Review – Avatar

James Cameron’s new movie Avatar opened in wide release on Friday.  My local hexadeciplex started showing it as 12:02 am.  I hadn’t been to a midnight movie since the first Harry Potter movie, so I picked up a ticket on Fandango, set my alarm for 11:15 and was five rows back in the center with my medium popcorn and Diet Coke when my digital watch beeped twelve.  In case you’ve been living on another planet (or perhaps one of its moons), Avatar is a big budget blockbuster chock full of spectacle that marketing folks at 20^th Century Fox have been telling us will change the way we see movies forever more.  Normally, that kind of hyperbole is – well, hyperbole.  However, in this case I have to agree.  I’ve seen stories that Cameron spent $200, $250, maybe $300 million dollars on this movie.  I can honestly say that the money is all on the screen every minute for almost three hours.

Almost the entire movie takes place on the far away moon of a gas giant called Pandora.  The lower gravity allows the trees to grow to the size of skyscrapers.  The natives are ten foot tall blue giants called na’vi.  The atmosphere of Pandora is poisonous (though fires can burn, so there must be at least some oxygen).  Humans must wear gas masks outside, march around in large mecha straight out of Robotech or interface with avatars, hybrids comprised of human and na’vi DNA.  I had no doubt Pandora existed.  Cameron wisely directed the movie with a minimum of swooping impossible camera shots that plague so many other CGI movies.  Everything seems like it was shot on location and he isn’t afraid to show us detail (and there are lots of details on Pandora).  The biosphere is as varied as any rain forest on Earth.  It’s populated with all creatures great and – well, greater (Pandora is deeper and darker than any African jungle could dream of).  The plants glow with bioluminescence.  The flowers and prehistoric tree branches light up under the feet of the main characters like Michael Jackson in the music video for Billie Jean.

The character design is very well done.  In a movie that ran almost three hours, I can only think of one shot where the characters seemed a little off.  That’s not bad at all.  James Cameron developed a new method of capturing the performance of an actor and adjusting it to the slightly alien shape of the na’vi anatomy.  It makes their performances very realistic and natural.  If you told me leading actress Zoë Saldana is actually the daughter of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Smurfette, I would not blink an eye.  The other performances by Sigourney Weaver and Sam Worthington are also well done.  In fact, I liked Worthington’s performance better as the big blue alien rather than plain old human.  However, that might be because the avatars get to go places and do things that are so much more neat-o than where the humans hang out.  Their corporate / military base complex is done up in typical gray metal futuristic office world décor that would have been at home in Outland or Aliens.  I’ve seen the future and – frankly – it’s kind of dull.

This leads me to the weakest part of Avatar: the screenplay.  I’ll give credit to James Cameron for pulling out most of the cringe-worthy dialogue found in so many action movies.  And when he “borrows” plot elements, he has the decency to borrow from good sources at least.  If you liked Dances with Wolves, you’ll like Avatar.  If you liked Dragonriders of Pern, you’ll like Avatar.  Ultimately, there are few surprises.  If you have seen an action movie in the past three decades, you’ll know what happens to each character shortly after they’re introduced.  You have Tom Blankslate the main character who meets up with Chief’s Beautiful Daughter.  Sure she’s annoyed by him at first, but – come on, what do you think is going to happen?  The human compound is run by Colonel Nastyscar whom the audience loathes from his very first line.  I don’t have to tell you where the Colonel ends up at the end of the movie; you know what happens to bad guys who are not only bad but are dickwads about it, don’t you?  I found myself keeping a mental checklist of all the points the movie was making and just checking them off as – one after another – they were introduced along the way like plot mile markers.

When I came down hard on James Cameron’s previous epic, Titanic, I found I had to defend my criticism against all those who thought it was just “the best movie ever”.  Since my constructive criticism contains spoilers to the plot of Avatar, I’ll just link to my thoughts here.  You can take it or leave it.

In the end, I’m glad I made my midnight run to see Avatar.  I enjoyed the eye candy on the screen as much as I liked my three dollar box of chocolate covered raisins.  When it comes out on BluRay (DVD just won’t do for Avatar), I’ll be sure and buy the version with the ten hours of documentaries describing in exhaustive detail how the movie magic was accomplished.  However, there will be a day – probably not in the too distant future – when the $300 million on the screen will be superseded.  At that point, Avatar may lose some of its luster.  After all, candy – any candy – is enjoyable at the moment, but ultimately is just empty calories.

