Here’s an audio/video mixtape from some of the best MJ mixes I’ve heard recently. How many times can we say “RIP Michael?!”

SIDE A : The MJ Warm Up

Track 1. Come On Come On Come On/Lemme Show You What It’s All About: Love the five-part Minding Michael podcast series from Qool DJ Marv Aural Memoirs & da Buttamilk Archives. Featuring the MJ hits I had forgotten along with those beloved pop standards, this podcast is not to be missed. My favorites are Part One, “A Good Time,” for its melancholy, and Part Three, “Grab Your Belt Buckle/Music’s Taking Over” for the disco hits that make you move even when you’re sitting down. “Roughly 75 percent of these songs, I’ve never played in public,” Qool DJ Marv wrote about Minding Michael. “This is my translation of Michael as a fan and DJ, as a boy who grew up with stronger together black family vibes and Black is Beautiful all up in my head, and as a man who still embraces that exuberant idealism by perpetuating it and sustaining it through the magic of the music in the mix.” (Ranging from 47 mins. to over an hour long)

Track 2. Shake It, Shake It, Baby: Eclectic Method’s The Michael Jackson Video: Don’t be deterred by the Peter Jennings intro to this MJ memory lane video mix. For my money, the highlight comes midway through the video when London-based Eclectic Method mashes up “Blame It On the Boogie” with “Black or White,” and then moves seamlessly into “Rock With You” on top of “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Favorite parts of this video show not one, but TWO Michael Jackson videos that stream simultaneously. Shows just what a versatile dancer and performer Michael really was! (4:51 mins)

Track 3. You Can’t Run Away From/This Love I Got: Can’t even remember hearing Jackson Five do “Ready or Not Here I Come,” but you can groove to it here on Norwegian DJ and Producer Teddy Touch’s Memories MJ Tribute mix. Love mixing freestyling and beats with MJ’s classics. (40:04 mins)

SIDE B (The Flip Side)

Track 4. And Don’t Go Around Breaking Young Girls’ Hearts: If you like it when Michael Jackson goes all electronic on you, check out this Billie Jean remix from Philadelphia’s DJ Apt One. Guaranteed to make you move! (6:06 mins)

Track 5. Let Us Realize that a Change Can Only Come/When We Stand Together As One: Believe it or not, there are a handful of viral music videos out there that feature performances by inmates from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, a maximum security prison in the central Philippines. (The prison management has inmates do choreographed dances there for exercise.) The CPDRC did a Thriller video remake in July of 2007, and a “We Are The World” Michael Jackson Tribute just days after Michael passed away. Neither performance needs any introduction. (4:26 and 3:39 mins)

Track 6. Never Can Say Goodbye: DJ Ayres did this Michael Jackson Mix for The Rub, a party that creates long lines around the block of Brooklyn’s Southpaw the first Saturday of every month. The mix is a great chronological history of Michael’s music from “Maybe Tomorrow” (the ’70s) to  “Butterflies” (2001). (53:47 mins) –AFS

Abbie Fentress Swanson is a freelance radio radio reporter (and music addict) based in Brooklyn, New York.

Traveling out of DC on the morning after the Inauguration was actually more difficult than getting in. As we waited thirty minutes to get a free cab, I noticed this sign in the trash. Apparently even the anarchists are excited about President Obama! I had a long cab ride in traffic to BWI while poor Jared had to endure a charter bus ride from hell to get a good airfare out of Philly.

On my flight to Houston I sat next to an African American woman who let me borrow her newspaper so I could read the full text of Obama’s speech. I’d missed a lot of it during the ceremony because the sound system didn’t quite reach where we were standing. After reading it, I broke into tears, my first emotional moment of the whole trip.

I was firstly just so grateful that we had chosen a leader who is intelligent and speaks in complete, coherent sentences. Second, I share more values with the President than not—a first for me when it comes to political figures. Third, the country is facing arguably the greatest challenges we have ever confronted, but I sense more optimism and can-do-it-ness in rising to the challenge, than cynicism or apathy than ever before. And lastly, I was proud of America for doing the right thing—for electing the better man, and for overcoming racial bias to do so.

As I handed the paper back to my seat mate with tears rolling down my face I  said, “I am so grateful.” She said to me, “I’m so glad to be sitting next to you, honey. God bless you.” There was so much more communicated in that moment than what we said to each other—and I’m not sure I can find the words to describe it exactly. But we found ourselves on the same side, beyond the divides that would have previously kept us from connecting. We transcended something so ubiquitous and tacit that we don’t even have a word for it. Its one of those things that only becomes noticeable when you suddenly sense its absence.

