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Filed under: My Name Is Earl, Episode Reviews
(S03E11) "Honk if you know someone on death row." - Sign outside of A. J. Johnson Prison.
It's too bad the WGA is on strike because somebody needs to write another sitcom for Craig T. Nelson. When Earl finally does get out of prison, I will truly be saddened by the warden's absence. Maybe Earl can get a job working for the warden after he gets released?
The more residents of Camden County and the surrounding area I meet, the more convinced I am that their drinking water is tainted.
Continue reading My Name is Earl: Burn Victim
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Apparently Jason Chen doesn't write for the Chicago Sun-Times. Their tech writer Andy Ihnatko ripped the player a new one last week (maybe just upset that he was the last person in history to review the Zune).
Still, he had some nice quotables that attack the music industry in a tone you usually reserved for seedy tech repositories like Gizmodo.
The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, "Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?"So did he like it? – Mark WilsonYou'll find that the Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World, where users aren't allowed to do anything that isn't in the industry's direct interests.
Microsoft's colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question and put the music industry in its place.
The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.
Zune Review [suntimes]
2000Despite everyone's whining about the FCC's regulating of Janet Jackson's nipple, dirty words, and the like, we writerly types (don't worry, we use that term loosely) should thank whomever's in charge that we don't have rules like they do in Britain, as today's Guardian reports:
Publications that call people "basket case", "nutter", or "schizo" could be breaching the Press Complaints Commission code of practice, the watchdog warned today.Then again, they didn't say anything about the use of the word "retarded," so maybe we'd be safe.
Press Told to Mind Its Language [Guardian]
( Release: Nov. 22, 2006 Avg. Score: 2.5/5
Details | Trailers | Photos | Reviews
) The Gist
Generic holiday snoozer
Sensual danse, sega from mauritius island at Deauville Top Reza 2006 with valerie gery and Boum Boum GroupFiled under: Gaming
Continue reading Live from Nintendo's Wii launch in New York
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
You think we have identity theft problems now? Wait until the Air Force develops its "voice transformation algorithms" so that it can convert any airman's (or woman's) voice into a "target voice." That means instead of having a pilot speak directly to enemies, software would be able to convert his/her voice into someone else's, ideally a person that the target recognizes as a friendly -- allowing the crafty airman to trick enemies with false intel. What about applications for us civvies? The Air Force acknowledges that there could be some "Phase III Dual Use Applications" which include restoring a voice to those who have a damaged voice box, or for creating voices in video games or for animated films. So once this gets going and we're ready to do "Engadget: The Animated Series," it'll be much cheaper to imitate our voices with no-name actors.
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

How can you win a competition that you never entered in?
Click here to watch the video
Submitted By: mightyminder
Tags: real hustle Scam
Wonderful Thanksgiving inspiration.Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Well lookie here, induction charging has reared its electromagnetic head in the convenient form of a AA battery. That's right, instead of custom modules fitted to your battery powered devices a la the SplashPad, the AB-001 from AAK Corporation of Japan claims to provide contactless charging to any device sportin' them AAs. The NiMH battery is rated at 1.2-V and takes about 11 hours to fully charge over a lifetime of about 500 charges. Sounds great, right? Now the rub: instead of just setting your camera, toothbrush, penlight or any other AA-powered device near (or on) the charger for a top-up, it appears that you have to remove and then drop these induction AAs into the charger's cup, turning all that contactless charging into nothing more than novelty. While it's all a bit dubious at the moment, our Japanese bureau is on it and we'll holler back atcha later once they get the scoop.
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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time
Filed under: Horror, New Releases, Sony, Theatrical Reviews, Remakes and Sequels

But there's something else going on here. Horror movies are the ultimate in "body" cinema, or cinema that we experience physically, rather than mentally or spiritually. Because of this, nudity and sex have always gone hand-in-hand with the genre -- even before nudity could be shown. Look at Cat People (1942), in which the heroine turns into a murderous feline when sexually aroused, or the shower scene in Psycho (1960), the ultimate in vulnerability.
