So Harry Potter took the record for top grossing weekend in the US, with a take of $168 million, beating out the last Batman movie.  Both are WB films and a testament to WB’s crack marketing squad.  But also HP benefits from the extra amounts charged for IMAX and 3D and the ever-increasing number of screens in the US.  Internationally, it took in $307 million.  That means that the film grossed close to $500 million in just its opening weekend.  However you want to look at it, that number is staggering.

So the theatrical business remains healthy even as home video is dying because the fools at the studios wasted years debating around DRM delaying a full entry into digital distribution.  So now DVD is dying, Blu-Ray isn’t picking up the slack, legal digital is still in its infancy.  These people have no one but themselves to blame.

I want to write more about the whole Murdoch thing but haven’t had the time to fully collect my thoughts and cite sources.  I’m sure the scandal will not end at the borders of the UK.  The FBI is said to be looking into things now.  Plus, one report has it that MySpace was just sold for $32 million – Murdoch bought it 6 years ago for $580 million.  Karma is a bitch, dude.

Also wanted to transcribe some bits of this past week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, one of the best episodes I’ve ever seen.  Guests included Dan Savage, Mark Cuban, Marc Maron.  Savage calls Bachmann and Palin “grifters and scumbags” – I think he was being too polite.  When they talk about the debt ceiling, about what might happen if the US defaults on bond payments, how the US is missing the boat on climate change, even the opening bit with that doctor who co-wrote The China Study talking about how the Republicans have even managed to politicize nutrition for fuck’s sake, well it’s an hour worth watching.

Anyway, here’s one statistic I remember from the show, hope I’m remembering it right.  In 1995, there was only one state in the US that had a population in which more than 20% were classified as obese.  Today there is only only state in the US in which less than 20% of the population is obese.  Why do you think that is?  It is the relentless mass marketing of garbage food.  I love my Double Stuf Oreos and Krispy Kremes as much as the next guy, maybe even more, so I’m pretty guilty of this shit, but I do try to balance it by otherwise trying to eat as much natural, unprocessed stuff as possible.  I’m not in great shape, true, but I’m just about 6 feet tall and usually weigh under 180 pounds, so I’m not doing that bad, though I could be doing better.

Anyway, long day, rainy day, Monday.  Time for sleep.

Have you been watching Game of Thrones?  I certainly have.  Aye, there be a spoiler or two ahead.

The series has certainly blown me away with its dense plotting – I’m guessing there are at least 50 recurring roles here spread across an entire world’s worth of kingdoms.  I’m not going to claim that it’s Robert Altman-esque or anything like that yet it’s well written and directed to the point where one doesn’t have trouble keeping track of all of this (as long as one is paying attention).  It doesn’t hurt that each episode features the standard HBO bits of nudity and violence.

I’ve never read George R.R. Martin’s books and thought I’d steer clear of them so that I could be surprised at how the series unfolds.  And so I was taken by complete surprise by the end of episode 9.  I thought to myself, “No, they’re not killing off the biggest star on the show before the first season is almost over!”  I didn’t believe it, I thought it was some trick on behalf of the producers and characters.  I couldn’t wait for episode 10 to find out that, yes indeed, they actually did kill that guy off.  I guess I would have known that had I been reading the books.  (Originally set to be a trilogy, the 5th book in the series comes out next month and writer George R.R. Martin says there will be a total of 7.)

And now I find out that episode 10 represents the end of season 1.  And that I’ll have to wait until spring of 2012 for season 2.  I might not be able to wait – I’ll probably read the books before then.

Oh well.  At least in the next few weeks we have new seasons starting for Louis, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage.

Game of Thrones is not kiddy comic book entertainment.  Neither are Louis or CYE for that matter.  I no longer hold high hopes for Entourage (it’s now vaguely painful for me to watch all the scenes they do in and around office buildings on the Warner lot) but I’ll stick with it simply because I’ve watched it this far, no real reason to stop now.

Not a question, that’s the title of the latest film from writer-director James L. Brooks.   Brooks is one of those people almost anyone who knows who he is loves and yet this film, starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson and Jack Nicholson was a colossal flop.  How do you know a movie by Brooks with a cast like that is going to be bad?  You can of course read the reviews and save yourself two hours, but curiosity got the better of me.