Constructive Criticism – Avatar (SPOILERS)

It’s easy to be critical of something.  It’s more difficult to offer constructive criticism.  After watching Avatar, I thought the plot and characters were bland and predictable.  Here are some ideas I came up with while watching the movie.  Mr. Cameron, if you’re reading, please don’t be angry.  In fact, feel free to use any of these in the Director’s Cut DVD you’re no doubt working on at this very moment.

Was there no way to make the Colonel any less of a dick?  From the hackneyed “you’re not in Kansas anymore” opening line to the arrogant racism that defines his character throughout much of the rest of the movie, you know – just know – he’s going to get a fatal comeuppance.  And it won’t be some big old anonymous explosion.  That’s reserved for extras.  No, we’ll need to see that smile ripped off his face in order to achieve audience catharsis.  That’s the ancient character algebra employed in every action movie since Dirty Harry.  If I had written the movie, I would have given the character some positive traits.  I think I would have made him less like General Custer and more like General Sherman.  Maybe make him a man defined by what he is.  He isn’t proud of killing.  He may not even agree with it, but – damn it – he’s very good at his job and he’ll do the best he can to accomplish the objectives he’s been asked to perform.

I didn’t buy the Corporate Weasel character either.  He explained the stockholders are concerned about quarterly profit statements.  That’s understandable, except the movie explains that it’s taken almost six years to get to Pandora from Earth.  That’s twenty four quarters and it just didn’t make sense based on what the movie gave us.  I would have made him more of a middle management wonk.  Maybe he discovered a lode of mineral early on and now it’s gone, but the time lag means his bosses don’t know yet and he’s getting desperate to keep up production.  Better yet, take a page out of current corporate management.  Have the unseen bosses on Earth provide his cool displays some unemotional pie charts in the 2150 version of PowerPoint that force him to implement some policy that he knows may be disastrous, but he doesn’t have the clout to defy.

The company in charge of Pandora is looking for the rare element unobtanium.  Yes, True Believers, you heard me: unobtainium.  Honestly, you didn’t need to throw the comic book guys a bone; they were lined up to see giant blue alien babes.  In any case, we’re not told anything about unobtainium except that it’s really expensive and worth killing off an alien race to – well, obtain it.  While I don’t deny greed for greed’s sake is not a powerful motivator, it makes the audience pick a side really quickly.  I would have explained the need for unobtainum a bit more: it’s the only thing we have that will plug the hole in the ozone layer, it will stop global warming before it’s too late.  We’re going to seed the sun with it, so it doesn’t go supernova.  By making the Earth’s situation more dire, the idea of an alien holocaust might seem more understandable, possibly even necessary from their point of view.  Actually, unobtainium does have one defined characteristic: it seems to defy gravity.  The Corporate Weasel character has a chunk that of it floats over a dish on his desk.  Later on in the movie, the main characters escape to the flying mountains.  My first thought was they must be made of unobtainum.  Ergo, why are the evil Earth guys busy cutting down trees with the giant tractors?  Why don’t they just hack off a chunk of floating island and haul that back to Earth?  It would seem to solve a lot of issues… though of course the movie would only be about ten minutes long.

Even as predictable as Titanic was, the good guy was allowed to drown while the bad guy was allowed to live his life.  There were few surprises in this movie.  I liked the main characters, but I wonder how it would have turned out if maybe Jake had died.  Just a thought.

Avatar is a straight black and white morality tale.  Humans are bad, Na’vi are good.  Na’vi ultimately triumph.  I think by making the good slightly less good; maybe show some unsavory aspects of Na’vi society.  Even the guy who dislikes Our Hero and was supposed to marry Zoë Saldana’s character steps into line without much argument.  There was no jockeying for position in the tribe?  And when Our Hero goes out to meet the other tribes of Na’vi around the world, are there no differences between them that might have put them at odds?  On the human side, could they have been slightly less bad and perhaps more desperate?  Moral ambiguity would have kept the audience guessing longer than the opening credits.  It would have made it into a movie that made audiences say “hmm” as well as “whoa”.  And I would have liked to have seen some kind of compromise made between the sides.  Perhaps something akin to Nelson Mandela’s ability to forgive his oppressors once he gained a position of power.  In that way, there wouldn’t be the need for petty revenge by Earth (can’t they nuke the site from orbit… sorry, wrong movie) and bad feelings all around.

