Screenshot: A Weblog

Maybe the most interesting thing about this summary of responses to questions about the future of newspapers by a variety of newspaper and media experts is that they all urge newspapers to be very hesitant about reducing their number of print days per week, but they also concur that in ten years we will no longer have daily print newspapers. Common wisdom is that, at some point in the not too distant future, newspapers are going to have to leave their bulky physical form behind, but it seems that these experts think it is more important now to start reshaping the content and format than the frequency or delivery mechanism. It is also clear that the current model for newspaper success hinges on not alienating those who are still reading the newspaper more than attracting new readers.

This dovetails nicely with an article I read earlier in the week about proposed legislation to allow newspapers to go non-profit so long as they do not endorse political candidates, in order to help them survive. This legislation, it is acknowledged, is intended to help small community newspapers more than the larger newspapers that seem to be the focus of the discussion above. Allowing newspapers to choose to operate under the same non-profit umbrella as public broadcasting is intriguing - I suspect that the public broadcasting rules in part reflect the limited spectrum issues in radio and television and the merit of using some of them towards non-commercial purposes. It is intriguing to consider whether there has now been a flop, with digitization removing the spectrum issues for radio and television, but the increased presence of free, electronic sources of information putting a de facto cap on the amount of print media our economy can support.

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Somehow, in the past six months, I seem to have become much less of a TV watcher. It is interesting - I always rolled my eyes at people who said "Oh, there are just too many more-valuable things to do than watch TV". TV is fun! There is some good storytelling on it! And sometimes, I just feel like my brain is going to start oozing out of my ears if I do not sit on the couch with some knitting and some vacuous entertainment for a while.

But I'm starting to see buzz about the fall TV schedule and I have to say I'm just not that interested. And in a weird fit of anti-snobbery, I'm worried that I'm becoming one of those "I'm too good for television" people. But I think more of it falls out of the trend towards more tightly-scripted, arced television shows. It seems that it is harder and harder to find shows that you can watch occassionally and still enjoy - with DVRs, shows can more easily expect viewers to keep up week from week. The season-long plot arcs have allowed television to do more interesting things and elevate itself as a storytelling medium, but there is part of me that feels like it has also made television watching into a chore, where you can't miss a week or you are "behind". And I have come to the personal conclusion that I do not need my entertainment to start adding to my to-do list as well.

And really this relates to my theme of relaxing about completing books from a few posts ago. Except for a couple of shows, I'm just not going to worry about whether I catch every episode. And if it turns out I do not enjoy the show that way, I am just not going to watch it. (I know - revolutionary!) Which shows am I going to stick with? I'll watch Heroes, assuming it remains as good as the first season. I'll watch The Office, assuming the increased focus on the Jim/Pam relationship doesn't get annoying. And I'll watch Project Runway, assuming they continue to make absolutely insane clothing. But other than that, I think television is going to happen if I happen to be home and in the mood for a break.

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It's odd enough that anyone decided to track which cities eat the most Ho Hos per capita, and it's random that Pittsburgh tops the list, but the best thing about the Post-Gazette coverage of this "story" was apparently the lack of application of common sense or basic math literacy, allowing the orignal story to claim that the average Pittsburgher eats over 1.5 Ho Hos a day. It's a little sad that this slipped through the editing process given how clearly ridiculous that statistic is. I particularly like the computation in the correction that, if their original statistics were correct, Pittsburghers together would be responsible for over half of the worldwide Ho Ho consumption.

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I've seen this type of side-by-side comparison done for models, but this commparison of ads of fast food with photos of the real fast food as it is served is - well, okay, not very shocking at all - nobody expects fast food to look anything like the ads. But it's still interesting to see quite how different the reality can be from what they are selling. [via Boing Boing]

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If you are a fan of The Office (the American version) and you are a bit of a geek, you will probably love That's What She Said, a weekly weblog that calculates the litigation value of Michael Scott's misdeeds in that week's episode. [via ALOTTFMA] Their assessment is that the "Ben Franklin" episode is the most expensive recent episode, with so many horriifying examples I had forgot them all. The Office is possibly the funniest show on television today, in part because they manage to keep Michael likable even when he's absolutely awful, allowing them to pull humor from situations that, in cruder hands, would just be distasteful.

