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hip news: Fake Cleveland Not as Lame as Reported
Despite having little fanfare, no program guide information for Tivo, and a premise that sounds "same old blah with new blah on top," Drew Carey's Green Screen Show is turning out very well. The American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? that Carey imported paled before its British predecessor, so you might think that rehashing the same grits with "drawrings" would be a step in the wrong direction. Instead, I've been drawn in (ha) by the bouncy theme music and perfect opening expository montage, and now I want to stick around.
The animation is really neat. There are obviously some cool artists working on this--in fact check out an article at Animation World Magazine: "Drew Carey's Green Screen Show: Behind the Animated Curtain of Oz" for the engaging story. The rub of the matter, though, is that all the spiffy animation would be for naught if the source comedy sucked. I think the improvement over Whose Line is the live performers. Using more people in each episode helps, and they seem to have really improved their improv, perhaps on their live tour. Carey, in particular, is no longer a massive black hole from which no laughter escapes; he has some funny moments, and also respects his limitations.
The particular set of skits I just saw was perhaps their best yet, from the gameshow "Catch That Knife!" to animal training with audience-member-provided sound effects, to a freeze tag game that breached the etiquette of improv.
erik 1:03 AM | permalink | yap
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hip news: crossovers
I'd pretty much given up reading fantasy books since, oh, junior high, but was prompted recently to read A Game of Thrones after having played A Game of Thrones. The boardgame incarnation is a decent game, something like Diplomacy with some nice Eurogame concepts on top. I enjoyed my one playing, but I could tell I wasn't seeing a deeper part of the game like my friends who had read the novel. I managed to find an ugly mass-market paperback edition of the book for $3.99, and must admit this is above the ranks of the usual fantasy dregs (don't be distracted by the awful design of author George R. R. Martin's website). I guess I'm going to have to purchase the rest of the novels in the series, and I look forward to playing the boardgame again. I will absolutely not, however, play the CCG.
On the darker side of the games/novels crossover scene, you have Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga. Even as CCGs go, Elemenstor Battles was awful--or that's the general opinion; I wouldn't ever play it. Then you've got the anime, the U.S. cartoon adaptation, the RPG, the novels, and the comics. There's just so much crap in this universe, I decided to at least check it out. Seeing as how I wasn't about to watch some kids' show or play a dorky role-playing game, I picked up some of the books by Tycho Brahe. I read the first two novels in the series, and stalled about 100 pages into the third. This is exactly the moronic, flowery fantasy crap that drove me away when I out-matured it at age 12. It's worse than Dragonlance! It's easy to see why the passing quality of A Game of Thrones stands out.
erik 10:30 AM | permalink | yap
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smart news: more than one way to skin a hydrogen atom
Fuel cells combine hydrogen (from a tank) and oxygen (from the air) to make water and electricity (to power, say, an electric car motor). They're heavy, and you need a bunch of them to move a car. You probably don't want to try to move an 18-wheeler with them.
There's another way to get at the potential energy of hydrogen, though: burn it (well, it's still oxidation, but it is a lot more explosive), as pointed out in the Wired News article, "Truckers Choose Hydrogen Power." By adding hydrogen to the air-fuel mixture of a standard diesel engine, you get a bigger bang for your buck. And by splitting the source hydrogen from water as you go, you don't need a big, pressurized tank of explosive gas in your vehicle. However, the article says the electricity used to split the water is taken from the engine's alternator--it almost sounds like a perpetual motion machine. Obviously not, as you're still using lots of diesel fuel (simply a bit less, with the hyrdogen's help), and I'm sure alternators on cars and trucks everywhere are producing an overabundance of electrical potential that's going unused, so that you're not taking undue energy to feed an inefficient process (alternator electricty splits water to create hydrogen that's burned in engine that spins alternator to create electricity). Just based on the laws of physics, though, you have to figure that using an engine's rotational energy to spin some coils of wire through a magnetic field is using some little bit of energy, and that's going to cost you more fuel, even if you use the electricity to create hydrogen to reduce your fuel cost.
If drawing off the alternator to split water is taxing, however, my suggestion: throw some solar panels on top of that big rig.
Or just screw it. Nobody said internal combustion was efficient.
erik 10:07 AM | permalink | yap
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smart news: oh golly, now the space age is calling
In the article "Dr. Evil's Lair Evolves" at Wired News, the enigmatically named Momus captures a current phase shift that's happening in big box stores around the country. With IKEAs popping up everywhere and Target filling up with celebrity designer items like the Michael Graves collection (way modern, but unfortunately bad functional design), the masses are turning on to modern.
The article takes a quick look at the roots of modernism, and how the Soviet Union screwed it up, leading to the dystopian visions of 1984 and Blade Runner. The backlash shows up in some interesting places, as the article points out that Ian Fleming named austere-modern baddie Goldfinger of the Bond series after a Marxist architect--a nicely layered critique for what was essentially escapist fiction, coming from pastoral-populist Fleming.
Take a look at Dwell magazine, however. The people living in these swanky modern houses are not evil SPECTRE agents. The only guy I'm wondering about, in fact, is this mysterious "Momus."
erik 10:03 AM | permalink | yap
| You are cool. |
primitive marketing devils?--standing next to a superfluous cellphone
I spotted two of the blue-faced guerrilla marketers that have recently annoyed CTA riders (CTA tattler: CTA listens to our complaints, asks U.S. Cellular to stop) outside the Hancock Center this morning. One of them had a rather poorly painted face--the blue was smeared around--so that it looked less like the marketing goal of unlimited talking and more like he was a greasy mechanic for Smurf cars.
erik 11:51 AM | permalink | yap
smart news: Wal-Mart Recycles Fresh Food Waste
From the Supermarket News daily email newsletter:
AURORA, Colo. (November 11, 2005) - A Wal-Mart supercenter here will recycle used cooking oil to help heat the store, and turn fresh produce, deli, meat, bakery and dairy food waste into compost. The experiments are two of 50 environmentally friendly measures being tested in the supercenter it opened Wednesday. It's the retailer's second ecologically-friendly experimental store; the first one opened in July in a warmer climate, McKinney, Texas. When heat is required, the cooking oil that's been used to fry chicken in the deli will be collected and burned with used motor oil from the store's Tire and Lube Express area in a waste-oil boiler. The generated heat will be directed into the store's heating, ventilation and radiant floor heating system. It's expected to reduce the store's use of natural gas by just under 22,000 therms per year, according to Wal-Mart. The store's produce, deli, meat, bakery and dairy food waste will be separated from other waste, compacted and delivered to A1 Organics, Eaton, Colo., where it will be turned into compost, which will be available for purchase in the store.
For reference, the U.S. DOE's Energy Information Administration estimated that an average Midwestern household would use around 990 therms over last year's heating season.
These efforts are fairly impressive. One further suggestion: Wal-Mart could use its waste cooking oil to fuel its fleet with biodiesel. Or maybe not. I'd like to see these new stores, but even if they went union they would still be too annoying to shop at. One final suggestion, Wal-Mart: unionize your unwashed masses of customers.
erik 9:40 AM | permalink | yap