(Okay, it was either that or something about The Hound of the Baskervilles.)
Tom Cruise popped the question to Katie Holmes early Friday morning atop the Eiffel Tower and she said yes. The Eiffel Tower? That's so cliché.
I personally didn't think the relationship was more than a publicity stunt, but now that they're engaged, I mean, that's so permanent. Can anyone still doubt that they are truly in love?
"I wish them the happiest marriage that anyone has ever had," said Dakota Fanning, a cute eleven-year-old actress who doesn't understand that it's all fake.
Brian Alvey
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Cruise trades red-headed league for Holmes
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Foo on Yahoo
About a month ago I ordered some CDs from Amazon, a small binge after months of not spending. (I do work at a start-up company, you know.) By the time the CDs arrived I had already given Yahoo's Music service a spin. I heard about it on Mark Cuban's blog and it's only $5 per month for unlimited downloading as long as you listen to the music in their software or on an approved MP3 player. Not a problem for me -- I was living in iTunes listening to CDs that I'd grab from the shelves and load into my library.
So my new Jack Johnson CD arrived and I never even opened it. I already had the album downloaded from Yahoo Music. These services have got to be a big blow for Amazon. Unless I want to hear these discs on a road trip, I don't see myself opening those CDs anytime soon either. My only complaint was that it was stingy on the Foo Fighters, but that finally changed.
When I heard that CK had downloaded the new Foo Fighters double album from iTunes, I went to see if my Yahoo Music had it. They did and I grabbed it quickly. But their older albums -- one of which I only have the case for -- took a few more days to appear. As of tonight I have them all.
I'm going to be able to work about twice as fast now. This is huge.
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Utah vs. Arizona
I was on an airport shuttle bus today and a guy in a Cisco Systems polo shirt was asking another guy where he and his kids were headed. He answered "To Utah vs. Arizona", meaning to say Utah via Arizona. Cisco guy asks, "Is that some kind of sports game?" Utah guy replies, "No, we live in Utah, but we have a layover in Arizona." Cisco guy says, "But you said 'Utah versus Arizona', like a sports game."
The shuttle stopped and I never got the chance to ask Utah guy if he knew Ken Jennings.
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The Bionic Blogger
Peter Rojas published his 5000th post this evening. I don't think I've posted 5000 words in the same amount of time. He's a machine. Nice work, Peter!
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Desktop Detective
I saw a hot ad for the Batman Begins movie on Yahoo. The ads and the site are stunning and high-quality like the ones for Sin City. I haven't paid much attention to the television ads yet, so I wasn't really excited about the movie, but the ad for the movie site was hard to ignore. The amazing production design from the film translates perfectly to the web. Four days away from opening day is a good time to get me hooked.
It looked so good that I raced to the downloads section and snagged a new desktop. Gone is the default widescreen HP Pavilion desktop (which was pretty good looking) and in its place I now have Batman, with his head hung low because he is depressed. Think if I cleared out some of those files he'd cheer up? (Yes, I did look at all of the available desktops to find one that would work with my crowded desktop.)
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The new Charles Addams?
Banksy is similarly subversive, but his work doesn't have the harmless morbidity of Charles Addams' timeless cartoons. Most recently in the news for adding a new piece of caveman art work to the British Museum, his site also features realistic paintings of outdoor life and advice like "Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for."
Watch out for parachuting cows. Nice.
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Springtime in Paris
It's Norwegian Independence Day (again) and in honor of my ancestors' holiday, Capgemini (headquartered in France) has released their new look website, powered by a CMS I had a hand in building.
They have some nifty navigation that lets you drill down with a spectrum of breadcrumbs down the right side of the page. It is no small task to get a new website launched at a giant company, but François got it done.
And it validates!
The best part is that I no longer have to say that I built a Linux/PHP/MySQL-powered CMS for a global consulting firm last year, but it hasn't launched yet so I can't really say who it is...
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TV ups and downs
Over on TV Squad, I saw that ABC is dropping Eyes and 8 Simple Rules. That's too bad because 8 Simple Rules has had some laugh-out-loud episodes in the two years since they lost John Ritter. All three kids are great actors and where will I get my David Spade fix? Oh yeah, Capital One commercials and Joe Dirt II.Eyes never had a chance, but it was a great show -- like Las Vegas with a brain and slightly less hot characters.
Luckily, and you might think I'm kidding, John Stamos' Jake In Progress was renewed. Jake's friend Patrick is one of my favorite characters on television (up there with Rose from Two and a Half Men and Chloe on 24). Plus they have Ian Gomez and Wendie Malick.
The real shocker today was that Desperate Housewives was renewed. I'm a total fan, obsessed with DH trivia and I was really worried that I wouldn't get my weekly fix of the zany adventures of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda and all their crazy Star's Hallow neighbors every Friday night this fall. Maybe they had a write-in campaign or something. Good for them!
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Good for Nick
Where would I be without Paid Content? If I don't read Rafat's newsletter every morning I might miss things like NewsGator snagging Nick Bradbury and his fine Windows-only FeedDemon news reader.
Nick is a great guy and I use his Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe HomeSite web editing every day, so it's nice to see him making the jump and getting more resources for expanding FeedDemon.
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Ace, the crime-fighting Bat Hound
My enthusiam for Smallville dipped when I found out they were having an episode that featured Clark Kent's dog, Krypto. Niki's tripled.
The other day I mentioned that Batman had a crime-fighting dog, but I didn't know what breed it was and I couldn't recall its name. Named Ace, he was originally a German Shepherd and later on has been portrayed as a Great Dane.
This has brought back memories that I thought were gone forever. There was a super-horse (Comet), Beppo (a Kryptonian monkey who stowed away in Kal-El's rocket unnoticed) and Supergirl's pet, Streaky the Supercat.
The highlight of this trip down repressed memory lane was discovering a narrative titled Postmodernism and the Batman Phenomenon, which explores the evolution of the Batman mythos and how it has been a reflection of the general culture or American society. It shows how the four Batman movies of varying quality had their parallels in the decades of Batman lore that came before them and how McCarthyism and Dr. Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent attacked the comic industry and drove the plot lines over the edge:
He felt that three men (Batman, Robin, and their butler, Alfred) living alone in a beautiful manor where fresh flowers were placed daily in vases was the dream home of homosexuals. Batman writers had purposefully stayed away from romantic or sexual adventures or innuendoes to keep the comic kid friendly, but had inadvertently left themselves open to this attack. The editorial staff at the time attempted to combat this by requiring the addition of more bat-characters (Batwoman and Batgirl) to add a feeling of "family" instead of the isolation of the Dynamic Duo. They also made the authors kill off Alfred in favor of a housekeeper named Aunt Harriet. They even went so far as creating a bat-hound, the perfect bat-family crime fighting dog.
Same Bat-time. Same Bat-kennel.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance