Weather and UVA move-in day snuck up on Christina and I and killed our Saturday plans to go visit Charlottesville.  As much fun as it would be to bump shoulders with 15,000 Wahoos moving back into C-Ville, we decided to take a raincheck.  While we were waiting for coffee, Christina overheard a group say they were going to a Lego convention that day.   We’d never heard of such a thing and a quick search turned up BrickFair 2009 at Tysons Corner.  On a whim, we dropped in to see what it was all about.

As Christina described it, it was a cross between adults, kids, foreigners, and crazies and it was all awesome.  The stuff they can do with Legos these days is simply amazing.  In addition, the Lego Mindstorms programmable robotics takes it up another notch.  From your basic space, pirate, Harry Potter, alien, and police Legos taken to a massive scale, working Lego factories made of Legos, recreated historic monuments, running trains, and perpetual motion machines, the BrickFair impressed. Not a bad way to spend an hour or two on a Saturday afternoon.

I posted some pictures in my BrickFair 2009 gallery.

Managed to catch not one but two movies in the theater this weekend: District 9 last Thursday and then Inglourious Basterds yesterday.  Both are actually quite good and worth seeing though each has issues.

District 9 was the more interesting of the two — drawing an obvious but not overbearing correlation to apartheid and with more than a few curious plot inconsistencies, it still managed to come across as a great action & special effects movie with a smart backstory.  It’s told in a newsroom/documentary-style that I thought worked pretty well even if the shaky-cam was probably a bit overdone.  It also wasn’t trying to tell the “whole” story and that explains some (but not all) of the aforementioned plot-holes.  That said, if you are looking for a movie that tells the whole story from start to finish, you are not going to appreciate the “incompleteness” of District 9.

Inglourious Basterds has Tarantino at his best… and his worst.  If you appreciate Buschemi ranting about tipping or Jackson preaching, you should definitely see Inglourious Basterds.  The dairy farmhouse and tavern basement scenes are worth the price of admission — some of the most entertaining scenes I’ve ever seen.  The rest of the movie is quite good as well though Tarantino doesn’t know how to pull on the brakes for some of the more sadistic violence scenes.  There are 2 or 3 parts in the movie that are essentially completely unnecessary and break the audience out of the movie’s spell as they look away in disgust.  A better filmmaker would probably have left un-shown the violence and just left it to the audiences imagination.  The last scene in particular could have been one of the greatest final scenes ever but instead, most people walked out of the theater disgusted.  A few minutes later, everyone will recall how good the movie was but why he took that approach, I don’t know.  Lastly, if Christopher Waltz doesn’t get a nomination for his role in the movie, it’s a travesty — his character is the one you want to hate the most but will be talking about long after the movie ends.

If I could only see one of the two movies, it would be District 9.  Basterds was, at its core, just another WW2 movie (granted one with extreme historic license) while District 9 actually broke fairly unknown ground with its story.  That said, I would highly recommend them both.

Twitter is more interesting to follow than to participate in.   That in and of itself is what I see as the biggest problem with Twitter maintaining its current popularity.   It’s the public-voyeurism into those more famous than yourself that seems to be driving Twitters mainstream acceptance. But in the end, very few people are active Tweeters:

Especially as Facebook adopts more and more of the Twitter features into itself, Twitter becomes increasingly more reliant on “celebrities”  (not just actors & actresses but other well-known people: politicians, pundits, authors, etc) to maintain it’s importance.  This is unfortunate as I finally, after 2.5 years, found a true use for Twitter: Real-time news.

The Iran elections were the tipping point.  While CNN and the other news networks droned on incessantly about “non-news”, the Iran elections were making waves in the Twitterverse.  People’s profile pictures were turning green in a sign of solidarity.  In real-time, people were learning and collating all kinds of details about what was happening in Iran.  Everyone, as a whole, were reporting the news while the news organizations themselves were completely oblivious.

And this is what I’ve found Twitter to be good for.  If you want minute-by-minute updates of some event, or to discover what happened on your favorite TV show that you missed, Google is not your friend; Twitter is.  CNN or Google will tell you about it in a few hours or Google will tell you about it in a few hours.  Twitter Search will tell you now.  Now Twitter has a point.

As a VT fan, is there anything more awkward to discuss than Michael Vick?

Ever since the news broke two years ago about the dog-fighting charges against Vick, I haven’t really known what, if anything, to say about it.  The cruelty of his actions are beyond comprehension.

Watching Vick in the National Championship game in 2000 is one of my favorite sports moments.   He dodged, weaved, and made even Bowden blush in appreciation for his skills.   He then proceeded to the NFL where he made every opposing team adapt their defense.  He made football exciting.

Yet, I’m also a pet-lover of the highest degree – just ask Argo or Beta about their Twitter accounts.  Trying to resolve Vick the superstar with Vick the dog-murderer is a challenge.  I think I know now how some people felt about OJ Simpson.  I remember wondering at the time how people could possibly think he was anything other than a murderer.  I don’t need to wonder anymore.

The justice system says Vick has served his sentence.  So be it.   I guess if we’re not going to allow people to reform, why release them from prison at all?  It’s time for him to start-over.  Let’s see if he can make amends.

The two adversaries stood just a few feet apart.  Swords drawn, seemingly lazily and without regard for the danger just outside parrying distance.  Their eyes betrayed their caution as they flicked from sword to opponent.  Waiting.  The crowd, drawn around the spectacle in a semicircle.  Old & young, they anxiously awaited the imminent hostility.

(more…)