Miscellany

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Toy Story 3 teaser trailer. What jumps out at me now is not the technology of the digital animation, which is commonplace, but how quickly we recognize our old friends Woody and Buzz and friends. Consistency of character is the magic sauce here.


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Cool--Hulu Desktop made it into Uncrate. I have a secret list of ambitions for Hulu, and most of them consist of getting Hulu featured in things I follow in my own daily life. Some others: getting mentioned on The Simpsons, by Oprah, by the President, and in the lyrics to a hip-hop song. Getting Jason to get one of those black and white dot photos in the WSJ.


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Useful little site: copypastecharacter.com


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Mad Men Season 3 episodes may be squeezed by 2 minutes to accommodate more ads. Damn this recession.


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Eastbound and Down Season 1 is coming to DVD in June. Can't wait. I love me some Danny McBride, like I did Will Ferrell before his overexposure.




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How they shot those Where Amazing Happens commercials for the NBA where classic plays are gradually painted in, one player at a time.


Kottke posted a great dissection of the Kobe to Shaq alleyoop spot, noting how it contains evidence of just how dysfunctional Kobe and Shaq's relationship already was at that time.


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Jeffrey Toobin profiles Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in The New Yorker. Toobin opened my eyes to just how much Roberts has already shifted the Supreme Court right during his short tenure. Roberts may be Bush's most unpublicized but lasting legacy.



Still, there is no disputing that the President and the Chief Justice are adversaries in a contest for control of the Court, and that both men come to that battle well armed. Obama has at most one more chance to take the oath of office, and Roberts will probably have a half-dozen more opportunities to get it right. But each time Roberts walks down the steps of the Capitol to administer the oath, he may well be surrounded—and eventually outvoted—by Supreme Court colleagues appointed by Barack Obama.



I loved Toobin's book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.


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If Obama is Spock, then is Kirk John McCain?


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Two challenges

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This Munsell hue test is a fun challenge of one's color vision. I was nervous taking it and perhaps overly excited when I submitted my arrangements and received a perfect score.


Munsell Hue Test


That might be my proudest accomplishment since breaking 100 for the first time on Flight Control on the iPhone (at $0.99 for a limited time only, Flight Control is a steal).


Here is a YouTube video of someone breaking 10,000(!?!) on Flight Control which makes breaking 100 seem like not such a great feat after all.


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Misc.

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An interview with Philip Glass.



The kind of music I was doing in the Seventies was very radical. The structure became the music itself. It became identical. In that way it was closer in a way to maybe Jasper Johns was painting and I was very influenced by his painting — when Jasper Johns did a painting of a flag, he painted a flag. So the question is: is it the flag or is it the painting of the flag? In the same way when I did a piece, I had reduced everything to scales and to a few simple notes. The process of the music became the structure of the music. So what was interesting for me was that the content and the form were identical — that was a very radical idea in music and in many ways it may still be a radical idea.



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Atul Gawande turns his investigative eye towards the high cost of healthcare in the United States in this week's New Yorker.



Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.



In an earlier Q&A online, Gawande noted:



The most important transformation going on in health care worldwide, I think, is that the complexity of medical know-how has exceeded the abilities of individuals. Medicine now requires teams of people to work together to prevent and treat disease for patients successfully. Medical schools don’t teach students how to work in teams or how to bring teams to be successful at this work. It requires communication skills and an ability to monitor and improve team performance. Some of this I touched on in a previous article called “The Checklist.

Skype billing issues

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I've been hit with the Skype billing issue discussed in this Slashdot thread. A few days ago, I received three e-mails in succession:



  • The first said came with the subject "Skype: problem with your payment" and began with the greeting "Hi there Joel Adams, Unfortunately your payment failed, but don't worry, we didn't deduct any money from your card." I thought it was a phishing attempt, but it listed my correct Skype Name. Uh oh. I haven't ever paid into my Skype account, and my name, as most of you know, is not Joel Adams. Alarm bells went off.

  • The second e-mail came 3 minutes laterwith the subject "Skype: we've delivered your purchase." It began with the greeting "Hi there Roseangela Rubio, Thanks for buying Skype Credit. We're happy to confirm your payment." AGain, it included my correct Skype Name. I was even more worried, and a bit confused. Who is Roseangela Rubio?

  • The third e-mail, with the same time stamp as the second, had the subject line: "Welcome to Auto-Recharge". This note was addressed to Roseangela Rubio.


