear that some education is taking place. My judgments diverge less and less. This means that this kind of reality programming is actually making me a more discerning observer of the world of fashion. It is helping me internalize my own modest mastery of the code.

...

Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely, one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into the studio and prime time. Reality programming is contemporary culture on tap. It is by no means a "raw feed." That is YouTube's job. But it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by their own efforts. In effect, reality programming is "stealing signals" from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit. (Mixed metaphor alert. Darn it, too late.)

This is an era in which we are inclined to issue lots of brave talk about cocreation, open source, and dynamic institutions. We speak of breaking down the citadel that separate the corporation from the real world. Well, this is actually what it looks like (for certain purposes). And funny old TV may in fact be one of the first meaning makers to figure out how we solve this particularly thorny problem. This, in turn, would make reality programming not the end of civilization as we know it, but a test case in what comes next.

What I find fascinating about reality programming are people who are addicted to the shows yet love to watch them just to tear down the participants. There is something bizarre in that ironic, conflicted behavior. Not that schadenfreude doesn't exist, but there is no greater charity you can contribute to a reality program participant than your eyeballs to their ratings.

Speaking of reality programming, Hulu now has the first episode of Architecture School.

TDS on the Olympics

Nothing like The Daily Show to put Olympics controversies in perspective.

Already, problems with Olympics broadcasting

I was so excited for this year's Olympics because for the first time, 2,200 hours were going to be put online at NBCOlympics.com. DirecTV has some 6 or 7 channels dedicated to the Olympics. It didn't seem possible that the problems with the last Olympics would recur, namely that anyone who is on the Internet would find out results before they were shown somewhere.

Alas, that idea of maximizing audience via an artificially enforced notion of primetime still haunts us. If you want to watch Michael Phelps compete in events, you don't get to see them live, at least not on the West Coast in any legal fashion. I logged into ESPN this morning and there on the front page were the results of Phelps' first heat of the 400 IM Medley (which I won't share here). In fact, the result is even listed on the homepage of NBCOlympics.com. But the network is trying to still aggregate an audience for TV, so marquee events like that are not shown online, they are only shown on TV on a delayed schedule. In this case, the heats are shown at 3:30 to 4:30pm PST.

The final is at 5pm PST, but on the west coast they are going to delay coverage until 8pm PST, so for three hours the East Coast and Midwest in the U.S. will know the results, while the PST folks will have to detach all electronic devices and live in willful ignorance of the sports world if they wish to have any suspense when watching the main events on TV.

The revolution will be tape-delayed. Sigh.

Bernie Mac dead

Just 50 years old. People still die from pneumonia?

Mad Men Illustrated

NY artist Dyna Moe has created some hot looking Mad Men wallpapers. Check them out over on Flickr.

Robot Chicken: Star Wars

All four chapters of Robot Chicken: Star Wars are online at Adult Swim. For all Star Wars fans, this is essential viewing. You will laugh. You will cry (from laughing so much). And it is better than Cats.

Did you hear me? Essential viewing. Go now. Leave. Go watch it.

Wachovia savings commercial

Hazel directed, Raza co-directed and animated, and Chris shot this entry for a Wachovia TV commercial contest around savings (all classmates of mine from film school). Check it out and vote.

Mad Men

Watching Mad Men gives me an irresistible urge to smoke herbal cigarettes (yes, that's what they're smoking instead of actual cigarettes, something I learned from the recent NYTimes Magazine profile).

The show is packed with smart, if stylized, dialogue. I wonder if ad agency employees watch the show with the same concealed pride with which invesmtent bankers watch American Psycho.

Dream portrait assignment

If I were Annie Leibovitz, or Richard Avedon, or some other photographer to the stars, and I was offered the opportunity to shoot any TV characters, I'd want to photograph Jamie Hector, Gbenga Akinnagbe, and Felicia Pearson, AKA Marlo Stanfield, Chris Partlow, and Snoop from The Wire.

Just three fantastic faces.

R.I.P. Tim Russert

I read the news as I was waiting to board my flight to Chicago today, and it felt as if a beloved uncle had passed away.

The truth tickles

Jon Stewart contemplates Obama's health record.

As Chris Rock said about McCain, "How can you make decisions about the future if you aren't going to be there?"

More Stewart..."Nobody joins the Marines because they think they're going to fight fire monsters."

The media writes that young people get more of their news from The Daily Show than regular news channels, and the note that with a tone of disapproval, but who keeps the politicians more honest than the court jester? The Daily Show is our news outlet of choice because it, more than any other news show, says what we think, and does it with style and humor.

Go Speed Racer

One of the catchier theme songs around...

The first season is up at Hulu, with the rest following closely behind, all 52 or so episodes. I have fond memories of watching this some lazy summer afternoons as a child. At an early age, I had gadget envy, what with the Mach 5 having a bunch of buttons on its steering wheel, each of which would activate some whiz-bang function.

Hulu also now has Versus' weekly cycling recap show Cyclysm Sundays. Now that I'm felled by my torn Achilles tendon, watching or hearing about any sport is like grapefruit juice in my eye, but I do have fond memories of cycling as the sport that brought me back to a mental and physical whole after blowing out my knee back in 1998.

Last, another good new add: the 2008 National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Hulu now has all the full episodes of this year's tournament. This episode has Phil Ivey heads up against Johnny Chan.

Smoking

David Sedaris on smoking in this week's New Yorker.

When I started smoking myself, I realized that a lit cigarette acted as a kind of beacon, drawing in any freeloader who happened to see or smell it. It was like standing on a street corner and jiggling a palmful of quarters. “Spare change?” someone might ask. And what could you say?

...

Given my reputation as a strident non-smoker, it was funny how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life were a play, and the prop mistress had finally showed up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.

Speaking of smoking, season one of Mad Men comes out on DVD July 1. I've tried to kick the DVD-buying habit this past year, but hot diggity that is some tempting product packaging.

Disappointing that the Blu-Ray box art for the same box set is purely conventional.

Recommended

Chris Rock's latest standup tour - Last night I caught Chris Rock's latest standup show with some coworkers. I have to let it soak in over a few weeks (during which I will dutifully, as a male, repeat his jokes to many of my coworkers and friends with a substantially substandard delivery that will deflate 85% of the humor of the routines), but with the performance fresh in my mind I'm convinced it's his best standup performance yet. I was in tears a couple of times. The Presidential election, race relations, differences between men and women, marriage, sex, steroids...he ranged over all the topics I was hoping he'd hit. If he's coming to your town, get yourself a ticket.

There's nothing like seeing good standup live; you can watch the inevitable HBO special, but you won't have the energy from thousands of people laughing to feed off of (the flipside is probably also true, that seeing bad standup live is exponentially more uncomfortable than seeing it on TV).

I last saw him live in Seattle some four years ago, during his Never Scared tour. Of all the standup comedians I've seen live (not a huge list, but includes folks like Dennis Miller, Seinfeld, Russell Peters), Chris Rock is my favorite. I saw Seinfeld twice in a four year span, and he repeated a great deal of his material. Though Rock covers similar themes in each show, I've never heard him use the same joke twice.

***

Lays ketchup flavored potato chips - one of my coworkers brought a bag back from Toronto. Apparently this flavor is a specialty north of the border. In America we love ketchup with our french fries, so why hasn't this flavor of chips caught on here? Whatever the reason, to satiate my fix I may have to resort to bidding on eBay.

***

State of Play - the British just seem to be able to crank out great political thrillers and police procedurals (I'm still a huge fan of Spooks, or MI-5 as they rebrand it for BBC America). This six-part miniseries stars the always fantastic Bill Nighy and a young Kelly MacDonald and James McAvoy, to name a few actors more recognized this side of the pond. It starts, as these things often do, with a dead body. When the press, government, industry, and police all tug on the thread, the plot unravels at a healthy clip.

Feed Our Kids Well?

The long lost first episode of The Dana Carvey Show is now available on Hulu, featuring, yes, the infamous "Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies" sketch. Timely satire, perhaps, given this election season?

In one of those inadvertent and bizarre coincidences, the ad campaign on this skit happened to be Ragu's Feed Our Kids Well campaign, leading to the the unplanned visual convergence below (click for a larger view; you won't fully understand unless you've seen the skit).

The Office and 30 Rock, back

Last night, The Office and 30 Rock came back from the writer's strike with new episodes. And laughter rang through the kingdom.

The Office - "Dinner Party"

30 Rock - "MILF Island"

What do you see?

One of yesterday's hot Internet stories was this photo from the White House website which appeared to show Dick Cheney leering at a nude female sunbather.

In a bit of PR control, and perhaps as evidence that we see what we want to see, the powers that be released a larger version of the photo which reveals that the reflection in his sunglasses was nothing more than a hand holding a fishing rod. [via popurls]

***

A plug to watch Arrested Development on Hulu via Airbag's Longboard: "Thanks to Hulu, the world no longer has an excuse for not watching Arrested Development. Sometimes the Internet just gives and gives and gives."

Another fun place I found a Hulu embedded video: in Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker blog.

***

PicLens, a cool browser plugin I often use to show people photos on Flickr, has a beta version that supports YouTube video browsing in Firefox, including Firefox 3b5, and IE. I couldn't get any videos to actually start playing, but I saw it working in a demo. Select a video and it starts playing right there within PicLens' 3-D wall.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on Hulu

If you missed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip the first time around, when it aired on TV, or, if you're like me and never caught up with the accumulated episodes on his DVR before having to return it to DirecTV, you can now catch up on every episode on Hulu, starting with this one...

Iran So Far

Who's the Star?

In this week's New Yorker, Joan Acocella surveys Dancing with the Stars.

What can you learn from “Dancing with the Stars”? First, the difference between a dancer and a non-dancer. The people who partner the stars on the show are not just professional ballroom dancers; in their field they are bigger stars than their partners are in their fields. I don’t know why they’re up there, dragging those klutzes around—the pay must be good—but when you watch them dancing with non-professionals you will see what makes a person a dancer. Contrary to widespread belief, the main difference is not in the feet but in the upper body—the neck, the shoulders, the arms, which are stiff in the amateur and relaxed and eloquent in the professional. The other giveaway is in “line.” You may think you don’t know what that is, but, as with consonance in music, you do know. It is the carriage of the body in a way that seems harmonious and natural, as opposed to awkward and forced. Poor Monica Seles, with every step she took, ended in a position that no human being has ever willingly assumed. She was eliminated in the first round.

Bad Idea Jeans

An old classic.

"He That Believeth In Me"

I've had so little free time recently that I haven't been able to try out Battlestar Galactica. Season 1 is bubbling up in my Netflix queue, but I've had the same three discs at home for a month now, the weight of the carrying costs outweighed by the (a) ambition, (b) guilt, (c) busy schedule, (d) all of the above (Ikiru? Berlin Alexanderplatz? Anyone?)

But I know how passionate the fans are and wonder if I shouldn't be trying to catch up with a greater sense of urgency. Season 4 tipped off last night...

What the...?

Bizarre moment from the minisode of the pilot of Sheena. It's hard to go wrong with a man in a gorilla suit.

***

Kanye West launches a travel site: Kanye Travel Ventures. It's not clear to me what the Kanye twist on this is, but then I could never figure out what Paul Newman had to do with tomato sauce either. [via Thrillist]

Odds and Ends

Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.

Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.

Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?

Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.

The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.

South Park online

Every episode of South Park ever, online to stream for free. The amount of time a lot of people can spend online just went up a lot.

EW

Entertainment Weekly has an article on Hulu in today's issue. Online at EW.com, Ken Tucker created a list of 10 videos, personal picks, discovered as he surfed Hulu over a work week. It's a good list that I'll have to work my way through sometime (yes, as with being a film student and having no time to watch movies, working at Hulu leaves you with little time to watch much TV, except in your spare time, on Hulu).

Always exciting to be in a magazine that is such a pop culture touchstone, but especially exciting for Christina, our fearless PR leader.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Happy day! Hulu added all of Season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, maybe my favorite of all the seasons of the show. If you've never watched the show, you can catch up on the short 12 episode season 1 on Hulu and flow right into the full 22 episode second season.

The show's sophomore season is a television classic built on so many of the series' best romances: Buffy and Angel's tragic love affair, the beauty and the geek pairing of Cordelia and Xander, the odd couple of Willow and Oz, and even one between Watcher Giles and Jenny Calendar. As so many shows are working hard to crank out new episodes in the wake of the strike settlement, I can't think of too many better ways to fill your TV void.

Tracy

SNL offers a counterpoint to Tina Fey's unabashed support for HRC.

Hulu launches

Around 1:45AM this morning, Hulu shed the covers of private beta and opened to the public. Anyone in the U.S. can now come to our site and watch any of our videos for free. No special software needed other than a web browser, Flash player, and an internet connection. PC, Mac, Linux users, we support all of you.

We've all substituted caffeinated beverages for sleep for days now, and this morning I came into work with my t-shirt on backwards. Coherence is going to be a bit of a reach.

We have increased our content lineup significantly. Among my favorites:

• Every episode ever of Arrested Development, all 52 of them.
• The Big Lebowski. Dude.
• The Lonely Goatherd from The Sound of Music, and the other musical numbers you'd expect from there: Sixteen Going on Seventeen, Maria, Do Re Mi, Edelweiss, My Favorite Things, So Long, Farewell, and The Hills Are Alive. Pauline Kael may not be a fan, but it's the music of my childhood.
• Kagemusha . Yeah, the Akira Kurosawa classic!
• The top 10 moves of February from the NBA. Warning: more than a few ankles are broken in this one. And here's that crazy Chris Paul dribble move from the All-Star Game, in which he fakes a crossover and snaps the ball back to himself with backspin, goes by the defender, and dishes to the trailer for the dunk. Chris Paul is crazy good.
• "Down by the River" from SNL, featuring Chris Farley. I miss that guy, and I miss his show.
• "Ultimate Power in the Universe" from Family Guy: Blue Harvest. Watching for free is a great way to try out shows you've heard of but missed out on the first time around, and Family Guy has been that show for me, the one that Hulu got me hooked on.

People love to associate Hulu with big media because of some of our investors, but Hulu is a startup through and through (look at the team photo below, taken at around 1:50 this morning--I don't think we look big media, do you?). It's the smallest company I've ever worked at if you don't count the lemonade stand I ran one summer day when I was about 8. Smaller than Amazon.com was when I worked there. We have our initial investments from which to run our company, but we're not going to be spending it on big parties with models walking around holding trays of saffron baby lamb chops. No, our pre-launch evening meal for everyone pulling an all-nighter was some 100 tacos from a local taco truck here in Santa Monica, at the extravagant cost of $1.25 per taco. Our biggest spend that night, out of our own pockets, was to raise $160 among the team to dare one of our star programmers Andrew to drink two cups of salsa, one red hot, one green, in 30 seconds. Andrew woke this morning $160 richer, though I'd venture to guess he paid the price sometime during the day.

A small group of people, a little family, work night and day (sometimes more night than day) to put this site together from scratch. Some of the user e-mails I've read make the easy assumption that we're an ignorant, uncaring media behemoth, but we do care, perhaps too much for our own peace of mind. Between Eric, Betina, and myself, we've read well over 10,000 e-mails since we went into our private beta, and rather than go the form e-mail response route, we've tried to respond personally to every e-mail we can. We're gratified by the compliments, and we agonize over the angry e-mails, even the inaccurate and/or profane ones.

We do want to be able to distribute our content internationally. We do want to offer more episodes of every show on our site. We do want more varied ad creative so that we don't have to watch the same ad spots over and over. We do want closed-captioning on every video on our site. And we do want to do it legally, in a way that compensates the creative people all the way back at the start of the food chain. Not a day goes by that we don't wish we could just accelerate the future with a snap of our fingers and have everyone in the world streaming HD content to their plasma TV's.

It's easy to bash big media and claim to be forced to resort to piracy, and it is absolutely the right of users to write in with their honest feedback. It's the most useful kind. But it's far harder to try to fix the problems. It's easy to open up your blog editor and rip the movie you just saw. It's exponentially harder to go out and make a movie. It's easy to laugh at some startup you read about in the news because the business plan sounds terrible. It's much harder to start a company yourself.

We're working here to try to fix the industry from within. We want to be able to watch all our favorite videos however we want, just like you. We're building this service to be one we want to use. We're not anywhere near the finish line. It always feels like the to-do list outweighs the completed side of the ledger. But if it didn't, then it wouldn't be that interesting a challenge, and most of us probably wouldn't be here.

Check out our site, and if you don't mind, help spread the word. The more users we can rally to our cause, the quicker we can transform things for the better.

Cheers!

Hey, it's Julie Taylor

I'm not sure why I didn't notice this before, but the person asking the question in the (in)famous Miss South Carolina clip from the Miss Teen USA competition is Aimee Teegarden.

Friday Night Lights was a really good book, a good movie, and it's a great TV series, too, though admittedly I've only been able to watch 7 episodes here on Hulu, 15 minutes here and there over lunch at the desk.

With shows like Arrested Development and Friday Night Lights, what's the truth? Do devoted fans overestimate the mass appeal of the show, or is it really, as fans claim, misguided marketing strategies on the part of the studio. If Friday Night Lights aired on a better night, not Friday night, would it grab a wider audience? How could Arrested Development have been saved?

The economics of more niche TV series and movies still seem prohibitive for creators. Talking to many producers of indie films, even finding a niche audience on DVD doesn't help many of them to recoup production costs.

Lower production costs, remove some layers of middleman marketing and replace with more efficient marketing channels (read: the Internet), lower distribution costs (again, the Internet), bump some of the revenue streams forward in time (overlap windows like DVD and theatrical/first run TV broadcast), and I hope the ecosystem is more friendly to shows like this.

As for Friday Night Lights, if you don't already watch it, the best way for me to support it is to try and hook you. Here are the first three episodes from season one.

Ah, Jack

With the writer's strike over, here's hoping Alec, er, Jack, is soon to be back.

State of the arts

Bryan Caplan on Tyler Cowen on the state of the arts:

From the standpoint of the consumer, the supply of great art has clearly never been better. And even from the standpoint of the producer, it is easy to argue that, overall, this is the best of times.

From Caplan's five points on why that is:

5. One of Tyler's best points: The past often looks better than the present if you compare the best to the best. There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best. Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer? But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.

That's almost certainly true for television. In music, thought CD sales are down, distribution via the Internet means I can more easily discover new music than in the days when radio was my primary means of exposure.

I'm less certain about the quality of movies overall, but there's no doubt that accessing classic movies via DVD and services like Netflix has broadened my viewing canvas in a huge way.

Jon Stewart, Stephan Colbert, and Conan O'Brien

Here's the clip from Monday's Conan O'Brien, the last in the Stewart-Colbert-O'Brien feud series that spanned the three talk shows.

Sexual Harrassment and You

Funny SNL skit featuring Tom Brady in happier times.

Super Bowl ads

Wow, what an upset! Tom Brady can take solace in being one of the few people in the world for whom this ad is not aspirational.

We've posted all the ads from the Super Bowl at Hulu. If you have an invite, you can see them here. If you don't have a Hulu invite, you can see them here.

I also have some Hulu invites to give out, so leave a comment with your e-mail address if you're interested in one but haven't gotten in yet.

Liftoff

Tonight's episode of Mythbusters settled, among other things, that long-standing Internet debate about whether or not an airplane on a conveyor belt moving backwards (like a treadmill) at a speed equal to the airplane's normal ground speed during takeoff would lift off or not.

The answer? The plane does take off. The thurst of the airplane engines acts on air, not on the ground through the wheels.

Technorati Tags: mythbusters, science, tv

Conan O'Brien playing Rock Band

Since I got my repaired guitar for Rock Band (looks like there was a design flaw that they've since corrected in other shipments, thankfully), it's the only game I spend any time playing. When I hear a song that's in Rock Band come on the radio, my ears try to pick out the guitar or drum line, and I visualize the notes in the guitar line scrolling down towards me as in the videogame. It really does engage you with music in a very deep way. It's the same bond I feel with classical pieces I played when I was in the violin section of various youth orchestras.

I'm not the only one who feels that way. In just two months since Rock Band launched, players have purchased more than 2.5 million new songs to add to their game libraries! I'm responsible for at least a good 10 to 12 of those song purchases. $1.99 for a song I can play forever in the game seems entirely reasonable to me. I would love to see them allow third parties to offer songs for the game, though, as the trickle of 3 new songs a week already feels paltry (though they added some Oasis songs this week--can't wait to try my hand at those!).

This past weekend, the morning after one particular late-night Rock Band session, I found a notice hanging on my front door for a Community Violation. The box for "loud music" was checked off. At first I was perturbed, but then a certain sense of pride took hold as I realized I was still young enough to keep the neighbors up.

My one and primary complaint is that stand-alone guitars are still not available for the game, so you can't play with a full four piece band. Unless you invite over a Rock Band-playing friend who plays it on the same console as you do and is willing to bring over their guitar, you're limited to playing either guitar or bass but not both. That guitars from one game, like Guitar Hero, don't work with other games, like Rock Band, is extremely disappointing as they all use the same basic control scheme.

My only guess on this is that they rushed the game out for the holidays and couldn't ramp up production in time to have stand-alone guitars available. Forecasting in the gaming industry seems dodgy, at best. You'd think after so many years that the Nintendo Wii would be readily available, but no.

Midnight Train to Georgia

I'm not a huge musical person, but I'm a sucker for musical spoofs. Someone randomly breaks out in song unexpectedly in a movie or TV show, I will laugh. From last night's 30 Rock:

The Wire

I'm late to The Wire, but damn, how good was season 2, which I just finished watching? Now in its fifth and final season, I'm happy to report that all the reports of its greatness are all true. Best show on TV by a comfortable margin. I'm just blown away.

Technorati Tags: hbo, dvd, television, thewire

E. Pluribus Wiggum

In this election season, a very timely episode of The Simpsons.

Firefly

At the end of last week, we added every episode of Firefly to Hulu. Watching all fourteen episodes and then topping it off with the feature film Serenity would be a satisfying way to spend part of your holiday break. The movie can be watched without having seen the TV show, but it packs a much greater emotional punch if you watch the TV run first. Here are the first two episodes:

We also added all of the first season of Roswell. Before Katherine Heigl was Aizy on Critical Assembly and Izzie the human on Grey's Anatomy, she was Isabel, the alien-human hybrid on Roswell. I'm awaiting her next show, when she is simply Iz, a metaphoric concept of woman. Here's the Roswell pilot:

Garkel

Working at Hulu allowed me to finally catch up on some of the first season of 30 Rock, a show so many people had recommended to me but which first year film school didn't allow time for. Tracy Morgan? Alec Baldwin doing comedy? I'm not sure why I waited so long.

Well played, Garkel.

Jack Bauer Eats

A bunch of my classmates helped clip content this summer at Hulu. One of the funniest clips, which Mira cut and which just crossed my desk randomly one morning, was titled simply "Jack Bauer Eats."

If you've seen the show, you'll know why it's funny. Otherwise, just move along. Nothing to see here.

One: cut a hole in the...oh, you know

A quick little test for work, and also a chance to revisit a classic.

More HD from DirecTV

DirecTV launched 21 new HD channels yesterday:

• A&E (Channel 265)
• Animal Planet (Channel 282)
• Big Ten Network (Channel 220)
• CNN (Channel 202)
• The Discovery Channel (Channel 278)
• The History Channel (Channel 269)
• The Movie Channel East (Channel 544)
• NFL Network (Channel 212)
• Showtime West (Channel 540)
• Showtime too (Channel 538)
• The Smithsonian Channel (Channel 267)
• The Science Channel (Channel 284)
• Starz Comedy (Channel 519)
• Starz East (Channel 522)
• Starz West (Channel 540)
• Starz Edge (Channel 520)
• Starz Kids and Family (Channel 518)
• TBS (Channel 247)
• TLC (Channel 280)
• Versus / The Golf Channel (Channel 604)
• The Weather Channel (Channel 362)

More are coming in October and by year's end, including FX, NBA TV, The Food Network, Cartoon Network, Bravo, MTV, VH1, and Tennis Channel. Good times. I chose an apartment on the inside of my complex just so I could get a DirecTV satellite pointed the right way out my balcony.

Technorati Tags: HD, DirecTV, tv

Abracadabra...uh, open sesame...uh, hocus pocus

Last night, I got home from work around 1 in the morning and pulled up to the electronic gate to my parking garage and pressed my remote key fob button. Nothing happened. I waved it out the window, then got out of the car and walked up to the gate, pressing the key fob near any place I thought the sensor might reside. No luck.

One car pulled up behind me, then another, and soon a few others. We all stood outside our cars, pressing our key fobs. In our neighborhood, there wasn't any street parking, so we were stuck. It was 1 in the morning, I was dead tired, and I was not a happy camper (though if my key fob was out of order then I was on the verge of being literally an unhappy camper).

So I turned my attention to the exit gate, just next to the entrance. That was one of those gates that opened as soon as you pulled up to it. The sensor for that was a bit further inside the garage, but by sticking my tennis racket through the gate I could just reach far enough to trip it and open the gate. I managed to lean my tennis racket against the sensor and then directed traffic through the exit like John McClane waving the planes home at the end of Die Hard 2.

A different discontent plagued me in the nanosecond before I passed out. The security in our parking garage is not good, not good at all.

***

Kanye vs. 50 Cent, as judged by Amazon Sales Rank: Decision to Kanye. Critic's average judgment? The same. From guns to lyrics to now sales...hip-hop conflicts are progressing to more civilized playing fields.

***

Jon Stewart will host the Oscars in February. He seemed a bit nervous to start the last time (even the coolest customer can experience some jitters in the face of so much star power), but he loosened up by the end of the ceremony. I think the second time will be the charm.

***

My favorite Microsoft application was always Excel. I spent a good portion of my early career in that application building massive models, writing macros in VBA, pushing it to its limits. It didn't always keep up--I always had problems getting linked workbooks to update and calculate quickly, and sharing workbooks among my team never worked quite as we wanted to--but of the Office suite, it's always been king.

