I just sat through, for no reason other than it was on, the “Seth and Alex Almost Live Comedy Special” on Fox. Basically a vanity project for Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, Fox allowed the egomaniac to do a “variety” show, which consisted of little more than him and Alex Borstein singing badly with an orchestra and telling unfunny jokes. Slow, turgid, and awful.

I’m not entirely sure when Fox decided to make Seth MacFarlane responsible for 95% of their programming, but this was simply too much. The guy has three shows to get his failed Broadway aspirations out, he didn’t need to be granted this masturbatory time block.

They pre-empted The Simpsons for this crap? Really?

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I wrote recently about how much of the joy of the fall season is sucked out of Seattle by the near-constant damp that mats the leaves into a sodden mess. You don’t crunch through these leave, you sort of moosh through them. They’re wet, sticky, heavy. They’re not kicked up by the breeze. They don’t playfully dance in the wind. They’re down and they’re staying there.

Doesn’t stop people from trying to move them.

Pretty much every morning, around 7:30 or so, you’re treated to a chorus of leaf blowers around our apartment, and pretty much all up and down the street, as maintenance guys engage in the futile battle against leaf-covered sidewalks. Yes, the loud, ear-shattering, pointless, ineffective spawns of Hell that are leaf blowers, destroying the early-morning quiet (as quiet as it gets here, anyway) as sullen men sweep them back and forth, over and over, trying to move solid masses of dead plant life with puffs of air. It doesn’t go so well.

I’ve never liked leaf blowers. They’re stupid-loud and don’t do the job they’re designed to do any better or faster than the rake they supposedly replace. And that’s with dry leaves. With the wet clumps we have here, the leaf blowers are totally outmatched. But still, unwilling to part with their cool little toys, even in the face of stark evidence that they’re useless, the workers continue to whip out their mechanized wands and attempt to blow the leaves away. And they’ll keep at it for the better part of a half-hour. That’s a joyous time to sit by the window, listening to the constant roar and scream of the engine as they accomplish nothing but feel cool doing it.

Can’t wait for winter and the half-inch of snow that will require them to break out the snow-blowers.

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Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. Growing up in rural Indiana, I loved this season. The gradual drop in temperature. The slow change of color in the leaves. The air had an edge to it somehow. Not the sharpened knife blade that winter winds brought, but just a sharpness, a tang. It was crisp in a way that is hard to define but easy to appreciate.

And the leaves… Mounds, drifts of them, spread and piled everywhere. Reds, oranges, yellows, an explosion of color in the trees and on the grounds. Sure, there was some grumbling about raking them up, but it seemed a small price to pay for walking ankle-deep through them on the way to school, listening to the crunch and rustle under your feet. And sometimes a small eddy of that crisp wind would pick up a handful and cast them into the air where they would catch the sunlight and turn into a blazing dance of color. A shifting, living stained-glass window, there for that one perfect moment and then gone forever. It was a time of magic.

Seattle in autumn is like walking through wet cardboard.

The air here, almost constantly damp, doesn’t have that traditional autumn edge. You don’t breathe it deep into your lungs because it feels like someone is pressing a wet gym sock into your face. The air coats you, weighs you down, and leaves you feeling like you need a towel at all times. And while there are leaves on the ground, they’re limp and lifeless, dull and dreary, matted down by the frequent rains. Even when it doesn’t rain, there’s still the aforementioned humidity that keeps them soggy, a sodden mass that doesn’t crunch underfoot, but merely makes a sound like walking in slightly damp mud. Instead of dancing into the air, they stick to your shoes and pants legs, giving you the joy of peeling dead, dripping plant detritus off your clothing.

Can’t wait to see what winter’s like.

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I love the picture quality of Blu-ray. Love the sound, love the fact that they can cram untold extras into the massive storage capacity. It’s a movie-lover’s dream format. So why am I getting ready to chuck my Blu-ray player out a third-story window?

It’s because Blu-ray is so damned consumer-unfriendly these days. I don’t know if the movie studios are trying to punish us for participating in that whole HD-DVD/Blu-ray format war, or if they’re tired of shelling out for HD transfers of their movies and they hope we’ll switch back to standard DVD, but they clearly don’t want us to enjoy watching our Blu-rays. Exhibit A: a little something I like to call Leadershit.

You’ve all experienced Leadershit. You pop in a disc and then have to sit through a slew of trailers, studio logos, THX and Dolby pimp screens, Blu-ray rah-rah shorts, and all sorts of other crap. Disney specializes in this sort of thing: Coming soon to theaters; Coming soon to DVD; Coming soon to Blu-ray; Now playing in theaters; Now available on DVD; Now available on Blu-ray; Soon returning to DVD; Soon retiring from DVD; and on and on it goes. And while you can, thankfully, skip through much of this mess, each trailer is its own chapter stop, so you have to hammer the Chapter Skip button roughly thirty times before you can even get to a menu.

