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May be a bit hyperbolic, but I think you might agree once you hear what it is. I was channel surfing tonight and came across an episode of Future Cars on the Discover Channel. This one was titled "The Brain" and was talking about how changes in computing power will influence the design and capabilities of the car of the future. Basically, your car is going to get really smart (smarter than the vast majority of drivers, I have to assume.) As someone who actually enjoys driving, I have to say I found a lot of the ideas and concepts they were floating anywhere from annoying to downright chilling. I hated the idea of the "Senso" from Sweden… a car that can sense your driving style and mood and will change the interior color scheme to soothing colors and your music to easy listening if it finds you driving too aggressively. (Might as well call it the Orwell .) While I found the concept of the "Automatrix" somewhat less annoying, I'm not entirely sure I...

I can't begin to describe how much I enjoyed this movie. After month's of dreck, with only the occasional good film to keep me interested, it's so refreshing to honestly enjoy a film without caveats or disclaimers. At times beautiful and haunting, at others terrifying and disturbing, Pan's Labyrinth does an amazing job of blending its two stories into a seamless whole. Del Toro does something that I only seem to see in European films, a blending of disparate, but equally important and powerful themes into one film. The first time I saw this was in The Unbearable Lightness of Being , where the story of a man's love affairs are set against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. More recently, I watched The Dreamers , a Bernardo Bertolucci film about a trio of young cinéastes who fall into love and bed with each other, all set against the backdrop of the '68 Paris student riots. In both movies, the political background is used to bring a greater depth to the pers...

I leave that to real journalists, like Tim Rutten in his Regarding Media column from last week's Sunday LA Times. But I've gotta figure, what's the point of one more person chiming in on the Anna Nicole Smith story, you know? But this week has really pushed this over the top. First, there's video of Anna, obviously out of it, seriously pregnant, in clown makeup with a baby doll in a carriage. And her lawyer/friend/would-be baby daddy Howard K. Stern heard on the tape telling her the video's "going to be worth millions". Then comes word that she was prescribed methadone under an assumed name, by some doctor she's seen rolling around with in a West Hollywood gay bar, while Howard (yes, that Howard) and the other wanta-be babby daddy, Larry Birkhead are looking on. Mom, Howard and god only knows who else are fighting over where she's going to be buried. Her dad, whom no one's heard from in over 20 years, has suddenly crawled out of the woodwork. ...

Went to the movies yesterday ( Ghost Rider , if you must know. Much as with the writer/director's previous film, Daredevil , it was pretty unimpressive.) But I had to laugh during the "pre-show entertainment" (Seriously, who the hell do they think they're fooling with that crap? It's 20 minutes of advertisements, I don't care how you dress it up.) Anyway, there was a spot that starts off in the 60's with the family looking over at the TV to watch a rocket launching and the family mouthing "wow!", then it segued to other "wow" moments, including one of a woman watching the fall of the Berlin wall, followed by, presumably her husband, coming into the apartment with a piece of that wall. There were other historical "wows", as well as some more nature type moments (a guy sees a dear on the street as he's jogging, etc.). But those two moments are the ones I remember, because they're such BIG moments, historically speaking....

With the news of Anna Nicole Smith's death yesterday, you had to figure it was only a matter of time (and a short amount of time, at that) before the custody battle ramps up. After all, her 5-month old daughter COULD end up the heir to millions, depending on how Anna's battle over her late husband's estate is finally resolved. We knew that her attorney/friend/husband (?) Howard K. Stern and former boyfriend Larry Birkhead were going to continue slugging it out. And I assumed that it wouldn't take long before Anna's mom jumped into the fray. After all, who better than family to look after that poor (metaphorically speaking) little girl? Whether it's Anna's mom that makes that realization, or one of the bevy of lawyers surely to be circling the household like a murder of crows is beside the point. But then comes this gem , in which Zsa Zsa Gabor's eighth husband, Prince Frederick von Anhalt, reveals that he's had a decade long affair with Anna. He says...

Every once in a while, a commercial comes along that just annoys the hell out of me. Honda's latest "we just want to apologize" campaign has captured one of those moments. In the commercial, the guy from Honda is talking to some woman and says he "just wants to help." So she leads him to a room where her pet parrot (or whatever) resides, and tells him the birds cage needs changing... "Bad". I mean, come ON! How difficult is it to get something like THAT right? It doesn't even SOUND right. f'ing morons. That's it. No more Hondas for me.  

Ok, so I just heard this word on tonight's episode of Bones . According to Urban Dictionary , it's been around since at least 2004, but tonight was the first I'd heard it. For anyone that's ever been caught in one, this is a perfect word to describe the event. Click on the wrong link/banner/search result and suddenly your computer is deluged with cascading windows of the pornographic kind. I haven't been caught in a pornado in a long time, it seems. Nor sure if that's because browsers have gotten better at combating this one, or the porn sites have moved to different tactics, or maybe I'm just not browsing in questionable turf these days. Whatever the case, this truly captures the experience.  

As you've probably heard, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an exhaustive report Friday on greenhouse gasses and global warming… Report: Humans 'very likely' cause global warming - CNN.com The gist of the report is that global warming is real, there's no doubt, and we'd better get ready for it. Surprisingly (especially in light of these revelations ), the White House not only acknowledged the report, but even went so far as to acknowledge the results… that global warming does indeed exist. Of course, part of the reason they accepted this report and its conclusions, while they've ignored so may other reports over the past six years, probably has more than a little to do with the ultimate conclusion the IPCC reached… global warming is real, but it's too late for us to do anyting to change anything. All we can do is prepare to weather the worst of it. That's right, the President can now acknowledge that global warming is real since he can...