Archive for January, 2012
January 31st, 2012 | 
Author:
Vernon Supreme for President. Just one of about four dozen candidates on the New Hampshire ballot.
From here: “When Steve Jobs died…, deification from the media and inconsolable consumers made gripes about Apple’s use of sweatshops seem like the cynical mumblings of contrarians. The problem is that there’s plenty of documentation and reporting that supports the criticism.” See also this: “Mike Daisey was a self-described ‘worshipper in the cult of Mac.’ Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.”
Posted in Uncategorized | 
Tags: Arthur@AmeriNZ, Coverville, Etta James, Gabrielle Giffords, Jaquandor, Johnny Otis, Ken Levine, Kevin Marshall, Kickstarter, Mark Evanier, Muppets, obit, Roger Ebert, SamuraiFrog, Steve Bissette, Steve Jobs, Vernon Supreme | 
2 Comments »
It’s interesting to me that, in the past year, the one guy who most influenced me in blogging, comic book artist/scribe Fred Hembeck, has seemingly left the blogosphere. He hasn’t posted a thing since April 10, 2011. He started FredSez on January 1, 2003, and for a several years wrote almost every day, an inspirational pace. But the output slackened in the last couple years before he stopped altogether. Hasn’t used his Twitter account very much anymore.
Seems that his chosen medium Read the rest of this entry »
From JEOPARDY! episode which aired on 11/11/11.
A large group of families that are related, it’s from the Gaelic for “family”. Answer below.
Here’s something someone e-mailed me, with some modifications, about collective nouns:
We are all familiar with a
Herd of cows (also the term, not necessarily exclusively, for Read the rest of this entry »
I tend to think of movie years from Academy Awards night to Academy Awards night, not so much because I’m an Oscars fan – though I am – but because some of the movies that get nominated don’t even make it to small markets such as Albany, NY until January or even February. Yeah, I know the Oscar nominations were very conservative this year, for the most part.
*means I have actually seen it
Best Picture
*The Artist
*The Descendants
*Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
*Hugo
*Midnight in Paris
*The Help
Moneyball
War Horse
The Tree of Life
Saw 6 out of 9, so far, 3 in the last couple weeks. War Horse is still playing, so maybe I’ll still see it. I’d love to watch Moneyball, which is available on DVD.
WILL WIN: The Artist, which I liked. It’s a film about film. I mean, so is Hugo, but not as directly.
WANT TO WIN: Midnight in Paris, or The Descendants
PLEASE! NOT: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Best Actor
Demian Bichir, A Better Life
*George Clooney, The Descendants
*Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
WANT TO WIN Read the rest of this entry »
While my wife was at a Tupperware party last weekend, I walked to the Madison Theatre in Albany to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. While ostensibly starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, the real lead is young Thomas Horn, as a quirky nine-year-old who starts a quixotic quest all over “New York City for the lock that matches a mysterious key left behind by his father, who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.”
I was a couple minutes late, and the film (actually the previews) didn’t actually begin until the moment I walked in the room. Eventually three others also saw the film that showing.
The good news is that the flashback relationship between the boy and his father is compelling. Read the rest of this entry »
Someone recently told me that children don’t really develop a strong sense of time until they are eight years old. If this is the case, then I really look forward to the Daughter’s next birthday.
As the person who gets her ready for school almost every morning, I can say that there is no correlation between what time she gets up and when she goes out the door for school. There have been mornings that I have to, almost literally, drag her out of bed, but then she becomes more alert and gets to school in plenty of time. There are other mornings she wakes early, yet we are rushing to get there before the late bell Read the rest of this entry »
Shortly after I saw the black-and-white, mostly silent film The Artist at the Spectrum in Albany the weekend before last, someone asked me what I thought of it. “It’s very clever,” I said. “But is it good?” “It’s the best silent film I’ve seen this century.”
None of this is to say I didn’t thoroughly enjoy the film; more to the point, I would see it again. It’s fun, it’s well-acted, and particularly so, precisely because it IS a silent film, though with music, and the actors have to convey so much sans dialogue. It’s just that there are not that many contemporary films to which I can compare it. Read the rest of this entry »