As she continued to read the paper, she showed me a story about Angola Prison where the inmates had been allowed to watch the inaugural ceremony on TV. The picture showed a man who has been in prison since 1957, doing a life sentence for two murders. She reminded me that according to the US Department of Justice, 32% of black men will enter prison during their lifetime, as opposed to seventeen percent of Hispanic males and six percent of white males. Yeah, there’s that, I thought. How are we going to change that one? But what I said out loud was, “You know, I think that is going to change too.”

What happened next during my four-hour layover in Houston reinforced that nascent hope, when I struck up a conversation with a young African American man behind the cash register at a Mexican restaurant. At first I picked up on his energy of subtle hostility, but when I made a comment about Obama’s busy first day he broke out a huge smile and started talking to me like I was one of his homies instead of some white lady buying a taco. “My man ain’t wastin’ no time,” he said. “He got up and said, ‘We gonna get down to business, we got some work to do. We gonna make some changes today.’”

It was so awesome, he and I were suddenly “us” instead of “them.” Then he said something that blew me away. He said “Today I’m an American. I ain’t African American no more. Today, I’m an American.” “Right on, my brother,” I said and gave him a high five.

I think this might be the first evidence that a tectonic shift in race relations is taking place. And what is happening is redefining what it means to be American. I think we are going to see some amazing things on a human-to-human level, as long as we stay open and reach beyond our old ethnocentric divides to connect with others. Do the experiment for yourself and see what happens when you tell an African American stranger on the street how happy you are that Barack Obama is our new President.

Over the next few days our Pop and Politics correspondents—including our founder Farai Chideya— will be covering the historic swearing-in ceremony of the nation’s first-ever Black president, Barack Obama. Our coverage in D.C. is possible thanks to a generous donation from the Knight Foundation. All coverage can be found in our special section dedicated to the inauguration.

Oh man. We knew it was coming. I don’t know how they’ve done it, considering the event at the end of the first movie, but they have gone ahead and made a sequel to Crank. You know, the ridiculous movie where Jason Statham plays a guy who is injected with a toxic “Chinese cocktail” that will kill him unless he keeps his adrenaline pumping? Yeah.

I first heard about this when it was announced last year that our favorite weirdo Bai Ling has a role in the movie. Automatically, that’s a strike against it. But wait, here’s the synopsis, according to IMDb: “Chelios faces a Chinese mobster who has stolen his nearly indestructible heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working.”

That’s right, baby. Another ridiculous premise and more Chinese mobsters! What is it with Jason Statham and Asian gangsters? Seriously. Transporters, Crank, War… now this. And is it just me, or does he essentially play the same guy in every movie he’s in?

Watch the uncensored, not-safe-for-work, for-restricted-audiences-only trailer for Crank 2: High Voltage here. Lots of Asian gangsters, thugs and hookers up in there. The movie opens in theaters in April. I guarantee you won’t see me standing in line for this one.

UPDATE: Oh yeah. Word has it, none other than Kwai Chang Caine himself, David Carradine has a cameo rocking the yellowface in Crank 2 as the has-been Chinese mobster who steals Chelios’ heart. Wow. This movie is really going there, and they just don’t care.

This post originally appeared on the Angry Asian Man blog.

It looks like my print subscriptions to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times might have actually earned me some money. That’s because, in the wake of Barack Obama’s historic election, the Wednesday edition of major newspapers are selling on eBay and Craigslist for upwards of $200.

Newspapers are printing hundreds of thousands of extra copies and still selling out. USA Today increased its print run by 380,000 copies and sold them all. The Washington Post tripled its newsstand rate to $1.50 and still sold out. In fact, it sold so many copies the paper ran off another 250,000 copies of Wednesday’s paper on Thursday. People lined up in front of the Chicago Sun-Times’ printing plant to buy copies practically straight from the baler. The examples go on and on.

This seems to indicate a couple of things about the state of print journalism. First, it puts into stark relief just how many people have dropped their subscriptions over the years. Of course, not every person of the millions who bought extra copies used to be a newspaper subscriber. But some certainly were, and it took a presidential election to get them to go out and buy a copy of the magazine.

