Category Archives: Entertainment

Live… From beautiful Newark, Delaware…

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As promised, I’m coming to you live and in person from the Apple Store at Christiana Mall in Newark, Delaware. At 3AM EST, I’m estimating a line that’s a ragged 250-300 deep. Not surprisingly, the crowd is very subdued and there is a heavy presence of Delaware State Troopers already on hand. Good times. With doors open in five hours, I’ll be back when things start picking up.

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3:35 AM – I’ve been the last person in line for 20 minutes. Does that make me the least dedicated of the early adopters or most dedicated of the regular consumers?

4:17 AM – According to one of the nice people beside me, the line is 254 souls. Glad to see my power of estimation is still pretty accurate.

4:46 AM – Just got an email from Apple. Apparently they’ve started selling some kind of new phone today. Who knew?

5:00 AM – Lots of NY license plates coming onto the lot now. The line is stretching around a corner and out of sight behind me. Best guess is that it’s probably 2x longer than it was at 3AM. After starting to read reports if shipping times slipping into October, glad I didn’t decide to wait and try sneaking in an order online. Three hours to doors open.

5:17 AM – The inevitable asshat with a boom box just showed up playing what I think is called “dance” music…. Although at quarter past five in the morning it may prove to be “get your face smashed to a bloody pulp by tired people in line” music.

5:46 AM – The mall is opening their doors at 6:00, so the line is preparing to schlep inside. Those who brought chairs are now losing their places in line as they dump them back in their cars. Suckers.

5:52 – My little corner of the line before heading inside.

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6:22 AM – Lies. Damnable lies! Still standing outside.

6:45 AM – And still outside. Not sure if it’s an issue with Apple or the mall security set up. I’m guessing the latter just from observation.

7:15 AM – Still outside. Blue shirts came by asking the line if anyone was buying only the 5c so they could form a delegate line. So far, 500 people asked, zero 5c sales. Not surprising, but a fun fact. Also, no availability on the gold model from any carrier.

7:32 AM – All silver iPhones, all carriers are sold out. My level of confidence in getting hands on today is plummeting.

7:52 AM – No more word on stock outs. The line, however, is getting restless.

8:01 AM – All 16 GB AT&T iPhones are out of stock.

8:33 AM – Line hasn’t moved in 20 minutes. Blue shirts claiming the still have AT&T and Verizon availability in space grey.

8:36 AM – 32 GB AT&T is out of stock. Confidence in making this happen today is almost zero.

8:40 AM – stock out of AT&T. Bugger me.

9:25 AM – 2nd in line at a Best Buy that didn’t open early. Crossing my fingers.

9:34 AM – Mission success @ Best Buy!

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12:46PM – Well, that took more effort than I anticipated. The short version: I have an iPhone 5s in hand. I’m back at the house and once I get some coffee and chow into my system, I’ll give you a “first impressions” review. Stay tuned.

OCMD…

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In about a month, I’ll be recovering from my first trip to Ocean City since sometime around 2002. If I’m remembering history correctly, that trip involved a one-night layover and an excessive amount of drinking at Seacrets… and I seem to recall that it was March, so not exactly beach weather. That didn’t prevent NAME REDACTED from dragging his Ocean City Postcardhungover self across the beach to jump in the water on a dare… ah, the dumb shit 20-something guys do when they don’t have any adult supervision. Of course, that’s not really the point.

If you grew up in Western Maryland in the 1970s and 80s, Ocean City was the place to be in the summer. That was before the mass exodus to Myrtle Beach for a more “family friendly” beach experience. OCMD was grittier to be sure, but it’s where my impressions of what a beach vacation is were built. I’ve spent time on beaches up and down the East Coast from the Jersey Shore through the Carolinas. I’ve enjoyed beach time on the Adriatic and on the worn smooth stones in the shadow of the Brighton Pier. I’ve sucked down rum drinks in the protected coves of St. Thomas and had three months of weekends parked on the sand at Waikiki, but Ocean City is still where I think of whenever I think of “going to the beach.”

It’s not fancy. It’s not built for old money… but It’s where Maryland goes when it goes to the beach. Salt air, liquid refreshment, Thrasher’s fries, and good company… Yeah, it’s hard to believe it’s taken me 730-odd days to make the trip.

Rewriting history…

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I saw the new Star Trek movie this morning. Having spent a good part of my late childhood and early adolescence steeped in the legend, lore, and canon of the Star Trek universe, I’m going to admit up front that I’m still a touch troubled by the “alternate reality” premise adopted for star_trek_into_darkness_poster_enterpriseJ.J. Abrams’ relaunch of the series… not so troubled that I’m boycotting the effort, of course, but troubled enough to catch myself muttering “no… no… that’s not right at all” more than once before the end credits rolled. I suppose that’s to be expected when you give one of this generation’s great hotshot directors license to tinker around with a franchise that’s been around for the better part of fifty years.

