Freyburg

Our undead pals just got the nod from the NY Times (in, inexplicably, the Fashion and Style section). Apparently zombies are cool again, for whatever that’s worth. All I know is until you’ve snuck music from the original Dawn of the Dead into a newscast, you aren’t a true fan.

In an extract from the “quick, what are the Americans up to right now, this smells like crap and I bet they’re distracting us from something bigger” files, here’s a story about how the Russians alledgedly fed Saddam intel during the American invasion. I can’t see the upside for Russia to do that, but…meh.

Sony may have dropped the ball with their “oops, not until November, tee hee” admission, but Nintendo ain’t about to pull the same move. In fact, the mighty N, which has been doing the right thing by concentrating more on games and less on streaming family photos to the bathroom, has just announced their next console will not only play all of the old school Nintendo classics, but will also emulate the Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx. Sweet!

So Lucas just can’t put the crack pipe away. He’s making a Star Wars tv series, and it’s going to be set in the 20 years of Luke Skywalker’s life before he heads off to blow up the Death Star.

Eh? Let me get this straight. Dodging around the fact that a Star Wars tv series is kind of pointless to begin with, why focus on something so fundamentally boring? Is the whole show going to be set on Tatooine? And what the hell does Luke do before he hits the big time as a Rebel champion? Get into fist fights with Jawas? You’d think with all the potential backstory the series could draw on (formative years of the Empire, buildup towards the Rebellion, politics on Coruscant, Empire hunting down various species that cheese them off like Wookies, etc..and that’s just off the top of my head), they could come up with something better. But apparently, this is not the case. Meh.

It was inevitable that an event on the magnitude of 9/11 would see some conspiracy theorizing going on, and this article in New York magazine does a pretty even-handed job of examining the phenomenon. I fall squarely into the “Osama did it, and the government are a bunch of screw ups for letting it happen” camp, but it never hurts to question things.

The Americans are getting their first glance of the new Dr. Who (ahem….ran in Canada a week after the British premiere, just sayin’ ) and so far the reaction amongst the mainstream media (aka: norms and surface dwellers) is positive. Like it could be any other way.

More dot.com bubble-esque nonsense, as Wall Street tries to find somewhere, anywhere to dump the money raised by venture capital. In a move reminiscent of the stupidity of the late 1990s, apparently companies with little or no business plan are finding investors giving them mounds of money pre-emptively.

According to Slate, the surfeit of faux Irish bars everywhere has beena calculated move on the part of Irish companies. Not that you should let that stop you from pickling your brain in the name of a country you’re probably not from tonight.

South by Southwest is a big music and new media conference in Austin. At a panel attended my a Motion Picture Association of America representative, the bile was a’flowin.

Supposedly home theatres, HDTV and DVDs are hurting the traditional theater business, and Hollywood is scratching its collective head as to how to fix the problem.