New Maddox

Today Maddox finally posted a new essay:

Fashion tips for women from a guy who knows dick about fashion.

New Maddox essays have gotten more noteworthy over the years since they've become so infrequent. There used to be a couple new ones a month, but now there's only a new one every few months. In fact, this is only the 5th one of 2007, and I just noticed that there were only 4 updates in all of 2006. On the bright side, I think the quality of his essays has improved, as he used to be pretty hit and miss, but every single essay from the last 2 years has been great. This one continues the streak, as he makes a lot of hilarious comments and valid points, although I did disagree with 2 things.

Writing about how ugly and disgusting "Crocs" women's shoes are, Maddox writes:

"People who wear Crocs go on and on about how comfortable they are, and how it's supposedly odor resistant because it's made out of some kind of anti-bacterial foam. Great point, dipshits! You know what else it's resistant to? You getting laid."

I'm sure Maddox is like the Soup Nazi with impossibly high standards when it comes to deciding who to sleep with, but for 99% of men (and that's a conservative estimate) what shoes a woman wears does not figure into deciding on whether or not she's worth pursuing for sex.

Then a little bit later he's talking about the ridiciulousness of nearly identical lipstick colors. To prove this he has a picture showing 2 "different" shades of lipstick sold by Revlon, "Red Reinvented" and "Cherry Delicious." The two shades of red cropped from Maddox's comparison image:



While it is ridiculous that Revlon makes both colors, on my monitor the 2 shades are clearly different, even though they are very similar. "Red Reinvented" (left) is redder, while "Cherry Delicious" (right) is duller, and looks like it has a very slight pinkish hue. I looked at the samples one after the other a bunch of times and I correctly identified which is which every time. I wouldn't be able to identify them I could only look at 1 without reference to the other, and I doubt the actual lipsticks are as easy to tell apart, especially when someone's wearing them, but that doesn't change the fact that telling them apart from the sample colors on my monitor is easy.

Except for those two minor things I thought the essay was right on. I especially liked the part about the curtain dresses, which reminded me of a blog Mindy Kaling wrote a while back with some pictures of dresses like that that she said were really comfortable or something, which in turn reminded me that I still haven't tried the Kookaburra Liquorice that I've wanted to try ever since she wrote about it several months ago. Tonight I looked online a little bit for it and it's super expensive, about $5 for a 10-ounce bag. As if that isn't bad enough, with shipping it's usually more than twice that. You can get a much better deal buying it in bulk, but I don't want to be stuck with a case (12 10-ounce bags) if it turns out I don't like it. And even if I do like it, it would probably take me at least 6 months to eat that much licorice, and by the time I got to the last few bags the candy would probably be stale.

John Cusack conversation with Naomi Klein about The Shock Doctrine

Over the past few weeks several segments of a conversation John Cusack recently had with Naomi Klein about her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism have been posted on The Huffington Post. The conversation has covered several different topics, and it's been fascinating and more than a little terrifying. Here are links to the 4 parts released so far:

Part 1: HuffPost Exclusive: My Interview with Naomi Klein (Video)

Part 2: Calling Things What They Are: More From My Conversation with Naomi Klein (Transcript)

Part 3: The Real Blackwater Scandal: Build a Frontier, You Get Cowboys (Transcript)

Part 4: The Real Blackwater Scandal: Build a Frontier, You Get Cowboys, Part II (Transcript)

I haven't yet got my hands on The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism or seen Cusack's new movie War, Inc., but I'm look forward to them both.

Chuck - S01E02

So despite my mixed thoughts on the first episode, I decided to give Chuck another chance and I was not disappointed. The second episode was funnier, the plot was more interesting (even though it seemed like just something they had to get out of the way, kind of like the episode of Futurama where Fry checks his old bank account and finds out that he's a billionaire), and the question of which, if either, agent could be trusted made things pretty interesting. One thing I didn't like was that the whole computer secrets stuck in his head thing is even more ridiculous than I thought it would be.

I liked that LOST was referenced when in the middle of reciting some of the secrets he knew he said, "Oceanic flight 815 was shot down...," but I have to wonder if the writers actually watch LOST each week since we learned in the Season 2 finale that Desmond not entering the code in time was apparently what brought the plane down. It would have been better if he had said "Oceanic flight 815 crashed on an island located..." or something like that that alludes to something we don't know.

