Leave it to the New York Observer to go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to the Oscar wrap-ups. The Transom reports not just from a Thursday pre-Oscar party at Mondrian, but from the men's room,

which was rapidly being permeated by a fetid odor. "Jesus!" said a curly-haired man at the front of the one stall, scrunching his face in disgust. "Oh man--that's awful!" gasped another, burrowing his head inside his trench coat. "Lawd-a-mercy!" cried still another, and then: "Check out those shoes," pointing to the black suede loafers peeking out from under the stall.

After about 10 minutes, the stall's occupant began jiggling the apparently jammed door, with increasing aggravation. The Transom helped wrench it open, only to encounter oil heir Jason Davis, the larger, lesser-known brother of Brandon, dressed all in black, with a white scarf and platinum hair.

Before The Transom could compliment Mr. Davis's performance and inquire as to his influences, the latter man made for the door--no doubt much lighter on his feet than before.

Kudos to The Transom for sniffing this story out!

Whoa.

I'm not sure how this fits with the blog, but here's Fr. Neuhaus on the passing of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.:

Nonetheless, Arthur Schlesinger was a delightful interlocutor. It was simply that he had not had a fresh thought for years. Our last encounter was at Princeton in 2004 at a conference occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of my book The Naked Public Square. I’m not sure he had ever read the book, but he used the occasion of what he understood to be its argument to blast the Bush administration for being the most dangerously religious presidency in American history. He was then age eighty-six and somewhat frail, and the other speakers at the conference were gentle but firm in trying to set him straight. But I had the impression that Schlesinger wasn’t listening. At that point, and for many years before that point, he had made up his mind.

Dorm Room All-Stars

Galley Friend L.B. gives us this wiggedy-whack Vandy hoops highlight reel. You won't be sorry.

Holla T. to the Double E.

Will Perdue represent.

More on Antonella Barba

Jenny's still dogging the story. The wet T-shirt at the WWII Memorial pics are actually kind of morally repugnant. I don't mean to sound more prissy than usual, but isn't posing semi-nude in the fountain of a memorial to the 405,000 men and women who died protecting your country kind of out of bounds? I'm just saying.

Although I'm also just saying that if Antonella could handle a snap, maybe Jenny wouldn't be into this story . . .

Everything Old Is New Again

Chris Anderson has a provocative post on the future of webdom:

I propose that things that are paid will become free and vice versa. So music and books and other media are turning from paid products to free marketing, while free-to-air video and radio become a subscription or on-demand product for a fee. If I explain any more the premise will fall apart, so I'll stop here. It is now A Law. Obey.

He's just thinking out loud, so there's no sense in trying to pick this apart, but as a conversation starter, I think it's pretty interesting. Also, it seems to me that it may be at least half right: The half about things that are now free becoming paid.

I've spent the last couple years preaching that newspapers and magazines should be charging for at least a portion of their online content. If I were running the web operations of a big-city daily, I'd follow the Wall Street Journal's model: Give away the stuff that other people do for free (opinionjournal.com) and charge like a mofo for the stuff that only you provide (everything else in the paper, which is locked down at wsj.com). It's not obvious to me why this wouldn't work for the Baltimore Sun or the Kansas City Star. Take the op-ed pages, supplement them with some opinion writing by your editorial staff that only appears online, trim down the national and world covereage in the paper, and throw lots and lots of resources into reporting the heck out of local news, business, technology, politics, and sports. And don't give any of that away for free.

Few newspapers would be able to get away with charging what the WSJ.com charges, but why couldn't they charge something smaller, say $19.99 a year. And if more newspapers and magazines move to this formula, they'll increase each others' pricing power, because as the freebie alternatives dry up, consumers should be more inclined to pay. (Consequently, I also suspect that having a paying audience of readers would increase the value of online advertising at a site.)

(I remember back about six or seven years ago, the holy grail of online news was the idea of micropayments--that everyone would have some PayPal-ish version of an EZ Pass and all articles would carry some tiny price tag, say $0.05. And then readers would pay as they go. I suppose that's still theoretically possible, but I suspect that the evolution of payment for news is much more likely to follow the traditional subscription model than an iTunes model.)

Not to over-analyze the psychology of media executives, but it seems to me that they've become so brainwashed by the constant claims that journalism is worthless, the Old Media is dead, MSM = Big Evil, dinosaurs, sail power, blah, blah, blah, that they've lost the confidence to even consider charging for the work they do when it appears online. This has allowed a huge market of bloggers and news aggregators to spring up and make space for themselves, in many cases off the back of the reporting work done by traditional newspapers and magazines. (Churchill would be unsurprised to see that failure of nerve cripples industrial empires as surely as it does military and cultural ones.)

If newspapers and magazines are to survive and thrive, eventually they'll have to take the plunge and find the courage to charge for the work they perform.

The other half of Anderson's argument, that paid programming today (books, music, video?) will become free is also interesting, although it seems less obvious to me. The bellwether here may be Google's attempt to digitize and distribute books, thus making a profits on other people's copyrighted material. Will individual authors and artists be cowed into not enforcing their copyrights? I would guess not.

But there are certainly signs suggesting that they might.

Jenny on the Spot

Dream Girl Jenny is all over the Antonella Barba-American Idol scandal. Just in case you were interested.

Game Stuff

It's a Sony-hating mash-up video. I applaud it.

Also, there's this bit about Call of Duty: The Lawsuit. Very interesting.

And let's not skip over this awesome piece of news: Sony didn't just delay the European launch of the PS3 because of supply problems--the company has decided to give European gamers an updated version of the console that's different from what Japanese and North American consumers bought. How's it different?

The European version of the PS3 will apparently not feature the PS2's Emotion Engine chip and will rely mainly on software to emulate PS2 compatibility. The result is that backwards compatibility will be limited compared to the U.S. and Japanese models. Some analysts see this as a positive, though.

The positive comes from the long-term production cost savings:

initial analyst reaction to the move by SCEE has been positive. In a note from the folks at Datamonitor, analyst Alex Kwiatkowski said, "By utilizing the latest hardware Sony is able to rationalize the number of components required. This move is significant, as it will have a positive impact on the PS3's long-term cost profile. By launching the PS3 in Europe with the new chassis, Sony has at a stroke removed one of the barriers to future price reductions, and providing it can make enough units available, Datamonitor believes there will be sustained growth in PS3 ownership as new users seek to benefit from the PS3's enhanced features and functionality."

Of course, that assumes demand high enough to realize savings. The real question is: When will PS3 ads begin appearing in European Sunday circulars?

News Flash: Giant Squid Update!

Or maybe only colossal squid":

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A fishing crew has caught a colossal squid that could weigh a half-ton and prove to be the biggest specimen ever landed, a fisheries official said Thursday.

If calamari rings were made from the squid they would be the size of tractor tires, one expert said.

The squid, weighing an estimated 990 pounds and about 39 feet long, took two hours to land in Antarctic waters, New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said.

The fishermen were catching Patagonian toothfish, sold under the name Chilean sea bass, south of New Zealand "and the squid was eating a hooked toothfish when it was hauled from the deep," Anderton said. . . .

Colossal squid, known by the scientific name Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, are estimated to grow up to 46 feet long and have long been one of the most mysterious creatures of the deep ocean.

All Hail Jason Reitman!

For he has reunited Michael and George Michael Bluth.

All Hail the New Media!

It's classic steam vs. sail over at TheStreet.com where Priya Ganapati writes this rosy story about Sony's PS3 prospects. Ganapati declares:

Sony's (SNE - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating) PlayStation 3 game console may finally be ready to break out.

Retail giants such as Best Buy (BBY - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating) and Target (TGT - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr - Rating) are expected to feature the PS3 console in their weekly retailer advertisements starting this week in a move that could signal Sony has sorted out production problems with the next-generation device.

Sony had faced delays in the mass production of blue laser diodes, a component of its Blu-Ray hi-definition DVD player that is part of the PS3 console, which pushed the launch of the console in Europe to March 23.

The company launched the PS3 in North America on Nov. 17, but supply of the consoles has been tight.

Now PS3 supply levels are "stabilizing," says Dave Karraker, spokesperson for Sony Computer Entertainment America.

"We are seeing more units of PS3 in stores on a regular basis and not the extreme sellouts that were there soon after the console was introduced," says Karraker. "And with supply levels stabilizing, you can expect to see increased marketing for PS3."

Best Buy featured its first ad for the PS3 on Feb. 18, while Target is slated to put one out on Feb. 25.

On the matter of Sony's supply problem, that seems to have been solved since about the first week of January, which is when major retailers began reporting that they had PS3 units sitting on their shelves. As for the question of advertising circulars, the PS3 was being advertised in Best Buy and Circuit City circulars in my Sunday paper. I remember, because at the time I noted how silly these ads were since the supply of PS3s was so tight. (I believe--but can't be certain--that the PS3 appeared in at least the Best Buy circular during the Christmas season, as well, but my memory on that count may be faulty.) Perhaps Ganapati meant that this is the first ad Best Buy has featured for the PS3 in 2007?