I’m not going to go down the road of issuing spoiler alerts and cover the play-by-play of the new movie. I’ll simply say that it’s probably one of the year’s best adventure movies – even allowing for the ubiquitous lens flares and oddly unnecessary moments. It’s even probably a good Star Trek movie – allowing for the wild deviation from the doctrinal story line. Despite the deviation, it’s hard not to appreciate the effort taken at re-envisioning one of the great story arcs from the the original series.

/geek_off

Brew…

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So once upon a time, one of my more farfetched strategies to get back to Maryland involved a scheme to buy the rights to an old Maryland beer’s name and label and re-found the tradition of brewing in Cumberland. For any number of really good reasons, that plan never went past the “that would be cool” phase of research and development. After spending a couple fordham-brewing-logoof hours at the Fordham Brewery in Dover this afternoon, I think it’s safe to say I have a new respect for the art and science of the “small” craft brewer. From what I can tell, it’s about as far from the stovetop brewing I did in my St. Mary’s County condo as a model plane is from the space shuttle.

Alas, it seems that brewery owner is going to be one of those things best retired to the list of ways I’m going to spend my eventual Powerball winnings. If you ever find yourself in Dover on a Saturday and have an hour to kill, I highly recommend stopping in and taking the $5 tour. With a payout of five samples and a free pint glass, how can you afford not to?

End of days…

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For the last year or so I have to admit that I’ve been watching the TEOTWAWKI crowd with at least a passing level of interest. As long as they’re of the relatively harmless variety, crazy people can be good fun. The thing that I can’t understand about the current crop of doomsayers is that they’re convinced that the end of the world is foretold by the fact that Mayathe Mayan calendar “suddenly” ends on December 21st.

I’m not sure the end of days crowd has really thought their argument through all that well. From my cursory understanding of Mesoamerican culture, the Mayan civilization more or less collapsed around 900 AD. I’m not an expert, but I suspect the fall of your civilization tends to mean you have more problems than updating a calendar that’s still good for another 1112 years. Finding water and feeding yourself spring to mind.

Convincing yourself that the world is ending because the Mayan calendar is about to roll over is pretty much like me sitting here convincing myself that the world is ending on December 31st because I haven’t bothered to buy a new wall calendar. It’s just one of these things I haven’t gotten around to yet, but if the historical record is any indication, I wouldn’t bet against the sun coming up on the December 22nd or January 1st. Still, I fully expect the nut jobs to put on a good show in the next few days.

All digital…

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From the OCD projects file, I’m happy to report that I’m well on my way to ripping, and converting my 400+ disk movie and TV series collection. In fact the bookshelf where those disks live is actually starting to look a little bare, with about half the shelf space cleared off. Let me say up front, that while I’m very pleased with how this effort is turning out, getting it done has become a giant pain in the ass.

I’ve got two DVD drives, one in my laptop and the other acquired specifically for this purpose, running pretty much full time whenever I’m home. The conversion software lets off a distinctive “ding” when each disk is finished converting at which point I dash off like one of Pavlov’s dogs to load a new disk and repeat the process. On the average Sunday, I’m averaging eight disks a day between the two computers. That’s more or less one season of a TV show to give you a little perspective. Weekdays seem net about 4 or 5 disks. That doesn’t seem like much until you start really thinking about volume of data I’m slinging around the house wirelessly.

As of this afternoon, there are 687 GB of video sitting on 2TB external hard drive that’s running as my media server. By the time the conversion is finished, I’m expecting to need a 3TB drive (and another as a local backup), because most of what’s left are high definition movies rather than standard definition TV shows. The future might be in the cloud, but I’m old school enough to want a physical copy of all of my data, even if that doesn’t mean hundreds of DVD’s sitting displayed on a shelf.

By the time you add in metadata, cover images, and deal with the occasional other conversion issue that jumps up, I guess this isn’t an undertaking that most people would want to bother with. I’m doing it mostly because I’m a dork and like the idea of being able to access all my media all the time from any device in the house. If you’re the kind of person who’s already inclined to go give up on disks and go fully digital, the effort may well be worth it to you too. After all, who wants to be bothered by such old fashioned tasks as finding a disk, putting it in the DVD player, and waiting for it to load, when the alternative is just finding a comfortable spot, scrolling through the playlist, and hitting the select button?

