As for the show, much of the hosting fell flat, but who cares. Awards shows are great and I always love them. It was great to see Bryan Cranston win the lead actor award for Breaking Bad; a great show that no one apparently watches. And it was especially great to see Mad Men win Best Drama; what a terrific show.

As I have mentioned before I am not motivated by achievements but this did feel pretty good. What set this game apart was that all achievements were, forgive me, achievable. I didn’t have to play through the whole game 5 times or drive every road on the island or kill a member of the design team online. Helping me in my quest was the intertubes with walk-throughs and lists of all the achievements. It would have been more meaningful if I had gotten it all without the assistance but I am at peace with it. I didn’t use any cheat codes to skip anything. I earned it all – just with a map telling me exactly how to get there when I got stuck.

Even worse is the attempt to play the “perfect” song for every story so “Rock You Like a Hurricane” leads into a story about a tropical storm brewing in Bermuda. Get it? Cause see the lyrics say hurricane and the tropical storm might become a hurricane… And then the newsreader/anchortron tries to tie the lyrics into the story. “Changes” by David Bowie plays, and is then followed with “Changes in the way people are using their credit cards.” How can you even parody that? It’s caught in its own Escher-like parody loop.

The Daily Show played a number of examples each achieving the same high bar of stupidity. It’s no wonder to me that the Amercan public is so woefully uninformed on the critical issues of the day. They’re being treated like Ralph Wiggum who summed it up with, “It says Choo-choo-choose you and there’s a picture of a train on it!” There sure is Ralph, there sure is.

Please. The Dark Knight has a fairly giant uphill climb before it even enters the top 25. Can we get serious about how we define success?

1) Inflation Adjustment
To compare box office results across different eras, it’s important to equalize the measuring stick. The fact is that a dollar went a lot further in 1968 than in 2008. Fortunately the holy grail of box office office web site, Box Office Mojo, did this legwork for us. They have a formula based on generally accepted inflation rates, to show how much movies of different eras would have made in current dollars.

The upshot is that the supposed current champ, Titanic, has actually made 908 million dollars domestic in current dollars, not the 600 million typically reported. And Titanic isn’t even in the top five. The Ten Commandments, E.T., The Sound of Music, Star Wars, and Gone with the Wind are all well ahead of Titanic. Gone with the Wind, in fact, made 1.4 BILLION dollars adjusted for inflation. By this standard, the Dark Knight has a very long way to go to catch up. As of today, the Dark Knight‘s 350 million dollar haul put it at number 13 on the all-time list. But if you adjust for inflation, that figure drops precipitously to number 94.

2) International Haul
It’s interesting that box office receipts are reported in the news almost exclusively in terms of domestic receipts. Given the incredible weakness of the American dollar, and the growth in the international markets, most of the money a modern movie brings in typically comes for overseas. In the cast of the Dark Knight, this will almost certainly ultimately be the case as well. Yet the domestic market is the sole indicator typically used to measure success.

Look at Titanic again. It brought in an astounding 600 million domestic in 1997 dollars. But it also brought in an incredible 1.2 BILLION additional dollars internationally for a full take of 1.8 billion dollars. This emphasis on the domestic take has the effect of giving the impression that major money makers were actually flops. Consider Troy, the sand and sandals epic of four years ago. It brought in what was considered a weak domestic haul of 133 million. But worldwide the movie brought in half a billion dollars. Yet is is still considered a massive underperformer in many circles. The point is that in the modern marketplace, we should stop talking exclusively about domestic haul and start reporting on the worldwide box office first.

3) Number of tickets sold verus population
If we’re going to adjust box office numbers for inflation, we should also consider just how many butts were put in seats during the theatrical run of the film, and contrast those numbers with the actual domestic population at the time to get a more accurate picture of the relative popularity of the film. (The domestic take also includes Canada, but I’m just going to focus on the US).

the Dark Knight’s current 350 million domestic haul, this means that about 43 million tickets have been sold at about 8 bucks a ticket.

Let’s compare this to 1982, when E.T. ruled the theaters. Adjusted for inflation, E.T. made one billion dollars domestic,with means that about 125 million tickets would have been sold at an inflation adjusted 8 bucks a ticket.

So clearly the E.T. haul is much, much higher than the Dark Knight; it is even more successful when you realize that the US Population in 1982 was only 232 million compared the the current US Population of 303 million. Meaning that there were tickets sold for more than half of the population. The current take for the Dark Knight isn’t even at one ticket sold for every six Americans.

It would be harder to compare to Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and The Ten Commandments, because they had initial “Road Show” releases at significantly higher ticket prices, but the facts are fairly clear: in much smaller markets, these film put many, many more butts in seats than the Dark Knight will ever hope to do.

None of this is meant to particularly rain on the parade of the Dark Knight. The film is doing fantastically well. But if you were to utilize accurate methods of comparison against other tops movies, the Dark Knight is almost certain to end up as an also ran.

I’m sure I’m not alone in being sick of hearing the Heath Ledger drumbeat; the Oscar talk, the brilliance of his performance, his ascension to the seat at the right-hand of God etc, all based on this performance. Can we STFU about it already? But the thing is, it turns out he is terrific. Incredible actually. He’s pulled off that rare accomplishment of delivering a clearly mannered performance, where it is evident that much work went into the mechanics and cadence of the performance, yet it didn’t seem mannered. At all.

Aaron Eckhart almost matches him in a much different role. As the idealistic, yet pragmatic District Attorney Harvey Dent, he’s thoroughly believable in an unbelievable universe.

Christian Bale is OK as the Bat-Man*; I still have never gotten used to how the various actors playing Bat-Man lower their voice to a growl when they put on the rubber ears. This version seemed especially bad. It seems clear that he’s not doing this to hide his identity because the few people he encounters as Bat-Man that also know Bruce Wayne already know he’s Bat-Man anyway. It comes across a bit as a weak man trying act like a tough man.

The Gotham of the Dark Knight is just a bit more grounded in reality than the Gotham of Batman Begins, with its myriad monorails floating  hundreds of feet in the air and plumbed through and between buildings. For the most part this makes for a better film experience.

The film does an extremely nuanced and effective job of developing the stories of Bruce Wayne/Bat-Man, Harvey Dent/Two-Face, Commissionar Gordon, and the Joker. For the Joker, there is no back story; and as snippets of the movie purport to tell the origins of his madness, we gradually learn they are all lies. The Joker is just a madman; there is no explanation. How refreshing.

Knowing that Harvey Dent was to become Two-Face, I spent much of the too-long movie wondering “when does he burn his face and become the villain that we know and love?”. It’s a good thing though that the transformation came so late in the movie, because for once the origin story IS the story; it took me to the end of the film to realize it. Most comic book movies seem to follow the same tired formula; the first third features highly compressed origin stories of the heroes and villains, the second third sets up the conflict, and the final third has the giant battle. But with the Dark Knight, the conflict is all about morality in an immoral world, and how sometimes there is no right choice to make.  When Dent makes the choice to become Two-Face it’s entirely understandable and his anger and villainy is almost defensible. He WAS the white knight and he played by the rules. And he was destroyed because of it.

Of course the complexity of this morality play is undercut by a presentation that seems at times to revel in fairly random and reckless killing of innocents and villains alike, yet at other times the entirety of the movie hinges on specific moral decisions by decent people and criminals alike to protect the lives of their fellow man, even at the expense of their own. When these moments arrived, it felt a bit like the final reel of a different movie had been spliced in accidentally; when did the lives of people suddenly start to matter?

Iron Man set the standard of comic book adaptations. You walked out of the theater jazzed, planning to see the movie again. With the Dark Knight you walk out impressed by many of the performances and the reach of the story line and character development, but ambivalent about the overall film because of it’s tonal inconsistencies.

*I’ve always preferred the original DC comic naming convention of “the Bat-Man” over the name “Batman.” It seems so retro, yet modern.

