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 | Tiananmen Square. Beijing, China June 28, 2008 |
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August 3, 2009"Tron Legacy"The trailer for the Tron sequel, Tron Legacy hit the Web last week, and it looks fantastic. A cleaned-up, high-res version of the footage that was shown last year at ComiCon, it doesn't give away any plot ... but does show what an additional 27 years of (compounding) computing power can buy you. The fun seems to be starting, too - as part of the viral promotional campaign, a replica of Flynn's Arcade got built in San Diego last month. And Disney is running a "Flynn Lives" Web site. I love that the nerds who grew up on Tron are now in charge of the sequel, and that they seem so determined to do it right. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 3, 2009 7:51 PM. June 9, 2009"Up" In 3-DI don't want to spend a lot of time doing some kind of half-assed movie review for a film that's getting 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, but Elaine and I caught "Up" last night at the Neptune, and it's absolutely fantastic. My friend Jeff called it a "masterpiece", and he's totally right. Elaine and I went for date night, and came out of the picture on a high. I just can't say enough good things about it. This was my first mainstream 3-D experience, and it was pretty good. 3-D's been a kitch thing (red-green paper glasses) or a geek thing (IMAX goggles) for, like, ever; I was expecting motion sickness and/or disappointment. Turns out the new glasses are no bigger (or heavier) than a pair of cheap sunglassses from the 7-11, and the film doesn't try to play up the 3-D angle too much. 3-D becomes something extra, like THX sound or a big screen; it makes the film a little better, a little more vibrant. I've always associated the Neptune with divey, low-budget, midnight "Rocky Horror" screenings; the fact that they've got a 3-D system was a shock, to say the least. Landmark's clearly put some money into the place over the past couple years, and that's a Good Thing. The one drawback to seeing "Up" theatrically is that you have to sit through trailers for some absolute junk - "Ice Age", "G-Force", "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" - flicks that are being marketed to kids, but aren't remotely in Pixar's league of filmmaking. Ugh. PS - If you go see the film, pack tissues. You'll need 'em. (I did.) PPS - Seriously. Go see it. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 9, 2009 6:24 PM. May 14, 2009Details On "Toy Story Mania" For The WiiThe OC Register has an update on the development of "Toy Story Mania" for the Wii, including quotes from the developers and some interesting stills of the game-in-progress: The game version includes the five carnival galleries found in the ride, such as balloon pops, plate tosses and darts. In addition, game developers came up with new and original galleries along with a series of mini games, for a total of 30 different games. My favorite note? The game was produced by the Irvine-based Papaya. Because of the company’s close proximity to the theme park, game designers got to spend time understanding the game. Emphasis mine. Yeah, sounds like a rough life, huh? "Honey? I'm off to California Adventure for a few hours for, uh, 'research'..." Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 14, 2009 5:45 AM. May 8, 2009"Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'"God, I love The Onion. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 8, 2009 7:04 AM. April 12, 2009"Little Red Riding Hood"Imagine the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" retold ala the video for Roykosopp's "Remind Me" (or those strange Areva commercials), and, well, you get this. It's incredibly clever, and totally worth the 3 minutes of your time. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 12, 2009 8:22 AM. December 19, 2008"Grand Unified Weekly"SlateV is one of my favorite podcasts; (much) more than a video version of the Slate Daily Podcast, V has evolved as a kind of variety hour of short-form video programming - some segments recur, others are one-off. And each morning, I find myself looking forward to whatever the new segment is like it's a present under the tree. One of their newest segments, however, dazzles. Called "Grand Unified Weekly", it's a smart science show with pop-culture sensibility and unique production values. The content is first-rate, but even more than that is the art direction: the whole thing is done as if screencasted from a Mac; the talking-head hosts appear as QuickTime movies, new content is summoned from the Dock, visual effects often come ala Stickies. Worth checking out, doubly so if you're a Mac person. (And get SlateV into your podcast rotation!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 19, 2008 2:18 PM. The Benny HillifierOn Tuesday, Slog linked to a Web site that I've been totally addicted to - The Benny Hillifier. The Hillifier is simple: you give it a YouTube ID, and it gives you the video, backed by the song "Yakety Sax". "Yakety Sax" can make any video (any! video!) hysterically funny. Don't believe me?
(See what I mean? Now it's funny.) Other suggestions: Evolution of Dance, Cute Overload kitty, roller coasters, etc. Discuss. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 19, 2008 8:34 AM. November 17, 2008"Star Trek"The new trailer for JJ Abrams' reboot of Star Trek hit the wire today, and I'm ... enthralled. It's got a vibe, an energy, a freshness that's been missing from Trek for, oh, about 15 years now. It's damn exciting. Give it a look and decide for yourself. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 17, 2008 3:00 PM. October 5, 2008"Shoot For The Moon"I've been spending part of my weekend savoring a fantastic, 1995 BBC documentary called "Shoot For The Moon", about the creation of "Space Mountain: Mission 2" at Disneyland Paris. If you're interested in Disney park attractions, roller coasters, or Imagineering in general, it's a must-see. It runs about an hour, and is available in five parts on YouTube: one, two, three, four, five. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 5, 2008 8:54 AM. September 14, 2008"Richistan"I just finished Robert Frank's new book, "Richistan", and thought I'd recommend it. Frank is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who covers the affluent (his column is called "The Wealth Report"). He wrote Richistan after observing that the world has a huge (and growing) number of millionaires these days, and thought it would be a good idea to do an anthropological piece about these people's lives. We get to see lower Richistan ($1M to $10M in net worth), middle Richistan ($10M to $100M in net worth), upper Richistan ($100M to $1B in net worth) and Billionaireville (self-explanatory). We learn how these people got their money (most of them made it themselves; only 7% is "old money"). We learn about the exploding demand for butlers, yachts, and fractional jet ownership. And we learn just how much complexity comes with wealth. I was particularly taken with this tale from a newly-affluent interviewee: "The other day we saw a mouse in the house. Before [I got money] I would have just gotten a broom and gotten rid of the thing. But now it's different. I e-mailed the household manager. He called the vendor, a pest-control firm, and the pest-control firm caught the mouse. Then the household manager directed two other staff members to dispose of the mouse. That's five people to catch a mouse, instead of a broom. It all seemed normal at the time. But then I thought about it, and I wondered, how did our lives get like this?" (Actually, this quote reminded me of the passage in The Bonfire Of The Vanities where Sherman McCoy is lamenting how hard it is to make ends meet on $500k a year. However, I think Tom Wolfe intended that as satire. Right? Right?) It's a quick, fun read. (And unless you're a resident of Billionaireville, I'd suggest you get it from the local library. I certainly did.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 14, 2008 4:24 PM. September 2, 2008"Business Time"Last night, Lane and I were hanging at home, winding down the day and listening to KEXP when the DJ decided to put on Flight Of The Conchords' "Business Time." I'd never heard the song before - despite Cintra's never-ending efforts to try to introduce me to the band - and, as the lyrics unspooled, I could not stop laughing. This has to be the funniest real-life slice-of-relationship song I've heard in, like, forever. Holy cow, I laughed. (Cintra assured me this morning that the band has other songs. I think it's finally time to listen to a few of 'em.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 2, 2008 8:45 PM. September 1, 2008"The Heart Of The Game"I wanted to take a moment to recommend a fantastic documentary on DVD called "The Heart of the Game." The film follows Seattle's Roosevelt High School girl's basketball team - the Roughriders - over a 5-year span. It begins with the arrival of a new coach, Bill Resler, and watches the team (and its players) develop, grow, and start winning. It's a mediation about competition, teamwork ... and utterly hypnotic. The filmmakers did an outstanding job of making their subjects comfortable in front of a camera - some of the footage makes you wonder, "how the hell did they get that?" As a fan of WNBA, I was also interested to see what an "updraft" effect the league is having on the lives of young female players; at one point, a coach mentions that participation in women's basketball is 4x what it was a few short years ago, and one of the players' goals is to play pro ball for the W after graduation. Clearly, having a bona-fide career path for women players is changing the calculus for a lot of them. Very cool. (And yes, given that the film was shot in Seattle, there's an obligatory clip of LJ and Sue doin' their thing. Which made me happy.) Recommend. It's 95 minutes, and you won't be sorry. Promise. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 1, 2008 4:38 PM. August 28, 2008Warners Re-Issuing 5 New Order AlbumsIt's been a good while since I bought any CDs (I'm pretty much all-iTunes and all-Amazon, all the time), but this news will get me to the store, for sure: On 28th September Rhino Records will re-issue one of the most consistent and influential music catalogues of the 1980s, that of New Order. All five albums will come with bonus discs featuring extended versions, b-sides and remixes, as well as extensive sleevenotes, including interviews with all four band members. It's a bit of a shame they're not issuing Republic, as well ("Regret" = best song of all time), but you can't have everything, right? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 28, 2008 8:46 AM. August 24, 2008"In Defense Of Food"I recently finished Michael Pollan's new book, "In Defense of Food" and have found myself, strangely, talking about it with just about everyone I know. "Food" is a follow-on to Pollan's hugely successful "The Omnivore's Dilemma", and it concerns itself with distilling the a lot of "Dilemma"'s findings into actionable, specific suggestions for changing your diet, and your life. The core advice ("Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.") isn't all that radical, or even surprising. What is surprising, and what most caught my imagination, was the exploration of the modern food industry, and how it operates. In some ways, "Defense" is a spiritual successor to "Fast Food Nation", and, just as that book will put you off your local hamburger, "Defense" will give you pause when you are confronted with the claimed health benefits of a protein bar, a bag of snack food, or any of the quick-heat meals that Americans rely on to get themselves through the day. Pollan advocates "hugging the edges" of your local grocery store, sticking with fresh fruits, vegetables, dairy and meats, and avoiding the highly-processed, preservative-laden concotions in the middle. I do find Pollan a bit fussy (and a bit too much of food snob), but many of his suggestions about how to revere and appreciate your food (eat slowly and deliberately; prepare your own food if you can; buy the freshest, most-local ingredients you can) have become part of Elaine's and my routine in the past month or so. We are making time for dinner with each other, cooking several times a week, shopping for our ingredients at the local farmer's market or produce stand, and, I have to say, Pollan has a point. I've found myself casting a wary eye on Balance Bars, Baked Lays, and pretty much anything that comes out of one of the vending machines at the office. I've tried to break habits about portion sizes (start with a half sandwich, wait 10 minutes, see if I'm still hungry), and have discovered real pleasure in preparing meals the long way 'round, especially on weekends (like this one) where we can - and are willing - to make the time (de-bearding mussels last Friday rates as one of my more interesting hands-on experiences in a kitchen). "Defense" is worth a read, even though I doubt you'll buy every one of Pollan's points any more than I did. It certainly will challenge your assumptions about what's in the grocery store, what you're putting in your mouth, and what role food is playing in your life. Recommend. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 24, 2008 4:57 PM. August 16, 2008Feeling The Aftershock
The trip was a blast - great company, great entertainment, great laughs - but I think all of us were surprised at just how much fun we had at the park that day. A few trip notes (and Silverwood tips):
My family was pretty excited about the whole day, and the Spokane folks are now talking season passes. Elaine and I will be back next year, for sure. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 16, 2008 3:36 PM. July 26, 2008Disney Is Rebooting TronBlue Sky Disney is reporting that Disney is developing a sequel to "Tron" - and they they showed a 3-minute clip at Comic Con this week. Other coverage from FirstShowing.net: The trailer opens with a man running from an approaching light cycle. As he continues to run, he makes a Matrix-style leap into the air. When he reaches the peak of his jump, he leans forward, and a light cycle forms around him. (OMG!) UPDATE: Jim Hill has more details on the film, and the clip itself is up on YouTube (better hurry before someone at Disney asks that it be taken down). Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 26, 2008 7:02 AM. July 22, 2008Aftershock Is OpenIt's official: Silverwood's newest coaster is open. After making the move from Six Flags Great America, Aftershock (nee "Deja Vu") is now rockin' and rollin' 3 inversions at 65 mph. Hooray! (If you don't know Silverwood, it's this family theme park just north of Coeur d' Alene, Idaho, that happens to have the best coasters in the Pacific Northwest.) Elaine and I will have to sneak out sometime in the next few weekends and scream our lungs out. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 22, 2008 6:18 AM. June 25, 2008"He Didn't Stop Believin'"I have a total soft spot for Journey - they of "Don't Stop Believin'" and "Only The Young". Like Van Halen and David Lee Roth, Journey had a falling out with their lead singer, Steve ("Oh, Sherrie") Perry, and has never really recovered: But as far as Journey’s fans are concerned, there is but one true Journey vocalist, and his name is Steve Perry. Before Perry, Journey were a chops-flaunting jazz-rock outfit whose first three albums had sold poorly; when Columbia Records threatened to drop the band, their manager, Herbie Herbert, prevailed upon them to hire Perry, who had a supple tenor, a gawky, earnest stage presence, and one of the worst haircuts in rock. Together, he and Journey began writing new songs that showcased two of these three qualities, and by the turn of the decade they’d become one of the biggest bands on earth. Well, this month's GQ has a terrific article ("He Didn't Stop Believin'") about Journey's search for - and discovery of - a new lead singer, Filipino Arnel Pineda (via YouTube, of all places ... no, really). Pineda is rumored to sound exactly like Steve Perry - astounding if true, given Perry's distinctive voice. Seemed a little implausible to me, so I checked out a few YouTube clips of the band performing live this year. Holy cow, he's good. It's eerie. Listen to a few clips and judge for yourself: "Faithfully", "Don't Stop Believin'", "Only The Young". Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 25, 2008 11:14 PM. June 1, 2008ThrillNetwork Reviews "X2"ThrillNetwork is up with a review of the recently-rebooted "X2" at Six Flags Magic Mountain: X2 is at once a fierce new beast and a familiar friend. The layout remains the same, but new speakers mounted to the seats add driving rock music and sound effects timed to match elements of the ride. Two below-ground pits have been filled with mist, forming a refreshing cool zone on hot days. And, the most anticipated new effect, two flame throwers have been added before the final raven turn to spray jets of fire at the trains rushing by. I got to ride "X" back in 2004, and loved it; I can't wait to try out v2.0. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 1, 2008 8:23 AM. May 4, 2008"Iron Man"After several months of trailer-induced excitement and buildup, Iron Man opened this weekend, so Elaine and I caught the 12:15 showing at Pacific Place today. I'm pretty happy with the picture. Let's be blunt - Iron Man is about as straightforward a superhero movie as it gets. It's the standard-edition Origin Storyline (see: Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman Begins, Fantastic Four, (actually, don't see Fantastic Four) etc.), where the otherwise-normal main character finds they're endowed with special abilities, learns to manipulate them, incurs a mortal enemy in the process, and then heads for the big, noisy, Computer-Generated Extravaganza of Explosions in the third act. (Generally, the hero prevails and is ready for a sequel.) What makes Iron Man work is the simple, sheer joy with which it's put together. Robert Downey, Jr. is perfect as Tony Stark, and the sets, graphics, tone, and sense of the movie really gel. When Stark is learning how to fly in his powered suit through the Los Angeles skyline - well, you buy it. He's having fun, we're having fun, it's wonderful. I do have quibbles. There are a few clunky lines of dialog, the plot sort of teeters under its own weight at one point or another, and the stellar supporting cast - particularly Gwenyth Paltrow - isn't given a whole heckuvalot to do (it's Downey's movie). But overall, it's great, great summer popcorn fare. Word is it made over $100M this weekend, and, frankly, it deserves it. Oh, and if you don't know - be sure to stay until after the credits. (Thanks to Khan for the tip!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 4, 2008 9:09 PM. February 5, 2008I Heart CosmoPodOne of the (under-appreciated) benefits of taking transit to work is being able to watch video on your iPod or iPhone while someone else does the driving. I love watching TV shows (I'm kinda addicted to "Entourage") or movies - particularly on the way home - as a way of unwinding after a long day. Problem is, there's a lot of great video on the Internet that I'd like to see, much of it on YouTube, and I've been somewhat stymied about getting that stuff from YouTube's Flash-based video player into a format that my iPhone can understand. Stymied, that was, until I discovered CosmoPod. CosmoPod is this kick-ass plugin for Safari that detects a video clip on a Web page you're looking at, and, with a click:
In short, it rocks. I find it incredibly useful for longish (40+ minutes) clips on YouTube - the sort I never have time to sit down and watch, uninterrupted, in front of my MacBook. (For some reason, these all seem to be taken from the "Talks @ Google" series - Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, "The Secret History of Silicon Valley"). CosmoPod detects this stuff, downloads it, and pops it on to my phone - fantastic. The product isn't free, but it is cheap - about ten bucks. If you're a commuter, it's well worth a look. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 5, 2008 3:13 PM. January 29, 2008How NOT To Use PowerPointChar sent out this terrific link, which is 3 minutes and 54 seconds worth of comedic awesomeness as Don McMillan takes the piss out of bad PowerPoint presentations. (My favorite is the first one - "Don't read every word on your slide.") Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 29, 2008 8:59 AM. January 27, 2008"Once"I wanted to take a moment to give a big, big thumbs-up for a movie called "Once." It's a poignant, touching, and moving low-budget indie film about music, creativity, and emotional healing. (That may sound like an After-school Special kind of thing, but it's not.) The actors are novices, doing fantastic, authentic work; the music is amazing (and original to the film); the characters make sense, in a real-world way. Movies about music, and the making of music, are notoriously hard to get right. The best I've seen so far is "Hustle & Flow", which really captured the light and heat of creating something new. "Once" does much the same thing, but in a totally different vein, with the music moving the movie forward, and driving the characters where they need to go. I can't recommend it more highly. It's short - just 86 minutes - and it's available as a rental in iTunes (which, incidentally, is how we discovered it). Give it a look. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 27, 2008 11:57 AM. January 24, 2008Deja Vu Confirmed For SilverwoodThe Spokesman-Review is reporting that, indeed, Deja Vu is moving from Six Flags Great America to Silverwood: Standing twice as tall as Silverwood’s tallest coaster, the ride will take thrill-seekers skyward at a 90-degree angle, down a 177-foot drop, through two loops and then climb again before dropping riders to do the whole thing again backward. This was rumored back in December, but it's great to see official confirmation. The ride is slated to open in July ... which means that I'll be heading out to Idaho this summer. (Tip 'o the hat to my Dad, who spotted the story!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 24, 2008 2:04 PM. January 6, 2008In Which I Confess My Sad Addiction To "Super Mario Galaxy"We got a Wii. I won't bore you with the story of how we got it (it was one of those right-place, right-time kind of things where the Best Buy had a stack of, like, 12 of them, and, as I was standing there, staring at the Tower Of Wiis like it was some kind of mirage or something, the salesguy slides up behind me and whispers, "We just put those out 15 minutes ago"), but suffice to say we have one, with an extra controller/nunchuck and a copy of Super Mario Galaxy. I bought Mario because I remember how much I loved - totally, totally loved - playing Super Mario 64 on my Nintendo 64 about a decade ago, and the title seemed to be the perfect Wii title - playful, colorful, cute, etc. We set up the Wii, played a few rounds of bowling and tennis on Wii Sports, and then I slid in Galaxy to see what it was all about. And I am now totally, completely, utterly and sadly addicted to the silly thing. Look, it's a Mario game. There's no blood, guts, machine guns, Covenant, you name it. You're controlling a plumber as he races around collecting coins and "star bits" while trying to save the princess from the clutches of the evil Bowser. It takes place in Technicolor up-is-down-and-down-is-up landscapes that Escher only hinted at, and, once in a while, you turn in to a bee. 'Cause you need to. Or you ride a sting ray as you surf waterways. (I've always thought that anyone involved with designing a Mario game would pretty much be prevented from running for public office, if you know what I mean.) The thing that makes Galaxy so compelling is how well it makes use of the Wii's unique controllers. You shake your controller to spin around and beat enemies; you "surf" on those rays by moving the controller in three dimensions; you wave your controller at the screen to pick up "star bits." It's easily the most interactive, immersive Mario game I've ever played, and I love it. It's been a long time since I've lost time while playing video games, but, well, I blinked yesterday morning and I'd been playing for three hours. Sad, I tell you. If you have a Wii, buy this game. And clear your calendar. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 6, 2008 11:50 AM. January 3, 2008NetFlix To Make A Set-Top BoxFresh on the heels of my predictions about AppleTV v2: DVD-by-mail service Netflix Inc. will begin delivering movies and other programming directly to televisions later this year through a set-top box that will pipe entertainment over a high-speed Internet connection. The battle over the living room is going to erupt into a full-fledged shooting war in 2008. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 3, 2008 11:51 AM. January 2, 2008Slate.com On Keeping Your New Year's ResolutionNow that I'm commuting again (I took the last two weeks off), I'm getting caught up on my podcasts, and listened to a great one from Slate called, "Rationalizing Resolutions: Can economics make you a better person?": Economists rarely make good forecasts, but let me venture one: Most readers of this column will eat and drink heavily over the next couple of weeks (as will its writer), and many of us will, on Jan. 1, vow to do better in the future. Can economics provide a little assistance in coping with this annual ritual? The piece was interesting to me, mostly because the idea of a Web site that motivates you to keep promises to yourself by holding a pool of cash hostage is pretty nifty. Jeff and I had a running weight bet for most of last year, where we'd each offer to pay the other $10 for each pound we failed to lose, relative to our specific goal. As luck would have it, we both made such lousy progress that wound up resetting the bet (three or four times, as memory serves), and calling 'no harm, no foul.' If we had to park, say, $300 each in escrow and watch it go to charity if we slipped ... well, I suspect we'd have been $600 poorer between the two of us, but certainly more motivated. The article is certainly worth a quick read. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 2, 2008 1:52 PM. December 20, 2007A New Vision For The Fun ForestThe Stranger has a story this week about a possible plan to not just save, but actually improve the Fun Forest: Roller-coaster enthusiast John Sutherland—a former ski-school director, resort manager, and University of Washington administrator ... wants to breathe new life into the Fun Forest by bringing in new rides, new crowds, and $18 million worth of private investment over the next two years. Sutherland—who once held a Guinness World Record for riding 40 roller coasters in 24 hours—has brought in a team of designers, merchandisers, and investors (mostly former Six Flags executives, he says) to completely rethink, or at least retool, Fun Forest. The city, of course, isn't taking his calls - which is baffling. A good amusement park in the Center - one that's staffed regularly, with good attractions and regular operating hours - could be a vibrant part of Seattle Center, and 180 degrees from the dreary Fun Forest we have today. (Tip o' the hat to Screamscape.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 20, 2007 9:04 AM. December 17, 2007"oPtion$: The Secret Life Of Steve Jobs"I'm a regular reader of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (if you like snarky tech, it's a must-read), and recently finished the book by FSJ, called, "oPtion$: The Secret Life Of Steve Jobs". Bill had snagged a copy when it first came out, and just raved about it, so I placed a hold through SPL. Now I know why Bill loved it so much: it's laugh-out-loud funny. Really, really great. First, the basics: "oPtion$" isn't some kind of tell-all book about Real Steve Jobs or Apple. Instead, it's all about Silicon Valley, unchecked egos, and narcissism. In fact, FSJ is sort of a geek Paris Hilton - he's famous, yes, but mostly famous for being famous, and woefully free of any actual talent. The book's got zingers a-plenty, mostly run through the lens of people doing things that annoy Steve: Suddenly the air feels really, really cold, and it's so quiet that I can hear the air conditioning whirring in the walls, and I'm thinking to myself, Holy friggin mother of Jesus, I am so going to kill the a-holes who did the HVAC work in this place. Because I specifically told them I want this place silent. Not quiet. Silent. Like a friggin tomb, I told them. Yet there's this whirring in the walls as if we're up in a jet at thirty thousand feet. How am I supposed to concentrate? This is how I'm supposed to work? I can't even hear myself think. Or consider this great example of how FSJ and Larry Eillison spend their weekends: Rat Patrol is what Larry calls it when we drive his Hummer up to the city and cruise the Tenderloin in the middle of the night, wearing balaclavas and commando outfits and firing Super Soakers at transvestite hookers. You get points for how many you hit, with bonuses for letting them get as close as possible to the Hummer before you leap through the roof and open fire. We've done it a few times and I'll admit, it's pretty fun, especially when the trannies get all pissed off and start shouting and swearing. Larry aims for the face, and tries to blow their wigs off. The book's plot revolves around Apple's stock-options scandal from earlier this year; Jobs is tortured by an incompetent board, rebellious iPhone engineers, and a Zune-toting, Windows-loving prosecutor who thinks Steve is a poseur. It's fantastic. FSJ, if you don't know, is really author Daniel Lyons from Fortune. Lyons did an appearance at Microsoft earlier this year (we regularly host speakers on campus), and the talk was videotaped ... it's damn funny (and not remotely safe for work - the guys swears a lot). Check it out (note: requires Windows and Internet Explorer). The book's a definite recommend. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 17, 2007 11:13 AM. December 11, 2007"Speed Racer" TrailerThe trailer for the new, big-budget, big-screen adaptation of "Speed Racer" is up, and I have just three words to say: Oh. My. God. I was never a big fan of the cartoon, and was pretty "meh" when I heard it was being made into a feature-length film, despite its pedigree (it's written/directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, the guys behind The Matrix). But the trailer ... wow. Just, wow. The Wachowskis have taken a sterile cartoon and blown it all out of proportion to anything that came before. And yep, it might suck, but I'm gonna be there opening weekend. Check it out, and see what you think. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 11, 2007 9:25 AM. November 25, 2007"Made To Stick"One great fringe benefit of Thanksgiving is the free time conferred by the day-after food hangover - everyone in the family is low-energy and sleepy, so they curl up on the couch/easy chair/bed and just ... chill. For my part, I decided to catch up a bit on reading, and finished "Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die". Most anyone in the corporate world has sat through a handful of terrible, horrible, soul-crushing, tear-your-eyes-out, Oh-God-Why-Didn't-I-Bring-My-Laptop-So-I-Could-At-Least-Do-My-Email PowerPoint water tortures. And the authors (Chip & Dan Heath) basically wanted to know why these meetings are so terrible (and their content so forgettable) while other forms of communication (for instance, that urban legend where the businessman meets a woman in a bar and wakes up in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney) are so memorable, so vivid, and so sticky. Now, generally I find books like this to be a dime a dozen - most business books are 20 pages of content and 180 pages of repetitive fluff - but "Made To Stick" beats that rap by using its own advice to stay engaging, light, entertaining and educational. And while it's easy to dismiss some of the advice as "advanced common sense," it definitely got me thinking about how I like to present and package information. I'm giving a talk to the high-tech club at UW next year about marketing jobs at Microsoft, and a number of the points in "Stick" have got me re-evaluating both what I'm presenting and how I'll present it. Good stuff. Definite recommend. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 25, 2007 9:02 AM. November 22, 2007"Live Free Or Die Hard"Elaine and I curled up on the couch last night to watch the fourth installment in John McClane's legendary string of bad luck - Live Free Or Die Hard. It's got some flaws, and it's waaaaaay over the top (to the point of silliness), but it wasn't too bad. I consider the original Die Hard to be one of the finest action pictures ever made - thrilling, smart, well-written, and genuinely exciting (and I'm embarrassed to say how many times I've seen it - let's just say I could write good-sized chunks of the script from memory). Die Hard 2: Die Harder was an atrocious piece of crap (thank you, Renny Harlin - don't you have another Cutthroat Island or Deep Blue Sea to work on?); Die Hard With A Vengeance was a good return to form. The fourth one, though ... I was worried. Originally called "Die Hard 4.0", the plot is pretty simple: bad guy hackers break in to the nation's utilities, banking and traffic systems and begin shutting everything down. McClane, as the old-school 'analog guy in a digital world' figures out what's going on and starts busting heads. He's got help, too, in the form of Justin Long ("Hello, I'm a Mac"), a hacker who inadvertently built some of the software being used by the bad guys. Flaws abound. The film's got a zillion plot holes; the computers all run "HollywoodOS"; the feds are silly and incompetent (standard for the franchise, but still); the hackers have amazing, godlike abilities to control any electronic device, anywhere; and so on. But perhaps the biggest problem is that Bruce Willis' character has, somehow, become The Terminator. At one point i expected him to put on some sunglasses, extend his hand to Sarah Connor and say, "Come with me if you want to live." Nothing kills him. Nothing. Falls off a building? Gets up again. Thrown out a window? Grabs a truck on the ground floor and crashes it into an elevator shaft (really). Blows up a fighter jet with a semi(!), slides down a slab of broken freeway at a 60-degree angle as a huge fireball goes off over his head, and, uh, limp for a few scenes afterward. [Insert obligatory, "I'm gettin' too old for this shit" line here.] One of the things I loved about Die Hard was that McClane was human - you shoot him, he bleeds. He gets hurt and angry and really damaged as the movie goes on, and it adds an element of risk for the audience - what's gonna happen to this guy? It was such a nice change from all the crappy Stallone flicks from the mid-'80s (Cobra?, anyone?) where the good guys are all superhuman, and the bad guys are just Bond-esque henchmen. Live Free is still pretty good - I was entertained, even as I found myself rolling my eyes. I just miss the John McClane of the '80s. Ah, well. Rental. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 22, 2007 9:25 AM. November 19, 2007The Onion Takes The Piss Out Of BloggersBack in 2000, The Onion ran a hysterical op-ed piece ("Barryploegel.com Will Never Be Accused Of Having Too Little Information About Barry Ploegel") that, I think, perfectly captures the narcissistic tightrope that bloggers walk (sometimes more successfully than others): The purpose of barryploegel.com shall be twofold: First, it shall enable anyone to access all the information they desire about me at the touch of a button. Second, upon my death, the site shall serve as a monument to all that I was. Future historians need not wonder who this enigmatic "Barry Ploegel" fellow was. They need only access my site to find an abundance of photos of me, a selection of MIDI Music that I composed, and excerpts from my very own Babylon 5 fan fiction. What's even more hysterical is that The Onion also put up a fake companion Web site - barryploegel.com - that's just spot-on. I mention this because I've found myself referencing the Barry Ploegel gag a lot lately, and everyone gives me the blank stare when I do. Enjoy. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 19, 2007 1:45 PM. November 16, 2007Awesome Apple Ad ParodyValleywag carried a link this morning to this outstanding Apple ad parody. Any Apple fan who listens to the lyrics will immediately start giggling. And, if you're interested, the original ad can be found here. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 16, 2007 4:42 PM. October 14, 2007I Heart "Robot Chicken"So I may well be, as usual, the last guy to the party on this one, but I've recently discovered Robot Chicken, and I'm giggling my ass off. The show, if you don't know, is a stop-motion-animation comedy sketch show that runs on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim (also home to Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which should tell you something right there). RC is the brainchild of Seth Green (he of Austin Powers and Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and Mathew Senreich. I got turned on to the show via a clip called "Supervillian Carpool", whose premise is that Skeletor, Cobra Commander, Lex Luthor one other 80s comic book bad guy are driving home from work together, and being, well, guys. Money quote: "Behold the gaseous stench of Skeletor's breakfast burrito!" So then I get a link for a genius Star Wars parody where Vader calls the Emperor to explain that, um, the Death Star blew up (see it to believe it), and I almost peed myself laughing. O. M. G. Kim told me that Seth and Matt did a segment on NPR, which I downloaded and listened to (also very, very funny); this, in turn, pointed me to a parody they did of "Law And Order" - it's 90 seconds long, contains no dialog, and stars anthropomorphic chickens. Fantastic. The shows are in iTunes, and I just bought a season pass. Riding the bus just got a heckuva lot more entertaining. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 14, 2007 9:27 PM. July 30, 2007Eddie Izzard In Seattle August 11 & 12Funniest Man Alive (tm) Eddie Izzard is coming to Seattle to "workshop" his new solo comedy material. Called "Work in Progress", he's playing the Bagley Wright Theater at 8 PM on August 11 and 12. Tickets are $50, and go on sale at 10 AM this morning. I love Eddie ("Dress To Kill" is one of the best comedy DVDs ever) and have seen him twice in Seattle, once for "Circle" and once for "Sexie." He's not to be missed. Need convincing? See: "Covered in Bees", "Empires", "Cake or Death," "American vs. British Movies." (FYI: NSFW audio) Lane and I are going to the Sunday show. Anyone else in? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 30, 2007 8:19 AM. July 12, 2007"Carmina Burana" At Benaroya HallElaine and I caught the Seattle Symphony's performance of "Carmina Burana" at Benaroya Hall tonight, and I just wanted to take a moment to highly recommend it. I'm not much of a classical music guy - my tastes usually run to dance/electronica and-or 80s pop - but of late I've been listening to more of the classical canon (pun intended). So when Elaine asked if I wanted to check out a few performances at the symphony, I thought, "why not?" I know only part of "Carmina Burana" (specifically, "O Fortuna" - if you've seen a trailer for an action movie in the last five years, you know the piece), so it was a treat to be able to experience the entire work, start to finish. What struck me most, however, was how vibrant the live listening experience is, relative to a CD or MP3. Classical music has always been something that's a little flat, as if it were boxed, put on a shelf, and was being broadcast from an AM radio contained within. I think this is because the speakers (or your iPod earbuds) just can't capture the full range of the sound in a way that being there does - feeling your sternum vibrate when the drums go off, that sort of thing. In many ways, it's the difference between watching Storm basketball on TV (generally tolerable) and the Storm at Key Arena (full-throated, hot-blooded excitement). You just have to be there. So go. If you've never been, I recommend it. The audience was totally diverse - lots of ages, lots of different people (translation: it's not just old ladies and their bored husbands), and, if you can, land something in the second-floor balcony. It's fabulous. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 12, 2007 11:13 PM. July 9, 2007Don't Take Your iPhone To The MoviesSo Elaine and I scored some advance passes to "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" tonight, 7 PM, at Cinerama. She left work a bit before 5 to get in line and hold our place; by the time she arrived, the line was already down the block, and the show was clearly going to sell out. I got downtown from work around 6:15, joined her in line, and we spent the half hour chatting and catching up on the day. So the line moves, we're at the doors to the theater, turn in our passes, get our hands stamped, and then they want to look through our bags for camcorders, etc. I take off my backpack, open it. It's all work stuff - binders and folders and notebooks, really - and then I open the front pocket, which has my wallet and my iPhone. (Which is off.) The woman's got a flashlight and a little stick that she's using to do security screenings, and, once she sees the iPhone, says, "I'm sorry, you can't go in." I blink. "Excuse me?" "No cell phones allowed." I point out that it's off, and she says that doesn't matter. "The rules are clear. No phones." She then suggests I leave it in my car. "I don't have a car," I tell her. "I just came from work. On the bus. All my stuff is with me, and I don't have any place to put it." "I'm sorry," she says, in a very I'm-not-at-all-sorry-voice. "The rules are clear. No phones." I blink, look at Elaine, blink again, shrug, and then we leave, walking past the hordes and noticing that replays of this conversation ("What? It's my cell phone. I have it on me all the time...") are happening all over the place. So now Elaine has wasted two hours of her time, we're not seeing the movie, and the studio (Warners) clearly doesn't give a hang about it. I understand the need to combat piracy - I really do - but pissing off honest moviegoers with ridiculous (and ridiculously ineffective) rules like this is insane. Be warned. Leave your phone at home. As for us? We're planning to rent something on DVD ... and preferably not made by Warner Brothers. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 9, 2007 8:45 PM. July 8, 2007Aways Be CobblingMy friend Benny sent me a link this morning to a fantastic Alec Baldwin short from Saturday Night Live. Baldwin basically spoofs his (legendary) turn in Glengarry Glen Ross as the guy from "head office" who's come down to the local office to crack skulls and get performance up. In Glengarry, he's yelling at real estate salesmen; in this clip, he's yelling at ... Santa's Elves. (And he screws up at one point, which is even better). If you've not seen the original Glengarry performance, you can get it here (NSFW). I loves me the YouTube. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 8, 2007 4:13 PM. June 30, 2007David Allen ProfileGreat article in Business 2.0 (one of my favorite magazines, by the way) on productivity guru David Allen, he of "Getting Things Done": All these are merely the bottles carrying his mysterious elixir. What he is really selling is a thought process designed to help people keep track of the endless tasks of modern life -- whether buying birdseed or closing a billion-dollar merger. People who commit to his step-by-step program, Allen claims, will not only gain control of their frenetic lives but waltz through their days stress-free. A bit long, but totally worth the read. (Link) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 30, 2007 8:15 AM. May 29, 2007"David Blaine: Street Magic"Kim turned me on to two hysterical YouTube videos this weekend, both of them parodying David Blaine's "Street Magic". Each is about five minutes long: I don't know what impresses me more about these shorts - the spot-on parody, the amount of planning these stunts must have taken, or how the actors are able to keep a straight face throughout and not burst out laughing. (I certainly wouldn't have been able to keep going, I know that.) Audio is NSFW, so wear headphones. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 29, 2007 8:43 PM. May 23, 2007Kids Say The Darndest ThingsI've seen two videos in the last few days, each featuring adorable moppets saying, uh, surprising things. Both are hysterical. The first is Will Ferrell's rampant, gosh-it's-everywhere "Landlord" sketch (tip of the hat to Jeff); the other is of a cute little three-year-old named Kassie talking about what she would do if a monster came in to the room (mad props to Melissa). Each is less than three minutes, and both are totally worth your time. (Wear headphones.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 23, 2007 12:01 PM. May 15, 2007Keane, "Hopes and Fears"Elaine turned me on to Keane a few months ago (their stuff is getting a fair amount of radioplay right now), so I recently borrowed her copy of their 2004 album, "Hopes and Fears." It's fabulous, just amazing, and I've been spinning it on infinite repeat here at the office for the past few days. Their sound is eminently hummable, catchy, ethereal, bouncy - especially "Everbody's Changing" and "Your Eyes Open" Like the Pet Shop Boys' "Fundamental", the whole album is just rock-solid, and stands up well on repeat listens. Give your ears a treat. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 15, 2007 11:48 AM. May 14, 2007"Road House"Last night was "Bad Movie Night" at Kristen & Aaron's; we chose the Patrick Swayze vehicle "Road House" as our flick du jour. Hoo, boy. Look, if you haven't seen "Road House" I can only say that are clearly leading a life of both privilege and disadvantage. "Privilege" because most people should never, ever, ever have to see "Road House." "Disadvantage" because, like the Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal or Pyramids, watching Swayze's feathered mullet flutter in the breeze as he delivers one hackneyed kung-fu ass-kicking after another to the bad guys is just one of those spectacles in life that cannot, under any circumstances, be replicated or imitated. You just have to see it for yourself. The "plot", if you don't know, is that Swayze plays Dylan, the second-best bouncer in the bar business. He studied philosophy in college, has a high tolerance for pain, does Tai Chi, doesn't drink, and recommends his fellow bouncers "be nice" to the rowdies. He's called in to clean up a bar in a small town ... and then ... uncovers corruption! Which needs fighting! By him! Personally! It all feels very 1989, which is good, because, well, it was filmed then. ("Road House" also has some of the worst lines ever delivered in any movie, anywhere -- and most of them are far too profane for a family-friendly publication like this blog. Suffice to say that we were catcalling and mocking the flick for most of the night. Oh, and the guy who does the voice for "Starscream" is in it. For two seconds.) Last night did raise a number of larger, taxonomic questions about "bad movies" - namely, what's bad? I mean, there are movies that are just awful ("The Pirate Movie", "Wild Wild West"), movies that are so-bad-they're-good ("Plan 9 From Outer Space"), kitchy flicks ("Big Trouble In Little China"), cult hits ("Buckaroo Banzai") and guilty pleasures ("Point Break", "Hudson Hawk"). Which of these is a "bad movie", exactly? I mean, "The Pirate Movie" is just about one of the worst, most unwatchable things ever put on celluloid. Clearly: bad movie. The problem is, I really have zero interest in spending a Sunday - no matter how drunk I may be - watching things of that, um, quality. But we still want to have "Bad movie night." How to tell one kind of bad from another? We obviously need a good criteria by which to judge bad movies. I've proposed a point system, of sorts - this is still really rough - whereby if a certain criteria is true, then the movie gets a certain number of points. Eventually, depending on the point total, the movie can fall in to a category from "re-runs on Starz for eternity" to "tear your eyeballs out." Possible candidates for points:
And so on. So we want bad. But how bad? And how to judge it? Thoughts? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 14, 2007 1:21 PM. May 8, 2007Introducing ... The OFone!Spoof videos, as a general rule, are hard to do well. Capturing the right tone of the thing you're spoofing - without being too obvious, too mean, too weak, or too "me too" (see: 99% of the "Get A Mac" parodies out there) is a challenge. So I'm pleased to report that this latest spoof - the "Microsoft OFone" is fantastic - just a perfect blend of breathless product-launch video and clueless crappy-tech product. The marketing guy, in particular, is genius: This is more than thinking outside the box. We're nowhere near the box! The box is on Saturn ... or Jupiter ... whichever is farther away. We showed this, apparently, at the Mobile and Embedded Developer Conference in Vegas. Do yourself a favor and check it out. (Tip 'o the hat to Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 8, 2007 9:53 AM. April 18, 2007Russell Peters Is Coming To The MooreCanadian funnyman Russell Peters is coming to Seattle's Moore Theather on May 5. We're getting a group together to see who wants to go. If you've never heard of Peters, don't be surprised - I had no idea who he was until I was up in Vancouver last Christmas, when my future brother-in-law popped in Peters' "Outsourced" DVD and we all started giggling. I find a lot of standup to be pretty stale, but I really laughed at Peters' material. His folks are Indian, and emigrated to Canada; Russell was born in Toronto in 1970, and uses his cross-cultural cred to do a lot of ethnic stuff. (It also helps that the guy is damn good at accents and mimicry.) If you're curious what he's like, you might check out a few gems on YouTube (most are NSFW):
