I’ll admit it, I was curious. Sure, I elevated my nose at the idea that a film could be made using a censored theme park ride as its source material. Yet in this sequel-stuffed summer, you could probably do worse.

Yes, Pirates is certainly just as weightless as the rest of the popcorn projects, but there is something captivating about Johnny Depp’s performance that makes this a mite different. Still, watchable though he and co-star Orlando Bloom may be, they don’t deserve 143 minutes. A little more Avid action would have been appropriate.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on Vancouver lately, and I’ve discovered several interesting facts about the city that claims to be #3 in North American film production.

None of these discoveries are quite as odd as this little navigational element I found on the Tourism Vancouver site:

That would be the flags of France, Germany, Japan, and, well… gay pride.

I’m not sure what to make of this positioning. Of course, I applaud the prominence the city gives to its diverse populations, though it’s hardly unique. But wouldn’t one be correct to assume that as far as this site is concerned, gays speak another language?

From this film, we can conclude the following:

1. There are some films which actually make DV work, in terms of style.
2. It’s amazing how much better one can look after a shave.
3. The British military is appallingly under-trained, at least against an average-joe human foe.

Overall: weird, but watchable.

From an NY Times article (Led by Intel, True Believers in Wi-Fi Say It Will Endure):

“The argument that free wireless Internet services will undercut the growth of providers such as Wayport, Cometa and T-Mobile is not supported by consumer behavior. … I can get free coffee at my office,” he said, “but I still go to Starbucks.”

It seems that Dave (Vucina, CEO of Wayport) has had a little too much coffee. Sure, it’s fun to cite companies such as Starbucks or Evian as sellers of things available for (near) free. But the comparison doesn’t hold here.

Wayport sells access, nothing more — and that makes them just the same as the (wonderful, blessed) free IP providers. Worse, with Wayport it’s less convenient to use (option A: power up. option B: power up and provide authentication/payment information for your time-limited session.)

Unless it’s strikingly speedier (difficult — it’s commodity equipment), Dave better just stick to saying that he’s poised to succeed because only his company is invited to the hotels and airports it services. If the free guys get in there, they’ll eat his lunch.

* plus, I’m poor.

I’ll be away until Monday, so I’ll have to wait until then to post on 28 Days Later and J.D. Powers.

Have a good weekend.

So I’m happily walking west along Lincoln Way, approaching Sheldon Ave., when the two small windows of the drive-thru at the nearby Taco Bell burst open. The employee leans out as far as he can, and shoves his middle finger upward with vigor, pumping his arm aggressively.

“You FUCKING ASSHOLE…” he begins.

I, of course, am quite taken aback. The few times I’ve been to Taco Bell, they’ve been exceedingly polite. Was this just a mask for their visceral hatred of me? And who the hell was this guy, come to that?

Then I realized he was actually yelling at the cackling occupants of a car that had just pulled in front of me. Apparently, the jokers had said something inappropriate into the speaker.

Ahh, Ames.

Why do I see shit, you might (understandably) ask? Well, because in FD there is no other option. And, in this case, because I a) like chicks who kick ass and b) have a crush on Lucy Liu (I know, it’s confusing.)

But to the “film.” First, whatever else you might say about the preposterously-named “McG” (real name: Joseph McGinty Nichol), you can usually say he has a strong sense of motion. I particularly like the way Demi Moore (who looks pretty damn good) slides into a Ferrari Enzo and peels off in the trailers. It comes as a surprise, then, that for someone who seems so obsessed with the visual, this picture looks so bad. In one scene, broken glass clearly came from a computer, in another, flame licking through a stage floor has SFX written all over it.

Even worse, some of the outdoor scenes have the characters with a sort of purple glow. At first, the strange cast seems to be a stylistic choice, as it is first noticeable at a dirt bike race presided over by Pink (naturally.) Later, though, when the Angels are just walking around outside, they have that same edge problem whenever the background is sky. It’s very off-putting.

The action scenes, by contrast, are just annoying. Movies have a long tradition of exaggeration, of course. I remember reading once that some filmmaker had decided the actual sound of a handgun firing sounded too weak, so he spiced it up with samples from several explosions — including a nuclear blast.

Post-Matrix, it seems that many films have taken a similar departure from reality. Not that I expect everything to be French, but when you have a scene where the girls manage to pull a truck off a dam after a tank has fired on them at one end and a shoulder-mounted rocket is launched at the other then during the time the truck is falling, uncover, enter, detach and start a helicopter, well, suspension of disbelief is a bit too much to ask. (Although it does make the walking-through-fire scene that comes later seem almost tame.)

I know that perhaps it’s all intended to be this wry and knowing send-up of all the action movies that came before, but I just don’t care. It stank, and I’m pleased to see that in its second week it dropped 62% at the box office (the biggest dip in the top 10.) Word-of-mouth, anyone?

What does the ‘Q’ in Q-Tip stand for? Quality. But that wasn’t its original name. No, the makers (the Leo Gerstenzang Infant Novelty Company) dubbed their very first cotton swab something else.

What, you might ask?

Would you believe Baby Gays?

(Hat tip: Ask Yahoo!)

Two judgments:

Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.
— Justice Kennedy, in the majority opinion

Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.
— Justice Scalia, in his dissent

Two reactions:

We’re living in the Castro in San Francisco while renovations on our house are completed. As anyone who has driven through this neighborhood knows, at Market and Castro there is a huge Gay Pride flag that flies every day of the year. Huge — maybe the largest flag I have ever seen.

I was out of town on the day of the decision. But I am told that the day after Lawrence was decided, the Gay Pride flag came down. An American flag was raised in its place.