Working in TV, Brooks was one of the creators of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Rhoda, Lou Grant and, uh, oh yes, a little show you might have heard of called The Simpsons.  As a writer-director of feature films, he’s made just six in his career, but those six include Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets.

Where did the film go wrong?  That’s not for me to say.  It’s filled with attractive, smart people saying attractive, smart things in attractive, smart settings.  Yet the entire set-up is preposterous, there is little chemistry on-screen between the stars (I’ve said it before, I’m no Paul Rudd fan) and the ending is a foregone conclusion 10 minutes into the film.  Knowing how something will end in advance isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the journey is interesting enough but this film leaves you practically screaming, “just get to it already!”

On the plus side, Reese Witherspoon has never looked better and Nicholson remains untouchable.

Also failing very publicly in the past week was comedian Paul Reiser.  (The connection here, if any, is that Reiser had a massive success for years on TV with the sitcom Mad About You, which co-starred Helen Hunt, who co-starred in Brooks’ As Good As It Gets.  Kevin Bacon’s gotta be around somewhere.)  After about a decade off, Reiser returned to sitcom land in the US this week with the Paul Reiser Show, greeted with hoots and howls by all the critics and ratings that were scary low.  How do you know that a new series starring Reiser and with a strong production crew is gonna be bad?  I wish I knew before I wasted 22 minutes staring at the screen with my mouth hanging open.

The premise is that Reiser plays himself.  He’s a stay-at-home dad with a group of motley friends.  Is he taking a page from Larry David’s playbook?  Well, David himself shows up for a scene in the opening episode that’s one of the few brief moments worth seeing.  In the show, even though Reiser was hugely successful (and is probably hugely wealthy) and is playing himself, he lives in an ordinary house, drives an ordinary car and has a group of extremely dull ordinary friends.  There’s two white guys, of course one black guy and then, for good measure, a strange Arabic guy who has a warehouse filled with stuff no one wants.  The characters barely rise above stereotypes (the high point of the episode is supposed to be when the Arabic guy glues his shorts to someone’s car … don’t ask) and they’re all over-acting like crazy, coming across more like dinner theater than big time TV.

Now get ready for the plot of the first episode.  Reiser has to fill out a form for one of his kids’ schools and doesn’t know what to put down under “occupation.”  So when he gets the chance to audition to be a game show host, he does it so he’ll have an occupation to list.  At the end of the episode, he realizes his occupation is “dad.”

Of course, a sitcom needs subplots.  In this one, two of his friends have kids working on displays for their school based on U.S. states.  The two friends swap states for their kids and then one complains that he got a crappy state.  (Delaware, in case you’re interested.)

It is just completely and shockingly bad.   As much as I enjoyed Reiser’s work as a stand-up and in Mad About You (and as the lame-ass bad guy in Aliens), I hope NBC puts this show out of its misery soon.

And now, something I expected to be bad but wasn’t.  How to Become Clairvoyant, the new album from Robbie Robertson.  It’s a star-studded affair, with Eric Clapton, Tom Morello, Robert Randolph, Trent Reznor and Steve Winwood.  And it’s Robertson’s first album in more than a decade.  The truth is, I’ve never cared for Robertson’s voice, and that could well be because he never sang lead in The Band and so his records don’t sound anything like Band records.  His previous records were also pretty uneven affairs and so is this.  But there are 3 or 4 stand-out tracks, tracks where I got past his voice and got into the songs and the production – .  And there’s a few lesser things here as well.  Maybe he needed a bit more time.

Speaking of old guys still making new music, there’s a new album out from Paul Simon, who I think is 70 now.  Haven’t played it enough to decide yet.

Iggy Pop.  On American Idol. What else could this possibly signify except the end of time?  Mark the date down.  April 7, 2011.

For those who are wondering, Iggy is 63 years old.

Sitting home, waiting for the vet to call back, trying not to think about things, watched some of the Golden Globes.   The Globes are one of the most meaningless award shows on the planet, but every big star attends because they’re sucking up to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and lots of people watch it because every big star attends, so people think it somehow means something.  But it doesn’t.

