The Times They Are A-Changin'

There's a really hysterical run-down of the Wired NextFest, which took place at Navy Pier last weekend over at ArsTechnica. I was thinking about going, but by the time Sunday rolled around, and there were about eight-million other things going on in Chicago that day, I decided to just wait for the future, rather than going to see a profoundly disturbing talking bust of sci-fi author Phillip K. Dick. Like the author of the ArsTechnica article, I have no idea why they went with Dick, who was, by every account I've read about the guy, mentally disturbed. Anyway, it's short, it's a fun read.

I bought a few DVD's at Hollywood Video last week: National Treasure, which ended up being pretty entertaining; House of Flying Daggers, which is visually stunning... or Zhang Ziyi is visually stunning, at least; and I bought Blade Trinity because... I have no idea why. Maybe it's a masochistic urge to get all of the superhero movies that come out on DVD. After all, some of them (Spider-Man, Hellboy, The Hulk -yes, I liked it, your opinion doesn't matter) are pretty good, and then there are these other ones, like Daredevil, Elektra (which there's no way in hell I'm going to get), and -in all likelihood- the upcoming Fantastic Four movie. I've been trying to watch Blade Trinity, I swear I have, but I just can't get through it, and I've decided that it's one of those profoundly bad movies that deserves a running commentary.

So I figure that's how I'm going to entertain myself once I figure out how I'm going to record the commentary, let alone get it up on the internet and get people to download it. And then there's the issue of how people would listen to the commentary while watching the DVD, which would all but require having an iPod or watching the DVD on the PC, muting the audio and running the commentary out of Winamp or something. It's a technical hurdle.

This week's iTunes purchase consists of: Two operas (Bach's "Magnificat" and Vivaldi's "Gloria"), which I picked up because they were only $5.99 for the pair; "Lose Yourself" by Eminem, because (no, seriously) I'm a sucker for a catchy rap song; "I Want You Bad" by the Offspring, which is also tremendously catchy, and it sounds a lot like something else, but I can't figure out what; and "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan, because ... how can you not?



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