Marge's boob job

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The Simpsons were in rare form tonight. Marge got an inadvertent boob job and everyone started treating her extra special. She's driving back from the plastic surgery clinic with Maggie in the passenger seat, and Who Let the Dogs Out is playing on the radio. And next week, the Simpsons spoof The Osbournes and reality TV.
BTW, the best new TV title sequence music is from Michael Mann's Robbery Homicide Division.
I've been exhausted all weekend. It doesn't take much to throw off my sleep cycle anymore, and it takes a lot to get it back. Still, I did manage to catch up with lots of people this weekend as I slowly crawl out of hermit status.

Holiday shopper's guide Part 1

Some ideas for things to get those special people in your life this holiday season, because being a classy gift-giver requires simply some sage guidance and a Visa. Some of this I've read about, some is just personal opinion. I think all this stuff is available online--I refuse to fight for holiday parking anymore and neither should you. Spend that time with those special people instead.
What do you all suggest as good gifts for this holiday season? Help educate so that we all end up with stuff that doesn't need to be returned, which means driving to a store, depleting fossil fuels and polluting the environment.
Ah, I can't wait for the holidays, when the mouths of my friends and family are filled with pretty lies and their arms bear gifts.

What's better

That's a question, not a statement. I was glad to see Large Marge (scary trucker lady face from Pee Wee's Big Adventure) kicking Kroger's butt.

Sniff, sniff--"Hey, do you smell something burning?"

What does it say about bloggers and their sense of humor that 3 of the top 10 most linked to stories in weblogs today were about this guy who burned his, umm, member with a laptop. Let me note that I write this on my laptop which is resting on my lap, but with a protective piece of cardboard to separate titanium from skin.

Oops Part I

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Sleep deprivation began catching up with me today at the office, so I downed two cans of Red Bull. I'd never really tried it before except for once at a rave, and it didn't seem to affect me then. I'd seen lots of engineers around the office sipping it in meetings, and given the cloudy, addled state of my mind and my general drowsiness I decided I needed the chemical boost.
Oops.
I don't take a lot of caffeine, and those two cans of Red Bull gave me heart palpitations. I nearly had a panic attack during a meeting. I'm not joking. My arms were shaking, my mind was racing, my heart was pounding, and I almost snapped my pen in two. Right now it's about 2 in the morning and my body is still at Defcon 1.
No more Red Bull, no coffee, no soda, no caffeine. As Yoda would say, "Bad things, it does." Keeps you awake, sure, but it's hard to be productive when you're vibrating like a helium molecule in heat.

Oops Part II

I just realized I haven't been archiving my old movie reviews. I overwrote most of them and they're lost forever. Humph.
Someday, when I'm not working, perhaps I can go back and recall what I thought about all of them. Pauline Kael claimed she never had to watch a movie a second time--her first impressions were chiseled into her memory. I dare not claim to be a fraction the critic nor to possess a sliver of the memory of a Pauline Kael, but my opinions of movies tend to be fairly constant after setting in.

ESPN Commercials

Some of ESPN's Sportscenter commercials are back online for a while thanks to T-Mobile. They never really get old, do they? I mean seriously, I've tested this. I've watched the same commercial over and over again for about 57 times, and I still laugh my ass off every time. Every time! When Kenny Mayne slides down on the office carpet and strikes a pose at the end of the commercial where he scores a goal on Alexei Lalas in foosball, I start convulsing and snorting things out my nose. It's got to be something hard-wired in the male brain, like a reflex.
"So Karl started drinking a little bit, and then he was going on and on about he and Mrs. Met. Nasty stuff, I tell you. Nasty stuff."

Doonesbury

Last week's Doonesbury was all about blogging. I liked this one best.

Hostage

The new BMW Film Hostage, directed by John Woo, is available for download. Clive Owen returns to play the poker-faced Driver for hire with a heart of gold and a stable of BMWs at his beck and call. As with all Woo movies, you get some closeups of bullets and guns which come through nicely if you download the 104Mb version of the short movie.
My primary complaint: men should not drive roadsters.

The Marshall Doctrine

Baseball Prospectus recently ran a fascinating two part interview (Part 1 Part 2) with pitching coach and former major league pitching star Mike Marshall. He has a website where he lays out some of his unconventional theories. Chapter 28, on pitch selection, is fascinating if you're a baseball fan. An excerpt:
1. Pitchers should throw all pitches for 66.7% strikes.
2. Pitchers should end 75% of at bats within three pitches.
3. Pitchers should end 100% of at bats within five pitches.
4. Pitchers should pitch equally well to both sides of home plates.
5. Pitchers should use the best six pitch sequences with which to achieve the lowest batting averages and on base percentages for the four types of hitters.
"To hitters who hold their bats vertically, pitchers should throw four seam fastballs. To hitters who hold their bats horizontally, pitchers should throw two seam fastballs. To hitters whose rear foot is close to home plate, pitchers should throw them fastballs away. To hitters whose rear foot is away from home plate, pitchers should throw fastballs inside. However, because all hitters want to hit fastballs, pitchers have to convince them that they do not need to throw fastballs."
I'm very curious to see how you throw what Marshall calls a pronation curve. Pronation of the arm during a throwing motion has applications in lots of sports. When a tennis coach finally taught me how to pronate on my serve, I went from having tennis elbow and a terrible serve to being able to hit the occasional ace with either pace or spin, or both.
For folks more interested in hitting (perhaps for your local softball league), Batspeed.com offers some interesting theories on hitting. Their basic premise is that most swing mechanics incorrectly cite linear mechanics when they should be preaching rotational mechanics. I'm going to try and apply some of these ideas next summer in my softball league.

Random thoughts

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New fiction editor at The New Yorker. A good thing, I think. The fiction there needs some more crackle.
The Sopranos isn't as good this year. Too many random story threads that don't move along quickly enough.
The West Wing hasn't been stellar either, though the last episode was good. After a while I wish Sorkin would put some flesh and blood in his liberal puppets. Let Seaborn hook up with Leo's daughter. Have Josh fall prey to Donna's charms one late night at the office.
Woody speaks out agains the war. Woody! When I think Woody, I think of Indecent Proposal, where he is holding that brick, giving a lecture on architecture, John Barry's lush score rising to a crest of emotion as Woody proclaims, "Even a brick wants to be more than a brick." Woody?
Any concert with a big name that's worth seeing in Seattle sells out instantly. If you're not ready to redial Ticketmaster on Saturday morning like a spastic 13 year old girl trying to get N'Sync concert tickets, you're totally out of luck. When you get through, you'll be put on hold for about half an hour, at which point some Ticketmaster agent will try to upsell you on four different Ticketmaster magazines and two different overpriced Ticketmaster services before giving you two tickets in a section you don't want to sit, and they'll charge you $8.25 per ticket as a handling charge. Someone break down this handling charge for me--I'm sorry, is Gisele Bundchen going to hand deliver my tickets, because that bored phone rep on the other end of the line sure isn't lifting a finger, judging from the passion in her reading of the sales script in front of her. Dealing with Ticketmaster is like being forced to watch Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood or Riding Cars with Boys in a shitty movie theater with unhinged seats covered in gum from viewers from a few months back. Anyway, back to the point of this whole thing...if Beck brings the Flaming Lips to Benaroya and I miss out, I am moving.
A very sweet Dell customer service representative with a Southern accent agreed to offer me a refund on the RAM which Dell convinced me to purchase and which failed to work in my computer because of some strange limitation in the way Rambus RAM has to be configured. That was the highlight of my day. PCNation.com, on the other hand, still hasn't shipped my photo printer and has no idea where it is. It's been three months now.

