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Why I like Chuck

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:20:27 +0000

I’d prefer Summer Glau and Portia de Rossi, but beggars can’t be choosers. Ok…there are actually a number of reasons I like Chuck, but my heart grows three sizes when I get to watch Adam Baldwin play the tough guy and Tony Hale do the weird things he does.

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My New Year’s Resolution: I Want a Girlfriend.

Minh Chu — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:49:11 +0000

The holidays suck. My sister-in-law once threw a dinner roll at my cousin’s face. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the roll was covered in mashed potatoes and it actually stuck to my cousin’s cheek. And as if dysfunctional family issues weren’t enough, I have to hear “Still no girlfriend?” at least 20 times between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

So this year, my new year’s resolution is simple: I want a girlfriend. From now on, whether it’s Father’s day, Christmas, or Martin Luther King day, I don’t ever want to hear that question again. With that in mind, here are my 5 reasons why I don’t plan on spending even one more holiday as a single man:

5. Extra Wine at Thanksgiving Dinner
The sound of my family droning on for hours wouldn’t sound nearly as bad if I could only get drunk…or at least get a nice buzz going. But I can’t stress how important it is that I be sober enough to drive so I can bolt the second my desire to strangle my brother becomes uncontrollable. If I have a girlfriend, only one of us needs to stay sober, and my thought is that at her family events, I’ll be the designated driver (the last thing I need is to drunkenly call her dad a d-bag anyway), and when we’re with my family, she gets the keys and I get the booze.

4.True Love
That’s right, it’s #4. I don’t want to sound unromantic here, but there are so many things that have more tangible benefits for me than true love. Look, I think true love is important, I mean…it made the list right, but since I’ve never had anything I would call true love, I just can’t get as excited about it as I can things like the next 3 items…

3. No More Going to Bed at 10:00 on New Year’s Eve
You ever been single on New Year’s Eve and not have a single party to go to? I hate bars the way Tom Cruise hates sanity…you know, the way the Olsen twins hate food. And even when I have a party I’ve been invited to, the only thing more depressing than being alone for New Year’s is watching everybody else suck face when the ball drops. So yeah, this New Year’s Eve will find me going to bed early (and probably drunk) just because all the other alternatives make me want to beat myself to death. If I had a girlfriend, parties would be fine, and if we didn’t have one to go to, we could pop open a bottle of champagne next to a nice crackling fire and ring in the new year together.

2. A Reason to Leave Early
Holidays are a time to be with family. An while I love my family, I can only handle them so much. I mean my older sister once told me that I would never amount to anything and that I might as well start hanging out at homeless shelters because I would be forced to move into one eventually, and I “should know which one has the most comfortable beds.”

With a girlfriend at my side, I can always say “I’m sorry, [name of girlfriend] needs to get up really early tomorrow,” or “we’re going to have to take off [name of girlfriend] isn’t feeling very well. While a girlfriend should be more than just a built-in excuse, that’s a real good icing on the cake.

1. No More Incessant Nagging from My Family
Maybe some people have polite families…but as far as I’m concerned, the only places they exist are on TV Land or Nick At Night. My brother got me Lars and the Real Girl for Christmas, and in the card he wrote “I thought you could use a good ‘how-to’ video.” The first words out of my grandmother’s mouth every time I see her are “are you dating anyone yet?” And it’s the way she stretches out the word “yet” as if to say “you’ve been single for so long, if you don’t date soon, you might as well just buy yourself a walker and move into a retirement community.”

Yes, for New Year’s my resolution is to get a girlfriend. It will mean so much less static from my family, it will mean the grief they do direct at me will be dulled by a good buzz and the thought that no matter how long Christmas dinner lasts, I’ll be going home with a beautiful woman by the end of the night. Who knows, it might even lead to true love.

