-George W. Bush, Interview with CBS News, Washington D.C., Sept. 6, 2006

The lyrics relate the artist’s perspective in ways we’ve not yet considered, allowing us to feel the impact of piracy on their meager lifestyles: “Don’t take away money from artists just like me./How else can I afford another solid gold Hum-Vee?” And he reminds us that there can be no exceptions to the penalties for these reprehensible transgressions: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a grandma or a seven year old girl./They’ll treat you like the evil hard-bitten criminal scum you are!”

Perhaps the most poignant lines detail the slippery-slope of wrongdoing, which always begins with seemingly innocent infractions: “‘Cause you start out stealing songs and then you’re robbing liquor stores/And sellin’ crack and runnin’ over school kids with your car!” These powerful words endorse a much-needed return to more earthy values, with songs sung by people, traded openly person-to-person, not stolen.

With inspiring choral arrangements and precision strikes at the industry, Weird Al paints a dichotomous picture of the biz, at the same time reminding us that labels have a right to sue but that the true impact of file sharing is minute and irrelevant. It’s almost as if, by telling us not to download this song, he is saying just the opposite, leaving his audience conflicted about the very act he’s (not) endorsing.

So please, for Weird Al’s and entire industry’s sake, “Don’t download this song. / The record store’s where you belong.”

Apple paints the current PC as uptight and nerdy while the Mac is oily, underdressed and downright rude to the PC. The PC takes the insults well by responding with wit, only once stopping to consider that maybe it isn’t cool after all.

When told by the Mac that pie charts aren’t nearly as cool as hanging out, the PC responds with almost invisible sarcasm and a pie chart showing two slices, one to represent hanging out with friends and the other ‘just kicking it’.

The commercials convinced me that I don’t want a Mac, even though one commercial reminds us that the Mac can now run XP, which would instantly transform it into the very object the commercial derides. Pie charts are cool; they pay my bills.

I’m not alone in thinking the Mac persona is not selling well.

The argument that music piracy limits sales has at least some merit, but the notion that lyrics sites are eating into sheet music sales is ludicrous. Most users of lyrics search sites are in fact looking for music they’ve heard SO THEY CAN BUY IT.

The female lead is installed for formula plot purposes only.

The Batmobile lacks panache and does [i]way[/i] too much damage.

The Scarecrow has no history; Raj al Ghul is flat; and the master plan is a simple terrorist plot, entirely unworthy of a great supervillain.

Oh and the story is positively unbearable: Anakin kills Mace-Windu to ’save’ Palpatine, realizes he’s done wrong, then does Palpatine’s bidding and slaughters a room full of children. WHAT?

Palpatine is the only decent character, decidedly evil and possessing the best fashion sense. We can only assume he had Vader’s costume planned well in advance. “All black, with a shiny, evil mask. Oh! and a cape…down to the floor. To the floor, I say!”

I have seen movies from books and been disappointed. I have seen just plain bad movies. But nothing could have prepared me for “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The wit from the book is absent with no attempt even made to translate it to the screen. The story is a jumbled mess of the book’s characters rearranged to fit movie formula with romantic inevitability; designated ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’; and the most important aspects of the main characters are completely misunderstood or absent altogether.

There are about fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of decent film where the story or dialogue was lifted directly from the book. The rest of the time, we sat there wondering when it was going to get better, only to be shocked as it actually got worse. It was not that material from the book was cut, that’s to be expected. More than two thirds of the movie was contrived, confused and unnecessary. From the opening musical number sung by the dolphins to the cell phone that exists only to plug Vodaphone to the tragic death of Marvin, this is a movie utterly without merit that everyone should avoid vigorously.

Marvin sums it up: “It’s incredible; it’s even worse than I imagined.”

If you are a fan, and you simply must see it, go reread the book and imagine the big screen.

While the questions are simple and irrelevant, the distractions are fantastic, ranging from downing shots of hot sauce to slamming the buzzer attached to the adjacent player’s hindquarters.

The final round takes the cake. The first episode winner won a new Mustang, but before he could claim it, he had to answer some more questions. Every time he got one wrong, one of the losing contestants trashed a portion of the car. The second episode’s winner was forced to select one of five plungers for each incorrect answer, randomly exploding one of his prizes.

A cast of mismatched cartoon and video game characters, each a fantastic parody in its own right, find themselves doing the real-world thing with hysterical results.

In episode one, the chubby 20’s sex symbol cartoon (ala Betty Boop) made a move on the ultra-gay video adventurer always on a quest to save his ‘girlfriend’ (ala Link from The Legend of Zelda), got rejected (of course), and degenerated into the evil sociopathic member of the household; the never-met-a-black-person-who-wasn’t-a-servant Princess (ala Diskey) has already made out with the never-met-a-racist-hotter-than-life black girl (while they sing a Disney-esque musical number about tongues); and the tiny yellow japanime half-rabbit half-whatever battle monster has already challenged the chubby 20’s sex symbol to an ultra-flashy seizure-inducing sub-titled fight to the death.

Who knows how long they’ll be able to keep this going, but it’s off to a roaring start: Preview/summary