The problem with all new Sci Fi shows is that the Sci Fi fan base has a very long memory and it’s all but impossible to come up with something completely new.  Alcatraz has the look and feel of Fringe, The X-Files, Prison Break, LOST, The Pretender, and just about every other Sci Fi show with something mysterious going on and random people wandering around trying to figure it all out.  There was even a strong feeling of The Matrix as the opening chase scene had our hero jumping between rooftops.  But that should be OK, we all like Fringe, et el, right?

House is a great show, but it has lost a lot of it’s appeal because we can all see the formula that the writers use.  We open with someone getting ill, House says they are boring, but then takes the case, he nearly kills them before each commercial break, and finally saves them with a sudden flash of intuition at the end.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

And so it is with Alcatraz, the show’s formula is clearly on display in the first two episodes.  Bad guy shows up, kills people, good guys catch bad guy and put him in secret prison.   Of course, they may get away from the Murder of The Week formula as the show progresses, after all, they are going to be bringing back Guards at some point as well.

Alcatraz was a tad on the violent side, with lots of blood spatter and lots of random killings of strangers we had no real reason to care about.  We even get the feeling that our hero Doc Hurley is a little too soft for being upset at the sight of so much carnage, while our other heroes calmly wander among the blood soaked bodies.  Except for Jorge Garcia’s character, most of the people we meet are pretty cold blooded and often downright nasty.  Sam Neill is not a nice guy at all.

I’ll keep watching Alcatraz and hope that J.J. Abram actually has something to do with the show, other than letting it use the Bad Robot logo.

It’s been the tradition on local talk radio to call for the head of Jerry Jones after the final loss of the season.  But yesterday the usual rabble rousers were replaced by some college football game, so I had to listen to another sports talk station.

These two guys wanted to talk trash about the Cowboys, but they set some ground rules, no talk about Jerry Jones.  Then they cut off everyone who called in and I changed the station.

The facts of the matter are clear enough, the only way anyone else will ever own the Dallas Cowboys is to pry them from Jerry Jones’ cold, dead hands.  And so long as Jerry Jones is Owner, General Manager, and de facto Head Coach, then the Dallas Cowboys will not move beyond the middle of the pack where they have lived lo these many years.  Which shouldn’t really bother Jerry, the Dallas Cowboy remain the most valuable NFL team, worth almost two billion dollars according to Forbes.

Jerry Jones likes to put on a good show, such as covering his face with his Superbowl ringed hands during the Cowboys lose to the Giants.  But can he really be all that upset or surprised by what he sees?  He hand picked everyone on the field, every player and coach works for Jerry Jones and asks how high when he says jump.  And this is the problem, Jerry Jones hasn’t got a clue when it comes to building an NFL team.

Jimmy Johnson left Dallas as a genius, but part of the reason the Jimmy Jonson Method worked was that those Dallas Cowboys saw that Jerry Jones had no respect for anyone then on the team.  Hell, if he could fire Tom Landry, he could fire any of them.  Somewhere along the line Jerry Jones did a complete 180 and now does everything he can to hold on to players long after they have pasted their sell-by date.  So no one is worried about their job, even though a complete house cleaning would be a good idea.

Way to go, Jerry.  I’m sure that you’ll give your GM a well deserved bonus for all his hard work putting together another great season.  Just remember, he deserves ALL the credit for this team. And the one before that, and the one before that, and the one. . .

The Book of Unwritten Tales features great voice acting, beautiful graphics, and a story that is chock full of jokes, witty comments, and a brilliant cast of characters.  It has a lot in common with Gray Matter-you get to control more than one character, you can find all clickable items with a touch of the space-bar, and characters tend to hand invisible items to each other.

At the beginning many of the puzzles are pretty simple, such as combining a tennis racket with a web bag to make a butterfly net.  But after a while the puzzles fall into the usual Adventure Game sort which involves having to do a bit of mind reading-what, exactly, does the game writer want me to do here?  Since this is the real heart of an adventure game, I really can’t complain about having a hard time solving some of the puzzles and too easy a time with others.  It was fun and I didn’t have to run to a walk-through with the same frequency I did with the last Sherlock Holmes game I played.