I immediately logged into my Skype account, changed my password, canceled Auto Recharge, and removed the credit card in my account. Then I waded through the customer support links to find one to submit an inquiry as to how this could have happened.


I received a reply 2 days later saying that it seemed a third party might have gained access to my account, and asking me to change my password. Of course I'd done all of that already. What was aggravating was this paragraph:



Skype can not refund the money you might have lost due to this incident. Every user has to take care of his/her security systems on private computers.


Please check if your PC?s security systems are running properly and if they are up to date. In order to prohibit those incidents Skype strongly advises to regularly update your PC's security software (e.g. firewall, antivirus etc.). It is possible that a trojan or some kind of hidden information collector is installed on your computer and sends this to a third party who uses this information abusively. Also be aware of different 'phishing' sites or Skype chat messages from strangers that contain links or require you to reveal personal information (passwords, credit card numbers etc.)



Any reasonably tech saavy user is going to resent the implications in this e-mail, the tone of voice that lumps them in with people who write their password on post-it notes and stick them on their computer monitor. I keep all my passwords in Yojimbo, I don't use dictionary words, etc. I always forward phishing messages, most of them for eBay, Paypal and Bank of America, to those companies.


I've written Skype back and demanded a refund, and we'll see how that goes. I've enjoyed using Skype a bit here and there in the past. It's a solid product. But any security issue like this, followed up by a customer service response that includes a sermon on PC security, is bound to leave a really bitter taste in one's mouth. Let's see how they respond.


In the meantime, if you're a victim of this problem, and you're reading this message, you are the resistance! (I just returned from a screening of Terminator: Salvation)



Random debates

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One space or two spaces after a period?


Saying you use two spaces after a period tends to date you. Older folks tend to adhere to this rule, not having been taught that the only reason to do so was because in the old printer/typewriter days, every character took up the same amount of space, and so you needed two spaces after a period to improve readability and more clearly mark the end of a sentence and the start of the next. I used to use two spaces because I'm old enough that I learned to type on a typewriter and my first computer printer was a daisy wheel.


But now, of course, I'm strictly a "one space after a period guy," and you should be two. Computers do all the heavy lifting and do the kerning for you, so putting two spaces after a period looks odd, as if you're trying to pad the page count of a term paper. A good test is to pick up any book and look at the text--it's all one space after the period.


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A longstanding debate in the world of usage is that of the phrase "begging the question". The most common usage these days is in the sense of "inviting the obvious question to be asked." But that is an erroneous use of the term which descends from a logic concept first formulated in a book by Aristotle.


This is Safire on the issue. And of course, my go-to source on usage is Garner, who writes:



begging the question does not mean "evading the issue" or "inviting the obvious questions," as some mistakenly believe. The proper meaning of begging the question is "basing a conclusion on an assumption that is as much in need of proof or demonstration as the conclusion itself." The formal name for this logical fallacy is Petitio principii. Following are two classic examples: "Reasonable people are those who think and reason intelligently." (This statement begs the question, "What does it mean to think and reason intelligently?")/ "Life begins at conception, which is defined as the beginning of life."



The larger issue here is whether to just accept this common misuse since most English speakers understand the intent of the usage, even if it's incorrect.


I tend to be particular about usage, and I try to adhere to the recommendations of usage gods like Garner. At the same time, I do take into account intent when interpreting the writing or speech of others.


For example, I differentiate between the kid on the playground in second grade who called me an Oriental to try to get a rise out of me from the grandmother of a friend of mine who once asked me what type of Oriental I was. That word is generally considered racially charged nowadays, but some people missed that memo and still just use it broadly to refer to things from Asian countries.


So I didn't take offense at my friend's grandmother's question. But, with a smile, I still filled her in on the sensitivity around the term. I couldn't help myself.


As for the kid on the playground, he got the reaction he wanted. I beat him up.


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Alex Tabarrok interview from TED

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TED talks, as most my readers here know, are great. Most of the content on that site is on video form, but they have interesting written content as well, like this text transcript of an interview with economist Alex Tabarrok (of Marginal Revolution fame). As on Marginal Revolution, the discussion covers many fascinating topics, from the rise of China and India to the tv show The Wire to the value of police.



I utterly reject the view that the Third World is doomed to poverty and starvation. Not only is this wrong, I think this attitude verges on the immoral, like thinking that slavery is an unalterable facet of the human condition so why bother doing anything about it? Moreover, thinking of this kind -- I call it the Lebensraum point of view -- leads to war and destruction. The Lebensraum point of view, however, is rejected by evidence from the second half of the twentieth century. Peace and free trade are the routes to wealth -- not a grab for "limited" resources.


