All Hail Blogzarro

Spurred on by Galley Friend A.K., I've been going through the back issues of Blogzarro and this site a real find. Check out, for instance, this seminal post exploring the end of a young comic collector's innocence:

The best lame comics have lame origin stories. “US 1″ came into exist not through the inspiration of a writer or artist; it was born in a marketing office. In the early 1980s Tyco created a line of electric trucking toys. A few years later they approached Marvel about doing a comic based on the toys. And Marvel bit.

Then, in 1983, in a lame reverse merchandising move, the “US 1″ comic hit the stands. And I bit. I was nine years old and excited to own a first issue of a series. This was an investment, I thought, that would pay off when I was in my early 30s, leading to an early retirement. Twenty-four years later “US 1″ comics are worth about six cents a copy and I am about 45 years away from retirement.

The hero of “US 1,” Ulysses Solomon Archer (U.S.A, get it?), graduated from college magna cum laude with a degree in computer program design and electronics engineering, among other things. He was quarterback of his football team. So, what does this athletic genius want to do with his life? Get hemorrhoids and drive a truck. Sounds like this guy shoots real low when it comes to career goals.

Immediately after graduation, U.S. joins his big brother, Jeff, as a gypsy trucker. But the life of a truck driver isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when there’s some demonic lunatic in a black 18-wheeler looking to play road hockey whenever it rains. The Highwayman, as he’s called, sends Jeff and U.S.’s truck off a mountain for fun. U.S. is thrown from the wreckage and survives; Jeff’s body isn’t recovered. Now we step further into lamesville.

U.S. is in bad shape after the accident. His skull is shattered. But, wait, there’s hope. There’s this new, experimental surgical “technique.” The doctors replace U.S.’s skull with a special metal alloy — which gives him at least two special powers: he has a really hard head now (which he uses for his devastating head-butts) and he can pick up CB transmissions in his head.

Of Comic Books and Cheesecake, part 2

Responding to this post on the proliferation of randy super-heroine statuettes, Galley Friend A.K. sends us this link to pure awesomeness: It's totally safe for work and features covers of Wonder Woman comics so fabulous that you won't believe the artists got away with them. Each is a giant F.U. to the Comics Code.

What are you waiting for? Go take a look!

Michael Bay Owns Your Ass

Remember Sissy Fight?

Well here's the Transformers movie tie-in version. And it's kind of awesome.

I'm not saying The Transformers is definitely going to win BP this year. I'm just saying that Criterion better start working on the platter for this classic right now.

Potter Watch

Some observations and predictions from Galley Brother B.J.:

I'm trying to reread years 1 through 6 before year 7 comes out. I'm about half way through year 2 and I've noticed a couple of interesting things:

Everything used by Malfoy to try and kill Dumbledore in year 6 shows up in year 2. When Harry accidentally ends up in Borgin & Burkes, he hides in the vanishing cabinet (although it's not named as a vanishing cabinet and he doesn't close the door all the way). The necklace is spotted and it is mentioned that its cursed and has killed its last 19 muggle owners. The candle that only give light to its holder also shows up. I'm pretty sure those are the only items that get described during the visit. And later, when Harry is in Filch's office, Peeves breaks the Hogwarts vanishing cabinet. It is identified as such.

Interestingly enough, Year 2 takes place in either 1992 or 1993; which we know because Harry, Ron, and Hermione attend the 500th anniversary of Sir Nick's deathday. The party takes place on Halloween and the cake states that he died in October of either 1492 or 1493). I'm fairly certain this is the only time you find out exactly when the Harry Potter books take place. I think this is noteworthy because the book is copyrighted 1999. Why was this date chosen? No clue.

Finally, I notice that Deadalus Diggle comes up a lot. He's the first wizard who's full name you hear in year 1. And he shows up two other times before Harry makes it into Diagon Alley for the first time.

Some wild theories:

Mrs. Weasley dies in year 7. I've been claiming this one for a while, but now I'm willing to bet on it. Why?

* She's the only mother figure for Harry.
* Harry has already lost 2 father figures.
* She always worries about everyone else.
* And there's dramatic necessity. A Weasley is always placed in peril. (Year 1: Ron with the giant Wizard's chess set; Year 2: Ginny in the Chamber of Secrets; Year 3: Ron abducted by Sirius; Year 4: Ron at the bottom of the lake; Year 5: Mr. Weasley in the Ministry of Magic; Year 6: Ron with the poisoned mead and Bill during the battle at Hogwarts.) It's become such a common occurrence that there's no suspense left when one of them is in trouble. To make year 7 dangerous, it makes sense to put a Weasley in danger early on and then kill them--just so J.K. can let readers know that she isn't fracking around.

I go with Mrs. Weasley instead of Ron because you just can't kill Ron at the start of year 7 and I think this death needs to come early on in order to make the rest of the book feel dangerous. Everyone knows a big death is coming; most people expect it won't come until the end. Kill someone early and the stakes have been upped for everything that comes afterward.

Dark Side Rebels

That. Just. Happened.

Of Comic Books and Cheesecake

There seems to be some agitation over a new Marvel statue of Mary Jane, pictured below.



It's unclear to me if people are bothered because M.J. is washing Spidey's costume or because she looks like she's on loan from the WWE's "Diva" squad. That said, there's a long, proud history of comic book cheesecake, much of which has even made its way into the comic statuette business as of late. Check out, for instance, this insane recent Supergirl:



Frankly, I'm surprised she's not depicted here fighting off an attack from some randy tentacles. But the most ludicrous serving of cheesecake in recent years has been DC's continuing fetishization of Power Girl, who has become something like a combination of Wonder Woman and 1995-era Pam Anderson.

Anyway, no matter how advanced and sophisticated comic books get, one suspects that they will never completely outgrow their pin-up roots. So if M.J. is getting the same treatment as the super-heroines, then I suppose there's no harm in it.

More Dorm Room All-Stars

Surely you remember the Vanderbilt hoopsters? Well, courtesy of Redskins Super Fan P.G., here's a crew of guys doing a dorm room dunk contest. It's pretty sick:



Now that's just the appetizer, check out this "in memorium" sequel, complete with grainy, sepia footage.

The Wages of Bushism?

Charles Barkley--who might as well be Cincinnatus in my book--now claims he isn't a Republican (and never was). He says some beautiful things.

I wonder if we'll be seeing more of this in the next couple years: People who are basically conservative being repulsed from the Republican party in general by the incompetence of the Bush administration?

UFC Goes Mainstream?

First Chuck Liddell makes the cover of ESPN Magazine and now NBC sports has an interview with him. If you follow this stuff at all, the proposed Tito Ortiz-Dana White fight sounds a bit too much like Vince McMahon stepping into the square circle. I'm glad it didn't happen.

The Writerly Life

So I'm reading a story from an April WSJ on the rise of militant atheism in Europe and the lead subject is a celebrity philosopher named Michel Onfray. In what may be the most damning line ever used to describe a subject, reporter Andrew Higgins give us this gem:

"Mr. Onfray, 48 years old and author of 32 books . . ."

Really, after that, what else do you need to know?

We're All Puritans Now

Last political post of the month, I promise.

Slate's Emily Blazeon writes of a certain person seeking the Oval Office:

This is a man whose life is filled with poisoned intimate relationships and who appears to be responsible for much of the poisoning. It's not only the religious or the uptight that can be put off by an utter lack of personal morality in a presidential candidate.

Really? I seem to remember a time not very long ago when a political party for which 99 percent of Slate's staff seems to vote every year insisting that exactly the opposite was true.

I say this not to chastise my friends at Slate--goodness knows this change in worldview can only be positivie--but merely to welcome them to the Land of the Unsophisticated Prigs.

I can only hope that they'll still think this way after Giuliani loses the GOP nomination and Hillary wins the Democratic one.

The Death of American Idol?

Maybe, maybe not. Too soon to tell. But I do think the show faces an existential crisis.

I dropped out of watching the show after American Idol Gives Back because it occurred to me at the time that the mega-special was an enormous, possibly fatal, betrayal of the audience, on two grounds. The first is that the American Idol franchise is half built on the art of the tease as they draw out their results shows once a week.

If you're good at it, you can tease the audience for forever. But the only Cardinal Rule of the Tease is that you absolutely, positively must deliver the payoff. During Idol Gives Back, the producers teased the audience for two excruciating hours, pretending that they were going to send someone home. And then, at the final moment, went back on their word. That's very, very bad. It breaks your bargain with the audience and makes them much less forgiving. I don't know if you can ever re-establish that trust once it's gone.

The other betrayal of "Idol Gives Back" was the show's honesty. A big part of the appeal of American Idol is that Simon is unscripted and, if not heartless, then at least clinical enough not to pull his punches because of sentimentality or politeness. That gives the show its tiny frisson of danger. The Idol Gives Back show gave us a neutered, Hallmark-ready Simon. Which is death.