I hate Powerpoint, and Word's formatting quirks always drove me batty. So when Apple came out with Keynote, and then Pages, I was willing to switch over. I haven't yet, but only because I don't use Word or Powerpoint anymore. All my writing now is done in a plain text editor, e-mail client, script formatting software, or with an actual pen and notebook. As for Powerpoint, I haven't had to make one of those in years, hallelujah.

But I was curious about Numbers, the new spreadsheet app in iWork 08, so I fired it up, imported an Excel spreadsheet, and gave it a whirl. I attempted to update the spreadsheet

Though I like a lot of the interface decisions made in Numbers, I will remain, for the time being, an Excel guy. And it isn't because Number lacks advanced features like pivot tables. My main complaint with Numbers is that it's not keyboard friendly. You have to use the mouse to do so many things that Excel allows you to do without leaving the keyboard. Mousing around a spreadsheet is just counter to my working style.

Numbers might be the "spreadsheet for the rest of us," but I guess that makes me one of Them.

***

George Saunders appears on David Letterman.

***

Looks like I won't be seeing The White Stripes in concert after all. Disappointing.

***

Patriots fined and penalized for videotaping NY Jets defensive signals. Outside of the Bears, the Patriots were once one of the few teams I rooted for because they seemed to win by being smarter than their opponents. Outside of Tom Brady, they didn't have too many marquee names, and they didn't have a crazy financial advantage like teams like the Yankees or Red Sox because of the NFL salary cap. They were the Oakland A's of the NFL.

I suspect that the advantage they gathered from videotaping opponent signals is overstated (as is the case with many forms of cheating in sports), but what's disappointing is the hubris and stupidity/arrogance represented by the videotaping scheme. They were playing a team coached by one of their ex assistant coaches; how did they think they were going to get away with it?And anyone watching the two teams would think it ridiculous that the Patriots had to resort to such scheming to defeat the Jets.

If Mangini was part of such a practice when he was with the Patriots, and if he was indeed the one who snitched his ex-team out, then there's a beautiful tragic resonance to the sequence of events. Every one involved with the scheme is getting what they deserve: Mangini is seen as a rat, Belichick (never a warm fuzzy personality to begin with) is seen as a win at all costs Nixon of the NFL, and the Patriots now will never get the full credit they deserve for their accomplishments.

People are always going to be jealous of and resent perennial winners, but it certainly helps the cause to have ammunition. Brady fathering children out of wedlock and dating supermodels, Harrison using HGH, Belichick and staff using videotape surveillance...it's more than enough.

As a sidenote, a cyclist caught using HGH nowadays is looking at a minimum of a year's suspension and a lifetime of disgrace. A pro football player caught using steroids or HGH gets a four game suspension and then is back on the field, or in the case of Shawn Merriman, on to the Pro Bowl or Nike television commercials.

The NFL has been rocked by all sorts of scandal for a year straight now, from Michael Vick to HGH to PatriotsGate to the revolving convict lineup on the Bengals to who knows what else, and you know what? The league is as popular as ever. The NFL is so popular that it doesn't seem to absorb any economic penalty from scandal. Perhaps because of the violent nature of the game, fans seem far more tolerant of steroid use in the NFL than in other sports.

The last part of summer

Big day today - the first 25 Red cameras shipped. From Jim Jannard:

Just so you know, I am here at 1:09am with the RED team personally reviewing each camera of the 1st 25. We are calibrating each camera and my job is to check the files in RED Alert! that Jarred is shooting. We are shooting ISO 320, 1000 and 2000. There are about 20 people here getting ready for tomorrow. It really is a memorable night. About a year and a half ago this was just a dream. Tonight the dream has become a reality.

I want to thank all those that believed in RED from the beginning.

Jim

And all around the world, high end digital video camera profit margins shrink.

***

Dancing with the Stars…it’s a lot about the casting. I’ve only ever seen clips, but the talent they’ve convinced to grasp at that last of their 15 minutes of fame has been impressive. Among the cast for the upcoming season:

• Mark Cuban
• Floyd Mayweather Jr.
• Wayne Newton
• Scary Spice (Melanie Brown)
• Helio Castroneves
• Jenni Garth
• Josie Maran
• Marie Osmond
• Jane Seymour

Mark Cuban isn't making some last clutch at fame, I think it's more about brand bolstering for him. Generating constant publicity for himself is just part of who he is. Mayweather is in the tail of his career, and I'm surprised to see him on the list. The The rest all make sense.

***

Farecast lauches hotel search in beta. It’s both similar and different to their airfare service which lets you know whether fares are likely to go up or down and thus whether to buy now or wait. Their hotel service, called Hotel Rate Key, lets you know whether a hotel’s rates are a bargain or not relative to that hotel’s historical rates.

***

What the residents of Dunder Mifflin did on their summer vacation:

***

Tom Wolfe reviews Entourage

But there is hope in this moxie wasteland of moviemakers. Johnny Drama draws not my ire. Here is the bravado-laden torch of the past, its fire fueled by protein shakes and casting off the nearly forgotten aroma of desire. His ginseng-toned body twisting and gyrating with anxiety and self-doubt, he’s a New Age Neal Cassady, passed up here for a Lifetime movie, there for a Hallmark Channel special—the Houghton Mifflin and HarperCollins of the television world. Johnny Drama is no mere muzzled bus driver, however. He is a symbol of irony, that word now recognized only by the literati. Played by Kevin Dillon, Sancho Panza to real-life brother Matt, this role oozes the true Hollywood pathos of silver-screen heartbreak. If watch Entourage you must, then watch it for Drama.

***

Indexed - lots of fun. I have a hard time picking my favorite.

***

Gorilla movie - [via Daring Fireball via Fresh Signals via AdFreak]

Two posts that seem like action and reaction

Time on the internet to surpass time watching TV for the average US household. I passed that point long ago.

TorrentSpy blocks US searches.

And so it ends

Tim Goodman, speculating on the finale of The Sopranos, wrote:

And Tony's fate is still undecided.

Is that such a bad thing? The static, Chase-esque, unrequited climax always seemed romantic -- have the series end with nothing happening, as if the camera shut off while filming, as if Tony and his two families went on with their lives, but our little glimpse ended.

Goodman goes on to change speculate on a number of other possible endings, but if he'd just ended his article there, that would be a pretty good call.

That will go down as one of the more famous cuts to black in editing history. That entire last scene was just an editing tour de force.

Technorati Tags: sopranos, tv

Showdown Sunday

Federer vs. Nadal on the terre battu. Tony Soprano vs. Phil Leotardo on the New Jersey soil.

It's also the day I have to face down my movie and wrangle it into a screenable form for the last week of school, but for the two showdowns noted above, I'll be glued to the screen.

Technorati Tags: sopranos, tennis, tv

Memorial Day weekend

I am really sick: eyes watering, nose running, throat burning. My sinuses and chest are so congested I feel like I'm breathing through one of those coffee straws. A lot of people at school seem to be sick; one professor just canceled a class tomorrow morning. It's odd to see a cold seize hold around school when the weather is 70 degrees and sunny every day.

I have not slept as much or as regularly this quarter, and this weekend was really packed. Perhaps the lack of sleep has compromised my immune system. Whatever the cause, here's a sick day worth's of content.

Saturday I spent as 1st AC (assistant cameraperson) on a classmate's shoot. Since this was a reshoot, we had the luxury of a 2nd AC, and it made life a lot easier. Last quarter we had one AC per shoot, and that's a lot of work for one person. You have to load and download film, take focus measurements, guard the camera, swap lenses, check the gate, clean filters, move the camera into position, swap the camera from sticks to dolly and back, pull focus, keep a camera log, set the T-stop on the lens, run a stopwatch on shots to calculate how much film was run and how much is left, mark and clap the slate, write camera reports, and more. It's a very technical position, but I enjoy it. The day started early, with a 5AM alarm buzzing in my ear. When I got home at the end of the day, I told myself I'd take a quick nap and then head out to meet up with a few friends. I woke up at 5AM the next morning.

Sunday was spent at a wedding in Laguna Beach. I know nothing about the city other than what I'd seen on a few episodes of that MTV show of the same name (that show was shot beautifully on Panasonic Varicams, I believe). I'm not sure the city had any say in the matter, but that show forever cemented that town's image among most of America as the place where wealthy, self-absorbed teenagers ply their Machiavellian schemes to climb the social ladder.

Monday, on a last-minute suggestion from Mark, I attended the last day of the Star Wars convention at the LA convention center (the official title of the event was Star Wars Celebration IV). I consider myself a moderate Star Wars fans (enjoyed eps IV-VI, watched eps I-III out of devotion), but next to the types of fanatics you'd imagine at a gathering like this, I felt like Paris Hilton at a Mensa meeting.

At one T-shirt booth I asked a vendor if she had a particular Boba Fett t-shirt in large.

"Which one?" she barked.

"The second one from the right, top row?" I replied, taken aback by her hostile demeanor. She looked over her shoulder and then back down at some book she was reading.

"That's Jango Fett," she muttered, and paid me no further attention. Oops.

This being the last day of the convention, the schedule was very light on Lucasfilm-generated content. Most things to see were created by vendors or fans, from droids, action figures, and models to fan films and costumes. One room featured dozens of decorated Darth Vader helmets, much like the ubiquitous cows that appeared on city sidewalks a few years back. Darth as Lady Liberty? Or the Unabomber?

At another booth, as I looked over some artwork, a boy of about 8 or 9 years old walked behind me holding a yoda lightsaber, one of the ones that lights up and makes lightsaber sounds when swung through the air. A booth clerk, in his early forties, stopped the boy.

"The yoda lightsaber?" nodded the man in approval. "Strong choice."

"It's my first one," said the boy, beaming.

"That one's very light," the man explained. "Good for people who use a one-handed fighting technique, like me." He proceeded to demonstrate with some shadow-fencing, but one of his parries smacked me in the back of my head.

"Sorry, man," he said.

"Easy there, Jedi," I said, rubbing my head.

I watched a couple of fan films in the screening room. The ones I saw were all 2005 award winners. "One Season More" is an animated short that imagines Luke Skywalker's yearning to leave Tatooine as a musical number. It has the suitable mix of love and satire that characterizes the best of fan homages. It's one portion of Star Wars The Musical. This year's winners and entries can be seen at AtomFilms.

No plans for a new Star Wars movie were unveiled, but one welcome bit of news was the announcement of a new CG series from Lucasfilm Animation: The Clone Wars. Here's a sneak peek. I really enjoyed the last animated series, Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 1 and Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 2. This looks to be in that style.

Tuesday morning and early afternoon I spent at Disneyland with Alan, Sharon, and my two nephews Ryan and Evan. What do Disney and Lucas have in common? Both appropriated stories and built entertainment empires. Lucas took strands of Japanese film and set them in another universe (Lucas was originally supposed to direct Apocalypse Now, and Star Wars is his version of that movie, about how a small force--the Rebels--can overcome a larger force--the Empire--through sheer force of will). Disney took Grimm's fairy tales, which were indeed grim, and gave them happier endings and an animated life.

Since the last time I visited Disneyland, over 10 years ago, the most apparent change is that the price of admission has more than doubled. But seeing it all through my nephew Ryan's eyes helped me to appreciate just how enduring a piece of culture Disney built. He was so excited he was a live wire--no nap needed on this day.

While sitting with my nephew on It's A Small World, he almost jumped out of the boat he was so pumped up. That ride doesn't look like it's been updated one bit since my parents took me on it when I was a child (I thought perhaps we'd see young children in India answering customer service phones, or Chinese kids sewing Nikes, but the ride retains its idyllic view of the world), and yet it still kills with youngsters.

Something I wondered while wandering the park: what happened to the Mickey Mouse Club? Why isn't that show still running? Look at some of the talent that came out of the sixth and seventh seasons of the most recent incarnation of the show, which ended in 1994: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling. That's the pop music equivalent of the 2003 NBA Draft that produced Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh, among others. The Mickey Mouse Club was so competitive that Jessica Simpson and Matt Damon failed to make the cut. I'm not sure why they ceded that space to the likes of American Idol. If Disney doesn't bring back that show, I hope they've at least retained the services of the casting director/talent scout.

------------------------------------

I miss walking the streets of NYC. Google Maps Street View allows me to revisit old favorites. Here's my old apartment.

Microsoft Surface, coming Winter 2007, is one of the early products pointing towards the gesture-manipulated touchscreen interface seen in Minority Report.

An upcoming June software upgrade will allow it you to watch YouTube videos on the AppleTV.

The 2007 Cannes Film Festival winners. From what I've heard from folks who attended, the lineup of movies was very strong this year.

Christopher Nolan is going to shoot some of The Dark Knight in IMAX format. Most features that have been projected in IMAX theatres are simply 35mm films blown up. Since they weren't framed for the IMAX theater, I find many scenes incomprehensible unless you're sitting in the back row. Audiences viewing The Dark Knight at an IMAX theater will see the movie switch aspect ratios from whatever the 35mm aspect ratio is to 1.43 to 1 when the IMAX scenes come on screen.

Based on Gallup Polls, America is willing to elect a black or a woman for president, but if you're gay or an atheist (or both, I presume) your time has not come.

Darren Aronofsky disses the DVD for his movie The Fountain. It doesn't have a commentary, but Aronofsky has said he recorded one himself and will post it online soon so you can listen to it while watching the movie.

as many of you can tell it is light on the extras as compared to my previous dvd releases.

everything at the studio was a struggle.
for instance: they didn't want to do a commentary track cause they felt that it wouldn't help sales.
i didn't have it in me to fight anymore.
whatever.

so:
niko, my friend who did the doc on the dvd came up with a novel idea.
we recorded a commentary track ourselves.
we're gonna post it on a site soon, http coming soon.
you can play it and watch the flick and hopefully you'll enjoy it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cannes, dvd, film, filmmaking, filmschool, microsoft, movies, music, politics, disney, starwars, tech, tv, video, youtube

Up too early on a Sunday

It took me a long time to come around to the American version of The Office. I loved the British original, as many did, and after watching the first few episodes of the American version I wrote it off as another sugar-frosted clone, like a Starbucks rendition of foreign drink. But for some reason I programmed my DVR to grab this latest season, and the other night, utterly brain dead after another marathon editing session, I turned on one episode, and then another, and then another, and before I knew it I had watched the entire season. At some point they ran out of British episodes to adapt and set off on their own path, and in doing so settled into a more confident stride. The American version is sweeter, not as uncomfortably tragicomic as the British version, but they share a comic rhythm. There's no laugh track, but punchlines are punctuated by a moment of silence and a sidelong glance into a handheld camera that sometimes pops in with a quick zoom (the laughter occurs on the other side of the TV screen, i.e., on my sofa). It's an effortless and graceful method of delivering jokes, and it stands out in contrast to the brutish contortions of American sitcoms.

If you're not extremely wealthy and can't get access to a hedge fund, don't fret. The influx in capital into hedge funds has made them, on average, a lousy investment.

Since 2000, the average hedge fund hasn’t done any better, after fees, than the market as a whole, according to research by David A. Hsieh, a finance professor at Duke.

New medical device triggers a happiness nerve in your neck with electrical pulses. I wonder what it does to people who are already happy.

Technorati Tags: finance, happiness, science, tv

Budget kitchen

Mark Bittman advises readers how to assemble a well-equipped kitchen for $200 to $300 by hitting up restaurant supply houses. The low prices he quotes for many kitchen tools are impressive.

The economics of The Godfather.

The Visual Effects Society announced its list of the 50 most influential visual effects films of all time (remember, the difference between visual effects and special effects are that the latter must be done on set, e.g. blowing up a car, turning on a smoke machine). The top 10:

1. Star Wars (1977)
2. Blade Runner (1982)
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
3. The Matrix (1999)
5. Jurassic Park (1993)
6. Tron (1982)
7. King Kong (1933)
8. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
9. Alien (1979)
10. The Abyss (1989)

RIP Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Can't say it bothers me much. The show never really grabbed me.

Technorati Tags: cooking, economics, film, howto, movies, tools, tv

Little bit of that

Seeing beyond sight: photos by blind teenagers.

It's been apparent to everyone that this season of 24 has been the worst yet. I gave up on it a few episodes in. The good thing is that low ratings have forced the show producers to take notice.

The Golden Ratio for making your butt look great is being employed by a jeans mfr called The Proportion of Blu:

I used to think those commercials by Citicard about credit card theft, where a criminal's voice would play over the lip movements of an old lady or other credit fraud victim were quite remarkable, the lip matching was so perfect. Then I used VocAlign with Pro Tools at school and realized it wasn't that technically difficult to pull off after all.

Now that the whole HD-DVD code story is a day old, the hot blogosphere story of the day seems to be this article in the NYTimes which cites an economic study (PDF) by Justin Wolfers and Joseph Price finding evidence of racial bias among NBA refs, namely that white refs call fouls at a higher rate against black players than against white players. The NBA did their own study that they claim shows that refs are not biased, but their refusal to release the underlying data from their study really weakens their position. Steven Levitt looked over the Wolfers/Price paper and found it sound. I suspect that if you'd asked a bunch of NBA fans and observers beforehand if they'd expect the study to find bias, and if so, how much bias they'd expect, they'd come up with numbers higher than Wolfers and Price found in their study. In other words, the study isn't that shocking.

Technorati Tags: book, economics, fashion, math, NBA, photography, race, software, tv, video, youtube

In a world...

Profile of Dan LaFontaine, the voiceover actor of choice for movie trailers and TV ads. I got a laugh just listening to the intro on his website.

Technorati Tags: movies, ads, trailer, tv

Spring break's over

Auto porn: a part by part look at the new BMW M3 V8 engine. Featuring brake energy regeneration (reminds of of the old Tiger Woods/BMW joke). Hear the sound of the new V-8 during acceleration. Check out these headers, and imagine them glowing bright red. If Paris were an auto-snob, she'd say, "That's hot."

As one article noted, these images of the BMW engine headers recall Edward Weston's photo of a pepper. Compare:

Arnold Kling on the single-payer health care:

1. People are forced to buy something that they don't seem to want
2. Provided by a monopoly
3. Paid for by higher taxes

Three funny Onion sports headlines:

• Greg Oden On Final Four Appearance: 'I'm Happier Than I've Been In 30 Years'
• Confident Phil Mickelson Guarantees Tiger Woods Will Win Masters
• Tiger Woods Signs $15 Million Deal To Endorse Alex Rodriguez

TigerCinema.com seeks to be a Netflix for Asian DVDs. They state that 95% of their titles have English subtitles and that most are Region 1. Sadly, the search and browse functions are somewhat crude. No browse by country? director? actor? The browse tree for Martial Arts is only one level deep! Good luck delving through 23 pages of results. The selection is decent but not as complete as I'd expect for such a niche-focused site. It's probably not entirely their fault as there are so many editions of many Asian movies, and many editions are out of print or hard to find. They probably can't stock enough copies of certain titles. For now, there's still eBay and HKFlix and YesAsia and sites like that for those willing to buy. Many eBay DVDs are simply burned copies and will not last very long; I treat most of those as disposable copies.

One of the best channels for showing off your high definition TV is Discovery HD Theater. Perhaps the best program to air on that channel yet is Planet Earth which debuted last Sunday. Apparently viewers agreed as the show snared 12 million viewers total over 3 hours and had a 3.6 HH rating, Discovery's third highest ever. I've only watched the first episode, "Pole to Pole," and it was spectacular, all of the footage having been shot in high definition. They say porn is the killer application for any new video technology, but IMHO sports and nature shows are the most desirable types of programming for HD.

Technorati Tags: autos, bmw, cars, economics, hd, healthcare, humor, dvd, sports, theonion

If you like 6'5" 230lb quarterbacks with a laser rocket arm

Word is that Peyton Manning impressed in his SNL workout Saturday. Granted, the SNL bar couldn't be set any lower these days, but this clip is worth a few chuckles.

Manning's appearance could have been funnier if this bit hadn't been tossed onto the cutting room floor.

Technorati Tags: humor, SNL, tv, video, youtube

Rock, live from 30 Rock

According to a deviantART post, the average human eye has 576 megapixels of resolution.

Submit a question now for Alfonso Cuaron who will answer questions live on Amazon.com this coming monday at 6pm PDT.

I found out from my sister Joannie that Chris Rock opened SNL last week with some election chatter: "And for those doubters out there who keep asking the question 'Is America ready for a black president,' I say 'Why not?' We just had a retarded one."

Technorati Tags: biology, amazon, SNL, television, tv, video

Apple TV

Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret review the Apple TV:

We've been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it's a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.

Once it becomes commonplace and simple to stream content from the Internet to the TV, the entertainment world changes. You think you have a lot of channels to choose from now!

There are other solutions already, but having a big, trusted name like Apple enter the arena is important.

Technorati Tags: apple, gadgets, tv

And exhale

Finally, a moment to come up for air. Film production is all-consuming and takes over your life like few other things. But this is just a brief respite, as I have my five classmates' shoots occupying my next five long weekends.

120 Hz TVs, the next step in TV quality after 1080p.

Scientific American investigates the hype around online dating.

NBA experimenting with 3D high-definition imaging. The cameras are the same ones James Cameron has used for some of his 3D IMAX pics. Maybe we're not too far off from the day when we can be like Jeremy Piven in that commercial for the All-Star game, where he freezes Vince Carter mid-air as he prepares to dunk and steps into the picture. You, too, can see Vince Carter's crotch as it soars over your head, all in breathtaking 3-D.

Speaking of high def, most people are down on high definition DVDs because of the HD DVD and Blu-ray format war. Unlike Betamax or VHS, though, I think this one is solvable, either through dual-format players like the LG or through dual-format discs. And now that I've seen a couple Blu-ray DVDs, I've got to admit, the pictures from those are superior to the pictures from regular DVDs, and it's clearly visible to the naked eye.

Technorati Tags: basketball, dvd, electronics, gadgets, HD, hoops, nba, sports, tech, tv, video

Wrinkled Golden Globes

I imagine the censors sitting around in the control room last night, looking at each other quizzically.

"Can we let that through? Anus and testicles?"

Shoulders all through the booth shrug in unison.

"Technically those are just anatomical terms, not curse words."

Technorati Tags: humor, movies, tv, video, youtube

Land ahoy

According to this article, ABC plans to set and announce an endpoint for Lost. I'm all for it. The show really needs one if only so fans believe there actually is some plan. It would even be beneficial to ABC (if disingenuous) for them to announce an endpoint even if it didn't exist.

But I'm skeptical that they'll announce one. TV networks tend to milk their golden geese for all they're worth; most shows end up drawn out so far that they jump the shark.

Technorati Tags: lost, television, tv

Stuff I'm excited to see

Trailer for Tears of the Black Tiger

Trailer for The Host.

Preview the first 10 minutes of this Sunday's premiere episode of season two of Extras. Guest star Orlando Bloom.

Technorati Tags: movies, extras, trailer, tv

Jack is back, a bit earlier than anticipated

The first episode of the new season of 24 leaked out onto the Net. The torrent is out there. It took about 35 minutes and then I was sold on this season. Giddyup!

Stream the new Shins album.

Preview a track each from the upcoming albums by Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, and The Good, the Bad and the Queen.

Links to loads of free classical music available online (in Ogg format)

Free album from Talib Kweli and Madlib called Liberation.

It was 72 degrees in Central Park yesterday, setting a new record.

Technorati Tags: 24, classical, free, globalwarming, mp3, music, torrent, tv, weather

What your lady wants for Xmas this year

I hadn't gotten three steps into James apartment late last night when he had me watching this short on his DVR, from the Justin Timberlake-hosted episode of SNL which was still running. I'm filing that away as an early leader for my Halloween costume in 2007.

Technorati Tags: humor, video, SNL, tv, youtube

Representin'

Yee-ha! Who says nice guys finish last.

Next time I see Yul, he's buying the first round of drinks.

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Wordloaf

Among the many cool-sounding shows I haven't had time to see recently is "All About Walken," a show featuring a bunch of Christopher Walken impersonators.

The Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta releases this Friday. Rumor has it that the Universal Binary will "scream" on the new Intel-based Macs.

Monthly upload bandwidth lifted from 20MB to 100MB for free accounts at Flickr. I though they should have lifted those a while ago, but better late than never.

I was fuming mad at the world today, well, mostly Bank of America for their shoddy (read: nonexistent) integration between branches in different states, and then I went back to watch episode 6 from this season's Simpsons, and by the end of the episode I was smiling again. Go grab a torrent. With guest appearances by Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen, and another comic turn by J.K. Simmons reprising his J. Jonah Jameson from the Spiderman movies, it's an instant classic. And yes, I don't watch much TV anymore which is why I'm recommending an episode that aired sometime during the Kennedy administration.

Technorati Tags: animation, humor, photography, photoshop, simpsons, software, theater, tv

I think she said "I'm an arse"

Meaningful Machines has come up with a clever software algorithm for language translation.

Maybe when their software is out of beta we can get Rosie O'Donnell a copy to beta test.

Technorati Tags: language, software, tech, youtube

When You Were Young

My classmate sent me a link to these photos of animals in the womb. Stunning.

These are from an upcoming TV program Animals in the Womb which will air on the National Geographic Channel in the U.S. next month.

Technorati Tags: animals, photography, nature, science

Elevate Your Game

I'm not a huge fan of the Lebrons Nike commercials. I don't really understand them. But this new commercial (another link here) for the Jordan Melo M3 shoe? That I like. Notice the clock at the end: 2.4 seconds left. The shoe releases Nov. 24. Jordan wore 23 (and yeah, Kobe wears 24 now, but...well). The commercial screams Wieden + Kennedy and recalls classic Jordan Nike commercials like the classic one for the Jordan XXI.

Not surprisingly, Melo is part of Brand Jordan.