More important is the concept of commemoration. The Sun-Times is selling framed copies of its cover for $99. The Times will send you a copy of Wednesday’s paper for $14.95, which includes a protective plastic sleeve. Newspaper companies that put their emphasis on their print product used to say newspapers were still valuable journalism because they provided context and analysis, something that couldn’t be delivered immediately. The millions of people buying these extra copies aren’t buying them for the news analysis, they’re buying them because it’s tangible proof of what happened on Tuesday night.

In some ways it’s gratifying that people still turn to papers in momentous times like these. But the newspaper is acting as little more than a photo to frame.

This election was something more than the beginning of the end for print papers—that happened long ago. This election was a true changing of the guard. Political sites like the Huffington Post and Politico saw huge increases in page views—HuffPo was up 472 percent compared to a year ago, and Politico was up 344 percent. Even traditional newspapers’ Web sites saw large increases in traffic. Want to see more polling data? Go to Pollster, FiveThirtyEight or 270toWin, don’t wait for the newspapers to summarize their own polls for you later.

Granted, I said I subscribe to both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which is unusual for someone my age. It’s mostly because I want something to read while eating breakfast, and the L.A. Times was practically giving the paper away. I certainly wasn’t waiting until Wednesday morning for my election analysis.

Newspapers love to write about themselves (see all that self-congratulatory Pulitzer coverage), so of course there were plenty of stories (previously linked to throughout this column) about the millions of extra newspapers printed to document Obama’s victory. And most of them had a slight air of gloating. “See, we aren’t dead yet!” the stories seemed to say.

Fair enough, but isn’t it a little sad for your goal to be stuffed in a protective sleeve, then stuffed in a closet and then likely never read again?

Related: Urb magazine founder Raymond Roker compiled a cool slideshow of covers celebrating Obama’s win. Here’s a taste.

What made the show such a success was its unbridled parodying of people-types in the U.K. The show spoke aloud what everyone else was witnessing in day-to-day life, from the “Chav” persona of Vicky Pollard—a teenage girl with a fondness for sports brand clothing, shop-lifting, smoking, binge-drinking and pregnancy—to the ancient socialites in charge of judging village events like jam-making or cake-baking—one of whom is plagued by bigotry and vomits on anyone who isn’t white or heterosexual. These were caricatures, with a high level of disgustingness thrown in, but they evoked the real-life counterparts in a way that allowed Britain to acknowledge them together.

The show’s tag line, “Class, Culture and Dignity” is, of course, a little British sarcasm. Little Britain USA lives up to the British show’s reputation for being crude, lewd and rude. But the show’s fondness for coarse, unrestrained sketches may be its downfall in the U.S. While the British public watched LB move from parody to perversity over five years, Americans are getting the rawest deal. This season’s Little Britain USA is the result of five years of broaching and breaking boundaries. The sketches are shocking, even for someone who owns the first few seasons on DVD and would consider herself an addict gone cold turkey since moving to the U.S.

Vicky Pollard: Proud mother of six, photo courtesy of the BBC

Many of the characters have been invented to parody American stereotypes—the gun-clinging cop, the brownie-guide going to camp, the muscle-bound gym-goer—but each with a hard-to-swallow outrageousness factor that makes it difficult to appreciate what the characters represent. The cop has more than an obsession with guns; it’s an erotic fascination that comes to a climax right before our eyes. The young brownie guide can’t help but spurt out references to Internet pornography as she waves goodbye to her mother and leaves for camp. The “gym buddies” sketch involves a couple of grotesque body suits, heaped with muscle and overshadowing the miniature body part beneath it all, bikini-line shaving, and sex simulation in a very precarious position for a public gym locker.

The sketches that remain funny without the involvement of bodily fluids include the Weight Watchers equivalent “Fat Fighters” and its team leader Marjorie Dawes. Her unabashed anti-“fatty” mentality is not only hypocritical, but hilarious. This week, Rosie O’Donnell had to defend her sexuality and size as two independent facets, after Dawes asked: “Are you a lesbian because you’re fat, or are you fat because you’re a lesbian?”

And then there is Carol Beer, the most unhelpful receptionist of all time, who instead of answering questions will cough in your face and tell you, “Computer says no.” Vicky Pollard, the classic Little Britain character, also returns this season to go to boot camp, and Lou and his wheel-chair bound friend Andy go to a preacher for healing.