Ah, the menus. If ever there was a case of “Look at the cool stuff we can do,” it has to be Blu-ray menus. 3-D animation! Internet connectivity! Multiple levels of navigation, each with its own 3-D animation and internet connectivity! And it all only takes twenty minutes to load and play! If I sit down to watch a movie, I just want to watch the damn movie. I don’t want to have to waste half my time waiting on all the whiz-bang graphics some studio paid for and, by God, we are going to watch. Case in point: I recently picked up Terminator 2: Judgment Day-Skynet Edition to replace my earlier T2 Blu-ray which I discovered did not have the extended cut of the film on it. (I have now officially purchased T2 more times than Star Wars.) Popped it in, and waited. And waited. And waited. I could not believe how long it took to actually get to the start of the film. I was so annoyed that I actually restarted the disc, grabbed a stopwatch and a pen, and took some notes. Here’s the tally:

• Load time to first frame of anything: 30 seconds
• Skynet Locating Our House animated menu: 20 seconds (minimum)
• Lionsgate 3-D studio logo animation: 30 seconds
• Black screen/load time: 10 seconds
• Skynet loading screen: 15 seconds
• Main menu open animation before you can make a selection: 7 seconds
• Time it takes to input Extended Cut unlock code and watch remaining animation: 18 seconds
• DTS Audio pimp screen: 20 seconds
• THX Certified pimp screen: 50 seconds(!)
• Studio Canal Studio 3D animation: 25 seconds
• Black screen/load time: 10 seconds

There you have it. A whopping four minutes before you can even see a single frame of the actual film. And out of all of that delay, the only things you can skip through are the THX and Dolby animations. The rest you’re locked into for at least a minimum amount of time before you can continue or, in the case of the studio logos, the entire damned thing. At no point can you hit Main Menu or Pop-up Menu on your remote. You are going to sit there and watch every last frame of this crap. Maybe not so bad once, but it is if you have to watch it all repeatedly, which brings me to my biggest beef with Blu-ray: resume play.

My wife and I don’t usually have an entire night to sit and watch a movie start to finish. We have to watch it in chunks before real life intervenes and we have to go get busy with something else. So we’ll watch a movie over the course of several nights, stopping the disc each time we have to return to reality. On DVD, that’s never a problem. Sit down, press play, pick up where you left off. Blu-ray doesn’t do that. Blu-ray will return you to the main menu every single time you turn on the player. And when you have to wade through three to five minutes of Leadershit before you can even select the chapter where you stopped the night before, I start eyeing the balcony, plotting trajectories, and wondering just how far I can hurl ten pounds of plastic and circuitry.

So what’s the deal? Why is “the ultimate movie format” so hostile to actually watching the movie? Why can’t we skip straight to the menu? Why can’t we resume play in the middle? Why don’t we get all the extras that were included on the original DVD release when we rebuy the movie on Blu-ray? What’s the deal, movie studios? Did Blu-ray run over your dog or something? It’s gotten to the point where I’m seriously considering giving up on Blu for a while, stop rewarding studios for turning out this kind of crap, and just contenting myself with standard DVD. Or maybe just bagging on home video all together for a time. Go outside. Take a walk. Enjoy some sunshine.

While keeping one eye out for falling Blu-ray players.

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I was a bit of a Ghostbusters fan in my younger days, so I was fairly excited for this game. Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, featuring the voice talents of the original cast, utilizing the authentic sound effects, considered to be the unofficial third film in the trilogy, this game is the closest you can get to being a Ghostbuster.

Turns out, being a Ghostbuster just isn’t all that fun.

Oh, there’s an initial thrill when you first fire your proton pack and hear that familiar energy crackle, watch your beam tear a burning trail up the wall. It’s enjoyable to wrangle a ghost over a trap and hold him in place long enough for him to be sucked down in a swirl of color and light. But the novelty soon wears off and you find yourself lumbering down corridor after corridor on your way to the next scripted event, where you’ll zap ghosts for a l-o-n-g time to wear them down before you can wrangle them into a trap. Along the way you’ll blast dozens of low-level ghosts who don’t require trapping, just shooting. In fact, there’s only a small handful of ghosts that you actually have to trap. The rest you shoot a few times with one of your specialized energy rays and they simply evaporate. It’s probably for the best that you don’t have to trap every single ghost in the game, as that would get tedious, but the developers have used the blast mechanic as an excuse to swarm you with smaller spirits.

Would you hold still while I shoot you for several minutes?

