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Purple?

The Sunday NYTimes has picked up the story: the presidential candidates are tied in NJ polls. Money quote?

“As the 9/11 message of the Republicans recedes, New Jersey voters will come back home to Democrats,” said State Senator John Adler, co-chairman of Mr. Kerry’s campaign in New Jersey.

“Recedes.” Right.

None of you may have been thinking to yourselves, “Could that Stepford Wives remake really have been that bad? I wish Gil Roth would give that a viewing during a transatlantic flight and let me know.”

So I did. I’m of two minds on this one: it either is that bad, or it’s somehow worse. But at least Nicole Kidman’s good to look at.

I’ll give Van Helsing a shot during the flight back, and answer the same question.

Off to London in a few hours for the PABord conference, continuing the oddball travel schedule which will see me board 27 flights in 2004 (up from 25 in 2003).

Fortunately, I have the 40 gb iPod, a laptop, some DVDs, and a paperback of Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver to keep me company. Last year, I read his Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age during a few of these trips. We’ll see if I can read his Baroque Cycle between this trip and the Brussels/Amsterdam tilt in December.

Hot, Furry Death

So I’m entering hour 5 of NFL viewing (well, 5 hours of sports viewing, as I watched a bunch of the Yankees’ 11-1 victory against the Red Sox), when I see an ad for the Star Wars Battlefronts game (you can see the same ad by clicking “navigate,” “downloads” then “trailer”).

Evidently, this videogame consists of most of the combat scenes from the original three Star Wars movies. According to the trailer, “For years, you’ve watched the greatest Star Wars battles. What if you could actually live them?”

Sounds cool, right? Evidently, you can play from either side–Empire or rebels–which isn’t quite tantamount to guys who always play the Nazis in WWII simulations.

The trailer commenced with a series of quick cuts, including a few moments that I found REALLY perplexing. Fortunately, I have TiVo, so I was able to freeze the ad and go back to see what it was:

That’s right. In this game, you can actually blow away Ewoks. I picked up these captures from the internet version, but the TV version also includes the on-screen phrase, “Jim killed Ewok.”

All we need now is Jar Jar Binks: Shooting Gallery, and George Lucas can buy that private island he’s always wanted.

Fight Night

Watched the Hopkins/De La Hoya match last night at the home of a boxing family: two brothers of former light heavyweight champ Bobby Czyz were in attendance, and we watched a couple of Bobby’s old matches while the undercards were duking it out in Vegas.

It was pretty informative, watching boxing with people who’ve been in the ring, and who’ve watched so much of the sport. As with every other subject, the layman can learn a ton from listening to the vocabulary of people who are initiates. So, primed by listening to their commentary over a few other matches, I was able to see the main event last night with a different set of eyes.

It helped that, early in the night, one of the brothers made a comment about hitting a body shot right in the liver, and how it caused an opponent to crumple to the ground. When De La Hoya fell to the canvas, the whole sequence made sense, given that he didn’t appear to be that beaten up before he dropped.

Anyway, it was an interesting match to watch, from a chess-match standpoint. It didn’t have the exctiement and absolutely destructive slugfest-itude of, say, Gotti/Ward I, but De La Hoya’s change of strategy (coming out boxing, instead of moving back and dancing) and Hopkins’ ability to adapt to it, while enforcing his will in the later rounds, was pretty cool to watch.

According to the coroner, Rick James had nine different drugs in his system at the time of his death, inclduing coke, speed, valium and vicodin:

“None of the drugs or drug combinations were found to be at levels that were life-threatening in and of themselves,” the report said. It gave the cause of death as a heart attack and ruled the death accidental.

When it came to drug use, I don’t think anything Rick James did was that accidental.

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer critiques Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham’s new 7,700-word editorial about the Republican propaganda machine. It’s not as exciting as Bernard Hopkins and the beans-and-rice incident, but it still makes for good reading.

Meanwhile, the bigger media scandal involves CBS’s use of likely-forged documents to attack the president’s National Guard record. It’s interesting to me because — in addition to the ideological bias involved, and the fact that Dan Rather and a CBS news exec are now contending that the contents of the memos are accurate, even if false (which is tantamount to the police saying, “Sure, we faked the evidence, but he’s guilty of something“) — it illustrates the power of the internet.

A bunch of venues have picked up the story that certain bloggers were the first people to publicize the possibility (now high probability) that these documents were incredibly crude forgeries that couldn’t have been generated using available technology of the time. Sidestepping the politics of the case (the standard “Does Dan Rather have a grudge against Bush’s family?”), it’s this aspect of it that I find fascinating. In short order, a new form of media has emerged, bypassing traditional gatekeepers, making tons of mistakes, but also offering perspectives and expertise that Big Media simply can’t match.

It’s like emergent architecture, where a bazillion little units start gestalt-ifying into a mosaic that represents reality far better than the top-down model of Big Media.