But many of my favorite sketches seem to have disappeared, perhaps because the producers deemed them un-translatable to an American audience: The strange Scottish hotel owner who speaks only in riddles and plays the pipe-whistle; Mr Mann, the annoying customer who is always looking for something unattainably specific (like a picture of a disappointed horse) or unhelpfully broad (like a book); or Mr Cleaves, a teacher at Kelsey Grammar School who sets ridiculously unachievable goals for his students (e.g.: “find the square root of Popeye” or “divide Henry VIII by Edward II”).

These were the more Monty Python-esque pieces in terms of outright silliness, and it’s a shame to see them exchanged for the cruder sketches. Still, I’ll be watching avidly to see how many different ways Matt Lucas and David Walliams can both annoy and charm America with their candid displays of “Class, Culture and Dignity” as they take Little Britain to big U.S.A.

And, umm, did LiLo just say what we think we thought we’ve been thinking since . . . ? Yep, Lohan’s gay too. She officially (and finally!) confirmed that she’s been dating Samantha Ronson for “a very long time” during a phone interview with Loveline’s Stryker. The convo was supposed to be all about the DJ AM crash, but the status of Lohan’s sexuality was just too pressing to pass up.

Speaking of the Travis Barker-DJ AM plane crash last Friday, both men were critically injured with second- and third-degree burns, but are now doing well. Both are being treated at a Georgia burn center and are expected to make full recoveries. When asked about the emotional state of the men, Dr. Fred Mullins, the medical director of the center, declined to comment, but added that “45 percent of all patients have some emotional trouble.”

Child porn pervs at Wal-Mart? Jamie Lynn Spears’s baby daddy took some photos for processing at a local Wal-Mart and someone behind the counter decided to cash in on duplicate copies. Police are still on the hunt for the perpetrator, but because one of the photos shows underage Jamie Lynn breastfeeding her three-month-old, the crime could count as a federal (porn!) offense.

Quote of the Week: “For those of you who don’t think length matters, I disagree—especially when it comes to wieners. There’s just never enough bites in a hot dog,” said Martha Stewart (gasp!), while holding up a 15-foot long weiner made by Empire National in Brooklyn, New York. Did someone spike the morning Earl Grey?

Trick-or-Treat! Brit-Brit has a little something-something for us to tune into. She released a song for radio airplay on this morning’s Z100 Elvis Duran show.  Listen up and you, too, might be persuaded to throw down some change so we can get this bitter girl a stiff drink.

These television ads are a cornerstone of the campaign.

I think we can all agree that something that’s “fine in moderation” is going to be extra healthy.

The Association’s Web site for this pr push has lots of handy facts, and frequently reminds readers that, like sugar and honey, HFCS is “natural.”

Prior to this July, the Food and Drug Administration hadn’t classified HFCS as “natural.” But after successful lobbying by the Refiners Association, the FDA changed its position. The FDA concluded, “Because the glutaraldehyde does not come into contact with the high dextrose equivalent corn starch hydrolsate, it would not be considered to be included in or added to the HFCS.” If that isn’t natural, then what is? (Read the complete text of the FDA’s letter here.)

After getting the “natural” labeling the association needed, it stands to reason the group quickly started planning for its advertising push.

Of course, the Corn Refiners Association isn’t the only disingenuous group that’s advertised. There’s Philip Morris’ QuitAssist Web site, and the myriad of oil company commercials promoting any number of good deeds.

At ExxonMobil they help stop malaria …

And ConocoPhillips builds houses.

There was a time in America when companies didn’t have to run commercials to repair their image. Instead, they could just advertise their products. Weren’t times better then?

On a recent fall afternoon, behind an unassuming storefront, three little girls giggle and hop through a sunny front room. A huge, old dog lounges around behind the desk. Parents sit patiently, reading magazines and, ostensibly, waiting.

Their children are out of sight and almost out of hearing, tucked into a row of cozy studios, learning piano, guitar, trumpet, chromatic harmonica, viola, or any other of the huge variety of instruments that are taught at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.

On a corner of Sunset Junction, the Conservatory is quietly entering its eighth year. Well, not entirely quietly. The fourth annual Hullabaloo fundraiser kicks off this weekend at Union Station, featuring one of the biggest names in jazz today, Roy Hargrove, in addition to one of the school’s co-founders, Flea, and Italian jazz singer Roberta Gambarini.