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Cordell Hull, U.S. Secretary of State under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is said to have remarked, "When goods don't cross borders, armies will." Free trade unites the world and reduces the threats from other nations. It doesn't eliminate it, but we have much less to fear from a rich, prosperous China than we do from a poor, starving China.

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Kindle book pricing, and the Kindle DX

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Short article in Wired a few weeks back about Kindle users protesting prices higher than $9.99 for digital books. It's as if users are valuing the books as just pure digital bits. When you buy books at a bookstore, you have some visual justification for why some books are more expensive than others. The book may be thicker, with more pages, or with glossy heavy stock paper with beautiful photographs, or an expensive leather binding. The varying form factor for books has allowed that industry to get away with much more pricing variation than, say, the music industry, where most CDs and LPs are shaped exactly the same, or the theatrical exhibition industry, where going to the movies costs the same regardless of what movie you're seeing and how much it cost to make (on an absolute basis, the cost variance for producing one movie versus another is much larger than in books and music). To the viewer, many elements of the moviegoing experience are the same regardless of which movie you're seeing: they are about the same length, shown in theaters that are shaped, for the most part, the same, with screens of roughly comparable size. That along with years of uniform pricing have pretty much ensured that the only theaters that can get away with varied pricing are ones offering a unique experience (e.g. a price premium for the massive curved screens of IMAX, or a price discount for the really old movies offered at second-run theaters).


With books for the Kindle, you have few visual cues to distinguish the value of one book from the other. And so it's understandable that users might be inclined to think every digital book should cost the same. In one sense, they're right, as the digital cost of storing one book versus another will not vary by much at all.


What is missing, of course, is the understanding of all that has gone into the production and marketing of that work, or a linkage between the quality of the book and the price. The uniform price that Apple placed on songs in the iTunes music store at launch ($0.99 per track) removed price variance as an element of the shopping decision, for better or worse. That is now a mental anchor, and any deviation seems, well, deviant.


As a retailer, Amazon and Apple have roughly the same costs for whichever digital book or song they sell, so I can understand their interest in standardizing the pricing and encouraging impulse buying with the simplified decision structure. I can also understand why a publisher or music label would prefer pricing variance, to better account for their costs in acquiring and marketing the different books in question.


As for my Kindle 2 , I have owned and used it just about long enough that I am ready to share an overall assessment soon (quick summary is that it's solid but with lots of room for improvement), but not long enough to avoid the disappointment of hearing Amazon announce the Kindle DX today. I've barely had my Kindle 2 for 3 months, and already a replacement has been announced?


I can understand and accept product obsolescence and early adopter risk in technology, in fact I'm well-versed in it what with iPods and iPhones and digital SLRs and laptops getting replaced by newer, higher-performance models every half year to a year, but the Kindle 2 barely started shipping 3 months ago. I feel like Kindle 2 buyers should have either received a heads up that the Kindle DX would be coming or that we should be offered an option for trading in our Kindle 2 for the DX. The Kindle DX seems a bit pricey to me at $489, not a slamdunk purchase, but one of my biggest issues with the current Kindle 2 is its screen size, and I would have liked to have known the DX was coming at this price point back when I was making my Kindle-buying decision back in February.


Amazon rarely disappoints me, but today it did.


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I like...big...growth but it's all a lie

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James Surowiecki assesses how the financial sector grew so large this past decade and why it was not sustainable:



There have been three big banking booms in modern U.S. history. The first began in the late nineteenth century, during the Second Industrial Revolution...The second wave came in the twenties, as electrification transformed manufacturing, and the modern consumer economy took hold. The third wave accompanied the information-technology revolution. Each wave, Philippon shows, was propelled by the need to fund new businesses, and each left finance significantly bigger than before. In all these cases, it wasn’t so much that the bankers had changed; the world had.


The same can’t be said, though, of the boom of the past decade. The housing bubble was unique, and uniquely awful. Each of the previous waves had come in response to a profound shift in the real economy. With the housing bubble, by contrast, there was no meaningful development in the real economy that could explain why homes were suddenly so much more attractive or valuable. The only thing that had changed, really, was that banks were flinging cheap money at would-be homeowners, essentially conjuring up profits out of nowhere.