Of course, in this political climate full of Hate Radio and paranoia that overlooks the obvious basic goodness of people, the idea that two such disparate peoples could come together and work for a peaceful solution would probably seem like the most fantastic element of the movie.

M-M-McBop

If Daniel gets to pick where we’re going for dinner, it’s usually by toy.  Whatever fast food restaurant is offering the latest and greatest bit of plastic along with their kids’ meal, that’s where he wants to go.  I’m not sure how he knows.  He’s grown up with the DVR and very rarely watches commercials.  Do they even make commercials about kids’ meals anymore?  In any case, Daniel wanted to go to McDonald’s.  I wasn’t surprised by the choice.  However, I was surprised that – instead of a toy – we got a CD instead.

“This is my first CD!” said Daniel.  I was a little put off at first; I’ve burned many a mix of songs for Daniel over the last few years.  He amended his statement, “This is my first CD that wasn’t just made!”  Daniel might not have caught the commercials for Kids Bop over the years, but I have.  The “Kids Bop” concept is basically a bunch of kids singing pop songs.  I was quite prepared to detest it, of course, but had to admit I was intrigued by the song selection.  Who were the ad wizards who picked Sean Kingston’s Beautiful Girls?  I tried to imagine a bunch of kids singing “su-i-ci-dal, su-i-ci-dal” without generating some vast parental s%^&storm in the process.

After dinner, we rushed home so Daniel could slip the Kidz Bop 3 CD sampler into his stereo at home.  My office is just across the hall from his bedroom, so I got plenty of exposure to the music pouring forth.  The songs were relatively well produced; all the kids sing on key.  I have to admit I didn’t think it was as bad as I predicted.  The lyrics were bowdlerized in Beautiful Girls.  They sing “in denial” instead.  However, that and Hey There Delilah sounded like the kids were singing along with the artist rather than complete remakes.  Kidz Bop has sold something like eleven million records; I suppose they have the clout to get the real artists in the studio with a bunch of kids.  Daniel rummaged around his room and got ready for bed.  Kidz Bop 3 was set to “infinite loop” on his stereo (actually, it only made it through six times before I snuck into his room in the dark and switched the music from CD to FM).

Review – I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream…

We drove into Chicago not once but twice in the last couple of weekends to visit Aunt Amy and her new apartment.  She lives in the Wicker Park neighborhood, only a few blocks from the actual Wicker Park.  Daniel had fun there; he got to run around like a maniac (one of his favorite activities).  Afterwards, we had more fun checking out a couple of ice cream shops around the area.

Cold Stone Creamery is less of an ice cream shop and more of a shoppe.  The ice cream was stored in large tubs behind a clear glass window along with containers of various chopped items: nuts, candies, cookies.  I had a small cup of French Vanilla and asked for some ginger snaps mixed in.  The barrista – sorry,  server; I forgot this wasn’t Starbucks – scooped out a shiny mass of ice cream and set it on a (cold) stone cutting board behind the window.  She proceeded to massage it with a pair of thin wooden sticks.  It looked like she was making an ash tray at summer camp.  The ginger snaps were gently laid in the depression in the middle, broken apart and gently folded into the mixture.  I was impressed.  If you have ever wrestled with a box of ice cream, trying to pry out a chunk with a cold metal scooper, you would have been impressed too.  It reminded me of watching the guys flip pizza dough at Italian restaurants when I was a kid.

I Cream is a new place.  I think it has a better take on the future of ice cream than Dippin’ Dots.  Any ice cream shop (or shoppe) will scoop to order.  I Cream takes it a step further by actually making the ice cream on the spot.  They had four main “types” of foundation: ice cream, frozen yogurt and sorbet.  They also had something called “hot pudding”, but since it was the first eighty degree day we’ve had, I didn’t see anyone actually order that.  Each foundation has various subtypes.  You can get regular ice cream, light, organic or soy based.  I picked light ice cream.  From there, I could choose from a long list of flavors.  I didn’t count them all, but it was at least as long as the old Baskin-Robbins list I remember as a kid.  If the flavor you picked didn’t lend itself to much color, you could also add in a dash of red, green, blue and so on.  They had clear tubs of toppings and mix-ins.  While this was the future of ice cream, I went with the old standby of crushed Oreo cookies.  A pair of gentlemen dressed in industrial white added the ingredients to an industrial mixer plus a flash of liquid nitrogen from a hose dropping down from the ceiling.  My scoop of ice cream was thus created with a flourish of foggy condensation that reminded me of a trick by David Copperfield.

I didn’t order the same thing at both locations, so I can’t make an exact comparison.  The ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery was creamier (go figure) and very smooth.  I have eaten enough ice cream in my life (more than enough actually; one of the reasons I’m on Weight Watchers) to know high quality ingredients.  The ice cream at I Cream was unlike any I’ve ever tasted.  It was very light and airy, almost the crystalline consistency of a snow ball.  Very tasty and welcome on a warm afternoon.  Which one was better?  The jury is still out on that; I think we’ll have to visit Aunt Amy a few more times before I issue a final decision.

Pikachu! Gesundheit

I was watching television with Daniel the other day.  He was watching the Pokemon cartoon series.  For the uninitiated, Pokemon started out as a card game.  Monsters were listed with various talents and points and kids could do battle with them.  The show is probably ten years old now and the original nine year olds who watched it back in the day have moved on to bigger and better things.  However, new crops of nine year olds rediscover it and the related Pokemon paraphernalia.  Daniel is just one of the latest batch to discover the wonderful world of Japanese “pocket monsters”.

Like the cartoons I watched as a kid, the plot of Pokemon is pretty much the same in every episode.  The “Pokemon Trainers”, a group of kids and their sidekick monsters (Pikachu and Squirtle, to name a couple), travel to some exotic location, looking for a new Pokemon.  Meanwhile, the bad guy and his incompetent minions also happen to be looking for the new Pokemon (what are the odds?).  After some twists and turns and usually right after “when things look their worse”… well, there is a commercial break.  But immediately following that, the bad guys get their comeuppance and the good guys win the day.

I didn’t mind the repetition.  After all, I watched Scooby Doo for years as a kid.  However, what got me was the writing.  Each Pokemon has a name.  If you don’t catch what the name is, the little monster will helpfully tell you all the time.  That’s how they communicate.  Dogs bark, cats meow, Pokemon say their name.  They say it happily, sadly; they can say their names with more inflections than a surfer can say “dude”.  I can only assume the script for a Pokemon episode looks something like this:

POKEMON TRAINERS
(surprised at the wondrous sight before them)
Huh?

PIKACHU
Pikachu!  Pikachu!

SQUIRTLE
Squirtle?

PIKACHU
Pika-chu!

SQUIRTLE
Squirtle!  Squirtle!

POKEMON TRAINERS
(amazed at the wondrous sight before them)
Ahhhh!

This is the job I want.  I think I was born to write for Pokemon.  The above sample only took me thirty seconds; I was that inspired!  While I’m sure the writers get paid ten times more than the average firefighter, the real reason I’d want to write is for all the children around the world.  Daniel would look at me with new respect… at least until he turns ten and discovers some new show on television.

Review – Star Trek

I was of two minds driving to the theatre to see the new Star Trek movie Friday night.  Part of me really wanted to like the movie.  The “regular guy” part likes to kick back and relax with his Star Trek DVD’s; it’s like touching base with an old friend.  He likes to watch it with Daniel, seeing him react to the Horta and the Doomsday Machine for the first time.  This would be the first new Star Trek we have shared together.  The other part of me, the “comic book guy”, walked into the theatre fully prepared to dislike the movie.  He’s followed Star Trek since Mom was writing letters to NBC while she was pregnant.  He’s seen every episode of every show, every film and read every novelization.  How would this “reboot” be anything more than a “rip off”?  How could they recast the original characters?  Comic Book Guy remembered the last time another actor played Captain Kirk.  It was the last episode of the original show, Turnabout Intruder.  It wasn’t the worst episode ever made, but it was pretty darn close.

However, Comic Book Guy had to admit as we all waited in line at the box-office, this isn’t the first time Star Trek has been redone.  There have been four other shows with totally new characters and new takes on the original mythos.  Regular Guy enjoys the original series, but is also a fan of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.  And when Gene Roddenberry – the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself – was “rebooted” off the Star Trek franchise, his replacement – Harve Bennett – gave us The Wrath of Khan.  Comic Book Guy had to agree with Regular Guy and Jerry Seinfeld that – really – that was the best of those movies.

