TheFacebook.com Sold Out

Normally I avoid the term "sold-out", because I feel that it is overused. For example, many would say that Gwen Stefani sold out because she went from some California punk rocker guy's girlfriend in like 1991 to doing crap like "Hollaback Girl" and making duets with Eve. I would just say that she "broadened her horizons" and conveniently raked in lots of cash along the way. See, TheFacebook.com has gone above and beyond anything Stefani pulled off. I remember when I first registered and there were something like 15 schools on the entire service. Facebook was fresh (although not really) and kind of quaint. It had been established by some college students to help their campus' socially inept student body get to know each other. A real feel-good story for the whole family. Well, ever since that day I have seen nothing but deterioration.

1. Over-expansion: TheFacebook went from a Harvard thing, to an Ivy League thing, to an elite college thing, to a big-school thing, to a 4-year post-secondary education thing, to a "this institution can up your monthly hit numbers and bump ad revenue" thing. The addition of SouthNorthCentralEastern Polytechnic State A&M Community College was a bit much. It just ends up killing the magic.

2. Commercialization: Money makes the world go 'round. I even wrote a song saying something like that when I was in 4th grade (not that I can write music... it consisted of me humming a general tune and imagining some generic R&B floozy repeating one phrase repeatedly. Don't judge.) I understand that the creators of Facebook wanted to make some money off of the venture. Good for them. The thing is, I'm a little tired of getting group invites to things like the "Jimmy's Sports Bar Group" or the "Madden 2006 presented by EA Sports" group. Sell all of that ad space you want, but stop intruding into my "personal space". I have the same objection to this as I do with pop-up ads. You are free to make advertising visible and attempt to draw my attention to it... within reason. Getting friended by "Fox's New Sunday Lineup" is as far from within reason as it gets.

3. High Schools: This was the straw that broke the camel's back, and also what pushed me to eventually make this post. Yeah, I know this will push even MORE traffic to the site and thusly increase the amount that you can demand from advertisers; however there needs to be a line drawn somewhere. What separates Facebook from MySpace now? I remember bringing this up previously and being told that "Facebook is for college students and MySpace is for teenagers with low self-esteem and dirty old men". Well Facebook is clearly no longer college-exclusive, and some of these pictures that I see up just scream "daddy didn't pay enough attention". There really is no difference... besides those damn embedded videos that seem to have taken MySpace by storm... not that I use MySpace. They even recently added personal photo albums... because I need to be able to see 9 different pictures of you in a trucker hat with no shirt on. Just saying. I should also add that alumni and administrative staff at schools (all of whom may or may not be dirty old men) can easily get a Facebook account.


4. Schools from Mexico, the UK and Canada: 'Nuff said







I kid, I kid... I love Mexican food, Tony Blair is awesome, and Elisha Cuthbert is hot.

A Picture Saves A Thousand Birds

That is a TERRIBLE pun.

Did you guys see game 5 of the NLCS? Here's the setup: it's the top of the ninth, and the Houston Astros are up 4-2 on the St. Louis Cardinals and sitting three outs away from a 4-1 series victory and the first World Series appearance in the history of the franchise. Their all-star closer Brad Lidge comes in and mows down the first two batters. He gets 2 strikes on David Eckstein, and he dinks a single into left field. No biggie. Next up is Jim Edmonds, who works a walk. This is where the collars get tight.

Albert Pujols comes to bat as the go-ahead run. Lidge gets 2 strikes on "Phat Albert" and the crowd is going NUTS. These people are excited, the Astros are practically running out of the dugout already, the plastic is up in the locker room and the bottles of champaign are ready to be wasted. Then it happens... Pujols absolutely DESTROYS a ball to deep left field, and the Redbirds take the lead. The crowd shifts from party time to dead silence in an instant.

Later, Fox would run through endless replays of reactions around the park and we would see the disbelief on Lidge's face in full closeup, Andy Pettitte in the dugout mouthing "Oh... My... God...", and Pujols making the most defiant walk out of the batters box that I have ever seen. Not "pimping" as the increasingly unsportsmanlike trots down the first-base line have come to be known in some circles, but just focused and proud and excited and composed and ready to get back to St. Louis and finish business all at once. It was one of the greatest sporting moments that I have ever seen. I was speechless.

Now if only Alex Rodriguez could have done that...

Housekeeping

We have some issues to address:

1. The BIGBIGBIG 10th Filmless Review will be up next week, and to further complicate matters, I must decide between some fairly large releases. Will it be North Country with Charlize Theron or Doom starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson? While Doom would make writing a humorous post easier... I mean, so much about this film is utterly ridiculous... a review of North Country would call for a picture of Charlize Theron (she's a handsome woman). Feel free to comment on the matter.

2. Speaking of which, I got fed up with the spammers and enabled the verification phrase thing on comments. We ask that our core of 10 readers not be turned off by this development.

3. I was recently railroaded into attending a figure skating exhibition, and would post about it if it weren't so embarrassing. Having that kind of information in the public domain would just be ruinous. Whoops.

4. David the Gnome is the shiznit. The site is pretty cool too.

Elizabethtown - Filmless Review

So, we almost had a second consecutive filmless review where I actually saw the movie beforehand. There was a free screening of Domino at the local theater but sadly, it conflicted with a class that I could not bear to skip out on. John Locke is just too important to me. Instead, I'm going to start by talking about Elizabethtown for a little bit and then veer wildly off topic.