I also cringed at the the successful efforts in the 2000 election to paint him as a serial credit-taker (“I invented the internet” etc.), when it was clear that he was not, in fact guilty, of taking the credit he had been accused of.

So it pained me to watch Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw this morning, with Al Gore as a guest. In the recorded introduction Brokaw said of Gore “he has since focused on his environmental crusade, winning an Oscar for his documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ as well as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.”

Umm… Newsflash to Brokaw at NBC news: Davis Guggenheim won the Documentary Feature Oscar for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which featured Gore. Gore didn’t win the award any more than Robert McNamara won the Oscar for “The Fog of War” (directed by Errol Morris and featuring McNamara).

So at this point in the show, I’m just disappointed in NBC and Brokaw for their poor fact-checking.

Then, Brokaw introduced Gore live. “Nobel laureate, Oscar winner. Crusader for conservation of energy…” While Brokaw was saying this, the camera was focused on Gore. He bowed his head down slightly like an elder statesmen to acknowledge the credits that Brokaw was extending his way… but he doesn’t bother to correct Brokaw when he described his “Oscar win.”

Ugh. This is very disappointing; This isn’t even nuanced. Gore did not win the Oscar. He could have quickly corrected Brokaw and moved on, but he didn’t bother.

I can see why NBC and Brokaw made the mistake: Do a quick Google search on “Al Gore” and “won the Oscar” or “Oscar winner” and you’ll get about 100,000 pages returned. do the same for Davis Guggenheim and you’ll get less than 10,000 pages.

But come on Al! Brokaw was speaking right to you on national TV. You had an obligation to correct the guy! Stop giving ammunition to your critics.

Full text and clip of Guggenheim’s acceptance speech at the Oscars (he invited Gore on stage to also say a few words).

Download the Meet the Press Podcast from iTunes (the offending parts are all in the first two minutes).

Seems Joss got frustrated during the writers strike and decided to try and launch a project entirely on his own. Or as he puts it, with the help of everyone he’s ever worked with or is related to. The result is reachable through that image on the side. It’s free through midnight on July 20th, then goes to iTunes, then off to DVD release where hopefully the money rolls in.

This is what the future looks like. Creative people putting out content outside of the established production system. Of course the trick is that were it not for the established production system where he made Buffy and all that no one would know who Joss Whedon is. So really the future is how someone like Joss does it without needing the production system to exist at all. But this is an important step.

Also, it’s got Nathan Fillion with a hammer sticker on his chest. If I were at comic-con next week I would so have that shirt.

Apparently there were three techs because the lead tech was training the other two techs; Verizon is clearly gearing up for a LOT of installations. Comcast should be checking their diapers right now.

I thought it was funny that one of the techs lived right near me, and therefore has received the same onslaught of material from Comcast in their efforts to badmouth Verizon. He pointed out to me something that I didn’t realize; when Comcast refers to their new “burst speed” of 12 mbs, apparently that means that they cannot maintain that speed consistently because of the limitation of their network. They don’t want to be sued for not consistently maintaining that speed, apparently, so they came up with a name (“burst”) that would allow them to claim the speed, without actually having to deliver it all the time.

Anyway, enough about Comcast. My initial thoughts about the FIOS is pretty much all good. Using the various broadband speedtests, I definitely am getting the advertised 20mbs/5mbs speeds to locations across the western US. It gets slower speeds to the east coast and much slower to Europe.

Interestingly, my desk pc could never get the full speed because it’s clear that my hard drive and bus aren’t fast enough; you could hear it plugging away trying to write the data fast enough as it came down the network (this computer is really pretty old).

Also, my Slingbox client is MUCH faster. To me this shows that Comcast may be doing something hinky with slingplayer data, or there is a limitation with their networks that reduces the quality. Basically the slingbox is a point-to-point constant signal from a TV at a remote location to your computer. The quality of the signal is entirely dependent on the upload bandwidth at the TVs end and your download bandwidth at the computer end. My dad’s house (where the slingbox is located) has 1.5 mbs upload available, and I’ve always had 6 or 8 mbs available download at my house. Yet I would have to set my slingbox to a limit of about 800 kbs (in other words about a tenth of my download bandwidth and half of my dad’s upload bandwidth) because the signal was not consistently strong enough at a higher bit rate. I always assumed that this was because of limitations at the upload end at my dad’s house.

