The acquistion of Johnny Damon by the Yankees is a laughable idea that I never thought would come to pass. The only thing close to the painfulness of watching Bernie playing in the outfield last year was watching Johnny being almost as bad in a much smaller Fenway park. While there is an addition by subtracting from the Red Sox, the goal isn't to beat them, but win the World Series. Anyone watching last year would come to the conclusion that outfield defense was the problem that needed to be addressed, not offense. At this point, I would have to believe Bubba is the better defensive option - and he isn't exactly a wiz either. Heck, putting Johnny in left and Matsui in center is probably a better option. The Yankees might have sewn up the AL East at the expense of the World Series.
Who knew Fox was shooting sitcoms in Hi-Def back in 2002? Apparently, Andy Richter Controls the Universe was shot in such a manner and HDNet will be bringing the entire series to the world (or to the small segment that gets HDNet) on Xmas Eve [via HDBeat]. If its poor showing in the polls on TvShowsOnDVD.com is any indication, Andy might not soon make it to DVD, so this might be the only way the common man gets to see the 5 unaired episodes for a while. Hopefully, some kind soul with Christmas cheer will bring the gift of the entire series to BitTorrent...
Amazingly, the best DVR to-date has not been manufactured in several years. The ReplayTV 5000 series featured both automatic commercial skip ability and unencrypted transfer/streaming of content. I believe automatic commercial skipping was never ruled illegal, just that SonicBlue at the time realized there was no money to be made in fighting the good fight so it removed this feature in later versions.
Not a peep has been hard from ReplayTV for a while now. Tivo always had the better UI - but ReplayTV is definitely the second best option available.
Therefore the annoucement today that ReplayTV will become a software company could either be a move of brilliance or solely desperation. I have admittedly never used Microsoft's MCE2005, but I don't doubt that ReplayTV could win the interface battle with them. Can ReplayTV however leverage their previous networking experience to bring video to all computers/TV's in the home or will not having standardized hardware be too much to overcome? Will they charge a monthly fee for their EPG? It will be interesting to watch, but I fear this will be a precipitous slope.
Yes, I have lost all flair for humorous article titles. Ripped from Fark, a list of the 50 Greatest Independent Films of all-time - at least according to some British movie magazine called Empire. Damn, do I love lists.
Quick Hits:
Reservoir Dogs #1
Terminator was an independent film? No wonder they showed parts of it so often in my intro film class.
Lots of Horror Films : Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead, some others. What about Halloween? Wasn't that independent? Saw (though I didn't particularly like it)?
Memento - good nod
I am not sure what it means that a British magazine had almost all Hollywood (or I guess actually American) films, but the only movie that I hadn't seen which I will be adding to my queue is The Descent - which might be in the Bit Torrent universe right now....
What I take to be a breaking story is the U.S. paying for story placements in the Iraqi media. Now I have only glimpsed at the CSM version, so the unanswered questions I have are "what stories did they plant?" and "Were the stories true?". My first take is: what is the big deal? There seems to be this attack that this goes against Democratic principles, but how? I see no evidence that their press is not free to publish what they want - they just decided to take a bribe. That might not be very democratic, but at least it is capitalisic. If the United States or their agents had a gun to these publishers's heads, then we should all be crying foul, but from these reports, it sounds like they chose to publish these stories from biased sources. I do not know the state of the media in Iraq, but most media sources are money making corporations. These media corporations all tend to have their bias - some people may reject stories from Fox News because of that, others the Village Voice. If Iraqi citizens are going to reject stories from these news organizations because they took a few dollars to publish these stories, that is their right. If other news outlets were taking pay to publish stories from terrorists, then I hope their would a campaign to boycott them.