Technorati Tags: ad, basketball, carmeloanthony, commercial, nike, hoops, shoe, sneakers

Stay of execution

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip gets a reprieve from the guillotine: NBC orders 9 more episodes to carry the show through season's end. The future looks grim, though. Considering all the stars in the show and its current viewer level of about 7.7 million people per week, it can't sustain a premium time slot. Maybe it will have the shelf life of, say, Sports Night?

Technorati Tags: sorkin, tv

This is all I have to offer

Aaron Sorkin visits a dental hygienist.

Why don't studios just use catchy movie posters as the DVD cover? Looking at the examples cited, I suspect that studios think that by the time the DVD comes out, everyone knows the story, so they don't go with the more mysterious poster images which act almost like teasers. But I agree, the movie posters are superior. Those are some fugly DVD covers, most of which seem to say, "Hey, remember who was in this movie?"

Amazon.com posted a copy of the Publisher's Weekly advance review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day. PW gave Pynchon a star, their mark of recommendation. If my mind weren't monopolized by all the first quarter film shoots my classmates and I are buried under, I'd be game for tackling new Pynchon. But my mind is, and so I'm not. Not even close.

Technorati Tags: aaronsorkin, books, dvd, movies, posters, reading, Pynchon

SNL, Year One

Saturday Night Live - The Complete First Season releases on DVD Dec. 5 and includes all 24 episodes in their original, uncut 90-minute format. Just in time for Xmas.

One more

After mentioning TV on the internet, how could I forget Matt Damon just ripping Jimmy Kimmel to pieces on the Jimmy Kimmel show? You have to watch to the very end...

I enjoy jokes where movie stars are allowed to curse on live television. When I went to the live taping of The Daily Show, much of the fun was not having to hear all the bleeping you hear when a show is finally aired on TV.

One thing that's been enjoyable about starting my grad school classes in the arts is hearing professors cuss without a moment's hesitation. It reflects a certain practicality.

"Look, this isn't undergrad where you're taking classes just for the hell of it. We're all adults here, you're here to get a degree that will hopefully secure you a useful job. People cuss in the real world, let's not pretend that this is the first or last time you'll hear adult language on a film set."

TV on the Internet

The Sci-Fi Network is offering, on iTunes, a free retrospective episode of the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica. I have not watched the TV show, but after The Wire, which seems to be enjoying an unprecedented critical push this season, it seems to be the TV show with the strongest cult following.

The clip below from what looks to be a new season of Extras? David Bowie guest stars and sings Ricky Gervais a little ditty. When is the new season airing on HBO? Without having set up my TV here in LA, I feel so out of touch with the world (embedded player via my friend Eric's site Mojiti).

It's premier season for new fall TV shows, and since I haven't gotten my home theater set up here in LA, I haven't seen much. But these days, an internet connection is a fairly adequate replacement. I caught the most recent episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip online off of NBC's official site for the show. Okay, so the quality of the video at full screen made me think I had cataracts, but I can't remember watching TV shows online prior to this year in any format other than a torrent (which, by the way, is still the best way to watch a TV show online, so maybe all this official online streaming is not all that exciting).

I'll always chase the Sorkin rat-a-tat-chat, but the Sarah Paulson character feels like a concept more than a person. She's the devout Christian who works at a comedy sketch show which puts on skits like "Crazy Christians." They also talk up her character Harriet in this episode as if she's the Will Ferrell of Studio 60, and so far she hasn't shown any comic abilities at all. Also, why hasn't anyone reacted at all to Amanda Peet's attractiveness on the show?

And, oh yeah, the premier of season 3 of Veronica Mars is also online, ahead of it's actually on air debut next Tuesday.

What's the first answer that jumps into your head?

I have to be honest, Ken Jennnings' answer is the exact one that leapt into my head. If the spellings of the two words weren't different, he'd have grounds to protest, I think.

Sole survivor

Instead of heading straight for LA after leaving NY last week, I stopped over in San Francisco for Mark's wedding. The slower transition from my old home to my new one was much welcome.

For one thing, my friend Cindy's apartment, where I stayed for the weekend, was so large that it helped to ease my sadness over leaving Manhattan. You could fit my entire NY kitchen inside her shower, and her apartment could house two entire families if a tornado picked it up and dropped it in Manhattan. These are things you learn to live with after an adjustment period in NYC, but being able to lie down in a shower to do snow angels helps to ease the pain of leaving NYC the way the patch helps a smoker trying to kick the habit.

California is also a state that makes a strong first impression. She's a looker. As soon as you step out of the airport, she greets you with sunshine and blue skies. The day before the wedding, I went for a jog in the afternoon from the Bay Bridge to Fisherman's Wharf, and though the headwind beat me up, the views of the ocean, sky, and bridges couldn't have been more gorgeous.

The point of this post, though, is to plug my old college classmate Yul who will be one of the contestants on this season's Survivor: Cook Islands. I've never really watched the show, but finally, I am one degree of separation from a reality show contestant. This season's show has already courted lots of controversy by dividing the contestants into four teams by race: Asian American, Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic. Various sponsors have dropped out and community leaders have protested. In other words, this transparent tactic for boosting ratings appears to be working as planned, though the test will come Thursday when the season premier airs.

Yul, though he couldn't share details of what had transpired on the show, invited us to a viewing party for a TV Guide Channel preview of the upcoming season. He was the last contestant profiled and was introduced thus: "...with a Yale doctorate, a compassionate nature, and a whole batch of imposing muscle." The voiceover was paired with an image of Yul sans t-shirt, looking like a video game Bruce Lee. Oddly, Yul never appeared with a shirt on in any of the clips, and you can imagine the ribbing we all gave him.

I won't be rooting for any particular team but for Yul. Early odds have him as one of 6 contestants with 8 to 1 odds, the favorite at this point being Adam Gregory at 7 to 1. If you're watching but have no rooting interest, I offer my endorsement of Yul as a really decent guy, a far cry from the cutthroat reality contestants you love to hate.

The Agent

New Yorker issues have a tendency of piling up around my place when I travel or when I'm busy as I can never bring myself to toss them out. Sometimes that can seem like a tactical error, as in times like these when I'm moving and have to lug about 275 pounds of unread back issues to the recycling bins in the basement.

But lying on my bare mattress now (all the sheets, pillows, just about everything is packed in boxes), I'm glad I saved the July 10/17 issue from last month. In it was an article titled "The Agent," (PDF) an excerpt adapted from Lawrence Wright's new nonfiction book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Though I'm exhausted from days of packing, the article, which I just finished reading at three in the morning, stunned me, introducing two characters and a story that will break your heart with how close we came to anticipating and perhaps stopping 9/11. We had all the puzzle pieces to assemble a picture of Al-Qaeda terrorists in our midst, but they were held by different U.S. intelligence agencies, and we couldn't assemble them into a picture of looming terror because of self-imposed bureaucratic walls that kept the CIA and FBI from sharing information. Our intelligence agencies, with their silly infighting, failed us.

Two charismatic characters are at the center of this story. Ali Soufan is the Agent, a Lebanese-American Muslim FBI agent whose Arabic language skills and tenacity made him one of our nation's leading assets in the fight against Al Qaeda. John O'Neill was the head of the F.B.I.'s National Security Division, figures more prominently in The Looming Tower, but also appears in "The Agent."

Soufan is the hero of "The Agent." O'Neill put in charge of investigating the bombing of the U.S.S.. cole in Aden, Yemen, in October, 2000. Soufan's investigation unearthed tracks that led back to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The CIA, in the meantime, learned of an Al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia and learned of two Al-Qaeda operatives, Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Mihdhar had a U.S. Visa. The CIA did not inform the FBI about the two of them, and so they slipped into the U.S. unnoticed. The CIA does not have authority to operate within the U.S., so once Mihdhar and Hazmi were on U.S. soil, they were the province of the FBI, or would have been, had the CIA alerted the FBI to their presence.

In June of 2001, Ali Soufan sat in a meeting with CIA colleagues and was shown photos from the secret meeting in Malaysia. Among those in the pictures were Mihdhar and Hazmi, but Soufan did not know of them yet, and the CIA shared little except to see if the FBI knew of them. Another photo of the Malaysia meeting, displaying an Al Qaeda jihadi named Khallad, was not shown. Soufan and his team had a huge file on Khallad, who they suspected of being one of the masterminds of the U.S.S. Cole bombing. Had the CIA shown Soufan that photo, he could have connected the dots.

On August 27th, 2001, Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother Salem purchased airplane tickets for American Flight 77 on Travelocity.com. Mihdhar also purchased a ticket for that flight online. They did not bother disguising their names, as they were not on the FBI terrorist watchlist.

Twenty months after their arrival in Los Angeles, on September 11, 2001, Mihdhar and Hazmi went to Washington Dulles International Airport. Hazmi set off the metal detector at the airport and was hand-screened, and Hazmi and Mihdhar were both flagged for an additional security screening at the gate, but both passed and boarded American Flight 77. One hour into the flight, the hijacked Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon, killing all 64 on the flight and 125 people in the building.

Immediately after 9/11, Soufan was told to find out who had perpetrated the hijackings. On September 12, 2001, he was handed an envelope with full details of the meeting in Malaysia. When Soufan realized that the CIA had known that Mihdhar and Hazmi, two of the hijackers, had been living in the United States for 20 months, "he ran into the bathroom and threw up." Wright notes: "Soufan's disillusionment with the government was so profound that he eventually quite the bureau; in 2005, he became director of international operations for Giuliani Security and Safety, a company founded by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York."

John O'Neill is an even greater tragic figure in the story of 9/11. His story is almost too unbelievable to be true. Perhaps no one in the FBI was more obsessed with the rising threat of Al Qaeda, but on August 22, 2001, O'Neill left the FBI after it was reported that his briefcase containing sensitive documents was stolen during an FBI conference in Florida. Though it was later found and though it was determined that none of the confidential material had been compromised, his career at the FBI was ruined.

O'Neill left to take a job as the head of security at The World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, just after American Airlines flight 11 flew into the north tower, John O'Neill received a call from his son who could see the smoke through a train window. O'Neill told his son he was fine and that he was going to assess the damage. After United Flight 175 hit the south tower, O'Neill called his girlfriend Valerie james, distraught. Yet later, at 9:25am, O'Neill called another woman he had been close to, Anne DiBattista, saying he was okay.

"The connection was good at the beginning," she recalled. "He was safe and outside. He said he was O.K. I said, 'Are you sure you're out of the building?' He told me he loved me. I knew he was going to go back in."

Another FBI agent, Wesley Wong, ran into O'Neill outside the north tower. She last saw him headed towards the south tower.

On September 28, 2001, O'Neill's body was found in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Wright reports:

...a thousand mourner gathered at St. Nicholas to say farewell. Many of them were agents and policemen and members of foreign intelligence services who had followed O'Neill into the war against terrorism long before it became a rallying cry for the nation. The hierarchy of the F.B.I attended, including the now retired director Louis Freeh. Richard Clarke, who says that he had not shed a tear since September 11th, suddenly broke down when the bagpipes played and the casket passed by.

For some reason, perhaps because I've come to adore New York City, I can't stop reading about 9/11. I've read the The 9/11 Commission Report in text form, and I'll probably reread it in its graphic adaptation. 9/11 and the events that led up to that day continue to haunt me, and Lawrence Wright's account The Looming Tower, which I've just begun, promises to be the best account to date. I'm not doing justice to his reporting here, so delve into "The Agent" if you want a sampling. Soufan is a fascinating character in many ways, particularly in his interrogation techniques, which demonstrate that torture is hardly the only way to extract information from suspects (torture has long been known to yield unreliable info). Soufan engages his subjects, demonstrates his knowledge and understanding of them and their cultural background, and uses his intelligence to checkmate them.

In the stories of Soufan, O'Neill, and bin Laden, there is a Syriana/Munich-style tragedy to be made. In fact, with its story of thwarted investigations and global conspiracies, it's the 9/11 movie I would have expected Oliver Stone to make, though from what I've heard his World Trade Center movie is a great departure for him.

Here is an online only interview with Lawrence Wright which came out at the same time as "The Agent." Here's a comprehensive list of Wright's articles for The New Yorker, including many on Al Qaeda. PBS Frontline came out with a documentary on O'Neill called "The Man Who Knew" and it's available online (Real Player and Windows Media).

Corddry leaves TDS, I leave NYC

I spent the entire weekend packing. I want to shoot myself. Before I go dark for my cross-country move, a few links from my final bit of housecleaning here.

I complained just the other week about the quality of YouTube videos. Stage6 is a YouTube knockoff, but using DivX encoding, so the video quality is much much better (for example, or another). Its selection is so miniscule it's laughable when compared to that of YouTube, but I look forward to the day when we surfers can have both selection and quality in online video aggregators. There's no reason we can't right now.

Speaking of YouTube, I'm Really, Really, Really Excited! Every hot new online community crowns its stars, and Bree (lonelygirl15) is YouTube's. I'm reminded of the mystery video footage which generated a cult-like following in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

Rob Corddry's has spread his wings and flown the Daily Show coop. Last Thursday was his last episode, and he follows in the footsteps of Colbert and Carell as Daily Show stars who sought greener pastures. The Daily Show is the Oakland A's of comedic television, launching talented funnymen but unable to retain their services once they achieve stardom. Except for Jon Stewart, of course. He's The Daily Show's Billy Beane, I guess.

I always wondered if the movie Sideways sank sales of merlot, and a brief scan of some older articles on the web seems to indicate only a mild effect, if any. But pinot noir sales got a boost. I'd been a fan of pinot noir for a few years before the movie came out, but the movie spurred a boost in production that has flooded the market with pinots that lack the earthy taste of the terroir that I loved. Many pinots now taste like syrahs, and it seems as if you have to spend upwards of $25 to $30 a bottle before you find a decent pinot.

Two researchers claim to have solved the "cocktail party problem," or how to separate one recorded voice from a group of other voices and sounds.

Tony Jaa's The Protector (I guess The Weinsteins weren't too impressed by its original title, Tom Yum Goong) is a huge letdown, especially after Ong Bak, but you wouldn't know it from the trailer, which features Jaa depositing his elbow and knees in a variety of unfortunate stuntmen.

Majority of "To Cross Street Push Button" buttons in NYC are placebos. I've long suspected that most "Close Door" buttons in elevators are also dummies, also.

Pretty and beautiful

Maria Sharapova feels pretty. I feel she's pretty pretty, too.

David Foster Wallace pens a love letter to Roger Federer in NYTimes Play Magazine (yes, there are DFW's trademark footnotes, in this case displayed in pop-up windows, and footnotes to the footnotes, displayed below the respective footnotes in the pop-up window).

Also in Play Magazine, an interview with Martina Hingis. Most players are not very astute analysts of their sport (or rather, they can't eloquently express themselves when dissecting other players and the sport), but Hingis is an exception.

Skeptics

Cool video of James Randi helping Johnny Carson to stump famed psychic and spoon-bender Uri Geller. Here's a clip where Randi exposes how one faith healer "heals."

Ghost Hunters is a TV show on the Sci-Fi channel in which two plumbers moonlight as TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) who investigate paranormal disturbances with a skeptical eye. In most cases, the paranormal activity can be explained after some on-site sleuthing. Sometimes, though, they can't explain the phenomena, though I can't point to which episodes those are because I've never seen the show.

Debris

The holy grail of video game graphics is ray tracing, and it may not be more than a few years off.

Michael Moore is working on a documentary called Sicko about the American health care crisis, but he's running into a problem. Every time he appears on scene to film a family's struggle against health care injustice, the family is suddenly given health care. It's Moore's version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

David Wain is shooting The Ten, a series of ten stories, one for each of the ten commandments. The cast includes Jessica Alba, Adam Brody, Rob Corddry, Bradley Cooper, Famke Janssen, Gretchen Mol, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Paul Rudd, Liev Schreiber, and Ron Silver, among others. Wain is probably most known for directing Wet Hot American Summer, so expect a remake of The Decalogue. If Wain needs to reduce his cast for budget reasons, it's not a stretch to think of a way for Jessica Alba to cause me to violate all ten commandments.

The sequel to Signs: Mel Gibson's Signs (of Anti-Semitism). It's tough not to think of this whole Mel Gibson debacle and think "Apocalypto."

Wondering who to pick as your fantasy football kicker? Neil Rackers. (YouTube clip, reminiscent of the Ronaldinho commercial).

Perhaps she is the Mark Fidrych of blondes, who burned too brightly, too soon, only to fizzle out at 25.

Product feature: does the body good

A gallon of milk on Amazon.com inspires hundreds of customer reviews. Ships from Gristedes in New York. I priced out what it would cost to ship to me here in NYC, and it came out to $30.24, with expedited shipping, which I highly recommend for milk.

Toyota about to pass GM to become the world's largest automaker, though they've been fighting some quality issues recently. I remember when our family first purchased a Toyota Cressida, it might as well have been a Bentley to us. We later participated in the Camry tsunami.

Domaines Ott and French rosé wines are the new hot summer drink. What I find most surprising from this article, though, is that Alex Kapranos, lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, is a food columnist for The Guardian, and Jay McInerney is wine columnist for House & Garden.

"My other vehicle is a Gulfstream." I just enjoy that article's title. Private air travel is tough on the environment because of the outrageous fuel consumption, so I always try to airpool when I take my jet to Aspen or Jackson Hole, cuz that's how I roll. Okay, that's not true. I've only flown in a private jet once, and that trip confirmed that private jets is heaven compared to the human cattle call that is commercial air travel.

Floyd Landis's B-sample came back positive, so his team Phonak fired him. Now USA Cycling and the US Anti-Doping Agency will prepare a case against him while Landis and his team prepare his defense. It will be months before we hear a verdict, though the court of public and media opinion works has already issued theirs. On the "Top Ten Landis Excuses" piece on David Letterman, number nine was "Who can resist Balco's delicious 'spicy chipotle' flavor." Landis posted a statement on his weblog yesterday and a response to the B-sample positive test today.

The pilot for Aaron Sorkin's new TV show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip leaked onto YouTube this week, then was promptly pulled. So I can just link to this 6 minute promo (begins with a riff on Network, beats up on NBC's own SNL, and makes a joke about Sorkin's coke habit) and 30 second trailer. Anyhow, this is all an excuse to tell a short story about my apartment hunt in L.A. At the first apartment I went to visit in Santa Monica, a bald guy named Evan answered the door. He looked really familiar, like someone I'd seen on TV or in a movie, but I just couldn't place him. So I didn't say anything. He showed me his apartment and was really generous with his time, explaining the neighborhood and its nearby attractions. He mentioned that he'd done the New York to LA move also, and that I should keep an open mind to LA (I'm in depression over leaving NY for LA right now). He never mentioned his work, but after I left his apartment, and as I was filling out an application, I realized who he was. Evan played Charlotte's flame Harry Goldenblatt on Sex and the City, the role for which he's most known, and he'll be in the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I didn't end up taking his apartment because I got a roommate and needed more space, but it seemed appropriate that he be one of the first people I met in LA.

Google announces "All Our N-gram are Belong to You," which I think is pretty generous of them.

Lowest common denominator

YouTube has the selection lead, and that has led it to a huge lead in the online video clip library space. It did the smart thing and went with a video format that almost anyone on any platform can play, and that is Flash video (.flv files).

But here's the thing: Flash video looks like crap. It is the Ford Escort of video formats. On many YouTube videos I feel like I'm trying to watch a 12-inch black-and-white television through the wrong end of binoculars. If you were to start a competitor to YouTube, and it would be silly to do so at this point, one thing you could do to win my allegiance is to use Quicktime as your default codec. Doesn't have to be HD. It doesn't even have to be another company; YouTube could offer Quicktime as the Lexus to its own Toyota.

If I want to watch a blank white screen with no sound (oh, how modern), I want to see it in quality.

Screwing around with faces and heads

Every time I arrive in L.A., I think two things. First, as I exit the airport, I think, "Oh the weather here is unbeatable."

Then, as I pick up my rental car and merge directly into a never-ending queue of traffic, "Oh, *%&$@#!."

Two random reader contributions. From John, MyHeritage is facial recognition technology for photographs. Their conversation starter for now is a feature that matches uploaded faces to the celebrities they most resemble. As you can imagine, I rated as a high probability match for a composite of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but then you didn't need such advanced technology to anticipate such a result.

From Mike:

The Amazing Screw-On Head, a humor comic from Mike Mignola (who
created Hellboy), is being made into an animated series on the Sci-Fi
channel. They have the pilot episode on their website:

http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/

It's about this robot-type guy whose head can screw on to bodies. He
works for Abe Lincoln taking care of weird supernatural problems. It's
voiced by Paul Giamatti and the main bad guy is voiced by David Hyde
Pierce, so the acting is good.

Lovecraftian humor and steampunk adventure? I'm there.

Spooks Season 4

In what is now an annual ritual, I will sing the praises of the BBC television drama Spooks (aired in the U.S. as MI-5 on A&E) and note that season 4 will release on DVD in the UK on Sept 4. With the dollar as weak as it is versus the pound, I would usually recommend waiting for the show to air in the U.S., but Season 4 shows no signs of appearing on A&E anytime soon, and the show is just that good. So if you have a region-free DVD player, and you should, then pre-order this (or you can, of course, prowl the internets for a torrent).

MI5 is the UK's anti-terrorist security service, and the show dramatizes the campaigns among a core group at the agency. It's addictive adrenaline-pumping, and in my TiVo queue, it's in the top spot even if it shows no signs of re-appearing on this side of the Atlantic anytime soon. I can think of few other shows so willing to put its main characters in (SPOILER ALERT: don't click on the next link unless you've seen all the episodes, b/c the roster of deceased characters is a huge spoiler) bodybags on such a consistent basis, but that's part of what makes it so good. The show doesn't adhere to the usual rules.

Season 4 is brilliant, as always, and the season finale, in a proud tradition, is mind-blowing. As you'd expect from a British production, the acting is first-rate, filled with a roster of handsome faces. Peter Firth, in particular, is unforgettable as MI5 director Harry Pearce. One just feels safer when one's spies have a British accent, from Alec Guinness's George Smiley to the various incarnations of 007 (Scottish accents, too, if we include Connery, and we do, wholeheartedly). They sound smarter, and the accent confers a certain swagger and ruthlessness that is dangerously soothing in our intelligence personnel.

I'm a sucker for spy thrillers, and it's surprising that American television only has 24, which is good but has more of a pop sheen. Another show that I enjoy that has a similar feel to Spooks, though adapted to a Japanese futuristic sci-fi world, is Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex. It airs on the Cartoon Network and the two seasons are available on DVD in the U.S. Don't expect the production values or intense action sequences of the movie from which the TV show derives. The TV show has even more of a cerebral feel, but it's entertaining in its own right.

Random unrelated factoids from Sean Connery's IMDb Trivia:

"Said in an interview that during the filming of Never Say Never Again (1983), he was taking martial arts lessons and in the process angered the instructor who in turn broke his wrist. Connery stayed with the wrist broken for a number of years thinking it was only a minor pain... the instructor was Steven Seagal."

"Turned down the role of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings series (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)) because he didn't want to film down in New Zealand for 18 months, and could not understand the novels."

"Turned down the role of the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003)."

Au revoir

Watching World Cup reminded me of this Nike soccer commercial from back in the day. Another winner from Wieden and Kennedy.

"Au revoir."

For those people who have been in a cave and haven't seen them, here's that current Nike commercial with Ronaldinho, the football equivalent of Tiger Woods bouncing the golf ball on his sand wedge:

And Ronaldo's response:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

I attended the taping of The Daily Show yesterday. I'd tried to get tix a few times before, to no avail, but this time I included a sob story about how I'm leaving New York in the fall (true story) and perhaps that melted the heart of the person on the other end of my e-mail. The show is taped at a fairly nondescript studio out on 11th Ave. between 51st and 52nd St. A sign hangs over the entrance: "Abandon news all ye who enter here."

I arrived a bit after 2pm and was fifth in line. Hmm, maybe I was a bit too early, but since no one is guaranteed a seat, I thought I'd better be safe than sorry. Thank goodness it was one of the cooler days in recent memory. I stood as still as possible, trying not to sweat. They finally opened the doors to us between 5:30 and 6:00pm.

I always enjoy when various young folks come out to greet us in line with phrases like, "Jon is very excited to see all of you." It sounds so odd, and yet people get excited upon hearing it. The next time I have people over for a party, I'm going to hide in my bedroom and send out a few greeters.

"Eugene is very excited to see you. He'll be out shortly. Now remember, turn off all your cell phones and make lots of noise. Lots of noise! Eugene does not use a laugh track."

The studio seated 200 according to my rough scan. A warmup guy, the audience fluffer, so to speak, came out and made comedic banter and led us in rehearsals of wild applause and screaming. If you're the type of person who turns his nose up at such behavior, preferring to stand with hands in your pockets or arms folded, the warmup guy will single you out and force you to rehearse in front of everyone else, so if you're such a person, best to stay home and watch on TV. If, like me, you've wondered why the audience of The Daily Show sounds like a mob of drunken frat boys, know that they encourage that. The audience actually consists of a fairly normal cross-section of society, but the warm-up guy and the ear-thumping soundtrack they pipe in the studio gets everyone worked up to a froth.

The studio consists of Jon's chair and desk in the center and three large screens arranged in a semicircle behind him. Jon came out to field a few questions before the show. Among them:

Who is more vile, Ann Coulter or Karl Rove?
Ann Coulter, because she has succeeded in dehumanizing those who disagree with her. I honestly don't think she'd feel a thing if they were killed in front of her. But someday, she'll learn the true meaning of Christmas.

When is Rob Corddry getting his own show?
I believe we have him through October, then he moves over to his own show on Fox(?). His brother is already gone. You have to watch out for those Corddry's, they'll f*** you. When we found him, he was just an orphan, emaciated, abandoned. I found him behind a dumpster, fed him, raised him, and what do I get? A knife in the back.

What size are your shoes?
[beat] Size 14.