The best part of The Book of Unwritten Tales is it’s wonderful sense of humor.  Small items are hidden in just about every scene, such as an archeologist’s room where we can find both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail.  The characters talk about adventure games and two are even obsessed with playing RPGs where they get to be bankers and accountants.  There are references to World of Warcraft and Death makes an appearance wearing a pair of bunny slippers that bear a striking resemblance to Max of Sam & Max fame.  I’m sure there were countless other gags that I didn’t get as I am not as up on the world of gaming as I could be.

This is a German game that has been translated into English, and it sounds pretty much perfect to me.  But I guess this was not always so, there’s a joke near the end of the game about a problem with the localization.

The Book of Unwritten Tales is a lot of fun and looks absolutely perfect.  My other favorite game at the moment is The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
which features the voice work of Doug Cockle as Geralt of Rivia.  Doug Cockle also has a role in The Book of Unwritten Tales as Nate the rouge, who sounds a lot more like The Tick than Geralt.  Yeah, it’s called acting.

KING Art has done a great job.

One of Tom Cruise’s super spy talents is stealing random bits of clothing, cars, phones, and just about anything else he needs from random strangers.  But hey, he does need them.  It’s not like he steals stuff for the hell of it.

Tom Cruise looks pretty good, a lot better than he looked when he appeared on Late Night the other day.  Simon Pegg was good as the comic relief.  Paula Patton and Léa Seydoux are good as the kick ass hot chicks.  And Jeremy Renner does a good job as the other super secret agent that rounds out Tom’s little team that needs to save the world.  It was also great to see Josh Holloway-Sawyer from LOST-even if it was a pretty small role.

As with all Action movies, the plot was a tad on the ridiculous side.  The bad guy wants to bring about a nuclear war so that the Earth can do a reboot once all that excess life is wiped out.  In order to do this he has to steal a number of items and get a number of things to happen.  At each step our unavowed Team just misses catching the bad guy.  Along the way Tom has to scale the world’s tallest building with the help of some magic gloves that they didn’t even try to explain.  It was a fun sequence, though.

One of the odd things in Ghost Protocol was the opening credits, which features a montage of all the major scenes in the film.  I’m kind of used to seeing a replay of the movie in the Closing Credits, but it was kind of odd to see flashbacks of the film before we saw it.  I guess it helped to take away any sense of suspense we might have been suffering.

Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol was fun and I liked the whole globe-trotting aspect of the story.  Blowing up the Kremlin was a nice touch as well.

I’m not a drinking man, not even beer.  But I am a reader and Beer Is Proof That God Loves Us is a good read.  Charles tells a loving story of beer, often mentioning beers of the world that I have never heard of.  He tells how all beers are now owned by one or two super beer companies-including that great American brand Budweiser.  He talks at length about the death of smaller breweries and the greed of uber brewers to buy all known brands and put them under one roof.  Kind of reminds of a certain Assembly Line Portrait Company I could name.

There’s a lot of science here, a lot of this is how beer is made and this is why this brewery was here and that brewery was there, but now-Charles can use his gee-whiz technology to duplicate any beer in the world.  One of the things that really impresses Charles is how well the giant beer brewers manage consistency over millions of bottles of beer.

Beer Is Proof That God Loves Us is a personal book, Charles Bamforth has worked for a lot of breweries and he is British, so he tends to talk a lot about Pubs and Bass beer and his general hatred of Margaret Thatcher, who he holds personally responsible for the end of the Public House as we knew it.   As with so many other things over the past hundred years or so, globalization has destroyed the world of beer-at least as far as Charles is concerned.

I loved Beer Is Proof That God Loves Us, even though I am not much of a fan of beer.  Charles has the courage to admit that he is not purely unbiased, that he loves some beers and is not so fond of others, and that he hates talking rubber frogs and other silly ads that hock beer.  He’s also not much of a fan of beer mixed with soda pop or coffee.  He likes good, old fashioned beer that is just beer.

Richard Ferrone does a great job as the reader of Beer is Proof That God Loves Us.

The story of a council block inhabited by an odd mixture of London poor, that happens to become the center of an alien invasion.    From the producers of Shane of The Dead, Attack The Block is a pretty straight forward take on a monster movie.