A start

Last Saturday afternoon, I dropped my car off for a repair, and they told me they needed to keep it longer than expected. So there I was, stranded without wheels for five hours. I could have taken the shuttle home, but I had my laptop with me, and in a moment which in a movie would be one of those subtle and crucial turning points in a character's development.
I climb into the car dealer shuttle, and the driver asks me where I want to go. Home, I almost say. The office, I should respond. But after weeks of living in Amazon headquarters all day, and after a morning of working through bug lists on e-mail, I need a break. My brain is cooked.
I could head downtown and shop, buy myself something. But it's a habit I distrust, this self-indulgence after spurts of industriousness. Strikes me as weakness--after all, I want the freedom to get something when I need it, whenever that may be.
Take me downtown, I say. I realize I need to take my watch in for a new battery, so I can start with that, deferring my decision for a bit. Besides, I have my laptop with me, and an idea is sprouting in the corner of my mind.
People everywhere downtown. When I first came to Seattle, it was pretty desolate downtown on the weekends for a big city. Now, with Pacific Place's parking lot (the most crucial cog in the revival of Seattle's downtown commerce in all the time I've been here) and all the big shops lining 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th St., people stream up and down the veins of downtown like they do in the heart of any bustling metropolis. Just being outside, everyone all around, gives me energy.
Four hours to kill. I know what I have to do. I've said it before, so I must take some of my own medicine. I find the nearest Starbucks (in Seattle, that means I just turn around), walk in, pop out my laptop and plug it into the wall, pull out my iPod and pop in my headphones, crank up the tunes, and start writing.
I have this germ of an idea for a screenplay, and some source material with me. So I pull that out of my bag and begin jotting out an outline. Three acts. No wait, it feels more like four. Non-conventional, but when you're in draft mode anything goes. I can always pare it back later.
Back in school, I'd do this once a week, or whenever the mood struck. This outlining. That way I always had skeletons or crude sketches of all sorts of stories in my pocket at any point in time. Finish one story, and instead of reading it, I'd move on to some other story skeleton and give it some flesh and guts. Then, later, I'd pull the completed story back out and re-read it with a critical eye.
I can't always write to music, but the the joy of the iPod is that it stores a gazillion songs and provides just enough noise to drown out the sound of the espresso machine and all the strangers around me. Four hours later, I have a 6 page outline. Four acts of about 21 scenes each. Obviously too long, this is more like a two part miniseries, but always better to have a mind pregnant with ideas than to engage in a staring contest with a solid block of whitespace.
It's been a long time since I've written. It feels good. I know I've got a long night ahead at the office, but I'm flush with writer's high, the satisfaction of the artist who has just surfaced from a long swim in the depths of his craft. Maybe that's too florid a description. But then, writing is not always that fluid and enjoyable a process, so those chances I get to romanticize it? I grab them. Later when I'm struggling I can look back and remind myself that good times lie ahead.

Digital cameras--is it their time?

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Luminous Landscape has done a field test on the new Canon EOS 1Ds 11 megapixel digital camera. Exciting results, as it appears that digital is making huge inroads on film. Of course, some people will continue to raise the flag of analog, much as some people refuse to buy CDs while hanging on to their LP collections for dear life.
At some point, though, the cost equation will work out such that digital is more economical. Perhaps not at the price of this Canon (currently list price is $8,999!) but very soon. I really wish Nikon would come out with a high end body with this type of resolution soon. Even more exciting, these new digital cameras will shoot full-frame, without any magnification factor. It's a huge leap forward in the digital camera arena.
This, added up with the fact that you can preview digital photos, change the ISO on the fly, never have to worry about what type of film you have in the body (color or B&W) or carry two camera bodies, and avoid the delay and cost of film processing and scaning means I'll be in the market for the next high end Nikon digital camera body if I can afford it (the Kodak DCS Pro 14n is based on a Nikon body and promises 14 megapixels, but I haven't read any reviews of it yet).

I...love...football on TV

Sometime over the weekend, maybe it was last week, the intro to Sportscenter consisted of a spoof of those Coors Light football commercials. You know, the ones that go, "I...love...football on TV...shots of Gena Lee...and those twins." Or, whatever it is they say. Anyone, some news anchor clearly spent a lot of time writing up that intro, and I just want to applaud his creativity. I wish I had it on tape. Anyway, instead of those blond twins, the anchor substituted the Minnesota Twins.
All the underdogs have won in the baseball playoffs so far. The perfect rebuke to Bud Selig and his pronouncements of doom.
Go Twinkies.

TiVo has me against the ropes

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My TIVO is ganging up on me. I didn't realize the side effect of hacking my TIVO and adding hard drives. It starts to save up so many shows that you feel compelled to sit around watching TV all the time. I have about 70 hours of television saved up and no time to watch any of it. I thought a TIVO was supposed to reduce the amount of television you watch.
Since the earliest days of theater, mass entertainment has obeyed some basic laws. First, as with Greek drama, the two genres that work are comedy and tragedy. In TV today that means sitcoms (situational comedies) and life or death dramas (legal shows, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, medical emergency rooms).
Shows that deviate from that have a tough road to hoe. Take Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night. It was about people producing a sports news show (SportsCenter, it was fairly obvious). Not quite a comedy (Sorkin has a sense of humor, but doesn't play for yucks the whole way through) and no life or death on the line, just corporate intrigue. So he took his formula and transplanted it into the White House, which added plenty of life or death drama. Result? A shelf-full of Emmys.
Why do you think all the ads for American Dreams show people about to die. Six Feet Under takes this formula to the extreme, beginning every episode with a death.
There's something perverse at work here. These dramas leave you feeling empty as soon as they're done. So you have to come back for more. It's addictive, like a drug, which makes for great commerce. But don't confuse it for art. Art that stays with you doesn't need to be watched over and over again. It stays with you, in your head, for a long time, perhaps all your life.
The vogue these days in television show ads is to have characters of the show standing there, staring at the camera, smiling, or not smiling, for about 5 to 10 seconds. They usually stand in front of the strangest backgrounds, like a dark industrial factory, or computer generated graphic. I can't imagine how uncomfortable it would be to pose in such a manner. The look on the faces of the actors say, "I'm very uncomfortable, please watch my show so I don't have to stand here anymore." Or "watch my show or there will be problems." Or "come watch my show where you can actually see me talk." Or "you, behind that camera, turn it off if you like your job."
Speaking of television, is anyone else having as much difficulty as I am finding the playoff baseball games on television? I got home yesterday night from work and decided I'd try to catch the Yankees-Angels game. It would be the first of the playoff games I'd seen this year, and trsut me, I'm not happy about that. I checked all the major networks. Nope, nothing on Fox. I checked the regional Fox channels. Nope. Checked ESPN's family of channels. Nope. I could have stood up, logged onto the Internet, checked a newspaper. Nope. Remember, I'm a guy. Using a remote control is in the blood.
I started flipping up from channel 200 on DirecTV, proceding up. Playoff baseball has to be on TV, so it had to be there somewhere. Sure enough, I found it on channel 311, the ABC Family Channel. Did you hear me? ABC Family Channel?!? Baseball's in serious trouble. Who negotiated that deal? Sheesh.