10 Tech Toys I Want That Nobody Got Me For Christmas

admin — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:46:49 +0000

Ok, Christmas is over…and I didn’t get everything I wanted…I mean, I got a sweater that says “world’s best dad” on it, but that doesn’t really do much for me. The one nice thing about a recession is that all sorts of companies are dropping prices on their stuff so they can get some sales. So (in no particular order) here are the toys I want to get myself:

Blu-ray Player

Like DVD players before them, CD players before that, and VCRs before that, Blu-ray players started off selling for about $1,000 to milk all the early adopters out there. But now I can get a Sony BDP-S350 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player for $269 or a Sharp Aquos for a mere $209 — I’m sold.

1080p Projector

Speaking of toys that have dropped in price, just a year ago you couldn’t find a 1080p projector for less than ten grand or so. But now I can pick up a 1080p Mitsubishi projector for just about two grand…scratch that, if you buy it from Amazon by December 31st, you get a $500 rebate, bringing it down to $1,509 plus free super saver shipping…I don’t want to sound like a Mitsubishi spokesman or anything here, but that’s a freaking great deal! (To get it, just click on the link, then click on “8 used & new” to switch the vendor from “Electronics Expo” to “Amazon.com” — voila! $500 rebate magically appears!)

125″ 16:9 Electric Screen

Go big or go home. If you buy a projector, then get a 70″ screen, you are stupid…just buy a flat screen, better yet, just send all your money to me. I think the perfect compliment to a 1080p projector is a screen that I can operate by remote control…next step, remote controlled fireplace.

Xbox 360 Elite

Despite my love of toys, I don’t have an Xbox 360 yet. Which means I don’t have Halo 3, Rock Band 2, or Call of Duty 4…and I think it’s about time to leave the stoneage and finally find out what happens to Master Chief (and catch up on some other time-sucks while I’m at it).

Ear-poppin Denon 7.1 Receiver

Let’s face it, 5.1 is about as high-end as VHS or 8-track tapes. Every time I watch The Dark Knight, a little voice in the back of my head keeps telling me that there should be two more speakers behind me making me feel like I’m on that Batcycle thing. And the Denon AVR-988 7.1 Receiver gives me 110 watts per channel, HDMI 1.3 inputs and outputs, and a Faroudja FLi2310 video processor that provides video scaling up to 1080p resolution so my regular DVDs will look crisp and clear…even at 125 inches.

Custom Built PC of Awesomeness

The Intel Core i7 is out, memory costs next to nothing, and I can get terabytes upon terabytes of storage served up at 300 MB/s for dirt cheap. If I could just add a small, networked computer to my living room, I’d have the ultimate media server as well as a machine that would let me finally say “yes, it can run Crysis.”

Asus Eee

In addition to letting me stream my music collection to the living room, having an Asus Eee on my couch also means plenty of Web surfing while I watch TV…could there be anything better?

Big Ol’ Flat Screen TV

Of course, if I’m going to watch all that TV while I surf the Web, I don’t want to wear down the bulb in my projector. Since I’ll be using the projector for all my serious movie watching, I don’t need to spend a fortune on a TV, but a nice sub-$1,000 40″ Sony Bravia should let me watch How I Met Your Mother in style.

iPod Touch

When I want to take my music on the road, I can think of no better way than to ditch my 1 GB Sandisk mp3 player and upgrade to an iPod Touch. I know lots of people go in for the iPhone, but it feels awkward holding that brick next to my head and trying to talk…and as one review pointed out, the phone is the weakest part of the iPhone.

Netflix Subscription

Ok…while not really a “tech toy,” Netflix now carries Blu-ray movies and streams videos so clear they make Hulu look like your watching video underwater. And now that I’m going to have a sweet home theater, I need lots of high definition content to enjoy. And while I can’t afford to get all of these toys, I think I deserve a few of them.

Secret Millionaire - Reality TV That Doesn’t Suck?

admin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:49:54 +0000

I hate reality TV shows. Unless they have Paula Abdul to offer drunken commentary every couple of minutes, I’d sooner stab my eyes out with two of the icicles hanging off my roof than watch boring people behave like buffoons for an hour (well…42 minutes plus commercials). But as a big fan of philanthropy and board member of a charity designed to raise funds for the deserving, I simply had to check out Secret Millionaire.