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I had a sense of deja vu watching tonight's episode of Mythbusters (Episode 59: Crimes and Myth-Demeanors 2) where they test the claims that various high tech security systems are intrusion proof - including fingerprint scanners! As I mentioned in my entry earlier this month, my Cyberattacks intersession course tried this same thing, though only with the small computer access scanner, not the major door access scanner Mythbusters featured. They, too, were able to beat the scanners, using more sophisticated techniques, but also being able to use a more plausible method of fingerprint capture. Whereas I like to think that my class and I were testing the myth that these things are vulnerable to spoofs using household materials.

The entire episode is actually worth catching in reruns (which the Discovery channel seem to run constantly) - they came up with some ludicrously simple methods for testing thermal and sonar sensors as well. It's really fairly damning.

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Hosted at the University of Vermont, this Web Essay on the Male Gaze, Fashion Advertising, and the Pose has a nice discussion of the issues in advertising portrayals of female beauty with a combination of scholarly references and good imagery. Worth checking out - it may not be Killing Us Softly, but it's an interesting read. I particularly like the photoshop job they do in the first few slides.

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I've added the new-to-me weblog Regret The Error to my daily websurf. It's a collection of links to errata corrections in a number of major US newspapers, but it's the accompanying commentary that is particularly good.

Reading through the recent entries, there's a fair bit of discussion of how much news sources rely on each other to be accurate, so that an error in one publication can spread throughout them all without much background checking being done. Obviously, the misreporting about the recent mining accident is a tragic example of this.

What I particularly like about the site is the way it discusses both media errors and plagiarism in the media. While not all instances of "facts" being copied from one article to the next are plagiarism, in a lot of cases it is. It is definitely interesting to learn where those lines are in journalism. I've read news stories that have quoted individuals that I knew had not actually spoken to the reporter writing the story, because I had seen the same word-for-word quote elsewhere in the media. This, to me, crosses the line from sharing a fact to using the work someone else did to collect and select the best quote to support a particular piece of writing. I'm curious what a journalist would say about that practice.

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The Guardian has a weekly "Bad Science" column, mostly exploring a poor interpretation of an experiments results, usually on the part of mass media. This week's column, Don't dumb me down, takes on the question of why mainstream media coverage of science is so bad. At the expense of some potshots at humanities scholars - who are all lumped in with a particular type of anti-scientific mindset - Goldacre does put together a fairly comprehensive list of the classes of mischaracterization in science stories, making for a nice crib sheet for when to question a science story. The fault, which Goldacre only hints around at the end, is at the feel of both scienists who are not interested in making their work accessible and journalists who assume scientist's work cannot be both accessible and engaging. I've always believed you shouldn't be able to get a PhD without being able to explain, to someone from a wildly unrelated field, what you did and why it was interesting. I think that simple exercise, applied to more research projects, could do a lot to help things along. Because the underlying point, that mainstream science coverage is dangerously inaccurate, is definitely valid. [via Slashdot]

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Squeeee! A Bad News Bears remake with Greg Kinear and Billy Bob Thorton! I loved the original movie, and I watched the television series religiously (which, by the way, check out the cast for that show: you've got Jack Warden who's been in every movie ever made, Catherine Hicks and Phillip Allen who are both alums of Star Trek movies, AND a pre-Stand By Me, pre-Goonies Corey Feldman!) I'll definitely be seeing the 2006 remake. Of course, the burning question - who will be playing Amanda?

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I'm only idly watching the Olympics, but I was impressed by the Beach Volleyball coverage. It was so useful for the commentators to point out that the sand surface is forgiving but the women have to brush the sand off themselves - the closeup of Misty May's sandy thighs didn't communicate that fact sufficiently.

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One of the reasons I can only grudgingly admit that I watch Survivor is that the reaction of people who don't religiously watch the show is fairly accurately summed up by this dialog between an enthusiast and a newbie. Though he's right, the show implied by the title could also be entertaining...