We picked up a “mega tub” of popcorn (more than enough for Regular Guy, Comic Book Guy and Daniel to share) and found a place to sit, just slightly right of center.  Regular Guy had some concerns about the movie’s rating.  It’s suitable for kids over thirteen, but Daniel is only nine.  I remembered when I was nine, I saw Alien for the first time and it basically left me psychologically scarred.  I leaned over and whispered that if I thought a monster was coming, I’d let him know and give him time to cover his eyes.  However, the alien monster – when it finally showed up in the movie – didn’t seem to faze Daniel at all.  He spent more time during the movie covering his ears than his eyes.  This movie is loud.  If Spinal Tap can hit eleven on occasion, I think Star Trek peaks around seventeen.  I expect cosmic spectacles like black holes and supernovae to be loud in movies (Comic Book Guy does point out there is no sound in the vacuum of space; a bit of science the film gets right), but everything else is loud in Star Trek: wind noise roars and electronic equipment squeals and shrieks.  Dr. McCoy’s ubiquitous hypo sounds like a shot from an air rifle.  All the while, the bombastic score rattled our ribcages.  Actually, I liked the music; it reminded me of the over the top musical cues used in the original series versus the new age pablum of the other shows.

The visuals are well done and I liked the retro-future look of everything.  The new transporter effect looked right.  The warp drive didn’t seem as “cartoonish” as it has in previous films.  The design of the new USS Enterprise takes the best of the original design of what Comic Book Guy thinks of as the real USS Enterprise and gives it more detail without going overboard.  The interior would be right at home at any Ikea; that’s futuristic enough for Regular Guy.  But the whole movie is very jumpy and chaotic.  It’s probably unfair to single Star Trek out when most movies look like they were edited by hyperactive mice on crystal meth.  Still, it was very difficult to figure out what was going on at times.  There was a fist fight near the end of the film.  I won’t say who was fighting whom because – frankly – it was hard to tell.  The scenes kept cutting away before the punches connected.  I realize “motion picture” contains the word “motion”, but – please – could we have just a few scenes that aren’t bobbing and weaving around and around?

There are parts of the movie that were needless.  A young James Kirk steals a 1966 Corvette and drives it into a quarry.  Comic Book Guy recalled A Piece of the Action, an episode where an older Captain Kirk attempted to drive a car with a lot less finesse.  Regular Guy just watched with eyebrow raised.  Driving a Corvette that far in the future would be like breaking into the Smithsonian and taking George Washington’s carriage out for a spin.  Where does one get leaded gas in 23^rd century Iowa (for that matter, where does one get leaded gas in 21^st century Iowa)?  While it’s possible the car is a replica or something (Comic Book Guy argues replicator technology won’t be available until Captain Picard’s time), this love of “ancient history” runs pretty deep.  Two hundred years from now, the clubs will still be playing those thumping techno-metal mixes.  The alien monster was unnecessary; all it did was bump up the MPAA rating from PG to PG-13.  It chases Cadet Kirk around Delta Vega (which is apparently a moon of Vulcan now).  As Comic Book Guy expounds, Vulcan has no moon and Delta Vega used to be located at the edge of the galaxy.

The area of the movie I thought I would have the most issues with – the characters – turned out to be a pleasant surprise.  Zachary Quinto has an “old school” take on Mr. Spock, channeling some of the early episodes of the show rather than the later films.  Comic Book Guy had to agree that made sense.  The Kirk family saga was a bit over the top, but I did like Chris Pine’s take on Cadet James Tiberius.  And Uhura’s subplot was not traditional canon, but interesting (one could even say fascinating).  Comic Book Guy agreed, remembering how Spock could “not think of anyone more capable than Ms. Uhura”).  The movie also did a good job explaining how everyone could have been different ages on the original show, yet all graduate from the academy at roughly the same time.  Chekov is only seventeen in the movie.  Kirk is a little older than Sulu and Uhura because he’s been a troublemaker and enlists late.  Dr. McCoy is older than everyone else.  When asked why he joined up, he replies caustically, “She took everything on the planet in the divorce.  Space is all I’ve got left.”