The school is the brainchild of Flea (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, in case there is another one) and Tree, otherwise known as Keith Barry. If Flea is the (caring, beneficent, somewhat absent) dad, Barry is the school’s Earth Mother. (They will be playing together on Saturday, the music teacher and the rock star: two old friends excited about opening for one of their heroes.)

In the late 90s, Flea returned to Fairfax High, where he played as a child, and was horrified to learn that music had been priced out of the curriculum.

Around that same time, Flea’s childhood friend Barry, moved to Silverlake—just as the neighborhood was beginning to be a haven for hipsters and families. Barry recognized it as a community ripe for teaching music. He is adamant, crazy even, about education. “It’s like water, air, food—it’s a nutrient!,” he says later in an interview.

The two friends had been kicking the idea of starting a music school around for a while, and it seemed like the time—and the place—to move forward. The idea was for a community music school. Somewhere anyone could come to and learn.

Barry, who runs the curriculum has his own version of the “three R’s” that you might remember from grade school.  He calls them “the three As: Academics, Athletics, and Art,” and they are what you need throughout our lives.  And he is full of homilies to illustrate this: from Babe Ruth (”Did people stop playing baseball after him?”) to children raised by wolves (”They’ll learn what the wolves have to teach them”)—but they all tie in to the importance of music, and of learning, in life. He is, as he says, “a proponent of music as a medium for child and personal development.”

The school is more egalitarian than most: slightly over a quarter of the students are there on scholarship, and the administrators are striving to hit the 50 percent mark. “Our school is here so that every kid has the chance to take music lessons,” Barry says. “Little kids shouldn’t be daunted to take their first music lessons.”

Adults are welcome and actually make up almost a quarter of the students‚ many of them parents of kids at the school.

Eight years after the doors opened, the school has about 600 students. But like other non-profits, permanence is a huge issue. The manager, Jennifer Rey, has told me that their rent just went up, and I can see just a twinge of that familiar anxiety in her face. They all want the school to exist in perpetuity, forever and ever offering this gift to the community. Which leads us back to the fundraiser:

“We’re not selling $125 tickets to see Roy Hargrove,” Barry says. (And it’s true. Hullabaloo is barely about raising money.)

And the auction is not about the cool stuff (which is, as befitting the school, very cool stuff:  skate lessons from Tony Hawk, designer clothing, art, music). Rather, says Barry, it’s about everyone—performers, the moms, the dads, the kids, the community, Roy Hargrove and Flea and Tree—coming together to support the idea that music is good, and healthy, and makes society better. 

The whole time we’ve been talking, Barry and I have been sitting in a cozy lesson room where, moments earlier, he had been teaching chromatic harmonica. The room has a music stand, with a signed book of sheet music, and a cork board with a Johann Sebastian Bach action figure pinned to it, a viola on the wall, and an iBook on a table. When I notice the computer, his eyes light up: “Let me show you something really cool.” He starts it up, and shows me one of the programs he uses to transcribe and teach. Out of a bunch of crazy music notes on the screen, Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” starts plinking digitally, and we both grin.

He plays a bunch of different parts, individually and then together, showing me how it all works for a group. Barry lives music, breathes it. And lives to teach it. It is awesome. I find myself wishing I were a kid in Silverlake. Maybe I am.

Advance tickets to Hullabaloo are available online, through the school’s web site at:
http://www.silverlakeconservatory.com.

-Last lines of Pink Floyd’s “Money”

Richard Wright, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Roger Waters, circa 1974. Photo courtesy of AP.

There are some people who measure their lives through small achievements. There are those whose lives are marked by big goalposts. And then there’s the group who divide their existences into epochs defined by which songs they were listening to at which time.

I, like Cameron Crowe, Quentin Tarantino, and Nick Hornby, belong to that last camp. Certain songs can play for only an instant and I’m immediately shuttled to another moment. It’s the easiest form of time travel, really…just press play, and you’re gone. What would H.G. Wells have to say about that?

Pink Floyd, more than any other band, invariably parses my life into discrete segments.So I was affected by the death of band keyboardist Richard Wright, who passed away from cancer Monday.