Unlike CGI fests such as Super 8 and Cloverfield, Attack The Block gives us a story on a human level-and leaves the over the top special effects in the box.

Our heroes don’t start off very heroic, they are busy mugging a woman when something falls from the sky and flattens a car.  They find an alien something inside.  The alien is small and appears to be nothing but an animal.  It attacks one of the street thugs and he decided to take it out.  It is only later, when a number of larger and meaner things fall from the sky that he realizes this might have been a bad idea.

The whole story takes place on a personal level.  We follow around a number of people as they fight for their lives while running from a lot of strange aliens with dayglo teeth and really black fur.  They don’t look at all like the first alien, but there is clearly some connection between them.  The authorities eventually show up, but they seem to have no knowledge of the alien invasion-they are still investigating the mugging from the opening scene.

Attack the Block is not a comedy and it’s not a parody, it’s just a good old fashioned sci fi movie.  There are a few funny bits and a few scary bits, and there’s a lot of action.

I liked the political aspects Attack The Block, mainly that Big Brother hates the poor and wants them dead.  At one point the main thug, a black teenager with dreams of being a drug dealer, says that the government sent the aliens to kills them, as they weren’t killing each other fast enough.  At another point he asks why someone is helping poor kids in Africa when there are plenty of poor kids in London that need help.  I’ve ask the same question myself.

I liked Attack The Block, but it very much a British film, and may not be to all Americans liking.

Hugo lives in a 1930s Paris train station where he has taken over the job of winding the clocks from his missing Uncle.  He spends a lot of time hiding from Sacha Baron Cohen, who spends the film doing his best Inspector Clouseau as a Train Station security guard.  Hugo also runs into a toy maker played by Ben Kingsley who has secrets he doesn’t want to share.  And I always like seeing Christopher Lee- here he plays a sage bookseller who gives Hugo a copy of Robin Hood.

The robot/automoton had a significant role in the story, but I was expecting it to be a bit more like C3P0 and a bit less like a ventriloquist dummy.  I had never heard of the book, so I went in with no idea what the film was about.  I was pleasantly surprised by the whole thing.

I don’t go to the movies much any more-there are so many just flat dumb-ass movies now that there is seldom anything worth going to see.  But every once in a while something good does make it through the Hollywood Machine and Hugo is one such film.  I’m not sure it quite ranks all the Martin Scorsese’s “Masterpiece” comments I have seen, but Hugo was a damned good movie.

Go on and see Hugo-and pony up for the 3D, it really works in this one.

We start off following a reporter covering the mindnumbingly dull U.S. Memory Championships-which involves watching people memorize all kinds of mundane infomation.  Reporter Joshua Foer becomes seduced by the idea that he, too, could memorize long lists of random items and sets his foot to the path of becoimg a memory master himself.

Along the way he tells the story of S, a man who could remember everything that ever happened to him, and EP, a man who perpetually lived in the moment as he could no longer convert short term memory to long term memory.  He then talks about the classic techiques of recalling, starting off with the Memory Palace.  This is where you remember some familar place and drop items you want to remember in each room, you need to make the objects oversized and outrageous.  Joshua Foer is amazed that the Memory Palace works, just as I was when I first used it.

As Joshua Foer moves through the history of memory, he starts to use newer techniques that I am not familar with.  Among them is the system called PAO-person/action/object-which allows a skilled user to memorieze a deck of cards in a minute or less.  This is where the books title of Moonwalking With Einstien comes from.  He spends hours a day practicing his memory skills and honing his recall times.  The goal of all his hard work is to compete in the US Memory Champisonships.

Along the way he meets two legends of the memory world-Kim Peek and Daniel Tammet.    Kim Peek is the odd little man that Dustin Hoffman spent some time with in order to perfect his Rain Man role.  He memorized phonebooks for fun and had next to no social skills.  Daniel Tammet, on the other hand, is a super genius who appears swave and sophisticated when comared to most Aspebergains.

In fact, the most intriguing bit in Moonwalking With Einstien is Joshua Foer’s suspecions that Daniel Tammet is a fraud who is actively ripping people off by pretending that he has autism, when in fact, he is a very highly skilled mnemonist or mental athelete.  What makes Daniel Tammet’s possible fraud hard for Joshua Foer to get over is that admitted mnemonists are a lot of geeks who make very little money from thier skills and are often treated like weirdos.  Daniel Tammet has been the subject of TV Shows, written a best selling book, and has his own line of educational products-Joshua Foer and mega memory pals, well, not so much.

