Greetings from Vice City.

As I suspected, ever since last Tuesday GTA: VC has been seriously undermining my attempts to get anything of purpose done. But I just finished the main narrative arc of the game, leaving only the side missions, rampages, and such, so I might now be able to wrench my life back. Fortunately, Columbia students get the Monday and Tuesday of Election Week off, so I still have time to catch up on all the research I should’ve been doing over the weekend. At any rate, if you love GTA 3, you’ll love GTA: VC. It’s the same…but different.

My Precioussss….

The official poster for TTT debuts….looks like no love for Merry and Pippen this time, or Eomer, Faramir, Theoden, Treebeard, or Wormtongue, for that matter. Nevertheless, we’ve got less than two months until the big show, and exactly two weeks until the extended Fellowship…it’s a good time to be alive. Update: Are PJ and Sir Ian thinking of The Hobbit?

Regime Change.

Rolling Stone writer William Greider thinks the Dems need to get rid of Daschle and Gephardt. I always liked Daschle – in fact, of the current (admittedly lame) crop of Democratic presidential contenders he and John Kerry were my top two choices. But after the Majority Leader’s capitulation on the Iraq resolution, I’ve definitely soured on him. [As I’ve noted many times here, however you feel about the (all-too-)suddenly all-consuming issue of Iraq, it is Congress’s job to declare war, not the President’s.] As for Gephardt, he’s been trying for too hard, too long. Somebody should’ve told him years ago that, in the media age, a man without eyebrows will never be President. At any rate, I think Greider’s point here is essentially sound — The Democratic leadership needs to stop imagining themselves in higher offices and start drawing lines in the sand.

Way Out of Sight.


The official site for Solaris goes live, with a number of stills (basically George Clooney and/or Natasha McElhone running around the elegantly designed space station.) I was hoping to catch the original at the Film Forum but it’s already gone. If Soderbergh is right when he describes the remake as “2001: A Space Odyssey meets Last Tango in Paris,” it sounds like the premier date movie for the fanboy/fangirl nation (this side of The Two Towers, of course.)