Enough familiar lines and mannerisms are there to start a new drinking game.  But take the pre-defined characterizations, the sound and the fury of the special effects, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot left.  I liked the plot concept.  Comic Book Guy liked it in the Star Trek novel Killing Time better.  Nero, the movie’s bad guy (no obvious parallel there) runs around the galaxy, wiping out billions of people and permanently changes the universal timeline.  He has his reasons, of course, but it ends up sounding like a rehash of another Star Trek movie villain whom I won’t name.  We see Romulans torture Captain Pike using a method which looked awfully familiar.  Comic Book Guy screams out in frustration, how does anyone know it’s a Romulan ship anyway?  The episode Balance of Terror explains no one has ever seen a Romulan.  They’ve all been hiding behind the Neutral Zone since Jonathan Archer’s time.

The original show had some episodes that were – shall we say – a bit light on plot and character development.  However, you could usually count on Gene Roddenberry to spoon feed a message to those viewers watching “way back in the Twentieth Century” on their new color televisions.  If there was any message in the new Star Trek, it must have gone over my head.  But in the end, as the Third Rock from the Sun style credits rolled, both Regular Guy and Comic Book Guy agreed it was worth the price of admission.  Most importantly, Daniel had fun.  He ate approximately sixty four pounds of popcorn, drank about three and a half gallons of orange and wolfed down a bag of Sweet Tarts that cost more than a Happy Meal at McDonald’s.  We walked out to the truck together and Daniel quoted me his favorite line; something Mr. Scott says when confronted with one of the most thought provoking moments of the film.

“So, in the future are there still sandwiches?”

Review – Sunrise Earth

I purchased an HDTV a couple of years ago to watch the Bears play the Colts in the Super Bowl. However, the first program I actually enjoyed watching on the new set was a series called Sunrise Earth.  Originally on the Discovery HD Channel (now HD Theater), Sunrise Earth is a pretty simple concept: show the sun rise somewhere in the world.

The light right before sunrise is called “the magic hour” by cinematographers because there is a golden color that fades out in the broad light of day.  The first show I caught was the sunrise over Machu Picchu in South America.  Nestled in between mountains, the ancient stone city looked like a movie set of Shangri-La.  Slowly, the scene shifted and I could see the lichens growing on the rocks of the buildings and the low grass on the paths where alpacas roamed unmolested (after a few moments, unobtrusive white text in the lower left corner of the screen corrected me: they were llamas, not alpacas).

As wonderful as the visuals are, the sound is unlike anything else on television.  On radio we called it “natural sound”: collecting samples of the ambient environment to give listeners a feeling of place.  One of my favorite shows was one featuring a Mayan pyramid rising out of the jungles of central America.  I flipped it on at lunchtime (I have a DVR, so I don’t have to get my sunrise fix at dawn) and suddenly there was this low growling tone.  I froze; sandwich halfway to my mouth.  My first thought was dinosaur.  It turned out to be howler monkeys in the jungle.

Sunrise Earth is not a flashy show.  There is no music, no narration.  For an hour, all you hear is the distant roar of a waterfall or the twittering of birds.  I am amazed by the silences.  The shots tend to be static – no zooms, no pans – and they can run over a minute long without cutting away.  The conceit of the show is the delivery medium: high definition.  It allows the viewer to look – I mean, really look at the details captured in the images and listen to the ambient environment of a place.  It’s like a spread in National Geographic magazine come to life.

Cheap Shots at Burger King

Daniel and I went out to lunch together.  He had the day off and had been good while I worked from home.  We drove over to Burger King where I was intrigued by the marquee under the logo sign: BURGER SHOTS. Without any frame of reference, I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.  My first thought was some kind of liquefied burger that was injected directly into the bloodstream.  That was silly, of course.  My second thought was some kind of liquefied burger that came in a small glass.  I didn’t have a third thought.

It turned out Burger Shots are small hamburgers, smaller than the regular hamburgers at Burger King.  I had a flashback to high school.  We sold a similar product when I was on the other side of the counter.  Back then we called them “Burger Bundles”, which was almost as stupid of a name as Burger Shots.  Back in the Reagan Administration, there were three small burgers on a little tray that were all wrapped as a group.  I think it was an attempt to co-opt White Castle.  It was a disaster.  The burger patties were very small.  As they cooked, they shrank down even smaller and a lot of them would fall between the steel grill bars and into the flames (of flame broiling fame).  The surviving bundles would be placed on a little cardboard rack and stuck in the steamer with all the other types of burgers.  However, the steam would turn the cardboard trays to goo after half an hour.  Burger Bundles died a quiet death.