Elizabethtown is about a depressed business guy with an incredulously important job for his age (Orlando Bloom) that travels back to his small Kentucky hometown to attend a parent's funeral and finds a kooky girl (Kirsten Dunst) along the way. This reeks of Garden State, with the differences being that business provides far less comedy ammo than a D-level acting career, and that I hate Orlando Bloom waaaaaaaaay more than I hate Zack Braff. This movie is headed by Cameron Crowe, who can usually be counted on to provide something mildly intriguing; but if Rotten Tomatoes is any indicator, he dropped the ball here.

Now that the review part is done with, I can get to the real topic this week: People Hating Kirsten Dunst. Every time I bring up something that Kirsten Dunst was even tangentially involved in, I can be sure that a rant on her uselessness is on the way. "She can't act", "She looks like a troll", "She has a funny name", "She looks like a bitch"... generally things of that nature. I must admit that I am completely incapable of being impartial, as her portrayals of Mary Jane Watson in the Spiderman films have earned her a lifetime pass from me; but to be honest, I think Kirsten Dunst is just super. She doesn't drop Albas on her roles, she's attractive in a "hey, that's actually a human being" way, and her MTV Punk'd segment seemed to indicate that she has retained a very un-Hollywood sense of humanity. I really don't see the issue; but like I said, many people despise her for some reason. This is a phenomena that afflicts several prominent actresses; Nicole Kidman and Jodie Foster come to mind (two other people that I have absolutely no problem with). Do people just hate blondes? I realize that Jodie Foster isn't really blonde, but I wanted to put that out there anyway.

What did we learn this week?

1. Elizabethtown sucks... but not because of Kirsten Dunst.

2. Kirsten Dunst was in Jumanji, Spiderman and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. EVERYONE loves these movies... so how can you hate her?

3. Blondes = A-OK

I Want to be on Jeopardy!

I only used that exclamation point because the show is technically named "Jeopardy!", not because I'm SOOOOOO excited about this... although I am. Yeah.

In my years I have picked up a ludicrous amount of trivial knowledge. This is useful in some ways, but generally I'm holding back information from others because my pool of useless knowledge extends far beyond the point of being "cool". It's edging towards that "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?" threshold. Seeing as this is both my gift and my curse, I think that at the very least I should use it to make some cash. Jeopardy! anyone?

Now, I'm not going to go nuts here and claim that I could win a standard game of Jeopardy!. There are days here and there where I could stay in the running, but not usually. However, I could definitely take some games during college week. I went so far as to sign up for the Jeopardy! College Week mailing list, but of course I haven't gotten a damn thing back; and it's been at least a year by now. How can I reach my dreams if Alex Trebek himself (oh, he definitely operates their e-mail services...) doesn't cooperate? HUH? I just want to get on Jeopardy, represent my school, and pocket some dough along the way. Is that so wrong? If I can't make a fool of myself on television, what is the point of knowing that Mayim Bialik was the actress that portrayed the lead character on "Blossom"? What other purpose could there possibly be for my knowing that Alexander Hamilton was born in Nevis? And more importantly, why the hell do I have to answer in the form of a question? And why was that a question? And this one too?

|t|r|i|v|i|a| is my anti-drug...

Serenity - Filmless Review

A VERY SPECIAL Filmless Review

Why is this a very special Filmless Review? Because I actually saw this movie. Oh joy! Serenity is the story of a rag-tag band of space mercenaries... but nice space mercenaries. The entire plot is veeeery complicated, and I have no intention of going through the whole thing, so you're getting a highly condensed version that may or may not make sense in the end. So... it's the 26th Century, and this band of nice space mercenaries (well, that's giving a bad implication; they commit small crimes and conduct transport for payment... they're not soldiers-for-hire) is doing the usual, when a member of the crew decides to save his psychic super-hero rebel sister from Alliance custody. This Alliance isn't necessarily evil, so don't imply that this is ripping off Star Wars... borrowing heavily is the proper term. Anyway, the guy saves his sister, brings her on board, and all kinds of crazy crap ensues because she is in possession of some damaging information.

So how is this VERY SPECIAL Filmless Review any different from your run-of-the-mill Filmless Review? Well, that plot outline was slightly more in-depth than it usually is. As usual, I will now veer wildly off-topic and end up finding some reason to call this movie a piece of crap. Shall we?

You may not be aware of this, but Serenity is actually a continuation of a television series on Fox that was cancelled 11 episodes into its existence. If you go buy the Firefly DVD set (the ship they ride is called Serenity, the show was called Firefly) you will actually get to see 14 episodes, but I guess the ratings were so poor that Fox had to pull the plug ASAP. Word on the street is that DVD sales have been very strong, and as a result some movie exec decided that it would be worthwhile to fund Serenity from an economic standpoint. I mean, it didn't completely bomb in its opening week ($10.1mil), but I'm sure that it will end up having lost money when all is said and done. All four of you that regularly watched Firefly will be rewarded when you go to see Serenity.

You know what? Since I went to go see this one, I can give a legitimate verdict on the film's quality. I'll give it a 7/10. Nice sci-fi action flick, with some suspense, some laughs, and some stuff you'll enjoy a lot more if you study up before hand.

P.S. - This was also very special because I wrote about a movie that came out over a week ago. This is almost as good as when I wrote about "Proof" like 3 weeks before it went national.