Stanford vs. Texas

This week's Sports Illustrated has a ranking of all the nation's collegiate athletic programs. The writer ranked Stanford #2, behind Texas. What the hell? Texas? Basically, the writer gave the edge to Texas because they offer more intramural and club sports and because of a slight edge in the "major" sports like football and basketball. Very arbitrary. SI's own stats offer a ton of other reasons why you could have arbitrarily picked Stanford. Stanford has 3 times as many NCAA individual titles (18 to 6), twice as many team national championships (4 to 2), a ridiculous edge in athlete graduation rate (90% versus 56%), nearly twice as many varsity teams (34 to 19), and all this with a school population about a fifth the size (Stanford at 6637, Texas at 35,206). Let's not even get into a count of Olympic medals.

Ryder Cup

The best event in golf, but I was in NYC and spent my time exploring rather than watching TV. Did read about the final score, though. Yes, of course everyone in hindsight can say that Curtis Strange made a tactical error by saving his best golfers for last, but not everyone has pointed out exactly why. In a relay race, his strategy would have worked out fine, because every runner is guaranteed their lap, and there's something to be said for having your strongest horse going in the last lap if things are close. However, in events like Ryder Cup, achieving a certain score can end the event prematurely, rendering later matches irrelevant. It's like baseball, which is in mathematical terms a race until 27 outs. In a case like that, you want to maximize the number of touches by your best guys because it's no guarantee they'll be up when they still have a chance to make a difference. True, in Ryder Cup, every player gets their match, but having Tiger Woods match rendered irrelevant was a tactical error. The U.S. needs to pick a new captain.
Similarly, it's silly for Dusty Baker to bat Barry Bonds fourth instead of third. It's one reason you put your best batters at the top of the lineup, and one reason why Tiger Woods should have been one of the first few golfers playing on the last day of singles. Plus, in an event where pressure has such a huge effect on performance, like golf, I believe it's easier to play from ahead, when you can play loose.
By the way, is Sergio Garcia the most irritating golfer alive? From his ridiculous pre-shot routine to his theatrics on the course, he's the golfer I love to see lose. Sergio and his girlfriend, the pouty Martina Hingis, form perhaps the most annoying couple going today.

Blog as confession

The soliloquy derived from the act of prayer, of speaking to God. My blog is like some degenerate soliloquy.

Religion in this new world

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The cover story of this month's Atlantic Monthly is about the growth of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere of the world, from Asia to Africa to Latin America. This is your father's Christianity, in a way. In the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in America's Protestant and Catholic community, a liberal uprising is increasingly critical of some of the Church's most traditional doctrines, including "mandatory celibacy among the clergy, intolerance of homosexuality, and the prohibition of women from the priesthood, not to mention a more generalized fear of sexuality." the story is much different below the equator. As author Philip Jenkins writes:
"The most successful Southern churches preach a deep personal faith, communal orthodoxy, mysticism, and puritanism, all founded on obedience to spiritual authority.... Whereas Americans imagine a Church freed from hierarchy, superstition, and dogma, Southerners look back to one filled with spiritual power and able to exorcise the demonic forces that cause sickness and poverty."
Jenkins argues that in all the recent fervor over the influence of radical Islam, we in the West are blind to this tectonic shift in the world's religious makeup. By 2050, at current growth rates, four out of five Christians will be Latino. Pentecostal Christians could number a billion, dwarfing the world's Buddhists and matching the number of Hindus in the world. Recent polls have detected this shift, even while focusing their attention on the size of the Islamic community. The Southern church is far, far more conservative than the Northern church. The progressive secular movement seizing the imagination of Americans is completely alien to most of the rest of the world.
I wasn't raised with any religion. I didn't have to attend Sunday school, and the few times I attended church was as a guest of another family or friends. So my knowledge of and intuitive understanding of the influence of religion and religious history is limited to what I've learned from more religious friends or relatives or from books or movies (some would argue the only things I've ever learned are from books and movies...no comment). But this movement could add to the growing divide between America and the rest of the world.
What I do know is that the conflict between the haves and the have-nots is one of the most explosive social reactions in human history, and to me it lies behind 9/11 as much as any reason offered to date. Still, a growing religious rift between a liberal Northern church and a more populous, fervent Southern church is worrisome. Even I know enough about history to know that differences in religion can lead to just as bloody a confrontation as a battle over land or oil. Jenkins notes that the primary difference between Northern Christians and Southern Christians is that those in the South are poor. That means they relate much more to healing and exorcism elements of the Bible. There's a whole interview with Jenkins posted here--fascinating reading.
By the way, among popular magazines in the U.S., The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Harper's form a three-headed monster of American culture. I recommend them all, though the biggest problem in doing so is how to keep up with all that reading. I have a pile of back issues about a foot high, and it's starting to lean.

Couples, II

Wow, I've never gotten as many e-mails over an entry in my weblog as I did over my recent post on couples. Some pretty heated responses, too. I won't quote any of them (though you can read Jenny's in her weblog--she's never been shy, and bless her for it), but suffice it to say many were critical of my rant. Some seemed a bit defensive, but on the whole some good points were made, and no one was openly hostile. The most popular point made was that I wasn't all that interesting myself because I'm always at work. Nothing I can say to that, other than I agree. Sometimes I bore even myself.
I'm a fairly agreeable guy, so I generally don't have to engage in many confrontations or arguments, and I rarely stir people up. That was kind of fun, though. I think I'll have to write a more opinionated weblog in the months ahead.
On a side note, The New Yorker heard me. David Denby reviews My Big Fat Greek Wedding in this week's issue. Maybe I'll read it to find out what the fuss is all about.

What to read?