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You know what the world really needed? A movie about a 13-year old girl who turns into 30-year old after playing a game, finds herself in a marketing-type job, gets into wacky hijinks because she doesn't understand the adult world and probably teaches the people around her to reclaim their playfulness and pulls together a winning project at work using the freshness of looking at the world through the eyes of a child. Oh wait, we already had it.

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The web is more entertaining when it is tearing down instead of building up - c.f. Cinematic Disasters: The 50 Worst Films of the Decade, meaning the 90's. Good for me - I've only seen six of them, but I do remember some of these coming out and being horrified. [via PCJM]

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Oooooo - I'm so ticked off. I've had my television tuned to educational access pretty much constantly since they started airing NASA-TV round the clock. It's the only place (in visual media - their website is great) that actually explains the science and engineering with any detail or accuracy. Listening to their press conferences and then the reports made on the evening news is like watching a big game of telephone, and one where the most interesting bits are left out.

So I switched it on this morning to see how they're progressing with getting Opportunity up and moving, and some jerk is a New England Patriots jacket is blathering about the superbowl. On educational access! And now they've actually switched to airing clips from old football games.

Network television is going to do a fine job covering this game, and there are entire cable stations which will be doing nothing but. Must we be so unintellectual as to preempt the only decent coverage of a historical event for hyping installment thirty-eight of a game?

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I'm not a huge video game player, and I don't enjoy horror movies, but this review of Ghost Master makes me want to go buy a copy and spend the weekend curled up on my sofa with my laptop. It sounds like a more goal-oriented, and silly, version of the Sims... with ghosts. I could rent Ghostbusters and while I played and pretend I was back in high school.

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I've got the Emmy's on in the background while I'm cooking dinner (wooo - the Daily Show just won its second Emmy of the night!), and Dennis Miller did a bit on the "year in review" which was mostly predictable, but his sports highlight from the year was the Milwaukee sausage getting clobbered by a Pirate! Wheeee! That video clip never gets old. I haven't watched the Emmy's in years, though - I'd no idea they were so goofy. It's like a ton of minute-long comedy bits, with hyper-rushed 30 second award presentations. It also seems wrong that the Academy Awards are up for an Emmy...

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I grew up with 3-2-1 Contact, remembered mostly to me as "that show with The Bloodhound Gang", because everyone knew that was why you tuned in. (And, by the way, I am quite sadenned that searching for the actual show title by Googling "Bloodhound Gang" results in pages of links to a band which appears to be best known for a song called "Hooray for Boobies", because the internet shouldn't tarnish all my childhood memories.) After 3-2-1 Contact went off the air (and stopped publishing their very cool magazine...), I found Square One, which I watched way passed the intended age. Again, the end-of-the-show serial mysteries were the best. Mathnet ruled even more than the Bloodhound Gang (the Fibonacci sequence trumps moth-pheremone ghosts any day!) and I remember being unwarrantedly excited the time they had an episode-long mathnet special.

Being an adult, I don't keep up on PBSs children's offerings like I used to, but I somehow discovered that the latest show in the "TV for geek kids" genre is Cyberchase, and I decided to check it out. This show is great. Deviating from the standard science-for-kids format, instead of a melange of separate scenes, each episode is a half-hour cartoon with a coherent plot. In each one, three children are sucked into cyberspace to protect MotherBoard from the attacks of the evil villain Hacker (played by Christopher Lloyd). This usually requires solving various puzzles. The cool part - often the kids get the puzzles wrong, and time is spent showing the kids trying to talk out the answers, often with each taking a different approach. In the few episodes I've seen, the puzzles have covered basic math and logic, but also pulled in what I would consider computer science puzzles, such as require inductive breakdowns of the problem or considering alternate representations of the data.

Definitely check this show out if you've got kids. It's just goofy enough to be fun for adults watching along as well. Tomorrow's episode looks to be a fun one:

Double Trouble

Out for revenge, Hacker invades Shangri-La and imprisons Master Pi . The kids and Digit arrive as Hacker searches for the Good Vibration -- the source of peace and happiness on the cybersite. Trouble doubles with unexpected results for the kids as well as Hacker, Buzz and Delete. Will the good vibrations continue, or will Hacker turn Shangri La into Shangri Blah?

