Matrix Reloaded

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The trailer for Matrix Reloaded will be shown before Episode II. Not that movie geeks needed any other reason to wait in line to see the film. May, and more specifically Memorial Day, has usually marked the debut of the summer blockbusters which have been marketed to death for the previous year. Typically kids have just gotten out of school, and it's the perfect time to release that PG or PG-13 flick which will turn away no one and debut with $50 to $80 million opening weekends. Studios are pushing back earlier and earlier into the summer, though, so we actually get Spiderman on May 3.

Elin Nordegren

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Proof that some Stanford grads do end up dating 21 year old Swedish supermodels: Tiger Woods' new girlfriend.
What's actually more interesting is that this story is breaking and spreading through WOM (I got the tip from a few friends and finally had to investigate to see what the fuss was all about) and weblogs. Do a Google search and you'll see that most of the top results are personal weblogs. For once, a whole slew of young male webloggers are beating People Magazine to the punch.
That reminds me, I really need to work on my golf game.

Yahooligans

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Most of you have probably heard about this already, but Yahoo didn't tell its users and went in and created a whole new set of e-mail preferences and defaulted them to yes. So if you have an account at Yahoo, you've probably been opted in to receive lots of spam from Yahoo.
Go here to override those and select no to everything. It's especially important if you have a Yahoo e-mail account which you use semi-regularly. I have one, as well as a Hotmail account, and they are essentially worthless because they're collection grounds for spam. I don't even log in to either account anymore. They're like elephant graveyards. It's embarrassing to even hand out a Hotmail e-mail account to someone--it's like pulling out a checkbook to pay at a restaurant.
Yahoo even included options to mail you or call you at home which is frightening if it meant that Yahoo partners would call me and intriguing if Yahoo itself called me. What would they call me about? What would they mail me about? Would Yahoo himself call me? "Hello, this is Yahoo calling, would you like to pay for a subscription to play Hearts online?"
Of course, everyone realizes why spam is so prevalent--the cost of sending one spam e-mail is nearly zero now. There are sites that give tips on preventing spam, but frankly, why should we spend time trying to fight spam if we didn't ask for it in the first place? More power to those fighting on the front lines. I think the proper penalty for spammers is that they must eat one can of Spam for every spam e-mail they send out.
Not that I have anything against Spam (for all you Hawaiian readers). This is a good occasion to bust out some classic Spam haiku:
Old man seeks doctor:
"I eat SPAM daily," he says
ANGIOPLASTY
and the two famous "pink coffin" Spam haiku:
Highly unnatural,
The tortured shape of this "food"
...A small pink coffin.
Dead creatures unknown,
congealed into myst'ry meat.
Tiny pink coffin.

