I have to get my hands on the episode when they were in Stockholm. Always fun to watch us from a different perspective. I'll probably just get annoyed on the travellers, but hey...it's entertainment.
Nomaaahh!: Let me get this straight, Nomar just signed a 1-year contract with the Cubs for $8 million, after passing on a $60 million 4-year contract with the Red Sox WORLD CHAMPIONS? Even if the Cubbies pick him up for four years, he's still losing $7 million a year. I cried for a week when Nomar left Boston, now I think I'll laugh for a week at his fine business sense (then cry the week after that because he's still making millions of dollars for playing a game).
Joystick: Continuing my video game blathering from yesterday... not only are the games dumbfoundingly complex, but the controllers are ass. Two thumb-pads, four shoulder buttons, four action buttons, and two function buttons seems to be standard now. This leaves me concentrating more on what button I should be pushing than actually playing the game. On top of that, I don't want some tiny pad for directional movement... I want an actual joystick! I thought it would be simple to go buy one, but I thought wrong. The closest thing I can find to what I am wanting is an X-Arcade Stick, but that's as big as a house and costs $100!! Harsh!
Cars: Looks like Pixar's follow-up to The Incredibles (titled Cars) has just been pushed back seven months. They say it's so that they can better time their movies (release a feature in Summer, then crank out the DVD version for the holidays), which makes sense from a business standpoint. But many people are speculating that the bigger reason is to give Pixar CEO Steve Jobs more time to decide about renewing a distribution deal with Disney after he finds out who is replacing Michael Eisner (the guy who's been running Disney into the ground for the past decade). A third option, which is my personal guess, is that the movie sucks...
You can then spend the next two hours of your life exploring the rest of the Aardman web site, which showcases numerous examples if their beautiful work in claymation. Dang. Now I want to go watch Wallace and Gromit!
Stockholm: Since Veronica Mars is now in reruns, I was flipping through channels and saw that The Amazing Race 6 was in Stockholm! Furthermore, contestants were hanging out at The Sheraton Stockholm, which is the same hotel I was at. Anyway, while I like the idea of racing around the world, I cannot bring myself to watch the show... it's just too painful to have to watch rude Americans be assholes to natives and complain all the time. As I was turning the channel, contestants were in Africa complaining about everything from how "gross" the taxis are to how stupid they think people are because they can't speak English ("DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH? I NEED SOMEONE SPEAKING ENGLISH!!!"). Holy crap. Thanks for being such a stellar example, dumbass.
Letterbox: Last night I had to stop by Wal-Mart and noticed that they had The Bourne Supremacy on sale for a staggering $15 (which is cheaper than even DeepDiscountDVD!). Since we are entering rerun season on television, I thought I would grab a copy because I remember it being a pretty good flick. But when I got home and started it up, I noticed it was the STUPID FULL-FRAME VERSION! CRAP! CRAP! CRAP! Why in the heck do they even sell butchered films? When are people going to realize that anytime they buy a film that has "been reformatted to fit their television" that they are missing half the movie? Sure the letterbox format's black bars at the top and bottom of your TV screen are annoying, but it's a small price to pay for getting to see the ENTIRE MOVIE AS IT WAS INTENDED TO BE VIEWED!! Argh.
Sorry to rant, but HOLY SHIT... it's bad enough that Chewbacca didn't get a medal at the end of Star Wars, but if you are watching the lame "Full-Screen" version, he doesn't even get to appear on the screen! The Digital Bits has a good argument for widescreen (letterbox) formatted movies, and excellent examples which you can see by clicking here.
I found a copy of the episode. Wow, they were just a 5 minute walk from where I live. That hotel with the Ice bar is so new I didn't even know they had a bar like that, go figure.
It would have been hilarious to see some teams heading for the wrong IKEA store. We've got two - on opposite sides of town. On the positive side, if they had gone to the wrong one they'd be really close to the hay bale assignment.
Widescreen tv's rock my socks off. Ever since getting a 16:9 unit, I don't think I could go back.
The detail, and love. That's what its about.
Posted by Ben on December 08, 2004 | Reply
In all fairness to Nomar, he left a bad situation where he was not wanted anymore. And before you smack him for signing for less cash, think that he probably could have signed for an awful lot more elsewhere as a free agent. Heck, aren't the Yankees looking for a 2b? Something must be right with the Cubbies. Maybe it's that hack manager Dusty's inability to hold players accountable, but either way, this seems to be the happy route for Nomar.
Wasn't wanted by the owners of the team? Perhaps... dangling him for the A-Rod trade was pretty lame. But not wanted by the city of Boston? Not a chance. They (for the most part) loved Nomar. But he wanted out because of crappy politics, and that was that. Sure his feelings were probably hurt. It's only natural that he was upset. But, in the end, he made the choice to turn down a 4-year contract and 60 MILLION DOLLARS that would have kept him with the Red Sox. Nomar's fans had nothing to do with the Rodriguez thing, and yet he made the choice to leave them.
I feel badly for Nomar and honestly can't say that I wouldn't have done the same thing if it were me... but he had another choice: he could have sucked it up and stayed. Stayed for the fans and the team he wanted to spend his career playing for (are there any franchise players left in the game?). I loathe the politics that are ruining baseball (hey, this is America, and we need baseball more than ever) but, putting politics aside, I would have had a heart attack if Nomar went to the Yankees!
I probably shouldn't be too bitter, it ended up working out okay for Boston.
In any event, I wish Nomar the best of luck... it's the least I can do for the 8 fantastic years he gave my favorite team. :-)
Funny... I never thought of going to an IKEA store while I was in Stockholm!
I found it a bit amusing that the Amazing Race teams kept asking "when does it open" referring to CITY HALL (which does apparently open at 10am) instead of the tower which, of course, opened three hours earlier. Too funny. The first three teams were owned!
So... you hoped you were very, very wrong in your prediction about Pixar's new film. Did you see it when it came out? What did you think?
Posted by Teri Centner on August 30, 2006 | Reply
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