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I was heartily amused by TeeVee's commentary on the media coverage of "Blackout 2003". Not that I got to actually see any of that coverage, what with being in the blackout zone and all. So I can't comment on how accurate their statement is that coverage focused on New York City more than on the several other states (and provinces) which were effected. A huge city without power is bad, sure, but it sounds like their television and radio stations both had generators and knew how to turn them on. Round these upstate parts, we were in media blackout, making the test of the emergency broadcast system which I heard the next day particularly amusing. Though, with the phones working, I guess the national coverage was useful, as we were all able to call out west and find out when we might expect our power back.

The story actually points out a more serious complaint I have about media coverage of events in New York City. See, there's a reason there is a "City" at the end of the name -- there is also a New York state. And while there are times when "New York" is unambigous: "mayor of New York", "senator from New York", etc., there are many more contexts in which it should be specified, such as "New York is without power" - a comment which leaves family unsure whether I'm sitting in the dark or not. In fact, they should be able to conclude from that statement that there is a state-wide blackout, because one rarely follows a state name with the modifier "state"; much more common is the modifier "city", as in "Kansas City" or "Oklahoma City", which I've never seen abbreviated to their ambigous state name. But one can't make that conclusion, because the media uses "New York" as an abbreviation for "New York City", and they're left with misinformed viewers when they actually mean the state (I've had multiple people be surprised that the New York smoking ban was being instituted "over here" as well).

I get that New York City is big and even referenced more frequently than the state as a whole, but the media, and particuarly the news, are supposed to be informing the public, and they've gotten into a sloppy habit.

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I've never been a fan of big summer movies, except for on those horrible 90+ degree days when the air conditioning is worth the cost of admission. Oh, I'm hearing how great Pirates of the Caribbean is supposed to be. I don't get the pirate love, and the explanations of the appeal mostly come out as: "But Amanda.... 'Arrrrr'!"

Ah well, the local independent theaters have actually been running some really good stuff lately. Spellbound, the documentary about eight contestants in the national spelling bee, was really good. They were very respectful of the children, which I appreciated. And tonight I saw Owning Mahowny, which was also very good. It's about a banker whose gambling addiction is spiraling out of control at the same time as he is being given greater responsibilities for (and access to) funds at his job. But where a Hollywood blockbuster would fill the movie with lush scenes of glitzy casinos and violent threats from goons, this was a very psychological movie. The casinos were seen mostly through the eyes of the gambler, whose focus stayed on the game at hand, or as seen from above through security cameras. And the central character is acted wonderfully by Philip Seymour Hoffman, really selling the tragic compulsion that Mahowny is acting under.

I know... "But, still, Amanda.... 'Arrrr'!"

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I told a friend I'd link to 80's Movies Rewind, an archive of 80's movies with photos and trivia. I like that the reviews point out the links between a lot of the movies. If I had an infinite amount of money, I could use their movie listing as a shopping list...[via PCJM]

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I think weather.com came up with this new icon, representing "Light Drizzle", just for Ithaca. Note the lack of actual clouds such as are present in the icons for "Showers", "AM Showers", or "Light Rain". What we have here is an attempt to portray the constant background grey of spring weather around here. I'm honestly impressed.

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From the "Please, I'm not that gullible" files, a converstion from earlier this evening:

Them: Did you hear it was announced that the Indiana Jones trilogy will be released on DVD this fall?
Me: No - cool!
Them: Yeah, but they remastered the whip as a cell phone...

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I was sent this today under the cover "I'm ashamed to be a guy", and I'm still not 100% convinced that it's real, even though it is at CNN.com: TNN changing its name to Spike. They want to appeal to male viewers more, drawing off their lineup of WWE, Star Trek: TNG and "Slamball" and their 66% male audience. When did Spike become "a guy's name" anyway? My association is with the Buffy villain, and while I love that character, I'm not sure he's the image of manhood for the WWE and Slamball.