I don't think audiences want to believe that Simon can be as pre-packaged and fake as everyone else on television because it introduces the possibility that even his critical schtick is an act. And the minute audiences believe that Simon is playing a part is the minute Idol starts to wane.

It's completely possible that I'm overstating things, but the numbers on Idol post-Gives Back must be giving Fox a fright--it's down and now tied with the much-diminished House.

Maybe Idol will make a comeback and this is nothing more than a blip, but I suspect that the Gives Back show may have been the night when Idol began its gradual eclipse from the culture.

Hugh Hewitt, The Dark Prince of Mean

Hugh lovingly--and rightly--defends James Lileks here. But in the course of his defense he makes a large mistake. He asks,

If, as I hope happens, the Strib wakes up and keeps Lileks as its online anchor and Jim Boyd disappears into well-deserved obscurity, what will that tell us about the talents of the two?

Umm, it will tell us absolutely nothing. Just as if, Lileks falls into obscurity and Jim Boyd goes on to run the New York Times, that, too, will tell us nothing about their talents. We measure talent by the work it produces, not the rewards it reaps. Need we recite a long, long, long list of spectacularly untalented hacks who have seen their careers as an endless buffet of prizes and payouts? Need we recall the depressingly long list of superb talents who go through life toiling in the shadows of said hacks? Tina Brown is much more conventionaly "successful" than, say, Ramesh Ponnuru. Katie Couric is much more "successful" than, say, Chris Wallace. Cynthia Tucker is more "successful" than Matt Labash. Who's the bigger talent? We could go on and on and on with this list and it's not just a question of left-right media bias.

Lileks is a treasure and he deserves a great future. But the world is frequently an unfair place.

Update: I don't know why this chafes me so. I think it's because there's a certain strain of free-market conservatism which insists that the only values are market values and that whatever a market declares is the Eternal Truth. These are the loud people who tell you that CEO X, who has driven his company into the ground, must have been worth $140 million a year, because if he wasn't, nobody would have been willing to pay him the money. I hate these people.

I'm as much for the free market as the next guy, I suppose. But market failures are real and pervasive and much, much more common than most conservatives would like to acknowledge. Sometimes they work themselves out over time, sometimes they don't. In any event, I'm happy to live my consumerist life by the free market, but we should never allow it to dictate to us moral truths.

And that's why we don't write about politics here.

Pajiba, Breasts, Etc.

Our homeys at Pajiba have their list of the Top 10 Celebrities They'd Like to Bang, which is as edifying as it sounds. Dustin Rowles gives us this bit of awesomeness:

6. Maggie Gyllenhaal — Gyllenhaal happened to be number two on my list, which Ms. Pajiba-hyphenate suggested looked like a list of women who would work in a book store if they weren’t celebrities.

And then Pajiba points us to this excellent exploration of the recent history of digitally-enhanced breasts on movie posters. Special Matus Alert: Exhibit A is Hermione Granger.

Alexandra Frackin' DuPont

I'm just saying that if you were to find yourself at work, trying desperately to avoid writing, you could do worse as a distraction than sifting through the Alexandra DuPont archives. DuPont is what people pretend Pauline Kael was. Only smarter. And funnier.

Favorite tidbits include:

From a review of The Mummy:

The plot is straight out of an old Hollywood serial: A ragtag bunch of adventurers in 1930s Egypt accidentally unleash an undead, nigh-invulnerable, utterly evil Egyptian priest. Then they spend the rest of the movie trying to kill him.

And there's this, from a review of the first X-Men:

THINGS I LIKED ABOUT "X-MEN": . . .

The interplay between Logan, Cyclops (James Mardsen) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). A romantic triangle, just like in the comics -- only without the I-speak-in-pseudo-erudite-paragraphs-even-as-I'm-flying-across-the-room-to-hit-you stylings of writer Chris Clairemont.

(Parenthetical remark w/r/t geek purists and C. Clairemont defenders: I'll try to resist a profound urge to swing a Fungo bat at anyone who tells me that Magneto's mutant-conversion-machine in this movie is dumber than anything in the comics. I read me some "Classic X-Men" comics in preparation for this film, and in one of them, our heroes found themselves aided by leprechauns. That's right, leprechauns.)

That's right: THAT JUST HAPPENED.

George Lucas, Spider-Man 3

This is rich. Here's George Lucas in an exchange with Roger Friedman on the merits of Spider-Man 3:

Lucas told me he has seen all the summer movies since his company, Industrial Light and Magic, does most of the special effects. The only one they didn't work on was "Spider-Man 3." What did he think of it?

"It's silly. It's a silly movie," he said. "There just isn't much there. Once you take it all apart, there's not much story, is there?"

Well, it's not "Star Wars."

"People thought 'Star Wars' was silly, too," he added, with a wink. "But it wasn't."

This from the stern intellect which gave us Ewoks, Jar-Jar, and a Darth Vader acting like Frankenstein.

Be that as it may, pace Anthony Lane and John Podhoretz, I kind of liked Spider-Man 3. The movie had all sorts of problems both in the writing and editing and not-tiny parts of it were ridiculous. Still, as a meditation on forgiveness, it worked for me and I particularly enjoyed the moments when Raimi let the movie be light-hearted--Bruce Campbell's scene, the bad-boy Parker montage, everything with Emil Skoda's J. Jonah Jameson. It was better than the over-praised first Spider-Man, but nowhere as perfect as the second film, which might be the best super-hero movie ever made. (The other contenders being, obviously, Batman, X-Men 2, and The Incredibles.)

But of all the problems with Spider-Man 3, the one that bugged me most--do you still have to have a spoiler alert on a movie that's made over $160M? if so SPOILER--was when Harry Osborn's butler announces that, like Bruce Wayne's Alfred, he was party to all of the Green Goblin's doings and that he himself could testify (how, exactly?) that Osborn Sr. died by his own hand. Only with this revelation does young Harry decide to come to Parker's aid in rescuing Mary Jane.

It's a preposterous deus ex machina, but what's maddening about it is that there's a simple and elegant way to write around it: Peter Parker comes and asks Harry's help in rescuing M.J., but, still blaming Parker for his father's death, Harry refuses. On further reflection of his fondness for M.J., he relents and follows Parker to the fight, surprising him by coming to his aid. Instinctually, he takes a mortal blow aimed for Parker and then, on his deathbed, he forgives Peter even though he still thinks Peter killed his father. Only because of this example is Peter Parker then able to forgive Flint Marko for the murder of Uncle Ben.

Is it just me, or does this solve all sorts of narrative and motivational problems without altering the story in any structural way? Perhaps they should have kept Michael Chabon, who wrote parts of Spider-Man 2 on board for the third installment.

Alternatively, they could have classed the project up by throwing in a '50s-style robot diner.

Genius from Slate

Commenting on the NBA playoffs:

Twenty years ago, the fabled Pistons' "Bad Boys" squads were the terror of the NBA. These days, Bill Laimbeer coaches a women's basketball team, Dennis Rodman is an international embarrassment, John Salley's on a lousy sports talk show that used to star Tom Arnold, and Isiah Thomas is running the Knicks into the ground. Sort of makes you wonder how Chauncey Billups is going to end up.

Star Wars, Iran, George Lucas

Precious blogging time was taken up today composing this item for Mike Goldfarb's WWS on an Iranian endorsement of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

Just wondering: If you're George Lucas and you hate the evil, conservative, Bible-thumping Republicans, what do you think when you find out that an Iranian regime, which executes homosexuals and brutally represses women, (to say nothing of their terrorist activities) thinks you're a genius? Maybe you don't switch sides, but do you maybe, just for a second, wonder if you're on the right side of history?

Nah, probably not. A man who defends Jar-Jar Binks to the bitter end isn't going to be spooked by being on the same side as the Islamofascist mullahs.

Where's Father Neuhaus when you need him?

Dirk Does Dallas

Sure, it's not fair. I didn't see a minute of the series and didn't even know Dallas had even been ousted from the series until this morning. And without looking up the stats, I'd guess that the Mavs have won about 130 more games than the Sixers over the last four seasons.

But still. Golden State? Between Dirk and Romo, Dallas might be replacing Houston as Choke City.

(Bonus: That's just for you, LB.)

Late Eagles Draft Talk

For anyone still reading after I basically took April off, here's an excellent exchange on the draft between D-Mac and Andy Reid:

Andy: So this Kevin Kolb situation is going to be a problem?

Donovan: We got lots a problems motherfucker.

Andy: Please watch the language Donovan, I'm a man of God.

Donovan: God tell you to fuck me in the ass on Saturday?

Andy: Of course not Donovan, it's just that you tend to crack like a damn egg. That homosexual latin fella saved me last year and he's gone now. We had an opportunity to bring in a great prospect to back you up so we took it. We're just acting in the best interest of the franchise.