Note to self: sun is good

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Jason's back from his trip to New Zealand...but now he's off to his sister's wedding. Supposedly Jason and Jamie jumped off a bridge (that's the non-suicidal bungee variety of bridge jumping, though some would say there's no difference). Jason doing that I can believe. Jamie? Hmmm. I'm going to await the pictures.
Did my first early morning bike ride of the year on Wed. morning before work. Tried, in a short time, to pack in a serious workout, so I did intervals. Brutal. Five 30 second sprints going all out and then a hard sprint up the hills above I-90 and I felt like puking. But the sun has poked its head out this week and it's made all the difference. Just the smell of sun-warmed air and earth is enough to cheer me up. I had been wondering how young is too young to have a mid-life crisis, but perhaps I was jumping the gun.
A movie convention: when a character in a movie spots some awe-inspiring sight on the horizon, but you can't see what they're looking at because the camera only show their awe-struck facial expression, if the character is wearing a hat, he or she will inevitably reach up with one hand and slowly remove the hat and bring it to his waist. Do people really do that? I guess I'll never know until one day I see someone witness a giant UFO approaching from the heavens.
The people I get along with best strike that fine balance between self-absorption and selflessness. People who crave attention and require constant affirmation to satisfy the depths of their insecurities lose my patience. People who are completely selfless are also frightening. It's a major accomplishment to confront your place in life and deal with it honestly and alone, on your own terms.
I'll say this about Macs--they make computing fun. I look for excuses to do things on my Mac instead of my Windows PC. Even if it's the same exact thing.
Movie to see this weekend: Y Tu Mama Tambien, despite the fact that it's playing at The Egyptian, which has terrible acoustics (Y Tu Mama is a foreign film, though, so perhaps the acoustic swamp that is this theater will not matter as much; by the way, "Y Tu Mama" is a great little phrase isn't it? Next time someone cuts me off on the highway, I'm going to shout "Y Tu Mama!").
Must choose once again from limited pool of single friends who will spend part of their weekend watching unknown subtitled film. You'd think that would be a big pool of people in Seattle, but you'd be wrong. You'd think that friends who are dating or have spouses don't get out much, and you'd be right. Am considering a wholesale age shift down in my social network. Older friends are moving on to another phase of life--marriage, kids, gardening, Blockbuster rental on a Friday night.
Gotta send some traffic to Idiot Savant, Allen's weblog. Looked at my traffic logs, and outside of Google and other search engines, his was the top referral site to mine the last few weeks.
Big fan of women who wear Seven jeans. Met one last week. We're getting married next week.
Actually, speaking of weddings, the sis is getting hitched soon. Whoooooooaaaaaa.
Toni sent me a DVD of all the BMWFilms, with extended director's cuts. What a dear. Watched WKW's film over and over again, and, inspired, tapped out a quick screenplay for a short 6 to 8 minute BMWFilm of my own. Am doing the casting in my head among people I know in Seattle. Good actors are hard to find. People who cringe when I take pictures of them? All disqualified. Question: how to shoot driving scenes without getting arrested? Hmmph. A problem.
Lots of allegations of racism in the criticisms of the criticisms of Halle Berry's emotional Oscar speech. I admit, I'm one of those folks who cringed at her speech. But, in my defense, I cringed at Julie Roberts' speech last year, and at Gwyneth Paltrow's tearful speech the year before. Probably reveals some innate discomfort with hysterical women on my part. No encounters with hysterical men come to mind, but I probably am not crazy about those, either.

Goals for 2002

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Look up, and it's already April. This year has been flying by. Where has the time gone? It doesn't feel like I've done anything yet this year, yet I've been working like crazy.
Time for a time out. Need to set some priorities for the year before it disappears on me. These have been brewing in draft form in my brain for some time.
My goals for 2002:
1) Get my finances in order--complete my personal financial plan, and get it fully implemented.
2) Finish a screenplay, gather the resources, and make a damn movie. Post it on the Internet. Distribute it on DVD.
3) Finish my novel.
4) Do one big athletic event--NYC Marathon or Death Ride or the some of the mountain stages of the Tour de France are the leading contenders. I want to really add some horsepower to my cycling this year, while at the same time cutting down the lbs I have to lug around. So it's not really a weight I want to hit. More like an average speed of 20mph on the bike and less than 10% body fat?
5) Achieve happy work/life balance--easier said than done, I say, as I take a break from work in the middle of the night to jot in my blog. In this economy, you can't complain about being busy, and people do all sorts of irresponsible things in the name of "having a life," but I'm going to try. After this weekend.
Yes, shudder to think of this, it could involve getting out and dating more. But no, you won't read about that in my blog. As public as I am with most my thoughts, I'm intensely private about others. Gossip and people who are constantly seeking out gossip so that they can be the first to tell others "Hey, did you hear about..." really annoy the heck out of me. Those people need to get a life.
So do I.
6) Become a good people manager--this means being fair and effective, not necessarily nice. Hard stuff to learn, but it's a priority. It's like being a parent--tough love. My role model? Jed Bartlet, Martin Sheen's president from The West Wing.
7) Travel to one of the following continents--South America, Australia (New Zealand), or Antarctica. Antarctica is last on that list, if you have to know. Other places that tempt me: Greece, Prague, Turkey.
8) Learn to play chess semi-decently. I haven't played chess since I was probably 8. I'd like to try to figure out what it's all about. Seems like a fun blend of psychology, logic, math, and strategy. It's either that or start up a Texas Hold'Em Poker game with the boys. Chess isn't quite as sexy, but then again, maybe it is.
Hmm, I think that's a good list. Any longer and it would be gratuitous. There you go--all of you are silent witnesses and can hold me to this list at the end of the year.

