AO Safety Personal Escape Hood #59100

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Yeah, I’m aware that this is the first blog post I’ve made here this month, and it happens to be an American Idol post. I suck, now let’s move on. Basically, after watching all this season and tonight’s finale, my pick for the winner is David Cook. I thought both finalists did really well, but my criteria is this: I pick the one who I would actually listen to on the radio. David Archuleta has got an amazing voice, and can really sing, there’s no doubt—but he sings real yawners, stuff that I just wouldn’t listen to. I get bored most of the time when he sings. Plus, David Cook is a lot more dynamic on stage, and actually seems like the exact kind of personality-slash-performer the whole competition is staged to discover. So Cook should be the winner. Of course, the judges all disagree and voted for Archuleta, and they’re usually right. In that case, it’ll be another Daughtry phenomenon… Archuleta will win, but he’ll fade into obscurity almost immediately while Cook will go on to have a successful career. You’ll hear him on the radio within the year.

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A portable text game console. Yes, please.
Boing Boing Gadgets asks the rhetorical question: Who’d like a portable text game console? With some neat mocked up possibilities, too. I’m raising my hand, by the way. The intent behind such a device would be, in their words, to "open up the possibilities to the world’s vast back catalog of ASCII-style titles." In other words, to play any and all ASCII text-based games. Like Nethack. Or text adventures (hundreds, if not thousands, of them). Or any other game that just used plain text. As long as it was a cool gadget. With a long battery life. For that matter, why don’t they have this type of thing for Commodore 64? Basically a handheld C-64. With keyboard and everything. It could be done.

Kung Fu Panda
The headline refers to the movie, of course, which I took the kids to see today. It was great. No, I mean it—it was great. (No spoilers.) Several things contributed to it’s greatness. First, not knowing (until the credits roll) who any of actors doing the voices are, except of course for Jack Black. I think sometimes on animated movies I get distracted by actually knowing who the actors are and then listening for them, rather than enjoying the movie. For instance, the voice behind Tai Lung (the snow leopard villain) was really good—really well cast—and itchingly familiar. Turned out to be Ian McShane, who played Swearingen on "Deadwood" (possibly the best TV show of all time), and that was masterful. But had I known it was him beforehand, I would have been listening for "Deadwood" instead. Jack Black, by the way, is also perfectly cast. But you probably already knew that. Second, this movie doesn’t suffer from what a lot of animated movies these days (particularly Dreamworks ones) does: slapstick humor propped up by "modern" or meta-themed jokes. In other words, nothing is out of place here (plot-wise, humor-wise)—with one exception which I’ll get to—and comedy doesn’t rely on "outside the box" or "frame of reference" jokes. (An example? How about Pinocchio wearing thong underwear in "Shrek 2"?) Third, that "one exception": Po the Panda—as played by Black—is such an otaku of kung fu and the hero characters that he actually has action figures and posters of them (the "Furious Five") all over his room. Yes, this seems out of place in ancient (? or medieval?) China, but it’s what pulls this movie together; Po is the ultimate geeknerd, the comic book-type obsessive who already knows (cerebrally, anyway) all about the Five and kung fu and the history of the epic battles of good and evil just like the "modern" geeknerds on the internet and in comic book shops today. It works because it resonates, I suppose, and if you’ve actually read this far then it’s very likely you know exactly what I mean and it resonates with you too. Fourth, it’s great fun with elaborate, enjoyable kung fu fight scenes. Ah, the wonders of animation. It’s well worth seeing. Thumbs up.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 1:22 am and is filed under Central Oregon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.