I just installed Brad Choate’s MT-DSBL plugin (original), hacked slightly so that it checks against both the Distributed Sender Blackhole List (original) and the Blitzed Open Proxy Monitor List. (Perhaps I should add SORBS (original)?) Hopefully this’ll cut down on spam. If this interferes with anyone’s commenting, please let me know. Edit: it screws up mine. Off for now. Edit: found the problem (my colo provider’s DNS is somewhat over-zealous). It’s back on.

“Whitey’s Boyos” movies and television shows include the following. There are other obvious candidates; if you haven’t seen every gangster flick Scorcese ever made, well, you’re like me because I haven’t seen Gangs of New York yet either. But you know what I mean. These, however, are the direct influences and recommendations. Mystic River: not as good as the book, but still very very good. Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon were on fire. Monument Ave.: Denis Leary was born to play an Irish thug; this is the movie where he does it best. Also with Colm Meaney, Martin Sheen, and a bunch of other good actors. Directed by Ted Demme. The Boondock Saints: yeah, that’s Boston for you, with a whole lot of Irish insanity. Good vs. Evil: the tone maybe goes a little bit too far towards the humor, but the image of a rough-edged group of amateurs fighting very bad things stuck with me. The Shield: wrong era, wrong side of the law, right ethos. Whitey’s Boyos are bad men doing good things, while Detective Mackey’s strike team is the opposite. ...

I admit it: the lure of a free Mac mini led me to take a peek at Freeminimacs.com (original). The deal is that you sign up for one of several offers via their site, and you get ten of your friends to do the same thing, and you get a free Mac mini out of it. Presumably your friends go out and do the same, and so on. The economics of this seem to make sense — it’s your basic pyramid scheme, but less objectionable because the upfront cost of getting involved is minimized. The percentage of people who complete the offer is fairly low (original), while the people behind it are making money on everyone who starts the process. So, sure, for a free Mac mini I was willing to give ‘em my email address. My spam filter is mighty. ...

The reading list for “Whitey’s Boyos” looks something like this: Black Mass: the canonical book about Whitey Bulger and John Connolly. This is where you get the basic history. Boyos: a gritty novel by an ex-Southie gangster. Not brilliant but pretty propulsive, and for obvious reasons the author has a good feel for the Southie underworld. Street Soldier: in a similar vein to Boyos, but non-fiction. Not as well-written and some have questioned its veracity, but I enjoyed it. All Souls: the best of the non-fiction, in my eyes. It doesn’t directly focus on Whitey, but it’s got great detail about growing up in Southie and it’s very well-written. Read this one for balance: it’s the price paid by Southie residents for the kind of things you read about in Street Soldier. The Kenzie/Gennaro series: an absolutely searing Boston-based mystery series. Dennis Lehane knows the dirty streets of Dorchester, and he writes the grime as well as anyone. If I can get half the feel of these novels into the game, I’ll be happy. (See also his Mystic River, which is not a Kenzie/Gennaro book but which shares their characteristics.)

In the lobby of the Lowes Harvard Square today, while waiting for Million Dollar Baby, I saw the following two posters side-by-side, much like they are below if your browser window is quite large. Both these movies are distributed by Warner Brothers. They’re both comic book adaptations. They ought to both appeal to a similar audience. What are the execs at Warner Brothers thinking? This is why Marvel-based movies are on a fairly strong run, while DC-based movies are not.

$81.3 million was pretty close; it actually hit $85.85 million. Not too shabby, although still somewhat behind Spider-Man and the Harry Potter flicks.

Bill Condon’s next movie will apparently be Dreamgirls. I’m quite happy that I won’t have to wait another six years for his next. It’ll be a remake of the stage musical, which I know nothing about; the storyline isn’t terribly compelling to me. But hey, it’s Condon.

A while back I pointed to the University of California’s online academic text archive. Robin Laws put this to good use, discovering a collection of Hollywood screenwriter interviews. I’m gonna read just about all of those.

Screw it — while there are three or four 2004 movies I want to see that I could see if I was willing to delay this puppy another couple of weeks, I’m gonna go with what I’ve got. The rules, as per last year: This is the list of my ten favorite movies of 2004. I didn’t see every movie I wanted to see, so I can’t claim it’s the ten best movies of 2004. I’m also being a little liberal about foreign flicks; if it was made in 2003 but was released in the US in 2004, or if it hasn’t been released in the US yet but I saw it in 2004, I’ll count it as a 2004 movie within reason. E.g., Days of Being Wild was released in the US in 2004, but was made in 1991, so it doesn’t get on the list. ...

My Boston Angel campaign will, of course, be called Whitey’s Angels.