We also got the NBC pilot of “Kidnapped” from Netflix on the same DVD. It’s a season-long kidnapping investigation of the son of a rich New York couple.
This literally was unable to keep me awake, so maybe I missed the best parts of it during nodding off spells.
What I did see was kind of cliché — hey, ya think the rogue ex-FBI guy is going to punch the officious FBI team leader by the end of the episode? — but a strong cast, including Delroy Lindo, Dana Delaney and Timothy Hutton, might pull things up as the season progresses.
In a burst of self-confidence, NBC is releasing two of its pilots for the upcoming season on a single DVD, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “Kidnapped.” This might suggest they think both are great, but they previously have released turkeys for free onto iTunes, so there’s no guarantee.
While I’m lukewarm on “Kidnapped” (more on that in a moment), “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” — one of two shows about Saturday Night Live this television season — is a winner.
(We rented the two shows on DVD from Netflix, although I’m told both are now floating around the Internet via BitTorrent and other mediums.)
I expected something much more reverential of SNL from an NBC show. Fortunately, Judd Hirsch’s meltdown before the opening credits even roll throws that out the window, attacking the fictional version of SNL, and television in general, for being too afraid of offending anyone and of putting commerce ahead of art (although acknowledging it’s always been a battle between the two).
The cast is good, with a lot of depth — there are recognizable solid actors who don’t have any lines in the pilot, but just appear in group shots — including an incredibly unpleasant Steven Weber, Amanda Peet playing a non-bimbo character (although her hot babeness is mentioned repeatedly by other characters), Tim(othy) Busfield, D.L. Hughley, Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford.
A great cynical little show and one I definitely intend to TiVo this season.
Big changes are coming to Player Versus Player play in World of Warcraft, starting with inter-server play in the next major patch.
Blizzard published an interview with game designer Tom Chilton about the changes to PVP in their newest Insider e-mail and included an MP3 link for those who would rather listen:
We’re changing the way the Honor System works to be more of a non-competitive grind so that it’s something that you can work toward over time. You’ll still be able to get honor points in battlegrounds and from outdoor world-PvP objectives, and from outdoor world PvP in general. You’ll be able to get honor points which you then spend to get rewards, but once the expansion comes out, it’s not going to be a ladder. There won’t be any decay involved – it will be a lot more like an experience system. At the same time, we want an arena, we want a forum to be able to do competitive PvP, and we want to make sure that competitive PvP isn’t just a time-grind. We want to make sure that it’s skill-oriented, so that’s where we’re going to focus with the Arena System. We’re going to try to make sure that the Arena System will require some kind of time investment, but very light compared to grinding away to the top honor ranks in the old Honor System. With the Arena System I think we can expect to see more of a chess-like rating system involved, and we’ll see plenty of players that spend some of their time, maybe 10 to 15 arena battles per week, in order to climb to the top.
My dwarven hunter has killed more than 17,000 members of the Horde, but under the old system, unless I was killing like mad every week, I’d make no forward progress beyond knight rank. Removing honor decay from the system sounds great to me. (Although I find the hunter PVP armor so fugly — not to mention it’s kind of a step down from my Zul’Gurub-level gear — that I don’t forsee me ever getting it, just the weapons and battle standard.)
So, my brother and his wife and their baby Kate are in town and went with us to Disneyland yesterday. I confess to being skeptical ahead of time: How much could a one-year-old get out of Disneyland?
Quite a bit, it turns out. Proving that she is, indeed, a Yarbrough, she clapped and squealed with joy both times she went on Pirates of the Caribbean (the revamped ride is pretty slick, and the Captain Jack Sparrow animatronics are eerily accurate in their sculpts), enjoyed the teacups and wanted to climb out of the boat and play in the waterfall on the Jungle Cruise.
But the evil genius of Walt Disney was most apparent when we rode It’s a Small World. Yes, it’s a somewhat (OK, not “somewhat”) obnoxious ride for adults, but Disney’s “Imagineers” knew what they were doing. Kate was entranced and at the end of the ride, tried to leap over Joel’s shoulder to crawl back into the ride on her own.
I shot photos and videos of the entire day — including her deciding that Eeyore was scary, not sweet, something that will have to be rectified with lots of Pooh stories, I think — and will be posting them once my computer is back in the land of the living. (It’s in the shop for yet another day, in what I’m increasingly convinced is some sort of intervention.) True, the videos of Kate on It’s a Small World might be only of interest to grandparents, but what the heck.
From the Associated Press:
MONTGOMERY, N.J. – Barbara Lehman has lived in this central New Jersey community for 30 years, but her time here is nearing an end.
She sent her children through Montgomery’s well-regarded schools. And she enjoys the rolling landscape even as housing developments have spread across it in recent years.
But her property taxes have climbed 56 percent since 2000 to a knee-buckling $14,000 a year — a heavy load for a high school French teacher whose salary goes up only about 3 percent a year.
“Oh, it’s terrible,” Lehman said.
Despite efforts by governors and lawmakers to do something about it, New Jersey has the highest property taxes in America — a burden that is alarming young couples and retirees alike and deepening public cynicism in a state with a long and rich history of graft and self-dealing.
The average property owner in the Garden State pays about $6,000 a year in property taxes, twice the national average.
Wow, pay a premium rate to live in New Jersey. Awesome.
(And yes, I’ve been there. That’s why it amuses me so much.)
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