Make no mistake, you will get swarmed, you will get hit with lots of cheap shots from behind and off-screen, and you and your teammates will go down. Often. Now I know the Ghostbusters aren’t superheroes. They’re just regular guys with unlicensed nuclear accelerators strapped to their backs. But these creampuffs get knocked flat at the drop of a hat, leaving it up to you to run over and revive them. And you’ll be doing that over and over. There was one frantic battle where I had to completely ignore the attacking spirits and merely ran back and forth across the room, reviving the team one after the other. As soon as one got up, one of the others would drop again. I considered just leaving them, but if you all go down, it’s Mission Failed and you have to sit through a twenty- to thirty-second reload to restart from the last (usually distant) checkpoint. Not a lot of fun.

Guys? Can I get some help? Oh, you're all down. Again.

Adding to the ease of getting knocked down are the canned animations in the game. If your pack starts to overheat, you need to vent it to keep it from locking up for several seconds. If a ghost attacks you, you need to dodge out of the way to avoid taking damage. These two events are mutually exclusive. Once you start venting your pack, the animation of you fiddling with the gun has to complete before another animation can start, so you can’t do a dodge until the venting is complete. I took a lot of shots on the chin because of that. Likewise, I’d dodge with a hot pack, try to vent along the way, open fire on the attacking ghost and instantly overheat because the venting couldn’t happen with the dodge animation underway. Same for switching between energy beam types, which you do often to attack different types of spooks. There’s even a full-second delay between the time you hit the sprint button and you actually start running, which is less than helpful when trying to get out of the way of Class V Possessor.

Still, I was willing to overlook a fair amount of this just for the fun of being a Ghostbuster—even a nameless, mute one—for a while. A short while. A very short while. I wound up finishing the game on next-to-hardest difficulty in under seven hours, and I’m pretty sure that time total included replaying areas after a mission fail. There’s a little bit of replay value in the game in the form of hidden spirit artifacts to find, plus an online mode that I must admit that I haven’t tried, but if you just want to play through the story, you can pretty much do it over a long weekend rental and save yourself the sixty bucks.

Talk slower. It'll add to the total game time.

I think I’m willing to cut the game more slack than I should just because of my old fondness for the franchise. Even with the cheap hits, the slow pace, and the questionable game mechanics, it’s worth playing just to hear Venkman fire off one-liners, to listen to Stantz and Spengler speculate in their quasi-scientific tecnobabble, to watch the Ghostbusters face off once again against malevolent spirits bent on tearing apart the fabric of reality. Maybe it would have actually made for a good third movie.

It’s just not that great of a game.

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Recently I wrote about Microsoft’s Project Natal, the full-body motion-tracking camera that will let you flail and wave to try and play video games. Now Sony has unveiled their motion controller with a fairly impressive, yet lengthy, tech demo.

I’m more predisposed to like this one over Microsoft’s offering because at least here you’re actually holding something, rather than just waving your arms blindly through the air and hoping for the best. There’s something physical and tactile to help ground you. Second, they actually show some gameplay I might be interested in (Look! Weapons! Combat!) rather than the Clumsy Monster Game and virtual dressing rooms. And, of course, they didn’t use the Heavily Sedated Model Squad to showcase the tech. That gets all sorts of bonus points right there.

But at the end of the day, it’s still another “wave your arms to play” setup and I just can’t get worked up for that. It was a novelty (and a short-lived one) when the Wii came out, and I just can’t generate any more enthusiasm for the concept. Watch the ending of the tech video, when he’s shooting arrows at the slowly lumbering enemies. Cool? I suppose so. Technically impressive? You bet. But is it an improvement over the current set-up? Is that really better than entering first-person mode with X and firing with the right trigger? Which is better: ripping off ten quick headshots against fast, aggressive enemies, or laboriously setting up your shot against plodding foes but doing it in a more “real life” way?

Both Sony and Microsoft, and even Nintendo, say the gamer user base is shrinking (I have no idea where they got that idea) and that they need to do something to get more people into the gaming realm. Hate to break it to you, but this isn’t it. These methods of interaction aren’t any simpler. Maybe more intuitive in the short-term, but even the developers in the video show difficulty in hitting things on-screen, interacting with objects, and making things go where they want. What hope would, say, my parents have? And what non-gamer is going to invest the money into something like this on the off-chance that they might enjoy it? (And don’t point to the Wii’s astronomic sales; that’s just parents buying their kids the cheap console.) People game because they like the games, not because they think the control scheme is nifty. You want to increase the gamer world? Offer up better, more original, more interesting games with greater variety.

And quit making the models wave.

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One of the big stories to come out of this year’s E3 is Microsoft’s “Our Wii Is Bigger than Yours” throwdown to Nintendo in the form of Project Natal. Stealing the idea from Sony’s EyeToy failure, Project Natal is a camera that claims to offer full-body motion-tracking, as well as facial and voice recognition. So now instead of just waving your arms around to play games, you can jump around and flail your whole body! Awesome!