Chuck x2

Good Luck Chuck

I have no interest in seeing Good Luck Chuck, but I was interested in seeing how it would do at the box office over the weekend compared to Shoot 'Em Up (which I have no interest in seeing other), which was released a few weeks ago, based on their very different advertising strategies. I had never heard of Shoot 'Em Up a week before it was released, and then the whole week prior to its release it seemed like every other commercial on TV was for it. The blitz didn't work too well, as during its opening weekend of September 7-9 it finished in 4th place and took in about $5.7 million. In contrast, it seems like there were a small but regular number of ads on TV for Good Luck Chuck over the last 2-3 months. Over its opening weekend September 21-23 Good Luck Chuck finished in 2nd place and took in $13.7 million. From the reviews, both of these are pretty bad movies, so I'm guessing that had something to do with the creative advertising techniques for them. I wonder how much, if any, of the difference in their opening weekend performance is because of the different advertising methods, and how this might affect future advertising. I guess I should be thankful that they haven't resorted to advertising crappy movies with the same despicable advertising technique used for that Head On thing, which I suppose is used because the stupid thing doesn't work at all (and even if in some parallel universe it did work, I think everyone there should boycott it on principle, to not reward the sleazy advertising used to sell it).

Chuck

I had seen some ads for this but I wasn't going to watch it until during a rerun of The Office last week there was a commercial for it and I heard what I thought was Adam Baldwin's voice. I was cleaning dishes at the time so I didn't see if it was him or not, but after I got done I looked it up on IMDb and sure enough it was him. Since the show had the guy who brought to life one of the funniest characters in the history of television, Jayne Cobb on Firefly, how could I not check this show out? So I set my VCR to record it, which ended up being a good thing since I forgot about it until 5 minutes or so after it started. So I watched the rest of the show, slightly confused. After it was over I watched the first 5 minutes and of course that helped everything make sense. Still, I thought the show was mediocre overall. The basic premise was pretty far-fetched (that's not how human memory works), and for a show about tech geeks (sorry, nerds) there seemed to be a lot of questionable computer things. For example, how does a virus destroy a computer? Even a really nasty rootkit wouldn't survive a hard drive wipe, would it? The best I could think of is if the virus somehow told the PSU that the mother board, CPU & hard drive(s) weren't getting enough power and when it put out more juice everything was fried. And how does a computer suffer complete destruction when it falls a few feet onto the ground, including a hard drive being in multiple pieces? I tried to put these quibbles aside and just enjoy the show, but it just wasn't that good. Adam Baldwin's character was not funny at all, and there were only a few laughs during the whole show even though from what little I knew about it, I thought it was supposed to be a comedy. It wasn't all bad though, as there were some funny parts in the beginning in the store. And then my favorite part was near the end show when Chuck diffused the bomb by searching for porn to kill the computer. I'm embarrassed I didn't see that coming, but I ended up laughing a lot harder than I would have if I had. Perhaps the overall lack of humor was because they had to setup all the plot stuff, so I think I'll give the show one more chance next week to see if they can bring the funny. Hopefully it turns out to be worth watching, but if not (and even if it does, for that matter), it completely sucks to see all the talented actors who were on Firefly, easily one of the best shows of all-time, appear in significantly lower quality shows (e.g., Nathan Fillion on Drive, Gina Torres on Standoff), so many of which fail, and they just keep coming up with new show ideas, most of which completely suck, all the while the Firefly 'verse is just waiting to be explored. I really hope Fox decides to give it another shot (or another network when Fox's TV rights expire at the end of the year), especially now that Kevin Reilly is there. He had a large part in saving The Office from cancellation after Season 1, and maybe if he'd been at Fox when they cancelled Firefly in 2002 and Futurama in 2003 (and then gone on to NBC to save The Office), maybe they'd both still be on the air.

An international unit of measure for pelvic thrusts.

Starbucks, Dell, Google, the list goes on: Huge business successes from meager beginnings. Today I thought of the idea which could form the basis on which to build the foundation of the next big thing to make that venerable list: The design of an an international unit of measure for pelvic pelvic thrusts. In addition to that, a way to do the measurement en masse, including location, velocity, distance, and any other relevant information. Then a comprehensive and searchable online database of pelvic thrust data could be created, which would be at one's fingertips at all times. Kind of like a Google Earth for pelvic thrusts. While I strongly believe that the pelvic thrust data itself should be free, I see no reason why it wouldn't be ok to make a little money (who are we kidding - we're talking huge bucks here) on the side with some tasteful, unobtrusive advertisements that appear whenever anyone accesses the data. If my projections are accurate, a few months after the database goes live, its bandwidth usage will put YouTube's to shame.