But NOW I can easily get 1300 kbs at my computer; or almost double what I could get from Comcast. This doesn’t make any sense; in both cases I am just using a small fraction of the available bandwidth. My suspicion is that either Comcast is throttling slingbox-type data (like they do with P2P data), or their network is just inherently unable to provide consistent data streams, even though the AVERAGE speed is relatively fast (I suspect it is the later more than the former).

The FIOS folks also mentioned that Verizon has gotten approval for TV services in our area; service begins in about two months. I’m definitely going to try it, but it hardly matters at this point because of the slingbox.

Oh, and one thing that I’ve always known going in, but it serves to remind people who are interested in the various speeds available through FIOS; at 20mps or 30 mbs or 50 mbs, the limiting factor becomes the upload speed at the other end of whatever your trying to download. It doesn’t matter how faster your connection is if the server you’re downloading your data from is slow. And, as I’ve found out with my old desktop computer, your computer itself might not be able to take advantage of the full speed.

I preface this by saying I do not have the first iPhone. In advance of the iPhone 3G announcement I was convinced they would be for sale the same day it was announced and I was prepared to pick one up on the way home. Unfortunately there was almost a month to wait and it just made me want it more. I am not a profligate spender – I am a cheapass and I hate collecting stuff so this was not idle gimme gimme gimme. This was well-considered gimme gimme gimme.

The big unknown was how popular it was going to be on release day and how long each activation would take. When the first one came out you could walk right in that afternoon and pick one up feeling vaguely superiors o the people who waited in line just that morning. Activation was handled at home and there were some random delays but nothing too tragic. And then a whole mess of iPhones were either hacked or bought and whisked out of the country. So now it’s mandatory in-store activation.

I prepared for the big day by calling AT&T the week before and made sure I was upgrade eligible and that the corporate discount my wife put on our account wouldn’t be an issue. They said no problem on either front. According to their website, there were only 2 AT&T stores within 25 miles of my house selling the item. The closest Apple store is in a mall and not that convenient. I have a job and a life so that whole waiting in line overnight thing wasn’t going to happen.

Friday morning on the way to work I drove by the first AT&T store and saw the line wrapping around the corner. I drove less then a mile to the 2nd store, pulled into the parking lot, rolled down the window and asked if the line was moving. They said not really, but it didn’t matter as that location had 30 of them and there was more than that in line. That pesky where to buy decision had now been dealt with and so off to work. I called the Apple store at lunch and was told there were 200 people in line. By this point the Apple activation servers had come back up, following a few hours of not working quite so much.

After work I went down to the Apple store and was told the line was about 2.5-3 hours. It was 5:00 and I thought sure. As it happens that number must have referred to only the bit of line that was in the service corridor and not the bit that was set up in the little maze in front of the store. Or the final bit of line actually inside the store. Fortunately the people around me in line were friendly and not idiots. (The one time I waited overnight for tickets was for Pink Floyd and the doorknob next to me turned to his compatriot and asked with no hint of irony what if his name was Purple Floyd. Oy.)

Finally inside the store and helped around 10:15 or 10:30. I got the impression the poor guy had been given a 5 minute version of the training and had been pressed into helping. The handheld computer choked on my account’s corporate discount. He went off to question those with the more robust training and the answer was that maybe I could open a new account with a new number, call AT&T the next day to get them to fix it. Infuriated that the previous call to AT&T hadn’t addressed that issue I gritted my teeth and told them to proceed. That potential morass was avoided not a moment later when the handheld computer stopped working. And then all of the handheld computers stopped working. After a phone call to HQ (about another 20 minutes) it was passed on that the AT&T servers were down and wouldn’t be back up till 5 a.m. Brilliant. Everyone was very apologetic, distributed vouchers that would let you skip to the front of the line the next day and off you go now. 6 hours standing in line for a fastpass. Woooooooo.