True Grit wasn’t even nominated this year.  And yet it’s a shoo-in for at least an Oscar nomination and, given its unexpected popularity at the box office, could well walk away with best picture.

And in the category of (cough, cough) Best Picture – Musical or Comedy, they nominated not one but three seriously bad films, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Burlesque and The Tourist.  Okay, it’s not as bad as when Pia Zadora won for best new actress, but still.

So God bless Ricky Gervais, who had the last line of the evening.  ”Thank you God … for making me an atheist.”

And I see that earlier in the night he said this:  ”Also not nominated was ‘I Love You Philip Morris,’ Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor. Two heterosexual characters pretending to be gay.  So the complete opposite of some famous Scientologists, then. ”

I don’t think Ricky will be invited back to host that show again.

Another distraction for me in recent days has been the What The Fuck podcast by Marc Maron.  I don’t normally listen to podcasts.  But I came across this article in the NY Times last week about this show and it made me want to check it out.   To put it kindly, Maron is a stand-up comedian who never made the jump to TV or films although many of his friends have.  He’s twice divorced (as am I) and had issues with drugs and alcohol in the past.  He is also a very intelligent, very insightful person.  He lures some of the biggest names in comedy to the garage of his house in L.A., sits them in front of a microphone and gets them to almost psychoanalyze themselves on his show.  His deep knowledge of the comedy business, his long time friendships with others in the field, whatever it is, people relax when they’re sitting down with him and open up to an almost unprecedented degree.

He did a two part, 2-1/2 hour show with Louis C.K.   They used to be best friends but fell out several years ago.  Louis is riding high right now with his show “Louis.”  It just completed its first season on cable and I’ve found it to be intermittently brilliant.  C.K. stars, writes, directs, produces, edits the show and I love it and I know very little about him and so I listened to the WTF interview with him and it just increased my admiration for him about a thousandfold.

Then I listened to the two part interview with Judd Apatow, one of the most important directors/producers/writers shaping American comedy in this decade.  When Apatow was in high school, when he was 16 years old, he knew he wanted a career in comedy but didn’t know how to go about doing it.  He had a show on his high school’s radio station and he managed to get people like Jay Leno and Garry Shandling to sit down for interviews.  And then he’d grill them.  How do you write a joke?  How do you get from point A to point B?  Maron plays excerpts from some of these archival tapes during the interview.  And you find out how Apatow went from that smart 16 year old kid to being the guy behind Get Him to the Greek, Funny People, 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, Pineapple Express, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Walk Hard, Anchorman and others.

Anyway, it’s fascinating stuff, at least to me.  There are 150 episodes of this podcast and the last hundred or so are all available as free downloads via iTunes.

Phone still hasn’t rang.  But I’m not in any hurry.

Louis CK may be the funniest stand-up comedian working today.  And he seems to be getting better and better.  Here he is on the Leno show a night or two back.   Hit this link if the embedded videos don’t show up below.

One night earlier this week, Bruce was the sole guest on the Jimmy Fallon show.  I managed to find Youtube clips of two highlights to share.

Early in the show, Fallon does a pitch perfect impression of Neil Young singing Willow Smith’s Whip My Hair – joined by Springsteen ….

After the interview segments, Bruce + Miami Steve + Roy Bittan are backed by the Roots (reason enough to watch Fallon’s show on a regular basis) for two songs, including this blistering version of Because the Night:

Sometimes I start watching a movie and then I realize that life’s just too short to waste time watching utter nonsense.  It’s not like I don’t love bad movies but some are just irredeemably bad.  Somehow I made it almost an hour into Legion before I lost patience with this crap.  I guess I was sucked in by the cast – Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Charles S. Dutton.  But a stupid premise, horrendously bad pacing and cheap special effects got me thinking there were better ways to spend my time.  This is director Scott Charles Stewart’s first feature film.  Apparently they’re letting him make another.