There is a larger question about the strage angle of this story--namely why the piece is mostly positive even though Sony's raw sales data (which Ganapati mentions later in the piece) are so bad and the company is having a senior management shake-up in Europe just weeks before the launch of the PS3. But that's less important and is really a matter of perspective. Ganapati is certainly entitled to her analysis of the situation and she may be right that the PS3 is about to break out.

Manny's Law

Who's your favorite NFL player, non-Eagle, non-Brady Division? Maybe it should be Manny Lawson, who seems to actually write this brilliant column for the '49ers' website:

Let’s talk about this San Francisco Crab Festival on the 24th that I have volunteered myself for. I don’t know what all it entails. I hope it is not dealing with live crabs because I’m not too fond of getting pinched. I try to stay away from that. Maybe we can race crabs, I don’t know. I’m not sure what it’s about. If it’s just eating crabs, that’s good. I can do that. I’m a huge seafood guy.

I haven’t really gone anywhere since the season ended, and it seems like they are really trying to send me home. All I do is work out and run and watch film, and now I guess they are trying to send a strong hint that I need to go away, go on vacation or get away from football because they have taken my weight room away from me. I have been kicked to the curb.

They are calling it a “re-modeling” but they know that I don’t know of any gyms around here to go to, and I don’t have one in my little neighborhood. And I don’t understand this treatment. It’s not like I loiter or walk around the building aimlessly bothering everyone. I have my routine, come in and I leave. I don’t think they love me any more.

I guess it is good that they are renovating our weight room, changing it and making it more efficient to players’ needs, but what about mine?

But I figured something out. If they take everything out of the weight room, where are they going to put it? Well, I discovered that they just shifted it to our locker room, so I can just lift in there. There’s always a loophole so in a few hours, I’ll be back in here getting my swole on. I’m sure they are laughing and thinking, “Let’s see if Manny can find the bench press.” Well, I found it.

I haven’t cleared 200 in bowling yet. I got 192 bowling and I choked on the last frame. I still can not believe. All I needed was 8 pins out of 10! I had been hitting at least nine pins all day with my little curve ball, but on that last one I decided I’d try to roll it straight down the lane. It didn’t work. Instead it went straight into the gutter, so I’m still not a pro and I still don’t have my own ball or my own shoes.
Vickiel Vaughn has bowled on his own too, and he did the same thing, came close to 200 but choked on the last frame with a gutter ball.

My choke really hurt my feelings. I just sat there. They know me by name because I go there so much so they were checking on me in there to see how I was doing, and I was just so upset. I just sat and thought about it for a bit. It was tough to swallow.

Mainly though, I’ve watched a lot of movies. . . .

He goes on. He's awesome, with a capital Awesome.

Derrick Comedy

I don't know much about these guys, but I really admire the sketch "Keyboard Kid": It takes gimmicky lighteheartedness, adds tragedy to it, and somehow pulls the whole thing back into lightheartedness again. Pay close attn to the actor's face and tell me you don't notice the shade of Buster Keaton. Also worth checking out is "Girls Can't Be Trusted." Derrick My appreciation does not extend to the skethc called Bro Rape.

And they have a plan . . .

Galley Wife SLL sends along this MSNBC story on the future of robotics:

For example, imagine a body suit with sensors that can guide you through a golf swing like Tiger Woods'. Or a robo-birdwatcher that can tell you where to look for that rare ivory-billed woodpecker. Or an android gardener that can show you where to plant your seeds . . . As baby boomers become older, they'll still want to lead active lives--but they may well welcome a little robotic help to do it.

SLL responds:

Sure. Tell that to Admiral ADAMA.

“My name is 6. Look over there at that rare ivory-billed woodpecker!!”

Slate Embraces the CW on UFC!

The ghost of Mike Kinsley must have been hovering elsewhere for Slate to have published Troy Patterson's conventionally intuitive piece on the UFC.

This isn't meant as a complaint, but perhaps Patterson would have been in a better position to comment on the UFC phenomenon had he watched more than what appears to have been a single clip-show from Spike. His ultimate conclusion might have been the same--and might well be right--but surely there are depths left unplummed here, like, for instance: Dana White's NASCAR-like control of the sport; the evolving standards of rounds, judges, and most important, weight classes; the financial success of the UFC enterprise; and the sports media's continuing insistence on ignoring UFC even while much smaller and more obscure sports (arena football, women's college volleyball, etc.) get column inches in sports sections and time on both ESPN and local news sportscasts.

Again, I'm not rendering a moral verdict here. The UFC might still be little more than cockfighting with homo sapiens. But the story seems more complicated and serious than Patterson has made it out to be. And it certainly deserves more a more serious attempt to grapple with it. So to speak.

Still, Slate should be encouraged, not chastised, for avoiding knee-jerk counterintuition. So good for them.

PS: Galley Sister MAL suggests that the "arm bomb" Patterson refers to was most likely an "arm bar."

Character Actors

Pajiba has a great ode to character actors. This isn't the typical love letter to Phil Hoffman--it's about guys who are still character actors and haven't made the jump to character leading men--guys like Zeljko Ivanek, James Rebhorn, and Nicky Katt (who I thought might break out after Way of the Gun). Sample awesomeness from their special shout-out to Galley Friend M.C.:

Jon Polito — The Greasy Gunman
Good grief, Jon Polito has been in everything. From Silvio the landlord in the reverse-peephole episode of “Seinfeld,” to detectives on both “Homicide: Life on the Street” (with fellow listee Zeljko Ivanek) and “Crime Story” (with listee Michael Rooker), all the way through Flags of Our Fathers, with hundreds of film and TV stops in between, Polito has been everywhere. Everywhere. But it’s his roles in a series of Coen brothers films that have been some of his most memorable character creations. Polito often plays a slimy character with vague underworld overtones, as in the stellar Miller’s Crossing, where he plays Johnny Caspar and gives a wonderful little soliloquy about “character” and “ethics.” Polito was only 40 when he took on the role of Caspar, originally written as a man in his mid-50s, but his mix of anger and self-pity turned the character into something both charismatic and vaguely unsettling. He’s strong enough to yield the spotlight to the rest of the ensemble in whatever he does, and that only makes him more watchable.

Don't miss this great piece.

Bonus: Did you realize that Peter Stormare was Slippery Pete in the Seinfeld Frogger episode? I didn't.

"Molotov Mocktails"

I checked out of the Sherman-Palladinoless Gilmore Girls a while back, but Galley Wife SLL is sticking out season seven, perhaps in the hope that in the series finale Luke will discover that there are hundreds of Gilmore Girls scattered across the planet and when Miss Patty does a special dance they all start talking really fast.

But no matter the show's fall from grace, last night's episode (written by Rebecca Kirshner) featured one of the great phrases in recent television history: "Molotov Mocktails." Kuwaiti communist radicals the world over would surely rejoice.

The lovely and talented Miss Kirshner is, of course, a Buffy alumna. Whedon should send her flowers this morning.

Behind Civ

Now that hours and days and months of reading, writing, and, um, "researching" are behind me, let me just air out a few other details from the Civ. piece.

1. You guessed it. The friend who controls foreign cities by starving out the population and repopulating it with his own people is Jonathan V. Last. Let us not forget he once defended the destruction of the planet Alderaan.

2. Joseph Bottum's strategy of winning at Deity was much more complicated than I let on. There are many conditions involved, such as selecting a single continent, choosing an ancient civ. whose unique unit comes early, building roads in one direction, gambling you will hit pay dirt (meaning you connect with another civ.). You must also reduce all funding on science in order to build as many units as possible. Then you send them out and overwhelm. I think Bottum once won by the year 400 B.C. Also, his wife won't let him upgrade to Civ. IV until he finishes writing his book.

3. Sid Meier is a very funny guy. When he was explaining the importance of decisionmaking, he says it is all up to the player to decide "Do I go for a barracks or a marketplace?" I asked him which is it. He said, "Yes."

I am sure there is more but it all seems to blend in now. Unfortunately I can no longer use the piece as an excuse for playing the game. But wait til I tell my wife about the piece I am writing on Vivid Video.

Whoopi--a week-old (or so) story

In case you missed it, this little news item about PBS's tracing Whoopi Goldberg's genetic ancestry to the impoverished little country Guinea-Bissau on Africa's west coast is a treat. It is the perfect setup for some goofy Coming-to-America type comedy, but in reverse. The people of Guinea-Bissau are thrilled to claim Whoopi as one their own, but the Hollywood-Square star is apparently loath to fly in an airplane to make their acquaintance.

Back to Africa: The Movie

Civilization and Its Contents

Matus, who doesn't write nearly enough for my taste, has written the most important article of the year: The definitive exegesis on Sid Meier's Civilization.

Don't miss it.

"R.I.P. TRL"

Jenny sends us to this great headline.

When Comics Attack

Blog Crush has video short of Joe Rogan ambushing some comic who seems to be unpopular in the stand-up world for stealing other people's jokes.