On somewhat of a slow news day, the field report was from Samantha Bee, reporting from San Andreas (the Grand Theft Auto neighborhood). They shoot those segments right next to Jon Stewart, in front of a greenscreen, so the studio audience can see Bee or Corddry or whoever is the field reporter. The guest this evening was Anderson Cooper, fresh off a two hour interview with Angelina Jolie, who Stewart referred to as the "Bono of hotness."

Before recording the usual check-in with Stephen Colbert, Stewart and Colbert chatted for a bit. Stewart complained about fatigue from raising his two kids, and Colbert responded, "It's like wrestling inexhaustible midgets." As with many of these live tapings, most of the funniest moments are the ones not shown on TV, when hosts like Conan O'Brien or Stewart just ad lib and chat with the audience.

Colbert screwed up the punchline of the check-in segment so they had to record it a second time. Then Stewart recorded the lead-in for the international edition of The Daily Show which airs on CNN International. I saw that a few times while on vacation in E. Europe. It packages a week's worth of Daily Shows into one long Daily Show.

One more item to cross off the NY checklist.

Mixed nuts

"Happy Mornings" is a commercial for Folgers, though it's difficult to see how.

The winner of Bruce Schneier's Movie-Plot Threat Contest involves the destruction of Grand Coulee Dam, triggering a chain reaction that knocks out the rest of the dams on the Columbia River and leaves the West Coast without power for months, taking down the U.S. economy in the process.

Well, if the terrorists do go after Hoover Dam, perhaps our best hope is to send in the Transformers, who are already doing work at Hoover Dam. On that note, is this test footage of Optimus Prime from the new Transformers movie?

As for terrorist plots, the one that's scaring New Yorkers right now is the aborted plot to gas NY subways (as described by Ron Suskind in his new book The One Percent Doctrine, excerpted in the latest issue of Time).

Not new, but still cool music video: man juggles in time to Fatboy Slim's "That Old Pair of Jeans" (thx Ken). That's one of the two new tracks on Fatboy Slim's greatest hits album Why Try Harder, releasing tomorrow.

The new Apple "I'm a Mac" ads are clever and funny. But are they all that effective in moving Windows users over to Macs, or do they just preach to the converted? I'm with Stevenson, I think it's the latter.

Raising children doesn't make one happy. In fact, when children finally leave the next, parents experience an uptick in happiness. So writes Daniel Gilbert in an essay for Time. But, he notes, that capacity for humans to sacrifice for the good of their children is why we have holidays like Father's Day. At his weblog, Gilbert includes footnotes for those interested in delving more deeply into the research cited. Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, a fascinating book I've just started reading this past week.

At Winged Foot this weekend, a score of 5 over par won the U.S. Open. That's not entirely surprising as the U.S. Open always has the toughest setup of the four golf majors. As long as the course is equally tough for everyone, the final score relative to par doesn't matter. But Matthew Rudy of GolfDigest.com feels this year's setup rewarded robotic play, with little decision-making required, and punished the world's true best players. Ron Sirak of Golf World disagrees.

Tonight, his journey ends

Tuesday morning, parts of Spiderman 3 were shot in Manhattan at the Broadhurst Theater (slideshow).

Deadspin has an anonymous source that claims that one of the people named in Jason Grimsley's affidavit as a person who referred him to an amphetamine source is Chris Mihlfeld who happens to be Albert Pujols' personal trainer. No one wants to find out that Pujols was on any illegal substance. It's bad enough thinking back to the Sosa-McGwire home run battle of 1998 that supposedly saved baseball and thinking that both of them were more artificially enhanced than Joan Rivers.

That short Samantha Bee American Idol-esque video retrospective on al-Zarqawi on The Daily Show last night caused me to laugh water out my nose. "Tonight, his journey ends. Let's take one last look back." It was set to that cheesy pop tune; I'm not sure of the name or artist. I wish the video was online to link to; perhaps it will be in a day or two.
UPDATE I: The tune accompanying shots from al-Zarqawi's terrorist training clip montage, a helpful reader informs me, was Daniel Powter's "Bad Day."
UPDATE II: Here we go, the Samantha Bee clip is in the middle of this clip.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Google Browser Sync is a Firefox plugin that syncs your Firefox browser settings across all your computers. Useful to me because I'm always bouncing between my desktop and laptop.

Al Qaeda leader Zarqawi is dead, killed in an air strike north of Baghdad.

Jon Stewart vs. Bill Bennett on gay marriage. If you wanted to send someone from the right to match wits with Jon Stewart on this issue, Bill Bennett probably isn't on the shortlist.

The Yoda backpack makes it seem as if Yoda is hanging on your back so you can look like Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. Pair this with a Force FX lightsaber and, well, you might as well lop off your manhood and put it in that backpack because it won't be getting any use.

Speaking of Star Wars, the DVDs for the original, unaltered Star Wars trilogy, Eps IV through VI, are being released in September, and the fans are already killing them with customer reviews on Amazon.com. All three DVDs currently average about 2 out of 5 stars in customer ratings. It's not just that fans are being forced to buy yet another set of Star Wars DVDs but that the original, unaltered movies will be released in non-anamorphic widescreen and will not have a new Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix. Some fans say it's just the original laserdisc transfer (I own those laserdiscs, by the way). Oh, the horror.

An online strategy guide to rock, paper, scissors. There's even a book in print called The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide. I went to a book reading/signing by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner today. It was fun to finally meet them in person. They mentioned that they're going to write a sequel to Freakonomics to be titled SuperFreakonomics. Their talk strayed to the topic of rock, paper, scissors. Phil Gordon is going to throw a $50,000 rock, paper, scissors tournament so Levitt can study the play. It just so happens that Levitt is studying the human ability or inability to randomize. He mentioned some initial studies that indicated that football (I think he meant European football) players are superior strategy randomizers. He's not sure why. If given 4 strategies to employ against each other, the optimal mix is something like 40/20/20/20 (or so Levitt said), and football players do that naturally. Rock, paper, scissors is a good test of that human ability. Gordon believes that some people are gifted randomizers and can consistently win at rock, paper, scissors, but it sounds like Levitt's skeptical since different people make the rock, paper, scissors finals each year.

Chip Kidd is the guest blogger at PowellsBooks this week. Among the his to-do's for the week:

• Design a cover for Christina Garcia's forthcoming novel, A Handbook to Luck.
• Construct and photograph a miniature set for Martin Amis's new novel, House of Meetings. By Thursday morning.
• Redesign a poster for a Pedro Almodovar film festival.
• Do the mechanical for Robert Hughes's Goya, newly in paperback.
• Get an approval on a jacket for a book on the history of relations between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle East (by Zachary Karabell).
• Do research on a poster for Sofia Coppola's upcoming film, Marie Antoinette (I'm so, so behind on this and Sony's being very patient).
• Design a cover for a play by Cormac McCarthy, entitled Sunset Limited.
• Do same for Kim Deitch's new graphic novel, Alias The Cat, which I am also editing. And which rules.
• Reconfigure my design for the Surprise CD by Paul Simon in order to adapt it to, of all things, vinyl.

Even Danny Meyer's wife and kids have to wait in line at the Shake Shack.

Comme ci, comme ca

What if someone steals your Mac laptop? Undercover is a piece of software for just that type of scenario. Report your laptop stolen, and the next time it connects to the Internet it will send network info and snap pics with its iSight. 10 minutes later, a team of Delta commandos armed with semi-automatics will crash through the skylight and neutralize the perps with tear gas and rubber bullets (okay, I made this part up, but it would be fantastic as a premium plan). If authorities fail to recover it promptly, the software will simulate a screen failure.

One other thing that Europe has over the U.S.: sunscreens with mexoryl which do a far better job of blocking UVA rays. Unfortunately, mexoryl is still banned by the FDA. The NYTimes covered this a while back. Mexoryl-based sunscreens are thought to reduce wrinkles, so as you can imagine, a healthy bootlegging trade has cropped up here in NYC, where you can get your hands on it, at a ridiculous price, if you ask at the right drugstores on the Upper East Side. You can also purchase it online from Canadian pharmacies. I'm kicking myself for forgetting to snag a couple tubes while in Europe.

The puggle: half pug, half beagle. For the NY bachelor who needs a NY-pint-sized dog that is, in the words of Thrillist, "passably masculine."

A Frankensteinian commencement speech spliced together from celebrity commencement speeches across the country in 2006. Did Jodie Foster really quote Eminem? Oh Clarice! My guess is that line was received with the silence of the lambs.

Ryan Seacrest breaks bad news.

"The West Wing" and some other TV notes

[SPOILER WARNING: If you didn't watch last Sunday's ep of "The West Wing" and don't know who won the election, then don't read ahead]

Just caught up on the last episode of "The West Wing." I was surprised to read that the ending was changed after John Spencer's death. I'd always assumed Santos would win. If Spencer hadn't passed away, I would have been wrong.

I've never tried to rank my favorite TV shows of all time, but if I did, "The West Wing" would be in the top five, no doubt. In its first two seasons, it was the best show on television. Everything I wrote about the show in my review of the first season DVD boxset for Amazon.com still stands. Not many shows can break the half-hour-sitcom/one-hour-police-medical-legal-drama stranglehold and create a dozen or more distinct and memorable characters. The show even restored American faith in politicians, albeit fictional ones (do a Google search for "The West Wing" and the actual real-life West Wing won't appear until the third page of results). Though it lost its footing for a season or two after Sorkin left, it found a compelling new overarching story arc when it transitioned from focusing on the old administration to centering on the election. Old characters found new roles, and the show won me back. Not too many shows jump the shark and then claw their way back.

When NBC announced that they weren't going to pick up another season, it freed the show to wrap up some loose ends. One of those, of course, was Josh and Donna's seasons' long flirtation. It's a measure of how dear the characters of the show are to me that their hookup (at long last!) made me happier than any culmination of a long-thwarted romance in my TV history (David and Maddie, Fox and Dana, and others that now escape my mind). A tenet of TV writing says that you shouldn't allow a romance to bloom between two of your main television characters lest you pop the bubble of sexual tension keeping your show flying high. But that tactic itself has become so widespread and predictable as to be moldy.

It makes sense to end the show now, as the Bartlet administration wraps up its second term, and yet I'll be more than a bit sad when I hear the theme song (MP3) for the last time (the last episode airs May 14; I hope they put the West Wingers in their finest formal wear for one last swanky affair before season's end). When they air Leo's funeral next week, I'll be wearing black. When old familiar faces like Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) and Amy Gardner (Mary-Louise Parker) pop back in for a visit, I'll feel like I'm reuniting with old friends.

Once the screen goes dark on The West Wing for the last time, and the credit appear, I'll miss them, in part because it doesn't feel like people like that exist in the real Washington, D.C.

***

Everyone could sense Vito was headed for a fall. But holy Bada Bing, I never saw that coming. Truly a moment for the TV scrapbook.

***

I've only seen the first two episodes of Big Love. When the show was announced, the premise didn't really hook me, but HBO as a brand name gets the benefit of the doubt with their one hour dramas, so I let my DVR file it away for later review. After two eps, I'm not ready to make any sweeping judgments, but the acting is exceptional.

Tim Harford wrote recently in Slate about the economics behind polygamy, or more specifically in the case of Big Love, polygyny.

Tidbits

Google Calendar launches.

Good essay by Chuck Klosterman on the emptiness of Barry Bonds breaking the Babe's HR record. At this point, however, it's not the sure thing it once was. Any minute, his body could just fail and and force him into retirement. Maybe the very substances that allowed him to make his late career run at the HR record will break him down just short of those milestones, a modern day Greek tragedy. Malcolm Gladwell suggests that perhaps we need to send in the forensic economists.

San Diego Serenade reenacts the bottom of the 10th inning of Game Six of the 1986 World Series in RBI Baseball. Conceptually brilliant, and I can't imagine how long it must have taken, but it's not super compelling watching RBI Baseball. If he could've gotten the ball to actually roll through Buckner's legs, that would have been unbelievable.

Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist, uses economics to answer mundane questions from readers of the Financial Times. For example, should a man leave the toilet seat down, as his wife demands? Sadly, the Financial Times requires a subscription to read the full columns or archived Harford articles, but Harford's website contains the gist of most of his responses.

An advance commitment from government to buy vaccines when and if they are developed would increase industry R&D in developing cures for low-probability, high-impact diseases (full PDF Report for download).

Yep, this gif is freaky, and so are these sculptures.

Scott Van Pelt does impressions of Mel Kiper and Stephen A. Smith (MP3). He should just do these impressions full-time when he's on Sportscenter; it would be funnier than his usual schtick and would finally complete the circular path that Sportscenter has taken towards becoming a parody of itself.

Tinseltown tidbits

Teaser site for Spiderman 3 offers one swatch of desktop wallpaper and a screensaver for now.

Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg team up to produce On the Lot, the American Idol for filmmakers. Winner to get a development deal with Dreamworks.

Vitamins and poison pills

Here are those snazzy opening titles from Thank You For Smoking.

***

Are vitamins really good for you? Well, I guess we can wait to see what happens to Ray Kurzweil. Most of the harmful effects of vitamins seem to arise in studies with high dosages. Should be interesting to see Barry Bonds and Kurzweil in about twenty years.

***

Once solely the domain of Corporate America, poison pills have come to the NFL. The Seahawks inserted a clause in their offer to Vikings receiver Nate Burleson that the contract would become guaranteed if he played five games in the state of Minnesota. So of course the Vikings did not match the offer, not that they would have even without the clause. I'd be surprised if these types of poison pills were allowed to stand. If you're allowed to make up random poison pills, then the entire concept of matching offer sheets is negated. You can make up anything to prevent a team from matching your offer.

***

Ryanair turns a profit by discounting plane tickets heavily and making up for that with fees for most every other flight amenity. It's difficult to ascertain exactly how the airlines turns its profit just from reading the article--it could be primarily a result of a low cost structure rather than gimmicky fees--but you can't argue with their results in a tough industry.

***

The most popular movie in South Korean history is King and the Clown, a movie inevitably compared to Brokeback Mountain for depicting a gay male relationship.

***

I would be remiss if I didn't record here that this was the first year that March Madness was streamed online, for free. This was a well-designed first effort, complete with a Boss Button, which would transform the streaming video window into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with one click.

***

The cost-of-living in NYC is so high, I don't feel quite as guilty as I otherwise would in using the local Barnes and Noble and Sephora as a personal library and medicine cabinet. I still do feel guilty, but on the other hand, there's something of the New York survivor spirit in the frugality of such tactics. I have no idea if those high-falutin moisturizers really reduce aging, shrink pores, and restore a youthful complexion, but $50 for an ounce is probably too high a price to find out with my hard-earned savings.

Yesterday I stopped in B&N to flip through John Dewan's The Fielding Bible, which I do have on order, though from Amazon.com. It attempts to bring defensive evaluations to another level by using data from Baseball Information Solutions.

Instead of just looking at statistics, Dewan and company used video of every batted ball the past several seasons and translated each into a vector composed of direction and velocity. Then they computed which of those balls should have have been turned into an out by a particular fielder. That provided each defensive player with an expected number of outs, and the main statistic in the book is how many plays each player made versus expectation, the plus/minus. The book includes some other statistics for each position to evaluate things such as fielding of bunts for corner infielders and throwing arm for outfielders (the only position not evaluated is catcher).

Some of the book's conclusions align with widely held assumptions. Ichiro is the best right fielder (though the trend is one of decline). Orlando Hudson is probably the best defensive 2B in the game. Manny Ramirez and Adam Dunn are atrocious in left. Torii Hunter is fantastic in CF.

Bill James contributes an entire chapter on Derek Jeter's defense, a much debated topic. After putting Jeter through several different defensive evaluation systems and watching video of Jeter's best and worst plays, James, a noted contrarian, concedes that Jeter's defense is indeed lousy (Adam Everett evaluates as the best shortstop three years running, and it isn't even close). Hey, Jeter counts among his ex-girlfriends Jessica Alba and Adriana Lima; please allow us this one grudging flaw in his game.

At any rate, it's a fun compilation of stats to pore over, the type of book to bring to a ballgame and use to incite heated debates between innings.

Yeah Yeah Yeah, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Heat Vision and Jack...oh yeah

Tomorrow (well, I guess it's today now), the Flaming Lips will release the video for the "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" on their website. It's the first track of their new album At War With the Mystics. It's a damn infectious song, and you can stream it off of their site by navigating to the Music tab.

UPDATE: Actually, the video is up at Yahoo. It didn't play for me; maybe that's why I've never heard of Yahoo Music.

You can also stream the Yeah Yeah Yeahs new album Show Your Bones in NME's media player (you may have to register and navigate to it, but that helps to select the true believers). Their last album Fever To Tell had some gems, and they were even better in concert when I saw them in Seattle in, oh, I think it was 2003, when they opened for The White Stripes. Fugly venue (Seattle Convention Center), incredible show. Karen O and her mates make music that bring out the happy rock star in all of us, and whenever my iPod tees up one of their tunes, my toe starts tapping. Oddly, Amazon only carries the import right now and shows a release date of April 4, which is really odd (I pinged some of my old mates to see what's up). The album came out yesterday--you can find it most anywhere, and you will, if you know what's good for you.

UPDATE: Okay, Amazon does carry Show Your Bones, and for only $9.96. It had dropped out of the search index for some reason, but it's there.

The pilot episode of the canceled 90's show "Heat Vision and Jack" is online at YouTube. Ben Stiller produced, Jack Black starred as an ex-astronaut named Jack Austin whose last mission had transformed him into a genius, and Owen Wilson voiced the talking motorcycle Heat Vision (actually inhabited by the soul of Jack's old roommate Doug). What cracks me up is the temp music snaked from Craig Armstrong.

Good things come in threes, so this fourth news item is the downer. Mitch Hurwitz has given up on Arrested Development, so as far as anyone's concerned, the show has officially been pronounced brain dead.

42

Lots of exciting finishes in March Madness this year, no doubt. Color me George Mason green and yellow. Just remember, Cinderella may wear a glass slipper, but you still should have her remove them at the door.

More on the Final Four: of the over 3 million entries in ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge, 4 people picked all four teams in the Final Four correctly. About 2/3 of entrants didn't pick a single one of the Final Four teams. I wonder how many of the 284 people who picked George Mason to win it all actually go to or went to the school.

Maybe 42 really is the answer to the secret of the universe?

The proper way to pour ketchup.

Everyone thanks those in our volunteer army who are fighting in Iraq, but if a draft were instituted, everyone would raise bloody hell. During times of peace, signing up for the military seems like a decent deal, but these days, the Army is missing its recruiting numbers despite lowering its standards and raising its cash bonuses. It's one of the ugly truths about the Iraq war: those who fight the war are the ones who don't have more attractive options. The issue is close to my heart because one of my editing class projects was Edet Beltzberg's upcoming documentary on army recruiting. Much of that footage was wrenching to watch.

Eric Haney, one of the founding members of Delta Force, gives a karate chop to the throat of the current Administration for the war on Iraq. I'm almost done reading Inside Delta Force, his account of the founding of Delta Force and his years in service. The book is in the news now because David Mamet used it as inspiration for his new TV show "The Unit" on CBS. The book isn't quite as thrilling as I thought it would be, mainly because Haney can't reveal a lot of classified methods and anecdotes. As for the TV show, I'm not so sure all the actors are cut out to deliver Mamet-ese. I enjoy his dialogue much like I enjoy a bloody chunk of prime grade beef, but in the hands of the wrong cook, even the finest cut of beef can be turned into lunch room salisbury steak. Haney's dismissal of the effectiveness of torture is a damning indictment of the abuses at Abu Ghraib from a different perspective--torture doesn't gain effective intelligence, Jack Bauer notwithstanding.

This might be the coolest bath toy you could buy for your toddler. I wonder if human fear of snakes is innate or arises from reading the Bible or watching movies like Anaconda, a movie which mostly developed my fear of Jon Voight in a ponytail.

Movies from Sundance always seem to be trickling into theaters. Brick was one of the consensus group favorites of our Sundance crew two years ago, though I thought the conceit of setting a film noir in high school lost its novelty appeal by film's end, giving way to a somewhat unsatisfying potboiler ending. Still, it's a gas to hear high school kids spewing hard-boiled dialogue, and what better place to transfer the stock characters of film noir than high school, a time in our lives when most of us were trying on personas in a massive game of social fencing. As compared to most multiplex fare, Brick is joltingly fresh. The movie won the Originality of Vision award at Sundance, and that was the appropriate honor to bestow on that movie.

Thank You For Smoking is the latest of this year's Sundance babies to hit the big screen. Like Brick, the movie sprints out of the blocks with gorgeous opening credits and loses breath by the finish. No one wears sleaze better than Aaron Eckhart, though, and the movie shares his charming cynicism. Until Nick Naylor (Eckhart) loses his nerve, the movie is a pleasant smartass. Rob Lowe and Adam Brody as a CAA agent and his assistant had industry insiders at Sundance crying with laughter. For those who want Eckhart neat, instead of on the rocks, try In the Company of Men, in which he played one of the more memorable characters many people have never heard of.

David Bordwell wants more from contemporary film criticism. More than just opinions or insights, he wants to learn approximately true things about film. Something tells me the two movie blurbs above probably don't meet his standard.

James sent me a link to this amazing single hand of poker between Phil Ivey and Paul Jackson. Whereas many players hide behind sunglasses, Ivey eschews them in favor of his cold, piercing gaze, against which sunglasses might be the only defense against going blind.

Sunday. Gervais. Simpsons.

This Sunday brings with it the Ricky Gervais scripted episode of The Simpsons, "Homer Simpson, This Is Your Wife," in which Homer signs up for a Trading Spouses-like reality show and ends up bringing home a nightmarish wife.

I think that is supposed to be a pic of Ricky Gervais, Simpsonized. I look forward to the day when someone releases a pack of Photoshop or Illustrator plug-ins that allow you to transform self-portraits so you can see what you'd look like as a Simpsons character, or as rendered by the Wall Street Journal, or South Park.

IMDb lists The Simpsons feature film as being in production, with a release date in 2008.

Money

Out of 5, which was out of bandwidth, is out of hibernation...money.

As always, while Hollywood studios hem and haw and dip thier toes in the HD-DVD pool, their less timid counterparts in the video industry have already dived in, sans swimwear.

Chef sleeps with the fishes. I really expect that sometime in the next few years, Trey Parker and Matt Stone will die within a few hours of each other, under mysterious circumstances. At that same moment, Tom Cruise and/or Mel Gibson will be at their child's baptism.

61 Chinese children were adopted by Americans in 1991. By last year, that number had grown to 7,906.

I was hoping for something like the BMWFilms, but the Pirelli Film "The Call"? Eh, not so much.

Download four MP3s from new It band Band of Horses.

Okay, smarty

Jeopardy is conducting online testing next Tuesday through Thursday, Mar 28-30. You have to meet the requirements and register, then you'll be assigned a time to log on to take the 50 question qualifier.

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This online site allows you to opt out of all those credit card offers in the mail. Since even torn-up credit card applications aren't safe, this may save you the cost of buying a shredder.

As a reminder, you can also sign up online for the Do Not Call registry, and you can reduce your junk snail mail further by following advice from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

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James turned me onto the most entertaining poker show on televsion, High Stakes Poker on the Game Show Network. It's a cash game, minimum $100,000 buy-in, no limit hold'em. In a tournament, all anyone ever has at risk is there initial tourney stake, but in a cash game, every dollar you put in is your own. It's not as easy to bluff or call a bluff when every dollar in is one of your own dollars at risk. High stakes cash game players (esp. Barry Greenstein) scoff at some of their tourney player brethren who've become famous thanks to TV, and this game is their chance to prove, in front of the cameras, that a cash game NL Hold'em game is the toughest game around.

In the most recent episode, Phil Hellmuth's arrival was greeted with glee and derision (Negreanu shouted "Yum yum!"), and Hellmuth proceeded to lose his entire $100,000 buy-in in the three hands of his that were televised (though admittedly at least one was a tough hand to get away from). All around the table, the lack of respect for Hellmuth's game was palpable.

Players can use huge bricks of cash in lieu of chips. The use of cash adds a literal element of intimidation, and it's also an impressive visual gag for the cameras, seeing two 1 pound bricks of cash worth $50,000 each flying into the pot and bouncing across the felt. Several leggy-busty models called "sweaters" stand around in the background at all times, and amateurs who put up the $100,000 can buy in. Occasionally Lakers owner Jerry Buss makes an appearance, loses all his money, and disappears again.

Toss in former Welcome Back Kotter star Gape Kaplan as the TV analyst and you have a one for the TiVo.

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The first ever electronic replay challenge in tennis. Since it's been around on television for years now, this isn't that exciting. On TV they seem to be able to bring up an electronic replay all the time, so I don't know why the chair judge just doesn't use it on any close shot.

Feeling the blahs

The night before the Oscars, I became light-headed, then feverish. During the night, I alternated between feeling like my body was about to burst into flames, and then shivering under every blanket in my apartment. By the time I finally fell asleep, the sun had been up for hours. In about 9 hours, folks were coming over for the Oscars, and if the phone hadn't been so far from my bed I think I would've called it off. I had visions of myself at my Oscars party, suddenly passing out and crashing through a glass coffee table, and then the screen would go dark and cut to the opening credits of House, with the cool theme music by Massive Attack.

Sometime during the night, my radiators stopped working, for no apparent reason. It was about 30 degrees outside when they stopped, and it was about 30 degrees inside my apartment by the time I dozed off.

It felt as if the door buzzer rang the instant I slipped into slumber. It was the FreshDirect delivery guy, dropping off all the groceries I'd ordered to use in preparing my Oscar spread. After putting all the stuff in the fridge, I tried to slip back into bed for one more hour of sleep, but it was done. Once my body sees sunshine, it's tough to force into sleep mode.

Usually, I try to prep food related to the best picture noms, but this year had me stumped. Should I pass out packs of Camels so we could all smoke through the night like Edward Murrow? Pop pills like Johnny Cash? No, that would fail to distinguish this night from any other night out clubbing in NYC. The only food that came to mind were the canned beans from Brokeback Mountain, so I settled on a main of Chicken and White Bean Chili. For this recipe, I had to char eight Anaheim chilies. I'd never even heard of this type of chili before, but fortunately Whole Foods had exactly ten of them left on Saturday afternoon.