Donovan: Forget that second round cocksucker for a minute. I saw how ya'll traded out of the first round.

Andy: Well we just didn't see anybody on the board at the time that we really needed. By moving down we were able to take Kolb.

Donovan: And you just had to let the Cowboys step in the spot.

Andy: Trading within the division is really no big deal.

Donovan: You wouldn't be spoutin' that bullshit if you were gonna spend the next five years runnin' from that crazy asshole they drafted. He's gonna break my damn neck because you couldn't just draft a fuckin' receiver?

Andy: We've got a great offensive line and plenty of targets for you to throw to.

Donovan: I needed a fuckin' wide receiver you dumb piece of shit! You think I'm gonna throw to Reggie Brown all year? Fuck that shit, I'm holdin' out. I got Chunky Soup money backin' me up.

"It's all about the moonbounce."

Even for a recovering coulrophobic like myself, I found Bill Goodwin's "On Being a Clown" to be pure enjoyment and right up there with the Great Zucchini. Unless you have kids, you easily forget that clowning around is, for many, still a way to pay the bills. And, no surprise, it can seem like a thankless job, considering the amount of work and energy required. You can find Goodwin's essay in the current issue of Doublethink.

Ireland Returns Dad's Call

This has been going around.

"I'm not going to call you 'The Shadow' anymore, dad."

Bad News Friday

First comes word that Jack Valenti, the man who made the modern MPAA, has died.

Valenti was a character--a former aide to LBJ who made it big in Hollywood. In Washington, you would see him from time to time--very short, very thin, with ram-rod posture and a mane of hair that was actually silver. He looked like a bit like a retired--and very rich--jockey.

My one brush with Valenti came about a year after 9/11. I was working on a story about Hollywood's aversion to movies about the war on terror and I called the MPAA to talk to him. The PR flak there told me that Valenti was in LA, but would call me in the morning, around 9:00 a.m., East coast time.

My phone rang the next morning at 9:00 a.m., sharp, and I talked with Valenti while he was at the gym. In the background, I could hear the squeaking of pulleys and odd putt-uptt noises and in my mind's eye, I pictured him in some sort of 1930s Mandlebaum-Mandlebaum-Mandlebaum gym with medicine balls and those machines that looped a giant rubberband around your mid-section and vibrated.

Whatever the case, Valenti was gracious, smart, generous with his time, and (what every reporter appreciates most) completely candid. I'm sad to see him go and, in an odd way, kind of surprised he's gone. Guys like Valenti--and there aren't many of them--seem like they'll be around for forever.

The other, more minor, bit of bad news is that Tim Minear's very promising series Drive has been yanked by the geniuses at Fox. I hope that, unlike The Inside, we get the chance to follow the story on DVD.

On the one hand, Fox is to be applauded for letting Minear create such interesting shows, such as Wonderfalls, The Inside, and Drive. But on the other hand, it makes no sense why they let him create these projects, and then give them minimal ad support and virtually no time to grow an audience.

Picoult on Wonder Woman

CNN has a little story on novelist Jodi Picoult's run writing the re-launched Wonder Woman comic book.

The interview is short, but interesting. But to be honest, I didn't think much of Picoult's first two issues--the writing isn't terribly crisp and the focus on Diana Prince doesn't seem all that compelling. To me at least.

I don't think this is a knock on Picoult, though. Wonder Woman is a hard character, probably the least interesting of DC's Big Three. She's the most difficult to do well and probably the least rewarding when she is done the right way.

All of which is a long-way around to saying how fantastic it is that Picoult even bothered to try her hand at comic books. Having writers like Picoult and Joss Whedon and Brad Meltzer working in the comics world is great for the industry and really great for readers. Here's hoping she does more after her Wonder Woman run.

The Final Word on The Condemned

From AICN, in the course of a surprsingly rave review:

Anyone who enjoys action films is gonna have fun with this. You’ll laugh at intentional moments and unintentional moments alike. And overall you’ll have a good, popcorn chomping time. But the guys who are looking forward to this? The folks who watched the trailer and had ZERO fucking apprehension about this? The guys who are going to wear their AUSTIN 3:16 shirts to the theatre Friday morning? This is their Citizen fucking Kane. These guys are gonna lose their minds at how awesome this is. It’s gonna play on TNT for like, a million, zillion years.

Pajiba Love

In the course of reviewing Vacancy, the geniuses at Pajiba make a piercing observation:

[O]f course, they can’t call for help, because they are out of cell-phone range (the day that cell phone companies fix the goddamn out of range issue in this country is the day that modern horror movies die).

So true.

Kryptonite Discovered

If Jerry Seinfeld doesn't buy this, then he's rich for no reason.

So I'm halfway through the first sentence of this Slate piece:

If Apple, Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Facebook, and Satan were forming a mega-portal that would satisfy all my Web needs (and in return I'd have to sell my soul and get a Bluetooth-enabled "slave chip" embedded in my eyeball) . . .

And I think to myself, Frack this! Someone is ripping off Reihan Salam. That's not cool.

And then I look up at the byline.

Hollywood Patriotism!

Well, not exactly. Galley Friend J.E. sends us this report from the Russian MTV awards:

Scandal hit MTV Russia's movie awards ceremony Thursday when a presenter refused to announce the viewer-voted award for best movie after realizing which film had won.

Vladimir Menshov, one of Russia's leading directors, was onstage at Moscow's Pushkin Theater when he opened the envelope with details of the winning film -- the World War II drama "Svolochi," in which a group of teenage criminals is sent on a suicide mission behind German lines.

Menshov gasped as he read the contents of the envelope, looked up and said: "I'm not going to hand over an award to a film that discredits my country, let Pamela Anderson (another of the evening's presenters) do it instead."

He then turned, dropped the envelope and stalked offstage, refusing to comment further.

J.E. sums it up perfectly:

It's something absolutely unthinkable in this country. Can you possibly imagine someone at the MTV Awards here refusing to give the best pic award to a film that portrayed the U.S. as criminally unethical on grounds that it made our country look bad? Impossible. And yet, it happens in Russia, a country with far fewer reasons to be proud.

Sony Watch

Why? Because I may never be this clearly, or prescienty, right again. Here's the full story:

The company had said it would sell 6 million machines by the end of its financial year (three weeks ago), but the global level of sales is currently believed to be less than 4 million.

A report in the Financial Times has suggested that the company is rethinking its pricing strategy. PS3 is the most expensive machine on the market, offering a Blu-ray disk drive.

However, the company has released a statement refuting this notion. “PS3 prices and shipment plans for the future should be determined by market trends and competition. Sony currently doesn't have any specific plan to cut the PlayStation 3's price.”

Analysts believe a price cut is inevitable, as the company struggles to catch Microsoft’s early lead with Xbox 360, and the $250 Wii continues to sell s many as can be produced. However, Sony’s plan has generally been to hold tight and hope that demand for Blu-ray drives will increase, by the end of this year.

The company already subsidizes its hardware sales, and has reported disappointing financials for its games division. A price cut would be financially difficult and would send a message that confidence in its Blu-ray strategy is low.

You think?

The End of a Beautiful Friendship?

Galley Friend B.W. sends us this piece speculating that the good times may be over between QT and the Weinsteins because of Grindhouse.

I have trouble believing that's true, no matter how much I wish it were so. As QT reminded Peter Biskind over and over, he built Miramax, man. He made that studio. Further, while I don't think the Weinsteins the geniuses people make them out to be, I can't imagine they saw Grindhouse as a real commercial prospect. It's a weird, self-involved genre movie--from a genre that only a handful of people have any affection for. Surely they must have seen the project as a reward for QT, a big enough plum to keep him working for them now that they're out on their own again.

Baldwin Family Values

Drudge has linked to the TMZ story with the voicemail Alec Baldwin left for his 11-year-old daughter, Ireland. Treat yourself to the entire audio. Highlights include Baldwin yelling at her for "humiliating" him and calling her "a thoughtless little pig" and claiming that she doesn't have "the brains or the decency as a human being."

But my personal favorite is when he says that he doesn't "give a damn that you're 12-years-old, or 11-years-old . . ." Father of the year!

Just out of curiosity, do you think Baldwin is going to be welcome at all the swanky Democratic fundraisers in 2008? Does this tirade maybe put into context some of his public statements about how terrible conservatives and Republicans are as human beings?

Ghost Ship

A very, very creepy story.

Old Age Watch

It's 25th anniversary of Porky's, Fast Times, and Last American Virgin. Ouch.

AICN has a great essay on the trio of immortal films (including trailer for all three). A sample of the introduction:

I was positively Machiavellian as a kid when it came to seeing a film I wanted to see that was rated R. I found that it was easiest to get permission to see a violent film that was rated R, while anything that dealt with sex was a much harder sell. In the case of PORKY’S, I was visiting my grandmother in Memphis when the film was gearing up for release. It was spring break, and Fox was doing sneak previews of the film for a few weeks before the actual release. I didn’t know much about it, but that poster was enough to pique my interest . . .