I was bored by Legion but offended by Nine.   Look, Fellini’s 8-1/2 is one of my all time favorite films, it’s a fucking masterpiece in my book, okay?  Why someone thought that would make a Broadway musical I can’t say and apparently the stage version did well enough that they could make a big budget film out of it, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago) and starring, of all people, Daniel Day Lewis.  Okay, you get to see Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson and even a woefully miscast Nicole Kidman looking pretty damned sexy.  And you get Judi Dench and Sophia Loren.  And a fat Fergy as the hooker on the beach.  But the whole time I was watching this, I was aware that Fellini’s film was an intensely personal work – the kind that film maker’s rarely get to do any more, at least within the studio system – so much of his life and his interior thoughts were up there on the screen for us all to see.  But this?  It was just work, pure and simple.  I didn’t feel Marshall had any personal connection to this, it wasn’t his life, it was Fellini’s life godammit and Fellini already filmed it so why do it again?

And if you’re gonna do it again and you’re gonna do it in English, why keep it in Italy?  Why keep it a period piece?  Why not really remake it, remodel it, update it, personalize it?  I guess that would take a bit more talent or ambition.  The film is awkwardly structured, with scenes intercutting between locations and sound stage for no good reason.  And they EVEN CHANGED THE FUCKING ENDING.

Maybe if you’ve never seen 8-1/2 you’ll like this – you do get to see Penelope Cruz looking freaking hot so it’s not a total waste of time.

Modern Family is a sitcom that I never watched.  But it just won the Emmy for best sitcom so I thought I’d check it out.  Here’s the deal – you get Married With Children’s Ed O’Neill married to a freaking hot Latina lady (Sofia Vergara) half his age.

(Yes, I know, for many of you, the picture above alone is cause to watch the show, though she doesn’t dress like that, at least not so far.)  There’s her 11 year old son from her first marriage.  And O’Neill has two kids – each grown up with a family of their own – in one case a traditional husband & wife and three kids, in the other a gay couple with a newly adopted baby from Vietnam.  It’s done in an ersatz documentary style and Ty Burrell’s character is clearly going for the Ricky Gervais cringe school of laughs.

It’s not howlingly funny – but then again one can never judge a sitcom by the first episode.  The writers and cast need some time to explore the characters and bring them to life.   My problem was the voice-over narration at the end of the 20 minutes, telling us about the lesson learned.  I fucking hate that in sitcoms, Wonder Years being a prime example.  I don’t want freaking life lessons from some 22 year old hack writer straight out of college waiting for his big break to make Adam Sandler movies.  I wanna be entertained and I want the Seinfeld “no kissing, no lessons learned” at the end of my entertainments.  But I’ll probably watch a few more episodes and see where it goes.

On the other hand, Louie, on the FX network in the US, is as original a series as I’ve ever seen.  It’s written, produced and directed by its star, Louis C.K.  (Sometimes he gets an editor credit too.) (His real name, in case you’re wondering, is Louis Szekely.)   It’s probably worth noting that Louis’s real life dad was mixed Mexican Catholic/Hungarian Jewish and his mom was Irish Catholic.

His previous series, Lucky Louie on HBO never really caught on with me – it struck me as a sort of I Love Lucy with almost-hardcore sex, there was frontal male nudity – and it only lasted one season.

This show on the other hand is a mindfucker.  You really never know what you’re going to get from one week to the next.  Ostensibly it’s about Louie, an over-40 stand-up comic, divorced with two kids, trying to make it in New York.  You get the stand-up bits like Seinfeld but he doesn’t have a real circle of friends.  He’s sad a lot.  Not sitcom sad, sad.  Sometimes the comedy is over-the-top funny and twists at the end and sometimes it doesn’t.

There’s an episode with some great jokes about flying in the US, including a bit where he’s convincing airport security to let him keep his little jar of lube because he’s going to need it to help him masturbate once he gets to his hotel, leads to him vaguely bombing doing his stand-up in the south, and then he’s in a diner where he meets a woman who’s a big fan and whose brother gets pissed off that Louie doesn’t want to sleep with her, pulls a gun on him, gets cold-cocked by a sheriff who later tells Louie that he’s not gay but thinks a kiss on the mouth as a thank you might be nice and  ….

Then there’s last week’s episode.  Sorry for spoilers, but I gotta give you an idea of what’s going on here.  Louie’s at a gas station and goes to use the toilet.  The urinal’s ripped out of the wall, there’s a hole there and someone’s scrawled “Heaven” next to the hole.  Louie moves over to the toilet, some older guy in a suit comes in, sees the hole and starts unzipping.  Louie asks him if he’s really going to stick his dick in there.  ”Well, it says heaven.”  But what if something awful happens?  ”You gotta have faith!”

Which then leads into him doing stand-up comedy, a bit about God being an asshole and a re-enactment of the whole Abraham-Isaac thing featuring God obviously drunk and coming up with this idea.

And that leads into a 20 minute segment that plays as if it’s based on a real event, laugh free, very intense, about how Catholic school managed to traumatize him as an 11 year old kid, ending with his mother telling him that if she knew they were going to teach him that crap she never would have sent him in the first place.

It is without a doubt the most anti-organized religion 20 minutes that I can recall ever seeing on network TV.

It’s not your usual sitcom is what I’m saying.  It’s not completely successful.  But it’s taking chances I don’t see many other shows take.  And I hope it sticks around for a long time.  It has already been renewed for a second season.

Oh, and unlike Modern Family, Ricky Gervais appears in a couple of episodes here.

Okay, kind of a rambling post.  To cut a long story short, avoid Nine and Legion, give Modern Family a shot, you gotta check out Louie.

Android is getting me curiouser and curiouser.   I note that bizarrely named HTC Droid Incredible (google it) is getting great reviews in the US; it’s not available in HK yet.   But then again, I have downloaded 247 apps for my iPhone(s) and iPad from Apple and that’s a big investment to walk away from, not to mention the fact that the next generation iPhone should be announced in the next couple of weeks and they’ll probably leapfrog Android.   But I’m worried about Apple’s development cycle.  It’s little wonder they’re losing ground overall to Android when they are releasing just 1 or 2 phones per year.

Though it’s not as if Apple is losing any sleep over this, what with their market cap passing Microsoft.  Is this permanent or just a temporary blip?  Either way, pundits are saying this represents the sunset of the Microsoft era and to some extent I agree.  Microsoft is winning in precious few categories these days.  Most of their market dominance in Windows and Office comes via their entrenched corporate user base – it’s just too expensive for large companies to move away from these tools without a more overwhelming reason than anyone has yet offered.

It’s clear that Bill Gates was right again – that the war for the hearts and minds of users is being fought through browsers and mobile devices now.  Too bad MS couldn’t deliver – whatever users IE has are simply because the thing is built into Windows.  And Windows Mobile is desperately trying to play catch-up but like Windows, it’s simply band-aids on top of band-aids, hauling those 16 tons of legacy code up the side of an infinitely high mountain.

Microsoft’s had some high level departures in the past week.  But someone there must be looking at Ballmer and saying he’s not the right guy to revive the company and one of these days Ballmer will “retire” – and if not a Steve Jobs-style success at Microsoft, let’s face it, the guy will retire a billionaire, so no tears in my beer (or my Coke) for him.

At work, they’ve given me a Dell laptop running Windows 7.   At home, I dual-boot Windows XP and 7 on my desktop, but I’ve just never acclimated myself to Windows 7 and I’m finding no particular love for it at work where it’s all I have.  My first Dell there (a hand-me-down) died after three weeks.  Data transferred to another Dell hand-me-down, I chunka-chunk along all day but I’m on the edge of asking to switch to a MacBook Pro, something I couldn’t do at my prior job but could do here.    Almost everything I do at work is via Chrome and MS Office – and there’s the problem, MS Project.  Which means dual-booting the Mac (which of course is not really practical) or running VMWare.

My car is now semi-fixed.  A recommendation for a different repair shop in the SK area brought me to HP Cars and they have much more expertise with BMW’s than the last guy I used to bring my car to.  That last guy, I’d bring the car, give him a list of 5 things, and 4 days later he’d say my car is ready and I’d ask about the 5 things and they’d only done 3.  This guy – one day to check things out, give me a quote, buy the parts; one more day to do the work and all of it’s done (and the list I gave him was 10 things).  This guy also told me about all of the things that the previous owner had done to mess with the car, some of which is reversible, some of which isn’t (at least not without spending a whole lot more money than I care to spend).   At any rate, the car is now running not just properly but also much more comfortably, and given the fact that I’m in a serious negative equity position on it, I’m now much more content to stick with it for another year … or even two?