While charring half the chilies on my gas stove and the other half in the broiler, my smoke alarm went off. As old as that sucker looks, it puts out an earsplitting, panic-inducing noise, like a robot screaming in agony. I was certain I'd woken up everyone in the entire building, and everyone on my block for that matter. I ran to my windows, but they were sealed for the winter so I couldn't pry them open quickly. I brought my air filter into the kitchen and turned it on high. All to no avail. Finally, looking at that smoke alarm, which, by the way, I couldn't reach because it was fourteen feet off the ground, I saw that it was hard wired into the wall. So I flipped all my circuit breakers, and it the smoke alarm went silent.

It was now that I recalled that the super had once told me I probably shouldn't use the broiler. Now I knew why. I stood there reveling in the silence, then went back to charring the chilies, in total darkness.

On to the Oscars, the show everyone complains about and yet still watches. With everyone bashing the Oscars, I feel sheepish admitting I look forward to the Oscars every year, though some of it has to do with the fact that there's always an Oscar pool on the line. It's the same reason March Madness is so popular. In fact, if no one gambled on March Madness, I wouldn't be surprised it lost over half of its appeal.

I don't know about that billion viewer claim for the Oscars. Who came up with that figure, and how? Even if everyone in the United States watched, and these are folks in the right time zones, that still leaves some three quarters of a billion viewers to backfill. And this year, the number of U.S. viewers looks to have been roughly 39 million. Maybe that billion is not the figure for people watching live.

The red carpet interviews, I concede, are dull. While laying out food, I stopped to listen to one or two of Isaac Mizrahi's interviews on the red carpet. He was so amusing in Unzipped, but he's a terrible red carpet interviewer. He loves the sound of his own voice too much and always seems locked in a battle for attention with his interviewee.

This year's production was one of the shortest I can recall, clocking it at just under three hours and a half, and yet it felt sluggish. Jon Stewart came out nervous in the opening monologue, a few jokes failed to kill, and awkward silence seemed to grab a chokehold. I enjoy Stewart, but this crowd, a subdued one, is vastly different than the fratboy audience on The Daily Show, the one which whoops and hollers every time the Applause sign lights up. On The Daily Show, Stewart can simply show a clip of Bush speaking, then wait while laughter pours in. His material was solid, but the audience's tepid reaction to much of it dampened his mojo and the show's momentum.

The Oscar crowd likes to drive in the center lane, which is why Billy Crystal is such a popular and successful host. You can take your jabs at the arm, but don't leave a bruise, and take too many shots at the folks in the crowd and they will stop laughing with you. The type of humor that works well at the Oscars is not the brand that is Chris Rock or Jon Stewart specialty. The Bjork-Dick Cheney joke was just right. It was political, but only tangentially, and poked fun at the entertainment industry, but only their clothing. Contrast that with, say, the joke about pulling down the giant Oscars statue so democracy could bloom in Hollywood. Or the joke about Scientology, which probably didn't get laughs from John Travolta and company. Johnny Carson was the prototype for the perfect Oscar host, but I can't think of anyone like him out there today.

Stewart's comic timing did hurt himself with a slightly mis-tuned comic timing. When a joke failed to hit, he'd fill in the silence with a follow-on comment, reaching for the bounceback laugh. "I'm a loser," he offered at one point, but the audience didn't bite. At least he tried. David Letterman got panned for his hosting effort, and he's no worse for the wear. Stewart will be fine, and he'll be able to mine his hosting gig for some laughs when he returns to the Daily Show Wednesday. They don't make comedians check all their sharp objects at the door on that show.

My nomination for the perfect host to restore some energy into the Oscars remains Jim Carrey. If they'd just unleash him, he'd be Billy Crystal but with a chance of broadening the appeal of the show to include some younger viewers.

Other thoughts during the evening, tape-delayed by a night so you can TiVo-scroll through all the bad bits I'm going to blame on my illness:

• The opening pre-recorded montage, with intros of past Oscar hosts, had a few duds. The bits with Steve Martin's kids weren't that funny, but the Mel Gibson bit from the set of Apocalypto almost rescued it. Mel may be crazy, but at least he hasn't lost his sense of humor.
• Half of the Oscars production lives and dies with the cutaway shots. When Stewart made a crack about piracy and how many actresses could barely afford enough dress to cover their breasts, the show immediately cut to a pregnant Rachel Weisz. Probably a coincidence, but I was taken aback. Very un-Oscar-like.
• On the other hand, the cutaways to Clooney were priceless. Gil Cates likely had a camera trained on Clooney the entire night, a wise move on his part. With picture in picture technology, shouldn't all viewers have the choice of having one of several stars always open in a subwindow on the television screen? Where was the shot of George Clooney when Three 6 Mafia gave him thanks? Where were the cutaways during their performance of "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp"? There's one person who must enjoy the Oscars every year, and that's the person who sits in a studio and sees the feed from every camera in the theatre. That guy's got some good stories.
• Three 6 Mafia - terrific acceptance speech, which began with them walking to the wrong microphone on stage. That was an undeniably catchy tune. The scene in Hustle & Flow, when that song finally comes together, had me grinning, and, along with "Wings" from Brokeback Mountain, "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" was the most memorable musical number from the year in movies. I wish I had a handle like "Juicy J" or "Crunchy Black." Three 6 gave props to everyone, even Gil Cates. Speaking of which, I want to give a shout out to Clooney here. George baby, you're the daddy. Let's work together, baby.
• Another group that looked like they were having a good time were the four crazy French dudes accepting the Oscar for March of the Penguins. The stuffed penguins they were holding were dressed better than they were; something tells me those guys will be paying some damage fees on those rental tuxes. Two of them weren't wearing bowties, and another's bowtie had gone vertical by the time he spoke. They sounded like they'd had a few bottles of vino prior to arriving. Leave it to the French to know how to live.
• One reason the Oscars always fall short of expectations are the dull thank-you lists that are most acceptance speeches. It always feels a bit political and insidery to thank producers, studios, publicists, and so on and so forth. Not all thank yous are dull, but the bar needs to be higher. A good example was Robert Altman. He noted that he couldn't possibly thank everyone he'd worked with, so he thanked only his doctor, Jodie Kaplan. That woman might be keeping him alive. She meets the bar.
• Robert Altman had a full heart transplant?!? What the hell? How does one keep that under wraps? Amazing. Sadly, the first movie that leaped into my head when he revealed his secret was Untamed Heart. I felt bad for Altman because he'd never won an Oscar for himself prior to this, but people are mistaken when they disparate the Academy Honorary Award as a consolation prize. The Academy may get it wrong in one year on any one award, but it's tough to be wrong when you're honoring someone with a lifetime achievement award. How many people in the audience last night could even hope to win one someday? Nicholson. Maybe Streep. Possibly Spielberg.
• At first, I thought, "How rude, they're playing music and the winner hasn't even begun his/her speech!" Then it became clear that they were playing music to accompany every speech. Not a good idea, and sure to go the way of the "awards presentations in the audience for lesser categories" from last year's broadcast.
• If you hadn't seen Crash and just watched the interpretive dance segment occurring behind Kathleen "Bird" York during the singing of "In the Deep," you'd think Crash was a zombie movie.
• It must be satisfying to win the loudest round of applause during the In Memoriam segment. Someone like Jack Nicholson must sleep well just knowing that someday, when he finally knocks off, he'll be the last one shown in that segment, to rapturous applause.
• When Dolly Parton came on stage to sing "Travelin' Thru", I thought she was introducing The Corpse Bride. It's a cruel industry that won't let its ladies age gracefully. She's 60 for goodness sakes.
• Lots of fake bakes in Hollywood. I can't say I'm a fan of the bronzed look. Some of the women, if they'd been naked and bald, would've resembled life size Oscar statues.
• Not Jennifer Garner, though. She nearly did a face plant, but give her a break, she must still be adjusting to the cantilevering forces brought into play by her post-pregnancy figure.
• All the next-day outfit analysis seems to have scared actors out of taking any sartorial risks, which is too bad. These people are gorgeous and wealthy and successful. At least let us believe, if just for a night, that they might make an occasional fashion misstep like the rest of us. The one time she attended, Bjork was adorable when she was describing in an interview how a friend of hers had made that swan dress. Now we may never have such moments again, and that's a loss for all of us. That said, after Reese won for best actress, it would have been marvelous if Charlize Theron had untied that bow on her dress last night to reveal a hawk. Then Charlize could've whistled, signaling the hawk to fly to the stage to claw Reese on the face and fly off with her statue. No one would be saying anything about Charlize's dress today if she'd done that.
• One fun way to liven your group during an Oscars episode is to compete to shout out the names of all the movies referenced in the Oscar montages as they flash on screen. If you were able to name all the westerns and film noirs, well then you're a true movie buff. Or just old. Or probably both.
• Jack Nicholson can read from the teleprompter and it's still entertaining. Maybe he could just come out as the presenter of every award, each time with a different partner.
• Paul Haggis once was known as the creator of Walker, Texas Ranger. Now he'll be introduced as writer of one best picture winner, director of another. Now that's a Cinderella man.

So Crash won best picture. I discussed my feelings on the movie last year. The movie has an emotional power in many of its vignettes, and some of the cuts are quite clever, but intellectually the movie felt so facile on the issue of racism that it failed to achieve a best picture type of transcendence in my mind. A movie about racism should draw blood, but Crash felt more like a comforting massage, an anti-racism message that had been spiked with sugar to to go down smoothly rather than to stick in the throat the way a breakthrough social message movie might. Perhaps it's a geographic issue. L.A.'s unique geographical layout and racial history may be adding a layer of local resonance that those of us who've never lived there can't appreciate.

Brokeback Mountain, my pick for best picture among the five nominees, manages to seize your heart without tearing open your chest to massage it by hand. It works at you from the inside out, and by movie's end you understand why Heath Ledger chokes the life out of every word, because his story isn't "that gay cowboy" story. No, as it turns out, we'd heard this tale before.

There's a brief cutaway during Brokeback Mountain. Those who've seen the movie will know which one I refer to, and so I can discuss it relatively spoiler-free. Still, skip the next stretch if you haven't seen the movie and haven't read the short story.

The cutaway in the movie leaves much up to the audience's mind. Did what happened in the cutaway truly happen? Is it a cutaway to a Ennis's imagination, or is it the work of an omniscient narrator, so to speak? I checked back in the short story by Annie Proulx to see how she handled it.

In the short story, Ennis hears the news from Lureen. She tells the story of how it happened. But Ennis disagrees.

"No, he [Ennis] thought, they got him with the tire iron."

Later, when Ennis is speaking to Jack's parents, Jack's father says to Ennis, "He had some half-baked idea the two a you was goin a move up here, build a log cabin, and help me run this ranch and bring it up. Then this spring he's got anaother one's goin a come up here with him and build a place and help run the ranch, some ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas. He's going a split up with his wife and come back here. So he says. But like most a Jack's ideas it never come to pass."

The next line refers to Ennis's thoughts: "So now he knew it had been the tire iron."

So I suspect the movie cutaway is meant to reflect Ennis's belief as to how it went down, as in the short story. We don't ever know the truth, and by that point in the movie it doesn't matter, because one way or another, they'd already broken both Ennis and Jack.

The movie that most moved me last year, however, was not nominated for any Oscars. It wasn't even made for theaters originally, but for TV, which may have disqualified it from the Best Foreign Film category. The movie is La Meglio gioventù, or The Best of Youth. The miniseries aired in four episodes in Italy, and in the U.S. it is split into two DVDs of three hours a piece. Everyone will mention the length of this movie when recommending it to you, but for good reason. We balk at the thought of sitting through six hours of any form of entertainment. But at the end of The Best of Youth, I felt the sorrow one feels after turning the final page on a long but beloved novel. If NBC's coverage of the city of Turin and Italy itself during this year's Winter Olympics left you dissatisfied, and even if it didn't, please do devote six hours of your life to The Best of Youth.

I leave this year's Oscars with this question: Is it really hard out there for a pimp? This sounds like a job for Steven Levitt.

Saturday Night Sort of Live

The funniest bits on SNL now are all pre-recorded. Maybe they should change their name to Saturday Night Taped. Hey, if it improves the show, I think folks would settle for that, and most everyone catches these shorts on YouTube anyway.

UPDATE: Well, SNL lawyers are killing YouTube SNL video clips faster than Barry Pepper sniping Germans in Saving Private Ryan, so the clip below is likely dead. Thankfully trying to suppress this stuff on the web is like trying to play whack-a-mole in hell. Here's another site hosting the clip, and if they kill that one, just go to your preferred file-sharing app or to Google.

Natty P! I'm feelin' ya, girl.

XXI

I agree, the new Wieden and Kennedy Air Jordan commercial for Nike is awesome. Gave me goosebumps and a curious watering in the eye. The move which most recalls Jordan for me is simply the kid with his hands on his knees, chomping on gum with the Jordan scowl.

Hoth 2014

The Chappelle Theory: "He knew that at the same time he was signing his record-setting deal, there was a secret cabal of powerful African-American leaders from the business, political, and entertainment industries working together to ensure that the third season of Chappelle's Show would never happen."

It's not too early to start campaigning for the Winter Olympics. Ice planet of Hoth, 2014!

FoxiPod uses Greasemonkey with Firefox to allow you to download MP3s directly into iTunes, something I'd been wishing I could do in Firefox for a long time. Safari dumps MP3s into iTunes already, but when doing so it initiates playback right away which can be disruptive.

Curling audio clip mash-up (MP3). Sure seemed like curling got a love of media love, even if in jest, this year.

Judith Harris first came to prominence for her groundbreaking book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, which argued that a children's peers were far more influential on their personality development than their parents. Now Harris has written a new book, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, which updates and builds on her earlier work. I look forward to reading it.

Rakebreak.com

Rakebreak.com allows you to recover some of the rake you pay at many popular online poker playing sites. Many sites will cut Ratebreak.com in a chunk of the rake it takes from you. Then Rakebreak gives most of that back to you, keeping a bit for yourself. Refer friends, and if they accumulate $400 in rake, you get a $50 bonus. [via Thrillist]

What is Microsoft's Origami Project, which is being unveiled this Thursday? The most popular theory seems to be an "ultraportable lifestyle PC," a sort of jack-of-all-trades gadget that combines all your devices into one: digital camera, camcorder, cell phone, MP3 player, PDA, Internet access device, e-mail device, and portable picture display.

The Sony Portable Reader System (PRS-500) is up for sale at SonyStyle.com for $349.99. I'd want to experience the screen resolution of one of these babies in person before plunking down that much cash, but electronic readers do geek me up, and this is the most promising model yet. The first thing Sony needs to do, however, is give this baby a name. PRS-500 is not sexy at all. Hmmm, maybe something like Origami Project, if that's not already taken. [via Engadget]

In the Minnesota Timberwolves game last night, Kevin Garnett tossed a ball into the stands in frustration and hit a fan in the face. Garnett was ejected, and rightfully so (a young girl to his right, perhaps the man's daughter, burst into tears), but my eyes rolled at footage of the fan being wheeled out on a gurney by medical personnel. From being hit in the face by a basketball? A player with a $100 million contract hits you in the nose with a tossed ball, and television cameras all swing around to focus on you--that's the time to bust out your best Oscar performance and get a good lawyer on the phone. But I think the guy probably realized that even the U.S. legal system would have a hard time finding in his favor when you have grade school kids being nailed in the face by hard red rubber dodgeballs every day in P.E. On a positive note, I'm sure the guy will be happy with his parting gift, likely to be some signed paraphernalia by KG.

Hot rumor at the NFL Combine is that Vince Young scored a 6 out of 50 on the Wonderlic test, though the latest news is that the grader may have scored the test wrong, though his score wasn't much better. Wonderlic must have some good lawyers because I couldn't find a complete sample Wonderlic test online anywhere, though ESPN.com once published a sample 15 questions that everyone online is forced to cite when posting about the test. Supposedly, Matt Leinart scored a 35, and the average score for an NFL prospect is about 19. I've never seen any studies that demonstrate any correlation between Wonderlic score and NFL performance, though Young's score would make him the lowest scoring starting QB in the NFL. That score would likely hurt Young's draft stock, not necessarily because his test score means he's unable to grasp an NFL playbook but because like many standardized tests, it's a test of your willingness to study for a defined task. A score of 6 would indicate that Young's preparation for the Combine was spotty, at best. He knew it was coming. So the latest news is that Young retook the test and scored a 16, and that he'll take the test a third time.
[related: Pro Football Weekly published scores for lots of players from last year's NFL draft]
[update: I did manage to find a sample Wonderlic test online]

Ah, thank goodness for TiVo

James and Angela have been keeping up with Dancing With the Stars, and James showed a bunch of us the most recent episode. Thanks to the joys of TiVo, he was able to fast forward to the best portions, namely three dances:

• Drew Lachey dancing to "Thriller"
• Jerry Rice dancing disco while wearing a giant afro wig
• Drew Lachey freestyle dancing while wearing a leather cowboy vest, blue jeans, and cowboy boots

A few snippets of the two Drew Lachey dances and the Jerry Rice dance are up at the show's website, at least until the finale on Sunday. The clip quality isn't great, and the image isn't large, but even so, some of that awe-inspiring goodness comes through. Sadly, YouTube only has a really low-res copy of Drew Lachey's "Thriller" performance. And in this case, high res is necessary to appreciate the genius of Drew Lachey's many facial expressions, especially his closing gaze into the camera in "Thriller" and his dance-closing "blow out my six-shooter baby" move in that cowboy dance.

Of Sasha Cohen's long performance at the Olympics the other day, commentator Sandra Bezic cooed, "That's the difference between Sasha and other skaters. Everyone else skates to Romeo and Juliet. Sasha is Juliet." Along those lines, I'd add, "Everyone else dances to Michael Jackson's 'Thriller.' But Drew is the King of the Undead."

"Nick, bro. Just watch. And learn."

As one judge said, "Drew, you're ready for the lead in Brokeback Mountain the Musical."

"Throw me the ball! I'm open!"

"I. CAN'T. HEAR. YOUUUUU!!!"

Also enjoyable are the occasional pans over to Nick Lachey in the audience, who has to be thinking that he's seeing his future enacted before his very eyes. Let's hope that he brings down the house by bringing out Drew's "Thriller" cape for a tribute performance of the "Thriller" dance on Dancing With the Stars 2008.

As for Jerry Rice, I'm just glad the audience has had the wisdom to continue to vote him in week after week despite the fact that the judges have done their best to score him out. Last year's show lost all appeal for me after the judges evicted Evander Holyfield. I'd love to remember Rice for all his fingertip catches for the 49ers, all those blowouts he provided me in the first version of Sega's Madden Football, but the thought of him in the huge afro wig may be too powerful and indelible an image to move out of its position in first recall.

"To me it's just like the Super Bowl, I want it really bad," said Jerry Rice in his post dance interview about the Dancing With the Stars championship. Really?

What's even odder to me is that all three of the dances referred to above earned great scores and rave reviews from the judges which shows you how little I know about ballroom dancing. After the "Thriller" dance, I thought to myself, "Hey, those are some moves I pulled out after a few too many trips to the cash bar at the last wedding I attended."

Then the first judge came out with her verdict, "The pasa doble is all about passion and power, bringing control to the dance floor. You dominated that dance floor!" And I thought to myself, "I've been doing the pasa doble all along?!"

Call to all aspiring professional cyclists

Someone from the Travel Channel contacted me. They are looking for someone who aspires to be a professional cyclist for an episode of a television show where they give people the chance to experience their dream job for a few days. If you think you can handle 3 days of pro cycling training and would like to show your stuff on TV, pull together a 2-minute audition video discussing what you do for a living now and why you're so passionate about being a pro cyclist (preferred formats for your audition video being DVD, VHS, or miniDV). Drop me a line (use the Contact Me link off of my homepage) and I'll let you know where to send your tape. The deadline for receipt of the tapes is Monday, Feb. 27th, so you'll have to sprint.

Duck and dunk

Pop quiz on marriage, one that bursts some common myths.

If you're looking to buy one of the new MacBook Pros that comes out this week, a good place to go is Amazon.com. They're offering a $150 rebate if you buy by Feb 28. Add in the A9 Instant Reward, Free Super Saver Shipping, and no sales tax (for most of you), and that's a healthy financial incentive to buy from Amazon instead of elsewhere. Of course, the only problem is that it's not available yet, so you can't buy it. Buyers should keep an eye on the site this week to see if the Add to Shopping Cart button makes an appearance before Feb. 28.

Nate Robinson is a great athlete, and the Spud Webb hurdle dunk was a lot of fun. But how he won the dunkoff after missing something like 87 dunks in a row is a mystery greater than even the figure skating scoring rules. I guess it's no surprise the sponsor this year was Sprite. The NBA changed the rules this year so that misses don't count against you, which is a good idea to encourage players to try some truly difficult dunks. But c'mon. You have to put some cap on it; this was a scene straight out of Tin Cup. And anyhow, Andre Iguodala made a jump, catch, and dunk from behind the backboard! He jumped so high he hit his head on the backboard the first time and had to duck under it to actually make the dunk (you can see a sequence of photos of the Iguodala dunk here)!? Can we get a Dick Button call on that dunk? They should have a rule that if you make a dunk that's truly spectacular and groundbreaking, you can just win the contest right then and there, outright. Like when Vince Carter jumped from behind the backboard, did a 360 degree spin, windmilled and dunked with one hand. Or when Jason Richardson tossed the ball off the backboard, caught it in mid-air, put the ball through his legs, finished a NYTimes crossword, and dunked. The judge of whether a dunk qualifies for such an outright knockout win would be the number of NBA players on the sidelines who jump out of their seats with and start high-fiving and hugging and giggling and screaming like a band of high school cheerleaders. It should've been over when Iguodala ran off the court and out the tunnel.

Sweet dunk...

...but here's the dunk that should have ended the contest.

The other thing that amazes me about the All-Star game is watching how easily NBA pros can make the half court shot. In that competition with three player teams making a variety of shots around the court, it only took Tony Parker and Kobe Bryant one shot each to nail the half court shot, and it didn't take the other teams much longer to nail it. They should just have a new contest on All-Star weekend, the half-court shooting contest.

Pride goeth before

The Visa jinx continues at the Winter Olympics. Their three most prominent Olympic athletes have all come up short: Bode Miller, Michelle Kwan, and now Lindsey Jacobellis, who "pulled a hammy" in the snowboard cross finals yesterday. Visa is breathing a sigh of relief that they never aired their Dick Cheney quail hunting TV spot. Coca-Cola pulled its Michelle Kwan spots, but their big Winter Olympic athlete endorser Apolo Anton Ohno is still missing gold (as well as an l from his first name).

In her Visa commercial, "Nervous," Jacobellis's coach tries to quell her anxiety before the event. All his motivational talk fails to do the trick, until he says, "Imagine your Visa check card just got stolen." Leaving aside the goofiness of the entire Visa check card ad campaign, it's particularly cruel that Jacobellis wasn't nervous enough in the snowboard cross finals to pull out victory.

After the event, reporters tried to tactfully extract some remorse from Jacobellis, but she stuck to her story, for the most part. She said she'd been having problems with the jump and tried to use her method grab to stabilize. Because that was obviously not the case, even to the most uneducated of viewers, every one of her denials was as discomfiting to listen to as the crash was to watch. Was she trying to cover for herself, or had some higher ups on the U.S. Olympic team given her the lines to read in a PR cover-up?

If she'd broken down and cried, wished she could have that fateful jump back, no one would have blamed her. But she maintained a placid, almost stoic PR face, though she conceded later in the day that some showboating may have led her astray. When she appeared in the studio with Bob Costas, I cringed in anticipation of a withering series of questions, but Costas showed a welcome restraint. He asked once about the showboating, but applauded her for not ducking the press. After all, she's just twenty years old and comes from a sport where style and an attitude of rebellion is entwined with the birth of the sport. A bit of youthful exuberance in that situation is understandable, if not good judgment, and the shade of the medal around her neck and the continual replay of her gaffe for years and years to come is punishment enough.

Leaving aside Jacobellis's fall, snowboard cross is the coolest new Winter Olympic sport. It puts competitors on the same course at the same time, allows contact, and results in a clear winner, with no human judging of creativity or skill. Also, it results in lots of spectacular crashes. When ESPN shows highlights of hockey games or NASCAR races, they show two types of events. Goals or the winner crossing the finish line, and fights or crashes.

Crashes just might be the most important factor in drawing viewers. Why is figure skating the most popular Winter Olympic sport? Could it be because the winner is the only one who can remain upright? Would more people watch ski jumping if Eddie the Eagle were competing, with the potential of turning into a human fireball with every jump? Why is watching Bode Miller downhill ski so riveting? The promise of spectacular crash draws out the rubber-necker in all of us.

Snowboard cross is human NASCAR. In Jacobellis's final, one competitor lost control on a jump and had to be evacuated on a stretcher, all within the first thirty seconds. Another rider flew off the course through a fence and had to crawl up a hill to make it to the finish line for bronze. If she hadn't gotten up, I guess they would have had an extra bronze medal. The next time I'm out snowboarding, I hope to be able to race a few friends down a snowboard cross course. They should build some in addition to the terrain parks at many resorts, and they should put them near the bottom of the mountain to add some fun to the last run of the day.

I have a proposal for another new Winter Olympic sport, a twist on the biathlon: one guy skis down the mountain while several other skiers with machine guns chase him down. Some of the pursuers can even be on motorcycles with studded tires. The competing skier has guns of his own, one in each of his ski poles, and has to survive while navigating an obstacle course down the mountain. Winners are determined by a blend of a few things: survival, the number of pursuers he/she manages to gun down, and style points on jumps and rails and the such. Based on a few James Bond movies I've seen, I'd expect good things from the British team.