If you're not into the comedy world, you probably won't care, except for the fact that Joe Rogan makes for a kick-ass avenging angel. But the real, super-fantastic payoff is when Rogan has another comic--some tall, skinny, Jewish guy named Ari--come up onstage. Look closely. Ari's wearing a "Tap Out" shirt.

Frackin' awesome.

What, no sepuku?

Sony's head of sales for Europe has resigned six weeks before the (delayed) European launch of the PS3. I'm just saying.

Some day the PS3 is going to be a brilliant case study for b-school students.

The Science of Godzilla

Galley Friends M.G. and M.C. both send along this detailed exploration of the science and physiology of Godzilla:

Godzilla is meant to be something like 100 m tall and between 20,000 and 60,000 tons in weight (his size fluctuates in the various films). Of course lots of people who like doing sums and talking about cubes and so on have used the mathematics of scaling to show why - duh - Godzilla couldn't really walk, stand, or even exist. Michael Dexter presents the argument here, and also brings in thoughts on blood pressure, circulation and physiology to show that a living Godzilla would variously fall to pieces, tear itself apart, have its organs turn to jelly, explode due to a build-up of internal heat... you get the picture.

I know of two palaeontologists who have made comments on various of Godzilla's physical properties. Jim Farlow, a palaeobiologist based at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, and best known for his work on dinosaur trackways, speculated in 1998 on the foot size of TriStar's GINO. Jim noted that he'd 'probably have to log-transform the measurements to get [the data from the toes] onto the same graphs with my other data without scrunching the other points into an indecipherable blur near the origin'. He also noted that it might prove difficult to cast even a single Godzilla footprint given grant limitations and the cost of plaster of Paris, silicone or latex rubber. Sadly, Prof Farlow never published his thoughts on this subject and all we have is a message posted to the dinosaur mailing list (here).

Sauropod expert Mike P. Taylor did a bit of science on Godzilla (this time on the original, not on the TriStar creation), but has also - for shame - failed to publish his results. Interested in how much weight can be absorbed by the limb's cartilage pads, and in how big these pads needed to be in sauropods, Mike threw Godzilla into the data set to see what might happen. Godzilla's cartilage disks would not, it seems, hold up under his immense weight, and we can therefore conclude that a terrestrial biped of Godzilla's size and weight is impossible. Mike included this valuable and surprising [joke] data in his 2005 presentation 'Upper limits on the mass of land animals estimated through the articular area of limb-bone cartilage', and to his annoyance it was the one brief comment on Godzilla that earned a mention of this presentation in a write-up of the respective conference (Jones 2005). An abstract of Mike's presentation exists (Taylor 2005), though it doesn't mention Godzilla, and you can see the presentation for yourself on Mike's website.

Oh you bet there's more. Hop to it.

More Clint Eastwood on War

Loathe as I am to do politics here, I have a mean-spirited and probably too-angry-by-half post about Clint Eastwood's new-found moral relativism over at the WorldWide Standard.

Fly, Eagles, Fly

Yeah, this is all kinds of awesome.

Truth: I'm just kind of shocked the Reid boys didn't find their way into one of those Samoan gangs you always hear about in Salt Lake City. I mean, they'd fit in, right?

The Novotna Rule

Steven Landsberg has this interesting, university-president career-destroying piece about how, in tennis women choke under pressure more often than men:

You can observe a lot of high achievers under pressure at a Grand Slam tennis tournament. Better yet, you can observe them under variable pressure: Things are a lot tenser when the score is 5-5 than when it's 0-0. Professor Daniele Paserman of Hebrew University made good use of this variability at the 2006 French Open, U.S. Open, and Wimbledon tournaments. First, he assigned an "importance" to each point in each match. He did this by assigning probabilities to every way the match might unfold, accounting for players' ratings, the surface they were playing on, and the identity of the server. That allowed him to say things like, "If Roger Federer wins this point, he has a 60 percent chance to win the match; if he loses the point, he has a 55 percent chance." The 5 percent difference measures the point's importance.

It turns out that by at least one measure—the number of unforced errors—men play equally well throughout the match. They make unforced errors on about 30 percent of the most important points, about 30 percent of the least important, and about 30 percent of all those in between. But women show a very different pattern: 34 percent unforced errors on the least important points, steadily rising to almost 40 percent on the most important. That's almost surely too big a difference to be mere coincidence.

What, besides choking, could explain those numbers? Maybe the closest games are usually played late in the match, when players are more fatigued; maybe more of those games involve weak players; maybe more of them occur at the French Open, where the court is harder to play. But professor Paserman tests all these theories, and none stands up to statistical analysis.

Another countertheory: Maybe women play more defensively when the score is tight. If both players just keep lobbing the ball back and forth, there can't be any forced errors, so all errors are recorded as unforced. In support of this theory, professor Paserman observes that women do play more defensively when the score is tight. (He measures defensive play by speed of serve, length of rallies, and so forth.) But, unfortunately for the countertheory, so do men. When the pressure's on, both men and women get more defensive (and by about the same amount)—but only women make more errors.

Get Larry Summers on line one!

Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter

Massawyrm makes the case that Thomas Harris isn't a hack--he just hates the character that made him famous:

Thomas Harris hates Hannibal Lector. No, I mean he fucking HATES Hannibal Lector. Hates the ever loving shit out of him. There’s no other explanation outside of mental illness. No, fuck you. It ain’t greed. Harris is a solid writer and Hannibal Lector books wouldn’t be a hard thing to write. He could write book after book after book of Hannibal eating his way across the world while a different cop narrowly misses catching him at the end of EVERY FUCKING BOOK and yet it would still be readable. It would have an audience. And an unending series of cinematic adaptations steadily declining in quality and budget. But this. There is no explanation for this. No explanation for the end of Hannibal. No explanation but that he has come to hate Hannibal Lector and keeps trying to write himself into a hole that no one will bother paying him to write himself out of.

Actually, the same thought occurred to me after reading Hannibal: Harris looked like he was trying to make Lecter so terrible that he'd never have to see his incarnation again.

Bonus: I'm not a big comments reader, but in the AICN comments section are two inspired bits. The first is simply, "Hannibal gotta eat." Nice to see the Rev. Al Sharpton getting some love. The second is,

Read between the lines in the author's end note in Hannibal. Harris hates the good doctor and doesn't want him living in his head. He couldn't get him to go away by giving him a 'happily ever after' with Starling, so now he's trying to pull a Terminator and kill him off as a child.

Harris's problem, however, is that he was on the leading edge--heck, he have even been the leading edge--of the torture-porn industry. And his efforts to wreck the franchise have only stoked demand.

Best Use of Soundtrack

Sony fanboy S.B. sends us this link to Onion's AV Club list of the 15 best uses of pop songs in movies. It's a pretty solid list--including Boogie Nights, Almost Famous, Goodfellas, and more.

We can all make our case for overlooked scenes, of course. I'd agree with S.B. and say that Aimee Mann's "One is the loneliest number" from the opening of Magnolia should make the list. You make think otherwise.

Nancy Drew, Dignity, etc.

How sad is this?

Last weekend, before Because I Said So, I saw the trailer for this summer’s Nancy Drew, and it’s just about as sad as you can imagine. The powers that be have taken a pretty decent teenage detective heroine and tweenified her, ditching the original premise in favor of a generic fish-out-of-water small-town girl moving-to-L.A. and dealing-with-fashion-faux-pas flick. The murder mystery seems secondary at best. It looks like a really pathetic version of Clueless for the Vacant-Stare Generation™, right down to another bad cover of “Kids in America.”

I mention this only as a segue to this tidbit: There is much unfounded speculation that Ben Stiller’s next project will be a buddy comedy with Tom Cruise, in which the two will update the freakin’ Hardy Boys with a film titled Hardy Men.

More on the F-22

Galley Friend Michael Goldfarb has another disturbing post about the F-22 Raptor--maybe "disturbing" is too strong a word. How about bizarre: There's talk of selling the F-22--to Japan.

Japan is, of course, one of our staunchest allies. But talk about one of history's jokes. Goldfarb has the punchline at the end of this post.

Submariner = Slider

Blog Crush sister-site With Leather points us to this video. I don't really know how to explain it, except that it's Marvel superheros, doing the volleyball scene from Top Gun. With Charles Xavier as the ref. And you can't really imagine how awesome.

Pistol Pete

Galley Friend R.S. sends along this utterly amazing Pistol Pete highlight reel. If you're too young to have seen him, this is must viewing. If you remember him, this will make your day. It's about 6 minutes long, but stick around for the "wrist-pass" around the 3:30 mark and the unbelievable passing montage that starts around 5:00.

Enjoy.

Guilty!

BREAKING NEWS: Senator Barack Obama has announced he is canceling his run for the White House after Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton expelled him into the Phantom Zone (above). His attempts to break free with his hand proved futile. Before disappearing into deep space, Senator Obama was heard yelling, "You have been known to disagree with the Senate before. Yours could become an important voice in the new order, second only to my own! I offer you a chance for greatness, Hillary, take it! Join us!... You will bow down before me, Hillary. I swear it, no matter that it takes an eternity! You will bow down before me! Both you and then one day your heirs!"