Secret Millionaire spends each episode following a millionaire or two as they are taken out of their lives of comfort and dumped into poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Disguised as poor people themselves, the millionaires live amongst some of America’s neediest for a week. At the end of the week, they have to give away at least $100,000 of their own money to one (or more) of the people they meet.

Secret Millionaire suffers from some of the same pitfalls that curse the reality TV genre. The producers clearly try to make places look far worse than they actually are. The community of Imperial Beach was outraged that the show’s first episode made Imperial Beach look like a wasteland…in reality it’s not. It’s far from great…but it’s not Chernobyl. In the second episode, when the rich husband and wife opened the door to the bathroom in their trailer-park mobile home, the sound of flies buzzing in the microphone suddenly appeared (clearly faked).

But despite the producers’ best efforts to ruin any sense of reality in their reality tv show, Secret Millionaire has some really enjoyable qualities: Probably most importantly, each episode something happens to drastically change the lives of one (or several) families. And as an added bonus, rich people (who are accustomed to wasting thousands of dollars on fuel for their private jet, or on extravagant dinners) get to see how several thousand dollars can do more than buy a ridiculous bottle of wine. They come to see how that money can do something like help a family get out of debt and change the course of their lives forever or it can help a small homeless shelter serve the destitute for years to come.

Make a difference in someone’s life
by supporting a good charity today

In The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne proposes that the biggest travesty isn’t that rich people don’t care about poor people…it’s that they don’t know poor people. What Shane suggests, and Secret Millionaire proves over and over, is that once rich people see that poor people aren’t all just lazy bums or junkies, and they realize what an impact they can make in the lives of the poor, they won’t be able to resist getting involved (which is why the Secret Millionaires usually feel compelled to give much more than the $100,000 the show requires of them).

If you haven’t watched it yet, you can watch Secret Millionaire for free on Hulu. You might find it so heartwarming, that you feel compelled to sponsor a child, make a donation to an amazing charity, or buy some food for that homeless guy you usually see on your drive home.

The Hottest Women in Sci-Fi Today

admin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:55:30 +0000

It used to be that when you said “sci-fi,” people immediately thought of guys with pocket-protectors dressing up like aliens and going to conventions to talk about which is better, Star Trek or Babylon 5. But with the success of shows like Heroes and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, sci-fi is enjoying its spot in mainstream. And with the many new sci-fi shows, come many new sci-fi babes. Here (in no particular order) are the hottest women of today’s sci-fi:

Summer Glau
Show: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
When it was announced that Summer Glau would play John Connor’s robo-protector, Firefly fans across the globe (us included) danced for joy in the street. The show has hinted that one day she might turn against the future leader of the resistance and he might have to take her out of commission…if that ever happens, we’re going to stop watching. We just want FOX to know that.

Ali Larter
Show: Heroes
Whether her name is Niki, Jessica, Tracy, or Shiva-Destroyer of Nations, one thing’s for sure…she’s hot. Though, if they kill her again and bring her back as a quadruplet, fans everywhere will need to give Tim Kring a collective facepalm.

Deanna Russo
Show: Knight Rider
The car talks…and it can transform into a truck. While we wonder how much Ford payed to turn KITT into not one, but multiple Ford cars…it does very well qualify Knight Rider as Sci-Fi and Deanna Russo can join our list.

Evangeline Lilly
Show: Lost
The Internet is full of debates over whether or not LOST has lost what made it great. For this article, all we care about is that Evangeline Lilly is so hot that we would pick a fight with Jet Li if she asked us to.

Hayden Panettiere
Show: Heroes
Every time we see Hayden off the set of Heroes, she’s telling us why we need to save the whales…and while we don’t have an anti-whale agenda per se, we do think she’s a little annoying. But she’s also one of the hottest cheerleaders TV has ever given us.

Lena Headey
Show: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
With our giant crush on Summer Glau, it would have been easy to overlook Lena Headey. And while we’re always a little put-off when a TV show spinoff recasts leading roles, Sarah Michelle Gellar made us not mind when they did it to Buffy, and same goes for Lena Headey.

