Why aren’t they making things like this for adults?
- A must-have for all boys, this cool hooded jacket has built-in headphone speakers in the hood
- Made of 100% nylon and polyester
- Multiple blue colors with yellow accents
- Regular fit
- Machine wash
That’s right, it’s a jacket you can plug an iPod into!
I need a new jacket. I like those colors. And yes, I’d love to have a hood that doubles as headphones.
Alas, it’s only available in kids’ sizes.
Sheesh.
Although the big surprise twist isn’t that much of one, The Skeleton Key
is still a very entertaining and stylish supernatural thriller, with an all-star cast, wonderfully spooky scoring and great directing like they aren’t supposed to do any more. And what’s more, it gets the difference between voodoo and hoodoo right.
Kate Hudson and especially John Hurt absolutely sell the story, and the entire conceit of hoodoo not being dangerous unless you believe it teases viewers not to believe.
Recommended for fans of supernatural thrillers like the Serpent and the Rainbow, the Ring and the Sixth Sense.
The Internet scares the bejeesus out of the newspaper industry, as I’ve mentioned before. Although the industry’s current slump in circulation began before the birth of the World Wide Web, there’s certainly reason to be concerned: Even more than radio or TV, the Internet provides an immediacy that the daily newspaper, which once was the place where breaking news was reported, can’t compete with.
I’m a big advocate of newspapers competing by working smarter and harder. The Internet, at this point, does not cover all news equally, and some of it, it doesn’t cover at all. Newspapers, which have infrastructures and credibility, can and should push their ways even more aggressively into these areas. At the end of the day, a newspaper Web site is no different from a blog or a rumor site, except that the newspaper site can have a credibility and authority the others can’t match. (Obviously, if it doesn’t have that, fixing that is job one.) So pursuing, say, local news and politics — which regional media rarely does — is a key part of the picture.
But so is using the Internet to reimagine the news business. It removes a great deal of the overhead from taking on aspects of other media, and can potentially bring in more eyeballs and, more importantly, help develop more of a relationship with the eyeballs already there.
So what does this mean for the Hesperia Star? Well, the holidays will delay a formal announcement, but we will have what I think is a first of its kind for a weekly newspaper (maybe a first for local newspapers generally) announcement early in 2006.
Well, the past week made me think that maybe, maybe my symptoms from this flare-up were going to taper off without ever getting to the life-disrupting stage they got to last April. Inconvenient I can handle, have to work from home and sleep 18 hours a day, I cannot.
The respite was apparently a bluff, because this weekend, my symptoms came roaring in with a head of steam. My eyeballs are back to boiling, I have a persistent dry cough — the kittens in particular are upset by this, because they’re not sure what it means yet — and I’ve been having a lot of joint pain. I’m still not at the point where Jenn has to help me get up from a laying position and help me get my legs over the side of the bathtub to shower, but I’m now on that side of the bellcurve rather than the side of normalcy.
Ho, ho, ho.
The good news and the bad news: The Dukes of Hazzard movie is extremely similar to the television series it’s based upon. No one ever gets hurt through all the stunts and cartoon violence, running moonshine comes off as a harmless bit of fun and most of the movie is watching amazing car stunts and ogling Daisy Duke.
It could have been a lot different: Johnny Knoxville could potentially have brought a gritty vibe, and Seann William Scott could have brought a real gross-out appeal, but except for momentary nods in that direction, the show stays mostly true to its roots.
Changing the tone more than the two leads is Willie Nelson as Uncle Jesse. In a nod to real life, Jesse sneaks in a little marijuana smoking (hinted at, more than shown in the rated version, explicitly shown in the unrated version) and brings a love of silly jokes to the proceedings — the ad-libbed scenes of Willie Nelson telling Johnny Knoxville one silly joke after another, as he lobs flaming jars of moonshine behind the car is one of the highlights of the movie.
Jessica Simpson does very little in this film, but it’s exactly what you’d expect and, to be fair, she does it very well. Daisy remains sexy-but-not-slutty, just as she was in Catherine Bach’s original version of the character. The 2005 rendition just is a hard-bodied version showing even more skin.
In a nice update, the General Lee doesn’t start off with the Confederate Battle Flag on the roof of the car, and once it appears, Bo and Luke are ambivalent about it being there (and it appears to be gone in the final sequence where the car is hidden in a field), and they get an earful about it while on the highway into Atlanta, both positive and negative.
Burt Reynolds, whose Smokey and the Bandit movies are almost certainly responsible for the creation of the original TV show, is mostly wasted here, showing little of the oily charm he’s been able to show even in lesser movies, like Striptease. Still, the Bandit turning Boss Hogg is worth a look, and a definite shout-out to the fans who’ve been watching this mini-genre of movies and television shows since the 1970s.
A recommended viewing for fans of the original show or Smokey and the Bandit. A recommended purchase only for those who want to have footage of Jessica Simpson writhing around in a bikini (check the music video on the DVD for more) close at hand at all times.
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