Can We Panic Now?

Those who have insisted all along that Sony's PS3 was an unstoppable juggernaut (I'm looking at you, S.B.) have maintaned that Japan was the Sony's Alamo, a territory where their advantage would be so complete that it would make up for flagging sales elsewhere. Well, it's the Alamo all right:

Enterbrain's Hirokazu Hamamura has predicted a price cut for

PlayStation 3 after new figures revealed that the console is being outsold by both Nintendo Wii and PS2 in Japan. According to Media Create, more than 80,000 Wii units were sold in the territory between January 22 and 28. During the same period Sony sold 21,000 PS2 consoles and 20,000 PS3s. Just 7000 Xbox 360 units were shifted as Microsoft continues

its struggle to secure a foothold in the Japanese market.

Wii sales for the entire month of January stood at 400,000 units, while 150,000 PlayStation 3 consoles were sold.

The PS3 launched in Japan on November 11, followed by the Wii on December 2. Since then Sony has sold 614,000 consoles while Wii sales have topped 1.4 million.

Tempting Fate

Really, this is the dumbest thing any corporate titan has said in a long time:

[Bill] Gates started off the Apple portion of his interview by touting security features in Vista. Providing a robust security foundation was even offered as a reason for having left out many of the features originally planned for Vista.

"We made it way harder for guys to do exploits," said Mr. Gates. "The number [of exploits] will be way less because we've done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn't done any of those things."

In another portion of the interview, he added, "Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine."

Unless this is a double head-fake, where Gates really does want Romanian hackers to bust Vista wide open because Microsoft didn't have the time to do security testing themselves, this seems really, really stupid.

Reason #476 to take the bus . . .

Because at the bus stops, at night, they sometimes show porn.

Go Ahead and Cry

Joss Whedon has left the WB's Wonder Woman project.

Last night's Super Bowl commercials were a mixed bag. The trick is not taking any notes on them and trying to remember any good ones and, even more of a challenge, recalling what products were actually being advertised. I found, for instance, the office-survivor ads to be funny. But was it for Monster.com or some other web-based job firm? Some promos were very short but easily memorable, such as Letterman and Oprah. Kevin Federline was able to self-deprecate for (I think) Nationwide Insurance. Gamers, I am sure, loved the Coke-Grand Theft Auto commercial, turning a criminal into a good Samaritan. And then there is the phrase "Connectile Dysfunction" for, I think, Nextel Sprint. But as one of my colleagues asked, What happens if you've been connected for more than four hours?

Super Bowl

In terms of collective quality of play, maybe the worst Super Bowl game in my lifetime. The only comparable messes are the Ravens-Giants in 2001 and Bucs-Raiders in 2003.

There have been worse games, I suppose, but not many games where the collective talent on the field was so terrible. The Bears are on the list of worst teams to appear in a Super Bowl since '82. And name the Super Bowl champs who were worse than the Colt. Again, it's a short list.

That said, the Prince halftime show was the best I've ever seen. To relive the glory, it's in two parts on YouTube. Part 1 and Part 2.

Update: From Galley Brother B.J.:

This year’s Super Bowl taught me that I actually know nothing about football.

I’d have thought that in bad weather the Bears would want to pressure Manning, take away the short passes, and force him to beat them over the top. I’d never have thought of Lovie Smith’s ingenious strategy of playing every down like it's 3rd and 15, not pressuring Manning, and giving up a safe 8 to 10 yard pass on every play. (Did Smith think he had a huge lead and could trade yards for time. Or did he just not want to risk getting blown out and was playing to lose while keeping it close-ish?)

I had thought that loose balls were very important and that you want to see your players diving after the ball once it's fumbled, like Grossman did after his HB fumbled right in front of him. Rather than pulling a Manning and watching the ball hit the ground 5 yards away and then refuse to go near it because there are defensive players running towards it. (How is it that no one called Manning out on this last night?)

I’d say Manning’s performance was nothing even remotely special. He had one touchdown pass because the Bears decided not to cover Wayne and a bunch of yards and a high completion percentage because the Bears weren’t covering anything short. And he refused to risk contact by not going after a loose ball after his HB fumbled near the Bears' 35. I’m not saying I could have put up those numbers against that Bears defense, but I’m saying Bubby Brister could have.

Of course, most talking heads/experts will disagree with me.

One-Liner of the Day

From Blog Crush II:

Did Sheila E ever get 2 lead a glamorous life? Because I think she probably works at Boston Market these days.

Bonus: It's possible--just possible--that this item, an extended Troy McClure discourse on the history of Super Bowl halftime shows, is the funniest thing ever to run on Blog Crush II:

Hi, I'm Troy McClure! You may remember me from such Super Bowl Halftime Shows as "Down with People, Up with Fish!" and "There Are 100 Michael Jacksons!"

I'm here to talk with you today about the evolution of the Super Bowl Halftime Show and, in accordance with my plea bargain with Miami-Dade prosecutors and the Miami Seaquarium, provide you with my prediction for the game.

The first Super Bowl Halftime Show was held, surprisingly enough, in 1965, years before the first Super Bowl. Initially the term was used by authorities as a code for beating up Vietnam protestors.

Take that, Maynard G. Muskyvote!

Trailer City

The new trailer for Knocked Up is remarkable not just for the stunning and unexpected comic timing of Katherine Heigl (somewhere, Jason Behr and Shiri Appleby are crying) but for how very, very much the male lead sounds like a 30-year-old Albert Brooks.

It's uncanny.

Best Euphemism Ever.

From this story about San Fran mayor Gavin Newsom boinking the wife of his deputy chief of staff/campaign manager, Alex Tourk:

Alex Tourk "confronted the mayor on the issue this afternoon, expressed his feeling about the situation in an honest and pointed way, and resigned," said one source close to Tourk and his wife.

Oh, to have heard that pointed expression of honest feelings.

PS: Just wondering--deep in the story, as all players are refusing to comment, there's this funny line: "A family friend who asked not to be identified said she would have no comment."

I don't know much about journalism or anything, but if a source isn't going to comment, they don't normally then get to request that they also remain nameless, do they? Isn't commenting the price of anonymity? And if you're going to let anonymous sources not comment, then why include it in the story?

The only explaination I can figure is that reporter included this just to get the pronoun "she" in, to point suggest that this anonymous no-commenter might be Newsom's ex-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle. But that seems like a stretch . . .

Such a Dirty Old Man

Being a latecomer to HBO/BBC's Extras, I've been catching up on the older episodes, including this one with Patrick Stewart. The man has got range!

I can't believe the news today...

According to Breitbart.com, certain parishes under the Church of England will now be able to perform services to the tune of U2 songs "in an effort to boost congregations." Two of the songs to be used are "Mysterious Ways" and "Beautiful Day."

As some of you know, I've listened to U2 since I was about 14. But if I were sitting in a church and suddenly I was told to please rise and sing the communion hymn, "Bullet the Blue Sky," I think I would have to flee.

Sadly, this sort of gimmick is not new. When I was in Catholic high school, someone conned our teachers and the local priest into playing Mr. Mister's "Kyrie" during the consecration.

Get Your Geek On

Dan McLaughlin has been musing about the Star Wars prequels. I know what you're thinking--Now?

Except that Dan isn't working in terms of recriminations. He's thinking about how the films could have been improved. And one of his ideas, in particular, will blow you. (Away!)

2. Combine the First Two Films. Since the original Star Wars ("A New Hope") billed itself as "Episode IV," the prequels had to be three films. But they didn't have to be these three. In fact, I think most Star Wars fans expected the first of the three films to introduce Anakin, the second to cover the Clone Wars, and the third to bring Anakin over fully to the Dark Side.

Had Lucas stuck with that order, a huge number of the narrative problems and omissions in the prequel trilogy would have fallen away. First, Lucas himself has admitted that he had to pad out Phantom Menace to get to a full-length film. Making an Episode I that covered Phantom Menace's storyline in 45 minutes before jumping ahead 10 years to pick up the Attack of the Clones storyline would have immediately removed or drastically shortened a lot of the filler and the redundant plotlines - the Gungans (Jar Jar even would not have been so bad with five minutes of screen time), the storyline where Anakin accidentally destroys the Death Star-lite, the fun but overlong pod race, the repetitive fight scenes at Padme's palace. As a corollary, instead of being off in a star fighter Anakin should have been present for the final battle with Darth Maul. That would have presented several opportunities - have him witness the death of his first mentor, intensifying his emotional scars. Have him play some role, through a not-entirely-intentional use of the Dark Side of the Force (perhaps even a Force-choke on Darth Maul that isn't noticed by Obi-Wan) that saves Obi-Wan and lets him kill Darth Maul, thus (1) establishing Anakin's unusual precocity without the need for a midichlorian blood sample and (2) serving as a sort of original sin in his relationship with Obi-Wan. Personally, I would also have laid out near the beginning the death of Sifo Dyas, whose critical role in ordering the clone army is never explained onscreen.