Talk about promising. That poster was practically a dare for a 12 year old. . . .

Apple's I-Rack

Is it funnier than the iSomething? Not quite; but it's funny nonetheless.

Greatest Class Ever

An MIT lecture on the pro wrestling. With special guest expert . . . wait for it . . . Mick Foley.

Dept. of Arrested Development

At least he didn't bite off her hand.

The Washington Post recently conducted a sociological experiment of sorts, in which premier concert violinist Joshua Bell would play for 43 minutes on a Stradivarius at the L'Enfant metro during rush hour. Would anyone notice? The results, as reported by Gene Weingarten, are fascinating.

Great News from PS3 Land!

In a brilliant move, Sony has pulled the plug on their cheaper 20-gig PS3 model. All the better to concentrate on what consumers really want!

All sarcasm aside, there was never any reason to have the $500 20-gig system except to help muddy the price-point waters at the time of launch. It's a rump system with no wi-fi, limited connectivity, and, if memory serves, limited backward compatibility, too. If you were going to spend $500 on a PS3, you might as well shell out the extra $100 for the full system.

The Writerly Life

The great Andrew Ferguson perfectly captures what life is like as a young writer in Washington:

Not long after I came to Wash ington to work as a junior editorial flunky, I went to a cocktail party at a think tank. (Attending cocktail parties at think tanks, I thought then, was one of the great perks of my job, which tells you all you need to know about the life of a junior editorial flunky.) There I met a fellow flunky--a flunkiette, you might call her, since she was even greener than I was, and much, much blonder. Her thankless job was to write speeches, op-eds, position papers, and other encyclicals under the name of the think tank's president. She was a ghost, in other words. A flunkiette ghost.

Comparing notes, we both mentioned our admiration for the wit, prose style, and intellectual range of a well-known newspaper columnist.

"He's the best," I said.

"Fabulous," she agreed.

Then, after a brief pause and a puzzled look, she said: "I wonder who writes his stuff."

According to AP, a California woman has given birth to the first baby conceived with a frozen sperm and frozen egg. The process was complex and the event marks a medical milestone. Doctors and scientists are said to be eagerly monitoring the male infant's development. Understandably, most of the information surrounding the birth remains confidential though we do know the name of the baby, Bobby Drake, and the presiding physician, Dr. Victor Fries.

More Great News from Sony!

Facing the PS3 debacle, Sony is casting about for alternate revenue streams from the $600 game console. And they may have found one: Pimping out your PS3's Cell processor to do networked computing aps for other companies while you're not using it Awesome!

Galley Friend K.N. sends us the dirt from the FT:

Sony PlayStation 3 users may soon be asked to share the supercomputer power of their video game consoles with companies that lack their own technology to run complex research projects, the Financial Times was told.

Sony Computer Entertainment is in discussions with a number of companies about possible commercial applications for the PlayStation 3. This comes in the wake of its non-profit partnership with Stanford University in March that harnesses the spare computing capacity of registered PS3s for the analysis of protein cells.

However, because this would be a commercial proposition that would benefit profit-making organisations, Sony is studying whether it would need to offer incentives, such as free products, to persuade PS3 owners to participate.

Another PR coup for Sony!

Poor Arthur Batchelor. Not only did the British seaman get teased by the Iranians, who called him Mr. Bean, but now he is being criticized by his fellow Brits for everything from selling his story to crying after suffering all those "Mr. Bean" taunts. None of this would have happened had the Iranians ever heard of Giovanni Ribisi.

Kimmel v. Gawker

I'm no fan of the Denton blogpire and I hate New York City. So I don't particularly care for Gawker since it is both (a) part of the Dentonverse and (b) about New York. Also, I kind of like Jimmy Kimmel, who can make with the funny. But Kimmel's recent ambush> of Gawker editrix Emily Gould is positively retarded. Evil Beet has an excellent retort:

I lost a lot of respect for Kimmel after watching this. He was in a bad mood, and I suppose he was trying to prove he could do “serious” television, and he really ought to have picked on someone his own size. His points don’t hold up. Celebrities these days know what celebrity means. You went to those auditions, Jimmy. Walked there with your own damn feet. You pitched those shows. You wanted to be a big star. You wanted people to write about you. People write about you now, Jimmy. Take the good with the bad, asshole. The Man Show did those candid segments that fucked with real people’s lives. I bet they didn’t all think it was as funny as you did. Oh, and remember how you left your wife of 14 years, with whom you had two children, for Sarah Silverman? Just checking, Mister Morality. Stick to sports and drinking beer and ogling women, Jimmy.

Whatever. The real shame here is that CNN is letting a game-show host anchor what's supposed to be a news show. (Not for the first times.) Several years back, when some other TV head moved from sports casting to "serious news," a friend journalist friend noted that the medium of television supercedes all of the imaginary subcategories we invent for it: In other words, TV news and TV gameshows have more in common than do, say, TV news and newspapers.

We can't expect someone like Jimmy Kimmel to remember that; but we should.

Fun with Google Maps

Galley Sis MAL sends us this hilarious set of directions from Google Maps on how to get from New York, NY to Paris, France.

Scroll down to #23 for the punchline. Someone at Google has a sense of humor.

Free MMORPGs

If you're trying to get off the WoW pipe, CNET has this bit of virtual oxycodone.

Get Your Fresh CulturePulp!

Mike Russell is back! With The Lords of Breakfast. It's what would happen if Capt. Cruch went to war with Count Chocula and the rest of the sugar cereal characters. Don't miss it.

Douthat on The Sopranos

Heresy time: I liked the first season of The Sopranos quite a lot. It was good stuff. But it didn't capture my interest enough to stick around for the second season--and if the first season is a fair measure of the show's quality, then it may be the most over-praised series of our time. (Of course, maybe the the show got a lot better after I stopped watching, which is totally possible.)

The Sopranos seemed to me like a really great show, but the best thing ever to grace the small screen? I liked Homicide better. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too. Ditto my latest TV crushes, Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica. But these shows don't get giant billboards and Vanity Fair covers like The Sopranos does. Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on David Chase's show--I just wish people would save a few plaudits for some of the other great TV being produced.

All of which is a long wind-up to this interesting bit from Ross Douthat:

I would actually go a little further than this (and I do, in a forthcoming piece), and argue that The Sopranos is implicitly - and sometimes explicitly - a show about damnation, and how ordinary, often-sympathetic people can willingly choose to go to hell.

Department of Bigger Boats

From Discovery's Channel's Planet Earth series, in super-duper slow-mo:


PLANET EARTH - Great White Shark Jump - Watch the top videos of the week here

Riddle me this: Who do you take in a fight, Bruce here, or a giant squid?

Where are Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Sue?

Galley Friend M.C. sends us this priceless quote from Peter King's MMQB column:

"I have made horrible decisions about who I am with or who I am going places with ... Two of my friends who had never driven a Bentley, I let them drive my Bentley one night just because. Not just to show them the upside, but I never had anyone do that for me. It's always the little things that get me in trouble."
--Pacman Jones to Deion Sanders on the NFL Network.

Lesbian Vampires!

Starring Lucy Liu and Carla Gugino. Happy Monday!

Thursday night I was lucky enough to attend the Washington screening of The Sopranos, featuring the first two episodes, "Soprano Home Movies" and "Stage Five" (which I had previously reviewed for The Daily Standard). This was followed by a dinner and Q&A with writer/creator David Chase. Sadly, we were all informed this would be off the record and so I am unable to share any insights about Tony's death at the hands of his nephew Christopher. Kidding.

Chase directed this season's first and last episodes (they just finished the read-through for the latter). During the Q&A, he was very soft-spoken, mild-mannered, and weary-looking. The questions (I was not picked) were fairly explicit about details from as far back as season one but Chase didn't miss a beat. (I wondered if he would react the way William Shatner did in the SNL Star Trek convention skit.) And no, he did not even hint about how it will end. I think the guests genuinely enjoyed the screening, particularly the first episode, which one veteran Washington pundit told me was already "much better than last season." Perhaps it was the whole coma sequence. Or maybe he didn't like Johnny Cakes. Best of all, we went home with a goody bag that included last season on DVD.

For my fellow Sopranos fans, you will definitely enjoy the next two episodes. And keep an eye out for Phil Leotardo's right-hand man, Butch Deconcini, played by actor Greg Antonacci. For some reason, he terrifies me (probably has to do with his crooked eye) and I am betting he will do something very bad before all is said and done. (Also be sure to enjoy Phil's lecture about the bastardization of his family name in episode two. I don't know how Frank Vincent does this with a straight face.)

Geek Alert

First, the obligatory Sony news: The PS3's Australian launch is a bust. Oops.