Moonwalking With Einstein is an entertaining book-if you happen to have a slight memory fetish as I do.  It has been some time since I actively used a Memory Palace or The Peg System or any of the other odds and ends of a well trained memory-because, like Joshua Foer, I found that they were not all that useful in the real world.  Joshua finds that he enjoys the company of his fellow memory geeks-and he does get a book out it-but he is not sure that anyone will ever change the world by teaching kids how to memorize a deck of cards in thirty seconds.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything proves at least one thing-YOU, yes you,  could be the next US Memory Champ, if you really wanted to be.

And Steve Volk seems to think it is wrong that people using the Scientific Method are shunned by the greater scientific community-to the point that fringe scientists’ papers are not published, their data is ignored, and no one takes them seriously once they leave the hard sciences for the slightly softer ones.  One of the funny bits being that Physics is now about as soft as you can get-Quantum Mechanics quite simply work with rules outside of most of our understanding-just as ghosts, UFOs, and Near Death Experiences do.

I have to admit that I have always had mixed feelings about these kinds of things myself.  I tend to fall back on Morpheus from the Matrix-What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.  At one point in Frige-ology Steve Volk talks about the fact that none of us really see the real world-our brain translates everything our senses receive into the world we perceive-which are not the same things.

I found it odd that Meditation and Lucid Dreaming were included in a book about the Paranormal-since I have been meditating and having lucid dreams for some time, but apparently doing any scientific research into these subjects is still considered a bit nuts.

Fringe-ology also brought to my attention my general tendency to disregard  the many things that other people believe in which I don’t and my feeling that those people must be a little crazy.  Seems everyone thinks people who don’t believe what they believe is crazy.  It makes perfect sense that this would be a normal human condition, but it was surprising to read just the same.

Steve Volk also shares the story of his own experience with what I tend to think of as the paranormal-he lived in a haunted house when he was growing up and his parents brought in a Priest to exercise the place.  And the exorcism seems to have worked.  Hmm.

By the end of Fringe-ology, Steve Volk has allowed himself-and encourages his readers-to give up on their hardline beliefs and take a chance on the idea that all believes have something going for them.  Would it be so bad if Science proved the existence of God or if all paranormal events were merely science we haven’t yet worked out?  A willingness to try things on and see how they fit is all he is asking for, but he know he will not get it.  It is fun to think about though.

Being a Portrait Photographer I often complain about the Author’s Photo I find in the back of the books I read, but this time, I really liked Jeff Fusco’s portrait of Steve Volk.  It’s the kind of image that I shoot once in a while.

The 10X Rule, like most self help books, is a great read that left me feeling as if I have finally found the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

The 10X Rule is simple, to get more, do more.  It’s also a bit scary.  Do more?  You mean, like now?  Yes, now The 10X Rule tells us.

The 10X Rule also has a list of the 32 actions that all successful people do and that you should do as well.  Things like Love Challenges and Readily Take Action.  It’s a good list.

Thinking back on my own life the whole 10X thing does seem to work.  When I was serious about blogging, I got a lot more hits if I post two or three times a day than I do when I only post once or twice a week.

One of the things missing from the 10X Rule is any mention of focus-which is my problem, and I am guessing the problem a lot of others have.  Author Grant Cordone assumes that you have one or two goals and that you can then put all your effort behind them until they become reality.  I tend to have a lot of goals and want to put the 10X effort into all of them.  That is not likely a good plan.

But then, Grant Cordone does list a large number of his own goals he is working on, chief among them getting 6 billion people to think of Grant Cordone when it comes to selling.  His example of how the 10X Rule works tell how he wants his own reality show and the many things he does to make that happen.  At the time of writing he doesn’t actually get the show, but he flies around the country, impresses producers, and sells Harley-Davidsons off a showroom floor.  His show was picked up by the National Geographic Channel as Turnaround King
.

The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failureis a great read-I liked it, but I am not likely to be banging out ten blog posts a day any time soon.