Couple of links to videos you might enjoy:

A run-down of all the questions that Lost asked but couldn’t be arsed to answer.

And for corporate drones like myself, a fascinating 10 minute animated presentation from Daniel Pink (author of Drive and other books) on the surprising truth on what really motivates employees.   In a nutshell, it’s not more money.  (But that’s if you’re already following his advice on paying your staff enough to take money off the table as an issue – meaning that you pay people a decent salary so that they don’t spend half of their work day worrying about money problems at home.)   What I find in things like this presentation or in the current best-selling book Rework and even in that book I mentioned a couple of posts back (Team Leadership in the Game Industry) is that the great majority of what these people are writing (and successfully selling) is just basic logical common sense stuff; there’s no rocket science in any of this.  It’s all stuff I know on at least an intrinsic level, based on my own experiences.   So, to paraphrase the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, what is it that they have that I lack?  The talent or focus to collect their thoughts and get this stuff down on paper and pixels in an easily digestible format.

But following the old dictum that you hire a consultant, hand him (or her) your watch and ask him (or her) what time it is, it may very well be the case that when I say, “We should do this,” people may not pay as much attention as when I say, “Jason Fried and Dan Pink say you should do this.”

And that’s just a part of my problem.   My larger problem at the moment is that the workload for everyone at my current company is so overwhelming that no one has time to do anything except act on a reactive basis.  I’m trying to focus on strategic thinking but there is just such a mountain of stuff that I’m getting sucked into reactive mode as well.  And that’s not good.  The answer probably lies in the advice that I’ve been giving to someone else – “you better step back and start figuring out what you need the organization under you to look like and then start finding a way to implement that.”  Spike, heal thyself!

Okay, so I accept all the logic people have left in comments about justifying how the bank structures its loans.  I understand it.  And I know it’s legal.  But it’s not right (at least not to me).  And it’s not how car loans are structured in the land that I came from.  (Yeah, yeah, so if it’s so great, why don’t I go back to where I came from?  Well, there are other things here that are better than there.)

Saw the aftermath of what I’m sure must have been an interesting traffic accident today.  Sorry, no picture, but this capture from Google Street View shows the location.

This is at the intersection of Pok Fu Lam Road and Third Street.  A bus (private bus, didn’t see if it was a school bus or a tour bus) somehow managed to plow straight into that guard rail – as of today the blue sign is sitting at a nice 45 degree angle to the sidewalk.  The bus was sitting there, leaning against the railing, the driver was under the bus doing only-he-knows-what.  How did he manage to end up there?  Did the brakes fail?   Was the bus overloaded?  Presumably no one was seriously injured – nothing in the SCMP, which seems to love reporting on this sort of thing.  But there are a lot of vehicles on the roads in Hong Kong that have no business being on the road, even if they did somehow manage to pass annual inspection.

There are two great female soul singers out there at the moment who would be hugely famous if this was 1970 instead of 2010.  Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings have a new album out that sounds better to me every time I listen to it.  And this week, Bettye LaVette, a veteran with an amazing voice, releases a new album.  LaVette’s might be more daring — this one is “Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook.”  That’s right, a classic soul singer takes on 60s (and a little 70s) British hits – Beatles, Traffic, Animals, Stones, Moody Blues, Elton John, Derek & the Dominoes (!) and The Who, among others.  Don’t have it yet but I think this is bound to be amazing.  I am sure she won’t be doing lazy Rod Stewart-style covers.