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Glass 40% full

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There was lots of press hand-wringing last week about a Nielsen study showing that 60% of Twitter users quitting the service after one month. The press, many whom were late in jumping on the Twitter explosion, seemed to revel in their schadenfreude as they poured fuel on the meme of Twitter user retention.


The 60% of Twitter users who abandon the service after one month is less than the 90% of recycled news coverage that can't formulate an original thought. How many people abandon their weblogs? Among people I know, it's much higher than 60%. Does that mean the remaining blogs are worthless? For an answer, maybe we need to consult the mainstream media, and to do so, ironically, we probably have to scour their blogs. I can't think of a mainstream media outlet today that doesn't have at least several blogs as part of their daily output, though by the time they jumped on the bandwagon it was already the size of an aircraft carrier.


I confess to being a bit puzzled by Twitter when I first signed up in March of 2007. With few followers and just 140 characters per tweet, it felt like I was shouting through a battery-less megaphone under water.


A few things changed my feelings towards Twitter. One was the launch of Favrd, which helped to separate the wittiest tweets from the chaff (pun intended) and which drew man people into using it as an outlet for humor, rather than just mundane status updates. The second was the launch of an app that could sync my Twitter account to my Facebook status.


The last, and most important, is that the service achieved enough critical mass that Twitter search became a useful tool for me to track what people were saying about Hulu. Maureen Dowd may wonder "Is there any thought that doesn’t need to be published?" and may think "I don’t care that my friend is having a hamburger?", but someone else's meaningless status update is someone else's treasure. If you tweet "I am having a hamburger animal style at In-N-Out. Sweet heaven." and that becomes searchable a few seconds later, that is somewhat useful information for In-N-Out.


[As an aside, I like lots of Dowd's work, but I'm glad Evan Williams and Biz Stone gave better than they got in that interview. Funny stuff. I appreciate her opinions on lots of issues, but on this one she's out of her element.]


A better example is that when I know one of our (Hulu) tv ads is going to air on a certain program, I can get real-time feedback on what people thought. I can't get that anywhere else, not through Google, not through Facebook (because their status updates are not globally searchable), not through the press, nowhere. That is the heart of the Twitter revolution, and that's why companies like Google want to buy Twitter, because Twitter has carved out that significant mindshare on the web.


As to how Twitter can make money, I can think of several premium services that some clients would pay for. If I could, for our @hulu account, allow our users to subscribe to particular types of messages, all from the same @hulu account, I'd pay for that. Imagine that we had one Twitter account for each show on our site, and you could receive a tweet when a new episode hit the site, with an auto-shortened link to that episode. I can do that via e-mail today, but e-mail is slow and expensive and polluted by spam.


I have many other ideas, but if I post them all I might someday have to pay a fortune to use Twitter someday, so I'll leave it at that. This is no guarantee that Twitter will be a great service for monetization; turning massive traffic and mindshare into revenue is no sure thing on the web as many cases have shown (free e-mail accounts remain, for the most part, free, for example). But they've jumped onto the hockey curve growth trajectory track, cemented their place in the cultural zeitgeist, and achieved that ever-elusive first-mover advantage which generates increasing returns (RIP Pownce). So their ultimate destiny is largely in their control, which is all you can ever hope for as a startup.


NOTE: For those of you who find me decreasing frequency of posting here depressing, try following me on Twitter. There, my volume per post is lighter, of course, but my frequency of posting is far higher. 308 updates there in just over a year now, somewhat backloaded.



Frustrating but thrilling

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The other night, I went to the gym next door to the office to watch the second half of game 5 of the Bulls-Celtics series. There is one bank of TVs hanging on the ceiling in the cardio section, so I climbed on an elliptical machine, which is all my physical therapist has cleared me for, and plugged my headphones into the TV audio jack. The display didn't light up, though, so I moved to another machine. Same result. I realized eventually that the audio jacks were powered by the machines, so I had to maintain a certain minimum speed on any machine to keep the audio running. Clever.


By the time I got going, I figured 45 minutes would be enough. As you know, I was wrong. The game went into overtime, and about an hour and 45 minutes later, having sweat about twelve gallons, my legs quivering, I staggered back to work.


Thank goodness I didn't try to watch tonight's game from the gym, they might have had to retire an elliptical machine in my honor after I died sometime in one of those three overtimes.