Opening Day

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Baseball season has started again, and there is great joy in Mudville.
This year I'm in a rotisserie league for both the NL and AL, both of which are run differently, so it's a lot to absorb. The great thing about rotisserie baseball is that suddenly you care about every game being played, because either one of your players is playing or one of your opponents players is playing. It's like March Madness for baseball over a 162 game schedule. I may actually care about AL baseball this year. A large part of the appeal of March Madness for those who claim it as the best sporting event around is the money they have invested in their office pool. I didn't enter an office pool this year, and I didn't care nearly as much about the tourney as I had in previous years.
It being April 1, I hoped to link to some good April Fool's sites on the web, but nothing in particular jumped out at me. I also didn't have the energy to write a truly good April fool's blog, though I had a few ideas.
The Onion had some amusing headlines:
"Excited Catholics Already LIning Up for Pope's Funeral"
and
"Man Bitten By Radioactive Sloth Does The Lying-Around-All-Day Of 10 Normal Men"

Misc

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Generally, I find Europe and Asia's more liberal policies on "mature" subjects to more reasonable than America's prude restrictions. However, maybe in the case of this Lee jeans commercial aired in Europe, that was a good thing. We get the talking belly buttons, and those were disturbing enough.
The latest supposed Google-killer launched today. It's called Teoma, and it was developed by the team behind Ask Jeeves.
So, how is it? Well, of course I searched for myself first, and my site showed up in the first three spots. I also show up in the tenth spot at some website that pirated my Amazon review for the X-files Season One DVD. The results look pretty decent. In fact, they look pretty similar to the results at Google. Which is another way of saying, doesn't look all that better to me, so why would anyone switch to use it instead of Google?

Headlines

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On CNN.com, I saw these three headlines listed one after another under "Top News":
Director Billy Wilder dead at 95 | Filmography
Country singer Lyle Lovett trampled by bull
Giant octopus caught off New Zealand
Whoa.
Billy Wilder was great--one of the directors who helped to make movies a populist art.
The Lyle Lovett headline leads one to believe, for just a second, that perhaps Lyle was bull-riding. The words "country singer" and "bull" equal cowboy hat and man being tossed violently about on the back of a bull with one hand on the saddle, one in the air as if waving hello.
I've heard of giant squid, but never giant octopus.

LOTR DVD, Two Towers preview

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Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring will come out on DVD on Aug 6 (you can order it from Amazon starting April 12). That will be a 2 disc set. Then, later in the year, a special extended edition of the film will be released in a 4 disc set with extra footage in the film.
Of course, no fan would buy just the 2 disc set, but it's tough to wait an extra few months for the extended edition. Why aren't they coming out at the same time? The official explanation is that additional time is required to prepare the special extended edition. That sounds reasonable, at least more reasonable than the explanation for special edition DVDs for movies that have been out for years and are released more than a year after the original DVD comes out.
The other big news is that a special three minute preview of The Two Towers will be attached to prints of The Fellowship of the Ring starting this Friday. I'd love to see the preview, but again there are tradeoffs--you have to spare 3 hours of your time, or you could, I suppose, pay to see the movie and just walk in at the end.
There's no way around it, they're going to get their money from me somehow.

With great power comes...