New Asha Ali single & Chungking's new album

The other day I noticed on Asha Ali's MySpace page that "These Months" had been deleted from the playlist and a brand new track, "A Promise Broken," had been added in its place. The new song has a quite different sound than that of her debut album. This is apparently attributable to the song being for a movie. The vocals are really strong though, and it's certainly nice to hear something new. There's a good, short review of the song, as well as a higher quality file of the song than the streaming version that plays at MySpace over at It's A Trap.

Also, it's been almost a month since Chungking's new album, Stay Up Forever, was officially released. Chungking's debut album (which was released twice: first as We Travel Fast in 2003, and then re-recorded and rereleased as The Hungry Years in 2005) was very laid back, and all about Jessie Banks' beautiful, lush vocals. Stay Up Forever, on the other hand, is pure electro-sleaze bliss. The music is now on equal footing with Banks' vocals, and the album starts off with a breakneck pace that I would have thought uniminaginable after listening to We Travel Fast/The Hungry Years more times than I can count.

The only thing I don't like about the album is track #5, "I Love You," which brings the breakneck pace of the first few songs to a dead halt 1/3 of the way through the album (is that the point?). While the tracks on the tail end of the album do slow down, this is fine since it would be disconcerting if the album were to end while still at the full-tilt pace established by the first few tracks. I think the album would be much better without "I Love You," and instead had a more gradual transition from the fast early songs to the slower songs at the end. The CD single for Love Is Here To Stay, the first single from the album, has an excellent b-side called "Jeans On." I think this song should have taken the place of "I Love You" on the album. If this were the case, this album would have been just about perfect.

My Statement

Tonight I rewatched Serenity (on the awesome new DVD), completing my little Firefly rewatching marathon that I had to do after reading xkcd's awesome comic from Monday. Afterwards I got on the computer to surf a little before going to bed. I checked my gmail and saw James Gunn had posted a new blog post, so I went over to MySpace to check it out, and it was just about the last thing in the world I expected:

"We (James and Jenna) need to announce that we have chosen to separate. We are sorry for any pain this causes family and friends. The enthusiasm we have expressed for each other's lives, spirits, and careers is real – we have been each other's cheerleader and friend during the past six years and continue to be so now and in the future.

"And a special note for our MySpace fans – We appreciate your support over the years, and would be overjoyed to have you continue supporting us both. You might be tempted to make one of us "feel better" by putting the other one down in a post. Please don't – we still have the utmost respect for one another, and we'd have to delete you. We aren't taking questions or doing interviews about this particular aspect of our lives. We're also avoiding reading any press on the subject, so don't send us any clippings or links about the split. Thank you in advance for respecting our privacy."

(Source: James Gunn's MySpace page and Jenna Fischer's MySpace page).

My first thought was that it had to be a joke. So I checked Jenna's page and saw the same statement. My next thought was that maybe their MySpace pages were hacked. Then I saw the time of the posts, about 3:30 this afternoon. If it had been hacking that would have been fixed by now. Just to make sure I googled their names and apparently it's on news sites, apparently with the MySpace messages as the source. As if that wasn't enough, if you think about it, the day after the release of a season of The Office on DVD is probably the perfect day to announce something like this for maximum privacy to keep immediate fan reaction to an absolute minimum, since everyone's spending all their free time in front of their TVs and not their computers.

Since it's real, my reaction is mainly shock. In interviews Jenna always described James as her real life Jim, and they seemed to be the perfect couple. So what happened? Were they both so busy with their mutually successful careers that they were left with too little little time for each other? Did Jenna's back injury create / exacerbate problems they were having? Did one or both of them meet someone else? It's certainly not any of my business, but I can't help but wonder. I mean, if the real Pam and the real Jim can't make it, what chance do the rest of us have?

I don't know either of them personally, but I'm a big fan of both their work, including James' Slither, The Toy Collector, Lollilove, etc., and Jenna's The Office, Blades Of Glory, Lollilove, etc.

In any case, regardless of what happened or what comes next for them, I wish them both the very best.