What makes me find this particularly sad, is that for a while TNN was my example of a network that knew it had a male audience but used advertising which built off that without being offensive to women. Consider those appalling chick-fight beer ads which supposedly poke fun at stereotypical beer advertisements by framing the objectional content inside a fantasy ad. Contrast them with TNN's ad for Star Trek: TNG in which two TNN employees are talking about the surprising success of their latest ad campaign, while a poster from said supposed campaign featuring a breast-exposing Klingon woman is in the background. The subtext is made explicit as one of the employees asks his friend if he'd "you know...." said Klingon, and the incredulous look on his friend's face, and the more-nerdy-than-not appearances of the two men sells the ad's ironic humor. And without turning off female viewers!

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A discussion of what good movies were supposed to be coming out this year led to short-term excitement that a new Kevin Smith movie should be released until an IMDB search revealed that the new Kevin Smith movie is a J-Lo movie, promptly negating all enthusiasm for it. It's just wrong.

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Because the media seems to be attempting equal parts overwhelming war coverage and overwhelming distraction from war coverage, I doubt anyone missed the insane hype for the "immortal" WWE Hulk Hogan/Vince McMahon match. As a public service to all of my raised-in-the-eighties readers who are fighting their involuntary curiosity over whether Hulkamania will be declared dead, I've done the web search so that you don't have to, and Hogan won. Excuse me while I now go dunk my browser in rubbing alcohol....

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Wooooooooo! Not that you would know it from watching television, but basketball isn't the only sport with NCAA finals going on, and Cornell just won its way into the NCAA ice hockey Frozen Four, with a beautiful double-overtime goal shot from pratically behind the goal line. The entire post-season has been exciting this year.

My enjoyment of the games, though, hasn't been helped by Time Warner Cable. Cornell's got their first chance to do well in the tournament in decades, and at least Time Warner Cable decided to air it on their local station, but they haven't actually followed through and made sure the games were aired in their entirety, or with watchable video coverage. Yesterday's coverage only started 15 minutes into the second period, the first half of the game being plauged with technical difficulties so bad they recommended people just listen to the game on the radio. Today's game had audio the whole way through, but the video varied between four-frames a second jerkiness, checkerboard interference, and at its best was so over-exposed you could hardly see the lines against the glaring white ice. Yes, Time Warner Cable garnered a great deal of hatred from local hockey fans over the past two days. At least they managed to air all of their commercial breaks successfully....

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I spent the past few days on a mini-vacation involving a lot of time in the car listening to music, and I got to listen to TMBG's "Particle Man" for the first time in many years. It's a cute song, but after a few repeats and the general boredom of a long ride, I started wondering what it meant. Being a good liberal-arts alum, I was of course able to come up with a semi-plausible interpretation wherein Particle Man, as the fundamental unit of matter, clearly represents the physical world and Triangle Man alludes to Christianity's trinity and refers to God. This explains why Triangle Man always wins when up against Particle Man or Person Man (obviously representing humanity). To understand Universe Man, it is necessary to look at the lyrics a little more closely. It is striking that Triangle Man hates Particle Man and Person Man - we are reminded of the often vindictive and destructive nature of Christianity's old testament diety. In contrast, we are told that Universe Man is "usually kind to a smaller man" but does not appear to interfere in his existence, and is timeless with his watch with an eon hand. Universe Man is the true underlying power, not God.

Once I got back, a quick surf of the internet indicated what I feared, that the song was never meant to be taken so seriously. This interview with They Might Be Giants says:

We'll be trying to write a real direct song, and people will think that there must be some hidden meaning, because the obvious meaning doesn't make enough sense. [...] I think "Particle Man" is probably the song that people talk about the most, and yet has the least to offer. Basically it's just a song about characters in the most obvious sense. They're not real people; it's not Animal Farm. It's not like they represent other people.

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The Simpsons had a hilarious parody of Fox News, with news-ticker jokes and an election "debate" in which their general biases were reflected by a drawn-in halo over Krusty the Republican candidate and upside-down devil-horned footage of the opposing Democrat. It is unfortunate for Fox News that an hour after that episode aired the front page of their website tag-lined their article on Clinton and Dole's 60 Minutes debate with the label "Bubba vs. Dole, Round One". [via JRE]

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How very like Fred Rogers for there to have already been a page up at the Mr. Rogers website this morning to help parents talk to their kids about his death. It's very nicely done, and it's very sad to have to be reading it.