Now the good stuff. The Wii port of the new Spider-Man 3 game sounds kind of dreamy:

Flick forward with the nunchuk and Spidey will shoot his webbing forward. Flick all the way to the right and you can send the superhero swinging at a near-90-degree angle. You can also dual-swing by motioning with both controllers . . .

That's basically the Holy Grail of videogaming right there. The Wii will pass the xBox 360 in sales later this year and by 2008 might be tripled-up on the PS3. And it shouldn't surprise anyone.

And the Actual Retail Price Is . . .

Mario Lopez?

Seriously, if this happens I might just move to Russia. Still, the story sent along by Galley Sis MAL is kind of fascinating--imagine making a Price Is Right audition tape:

The field of candidates to succeed Bob Barker as host of CBS' venerable game show "The Price Is Right" might be narrowing.

Sources indicated that Mark Steines, George Hamilton and Mario Lopez have emerged as top contenders, with Steines, co-host of "Entertainment Tonight," getting the strongest buzz at the moment. Tapes of "Price" auditions have been sent out and are being shown to test audiences around the country, sources said.

The list also includes Todd Newton, John O'Hurley and former "Beauty and the Geek" host Mike Richards.

Dreamcast, R.I.P.

And another part of my childhood dies.

Note to Dean Barnett (and other golf junkies)

This doesn't do much for me, but I suspect that for a certain segment of the population, this will be catnip:

Forty-seven years ago, on Masters Sunday, Arnold Palmer staged one of his classic, furious charges. He nearly made birdie on No. 16 at Augusta National, and he did make dramatic birdies on Nos. 17 and 18 to snatch the green jacket away from San Francisco native Ken Venturi. . . .

As a lead-in to its coverage of the final round, CBS will air a one-hour, colorized re-broadcast of the closing holes of the 1960 Masters. Not a documentary, pausing frequently for retrospective interviews. Not a highlights show, bouncing quickly from shot to shot. This will be a genuine re-broadcast, as if the events were unfolding live.

The project was the brainchild of CBS play-by-play man Jim Nantz. He unearthed the original footage and spearheaded an ambitious effort to have it colorized. Nantz and Palmer introduce the show and Nantz interviews Palmer afterward. In between, viewers will see the same coverage viewers did in 1960, except in color. . . .

The idea hatched when CBS agreed to give Nantz air time before the final round of each Masters. Last year, he put together a 20-year anniversary piece on Jack Nicklaus' landmark victory in 1986. This year, Nantz and producer Chris Svendsen went one step further.

They hooked up with Legend Films, a San Diego company specializing in colorization technology. Nantz described the process as long and tedious, involving 62,000 frames of film and 10,000 man hours.

But it sounds like the result was worth the time, effort and expense. The show not only features Palmer rallying past Venturi, but also 47-year-old Ben Hogan on the 18th hole, Nicklaus as a hotshot, 20-year-old amateur playing alongside Sam Snead, and tournament founder Bobby Jones hosting the post-round ceremony.

Enjoy! (If you're into that sort of thing.)

PS3 Watch

The first week of PS3 sales where better than expected, if not great, in Europe. Now comes week 2:

Sales of the PlayStation 3 have dropped dramatically on the second week of release in the UK, with official Chart Track figures revealing a fall of 82 per cent.

Will someone who understands the stock market explain to me when the market will catch up to this disaster?

The Burghers Next Door

Galley Friend J.E. sends in this great item:

I got a tremendous laugh out of the first item in today's Page Six. It's about the blood-and-gore director Robert Rodriguez and his now estranged wife, who also happens to be his producer. She checked out after 18 years and five kids when she discovered that he was shtupping the star of his latest film. Here's the part that made me laugh: " Rodriguez and Avellan insist that their separation is amicable and that they plan to raise their four boys, Rebel, Rocket, Rogue and Racer, and daughter, Rhiannon, together and continue their partnership in Troublemaker Studios.


Let's see, they give their kids names that reflect a complete contempt for traditional mores, and even name their studio "Troublemaker." But a little extracurricular marital activity--that's beyond the pale. I guess they don't preach what they practice.

So bourgeois!

More Captain America

It's like The A-Team meets Roger Corman's Fantastic Four, with a dash of The Bionic Woman thrown in for good measure:



This is all courtesy of Popoholic. I have to admit that not only do I remember this, but I loved it. The '70s were a real golden era for superhero TV between this, Linda Carter's Wonder Woman, and the Bixby/Ferrigno Hulk.

Although some of us (I'm looking at you, B.J.) were always partial to the early '90s, John Wesley Shipp Flash.

Wrestlecrap

Noting last week's post on the greatest Wrestlemania matches of all-time, Galley Friend A.W. sends this link to the worst Wrestlemania of all-time--Wrestlemania IX: Caesar's Palace.

Ugh. [shiver]

PS3 Notes

For those of you who might have gotten the impression that Sony didn't put a ton of thought into the PS3, there's this story on how the company was adamant about . . . the font used on the console:

CVG reports that Teiyu Goto, one the main creative minds behind the design of the PlayStation 3, has admitted that SCE’s chairman and chief executive Ken Kuturagi was the driving force behind Sony’s use of the Spider-Man movie font for the PS3 logo.

In an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine, Goto stated: “If you really look at the PS3 contour carefully, it is rounded when viewing the console in profile. Rather than creating a typography with all the risks that entails, it was wiser to use the one from Spider-Man, for which Sony has the rights.

“It was also the wish of then-president Kutaragi, who insisted that I use this typography. In fact, the logo was one of the first elements he decided on and the logo may have been the motivating force behind the shape of PS3.

That'll be a great footnote for whatever MBA student does the first study of the PS3.

Everybody Runs

I only link to this story so I can use that headline. Minority Report is totally under-rated.

How Many Regent Grads Does It Take to Run a Country?

Guess how many graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University are working in the Bush administration?

Go ahead, I dare you.

I Make It Rain

Strap on your Compton hat for this crazy amazing Jeffrey Goldberg piece on Wal-Mart.

How great is Goldberg? You can drop him into Kurdistan to report on terrorists or Arkansas to report on the world's largest retailer and he gets the goods either way:

It became clear to me in Bentonville that Wal-Mart’s senior executives had been tightly scripted. When I talked with John Menzer, a company vice-chairman, a spokeswoman named Sarah Clark, my official escort there, told me that the conversation would be limited to the company’s new Jobs and Opportunity Zones concept, which is designed to help smooth the arrival of new stores in urban areas. (A company source told me that the Zones idea was intended by Edelman as a public-relations maneuver to soften Wal-Mart’s image among minority communities; the entire budget for the program is five hundred thousand dollars over two years.) Menzer, a slender man with a thin smile, explained the company’s attraction to underemployed inner-city residents, saying, “One of the biggest opportunities a person has at Wal-Mart is to be part of this growth company. There are always opportunities for promotion, learning, and education, and people know they can build a career here.”

When I asked about the “open availability” policy, Clark interrupted, while Menzer stared at me. “I can certainly take that one,” Clark said. “I’ll make a note of that. We’ll talk about that later. We don’t have ‘open availability.’ ” Menzer continued as if the question had not been asked. “Now we’re expanding outside our four walls to invest in the community, so let me add that in as another step we’re taking,” he said. (Sometime later, Clark suggested that I interview an employee about flexible scheduling, and she provided the name and number of one who would talk to me: Latoya Machato, a cashier at a Texas Supercenter. I called the store and asked for Machato, but was told that “cashiers can’t come to the phone during work.” I called later and was told that Machato could speak to me on her break, but would not be allowed to call long-distance from a company phone. I asked Clark if Machato could talk to me after her shift, but Clark said that that would be impossible, because the store would have to put her “on the clock,” and thus file the paperwork to get her paid an extra hour’s wage.)

Go read it all. It only gets better.

That QT Movie

I'm not really feeling Grindhouse, but if the movie is half as entertaining as this review, then it'll be worth at least a matinee ticket. Seriously, this is like Matt Labash, in New Orleans, on crank:

PLANET OF TERROR is directed by Robert Rodriquez, which is all I need to say. In fact, instead of his name on poster saying, “Directed By”, he can legally change his name to a picture of a naked Viking woman on a snowmobile with flamethrowers out the back and the flamethrowers are killing a Yeti. That’s the level of guaranteed quality his name brings to stuff.

Then there’s three other trailers – one by Rob Zombie that involves Nazis and werewolves (more factual research), one by Edgar Wright that made me laugh harder than seeing an old man give the finger to a fat kid, and then one by Eli Roth that Eli Roth should make.

Actually, the fake trailers are kind of a bummer, because I really wish they weren’t fake. Maybe the government will put some “don’t be a pussy” drug in the water supply, and everyone will go see this instead of PILLOW FIGHT AND SCENTED CANDLES AND BOREDOM, or whatever Sandra Bullock movie’s coming out, and they’ll make more of these.

