Yes, please.

See, a capella is cool.

When my dad visits, he can always be counted on to leave behind some hyper-masculine paperback trash (what's the counterpart of chick-lit, will "dude-lit" work?). The Reacher series can be summed up as the continuing adventures of an unbelievable bad-ass who goes around doing bad-ass things for, essentially, the sake of pure bad-assery. The writing isn't spectacular, and the plots aren't realistic, but there are worse ways to spend a few hours.

Even worse than I expected it to be, which is saying something.

(By the way: best ever use for the Kindle app on iPhone? Reading books you'd be too embarrassed to be seen with.)

This is a cool toy... contrary to what cartoons taught me, if you dig a hole through the Earth in the continental United States you don't come out in China.

Yeah, I think I'm done with this show. It's not really so much that the writers/producers seem to think that subtlety is incompatible with drama (since most prime-time dramas suffer from this problem), it's that they seem to be lazy. Problems with overwrought tone I can deal with (heck, I'm enjoying Dollhouse) but I can't abide crappy world-building.

How big is Gilboa? Big enough that it has more than one broadcast news network, publicly traded companies, a financial system sophisticated enough to permit hostile takeovers, and the Internet, but small and primitive enough that you can get anywhere in the country by car or helicopter, they're still on the gold standard, and a single commercial port generates enough economic benefit that it can catapult a country into the information age and it's worth going to war over.

Feh. Ian McShane is great, but he's trapped in a world created by lazy/unimaginative writers. I'm out.

A Facebook Haggadah.

A local designer makes the case that our signage sucks.

(Via GC:PVD)

Hanson + Smashing Pumpkins + Fountains of Wayne + Cheap Trick = surprisingly good.

I have, so far, only seen the first episode of Kings, but the second is on my TiVo, and I have a free moment to write about it now. (If all of this is covered in the second episode, well, my bad.)

It was an interesting surprise to discover that the theme of the show was not, as advertised, "What if the U.S. had a king?" Rather, it's, "What if the Biblical story of David took place in an industrialized society?" which is pretty cool, too. (If you don't want any spoilers, don't read 1 Samuel!)

What I'm spending the most brainpower on, though, is trying to understand the fictional world in which Kings takes place. Is it a post-apocalyptic version of our world? Is Shiloh built on the site of the ruined New York City? How big is Gilboa? Etc?

We get the sense Gilboa isn't all that big. We're told in the first episode that the front is only a few hours north of Shiloh, so if Shiloh really is Manhattan, then Gath is upstate New York? Or Massachusetts? Of course, it's possible that the world of Kings can't be mapped to real-world geography: I can't quite tell.

I'm especially baffled by the level of technology. They have skyscrapers, cars, planes, computers, cell phones, and the Internet, but their military technology is totally backwards. The Gilboans are fighting in trenches, for crying out loud. Gath's military superiority comes from their tanks, which the Gilboans don't seem to have. At the same time, we've heard talk of air support, we've seen helicopters, and we've even seen fighter jets in at least one quick shot. So, what the hell? Do they not have missiles and bombs? Why is Gilboan military technology so pathetic, given the sophistication of Shiloh? And what is Evil Military-Industrial Company Crossgen making its money off of? Rifles? If Shiloh is only a few hours from the front, why hasn't Gath bombed the crap out of it?

Basically, I'm hoping we'll find out that there's a coherent and interesting story about the kinds of technology they do and don't have in the world of Kings, but I'm suspicious that it's just bad writing.