For some reason, it just feels like a whole slew of artists whose work I've appreciated in the past have come out with new works in the past several months. On the musical side, new CDs by Coldplay, The Flaming Lips, Pulp, Aimee Mann, Bruce Springsteen, Beck, Paul Westeberg, and on and on. Lots of good stuff.
On the bookshelf, a similar wave of new hardcovers:
The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Summerland by Michael Chabon
After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster
new unnamed novel by David Eggers
Lullaby by Chuck Pahlaniuk
The thing is, I can't bring myself to purchase any of them. So many people love to declare with price that they're reading the latest novel by [insert popular author] as a medal of courage, but I must confess that most long fiction bores and/or disappoints me. What's worse, hardcovers are expensive, heavy, and they take lots of space in your room and lots of time from your life.. So if any of you have read any of the above and have any recommendations, please leave a comment or send me a line. Or if there's another new work of fiction I've missed, send those my way as well. I find you can't really trust newspaper reviews; every new novel can find some glowing reviews for the dustjacket. Glowing reviews by other authors whose works I enjoy (if Tobias Wolff or Jonathan Franzen or someone like that recommends something, I'll usually pick it up) are a much better gauge of readability, if not quality.
My latest recommendation? 12:30am reruns of Sports Night on The Comedy Channel. Can't go wrong with some rapid fire dialogue courtesy of Sorkin after a long and brutal day at the office. This is The West Wing without the gravity--a failed experiment in which you can see all the familiar ingredients and the promise Sorkin realized with The West Wing. And if you purchase one of these kits highlighted in today's Slashdot and soup up your Tivo, you could have an entire season of this show taped in about a month, with the equivalent of 1190 hours of free disk space left.

Kelly Kelly Kelly

Hey, it's American Idol! You bet I'm going to catch this show when it hits Seattle (and I know many of you out there will be lurking in the shadows there).
The real story behind Idol is the return of Paula Abdul and the rise to fame of Simon Cowell. Which of us couldn't benefit from having Paula on one shoulder to boost us up ("I've got two words for you Eugene...phe...nomenal") and Simon on the other ("Umm, look, let's be honest...there are about 3 people in this room smarter and better looking than you are, and if America does its job, you'll be out of one soon").
Simon. Cheeky fellow. But he speaks the truth. He speaks the truth.

The end of summer

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Yesterday, Sunday, was grey out. Today, as I left the office and walked out into the night, the rain was pouring down. Saturday may have been the last day of the summer. I think I'm sad about that. I'm not sure. I don't feel anything.

Dead (or missing) presidents

The Sopranos season premiere was somber in mood, using the nation's economic recession as the central theme. It ends with a slow zoom into a twenty dollar bill, ending with an extreme closeup of Andrew Jackson's right eye. Yep, in tough times we're all locked in on the almighty dollar.

Tough times for Stevie

Some of the directors at AOL/Time Warner are trying to oust Steve Case. Tony Soprano ain't the only guy having a rough go of it.
If they're blaming him for the deflation of their stock, I think they're pinning too much on the donkey. Anyone outside the company could see that the value being assigned to the so-called synergy between old and new media (yeah, we'll just take all these assets we have, like movies, magazines, and music, and just pump them through high-bandwidth pipes and make lots of money somehow) was inflated to absurd proportions.
I'd love to sit in on some of the senior management meetings at AOL/Time Warner. Steve Case, Ted Turner, Richard Parsons, Frank Caufield, John Malone, James Barksdale--big egos, big agendas, and big personalities.

Records are made

Nothing against Emmitt Smith, who has about 400 or so yards left to beat Walter Payton's all-time rushing record, but I'd rather not have anyone unseating Sweetness from the top of the record book. I'm still peeved at Ditka for having given Refrigerator Perry the touchdown in the 85 Super Bowl instead of Payton. Ditka and his idiotic macho attitude had to insist on shoving Perry down the Patriots throats. The Bears were going to kill the Patriots anyway--why use the gimmick play? As it turned out, Payton never scored, and now he's gone. I have no pity for Ditka being kicked out of coaching. He was a lousy one.

Must see Fall TV

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Fall is my favorite season. I have happy childhood memories of the dry golden leaves dancing in the crisp air, giving off a rustling noise like cymbals to compliment the whistling of the wind. Memories of playing touch football with friends until the sun went down. Friday night high school football games and all the crazy emotions they stirred up. When I think Fall, I think of a cool, grey day outside, golden light inside the house with relatives visiting, pro football on TV, the smell of some meal always being prepared in the kitchen.
It's also the time when all my favorite TV shows return. This Fall promises a strong lineup. Here's what I'm going to be watching:
  • The Sopranos: finally, we get season four. The Simpsons parodied the opening title sequence of The Sopranos in an episode recently (a repeat, I believe. Is there anything the Simpsons can't do? More on them later). This is the best drama on television (yes, I know, it's not TV, it's HBO), one hour commercial-free every Sunday. The Sopranos doesn't depend on one element, like, say, the way Buffy depends on the humor of Whedon's writing. It's all around great. Strong acting by just about everyone in the case (and great acting by several), a great soundtrack from the title track by A3 to the different songs hand-picked for each episode, and writing by David Chase that snaps and crackles. By the way, if you don't subscribe to HBO, you're missing out. From The Sopranos to Six Feet Under to Sex in the City to Curb Your Enthusiasm to reruns of The Karate Kid, you'll get your money's worth. People will pay $10 for an hour and a half piece of crap movie but won't pay that for four hours of The Sopranos each month? You're giving me agita.

  • The West Wing: America's favorite president returns (who doesn't think Jed Bartlet wouldn't wipe the White House with Dubya if they ran against each other head to head). All attention on Sam Seaborn to see if we can detect any hints of money-grubbing jealousy in his eyes. Sam's a great character, but Rob Lowe is crazy if he thinks he's doing his career any favors by walking away. Mary Louise Parker becomes more of a regular this season. Grrrrr. Will Josh finally choose between Parker and his admin? Actually, why choose? Grrrrr! More of Sorkin mocking Dubya and his idiocy. Yee-ha! Ever notice the only cast member on this show that's married is the president? That's what comes of working all the time. I envision myself as Josh Lyman, about 40 years old, still working around the clock, trying to carve out time for a few dates on the side. With Mary Louise Parker. Grrrr.

  • Firefly: just to see if Whedon has the magic to avoid a sophomore slump--remember Chris Carter and Millenium? A space cowboy adventure. Maybe it can capture some of the charm, fun, and pathos of Cowboy Bebop, the fantastic animated series from Japan.

  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer--likely the last season for this TV hall-of-famer. Like The X-files in its last days, except most of the major characters are still around which will help the series to finish strong. With Firefly and Buffy, how does Joss Whedon get any sleep?

  • Curb Your Enthusiasm: I've only seen one episode, and I realized it's like a low-budget Seinfeld. The same obsession with minutiae. Larry David is like George in about 30 years, still as cantankerous and petty as ever. But since this is HBO, they can cuss up a storm.