Saturday morning I woke up early anyway and decided to try for round two. I called AT&T to remove that horrible filthy corporate discount from my account and motored in. Arrived a few moments after open to find approximately the same line situation as the last night. I presented my get out of jail free card to the guard and was invited to join the in-store line where I greeted familiar faces from the previous evening’s adventure. Our shared suffering brought us together. I told those around me of having to explain to my wife that I’d spent 6 hours on a lovely Friday evening in line with nothing to show for it and they nodded knowingly.

About 15 minutes in the Assistant Manager decided to change-up the line workings and organize by voucher/fastpass number. This would have been a fine idea but for two issues. Issue one is that people had already been waiting that morning and this reorg would push them back further. I was at the end of the line so it couldn’t get any worse for me. The second issue was that the vouchers had not been distributed in a careful and reasoned manner the previous night. It stands to reason that the guy in the middle of activating a phone (me) would be in front of a guy in the line who had not yet been helped but turns out that guy got number 1 and I got number 14. Which was ok until I was actually at the front of the line Saturday morning and mister number 1 walks into the store to immediately push me back in line. Oy.

Finally salvation was at hand when I was next up. The phone activated without a hitch, they threw in a free case to salve the pain, and off I went an hour later. (I would have preferred free AppleCare but whatever.) As I exited the store I heard a guy at the front of the maze line becoming irritated that the regular line hadn’t actually moved in an hour. I felt for the guy because the rules were being changed on him and he was helpless to do anything about it. But come on dude, I put in 7 hours and 2 car trips.

I haven’t seen any official explanation as to why the Apple servers choked earlier on Friday or if the AT&T server were really undergoing scheduled maintenance Friday night but honestly it was a pretty crappy consumer experience. I think the Apple store people did a pretty good job considering the day they must have had, though I think the numbers system could have been better handled. It was also obvious that the morning shift wasn’t expecting everyone from the previous night’s denial to show up at once and that was just silly. If I was new to Apple this would not have endeared me to them. Sadly I’ve been drinking the Jobs punch for a long time and while this was lame it wasn’t enough abuse to drive me away.

I’m not waiting in line again though unless whatever it is pays my mortgage for me. 

Essentially the theater turned up the right channel to earbleed levels. I knew something was up when the trailer for the Mummy III came up (which I’ve seen in theaters at least three times so far), and the funny line that Brendan Fraser says while in a plane about to crash — “why am I laughing?”) was completely drowned out by the effect sounds. I sat through the opening credits of Hellboy to see if it would change; and it didn’t. So I went out to talk to an attendant; he followed me back in and listened for a while while I went back to my seat. I was hopeful that something would change, but nothing did.

It’s odd watching a movie where the ambient channels of the soundtrack are louder than the prime dialogue; in scenes where Hellboy is walking through a crowded street, you distinctly hear the background dialogue of the extras over the voice of Hellboy. Certain music cues that are intended to blend into the background are out there front and center. And the dialogue all sounds like it’s coming from the next theater.

And to top it off, they hadn’t turned on the Air Conditioning; and the theater was just this side of too hot; probably about 78 to 80 degrees. Bleh.

The predecessor to this theater was the late, non-lamented Grand Cinemas Alderwood. During the long slide towards closure, the theater was incapable of screening any films without screwups. The last 13 times I attended a movie there, SOMETHING was wrong, from images spilling onto the curtain, to out of sync tracks, to continual problems with focus. (Which of course prompts any rational person to wonder why I kept going back; I simply have no answer to that).

The Grand Cinemas Alderwood was a great theater once. The Alderwood Mall 16Plex is currently a great theater. I just hope the experience today isn’t part of the same trend that ruined it’s older brother.

Oh, and Hellboy II? Great movie.

