Freyburg

Gulp. Looks like the tried and true method of getting a foot in the door in journalism, working a small town beat for peanuts, is in danger of being outsourced to India. A Pasadena website covering local politics is hiring two Indian journalists for a combined salary of $20,000 to watch city council meetings and do interviews over the web.

While it’s disheartening to see outsourcing reach the sacred shoals of journalism, I suppose this sort of thing was inevitable. The rules haven’t changed all that much…define your niche, write well and often, and suck down the fact that your field just got a lot more competitive.

The Times rates Tony Blair’s decade in power. To no-one’s surprise, a bunch of substantial achievements are overshadowed by the Iraq disaster.

Apple’s ace in the hole has always been design. With a few notable exceptions (like the Dirty Hippie iMac) even Apple’s crappier products have at least looked good and held industrial and interface diesgn to a higher standard than their computational peers. MIT’s Technology Review peers inside the secretive world of Apple’s design team and explains how Apple’s been able to maintain its edge.

While Spiderman 3 has taken a bit of a drubbing from reviewers, it can be best summed up as “OK with glimmers of cool.” The weird thing is that the cool bits generally have very little to do with the estimated $350 million price tag of the film. Little set pieces involving Tobey Maguire swaggering like a fool down Manhattan streets and Bruce Campbell playing a snooty french maitre’d are way more fun than the action sequences. All the much-touted sand effects, though impressive, don’t really amount to much, and neither does Venom’s malevolent glop.

The main problem with Spiderman 3 is that not only is it villain-heavy, none of the villains hold a candle to Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin or Alfred Molina as Doc Ock. One of the key strengths of the Spiderman series, besides an appealing lead character, has been well thought out villains, and Thomas Hayden Church and Topher Grace are both good but not great.

And there’s also a lack of an “ooomph” moment, like the end of the first film where Spiderman finally shows his stuff with some sustained webslinging through New York’s skyscrapers, or the subway scene in Spidey 2 where the wallcrawler is carried to safety by subway passengers.

Still, for all my complaining it’s still a more entertaining and coherent film than some of the dreck headed our way this summer. And it was cool to be able to pick out locations I’d walked through not two months prior, especially in the sequences filmed in Times Square. Also, Stan Lee has a cameo and utters a classic Stan Lee-ism. I rate it…torrentable!

NYT film critic Manohla Dargis pretty much sums up my feelings on the Hollywood blockbuster. Yeah, the vast majority of big event films are stupid, loud, and a waste of time, as this summer’s slate of drivel proves. But the odd good one (the LOTR trilogy, the original Matrix, historical epics like Lawrence of Arabia) take the audience to places they’ve never been with a level of spectacle and a depth of emotion that only a big-budget movie can deliver.

Dr. Who returns to the tried and true with a nice little monster romp involving fountains of youth, genetic tomfoolery and a bit of the ultraviolence. Not to mention a corker of a trailer for the second half of the season. Some Eurovision nonsense is getting in the way of broadcasting the episode next week, so we’ve decided to make this an all-request show. Email, send mp3s, or do whatever else you can think of to help us create next week’s DIY podcast. (feed, web, direct download)

I’m not as militant as some of my friends when it comes to cycling in the Lower Mainland, but this screed in the Vancouver Province attacking cycling to work is just plain wrong. Though I haven’t biked to work in a while due to rain and laziness, I’ve made the trek from Yaletown to Burnaby on a day in, day out basis and thanks to a decent network of cycling paths, it’s a safe, healthy way to get from point A to point B. It’s nowhere near as dangerous as the columnist makes it out to be, provided the cyclist isn’t a complete idiot, obeys traffic laws and wears a helmet. While I’m certainly not advocating getting rid of cars and forcing everyone to cycle everywhere, as the more patchoulli-scented bike activists are sometimes wont to do, this article does the same thing in reverse.

Pretty much everyone is distancing themselves from Bush and his cabal, including Republicans, because of the neverending disaster in Iraq. But George Tenet is making a big show of new-found oppostion to the war, which is interesting given his intelligence failures are part of what got the United States in multiple Middle Eastern conflicts to begin with. Christopher Hitchens lends his acidic pen to a Tenet takedown via Slate.

For thelast week, I’ve been battling my own stupidity and Network Solutions protocols about renewing web domains.I’m not going into the details and jinxing things until everything is fixed later in the week, but I’d like to apologize to my readers for not being able to post for the past few days. Believe you me, I wasn’t very happy about the situation either. Hopefully I’ll be able to make up for it with some more postings soon.