Back on the topic of Olympics sponsors, I'm not sure what to make of the fact that Home Depot employs more Olympians than any other company. Every time the Olympics come around, Home Depot airs its ads touting its Olympian employees. Do Home Depot employees get a lot of time off to practice? Does Home Depot pay for their training? Is there a pool in the back office of every Home Depot? It's such a tease. I go to Home Depot expecting that when I ask for something off of a shelf high up, some Home Depot employee will sprint down the aisle with a long segment of PVC pipe, pole vault up towards the roof, grab my item, and then nail the landing with arms raised to the sky ("Wow, hey, I've got to shop here more often.").

By the way, NBC found its new hit comedy during the Winter Olympics, but unfortunately it ended tonight. Yes, My Name is Ice Dancing. I'd never watched this sport before, but yesterday after my nephew went to bed, we adults tuned in to ice dancing. A good time was had by all, especially with the return of the great Dick Button. He brings a real knowledge of the sport, without a doubt, but more importantly he brings a Bud Collins-esque panache and fervor and a brand of honesty rare in the sports commentating world.

When Button gets himself worked up, the results are spectacular.
"NOW THAT'S A TWIZZLE WITH SOME SIZZLE!"
"CAN YOU FEEL THE SEDUCTION! YOU CAN'T TAKE YOUR EYES OFF OF HER! HELLO WORLD, MY NAME IS ISOLDE!"
"YOU KNOW WHAT, TO THE HECK WITH THAT POINT!"
"THIS ROUTINE BORED ME TO TEARS! THERE MAY HAVE BEEN DANCING, BUT NOT ON THE BACK OF MY EYELIDS!"
[Note: I made these up, but like Hollywood biopics, they were inspired by a true story]

Add that to the facial expressions of the ice dancers as they "get into character," the indescribable costumes (why does every guy have to expose his chest?), the supercharged backstage tensions between couples who are mixing work and love, and the potential that at any moment a guy might lose his grip and toss his partner into the third row of the stands, and you have entertainment gold. One way to improve the broadcasts would be to add some pop-up notes during the routines, a la VH1:
75% of ice dancing and figure skating couples have dated.
Ben is secretly in love with Tanith.
Sasha Cohen is really 9 years old.
Olivier's favorite color is fuschia, and his favorite movie is Billy Elliot.
[Note: I made these up, too; I think Sasha Cohen is actually only 7 years old.]

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to work on my comedic screenplay starring Will Ferrell and Kirsten Dunst as a pair of ice dancers, Vince Vaughn as their coach, and Owen Wilson as a competing dancer from Bulgaria.

A word from our sponsors

I stuck a few Adsense text links in the right column. I tried to keep ads off of this page, but in the past half year I've been hit with a lot of traffic overage fees, about $5 a month, and I've always wanted to run this site wallet-neutral. In the past my Amazon associates rev has covered enough of my hosting fees that I didn't bother with ads. I have two suspicions about the Adsense text links. One is that they'll need to be more prominent than they are now to generate much revenue, if any, and the second is that my blog content may not be topically constrained enough to generate many relevant Adsense links (Google offers tools to test the latter, and a few trials haven't turned out much). But for the time being, I'll keep them subtle and minimal, and if one strikes your fancy, do click through and help a brother out. At any rate, when I finally get around to the site redesign I keep putting on the back burner, I'll figure out what to do with them.

Even bobsledders use steroids. That strikes me as really odd. If you're one of the guys in back, isn't your primary skill to sit?

NBC is not covering the Olympics live, and that's a problem in this day and age. A quick peek at ESPN or any major news site online or on TV and you can't help but find out who all the winners are going to be later that evening. I have no idea why they aren't doing live broadcasts on NBC. On the East Coast, NBC replays its primetime coverage from something like 12:30am to 5:00am, for no apparent reason. Why not a live broadcast and then a primetime replay? Even NBCOlympics.com's online video clips are delayed in order to not ruin things for the network. The tail's wagging the dog.

I had a friend in town on Sunday, and at dinner she said that I'd never guess what her favorite new TV show was. I said Grey's Anatomy. I was right. It wasn't difficult since every girl I know watches that show. It's the new Sex in the City, complete with Ellen Pompeo providing Carrie-esque voiceovers. Their big push to grab onto the coattails of the Super Bowl worked, though, as many guys who had the game on were forced to watch the show with the ladies afterwards (like me). An artillery shell in the gut? Are you kidding me? What a McGuffin.

Two movie soundtracks I enjoyed recently: Syriana and Mysterious Skin.

Breaking the speed limit

When record-breaking snows are falling outside my window (26.9 inches), I yearn to be on a mountain somewhere boarding. Since that's not meant to be right now, the next best alternative is to make some hot chocolate and cozy up under a blanket to watch the Winter Olympics.

Maybe my favorite winter Olympic sport is the Alpine Downhill. Those guys are just configured differently than the rest of us, to be able to launch themselves down the mountain like human missiles over icy, hard-packed snow at upwards of 75mph. One mistake and it's into the Medevac with you. Those Spyder downhill suits are cool, a bit like high-end futuristic Spiderman Halloween costumes, ones that happen to cost $700. They're also appropriate, because it seems the downhillers are only hanging onto the mountain by some superpowered adhesion; so many times it seems they're at the verge of escape velocity, when they'll just suddenly separate from the mountain and soar off into the clouds.

Two things I'd like to see: (1) video from a helmet cam mounted on one of these guys on a downhill run, projected on a big screen, and (2) that technology that allows NBC to show each racer on screen simultaneously with a ghost image of the current leader, like they have in videogames. That would allow easier visual comparisons of lines and form. They used it once when comparing men's winner Deneriaz with silver medalist Walchhofer, but only after the race was over. In doing so, they showed that Walchhofer lost the race when he nearly failed to land on the Angel's jump (though his recovery was unbelievable).

24

The current lineup on TV feels light. Despite the 100+ channels on cable TV, not much catches my eye. My Name is Earl was funny for a few episodes, then quickly dropped off of my TiVo record list as the novelty wore off. The West Wing is in its final several episodes, and it's the right time to wrap that show up, but that leaves only the absurd Commander in Chief to fill the political slot in primetime. I've lost the stomach for any reality TV. Sportscenter today is a dim offspring of Sportscenter in its heyday, the Patrick-Olbermann years.

MI-5 (or Spooks) season 4 has finished airing in the UK, but it doesn't appear as if it will tour the U.S. on A&E anytime soon. The Sopranos next season hasn't begun. In this dead period, thank goodness for Veronica Mars and 24.

Jack Bauer is the Michael Jordan of counter terrorist agents. Talented, ruthless, and absolutely indomitable. He's also the paragon of U.S. productivity and efficiency, recalling the way the first two Jason Bourne movies crafted an American workaholic who is all work, no play, and exciting as hell.

24 is the antidote to Lost, the TV show on which nothing much happens (or rather, the show loops in on itself over and over until it digs a moat between my empathy and the characters on the show). On 24, you find out someone is a double agent on one episode, in the next episode Bauer has broken a few of the guy's fingers or has connected his earlobes to the nearest light fixture, and one episode after that the double crosser is dead or fired, or both. If Jack Bauer were among the passengers of Flight 815, Lost would be Found in no time.

Chloe and Edgar are like the clowns in a Cirque du Soleil show. They provide techie comic relief. Skilled at their jobs, socially awkward, they're the people Jack calls when he needs to get stuff done quickly, because the management will only get in the way, and they remind me of many talented programmers I've worked with in the past. Jack's the poster child for under-appreciated worker bees everywhere, fighting against the bumbling bureacracy above him, proving himself so effective that even his nervous, conservative managers can't help but unleash him. His higher-ups at CTU hover around speaker phones, wringing their hands, ordering Bauer into situations of extreme peril when all else fails.

24 is therapeutic not only because it enacts a fantasy of successful counter terrorism in a post 9/11 world but because of the way the U.S. security agencies bring down the bad guys. Bauer is a scalpel in the war against terrorism. Whereas our real president has to send tens of thousands of our soldiers into Iraq to engage in a quagmire of a war to ostensibly uproot a scattered and smaller force of terrorists, nothing is disturbed on 24 except Jack Bauer's personal life. Last season he even died for us, figuratively. He's the martyr in our televised dream of winning the war on terrorism.

There's a wonderful moment in every episode, just before the end of each hour, when the music rises in urgency, several plot threads climax simultaneously, and suddenly the screen splits into a two by two grid, images from each of the major plot threads hovering side by side like a Brady Bunch title card. It's analogous to a circus juggler holding up seven bowling pins and leaning against a unicycle. You know you're about to get your money's worth.

Super Bowl XL not so L

[I've been terrible about finishing posts recently. I have dozens of drafts, near-finished, sitting unpublished. I'm not sure why I've been so reluctant to publish recently. It's some variant of writer's block. I'll try to be better in the coming weeks.]

I thought the Super Bowl was boring. I can't remember any of the commercials. Of course, I was working on my laptop while the game was on, but at no point was I so riveted that I felt the need to give the game my full attention.

Part of the problem lies in the expectations. Two weeks of media buildup is just too much. Everyday, every sports page and every sports network had a gazillion features on the Super Bowl. It just doesn't warrant all that analysis. Cut out the extra week of media hype, and get the game on.

I'm hardly the first one to point this out, but the officiating was lousy, and that's a shame. That's what a lot of fans will remember, and not that Pittsburgh had to win three games on the road against a few of the top teams in the NFL just to get to the Super Bowl. The pass interference call on Darrell Jackson in the end zone, when he caught the touchdown, was ticky tack at best. He should've kept his arm down, of course, because even if he didn't tap safety Chris Hope, he would've scored that TD. In such a violent sport, it's disappointing when huge swings of momentum come down to such marginal offenses. Then, of course, there was the phantom hold on Sean Locklear, holding being perhaps the most nebulous call in football. Hasselbeck was called for a chop block later, but he was going for the tackle, as Madden and Michaels pointed out, so it was the wrong call. How ironic that in the age of instant replay, the officiating seems to have gotten worse, rather than better. The Steelers themselves were robbed in the game against the Colts, so though they may not sympathize, they should be able to empathize.

Beyond the officiating, many big-name players failed to live up to moment. Jerramy Stevens, after getting berated all week by the melodramatic Joey Porter all week, dropped about 27 balls that hit him right on the hands. On Stevens' only touchdown, the great Troy Polamalu failed to get over and cover. The most noise Joey Porter made all week was prior to the game; once the game began, he disappeared. I'm still not sure what he was all worked up about, but he came off all week as a caricature of an angry man. Ben Roethlisberger's TD run was iffy, at best. Football's strength is not in precision of measurement, and his TD exposed that. Who knows whether the bowl crossed the plane? With the exception of the long toss to Ward near the goal line, Roethlisberger was awful. That interception he threw to Herndon was terrible. The best Steeler QB was Antwaan Randle El. Shaun Alexander, NFL MVP, ran for a very quiet 95 yards. Jerome Bettis, the most media-friendly player all week, couldn't convert on two goal-line rushes, and fittingly retired right after the game. I've always enjoyed his game, that bruising running style, but he was in the twilight of his career this year.

Seattle played better for most of the game, but they looked like the keystone cops at the end of each half, trying to manage the clock. Tom Rouen, not a big-name player, kept punting the ball into the endzone instead of trying to pin the Steelers inside the 20 for some reason. Josh Brown, also no marquee name, missed two field goals indoors.

If some calls had gone their way, Seattle would've kept the game much closer, and who knows who would've won? But it's fitting, in some way, that Seattle got screwed by the refs. I lived there for seven years, long enough to absorb the long history of tough luck in Seattle sports. Griffey, the Big Unit, and finally A-Rod left town. As for the Seahawks? During pre-game introductions I could've sworn they were playing in Pittsburgh, the fans were just jam-packed with Steeler fans. Every time I looked up during the game, it seemed as if the NFL was running an ad with some Steeler cradling the trophy even though the game was still going on (by the way, that was an absurd ad campaign; I half expected to hear Bill Cowher sniffling and shouting at the trophy, "Damn it to hell I wish I could quit you!"). I think Seattle has one national sports championship, in basketball, and that probably came in the era of short shorts. Just a tough luck sports town.

Another problem with the Super Bowl, even more so than for regular season games, is that there are too many commercials and stoppages of play. The average NFL game is just way too long. After an extra point, they go to commercial. They come back for a kickoff, and then go back to commercial again. Why does there have to be a commercial after a kickoff? It's not as if the QB is on the return team. Just give the offense a bit longer than usual to got on the field after a kickoff, and stay with the game.

As has been mentioned in the press a lot this year, most of the tickets to the Super Bowl go to the rich and connected. The entire game feels sterile. It's always played indoors, in a dome. The field is immaculate, the fans are wealthy, well-behaved. The halftime show is always so unimpressive on television. The audio sounds faint, as if it's being recorded by a shotgun mike in a hot air balloon hovering over the stadium, and even the biggest rock star looks puny and ridiculous playing on a stage in the middle of a football field. The Super Bowl always manages to find some crazy fans to surround the stage at halftime, and the way they cheer and dance with such exaggerated enthusiasm to every song is frightening.

One last thing I'd love to see at the Super Bowl is coverage on more than one channel, with each channel carrying a different angle of the play. Only on replays do fans get to see some of the more revealing angles, and for a generation raised on the Madden video game, that's just too restricting. Many plays can be better appreciated from a wide shot behind the QB than from the usual birds eye sideline view that's the standard NFL viewing angle. Even the standard angle could be improved by pulling back a bit so fans can see more of the action in the secondary.

As a footnote to that request, I'd love to see the NFL offer a pay-per-view version of the game with microphones on the field of play. It will never happen, but I would kill to hear the trash talking on the field. Just what was Joey Porter yelling into Jerramy Stevens face after he dropped that last pass of the game? We'll never know, and that's a shame.

I did enjoy one thing about the Super Bowl, and that was the trick play pass from Randle El to Ward. On TV, it's always blindingly obvious when a receiver or running back means to throw. They don't run full speed, and their eyes are focused way downfield. Apparently, it's not so obvious to people in the secondary, because they bought the fake completely and left Ward right open, and Randle El put that ball on the money. More NFL teams should spend time designing a few good trick plays. The payoff when they work seems so high, and when they fail the loss is usually minimal.

Two more 'staches

Two more reasons 2005 was the year of the mustache.

His name is, well, you know. His mustache transformed him into a big TV star.

This guy's name is עמיר פרץ. His mustache promoted him to top dog of the Labor Party in Israel.

God, I wish I knew how to quit you!

2 Stars, 1 Slot

Because we're guys, my brothers and I are constantly bantering around movie lines. The quote du jour, useful in so many situations: "God, I wish I knew how to quit you!" Actually, you can just use the quote by itself, in any context, and it will crack us up 90% of the time. We haven't even seen Brokeback Mountain yet, though we have seen Brokeback Goldmine, and I've read the short story by Annie Proulx.

Did you see Reggie Bush on his touchdown run last night (rhetorical question)? The man accelerates like a sportbike. Awesome. Too bad USC didn't put him in at linebacker to shadow Vince Young, who ran all over USC like it was a Pop Warner game. That's the thing about college football (or even high school football): you can just put the ball in the hands of your best player by putting him at QB and letting him run with the ball on every other play, and it will usually work. My high school football team played against Donovan McNabb in the high school playoffs once, and that game reminded me of watching Young run all over USC last night. Young looked like he was bigger than every USC defender past the defensive line anyway. That camera shot from behind Young, standing triumphant and pointing his hands like six-shooters as a blizzard of multi-colored confetti rained down on him, was a beauty.

Jon Stewart to host the Oscars

News bit here. The Chris Rock experiment ends after just one year. Hosting the Oscars is probably the most unimportant but highly scrutinized hosting gig in the world.

Stewart typically focuses on politics, so I'm curious to see him turn his wit on Hollywood. Amidst all the tearful speeches and white-clenched knuckles around gold statues, a host who's willing to poke fun at the biz to balance out the extravagance of the whole affair is a really good thing. Stewart seems to fit the bill.

Trailer park

If you're a member of Netflix and a friend and I haven't added you to my Netflix friends list, drop me a note. I enjoy the quizzes about my friends' tastes.

***

Trailer (high def or std) for Mel Gibson's next directorial effort, Apocalypto, about the end of the Mayan civilization. Wow, I'm speechless. I really don't have anything to say about that.

***

I love when David Letterman gets serious. I wish I'd seen this segment, in which Letterman landed a few body blows on Bill O'Reilly (YouTube video clip). Letterman even displays a stronger grasp of logic than O'Reilly, who tries to exonerate the CIA's intelligence failure on Iraq by saying MI-6, Putin's intelligence agency, and the intelligence of Mubarak's agency in Egypt all made the same errors.

Letterman: "Well then that makes it all right?"

***

Jet Li's next and perhaps final martial arts movie: Fearless. Trailer under the Media link (click on Media and then click on the Trailer link below the Story button). His run of American movies was a disaster (as were those of most of the Hong Kong and China action stars and directors who sought out Hollywood), but when teamed with Chinese directors and focused on martial arts period pieces, his batting average is quite good. Ronny Yu and Yuen Wo Ping...I'm going to go see this.

Every year, I hear a rumor that Jet Li is going to retire and become a monk. I'm okay with that, as long as a band of evil martial artists attack his monastery, forcing him to come out of retirement to whup their butts. And, oh yeah, as long as movie cameras are rolling to capture every ass-kicking moment. If that happens, then I'm totally cool with that.

***

Teaser for Michael Mann's Miami Vice feature film starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. I'm not sure I wanted my fond memories of the television show to be tainted by a revisit with new actors (Farrell's Fu Manchu doesn't feel right, and "You understand the meaning of the word verboten? As in badness is happening right now." really doesn't go down easy), but I've not passed up a Michael Mann simmering testosterone hotpot in the past and I probably won't start now.

Back when I was in the fifth and sixth grade, sneaking over to a friend's house to watch an ep of Miami Vice was one of the great illicit joys in life. Yes, I led a sheltered youth.

Compound juices

For the longest time, I thought Seth Rogen, who played Ken on Freaks and Geeks, pulled a reverse Kirstie Alley and lost a ton of weight in order to play Logan Echolls on Veronica Mars. I finally paid attention during the credits and realized that Echolls is played by Jason Dohring. Same face, same voice - they look like brothers.

***

On so many airplane flights, they don't have apple juice or cranberry juice, but they do have cran-apple juice. SKU and space-saving decision, or the fingerprints of the powerful cran-apple lobby?

***

At the grocery store near Derek's apt in Chicago, Bartlett pears were selling for $0.59 a pound. I wanted to cry when I saw that. Those same pears sell for $2.49 a pound at Whole Foods in Union Square.

***

Sign up for the beta test of AllPeers, which looks like it will be a killer extension for Firefox.

***

Since we have such a big Brady Bunch-esque family, we instituted an annual Christmas gift exchange several years back. Every year I use the Excel random number function to assign everyone another member of the family to shop for, and all we have to do is purchase for that one person. It reduces the holiday shopping stress by at least one magnitude of order, and everyone receives something substantial. The days of receiving three pairs of socks, a book, and a $20 GC to each of four different stores is over.

I highly recommend the same for those who are driven bonkers by holiday shopping.

Always be cobbling

Always
Be
Cobbling
(thanks James)

If they just sent in Alec Baldwin, the city could have averted this transit strike.

ITSM

All the cool kids (web dorks) will be cranking out iTunes signatures today, thanks to Jason Freeman. iTSM cranks out a representative montage of song clips from your iTunes library based on criteria you select, like play count or rating. C'est chouette, hein? Makes a great "name as many tunes in this as possible" contest clip generator.

Background on the relationship between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and how Tolkien convinced Lewis to switch to only using initials for his first name. Wait--I meant how Tolkien was instrumental in converting Lewis to Christianity, their friendship, and their eventual falling out. Sounds like fodder for a movie, with Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Lewis and Ian McKellen as Tolkien.

The trailer for Sofia Coppola's Mario-Antoinette is out. Set to "Age of Consent," from the best New Order album, Power, Corruption, & Lies. The musical choice feels SCoppola-esque, non? When Sarah Flack came to speak to our class, she mentioned that she was in the midst of editing it, and we all thought, "I wish I was Sarah Flack." And I added, "I bet she has health insurance."

One of my favorite music videos of all time is Gondry's video for "Like a Rolling Stone" by the Stones. This short article discusses the making-of, and the video is part of the awesome DVD Director's Series, Vol. 3 - The Work of Director Michel Gondry. There's still controversy over who invented the image-warping virtual cinematography effect, but anecdotally it's most often referred to in reference to The Matrix effect or the Gap swing dancing ad (Quicktime). Nowadays, the effect is used in lots of ads--the Really Bend it Like Beckham title sequence is cool (one of the lower links on that page). Someday maybe they'll release a version of this interpolation software for use on your computer at home, and then the world will be flooded with hundreds of frozen time snowboard jump Quicktime movies.

Girls on Aslan! Kong with Ann Bust! SFW.

Error message from my most recent Google Search:

We're sorry...

... but we can't process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google

What that's all about?

X3

Phoenix! Brings back happy memories, even if the movie goes off and does its own thing, as the previous two have.

The best new board games of 2005 [at TMN]

Some suspicious (insider?) large bets at Sportsbook.com likely reveal who will win SI's Sportsperson of the Year and Time's Person of the Year [don't follow the link if you don't want the spoilers; via Marginal Revolution]. I don't think the Time's Person of the Year winner is much of a surprise, though.

The Dave Chappelle Show, minus Dave Chappelle. Chappelle stressed out? Can't that man afford all the ganja he can smoke now? Just kidding, man, we want you back. I tried desperately to get chosen to be in the audience during the filming of Block Party when I first moved to NY, but to no avail.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve

I showed up in L.A. last night. Like Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West, my arrival was announced first with the lonely, plaintive wail of a harmonica, and then, a rental car shuttle van exited frame left revealing me, standing curbside at LAX, my cowboy hat tipped 15 degrees south, leaning on my rollaway.

The teaser trailer for Shyamalan's next movie, Lady in the Water. I thought at some point that this was billed as a Splash remake, but that seems unlikely. Cinematography by everyone's favorite punch-drunk DP, Christopher Doyle.

I saw Antonioni's The Passenger at the New York Film Festival a month or so ago. As is my custom these days, I avoided reading anything about the movie beforehand, not even plot synposes, let alone any critic's reviews. Even without any reference points to bias my thinking, that last shot of the movie is recognizable as an instant classic, a recapitulation of the entire movie in one long, unbroken shot. I am curious now as to how it was done. The more of Nicholson's early work I see, the more I think he's earned every on-screen Lakers courtside cameo.

Last week while I was over at James and Angela's for dinner, Angela and I sat through a season 2 Laguna Beach marathon. What I've read is true: Laguna Beach out O.C's The O.C., which at any rate took only three seasons to jump the shark. What caught my eye was the way Laguna Beach is shot and edited: like a narrative. Though it's shot on video, it's shot in 24p on the legendary Panasonic AJ-SDX900 (with an occasional helping hand from the AG-DVX100A), and while video still doesn't look like film, this is about as close as it gets. The multi-camera setups, gamma curves, 24p, and the editing all convince you at times that the show is scripted. The AJ-SDX900 has an MSRP of $25,000, and that might just be cheap.

Speaking of the beach, it's 80 degrees here in Manhattan...Beach. I am thankful already.

An insightful article by James Surowiecki in this week's New Yorker about the differing lengths of the average work week in Europe and America. Because Americans work more, they spend more of their income on services like child care (nannies), housecleaning, and dining out. Europeans have shorter work weeks and more leisure, but this has stunted the growth of their service industry. Send us your poor, your huddled, your French maids, your Swedish au pairs.

From that same issue of The New Yorker, which I read on the plane flight over to L.A., an excerpt from a book review by Louis Menand (one of my favorite New Yorker columnists):

�The twenty-first century,� he suggests, �might yet belong to Europe.� Is this a credible expectation? A lot depends, of course, on what is meant by �belong.� From the provincial American point of view, the most striking change in the status of Europe is that it is no longer the place where Americans with intellectual, artistic, or just �life style� aspirations wish�or even pretend to wish�to be. Once, Europe was where all the new stuff seemed to be coming from. Then, some time in the nineteen-sixties, that stopped. Europe�s great cities are still fascinating to Americans, but the fascination is fundamentally touristic. They�re theme parks. Almost no one thinks that you can�t be a real writer or painter or sophisticated bon vivant unless you spend some time living in one of them. This is not a judgment on the splendors of American civilization; it�s just an observation about European civilization, and it bears on what sort of role in the world Europe will play during the rest of the century.

A bunwarming holiday story: Canon says that copy machine service calls increase 25% during the holidays because so many people photocopy their asses, cracking the glass (literally). In response to the super sizing of America, Canon has increased the thickness of its glass by an extra millimeter. Please, people, if you have to copy your bum, be safe and use a spotter.

To you and yours, a happy Thanksgiving. To crib from Jon Stewart, I hope you celebrate the traditional way: eat with some folks, and then take their land.

Superman reruns, or returns, and so does Johnny Cash, sort of

Hipster shirts for your dog, including a Von Bitch T.

***

The teaser trailer for Superman Returns came out last Thursday evening, attached to the latest Harry Potter movie. The few glimpses imply a remake of the Richard Donner Superman--we have the John Williams score, the same Jor-El voice, the same uniform and hairstyle, the same improbably penthouse apt. for Lois Lane on a journalist's salary, the same unknown actor donning the red underwear--but then I clicked on story and realized it really is supposed to be a return of sorts. Where did he go? The trailer didn't excite me enough to care.

