Culture

Excellent second to last episode of The Apprentice tonight. I’m already looking forward to the next season, when competitors will know the format better. There wasn’t a lot of metagaming in this season, and that’s got to be partially due to the lack of information about the full rules. Next year, contestants will know that they’ll see their fired peers again, and they’ll know that they can keep allies on their team safe even when it gets down to three people per team. More important, they’ll be more confident about the twists. ...

Things I know to be true: Kip Manley can write, and City of Roses looks like it might be a really good textual equivalent of the webcomic form. Which is to say we’re getting back to serial literature, a la Dickens, except that Kip’s madly promised to post an installement every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday so it’ll be a tad more frequent than Dickens. No standing on the docks waiting for the next installment for us. ...

Dave Winer on journalists: Journalists do all that they think bloggers do, with an extra added bonus of arrogance. There’s no accountability. No equivalent of the ABA or AMA. No malpractice suits to worry about. Well, no equivalent except the SPJ. And while it’s true that journalists don’t have to worry about malpractice suits, I hear libel suits are still in vogue. It’s such a silly question anyhow. Blogs are a medium, like television and newspapers. Journalists can blog; blogs are not inherently journalism.

Not that I am not all about the Luke Wilson, but I cannot help but think that 3001 ought to list C. M. Kornbluth in the credits somewhere. “Marching Morons” comes to mind. The IMDB boards are all a-twitter because the plot is stolen from Futurama. Which, I guess, is evidence of Kornbluth’s predictive skills.

That took a lot of the pleasure out of The Apprentice. (Gonna be spoilers here.) Long story short, Trump made two errors: 1. Complaining that Team Troy set the rental price too low at $35-40K. The Director of Sales for the building told them that it had been renting for around $40K; given the time they had to rent it, it made sense to nail down any offer in that range and hope that the other team would whiff, which they very nearly did. ...

Ever wanted a list of Shaw Brothers movies that got four or more stars from Kung Fu Cinema? Yeah, me too. So I made one.

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead has entered the public domain, which means anyone who likes can digitize the whole thing and stick it up online for you (yes you) to download. And I’m not about to spoil a set-up like that by skipping the punchline (original). No bittorrent yet.

The Celestial Pictures DVD restoration of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is maybe the clearest print of a Hong Kong movie I’ve ever seen. It’s beautifully vivid. The only thing that’d beat it would be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I’m not sure I can count that. OK, look, it’s this pretty: Look at those reds and blues. They pop. In fact, my only complaint may be that it’s a little too vivid, but I’m not sure that’s not just my modern eyes watching a 70s Technicolor epic. ...

Sherman Cafe, in Union Square, has free wireless. The coffee is pretty good, too. Good place to hang out on a Sunday afternoon.

I just read the last issue of Cerebus. That’s it; ain’t any more. For an insane guy, Dave Sim sure draws a pretty comic. It never stopped being gorgeous. I wish I could say kinder things about it; I am staggered by the weight of it. Thousands upon thousands of pages. There have been few such extended achievements. When both he and Gerhard are dead, Cerebus will enter the public domain. He has arranged for the negatives to remain with trustworthy custodians, and they will be available to those who wish to reprint any portion of it. The attentive will notice that those two statements are not entirely congruent. Who knows? I’m going to spoil the end now.