I can’t listen to Pink Floyd’s “Time” without being overwhelmed by a series of images from my past. The first takes place in 1996, when I was introduced to the band for the very first time. I was in 7th grade, and my parents had just picked me up from some Bat-Mitzvah. I can’t, for the life of me, remember whose it was or whether I even had that much fun, but what stands out so vividly in my memory is the Tower Records bag sitting next to me in the back seat. “Open it,” My dad said, barely containing his glee. He had just come back from the store, having gone there with the express purpose of introducing his kids to what he felt was some of the most sublime music of all time. In the bag were three CDs I was very soon to understand were priceless: a two-disc set of Jethro Tull’s Greatest Hits, Blood, Sweat & Tears’ Greatest Hits, and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. I wish I could hear those CDs for the first time again; my life was never to be the same afterwards.

“Time” takes me back to another set of nonlinear scenes, one in 7th grade, one in Spring 2003 and another back in July 2001. In the first, my friends and I sat around the Middle School’s garden arguing over whether or not it was the best song on the album. In the second instance, I had turned in a paper at Berkeley on the section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse titled, “Time Passes.” I had stapled a lengthy missive to my Professor explaining that I wrote the essay while listening to “Time” on repeat. Turns out she was also a fan. And the third memory transported me into summer music camp at CalArts. The program ended with a showing of The Wizard of Oz set to The Dark Side of the Moon. As Dorothy ran across the yellow brick road, all I could think was that Wright and his cronies were geniuses, not only for somehow managing such magical synergy with one of the better films in history, but also for creating a piece of music that could, true to its name, lift three very distant fragments of time and superimpose them onto one another.

I can easily assign Floyd albums to ages I’ve been or grades I’ve been in…9th grade belongs to “Wish You Were Here”; 10th grade is carried by “The Wall” 11th grade conjures memory of “The Wall II” and “The Division Bell”; 12th grade evokes “Meddle”—and so on. When my 11th grade crush stood up before English and announced he hated Floyd, that was it, the deal-breaker, the other side of the romantic Rubicon; I was over him. “Echoes” became the anthem to my daily ride to school, not purely because its 23:29 minutes conformed perfectly to the duration of trip which took me down Mulholland Drive, but also because its exultant crescendos, poetic verses, varied sections and instrumental solos were simply mind-blowing. And Wright had a hand in writing and playing those songs.

1971 Meddle album cover.

One of the founding members of the band, Pink Floyd could not have been the same without Wright’s keyboard-playing, his singing and song-writing. Fellow-band member David Gilmour said “in my view, all the greatest Pink Floyd moments are the ones where he is in full flow. No-one can replace Richard Wright—he was my musical partner and my friend.”

I’d like to thank Richard Wright, a talented man who has given me so much. I sure hope he enjoys “The Great Big Gig in the Sky.”

If only the movie was as charming as Clooney looks

Joel and Ethan Coen’s films walk a fine line between compelling and convoluted narratives. Their latest flick, Burn After Reading, a story about two inept employees at the fictional Hard Bodies gym, Linda Litzke and Chad Feldhiemer (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt) who stumble upon ex-CIA underling Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich)’s memoir and boorishly attempt blackmail him, falls into the latter category.

The Coen brothers are famous for inept characters. Their black comedies from the 90s heavily featured kidnapping (Fargo, Raising Arizona), accidental death (Miller’s Crossing, The Man Who Wasn’t There), and improbable coincidence (The Big Lebowski, The Hudsucker Proxy). Burn After Reading, the third in a their “idiot” trilogy (following O, Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty) is no exception.

After a entertaining opening scene befitting a CIA thriller, complete with typed-out captions, Google-Earth style locators and impeccable sets, we’re left wondering where our presumptive hero (Cox, who quits his job in memorable fashion after being demoted) has gone, as we follow the other four (!!) main characters through the twists and turns of their pathetic existences. Tilda Swinton is excellent as Cox’s hard-as-nails, cheating wife, who laughs at his stuttering, “Well, I always wanted to write… I was thinking, perhaps, a memoir.”  That’s mem-oir, pronounced the French way, if you please.  But we never really find out anything about her inner workings, except that she’s sleeping with an ultra-sleazy private security professional, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney).

Pfarrer (also married) runs into Litzke on an online dating service, where he seduces women with such time-honored moves as showing them the pistol he’s still carrying around, even though he isn’t doing “personal detail” anymore. Don’t worry.  In twenty years, he’s never “discharged” it. Sense a plot device?

Clooney has some of the film’s funniest lines—his character suffers from both “lactose reflux” and “sea-fish allergies”—but crammed into the ever-complicating plot, they aren’t quite sharp enough to engage us.