How is it that Jor-El can continue to speak to Superman about present events. Is he like Obi-Wan Kenobi, part of the Force in some way? If that is so, and I were Clark, I'd definitely have him record my answering machine message. Marlon Brando as Jor-El: "Whom do you seek? [long pause] I jest. My one and only son, Kal-El, whom you know as Clark, is not present. But I have sent him to you, because you are a people of promise, a people who need merely a light to guide you, and so, if you should deign to leave your name and whereabouts, I shall send him to you, my one and only son, my [beep]"

***

Perhaps this is the real reason for the war in Iraq: to capture a new market for Fox's The Simpsons, or Al Shamshoon as it's translated in the Middle East. Homer is now Omar, and in deference to the Koran, forbidden items such as Duff's beer and bacon have been replaced. [Thx Arya]

***

The Movies101 selection last Wednesday was Walk the Line. When the title was announced, the woman behind me squealed with delight and kicked me in the back of my head. I was less than sanguine, not because of the sharp blow from her pointed heels, but because biopics, let alone those about musical luminaries, are not my cup of tea.

Prof. Brown prefaced the movie with a long disclaimer absolving the filmmakers of any blame for any liberties they took with Cash's life. He believes that in condensing a life into two hours, it's not only acceptable but necessary to abbreviate and remix a person's life so that it tells a good story (his primary requirement for a movie).

I agree that movies that have to condense a lot of material--biopics, adaptions of long novels--have to convey the spirit of a person without rehashing their entire lives. But to me that's not an excuse for gross simplification or omission. Many people watching biopics become so tied up in the illusion that they believe that what's depicted on screen is how that person actually was; that's a lot of responsibility. Most often, biopics seem to cross the boundaries of acceptable artistic license by cleaning up the protagonist and by sullying the antagonist. Hollywood believes we want our heros to sport a core of decency below any cinematic soot our enemies unambiguously dark, with black hat and sinister mustache translated into the appropriate time period.

I'm actually not an expert on Johnny Cash's life, so I can't comment on this movie's accuracy in depicting his life, or his spirit. Contrary to what many are saying, Joaquin Phoenix does not sound like Johnny Cash (who does, really?), but he channels the spirit of the music, sending his voice down into the earth, and that's what matters. Reese Witherspoon sparkles. I know nothing of June Carter, but if Witherspoon isn't channeling her spirit, then whoever she's playing is still fascinating. Both Phoenix and Witherspoon are shoo-ins for Best Actor/Actress Oscar nominations: these are the right types of roles, the right types of performances.

I'm less gung-ho about the movie itself. It still has the fairy-tale quality of a biopic, even if it covers some dark territory (though nothing dark enough to match the grit of Cash's music itself). If anyone ever does a biography of my life, I hope it's Hollywood, because then I know that I'll come off well.

***

When I was growing up, my mother used bajiao (eight feet), or the star anise, to make beef stew. I never could appreciate the flavor, only because every time I bit into one of those eight-legged stars while eating my mouth would be assaulted by that bitter licorice taste.

So it's a bit ironic to me that star anise is now one of the most coveted spices in the world because it provides the shikimic acid at the heart of Tamiflu.

***

The most popular recommendation I received for my cold (and thank you all for the unsolicited plugs for your favorite remedies) was Airborne. It's a preventative measure, to be taken as soon as you feel a cold coming on. It's a pill that combines lots of popular cold cures, from zinc and echinacea to vitamins C, E, and A. It's an aggregation strategy product, like putting lotion in Kleenex, or combining teeth whitening and tartar control substances in toothpaste.

I've never taken anything that's helped me to stave off a cold. If I feel the symptoms developing, the cold always follows. Some medications have helped me to combat the symptoms of a cold. Still, I'm willing to give anything a try, so I've added some Airborne to my medicine cabinet for a test next time.

***

I decided to shelve the turducken idea for Thanksgiving. In the end, it just sounded too gimmicky. Here's another aggregation product, but in the end the idea of combining the flavors of those three meats just didn't sound intriguing enough to drop $100.

A different product has caught my eye: the 72 oz. steak. As illustrated in an episode of The Simpsons and in John Candy's The Great Outdoors, attempting to devour an enormous slab of red meat in one sitting is a time-honored American tradition. Among the interesting trivia of this long-standing contest:

Frank Pastore, a professional pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, ate the complete steak dinner in a record that still stands today of just 9½ minutes back in May of 1987.

He failed to make the team in Spring Training and was out of baseball that same year.

***

Stream the new Ryan Adams album, 29.

***

Sometimes when I listen to Bush and his Administration speaking about the war in Iraq, I'm reminded of the concluding scenes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, when some of Aguirre's companions sit on the raft, driven mad by illness and hunger. Meanwhile, one by one they succumb to the arrows from near invisible enemy, Indians hiding in the forest to either side. An arrow pierces a man's leg.

"That is not an arrow," he says.

He sees the carcass of a ship, sitting high up in a tree.

"There is no ship," he says.

It's a beautiful sequence, because Herzog does not show most of the attacks. Aguirre simply finds one body after another, a poisonous arrow in the neck. Aguirre holds his daughter, and then the camera tilts down, and we see an arrow in her chest.

Exhale on the way up

I finally got the GRE out of the way last night. After you've been out in the real world for a while, standardized tests are even more of a pain in the ass than they were in high school or college. Thank goodness that's done. Now I have several hundred esoteric vocabulary words taking up room in my head, most of which will never see the light of print again.

Poking my head up above ground, I find a cold and rainy NY. Okay, back into the cave for another week or so of asceticism.

***

At long last, photo printing through Flickr, though only for folks in the U.S. for the time being.

The latest MP3 blog I'm digging: Out of 5. A different themed mix every week, 10 songs chosen by 10 different people. You can download each week's mix as a zip file, but there's no archive, so tune in weekly.

Jackie Chan's iTunes Music Store celebrity playlist reveals that Apple's music store offers more than a handful of Chinese tracks. Jackie on "Jia Xiang de Long Yan Shu": "A memorable song representing a noble mission saving sight." Huh?

The first and second seasons of The West Wing on DVD, for only $19.97 each, or 67% off. That's a pretty damn good deal for the two best seasons of what was, at the time, the best show on TV.

Among the top 10 forecasts from The Futurist in its Outlook 2005 was this strange one: "Worm shortage ahead. Increasing worldwide demand for fish is creating a shortage of worms to supply anglers and fish farmers." That's right, a worm shortage. You heard it there first.

The James Randi Educational Foundation offers a 1 million dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper conditions, evidence of paranormal or supernatural powers. No one has ever passed the preliminary tests. I can make one of every pair of my socks disappear gradually over time. I wonder if that qualifies. [from TMN]

Not on the bandwagon, or maybe I am

Jason Lee always seems to play a cantankerous sidekick in the movies, which is why his good-natured simpleton in My Name is Earl is such a pleasant surprise. Funny show.

I'm not one of those Cubs fans who wants the White Sox to lose. It's not a zero sum game fore baseball in Chicago, despite how many fans on both sides behave. I'd love to see Chicago with a national champion in its midst again. That's not to say a White Sox World Series victory will mean a fraction of what a Cubs World Series win would mean to me.

I love the version of the Jarhead trailer that is set to Kanye West's "Jesus Walks". It may be just a case of the music carrying the moving images, but when Jamie Foxx says "I...love...this...job" in cadence to the music, that's a beautiful thing. I've been editing army footage in class, and this trailer is driving me nuts because I'm overwhelmed by an inclination to set the footage to Kanye West.

Lincoln Burrows does escape from prison. I was walking back from class last week and he walked past me on the sidewalk. I couldn't place him except as the guy who had to escape from prison on that television show on Fox. How many degrees from fame are you when people recognize you from commercials for a show they've never seen because Fox blitzes all its programs with in-house promos?

Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 is rearing its head again in NYC.

To absolutely no one's surprise, some of the first content available for the video iPod is adult.

I'm not even sure exactly what Apple's new software Aperture does, and it costs $499, but already I want it. Apple seems to release something I want every other week now. I surrender, just take my Visa.

Life's so hectic right now, and I'm exhausted, so this is all you get, just a few brief thoughts and rabbit droppings.

The new iPod plays video

Video playback capability in the iPod has been rumored for years, and now it's finally a reality. At the same price as the previous generation of iPods, the new models, available in black and white, arrive just a short while after the Nano so as to allow Nano enough time to sell a gazillion units. You can check it the latest iPod in its new television ad featuring U2. I can't imagine watching an entire television show on such a tiny screen, but music videos? Perhaps. If you put the iPod in the dock, you can control it via the new Apple remote control, and the dock allows you to output composite video and RCA audio to a television/receiver/monitor.

You can purchase television shows from iTunes to sync to your iPod, or you can use Quicktime 7 Pro to export your own video content to iTunes for transfer to the iPod. I can see carrying around some footage of my nephews.

More interesting to me was to see what the pricing for video content would be. iTunes is offering music videos and individual episodes of TV shows like Lost for $1.99. The Lost Season 1 DVD, which contains 24 episodes, costs $38.99 from Amazon.com, or about $1.60 an episode. So the Apple TV show pricing feels about right, with a slight premium to the volume pricing of the DVD. You can't burn the shows to DVD or CD. You have to watch them on your computer or an iPod.

The episodes of Lost being offered are the three most recent ones, and future episodes will appear in iTunes a day after they're aired. Is there a window after which these won't be for sale, or will they be available in perpetuity? Also, how much does ABC keep of every $1.99 sale?

Meanwhile, DVR manufacturers are talking about a day not so far in the future when hard drive space is so cheap that DVRs will just tape every hour of TV so you can watch any show on demand, without programming the device. Enterprising geeks already trade television shows through their computer using Bittorrent. Someday soon, all media, from music to movies to television shows, will be available on demand. If the networks and studios band together, they might be the ones collecting on this traffic, but as slow as they move, it seems unlikely. With just five television shows offered in this latest rev of iTunes (Desperate Housewives and Night Stalker are the other two ABC offerings), ABC/Disney is the only studio testing these waters, and they're just dipping their toes in with caution. This meager offering is most certainly the choice of the networks, not of Apple.

Lost, indeed

Lost is really annoying me. Ever since the first episode, the show has relied on the mystery after mystery. But to date, it's proven to be all hook, no payoff.

The show is starting to feel like an exercise in stretching a taut story out even further, to the point where it either loses all elasticity or it just snaps back with a bang. The advertisements for the last episode of season one promised some answers, but all we got was a peek down a dark hatch, which is barely more than what had been shown the previous episode. The advertisements for the second episode of this season promised, "The fate of everyone on the island becomes clear." I must have missed something, because my magic 8-ball of a television set showed me an episode that felt a lot like "Reply hazy, please watch again next week to keep our ratings and advertising revenues sky high."

Stories fail to progress much from one episode to another. We're back in Locke's past in the latest episode, and we don't learn a whole lot more. I was beginning to think that the entire season would go by with Desmond still holding a gun to Locke's head while Jack and Desmond shouting at each other in that hallway.

Jack: "Put the gun down!"

Desmond: "No, you put the gun down, brother!"

Jack: "I said put the gun down!"

Desmond: "You first, brother!"

Jack: "Aaaaaaa! Put the damn gun down! Now!"

Desmond: "I will shoot this bald man in the head, brother! Brother! Brother! Brother!"

Few loose ends are ever tied up, except as they relate to minor details in the back stories of a few characters. The island remains a riddle. Every new character that promises an answer turns out to be another mystery; Desmond was no different, and Jack and John just let him run off. Ethan got shot. It's becoming predictable that every potential solution will be DOA; of course we knew Jack would hit the Enter key in the latest episode instead of seeing what would happen if the 108 minute timer ran out. Lost is a universe that's still expanding, with no signs of stopping to settle before contracting towards a finale. I've been down this disappointing road with shows like The X-Files before, and I'm not falling for it again.

Last season, show creators admitted that they had no idea where the story was going and that they were writing it as they went, altering the story based on which characters the audience responded to. That was a disastrous admission, because if the show's creators had no idea what all these mysteries tied up to, they probably didn't tie up to anything at all. All the time fans were devoting to every easter egg could be wasted time, and if someone did solve the mystery, the writers might just change the solution to maintain the element of surprise.

The show creators have changed their tune this year and have stuck to the party line: a master plan exists to tie it all together. With every new mystery, that seems more and more unlikely. Lost is like a juggler who keeps tossing balls high into the sky. At some point, the audience expects them to fall. If the juggler misses a few on the way down, or if only a few of them reappear again, the performance will be a letdown. Obsessive fans who analyze every detail and clue like forensic scientists are the among the toughest to please, and this show is cultivating a whole lot of them.

The other problem is that the more time spent with these characters, the more annoying they become. They're almost all hysterical, one drama queen after another. In episode 2 of this season, I felt trapped on that raft with Michael and Sawyer screaming at each other like punks on the playground. If I had been there, I would've jumped into the water and let the shark take me, or I would've grabbed the gun and shot them both.

If by the end of this season, more is left unanswered than answered, I'm not going to waste my time on another season. If you follow the incentives, things don't look hopeful. ABC wants the show to keep running as long as ratings are high. Besides the ad revenues, a show that lasts for three seasons or more can earn a mint in syndication (you need enough episodes to air a show in syndication 5 days a week). All the actors want the show to continue because it provides a steady paycheck that is only likely to rise with continued success. I don't know what J.J. Abrams wants, but I assume he is in no hurry to wrap things up.

One thing that might help is if some of the actors become antsy and engage the network in a premature salary showdown. Unwilling to bow to their demands, the network might force Abrams to start killing them off, tying up their storylines.

I love brain teasers of movies or television shows, and no one wants it all to tie together in a clever and coherent way more than I do. As we studied in editing class, one of the great things about The Sixth Sense was that in the climactic scene, when Bruce Willis's ring hits the floor, the movie actually flashes back to key scenes from earlier in the movie, just to show you they didn't cheat you, that you could have figured it out if you'd been paying attention. I'd love for Lost to work out so neatly, but the show has yet to earn that trust.

Everyone I know is a huge fan, so I'm in the minority here. Lost is losing me. Maybe this is all a huge meta joke, and the people being tested are not the people on the island but the viewers of the show. The finale, several years from now, will reveal that all the show's mysteries really didn't add up to any solution, that it was all an elaborate hoax to see how long we'd keep coming back before we lost interest.

Late afternoon with Conan O'Brien

Joannie was in town last week through Thursday for a conference. She got out Thursday afternoon, just in time to join me for lunch at Burger Joint and then a live taping of Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Burger Joint, in contrast to the fancy surroundings of Le Parker Meridien hotel lobby, is a greasy joint, a literal hole in the wall that seats about 25 people at the most. I'd eaten brunch at Norma's, just across the lobby, and never suspected Burger Joint was there, ensconced behind a curtain, the only indication of its presence being a neon burger sign. The decor consists of a couple random movie posters hung on faux-wood paneling. The place is as simple as its webpage/menu.

I've read that the lines at lunch can be brutal, as at my current favorite burger joint, Shake Shack. Joannie and I were there at about 1:30 in the afternoon and had to wait about fifteen minutes for our burgers and fries. The burger, a bit bigger than a single burger at Shake Shack, is straightforward and quite satisfying. Worth the wait. The fries, which come in a brown paper bag, were not. I'm still partial to the Double Shack Burger at Shake Shack, with its combination of sirloin and brisket, but Burger Joint is a worthy player in the mid-priced burger scene.

The old cliche is true: the camera adds ten pounds. In Conan's case, that's a good thing, because in person he's, in Joannie's words, "weird-looking." On television, the extra ten pounds add a bit of softness to an otherwise angular face. He's also as pale as an albino. On this day, he'd cut himself shaving just before going on air, so he wore a band-aid under his lips the entire show. A good comedian relishes the unanticipated, and in this case the band-aid provided a few minutes worth of jokes that Conan interspersed between pre-planned material.

The camera also adds about ten yards, apparently. It's shocking how cramped the studio (located at 30 Rockefeller Plaza) is in person. It seats about 200 people and consists of two halves. On the left is the curtain from which Conan and guests pop out, in front of which Conan does his monologue. At the near left corner sits the band, the Max Weinberg 7. The right half of the stage is Conan's desk, where he does most of the show. Use some really wide-angle lenses and shoot up close, and a tiny space can look enormous on television. If New Yorkers could only experience their closet-sized apartments through just such a lens, they wouldn't feel so cooped up.

The camera does not make you funnier, but that's not a problem for Conan. He's funny on TV, he's funny in person, and he's funny even when the cameras aren't rolling. After the warm-up comedian did his schtick and just before the taping began at 5:30pm, Conan popped out for a quick routine of his own. He speaks fast, and if and when a joke crashes, he recovers quickly, usually by admitting the joke is bad and using his honesty to draw a laugh, and then moves on before you can dwell on the moment.

His deft comic touch carried this show as the routines were of middling quality. The guests were Kim Cattrall, pushing her new book Kim Cattrall Sexual Intelligence, Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live, and David Rakoff, author of Don't Get Too Comfortable and sometimes a contributor to This American Life on NPR.

Tomorrow's technology today: fusion and nanotechnology, in consumable goods form

Banana Nutrament has an MP3 of David Bowie and Arcade Fire singing "Wake Up" together. Bowie vocals on one of my favorite songs of the last year...cool. I'm going to see Arcade Fire on Central Park Summerstage Thursday evening. It will be my first Central Park concert.

How efficient is the Red Cross? Is there a better charity to donate to when crises like Hurricane Katrina strike? It's the most linked to charity for donating to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, but someone expressed reservations about how efficiently the Red Cross channeled those funds to aiding victims. I don't know the answer, but I found this evaluation in which the Red Cross online earned a four star rating (out of four). Not sure how objective or accurate this evaluation is, though I was hoping more knowledgeable folks had already done the legwork on this. The president and CEO, Marsha Evans, does indeed make a really generous salary ($450K a year, according to this site), though overall program expenses seem reasonable at around 5.6% of revenues.

The new iPod Nano is cool (the ROKR is not), most people agree, but while I love my iPod(s), I really hope the quality control on this new edition is better than that on previous editions. I don't know anyone who's purchased an iPod who hasn't had to bring it in for repairs at some point. Ironically, my most reliable is my first one, the first generation iPod. My other iPod, the Shuffle, is temperamental, like a crazy girlfriend.

Stream the new Sigur Ros CD Takk

Yet another Godfather novel on tap for next year. Sounds like this one weaves the Corleone saga with the Kennedy assassination.

Xbox 360 has a launch date: Nov. 22

Gillette unveils yet another razor, the successor to the Mach 3: Fusion. This baby has an enhanced indicator lubristrip, 5 blades, and a precision trimmer blade for side burns and shaping your goatee.

Heather Havrilesky rates the fall television comedies. Those that rate well on her scale are Ricky Gervais's HBO series "Extras," Chris Rock's UPN series "Everybody Hates Chris," and, to a lesser degree, NBC's "My Name is Earl" and Fox's "Kitchen Confidential." "Extras" premieres Sunday, Sept 25, at 10:30pm. That's the one I'll be tuning into for sure, along with every other fanatical devotee of "The Office."

Red Sox outfielder Gape Kapler ruptures his Achilles tendon running around second base after a teammate hit a home run

Canon jumps into the HDV camcorder fray this week with the XL H1. It will cost $8999 and ship in November. Cool looking camcorder, but surprisingly, Canon won't offer 24P or 720P recording, only 1080i in HDV mode. Whether or not they believe 24P is useful or not, it's clear many users do, and the user is king. Panasonic will offer that in their HVX200, and they'll take market share because of it.

March of the lemmings

Wolfram Tones: Create music based on Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Download them as ring tones if you like. Many of them do sound like ring tones, actually. It reminds me of GarageBand with a random music generator. Not stuff I'd listen to all the time, but it's interesting to click on the various music genre buttons to see how much it resembles what you think of as country or r&b or classical. Someday perhaps there will be a Computer Idol competition. On a somewhat related note, the ideas in A New Kind of Science (NKS) seem to have relevance to the current evolution vs. intelligent design debate. NKS is online, so you can read, for example, this chapter: "Intelligence in the Universe."

The UCI, cycling's governing body, exonerates Lance Armstrong of doping charges and criticizes the accusers. L'Equipe to respond saturday. One thing is certain; this whole bitter fight is no help to the sport, as doping has once again, as in 1998.

Derek and Ken were in town for Labor Day Weekend. I always learn something when I spend time with those guys. One of my learnings this past weekend was that lemmings do not commit mass suicide. It's a myth perpetuated by a Disney documentary in which the filmmakers ran lemmings off of the side of a cliff to create the myth of their suicidal tendencies. Looks like that Disney documentary is available from Amazon.com on VHS. I'm not sure how the lemming myth took hold of me, but I suspect it was Gary Larson and his Far Side comics. I remember one depicted a whole flock of lemmings headed for the edge of a cliff to jump into the ocean, but one is shown wearing an inner tube with a sly grin. Another showed a family of lemmings in a car, headed off on vacation. The mother and father lemming sit in the front seat while two lemming children are in back. The mother is shown shouting at the kids, "Hey! I told you kids to knock it off back there!... or so help me I'll just take this car and drive it off the first cliff I come to!" I miss The Far Side. Larson went out on top.

Meet the F**kers (Windows Media), a Daily Show video clip that provides some satiric catharsis for any anger you might feel towards the Bush administration for their slow reactions to Hurricane Katrina. I hadn't seen the footage of Mike Myers' reaction to Kanye West's outburst until watching this clip, or Michael Brown's disastrous interviews, or the Larry King interview with Celine Dion. Memorable.

Colin Powell regrets his statements to the United Nations in February of 2003. I was aboard a ferry from the north island of New Zealand to the south island when he gave his testimony, and I watched it on CNN. Little did I know it would be downhill from there for someone who seemingly everyone thought would make a perfect presidential candidate.

I'm going to join Bill Simmons on the Bears bandwagon. Really good young defense, and if Kyle Orton surprises (and sometimes new starting QBs do) then perhaps they can win a bunch of low-scoring rumbles. It all depends on what that offense looks like after they take off the bandages.

Vincent Cerf is the new "Chief Internet evangelist" at Google. I look forward to hearing about this Internet thing. It sounds cool. As an aside, based on my years of working in the Internet biz, anyone who has "evangelist" in their job title has a cushy job.

The Nokia 8800 is one gorgeous cell phone. Though China isn't listed as one of the countries where you can buy one, I saw them in several stores in Beijing and Shanghai. The slider resistance is firm but silky smooth. I held it, fondled it, drooled over it, but left my credit card sheathed. $800, which is roughly what they were charging, is a lot to pay for technological sex appeal.

Takk

New album by Sigur Ros releases September 13th. Love them. This one's sung in actual Icelandic, instead of the made-up Hopelandic.

Peeved by the attacks by L'Equipe, Lance hints that he might come back and kick some butt in the Tour again next year. If so, he needs to make up his mind soon.

I've watched Felix Hernandez pitch a few times now. Awesome. Wicked stuff, especially that movement on his mid-90's heater. In 51 innings he's struck out 50 batters and walked only 10, giving up only 31 hits. Lefties are batting .129 against him. I hope he stays healthy and drug-free for many years.

Okay, so most of the last season of Six Feet Under left me cold. But the last few episodes, after you-know-who dies, were quite good. The last montage of scenes in the last episode moved me.

What happened to summer?

James and Angela and I ate at Angelica's Kitchen, an organic vegan restaurant, on Monday night, and we sat next to Morgan Spurlock and his girlfriend (wife?), both of Super Size Me fame. I guess he hasn't relapsed since his McDonald's days. In a way, perhaps it's healthy that he just gorged himself for a month on that stuff. He'll probably never have a hankering to eat a burger at McDonald's again. The best dish was Angela's tofu sandwich.

I like Google News, but I thought they were going to weight their news sources with a bias to more reputable, big-name sources. The biggest problem with Google News and Google News Alerts is all the random stories from small town papers, many being repeats of the AP Wire story. That problem still exists.

Oh dear lord do I miss DirecTV. This season they added an optional NFL Ticket SuperFan add-on package that includes over 100 games in HD, a Red Zone channel that switches automatically to any game where a team enters the opponent's red zone, a Game Mix channel where 8 games are broadcast on one screen, and a Short Cuts feature showing commercial-free replays of games in 30 minutes or less. It's like crack for a fantasy football player, and it's not available to me b/c I can't get line of sight to the DirecTV satellite from my apartment in Manhattan. When I was a DirecTV subscriber in Seattle, I didn't mind that DirecTV had basically a monopoly on showing all the NFL games, but now I'm ready to break into the roof of the nearest skyscraper to set up a satellite with a mile long run of cable to run through my front window. Time Warner Cable stinks.

More than 400 million watched the finale of "Super Girl", an American Idol-esque Chinese reality tv show. That's about the same number of people as live in the United States and Britain combined. The winner was Li Yu Chun, a tomboyish Sichuan native (a video clip of her final performance can be found here). The show only allowed female singers, and the official show title was "Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl Contest." The show was touted among Chinese youth as a triumph of democratic voting, as anyone could pay 1RMB (about $0.12) to vote via text message.

$ > time

Hurricane Katrina rips hole in Superdome roof
It sounds like something out of The Day After Tomorrow.

Money is more valuable than time
This according to a paper presented at the 2005 World Congress of the Econometric Society. The researchers found that people were much more generous with their time than their money.

A transcript of Lance Armstrong's appearance on Larry King Live
I still haven't read an account of what happened that makes it clear exactly what was tested, how it was verified, etc. All this medical testing jargon is just confusing. It's shocking how eager Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc is to sully the image of his event's most famous and most recent champion. Can you imagine David Stern leaping at the opportunity to publicly lambaste one of the NBA's star players? The Tour was already going to need a lift next year with Lance gone, and this is hardly the best way for Leblanc or L'Equipe to promote next year's race.

More and more couples are streaming music from iPods instead of hiring DJs for their weddings
One couple is cited as saying that they didn't think the DJ would have music from their favorite bands, like the Postal Service and the Shins. They then note that neither they nor their wedding guests are big dancers, which explains a lot.

Marat Safin drops out of the U.S. Open with a knee injury
Thus removing one of the few players with enough game to beat Federer. Safin is replaced by Bjorn Phau of Germany, who is not among those aforementioned players. Actually, on hard courts, maybe Safin is the only guy who could have stopped Federer.

