Dubya is for Wayne
From an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Andrew Klavan:
"There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past."
Huh, I must have missed the part where Batman misled the people of Gotham into blaming people who had nothing to do with the crime rate in order to support his own personal agenda.
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These are pointless.
Get it? Pointless?
It works on so many levels!
The best thing to come out of this year's E3, internet posting, and ytmnd.com.
Hey, have you ever noticed how sometimes people say things that are kind of stupid in online message boards?
(Watch out for a bit of naughty language there kiddos!)
In the bleary-eyed panic of morning.
Last night, I set aside a vital stack of papers that I needed to bring in to my new job today to hand over to the HR department.
This morning, I couldn't find my keys. I can usually find my keys. I usually know exactly where they are. This morning, I could not find them anywhere. Not a huge deal, as I take the bus, and I'm sure they're there somewhere, but still, it was unsettling, and I was kind of panicking.
Now, here I am at work, and I go to hand over the paperwork to HR only to discover that the stack of papers I grabbed this morning is not at all the one I set aside last night, which I really need to turn in to HR today. Outstanding.
This means that I get to spend my lunch hour running--literally running--back home, hoping that one of my roommates is there to let me in because I don't have my keys, grabbing the correct stack of papers, and running back. If I'm lucky, I should just barely get back to my desk, huffing and puffing, in under an hour.
I'm not normally this clueless, I swear. It's just been one of those days.
UPDATE!
Keys: found.
Papers: delivered.
Sammich: eaten.
A pretty heroic lunch hour, I must say.
I'm the 1,547th Most Extreme Person on the Planet!
I picked up Space Invaders Extreme for the DS today. I think that a number of cIassic games, like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, achieve a kind of perfection in their simplicity. Both Pac-Man and Space Invaders have seen numerous iterations over the years, most of which have strayed too far from what made the original games so timeless. However, last year brought us Pac-Man Championship Edition, one of my favorite games of the past few years, which thoroughly delivered on the potential inherent in an update by staying true to the cIassic gameplay and just making a few minor tweaks that made it feel totally fresh and new and really, really intense. Now we have Space Invaders Extreme, which takes the same sort of "let's stay faithful to the original but kick it up a few notches and set it to a techno beat" approach as Pac-Man CE did. Personally, I'd say that the cat-and-mouse gameplay of Pac-Man is inherently a bit more exciting than the blast-the-relentlessly-descending-invaders gameplay of Space Invaders so, in a battle of the awesome updates, I'd put Pac-Man CE ahead of SIX (That's a more extreme way of abbreviating it than SIE would be, wouldn't you say?), but they're definitely in the same category, and I'm really enjoying my time with SIX so far.
I uploaded my high score after my first go at the Ranked mode and am currently ranked #1,547! But I didn't really get how scoring worked, and as I come to understand the game better, I'm hoping to improve my ranking at least somewhat. It seems, though, that at this point there's only one person out there extreme enough to really understand how the scoring works in the game. Currently the #1 ranked player has a score of 1,411,603,407, while the #2 ranked player is way behind with a mere 13,281,740. That's got to be the most ridiculous scoring gap I've ever seen.
UPDATE: I played by far my best ranked game so far last night, making it to stage five and initiating a number of Fever Times throughout the game, winding up with a score of 5,562,320, which currently has me at 146th on the leaderboard.
Recent Reviews
But the follow-up, Plans, is here. Does their first major label release live up to the great heights of its predecessor? No, not quite, and it probably won't bring many new fans to the group. (Speaking of great heights, it's also probably no coincidence that the first single, Soul Meets Body, sounds a bit more like a Postal Service song than anything Death Cab has ever done before.) Some current fans may even wish the album had a bit more oomph, though many will fall right into these lush, evocative songs like the arms of a lover they're about to painfully break up with for the twenty-seventh time. Death Cab has always tended to eschew typical pop song structure, but here on Plans more than ever before their songs tend to just repeat and build rather than evolve, which is great if you just want to be carried away but a bit boring if you're looking to rock out. There are a few disposable tracks here, like the grindingly repetitive and cliched Someday You Will Be Loved and the disappointingly forgettable closer, Stable Song. The third track, Summer Skin, is a halfway decent meditation on the dark side of summer love, but Death Cab already hit that particular ball out of the park with the fantastic song Photobooth a few years ago. And seriously, what's with all the synths in Different Names for the Same Thing? Hey, I dig The Postal Service too, but Death Cab is at their best when they sound like Death Cab. Your Heart is an Empty Room has a vintage Death Cab sound to it but never quite takes off the way their best songs do, though Crooked Teeth fares a bit better, recalling some of the playfulness of their great song I Was a Kaleidoscope from The Photo Album. Still, lyrically Gibbard is at the top of his game, and the best melodies here are as well-suited to the lyrics as ever, driving home his precise evocation of the resigned sadness of a love faded by time in Brothers on a Hotel Bed and his rumination on love and death in the wonderfully stripped-down I Will Follow You Into the Dark.
On the whole, Plans ends up sounding like a decent album from a band that knew they'd done something great, was unsure of how to follow it up, and decided to play it safe. I don't blame them--I'd be intimidated by Transatlanticism's greatness, too--but I hope their next record is a bit more ambitious.