Newsroom…

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I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about television. Outside of a few shows that I follow religiously, the set usually just runs as background noise. Most people have favorite TV shows or series, but there are probably fewer of us who have favorite TV writers. Still, I’m glad to see one of my favorites making a splash next Sunday night with Newsroom on HBO. Aaron Sorkin’s writing is, well, just dreamy. I loved the super-fast dialog and walk-and-talk’s on West Wing. His characters, for me at least, reach a hard to replicate level of believability for television. If the trailers for Newsroom are to be believed, it looks like he will hit the mark again.

Sure, Sorkin is an evil genius, notoriously hard to work with, and has an ego big as all outdoors, but damn, the man can write. He can suck you in and make you feel the story. Even when you don’t agree with the politics of the characters or even like them very much, he manages to find a way to invest you in the story and in the lives of the characters on screen. Not a handful of other screen writers manage to hit that sweet spot, but he does it more often than not. Plus, he’s writing for an HBO audience now which means the show won’t have to be dumbed down or cleaned up enough to be acceptable to the broadcast networks.

I’m not usually gushy about television, especially a show that hasn’t premiered yet, but I’m going into it wanting to like Newsroom. Come on, I can’t be the only person out there looking forward to seeing the news media through Sorkin’s slightly warped and monolog-ie perspective, right?

From the Mailbag: The Last Crusade…

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The Question: Why Indiana Jones and the Last Crusades is one of the greatest movies?

The Answer: The Last Crusade is one of the defining movies of my childhood. It holds a place of honor among such enduring classics as Back to the Future, The Goonies, Clue, Gremlins, Red Dawn, and The Hunt for Red October. There are a couple of key reasons I always think of it as the first among these worthies.

1. The Nazis. The Nazis are the best enemy ever. They’re devious and evil, but they’re smart. It’s always better when the hero defeats a smart foe.

2. It’s a family thing. Sean Connery and Harrison Ford are two of the 20th century’s great actors. It feels perfectly natural to see them as father and son and to understand the inevitable tension and conflict between them. I suspect that anyone who has been a father or a son can identify easily enough with that bit of the movie.

3. To seek the grail. The quest for the grail is one of our oldest legends. It’s one that’s stuck with us generation after generation for millennia. How can anyone watch Last Crusade and not ponder for a moment what eternal health, eternal youth, and eternal life might be like? The quest for immortality is just about as old as our species and it’s powerful because for all our advances, it remains just out of reach on the other side of the precipice.

4. It holds up. So many movies from childhood are a raging disappointment when you watch them again as an adult. The Last Crusade never disappoints. It’s a morality play about good and evil, about love and loss, and about following your passion and overcoming obstacles.

5. Histo-fiction is fun. The original Indiana Jones trilogy is a throwback to a historical 1930s that never was, but we like to imagine existed. A more innocent time, a time before the world tore itself apart in the last good war, and when the line between good and evil was pretty damned clear and heroes always rode off into the sunset.

Sure, it’s not an epic with the scope of Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind, but a studio could do a lot worse than looking at The Last Crusade to find out how an action movie should be made. Tomb Raider and National Treasure do their best to emulate this kind of storytelling, but they’re at best pale shadows of the original archeological bad ass.

More Counting…

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Breaking with tradition, it’s 8:00 on a Saturday and I’m not pondering the acceptability of crawling into bed while it’s still light outside. That would be because the doors just opened at the Borgata Events Center and sometime in the next hour or so, Counting Crows will be on stage. This falls well inside the circumference of my happy place.

Listening to these guys is always like taking a ride on the way back machine and landing square in the middle of Cambridge Hall, 6th floor, high side.

Time warp…

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Every morning for the last week or two I’ve gotten in the truck, pulled up one of the “current hits” channels on Sirius and had an immediate and visceral “what is this gawd awful noise” kind of response to whatever song happens to be playing. I don’t want to say what I think I’m saying, but damn it, I remember top 40 songs being, well, better. Since life is too short to listen to music you can’t stand, I almost always find myself gravitating towards “the 90s on 9.” Not that I consider the 1990s in any way the high point of music or anything, it just… well… It just sounds better than what I’m hearing on those other channels.

I can’t help but take a nervous look over my shoulder. I know that dad’s satellite radio is more or less stuck on the 50s channel and only occasionally makes a jump over to the 60s. The thought that this is what’s slowly happening to me, has filled be with an unnatural dread. I’m serious. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

As much of a curmudgeon as I am, I still think of myself as at least being passingly in touch with pop culture. I’ve already lost my hair and even though I’ve clearly made my peace with that, I’m just not willing to surrender anything else quite so easily to the evil bastard called aging gracefully. I remember liking music from summer well enough, so I’m crossing my fingers that 2012 is just a particularly bad year in music and not the harbinger of worse things to come. Maybe I’ll just leave it on 90s on 9 and call it a day.