The Top 20 Matches in Wrestlemania History

It is so on.

Somehow, they clock Hogan-Andre the Giant in at #18. Ridiculous. But they do have this tidbit:

Hulk Hogan on what would've happened if Andre refused to lose the match to him at Wrestlemania III: "I'll tell you, Hulk Hogan would've turned into a bad guy a lot quicker. My good guy run would've been over that night if I didn't beat him. I would've got up, shook Andre's hand, then hit him over the head with a steel chair and beat the hell out of him. It would've changed everything."

Somehow, Triple H only makes the list once. Discuss.

Short Cuts

Two other items of note:

First, Galley Friend M.R. sends us the web comic "Breakfast of the Gods". You'll laugh, you'll cry. It's amazing stuff.

And then, Galley Friend B.W. gives us this clip of the best basketball finish of the weekend--the Div. II championship game. Now that's a collapse.

Go Joe!

Okay, these two amphibious assault vehicles are just ridiculous. Here's the run-down on the big one:

Lockheed Martin has conceived a new class of high-speed amphibious combat craft with a top speed of up to 50 knots on water and up to 80 miles per hour on land. Significantly, the vehicles can make the transition from land to water and vice versa in five seconds and will be capable of traveling 50 miles on sea and then 100 more on land without having to refuel.

The little one, a two-seater called the Terraquad, looks like this:

The question is, which one would COBRA get? Since they got gyped on the Whale/Water Mocasin deal, it seems only fair that they get the ACC/R.

Hoyas, Heels, Wins, and Losses

For some, it isn't enough to simply go to HoyaSaxa.xom for full coverage of last night's stunner against UNC. They've got to do the analyzing themselves. And so now, with guest commentary from Galley Friend Joseph Bottum, a review of last night's win:

Georgetown didn’t win; North Carolina lost--or so friends from down South have been calling to insist. The Hoyas played well down the stretch and through the overtime, they admit, but just look at the Tar Heels’ collapse: a stretch of 1 field goal in 14:37 minutes and 23 misses on their final 25 shots.

That sure does look like a collapse. But is it true that North Carolina’s failure decided the game more than Georgetown’s success did?

Some obvious things should be said here: Teams don’t collapse without a lot of help from their opponents. When good shooters start clanking their shots at the end of a game, it often comes from tiredness that playing against a well-coached team induces. A strong defense inside forces a team into low-percentage shots outside, and after a stretch of that outside game, even average shooting starts to look very cold.

That said, North Carolina didn’t manage even average shooting down the stretch and through the OT. They took 4 three-pt shots in the final six minutes of regulation--by my count, 3 of them good, reasonably open looks--and missed all 4. Along the way, they hit 1 of 3 strongly contested two-pt shots and had Hansbrough fouled twice for 4 free throws.

That’s 6 points from inside play for nine possessions over six minutes--which isn’t really too bad. The question is why they took and missed 4 three-pt shots during that same six-minute stretch. Part of the answer has to be Georgetown’s defense: The Tar Heels tried to get the ball inside on 3 of those 4 possessions and just couldn’t manage it. The other part of the answer is panic--induced by the fact that the Hoyas’ offense over the last six minutes was something close to perfection.

Look at it this way: At 6:03, Georgetown is still down 10. They score on eight of the next nine possessions, for 16 points in six minutes:

6:02 Green hits 1 of 2 free throws
5:37 Sapp layup
5:09 Green hook
4:19 Hibbert dunk
3:15 Wallace hits 2 of 2 free throws
2:43 Ewing lob from Green
2:13 Sapp layup
1:25 Green misses layup
0:35 Wallace three-pt. shot
(10th possession, with 2 seconds left: no shot)

Well, who wouldn’t panic? North Carolina was ahead through all of this until Wallace tied it at 0:35, but the feeling of the game had shifted entirely to Georgetown, and the Tar Heels were obviously burdened by it. North Carolina got no offensive rebounds during this stretch, and that was all: 10-point lead disappears, and the game heads into overtime with momentum all on Georgetown’s side.

Interestingly, in overtime, the reverse is true: Georgetown’s defense was better than its offense. The Hoyas did allow three offensive rebounds and turned the ball over once immediately after a defensive rebound. But they closed down the inside completely until Hansbrough was fouled at 0:31 after an offensive rebound, and they strongly contested the first 4 three-point shots North Carolina took.

Meanwhile, the Hoyas’ offense was very good during the OT, but not the perfection you might expect from the lopsided scoring. Georgetown had 10 possessions in OT, but 6 of them came in the final 1:38, with Summers’ dunk the only basket and the other 5 producing foul shots after deliberate fouls by North Carolina (all by Summers and Sapp, with Summers 4 for 4 and Sapp 3 for 5).

So Georgetown’s offense in OT essentially came down to the first 4 possessions, after which a scoreless North Carolina was in a deep hole. Here’s the breakdown:

1. Green miss, ball out of bounds on NC, Wallace scores on backdoor cut at 4:22. (G’town 1 for 2 shots.)
2. Loose ball, scramble, Summers stuffs at 3:57. (G’town 2 for 3.)
3. Green banks it in at 2:53. (G’town 3 for 4.)
4. Lost pass, Green blocked, Sapp misses 3-pt shot at 1:54. (G’town 3 for 6.)

That’s excellent basketball--6 points in 3 minutes, 50% shooting--but not the high-speed perfection I felt it to be while watching it live.

Turns out that what was high-speed perfection in OT was the defense. Hibbert, in particular. North Carolina got some second chances--preventing offensive rebounds has to become a higher priority for the Hoyas--but Georgetown shut down the interior and contested the low-percentage outside shots that the Tar Heels didn’t make.

So, did Georgetown win or North Carolina lose? The Hoyas’ amazing 8-for-9 run at the end of the regular game makes it look as though Georgetown won, while the Tar Heels’ 4 missed three-pointers (three of them good looks) over that same stretch make it look as though North Carolina lost.

But the Tar Heels had reasons to miss those shots: tiredness, panic, and a Hoya zone defense that confused them at the end. That’s enough to make it definitive: Georgetown won.

JVL adds: I agree completely with poet, intellectual, Civilization Grand Master, and Hoya Super-Fan Joseph Bottum.

Four things typically happen when a team "collapses" in basketball: (1) They turn the ball over at an alarming rate; (2) They go stone-cold from the field; (3) They miss free throws; and (4) The opposing team starts raining 3-pointers. Only one of those things happened during regulation in the UNC game. UNC certainly could have played better down the stretch, and in overtime they looked ashen even before the tip. But they didn't choke in the conventional sense of the phrase.

What happened is that Georgetown played efficient, controlled, and very, very smart basketball. They pounded the ball inside, they passed up 3-point shots (except for their final score in regulation), they played excellent defense, and they managed their substitutions brilliantly, getting the most out of Hibbert and Ewing Jr. It was a cool-headed, cerebral performance and the guy who deserves the most credit is John Thompson III. The impact of coaching is often over-stated, but to my mind, that win is almost entirely on him.

(If you've followed Georgetown basketball for the last 20 years or so, imagine just for a moment how a team coached by Thompson the Elder would have behaved under similar conditions.)

About that travel...

To my colleague Mr. Last:

Of course he traveled. No question about it. But did the refs notice and let it slide? I certainly didn't notice (probably because I passed out). These things happen. Like the game I caught a few years ago that Georgetown lost against Villanova in which the Wildcats had six players on the floor and won. Nobody saw that, not the refs, and definitely not our incompetent and now-former coach.

But as regards the Post, you must have missed John Feinstein's column in the same issue (probably because it was tucked away on page E13). Now you know Feinstein is not exactly a Hoya superfan. You know his gripe about Georgetown refusing to play in the BB&T classic (a legitimate gripe at that). But here is his take:

There will be a lot of debate about whether Green switched pivot feet as he spun into the lane on his game-winning shot. The answer to that question is: It doesn't matter. The officials aren't making that call at that juncture of the game unless the movement of his feet gets him into better shooting position. Green was double-teamed with a third player running at him and still made an off-balance shot. If college basketball officials called every switched pivot foot, every carry, every extra step, no one would ever score. Green made a big-time play to win a big-time game. Leave it at that.

Hoya Motherfrackin' Saxa

I want to get this in before Matus starts his campaign of disinformation:

For the record: I had Georgetown last night. I have them all the way into the championship game. So I had a vested interest in them beating Vanderbilt. Further, I like Georgetown. I grew up loving the team and school. They produced The Answer. As Marv Wolfman used to say, 'nuff said.

But last night's win was a travesty. With 2.5 seconds on the clock and Georgetown down a penny, Jeff Green walked. This isn't a judgment call. It's not calling a foul, where the ref uses discretion. Green planted his pivot foot, he did a number of jab steps with this other foot. Then he planted the free foot, and started jabbing with the foot that was the initial pivot. Referees not calling that walk is like giving a football team a fifth down. It's an affront to the very foundation of the game.