Like other Coen brother films, shot by shot, Burn After Reading is beautifully done.  Watch for the lunch scene between Clooney and Swinton, where her red hair and the red lamps contrast nicely against the blue-and-grey backdrop of a swank Washington, D.C. restaurant. D.C. itself plays a prominent role in the film, but to no real effect. It is, unfortunately, an every-man city, dressed up in black cars, aviator sunglasses, and familiar American landmarks.

Overall, the movie ranks slightly below Lady Killers in terms of tedium. Burn After Reading doesn’t have any of the traits most likely to induce my wrath: it’s not nonsensical, indulgent or saccharine. It’s worse: it’s boring. Well, that’s not entirely true: there’s at least one surprising moment deeply embedded in the 96-minute flick, but it’s tough to be surprised when you don’t care about what’s happening.

Back in July, McCain accused Obama of pulling the race card after Obama told supporters in Missouri that he didn’t look like the other presidents on the dollar bill. Well now, someone “loosely” associated with the McCain and Palin duo is truly showcasing the race issue. However, in this particular case, I’m not sure it’s believable.

According to a video circulating around YouTube, an African American guy named Kevin is claiming to be the father of Bristol Palin’s baby. He says that Bristol was sexually intimate with him “outside of her relationship” with Levi Johnston, the reported father. He even asks Bristol to call him, and he would take the video off YouTube.

Kevin actually blames race as the reason the truth about the child’s paternity is being kept a secret. In the video, he said:

I didn’t want to pull the race card but feel like Ms. Palin (he mispronounced as PAL-in, not PAY-lin) is keeping me away from my child to keep her political career in good standing. She understands that an African American male being the father of her child wouldn’t be best for her career.

The kicker to this paternity video is that old Kevin doesn’t agree with Gov. Palin’s politics, and is voting for Obama. And it probably comes as no surprise; Kevin is a “musician working on his urban rap career in LA.”

Image Courtesy of Gizmodo.com

I’m no software expert, but I thought I’d take Google Chrome for a spin and give a review in lay terms. My credentials? Software glitches and slow load times piss me off. And I’m a sucker for cool features.

First off, Chrome is still in beta, which means the folks at Google haven’t finished putting it together but they’re eager to let intrepid techies try it out—the feedback they get will help them smooth out any glitches for the final (actually, read “official,” as no software release is ever final) version. In anticipation of the initial release, Google released an online comic that described what makes Chrome different from the competition. It’s worth a read for the technologically curious, though it might seem condescending to some users.

I’ve been trying Chrome out for a few days, and I can say it’s discernibly faster than Internet Explorer much of the time. However, I just discovered version 3 of Mozilla Firefox. In a side-by-side comparison (without clocking them), Firefox seemed a bit faster. The pages popped, and when I visited the home page for Barnes & Noble, Firefox was napping at the finish line while Chrome was hung up waiting for a Flash graphic to load and start scrolling across the screen.

On the other hand, Chrome beat Firefox to the punch on a few other pages, so I can’t say for sure which is faster. I can say only that either one is a breath of fresh air after waiting on Internet Explorer for so many years. (As an aside, I do have to wonder why a company that sounds like baby talk and adorns itself in bright primary colors and Sesame Street letters would call its browser Chrome—the browser’s logo is, in fact, green, yellow, and red. For now, the interface is somewhat silvery, but if they give users the option to customize the colors, there won’t be any reason to call it Chrome, at all. But, then, I guess there’s no reason to call its competition Firefox.)

Chrome has what everyone is calling either a “stripped-down” or “minimalist” interface. I’m all about simplicity. The tabs go above the address bar in Google’s browser, which may feel strange at first. But if you hide the bookmarks toolbar (which you can easily bring back by hitting “Cntrl-B”) you get a maximum of browsing space. There’s not even a status bar at the bottom, so it’s all about the Web site. I like the minimalist approach a lot—the Web should be about the Web, without the extra architecture and framing to remind you that you’re inside another program.

Chrome takes this purist approach to the Web site as an online “program” to its logical conclusion by giving you the option to save a page as an application. A link to that site can reside anywhere on your computer, and when you open it up again, it lives in a bare-bones window without any browser controls. Obviously, this works best for online applications like Office Live, Google Docs, or say, a blog. I saved the Pop + Politics dashboard site as an application, and since blogging software has all the necessary navigation tools built directly into the site, there’s no need to ever use a back button or an address bar. I just open it up and treat it like a word processor slash html editor.