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New Spiderman trailer posted today.
Looks like fun, as does Episode II. But is it just me or do the special effects in Episodes I and II look so obviously fake as to lose some of the magic of the old school, physically produced special effects? Some of those landscapes and sets in the new Star Wars films just look like cartoons to me. The surfaces don't look solid or real. Sure, it saves George Lucas time and money to not have to build models and sets for all the cities. There was a raw, realistic look in Episodes IV-VI which lent them a sense of scale.

Speed reading

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One thing everyone should learn is how to speed read. I have to because of the number of books, newspapers, and magazines I have to keep up with. And time is money.
Take a tutorial to learn the basic techniques. Or take a test to see just how fast and good a reader you are, to determine if you can benefit from speed reading.
The principles are simple: scan blocks of words at a time, keep your eyes moving forward. Your mind can absorb information faster than you can read it, and you don't need to read each individual word to comprehend the meaning. Most words don't have meaning in isolation anyway--blocks of words convey thought. We read slowly because we're taught at an early age to read out loud, and later in life we continue to read "out loud" in our mind out of habit. That slows us down because reading out loud requires you to fixate on each individual word.
It takes time to learn. It helps to use some simple training techniques. The basic principles once again:
1. Scan blocks of words--don't read word by word.
2. Don't linger on any words. Keep your eyes moving forward on the page, and don't let them wander.
3. Don't go backwards to scan things you missed (or at least reduce the number of times you do so)
What's even better is that speed reading tends to improve comprehension which may not be intuitive but has proven true in my own experience.
There's enough info on speed reading online that you needn't take a course or pay to learn to speed read. But if you have to, you can always download a trial copy of software like RocketReader to give yourself a kickstart.
Generally, I read at b/t 500 and 600 words a minute, though I could hit 1000 when I was younger. I remember using this machine that would flash a bright horizontal light on a page and move it down at a constant pace which could be adjusted. Your goal was to keep up with the line while reading. I think all this reading off of computer screens has slowed me down (on average people read 25% slower off of computer screens than off of paper).
One thing which helps readers is to keep horizontal blocks of text reasonably short, which is why I insert so many line breaks in my blogs.
One thing which I've also found is that it's difficult to spead read certain writers, whose sentences tend to meander, or who use non-conventional sentence structures. And foreign texts are hard to speed read, mostly because they contain so many words which aren't in my limited vocabulary.
So if you're looking for a self-improvement goal for this coming year, forget yoga, or losing five pounds, or quitting smoking, or all that stuff you pledge every year and have to start over the next. Set a goal to triple your reading rate--it's like biking, once you learn, you never forget. It will benefit you for life.