A quick word about DVDs: if you're interested in Peters and want to rent his "Comedy Now" DVD off NetFlix (the only thing they have), you're getting two shows on one disc. The first is "Show Me The Funny"; the second is "Comedy Now." Do yourself as favor and skip "Show Me The Funny" because, uh, it's not funny. It was pretty clearly shot before Peters found his groove, and it's really awkward. Yikes. If you're interested in catching the show at the Moore, it should be a blast. Let me know if you're goin'! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 18, 2007 11:53 AM. April 15, 2007Spiders On DrugsMy friend Dan sent me a link to this excellent "nature video" about the effects of drugs (THC, caffeine, LSD, alcohol) on spiders. It looks straight-up, but takes a left turn about a minute in. Hysterical. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 15, 2007 8:47 AM. April 9, 2007John Hodgman On "This American Life"iTunes was kind enough to download yesterday's "This American Life" for me this morning (you're subscribed, right?), and, as I often do on Mondays, I began listening to the episode as I strolled down Cap Hill to catch the bus at Montlake. Well, it turns out that this week's episode is all about jobs ("Nice Work If You Can Get It"), and it has a hysterical bit from John Hodgman (aka, "PC" of Apple's "Get A Mac" ads), where he talks about how hard it's been for him to adjust to being, well, recognized as PC just about everywhere he goes. (The best bit is when he walks in to an Apple Store - I about choked on my coffee. It's that awesome.) You can get the episode off the TAM Web site; Hodgman's stuff starts at 8:14. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 9, 2007 10:29 AM. April 8, 2007Sad Kermit: "Hurt"A little more than a year ago, I blogged/enthused about Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt." Well, this morning, Richard sent me this link to a YouTube of "Hurt" being done by ... Kermit The Frog. (So great.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 8, 2007 9:29 AM. March 26, 2007Flu Film FestivalHey, you know that flu bug goin' around? That really nasty one that sneaks up behind you, smacks you upside the head with a baseball bat, and then goes after your family? Yeah, so it took me out late Thursday. As a result, I spent the vast majority of my weekend, well, asleep. Like, slept-for-33-out-of-72-hours kind of sleeping. Dead to the world, except when I'd wake up, slowly move my head around, and realize that I'd just slept far too much to get back to bed anytime soon. Ugh. For these kinds of days - days when you're too flat on your back to do anything productive, but not dead enough to be unconscious - there's only one to do: stock up on chicken soup and OJ, and then load up the DVD player with some big-budget trash. One trip to On 15th Video, and I was set. The flicks:
And that, dear readers, was my weekend. I hope you all did something a lot more fun, a lot more active, and a lot less bacteria-ridden. (And seriously - if you want to take your brain off the hook and watch things go BOOM, Pirates is your film.) Stay healthy, folks. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 26, 2007 8:46 PM. March 13, 2007Twirl-A-SquirrelToday's Moment of Zen: Twirl-A-Squirrel. No sound, but in this case, a picture says it all. Hypnotic, I tell you. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 13, 2007 1:46 PM. March 3, 2007"Bridge To Terabithia"Elaine and I had a hot date last night, catching dinner and a movie at Pacific Place. Our choice? "Bridge To Terabithia", based on the book of the same name (and that, in truth, made me cry my eyes out at age eight or ten or whenever I read it). Verdict? Well, let's just say that, er ... old reflexes die hard. The sound of sniffles - mine included - echoed around the room for a good chunk of the evening. Yowza. If you're a fan of the book, you won't be disappointed. But I do recommend waiting for video, if only so you can have a big 'ol box 'o Kleenex next to your popcorn and beer. Recommended. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 3, 2007 5:33 PM. February 19, 2007Introducing The BookThe internal "Office Product Planning Random" e-mail alias delivered gold (again) this morning (tip 'o the hat to colleague Jill for sending it over) with the video, "Introducing the book." It's non-English (but does have subtitles), and anyone who has done in-person tech support at some point in their life will laugh, laugh, laugh (and cry, cry, cry) over this puppy. Be sure to watch the whole thing, too - the last 20 seconds or so (when it's "flipped over") are just priceless. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 19, 2007 8:48 PM. February 1, 2007Kitty Washing MachineAlan sent this YouTube video ("Kitty Washing Machine") around at work this morning, and I can't decide if it's the saddest thing I've seen this week ... or the funniest. (Marnie, at any rate, will be horrified.) UPDATE, February 26, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 1, 2007 11:27 AM. January 16, 2007"Fundamental"Have you heard the Pet Shop Boys' new album, "Fundamental"? It's terrific, and I'm completely addicted to it. (Like, three-times-a-day-at-the-office kind of addicted.) I was a big PSB fan in the 80s (who wasn't?), and followed them into their early-90s material ("Behavior", "Very") with a grin on my face and a spring in my step. And then, at some point, right around "Bilingual" ... they lost me. The music was too overproduced, too ... something. It wasn't for me. So I moved on. But a friend of a friend is a PSB fanatic, so I'd been hearing a lot about them of late (plus, they were in town a month or so ago). So I checked on iTunes, found the album, and took the plunge. Whoa. It's lush, it's catchy, it's terrific. If you're looking for some state-of-the-art, smart (and political) dance music, it's the way to go. Try these: (And if you're going to dip a toe, do it with "Integral." I can't get it out of my head.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 16, 2007 2:42 PM. January 14, 2007Wii-ha!Last weekend, Kristen & Aaron hosted their monthly "Game Night", inviting the usual merry band of malcontents and tricksters to come over and best one another at high-stakes "Risk", "Taboo" and "Trivial Pursuit." (Elaine and I are both malcontented and trickster-ish, so we're on the list.) The novelty of January came in the form of a Nintendo Wii, which Ryan was kind enough to bring ("Santa brought it for my boy," he said, "And I thought I should share"). Now, as K & A have converted their downstairs into a shockingly effective Home Theater On The Cheap (TV projector, shining brightly on a white Target-acquired shower liner ... you get the idea), we had a great place to plug in said Wii and put it through its paces. Holy cow, it's awesome. Truth be told, I'm not much of a gamer. Yes, I loves me some Roller Coaster Tycoon now and again, and Stan and I blew most of Christmas doing the slack-jawed, crazy-thumbs, boy-gamer-on-the-couch thing while we finished "Gauntlet." But those are exceptions. The Wii? It makes me want to play video games. Much ink has been spilled about the Wii's revolutionary and innovative new controllers. In case you're not familiar, it's pretty simple - the Wii controllers don't have wires that connect them to the core console. While that's pretty nice (the XBox 360 does this, too), the kicker is that the controllers are able to communicate all kinds of information about their location in space back to the console. Step closer to the Wii, and the machine knows it. Move your controller hand up and down rapidly, and the machine knows it. And so on. What this means, in effect, is that you play Wii games by holding the controller and moving naturally. Wanna go bowling? Fire up Wii Bowling and start throwing strikes. Notice -- you're really throwing strikes, because the controller tells the console when you're moving your arm, as well as the position of your hand at the apex of the swing. The faster you throw, the harder you throw the ball. Wanna play baseball? Fire up Wii Baseball, put the controller in your hand, put your hand behind your head, and start swinging at the virtual pitches (in a stadium that looks suspiciously like Safeco Field). Pitching at the opposition works much as you'd expect: over-the-shoulder fastballs, baby. We simply could not get enough of this for the course of the evening. We tried tennis, boxing, all kinds of stuff. The natural movements, coupled with the large screen, meant that we were "in" the game in a very real sense. This was particularly true of boxing. To box, you plug in an attachment to the Wii controller called a "nunchuck". Put the controller in one hand, the nunchuck in the other, and square off against your opponent. Wanna block a punch? Hands in front of your face. Wanna hit the other guy? Throw a punch. Wanna hit him hard? Throw it faster. Wanna avoid him? Move your feet! Go! Go! Go! I was winded after boxing. And, believe it or not, still sore two days later. (And, not to make it sound like I'm an out-of-shape nerd or anything: I boxed a lot. And I totally whipped some ass.) Wii-related injuries have made the news of late - controllers accidentally thrown through windows, and so on. I can totally see why - Ankur was going mano-a-mano with the tennis game, and, in a particularly aggressive overhand serve, managed to smack the ceiling with this controller. (Try that while playing Halo.) This has led my buddy Patrick to coin the self-explanatory terms "Injur-Wii" and "Fatali-Wii". So, yeah, we're addicted. Elaine tugged my sleeve midway through the night and whispered, "Can we get one of these?" (Who am I to say no?) If you've yet to try one, I can't recommend more highly. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 14, 2007 8:26 PM. January 12, 2007McSweeney's: The iPhone ManualMcSweeney's has a very, very funny parody: the iPhone Manual (or at least, its table of contents). It starts reasonably enough ("III. Making a call using the iPhone") and gets progressively sillier. Choice excerpts: X. Using the iPhone to assist European antitrust authorities in understanding the difference between "tying arrangements" and "legitimate competition" in online music sales Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 12, 2007 12:57 PM. January 7, 2007"Rejuvenile"This weekend, I finished Christopher Noxon's, "Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up". I'd mentioned it on the last "Confab", and thought I'd take a brief moment to call it out. The book is an exploration (treatise, really) on changing social norms around adulthood, and what it means to be adult. We know that the 'traditional' notion of the Lifestyle Conveyor Belt - first high school, then college, then marriage, job, house and kids by age 25 - has been bankrupt for about 20 years now; people are marrying later in life, having kids later in life, returning home to live with parents after college, and so on. What's less explored, or less understood, is that the very concept of 'adult responsibility' has morphed and changed at the same time, allowing high-functioning, normal adults the luxury of engaging in silly, childish, or child-like behaviors, often in parallel with their other responsibilities. Three decades ago, adults were expected to act, well, adult, to repudiating things that were seen as frivolous or childish. Today, adults can adopt kid-like hobbies or interests (cartoons, Lego, hackey sack) and nobody bats an eye. This results, among other things, in otherwise-normal 34-year-olds having, oh, say, a crazy enthusiasm for Disneyland. (In fact, given that Elaine and I spent our Saturday at Kristen & Aaron's "Game Night" (think: Jack + Coke + "Karaoke Revolution"), I'd say most of my friends are rejuveniles, to varying degrees.) The book doesn't court controversy with a position or point-of-view; rather, it's a walk-through of demographic changes and trends, coupled with interviews of rejuveniles all over the country. Some of the market statistics are pretty amazing - Disney World, for instance, clocks more than 200,000 visitors a day; of those, fully half are adults without young children. When Disney figured this out, they began re-architecting Walt Disney World to offer more adult-oriented entertainment ... and hence we have Cirque du Soleil and the Richard Petty Driving Experience in Orlando. I also enjoyed the books' discussion of adults that do kid-like stuff, but without the kid-like enthusiasm: It should be clear, though, that not all play is created equal. There is a big difference between the sort of spontaneous, imaginative play embraced by rejuveniles and what play theorist Gwen Gordon calls "the enemy of play": recreation. ... Some adults have a talent for turning even the most childlike pastimes into exercises in adult efficiency, improvement, and status-accrual. Witness the owners of fifteen-pound bicycles who can't imagine riding without microcomputer systems that track pedal cadence, altitude, and heart rate. These adults play to lose weight, blow off steam, or spend "quality time" with the kids, in the process barely glancing up against the pulsating anarchic force of true play. (Not that this describes anyone I know.) I don't know that I'd buy the book (SPL has it), but if the subject strikes you as intriguing, it's definitely worth a look. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 7, 2007 3:17 PM. December 20, 2006Free "Expertise"Last month, I blogged about how much I was enjoying John Hodgman's (very) funny "The Areas Of My Expertise" on audiobook. Well, wouldn't you know it - I signed in to the Internets this morning and saw that the silly thing is available for free through iTunes. I don't have any idea how long this offer lasts, but I'd wager this is akin to finding a fresh $20 bill on the ground. Treat yourself, and give it a listen! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 20, 2006 9:55 AM. December 10, 2006Ride The Ducks!
It was a total blast. Ducks aren't unique to Seattle; they're found in a number of cities in the US (Boston and Philadelphia both have them, for instance). If you've never seen a Duck, it's basically a truck that can go in water - an amphibious vehicle from World War II, originally used to get troops from boats to land. These days, they've been equipped with upgraded sound systems and very enthusiastic drivers, and they're found zipping all over town loaded with tourists. Out guide, Cap'n Daniel, was great - he (clearly) loves his job and has a real passion for Seattle. As we drove around, he was cracking corny jokes, pointing out landmarks, and sharing little bits of Pacific Northwest trivia. We started at the Space Needle and proceeded to see the waterfront, Qwest field, Pioneer Square, the downtown shopping district, Aurora bridge, and Gas Works Park. Ultimately, we launched into Lake Union and toured the houseboats. Make no mistake, the tours are goofy as hell. Think "morning radio show" goofy - sound effects, James Brown's "I Feel Good", the Gilligan's Island theme, B'52's "Love Shack" - you get the idea. It works, though: we found the enthusiasm infectious, and both of us were giggling for most of the trip. If you have relatives coming to Seattle for the holidays and you're not sure what to do with 'em, go on the tour. It's totally informative, fun, and a great way to see a lot of the city in a short period of time. (Plus: amphibious! How cool is that?) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 10, 2006 1:12 PM. December 5, 2006"Sneaky Driver"When Elaine and I were in Paris, we saw these metal cylindrical barriers that would pop in and out of the ground to prevent vehicles from driving where they weren't supposed to (back alleys, mostly). Garbage trucks and other "official" vehicles can cause the barriers to retract into the pavement; after the truck drives over, the cylinder pops back up. At the time, I remember asking myself, "Huh! I wonder what would happen if someone were on top of one of those things when it popped out of the ground?" Well, someone found out. And it's on YouTube. Awesome. (Tip 'o the hat to BoingBoing for this one.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 5, 2006 5:44 PM. November 26, 2006Addicted To "Deadwood"Just some quick props for (and a recommendation of) a great (HBO) TV show - Deadwood. Allie suggested I check it out several months ago, and was even kind enough to loan me her entire six-disc (!) set for of first season. Now that my travel schedule has settled down a bit, Elaine and I have finally made some time on the couch to see what the fuss is all about. Wow. A lot has been written about the show (particularly its use of language and profanity), but the accolades are well-deserved. The characters are terrific (especially the corrupt, profane Al Swearengen, played by Ian McShane), the storyline is great, the drama ... the sets ... oh, hell, the lot of it is just fantastic. Oh, and there's swearing in it. (Did I mention the swearing?) We're getting Season 2 off of Netflix here shortly. If you're in-market for a TV addiction, I suggest put it in your queue. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 26, 2006 4:25 PM. November 17, 2006"Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager"Once again, I feel like I'm the last guy to the party on this, but have you seen the short-film series on YouTube called "Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager"? It's all about Darth's less-successful younger brother, Chad ... who works in a grocery store. (And he's not very good at his job.) It's sort of an Office/Star Wars mashup, and it's pretty damn funny. Check it out. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 17, 2006 7:30 AM. November 16, 2006"The Areas Of My Expertise"Comedian John Hodgman, of "The Daily Show" (and, more famously, the "Get A Mac" ads - he's the PC) has a new book out, called "The Areas Of My Expertise, WHICH INCLUDE Matters Historical, Matters Literary, Matters Crypto-zoological, Hobo Matters, Food, Drink & Cheese (a Kind of Food), Squirrels & Lobsters & eels, Haircuts, Utopia, What Will Happen in the Future, and Most Other Subjects." (Yeah, read that again.) I heard an interview with Hodgman on NPR, and it was hysterical - Hodgman, like David Sedaris, is a funny guy with funny material, but his delivery of the punchline - dry, sardonic, totally flat - is what sells it into the stratosphere. So when I saw that he was narrating the (abridged) audio version of the book (on iTunes), I just had to have it. The book's pretty great. I mean, it's six-some hours of out-and-out lies, made-up facts, and general absurdities, and it veers from the laugh-snort to the ho-hum and then to the laugh-out-loud-while-you're-on-the-bus-so-hard-that-people-move-away-from-you. Definitely get it (from the library, at least). You won't be disappointed. (And, even if you don't get the book, do yourself a favor, follow my link to "The Daily Show", and watch Hodgman talk about global warming. It's killer.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 16, 2006 6:19 PM. August 18, 2006Samuel L. Jackson On "The Daily Show"As if you needed any more encouragemetnt to go see "Snakes On A Plane" - Sam Jackson was talking about it on The Daily Show this week; YouTube's got the clip. It's fantastic. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 18, 2006 2:52 PM. Jackson vs. JacksonTonight (for me at least), the entertainment options available in Seattle are some kind of cruel test, akin to asking a parent which of their children is prettiest. In one corner, we have Samuel L. Jackson, star of "Star Wars" and "Pulp Fiction", whose latest, Web-fueled masterpiece, the sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated (not) "Snakes On A Plane", opens everywhere today. (Kim caught the midnight show in San Francisco last night, and called me from line just to taunt). This is as sure-fire an entertainment bet as one gets in this world: for your $10, you get to see:
In the other corner, we have Lauren Jackson (no relation), who opens the first round of the WNBA playoffs tonight at Key Arena with the Seattle Storm vs. the Los Angeles Sparks. Given the longtime rivalry between Jackson and the Sparks' Lisa Leslie (they play the Imperial March when the Sparks are introduced at the Key), I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear LJ utter some flavor of "I'm tired of these motherf*ck*n'" line, herself. (With an Aussie accent, of course.) So which to choose? C'mon, it's not even a contest. Sam, I love ya, buddy, but I'm goin' with the Storm. See you all at tipoff. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 18, 2006 8:22 AM. August 13, 2006"The World's Fastest Indian"Elaine and I finished "The World's Fastest Indian" on DVD tonight. Rent it. It's the story of Burt Munro, a determined Kiwi with a love for speed who ripped up and rebuilt his 1920's-era Indian motorcycle into something, well, quite other, setting a land-speed record at Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1960s. It's a wonderful, small, simple story about passion and character. It came out in 2005, and is carried entirely by Anthony Hopkins in the title role (the rest of the actors are no-names). Fabulous stuff. Trust me: you won't be disappointed. UPDATE: Elaine e-mailed me to slap me around a little bit: Hey, Diane Ladd is not a no-name. You just don't recognize her. Her daughter is Laura Dern. She's right, and I'm sorry about that. I'll check the IMDB entry before posting next time. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 13, 2006 10:40 PM. July 26, 2006"Now Joining"One of my fellow Planners sent around a link to a great video that satirizes the joy that is the corporate conference call. (And it also does a faboo job of nailing the ridiculous acronym-speak we love so much here at Microsoft.) Check it out ... and try not to cry. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 26, 2006 9:50 AM. July 18, 2006Jon Stewart On Ted StevensI know this subject has been covered to death all over the Internet(s), but Ted Stevens' idiotic rant about the Internet being "a series of tubes" was brilliantly satirized by our good friends at The Daily Show; YouTube has the clip. I'm looking forward to additional technical lectures by the Distinguished Senator from Alaska - next up: "cars are a series of muscles" and/or "cell phones are a series of tiny gnomes talking in your ear, as if by magic." (Does it surprise anyone that this moron is a huge proponent of drilling in ANWR and a $200-million-dollar pork-barrel "bridge to nowhere"?) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 18, 2006 11:52 AM. July 17, 2006Ferry Corsten, "Fire"So C89 has been playing the hell out of a catchy dance track that remixes a vocal clip from Duran Duran's "Serious": Oh woman you make me feel As a) I'm a huge Duran fan and b) we use "Serious" for the intro to Confab, I've been rather eager to figure out what the remix is. Turns out it's not an official Duran song; instead, it's from Ferry Corsten, and it's called, simply, "Fire". The really good news? You can get it through iTunes. My $0.99 is already spent... Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 17, 2006 9:26 AM. June 26, 2006Best. iTunes. Playlist. Ever. It goes like this. Of late, the music I listen to has been feeling a little stale - the same stuff (Chicane, anyone?), over and over. So, making use of the iTunes Smart Playlist feature, I told iTunes to start serving me up some stuff that I liked, but hadn't listened to in a while. Specifically, I told it to give me songs that hadn't been played since last year, and that I'd rated with at least two stars or more. (I'm a little embarrassed to note that some 45% of all my songs fit into this classification.) Now that I've had this playlist for a bit, I can recommend it unreservedly. It's fabulous. Listening to it keeps delivering moments of, "Oh! I love this song!". I feel like I'm reconnecting with my music in a big, big way. If your iPod is starting to feel a little repetitive, you might try this yourself. Just do the following:
Enjoy! UPDATE, November 10, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 26, 2006 8:45 AM. June 5, 2006"An Inconvenient Truth"One of the other things I did this weekend was catch the Saturday night showing of "An Inconvenient Truth" at Pacific Place. In case you don't know, "Inconvenient Truth" is a 90-minute science lecture by Al Gore (yes, that one) about global warming. It's the film version of a presentation Gore's done over the years for cities, colleges, and others. (In the movie, Al claims he's given the talk more than 1,000 times.) I've been eagerly anticipating this movie since I first heard about it. Since Saturday night, I've been asked by several friends "what I thought." Surprisingly, this is a tough question to answer - I just watched a film that discusses, with great frankness, the very real possibility that Earth will no longer support our species by the coming century. ("I laughed, I cried, it's better than Cats" just doesn't seem appropriate, here.) So. I do have some thoughts on the subject. First, and most importantly, see this movie. You owe it to yourself, the country, your fellow human beings, your offspring, and the planet. Take the $9.50 you were thinking about spending on "The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift" and see this instead. I promise it'll be more interesting and scarier (by far) than any movie you've seen since, well, "Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room." The great thing about "Truth" is that it really calls out the skeptics of warming, and forces them to respond to the facts - temperatures are going up, snow packs and the polar caps are melting, and carbon emissions are highly correlated with these activities. Skeptics will need to do more than just mutter, "well, not everyone agrees that it's real" at a cocktail party to justify their position. That's good - it moves the debate forward. Second of all, help others see it. Coming out of the theater, I remarked to Mollie that if the usual lefty do-gooder types (no offense to Ed Begley, Jr., but he's the poster child) are the only ones who show up, the film will have failed. But it's OK if the theatrical release is wall-to-wall with Prius drivers, as long as the DVD gets seen. DVD releases are where thinking films start to reach the majority of people who can do something with the information (we saw this with "Super Size Me"). A good DVD sparks debate in the living room in the way a film never does at the multiplex. So: get the DVD out there. Host movie nights for people who are interested, but reluctant to part with $3.50 to rent an "Al Gore movie." And then talk about it with them. Third of all, take stock of your life. If you're making a lot of elective trips with your car, maybe cut back on 'em. Walk a little more. Use less electricity, either by turning things off or using more power-efficient appliances and bulbs. Yes, you can (and should) buy a hybrid. And yes, you can (and should) consume less, or at least consume stuff that you know isn't raw, unadulterated evil for the planet. But be honest with yourself about what you can do, conservation-wise, as a household. Books like "Garbage Land" are great at illustrating the great, sprawling, smoking machinery we've built to keep our society humming, and fixing a planetary problem means fixing that machinery wholesale, rather than 5% of the population living like it's 1855. My motto? Use only the energy which you truly need (but if it's cold in your house, then turn on the heater). Fourth, we need to start the debate nationally. I'm not talking about the "is global warming happening?" debate - that's not actually debatable (unless, of course, you're on the Exxon payroll). Rather, I'm talking about the debate over the best, and most effective, way of addressing the problem. I'm a big believer in market-driven innovation, and so my inclination is toward reshaping the boundaries of our market forces - mandating that our industries adjust their economic models to address the costs of producing carbon dioxide (i.e., "cap and trade"). Pricing carbon effectively will both reduce its wanton use (people use less when something's not free) and also create market opportunities for carbon-reduction (or replacement) technologies. For those who claim this is a "hardship" on industry, I have two responses. First, our society has a long tradition of adjusting our expectations of what ethical capitalism is - we've outlawed child labor, mandated 40-hour work weeks, and required safe workplaces. Productivity has continued its upward march. This is no different - we're simply requiring that industry take account of its deleterious effects on society. And second, we're talking about the future of the species, here. Some petty little extra 2% return doesn't outweigh the rights of hundreds of millions of people not to get flooded out of their houses as the sea rises. (Send my regards to Wall street.) Fifth, get involved. In terms of political action, write your congressperson. Let them know you've seen the movie, and you're concerned. That's it. Just let 'em know you're paying attention. If you've got policy ideas, send 'em in, too. In some ways, I'm a little frustrated by the fact that living in-oh-so-blue Seattle, my legislators basically agree with me on this issue (Senator Cantwell, for instance, has an exemplary environmental record). So there's no one for me to protest to, no one to get the attention of. But I'm still writing the letters. And I guess that's my final takeaway, here - fixing warming is a process. It's a war, not a battle, and it's going to take constant pressure and vigilance. But we can beat this thing. And it's key, too, to remember that we're not talking about stopping "the American way of life" - rather, we're talking about preserving our way of living. You'll still have your car, your house, your weekly trips to Costco. The difference is that your car will get 50 MPG, your house will get its electricity from renewable resources, and Costco won't offer products that have been produced by shoving a lot of crap into the environment. Global warming is real. Global warming is happening. It's time to do something. So first, see this movie. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 5, 2006 10:11 PM. "Garbage Land"I finished Elizabeth Royte's "Garbage Land: On The Secret Trail Of Trash The premise is simple enough: Royte lives in New York, and, like most of us, puts out her trash every week for pickup. One day, she got curious: just what, exactly, happens to her stuff when she gets rid of it? This led her to ride with sanitation men on their rounds, visit landfills, incinerators, recycling stations, and solid-waste treatment plants, see how plastic is melted down and reconstituted into new shapes ... you name it. It's an interesting question: when we throw something away ... where is "away," exactly? In the course of her investigation, she began monitoring and measuring just how much trash her household generates: When I finally sat down to crunch my kitchen garbage numbers, I found that two adults and one child had in ten months sent to the dump an average of 4.65 pounds of trash a week, which was 19.5 times lower than the national average (using the EPA's per person figure). Over that same period I'd theoretically diverted 680 pounds of metal, glass, plastic, and paper (glass collecton was still suspended [in New York during this time], so after weighing all those jars and bottles, I regretfully placed them back in the trash), and tumbled 221 pounds of green material into my compost bin. Had all 1,100 pounds gone to Bethlehem [landfill] on my own private truck, it would have cost me fifty-seven dollars to tip [it into the pit]. Garbage has always been a problem for humans, be it long-ago disposal of bodily and animal waste or modern, plastic-and-chemical cocktails (think "AA batteries"). Modern cities are really oversized Disneylands - theme parks - designed to let their occupants focus on fun (novelty, shopping, etc.) while vacuuming out all the unpleasant stuff that is a consequence of those activities. Garbage will always be with us, but that doesn't mean we can't change how we approach it - or just reduce the volume of it we generate. Toward the end of the book, Royte writes: If we have a garbage problem, it is that landfills and incinerators make it too easy to get rid of things. Burying or burning waste only spurs more resource extraction to make more products. Our trash cans, I believe, ought to make us think: not about holes in the ground and barrels of oil saved by recycling, but about the enormous amount of material and energy that goes into the stuff we use for an instant and then discard. Garbage should worry us. It should prod us. We don't need better ways to get rid of things. We need to not get rid of things, either by keeping them cycling through the system or not designing and desiring them in the first place. Exactly. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 5, 2006 1:42 PM. May 29, 2006Evolution Of DanceGina sent me a link to this fabulous video on YouTube: Judson Laipply, doing the "Evolution of Dance" in six minutes. He runs the gamut from "The Twist" to "Grease" to "Thriller", Eminem, Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. It's excellent, and pretty damn funny. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 29, 2006 9:26 AM. May 23, 2006"Never Eat Alone"As usual, I made use of my in-flight time to get caught up on some reading. Today's book was "Never Eat Alone Let's get the obvious right out of the way: "Never Eat Alone" is a great frickin' title. It's short, succinct, descriptive, and delivers a tip that you can put to immediate use in your personal life (You: "Hey, maybe I shouldn't eat alone anymore!"). It's the "Snakes On A Plane" of books. The problem is, the title is almost too descriptive. Since most business books are gimmicks - 1 good idea and 10 pages of original content, blown out to 220 pages of repetitive fluff - I had held off on reading "Never Eat Alone" because I felt, well, that I kind of knew what it was going to say ("I shouldn't eat alone? OK. Where's the new Harry Potter?"). But when you're stuck at 35,000 with a good couple hours of flight time left, well, you reach into the bag and deal with the 220 pages of fluff. (It's that or the SkyMall catalog.) I'm pleased to report, then, that Ferrazzi's book is actually pretty good. For the last two years, I've done an hour-long session for incoming UW MBA's called "Informational Interviewing 101" that's all about how to use your new-MBA-ness to get out in the business community and talk to people, make connections, and learn what you need to in order to maximize your special time in school. "Never Eat Alone" makes a lot of the same points that I do in my talk - so much so, in fact, that I think Ferrazzi might be a great primer for anyone going to business school. He blends a strong overall philosophy of the importance of (and required respect for) other people with good, tactical, commonsense recommendations about how to prepare for meetings. An example: [Before meeting with someone], Be sure to check out the company's Web site. Use search engines, like Google, to check a person's affiliations. Going to a meeting without Googling someone is unacceptable. Or: Do you want to stand out from the crowd? Then you'll be miles ahead by following up better and smarter than the hordes scrambling for the person's attention. The fact is, most people don't follow up very well, if at all. Good follow-up alone elevates you above 95 percent of your peers. The follow-up is the hammer and nails of your networking tool kit. Again, basic advice. And again, totally accurate. The book does have its weaknesses. First and foremost, Ferrazzi is a horrible name-dropper ("Martha Stewart? A friend, by the way."), and the book often feels like it's "Ferrazzi on Ferrazzi" (subtitled, "The secrets of my success ... revealed!"). Second, a number of his observations about the changing nature of work (corporate loyalty is dead, employees have to be proactive about managing their careers, focus on the "Brand Called You", yadda yadda) have already been covered to death in magazines (this is, for instance, the stock-in-trade of Fast Company). But these are quibbles. For all his Rolodex worship, Ferrazzi comes across as a pretty genuine, self-deprecating guy. And the book is chock-full of great suggestions and information, and has a positive, optimistic outlook that I found engaging. If you're in B-school (or thinking about going), read this book. And if you're out in the working world and this sounds like new information, you should read it, too. Otherwise, get that copy of Fast Company. Recommend. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 23, 2006 6:52 PM. May 19, 2006Snakes On A Plane: Early AuditionsIt's been a while (OK, a month) since I've blogged about "Snakes on a Plane", so imagine my delight when I discovered this genius video on YouTube. Imagine Christopher Walken, Jack Nicholson, Joe Pesci, and a few others trying out for the picture. Now imagine that their auditions were on tape. And now click the link (oh, it's got some explicit language - be warned). It's awesome. Try not to disturb the person in the next cubicle as you laugh. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 19, 2006 3:39 PM. May 17, 2006Slate Daily Podcast On "He-Man"Today's Slate's Daily Podcast takes on "He-Man" - and it's a riot. The author, Sam Anderson, had an adult experience with "He-Man" that was much like mine with "Star Blazers": Sadly, I can no longer watch He-Man through 6-year-old eyes. The show, it turns out, is not quite the singular artistic triumph I once thought it was. Its creators seem to have spared every expense. It's a badly animated, low-budget scramble of every sci-fi and fantasy franchise that preceded it—Conan the Barbarian, Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman, even The Jetsons. The best part is that Anderson takes a laugh-out-loud swipe at the gay undertones of the show: In the ever-growing lineup of "outed" classic superheroes, He-Man might be the easiest target of all. It's almost too easy: Prince Adam, He-Man's alter ego, is a ripped Nordic pageboy with blinding teeth and sharply waxed eyebrows who spends lazy afternoons pampering his timid pet cat; he wears lavender stretch pants, furry purple Ugg boots, and a sleeveless pink blouse that clings like saran wrap to his pecs. To become He-Man, Adam harnesses what he calls "fabulous secret powers": His clothes fall off, his voice drops a full octave, his skin turns from vanilla to nut brown, his giant sword starts gushing energy, and he adopts a name so absurdly masculine it's redundant. You can (and should) give it a listen (MP3 here) or check out the original article ("By the Power of Grayskull!"). Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 17, 2006 10:00 PM. May 16, 2006"The Flight Of The Creative Class"What with all my flying hither and yon of late, I had the opportunity to finish Richard Florida's "The Flight Of The Creative Class It's pretty damn good. In many ways, this book is of a cohesive piece both with Florida's earlier "Rise Of The Creative Class I don't want to write a long book review, so I'll cover just a few quick points. First, Florida spends a bit too much time defending some of the more controversial aspects of "Creative Class", such as his much-maligned (and much-misunderstood) "Gay Index", which postulates out that a community's acceptance of diversity - specifically gays and lesbians - is often correlated with being more creative, and therefore hosting more creative jobs. (As you might imagine, many on the social right have, um, issues with this finding.) Second, Florida has generated some new metrics in the second book. One of these, the Values Index, talks about the importance of tolerance in attracting and retaining the bright people necessary to create good, high-paying jobs - and how we're fumbling the ball here in the US: Tolerance lies at the root of America's growing competitive challenge. While some may find this surprising, the data could not be clearer. The United States ranks twentieth of forty-five nations on the Global Tolerance Index, alongside countries like Italky, Korea, Israel, Spain and Croatia. While the United States scores very high in terms of commitment to individuals and self-expression, it scores much lower than many other advanced nations on the Values Index. The United States ... is the outlier among the other economically advanced nations, being much more "traditional" than most. Third, "Flight" discusses how our post-9/11 immigration policies (and overall social paranoia toward immigrants) are creating an environment that's hostile to many of the best and brightest the world has to offer. As a result, those people are choosing to go ... elsewhere. (In case you think this is not a big deal, I'd like to remind you that Mr. Google, Sergey Brin, is a Russian immigrant.) Finally, the book talks about the kinds of things that cities and regions need to keep in mind when trying to be (and stay) competitive for creative talent. I was delighted to see that a personal fave issue of mine - transit - made the list: A common feature of leading creative centers around the world is efficient and heavily-trafficked subway and light-rail systems. The availability of subway and rail transportation was a key factor cited by creative people in the interviews and focus groups for The Rise Of The Creative Class, trumping amenities like bike trails, coffee bars, and music venues. Not that you're made of free time, dear reader, but if you've got the cycles, I'd add it to the 'ol nightstand. Read "Rise Of" first, then "The World Is Flat," and finally "Flight Of." And then join us for Confab - it's going to be a hot issue. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 16, 2006 9:50 PM. May 15, 2006James, "Sit Down"OK, the song in my head this week is James' "Sit Down" (ITMS link), which is catchy, fun, eminently singable and totally, totally addictive: Now I’m relieved to hear Play the free 30-second preview ... (but buy it at your own risk - it's gonna stick in your cerebellum). Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 15, 2006 8:29 AM. May 14, 2006Dance Dance RevolutionToday was a fabulous, wonderful, gorgeous, sunny Seattle day, and I'm pleased to report that Elaine and I got out to enjoy it with a nice, long, 8-mile walk around the city. We wound up downtown in the early evening, and hooked up with Richard. The ostensible reason for our walk (aside from enjoying the day) was for me to swing by Office Depot in order to pick up a new multifunction printer (a HP Photojet 3310, in case you're curious). Sadly, we missed Depot's closing time by a scant 10 minutes, so found ourselves near the convention center with a bit of time to kill. And then we glanced over at Gameworks. Why not wander in? So there we are, strolling through the cavernous first floor, taking in the gleaming "House Of The Dead" machines and the old-school retro kitch games (Robotron, Ms. Pac-Man) when we spy an idle Dance Dance Revolution. So ... I'm curious. I mean, I know I'm way late to the DDR craze - I've got friends who love the game (and, it should be noted, these friends have good jobs, so they're not of the smoke-pot-and-munch-Cheetos-on-the-couch persuasion); many of these friends even play it with their spouses. And while I'm not much of a dancer (I mean, I like dancing, but I wouldn't say I'm good at it), I do think the game looks like fun. (There are these Japanese schoolgirls that play DDR with unbelievable skill in the game room at the UW's HUB - I can watch 'em for hours. They're mesmerizing.) However, I've got the classic White Guy Sense Of Beat (read: no sense of beat at all), so I'm imagining that an extended session on a DDR machine will simply result in a gaggle of Japanese schoolgirls pointing and laughing at me. And yet, Gameworks is pretty empty. No Japanese schoolgirls. Richard, Elaine and I all start giving one another the, "Well, do you want to do it?" look, and finally I'm off to buy a GameCard with enough points on it that we can thoroughly embarrass ourselves. Which we proceed to do, with much laughing and pointing and cracking up ... and yes, sweatiness. The game is a total, utter, blast. (And hoo, boy - do I suck.) We didn't use all the points (we pooped out), so now I have this partially-charged GameCard ... and I'll be downtown on Thursday for Confab anyhow ... Anyone wanna dance? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 14, 2006 8:41 PM. April 30, 2006"The Pirate Movie"Last night, I got together with Elaine, Kristen, Aaron, Dan and Juli for a "bad movie night." Our pick? The 1982 Kristy McNichol/Christopher Atkins bomb "The Pirate Movie." It's hard - truly, truly hard - to express just how awful this motion picture is. Just as being doused by a bucket of ice water can take your breath away, seeing a film that is this awful, misconceived, badly cast and poorly put together can cause you to re-evaluate whether your very notion of "good" and "bad" movies is even calibrated correctly. (Candidly, it made me wonder whether "bad movie nights" are - as we originally believed - drunken howl-at-the-screen-a-thons, or whether they're just a form of masochism. After last night, I'm comin' down on "masochism.") Where to begin with this film? Let's see... "The Pirate Movie" is an update of Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Pirates Of Penzance", but with 80s power ballads and outfits straight out of Olivia Newton-John's wardrobe. The plot follows the rough outline of the G&S production - boy lives with pirates until his 21st year, when he's technically free to leave - but, bizarrely, sets it all in fantasy-flashback, where the real world is 1982, but the nerdy tomboy heroine (McNichol) dreams it all up after nearly drowning. No, really. Some notes, in random order:
So why did we rent this monstrosity? I blame Slate. Back in February, they did a podcast on bad movies ("And The Nominees Are" - 7.6 MB MP3) where readers could vote for the worst musical, worst Western, and worst biopic. They then gave out the awards in March ("The Bad Movie Awards" - 6.98 MB MP3). Well, these were so funny - and sounded like such fun - that we decided to try 'em out. Hoo, boy. Message? Leave the bad movies to the professionals, kids. You just don't know what you're dealing with. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 30, 2006 10:15 AM. April 24, 2006David Sedaris @ The ParamountI've been pretty heads-down at work these past few weeks. Our team is about to present a lot of our work to the rest of Office in a big, three-day event (my naming suggestion, "Plannerpalooza", was killed in committee) so there's a zillion details to be dealt with - wrapping up research and analysis, creating presentations, rehearsals, logistics, etc. Tomorrow is the kickoff of our extravaganza (warning: blogging will be light this week), so in the interests of pragmatism (it's the night before, and we've pretty much done everything we can at this point) and work/life balance (as in: I'd like to get some), I booked out of the office a little before 6 PM to catch David Sedaris at the Paramount with Elaine. It was excellent. I'm a huge, huge fan of Sedaris' writing (Christmas was spent reading "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"), but Sedaris' writing is only half the story. You have to hear him - and preferably, hear him live, when he's dialed in to the audience and can use the rhythm and laughter to his advantage. He writes just like he talks, delivering these zinging one-liners with this fatigued/whiny/dry/New York/gay routine that makes you howl. The subjects of the jokes are almost besides the point. I mean, this is a man who writes about his adventures buying a human skeleton for his boyfriend, the time he and his sisters were tortured by the Babysitter From Hell ("Mrs. Peacock"), and the time the elegantly-dressed couple on the 757 turned out to have potty mouths that wouldn't quit. The setups are outrageous, but the humor is 100% everyday-life observational. Sedaris mentioned that he's doing 37 cities in 36 days (!), and, despite that, was relaxed and funny, and made time for the audience (and book signing in the lobby). If he comes to your city, catch him. (If you can. It turns out tickets in Seattle have been sold out since November! Mine were a Christmas gift from Richard - thanks again, man!) UPDATE, July 4, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 24, 2006 10:37 PM. April 23, 2006"The World Is Flat"I finished Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat I'm a big, big fan of trade - mutual, reciprocal, fair exchange unites people and communities. I am most certainly not a fan of the trade perversion known as "carte-blanche globalization," where some rich white guy defends his right to have Nikes made by 19-year-old Indoensian women in inhumane conditions for $0.18 a day. As such, I will tell you straight-up that the first 225 pages of Friedman's book annoyed the holy hell out of me. I read bits of Friedman's pro-globalization rah-rah text "The Lexus And The Olive Tree I'm glad I didn't. Following its initial, breathless, "gosh, isn't this amazing and great" boosterism, "Flat" matures and deepens into a serious, thought-provoking essay about what we, as citizens (and workers) must do to ensure that we are fair to people (preserving their economic viability, and their personal dignity) as these changes arrive with ever-greater frequency. The list is simple - commonsense, even:
Of course, Friedman's view - that we must protect people from the amorality of the market - is far more enlightened than that of many get-rich-quick CEOs, each of whom assumes it's "somebody else's problem" when an autoworker in Detroit loses their job to one in China or Mexico. I recommend "Flat" because it gives one a useful shorthand for thinking about and discussing some very important issues. If you believe that the world is flattening (and I certainly do), then the next meaningful question is, "what should we do about it?" Give it a read. I'd love to talk about it. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 23, 2006 9:27 PM. April 22, 2006Six Flags CEO Says Enchanted Village Doesn't Cut ItThe Federal Way Mirror has an article on Six Flags Enchanted Village, where new Six Flags CEO Mark Shapiro admitted that the park needs work: In comparison to the company's other theme parks, Shapiro said more needs to be done to Enchanted Village-Wild Waves to bring the park up to a similar level. "I can't tell you this park is in the shape of the Six Flags standard," he told employees. I have just two words for Mr. Shapiro: Thank God. Enchanted Village has always been pretty dismal. It's been around since '77 (according to RCDB) and it's been expanded upon several times, with each expansion adding a slightly different look and feel to the place. The biggest expansion came in the mid-80s, with the addition of the "Wild Waves" water park. When Six Flags bought the property back in 2000, they pumped a bunch of money into it, which added a modern set of rides (and modern theming). The result, today, is that the park is a low-rent mismash of different styles and eras, with jarring effect. You can literally start in the nice, new, Six Flags-esque section and stroll a few yards down the way, only to find yourself in the "unadorned asphalt chic" of an early-80s carnival midway. It's interesting to me that Enchanted Village, situated in oh-so-metro Seattle, has been left for 30 years to rot in the rain, while our neighbors to the east in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, have a great local park in Silverwood (that, incidentally, is hardly standing still). After a walk around the park, Shapiro reiterated that new rides aren't enough to make Enchanted Village-Wild Waves more successful. Amen. It really would be wonderful for Seattle to have a nice, clean, modern theme park (that, you know, I might actually want to take my friends to). I can't wait to see Enchanted Village management pay some attention to detail. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 22, 2006 5:49 PM. April 13, 2006"Ask A Ninja" On "Snakes On A Plane"So there I was this morning, standing around at Montlake, sippin' an Americano and waiting for the 545, and I think to myself, "Self, it's time to get caught up on your ever-growing backlog of 'Ask a Ninja' videos." So I whip out the trusty iPod, spin up the episode ("Minjas") ... ... and find the Ninja weighing in on "Snakes on a Plane." OK, it's hysterical. And it also felt like I was witnessing something new and bizarre: two fan-fueled Internet memes bumping in to one another. It's like watching a pair of dogs meet for the first time in the park: they look interested, the sniff, they size up, they walk away. Only, in this case, um, on my iPod. Watch the video. (The "Snakes" bit is at the end.) (Question: in the interest in reciprocity, d'ya think there'll be any ninjas in the movie? Or just Sam Jackson doing his "We got mother$%^@#% SNAKES!" bit?) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 13, 2006 9:15 PM. March 29, 2006RIP, Arrested DevelopmentIt's official: the funniest show on TV is now dead. "Arrested Development," the critically praised but low-rated Fox show that won an Emmy for outstanding comedy series, as well as Emmys for writing, will not be resurrected on Showtime as rumors circulating for months have suggested. Phooey. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 29, 2006 3:33 PM. March 20, 2006"V For Vendetta"After months of anticipation, I caught yesterday's 12:45 showing of "V For Vendetta" at Pacific Place. Verdict? The movie is good, not great. Which is a pity. "Vendetta" suffers from an identity crisis. On the one hand, the picture is a straightforward revenge flick (think "Man On Fire"), featuring a main character that extracts his pound of flesh from the people who wronged him. On the other hand, "Vendetta" is a political movie, full of good, important questions about security vs. liberty, tyrannous leaders, and the politics of fear. Sadly, the film isn't very good on either score. Revenge flicks depend upon the audience's empathy with the character and his/her motivations to succeed. But V is pretty unsympathetic - he does vile, violent, vicious things to everybody, even those he claims to be protecting. And on the political front, the film isn't nearly sharp enough. Yes, there's the Orwellian imagery, the Bill O'Reilly blowhard on TV, the "imagined future" where a hard-right, religious ideologue seizes on a national disaster to assume absolute power. Yawn. Frankly, I thought fascism as portrayed in "Starship Troopers" was much scarier, sharper - and funnier. Ultimately, it's a comic-book movie - and on that score, a good one. I read the graphic novel last year (after the trailer for the film piqued my interest), and found the film to be a faithful adaptation - certain scenes are direct lifts, as is much of the dialogue (yet interestingly, Alan Moore took his name off the movie ... hm). Rental. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 20, 2006 9:14 AM. March 13, 2006"City: Rediscovering The Center"I just finished a wonderful book on urban planning, urban spaces, and the urban dwellers who use (or fail to use) them. It's called "City: Rediscovering The Center If you have any interest in cities and how they really function, I can't recommend it more highly. It goes on the list with Jane Jacobs' "The Death And Life Of Great American Cities The Whyte book is a study of how people behave in cities - where they congregate, how they interact with one another, how they loiter, shop, walk, and drive. Whyte used cameras (both still and high-speed) to record people as they went about their business at intersections and on sidewalks, charting out areas of the city that succeed and pointing out those that fail. I think everyone has seen Parks That Work (full of people laughing, children playing and so on) as well as Parks That Don't ("unsafe", full of drug dealers or the homeless) - if you've ever wondered why this happens, Whyte's got some great explanations. One example of a critical planning factor concerns the widths of sidewalks - they need to be wide enough to allow traffic flow around trash cans, hot dog vendors, newsmen and the like, but not so wide that they create vacuum. Turns out that crowding is actually a desirable feature of sidewalks - they give vibrancy, attract more people, and thus make a place magnetic for pedestrians: The most dramatic contraction in walking width was in Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston. The venerable old building was a given, and because of the placement of the pillars, the main walkway could only be eleven feet wide. Developer James Rouse and architects Jane and Ben Thompson thought the very narrowness could prove a virtue. So it has. The walking of it is an experience and it has attracted one of the heaviest pedestrian flows of any marketplace in the country. You edge past food displays, detour around knots of people sampling the food, and past all sorts of smells and sounds. You are crowded, no mistake, but it a free-choice crowding and very tolerable. The book is an ode to urban life and what makes it worth living; just reading it makes you fall in love with your city all over again. Check it out. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 13, 2006 11:14 PM. March 4, 2006"The Bridesmaid"John, Brynn and I caught the 10 PM of Keira McDonald's one-woman show, "The Bridesmaid" at Theater Off Jackson last night. The show is a hysterically funny rant/riff by someone who's been a bridesmaid for the better part of a decade - and having to deal with the usual junk that comes along for the ride (ugly dresses, thankless wedding chores, hook-ups with cousins from out of town). Layer on top of that the usual wedding stuff - too much booze, uptight inlaws, the endless buying of blenders, the politics of where people register - and I can pretty much guarantee that we've all been there. Think of it as the flip-side to Wedding Crashers. (I will say, too, that I think women will enjoy the show more than men - there was a trio of gals behind us who were just losing it as the show went on.) We talked with Kiera afteward, and it sounds like it's not getting the marketing support it deserves. So - a plug: go see this show. It runs through March 11; tickets are $10 - 206-325-6500 or at the door. You won't be sorry. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 4, 2006 9:23 AM. February 20, 2006"TV Stardom On $20 A Day"I don't know why I'm just finding this now, but back in December the New York Times ran a great article about the folks over at RocketBoom: Amanda Congdon is a big star on really small screens - like the 4½- inch window she appears in on computer monitors every weekday morning or the 2½ inches she has to work with on the new video iPod. Ms. Congdon, you see, is the anchor of a daily, three-minute, mock TV news report shot on a camcorder, edited on a laptop and posted on a blog called Rocketboom, which now reaches more than 100,000 fans a day. The article talks a bit about the changing nature of media, and how relatively inexpensive shows like RocketBoom (Amanda claims it costs them $20 to put together an episode) may actually be able to mine a good profit in the narrowcast-video video era: They have no background in business, but Jeff Jarvis, who tracks developments in technology and culture on his blog, BuzzMachine.com (and who has served as a consultant to The New York Times on Web matters), pointed out to them that they might be able to charge $8,000 for an interactive ad at the end of the show, which would bring in about $2 million annually. Like podcasts, the sheer number of video blogs is exploding right now, and, as podcasts have eaten into radio listenership, I fully expect that video blogs will start chewing into TV time in the not-too-distant future, too. Advertising, therefore, is inevitable - the fine folks over at Pepsi want to make sure you're not forgetting their product, whether you're watching Friends at home, RocketBoom on your iPod, or playing Grand Theft Auto on your PS2. The cool thing about video blogs - at least for the moment - is that they're low-budget enough to make the economics attractive for those with the time and the talent to put one together. (Go, Rocketboom, go!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 20, 2006 1:41 PM. February 15, 2006"Date Of Birth" On KUOW!John Kaufmann's publicist deserves a big-ass raise. John got on KUOW's "The Beat" today to talk about "Date of Birth." Great interview, and totally worth listening to. You can get the audio stream here (RealAudio required). (Way to go, John!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 15, 2006 8:21 PM. February 11, 2006"Date of Birth"
It's wonderful. Go, go, go. (Hey, I'm not just pimping for John, here - the Seattle Times liked it, too.) The play is deeply personal, a meditation on family and human moments that was prompted by a tape made by John's father on the day of his birth in 1970 (this tape really exists.) While doing some thinking about what this tape meant to him and his family, John conducted interviews with other family members - his three older siblings, for instance - to get their impressions. And then, while visiting his (very pregnant) sister Gina in November '05, she went into labor and delivered. John captured the whole thing on audiotape, and built the play around the verbatims from that experience, moving between 1970 and 2005. It's warm, moving, and funny as hell. What made tonight particularly interesting is that most of John's family - including Gina, her husband, and John's new nephew - were in the audience. (It's gotta be strange to be watching unfamiliar actors portray you, while saying lines you actually said as you went through one of the most deeply profound experiences of your life.) It only runs a couple more weeks, so seriously, gang - go. Especially if you have kids. I suspect that for parents - especially new parents a - this will be a real treat. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 11, 2006 11:37 PM. February 5, 2006Great Podcasts: 43 Folders/37 SignalsIt's been a lazy Sunday (although I did get out for a run around Greenlake - yay!), and I've spent a hunk of it in front of the computer working on a personal coding project. This has given me an excellent opportunity to catch up on some of my podcasts. Two stood out, and I wanted to recommend them. The first of these comes from the 43 Folders folks (iTunes podcast link), who produce a show all about productivity and "Getting Things Done
The other great session was an interview that Jason Fried (of groundbreaking Web2 dev shop 37 Signals) did with the guys over at the Web 2.0 show (iTunes podcast link). Fried covered a lot of the same ground that he did when he spoke at Web 2.0: 37 Signals uses a deliberately-small development strategy so they can focus on solving specific, small problems that delight customers. Listening to him talk really took me back to my startup days, and I'm in full-on admiration that Fried has managed to enjoy enough financial success to keep doing what he loves. Worth 40 minutes of your time, for sure. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 5, 2006 6:05 PM. January 27, 2006"Hurt"I might be the Last Guy On The Internet to catch this, but have you heard Johnny Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt"? It's awesome - slow, subtle, moving, haunting - just fantastic. It takes the slow, whispery, heroin-flavored original and infuses it with the regrets of an older man looking back on his life. Yeah, I so bought it on iTunes this morning. The fact that Johnny Cash recorded it in 2002 - and it was his last hit before his death in 2003 - makes it even more poignant (it's very much like watching "The Crow" and knowing that Brandon Lee died during the filming). (Big, big thanks to my friend Anne, who showed me the video last night.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 27, 2006 1:54 PM. "The Trader Joe's Adventure"I've just finished a really interesting book on hip urban retailer Trader Joe's: "The Trader Joe's Adventure Now, I'm a fan of Trader Joe's - I love their selection of quirky products, and I dig their eclectic (and generally inexpensive) wine collection. What I didn't know, however, was anything about the history of the business or its general strategy. Short version: California entrepreneur Joe Coulombe started the business as a chain of convenience stores in the '60s. When 7-11 started getting popular, he changed his strategy in order to differentiate himself. He started buying and stocking "affordable gourmet" foods from obscure vendors, and quickly gained a cult consumer following from people who wanted quality, hard-to-find luxuries at low prices. In the late 1970s, Coulombe sold his business to German retailer Aldi. (Coulombe now blogs about his main passion, wine, at www.winejoe.com.) Today, Trader Joe's is a privately-held grocery store that flaunts most industry conventions. Their stores are small. They stock only a handful of products relative to a generic Safeway or QFC. Where most grocers push national brands, some 80% of Trader Joe's products are private-label, designed exclusively for the store, and completely unique. TJ's is also different in its real estate strategy, hiring/retention policies, marketing, and approach to growth. The book is good, but does suffer from two things. First, it's a bit booster-ish - the author, Len Lewis, is an industry insider, and clearly loves Trader Joe's. This hurts his objectivity a bit. Second, both Aldi and Trader Joe's don't talk much to the press. Lewis was therefore unable to secure interviews with Trader Joe's management, and the book is rife with statements like, "Jane Smith, Trader Joe's CFO, was once quoted as saying..." Lewis was able to interview a lot of people who work with Trader Joe's (real estate professionals, other grocery analysts, and so on), but statements from the business itself are conspicuously absent. That said, at 200 pages, it's a good, quick read. Recommended. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 27, 2006 9:20 AM. January 23, 2006Another Childhood Memory Bites The DustLike all boys born before 1980, I loved the TV show Star Blazers as a kid. Star Blazers, if you don't know, was a Japanese cartoon set in the year 2199. Earth is being hit with deadly, radioactive planet bombs, sent by the evil Gamilons, rendering the surface of the planet uninhabitable. To reverse the damage, a group of humans ("The Star Force") goes to space aboard a converted World War II battleship, the Argo, in order to retrieve the "Cosmo DNA" from Queen Starsha of Iscandar. The Star Force has one year to get to Iscandar and back. (Look, I know how unbelievably dorky this looks when written out on a Web page, but ya gotta believe me - as third-graders, we'd practically come to fights out on the playground about who'd get to be Derek Wildstar. And, as a valentine to all my fellow geeks out there, you can get an MP3 of the theme song here. Sing along. You know you want to.) Season 1, "The Quest For Iscandar", totally captivated all of my childhood friends. It was followed in short order by a second season, "The Comet Empire," which also, to my eight-year-old brain, kicked enormous ass. I freely admit that the shows were somewhat formulaic, following this rough structure:
I had the ability to catch Season 1 on DVD a few years back, and it aged OK. It wasn't going to win any awards for writing, directing, special effects, or whatever, but the show was just as I remembered it, and I suddenly found myself back in my parents' house, 7:30 AM on a Saturday morning, eagerly waiting for the latest installment with a bowl of Trix on my lap. So imagine my surprise and delight to learn that there was a third, unaired (in the US) season of Star Blazers, called "The Bolar Wars." And imagine my further delight to see that NetFlix stocks the DVDs. (Score!) Well, the first disc (episodes 1 - 5) arrived last week, and I had chance to watch it this weekend. Hoo, boy: It's bad. Like, threaten-all-your-warm-fuzzy-memories bad. Like, make-you-question-your-love-of-the-original bad (see also: Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions). First of all, the show seems to have been done on the cheap. The opening theme is sung in Japanese, and Japanese subtitles appear throughout the show. That's kinda bad, but forgivable ... until the American actors start opening their mouths, and you realize that any magic, any magic at all from the original two seasons has been flushed down the toilet by a bad plot, worse writing, and - wait for it - the ultimate insult: new voices for all the characters. I didn't even finish the DVD ... I had to turn it off, lest the last remaining fondness for my childhood be consumed by this thing. (sigh) You never can go home again. (But at least you can shop there.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 23, 2006 11:22 PM. January 14, 2006"Murderball"Last night, I watched a facinating, engrossing and uplifiting documentary called "Murderball" about the sport of Quadriplegic Wheelchair Rugby. It spends time with the official US Paralympic Team, and focuses on their intense rivalry with the Canadians as they prepare for the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens. First, a clarification - "quadriplegic" is not synonomous with "paralyzed." "Quadriplegic" means you're impaired in all four limbs, but obviously the level of impairment can change depending on the reason you're in that condition. Some of these guys were in motorcycle or car accidents, some are vets, some had polio as kids. Whatever the cause, each athlete gets a "point" (1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and so on) assigned to them, with higher points correlating to greater function. Any given team gets a total of 8 points on the court at any one time. The really fabulous thing about "Murderball" - aside from the fact that it's interesting, well-made, and full of people you come to know and like - is the unblinking, unsympathetic look at the lives of people with these disabilities. Mark Zupan, for example, is a regular guy who was injured about ten years ago. He went through rehab and now is a heavily-tattooed, highly-competitive athlete with a shaved head and a goatee, getting out on the court and trash-talking the guys he's up against. The fact that he's in a wheelchair is kind of beside the point - and that's the point of the movie. These guys are as raunchy and ribald as you'd expect, and they do address almost every aspect of their lives (including "The Sex Question" - the answers are "yes" and "as often as possible"). One other thing that comes shining through is the importance of sports like Wheelchair Rugby to the newly-injured. If you're an Iraq vet who just lost a leg or has nerve damage, you're probably in a lonely place, wondering what the rest of your life is going to hold. Murderball, the sport, gives you a way to see yourself succeeding, with a social outlet and the pride that comes with athletic accomplishment. It's an amazing movie. Don't miss it. UPDATE, May 13, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 14, 2006 11:12 AM. January 2, 2006"Power Steer"I went vegetarian in 1997 as part of a get-healthy program. I needed to lose weight (and did), so changing out my diet seemed to be a great way to kickstart the process. Vegetables, generally, are much less calorically dense than meat products - you can eat (and feel full) but only take in 200 calories instead of 400. (Note that this assumes you're not adopting the "Doritos aren't meat, so they're a staple vegetarian food" program.) Over the past few years, I've begun relaxing my standards (sushi was the "gateway meat") until reverting last year to full-on omnivore status. But recent conversations with friends of mine, coupled with articles about PCB's in fish and books and movies like "Fast Food Nation After last week's Confab, Brian shot me an article from the New York Times, ("Power Steer") about a guy who bought a calf and then followed its life as it was raised, fattened, and slaughtered. It's fascinating: "American regulators permit hormone implants on the grounds that no risk to human health has been proved, even though measurable hormone residues do turn up in the meat we eat. These contribute to the buildup of estrogenic compounds in the environment, which some scientists believe may explain falling sperm counts and premature maturation in girls. Recent studies have also found elevated levels of synthetic growth hormones in feedlot wastes; these persistent chemicals eventually wind up in the waterways downstream of feedlots, where scientists have found fish exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics." So, anyway ... I'm back off meat for 2006. Boca burgers, anyone? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 2, 2006 1:10 PM. December 29, 2005FSM: The Wired InterviewRegular blog readers know that I find the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster business to be pretty freakin' hysterical. Well, turns out that Wired magazine has posted an interview with Bobby Henderson - aka "The High Priest Of FSM." It's a hoot. In it, he talks about why the Kansas Board of Education is obligated to give equal airtime to His Noodliness: Our theory is as much science -- in fact much more so -- than what the ID (intelligent design) guys are proposing. And, if you are going to redefine science to include supernatural explanations, you have to allow them all. To include intelligent design in a science classroom you have to first expand the definition of science to include supernatural explanations, rather than only natural ones, as it is now. It also turns out that Henderson is working on a new book, "The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster" that will be out in March (hint: I love gifts). And the proceeds from the book? Well, they'll be used to buy a pirate ship. No, really. Awesome. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 29, 2005 1:34 PM. December 23, 2005"The Santaland Diaries"So Wednesday's performance of "The Santaland Diaries" at the Bathhouse was just terrific. It's a one-man show, and runs a little more than an hour. If you're not familiar with the story, it goes like this: a few years ago, humorist David Sedaris took a job as an elf at Macy's Santa exhibit. He, along with a cast of other elves, were responsible for moving the hordes of people through the line so their kids could sit on Santa's lap, place their order, and have their picture taken. As you might imagine, people shopping at Macy's didn't exactly behave well. And the guys playing Santa, well, let's just say that some of them weren't super-well-behaved, either. The play is hysterically funny. But the thing about Sedaris' writing, though, is that the delivery is key. If you've ever heard him read his own work, you quickly realize that his nasal, neurotic, slightly-bitchy vocal style is the only way to experience the humor in its full form. In fact, Jeff and I were chatting about this at work yesterday, where he confessed that he'd expressly bought the Sedaris book, "Me Talk Pretty One Day" as an audiobook off iTunes. "It's not the same on the page," he said. Sadly, the Bathhouse is sold out for the rest of the season, but they nailed the Sedaris voice. If it comes around next year, go. It's worth it. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 23, 2005 9:56 AM. December 21, 2005"A Christmas Carol"I caught the 8:30 performance of "A Christmas Carol" at the ACT last night with Richard and Elaine. Richard had managed to secure three single tickets on fairly short notice - and don't ask me how, because the show was sold out. Now, my memories of Dickens aren't terribly fond. In fact, they're mostly informed by reading things like "Great Expectations" in seventh grade; I remember his material as being pretty verbose and overwrought - the dude was writing serials, and was clearly paid by the word. But "A Christmas Carol" is one of those holiday classics that you're supposed to see, like "It's A Wonderful Life" (which is a pretty good film) or "Nutcracker" (whose popularity continues to baffle me). That said, last night's performance was awesome. My expectations were exceeded on several levels. First, the play was adapted, which meant it was cleaned up and streamlined, taking out a lot of the turgid prose. Second, it was done in a "theater in the round" style, which meant the audience was sitting in a circle, facing one another, with the actors and actresses in the middle (coming and going from tunnels that lead from backstage). They made excellent use of a hydraulic floor and props being raised and lowered from the ceiling. It's imaginative and novel. Third, the set design and effects were perfect. And fourth, finally, the performances themselves were just outstanding. The 90 minutes flies by, and you really get a sense of Scrooge's transformation from a hard-hearted old bastard into someone who really understand the value of love. We're on a bit of a theater kick this week, and off to see "The Santaland Diaries" tonight at the Bathhouse. Look for a post about that sometime tomorrow. UPDATE, April 1, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 21, 2005 11:28 AM. December 20, 2005"Commander In Chief"I woke up this morning and saw that the ABC drama "Commander In Chief" has been added to the iTunes Music Store for purchase. I've been curious about this show for a while, but, not having a TV, had resigned myself to wait for the DVD to come out at the end of the season. So I punched up iTunes, dropped $1.99, and jumped in to the shower while it downloaded. By the time I was dressed and walking out the door, the bits were on my iPod, ready to go. Surprisingly, the experience of watching en entire TV show on the bus is pretty pleasant. I wasn't sure how well it would work - up 'til now, I've tended toward 3-to-5 minute "snackable" content like music videos and Rocketboom - but I can totally see the appeal of having 45 minutes' worth of programming in the palm of your hand. The commute went fast. Amazing. Oh, and the show's great. I expect I'll buy Episode #2 for tomorrow morning. UPDATE, July 4, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 20, 2005 9:28 AM. December 18, 2005"Everything Bad Is Good For You"I've just finished Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter The general consensus about pop culture is that it's a vast wasteland, pandering to the ever-lower tastes and appetites of the passive American consumer. It's filled with sex and violence, and the latest 'innovations' - reality television, or violent video games - are perfect examples of the moral depravity we've fallen in to. Johnson is having none of this. He postulates - convincingly - that the context of pop culture (sex, drugs, Halo 2) is being confused with its true content, and that the content of popular entertainment is more challenging than ever. Shows like The West Wing and 24 force the viewer to keep vast amounts of information in their heads, from character social networks to casual information about the worlds these characters inhabit. And unlike older shows (e.g., Dragnet) where all the relevant information is presented to the viewer for easy consumption, shows like The West Wing repeatedly keep vital information from viewers, forcing them to pay attention and infer what's going on. Video games, too, are quite good at forcing their players to think logically, deal with deeply-nested hierarchies of tasks, and solve puzzles and problems. One great passage from the book that sums it up: So this is the landscape of the Sleeper Curve. Games that force us to probe and telescope. Television shows that require the mind to fill in the blanks, or exercise its emotional intelligence. Software that makes us sit forward, not lean back. But if the long-term trend in pop culture is toward increased complexity, is there any evidence that our brains are reflecting that change? If mass media are supplying an increasingly rigorous mental workout, is there any emperical data that shows our cognitive muscles growing in response? Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to finish the latest Entertainment Weekly. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 18, 2005 11:58 AM. December 17, 2005"'Twas A Night Of Shitty Theater"
It's terrific. Random, funny, and terrific. The central concept is that Open Theater, being a community institution, has received hundreds of unsolicited holiday-themed scripts over the years. The aspiring writers who created said scripts each hoped to have their plays produced. Sadly, the plays suck ("shitty theater"), but the Open Circle has decided to stage the particularly excruciating bits from 20 different plays in one evening. With narration. (Of course, this is all nonsense, but it's a shockingly funny device.) Mechanically, it's 12 or so actors and actresses, scripts in hand, stepping forward to play the various parts, each of whom returns to their metal folding chairs once their part is done. Tonight's the last show, and it's just $10. Go! Go and see it, I say! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 17, 2005 8:45 AM. December 12, 2005"The Sound Of Music" @ The 5th AvenueSorry I didn't post this over the weekend, but I caught "The Sound Of Music" at The 5th Avenue on Friday night, and simply loved it. Live theater is odd for me: I never really go to events (usually when I do it's because one of my friends is in/has produced the show), but whenever I do go, I always come out energized, excited, and vowing to see a heckuva lot more live theater in the future. So when Elaine asked me if I wanted to go to "TSOM" a few weeks back, I said "sure." And hoo, boy, am I glad. "Sound of Music" is first-rate all the way. The female lead has a tough job, right? I mean, she's playing a well-known part that was made famous by a beloved actress in a movie that's known (and revered) all over the world. Fortunately, Kim Huber stepped in to it and knocked the cover off the ball. She's a big-time thesp (according to the production guide, she's played Belle in "Beauty and the Beast" on Broadway more than 1,000 times), but it just makes the show that much better for the audience. The performances are great. The sets are great. The show is breezy and wonderful. And if you want to see it, you better move fast: the show ends its run on December 18. Richard's got season tickets to the 5th Avenue, and now I know why. I expect to be bugging him for his spare ticket over the next year. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 12, 2005 9:21 PM. "The Search"Last night, I treated myself to the luxury of an unbroken couple of hours on my couch, curled up with a glass of wine and a copy of John Battelle's "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (I'm firmly convinced that I don't finish enough books. God knows I start plenty of them, but they always seem to wind up stacked on top of my bookshelf with an Amazon.com bookmark parked in around Page 70.) "Search" is excellent, a wonderful hybrid of business profile and social commentary. It is most explicitly not a chronicle of Google; rather, it's a historical look at the rise of search engines (think WAIS, Archie, and WebCrawler, then AltaVista, and so on), the de-emphasis on pure search by the leading Internet companies (Excite, Yahoo) in the late nineties, and the rise of Google as a solution to a problem that nobody wanted to address head-on. The book benefits from three things. First, the firms it discusses (and the timeframe in which they're discussed) are just flat-out interesting. The Internet boom created a lot of winners and losers, flooded a lot of people with money and power, and a number of interesting ideas and personalities were brought out as a result. "The Search" captures that aspect pretty well. Second, "The Search" is more than a business biopsy. Battelle thinks that search matters to society, and is firmly convinced that we're in our infancy with a lot of this stuff. I agree with him, and am really intrigued by some of the directions we'll see go over the next 5, 10, and 20 years. Third, and finally, "The Search" benefits from Battelle's writing style, which is just outstanding. His examples are clear, his characters are interesting, and the prose made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion. A lot of these kinds of books tend toward the gushy, breathy, gosh-this-is-wonderful vibe, or else are dry, technical, and about as interesting as watching paint ... well, you know. This is not that. Definite recommend. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 12, 2005 9:40 AM. December 9, 2005"Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic"Elaine, Richard and I caught the 9:30 showing of "Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic" at the Varsity last night. Silverman's a stand-up comic who specializes in really pushing buttons with respect to cultural taboos. Her character is this narcissistic, self-absorbed, pampered white girl who doesn't realize the horrible things that are coming out of her mouth. I first got notice of Silverman (and this film) during the previews before "The Aristocrats" (Silverman also appears in 'Aristocrats'; she's one of the best things in the movie). "Jesus is Magic" is pretty uneven - riotously funny, punctuated with long periods of ho-hum. She blends a filmed stand-up comedy routine with fantasy musical numbers - some of which work, most of which don't. That said, when she's funny, she's funny (and you hate yourself for laughing). She's also wildly offensive, so don't go with anyone who takes race/sex/gender/political/religion jokes seriously. And feel free to wait for video, too - there's nothing special about seeing her in the theater. You can read a profile of her in the New Yorker ("Quiet Depravity") if you're interested. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 9, 2005 9:04 AM. December 7, 2005"American Gods"Marnie was kind enough to loan me two(!) Neil Gaiman books - "American Gods I just finished "Gods" and really enjoyed it, but was struck by some eerie parallels in the plot between it and Douglas Adams' "Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul." In both books, the central concept is that gods (Odin, Thor, Loki, and so on) are walking among the human population, doing day jobs - they've lost their celestial powers as belief in them has waned among the human population. And, on the flip side, new gods - gods of technology and television, in Gaiman's book - are on the upswing, and a war is coming between the old and the new. I enjoyed both books thoroughly, and found Gaiman's to be engrossing and fun (Adams is a bit more whimsical, and certainly very British). But the parallel was pretty odd. Has anyone else noticed this? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 7, 2005 8:43 PM. December 5, 2005PandoraI saw an article in this month's Fast Company about a new, online music service called Pandora. The service is a Flash-based streaming radio station that lets you start with a favorite "seed" artist (e.g, New Order). From there, Pandora works to find you music you'll like. You can vote on the songs it plays (thumbs-up or thumbs-down) as they come to you. I'd checked out the site, but hadn't made time for it until today, when my buddy Patrick sent me an enthusiastic e-mail. So I surfed over, created an account, and rocked out at work for the balance of the day. It's totally cool. After a handful of recommendations, Pandora has quickly honed in on some music that I'm really enjoying - new stuff, stuff that's agreeable to my tastes but that I'd not heard before. One of the great things about the service is that you can bookmark stuff as it plays, which saves it to a playlist - iTunes Music Store and Amazon links, ready to go. Check it out! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 5, 2005 8:06 PM. November 27, 2005"The End Of Suburbia"I recommend that you add "The End Of Suburbia" to your NetFlix queue. (And thanks to Richard for the tip!) In the vein of pop-documentaries like "Super Size Me" and "The Corporation", "The End Of Suburbia" talks about what the end of inexpensive, plentiful oil is going to do the American economy and way of life. One of the things it does quite well is make the case that the suburbs, as we have known (and come to revere) them, are in real danger of being depopulated as transportation costs begin rising. It's a quickie, 90-minute flick, and the interviews are with some pretty heavyweight folks. There's not a lot of "new news" in it (after all, most rational folks would recognize that people commuting 50 or 100 miles from their jobs is a totally untenable, unsustainable activity). As the world hits peak oil production and the economies of China and India come online, we Americans are going to find ourselves paying ever-higher prices for ever-dwindling supplies of irreplaceable fuels - and our lifestyles will need to adapt in a hurry. It's sobering and eye-opening. Not a "date movie", but watch it anyhow. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 27, 2005 5:45 PM. November 21, 2005Rocketboom: All About The Blue BallsThe folks over at Rocketboom are out of control with the Blue Ball Machine. So first, they show the machine itself on the show, and make funny snarky references to it for the next few episodes. Then, they find out about the "tragedy" video, and run with that. And now, as of Friday's show, they've taken Amanda out of the studio and created this bizarre, real-life, romantic-comedy-esque-, hey-let's-be-friends-and-play-in-the-park-together thing that is a) funny, b) mildly disturbing, and c) rather hypnotic. Amanda will clearly do anything for this show. Look at some of the people in the background as she's crossing the street with the ball on her head, or eating with the thing at the restaurant. Priceless. (And I don't know if you've seen this morning's installment, but the bit about the holiday lights (wait for the end of the show for the payoff) is excellent.) I actually think Rocketboom is one of the best reasons to get a video iPod. Think about that one for a sec... Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 21, 2005 8:52 AM. November 18, 2005Blue Ball "Tragedy"First, if you missed the hypnotic "Blue Ball Machine" link from my post last week, check it out. OK, got the music stuck in your head? Good. Now, visit this very funny (and slightly twisted) "tragedy" film involving some of the little men from the Blue Ball machine. (It's put out by the same folks that did the original). I love the Internet. (But where do people find the time?) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 18, 2005 2:28 PM. November 10, 2005Speaking Of V/A/P/DAnd, as long as I don't yet have a public ban on V/A/P/D links, I thought I might share this piece of chewy goodness. It's from yesterday's Rocketboom, it's hypnotic as hell, and you want your sound card turned on before you hit the link. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 10, 2005 7:48 AM. November 3, 2005Rocketboom!Am I the last person on the Internet to find out about Rocketboom? It's an awesome, and awesomely funny five-minute "news of the day" video segment, breezily read by the destined-for-greatness Amanda Congdon. From their "About Us" page: We differ from a regular TV program in many important ways. Instead of costing millions of dollars to produce, Rocketboom is created with a consumer-level video camera, a laptop, two lights and a map with no additional overhead or costs. Also, Rocketboom is distributed online, all around the world and on demand, and thus has a much larger potential audience than any TV broadcast. However, we spend $0 on promotion, relying entirely on word-of-mouth, and close to $0 on distribution because bandwidth costs and space are so inexpensive. You can visit the site, or subscribe to a video Podcast is through iTunes (ready to rock and roll for the Video iPod, natch). Big thanks to Richard, who addicted me with this episode. Wow, one more thing to do on the bus. I may have to find a longer commute. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 3, 2005 9:48 PM. November 1, 2005"WNBA Draft To Double As Bachelorette Auction"The Onion takes on the WNBA in this week's issue: The WNBA is billing the event as a showcase of talented, interesting, and fun women who would be great catches for a team in need of some offense or anyone who's free next Saturday night. A little harsh, a lot funny. Give it a read. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 1, 2005 8:58 PM. October 29, 2005"Shopgirl"After months of trailer-induced anticipation, I caught the 9:10 of "Shopgirl" at the Meridian last night with Elaine. The film is different. It's a spare, lean meditation on loneliness and single-hood - the main character, Mirabelle, has finished college and moved from Vermont to Los Angeles. She works a boring retail job at Saks, and goes home at the end of her day to her cat and her sketches. She's achingly lonely, and just wants to be noticed. Look, I think everyone past their early twenties has had this experience at some point, where you ask yourself, "Is this it?" I mean, you've done the things you were supposed to do - got a good education, found a respectable job - and yet something is missing. The mechanics of going about your daily life leaves a hollowness - coupled with a fear that said hollowness will never be filled. When it's operating on that level, the film really works. We don't spend any real time getting to know these characters, except in broad strokes - we see them as a stranger might see them, and we're left to fill in the gaps with our own experiences. As an emotive/evocative storytelling device, it's quite effective. But the film makes mistakes - it's marred by a ponderous, totally unnecessary voiceover, and spends too much time with minor, peripheral characters doing things that don't actually go anywhere (note to filmmakers: quirky is good in a sitcom, distracting in a drama). So it's not a feel-good movie, exactly, but I'm glad I saw it. NetFlix it, and let me know what you think. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 29, 2005 9:31 AM. October 22, 2005"Blink"I've blogged before about a podcast of an excellent talk Malcolm Gladwell gave at the SXSW conference earlier this year. Malcolm was speaking about the work and findings behind his recent book, "Blink Well, I recently finished "Blink", and it's wonderful. Like Gladwell's earlier "The Tipping Point Gladwell talks about the value (and danger) of snap judgments as they relate to everything from detecting faked art to marriage counseling to police work. And he does a brilliant job of showing that less data is better in certain cases - such as when diagnosing heart attacks in an ER, or when auditioning classical musicians for an orchestra. It's a must-read, folks - and if you're not down with shelling out for Amazon, the SPL has it. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 22, 2005 1:34 PM. "MBAlmer: Fake News For Real MBAs"The Fall 2005 issue of "Business" (the official magazine of the UW Business School) has an article about the MBAlmer - a spoof newspaper that we started in the Spring quarter of my first year in b-school: It began, appropriately enough, with the surreptitious passing of notes in the back of class. Feeling uninspired one day, Gavin Shearer (MBA 2005) and Chris Meyer (MBA 2005) traded invented headlines—some satiric, some sophomoric—affectionately lampooning friends and favorite profs. The in-jokes got out, and soon someone suggested culling them into a fake online newspaper, a local version of The Onion. You can read the entire article here. (PDF) Look, it's incredibly gratifying when you can be part of something that catches fire with people. But in the case of the MBAlmer, I had a lot of help. Aside from owing a spiritual debt of gratitude to The Onion, the original genesis of the newspaper was a spoof that was dreamt up by classmate Flavio Kaplan. It had just been announced that Dean Gupta was leaving us for USC, and I was hanging out in the MBA lounge. Flavio, tapping away on his laptop, looked up at me and said, "Gavin! You know how to build Web pages, right?" (Uh, sure!) Flavio was trying to wrap a Seattle Times look-and-feel around a fake news article. The gag was simple: we'd hired USC's former dean in retribution for USC hiring Gupta. I was totally in to it, of course, and the two of us quickly whipped up this little gem ("UW Business School To Hire Former USC Dean") and sent it out to the MBA mailing list. Response was positive. And the seed was planted. From there, the "Business" article is pretty accurate. Chris Meyer and I were cracking each other up during a very slow Operations class one day, and it was all downhill from there. It's really, really important to point out that the MBAlmer was (and is, now more than ever) a team sport. Cintra wrote articles; Marnie and Joanne were forced to sit through thousands of iterations of the same crappy joke as we tested and tested; poor Mike Liu and Arkan Kayihan ('05 and '06 class presidents, respectively) were terrificly good sports, as were the members of the Program Office and faculty. Everyone liked the joke. And now, of course, the paper is under the safe control of 2006 funnyman Andy Boyer. It's a pretty "inside baseball" spoof, but seems to translate well to other MBA programs. If you're interested in reading the MBAlmer, you can get the current issue here. Archives are available, too - first issue, second issue, third issue. And remember: MBAlmer is a satire. Please read responsibly. (And big thanks to "Business" writer Ed Kromer, who sent me a few free copies of the issue for my scrapbook. You rock, Ed!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 22, 2005 12:36 PM. October 21, 2005Cinecast: Now VideocastAdam and Sam, the guys behind one of the best podcasts on the Internet - Cinecast - have taken the Great Leap Forward and are now making the show available as a video feed, compatible with the new video iPod. I've not viewed the video yet (I'm curious to see what they do with it), but I'm downloading now. (An average video show is ~35 MB, while an average audio show is 6.7 MB. We'll see what the video buys you.) The video feed is available here. Way to go, guys! UPDATE, December 31, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 21, 2005 7:00 PM. McSweeney's On Giant SquidAdding to the mythos of the Giant Squid, McSweeney's has a great (and funny as hell) Giant Squid entry today, "Giant Squid Takes US Weekly To Task." Why did you have to take pictures of Giant Squid skiing in Switzerland with his children? Why? Was that really necessary? The kids don't deserve this. They didn't ask for their father to be a magnet for vulture paparazzi. You know that Giant Squid is divorced and that Sierra, Murmur, and Sol live with their mother. Speaking of McSweeney's, my first issue of The Believer arrived in the mail today - whoo-hoo! (Thanks to Gina for the link!) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 21, 2005 6:32 PM. October 16, 2005"V For Vendetta"If you've not seen the trailer for "V For Vendetta" (HD version available), get thee to a browser and check it out. This is the latest film from the Wachowski Brothers (aka, "The guys behind The Matrix"), and it looks like they might have found some of their mojo after the poor reception of Reloaded and Revolutions (for the record: I really liked those films, but I know I'm in the minority, there). I've been rather addicted to the Vendetta trailer for the past month or so, and was really looking forward to seeing it in November (the original release date was the 4th). The release date has since been pushed back to March (pity). Out on my errands yesterday, I swung by the library to pick up the book/graphic novel upon which the film is based. It'll be nice to have some fiction to read on the bus this week. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 16, 2005 12:27 PM. October 3, 2005Flying Spaghetti Monster: The GameOK, this FSM stuff is out of control. Hot on the heels of my seeing a barista at Victrola decked out in a Flying Spaghetti Monster T-shirt, Gina sent me a link to the addictive, hysterical "Flying Spaghetti Monster: The Game". From the intro: As the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you must convert as many people into pastafarians as you can before time runs out! Gameplay tip: the FSM casts a shadow, which indicates the target zone for the Noodly Appendage. You'll know when you've successfully converted someone because they turn in to a pirate. It's so awesome. I feel very touched by the Noodly Appendage myself at the moment... UPDATE, September 4, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 3, 2005 7:43 PM. GIANT SQUID!I'm a big, big fan of the Slate Daily Podcast (iTunes link). The show is a simple little thing, just a few minutes in length; it features a selected story from the Slate site, read by Andy Bowers. Bowers is terrific at his job - deadpan and funny - but once in a while his stuff gets elevated to the level of comic genius. (This usually happens when the written material he's working with is unusually strong, and Bowers takes the opportunity to kick the piece up to a whole new level.) Such is the case with a recent entry, "GIANT SQUID!": it's hysterical. To fully understand the genius of what Bowers has done, though, be sure to listen to one or two other, generic, podcasts (one, two) - or at least the first 30 seconds of them - to understand the general Slate podcast format. Then - go to town. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 3, 2005 7:04 PM. October 1, 2005"Serenity"Richard, Amy and I caught the 9:20 showing of "Serenity" at the Meridian last night. For the uninitiated, "Serenity" is a science fiction film based on a failed 2002 TV series called "Firefly". "Firefly" was created by Joss Whedon (who also created "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel"), and found an incredibly devoted fan base. So when the series was terminated by Fox midway through its first season, the fans, well, freaked out. In fact, the fan response was so strong that it convinced Universal to pony up $40M to make this movie. And here we are. Now, I'd seen an episode or two of "Firefly" when it was on-air; it's a classic western that happens to be set in space, with an interesting blend of low- and high-tech stuff. Hence, characters carry John-Wayne-style six-shooter revolvers and whatnot, but also zip around in hovercraft. The thing that sold the show was the writing and acting (the former is smart, the latter is excellent). So how's the movie? Well, I enjoyed it - but it didn't knock my socks off. "Serenity" plays a lot like the X-Files Movie in that the fans get a whole lot more out of it than the average Joe or Jane. The place was packed, and the vast majority of the audience was laughing or clapping or cheering at sequences that, to the rest of us, were plain-vanilla. So it's clear that Joss has designed the movie as a valentine for the devoted ... which is, if you think about it, as it should be. It's not bad. Definitely worth a rental. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 1, 2005 11:03 AM. Re-Marketing "The Shining"I don't know if you've seen this yet or not (it's making the rounds), but Heidi sent me a link that you've gotta see. A guy on the Internet has taken the film "The Shining" (the original Jack Nicholson version) and re-cut a trailer for the picture that sells it as a romantic comedy. Think of it as "The Shining as done by Nora Ephron." It's both creepy and brilliant. And the use of "Solsbury Hill" is dead-solid-perfect (as well as a parody of the trailer for "Vanilla Sky") You can get it here. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 1, 2005 10:46 AM. September 20, 2005Addicted To "Shopgirl"Look, I don't know what it is, exactly, about the trailer for "Shopgirl" - the music, the tone, Claire Danes, what - but I'm obsessed with it. It's playing in a loop in the background on my machine. No, really. And now that damn Death Cab song is stuck in my head. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 20, 2005 8:16 PM. September 18, 2005Podcast: Malcolm Gladwell @ SXSW, 2005I've been puttering around my apartment this morning, doing laundry and taking care of the usual Sunday-morning stuff. At the same time, I've also been listening to a recording of noted author Malcolm Gladwell ("The Tipping Point Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 18, 2005 10:27 AM. September 16, 2005What Are You Reading?Hey! Readers! What are you reading these days? Now that I'm bus-commuting five days a week, I'm finding myself with a lot of time to consume the written word. Last summer, I was chewing up about a book a week, but now that I've discovered podcasting I'm getting new voices in my head. And I like it. So this has me thinking about expanding my reading list - shaking up my subscriptions and whatnot. So I've gone out and subscribed to "The Economist" (thanks, Jeff!), "The Believer" (thanks, Cintra!), "BusinessWeek" (thanks, Tom!) and "Esquire". So I ask: what do you read? What do you like? Where do you get your information? What surprises you? Chris enthused about how much he loves "Fast Company" and "Business 2.0" over beer last night; I love 'em, too. But I already read 'em. What else you got? Any other suggestions? UPDATE, September 4, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 16, 2005 7:45 PM. "Lord Of War"After a theater hiatus, Richard and I went out tonight and caught "Lord Of War". Based on the trailer and some glowing advance reviews, I'd been looking forward to seeing it. Sadly, it's not very good. Despite (or maybe because of) its smart pedigree - written and directed by Andrew Niccol, who made (the underrated) Gattaca and The Truman Show - the film just isn't as good as it feels like it should be. The subject of international gun running is certainly interesting, and lends itself to being covered about a zillion different ways. Unfortunately, Niccol picks the straight-narrative style, ala "GoodFellas", but saddles us with a central character that simply isn't interesting. And that's the kiss of death. The actors do try. Nic Cage is, well, Nic Cage, and Ethan Hawke plays an intense, driven, young Interpol agent trying to bring him down. But the rivalry between the two never really gels, and neither do the other relationships in the film, be it between Cage and his wife, or his brother, or even the sadistic dictators who buy his merchandise. What a letdown. Just when I thought I'd found a movie that would get me out of the house and be glad to go to the theater, well, I picked a turkey. Learn from my mistake, OK? I'd like to think that my $9 wasn't totally lost. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 16, 2005 7:34 PM. September 12, 2005Weekend Film FestivalThe other thing I did with my weekend (when I wasn't running or doing security stuff) was get caught up on the dusty pile of DVDs that the good folks at NetFlix had sent me. Three mini-reviews:
Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 12, 2005 10:08 PM. August 24, 2005What If God Wanted Pasta Sauce?So there I am, reading BoingBoing this morning and minding my own business, when I see: FSM flotsam So let's recap what this is. Someone (ok, a guy named Alex) has decided to redo Joan Osborne's hit, tailored to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This is not merely a lyric re-do - they frickin' recorded it, and are making it available for download. This is hysterical. I love the Internets. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 24, 2005 6:44 AM. August 21, 2005"The Aristocrats"Richard and I caught "The Aristocrats" at the Meridian yesterday. Hoo, boy. Don't bring the kids. This is a movie about a very, very dirty joke. The premise of the joke is simple: a family - dad, mom, two kids (and, optionally, a baby and a dog) - walks in to a talent agent's office and asks for an audition. The talent agent puts them off, saying, "I don't book family acts; they're too cute." The family begs for an audition, and the agent relents. The family then does their "act", engaging in a number of sick and disgusting behaviors with one another. At the end of the act, the agent - dazed, exhausted - says, "That's a hell of an act. What do you people call yourselves?" The family, beaming, says, "The Aristocrats." So ... the joke's not funny. At all. The punchline is weak, the setup is weak, it's basically a joke your grandfather might have told you (in a very, very clean form) and you would have groaned. But what makes the joke special - and therefore, the subject of an 86-minute documentary - is that its very weakness makes the joke the perfect vehicle for a given comedian(ne) to express his or her personal joke-telling style. The beginning and the end are sancrosanct, unmodifiable, but the middle part - the details of the act itself - is totally open. So comics have sat around for decades and told this joke to one another in clubs, at parties, you name it - always after the audience has gone home - with the intent to shock one another by making the joke a dirty as possible, with every kind of crazy, perverse, sick behavior you can imagine. If it's taboo, filthy, profane, or disgusting, it's fair game. Some comedian(ne)s go for length (one telling lasted for 90 minutes), some go for velocity and shock (the canonical telling of the joke was done by Gilbert Gottfried at the 2001 Friar's Roast of Hugh Hefner), others insert themselves into the joke, and make it very self-referential (and very, very uncomfortable for the audience). It doesn't matter. The point of the joke is the style in which it's told, which makes the joke an imperfect proxy for the soul of comedy; how can a comedian, like a jazz musician, take a well-known piece of music and make it their own? You can see a version of the joke - told by the South Park characters - online. (Not even remotely safe for work). Everybody is in this picture - George Carlin, Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg, Steven Wright, Paul Reiser, Don Rickles, Jon Stewart, Drew Carey, Sarah Silverman - you name it. Which is also what makes the film fascinating, because you see these famous comedian(ne)s talking about their craft in a very unguarded way. So ... I laughed. A lot. But that's because the movie is often very funny, even though it's not a funny movie. Some people walked out of the film because they couldn't handle the language (the film was going to get an NC-17 for language alone, but instead was released unrated). It's a rental. But see it. (And for love of His Noodliness, don't see it with your kids or with people who are easily offended.) UPDATE, August 5, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 21, 2005 9:10 AM. August 15, 2005In Praise Of Neil GaimanI'm probably the last geek on Earth to know about/read/worship author Neil Gaiman (BoingBoing seems consumed with praising him, and rightfully so), but Marnie loaned me two of his books ("Neverwhere Wow. I'm thoroughly impressed. "Neverwhere" is right up there with "Snow Crash Interestingly, one of Gaiman's other stories, "Mirrormask God, I love vacation. UPDATE, August 5, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 15, 2005 11:30 AM. August 12, 2005"Hoop Dreams"The groundbreaking documentary "Hoop Dreams" released to DVD recently, but it's been sitting on my shelf for a while while I've taken advantage of NetFlix's "no late fees" policy, if you know what I mean. Over the last two nights, I finally got around to watching it. I remember that Siskel & Ebert fought for the film when it came out in 1994, and now I know why. It's a fascinating, painfully honest film about the lives of William Gates (no, not that one) and Arthur Agee - two poor black kids in Chicago that see basketball as their ticket to riches and fame. The film follows the two of them from ninth grade through senior year of high school, and tracks their development as players and people. The films is also an unblinking look at what many of our disadvantaged citizens deal with on a daily basis. Arthur's mom, for example, is left by his dad partway into the movie; she lives on public assistance of $268 a month from the city while raising a son, daughter, and grandchild. At one point, the power is turned off. The kids have crack dealers doing their business at the corners of their local basketball courts. And so on. Anyhow. It's a moving, wonderful movie, and well worth the investment of time. Get it in your queue. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 12, 2005 4:20 PM. August 9, 2005Crying While EatingToday's Moment of Zen comes from my friend Philip, who, after an appropriate number of Coronas, began strongly encouraging those of us at my party on Sunday to "check out the Crying While Eating Web site." So I did. Philip's a guy you listen to. And now I'm encouraging you. It's exactly what it sounds like. People are eating ... and crying. At the same time. It's as if they're crying ... while eating. You can't make this stuff up, people. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 9, 2005 3:29 PM. August 5, 2005CinecastI am all in love with a podcast called "Cinecast" It's produced out of Chicago, and features two guys (Adam and Sam) talking about movies they've seen in the theater in the last week or so. They're smart, interesting, well-spoken and thoughtful. It's easily some of the best movie criticism available out there, especially when benchmarked against the dreck that passes for "reviews" in most papers. There are two things that I really dig about it. First, Adam and Sam's discussions remind me very, very much of the kinds of conversations I have with my friends Benny and Rich, each of whom is as in to movies as I am, and each of whom brings a certain kind of sensibility to the debate process. Adam and Sam, for example, are deeply split about "Sin City" - one loved it, the other thinks it's a misogynistic piece of crap - and the phrase, "look, I don't want to turn this debate into another 'Sin City' conversation" tends to make its ways into heated debates. This is so much like what it's like debating with Ben or Rich. Crazy. Second, the show is just well-done - good sound, clean and consistent structure, and so on. The guys take the show seriously, and come off as professionals. And in this crazy podcast world, where anyone and everyone can get the microphone, those "little" qualities really differentiate. If you're interested, Cinecast available through iTunes, as well. Enjoy! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 5, 2005 2:05 PM. July 23, 2005His Dark MaterialsJeff, Richard and I went out to Greenlake this morning for a few laps (major props to Jeff, who set a personal distance record - 6 miles - as part of his half-marathon training: you rock!), and, as we passed by the Bathhouse Theater, I noticed that they are putting on "His Dark Materials" today and tomorrow. "His Dark Materials" is a trilogy of wonderful young-adult fiction books by Philip Pullman - "The Golden Compass Plus, it's free (but there's an $8 suggested donation, and I suggest you donate). If I can get enough stuff done today, I think I'm gonna catch tomorrow's performance. Check out the details about "Part One" (4 PM, today and tomorrow) and "Part Two" (9 PM, today and tomorrow). If you want to go, drop me a line. I'd love company. [UPDATE] I just phoned the Box Office, and it turns out the shows are at 2 PM and 7 PM, respectively - the Web information is inaccurate. UPDATE, May 13, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 23, 2005 12:34 PM. July 20, 2005The "Arena Rock" CDSo in the last few weeks, I've managed to hit basketball games in Seattle and Los Angeles, as well as a Mariners game at Safeco. One thing I've noticed, with all my stadium-hopping is that there is clearly an "Arena Rock" CD or something that the guys running the sound board all buy and play the hell out of during games. This is the music they use to pump the crowd up, get it dancing, get people to cheer for the home team, and so on. The reason I say there's a CD somewhere is that the music, from venue to venue, is shockingly similar. So my question to you, dear readers, is: "If this CD were actually available for sale, what would be on it?" What have you all heard when you're at a game? I'll get us started with a few choice titles:
Ok, what are we missing? Sound off in the comments - and be sure to include iTMS URLs if you can! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 20, 2005 5:20 PM. "The Corporation"In keeping with my ad-hoc Corporate Outrage Film Festival, I just sent "The Corporation" back to NetFlix. It's a documentary film, based on the book of the same name The film takes a look at the history of corporations - what they are, where they came from, how they're constructed, and how they operate - and then proceeds to ask a simple question: "If a corporation is a person (and legally, it is), what kind of person is it?" Their answer? A psychopath. The film is a bit too long, and a bit too ambitious, but it does an admirable job of assembling its facts and making its case. It shows the dark, seamy underbelly of capitalism, and focuses heavily on concepts like sustainability, power, and exploitation. We get interviews with notable liberals like Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore, of course, but we also get to spend time with some Indian and Latino activists, and, notably, Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpet company. The film is thought-provoking and conversation-inducing. See it with intelligent people that you like to talk (or argue) with. Ebert really liked it. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 20, 2005 4:39 PM. July 9, 2005IT Conversations: Cory DoctorowI'm throwing a housewarming party tomorrow, so I used my afternoon to deep-clean my apartment. The party is a good excuse, actually, as the place was starting to veer from "OK" to "skeezy guy dewlling" in the cleanliness department. As I vacuumed, mopped, scrubbed, etc., I listened to a podcast from "IT Conversations" , which is a Web site Tim recommended to me a few weeks ago. This podcast is a fascinating, hour-long interview with Cory Doctorow, noted author (I loved his "Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom") and employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. After sputtering for the first few minutes, the chat really gets rolling and veers into guerrilla WiFi networks, the importance of open wireless (as a policy, not technology, question), talks a bit about Victrola's decision to kill their free WiFi on weekends, dumpster-diving for technology, and the use of "book" as a verb, and not a noun. One great quote, on the subject of commercial WiFi: "If you price these things for commercial users, and only for commercial users, you miss enabling all those applications that are lurking in potentia - whose users won't pay commercial rates, whose users don't have expense accounts that they can charge their wireless access to." Give it a listen (whether your home needs cleaning or not). Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 9, 2005 4:20 PM. July 4, 2005"Inside The Magic" Now In iTunesHa! Ricky Brigante's Disney podcast, "Inside The Magic" is now available through the iTunes Podcast system. I'd written previously that you could only get Ricky through his Web site, but that all changed late last week. I'm telling you - the iTunes podcasting directory is kicking the door wide open on this stuff. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 4, 2005 1:08 PM. June 24, 2005"Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room"Nate, Jo, Cintra and I caught the 9:20 of "Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room" at the Varsity tonight. (Richard bagged out after viewing the trailer, claiming that his "blood was boiling, and he didn't want to spend the evening pissed off.") As it happens, Richard was right. The movie is really, really, really depressing. Colin Covert of the Minneapolis Star Tribune calls it "the horror movie of the year" and he's not too far off. I'd followed the Enron story in the papers, of course, but had never seen the whole atrocity put together in a coherent, linear, accessible fashion. Director Alex Gibney, working from the book of the same name The spark that touched off Enron was a financial innovation called mark-to-market accounting. It allows me to book the estimated future value of a given asset in today's dollars, and claim that value on my balance sheet. I know not everyone reading this blog has an MBA, so let me put it in English. Let's say I've closed a piece of business with Customer X. The core is a $1,000,000 project, with ongoing fees of $50,000 a month. Under conventional, accrual-based accounting, my business can only recognize (or "book") revenue as I do work. Thus, when the project is 10% complete, I can claim 10% of $1,000,000, or $100,000. Assuming that I am able to get the whole project done in six months, and am able to get six months of monthly revenues from Customer X, I will be able to book $1,000,000 for the project and 6 x $50,000 = $300,000 or $1,300,000 in the first year. I then give this number to the public - analysts, shareolders, and so on - to let people know how well my business is doing. $1.3M in sales! Go team! Mark-to-market accounting is wildly different. In this case, I am estimating future cash from this transaction - basically, guessing - so I can claim it today. So let's say that I guess that this client will like me, and will stay my customer for ten years. Let's further say that I guess this customer will need two more of these kinds of $1,000,000 projects over those ten years. Under mark-to-market, I can justifiably claim all ten years of recurring revenue and all three $1,000,000 projects on today's books. In case you're not handy with the calculator, my $1,300,000 in the first year just turned in to $9,000,000. Go team! Now. You're Enron. You want your stock price to go up. Stock prices are a function of many things, but one biggie is smooth, predictable earnings - as long as a business is ever-more-profitable, its stock will rise. Do ya think there might be the teeniest, tiniest bit of pressure inside a company using mark-to-market to, oh, say, be pretty flamboyant with their estimated future projections? Do ya think that, oh, maybe, golly, a few of those flamboyant estimates might not pan out? Those ten-year super-happy customers might actually leave in Year 2 or something, taking the remaining 8 years of projected future revenue with them? What do you do then? Well, one thing you can do is to manipulate the California electricity market to the tune of $30 billion. That might buy some time. But here's the deal: Enron had help. Since they were printing (counterfeiting) money, they had plenty to go around to the lawyers, the bankers, the watchdogs, the auditors, the analysts, the politicians, everybody. Everybody got a taste. People who didn't play ball - analysts, for example, that had the temerity to ask hard questions - lost their jobs. So why not just shut up and cash the check? Everybody is doing it. So the Enron story is really about the damage we all do when we observe wrongdoing - when we know something stinks - and yet we do nothing. In the Enron mess, this silent complicity led to tens of millions of people getting screwed - customers, employees, shareholders, citizens of California - and for what? A measly few hundred million dollars in ill-gotten gains? Think about that. The combined value of the looting from Enron's top executives - $200 million here, $39 million there - is still less than Jeff Bezos' net worth. And they had to screw tens of millions of people to pull that off? The justice system seems somewhat ... inadequate to deal with this. I need to go take a shower. See this movie. UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. UPDATE, November 18, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 24, 2005 12:47 AM. June 20, 2005"Batman Begins"Cintra and I caught the 6:15 PM showing of "Batman Begins" at Pacific Place last night. Despite my horror with the state of the franchise (have you actually seen "Batman and Robin"?), I confess to being pretty excited about this, for three reasons:
So what's the verdict? It's so good. This is easily one of the best movies I've seen all year. It's genuinely exciting, with a perfect cast and tight script, well executed. The plot makes sense. The characters do what they do for understandable reasons. The effects aren't overpowering. The cinematography is flawless. It's not your typical superhero flick, either. I love that Batman makes mistakes (leaps for a ledge, misses), gets hurt (wakes up covered in bruises after a fight), has his butt saved by others (Alfred, for instance), and basically becomes more human in the process. The action is terrific, and the fights actually feel like fights - organic and messy, as opposed to the hyper-stylized, bloodless ballet fighting of, oh, say, "Revenge Of The Sith." You also get the terror that Gotham's criminal element must feel when "the Bat Man" is skulking around the city, exacting revenge. If you're a goon with a semi-automatic weapon, you're a sitting duck. Just an unbelievably, unbelievably good flick. Catch it in the theater. UPDATE, January 1, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 20, 2005 7:44 AM. June 17, 2005"The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill"
It's excellent. The film is a documentary, focusing on the life and work of San Francisco's Mark Bittner. Despite having no visible means of support (he claims he "hasn't paid rent in 25 years"), Bittner has adopted a flock of 47 wild parrots that live on and around Telegraph Hill. Bittner's close proximity to the birds has taught him that each has a personality, and he lovingly points out how the parrots live with one another and their urban environment. We meet his "landlords", zoo workers, and interested residents of the city that come out to observe the birds and ask questions. And we see the deep, and deeply moving, emotional bond that Bittner has developed with these animals. I won't say more, except to encourage you to see it in the theater - or at a minimum, get it in your Netflix queue. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 17, 2005 4:35 PM. June 11, 2005StrongBad On Theme Parks...My friend Allie (Yo, Allie!) sent me a link to this hysterically funny episode of StrongBad, where StrongBad explains his plans for a new theme park, "StrongBad's Mount Ridesplace USA!" Oh, my God. It's freakin' hysterical - I actually laughed out loud while watching. They so nailed all the theme park business (cheesy characters, gift shops, and ... the bored tour guide operators the "StrongBadian RiverQuest Safariventure."). If you don't know what StrongBad is, you can get a quick snapshot by clicking here. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 11, 2005 7:59 AM. June 10, 2005"Speed Of Sound"I had beer with my soon-to-be-(again)-boss at Microsoft on Tuesday. As we were catching up about work and life and stuff, we got off on a great tangent about music. She didn't know I was a DJ in college, and as it happens we like a lot of the same bands (e.g., New Order, Coldplay). I'd not yet heard the new Coldplay album (X & Y), but she said she'd ordered it and it was on the way. So after I got home, I hit iTMS and started listening to samples. And then I just bought the silly thing. I'm loving it. "Speed Of Sound" is the main single, and it's the one I keep running back to. Some people are knocking "Speed" as being too derivative of "Clocks", but I think that's pretty unfair. Overall, this is good stuff. Way to go, Coldplay! Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 10, 2005 10:01 AM. May 30, 2005"The Office"I have yet to see NBC's Americanized version of "The Office", but the BBC original has hit DVD and I was curious, so ... It's actually hard - like, almost physically painful - to watch. Very much in the vein of Arrested Development, The Office is shot like a documentary. In this case, the subjects are the employees of a paper company outside London. The primary character is the boss ("David Brent"), who we follow around and watch as he a) mugs for the camera, b) makes thoughtless remarks about his people, c) cracks "jokes" that are totally inappropriate, d) deals (badly) with a new temporary worker and someone from the head office, and e) basically makes an ass of himself. It's genius. The actors, sets, writing, all of it - perfect. But who wants to watch a show that reminds them of how terrible work can be? Isn't escapism a big part of the appeal of television? I'm only through the first two episodes, and I confess I'm considering not ordering the subsequent DVDs. It's just too painful. (Perfect. But painful.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 30, 2005 10:18 PM. May 29, 2005"Network"I just finished "Network" on DVD from our friends at NetFlix. It's hard to know what to say, here. The picture is a razor-sharp, biting satire of television and American pop culture. And it was made in 1976. One of my favorite films is "RoboCop", which is another satire that, at the time (1987), was shocking in its attitudes toward consumerism and violence in society. Today, RoboCop looks pretty tame, even common-sensical. Which is a (sad) sign of how far we've moved toward the (disparaged) ideals put forth in the film. "Network" follows the "RoboCop" mold. It's still over the top, but if you watch it without thinking "Fox News", well, you're not paying attention. Definite rental. Like, now. Put it at the top of your queue. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 29, 2005 10:58 PM. May 20, 2005Episode III: Less Crappy
The Good: The story concludes with a satisfying, interlocking ballet of events. That's cool. "Sith" perfectly sets up for the fourth (first) film, with the creation of Darth Vader, the birth of Luke and Leia, the creation of the Empire, and puts in place the furniture of the original films (e.g., stormtroopers, rebels, and so on). There's an admirable, logical, planned quality to this movie that shows Lucas put a lot of thought into what he was doing in terms of the arc of the mythology. The Bad: Oh, where to begin? Dialog, for starters - there's a scene between Padme and Anakin that boils down to each of them saying, "No, I love you more" to the other. It's HORRIBLE. I suspect, "No, I love you more" will get right in there with "More Cowbell" and "Goes FAR, get it? And zere is no vay it came from zat movie, which I have never seen, so how could I copy it?" as killer, snarky catchphrases amongst my friends. Then there's the effects - beautiful, but often difficult to follow, which means they go from "Ooh! Space battle" to "Uh ... that's kinda pretty" really fast. The mind disengages. Actually, this is a point I'd like to make to filmmakers everywhere: less is more. Before "Sith" I re-watched the "Attack on the Death Star" sequence from Star Wars to get pumped up. If you re-watch that bit, you notice that it tends to "clump" characters together - you have a small group of people that the audience can relate to, and the movie takes each of them in turn (for instance, the Y-wings attack first, then the first run of X-wings ("Stay on target!"), then Luke and Wedge go in and blow stuff up real good). This means that the audience is able to keep track of who is who when the models zoom all over the screen, and can stay emotionally engaged. With "Sith", on the other hand, Lucas has decided to take full advantage of Moore's Law to cram each and every space battle full of as much crap as possible. It overloads. The audience quickly gives up trying to figure out who's in what ship, what the objective for the scene is, or - most critically - whether a character is in danger or not. It's numbing. And it's also bad storytelling. A final note: I actually cursed Dave Chappelle during this movie. Samuel L. Jackson is, once again, playing Jedi Mace Windu, and, despite Sam's deep gravitas, all I could see in my mind was Chappelle as Jackson, doing "Samuel Jackson Beer" and him going, ("Goooood mother$$@# choice, mother$$@#! It'll get ya drunk!"). At which point, I started giggling. (Or maybe that was "No, I love you more.") Wait for video. And let someone else pay for it. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 20, 2005 10:07 AM. May 19, 2005"Revenge Of The Sith" @ 9:45Like most thirty-something geek guys, I have a major, major soft spot for Star Wars. And, like most of those guys, I thought the first two of the prequels sucked And yet, here I am, having just bought tickets for Episode III (according to everyone, it's 'much less crappy'), and I know I'll probably be disappointed, but ... sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do. Look for a review tomorrow. Here's hoping George got his mojo back. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 19, 2005 4:29 PM. May 8, 2005"Primer"I just finished a really interesting, super-low-budget flick called "Primer" that was recommended to me by Benny. It's one of those played-in-Seattle-at-an-art-house-theater-for-a-week movies, and it's just hit DVD. The basic premise is that two geeky, white-collar guys invent a machine in their garage that appears to allow them to travel forward in time and return. Things quickly get out of control. It's smart as hell. You can read Ebert's review, or watch the trailer. A definite recommend. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 8, 2005 8:22 PM. April 29, 2005PI Likes "Hitchhikers"The Seattle PI gave "The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy" a glowing review: "Science fiction only in that the science is pure fiction, Adams' comedy is sci-farce with an epic sweep, a juvenile love of silly names, and a droll take on creationism (which is at least as plausible an explanation of life as we know it in "The Matrix," and much funnier than the Bible)." I'm a huge Douglas Adams fan, and have been looking forward to this flick since I first heard about it. However, Ebert peed on the movie this morning, so it may be one of those films you either love or hate. If I'm not too busy installing Tiger, I might see if I can catch this tonight. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 29, 2005 9:25 AM. April 15, 2005Big In Japan
Anyhow the article is great, and worth a read. And if you're interested, U.S.E.'s album is available on iTMS. Now that the gang is back from Japan, they're playing the Vera Project tonight. We're so totally going. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 15, 2005 7:33 AM. April 7, 2005"Sin City"Nate, Mike and I all caught the 7 PM showing of "Sin City" at Cinerama last night. My feelings on the film are really split. On the one-hand, it's an artistic vision, lovingly made and visually stunning. Robert Rodriguez has really mastered the art of making a $40M picture look like $100M on the screen. At this point, I think Rodriguez is a much better poster child for "why digital?" George Lucas ever could be. (Rodriguez uses digital to do more with less guerrilla filmmaking at its best -while Lucas uses it to indulge his control-freak side.) The dialogue is straight out of 1940s pulp detective novels (women are "dames" etc.), and the acting is great. That's the good. The bad is that the film is ultra-ultra-ultra-violent in an almost-reprehensible manner. I'm no prude about film violence (I love Pulp Fiction, for instance), but usually it advances the story or serves a larger purpose. In this case, the violence is appropriate to the subject matter (the original comics), but it left me feeling numb and horrified. So yeah, I'm glad I saw it, but it didn't make me happy. See it for yourself, but be warned. It's not quite the flick the trailer sells it as. UPDATE, November 18, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 7, 2005 12:42 PM. March 28, 2005PI: "Teatro ZinZanni's latest delivers a full menu of music, fun and surprises"The PI has a quick write-up on the new Teatro ZinZanni show that opened this last week. One of our favorite characters, Ceasar (played by Frank Ferrante), is back: "Sporting an enormous pompadour and huge sideburns and wearing a garish salad-green costume with embroidered green jacket and cucumber-shaped shoes, Ferrante is brilliantly funny as he pulls audience members to the center stage for impromptu skits. Whether he is tossing out such lines as, "I'm arugula guy" and, "Our lust will always romaine" or ad-libbing about a woman's outfit ("It's sarong, it's so right"), Ferrante is as nutty as a Waldorf salad." Mary, Richard and I caught it on the 20th - the last night of the last show. It was my third time going to Teatro, and it's awesome. The show's been different, reinvented, every single time we've attended. The concept sounds strange - sort of Cirque du Soleil meets dinner theater - but it's funny and risque and a wonderful, wonderful evening. Easily one of the best things to do in the city. I can't wait to see the new show. Hmmm ... graduation present .... Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 28, 2005 2:45 PM. March 24, 2005Arrested DevelopmentMary's been under the weather for the last week or so, and now I've got her stuff. Ugh. The time off from feeling good is giving me time to curl up in front of the TV and just take my brain off the hook. And so it is that today, armed with my NetFlix backlog, a remote control, and a soft blanket, I have finally discovered the joy that is Arrested Development. Entertainment Weekly has been raving about this show for the last several months, and now I know why. It's sly, funny, very smart and and an absolute miracle that it's stayed on the air as long as it has (hey, as a huge fan of ABC's prematurely-killed Cupid, I know whereof I speak). Development is hysterically funny, and gets more so as it goes along. Everything is very deadpan, and there's no laugh track. I'm totally addicted. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 24, 2005 4:30 PM. February 27, 2005IM War
(Windows Media required.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 27, 2005 7:17 PM. February 24, 2005Ever Wondered About Airline Prices?
Our Spreadsheet Modeling class is doing a lot of simulation right now, using Crystal Ball (and Excel) to forecast values for various problems. It's interesting stuff. One of the simulations we're working with has to do with airline "overbooking" - computing the optimal overbooking quantity for a specific airline route, given demand forecasts, reimbursement costs, customer-satisfaction costs, fixed operation costs, and whatnot. Anyhow, all the spreadsheet kung fu reminded me of this hysterical ad from the (fictional) "Sky High Airlines" (Alaska Air) about the "super computer" they use to set their prices... 1.66 MB, QuickTime required. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 24, 2005 2:45 PM. Uma, Oprah. Oprah, Uma.My buddy Jeff (a Lead Planner in Office, a Mac-head, and all-around good guy) is apparently in love with the "Numa, Numa" video. So much so, in fact, that he sent me the link to buy the silly thing off iTMS. Turns out the song is actually called "Dragostea Din Tei" and it's from a band called "O-Zone." In case you want to spend $0.99 and make some movies with your iSight, or something... Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 24, 2005 12:21 PM. February 19, 2005Warhol Was Right
I was IMing with my friend Elaine last night, and we were discussing funny online videos. She said, "have you seen the Numa guy?" to which I intelligently replied, "Huh?" So she sent me the SWF file. Oh. In the same vein as the Star Wars Kid, this guy is basically lip-synching (and doing in-chair choreography) of "The Numa Song" in front of his Webcam. Elaine claims this guy has been on VH1 and is quickly approaching Mahir status. FWIW, I found this article on the New York Daily News site. Ya gotta check it out. (2.88 MB, Flash required.) UPDATE, April 1, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 19, 2005 2:41 PM. February 18, 2005Waiting For "Waiting For The Sirens' Call"
My favorite band on Earth - New Order - has a brand-new album (Waiting For The Sirens' Call) coming out on March 28! In the UK. One of the singles from the album, "Krafty", is pretty catchy. Its video is available online now. OneWorld (a show on the BBC) has four of the tracks from the album, along with some other stuff, on their Valentine's Day program. With luck, iTMS will have it available for download on Game Day. Failing that, it's Amazon's UK operation for me. [UPDATE] The US release date is April 12. So - do I wait for the domestic release, or order the damn thing from the UK in March? Decisions, decisions... Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 18, 2005 10:00 PM. January 20, 2005"Fantastic Four" TeaserA teaser trailer for the upcoming "Fantastic Four" movie (opens July 4, 2005 - aka "Will Smith Weekend") is now online. It looks ... interesting I liked the Fantastic Four comics as a kid (I'm not a big comics guy by any means, but remember enjoying those), and have hope that this could be another entry in the Good Comic Book Movie pantheon (Exhibit A: X-Men). That said, I'd feel a lot better if the director were Bryan Singer instead of ... Tim Story? Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 20, 2005 3:26 PM. November 7, 2004That's Incredible!Mary and I caught "The Incredibles" late this afternoon at Pacific Place. It's awesome. According to Box Office Guru, the film made over $71M this weekend, just edging out Finding Nemo for Pixar's best-ever opener, and becoming the fourth-highest-opening superhero film of all time (after Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, and X2). The place was packed, and the audience loved it. A definite recommend, and a definite see-it-in-the-theater (as opposed to waiting for the Netflix Gods to bring it to you, which is what I usually do...) Speaking of Netflix: Incredibles' writer/director Brad Bird made a movie about five yeas ago called "The Iron Giant." It's excellent. If you've got Netflix, add it to your queue. You won't be disappointed. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 7, 2004 8:27 PM. October 31, 2004Ring, Ring, Ring...Mary and I went to the Crocodile last night to catch Seattle's own United State of Electronica. The show was fantastic - we got out around quarter to two this morning. And my ears are still ringing. Mary and her sister do Bumbershoot as an annual thing, and caught U.S.E. playing the SkyChurch, randomly, about a year or so ago. Since then, they've both been raving fans. Now I understand why. U.S.E. is easily one of the best live bands I've ever seen (the absolute best was seeing New Order play Area: One at the Gorge in 2001). The crowd knew every word to every song, sang along, jumped up and down, and fed the band's energy. The band, in turn (and there's seven of 'em!), fed the audience exactly what it wanted. I thought I'd mention two other acts that were terrific. One is Something For Rockets; they're from L.A., they sound excellent, a good number of their tunes are incredibly catchy. Their singer sounds uncannily like Peter Murphy. The second is Aqueduct, who was celebrating the release of their new CD. They were in a total happy/party/festive mood, and got the audience raving with "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta" (Office Space fans, rejoice!) and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." The gimmick with both songs is that they were done with an old-school Juno synthesizer that sounds like an Hammond organ. Hysterical. If you're interested, the U.S.E. album is available for free download. Be sure to play "La Discoteca" and "Climb The Walls (Umbrella Of Love)." Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 31, 2004 1:26 PM. October 28, 2004Retro A-Go-Go
In my youth, I was a college radio DJ (at both KUPS and KUGS); my hallmark (curse?) was '80s music. Duran Duran, New Order, Flock of Seagulls, Men Without Hats, Tears For Fears. If you heard it during Junior High, I played it. Repeatedly. The '80s thing has been in vogue for the past few years (witness the rise of '80s radio), and a lot of the old acts have been cashing in on it. I'm pleased to report, however, that two recent entries - Duran's "Astronaut TFF has turned in a solid, catchy, "we've still got what it takes" single with "Call Me Mellow." Duran, meanwhile, has a handful of great ones such as "What Happens Tomorrow," "Chains" and "(Reach Up For The) Sunrise." Both albums are in permanent rotation on my iPod. (They're excellent for urban hiking.) iTMS has both albums for download. You can also cherry-pick singles if you like. As a contrary opinion, Heidi (a larger Duran fan than I will ever be) thinks the new album is "OK" and likes the Duran bonus track ("Virus") more than the core material. "I'm still warming up to it," she says. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 28, 2004 4:35 PM. October 19, 2004Mystery Of The Ancients ... Solved!
When I visited Benny in Austin last month, I blogged a (tiny) bit about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force. When I came back to Seattle, I was still giggling about how frickin' hysterically funny the show is - in particular, the "Universal Remonster" episode from Season Three. The "Remonster" bit was captured as an MPEG on the Internet, and the file has spread like lightning through UWBS. (It was particularly virulent during the Stearns Direct Marketing Craziness ... nothing like a project that keeps you until 4:30 AM to make your team punchy, punchy punchy). Today, there's a better-than-80% chance of overhearing someone in the lounge as they quote the crazy German alien (the orange one) defending his copyright-ripoff activities ("No! Can you not see? She has a mohawk and wheelchair! We are NOT getting SUED!"). Anyhow. Today, one of the Ancient Mysteries Of The Universe has been solved (I love the Internet). Turns out the aliens have a name collectively ("The Plutonians") and individually (Ogelthorpe is the German one, Emory is the mellow green one). So, you know, that's a relief. Or something. (If you have not yet seen ATHF, get thee to a local video store and rent Volume Two. Pop in "Universal Remonster." Repeat. You'll love it.) UPDATE, May 13, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined. Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 19, 2004 7:52 PM. August 6, 2004"Before Sunset"Mary and I are both huge, huge fans of the 1995 Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy film, "Before Sunrise." Last night, we caught the sequel, "Before Sunset" at the Uptown. The first film tends to polarize people - they love it or hate it, without much middle ground. It's the story of an American guy (Hawke) who's been bumming around Europe for a few weeks, and is leaving for home the next morning. He runs into a French girl (Delpy) on a train, they like each other, and he manages to convince her to get off the train with him in Vienna. He's got no money for a hostel, so the idea is to walk around until his flight. The film follows them, and their conversation, for the intervening hours. What makes "Before Sunrise" spectacular is that the conversation is both natural and funny, engrossing and personal, yet manages to generalize the experiences of the characters into something that almost anyone who has Met Cute can appreciate or relate to. "Sunset," rather than rehashing this premise in the usual sequel = first-film-only-with-bigger-budget-and-more-explosions formula, finds the same characters nine years later. And then it deep-dives into what it's like to grow up and hit your later twenties and early thirties. It's about the good stuff and the bitter disappointments. And it's about second chances. Amazing. If you liked the first one, you'll love the second one. And if you hated the first one, well, Collateral opens today. Anyhow. This isn't a movie-review blog, so I'll leave it at that. The movie touched me; Mary and I couldn't stop talking about it. (It's in limited release, so run - don't walk - to the theater.) Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 6, 2004 11:51 AM. |
Last weekend, Elaine and I headed out to Spokane to see family and ride roller coasters at 
Yesterday afternoon, Elaine and I took ninety minutes to "
" and am recommending it very highly.
My incredibly talented friend John Kaufmann has a new play out right now called "
Among his many talents, my buddy 
Mary and I caught the 12:15 showing of "
"Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith" is, in fact, less crappy than the other two prequels. However, it's still not a very good movie. I'm glad I saw it (and I'm glad I saw it in the theater, because when you hear other people laughing at the terrible dialog, you realize you're not being too harsh) but I have no need to see it again.
This week's issue of The Stranger has 
