Category: Uncategorized

Is there nothing fake boobs can’t solve?

Esther Snyder, co-founder of In-N-Out Burger (aka, the best fast-food burger in America), died last week.

Pix from our Seaside Heights trip yesterday with my brother, his wife, and their two kids! Writeup to follow (it may be a doozy)!

Amy & I went out to see Talladega Nights this afternoon. It was a hoot (but no 40-Year-Old Virgin, and it featured the tallest lead cast ever, with major screen time going to Will Ferrell (6’3″), John C. Reilly (6’1″), Michael Clarke Duncan (6’5″) and Sascha Baron Cohen (6’4″). We felt that they should have added either Tim Robbins or Tom Cruise.

We bought the movies at a ticket kiosk outside the theater. A printed note was taped next to the screen on each kiosk, to let moviegoers know that the trailer for World Trade Center would be shown before The Devil Wears Prada and You, Me and Dupree. If any of you readers from outside the NYC metro area went to the movies this weekend, did you see any similar notice, or is this something that they’re just particularly sensitive about in this region?

I saw the commercial for World Trade Center a few weeks ago while I was donating at the blood center over in Linwood. I admit that I had a hard time figuring out if the clips it showed were effective movie-making or if I’m still too strongly affected by the imagery. I know it’s not exactly summertime fare, so it’s kinda odd that the studio chose to drop the film just now.

On the other hand, Amy & I were pretty happy to find out that Idlewild is coming out in a few weeks, because

a) it means that there’s a new OutKast album, and

b) it means that we can meet up with official VM buddy Mark F. and see the flick at his local theater: the Magic Johnson Theater up in Harlem!

There’s also Little Miss Sunshine, Borat and Jackass 2 to see, so I might actually get out to the movies a few times before the end of the year! In the last few years, I’ve gone to fewer and fewer flicks, largely because I can’t be bothered. But Amy’s a good influence on me, getting me out to see important films with moments like this one.

In other news, my brother, his wife and their two daughters are in town for a week. We’re all planning to go down to the shore for a day. This time, I’ll remember to bring my camera to the boardwalk (and I’ll buy some goofy T-shirts, Tina). We picnicked up in a botanical garden on Saturday, and I got to tell the kids (6 and 3) outrageous lies about The Hunchback of Skylands Manor and The Slav in the Iron Mask. They love me.

I’m also battling a milder case of poison ivy than the one I got hit with around Memorial Day. I spent Friday afternoon with My Pal The Chainsaw, taking down some of the dead and decaying trees in the yard. While I did wear long sleeves and long pants, I managed to get a little of the evil stuff on my forearms, an inch or so above the wrists.

This pisses me off greatly, since it now means I’m going to have to get a biohazard suit for the next time I go out to clear more of the yard. Or I can hire some landscapers, warn ’em about the poison ivy, and let them take care of things.

I’m about a third of the way through this article about how the northeast NORAD base responded to 9/11. It’s harrowing, and it’s reminding me how different we thought it all was 5 years ago.

The eternal sunshine of the spotless Lohan. (turn the volume low and wait for it to load)

Neat interview with Paul Reubens at the Onion’s AV Club. I first discovered Pee Wee Herman (I was going to write, “My first exposure to Pee Wee Herman”) when I was watching Cheech & Chong films with my dad at far too young an age (like 11). What’s great is that my father had no idea C&C movies were all about drugs. He just found them funny.

Anyway, I went from there to HBO’s showing of Pee Wee’s stage act, which was also transformatively weird. I’m glad he’s rebuilt his career, and I hope he can get funding for his Pee Wee movies.

AVC: The Internet Movie Database says you had “complete creative control over Pee-wee’s Playhouse, with three minor exceptions,” but it doesn’t give any details. Do you remember what the exceptions were?

PR: In the first episode, the network said “You can’t stick that pencil in that potato, because pencils are sharp, and you might encourage kids to stab things.” So we didn’t do that. Let’s see. There was an episode they got a letter about, where there was a fire in the playhouse, and a firefighter showed up and he and Miss Yvonne were flirting, and he said “You have to have a smoke detector,” and she said “I have one in my bedroom, above the bed.” They asked us to change that for subsequent airings of the show, so we went in and looped dialogue over it, so instead, she said “I have one in my kitchen.” I put it back to the original version for the DVD release. There was a shot of a bathroom door that we held for a really long time, and you could hear Pee-wee peeing. They asked us to tone the sound of the peeing down, and add a score so it was a little less graphic. All the changes they asked us to make seemed really reasonable to me, and we accommodated them. I think in 45 episodes, there were only maybe three other changes they ever asked for.

Enjoy.

And if you don’t enjoy that, here’s a piece from Foreign Policy about forgotten (but ongoing) territorial disputes. I can’t wait for Canada and Denmark to declare war.

BizWeek offers an essay on how failed videogame platforms are good for the business:

Of course, whereas a market leader’s role is to provide stability, there is a difference between stability and stasis. Ideally, the “big guy”, whoever it is, must represent the basic ideals of the medium as it currently stands; the moment it no longer provides that representational force, the entire industry begins to shift on its foundation. People grow restless, lose interest because videogames no longer “speak” to them. Intuitively, new users won’t be attracted by an industry that doesn’t seem in touch with where it’s going or where it is now. Sales slump; everyone blames everyone else, and the industry just becomes all the more conservative because if it doesn’t know where the draft is coming from it’s best just to wear a coat to work, leading the spiral ever downward until someone steps out of the crowd and realigns the industry with its principles, creating a new status quo — as Nintendo did twenty years ago, as Sega kind of tried to do five years later, as Nintendo’s trying to do again today.

The thing is, by nature the most vital area of the game industry lies not so much the mechanics of the upper echelon of the industry – rather, it rests below the radar of your typical analyst, in the dark, greatly loved yet poorly exposed corners of the market. Though by popular definition you might well call them failures, without your Sega Saturns, your Atari Jaguars, your Amigas and GameCubes and NeoGeo Pocket Colors, the industry would be an autocracy, governed by a single dictate — indeed, one of limited perspective and shallow, if broad, concern for growth.

For the record, official VM buddy Sang & I played the heck out of the NBA 2K2 game on the Sega DreamCast.

After the World Cup, Bill “Sports Guy” Simmons (as opposed to Don “No Soul” Simmons) decided he would start supporting an English Premier League soccer team, and asked his fans for advice on which team to support. The massive article that resulted makes for some fun reading.