Today I'm taking a trip

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Today I'm taking a trip down memory lane. It's a mix of the food poisoning I feel coming on, which evokes memories of getting food poisoned from bad hamburger at IHOP as a child, and an encounter with a movie from my youth.
I saw E.T. at the incomparable Cinerama on Saturday night. My mother took me to see E.T. in 1982. I remember the event fondly because it was one of those movies she would not have wanted to see on her own, but she had probably heard the big buzz and known that parents were taking their kids to see it, and so she took me. She made lots of sacrifices like that.
To see the movie again was to be transported back to 1982, when Men At Work was the Grammy's Best New Artist, and Olivia Newton John won best music video for Physical and Toto won record of the year for Rosanna. It was probably around the time I first began getting into music, ordering cassette tapes from the BMG music club, trading cassettes with friends and spending hours making mix tapes. Some other songs I recall:
Eye of the Tiger by Survivor
I used to listen to this while jumping rope.
Hard to Say I'm Sorry by Chicago
Chicago was the king of the type of love ballads that all teens listened to when falling into puppy love, pining over unrequited love, or mourning in melodramatic fashion over lost love.
Ebony and Ivory by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder
We had to sing this in chorus class. Over and over and over. I remember that in those days teachers didn't use copiers. They used this weird type of primitive copying machine (whose name eludes me--can someone please tell me what those were
called?!?) which printed in this purplish ink that would bleed all over the page. And the teacher would pass out song lyrics duplicated in this fashion to all of us, the serif fonts struggling to maintain their form on these soggy pages, and we'd follow along mumbling as our chorus teacher banged on the piano and sang loud and proud.
Don't You Want Me by the Human League
My friend Alan was this crazy firestorm of a kid with the strangest interests. He loved karate, his hamsters, Atari, and the strangest music. This was one of the songs he used to play on his tape player over and over. I don't want to remember this song, but it has been hard-wired into the 1982 memory banks in my brain.
Other movies I saw that year and rememberd:
Chariots of Fire
I saw it with my dad, and that Vangelis theme still runs through my head. I barely remember the movie but I do remember the scene where some guy falls down in a race then gets back up and in a surge of adrenaline catches and passes all the other runners.
Annie
My sisters liked to sing songs from that movie. I think Karen had an Annie haircut for a while. That didn't last.
Firefox
My cousin Chuck and I loved the lines at the end...
"Rear missiles. Rear missiles! Damn it!
Think Russian
Rear missiles!"
Firefox cold hit Mach 6, I think. We still don't have any planes that fly that fast, do we?
First Blood
I must have seen this at Derek's house a few years later. My early initiation into movies was from rented cassettes which I watched at Derek's house. I'm just no recovering from that overdose of John Hughes and ninja films. Stuff like Remo Williams, Some Kind of Wonderful. Those probably represented the pinnacle. My childhood education in film came courtesy of the local video rental store.
Other memories evoked by the film: Riding on BMX dirt bikes. The Speak and Spell toy. Lunchboxes and thermoses (not in the film, but I remember a classmate who had the E.T. lunchbox). What ever happened to thermoses anyway? Do people still use them? Spaghetti-O's in a thermos was the world's greatest lunch, its warmth miraculously preserved over the course of morning classes. Halloween masks (life was easier as a child, when a plastic mask held on by a cheap vermicelli-thin rubber strap and a plastic cape constituted a pretty damn good Halloween costume). Underoos--I had the Incredible Hulk Underoos, and they were sweet. Star Wars figures. If only I had kept mine in great shape, I might be rich now. I had most of the ones that Eliot had in the film, and I had the Millenium Falcon and the Creature Cantina playset.