But what's really, really disgusting is the coverage in today's Washington Post. The paper ran three stories on the G'Town/Vandy game and only one of them hinted at the call which handed the game to Georgetown. Here, then, is the Post's full account:

There were cries that Green had not reestablished his pivot foot, and therefore traveled. But basketball minds much wiser than us surmised you can't make a call like that to end a taut thriller.

What an embarrassment. I'm not saying the Hoyas should resign from the tournament or play UNC wearing hairshirts, but they should be ashamed of themselves for carrying after the game like they'd won the Super Bowl, instead of having it handed to them unfairly. And the Post should be ashamed of whitewashing the worst call of the tournament. A black-and-white, no judgment required rule call, which changed the outcome of a game.

Ninja Warrior

Galley Brother B.J. sends us this ridiculous look into the Japanese phenomenon "Ninja Warrior."

Seriously, this makes the American Gladiators look like a bunch of pansies. Will someone remind me how we beat them in a war?

Although I was quite, um, excited by the new Hanes ad featuring Jennifer Love Hewitt, I've been quite baffled by the new Hanes commercials, prominent during March Madness, featuring Michael Jordan and Kevin Bacon. For one, I didn't know they were friends. Secondly, where are they? In the Hanes members-only Lounge? An in apartment? If so, are we to assume they live together? And what's with Jordan trying to block all of Bacon's shots in the waste paper basket? At least with the Love ad, we knew she was in a photo shoot. Here, with all the stark white walls, we could be in another dimension. Give me a backstory!

Lawyer/Wrestling Humor

I'm a big fan of Above the Law and a few other legal blogs because they manage to be both serious and frequently very, very funny. (I suspect the soul-crushing ethos of the Big Firm life is to legal humor what heroin and poverty is to song writing.)

Anyway, go read this awesome post on AUSA Tad Dibiase. Then, scroll down to the comments and watch "Virgil" run wild on you.

Awesome.

Two-fer

Galley Brother B.J. sends along these two bits of satisfaction.

Bit the first: ESPN.com is now getting blown out by FoxSports.com. This is good news not just because my full-time job is part of the Murdoch-Fox-News Corp Empire. I suspect that the next step in the fall of ESPN will be Fox Sports Radio overtaking ESPN Radio. Steve Czaban's First Team on FSR is one of the best sports talkshows you'll ever hear--particularly compared to the ESPN's flagship Mike & Mike in the Morning, which is kind of like the Family Circus of sportstalk.

We can only dream of the day the Fox Sports network can seriously challenge the ESPN Family of Networks, which have become all but unwatchable.

Bit the second is more bad news for the PS3. Follow the link if interested.

End of the Celebrity Sex Tape?

The Kim Kardashinoplousanova tape is (finally) out and the Blog Crush thinks it might be the end of an era:

I don’t know what I was expecting, but this thing may officially kill the novelty of the “celebrity” sex tape. Not only is it boring, but the chick in it is only a celebrity because she has a celebrity sex tape. That’s circular logic, at best. A boat show in Iowa has bigger celebrities than this tape. And since she’s only famous because some dude fucked her after checking his lighting, I’m almost positive that makes her a porn star. So that’s how this needs to be judged, and on those merits, this chick would barely crack the top 100 (just after Jenna Haze but well before Wifey). Today’s porn has hotter chicks, more deviant sex and even more exotic locations. "Buttman & Rocco's Brazilian Butt Fest" has everything this tape does, but with more star power and at one point they interview a girl next to a pretty fountain. Three minutes later they shove unspeakable things inside of her, of course, but the fountain was a classy touch.

Two things of note this morning. First is Matus with a primer on what Fred Thompson's movies hint at for his presidency. Awesome.

Second is the AICN pointer that Gerard Butler is near being cast for Watchmen. They won't say for which part, but the obvious choice would be Doctor Manhattan, no?

Merry Christmas

While doing other work, I stumbled across this old Tad Friend profile of Roy Lee. It's miniature, and perfect. It may be the single most insightful look into the film industry since Adventures in the Screen Trade (not counting The Big Picture, which is enlightening on a financial, as opposed to personal, level).

Print it, read it, love it. You can thank me later.

When Comics Attack 2

Blog Crush has another video of Comedy Central darling and erstwhile pitchman Carlos Mencia stealing jokes--this time from Bill Cosby, circa 1983.

The funny thing is, Cosby is so much better that the whole thing is a little weird. It's one thing to steal material from someone because you think you can make it better, but this is just plain weird.

Best TV Opening Credits Sequences

Galley Friend M.C. sends us this fine AV Club rundown of the best opening credits sequences in TV history--complete with video samples of them all (except for the Taxi credits, which are recreated via the magic of GTA).

I was particularly thrilled to see Buck Rogers make the list, part of the Erin Gray double-feature that made me feel so funny as a young lad. But I'm a bit surprised they couldn't throw some love toward BSG, which does a lot with their credits.

The Analysts Catch Up with Sony

Following up on yesterday's post on Sony's PS3 sales we have this word from Deutsche Bank analyst:

To put the PS3's situation in context, Patel said, "PS3 consoles are available at retail but sales are lackluster. Its 130K units sold in February was less than Xbox 360 sales last year (160K) and even less than the original Xbox sales of 140K in Feb-2002."

That's right: The PS3 isn't just selling worse than xBox 360--it's selling worse than the original xBox.

In the same vein, the Wershovenist Pig sends us this entry:

Nintendo changed the playing field in the handheld wars by taking risk - by changing the input (stylus) and introducing the two-screen layout - while Sony focused on graphics and processing power. The results thus far are conclusive - and damning - for Sony. The big question is whether or not the proposed changes are meaningful enough to tip the competitive balance, and if they are truly going to result in a handheld player with mass appeal.

As noted above, it appears that as goes the handheld market so goes the console market, with the Wii continuing to trounce the PS3 by a 3:1 margin. Further, another interesting tidbit are the latest web traffic stats for the "Big Three" native sites - Nintendo.com, Xbox.com and PlayStation.com. Nintendo.com is up 91% year-over-year, while PlayStation.com is down 8% over the similar period (FYI, Xbox.com is up a healthy 47% YoY). Conclusive of Sony's defeat? Of course not. But are the trends disturbing for Sony? Absolutely. At some point Sony has to get the joke: is it super hi-tech and niche or mass market? Because right now it is straddling two worlds and not serving either one - or its shareholders - particularly well.

So Easy a Caveman Could Do It

The great Seth Stevenson has a fabulous piece on the Geico Caveman ads. Stevenson groks that the spots are made great by the tiny, tiny details:

In one dialogue-free spot, we see a caveman riding an airport people-mover. He glides past a Geico billboard with the "So easy a caveman could do it" slogan, and he sighs in disgust. This surface joke is fine. But what I adore here is the sparkling precision of the art direction. The soundtrack is bouncy synth-pop from the little-known indie band Röyksopp. The caveman (en route to or from a vacation) totes a wooden tennis racket in a canvas shoulder bag. The implication of these careful cultural signifiers: The caveman has grasped not just literacy and reason but also the affectations of the modern hipster aesthete. (That knowingly antiquated racket might easily have been stolen from a Wes Anderson set.)

At the campaign's ancillary Web site, CavemensCrib.com (it lets you poke around their apartment), we learn that the cavemen are into (among other things): blogging, Tolstoy, yoga, smoked Hungarian paprikash, and Paddy Chayefsky movies. They have poetry magnets on their fridge … in Esperanto.

Sony, PS3, etc.

Because it's fun. From Last Boss:

I'm not sure what Sony's plan in this fight is. They slightly missed their goal of 2 million PS3s shipped by the end of 2006, then got scared and changed their prediction of 6 million PS3 shipments by the end of March to just 4.5 million shipments instead. Since then, Nintendo has continued to fall behind the voracious demand for their Wii console, and have achieved a substantial early lead over the PS3.

There's talk that Nintendo already reached 6 million console shipments, but if demand is really that high, then the number of shipments should equal the number of sales, and according to VGCharts they're still a little short of their six million goal. It also lists Sony at barely beyond the 2 million PS3 sales it reached in January.

How about that chart of videogame console sales? Here it is, and it's pretty rough.

Car Porn

From Galley Friend M.G. comes this video of a Bugatti Veyron reaching its top speed--253 mph.

Bonus style points for the use of "Duel of the Fates."

Distraction

Just a few days ago Matus and I had our annual bracket lunch. Looking at my initial picks, I said to him, "But this is crazy--I've picked chalk everywhere with almost no upsets. That can't happen." So I went back to the drawing board to find the upsets that were obviously hidden in the field.

Yeah.