Hardware Hotness

Mike Goldfarb has a disturbing post about the unbelievably hot F-22 Raptor. Seems the fighter was designed without the ability to send data!

Ouch.

Caffeinated donuts. I'm just saying.

WorldWide Standard

Galley Friend and Eagles Super Fan Michael Goldfarb has taken over the WorldWide Standard and looks to be taking the blog in different, highly interesting directions. For instance, here's Goldfarb on the "MOP"--the Air Force's new stealth bunker-buster:

Military and Aerospace Electronics reports that the Air Force is working to outfit the B-2 stealth bomber with a "30,000-pound bunker-busting 'super bomb.'" The bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), is designed to destroy deeply buried and reinforced bunkers of the type North Korea and Iran have relied upon for their nuclear weapons programs.

You can read more about the MOP at globalsecurity.org, but most significant is its ability to penetrate more than 200 feet of earth and reinforced concrete. That is a significant improvement over the GBU-28, which is a 5,000-pound laser-guided bomb that was initially used to destroy Iraqi underground facilities in the first Gulf War. And while some experts have questioned how effective bunker-busters will be against hardened targets in Iran and elsewhere, John Pike told me last year that he believed the military had deliberately fostered such doubts in an attempt "to lull the mullahs into a false sense of security." He said the GBU-28 would cut through such facilities "like a hot knife through butter," which makes one wonder just what a bomb six-times heavier could do.

Goldfarb is a fine reporter and a great writer and if you have even passing interest in military affairs, he'll be required reading for you.

Sony: Completely Out of Touch

Take a look at this article, featuring an interview with Sony's Jack Tretton. The date stamp on it says "January 23," and I assume that's from 2007. But Tretton's description of the marketplace sounds like it's from January 2006. In the course of ruling out a PS3 price drop until 2008, Tretton says:

Tretton also stated that demand for the PS3 means that consumers will be willing to pay over the odds at launch.

“I think the consumers that get their hands on a PlayStation 3 clearly see the value and not only want to buy one for $599, in some instances they’re willing to pay ridiculous prices on eBay,” he said.

Here's the PS3 eBay page. First, note that there's a ton of inventory. Next, observe that there are indeed a lot of sellers asking ridiculous prices, but not a lot of buyers at those levels. The action seems to be on the many, many units which are selling below MSRP.

Aussie Open Notes

Andy Roddick can't roll with RFed, but he gives good interview:

He was asked what it was like to be on center court at the end of a Grand Slam semi in which he was sent packing in straight sets in just 1 hour, 23 minutes.

"It was frustrating. It was miserable. It sucked. It was terrible," Roddick said. "Besides that, it was fine."

Roddick was asked to explain the match starting from the point where the score was 4-4 in the first set.

"I got broken. Then I got broken three more times. Then I got broken two more times in the third set. Then it was over 26 minutes later. Is that what you saw, too?" he said.

Questions turned to Jimmy Connors, the former great who is now coaching Roddick and who the player had earlier said helped to boost his game and his confidence to the point where he believed he was ready to challenge nine-time Grand Slam winner Federer.

Reporter: "What did Jimmy say to you straight after the game?"

Roddick: "He gave me a beer."

What was Connors advice coming into the match?

"There was a lot of strategy talk," Roddick said. But, "It's not so much like, `If you're down 6-4, 6-0, 2-0 ...' We didn't really talk about that. Oops."

Will Work For Food

Specifically, I will work for foie gras eggrolls, Bay scallop ceviche, and freshly shucked oysters. As Washington Post staff writer Sara Kehaulani Goo reports from Google HQ in Mountain View, California, that is exactly the sort of fare offered by the company's various cafés (and not cafeterias) to its hard-working employees.

Just a taste:

One week, according to menus Google provided, chefs featured the "tuna tower": a collection of "mixed organic greens, carrot matchsticks, and Asian dressing topped with sliced, seared Ahi tuna, diced ginger root and lime, toasted coconut, basil, mint, cilantro, pickled cucumber and peanut praline." Earlier this month, a menu at Cafe 150 touted egg rolls "stuffed with Szechuan duck confit, Sonoma foie gras and julienne celery root . . . served with huckleberry-ponzu jelly"; Bloody Mary consomme with "house made crab, saffron, and celery gelee"; and, for dessert, potato chips covered in chocolate and sprinkled with fleur de sel.

Two other things: Google offers not only lunch but breakfast and dinner, encouraging its 10,000 workers to spend more time in the office, thereby bolstering productivity. Second, did I mention it is all free?

I know what you're thinking. Go ahead, soak it up, enjoy it while you can. But nothing lasts forever and one day this too shall pass. Maybe so, but that might not be for at least another six or seven years. And right now, I am thinking of going to Potbelly's, wait in a line that wraps around the block, and purchase a "Wreck" sandwich and a bag of Utz sour cream and onion potato chips.

It's just not right.

Bam Bam Bigelow, RIP

Sad news: Scott "Bam Bam" Bigelow is dead at the age of 45. ImpactWrestling.com has details about services to be held at the Jersey shore this Friday and Saturday.

I don't know that I ever saw a great build-up to the introduction of a new WWF wrestler like the one Vince McMahon gave Bam Bam. Remember all of the managers--Bobby the Brain, Mr. Fuji, etc.--fighting to sign Bigelow, only to have the weird Mr. Humperdink emerge with him after weeks of promos?

Quiescat in Pace.

At last night's State of the Union address, President Bush recognized Dikembe Mutombo for his humanitarian efforts, saying:

Dikembe Mutombo grew up in Africa, amid great poverty and disease. He came to Georgetown University on a scholarship to study medicine--but Coach John Thompson got a look at Dikembe and had a different idea. Dikembe became a star in the NBA, and a citizen of the United States. But he never forgot the land of his birth--or the duty to share his blessings with others. He has built a brand new hospital in his hometown. A friend has said of this good-hearted man: "Mutombo believes that God has given him this opportunity to do great things." And we are proud to call this son of the Congo our fellow American.

Afterwards, Mutombo told the Houston Chronicle in a phone interview that "My heart was full of joy. I didn't know the president was going to say such great remarks. He raised me so high. I'm so happy. I'm so proud to be a citizen of the United States of America and to be recognized for my work. God is good to have put this work in my heart."

The Rockets center then proceeded to Statuary Hall and greeted the press gaggle with a hearty "Who wants to sex Mutombo tonight?"

The Daily Mail reports that this frill shark was recently discovered off the coast of Japan. Widely regarded as prehistoric because it has barely evolved over millions of years, this frill shark lurks more than two thousand feet below the surface, has a "mouthful of needle-sharp teeth," and feeds on other sharks.

Shoot it! Shoot it!

House: A Very Special Episode

Blog Crush II got their hands on the script for a Super-Bowl themed episode, guest starring Peyton Manning. So brilliant you'll cry.

SuperBowl Sour Grapes

Much--too much--is being made over Dungy and Smith being the first black coaches in the SuperBowl. Does anyone care about this stuff anymore?

But on the off-chance someone out there does care, I propose that we simply declare that the NFL will only have completely solved its diversity problem when a black kicker wins a SuperBowl.

(Or, failing that, when another white running-back wins. Whichever comes first.)

Get Your Fresh CulturePulp!

For real this time. A very excellent installment.

Best Headline Ever?

The wits at the Washington Post have this tidbit on Nancy Pelosi's new charm offensive:

"Pelosi Lures Cameras to the Speaker's Box"

Yeah, baby! No word yet as to whether Vivid or Digital Playground will win the rights.

My Fast Wants to Hump Peter Stormare

The best ad series of the year has got to be VW's new GTI series, "Un-Pimp Your Ride." The spots feature Peter Stormare doing a hipster/mad-scientist character that's a melding of his characters from Big Lebowski and Minority Report, with of dash of Sprockets added for good measure. The only way these ads could be better would be if he threw in a barely-audible cluck-ing sound.

This one is the best of the group:

Check out the wild look in his eyes just before he gets to the catch-phrase, "Time to un-pimp ze auto..." Priceless.

The two other entries in the series are here and here.

Aussie Open Notes

Saw a lot of the new Serena Williams this weekend:

"Get the champ some peanut-butter brickle ice cream!"

Mummy Represent

Dustin Rowles has some unkind words about the news that the third installment of the Mummy series has been given the go-ahead. But let's give a little shout-out to the Mummy: Yes, the movies aren't much, but the Universal Studios' roller-coaster, Revenge of the Mummy, may be the best theme-park ride ever made.

Plus, the Mummy franchise brought Rachel Weisz to the wider world. And if she isn't in your top five, something's wrong with you.

Cold Comfort Farm

Yes, this is the only thing Philly fans have to keep them warm this weekend.



Note the outstanding POD at the end of the clip. Some producer was thinking fast.