An interview with Cameron Crowe about Elizabethtown
I am intensely curious about the already famous telephone conversation from this movie. Crowe mentions that Kirsten Dunst's character makes Orlando Bloom's character a "mixmap" - a map with musical cues. Very cool, like amateur museum podcasts, in a way. I can see posting a musical mixmap as a podcast to someone in another city. More from Crowe on Dunst:

And she's a huge music fan. I play music during takes and she's the first person I've worked with who'll go, "Um, I don't like that song." The camera will be rollin' and I'll play "Trouble Man" by Marvin Gaye, and she'll go, "Turn that Marvin Gaye music off! Put on some Rilo Kiley."

She stays up all night and downloads music from LimeWire. She needs to be arrested.

During the summer TV lull, I set my PVR to tape Six Feet Under so I could finally see what the hubbub was about. From what I'd read, I'd be catching the show after it had jumped the shark, and that might explain my cool reaction. Watching the first half of this last season was like listening to one's parents arguing; really shrill and overwrought. The show also relies too heavily on confrontations with ghosts and spirits, something The Sopranos deals in occasionally as well. That's always felt like a dramatic crutch to me, a way to cover ideas that can't otherwise be conveyed by acting and dialogue between real people. I can understand how fans of the show would stick it out through every last episode, though. I was the same way with The X-Files, a show that lurched on for several seasons after it had careened off the tracks.

Former Washington Post pop music critic David Segal laments the the loss of spontaneity in modern rock concerts

James Surowiecki weighs in on tipping in light of Thomas Keller's decision to abolish tipping at Per Se, replacing it with a fixed service charge

Needles in haystacks

Back from Washington, DC, arriving to a snowstorm-sized pile of links in my newsreader...

The World Series of Poker's main event is down to just 12 players
Just one pro remains, Mike "The Mouth" Matusow, in 8th place (profile of Matusow in the NYTimes). Phil Ivey, one of the last big names, finished in 20th place, while last year's champ, Greg Raymer, finished 25th. Kate Hudson's brother Oliver earned the dubious honor of being the first player to be knocked out of the tourney, and on his very first hand. He had a pair of 10's, raised pre-flop, and Sam Farha called. The flop came A-A-10, and both guys found all their money in the center of the table. Farha had A-10 and left Hudson almost famous, befitting Kate's brother.

Esquire Magazine's Sexiest Woman Alive will be revealed in the November issue, but the clues give it away: Jessica Biel

Matthew Barney and Björk collaborate on a film which debuts at a museum in Japan
From the article, a summary of the movie titled Drawing Restraint 9: "Björk and Barney arrive as guests on board the ship. During a storm, they marry each other in a mysterious ceremony, morph into whales and then swim off towards the Antarctic. In this dream-like story, nothing is really narrated." Yep, that sounds like a Barney/Björk movie. Björk also revealed that "she and Barney plan to sell their New York home and live on a houseboat." That also sounds like something they'd do.

UCLA grad student plays Russian roulette as performance art, terrifying his classmates
Huge hubbub ensues, including possible legal action and the retirement of two professors known for controversial performance art of their own, but in the end all returned to normal and the student received an A-minus for the course.

Simpsons-Family Guy feud
This is sure to end with Homer gunned down in front of Kwik-E-Mart by Stewie Griffin.

Mansquito! Attack of the Sabretooth! Dog Soldiers!

At the Tour de France, Bobby Julich is riding elliptically-shaped chainrings
These chainrings change the effective gear ratio as you pedal. In this case, Julich's O.Symetric Harmonic chainrings maximize the gear ratio when pedals are horizontal, when you can theoretically apply the most effective perpendicular force to the pedals. Then the gear ratio decreases for the bringing the pedal across the top and bottom of the pedal stroke. Shimano once made a similar pedal but abandoned it because it's so tricky to integrate with the front derailleur (the chain is moving up and down through the derailleur cage).

Morgan Freeman buys a pop-a-shot machine
Since Freeman narrates every other movie out there these days, this is timely. And funny.

Countdown of features in the upcoming Movable Type 3.2

The bizarre and sometimes disturbing world of bioart

Everything, and I mean everything, you ever wanted to know about the male hug
Mine is a hug-happy family.

Trump tries on some bad idea jeans

We got ourselves a bike race

Thrilling stage in the Tour de France today. The finishing climb was a category 2, but only because it was near the finish of the stage. It wasn't that steep, maybe 4% or 5%, but it was long, and finishing climbs like that, especially early in the Tour de France, can make for exciting finishes because more riders can hang around than on the Alpine or Pyrenean climbs that can kick up into the 10-12% slope range (that's not to say I'm not amazed that professionals can turn a big chainring and crank up a mountain like the Col de la Schlucht at around 25 mph; that's just sick).

Everyone knew Vino would attack, but few expected the following:

• Team Discovery Channel didn't have anyone strong enough to hang with the late attacks, leaving Armstrong isolated with his chief rivals on the final climb. Lance was clearly disappointed in his team after the stage, though he tried to be respectful, saying perhaps his team had been worked too hard. But Brunyeel and Armstrong aren't going to sleep as easy tonight, and no one will feel worse than Lance's teammates about not being there for him at the end. I don't think Brunyeel or Armstrong will chew the team out tonight. Everyone saw what happened and knows what they have to do. Still, all the confidence and psychological advantage Team Discovery earned in the prologue and team trial evaporated on the Col de la Schlucht today.
• Andreas Kloden, who'd had a very disappointing early race season, looked super strong in finishing second, and that was a finish that even a photo couldn't clarify.
• Pieter Weening wins the stage with after attacking on the last third of the stage. His winning attack was particularly impressive given how high the pace has been and how many A-listers were attacking on that final climb. Great day for Rabobank, with Rasmussen donning the polkadot jersey. Somewhere, the Dutch crazies were partying on some mountaintop. They may not have been seeing their self-composed can-can tune "Boogerd is the Best," but Weening has two syllables and fits in nicely. "Weening iiiiiiiiiis, the best-he-is-the-best. Weening iiiiiiiiis the best-he-is-the-best. Wee ning is the best-he-is-the-best. Wee-ning is the best-he-is-the-best." I'm not kidding, those are the lyrics. It's much more exciting when you're dancing in your bike cleats and singing it with several hundred Dutch youths dressed in cow suits on the side of the road on Alpe D'Huez.

I can only imagine what Brunyeel was shouting into the team 2-way radio on the final climb when Salvodelli became the last team member to drop off, leaving Lance alone.

"C'mon boys, we can't leave Lance ah-lone. Dis ees vuh-ry baaad. C'mon Paolo! C'mon Popo! Venga venga venga! C'mon guys! We can't leave Lance like this. Get up to the front, boys!"

If Kloden really is regaining his from from last year, then they can launch him, Vino, and Ullrich against Armstrong in alternating waves, as they did today. As soon as Lance covered Vino's second attack, he didn't have a chance to catch his breath before Kloden launched off the front. If Armstrong gets isolated again, things could get ugly. Toss in Landis, Leipheimer, and Basso, and Armstrong may not have one restful day in the mountains. Also, we have yet to hear from Heras and Mayo, and I'm anticipating some attacks from them in the Alps and Pyrenees. If Lance has any chinks in his form, he's unlikely to be able to hide them on a stage. Brunyeel will have to be in the team car doing lots of calculations to decide which attacks Lance should cover; depending on who has opened up which gaps, and depending on how much time he and Lance think he'll take from them on the final individual time trial, Lance can decide when to accelerate and when to sit tight. Ooh it's going to be a doozy of a Tour.

Armstrong's face looks particularly gaunt this year. Today he wasn't particularly strong, but at the end of the day he lost no time to any serious GC contenders, and that's with T-Mobile burning their three top guys pretty hard on a stage that wasn't decisive. Lance wasn't as explosive relative to the other riders as he usually is, in part because the slope was so gentle, but he still covered all the key attacks and finished with the same time as every rider that mattered.

Team Discovery Channel is more suited for staying around Lance on steeper climbs, and I suspect they'll bounce back when the roads rise up more quickly. It's been an interesting Tour thus far, with fortunes changing dramatically from one day to the next. One day Zabriskie is in yellow jersey, then a few days later he's almost dead last. One day Team Discovery Channel looks like they'll dominate, then the next day they seem to be the most vulnerable of the major teams. Early in the Tour, Boonen seemed like the next Petacchi, then a crash and a few more stages later, Robbie McEwen seems like the sprinter to beat.

A riders fortunes can change in one day on the mountains. Eddy Mercx, the greatest cyclist ever, seemed destined to win his sixth Tour. Then, on the ride up to the mountaintop finish at Pra-Loup, he cracked, and just like that it was over for him. The pace has been unbelievably high in the Tour this year. It's the fastest Tour in history thus far, and so I expect some riders to crack suddenly over the next two weeks. It's always difficult to predict who those will be, but it will happen.

Can't wait for tomorrow's stage, and in about half an hour, correction, in about half a minute, I guess it will be on television. Might as well stay up at this point and catch the first half, though I'll be on a bus headed to DC during the stage conclusion. I'll have to catch the replay in the evening.

Tidbits

Cory Doctorow to virtually sign a virtual edition of his latest novel in Second Life

Download some live tracks by The Flaming Lips for free

***

In the Tour de France, you often hear how the Discovery Channel Team and Lance don't mind if another team takes the yellow jersey because then that other team will have to defend the jersey. What that means is that the team which has the yellow jersey rider will drive the peloton to chase down breakaways in order to keep their man in the yellow jersey for as many days as possible, even if that man has no chance of winning the Tour. This is one of the odd things about the Tour, where just being a leader for part of the race is worth fighting for. Each stage of the Tour is a mini race in itself. I don't believe you make any money for winning a stage, but the economic incentive often cited as the reason for contending for these intermediate goals is to garner more exposure for your sponsor, whether on the podium accepting the yellow jersey or in newspaper articles or on television in a breakaway. I'm skeptical that the math works out--team sponsors seem to go bankrupt every few years in cycling, but it does create dozens of stories within the overall drama that is race to win the Tour.

***

Speaking of cycling, Vinokourov went high risk-high reward today and attacked late on rain-slicked roads to take second place and make up 19 seconds on Armstrong with a 7 second gap and the 12 second time bonus. Vino has to be seen as Armstrong's chief competitor, chiefly because he's not intimidated by anyone and he's always attacking, something that can't be said of Ullrich or Beloki in years past. Vino will likely lose at least a minute to Armstrong in the last individual time trial so you know he'll be attacking in the mountains. Two alpha dogs butting heads will make for some exciting stages, especially if Ullrich becomes Vino's sidekick. Some have faulted Vino for taking too great a risk for such a short time gain, but I believe Vino recognizes he has to take risks to even have a chance to topple Armstrong. You can't sit back and wait for Armstrong to crack; the odds of that are as slim as the new Lindsay Lohan.

***

Say what you will about Tom Cruise, and many people have called him crazy, but he is acting with the passion of a true believer. That is, if he really does believe that Brooke Shields is hurting herself with whatever drugs she's taking, and if he really does believe that Scientology offers a better way out for her and others sharing her condition, then his behavior is consistent with those beliefs. Few are the people who tout their beliefs and act on them with equal ardor. That's not to say he's necessarily right, and I'm no expert on the topic, but he's at least consistent. And his interview with Matt Lauer was a refreshing change from the usual ass-kissing puff pieces that are celebrity interviews.

***

I was reading Chuck Klosterman's new novel Killing Yourself to Live : 85% of a True Story yesterday, and in it he opines that Radiohead's Kid A feels as if it predicted 9/11 in a way. He goes on to describe what he thinks each track signifies. Curious, I popped the CD in. Exhausted, I dozed in and out for most of the album. The next morning, my clock alarm radio woke me not with music but with the absence of music. Two serious voices gave updates on a developing situation in London, and the variance from the usual music caught the attention of my subconscious. It was that same divergence from my clock radio's usual morning music alarm that woke me the morning of 9/11.

I had a class in SoHo this aftenoon and took the subway. I wasn't sure if it was the London attack that had scared people off, but only one other person was in my subway car on the ride down.

***

The kickball team I'm on won its sixth game yesterday when the other team failed to show on a rainy day while the bare minimum eight of us trekked all the way up to Riverside Park in the storm. It's the second or third game we've won via forfeit. Our chief skill is attendance.

***

Boxing fans who missed it the first time around will want to set their TiVo for Showtime on Aug. 6 when they televise a replay of the epic Diego Corrales-Jose Castillo slugfest before the Jeff Lacy Robin Reid fight. They put their heads together from the opening bell and just pounded on each other from close quarters for 10 rounds. Nothing seemed to slow either of them down. By the eighth round, Corrales' left eye was a slit and Castillo's left eye was streaming blood. Each fighter was so possessed that even several low blows seemed to have no effect. In the eighth round, Castillo hit Corrales so hard that Corrales's mouthpiece flew out, but he kept fighting and landed a left that wobbled Castillo. Both fighters seemed indefatigable, throwing punches as if they were attached to button-mashing videogame players.

Then, in round 10, Castillo knocked out Corrales with a massive left hook to the chin. Corrales got back up but looked dazed, and Castillo proceeded to knock him down again with another left hook. Corrales stood up just on the ten count and said he was okay, but the ref fined him a point for excessive spitting out of his mouthpiece (a delaying tactic). He looked done, but then he proceeded to rise from the dead in one of the most amazing comebacks I've ever seen, pinning Castillo against the ropes and pounding his head like a pinata. Only the ropes seemed to be holding Castillo upright and the ref stepped in and stopped the fight.

Just a magnificent, brutal fight, as close to a modern day gladiator battle as I've ever seen. I may need to subscribe to Showtime again; all the best fights this year were on Showtime, not HBO, and a rematch is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 8 though nothing's been signed yet.

It's Tour time, baby!

Ever since 1999, July has meant one thing in my mind: Lance in France. The 2005 Tour de France kicks off Saturday morning, and I'm all geeked up. One thing, though, does have me down. I'm not headed over to watch the Tour in person for the first time in four years. The cost proved prohibitive this time around, and I'm going to ache as much as if I had to work through the Christmas holiday season. There's nothing like being in France and watching the Tour in person. It's the type of vacation I could do every year for the rest of my life, and for a while I thought I just might. Everyone should try it at least once.

I'll miss riding through the beautiful sun-drenched French countryside, hundreds of thousands sunflowers swaying in the wind; suffering up the gorgeous but soaring Alps as if climbing into the azure skies; inching up the steep and unforgiving Pyrenees in sweet agony; eliciting a few cheers of my own from spectators from all over the world, camped out on the roadside waiting for the Tour to pass by; burning so many calories that no amount of delicious French food can keep me from dropping a few pounds; struggling to make sense of sweat-drenched paper maps and unmarked backcountry roads; French cheese and bread; the thrumming bass of helicopter blades from further on down the mountain, portending the arrival of the head of the peloton; the sound of several hundred thousand fans, worked up to a frenzy; partying with crazy Dutch contingent on a mountaintop finish (so generous the past two years with their satellite television, their beer, their music); the invigorating chaos; feeling the breeze from these god-like cyclists screaming by at 35 mph just a foot or two from my face; les femmes françaises; discussing cycling with people who've followed the sport nearly all their lives, who know cycling like few people in the American public do; Paris.

I wish I could be there to watch Lance's last Tour. As those of you close to me know, I feel a particular kinship with Armstrong. I lost my mother and grandmother to cancer in 1998, the year Armstrong came back from cancer to prepare for the Tour. My left knee exploded (just about) that same year, that awful year, and after surgery my physical therapist prescribed cycling, a low-impact way to regain mobility in my knee and strength in my legs. In 1999, when Lance Armstrong shocked the cycling world by winning his first Tour de France, I purchased a road bike and became a cycling junkie. In 2000 I completed the Seattle to Portland (STP) one-day ride with a group of friends. In 2001 I got a taste of what it means to suffer in the mountains during the Ride Around Mount Rainier in One Day (RAMROD).

In 2002 I really learned what it meant to suffer in the mountains during a Tour de France cycling camp led by Lance Armstrong's coach, Chris Carmichael. Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux in 1967, and under a scorching French sun I thought I might join him. In 2003, on my second tour of duty in the south of France, Lance survived all sorts of calamities to tie the record of five Tour victories. And last year, my most recent trip to France, Lance broke that record.

Though American television has carried very little of Lance's race season, I've followed his performances online. He looked strong in the Dauphiné Libéré, and he looks to be peaking at just the right time. Meanwhile, Jan Ullrich looks just a bit heavy and slow, as if he'll have to ride himself into shape during the Tour yet again. Some things never change.

I don't see any reason why Lance shouldn't be favored to win again. He has Tour preparation and his team dynamics down to a science. Despite living at the eye of a hurricane of publicity and fame, he has an iron grip on every variable in his control.

The team he's bringing to the Tour de France is, on paper, the best cycling stage team ever. The new ICU rules requiring teams to enter all the Grand Tours actually consolidated power with the top teams, and Discovery Channel Cycling is now the strongest team in the world. Among those shepherding Lance around the outside of France:

• Jose Azevedo, sixth in the Tour in 2002 and fifth in the Tour last year.
• Manuel Beltran, three time top-10 finisher in the Vuelta.
• George Hincapie, Lance's faithful lieutenant, someone who's evolved into the ultimate domestique. Also the guy who's lived every male cyclist's dream by hooking up with one of the Tour de France podium girls.
• Yaroslav Popovych, perhaps the best of the rising young stars in the cycling world and Lance's future successor as Discovery Channel team leader.
• Jose Luis Rubiera, four time top-10 finisher at the Vuelta and Giro.
• Paolo Savoldelli, winner of the Giro in 2002 and this year!

If they stay healthy, they'll be a juggernaut.

At this stage in his career Lance would not ride the Tour de France unless he felt he could and would win. The athlete Lance reminds me of most is Michael Jordan, and not just because they both have their own buildings at Nike HQ. Both are hyper competitive, brash and magnificently arrogant, and both maximize their freakish genetic athletic gifts with an unmatched work ethic. Both say the right things to the press, managing their public images with meticulous care, yet ask any of their opponents and they'll tell you that Lance and Michael are vicious, ruthless killers. I remember reading an article by Jason Williams (the one who shot someone on his estate) in which Williams described Michael as a "hard, hard man," that if you crossed Mike on the court he'd track you down and utter, "I'll f***ing break you" in what I can only imagine was a voice from hell. Mike even cracked many a teammate in practice, before they'd even made it into an actual game. One of the images of Michael I'll always remember is his face-off with Xavier McDaniel in the 1992 Eastern Finals. The Knicks had been beating up on the Bulls all series, and the X-Man had finally crossed a line. Michael locked foreheads with McDaniel, shooting him a look of raw fury and uttering what I doubt was the Lord's prayer. Then Jordan went out and led the Bulls to a Game 7 rout.

Various stories of how Lance and Mike gain a psychological edge on their chief competitors circulate among followers of the sport like myths. Lance calling his competitors during the offseason from mountainside climbs and asking them if they knew where he was. Michael trash-talking opponents like Charles Barkley during offseason rounds of golf, probing for any sense of doubt or weakness. Jeff Van Gundy called Michael out on it one season in the press, and the next time the Bulls played the Knicks, a game I was at, Jordan dropped 51 on the Knicks and then cussed Van Gundy out from the court after points 50 and 51 dropped through the net.

They both also demand absolute loyalty from those around them. Slip up once and you'll go from the inner circle to the doghouse just like that, and that doghouse is like a max security prison. Pippen was the perfect teammate for Jordan because he didn't want to be the alpha dog. Hincapie is the perfect sidekick for Lance because for three weeks each July he has no thought other than to put and keep Lance in yellow. Lance's teammates who've left for other teams--Kevin Livingston, Roberto Heras, Floyd Landis--well, let's just say Michael Corleone telling Fredo, "You're dead to me now" comes to mind. One can't shake the sense that even those loyal to Michael or Lance are scared of them. Tiger Woods is the same way, as his former caddy will attest. At this year's Tour of Georgia, when Lance Armstrong helped lead out teammate Tom Danielson to the overall race lead over ex-teammate Floyd Landis on the brutal Brasstown Bald climb, Lance pointed at Landis and then the race clock as they crossed the finish, as if to point out that Floyd could have had the race lead if he'd just stayed by Lance's side.

Even if they didn't have enemies, I suspect Lance and Michael would conjure some up. Both athletes have origin stories for their greatness, almost like comic book heroes. Peter Parker became Spiderman when bitten by a radioactive spider and when his neglect of a criminal led to his Uncle Ben's death. Michael Jordan set out to prove the world wrong when cut from his high school basketball team. Lance Armstrong carries an eternal chip on his shoulder because his father abandoned he and his mother to grow up in a rough neighborhood in Dallas. Later, the cancer that nearly killed him actually transformed him into a champion. Mentally, he had cheated death, and no human competitor could ever intimidate him. He'd live life to the fullest because he had been given a second chance. Physically, it didn't sap his power but did shave some ten or fifteen pounds off his frame, turning him into a that rare combination: a cyclist who could climb and time trial. Who knows if these events have any significance at all? The stories may be passed around more for the rest of us than for Lance or Michael.

Both elevated their sports in unique ways. Jordan, as documented in Playing for Keeps by David Halberstam, Jordan was a once in a lifetime player on the court and off the court, transcending his country, sport, and race to become an international mega celebrity. The NBA is still searching for Jordan's successor as its international mega-ambassador. Armstrong's first Tour win came a year after international cycling seemed ready to collapse under a series of drug scandals. Though cycling still has the drug-use sword of Damocles hanging over it, Armstrong has stayed clean and remained the sport's top story. Having beat cancer, Armstrong is more than just a cyclist; he's an living miracle, an all-purpose motivational speaker, and a deity in the cancer survivor community. Though not everyone loves to see one person dominate a sport year after year, having a single lightning rod for the fan's adoration and attention or hatred allows mythologies and legends to sprout. The NBA hasn't been the same draw since Jordan retired from the Bulls, and I highly doubt the Tour de France will see the same number of American spectators in 2006 that it did in 2004.

Lance's toughest competitors in the 2005 Tour? Himself and bad luck. He's definitely older, not quite as dominant in the time trials on mountains as he once was. For a professional cyclist he's an old man at 34. In a three week stage race, when only minutes or seconds separate the top several riders after over 90 hours on the road, any number of mishaps can cost a rider the race. A crash, an injury, one bad day on a mountain, food poisoning, an overzealous fan, a political protester, mechanical failure.

After that, his toughest competitors, as named by Johan Brunyeel, will be Jan Ullrich, Alexandre Vinokourov, Ivan Basso. Ullrich is a great time trialist but isn't explosive on climbs, and he's like Patrick Ewing or Karl Malone to Armstrong's Michael Jordan: perhaps just not vicious or cold-blooded enough to deliver the winning blow. Vino is a brave, aggressive rider, but not a great time trialist, and he'll be marked the whole race through this time around. Basso hung with Armstrong on two mountaintop finishes last year, but his time trialing isn't in that topmost echelon. Levi Leipheimer, and old teammate of Armstrong's, is also a strong time trialist and climber, but his team may not be strong enough to carry him through. None of Armstrong's former teammates has ever really damaged Lance in the Tour, and there may be a psychological barrier at play there.

Two ways to get pumped for the Tour this week: read Lance Armstrong's War by Daniel Coyle and watch the Lance Week programming on the Discovery Channel family of cable networks. Sang first alerted me to Coyle's book (his cousin used to date Coyle), and then I spotted a few rave reviews in the press. I'm a sucker for any non-fiction Lance Armstrong and/or cycling-related book, and the details at the book's official website sealed the deal. In particular, don't miss the Q&A with Coyle about Lance. Coyle moved to Europe and followed Lance for the year of his sixth Tour de France win, living my dream life, and in doing so, Coyle appears to have captured a more intimate portrait of the man. Most people who've been around cycling for many years know that Lance can be brash in a Texas-sized way, and Coyle donned his wings for a flyby of the sun. This quote from a Velonews interview with Coyle is revealing: "he is a good hero for my 10-year old son, but I wouldn't necessarily want him to date my daughter." Sounds like Michael Jordan, no?

I just received my review copy of the book today, and it will be a miracle if I don't devour it in the next few days.

Tour coverage in the U.S. will be on OLNTV, as usual, live from 8:30 to 11:30am EST daily, with several replays on into the evening. In most years, the Prologue doesn't provide much separation among the race contenders. This year, however, the Tour begins with a medium length time trial rather than the more customary short prologue time trial. This will limit the top finishers to true time trialers, of which Lance and Ullrich are two of the best, and it might provide significant separation among the contenders right away. Santiago Botero and Michael Rogers are also excellent time trialists, and Lance's former teammates Leipheimer and Floyd Landis could be near the top as well.

Follow daily updates on the Tour online at Velonews. Find collections of links at the Tour de France blog, which I'll be checking out this year for the first time and through which I discovered this gorgeous infographic on Lance (PDF). Read commentary at The Paceline and Team Discovery Channel websites. And this year Sirius is offering a daily Lance in France podcast during the Tour; iTunes 4.9 makes it a cinch to subscribe.

And to ease the blogging load on myself so I can keep up with the Tour, I'll try to post bits from my personal journal from my first visit to the Tour de France in 2002.

@&*#!

How much cussing is there in Deadwood? A lot (audio, not for @#$%&*-ing sensitive ears).

Since Michael Lewis published Moneyball, have major league front offices corrected for the undervaluation of on base percentage (OBP)? These professors suggest they have, due in part to the ascent of some members of the Oakland A's front office to General Manager positions elsewhere. Valuation of OBP took a huge jump up in 2004, leaping above the valuation of slugging percentage (SLG) for the first time.

New York Metro profile of Jean-Georges

Upcoming videogames: The Warriors, and The Godfather
Videogames borrow from movies, movies borrow from videogames. Paramou