Another cool feature not found in other browsers: you can drag and drop the tabs outside the browser. Apparently, each tab operates like an individual browser window. Drag one to the desktop, for instance, and it actually becomes a new window. Drag it back inside the other window, and it becomes a tab again. Is this anything other than a gimmick, really? Supposedly, yes. Because each tab operates on its own, if it fails, one tab closes without crashing the whole browser. I haven’t seen a tab fail yet, so I can’t report on the usefulness of the feature.

And perhaps most interestingly, Chrome has dropped the separate search box in favor of what Google is calling an “omnibar.” You can type an address or a search query into one box, and as you type Google pulls from your favorites, your search history, and a typical Web search to suggest sites in a drop-down box under your text. If you type a few words of natural language and hit Enter, you’ll go to the search results from the engine of your choosing (you preset the default engine…Google politely asks whether you’d like to keep it as the default when you first install and run Chrome). If you type a full address and hit Enter, you’ll be taken directly to the site. CNET reviewers apparently feel the need to have two boxes (for comfort?), but I come down again on the side of simplicity. One box equals less clutter.

A lot of Mac users are going to be frustrated that Chrome won’t run on their systems yet (or on Linux for that matter). Google supposedly has plenty of plans for the second release. And the program still has a few problems. For one, and I find this a bit annoying, Chrome sits on top of the taskbar at the bottom of my screen. I set the taskbar to auto-hide, and with every other browser the taskbar pops up again when I move my cursor to the bottom of the screen, but not so with Chrome. You have to minimize Chrome to get the taskbar back. Clearly that’s not the case if I have the taskbar always on, but it’s a nuisance nonetheless. I’m sure they’ll have it fixed in future versions.

If you want the whole scoop on Chrome, you can read about it to your heart’s content on CNET. I’m definitely infatuated with my new toy, but I still need a few more days running Firefox and Chrome together before I make any commitments. One thing’s for sure—I’m not going back to Internet Explorer anytime soon.

If you hadn’t heard, the highly-anticipated (speak for myself, I know) 90210 spin-off aired this past Tuesday and was it ever juicy! From underage drinking to gratuitous blow-jobs to plagiarism to Maury-worthy paternity scandals, the jam-packed, two-hour season premier could have passed for a Lifetime made-for-TV movie (on crack).

Tuesday’s spin-off began exactly where the series left off in 2000. The only difference? The character equivalent of Brandon is now some adopted black kid. And voila! The gang is instantly politically correct.

People, what has become of prime-time television?

I was a big-time Brenda-Brandon-Donna-Dylan-David-Kelly die-hard back in my day. I pretty much grew up with those brats. When an episode aired, I was all about the zip code — even if I had already seen the episode before.

The gang from West Bev was always older and, ahem, a little more mature than me, but my overworked single mother never had the time to sit down and watch an episode for herself. She was aware that her oddball daughter would wake up at six on Saturday mornings to watch old reruns of The Brady Bunch, so really — how harmful could this other show be?

My mother actually lucked out because the earlier episodes of 90210 were total Disney. They attempted to tackle tough topics with a family-friendly (albeit melodramatic) approach. Take the time Brenda learned to give herself a breast exam and, at the tender age of (what?) 15, happened to discover a lump — OMG! She freaked and stressed and cried and yelled, but in the end, everything was benign. The moral of the story: Check yourself before you wreck yourself?

The original cast of Beverly Hills, 90210 (Wholesome, no?)

But then the gang graduated from high school, went off to Skank U., and drugged it up. I was a bit older by then, so I could play it cool and digest what I was watching. But what about all those preteens who were now religiously tuning in as I once did? Talk about a crash course in the worst kind of sex ed — the rape kind, the promiscuous kind, the when-the-heck-will-Donna-quit-whining-and-just-give-it-up-to-David-before-marriage kind.

And judging from Tuesday’s episode, it’s only gotten worse.

Gone are the days when a girl’s virginity and her boyfriend’s speed habit are the biggest sources of drama in her life. High school jock pranks involving pigs and divorced parents still fuel the fire, but nowadays, the combined weight of the cast is comparatively halved and while old Dylan had a Porsche, new Dylan flies women to San Fran on a whim. On his jet.

*sigh*