I thought for sure I had posted something about the G.I. Joe movie supposedly coming out this summer, but a search through our archives comes up empty. What I would have posted then was the movie takes place some years in the future and instead of featuring a crew of All American Heroes, the team is like some kind of quasi UN special forces. And then G.I. Joe figures were my favorite toys growing up. FAVORITE. Every year my mom asks about tossing them and every year I say no.

In any case, a Twitter post by Agent_M pointed me towards this 12 second clip on ET about the movie. And then, down the rabbit hole I went, spending the next several hours looking for info on the movie. There’s not a lot out there making me me think August 7th was an old release date and the movie had been pushed. What kind of comic book movie comes out without some snip of footage being released 18 months early? So imagine my delight at stumbling upon a sneak preview of the Super Bowl spot leaked to the web TODAY?

The movie looks slick and the 30 second spot shows the destruction of the Eifel Tower along with Duke, Scarlet, General Hawk, and most importantly, Snake Eyes. I’m going. More G.I. Joe memories and movie awesomeness after the jump.
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This, from Joe Posnanski, made me chuckle out loud:

Kudos to the NFL for their controversial decision, announced on Thursday, to “salute service, courage and bravery” at this year’s Super Bowl. That is so much better than the theme in Super Bowl XXXIV, which was, I believe, “to lightly mock service, courage and bravery” or the pregame show in Super Bowl XIII which was designed to “just kind of ignore service, courage and bravery.”

(Huh, this appears to be post number 1,000 on Unlikely Words.)

Is it just me, or is Tom Daschle rocking some surprisingly stylish spectacles for a former senator?

Catherine is right: Spencer is right: Dick Gregory is right: tea with honey and red pepper flakes is awesome when you’re feeling sick and congested.

I modified the “recipe” slightly, adding a tablespoon of honey, a lemon wedge worth of juice, and a teaspoon of red pepper (two tablespoons sounds insane—let it be known that Spackerman is hard) to my Earl Grey. Drinking it was an experience, and I felt a bit better.

I was actually hungry before I started reading this list from Men’s Health. Now, I just weep for my country. My disgusting, unhealthy country.

I’m proud to say that as far as I can remember, I’ve never eaten any of the foods on the list.

(h/t dhodge)

A reader of Talking Points Memo writes in to suggest there may be hope yet for struggling newspapers. Essentially, quite a few of the troubled newspapers operate profitably, just not profitably enough to cover the interest payments of these over-leveraged corporations.

So, these bankruptcies may in the medium to long run be good for journalism (in the traditional sense). Assuming the new owners emerge from bankruptcy with limited debt, the papers have many positive attributes upon which to earn a reasonable profit while building new sources of revenue. They have an unparalleled local focus and understanding, they are the most efficient vehicle for several categories of advertising, and they have significant advertising sales forces that can be re-focused on lines of business that can sustain the papers over the long haul. This is particularly true if the surviving owners are people who believe in the public trust mission of their papers and news-oriented web channels.

Also, in an interview with Michael Lewis in The Atlantic, we learn that Lewis isn’t concerned about the magazine industry.

Well it makes it a little hard for me to prophesize doom. And I hate spinning theories to which I’m an exception. So my sense is, there’ll always be a hunger for long-form journalism, and that it’s just a question of how it’s packaged. And that people will always figure out how to make it sort of viable. It’s never going to be a hugely profitable business: it’s more like the movie business or the car business in that there are all sorts of good non-economic reasons to be involved in it. The economic returns will always probably be driven down by too many people wanting to be in it.

But I don’t feel gloomy about the magazine business at all.

Here’s a New York Magazine article about the nerds at The New York Times who are doing extremely nifty things with their website. (The Year In Ideas 2008, the chart they put together for movie earnings, and to a lesser extent the galleries (like this one of Obama’s People) come to mind.)

What they’re doing isn’t earth shattering web design, but it does seem to be far and away above what other newspapers are doing and, frankly, how any other websites are presenting news.

I have little faith in web advertising as a sustainable revenue model capable of supporting a website (actually supporting an entire company, print media is circling the drain) like nytimes.com over the long term. The Times released earnings yesterday showing digital ad spending down (”Digital ad revenues, which grew at a rate of 15 percent in the year-earlier quarter, were down 3.5 percent in Q4 2008.”) (Then again, Twitter says media is thriving, so who knows.)

I was talking about this with friends and suggesting in the future we might see “NYTimes.com Presented by Apple” (or by Google, or by Microsoft, or by Coca Cola, you get the idea). It’s a destination on the web for people, but in order to keep presenting the news in new and innovative ways, they’re going to need CPMs that just aren’t attainable. Being owned and presented by a company not in the news business seems to me like a very viable option.

2 questions for you:
I’m more fascinated by the melting down of the traditional media than in the auto industry, am I alone on this?
Is the above paragraph completely crazy?

Obviously.

Remember last week when I was telling you about how much the people of Somerville loves Tom Champion. And how they love him so much there’s a fan group on Facebook? Cosmo Catalano has remixed the latest snow emergency call into some bumping Tom Champion fanmusic. Just listen to it.

Ex-KGB Igor Panarin predicts the breakdown of the USA and then Vitaly and Kevin discuss it.