So if you need a distraction too, check out this positively insane story about an Aussie guy who built himself a flight simulator. What's that, you say? How interesting could that story be? Check out the teaser photo:

Law & Order

As previously noted here, CNN is reporting that Law & Order may be on its way out. It will be a sad, sad day for America when the axe finally falls.

(Note to CNN editors: Law & Order has spawned four spinoffs, not two. In addition to SVU and Criminal Intent, both of which are still on the air; Law & Order also begat Law & Order: Trial by Jury and Conviction.)

Captain America, R.I.P.

For whatever it's worth, this is the most fun I've ever had as a writer.

The Last Porn Queen?

Jenny's intern has the scoop on the new sex tape from Keeley Hazell. I normally keep reasonably close tabs on these sorts of things, but even I have no idea who Kelly/Keeley or that Kim Kardashianopolis chick are.

So I ask the following question: Will the "accidental" celebrity sex tape ever go away, or has bittorrent insured that it will be a permanent feature of the cultural landscape for the rest of our lives?

Seriously.

One of the many reasons Gilmore Girls became all but unwatchable to me was the introduction of Logan Huntzberger, the hard-partying Yale student who was the scion of a media titan. It says more about me (and none of it flattering) than it does about the Sherman-Paladinos that I found this sort of fictional nepotism so infuriating.

Real life, of course, is stranger, or worse, or something, than fiction. To wit:

LAST Monday, Jared Kushner, the boy publisher of The New York Observer, was nestled in a wingback chair in the book-strewn office of the newspaper’s longtime editor, Peter Kaplan. They were talking about Mr. Kushner’s latest acquisition, the Web site politicsnj.com. “The more stuff he buys,” Mr. Kaplan, said, leaning back, “the happier I am.”

Happiness can take time to grow, both men know. Back in October, when Mr. Kushner invited Mr. Kaplan to a Yankees playoff game three months after buying The Observer, the gray-templed editor, who has been a mentor to waves of young journalists in New York, wasn’t so confident things would work out with his new young boss.

Mr. Kushner, 26, the scion of a troubled New Jersey real estate family, who is also a full-time graduate student, had dabbled in Boston-area condominiums, not publishing, while an undergraduate at Harvard. The sum total of his journalism experience was writing an article about dorm food for a student magazine. In the short time he owned The Observer, Mr. Kushner had found little time even to meet with Mr. Kaplan.

“It was tense,” Mr. Kaplan, 53, recalled of their early relationship. That October night, there was a rain delay of hours. As other fans sought cover in the tunnels of Yankee Stadium, Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Kushner remained in their field-side seats, drinking Bud Lights and talking newspapers. Mr. Kushner told Mr. Kaplan he had been at a game two weeks earlier and sat next to the owner of another New York news media property, and he was astounded at his disdain for his staff.

Surely this sort of thing goes down better with a bit of arsenic.

Colossal Squid!

Pictures on how it all went down:

Premiere Magazine, R.I.P.

I was saddened by the news that Premiere is shutting down print operations. I haven't read the book in a long time, but back in the day, it was one of the best parts of the Celebrity Industrial Complex. Premiere did the fawning star stuff, but less of it than, say, Vanity Fair, which aspires to seriousness every so often.

The old Premiere deserves a lot of credit for publishing some of William Goldman's great essay work (which is fortunately now collected; treat yourself, you'll thank me), "Libby Gelman-Waxner" neé Paul Rudnick, and Jewel Shepard.

For those of you not familiar with Jewel Shepard, she's a former B-movie queen--one of the pretty girls who came to LA with dreams of grandeur. It didn't quite work out for her. She did some stag magazines. And some movies such as Hollywood Hot Tubs. But it turns out that she's also a gifted, funny writer with a surprisingly soft touch. Someone smart at Premiere gave her a chance and she wrote a series of great pieces for them.

Those essays are hard to find now--what with the elitists prigs at Nexis not including Premiere in the Great Database of Western Civilization. But you can find some reproductions of them on the web. A sample:

From "I'm Naked on eBay":

Every time I log on to eBay and do a search on myself, I find a little piece of my past:

“Jan. 1983 Issue of Easyriders magazine with Jewel Shepard on the cover and inside. Jewel Shepard is famous for her appearance in Hollywood Hot Tubs and The Return of the Living Dead movies.” That's a real one. In case you've never seen a copy—and I don't know how you could not have—Easyriders is one of those successful lifestyle publications. In this case, the lifestyle is riding the biggest, noisiest motorcycle you can afford, with a beer and a babe who flashes her tits and tattoos at UPS drivers. Each issue features a photo spread of a nude lady and a Harley, both displaying their trim.

I have only the vaguest recollection of how I wound up being one of those nude ladies . . . Must have happened during those drug years that neither I nor the Republican candidate for president can recall. I do remember thinking the pics would be off the newstand in short order, never to be seen again. That was before eBay. The Easyriders issue offered there went for 50 bucks—probably about what I got for the photo shoot.

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's flattering to know that enough guys out there want me badly enough to jack the price up that high. On the other hand, it's annoying to discover your own body priced out of reach.

Or this essay on movie press junkets:

I didn't set out to write about junkets per se. I set out to write about Mark Burger, a likeable guy who is the film, theater, and video critic for the Winston-Salem Journal, published in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A member, as it were, of the media non-elite, who also happens to be a fairly accomplished junketeer.

He gets lots of free stuff: T-shirts, sweashirts, hats, bags, and even soap—most recently, pink soap, courtesy of the makers of Fight Club. (The first rule of Fight Club is: You don't talk about Fight Club—unless they send you pink soap.)

More importantly, he gets to be up close and personal with many famous people, some of whom he has admired for years. He also gets to see a whole bunch of movies, and—as he tells me several times—“movies are my life.” Wanting to see precisely what that life consisted of, I made arrangements to meet him in New York and tag along for a particularly big junket weekend. It was pretty surprising to learn that movie studios both major and minor, which normally engage each otherin pit bull-like competition, actually cooperate in the scheduling of their junkets, co-ordinating things so that all the journalists they gather from far and wide can cover more than one movie on their trip to fabulous Gotham or Los Angeles or wherever. Kind of restores your faith in the brotherhood of man and all that stuff.

Go read the rest of that one, it's the best look you'll ever see into how studios make those print ads with all of the quote snippets from local papers.

Anyway, pour some for Premiere tonight. And if you edit a magazine and want some great culture pieces, give Jewel Kilcher a call.

Get Your Fresh CulturePulp!

M.E. Russell is back, with Attack of the MUFOlogists!

Whedon Watch

IGN has a good interview with Joss Whedon. Lots of "Buffy Season 8" and more:

GN Comics: Will this season be as dark and moody as Seasons Six or Seven?

Whedon: No, you gotta bring the goofy on… a little bit. The goofy is where an enormous amount of the fun lies. Like the show itself, the series will ping pong. It will go from Greek Tragedy to French Farce between issues and sometimes between panels. Having the characters just talk, just yak at each other, is just so glorious for me. I love their voices and that's always really fun. But Brian is doing the Faith arc and that's not without the darkness. Drew Goddard is coming in and he's not without the silly. It doesn't mean that each won't have some of the other, but yeah not a Season Six kind of comic. That would be pretty much all blacks with word balloons.

Great news, everyone. Hanes model and actress extraordinaire Jennifer Love Hewitt can now be seen online promoting the new All-Over Comfort Bra. As always, Love came to the shoot loaded with energy, overflowing with enthusiasm and cheer. Why, she could barely contain herself!

Watch how Love is uncomfortable modeling in those annoying generic bras, wires sticking out, straps falling off her shoulder, itchy tags chafing her back. Enough! she said, as she returned to her trailer, threw the old bras in the waste basket, and put on the All-Over Comfort Bra.

If only my job was to take out the trash.

Starbuck: Unplugged

Read this if you dare. I'm staying pristine until Season 3.0 hits DVD.

Human Pole Position

From Last Boss. Don't ask questions, just play the video. (And yes, sicko, this is a totally safe for work.)

More Sony News!

Sony has been hyping the release of Warhawk as one of the games to look forward to for the PS3. Oops.

The long-running rumour that Incognito Entertainment’s tilt-controlled PS3 title Warhawk has now become a download only title have finally been confirmed by the game’s developer.

In an interview with IGN, Incognito admits that the single-player element of the title has been cut as it was judged as being far weaker than the multiplayer component. The final release will be a smaller game than the one first aired at E3, with its size having been trimmed to ease its download time over the PlayStation Network.

Sony has yet to announce a release date for Warhawk . . .

UFC Watch

It's huge in Columbus. Best tidbit:

"Something like 80 percent of our guys have graduated from college," White said. "Compare that to boxing where it’s always the same old story — the guy grew up on the mean streets and he would be dead or in prison without boxing."

One UFC fighter with a master’s degree, Rich Franklin, began fighting while employed as a high-school math teacher in Cincinnati.