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The Grudge 2 blows its two opportunities to revel in sex. Toward the beginning of the film, we drop in on three English-speaking co-eds studying in Japan. Blonde Vanessa (Teresa Palmer) and sexy Miyuki (Misako Uno) tease the more bookish Allison (Arielle Kebbel) and teach her to wear her schoolgirl skirt just a little higher. The movie never bothers to explain why the two popular, promiscuous girls would give the time of day to the nerd girl, but so be it. The trio heads for the spooky house of the previous films and, though Karen Davis (Sarah Michelle Gellar) tried to burn it down, the curse still holds: anyone who goes in there will have the stringy haired-girl and her creepy blue brother breathing down their necks.
My point is this: in any, more playful horror film, Vanessa and Miyuki would die in some compromised position, preferably naked. And The Grudge 2 sets it up for us: Vanessa takes a shower, the camera decapitating her from the shoulders up and from the knees down, and Miyuki meets her boyfriend in a hotel for a romp in the sack, only to meet the beastie before her sweater comes off. Presumably some earlier screenplay draft made more of these scenes before some nervous producer toned it down. Part of this thinking is to aim for a PG-13 and thereby draw in more of the expected age group for this type of film, but the main problem is that, by shutting down the film's libido, it becomes frigid and lifeless.
And thus the other plot threads proceed in the same, safe, sanitary way. Playing Karen's sister Aubrey, Amber Tamblyn is presumably the heroine of the film, but writer Stephen Susco and director Takashi Shimizu (the man responsible for all preceding Grudge movies so far) forgot to provide her with a personality. The best she gets is that her mother (Joanna Cassidy, from Blade Runner and Who Framed Roger Rabbit) loves her sister Karen more. Hearing the news that Karen started a fire and is now in the hospital, Aubrey is dispatched to Japan to find her. Gellar gets a glorified cameo, acting crazy and terrified and finally succumbing to the beastie with the stringy hair (once more played by Takako Fuji).
Incidentally, Amber's dad, Russ Tamblyn, was lucky enough to have one superior horror film on his resume, Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963).
Aubrey meets a so-called journalist, Eason (Edison Chen), who has supposedly been working on the Grudge case for "three years" and yet doesn't know any more than to go back inside the house, and to bring Aubrey with him. Chen's bizarre, wooden acting -- full of awkward pauses -- only emphasizes just how awful Susco's script really is. Characters continually respond and react in the oddest ways to the events around them. It made me wonder if the writer had ever spent any time among other human beings before sitting down to his keyboard.
In Chicago, a third group of characters undergoes similar terrors. Jennifer Beals (yes, the one from Flashdance) plays Trish, the new step-mom to a young boy (Matthew Knight) and a cute teenage cheerleader (Sarah Roemer). The movie treats us to a preview of coming attractions, showing us an incident involving Trish, her new (jealous) husband, a frying pan and some bacon grease. The apartment building this family occupies goes crazy when a mysterious figure in a gray, hooded sweatshirt comes to stay. (Or maybe it's not so mysterious if you're watching carefully enough.)
With their nonsensical stories, the Grudge movies have other Asian horrors over a barrel; too many of them save their "surprise" for the ending, a gambit that hardly ever works. The Grudge 2 isn't smart enough to save anything until the end, and so there's no real downturn or disappointment. In fact, I have to applaud the tidy, compact ending The Grudge 2 does come up with.
Moreover, director Shimizu knows how to piece together the occasional good jump-scare or creepy mood, even if his work is a pastiche of Craven and Carpenter. Earlier this year I had the pleasure of seeing his 2004 film Marebito, a low-budget quickie reportedly shot in eight days and starring another Japanese director, Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo the Iron Man). A good portion of the action has one man, a filmmaker, descending into Tokyo's cavernous underground, looking for something scary. He finds it.
The impulse behind Marebito shows that Shimizu has enough ambition to deserve a fascinating career. But first he needs to escape the curse of The Grudge.Permalink | Email this | Comments
In this Macromedia flash tutorial you will see how to make a great image masking effect to an image of a flower.
http://www.beYOU.tv/videos/93 brings you Dance of Shiva: Level 2.