Not living in Chicago anymore, it's harder to follow my hometown teams, but I still follow them in the postseason when they make it onto national TV. Since the glory years of MJ, it's been grim. The Bulls had terrible seasons and high draft picks for many years, but they never seemed to land that one superstar you need to build around to win it all in the NBA.


1999 top pick overall Elton Brand was solid, not spectacular, but the Bulls traded him away essentially for Tyson Chandler, who was a solid shot blocker and rebounder but whose offensive repertoire never extended beyond the dunk. The other Chicago first rounder Ron Artest was a good pick but also got traded away in a deal for, essentially Jalen Rose.


In 2000 3 first round picks turned into Marcus Fizer, Jamal Crawford, and Dalibor Bagaric. Not a great draft overall, but no lasting pieces out of that group. I have to avoid using the word twin towers to refer to 2001, though that was the year we grabbed Tyson Chandler and Eddy Curry with the second and fourth picks of the first round. One skinny, one fat, neither good enough in a draft that produced Pau Gasol, Jason Richardson, Shane Battier, Joe Johnson, Richard Jefferson, Zach Randolph, and Tony Parker, among others.


In 2002, Jay Williams. Seemed like a great talent when he pulled off an early triple-double against Jason Kidd, but then he got on a motorcycle, expressly forbidden by his contract, and crashed into a light pole.


2003, the Bulls really wanted Dwaye Wade, but they were two picks too late and obtained Kirk Hinrich. Solid, a player who plays tough defense, but limited offensively by an inability to finish around the basket and a solid but not spectacular jumpshot. 2004 brought Ben Gordon with the third pick, Luol Deng with the seventh. Gordon will always inspire a love/hate relationship. Beautiful jump shot, and when he's hot, he can carry the offense. He's always been one of the few pure scorers on Bulls teams that have struggled to do so over the years. But he's short and not particularly tenacious on defense, and to good opposing guards he gives away as many points as he scores. Deng seemed to be developing for a couple years in a row, and then he got the big contract and his development stalled with a series of injuries.


No pick in 2005. In 2006 the Bulls drafted LaMarcus Aldridge and traded him for the guy taken two picks later, Tyrus Thomas, a freakish athlete and shot blocking machine who seems destined to always be one of those players whom everyone thinks should be better than he is until the day we realize he is the sum of his parts and nothing more. In hindsight we'd rather have Aldridge who has developed a polished post game. Thomas needs to lock himself in a gym all summer and shoot five hundred 18 footers a day until he can be a threat running the pick and roll with Rose.


2007 brought Joakim Noah. At pick 9 in that draft, not a bad pick, though he seems more in the Tyson Chandler mold of high energy tall guys who can only be complements on offense because of a lack of any offensive moves or jump shot. He's the type of player you hate when playing pickup if he's on the other team, but if he's on your team you love him as he runs around, harassing opposing players on defense, snagging rebounds with hustle, getting it back for you to shoot.


And finally, in 2008, perhaps out of exasperation, the fates finally dropped the magic ping pong balls and gave the Bulls the top pick. They managed to avoid drafting Beasley and went with Derrick Rose, and suddenly hope returned to the United Center. Rose is still raw, still half coal, half diamond, but when he has his moments, he flashes the type of potential that projects to superstardom, something you can't say of the aforementioned players the Bulls have drafted. He still needs to solidify his jump shot, add a 3-point shot, cut down on the silly turnovers, and use his strength and speed better on defense. He doesn't seem assertive enough considering he is the centerpiece around which this team will be built--a more boring interviewee I have yet to see--but that may come in time.


On the positive side, his top speed on the dribble is world class, his finishing ability around the basket with either hand is fantastic, and he can covers as much ground with his strides as maybe Lebron. He'll blow by his defender above the free throw line, from just inside the 3-point line, and two strides later he's laying the ball in with one hand. It's videogame-level freakish.


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This history of frustration mixed with excitement extends to this series. On the one hand, I want to tear my hair out.



  • Vinny Del Negro is a terrible coach. Forget running out of time outs. When he does call time outs at key parts of games, he must be doing Sudoku on his clipboard because the plays coming out of those time outs are routinely terrible.

  • Ben Gordon and John Salmons are just hard to watch at times. They regularly enter this zone where their teammates fade into the background, and they dribble and dribble and go one on one with their man, culminating in some crazy off-balance jump shot. When the Bulls have one chance to get a score for the win, coming out of a time out, I reflexively throw up in my mouth before the ball is even inbounded.

