September 2011 Grab Bag!

The days are getting shorter, the night’s colder…it seems that, like it or not, summer is coming to a close. It’s just going by faster and faster, no? Well, to help ease the pain and warm the rapidly chilling cockles of our heart, I bring back the Grab Bag after what seems like a very long hiatus (okay, maybe just a month).  For those of you not familiar, the Grab Bag is a Herb Caen inspired listing of stuff that has attracted my notice, stuff I’d like to share with you as you make your way through the day.  Let’s get to it!

I needs must start off with video games, mostly because Amazon just told me my copy of Gears of War 3 has just shipped! Time to plug in my wireless headset and Xbox controller battery, I guess.  This is the third and I guess the last chapter in the Gears storyline, and I so far, at least according to Geekscape, it sounds like it’s going to be a great game and fitting way to close it all out.  The real challenge won’t be the game, of course – it will be finding the time to play, especially since I like to play with a few friends online in cooperative campaign mode. Whatever; it will be awesome, like is good.  Now, some would argue that playing videogames is a waste of time, but did you catch this article reporting how a bunch of gamers helped crack the secrets of a protein-cutting enzyme from a virus resembles AIDS? And how researches have been trying to do something for years that gamers were able figure out in a matter of weeks? Neat story.  Now, if only I could associate with the time I spend playing Words with Friends with finding a cure for cancer, I’d feel like I was really doing something.

Further signs that I will be spending more time with my old, embarrassingly loud Xbox 360, now that I read that Microsoft is talking to Comcast and Verizon for some kind of “Live TV” service, which really does make a lot of sense, given that everyone else seems to be vying to be the next TV channel…channel. There have been a lot of streaming media boxes announced as of late, with new entries from Sony (the SMP-N200, $99, supports 3D) and Netgear’s NeoTV Player ($80, seemingly a very basic portal to Netflix, YouTube, etc). Oh, I won’t go into the whole Netflix/Qwikster news–you know all about that–other than having to point you to the story of the guy who owns the Qwikster twitter account, who is suddenly realizing he might be able to make some money off the whole thing.

Speaking of making money off the whole thing, again and again, George Lucas re-re-released Star Wars again, this time in Blu-ray (pretty exhaustive review here), and, hopefully, that’s the last we’re going to see and/or hear about the series again. Yes, there are a few changes (Adolf’s passionate reaction here), all of them unnecessary and stupid, but, still, people are excited, they even lit up a building to look like a very, very tall lightsaber, and NASA’s big news seemed suspiciously serendipitous . I started Star Wars very, very late on Friday night and Empire Strikes Back even later on Saturday night, and I can tell you that the movies look very good (you notice stuff that you hadn’t seen before) and sound even better (even though it’s “just” a 6.1 mix).  The only problem I found is that I knew what was going to happen for each film. I’m actually only partly joking. I’ve seen these films so many times in one format or the other that as good as these discs are…I just, ugh. It’s awesome, but like…I’m done. It’s just not as much fun. And even if I see them with other people in the room, they’ll probably just start quoting and talking along, or talk through the slow parts…you know, like normal do. I just need not watch these movies for twenty years. I think that’s the only way. But I digress. Oh, for those of you who are not tired of the movies and are looking for a new surround system to watch them in but don’t have a lot of space or money, check out this Yamaha Soundbar for $300.  Somehow it’s able to reproduce a 7.1 system.  For the price, it looks pretty good.

Here in the US, the upcoming TV season is starting, which is not something I usually care about (most of the shows I used to watch always returned at odd parts of the years, like LOST and Battlestar Galactica, but, of course, those shows are gone. Los Angeles is really one of the only places I have ever lived where someone can ask, “What are you watching on TV” without being openly mocked, but most of the people I talk to these days are not really excited about much, to be honest. I am intrigued by Pan Am, but that really might only be because I love the Pan Am logo and because the brand figured so prominently in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I hear Up All Night is supposed to be funny, I assume The Playboy Club will last two episodes, and while I want to be excited about Terra Nova, I am bracing myself for the worst. I am excited to see that teasers for season two of The Walking Dead are already moaning their ways onto the Internet, but given all the problems that show has had, I hope the season maintains what looked like a promising trajectory.  Whitney’s really excited about seeing Buffy in Ringer, but all in all, it looks like we’ll be catching up on all the shows we keep putting off, like True Blood, if only so we can stop getting openly mocked for not watching it. LA…so weird.

This is the final paragraph, which means it’s all about the lightning round! Like Daft Punk? Check out this 7 minute track titled Drive, from 1994, which just came out in a Soma Records compilation  on Monday — it’s really (really) hard, but worth a listen if you like duo. The compilation seems to be pretty fantastic, by the way.  If you didn’t catch the Emmy’s last night, I thought the opening number was pretty entertaining, see what you think. And usually this is Ryan’s beat, but check out this story about a recently discovered species of raptor, complete with nasty claws! Speaking of which, apparently NASA is not totally sure the family of asteroids we thought killed off that very same raptor was really behind their demise.  Everyone I know who has a Dyson vacuum cleaner seems to love the damn thing– Wired has a nice interview with Sir James Dyson, if you’re curious about that new space-aged space heater his company’s released.  And, finally, there are a lot of stories gushing over the official launch of Google Wallet.  I, for one, already use a very lightweight plastic financial transaction tool–my debit card–for most of my purchases, I admit to not understanding what the big deal is, especially with products like Square out there making using a card even easier…but what do I know?

So that’s your 1200 word edition of the Grab Bag! Kinda chunky, but hopefully will find some of those nuggets interesting and/or useful. Myself, I am going to get back to watching Being There with Peter Sellars – some prep work for a short film I shooting next Monday. Stay tuned…

Mike Romo is an actor in LA and is pleased so many of you have seen that Charter commercial he’s in. Now he’ll have heat for the winter!  Mail/Twit/Face.