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I recently received a copy of the Special 30th Anniversay Edition School House Rock! DVD, and it's every bit as fun as you would expect. I had no idea they had made forty-six songs, but they're all here, along with nifty extra features and a new video and everything. My favorites are "Interjections!" and "I'm Just a Bill!". But I noticed something odd in one of my other favorites, "A Noun Is A Person, Place or Thing". Check out their rendering of Chubby Checker I've included here. Is it just me, or is there something off with that image?

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I detest the media. The Columbia destruction is a tragedy for both the astronaut's families and everyone at NASA associated with the project. I am sure that nobody there is feeling relief that Bush said we will continue space exploration, as the pundits started saying after he spoke. I can't imagine they are feeling anything but grief over the loss of their teammates lives and the failure of the mission, and agonizing over whether there is anything they could have done to have prevented it. I hope that people's thoughts and prayers go out to them as well. The loss of lives that were in their hands must be personally devastating.

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If you haven't already seen it, the only decent Superbowl commercial has an extended 3.5 minute version too: Terry Tate: Office Linebacker. Hilarious!

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I was dubious at first, but my friend J seems to have stumbled across the definitive evidence that the Simpsons is set in Springfield, Michigan. In the second season episode Three Men and a Comic Book, Bart turns in a soda bottle for recycling to Apu and declines to credit the cash towards a purchase, saying "No, not today, I need the dime". And as you can see in this chart of Beverage Container Deposit Systems in the U.S., Michigan is the only state with 10 cent deposits. Q.E.D. Very nice work, J!

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Of course I saw The Two Towers tonight, and of course it was wonderful, and I could blather about what I liked and what could have been done better and what adjustments they made to the book. But what I did not expect was the audience composition at the 3:45pm showing I attended. Sure, there were the hardcore geek fans with their cloaks and scruffy beards. But the most significant, and certainly the loudest, group was the early-adolescent girls with "I [heart] Frodo" painted on their face and pictures of Elijah Wood pinned to their shirt, who serenaded Orlando Bloom with shrieks and hoots when he appeared on the screen or did something exciting. Lord of the Rings has become a teen heartthrob movie, and a corner of me suspects that market segment is how a particularly out-of-character and out-of-genre scene for Bloom came about. The phenomenon is utterly bizarre, and I feel as if these girls are missing the point of the movie. They don't seem to want to be Arwin or Eowyn, or join in the fantasy or Tolkien's world. They were the crowd that wasn't comparing the movie to the book afterwards, though they were fans enough to buy tickets for a show that sold out days ago.

And there is the odd way in which the teenaged girls latched on to the most genderless of the men in the movie. Even as the hero, Viggo got no cheers as his name appeared in the credits -- have these girls no eyes???? It's so easy to forget the appeal of the non-threatening, cute male to an adolescent girl. But then why the lack of love for my favorite hobbit, Sam? He's sweet and strong and faithful and absolutely adorable to boot. Those girls puzzle me greatly, but at least they are helping support some movies I love for a change.

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I can't resist a Star Trek movie, no matter how much I know I should, so I saw Nemesis this evening. Full review of Star Trek: Nemesis here, but it really is as bad as you might fear from the previews. Taking a darker tone this time around really didn't help. I'm a bit sorry I bothered to go see it, though I know that no number of bad reviews would really allow me to skip a Trek movie. I'm glad this is supposed to be the last one and I hope they stick with that promise.

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I listened to the streaming VH1 radio for about a week before it mysteriously disappeared. I've become really sick of all of my MP3s again so I looked around and found Live 365 and they seem to have an okay selection of stations. Honestly, I haven't looked beyond 80's Retro Radio yet tonight. The first 10 songs up, I knew every word to, and it's great grading music (which is what I'm doing right now). How can you go wrong with a station that starts with In Your Eyes, and then moves on through Breakout, Bette Davis Eyes, Simply Irresistible, Let's Dance, and If You Leave. And that's at 2AM no less, with no bleary DJs to put up with. I love the internet.