  • On defense, Ben Gordon is terrible, easily picked off by screens. There are times when every one in the stadium knows the ball is going to Jesus Shuttleworth, and if Gordon is guarding him, I know Ray Ray will get a great look. Allen is no defender to write home about, but Gordon makes him look like Ron Artest.

  • NBA officiating is horrendous. Still. Rajon Rondo has been amazing, unbelievable, a freakish talent, but he should be sitting out game 7 after the hit on Brad Miller's face and then the swinging elbow at Hinrich. I don't buy the excuse that you can't call that on a star player at the end of the game, but Rondo, a smart player, knows it's the case and knows to push the limits in key moments of the game, giving light shoves, grabbing jerseys, little things that he knows the officials won't call on him. NBA games in the playoffs feel "loosely scripted" because of the officiating, like an episode of The Hills. The poor base level of officiating has slowly sapped my interest in the NBA over the years.

  • Every time the Bulls seem poised to steal the momentum, it seems like Rose drives into traffic and turns the ball over. He still has that rookie penchant for playing out of control at times.


On the other hand, how can I complain about what will be the longest 7-game playoff series in NBA history. The only suitable way this can end is with a 6 overtime thriller on Saturday, which will end with so many players fouling out that Vinny Del Negro and Doc Rivers will have to tear off their suits and engage in a game of Knockout to decide the series. Among the positives:



  • Sometimes Gordon and Salmons get hot. They fall into that class of "No...no...no! NO! AHH! YES! Oh my god! YES! WHOOO!" players because they horrify you with some of the shots they take, but when they go in, you cheer almost out of disbelief. Doug Collins' reaction to the crazy one-handed lean-in jumpshot by Gordon shot at the end of Game 5 was a classic example of that. For all the reasons mentioned earlier, the two players are tough to watch, but when they're not on the floor, it's hard for the Bulls to score. When Gordon enters one of his zones, as in game 2, it's comically fun to watch; it's like he's a videogame character who's obtained enough points to activate some sort of indestructible frenzy mode.

  • Kirk Hinrich coming off the bench is a real asset. As a starter his faults seemed too prominent, but off the bench his defense and ballhandling and leadership are far more than you'd expect from a sub.

  • I like seeing KG's crazy intense pumped-up face when his teammates do something good. He lopes around, fists clenched, jaw clenched, like he's going to punch one of his teammates in the face. If, in the middle of game 7, he starts pacing the sidelines because his team is down, then suddenly tears off his Italian suit from the collar, revealing a Celtics jersey underneath, and subs into the game, even I will be off my sofa cheering.

  • Having Brad Miller back is fun. I missed him when the Bulls traded him years back. He's as slow as a glacier, with the vertical leap you can measure with your thumb and index finger, but he passes well and can shoot. The Bulls don't have any player with real post moves, so good shooters are critical to help them score enough points to compete.

  • Joakim is on our team, so I like him. I was sending text messages to my brothers and sisters all during game 6, usually to commiserate after one of Del Negro's terrible play calls coming out of a time out. After the game, Joannie mentioned that she really liked the guy with the long hair. It didn't surprise me. To someone who doesn't watch much basketball, his hustle and emotion are very visible. He wants to win, and you can't fault him for that.

  • In this Bulls team, you can see a nucleus to build around.


I don't think the Bulls will win on Saturday, not on the road, but as long as it's not decided by the officials, I'll be happy.


Well, maybe I'd like one more overtime, too. At this point, it seems only appropriate.


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And so, dear reader, we married her

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ABC is joining Hulu. It's a thrill for us to welcome them and a big day in our company history!


Between that deal, and our TV campaign, and the concurrent development of many projects for Hulu, and staying up late to communicate with some of our developers in China, and an add-on session of two months of physical therapy for tendinitis of my Achilles, my posts here have been few and far between. May, I promise, will be better. 2009 has assaulted me like a young Mike Tyson and it hasn't let up.


My last physical therapy session (or at least I hope it will be so) was yesterday. I am still not 100%; when my therapist asks me to balance on one leg and do calf raises, it's clear which leg I suffered the injury on. But I am going to attempt to start running again. The NY Marathon is Nov. 1, and my goal is to finish it. I can't run even one mile today without my Achilles flaring up, and the weakness in my left leg calf and ankles has led to shin splints on just that leg, but I'm not ready to throw in the towel on any activities.


