Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is Guy Ritchie’s take on the classic story. Think Iron Man meets The Illusionist, more the latter than the former despite the trailers.

Robert Downey, Jr. brought a soused joie de vivre to the eponymous detective. Jude Law created a fresh, yet entirely fitting, take on the character. Kelly Reilly delivered an engaging humanity as Watson’s love interest. Rachel McAdams seemed to disappear in her scenes. I never bought her performance as the one woman that could outwit Holmes; I would have liked to see how Moira Kelly approached the role. The visuals of Ritchie and Philippe Rousselot reminded me of Snatch. The movie felt a bit long but James Herbert had a lot of plot to include.

If you enjoyed Iron Man and The Illusionist, you will probably enjoy this film. It might be a little too intense for the under-eight crowd, though.

Holiday Humor

Yesterday we came home to find one of the garbage cans had a dent in its vinyl side. I quipped, “The garbage man was mad a-boat working on Boxing Day.”

Get it? The day after Christmas is a holiday in Canada?

Maybe you had to be there.

Astro Boy

Astro Boy is a feature-length, computer-animated adaptation of the progenitor of anime.

I have never seen any of the original cel-shaded shows and was completely unfamiliar with the source material before seeing the movie, so perhaps the movie would be more enjoyable for fans of the anime version. But I never really engaged with it. Perhaps there was too much Ben Sanderson and not enough Veronica Mars.

I think this movie would play well only with the tween crowd.

Safari Fired

My web feed needs are quite simple, mostly web comics and family’s, friends’, and author’s blogs. So simple that I haven’t bothered to learn the difference between RSS and Atom . Accordingly for years I have just used Safari as my aggregator.

Despite the marketing to the contrary, I have not found Safari 4 to be much of an improvement over Safari 3. In particular, its handling of web feeds is unacceptably broken. There are several feeds for which it would only notify of updates every couple of months. The checking of feeds would consume Safari such that it would be unresponsive for five seconds or more upon startup. At least half the time when I tried to browse to a particular feed Safari would spin for some time and then show an error page saying that there was an IPC timeout in the Mach kernel.

I think that all three behaviors are symptoms of the same cause, probably an architectural flaw in the code for the feeds. This behavior first appeared in the beta for Safari 4 and has not been fixed in the eight months since then. A mantra often associated with Mac software is “it just works”; Safari 4’s web feed handling just doesn’t work. There is no way that the kind of problems I continue to see can be considered acceptable. Simply put, Safari 4 should not have shipped with these failures.

Yesterday I reached my breaking point and went looking for a new aggregator. I chose NewsFire and have been very pleased with it. I have seen no problems at all with any of the feeds, so I know that the problems are not caused by the feeds themselves. I like the NewsFire interface a lot, finding it very usable. And since I’ve removed my feeds from my Safari bookmarks, Safari starts up a lot faster, too.

Happy Trails, Lawman

Requiescat in pace, Tony.

This Vehicle Stops at All Railroad Crossings

I saw a propane delivery truck recently. On the back of the pill-shaped propane container, below the diamond-shaped hazard signs, was the advisement “This Vehicle Stops at All Railroad Crossings”. As we stopped at the railroad tracks, I thought about the impetus for the practice. Obviously the damage from when a train hits a propane tank is unacceptable so extra care must be taken to avoid it.

Wait a second.

When a train hits a propane tank? If the probability of a train collision is high enough for the propane folks to have a procedure to address it, what about the rest of us? A train hitting my car would cause an unacceptable amount of damage to me.

Why don’t we all stop and listen at railroad crossings?

The Disloyal Opposition

I read in American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent that Paul Feig, who created Freaks and Geeks, said, “…I honestly see the battle between Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, as the exact same dynamic — there’s a group of people in this world that don’t like conflict and care about what other people are going through, and then there’s this other group of people in the world who hate that.”

His statement is not descriptive of the difference between the two parties, but rather is symptomatic of the similarity between them. Each party praises themselves for their righteous concern for the welfare of humanity and condemns the others for their wicked willingness to subjugate others for their own benefit. (And H.L. Mencken said, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”) Certainly over the last twenty years both parties have shown no hesitation toward limiting freedoms, one more in the bedroom and the other more in the boardroom. Neither can claim to have effected a net increase in the rights of citizens.

Such a factional mindset is not only inaccurate but incapacitating. Political discourse devolves into sectarian squabbling a la Little Endian versus Big Endian. Instead both parties should embrace the concept of the loyal opposition. Alas, I suspect that the current behavior is a consequence first-past-the-post voting system and thus I fear it shall not change.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs opened deservedly well at the box office. I have heard that the movie bears little resemblance to the book but even as a standalone story it is a good family film.

The writer-directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller (who are friends of the strip), delivered an excellent story about underdogs following their dreams with a palatable portion of warning against gluttony. The animation is top-notch and the voice talent is excellent. I really enjoyed the cultural references like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Fantastic Voyage. (Keep an eye out for the Welcome to Mooseport shout-out.)

If you liked Meet the Robinsons then you will probably like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Water Warfare

Water Warfare from Hudson Soft is a “first-person-soaker” WiiWare title. Neither my kids nor I are much in the way of FPS gamers but we really enjoy this game. The controls are easy enough for even me, who was raised on a two-axis joystick with two buttons as controls, to master. It may seem like a gimmick, but getting wet instead of getting killed changes the whole feel of the game. That detail makes the game more accessible for those not quite up to the soul-crushing rigors of the FPS genre.

Rally de l’Absurde

Whilst kibitzing with friends this morning, I happened upon a delightfully ludicrous idea: rally racing in a Prius. Like other rallies, the winner would be the car with the fastest time from start to finish. However, an additional requirement would be that each car is given a finite amount of fuel with which to complete the course. I find the juxtaposition of auto racing and hypermiling delightfully absurd.