Darth Gates on the PS3

Sure, he's spinning, but Bill Gates makes some reasonably persuasive points nonetheless:

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has declared that the strategy for Xbox 360 is "working perfectly", questioning Sony and Nintendo's next-gen console offerings.

As reported by Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News, Gates observed that the original Xbox was "20 per cent better" than its rivals.

However, he continued, "It didn't matter. We were a year late, didn't have the best games. We had this bigger box. We did have online. We didn't switch positions on that."

But as for the strategy for Xbox 360, "It's working perfectly. We wanted to be the guy with the small box that costs less. We wanted to have the most games. We wanted to play to our software strength, and tools and online.

"We wanted to swap positions with Sony. We wanted to not be a year late, not be a big box, not be a more expensive box. How are we doing on that?"

I can't believe I missed this but, last November, according to Jon Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune, "A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.... The sighting occurred during daylight, about 4:30 p.m., just before sunset.

"All the witnesses said the object was dark gray and well defined in the overcast skies. They said the craft, estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter, did not display any lights.

"Some said it looked like a rotating Frisbee, while others said it did not appear to be spinning. All agreed the object made no noise and it was at a fixed position in the sky, just below the 1,900-foot cloud deck, until shooting off into the clouds."

Luckily, the UFO found an open gate at Midway.

The master of ceremonies for this year's White House Correspondence Dinner has just been revealed by the Examiner: Rich Little. That's right, the Rich Little. Remember his Christmas Carol impression-extravaganza? Sure that was in 1978 but it still resonates today. And what about those indelible Little Debbie commercials? Frank Gorshin, if only you were still with us! (Or what about Pat Cooper?)

Manning

Blog Crush II has an awesome video of Prince Peyton. Scroll all the way down.


Seriously: If Manning wins, or even get to, the SuperBowl, ESPN and other NFL telecasts will become totally unwatchable next season.

For no good reason, here are Archie Manning's career stats. Go look the up the next time one of the ESPN heads talks about his greatness. That's right, 125 TDs vs. 173 INTs, lifetime. Only two seasons with more TDs than INTs.

I'm not sure he'd even start in today's NFL.

Short Sony. Now.

From Galley Friend S.B. comes this AICN entry indicating that porn producers seem to be choosing HD-DVD over Sony's Blu-Ray.

Update: The NPD console numbers are out:

Official hardware statistics reveal that despite the addition of new hardware to the market, Sony's PlayStation 2 was still the biggest selling home system, clocking up 1.4 million units for December, and 37.1 million to date in the US.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 added another 1.1 million units in December to a total of 4.5 million units since launch, while Nintendo's Wii sold 604,200 units for the month - with year end sales at 1.1 million.

Although Sony recently announced it had shipped one million PS3 units to North America, NPD data reveals the new console has only sold 687,000 of those, with 490,700 units sold in December.

Advantage: Blogosphere

Galley Brother B.J. sends us to the Nation of Islam Sports Blog. It's pretty good. Sample:

Salaam aleikum, Paul Hewitt.

Your Georgia Tech Black Jackets defeated the ultimate white devil, Mike Krshewissdiyssky and his evil forces of oppression, in the subhuman form of Duke Blue Devils.

For years slave master coach KKK has built his fortune and fame on the back of the original human. In turn, slave master coach KKK has tried to give the credit to the white players that have reaped the benefits of the Negro teamates around them. Jay Bilas, Bobby Hurley, Christian Laetner...etc, have all been products of their Negro teamates. Held in esteem and on high as they paraded themselves mounted atop the Negro throes beneath them.

How times have changed in Durham. Now, slave master coach KKK doesn't have the great numbers of talented Negro soldiers to fight his battles as in the past. Now his white players are exposed for what they are. Greg Paulus and Mcwhatever his name is are shown to be little more than above average players.

Here's NoISB on hockey:

White devils on ice. Whirling dervishes on skates. White athletes propelled and assisted by physics to speeds they can not reach on land. The ice. The last refuge and hiding place of the white athlete.

Not Michael Bay Blog territory, but still.

Great Moments in Philadelphia History

The drafting of the Constitution.

The election of Frank Rizzo.

And now this:

One group of Philly fans loaded up a pickup truck with imported snow in order to fire snowballs at Giants fans before yesterday's game. Even more hysterically sociopathic, the Birds supporters brought buckets to take the snow with them in order to hunt down New York fans in the parking lot.

Yeah, baby.

An American Hero

Some Galley Friends are aware of my slight misgivings about Realtors. But now I've found Frank Borges Llosa--a D.C. area anti-Realtor.

How great is Frank? If you go by his blog, he seems to know his stuff. And his mission statement seems to be along the lines of Are you sure you really want to buy that place?

But it gets even hotter--like this long post taking on the National Association of Realtors for their "It's a great time to buy or sell a home" campaign. (Only Realtors could figure out how to work the square root of -1 into market economics.)

Here's Frank on why not to trust the NAR. Here he is on how leverage increases the buyer's risks. Here he is on how Realtors fudge MLS data.

Go read it all.

My Name Is . . . Koyyyyyyyyy!

What's better than TonyHomo.com? How about the Koy Detmer fanpage.

Has there ever been this much love for a holder? Go ahead and download the Koy Detmer wallpaper. You know you want to.

Peter Jackson's Progress

If you haven't followed it, Peter Jackson's fight with New Line has now escalted to the point where studio head Bob Shaye says that Jackson, who was responsible for the biggest success in New Line's history, is no longer welcome at the studio: "[T]he answer is he will never make any movie with New Line Cinema again while I'm still working for the company."

The genesis of this fight is a lawsuit Jackson and his wife have launched against the studio seeking to gain access to the company's finances (see Jackson's explanation here). The nub seems to be that Jackson and Walsh think New Line is cheating them out of some revenue still due to them.

That may be true. Heck, the way studio accounting works, it probably is true. But it says something deeply unflattering about Jackson that he isn't content with what he has and able to write off whatever theoretical moneys he's missing out on as the cost of doing business.

Let's not forget that until Mike DeLuca (the former head of New Line), plucked Jackson out of obscurity and gave Jackson the LoTR project, he was a small-time, fledgling genre director. If you look at >Jackson's track record, he had four features under his belt, the biggest of which grossed $16.7M. (Only one other of Jackson's movies topped the $1M mark.)

Yet DeLuca and New Line bet the company on Jackson, giving him an initial budget approaching a quarter of a billion dollars. (The actual budget increased as post-production costs increased and the FoTR performed well at the box office.) By all accounts, Jackson was given near total freedom from and support by New Line, he won himself a basket of Oscars, and pocketed, when all was said and done, somewhere in the neighborhood of $250M for himself.

If New Line is cheating him out of another $8M in DVD revenue--heck, if they're cheating him out of $80M--Jackson should be grateful to the company for making his career, supporting his artistic vision, and changing everything about his life.

Going nuclear over a few extra dollars here and there after he already has his "fuck-you" money, suggests that Jackson has gone Hollywood in the worst possible way.

But after seeing King Kong, maybe we already knew that.

Levels of Funny

(*Also from Blog Crush II.)

Hating on Charm City

From Blog Crush II:

Fun fact: My favorite movie of all time is the Sum of All Fears. I know: Ben Affleck crappiness matched up with Tom Clancy retardery. But here's the kicker: Baltimore gets blown the fuck up by a nuclear bomb. I own the DVD and it's the only part I've watched since buying it. Still the greatest purchase I ever made.

Scroll up to the next post and you'll get more from the Sex Cannon, particularly an awesome White Chicks joke.

Impossible is the Opposite of Possible

Galley Friend C.L. gives me, and you, this amazing, beautiful gift: George Michael Bluth doing Aleksey Vayner. Is it better than anything you could possibly imagine? Yes.

News Flash: Sony Solves PS3 Supply Problem!

Executives at Sony have finally gotten some PS3 inventory onto shelves in North America, conquering what some analysts thought might be an intractable supply issue. With one half of the equation solved, Sony now turns to the PS3 demand problem:

Daniel A. DeMatteo, vice chairman and COO of GameStop, late last week said PS3s are available at "hundreds of the company's 3,700 outlets," according to the New York Times. The Wii, on the other hand, is still hard to come by.

"We got some [Wiis] in yesterday in really limited supply, and they virtually disappeared," DeMatteo said, according to the NYT.

The $250 Wii and $499/$599 PlayStation 3 were very difficult to purchase after their November launches, as gamers lined up outside stores at times days in advance to buy the systems. DeMatteo says this is the first time that PS3 stock has remained unsold in his stores.

Over the weekend, GameSpot editors visited a local EB Games, which is owned by GameStop, and found PS3s available for purchase. As for the Wii, one clerk told GameSpot, "We got some in earlier this week and they were gone in five minutes."

Pajiba Love

Our friends at Pajiba have kindly nominated (or nominated to be nominated) Galley Slaves for something called the Bloggies.

I don't know what the Bloggies are, but that's hardly the point. The reason I mention this at all is because Pajiba has put us on a list that includes two of the best blogs on the planet: Blog Crush II and Jenny's House of Romophobia. Which, however undeserving, is pretty sweet.