  • The Simpsons: it's not must-see TV for me anymore, but that's because it's been so good for so long I just take it for granted. There's little continuity: it's meant to be something you can start watching at any point and then discard. That's the problem with satires--you can live without them. It's hard to truly care about the Simpsons since they're intended to be caricatures. If they ever end the show, you won't get a final episode like that on Family Ties, when Michael J. Fox as Alex Keaton walks out for the last time and hugs Michael Gross and Justine Bateman and audiences everywhere shed a tear. But if you think about how many seasons of sustained quality the Simpsons have produced (I was watching this show in high school!) it's staggering. It's the beauty of using a cast of writers--you can constantly rotate in a crew of new funny people, like Saturday Night Live.

  • Smallville: I can't wait to see when Clark finally learns how to fly, and how they fit that into their budget. Or when he develops his heat vision (okay, does anyone believe that Clark doesn't use his x-ray vision to give Kristin Kreuk the evil eye in class all the time? C'mon, he's a teenage boy). Also, looking for reasons why Clark ends up wearing that ridiculous red and blue outfit when he decides to head to Metropolis after high school. I mean, c'mon, his dad is Bo from The Dukes of Hazzard (John Schneider)!!! Would Bo raise a son who'd wear red underwear outside a blue bodysuit? I think not. The show does a good job of capturing teen angst. There's always one scene each episode where Clark mopes over Lana and some mopey ballad plays in the background, and at the end of the show WB pushes the CD for sale. It works, too. Product placements are the best form of advertising in this new age.

  • Monday Night Football: Al Michaels and John Madden...solid. Pat Summerall was comatose last year. It was time for Madden to move on. Plus, with two rotisserie football leagues going for me, there's money going on just about every game. That's the beauty of roto. If there was rotisserie politics I'd watch C-Span every day.

On a side note, it's clear that Aaron Sorkin and David Chase dislike each other. Chase mocks Sorkin for his drug abuse, Sorkin replies that at least he cranks his shows out on time. We have the makings of a really exciting rivalry here. Forget the celebrity deathmatch, we need an epic battle between the cast of the two shows. This would be the equivalent of Marvel vs. DC, Godzilla vs. King Kong, Hulk Hogan vs. The Rock. Bartlet and team vs. T and the Soprano clan. NBC and HBO team-up for the television confrontation of the century. Bartlet becomes aware of the vast network of illicit activities in New Jersey when Tony tries to buy off a senator. Bartlet orders Leo to mobilize the troops to put it to an end. Tony retaliates, ordering Silvio to put a horse head in Toby's office. Complicating matters is the fact that Christopher is now dating Zoe, living a 21st century Romeo and Juliet. In the midst of all this is the rogue Russian who escaped in that episode in the woods. He's nobody's friend, killing people on both sides for reasons unknown.
That would be must see TV.

In a world without laughter

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The trailer for Comedian cracks me up. I love that guy who does the voice-overs for movie trailers. I wish I had his voice--it's kind of Robert Stack. I'd be such a hit at every party.

I'm fairly certain I'll find you

Watching the TV commercial for The Four Feathers, a movie I'll see because it's directed by Shekhar Kaphur, who directed the immensely entertaining Elizabeth. The only thing that trips me up is that the trailer contains a clip of Heath Ledger stating emphatically, "I will find him." (emphasis on "will").
Anyone seasoned moviegoer knows that the line "I will find _____" will forever be associated with Daniel Day Lewis who uttered the line in Last of the Mohicans. It's supposed to be a serious moment in the film, but somehow that line got so much play in the trailer that audiences everywhere OD'd on the gravitas. I don't know a single movie buff who doesn't crack himself up from rehearsing, "Just stay alive. I will find you!"

Unworthy of the Hamptons

What was that dress Carrie was wearing at the wedding in the season finale of SITC? Looked like a shower cap. Sarah Jessica Parker is a terrible dresser in real life, and sometimes it carries over into the show.
I think the show is losing steam. This season was dull. As Keith Olbermann said, "Too much city, not enough sex." Or something like that. The plot structure is a bit tired.

Sampras-Agassi

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Wow, Sampras and Agassi in the U.S. Open final once again! What could be more American. Should be awesome. Glad to see them put the spanking on the two young punks, Roddick and Hewitt.
I enjoy watching Sampras' game a bit more (longer, more classic strokes than Agassi) and will probably root for him because it looks like Agassi's got more years left in him. Sampras had an easier semifinal, so he should be fresher, and he's playing as well as he's played in over a year. When they're both on their games, as they were in the semis, it's always a great show. The best groundstrokes and return game in tennis versus the most effective serve and volleyer in the game
Hewitt is like Michael Chang on steroids--taller, hits harder, runs just a bit faster.
John Mcenroe and Mary Carillo are great color commentators. Too bad CBS has Dick Enberg. CBS throws him on every sport, from golf to tennis to football, and he knows little about any of them, except for what he's read or heard from others. He's like the Ted Danson of sports commentary. Somewhere in his past he did something good and unfortunately they keep getting chances for more work because of it. Danson had Cheers--who knows what Enberg's great accomplishment was. Throw Cliff Drysdale in to do play-by-play instead with Mac and Carillo and you'd have the dream team of tennis commentary.

X2

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New trailer for X-Men 2 (X2). They had the good taste to use music from Holst's The Planets (name that planet smart readers).

What?!?

Tamyra was eliminated instead of Nikki on American Idol tonight. What the hell?! Nikki barely qualifies to be Tamyra's backup singer.
None of the singers are amazing, but the weekly drama to see who the fickle public eliminates is intriguing. At this point, my money's on Kelly. Justin is a ham whose voice is thin, and Nikki's just not a very good singer, and I'm not sure what kind of look she's going for, but it's not good. How she survives every week is the great mystery of the summer.

Precious daylight

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Tuesdays and Thursdays are always a mad dash home from work to salvage enough daylight from the remains of the day to complete my bike training rides. Today it was a frantic rush around the south end of Lake Washington. I got home and it was pitch black out so I finished my training ride on the indoor trainer. It doesn't get light in the morning until past 6am now, so morning rides of any length are out when early meetings are on the docket. Did the summer ever start here in Seattle? I must have been napping.
My allergies are going crazy as well. As I've gotten older, the frailties pile on. Arthritis in the knee, grey hairs, allergies. I was never allergic to anything as a kid. I like to think that the counterbalance is a monumental surge in intelligence and worldly charm.

New novel by Dave

David Eggers, who rocketed to literary fame with the catchingly titled (as post-modern a title as can be) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story is publishing a new novel to be released Sept. 20. To get one of the first 10,000 copies, you have to pre-order from McSweeney's. This week's New Yorker short story is an excerpt from this upcoming novel, and Eggers discusses it in an interview currently posted at the New Yorker site.

Yoshimi

Nope, not a Japanese product like Asian drink Pocari Sweat (is this a bad translation?!?) being pandered by Jean Reno. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is the amazing new album by The Flaming Lips.

