BilmBlog500

On the evening of Sunday July 10 I made my way to the AMC Empire and saw Knight and Day (aud #25) and The Girl Who Played With Fire (aud #18). And enjoyed both. Knight and Day took a critical reaming, but it seems to be getting some decent word of mouth and holding pretty decently at the box office, and deservedly so. No, it's not great art, but it's a lot of fun and a perfectly pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. There's totally nothing wrong with that. I've generally been happy as a clam the past 25 years to spend a little bit of time with Tom Cruise, and here he's on Cruise Control. Nothing serious about this, no Magnolia thing or Born on the 4th of July thing, totally Cocktail Tom here. He has me at "hello." And there's good chemistry between him and Cameron Diaz. A lot of the critics have made out as if this was some cheapo thing like The Bucket List where you could tell in every shot that Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson weren't...

Sadly two Hungarian touriststs died in a duck tour accident in Philadelphia this week. That is two more people than have died from succesful islamic terrorism attacks in the in the US in the past 8 years. Yet we live our lives under constant assault from the security state that has developed in the US. I can enter a major league baseball stadium with a factory-sealed water bottle but not with the same bottle in its entirely empty state. I must wait on line and present photo ID to enter midtown office buildings filled with people and companies nobody in the world cares about. Airport security theatre.. Bag checks for the Bryant Park FIlm Festival. I'm not linking to all of my earlier posts, click the Homeland "security" tag to find more. And as it turns out, going on a duck tour in Philadelphia is more dangerous. OK, I'm being a little tiny bit flip here. If or even when there's a successful suicide bomb attack in the NYC subways, that will be a very bad thing...

Shortly after my last funny book roundup I sat down with Wonder Woman 700 and the latest issue of Simpsons Super Spectacular. I would've gotten more pleasure flushing myoney down the toilet. Wonder Woman was a disaster. It wasn't that I couldn't finish any of the three stories. No, they were so bad I couldn't start them. When that happens with the fiction in The New Yorker -- well, tastes differ. But in Wonder Woman? I missed Batman 700 the week it came out, leafed through at the store, and after my experiences with WW600 and Superman 700 decided to leave on the shelf. Simpsons Super Spectacular is the weak link in the Bongo line. Like an all-star film comedy whose creativity stops with the casting this book often thinks the very idea of it is so fun that there's no need to take it further. But this issue is bad on an entirely different level. I keep buying the book because I like the idea, but I think after this issue it might seriously be time to do The Simpson...

So let's see what's happening this week in the world of e-books and retailing. Borders officially launched its e -book store today and has new low prices on the Sony Reader in their e-reader department , which is also charging forward and looking toward the opening of in-store AreaE sections in stores next month where people can play with the Sony, Kobo and Alutek devices, promises of more to come. Their goal, expressed in this news release , is to gain a 17% market share in e-books. And now here's an article from Publishers Weekly, reporting on a Barnes & Noble investor conference presentation. An article in the print edition of PW this week further elaborates, saying B&N claims a 20% share of the e-book market currently compared to a 17% share of print books, that they now sell 80% of their Nooks in retail stores vs. internet, and that currently print retail accounts for 90% of book sales but will drop to under 70% by 2014. Even though they see brick and mort...

So there's this great debate right now over whether the federal government should be spending more money or should be focusing overtime on deficit reduction. I find myself surprisingly ambivalent about how that question gets answered. I am liberal by nature and tend to think the government can spend lots of money toward very good ends. I get embarrassed walking around the streets of New York City, which is a very rich city, and seeing how many potholed awful streets we have, as if we can't afford to take good care of them. I see way more panhandlers and homeless people in New York than I do in London, which embarrases me. We need to invest more in infrastructure, start pouring some dollars into high speed rail and better mass transit and better highways as well. Update that electric grid. SIngle payer health care. I can think of all kinds of things I'd like the government to spend money on. And certainly, not extending unemployment benefits in the current situation st...

I spent part of the 4th of July at my younger brother's. My younger brother is my closest friend in all the world, I love spending time with him, but he and his family do all the little things to use more energy than we should need to. Saturday in the Northeast it was certainly warm, temperature got up into the 80s, but it was very low humidity, and really the kind of beautiful summer day that we'd all like to have lots more of. Unless you're out working really hard in the heat of the day in the sun, it's just not that uncomfortable. Quite the contrary, really. Yet, my brother's house is air-conditioned to 72º for the entire day. He's out for little league practice, he's swimming at a neighbor's pool, he's bbqing at the neighbor's for dinner and the ac is going. I was hanging around the house but can assure you I didn't need the ac, but it's also not my place to go turning it off. And then there are the lights that are left on, in...