Yvonne Strahovski
Show: Chuck
We’re on the fence about Chuck…but we love Yvonne Strahovski. With this picture, we don’t need to say much more.

Marley Shelton
Show: Eleventh Hour
Ok, we were really bored with Eleventh Hour. It’s not very interesting and it probably won’t be on the air much longer, but Marley Shelton is the biggest redeeming factor to the show, she’s hot, she’s tough, and we want her number.

Tricia Helfer
Show: Battlestar Galactica
Edit: When we published this list, we somehow forgot to include Six…sorry…that was our bad. Here you go Internet:

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Star Trek - Rebooting Never Looked So Fun

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:40:48 +0000

When a movie franchise grows stale, Hollywood will often pull the plug, wait a couple years, then “reboot” the franchise with new actors, new plotlines, and a new feel. Sometimes this works great…Batman and Robin starring George Clooney and California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was expensive, boring, and a total waste of just about everyone’s time. A few years later, Batman Begins offered audiences a darker look at the Dark Knight, and Batman was reborn in the form of Christian Bale. Then again, sometimes make Ang Lee’s Hulk or a boring Godzilla movie.

With the upcoming reboot of Star Trek, we’re forced to ask…Can J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias) bring the USS Enterprise out of the halls of Sci-Fi conventions (where middle-aged men dress in unfortunately tight-fitting spandex or Klingon makeup), and into the mainstream?

With an exciting new take and a younger cast (including Zachary Quinto from Heroes), it’s possible. And with that trailer, we’re excited to find out.

TV is Broken - The 2008 Season Sucks

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:38:50 +0000

Last season’s writers’ strike caused nearly every non-reality show to have very short runs last season. Between the strike and Kiefer Southerland’s DWI conviction, 24 didn’t even have a season. As a result, TV fans across the nation have been bored with reality shows about modeling (yawn), or worse, they had to go get social lives. But after 18 months of boredom, die-hards from coast to coast ditched their friends, upgraded their DVRs and got ready for an awesome 2008 Fall season. What they got instead was a bad Sex in the City ripoff, two mediocre X Files clones, and some terrible plotlines for their favorite returning shows. TV is broken, here’s our proof:
The Worst New Sitcom: Kath & Kim It is almost impossible to get viewers behind a show with entirely unlikeable characters. Even when you do it perfectly (It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia), you’re limited to a niche audience at best. Kath & Kim chronicles a spoiled, self-involved woman-child and her enabling mother. If we wanted to watch annoying people who are in love with themselves, we would have watched The Simple Life.
The Worst New Serial: Eleventh Hour With more interesting actors than J.J. Abrams’ Fringe, and with Jerry Bruckheimmer at the helm, we’d hoped this would be interesting. Instead we found an utterly boring, sort of sci-fi show that in its debut chose to get at the forefront of the stemcell/cloning controversy. Of course nobody likes to be preached at, and they’re about six years too late to join the debate.
The Worst Returning Serial: Prison Break This is what happens when TV executives get greedy, pure and simple. Prison Break was never supposed to last more than two seasons. But it was making money, so when some producer needed a new chinchilla-skin car cover, they asked “does this really have to be about people breaking out of prison?” Then they started bringing people back from the dead, and not wanting to spend much on the makeup budget, lasered off the ginormous tattoo covering Wentworth Miller’s top half. You’ve jumped the shark, please get off TV now.
The Most Annoying Plotline: Heroes Every season is referred to by the show’s creators as a “volume.” First season was “Generations,” followed by “Exodus,” and now we are in the middle of “Villians.” Clearly Tim Kring is a fan of Empire Strikes Back, but who wants to tune in week-after-week to watch their favorite characters get their back-sides handed to them? To compensate for such wimpy heroes, every time one of them dies, they are miraculously brought back (or turned into a triplet). As long as they keep this up, they’re going to lose tens-of-thousands of regular viewers every week.