The Easiest Sell in the History of Pictures?

The history of cinema is littered with high-concepts that practically sell themselves:

* A giant shark becomes territorial.

* A dinosaur DisneyWorld goes terribly wrong.

* There are snakes. On a plane.

But have you ever heard of a high-concept as easy as the one for Normal Adolescent Behavior? Here's Drew McWeeney describing the flick:

Amber Tamblyn stars as Wendy, a smart girl who is a sort of lynchpin for a group of friends who have known each other since kindergarten. The six of them decided to skip the world of Friday night parties and hook-ups and spin the bottle so that they wouldn’t get side-tracked.

So every Saturday night, they get together as a group and have sex.

If New Line can't make a lot of money with this, something's wrong.

Pepper . . . and Salt!

Words of wisdom from Galley Friend M.G.:

Being from Philadelphia, this is all we can hope for--all we live for. We can never win the Big One. But if we can ruin the Giants' and Cowboys' seasons . . . that's our measure for success. That's our SuperBowl.

True that.

This has been the most satisfying year of Eagles fandom in my lifetime. Consider:

* The Birds beat the Cowboys twice--holding Terrell Owens to 6 catches for 68 yards and exposing him as the washed-up nutcase he is.

* Owens had a 1-year contract with Dallas and now that the rest of the league has seen that he's as used up as LiLo's cooter, it's nothing but short money from now on. The Cowboys might pick up his 1-year option for next year, but I bet he's substitute teaching within three.

* Tony Romo's bungled hold against the Seahawks was the best Dallas defeat ever (non-Philadelphia division). It was so good that it didn't even matter what happened to the Birds on Sunday.

* Listening to Parcells rip Romo after the game ("It looked like a good snap"), it appeared that (a) the Great Tuna might not be coming back to Dallas and (b) Romo's confidence might be shattered, Chuck Knobloch-stizz.

* Let's be clear: The Eagles have no--zero--chance of beating New Orleans on the road. But by beating the Giants last night, they contributed to the Legend of Manning. I hear squash season begins the second week of February.

* Also, last night's win probably signed Tom Coughlin's coaching death warrant.

Just in case you're keeping score, that's at least three, maybe even four or five, Giant/Cowboy careers wrecked by the Eagles this year. Fucking awesome. To be honest, I bet winning a championship is nowhere near as satisfying. Not that I'd know.

(And the Birds went to the playoffs with a backup QB, which doesn't happen every day in this league.)

How good was this season? So good that, for today, at least, I don't even care that Malibu Brownie has returned to Sixers management and looks to be about 12 months from taking over the head coach job. If Billie King wants me to buy a Nuggets jersey that badly, then . . .

The Rowdy One

Start your week off right: With this excellent Roddy Piper interview. It doesn't get much better:

"The fans saved my life, I truly believe that," Piper explains. "There was this pay-per-view called Cyber Sunday and the fans voted between myself, Dusty Rhodes, and Sgt. Slaughter, some pretty good company there, and it was for who was going to be Ric Flair's partner going for the tag team titles. Kindly, the fans voted me in, we won the titles, then we're over in Europe and something goes wrong with my legs…they're not working. They fly me back to the States, put me on the slab, cut open my back and they discover I have cancer. Lymphoma. But there's a really happy ending to it. First off, they picked the wrong guy to bully; I'm going to kick its butt. Also, they caught it at its very early stage. They put me on the rotisserie every day now, I'm going to be on radiation for the next 4-5 weeks, and they think they can clear it up. I'm going to be walking down that hall again, Jon.

"If the fans didn't vote me in, I wouldn't have went to Europe, I wouldn't have had a reason to have my back checked, and from what has been explained to me, in two to three years, this would have been all throughout my body and I would've had to go out that day. But you know what, the fans have been taking care of me all my life. What can I even say to them for that? It's pretty special for me."

Proposed: In the pro-wrestling pantheon, the only guy who comes close is Ric Flair.

Discuss.

Lisa, Nielsen, etc.

Just catching up on back Lisa de Moraes columns and this one is gold:

It's hard to be one of the Reporters Who Cover Television this time of year. While the rest of the population gets to attend holiday parties and amuse themselves with witty conversation about the regrettably low standard of morality among that segment of the population younger than they are, the poor RWCT usually can be found backed into a corner by a mob of partygoers angrily demanding to know why their favorite TV show was canceled while "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" is still on the air even though no one is watching, why reality programming continues to be perpetrated upon them, why TRWCT are so mean to that nice Katie Couric and, finally, to give details of their own idea for the next sure-fire gimongous TV hit.

Generally, at the first party a Reporter Who Covers Television has enough distracting factoids in his arsenal to come back pretty chirpily to this onslaught, if the eggnog is of high enough octane. But by the second party -- third, max -- his knotted and combined locks begin to part and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine, as Hamlet's dad used to say. . . .

Did you know, for instance, that "Studio 60," in addition to having an unusually upscale audience, as NBC likes to remind us, also is the year's No. 1-ranked show on Nielsen's Timeshifted Primetime TV Program list?

"Studio 60" enjoys an 11 percent increase in viewership when you add in all the households watching the show up to seven days after its Monday 10 p.m. broadcast. That's the largest percent increase of any program on prime-time television, Nielsen says.

This suggests that (a) NBC should try to strongarm Nielsen into using so-called "live + 7" numbers -- how many people record a show on VCR or DVR and watch it up to seven days after its broadcast -- in its weekly ratings reports so as to goose "Studio 60's" ratings and (b) maybe NBC should find a better time slot for "Studio 60." . . .

The Top-10 timeshifted programs are mostly serialized -- "Heroes," "Gilmore Girls," etc. -- but include the CW's reality series "America's Next Top Model." That makes sense since this fall it aired in the same time slot as ABC reality hit "Dancing With the Stars."

"American Idol," meanwhile, had the most product placements on broadcast TV this year with -- you want to be sitting down -- 4,086 occurrences in calendar 2006, which in the case of "Idol," really means between January and May.

"Idol" is the Mount Everest of product placement. Nothing else touches it. The No. 2 show on the 2006 Product Placement Top 10 is "The Amazing Race" with a mere 2,790 occurrences, followed closely by "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" with 2,701.

We're guessing about 3,346 "Idol" product placement occurrences come in the form of those three insidious red Coca-Cola cups prominently placed in front of judges Paula Abdul, Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson. Every time the camera cuts to Paula sitting at the judges' desk drinking "whatever" out of that Coke cup, it counts as one "occurrence," a nice Nielsen spokeswoman explained to The TV Column.

The rest of the occurrences on "Idol" are probably Cingular cellphones, from which we're urged to text-message in our vote for that week's best performance.

Not coincidentally, Coca-Cola is the most product-placed product of 2006, with -- will you look at that -- 3,346 occurrences. Cingular Wireless also is in the Top 10, but with a mere 532 occurrences. That's behind the Chicago Bears football team's 600 occurrences -- thanks to the ABC sitcom "According to Jim."

Here' s a fun fact you can wow them with at the next office party: All of 2006's Top-10 Product Placement Programs are reality series. Except for one scripted show, at No. 8.

Can you guess what it is?

[Pause] "King of Queens."

She's the best.

New Hotness

Not from Blog Crush or Blog Crush II, but from the original OG, Fr. Neuhaus:

Mark C. Taylor of Williams College is among the most nimble of nimble minds perched on the cutting edge of whatever, just possibly, might be the next big thing. His many books over the years on religion, philosophy, economics, architecture, and whatever have in common a neophiliac’s conventional delight in debunking what he takes to be conventional wisdoms. He was a friend of the late Jacques Derrida. (Earlier this year, The Onion ran the headline “Jacques Derrida ‘Dies.’ ”) Taylor is most noted for his conjoining of postmodernist a-theology with the “death of God” and a deconstructionist employment of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Older readers will no doubt remember the death of God. Taylor’s newest book is "After God."

In any event, Mr. Taylor’s op-ed (requires subscription) in the New York Times raises the alarm about the growing number of college students who “seem to be practicing traditional forms of religion.” These “fundamentalist” and “chauvinistic” students, we are told, do not take kindly to having their faith criticized. Even “distinguished scholars” are burdened by a new regime of “religious correctness” and some are “even subjected to death threats.” Mr. Taylor does not say whether he personally has been treated to the frisson of a death threat, but an administrator did once ask him to apologize to a student who complained that Taylor had offensively attacked his religion in class. Mr. Taylor writes, “I refused.” There are no doubt those who will admire his courage in the defense of professorial bad manners.

Of course, he does not see it that way. Mr. Taylor writes, “For years, I have begun my classes by telling students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed.” Imagine that. A man who embraces as his life’s work instilling confusion and uncertainty in undergraduates. Challenging work, that.

Then he let the Alpine play.

Baby, have you ever wondered...