To highlight the advantages of the system, they produced a highlight video starring folks from the same stable of zero-acting-ability Old Navy-model rejects that Nintendo always uses, living in one of those Ikea-furnished houses no one actually has. The whole video is a gamer’s nightmare, but there are some fantastic standouts, including Dad doing a horrendous version of a pit stop, a little Hanson kid playing Monster (watch for the roar), and the lifeless conversation between Daughter and her ethnic friend about dress choice. You watch that and tell me it doesn’t beat using twin thumbsticks to shoot zombies in the head.

Here’s the thing, and maybe this is just me, but I don’t want to move around while I game. I’m quite content to place my ever-expanding ass on the couch and move no more than my thumbs while my character runs and jumps and swims and shoots and does whatever hell else I tell him to do while I remain perfectly stationary. If I want to perform a 360 nollie highside laser flip (or whatever) on a skateboard, I’m fine doing it with a combination of the right stick and left shoulder trigger. I don’t need to actually jump into the air in my living room. Likewise, I don’t need to actually kick my foot to kick a virtual soccer ball. Seems to me that if I were going to do that, I’d, I dunno, actually go outside and kick a friggin’ ball.

So please, game companies, stop with the “revolutionary” new ways for us to game. We don’t play with our families. We don’t have the necessary room to do all this thrashing around. And we really don’t want to move. You want to do something cool with game control? Put a button on the controller that automatically orders pizza. That I would use.

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I’ve decided to buy one of those dumb-ass over-the-ear Bluetooth headpieces that countless cell-phone douches use to hold ungodly loud conversations with invisible people in the supermarket so they can continue buying toilet paper without having to tie up their hands. Please understand, I’m not going to use it for that purpose. I’m only going to use it in the car, and I’m not even going to hook it up to my cell phone. Just this way I can sing along with the radio and passing motorists will simply think I’m having an animated phone conversation.

Better to be thought of as an ass than a nutcase.

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Remember that huge cash bailout for the auto industry a little while back? Sure you do. The car makers got a huge chunk of cash and, in return, this week they closed a couple thousand dealerships and put several thousand folks out of work. So, money well spent, I see.

And I was thinking about this, and I think the government was a little short-sighted in their bailout process. I keep hearing that the auto industry is essential to the American economy because of the number of workers they employ (minus the several thousand that are no longer working), plus all the dealerships they support (ditto), and then the domino effect of parts manufacturers, shippers, component makers, etc. And that’s where I think the bailout wasn’t thought through all the way. Instead of just handing the various corporations large wheelbarrows of cash for, essentially, nothing, I think they should have done the obvious thing when giving a car dealer a large sum of money:

They should have bought cars.

Think about it. We gave them, what, twenty-five billion? How many cars would that have bought? I’m no mathematician, but I think it’d be something in the neighborhood of 1.25 million cars. What would the government need with that many cars? Well, give them to law enforcement, for one. I’m sure there’s a lot of police stations out there that could use some new vehicles. What about buying hybrids and giving them to local government agencies? Then they’d have new vehicles and lower operating costs, meaning less of a budget burden. That’s win-win. Plus the car manufacturers would be able to ramp up those new hybrid production lines, bringing the overall cost down and making them more affordable for the rest of us, meaning a possible swing away from using so much foreign oil. Another win-win. The feds could also sell some cars at reduced cost to out-of work families. They get a cheap, new car and the government actually recoups some of their bailout money. Win-win again. Plus there’d be the huge upswing in production. Factories would need to work at capacity to meet the demand for that many new cars. Suppliers would have to create and ship thousands upon thousands of new parts to fill the orders. People would be working, jobs would be saved, money would start moving again, and the economy would see a boost. I can’t help but think that consumer confidence would also be uplifted, which would bolster the stock market. And maybe most importantly, America would actually be making something again.

Yeah, it’s too late now, but wouldn’t that have made sense? To get something for all that money? Hell, if I go to the drive-thru at McDonald’s and discover when I get home that they left out my fries, I’m pretty pissed that I just wasted two bucks for nothing. This is twenty-five billion and nobody got anything.

Well, besides screwed.

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My left hand does, anyway. Feels too heavy, kinda off. Must be this wedding ring I’m wearing.

Yes, the Soon-to-be-Mrs. is now just the Mrs. and I’m trying to get used to having a heavy chunk of metal on my finger all day long. It kind of feels like if you wrap a Band-Aid around your knuckle too tightly and can’t bend your finger properly because of it. It’s a near-constant distraction that my mind is always peripherally aware of. I find myself messing with it all day long, taking it off, twirling it around. My brother, who apparently went through the same thing, likened it to putting a collar on a cat, which if you’ve never done, can be quite amusing as long as you stay out the kitty’s reach.

I’m sure I’ll get used to it in time and pretty soon it’ll be like I’m not wearing it at all. But until then, I guess I’ll just keep drifting left and bouncing off the wall.

What? I said it was heavy.

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