Japanderers

4The 15 minutes of fame for Japander.com has arrived with its feature in EW and Yahoo. Features lots of clips of Western actors padding their bank accounts by sneaking over to Japan to hawk all sorts of wares in TV commercials. I've only watched a few, but by far my favorite so far is the Simpsons pushing some drink called C.C. Lemon. Authentic because they speak Japanese and are way too enthusiastic, as all actors are in Asian commercials. Because damn it, C.C. Lemon is NUMBER ONE!!! C.C. LEMOOOOOOOOOONNN!
Menthos!

That's two they'll lose

Hey, I'm not the only guy who'll give up on baseball if they go on strike. So will Sports Guy.

New trailer for The Ring

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The American adaptation of the Japanese horror classic--Quicktime trailer in high res. I have a hard time believing this adaption will match the original in creepiness, but it does star the talented Naomi Watts. If it's successful, prepare for a wave of adaptations because there's an entire library of good, low-budget Japanese horror films for Hollywood to mine (and ruin).

For the love of *&^$%#

Okay, it's the 21st century. Can someone please invent a vending machine that dispenses the item you selected successfully 100% of the time? You reach in your pocket, miraculously cobble together a half pound of nickels and dimes that just adds up perfectly to the cost of a bag of pretzels or chips or cookies, and then you press the button and the metal coils turn, and your bag is pushed forward from with a mechanical whir, and then....it hovers there in space, like a bag of Doritos trying to commit suicide by jumping from the 8th story of its vending apartment.
I'm not sure what burns me more, not getting my chips or the thought of someone else getting two bags of chips. I want a tax deduction.

9 minutes

I think I read this in a Sports Guy mailbag column, and it came to mind this morning. I've been getting up at 5:30 am every morning this week--I'm still on French time. My alarm goes off at 6 am, and I hit the snooze button.
9 minute later, the alarm is back on. Some ensemble morning talk show hosts babbling on with energy and enthusiasm that is superhuman considering the time of day. Inevitably, once a week, the host has to chew out a caller who's dying to hear himself live, "Please turn off the radio, Bob." Where was I? Oh yeah. 9 minutes. Why are all alarm clock snoozes set at 9 minutes? Someone has to tell me. Is there some scientific axiom that 9 minutes is just enough time for you to pass out again, but not deeply enough to achieve REM sleep? Maybe one company in the world has a monopoly on making the snooze chip for alarm clocks globally, and they're too stingy to change their production process to accomodate alternate snooze intervals.
I should have tried it with the hotel alarm clocks in France. They still measure time in minutes, but maybe the metric system means you have to multiply the 9 minutes by 1.67 or something like that so their snoozes are 15 minutes. Actually, they probably have 30 minute snooze increments considering dinner out in Europe lasts about 4 hours. How can you have faith in the European economy if they don't understand that the more people you cycle through a restaurant, the more money you make?
The damn Air France air baggage handlers were on strike in Paris when I flew over for my Tour de France camp, so my bags were stranded there for days as I flew on to Marseilles. Then on the way home, the KLM pilots were on strike so I was stranded a day in Amsterdam. They have laws limiting work weeks to 35 hours in France, and they still strike. And they complain about Lance Armstrong, an American, winning their race year after year. They should stop striking and get to work.

Chicago

RealOne trailer for the new movie adaptation of the musical Chicago. Click on the link that reads "haute resolution" for the high-res version, or "moyenne resolution" for you lower bandwidth users. Catherine Zeta Jones is barely recognizable in costume. Of course, so was Michael Douglas when she fell for him (there's no other explanation), and then BAM! He stops using makeup and ages 50 years on her in a day. Yikes, that must have been a tough morning when she woke up to that. Talk about scary morning faces.

Airline security in Europe

European airports do their carry-on baggage security x-ray screening at each gate, rather than en masse before you enter the terminal. It's a superior system. Costs more because you have to buy more of those x-ray machines and hire more security staff, but it means less time in line for passengers, and if there's a security breach or delay, only a subset of passengers is affected.

Schizo TIVO

My hacked Tivo device (it has two giant hard drives patched into it for 305 hours of recording time) has some algorithm for selecting random programs to record as suggested viewing. I think it's supposed to be based on other programs I've instructed it to record, but the algorithm isn't very good. Much to my horror, one of the shows it selected was Nash Bridges.

Three's the charm...or maybe not

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Saw a screening of Signs, the new M. Night Shyamalan film. Didn't find it to be as good as his previous two movies, The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable. The trademark suspense and mystery is there, but it doesn't pay off.
There's a fine line between inspiring a sense of wonder and coming off as hokey. Signs was the latter for me. Also, he's got to stop casting himself in all his movies--he's not that great an actor, and he can afford to hire some real acting talent. Get over yourself, M. Night. You're a good director, so stay behind the camera.

Spirited Away on DVD


Hayao Miyazaki's latest is out on region 3 DVD and region 2 DVD now!

Lowe leaving The West Wing


Rob Lowe is leaving The West Wing over a salary dispute. It's so hard to tell what the details are in a case like this. It's certainly possible he didn't push for a raise but was characterized as doing so through an intentional media leak. All I care is that Lowe's Sam Seaborn will be no more early in 2003. That's a shame.
I'm as strong a proponent as there that the director and writer are the key determinants of the quality of TV shows and movies, but that's mostly because they have the ability to court first-rate acting talent. In television, where an actor will play the same character for hour after hour, year after year, it's harder to replace them and maintain the same feel. The X-Files wasn't the same when Duchovny and Anderson left, and much of the quality difference in the Bond films was due to Connery versus some of his weaker successors.
Having now seen the first season and bits of season two, I can notice a dropoff in quality this season. Not the actors fault. The writing is inconsistent. Sam doesn't play as large a role now, but while he wasn't an Emmy nominee like many of the other actors, his was the emotional everyman at the heart of the ensemble cast. It won't be easy maintaining the quality of that show through seven seasons, but it will pass the 80 episode mark (or whatever the number is which marks economic megasuccess for TV shows--I think it's eighty, the point at which you can capture massive syndication fees). Let's hope they can work something out.

Sunday is HBO

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Season premiere of Sex in the City Sunday, and a new season of The Sopranos Sept. 15. The former is a way to lure women to your place, and the latter is the perfect lead-in to guys Sunday Poker night, $5-$10 Texas Hold'em.