If you were do to an archaelogical dig into my past, my toys would be the centerpiece. You wouldn't have any idea what sort of attachment or relationship I had with the toys, but they'd be my Rosebud.
E.T. is a great film. Ghandhi stole the Oscar for best picture that year, and with The Fellowship of the Ring losing this year, I daresay we will need another tearful Halle Berry-esque speech when a science fiction film finally wins for best picture. That's truly 74 years of prejudice against the science fiction and fantasy film category.
Other vague memories from that time:
Knight Rider (being remade into a movie, perhaps) and Dynasty.
The A-Team.
Showbiz Pizza.
Big hair.
Transformers, America's take on Japan's obsession with robots that could turn themselves into objects like trucks, airplanes, ships.
Kool Aid (one packet of flavoring, one cup of sugar, 8 glasses of water, and voila, neon thirst quenching. Much tastier than Tang or Ovaltine.
My brush with soaps in the form of Days of Our Lives ("like sands through the hourglass..."). Yuck, what was that all about? That was Chuck's fault.
Voltron and He-Man.
Baseball cards, like those from Topps which came with nasty pink sticks of unchewable bubble gum. Fleer and Donruss.
Big League Chew.
Robitussin, Mentholatum, Flinstone vitamins, and Pei Pa Kao.
Dragon's Lair. Ooh, speaking of video games...
Atari 2600. Remember some of the weird games they had for the Atari 2600? My cousins had all these pirated cartridges from
Taiwan, which didn't have labels, so we'd have to label them with ballpoint pens and masking tape to keep them straight, or we'd just have to stick cartridge after cartridge in the machine to find the one we wanted.
Breakout.
Pac-Man, which, with the crude graphics of the 2600, didn't have dots to gobble but wafers instead.
Decathlon, which my cousin Chuck and I would play for hours. To run, you had to swing the joystick back and forth rapidly, and we'd have to wrap our hands in gauze because the skin on our palms had ripped off from one too many 1500m runs.
Megamania, which would rain strange objects like hamburgers from the sky.
Air Sea Battle, the first game I ever owned. Hours of fun because it contained so many different games all in one.
Combat, the second game I ever owned, and like Air Sea Battle one of the great multi-player games ever invented.
Asteroids: a simple, 2-D classic.
Bowling, another 2-D classic. Taught me how to score in bowling.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: avoid the tsetse flies!! The first RPG I ever played.
Space Invaders: I love that image on the cartridge--it's my visual equivalent to
E.T. the video game, which, admittedly, sucked. Never could do much more than get E.T. to crane his neck over and over.
Joust, with its cool looking people riding what looked like giant ostriches.
Pole Position, the first high end driving game.
Journey Escape, one of the weirdest games I ever played, and thus the most memorable. You play a band member trying to avoid shady music agents while music by Journey plays in the background, and at the end you encounter this giant person who looks like the Kool Aid man.
I loved the packaging on those games, and I can still picture them vividly. The multi-hued solid blocks of color with the crude cartoon images on Activision's games like Pitfall. The simple monochromatic text labels on early Atari cartridges like Breakout.
That was back in the day when it was worth it to pay a quarter to play games in the arcade because the quality was so superior. We used to go to this arcade in Palatine that allowed you to pay one flat fee and play for 2 hours straight with unlimited play on every machine. Nowadays, games in arcades are expensive and you can get comparable quality on a home console.
You know what else is great? With the Internet, you just know that you can locate that nutcase out there who collects Underoos and has a website with pictures of all the ones he has, or the fanatic who must preserve photos of the Millenium Falcon model. It's not quite the same as getting inside my head, but if you've lasted this long, you know Eugene the 8 to 10 year old kid a lot better than you may have wanted to.

