A Smattering of Salmagundi

• Nik and I went and saw Four Brothers over the weekend. It was decent but probably a better rental. Definitely a matinee (as we did) at the most.
• I did note, observing the Coming Soon posters in the lobby and during the trailers, that I have a higher-than-usual number of films awaiting release that I’m anticipating: Serenity, The Chronicles of Narnia, Corpse Bride, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Wallace and Grommit, X-Men 3 (even though they’re not going with my idea—of course), Underworld: Evolution and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
• Some I’m skeptical about: Flightplan (Does this look like The Forgotten on a plane to anyone else?), King Kong (Really? King Kong? Uh… why?), and Aeon Flux (I had some friends in high school who liked the Liquid TV/MTV cartoon, but I couldn’t get into it. Stylistic, but—and coming from me this is saying something—too cultish in the writing department. Plus, Charlize Theron? Blugh.).
• Speaking of Harry Potter, like every good fan I pre-ordered my copy of The Half-Blood Prince weeks ago, but since then I’ve started and stopped reading it about twenty times. The reason is that I can’t remember what happened in book five to save my life. I keep hoping if I press through it will start to make some sense, but so far that is not happening. I read Order of the Phoenix like in the two days after it came out and that was so long ago… I know the events at the end of the book were important to the overall story being told, but I can only remember a few events/scenes. So this weekend I, with great reluctance, picked up my copy of Phoenix. Again. Curse my poor reading retention!
• I keep seeing this story about the iPod silhouette model who “can’t afford an iPod.” Um, okay. What bugs me about this is that every news service that picked up the story reports it exactly this way: “Iconic iPod model can’t afford to buy the product she’s shilling.” Which makes it sound like Apple didn’t pay her enough to even buy an iPod. But in fact they paid her $1,500 for three hours of modeling work (which is, as at least one of the stories pointed out, standard wage for such work). That this particular individual had other things to do with that money than buy an iPod is, in my opinion, only a passing curiosity not really a shocking development.
• Slashdot mentions today that RSS may have won over Atom in the Syndication protocol race. For once a Slashdot poster comes up with a reasoned comment stating that it is functionally irrelevant anyway since nearly all aggregators and parsers work equally well on the various RSS versions and Atom, plus many content management systems and blog software auto-generates both feed types. Besides, just because Microsoft is throwing their weight behind their embraced-and-extended RSS variant (known for now as “Web Feeds”) in the (cough) forthcoming Longhorn doesn’t mean RSS can do a victory lap just yet. In any case all I know is that when I have the option of Atom or RSS to put into NewsFire (my aggregator of choice) I always pick Atom because the feeds are usually cleaner, more complete and less prone to errors. This could be nothing more than coincidence or luck but there you go.
• I downloaded the new Corrosion of Conformity album from iTunes yesterday. COC, at least since Pepper Keenan came on board, has been solid from “Deliverance” to the stunningly brilliant “Wiseblood” and then the criminally underrated “America’s Volume Dealer.” I hoped that Keenan’s appearance at the Metallica bass player tryouts during Some Kind of Monster didn’t mean COC was over with. I guess not. The new album (“In the Arms of God”) is something of a departure from the bluesy, swaggering southern metal they nearly perfected on the previous two albums and channels Black Sabbath almost eerily at times. But that’s not really a bad thing and while some of the sheer beauty of their riff construction has been traded for a more punishing grind, I’m initially impressed with the new stuff. I saw the album at Rasputin’s on Friday coming home from working over at Eggsites on my day off from the City but it was used for $14.99 (what the heck?!) and they had no new copy so I gambled that iTunes would come through. They did and I felt better about legitimately supporting a band that I gather could use the support.
• I also picked up a few Guided by Voices tracks based off a dimly remembered tip from last year and was more or less pleasantly surprised with the quality. It’s dingy alt-punk/rock and I really know nothing about the band so maybe everyone else discovered them back in like 1987 and I’m so late to the party I’m sitting here thinking this is cool new stuff and it’s all retro chic or something. Whatever. Good tunes.
• I’ve had “Learn to encrypt email” sitting on my mental to-do list for like three years now and I started thinking today, “You know, everything else is really easy with OS X, why not public-key encryption in Mail.app?” Well, it’s not really that simple but it isn’t as bad as it had been when I tried back in my Linux-on-the-Desktop days so hopefully by the end of the day I should have me a nice new public GPG key and be ready to share trade secrets via email with the best of ’em. Not that anyone else I know uses encrypted email, but it’s nice to know that I could if the need arose.
• After my video game rant last week I decided to put (some of) my money where my mouth was and go try some games. My beloved locally-owned video store closed down a couple of weeks ago due to some leasing snafu and the insufferably high property values around here which really chaps my hide. My utter refusal to darken the doorway of a Blockbuster is well chronicled but without Home Video (a very original name, I know) to serve my impulse renting needs (Netflix is still my primary source of DVD rentals) I’m stuck with Hollywood Video. Hollywood at least tries to display something that resembles customer service but they’re a crummy mega-franchise so they have the same 16 movies at every store, no stock movies worth mentioning (“Oh look, twenty-four copies of Batman and Robin”) and their video games are about as far behind as I am. Anyway the only game I ended up being able to actually rent and then subsequently play was Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The problem with that game is that it’s all about the exploration in Metroid and I don’t have that kind of time with a rental so I’ve been doing the GameFAQs Walkthrough routine which really cheapens the experience. I will say that I thought the Phazon suit from Prime was the coolest thing I’d seen in a long time, but the new Dark Suit in Echoes leaves the Phazon suit in the dust.

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