The one year anniversary of my Achilles rupture is coming in just over a week. It has been a tough year. You don't realize how much being active contributes to a healthy and happy state of mind until you're knocked out of commission for so long. At therapy yesterday, I jumped up and hit the ceiling at the office. It felt like a celebration.


I am convinced that a big reason for the rupture last May was that I had just completed a two week dosage of the antibiotic ciprofloxocin for a sinus infection. I went to run the Santa Monica 5K on a Saturday, then to play basketball on Monday, and pop went the tendon.


The FDA has since issued a health warning regarding the increased risk of tendon rupture from the usage of the class of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones: Ciprofloxocin and Levofloxacin being the two most well-known, along with Ofloxacin, Pefloxacin. They cause something called tendon cytotoxicity--in layman's terms, they weaken your tendons. I wasn't told this when I was given my prescription at the drug store, but do a search on Google on this topic now and you'll find plenty of documentation.


If your doctor prescribes one of these for you, I'd first ask if another antibiotics are really necessary. If so, ask if an antibiotic that's not in this class is a reasonable substitute. Doctors like fluoroquinolones because they're broad spectrum, but ask me if I'd rather have a lingering sinus infection or a year's worth of pain and immobility and lingering tendinitis and weakness from a total Achilles rupture. If you have to take one of those fluoroquinolones, I recommend swearing off any physical activity until a few weeks after you've completed your dose. You'll feel fine and think it excessive, but believe me: it's not worth the risk.


How did I get from ABC joining to Hulu to issuing health warnings? You can tell what's top of mind for me these days. Let's treat both of these as good news: Hulu adds a valued partner, and I'm out of therapy and back on the road to health, running shoes laced.


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The Brothers Bloom - the first seven minutes

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Years back, I saw a movie at Sundance called Brick, by a first-time director named Rian Johnson. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lukas Haas, Brick cast the traditional roles of a film noir in a high school setting, hard-boiled dialogue and all. Of the many movies I saw that year, Brick was among the most memorable for its intriguing conceit, one which the director committed to fully. It was no surprise that it won a special mention or award during the festival for uniqueness of voice or vision, something of the sort.


Back then, I made a mental checkmark next to Rian Johnson as a talented young director to watch. And soon I will have the chance. Hulu has an exclusive on the first seven minutes of his next movie, The Brothers Bloom.







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Three musical pieces

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As an espresso shot of inspiration, this musical number (YouTube) which many many people forwarded me yesterday. What would be perfect is if I heard she'd started dating Paul the opera singer.


Also moving, also musically related, is Anvil! The Story of Anvil, a documentary about a metal band. Like many who come to this movie, I had not heard of Anvil, nor am I a metalhead. My first thought on seeing the trailer was that I wanted to see it but perhaps just on DVD given how far on the periphery of my interests it fell.


But I kept getting pitched to see it from UCLA film schoolers who raved about it, and given that it was only in LA for a one week run at the Nuart, and after reading a rave review by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, I planned an outing to see it last night and invited a bunch of friends.


Just one person responded, in the negative, and the remaining radio silence I read as tacit declines, perhaps reacting the same way I did to the trailer. So I went by myself; once I saw the documentary, that seemed only fitting.


Anvil was a seminal metal band, and in the early 80's, people in that genre of the industry foresaw big things for them, but for reasons not entirely clear to me as an outsider to that genre, they slipped into obscurity while bands like Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, and Slayer went on to fame and fortune (in the documentary, they are referred to as The Big Four, a bit of trivia that was news to me).


Lead singer Steve Kudlow is known to all but his family as Lips. The drummer's name is Robb Reiner, a coincidence that seems so improbable and perfect that I thought he might have changed his name at one point, but no, this is art and life together in a winking conspiracy. The two of them are the founders and soul of Anvil, and even now, in their 50's, bicker, make up, repeat, like an old married couple.


What always surprises me is how sweet all the people involved in heavy metal music seem to be, from the musicians with their face paint and outfits heavy on leather and endless waves of hair to the fans with their heads bopping and tongues hanging. Lips is the star of the documentary, almost childlike in his optimism. He and Sally Hawkins' Poppy from Happy-Go-Lucky should get together, just to see if their buoyancy might generate a harmonic convergence that could bring about world peace.


Not that Lips doesn't have his moments of despair, but much of the wonder of this movie is watching him, on screen confronting his despair, and then setting it aside with what comes to seem a courageous perseverance and good cheer.


