For the record, this is the front door of my villa: This is the view from the deck: And this is the beach. Follow the links for bigger pictures. Having a great time; wish you were here!

I say “Well, I think I’m going to see Constantine after all.” And you say, “What? That’s stupid. Keanu, and Los Angeles instead of London, and dude.” And I say, “Well.” Then the New York Times says, “How difficult is it to play a mythic figure like Gabriel as opposed to, say, a soccer mom?” And Tilda Swinton says “They’re exactly the same, because no one you play is ‘real.’ Every character is a construct, even if you’re playing a suburban mother. You’re looking for a construct in the way you look and talk, and you have either the mythic information about Gabriel, or what we know about suburban mothers, and then you just try to make it real. It’s exactly the same. So, you start with what we know about Gabriel as God’s messenger.” ...

I held a Playstation Portable in my hands today. Nothing about the experience made me any less impatient for the day when I will own my own. It is somewhat larger than the Nintendo DS, but the space is put to good use with the incredibly gorgeous and vivid screen, rather than being wasted with a (so far) useless touchscreen. The controls feel good. I did not experience the problem with the square button that many have reported. The analog stick is amazing. It’s a marvelous piece of technology. ...

I finished up the FireflyDVDs yesterday. Overall I liked the show quite a bit. Nice snappy Whedon dialogue, potentially interesting universe, characters with secrets and conflicts, and a decent enough plot. I say potentially interesting, because despite Whedon’s claims that “Sometimes the Alliance is America in Nazi Germany,” he didn’t show any good in the Alliance during the first season. Mal may be an antihero (original), but in the short space of 11 episodes he’s never wrong. I’m willing to take Whedon at his word, and assume that the shades of grey would have shown up later. They just didn’t show up yet, and so the interesting elements of the Firefly universe remain potential. ...

You’ve probably seen it, but if you haven’t, check out Google Maps. I would not want to be working at MapQuest right now.

Hey, so it turns out they do this new DVD thing every week. Whatta bonanza. Before I get started on talking about this week’s harvest, I wanted to mention that I picked up Delicious Library (original) over the weekend. It is awesome, although I would recommend carefully backing up your database regularly, since I lost a couple of titles in some sort of hiccup at some point. But man, is it awesome. I cataloged 360 DVDs (yeah, yeah, I know) in about two hours of lazy work. Cool stuff. ...

The Boston Globe has a good article (original) on the Berwick Research Institute’s BRI:AIR show. (Mentioned previously here.) If you don’t buy the Globe, though, you won’t get the stunning picture of my brother. Word to the wise. Speaking of which, he’s giving a lecture at Design Within Reach this Thursday at 7:00. The subject is studio furniture and designing for big box stores.

Hm. Looks like the Iraq election turnout numbers (original) may be somewhat lower than first reported. Apparently the official number is 60%. Developing, as they say.

Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus has, in something more or less akin to order: samurai, samurai zombies, convicts, gangsters, mysterious women, zombie gangsters, zombie convicts, cops, and mutants. Most of them wind up fighting each other. I won’t try to list the arsenals; rest assured that if you like guns, blades, fists, or feet you’ll be happy. There’s also rambunctiously zestful overacting. It’s pretty great. It’s sort of hard to figure out what else one can say about this movie. It’s not that it’s plot-light — there’s a ton of plot, to the point where some of the plot kind of spills out the sides and runs down the edge until Kitamura remembers to go clean it up. It’s not coherent plot, but it’s plot. There’s also a ton of style; Kitamura loves his electronica and he really loves rotating the camera around a fight scene. The fight scenes are good. All the characters have enough cool to freeze a smallish ocean. ...

For some reason, Glenn Reynolds (original) is very interested in the Volcker Report, which implicates the UN in corruption involving Iraq’s food for oil program, but hasn’t said a word about CNN’s report that the US condoned Saddam’s oil smuggling.