BilmBlog500

All kinds of nice photos and stuff I took at BEA and maybe I will have time to post more on the subject at some point. One quick post I did want to make was about the array of eReaders that were on display at BEA. We could play with the Kobo, which is the new eReader that Borders will be selling, and the BeReader, and the Sony Reader, and at least one or two more. The good news for Amazon is that nobody's been able to improve upon the Kindle in a total way even though all of these people have had plenty of chances to learn from the Kindle's mistakes. The Kobo Reader is cheaper than the others, and the navigation wasn't bad, but it seemed a little slow going from one screen to another. It also felt cheap, without the same heft as the others. On balance, I do think this might be a good purchase if you want to go below the $150 price point on an eReader, but it's not a threat to the Kindle. The Be, I didn't like that very much at all from a quick playing around with...

Kick Ass was a little frustrating to me. Very good in some ways, but yet not as good as I think it should have been or could have been. The biggest problem I had with the movie was the tone. I don't mind violence in movies, per se, but there was something about the violence here that struck me as being gratuitous and inappropriate. When one of the bad guys is crushed in his car in a junkyard in a much bloodier way than we need with some kind of classical-ish music playing in the background, we're very definitely getting into Clockwork Homage territory, and I don't think Kick Ass is the kind or type or place or whatever of movie for this. Would the movie have been less fun if the blood hadn't been smattering around like in 300? We're able to see when Kick Ass it getting his ass kicked outside the convenience store that this isn't a glamorpatch, we maybe didn't need the unmasking/torture scene to be served up with quite so much brutal relish. Second bigge...

This is the week when the TV networks are announcing their fall schedules, and it's always interesting to see what does and doesn't get picked up. Like, over on Fox, the Simpsons gets 6.3 million viewers last week, 24 gets 8+ million. The Simpsons is coming back next year, and 24 is not. And you could find conundrums like that up and down the scheduling announcements. Well, it's a lot like that in book publishing sometimes. There are the numbers where nobody will want you and the numbers where everyone will want you, and then there are the numbers in between where life isn't fair. Where this author selling 12,000 copies in paperback gets dumped while that author who is selling 9,000 copies gets to return for another day. There's one big difference in publishing, which is that demographics aren't as important to we book people, while in TV it can be much nicer to have 3 million views of 8 that are those hard to find younger viewers than to have 1.2 million yo...

Haven't done a movie review in a while. Haven't actually seen many movies in a while. In fact, in the past three weeks the only movie I saw prior to belatedly Kicking Ass yesterday was a screening of Harry Brown. So a few quick movie reviews in this post, and then I'll talk at more length about Kick Ass in a post just a little bit later. Now, Harry Brown, that's the new Michael Caine movie. I saw it as part of a Michael Caine evening arranged with the Museum of the Moving Image and BAFTA and held at the DGA Theatre in Manhattan, which included an hour of conversation with Caine supplemented by a few film clips. The conversation was wonderful. Caine is wonderful, he's a born raconteur, I'm sure some of the stories he was telling us he has told to 89 other audiences, but he has the gift for making it seem like we were hearing them for the very first time that night. Harry Brown is not so wonderful. When I realized 30 minutes in that it was essentially ...

And while I'm linking from the Washington Post... Columnist Tracee Hamilton gives some love to long-time Detroit Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell, who passed away this past week. Harwell was a great baseball announcer. I had the honor of hearing him often during my college years, including during the 1984 season when the Tigers dominated baseball. And the lines Tracee quotes from which Harwell recited at each season's opening -- they were in my family's Hagaddah as well and recited every year at Passover. The man had taste.

So here 's an article from the Washington Post on Monday , one of the many places in the country where medical marijuana is slowly working its way into the mix. In it, DC AssistantPolice Chief Peter Newsham says: "People don't feel marijuana is dangerous, but it is, because of the way it is sold. We frequently recover weapons when serving search warrants associated with the sale of marijuana." Well, ain't that just the best argument in favor of legalizing I've ever seen. If the only dangerous thing he can come up with is a direct result of the fact that it has to be sold surreptitously and illicitly and thus involving guns, then let's legalize it and make it safe.