I can see why so many film students gravitate towards the story, as all who enter the arts confront the issue of "what price my art?" on a daily basis. The internet has made critics of us all, but it has not simplified the question of why people pursue art, and at what cost to themselves and their loved ones.


It's a touching story about which I will reveal little else other than to recommend it highly. See it if/when it makes it to your town. The director Sacha Gervasi, who wrote the screenplay for The Terminal and who is teaching screenwriting at UCLA Film School this quarter, showed up after the screening for an unpublicized Q&A. He was gracious and shared some intriguing stories:



  • Gervasi met Anvil when he approached them backstage in London and introduced himself as their number one fan. Lips said it was their first time in London and asked Gervasi to show them around town, leading to the humorous image of Gervasi, a young metalhead, leading Lips and Reiner through the Tate Gallery. Gervasi claimed credit for introducing Reiner to the works of Francis Bacon, a story that is less humorous when you learn, in the movie, that Reiner paints Edward Hopper-esque scenes with considerable skill.

  • At the screening at Sundance in 2008, a woman during the Q&A asked Lips if he'd ever considered what toll his pursuit of his music placed on his family, and Kudlow broke down and started crying, and then the woman started crying. And she said to him that at least he'd taught his son one of the most valuable lessons, and that was to never give up on his dreams.


Lastly, as part of our documentary launch at Hulu, we added a documentary I saw at Sundance years ago and loved, called DIG!. It shares some parallels with Anvil in its exploration of why artists do what they do.







Director Ondi Timoner, the only two-time Grand Jury Prize winner ever at Sundance, spoke to Hulu editor Rebecca Harper recently. One of the reasons this appealed to me more than many documentaries is that Timoner used one of the principal characters as a narrator, and not an unbiased, omniscient narrator. It's a twist that works, something Timoner spoke about:



Why choose to have Courtney narrate the film?


Courtney was a huge breakthrough for me. I'd attempted to tell the story without narration, but I needed an anchor. I didn't want omniscient narration; I wanted it to be a ride, a journey. So I woke up very pregnant in the middle of the night a month and a half before I finished. I called Courtney right away. He happened to be in Europe at the time, but he was flying into L.A. the next day. He didn't change any of my words; he was gracious and generous. I appreciate him for that.



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The Girlfriend Experience

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I can't think of too many directors who've built a more personal and varied body of work than Steven Soderbergh. He's written, produced, directed, and even been his own cinematographer, while doing anything that interests him, from personal projects to huge blockbusters with stars like George Clooney and Julia Roberts. He's experimented with distribution with a day-and-date release for Bubble, and he's shot epic movies like Che Parts 1 and 2 with a Red One camera that was still in beta. It's a dream of a career arc.


We have the premiere of the trailer of his next movie at Hulu. The Girlfriend Experience (also shot on the Red One) follows the life of a high-end call girl who offers not just sex but the full girlfriend experience, and it stars an adult film star, Sasha Grey. Soderbergh did a Q&A with Hulu about the movie.



Why choose to go with non-professional actors for this project?


I've been experimenting with non-actors (terrible term) for years now, and I really love what they bring. It's not a result-oriented process for them, so the feeling of the performance can, if you're lucky, be incredibly realistic, almost documentary-like. In fact, I viewed the whole film as kind of a fictionalized documentary.



Most of the movie was shot with nothing more than natural light. I'm looking forward to seeing it.







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The answering machines lives on

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Recently someone posted about how the ubiquity of cell phones has neutered movie plotlines dependent on lack of communication for dramatic suspense (if someone knows which post I'm referring to, let me know; for the life of me I can't remember where I saw it). For example, Romeo and Juliet would've never ended tragically if the two of them could have texted each other rather than having a messenger try to deliver the news of the faked death ("Drnking drug to fake death for 2 and 40 hrs. Not rlly dead! Meet @CapuletCrypt? <3<3<3 -J")


So screenwriters depend on poor cell phone reception or destroyed cell phones to try and extend the useful life of communication barriers as a plot device.


The plot device that bothers me the most is the use of old-school answering machines to incite conflict. Every time a character comes home with a loved one and then presses play on one of those old-school answering machines, unwittingly playing a suspicious or incriminating message out loud before they can hit the stop button, I picture a lazy screenwriter at the laptop thinking of how to squeeze a plot turn into one page of script. I barely know anybody who still has a landline, let alone one of those answering machines. Mobile phone voicemail just isn't as convenient for a screenwriter, though, so the answering machine lives on.


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