One network has two different shows in two different formats on the exact same niche subject; behind the scenes of a fictional late night sketch comedy program (e.g. SNL). One of them has been hugely hyped and incessantly dissected pro and con by the media. Unlike that one, the other one isn’t terrible.

1. Alec Baldwin in the absolute perfect role for him, Jack Donaghy, a self serious megalamaniac suit.
2. Laugh trackless fast paced absurdist humor. Hyrbid sketch comedy / improv / sitcom in terms of feel.
3. 30 Rock stars former Saturday Night Live head writer Tiny Fey as Liz Lemmon the head writer of The Girlie Show (TGS). I was always agnostic on Tina Fey but in this show she is tremendous
4. Actual quote: “Jack Welch has such unparalleled management skills, they named Welch’s Grape Juice after him because he squeezes the sweetest juice out of his workers’ mind grapes.”
5. The sneaky best new show of 2006 which is now forming a sneaky great thursday lineup for NBC with the Office (great), Scrubs (formerly great but still strong) and 30 Rock(Something Awesome)

I do not normally have time for console gaming, but I made an exception for this game made in the spirit of Ico.

1. Your character is charged with slaying colossi to save your honey.
2. What’s a colossus? Measure the vertical dimension of your TV and prepare for the colossus to take up all of that, and more. Significant parts of every battle take place ON the colossus.
3. Even their steps near you can kill due to the shockwaves they create. Your controller will vibrate, your hands shake, your horse panics and bucks you. It feels like you really are fighting a colossus and it can be frightening
4. You will not know how to kill any of the different colossus so they became an epic puzzle struggle, where you have to stay alive long enough to figure it out.
5. The world is lyrically beautiful. I don’t know what that means but it seems appropropriate, which is a made up word.
6. Only available on Ps2 unfortunately.
7. Do you like boss battles? Good ones? That’s 95% of this game.
8. The game was marketed virally through Giantology.net.
9. Worth it just for the story.

This is Werner Herzog’s latest film, made more than 30 years after Aguirre.

1. Herzog makes movies about tragically obsessive people. Timothy Treadwell, the film’s subject, wanted to become the Grizzly Bear version of the Crocodile Hunter. A natural fit if there ever was one.
2. “I will die for these bears. I will die for these bears. I WILL DIE FOR THESE BEARS.”
3. He lives with Grizzly bears and a family of foxes adopts / he adopts them. Yes, this is a documentary.
4. Two grizzly bears fighting tooth and nail for a good few minutes while taking a dump.
5. Haunting, surreal, but also touching. Treadwell loves theses bears because they are all he has.

1. While it says markets in the title, this is a book about life, and how we deal with probability above all else.
2. From MR.com:
   

   This is a classic example of what Nassim Taleb calls being “fooled by randomness,” in his intriguing book of the same name. We think that randomness means there will be no clusters or sequences of similar behavior, and therefore when we see them we assume they’re evidence of some hidden pattern. (You can see this in the way people interpret everything from clusters of cancer cases to hitting streaks in baseball.) But they’re really just evidence of the numbers working themselves out.

3. It will cause you to renanalyze many things in life, especially expected value weighed decisions.
4. Professionally, if probability comes into your work at all, reading this will be a great boon to you
5. The author is not a scientist, he is an actual professional who is amazingly well read and has a great contempt for the intellectually lazy, and no qualms about sharing it. This results in yet another opportunity to get your pretension on
6. His approach to probability and life draws from everything from behavioral economics, to classical economics, to poetry to neuroscience.
7. Changed the way I think and was a gateway to my further reading on randomness and probability.

You may have played Mario Kart on the SNES. You may have played it on the Nintendo 64. You mave have played Double Dash on the GameCube. This is Mario Kart on the Nintendo DS handheld gaming platform and it rocks more than any previous iteration.

1. Mario Kart untethered. You can play anyone else who has it around the world as long as you are within 20 feet of them or within 20 feet of a wireless access point.
2. Anyone can be competitive, especially when there are more racers. The game gives super powerful items to people who are very far behind.
3. My gf beats me 40% of the time
4. I am all about the red sparks and I maintain they are orange.
5. You always have a game of Mario Kart against another person ready to go at any time of day wherever you are.
6. The Nintendo Robot is an unlockable character.
7. I have played it for at least 80 hours and all over Argentina

Werner Herzog makes films about people who are as obsessive and insane as he is and he makes films like no one else on Earth.