The Oscars

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Much ado, as usual. Lots of suggestions about how to improve the show. Ones which make sense, to me:
1. Use approval voting. It makes sense for multi-candidate competitions and is used for political elections in many countries. In approval voting, you get to vote for one or all of the candidates, any that you like a lot. The one who gets the most votes wins.
2. Choose a better host. Half of Whoopi's jokes about how bad her jokes are. She recycled half her jokes from the last time they had her host. "C'mon, people, work with me," she'll say after she gets modest laughter for her previous joke. That's one of the oldest crutches in comedy. C'mon Whoopi, work harder. Steve Martin brought a nice cerebral, satiric humor to the show last year, and Billy Crystal's dance numbers were amusing. But Jim Carrey would be the best of all. Even Chris Rock. But it will never happen.
3. Combine the acting categories. Men and women all in one pool. No other category all night is divided between the sexes. Why is acting any different? Just so they can give out a few more trophies. Don't they need to shorten the show? Wouldn't it be more exciting to see 10 men and women compete for one acting award? That would be fun. It will never happen.
4. Let the presenters for each award write their own speeches. The Academy, worried about folks like Richard Gere freelancing and urging us all to free Tibet, write canned speeches for the presenters that sound limp and stilted as read off the teleprompters by the stars. C'mon, let's see more presentations like Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller's lead-in for best costume design. Or do actors always need someone to give them their lines? If they're the best actors in the world, why can't they memorize their lines and deliver them convincingly as opposed to reading them like robots? Do we really need to hear why editing or makeup or visual effects are important to a film? Seriously, it's ridiculous to explain why a director is important to a film.
I actually don't mind the length. Really, if everyone minded the length so much it wouldn't attract a billion viewers. The show isn't in that bad a shape--for what it is, which is a big party for a small, elite, priveleged cadre of our society, it is can't miss TV for a huge portion of the world's population year after year. We all love to see what those damn good-looking, rich, crazy people are wearing, what they'll do when they win, what they'll do when they lose. Everyone's patting each other's backs, the rest of us in the world can sit like jealous flies on the wall and wish we were attending the post-parties. I'm reminded of watching the homecoming queen selections during high school.
My other notes on the evening:
What's with J.Lo's big hair? She has a split personality. In music she's kinda trashy, hanging out with the hip hop dudes, wearing green dresses that show the cleavage. In movies she's sedate, wears conservative gowns, and now she has big hair. Would her hip hop buds let her get away with that? Smart move for her movie career (look what happened to Mariah Carey), but still seems
disingenuous.
I was cringing the whole way through Halle Berry's speech. It was great to see some black actors and actresses honored during the evening, but I'm not sure the situation is much different than it was before. Halle Berry's part in that movie was specifically written for a black woman, and it was still a fairly small indie film. Her roles in big films--Swordfish, for example--haven't exactly been meaty. We'll see if any real progress is being made in the years to come.
Denzel's speech, on the other hand, was smooth. As is Denzel. Classy, not overly emotional. Act like you've been there, and in his case, he had. Glad to see him win--he was great in Training Day. The way he speaks--wouldn't you love to have Denzel, Harvey Keitel, and Morgan Freeman chatting away as your poker partners? Distinctive American dialects all around.
Julia gets away with a lot. She's getting a bit carried away with her status in Hollywood. First of all, did she call Bill Conti "Tom Conti"? She disrespected him last year by calling him "stick man" and now she gets his name wrong? Bill Conti is an Oscar winner himself, Julia. Give the man some respect.
And what's with Julia's obvious bias for Denzel? Not that he didn't deserve it, but the other nominees must have thought Julia would said "Oh shit!" if one of them had won instead.
Watching who gets to present specific awards is a cue as to the pecking order in Hollywood. Tom Cruise getting to give the opening speech is acknowledgment that he is prince. Kevin Spacey was given the honor of talking about the mourning over Sept. 11 and the ones who had passed as he's the duke of Hollywood, the one who respects its history (yes, he loved Jack Lemmon) and has a formal training in the craft of acting. Julia presents best actor to her friend Denzel--that's the queen honoring a friend witha knighthood. Mel Gibson presents best director. He's the maverick turned lovable veteran. The goofy uncle of the family. And Tom Hanks gets to present best picture--he's king. There you have it--the reigning ruling class of Tinseltown.
Tom Cruise actually was the dark prince this time around. His speech was a bit corny, but his delivery was almost malevolent. With his 4 day beard and halting delivery, it was all a bit melodramatic.
I thought Jennifer Connelly was going to curtsy at the end of her speech. She has a frail persona. Her speech was polite, or as a writer described her in Salon, "evocative of a shy fourth-grader doing an oral presentation on the solar system."
I enjoy the segments that show clips from lots of movies, or clips from soundtracks--that's the magic of movies that we care about.
No crazy outfits this year. Conservative pink or black dresses on all the women, the men in their same old boring tuxes with black bowties or the solid black silk tie. Where's Bjork when you need her?
Okay, someone has to know the answer, why do British singers sound American when they sing? There must be an actual phonetic principle at work. I intuitively understand why, but I want the technical explanation.
Amelie didn't win best foreign pic, so perhaps there is some hope for Academy voters after all. No Man's Land was a better film.
I love the Oscars. Someday I'm going to get mine on stage and I'm going to talk and talk, past the time when Bill Conti cues the music until they send Russell Crowe out to go Gladiator on me and drag me off the stage.

Beat

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Been one tired pup recently. Work is intense. Chronic brain fatigue.
I'm playing a fool's game. Take time out in the morning to try and work out, or take time at the end of a long work day to read a little, or to hit the gym. It doesn't matter if the big block of time you're working around in the middle is the same size every day. It's a zero sum game.
Had my eyes checked. Occasionally, the vision in my right eye just goes for five to ten minutes at a time. First time it happened I nearly lost it. Then, every few months, it would happen again. I imagined what it would be like to go blind. The initial depression. Then the violent, angry explosions, perhaps a bout with alcoholism. The cinematic confrontation with someone, the best supporting actor or actress, who'd chastise me for feeling sorry for myself. The inevitable triumphant return after a period of training with the blind master. The exclamation point being a thwarted robbery, or a masterful piano recital, something like that.
Doc's diagnosis? Ocular migraines. Perhaps that explains the splitting headaches I've been having recently. Maybe it's this godforsaken weather.
Snow today. It's March. In Seattle.
Cold.

