Since this is the second time this year I’ve had to set up my podcasts, Firefox and World of Warcraft, I’m going to take a moment to jot down the podcast selections, Firefox extensions and WoW mods I’m using, just in case this happens again at some point, so I can be back up and running faster.
Podcasts
Firefox extensions
World of Warcraft mods
When we went to Disneyland this past weekend, the crowds were pretty mild (except for literal bumper-to-bumper traffic on the reopened Pirates of the Caribbean ride), but it got me thinking: Surely there were even better days to go to the park.
And that’s what the Internet is for: Average Temperatures and Attendance Trends for Disneyland. Clearly, this is what the Internet is for. (Thanks, Al Gore!)
Going the week after Thanksgiving, or in January, sounds pretty good to me.
Wired has a neat article about how Survivor is a well-designed videogame played with living characters and a real world environment:
“Nobody talks about it on this level, but that’s what I do,” said Burnett, nattily dressed in a tieless pinstriped suit. I met him at Trump International Hotel when he came through town to talk about Gold Rush.
While tweaking Survivor, he closely studied John Nash’s game theory in order to better engineer the hysteria and emotional blowouts of each season’s finale.
The 13th season of Survivor debuts on September 14.
As promised, for parents and grandparents, here’s Kate on It’s a Small World. We pick up halfway through the (best for people Kate’s age) ride, after Joel has shot some photos with my phone. (I’ll post those to Flickr or something soonish.)
(The second video is taking a while to process by the site. If you can’t see it, come back later.)
This fourth Spike Lee/Denzel Washington collaboration in many ways is the most conventional and the one that has the least to do with Spike’s own voice — he’s operating off a thriller script he did not create — but there are still signs that “Inside Man” is still a Spike Lee Joint.
There’s the signature shot of a protagonist moving down the street on a rolling cart instead of walking, an off-hand discussion of the damage done by videogames that glamorize the gangsta lifestyle and, as always, a lot of Spike’s signature camera work and camera shots. For big Spike Lee fans, this might not be as much Spike as they want, but the film is still definitely worth watching.
It’s a smart thriller, not so much a “whodunnit” as a “what, exactly, did they do?” Clive Owen appears at the very beginning of the film, laying out what’s happened in the film, with an implicit challenge to the viewers to figure out exactly what they’re about to see. The bank robbery that follows is mysterious and more clever than it at first appears to be and the entire affair takes on extra realism thanks to an extremely good cast, including a number of lower-tier character actors putting in solid work, and especially Christopher Plummer and a surprisingly disquieting Jodie Foster, playing against type.
The final resolution doesn’t have quite the emotional pop that may have been intended, but it’s an intellectually satisfying one.
“Inside Man” could have used more of Spike Lee’s signature style to spice things up, but it’s still a very solid little caper movie and well worth seeing for fans of such films or Spike Lee Joints.
