November, 27, 2005 archives

i found barefoot cabernet sauvignon to be fairly disappointing. but as you can see from the label, it was “highly recommend” by the beverage tasting institute in 2002.

the website claims the wine has “robust flavors of wild berries and currants,” but they eluded me. my next-day impression of the wine is that it didn’t have much of a fruit flavor at all.

you have to wonder about a wine company that advertises its “new upscale image!”

traffik is the 1989 british television miniseries that steven soderbergh’s film traffic was derived from, along with the more recent usa network version of the miniseries, also called traffic.

the miniseries shares two of its three major story arcs with the film version, and naturally is set in britain (and pakistan), rather than the united states. at the time, the series was remarkable for showing the drug trade at such different levels, and what motivated the participants beyond a simple good/evil distinction. i think that has been done better since then, such as in the wire, but traffik deserves credit for breaking the ground.

yesterday’s news is a brilliant blog from the minneapolis star-tribune which highlights old items from their archives. it’s a brilliant idea that every newspaper should adopt. especially the los angeles times.

it sounds like the star tribune doesn’t have its archive digitized, and the blog’s writer is working from microfilm. you can access the archives of the los angeles times going back to 1898 online (but only from the central library), and back to 1986 from anywhere.

i wonder what it would take to get the archives of some of defunct newspapers of los angeles online, like the los angeles herald-examiner and its predecessors. the library has it on microfilm. but you can’t really do a full-text search of microfilm. (what would be ideal is images of the pages and plain-text of each of the articles. pulling out clean text of articles is obviously a lot more work than just doing an optical-character recognition job on the page images to do a by-page full-text index.)

i turned off the recurring billing for my world of warcraft account a month ago. on the same day the cycle started, brilliantly enough. today my game time ran out. maybe i’ll be back once the expansion is released, but it seems doubtful.

it’s a brilliant game, but ultimately i have the same issues with playing it that i do with playing at real life. and that’s not very much fun.

heist is almost exactly what you would expect from a movie of that title from david mamet. gene hackman and danny devito are brilliant, but so is all of the supporting cast, such as ricky jay (who had most of my favorite lines).

the plot is probably the weakest element, but the more i think about it, the better it is. i was expecting a little more flash, but i think the film really pulls off a more moderate and realistic heist.

the dialogue crackles, of course. one particularly great line: “My motherfucker is so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him.”

in an odd bit of serendipity, today (and tomorrow?) they’re shooting scenes in my neighborhood for the pilot of heist, a possible 24/prison break/the wire/murder one-style series about a jewelry heist that unfolds over a season. they’re using the farmers & merchants national bank.

speaking of murder one, they finally released the first season and the second (last) season on dvd.

it’s comforting to have a fake bomb squad entering the fake bank across the street. this is for the pilot of heist.

when i was coming back from the gym this morning, there was a cute actress/extra that was totally checking me out. but i could be wrong. i’m not very good at picking up on that sort of thing, so this was either so obvious even i couldn’t miss it, or something else entirely. for the sake of my self-esteem, i’ll assume it was the former.

i’ve started collecting some of my shots of the shoot of the heist pilot into a set. and that’s not the actress i wrote about earlier.

doug liman is the director of the pilot for heist. he directed the movie go, the pilot for the o.c. (which explains my temptation to yell “welcome to downtown, bitch!” out the window), and a bunch of other stuff i’m too lazy to look up.