I saw Grindhouse over the weekend when my friend Joey JoJo Shabadu Jr was in town. The easiest word is of course spectacle, it doses you with incredible amounts of gore and schlock, dishing out cornball cliches and explosive violence at every turn.

But in the end, I think exhilarating wins the day as a way to describe Grindhouse. By the time I left the theatre I was so amped up that I felt as if I had just gone through a physical workout.

Of the two feature films in Grindhouse, I think I enjoyed Planet Terror more, if only because standing alone it would be one of the best zombie movies ever made. But Death Proof is certainly a fine accompanying piece, even though I wouldn’t have likely seen it were it issued by itself.

Sadly, this movie hasn’t shown well at the marketplace and thus we likely will never see Grindhouse 2 featuring Thanksgiving and Machete. But still, see this one in theatres while you still can.

I forgot to mention this when it was still news.  However, I should publicly admit that I was wrong about Apple’s intentions towards music DRM.  I thought that their DRM was designed an intentional anticompetitive move in order to foster lock-in for iPods, and that their anti-DRM grumblings were just posturing to make themselves look better to their flock of true believers.

However, this is apparently not the case since they have followed through with their words and enabled DRM-free music from the music label which approved of the move.  This means that a song bought from the iTMS can be played on any music player, making the iPod just one amongst several competitors in the digital music players market instead of a required piece of a proprietary iTMS solution.

Apple must realize that they make a quality product with the iPod and that people are willing to pay a premium for that product even without anticompetitive lock-in. Time will tell, but they may even sell more as they market a more worthwhile product on iTMS.  Regardless, kudos to Apple and I was wrong.

Next time you think you had a bad day, think of the guy in the picture here.

Major kudos go out to John Edwards and Barack Obama for spurning FOX “news”.  It’s nice to see FOX finally being rewarded with the marginalization it has so long deserved.

What a dilemma they must face.  On the one hand, they want to complain about how the Iranians treated the captured UK prisoners.  But on the other hand, the tactics the Iranians used were less harsh than those the White House argued it should be able to use against detainees.

Thankfully I’m sure by now they’re already used to stretching the truth and twisting facts and holding steadfastly to double standards.  But man, that must be tiring.

That’s right, they now hit 45km/h!

A friend recommended I check out Mike Judge’s new movie Idiocracy, which as he suggested was a very funny movie which was somehow completely overlooked by most people.  The general plot is that the extremely average protagonist is cryogenically frozen for five centuries and emerges into a world where humans have been bred into incredible stupidity leaving him by far the most brilliant person on the planet.

Of course, you have to get past the outstanding hypocrisy of the man who created “Beavis and Butthead” lecturing us on the dumbing down of our culture.  With all of the references in the film I’m rather surprised he didn’t poke fun at his own creation in this way.

It really bothers me that I can’t figure out how to properly play the children’s game of Connect Four.  For some reason, I’ve never been able to grasp the strategy of it and consistently fail to spot the patterns which would enable me to both stop the opposing player and to make any serious play at success.

It’s not that I expect that I’m so smart that I ought to be superior at everything — even if I were mediocre I could accept that.  I am mediocre at the game of chess and I fully understand and accept my limitations in that arena. But Connect Four seems so damn simple, yet I’m unable to beat a computer player at anything beyond the simplest and easiest level.  It’s so frustrating, even when I concentrate and try to observe strategy in motion I keep being surprised and lose, from when I was a kid all the way up to today.

There seems to be something about the mechanism or patterns in the game which my apparently feeble brain is unable to grasp.  Oh well, at least it’s not anything important.