1. Aguirre was a gimpy mid-level conquistador in the early 16th cerntury who descended the Andes in what today would be near Iquito, Peru. His goal is nominally to find the mythical city of El Dorado, but in reality he seeks REAL ULTIMATE POWER. And infinity.
2. Breathtaking shots of actual Quechuan natives trekking the Andes and the Amazonian rainforest. This movies sweats authenticity in a way that is rare in a work of fiction about the distant past.
3. A river rafting movie that is basically the same as Huckleberry Finn.
4. I’m kidding.
5. Time had it as one of the 100 best movies ever.
6. The shots in this movie are singular and you have never and will never see anything like it.
7. A haunting, mystical score provided by Popol Vuh on a harpsiorganochord or something.
8. The whole movie is an experience that will never leave you.
9. MONKEYS.

Alan More is an incredible creator of dense literarily rich worlds and characters whose moral compass is not straight as a Golden Era hero’s would be, but instead, spinning fluidly like an inner Wheel of Fortune. In Volume I of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore rips Victorian Era literary figures out of their worlds and writes them into a post modern comic book reinterpretation of the England of their era.

1. Airships, Air galleons, zepellins and cavorite.
2. Allan Quartmain, Wilhemina Harkness (from Dracula), Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo adventuring.
3. Tons of allussion. Literarily, a world of allussions and since I’m not well read (despite being a snob) I didn’t get many of them.
4. Bonus frameless prose epilogue short story.
5. Quote from Quartmain to Nemo: “For my part, if I’m honest, I’m here because I wanted another adventure.” “Yes, it’s hard to just stop isn’t it. When we stop, we start to fall apart.”
6. Nautilus and opium dens.
7. Did I mention zepellins????

This is their favorite album of mine. That of course changes week to week.

1. If Satan were to come to me, and say “Hey Will, what is Rock?”, I’d say “Satan, Rock is the Pixies. “
2. Moving, whining, angry, nervous, frenetic, lilting, pulsing, beating music that is unrelenting.
3. One two singing punch of Black Francis aka Frank Black using his voice to yearn through falsetto loss of breath back down to talking and Kim Deal cutting through the rock with her girl sounding voice.
4. Where is my Mind?
5. Gigantic
6. The album is short, sweet, and flows. All the songs work as you ride the cd’s crest to the end.
7. The Pixies never get stale

Miho is the “deadly little” Old Town assasion played by Devon Aoki in the film. She is the star of this short story, along with Dwight (From Book 1).

1. Strong comic book action; Miho balletically dances through the black and white comic book frames, leaving death behind.
2. Story wraps up well.
3. Seemed too much like an idea that didn’t need to be stretched out so much.
4. It also seemed “too easy.”
5. Worth reading if you like the other awesome Sin City books.

Note: This may end up on Kinda Awesome.

I’m in Silver Land.

The final story from Frank Miller’s Sin City series and the long kiss goodbye to the Basin City Universe.

1. A story that takes you somewhere.
2. Final quest of sex, violence, corruption and pulp horror that is the currency of the Sin City.
3. Marical in Orange and Delia in Blue; the great visuals effect of bold color awash in a sea of monochromatic frames.
4. The way that Miller tells this story lovingly and pulling literary devices without the use of words like on Pages 246-247.
5. Even the frames themselves move around and reshape themselves, the very current of the story fighting through and cutting its own path.
6. Page 45. The signature Sin City overexposed-negative style.
7. Cars that always fly over hills and always exude the qualities inherent in awesome.
8. Most ferocious “Wallace” in literary history.

London. Awesome.

Crossing the Atlantic for 6 months to do a job. An important job. A Great Britain job.

What’s awesome in London? Please give me recommendations for awesome consumption of food, entertainment and merriment. I have an awesome woman to enjoy it with so factor that in. Comments are wide open, submit below.

Lars Von Trier, auter/director/travelphobe extraordinaire, challenges fellow Dane director J? Leth, to recreate J?’s famous short The Perfect Human but with certain awkward conditions.

1. Without a doubt the most awesome DVD menu loop ever. If I had been told this was the entire film, I would have been satisfied.
2. Movie, especially the conversations between Von Trier and Jorgen, really lets a man get his pretension on.
3. Cartoons are CRAP.
4. Danish white person boogeying.
5. Cuba.
6. As a side project, find the best thing you’ve ever created. Now try and and remake it five times, under different rules and conditions set forth by an independent third body. If you choose your child as the best thing which you have ever created, document the process and send it to John Stossel of 20/20 fame so he can do a segment on you and utter “Give me a break.”
7. Give John Stossel a break.
8. The Perfect Human’s plot outline is itself awesome: “An elegant and humorous film-in the guise of a serious anthropological treatise-spotlights “The Perfect Human,” a model of the modern Dane created by our wishful thinking.”

1. Self Explanatory.
2. I’m Proud to be Awesome.
3. Yeah, I linked to Delia’s, you want to make something of it? Refer to Number 2.

Fresh to people who saw the movie, Sin City Book 6 does not have a singular arching story, but instead includes a dozen capsules which release vignettes into your system.

1. The opening scene from the movie, in which Josh Hartnett played a romantic hitman.
2. Dwight and Merv on different mini-missions.
3. Introduction and evolution of sexual hitwoman “Blue Eyes.”
4. The most varied art of the whole series. A lot of the shorts serve as set-ups for awesome frames.
5. Frank Miller doing Frank Miller things.
6. An awesome collection of neo-pulp shorts, taking place in the monochrome but ultimately gray universe of Basin City.

Scale of Sin City Books.

Blues rock duo from Ohio Extraordinaire, Thickfreakness is the 2nd album by the Black Keys. To the bullets:

1. Went to their concert a year ago, with only having heard and loved their MP3’s. Expected a Jimi Hendrix looking dude with 3-4 people backing him up instrumentally. Got a white dude wearing a flannel and a beard. He had one sidekick on drums, an Oggie-from-the-UK-Office-looking bespectacled bean pole. My mind was blown by their appearance, and reblown by the sheer rock awesomeness of their performance
2. Set you Free is the most accessible song on the album, and you may have heard it on the School of Rock Soundtrack. The song is a playful meditation on liberty and on setting.
3. Hard Row provides bluesier taste of their style. Popular with the girlies (not empirically true).
4. Their music started appearing in commercials two years after I started liking them. Consistent with the Something Awesome Music Corollary.
5. They have a singular derivative musical voice. Blues Rock at its best.

Introduced to the marinated joy of Kalbi Beef at a little bee-bim-bop joint on Thayer Street during my epicurious college years. Few years later, sought out and found the the most awesome such establishment in all of New Egland, and perhaps, the entire globe, squirreled away next to a laundromat and a pool patio supply store in cosmopolitan Burlington, MA.

1. Short Rib. Bulgoki. First two items on the menu. As far as you need to go on the menu.
2. Management gives the customer lettuce and a series of culinary test trays containing pungent Korean vegetables, spices and *MAGIC* (some sort of miso paste). The customer is to combine these things with steamed rice, and the BBQed meat (which is cooked in front of you) to roll up something into your mouth.
3. Interaction with cordial yet cudgelling Korean waitressess. My predilection for overiszed beef/lettuce/MAGIC creations has led to being scolded and force fed a properly sized unit.
4. Note, that was the last time I ever write that I have been force fed a properly sized unit.
5. ~$20 a pop. What a bargain!
6. BYOB, so you can bring your finest j䧥rmeister.

Update 11/25/05: I went this weekend and it is no longer BYOB and when I took out my bottle of Veuve Clicquot they looked horrified. Apparently, they had some alcohol-related run-in with Johnny Lau.

The third offering in Intelligient Designs Advance Wars’ Series. Available on the Nintendo DS and indeed, something awesome.

1. Easily digestible deep strategy game
2. “Just one more turn” compatible
3. You? You tactically and strategically command and produce a force of units.
4. Real time strategy game in a turn based format. Aka a turn-based strategy game.
5. This iteration allows you to tag your man Dance 360 style.
6. Only reason I spent $150 on a Nintendo DS
7. I expect to get a minimum of 200+ hours of flexible entertainment. At sub $1 per entertainment hour (net of the Nintendo DS purchase), this investment has a compelling fun/$ ratio.

Thursday night, the long awaited arrival of my Black 4gb iPod Nano occurred. It blew past my expectations and sated my inner jealousy which had spurred the purchase in the first place.

1. I had seen it. I knew it was small. But it was much smaller in my hand than I had previously realized. Size is about 1.5 sticks of gum wide. Two sticks of gum worth of depth. One stick of gum long. Weight is approx 8 nickels.
2. Functions just as well as my iPod Mini ….but in a slimmer form factor.
3. My perfectly maintaned MP3 collection was (finally) rewarded when the album cover showed up when I played “If You See Me Coming” by the Black Keys. I had no idea this feature was available.
4. It displays photos, another feature I had no idea about. I can have my pictures from Maccu Piccu or Barcelona or of the 2004 Red Sox World Series banner handy. In the picture above, you can see the black wizard from Final Fantasy who is basically my best friend forever now.
5. I have kept up with the Jones’s.

Bought it at Banana Republic after the retro-cowboy look seduced me.

1. Definitely makes a statement. Always better to be noticed than to be another penguin in the herd.
2. The men in my office were against it, vehemently; multiple women approved. Success.
3. It is almost impossible to match a tie to it. But when I do, it will be glorious.
4. In response to criticsm, I retorted, “Yeah, but unlike you, I’m PROUD to be awesome.”
5. Yes BR, B-Rep, Banana, whatever you want to call it, it’s expensive. But I have shirts which I bought from there 5-6 years ago and they still look modern and interesting. They have some true gems
6. This could be used in my “cowboy/plush horsey taped to your crotch” halloween concept.