17 miles, 3000 feet to Paradise

"I become a happier man each time I suffer."
Lance Armstrong said that when discussing why he cycles. Sounds like just another pithy sports quote, but anyone who cycles consistently for a few years knows exactly what he means. I would clarify Lance's quote by saying that a cyclist is only happy when he's worked hard enough that he can suffer even more than normal.
It's not just the early season, out-of-shape-after-a-winter-of-sitting-on-your-ass, suffering that cyclists enjoy. It's after you've trained a whole season and are in good enough shape so that you can increase your exertion and raise the ceiling on your suffering...that's joy.
Yesterday I drove out to Rainier with my bike stuffed in my back seat (it actually does fit, with tires removed, even with my top up). It's a fairly long drive, and I listened to grave, dramatic movie soundtracks the whole way to psyche myself up for the climb to Paradise, which sits at about 5,200 to 5,300 feet above sea level. Most of the way out there, the skies were gray, heavy with gloom, but somewhere on highway 7 I saw a solitary patch of blue sky. Soon, bright sun was shining down everywhere as if it had been awaiting me at the park.
Pulled into a campground just inside Nisqually, unloaded my bike, put the tires back on, pumped them up, and set off for Paradise. My altimeter read 2,310. I had no idea how long the climb was, and I didn't really care. I was excited at the prospect of a true, long, torturous climb after spending all season riding the tiny hills in Seattle. This was a Tour-worthy climb, noble suffering.
Also, the last time I rode to Paradise was in RAMROD last year, and that time I had ridden a flat tire in to the rest stop just above this campground and had suffered the whole way up to the top. It seemed like everyone passed me on that climb, and memories of that painful ascent had become a mental block. I had to conquer my demons, just as Lance had to overcome a mental hurdle on the Col de Joux Plane, where he bonked in 2000, in this year's Dauphine Libere.
No need to recount the whole ride. What is there to say about mountain climbs on a road bike? You strain in a low gear almost the whole way up, plodding along at around 9 to 10mph, dripping sweat, for about two hours, sliding around on your saddle all the time to try and work different leg muscles. Great fun, believe me, even though I know you don't. Beautiful views off the cliffs at the side of the road.
I didn't exactly fly up to Paradise, but man it's satisfying to reach the top. I sat on a picnic bench and stretched out. A young Muslim girl of about three or four years old stared at me in my strange biking outfit as if I was some alien. Looked at my bike computer and my watch. I'd climbed 3000 feet over 17 miles of paved road.
The drive home was great. Put the top down, cranked the heat up on high, cranked some less dramatic, happy pop music up even higher, and sang at the top of my lungs with the sun warming my neck and the wind mussing up my hair. Zipping in and out of traffic at 100mph, my bike in back, that's heaven. If I'd taken a random exit by mistake and headed off East into the open roads, I wouldn't have given a damn where I was going. Would have kept driving until I ran out of gas, then pulled my bike out and started riding.

VR Seattle

Sang and I hosted a going away BBQ for Jenny and Adam today. If the two of them should miss Seattle, they can always see some of it on the web at VR Seattle.
Here's the tunnel I go through just about every time I go for a bike ride, the I-90 tunnel which opens up on Sam Smith park. I've gone through it countless times, so I know the slight downward slope and the cool breeze to expect when heading through the tunnel East, with fresh legs, clicking up to the big chainring, the sound of my chain jumping up and clicking into place reverberating through the tunnel with a satisfying mechanical echo.
Here's a view of the I-90 bridge which I cross once I'm through the tunnel. I hate the bridge. It's about a mile and a half of windy, noisy, dusty, bumpy pain. When riders pass you on the bridge you can't hear them approaching. I hate being passed on the bridge. Coming west on the bridge is more enjoyable. The first two thirds are downhill and you can easily hold speeds in the low twenties. Then it ends with a nice gradual ascent which gets your heart rate going. That's the spot to overtake other riders if you have any pop left in your legs.

Dancing up the mountains

I think the reason I continue to bike, even though it's often long, dull, and a pain in the ass, is that I want to be able to dance up the mountains. Riders who spin their pedals lightly and just float up the mountains, overcoming gravity and their own body weight, ride through adversity in such a pure and simple way. It's a grace I seek in my own life, to be challenged, to put down the hammer, and dispel all obstacles with exertion and joy. Everything feels like a burden now, and only energy, positive thinking, and discipline can carry me through it all.

The Ring

AICN linked to the first trailer for the American remake of the Japanese film, The Ring. Wouldn't you know it? The trailer is Japanese.
A really, really fun horror flick, but the trailer seems to confirm that it won't seek to be original in any way. Just borrow everything possible from the Japanese film, including the video footage, the sound effects in the trailer, and insert Naomi Watts. Vanilla Sky, La Femme Nikita, when was the last time an American remake bettered the foreign source material?

34 seconds back

Lance lost more time to Galdeano today and is now 8th, 34 seconds back. Lance's wheel got tangled with a teammates' tire in a crash near the finish line.
Nothing he can't make up later, but it adds some drama to this year's Tour.

All-American

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Watched Rob Lowe host the Macy's fireworks show from the Big Apple last night. Lowe was a good choice to represent America. Here's a guy who videotaped himself having a threesome (pardon moi, a menage a trois) with two minors, and now he's come back to be one of my favorite characters on The West Wing. We're a nation that forgives.
Lowe was a good sport in his first several West Wing episodes, poking fun of his past when he finds out he's had a fling with a high-priced call girl.
Ray Charles singing America the Beautiful, that's an American tradition, like Charlie Brown TV specials during Halloween and Thanksgiving. Britney Spears dressed in skimpy outfits doing hip pumps with a cadre of multi-ethnic dancers while singing "Boys"? That's a new one. Couldn't she have sung Yankee Doodle Dandy or something? Draped in an American flag?

Season finale week

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It's the annual TV season finale week. These are the times I wish I had a dual tuner for my satellite.
24, Smallville, The West Wing, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all conclude this week. The one blessing this long winter season has been a surplus of good television, from the series listed above to miniseries like Band of Brothers.
The X-files television series aired its last ever episode tonight. I hadn't really watched that many episodes this year, but I watched tonight out of loyalty. As expected for a show that plans to branch out into movies a la Star Trek, it didn't wrap up everything in a satisfying way. It was a tough season for the show, but I did find the explanation for why the Anasazi and the American Indians fled to the Southwest of America and relinquished their land to be clever. Basically, the material in that area of the country (magnetite?) was kryptonite to the alien super soldiers. American Indians discovered that and fled to that area to avoid being wiped out by past alien invaders.
I started watching the X-files in season three, and through the X-files newsgroup I found someone who was willing to copy videotapes of every episode from seasons one and two for me in exchange for $50 and a series of blank videotapes. I watched all fifty episodes of those seasons in a matter of two weeks. With the advent of DVD, I must say that one of the most satisfying of all entertainment events is watching an entire season of a great TV show over the course of a week or two. The duration of such a length of episodic entertainment makes it wholly unique.
I can't wait until they put the rest of Seasons One and Two of The West Wing out on DVD.
Adieu to the X-files. It was time for it to go gracefully into the good night. The website Jump the Shark is dedicated to identifying those moments or episodes when a television show hits its peak. After that point, it's all downhill. The name comes from an episode of Happy Days when Fonzie waterskis and jumps over a shark. For the X-files, that moment, for me, was sometime before Duchovny left the show for good. The whole plot with the cigarette smoking man had been resolved, the story about Mulder's sister had been closed out, and the mythology tried to change course and extend its run for a while longer. Duchovny's departure sealed the coffin. Okay, that's not really a moment, but I'm tired, I can't fall asleep, and my foot is cramping.
Perhaps M. Night Shyamalan's Signs will provide me with my summer's worth of paranormal mystery.