Also out this week, the major label debut from Eli “Paperboy” Reed, a new album of ballads from Keith Jarrett & Charlie Haden, an album from Karen Elson (Jack White’s wife, of course he produced), a live album from national treasure John Prine, a new single from Portishead …

On my way home tonight, stopped off at Hang Hau looking for a new pair of sneakers.  There are several shops in the various malls above the Hang Hau MTR station.  I managed to save some time because every time I found a pair I liked, next to the price tag was an indication of which sizes they had in stock.  Not one of these shops had any sizes larger than 10.5 US, at least not in the styles I liked. Then I spotted a Nike shop.  I have no idea if these shops are directly operated by Nike or if it’s a franchise thing.  They had sneaks I liked.  And they had larger sizes – there was a new one I liked, came in 5 different colors and they had Euro size 46 but not in any of the 2 colors I might have popped for.  They did have size 45, but just a hair too tight.  So I thanked them and walked out of the shop.

Then it occurred to me – there is no place in Cyberport selling sneaks.  I won’t have time to get to Times Square or Mong Kok or anywhere this week.  And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life going from shop to shop trying to find my size.  So I went back into the shop.  ”Can you order these in my size?”  One quick phone call later – yes, we can have them here for you tomorrow afternoon!  Do you need me to leave a deposit?  No, just my phone number so they can call me once they’re in.

The question is … this is how a chain trains their staff?  Shouldn’t they have offered to check on stock in other locations for me the first time, before I walked out?   One would think.

Oh, I was sitting in the waiting room at Time Warner today.  They’ve got big screens there showing several different satellite feeds of different networks and shows.  One was HLN – Headline News.  On the left side of the screen in big letters it said ISSUES!!!!!  And then for ten minutes a panel discussed Lindsay Lohan.   Honestly, even if she’s a train wreck, I think she’s hot (or at least used to be).  But, seriously, no producer will hire her for a movie or TV show any more and she’s never done anything worth remembering … and yet her life is perceived to be of such great interest to people that the fact that she may be ordered to go into rehab is worth spending 10 minutes of global network time on?

Look, I enjoy a bit of gossip.  I subscribe to several gossip blogs via RSS.  I can look at pictures of Kim Kardashian’s cleavage till the cows come home.  But ten minutes of global network time given that apparently we are two minutes away from nuclear war in Korea, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spread, Europe is still financially melting down and everything else that’s going wrong in the world today, Lindsay Lohan is 10 minutes?  (And am I just as guilty, blogging about this stuff rather than something more substantial?  Are my mentions of Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian simply obvious ploys for a higher Google page rank?)

Okay, granted, tempests in teapots.  And, while I’m at it, one more thing ….

LOST SPOILERS BELOW!

The last episode of Lost.  Frankly, the more I think about it, the more I hate it, at least the last 15 minutes.   And here’s why. Because the characters in the show – specifically, Jack who is dying from a stab wound and still trying to save the island, is told by Desmond that what he’s doing doesn’t matter.  And apparently the reason it doesn’t matter isn’t because by stopping Smokey and saving the island he saves all humanity, which is what we’ve been told for six years.  No, he’s told it doesn’t matter because he and everyone else are going to die eventually anyway.

And so that’s it?  That’s the big philosophical reveal?  Don’t bother to do anything because no matter what you do you’re going to die?  Don’t bother to invent a cure for small pox?  Don’t record Exile on Main Street?  Don’t stop a war somewhere? Sorry, I just don’t agree with that at all.

Even at my crappy, low level, what I do matters, to myself and the people around me.  And so what if me and everyone I know is gonna be dead some day and nothing I’ve done even leaves a lasting legacy?  So I shouldn’t bother?   Sorry, I can’t live that way.

I could accept the ambiguity at the end of the Sopranos because it fit very much into the tone of the entire series.   I could accept that the producers would elect to leave some things unexplained – who built the giant four toed statue?  How did Jacob travel to the US to pick and help his “candidates?”  How did Hurley manage to keep gaining weight stuck on an island eating only coconuts for six years?  But this, six years of watched flawed people struggle with their flaws and make sacrifices for each other (and sacrifices perceived for the good of humanity as well) and now we’re told that none of it matters?  I would have been happier if turned out the whole six years was just a dream Locke was having while in a coma.   This is mean, nasty stuff and somewhere, in some mega mansion in L.A. or Hawaii, the producers of the show are laughing at us for falling for their ten cent attempt at philosophy.

At least that’s how I see it tonight.