The new Burger Shots are a little bit bigger than the bundles were.  You get two instead of three in a value meal.  Altogether they’re probably close to a regular hamburger, maybe a little bit bigger.  The buns look like dinner rolls.  They’re smooth and square and don’t have sesame seeds like the rest of the Whopper clan.  I split a six pack with my son (“six pack”, “shots”; I’m sensing a trend here).  They came in a long and low cardboard box.  I haven’t seen that kind of packaging at Burger King in a long time.

They weren’t anything special, though I think they might serve a purpose for people like me.  A regular Whopper is something like fifteen points on Weight Watchers (depending on what you get on it).  A regular hamburger is close to ten.  Perhaps if someone is in the need for flame broiled goodness, splitting a two-pack of Burger Shots would give just enough taste without blowing a day’s worth of points.

Making the Case for “25 Things About Me”

I was checking out my Facebook page a couple of weeks ago when I noticed I’d been tagged.  I was mentioned in someone’s note, “25 Things About Me”.  Actually, I wasn’t mentioned in any of the 25 things.  Instead, I was being asked to write 25 things about myself.  I’ve been writing a consistent blog for about a year now and have more than 400 separate entries on my site.  They tend to fall in a few categories: something about me, stories about people I know, how I feel about something.  There is one common thread running through all of them: me.

I ignored the tag until I was tagged twice more.  I have a Facebook page, but I also have a MySpace site (I also have a Twitter account, but we won’t go there).  MySpace tends to be more anonymous.  I have many friends on MySpace, people whose blogs I read and others who read my blogs and send me comments, but I’ve only met a handful of them in person.  Surveys abound on MySpace.  I think they’re more prevalent because we don’t know all the little details about one another.  Facebook seems to be geared towards linking you with people you already know: friends from high school and college, relatives near and far.  Surely I didn’t have to post 25 things about myself when all of these people knew the real me.

By now, I had been tagged a dozen times.  So, I took a look at some of the lists people were providing.  There were some facts that I knew about, major seismic events in their lives.  Some of them were totally trivial and – frankly – not worth the pixels on my screen to read.  But there was a third category too.  As I write this, the “25 Things About Me” request has gone viral on Facebook.  It’s been mentioned in Time Magazine.  Other sites make fun of it or adopt its conceit (“25 Things About the Economy”).

As someone who has never sent money to Nigerian princes online, someone who is really not interested in adding 37 to my age and dividing it by two, as someone who does not fill out surveys at restaurants and has risked ancient curses by not passing chain letters on to twenty people I know, I do recommend coming up with your list of 25.  It turns out even the people I’ve known all my life hold small secrets that I was not aware of.  And – since I’ve posted my 25 – I’ve gotten some of the same types of notes back.  It may end up being a big marketing scheme or a way for the government to ferret out more information from its citizenry, but I think we all can risk a bit of ourselves to bring our deeply-divided, widely spaced world just a little bit closer together.

Review – Apple Safari

I’m not a big fan of Internet Explorer.  Like most Windows users, I do have it on my machine and use it on occasion (mostly to update Windows and Windows related applications… like Internet Explorer).  I actually purchased Netscape Navigator back in the early days of surfing the net.  I’ve tried Lynx and Opera over the years.  My web browser of choice these days is Firefox, but I am always interested in other alternatives.  When I came across Safari for the PC a few weeks ago, I got a bit excited.  I have not drunk deep from Apple’s well of Kool-Aid, but I admit their software offerings tend to hit pretty close to the mark when it comes to speed and usability.

I loaded up Safari and ran it through my typical on-line paces.  It loads up with the typical grey metal look of iTunes.  Everything looks thicker on Safari due to its font smoothing.  It took a little getting used to, but it does make things more readable.  If there are fields to fill out on the web page, the one in focus has a bit of a “glow” to show you where you’re at.  As a web page loads, the title bar fills with color.  I missed that from my Netscape days.

My major dissatisfaction with Firefox is its speed, or rather lack thereof.  On my Pentium III, it would take a good minute for Firefox to load up.  It’s not as bad on my “newer” five year old machine, but I can still say “Mississippi” a dozen times or more before my home page appears.  Internet Explorer is quicker (when it doesn’t lock up).