Final Thoughts
In The 40 Year Old Virgin Steve Carrell asked “is it true that if you don’t use it, you lose it?” And when it comes to writing compelling TV shows, the answer is a resounding yes. TV writers’ brains have atrophied from not working for so long. And we’re pretty sure they’ll get their groove back, but we have two questions…by the time they do, will anyone still be watching? And, anyone want to buy a used DVR?

Call us corporate shills, but it’s times like these, we’re seriously glad we have Netflix.

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George W Bush’s Last Night in Office - Amazing Video from the Future

admin — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:32:26 +0000

If this video doesn’t make you believe time travel is possible, nothing will.

Actually, this is the music video for “As Tall as Cliffs” from indie collective Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s. In addition to having a good sense of humor and a time machine, Margot is one of the best upcoming bands out there.

If they ever come to your town, take our advice…go see them. They manage to fit 8 people (sometimes more) on the tiny bar stages and fill the club with Red Bull-meets-a-bottle-of-caffeine-pills levels of energy and some seriously great music.

Fringe vs. Eleventh Hour - Battle of the X Files Ripoffs

admin — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:17:58 +0000

The Fall 2008 season has brought viewers two new shows that follow a team of agents who are called to investigate the unusual and paranormal. But if you’re like us, you only have room in your life for one show about the exact same thing. Here’s a breakdown of the how Fringe stacks up against Eleventh Hour, and which sci-fi investigator show should ultimately win a place on your TV.

Leading Lady - Anna Torv vs. Marley Shelton
Anna Torv is boring. She looks plain, her lack of emotion almost rivals Agent Smith in The Matrix. On the other hand, Marley Shelton is hot, could easily beat up any guy you know, and ever since Planet Terror, superfans across the globe have been waiting to see more of her.

Leading Man - Joshua Jackson vs. Rufus Sewell
Hmmm…Pacey from Dawson’s Creek, or that dude from Dark City. While Fringe might just do for Joshua Jackson what How I Met Your Mother did for Neil Patrick Harris, we’re going to give this one to Eleventh Hour for hiring the guy from one of the best cult-classic sci-fi flicks ever.

Comedy Sidekick - John Noble vs. Rufus Sewell
Crazy old man that apparently performed hundreds of LSD-inspired experiments in the 70’s vs. Rufus Sewell (again). As the geeky scientist that pairs up with the butt-kicking blonde, Sewell has to try to be funny without being a total loser. On the other hand, John Noble keeps a live cow in his science lab.

Executive Producer - J.J. Abrams vs. Jerry Bruckheimer
On one hand J.J. Abrams brought us Alias and Lost. On the other hand, he brought us What About Brian and Cloverfield. Jerry Bruckheimer produced The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, both National Treasures, and a whole string of CSI’s. Tough call, we’ll call this one a tie.

Plot - Team investigates strange occurrences vs. Team investigates strange occurrences
This one really should be a tie, but Eleventh Hour just isn’t compelling. However, from the very first episode, Fringe clearly set out a battle between the good guys and the evil corporation, and tipped-off the viewer that not everything is what it seems.

Overall Winner
When the Fall 2008 TV season was announced, we thought Eleventh Hour was going to be the clear winner. But despite how much we love Marley Shelton and how little we care about Anna Torv, Fringe is the better show, without question. It’s filled with more intrigue, more suspense, more humor, and it has a cow.

So with all the categories counted, we declare the winner: X Files
.

If you’re going to copy something, at least make it better than the original. This is the rule bands must follow if they cover a song, it’s how Microsoft became an empire, and it’s why Japanese television sets took over the market. So if you want to watch a good paranormal investigation show, just watch X Files.

Valkyrie Trailer

admin — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:22:02 +0000

There are two things Germany really hates: Hitler and Scientology. One being a very dark cloud looming over Germany’s past and the other being labeled “a dangerous cult” by German authorities. So when Tom Cruise wanted to shoot a movie about the plot to assassinate Hitler, he was met with a bit of resistance from the German government. But their hatred for Hitler won out of their hatred of Scientology, and they eventually relented. So on December 26, 2008, Valkyrie will be coming to theaters.

While we’re not going to rush out the day after Christmas to see it, from the trailer it looks pretty interesting.