It was an extraordinary moment that said more about the importance of this decision than any commentary ever could.
— Professor Lawrence Lessig, on his site at Stanford Law School

“I absolutely do, of course I do.”
— Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., when asked whether he supported a Constitutional amendment that would ban any marriage in the United States except a union of a man and a woman

[B]ars and restaurants that measure no more than 3,750 square feet (not including the parking lot, as long as the parking lot is used exclusively for parking purposes) can contain no more than four TVs (of no more than 55 inches diagonally) for their patrons to watch, as long as there is only one TV per room. The radio can be played through no more than six loudspeakers, with a limit of four per room, unless the restaurant in question is run by “a governmental body or a nonprofit agricultural or horticultural organization, in the course of an annual agricultural or horticultural fair or exhibition conducted by such body or organization.” Then it’s OK to use more speakers.

It is…technically against the law for Girl Scouts to sing “This Land Is Your Land” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon” around a campfire without paying royalties. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers tried to collect such royalties. It backed off only after it faced public outrage–which was fanned by restaurateurs wanting to play the radio without having to pay fees. It now charges the Scouts $1 a year, foregoing real profits while making it clear that the girls sing only by ASCAP’s belatedly good graces.

Remember when I used to bitch about copyright law every other day? This is why. (Quotes from the Jonathan Zittrain’s excellent article, The Copyright Cage.)

It is a measure of my intense geekiness that I can get excited by a product such as Cisco’s new phone. But excited I am: here is a handset that operates through wireless Ethernet (so-called “Wi-Fi”) and allows users to have a phone extension that “follows” them wherever they take it, provided a wireless connection to the company network is available. The next version, Cisco says, will have a VPN client built in, so employees can take the handset anywhere (London, anyone?) and make and receive calls over the public Internet just as if they were in the office.

Of course, the product (similar versions of which are also available from vendors such as Avaya) is not without its shortcomings. Chief among these: poor battery life, the short range of Wi-Fi hotspots, and the inability to “roam.” These are serious obstacles, but to those who claim the cell phone will conquer all, I offer three numbers: 54. 0. 30.

That’s 54Mbps, the current top speed for the recently ratified 802.11g standard. While this is a theoretical maximum, no cellular network — including the vaunted 3rd Generation (3G) — gets anywhere near this speed.

That’s 0, as in 0¢ per minute. When call traffic is carried over the Internet, per-minute metering (almost always) goes away. It’s such a trivial amount of data that it’s not worth tracking. You might pay a fee for access to the hotspot (perhaps, heaven forfend, the cost of a Big Mac) but from there it’s potentially free calling worldwide and high-speed Web browsing, concurrently. Surfed the Web on your cell phone lately? How about while you were chatting?

And of course, 30% of long distance traffic is already packetized, hopping from switched phone company circuits right into the IP rodeo.

Add it all up, and I think my cell phone will be relegated to conversations on the move, provided the quality is there. My more relaxed (or data-intensive) exchanges will likely be made at rest, in a setting where I can speak — and surf — all I want.

John Malkovich’s directorial debut did a good job of creating a mood surrounding his unnamed Latin American country, and Javier Bardem as Rejas was amazing in a subtle, understated way. Ultimately, though, the movie’s pacing was a drag, its central conflict resolved in somewhat unimpressive fashion and the love story, well, let’s just say I was unconvinced by the relationship between the characters.

None of that is intended to rip it apart, so much as to say it was very intelligent, in a somewhat boring, distant way.

I saw this a few days ago, but just couldn’t bring myself to admit it. (And yes, I saw the first one in the theater as well.)

I read somewhere that the big bank this Diesel-less sequel scored proves that it’s the cars which are the real stars of the show. Even with that in mind ahead of time, I’m at a loss to explain why. These are basically Mitsubishis, kids, but made even uglier with the application of loud, garish colors and decals.

The whole after-market industry is very foreign to me, and not just because so much of it is so ugly. I guess it’s because I’m biased towards the manufacturers. I want to believe that the full-time vehicle designers and engineers knew what they were doing, and if they didn’t think a huge-ass spoiler was necessary, then it probably isn’t.

But then somebody mentions the Aztek, and I think maybe these people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing after all.

Another Fast Company article, and this one makes me laugh.

It’s a study about luck, and here’s how they did the experiment:

How did you uncover that in your lab?
We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That’s it. Luck wasn’t on their minds, just some silly task. They’d go through, and after about three pages, there’d be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert — I mean, we’re talking big — that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU’VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, “There are 43 photos. That’s what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?” We’d say, “Yeah, carry on.” They’d flip some more and say, “Do I get my 150 pounds?” Most of the unlucky people didn’t notice.

There’s also techniques for becoming lucky, which I presume include “read everything when you’re picked for a study.” I don’t know — I didn’t read them.

Which I guess means I won’t become this guy.

A Fast Company article on GPS tells the story of how that technology is permeating every part of the modern business world. Two items, however, give me pause.

Privacy. The author convinces a GPS vendor to let his guard down and discuss more advanced applications of the technology. The exec “starts talking about insurance companies selling you auto insurance based on how you actually use your car, say, a month at a time. They review the GPS information on where you’ve driven, how far, to what areas of town, and how fast (speeding, eh?) and bill you for the risks that you’re taking. Progressive Insurance has in fact done a trial using just such a system in Texas.” I stand with the author when he adds “Holy mackerel. The insurance company will have records of everywhere I drive and how fast I drive there.” Then imagine what would happen when people sued for this information, or cops requested it…

Efficiency. Services such as expediter Con-Way NOW use GPS to rush shipments for clients. One client is Ford: “Ford books an average of 1,000 such shipments of auto parts each month.” Do you think that perhaps if you need 12,000 rush shipments per year you might just have systemic problems that should be addressed? Yeah, I think so.