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Remember kids: always check Rotten Tomatoes before plunking down your perfectly good money for a movie. It was ignoring this advice which led me to see Full Frontal this evening. I at least enjoyed it more than the person I saw it with, but both of us left the theater shaking our heads. It was a self-aware film about film making, and tried to be all cute and clever about being not just about film making but also about making films about film making, and so on. It's all very meta. With the tag line "Everybody needs a release" on the posters, I suppose the quest for meaningful relationships, and the randomness of finding "The One", even for a while, also runs through the movie as a major theme, but it wasn't treated particularly interestingly. I'm sorry, but it's not "modern" or "edgy" to throw an internet-based romance into your story anymore. I still can't figure out what the point of the Hilter-monologue play was, except as a model of how bizarre actors and directors can become. The bad film quality was as annoying as most reviewers thought. I understand why it was done, but the quality was so bad, I sometimes couldn't tell which character was on screen.

As a single positive, David Hyde Pierce did an amazing job and was the only interesting character in the movie, no thanks to the script. He actually acted, and left all of the meta layers of meaning alone. He has one scene where he's on the phone with the vet because he's afraid his dog is dying, and it was utterly realistic and touching. He even managed to pull off a somewhat overly symbolic scene in which he goes to get himself a beer after having been fired - his boss having asked him whether he drinks his beer out of the bottle or a glass, and then telling him the company is looking for bottle-drinkers. It's a contrived set-up, but he doesn't over-act the moment when he has to decide if he'll pour this beer into a glass as well. I wanted to know more about this guy, and the rest of the characters were just a distraction. Unfortunately, most of the movie was about the other characters, so I really can't recommend bothering to go see this mess.

My clever friend (who should say hi in the comments if they'd like to be publically credited) was observant enough to spot a small note of interest to X-Files fans, though. Remember in Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose where Scully and Mulder use a psychic (Clyde) who can see how people are going to die to solve a case? And the following bit of dialogue takes place:

Clyde: "You know, there are worse ways to go, but I can't think of a more undignified one that autoerotic asphyxiation."
Mulder: "Why are you telling me that?
Clyde: "Forget I mentioned it. It's none of my business."

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After a series of internet radio stations I enjoyed went off the air, I'd given up on internet radio, but I saw someone mention Radio VH1 and decided to give it a try. I'm loving it. They have a ton of different stations, in different genres, including some really fun ones like a compilation of their top 100 one-hit wonders or the "Summer Fun" mix station (currently playing). You have to register to listen (and the site doesn't make that entirely clear), but I'm really enjoying it.
[edited to add: Of course, I found this through the wonderful Pop Culture Junk Mail - I should have known...]

Posted by Amanda at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes, a banner ad manages to catch my eye. This time, it was one from EnergyStar, the energy-efficient appliance certification people. Their ad features a "summer energy saving tip", specifically to wash your clothes in cold water. I've seen this advice before and it always irks the hell out of me, because it's an example of trying to reduce energy by not actually accomplishing the task you set out to do. Cold water simply does not dissolve soap as well as hot, or at least warm, water. Go grab a bar of soap and check out the difference in washing your hands with cold water as compared to warm water. And that's just on the surface of your skin - not absorbed into cloth. Many clothes don't need to be washed with truly hot water, of course, but a cold water wash and rinse just does not get the same amount of soap out, and if you reduce your soap usage too much, you sort of miss the point of, you know, washing your clothes.

Posted by Amanda at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I also rewatched Big Trouble in Little China with some friends over the weekend, and it remains one of the funniest bad movies I've ever seen. It's got some great dialogue, and beautifully cheesy effects. If you're already a fan of this movie, check out the fan site The Wing Kong Exchange, particularly the huge sound files area. We also watched The Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which is supposed to be funny in a similiarly bad way, and also has a strong cult following (see the Banzai Institute), but which I didn't enjoy nearly as much. Sure, it's got a great 80's vibe, and it's hard to resist a sci fi movie with John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, and Jeff Goldblum, but it was too much bad and not enough funny.

Posted by Amanda at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)