Ahn Trio

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Audrey took me to see the Ahn Trio as a birthday present (the birthday that keeps on giving late into the year). I'd never heard of them before. Turns out I had seen them recently and didn't realize it. They are currently on the homepage of the Gap.

Jennifer Garner from Alias is also featured on the Gap website. I think that's her boyfriend? Husband?

It's celebrity central at the Gap. Seeing celebs model Gap clothing has the same effect on me as seeing Tiger Woods touting Buick minivans or Britney Spears singing the praises of Pepsi Cola. Namely, no effect whatsoever.
It's remarkable that three siblings could get along well enough to collaborate so closely for so many years, especially since two of them are twins. The concert was lots of fun. Good to hear some new pieces, many of which are featured on their CD Ahn-Plugged. In particular, the tango Primavera Portena by Astor Piazzolla. Also good to see a younger crowd at the concert, listening to classical music. Say what you will about the use of glamor and glitz, younger musicians, and/or sex appeal to sell more country and classical music CDs. It's good business.
That Angella Ahn is pretty cute.
If you really have to know, I don't think HP should merge with Compaq. Mergers rarely make sense, rarely work out well. What does this one do for either side? I have no idea.

Annual must-read

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Warren Buffett just published Berkshire Hathaway's annual letter to shareholders, probably the most read such letter in all the world. It's probably the only annual report that people read even though they don't own a single share of the company (by the way, a single share of Berkshire Hathaway A Shares (BRKa) costs $71,600. I don't think it's ever split.
It's a great read. How many CEOs admit their mistakes, or accept blame for poor performance? It's tough to blame Buffett for the poor year that Hathaway had--after all, a bulk of their losses resulted from insurance claims for Sept. 11.
Some interesting comments from Buffett on the stock market:
"We made few changes in our portfolio during 2001. As a group, our larger holdings have performed poorly in the last few years, some because of disappointing operating results. Charlie and I still like the basic businesses of all the companies we own. But we do not believe Berkshire's equity holdings as a group are undervalued.
Our restrained enthusiasm for these securities is matched by decidedly lukewarm feelings about the prospects for stocks in general over the next decade or so. I expressed my views about equity returns in a speech I gave at an Allen and Company meeting in July (which was a follow-up to a similar presentation I had made two years earlier) and an edited version of my comments appeared in a December 10th Fortune article. I'm enclosing a copy of that article. You can also view the Fortune version of my 1999 talk at our website www.berkshirehathaway.com.
Charlie and I believe that American business will do fine over time but think that today's equity prices presage only moderate returns for investors. The market outperformed business for a very long period, and that phenomenon had to end. A market that no more than parallels business progress, however, is likely to leave many investors disappointed, particularly those relatively new to the game.
Here's one for those who enjoy an odd coincidence: The Great Bubble ended on March 10, 2000 (though we didn't realize that fact until some months later). On that day, the NASDAQ (recently 1,731) hit its all-time high of 5,132. That same day, Berkshire shares traded at $40,800, their lowest price since mid-1997."
Just do it, please

I wanted to check out the new Air Jordans. Problem? Niketown is probably the slowest, most unreliable online store I've ever shopped at. I don't think I've gotten a single page to load completely yet. If you somehow manage to buy something from this site, please let me know. It reminds me of Sony's online store in that they're incredibly image heavy yet no one page every loads every image successfully. Both companies have great brand names and a lock on production of their products. It's a shame they can't figure out how to launch a halfway decent online store.