But before all that came the lies: he started by telling me that “you’ve probably seen the trucks in your neighborhood installing the fiber optic wires.” This is a clear lie; Verizon has been in our neighborhood for the last two months (at various times) installing fiber, NOT comcast. This is the same tactic that Comcast used on the door hangers they left throughout my neighborhood; basically they take advantage of a vague understanding that there is a new fiber optic service available, couple it with the sight of work trucks in our neighborhood, and leave the distinct impression that the new fiber service and works trucks are theirs and not Verizon’s.

It’s to my infinite shame that I didn’t shut my mouth and let the guy spin his web of bullcrap. I was so excited to tell him that I am about to cancel Comcast that I cut off his opportunity to further lie.

That said, it did feel quite good to tell him how much I hate Comcast, how frustrated I was for them ripping my dad off for two years, and for lying about their own non-existant fiber service. And I especially loved telling him about how Comcast is just a whisker away from winning the steaming golden turd trophy from Consumerist as the worst company in America (that bit of news clearly took him aback).

He kept pressing me with the advantages of Comcast’s service. He pointed out that they have a 16 megabit “Blast” service with 2 meg upload. Of course I signed up for 20 meg dowload and 5 meg upload from Verizon for the same price. When he pressed the point, I felt like asking him if he knew basic math (“is 20 greater than or less than 15? How about 5 and 2?”)

He also mentioned that Comcast is “very competitive” I have to give him credit for that. You can’t see a movie in my area without seeing ads for Comcast alternately dissing Verizon’s fiber service while promoting their own. You can’t pass a billboard in my area that isn’t promoting Comcast’s “fiber service” at the expense of Verizon. You can’t open your mail box without getting misleading junk mail from Comcast. You can’t open your front door without bullcrap door hangers filled with lies about the “superior” Comcast product. And apparently you can’t sit at home having lunch without a Comcast rep personally interrupting you to lie to you.

The problem is that Comcast is competitive in marketing, not service. And the time to have been competitive in service would have been last year. Or the year before. Like every other monopoly, they basically sat on their lead, giving us subpar service at inflated prices. Just like when DirecTV began eating into their cable TV monopoly, Comcast only gets “competitive” when it’s too late.

I had already shut the door on him when I realized I should have pointed out that nowhere on the Comcast web site can you find out exactly how much there service costs. Yet it took all of 5 seconds to find out the prices on the Verizon site. Ah well, given Comcast’s history, I’ll probably have another rep out within the week, providing a further opportunity to continue the harangue.

It’s not the best start with Verizon, given that I probably submitted my contact info on their website at least 30 times to be informed of service availability, called Verizon three separate times, and even went out and gave the crew installing the fiber backbone donuts two months ago… yet I never received notice of service availability. I just discovered it by checking their web site. Hopefully this doesn’t portend to bad things.

Also, they don’t have approval for TV service yet; which doesn’t really matter to me right now; I’ll just be happy with my 20 meg download 5 meg upload.

Goodbye Comcast, you horrible, awful company.

We’ve had a parade of trucks in our neighborhood the last few months as giant spools of fiber optic cable have been pulled into place. So it’s nice for Comcast to let us know that the service is now available.

Except those f**ktard lying scumbags at Comcast aren’t the ones who have been adding fiber optic to my neighborhood; Verizon is the one that’s been systematically adding the fiber. Comcast isn’t adding fiber, and as near as I can tell has no plans to add fiber to my neighborhood or any other neighborhood, other than in a backbone sense.

Basically, the scum at Comcast are banking that my neighbors and myself will be confused by all of the work that Verizon has done and assume that it was actually Comcast performing the work. They are banking that their double-speak flyer will confuse us enough to assume that if we sign up for their new, faster service, that we will be getting the ”fiber optic” service that we’ve heard so much about. But their new service is 2 to 10 times slower than what we’ll be able to get from Verizon.