..wondered whatever became of me? I'm living on the air in Cincinnati. Cincinnati, WKRP. Okay, not really, but that's where I spent last weekend for a wedding and New Year's. It was my first trip to Porkopolis (and actually my first time in Ohio) and I enjoyed it very much. They like to eat in the Midwest. No, I didn't get a chance to sample the Skyline chili but I did have ribs, a skillet of eggs, bacon, onion, and cheese, and a wiener schnitzel. Coming from DC, it was almost disturbing just how friendly those Midwesterners are. They constantly ask if you are okay and if everything is alright. They look you in the eye and smile. And they give you their name and phone number and hotel room...

Anyway, a great town. I highly recommend visiting the bar at the Netherland Hotel (now a Hilton) and the Mount Adams bar & grill.

A few other things. I am in the midst of profiling Civilization creator Sid Meier. He couldn't have been a nicer guy. Almost Wallace Shawn-like. ("Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!") The interview will be part of a future piece but in case you are wondering, there is, he says, at least one cheat code. No, I couldn't get it out of him.

Secondly, has anyone else seen the Reuters story on the robot in South Korea that will aid in the delivery of babies? I believe the first two babies it delivered were named Luke and Leia.

Platform Agnosticism

I'm not much of a fan of David Denby as a movie critic, but his long piece on the future of movies is brilliant and beautiful. A must read.

Here's Denby on HD-DVD:

At the house of my friend Harry Pearson, who started the high-end video magazine The Perfect Vision, I watched movies on what must be close to the ultimate home-theatre system, a setup priced at two hundred thousand dollars. I thought that a glimpse of the best now available might be a way of anticipating the affordable future. It was also tremendous fun. Harry’s system uses a digital projector suspended from the ceiling, which fed a movie screen nine feet across the diagonal. Various electronic components decoded or upgraded the digital information or sent the sound to multiple speakers positioned around the room. The player was one of the new HD DVD sets made by Toshiba, and the experience of watching what it produced on that screen was like putting on a stronger pair of glasses for the first time: everything was brighter, crisper, more sharply defined—newer somehow, as if it had been freshly created, even though one of the movies we watched was a half century old. (Digital transfers are made by scanning a film negative or a print; technicians then digitally enhance the images.) With amazement, we watched a DVD of John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece, “The Searchers,” which is widely considered to be one of the most successful transfers of an old movie. The southwestern sky above Monument Valley was a brilliant azure; the desert was not a mass of orange-brown glop but grains of sand and pieces of rock; and, inside the pioneers’ cabin, details normally hidden in shadow, like drying corn hanging from the ceiling, were clearly visible. And so it was with a recent film. When Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” opened two years ago, I referred to the Hit Pit—the gym where much of the action takes place—as “sweat-stained” and a “relic.” But the high-definition transfer of the film, bringing shapes and textures out of the murk, revealed a gym that was old and shabby but also tidy and scrubbed clean.

Yet, though the detail was extraordinary, the image was different from a film image, and strange in some ways. In film, the illusion of three-dimensionality is produced by the laws of perspective, by the manipulation of focus, and by the subtleties of lighting: we are led into depth by gradations of color or, in black-and-white movies, by shades of gray. A digital transfer compacts color and increases contrast, so, in the early attempts—say, from a decade ago—the actors looked almost like cutouts against a flat background, their flesh tones waxy and doll-like. The images didn’t breathe the way the original film images did—the faces seemed to have lost their pores. But high-definition digital produces a more nuanced gradation of color and a more definite molding of the face—you see planes and hollows. To my eyes, both in digital transfers and in movies that were shot digitally, flesh still looks a little synthetic, but it looks better than before, and no doubt it will look even better in a few years. (“You want pores, we’ll give you pores,” a digital technician in Los Angeles told me.) The image was steady, too, in a way that a film image is not. A film, after all, gets pulled into place in a projector by pins entering and then withdrawing from sprocket holes; the image onscreen can jiggle a bit. On Harry’s system I noticed an evenness, steadiness, and hard focus into the far reaches of the screen, and also the absence of earlier digital artifacts, like a black edge around shapes or a flaring of solid whites.

All in all, high definition is a big improvement over standard digital imagery, though in truth I admire it without loving it. To arrive at a film print ready for exhibition, the image has to go through at least four generations—from negative to positive, and then back and forth again—and, by the end, the multiple printing produces some minor softening and darkening of color. I like the way color blends on film: the image is painterly and atmospheric; more poetic, perhaps, than a digital image; lyrical rather than analytic. I may have seen more of the Hit Pit in the high-definition transfer, but expressive metaphor had yielded to workaday reality. I was happier with my earlier sense of the gym as a place of defeat redeemed by Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. And I think that Eastwood, having directed almost thirty films, may have intended “Million Dollar Baby” to look the way it looks on film.

And here he is on the idea of platform agnostism:

No exhibition method is innocent of aesthetic qualities. Platform agnosticism may flourish among kids, but platform neutrality doesn’t exist. Fifty years ago, the length of a pop single was influenced by what would fit on a forty-five-r.p.m. seven-inch disk. The length and the episodic structure of the Victorian novel—Dickens’s novels, especially—were at least partly created by writers and editors working on deadline for monthly periodicals. Television, for a variety of commercial and spatial reasons, developed the single-set or two-set sitcom. Format always affects form, and the exhibition space changes what’s exhibited.

I looked at “Brokeback Mountain” on a portable DVD player with a seven-inch screen and headphones—the kind of rig people use on airplanes and in jury waiting rooms. The focus was precise, the color bright. And, through the headphones, I heard such extraordinary details as the flip-flip-flip of the rain on the tent when Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are up in the mountains. Yet there was something wrong. I was not in the mountains. The grandeur of the terrain is not something the men are necessarily conscious of, but the massiveness of the mountain range, the startling clarity of the air, the violence of the weather enlarge the experience of feelings they have no words for and can’t control. If you watch the movie on a small screen, you’re not living within this great breathing, palpable place. The small screen takes the emotion out of the landscape.

Go treat yourself to this great read.

KSK Goes Blue

Blog Crush II has the following spit-out-your-coffee-awesome line in this post. It's dirty. Real dirty. So I'm going to put it in invisotext. Highlight if you dare:

Dude, have seen the cock on Darwin Walker? Good fucking Lord. You could hang Saddam Hussein with that thing and have enough left over to dock a battleship . . .

Pajiba Hype

Dustin Rowles has a ridiculously fun list of the most disappointing ("hype-busting") movies of 2006. Absolutely worth reading. What's that? You don't believe me? Sample the goods. On Nacho Libre:

Granted, by the time Nacho Libre arrived in theaters, I’d long since become sick of anything associated with Jared Hess’ directorial debut, Napoleon Dynamite (cubicle monkeys and frat boys had ruined all that was quirky and fun about the film by exhausting each and every catchphrase ad fucking nauseum and basically Lindsay Lohaned a cute, somewhat endearing indie film), and School of Rock had already sapped what little entertainment value Jack Black had remaining from his arsenal of fat-boy witticisms. Still, I’d naïvely held out some hope that the combination of Black and Hess could somehow rekindle their respective magic. Unfortunately, Nacho Libre was the ultimate comedic disappointment: Not only had Hess’ whimsy been exorcised by the big budget, but the film didn’t even work as mainstream gross-out, dick-and-fart fare. It was lame sketch comedy run amok, based on the flimsy premise that Jack Black’s flabby torso was intrinsically hilarious, especially in combination with a bad accent.

Episcopalian Monster Truck Ad

Galley Friend C.W. has sent us this unspeakably funny radio ad for St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. The ad, which C.W. said was commissioned, but never aired, was done up in the style of Monster Truck Rally ads. As in:

This Sunday-Sunday-Sunday! It's a Sacramental Showdown at St. Andrew's!

I'd transcribe more of it here, but you wouldn't believe me. So just click on the link and turn the volume up. Because this is the funniest thing you'll hear in 2007.

Bonus: The St. Andrew's in question is this church in Birmingham, Alabama.

How smart am I? This smart.

There will be no other discussion of the topic; talking about it will only detract from the enjoyment.

All Hail Tony Jaa!

For those of you who are fans of brilliant stunt work, here's a four-minute shot of a Tony Jaa fight sequence. It's done in a single Steadicam shot, which is kind of amazing. I can't even imagine how many takes they must have done to get it right.



Jaa might be the next Jet Li.

Boise State

This is a public service: If you didn't see the Boise State-Oklahoma game and then somehow missed the highlights, here's a brief montage of what was certainly the best football game in the last year and certainly ranks somewhere on the all-time list. It's only 2:30 long and you owe it to yourself to watch.

There are larger implications from this--or at least there should be. There is no compelling reason Boise State shouldn't be in the national title game instead of Florida. And if the Powers That Be in college football want to avoid a playoff system and keep the BCS, then they ought to mandate that if a team goes unbeaten, then they go to the championship team--and if that means that you get Boise State playing Utah every once in a while, then so be it.

The point of this dictum would be to force the big-conference schools to play the Boise States of the world during the regular season, giving the small-conference powers a chance to prove whether or not they're legitimate contenders. As it stands, the current system is ridiculous.