This sequel
to Kevin Smith’s original film is surprisingly charming, despite two weak leads as the titular clerks.
Whereas the first film was mostly gross-out humor and pop culture references, Smith is older and wiser and his clerks are both feeling the passage of time, which deepens a movie that, at its heart, is still mostly gross-out humor and pop culture references.
This is well worth seeing for fans of Smith’s Jersey films, but hard to recommend to anyone else.
The creator of “Survivor” is now casting for his new reality show, “Pirates.” Deadline is December 12 — next Monday — and the application apparently includes an audition video, but the application documents are a little vague on that subject.
Now I just need to find my passport, come up with and shoot a video in one week and get lucky.
Oh, and get a crash course in sailing from Dad …
I admit it: I’m a sucker for any television show about journalists. I’m probably the only straight guy in America who mourns the passing of “Pepper Dennis.”
So, when a show about a female sportswriter who’s constantly surrounded by guy buddies hits TBS — “My Boys,” which debuted this week — I’m there.
Jordana Spiro plays an improbably hot sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times. (I say “improbably hot” because sportswriters get access to free food at every damn event they go to and, well, they tend to at least nibble. If they’re not going to be appearing on TV, most journalists don’t really look like Jordana Spiro or her male counterparts on the show.)
Like a lot of my female friends, she’s most comfortable around men, whether they be her brother, her old college roommate or fellow sportswriters. As a result, the single P.J. Franklin is kind of a mess when it comes to the dating world, making “My Boys” a sort of “Sex in the City” with less talk about stupidly expensive shoes and more about how P.J. freaks out the guy she’s interested in because she’s not girly enough for him.
It’s pretty good and, apparently, it’s pretty on-base as far as female sportswriters are concerned. I could do without the “Sex in the City”-style voiceovers (their appearance on “Medium” this season has been especially unwelcome), but otherwise, this looks like a show that’s got potential.
Hopefully P.J. will be around a lot longer than fellow Windy City journalist Pepper was.
I’ve had to physically restrain the Hesperia Star’s office manager, Sharon, from putting up holiday decorations before this morning. She’s of the camp that believes that they should go up by the day after Thanksgiving at the latest, whereas I find that the Christmas season shouldn’t start until December. (I blame growing up with advent calendars in the house.)
But today is D-Day (“D,” of course, for “decorations”) and I expect to go into the Star and find that it’s been transformed into Santa’s newsroom.
For my part, I’m bringing in a new mix of Christmas and holiday music on Ye Olde Stolen Music Repository.
Years ago, back when I was in the grip of my Great Theories About Bachelordom, one of the theories was that I needed to have my own holiday music so that I could host, I dunno, swinging bachelor pad cocktail parties or something. (I think I had all of one.) So I set out to start collecting Christmas music, but I didn’t want to get the same old, same old stuff. Every year, I try to get one or two new albums of really cool Christmas music, especially of good takes by popular musicians or great interpretations of classics that stand up on their own merits (like the album of slack-key guitar Christmas songs, for instance).
This year’s mix is an hour and 20 minutes of rock and pop Christmas tunes. Most of them came from iTunes or from CDs I’d purchased, although a few are from a KROQ Kevin & Bean Christmas CD, so those songs may be harder to track down, for those playing along at home.
Here’s the ones available in iTunes:
And the ones that are not, for some reason:
- “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (Mulato Beat Remix) – Louis Armstrong & Velman Middleton
- “Christmas Wrapping” – Save Ferris
- “Jesus Was a Dreidel Spinner” – Jill Sobule
- “Please Come Home for Christmas” – Unwritten Law
- “We Three Kings of Orient Are” – The Beach Boys
Find those on your own. Ho, ho, ho.
Well, Microsoft’s would-be iPod-killer (wait, now it’s no longer a killer, it’s an expand-the-marketer, or something), the Zune, is getting hammered:
Only the Zune software can sync music, video and pictures onto the device; Zune is incompatible with Windows Media Player, the familiar hub of the Windows desktop media experience.
The Zune app doesn’t even have as many features as WMP. And why (for the love of God) doesn’t it support podcasts? That’s pure insanity.
It’s incompatible with Microsoft’s own PlaysForSure standard, too.
You’ll have to buy all-new content from the new Zune Marketplace.
Oh, and the Zune Marketplace doesn’t even take real money, proving that on the Zune Planet there’s no operation so simple that it can’t be turned into a confusing ordeal. The Marketplace only accepts Zune Points, with an individual track typically costing the equivalent of the iTunes-standard 99 cents.
By forcing users to buy blocks of Zune Points (with a $5 minimum), the Marketplace only has to pay one credit-card processing fee.
Zune Points will also make it easier for the Zune Marketplace to institute variable pricing. The music industry wants it desperately. The industry has been pressuring Apple to abandon its flat 99 cent pricing and start charging more for “hot” tracks.
Apple has stood firm against this, insisting that low, uniform prices keep sales high and discourage the iTunes Store’s users from downloading music illegally.
I’m certain Microsoft will cave on this one. It has already given the music industry the other thing the industry has been demanding from Apple: a kickback on every player sold.
“These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it,” said Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. “So it’s time to get paid for it.”
Well, Morris is just a big, clueless idiot, of course. Do you honestly want morons like him to have power over your music player?
Who knew the Chicago Sun-Times could muster such venom in a tech article?
Wired went in with an upbeat attitude, but still ended up with little positive to say:
I fired up the unit, and its gorgeous interface blinked to life. So far, so good! The Zune can do things I only wish my iPod could. It wirelessly beams media files to other Zunes, sports an FM receiver, and plays video in a landscape mode. But when I tried loading some WMV files, it happened: error message! I tried loading a Grey’s Anatomy episode I got from iTunes. No love, because it’s a protected file. I couldn’t watch my personal files or anything bought from iTunes, and the Zune Marketplace doesn’t sell videos yet, so what exactly am I supposed to watch? No good WMVs? WTF!? This pretty baby has a lot going for it (like decent earphones not sold separately), but I’ll keep searching for The One — Zune and I just aren’t compatible.
Even the normally techno-lusting This Week in Tech podcast couldn’t find anything good to say about it, going so far as to say the Zune will herald the end of digital rights management, by showing just how ineffective and dumb a “solution” it is.
Meanwhile, two years on, me and my “stolen music repository” (a 20 GB iPod stuffed with songs purchased from the iTunes store) are chugging along just fine.
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