They know that Verizon hasn’t advertised their FIOS service to our neighborhood yet because they haven’t fully completed their work. Comcast timed their little note to arrive a few weeks before Verizon began their own advertising blitz, hoping (I assume) to tie up customers with a year-long agreement for their infinitely slower, infinitely lamer service.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that this isn’t the first time Comcast has tried to screw me or my family. It probably won’t be the last. And Comcast calls EVERY SINGLE DAY trying to get me to sign up for their new service. I never answer, but I’m looking at my caller ID unit right now and they’ve called 10 times in the last two weeks (I Googled the number and sure enough, about 7 million other people are getting the same calls).

Here’s the complete text of the door hanger, with my annoted thoughts:

“We are continuing to upgrade the fiber optic network in your neighbhorhood”
[Like every major Internet provider, we have fiber backbones to our networks. We periodically upgrade these networks and we're currently upgrading one of our networks in your "neighborhood," if you define neighborhood as somewhere in a 50 mile radius. But don't for a second think that those trucks you've seen on your street installing fiber optic cable are OUR trucks. They're not. Despite what we're implying here, we have no plans to offer a direct-to-your-house fiber optic service.]

“Our latest upgrade allows us to deliver the next generation of High-Speed Internet with speeds up to 16 Mbps download and up to 2 Mbps upload”
[We are offering you speeds are significant slower than the 30 Mbps download and 15 Mbps upload that Verizon FIOS will offer. We hope you won't notice. When we says "next generation" we are referring to the the next-generation in OUR product line-up, not the industry as a whole. Sure the 33rpm record is an improvement over the 78rpm record, but if a 5.1 surround track was available, wouldn't you rather listen to that? Of course you would. That's why we're purposely obscuring the facts with our carefully constructed lies and mistruths.]

“You are now eligible to receive the new Blast speed tier. To sign up, simply call one of our local representatives at 1-877-393-8357″
[By Blast we mean slow, compared to our competition. Just be thankful that we're letting you know about this "improvement" because the last time we offered faster speed for the same price, we didn't even tell you about it for two years. We just kept you at the old speed until you called to ask about it. Then it took us all of 4 seconds to give you the same speed every new customer had been getting for the same price. God you are a stupid customer.]

“For more than 10 years, we have been making improvements to our fiber optic network in Washington neighborhoods just like yours. It is our pledge that we will continue to upgrade your neighborhood to ensure that you have the latest technological advances.”
[We hope that you assume that all of those trucks you've seen installing fiber optic cable in your neighborhood these last few months are our trucks. They aren't. But we are confident that you are too stupid to realize it. We hope that the double-speak gobbledygook of this notice will lead you to the conclusion that we are installing a direct-to-house fiber option solution like Verizon is. We aren't. In fact we're banking that you've heard a lot of great things about what Verizon is doing, and we are piggybacking on their good press by describing our service like it is their service. It isn't. Ours is an out-dated coaxial cable based service that is pushing its max limits. Verizon's is a full fiber-based service that has a comparatively unlimited potential.]

Comcast, I hate you. I hate you so God damned much.

It’s been officially 50 years today since an anonymous thug murdered James Ellroy’s mother Geneva, destroying his childhood and giving birth to the demons that have driven the most original mind in crime fiction of the last three decades.

• I had no idea that Joss Whedon was the lead scriptwriter. I think I remembered somewhere that he wrote Alien Ressurection, but Toy Story? No idea.
• The end credits encouraged the viewer to  “visit ‘Toy Story” online at www.toystory.com”. Is this the first movie that had this kind of a credit? The movie came out in 95, which is before most people had even used the web. Must have been weird or jarring at the time…
• There’s no opening Pixar credit sequence; just a Disney credit (the Pixar sequence came at the end of the film).
• Though the film holds up really well, it’s interesting how simple the graphics seem now, and how basic the story is. It’s a truly great film, but it’s definately moving into that “classic film that we appreciate for it’s importance” mode.
• The genesis of the film is so long ago that the creators note on the commentary that they signed Tom Hanks before Philadelphia came out, and long before Forrest Gump and Apollo 13. And no one had even heard of Tim Allen.

Wow. As someone who has been an animal advocate in my personal life and for many different animal organizations, I am humbled by this man’s statement. Absolutely beautiful.