Unfaithful

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Went with Audrey to see Unfaithful today and mentally catalogued the standard visual vocabulary of suburban housewife infidelity used by director Adrian Lyne, who has covered variants of this theme in his previous films Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal.
The opening shot immediately employs the standard establishing images for suburban bliss: a shot of a beautiful home with a large yard, children's toys in the backyard (a bike which ominously topples in the rain), the family dog (standard prop), and the mother at work preparing breakfast. Later in the film there are other such tropes of domestic suburban life: crayon drawings by the child, tacked onto kitchen walls. As Ebert points out, "all movies involving suburban families are required to contain, a scene where the parents sit proudly in the audience while their child performs bravely in a school play." That scene occurs here.
The suburbs are where family resides. New York City, where Diane Lane's Constance Sumner has her affair, is the urban jungle where family has no place (think Jodie Foster in Panic Room for another example of family under urban assault). When a common household item makes its way from one setting to the other, Lyne makes it clear that those world's aren't supposed to mix (I won't reveal what the item is in case any of you go see the film).
Her loving, faithful family man of a husband wears sweater vests, or long-sleeve sweaters in shades of blue that only your grandfather would wear. He has a conservative haircut, is always wearing his respectable half-rimmed glasses, goes to a job which requires a tie.
Her stud of a boyfriend wears the types of sweater that male models wear, those with fancy knit patterns, and he doesn't put anything nothing on underneath. That way he can reach over his back and pull the sweater up over his head (I learned long ago that that is the way women like to see guys remove shirts and sweaters and other such tops) at a moment's notice before their next romp in the sack, or public place, as it may be. He has the type of long hair which Prada models sport, the eternal 2 day shadow, and a tattoo on his shoulder. Somehow he affords his apartment in Soho, despite evidence that he mainly deals in out of print books. Of course, he does happen to con some poor sucker out of a first print of White Fang in its original dustjacket for $1.50. He claims it's worth $4000. I guess that would cover rent in New York for about two months.
Anyway, the point is that Lyne is not exactly the most subtle filmmaker. Unfortunately, American film in general has always dealt with infidelity in one of two ways. Either the affair is justified because it's the result of true love (and the actual spouse is cruel or evil or uninspiring) or the affair causes vicious repercussions for the spouse who initiates it and everyone around him or her.
I thought of this today in particular because I caught the rerun of last week's episode of 24 and my worst suspicious were confirmed. Don't read ahead if you haven't seen the episode yet...
So it turns out Nina is the traitor. I had a feeling early in the season that she'd die, but then, last week, after the commercial mentioned that next week we'd find out who the traitor was, I knew it was Nina. That's because she had an affair with Jack. In American drama, the woman who has an affair with the otherwise loving husband always either dies or turns out to be evil. I've enjoyed 24, but it isn't without its flaws. This is one of them, that they'd fall back on this standard plot cliche. What's worse, having Nina as the double agent probably means some of the earlier episodes don't make much sense.
Of course, the series has taken lots of twists and turns. Let's hope she's pretending and isn't actually the traitor. I suspect, however, that she is. And if she dies, I guess another home-wrecker gets her just due.
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Saw this in IMDb news clips:
Actors Orlando Bloom and Kate Beckinsale are to feature in new ads for clothing giants Gap. Three new TV ads have been directed by Cameron Crowe, the eccentric Coen Brothers and Roman Coppola. Bloom and Beckinsale feature in Crowe's ad as a couple being chased by a group of admirers while out for a stroll. The ad directed by the Coen Brothers sees Christina Ricci beating Dennis Hopper in a game of chess, while Coppola's effort features Scarlett Johansson and Ashton Kutcher riding bikes.

Dave

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David Letterman is a cool dude. Here are some excerpts from
his speech on Monday night during his show, when he announced
that he would stay at CBS:
"You folks came on a good night -- I'm still here."
"I woke up this morning and had to check (the) New York Times to see where I was working today."
"This is a very interesting time right in the middle of a very tricky contract negotiation. CBS, all of a sudden they can't kiss up to me enough -- it's crazy. I finally got a get-well card for my bypass surgery -- two years ago -- crazy."
"I figured out what I'm going to do. I'm going to get a face lift, then I'm going to Fox News. That is exactly what I am going to do."
"Can you believe there are two networks fighting over this crap -- crazy, ain't it?"
"I recognize that what I am going to talk about is ridiculous when you consider what happened six months ago, when New York and Washington, D.C., were attacked. Compared to that, this is all trivial, pointless and downright silly."
"Paul (Shaffer, the show's musical director) and I came over in 1993. We'd been fired from NBC. CBS was nothing. From 11:30 on, the rest of the night there was nothing but `Gunsmoke' all night long. And we were able to build something."
"A couple of months ago -- my contract is going to be finished in August -- I get a call from the boys. They say we have to negotiate. I say fine, negotiate. There's been good times, and we've had fistfights. I'm not speaking figuratively, I'm speaking literally -- I actually punched some executives."
"We get a call from another network, and, apparently, the guy had been drinking. He says come on over, and I'm thinking he is nuts. Turns out it's ABC, and they are serious. The more I talked, the more I realize they are serious, and they have all the damn money in the world. I get a call from Regis saying he would be available for sex. Isn't that odd? And then it got crazier and crazier."
"I just need to say a word about Ted Koppel. He has been on this show three or four times, and to me he has always been a gentleman, a great guest and very funny, really funny. Back in '79 he began on `Nightline,' started out doing nightly reports on American hostages in '79. The point is, his contributions to American culture speak for themselves. He is one of a very small group that represents the highest echelon of broadcast achievement. Ted Koppel at very least deserves the right to determine his own professional future. Absolutely no less than that."
"So what I have decided to do -- and this has not been a very easy decision for me -- I have decided to stay here at CBS. (Applause) The morons running this network think there won't be fistfights. By God, there will be fistfights, and that's too bad. I would like to finish my career -- a week from Tuesday -- at CBS."
"I just want to say a word about the folks at ABC. I would rather ride naked on the subway than go through what these people had to go through. To me they were gracious and generous and very, very patient. Whatever you decide to do at 11:30, I wish you the very best. And my personal hope is that it will continue to be occupied by Ted Koppel and `Nightline' for as long as that guy would like to have that job -- that is just the way it ought to be."
Jon Stewart was considered as a potential replacement for Dave had he moved to ABC. Jon Stewart has good things in his future. He's a funny dude.
P.S.: David Letterman signed a 5 year renewal with CBS. He stands to make $150 million over the life of the deal. He's a cool dude. But don't feel sorry for him.