After all of Apple’s claims of speed, I was surprised to find Safari was the slowest of the bunch.  It has tabs like almost all browsers these days.  However, pages that would automatically create new tabs in Firefox or Internet Explorer seem to launch new instances of Safari.  Maybe there’s a setting somewhere that I haven’t found, but I feel this should be default behavior.  Another issue is bookmark management.  I don’t ask for much, but I do like to sort my bookmarks in alphabetical order.  However, I could not figure out how to do it.  I finally gave up and looked on-line for help.  To my surprise, the reason I couldn’t find the function in Safari was because it didn’t exist.

On too many levels, Safari felt like a step backwards.  It didn’t compare well to Internet Explorer 7 and – once I found out you could smooth your fonts in Firefox – that pretty much sealed the deal.  Safari got uninstalled.

Upper Class / Lower Expectations

I had to travel to Indianapolis this week, so I took a chance with the Priceline site to get a better class of hotel.  I did pretty well last time; I got a room at the Hamilton Inn for what I would have paid for a room at a Microtel.  This time, I was pleased to see I got a room at a Hilton.  It was considered a three and a half star hotel.  I was paying (or rather my client was paying) Red Roof prices for it.

I checked in and was impressed with the size of the hotel and the amenities it offered.  The elevators featured posters of the meals available in the large restaurant on the ground floor.  There was a big business area and several conference rooms.  I got up to the third floor and checked out my room.  The bed was soft and the room was clean.  However, I found it rather basic and lacking some of the things I’m used to.

For example, I like having a microwave in the room.  At the very least, most of the places I stay in have mini refrigerators.  I carry packages of microwave popcorn and bottles of Diet Pepsi in my suitcase.  I was out of luck on the popcorn side.  Cold pop was available via room service… for $2.50 a bottle (plus a $2 delivery charge).  I found the ice down at the end of the hall.

Ironically, it’s the very amenities the Hilton prides itself on that limit the amenities I would rather have.  I suppose those who can afford to stay at the Hilton without resorting to Priceline wouldn’t balk at a $15 breakfast.  However, my lower class tastes fall more to the free breakfast offerings; toast, juice and those Styrofoam cups of waffle mix.

Patrick McGoohan

“Where am I?”

“In The Village.”

“What do you want?”

“Information.”

There was this strange little show on public television when I was younger.  It was an old British show from the sixties.  My parents both loved it and actually visited the town where it was shot on their one visit to the U.K.  together.  My parents didn’t see eye to eye on too many things, so the fact they agreed on this show stuck in my mind when I tuned in.

“Whose side are you on?”

“That would be telling.  We want information… information… information!”

“You won’t get it.”

“By hook or by crook, we will.”

It was called The Prisoner.  It starred Patrick McGoohan.  He played the lead role, an unnamed character given only a number as identification: Number Six.  The credits show him confronting someone (his boss presumably) and tendering his resignation.  While it is never actually spelled out, we assume he was a spy of some sort.  As he is set to begin his new life, he is drugged and wakes up to find himself in The Village.  It seems to be a pleasant sort of place; the kind of seaside town English people would probably visit for a vacation.  However from the very beginning, there is a sinister undertone to everything, an almost Twilight Zone feel.  Number Six spends seventeen episodes trying to determine the purpose of the place and how to escape.  On the other side, The Village powers-that-be, led by Number Two (and presumably a Number One somewhere off camera), try to extract the reason for his resignation.

“Who are you?”

“Number Two.”

“Who is Number One?”

“You are Number Six.”

As to what it all meant is anyone’s guess.  In their battle to uncover the secrets of the other side, neither Number Two nor Number Six was willing to divulge much of anything to the audience.  Fans of Lost, The X-Files, and Twin Peaks – to name a few – have to thank The Prisoner for pioneering this genre of shadowy conspiracy on television… at least as entertainment.  By 1967, governments had already mastered the real thing.  Unlike most television shows – even today – The Prisoner actually ended.  Loose ends were tied up after seventeen episodes… well, sort of.

“I am not a number, I am a free man!”

Patrick McGoohan was an accomplished actor, but also a director and writer.  He not only starred in The Prisoner, but he also wrote many of the episodes and co-produced it.  While he went on and played many other roles in his career, ironically it was the non-character without a name that he forever will be identified with.  Patrick McGoohan died last week following a short illness.  He was 80 years old.