Mishmash

Links, news, and other fun stuff...

NBA Playoffs
For the basketball fan, there isn't a much better time of the year than the NBA playoffs. Round 1 was full of exciting finishes, stars shining bright on the national stage, and a renewed buzz around the league generated by even casual sports fans. A few brief thoughts...
- The Spurs look like an old, but still well-coached team. They play great team defense and they swing the ball for open threes better than in previous seasons. Problem is, they look old, with even the relative young'uns like Parker and Ginobili clearly limited by leg injuries, and Duncan looking like he has even less lift than last year (when he summoned some heretofore unseen well of strength to battle the Wallaces into submission in Game 7, forcing them into foul trouble and paving the way for Ginobili's heroics in the second half).
- The Pistons look awesome. Simply as a basketball fan, I love watching them play - the way they run their offense (with a good variety ranging from the maze of screens for Hamilton, to post-ups for Rasheed, to wing isos for Prince and post-ups for Billups), to the way Big Ben anchors the defense. There are only two things that annoy me about them - 1) Rasheed (comes across as rather brash and unlikable, at least in the media and in his past offenses) and 2) in previous seasons, it seemed as if they never felt that they committed a foul, complaining about everything. However, it seems that 2) has diminished this season, so that may have been an artifact of Larry Brown's regime. Even as a Spurs fan, I don't see them taking Detroit down unless they get unbelievably hot and Duncan discovers a fountain of youth. Oh, and the Admiral in his prime wouldn't hurt either.
- Dallas is versatile. I like Josh Howard's game. They might be able to give Detroit a run for their money simply on the basis of having younger legs than San Antonio.
- The Suns-Clippers series should be a pretty solidly fun one to watch. I enjoyed game 1, with the way both teams executed contrasting styles (fast break vs. Brand in the post), mini-runs by both teams, etc. Brand has been a mainstay of my fantasy teams for years, and Diaw was my main free-agent pickup this year, so I feel like I've been following both teams for most of the season already. Haven't seen any of the Nets-Heat series yet.

24
- Looks like "The Sentinel" won't actually be 24: The Movie after all. I'm thinking they'll try to make use of the real-time gimmick in 1/2 hr - 1 hr chunks. Since it sounds like they'll be filming in multiple locales, they might need to make it a bit less Jack-centric as well.
- Here's an interesting article theorizing that part of the appeal of 24 is that it's shot like a live-action comic book. No, not stylized like "Sin City" (speaking of which, I still need to see that), but rather, the acting (holding expressions a heartbeat longer than normal, speaking in terse phrases as if in a speech bubble) and cinematography (the multiple side-by-side real-time panels the show will employ) strike a chord with viewers who grew up on Batman and Spiderman saving the world before they found out they needed Jack Bauer to finish the job.
- An amusing Flash comic about the current administration, presented in the "24" style. Bush's approval rating is dropping... what's he gonna do?

Other news and links
- To help become a more efficient partaker of televised media, I recently acquired a DVD Recorder (no hard drive). While it'd be nice to be able to record up to 100 GB of shows, it wasn't worth paying up to 3x more. Eventually the hard drive technology is going to spread and centralize all home entertainment anyway (gaming systems, DVD players/recorders, perhaps even being managed by your PCs), and so it'll eventually get cheaper.

- Check out this video: "The Evolution of Dance." Inspired idea for a show, and the guy has the chops to pull off just about every famous move. Thanks to Phuoc for the link.

- On Sunday, I finally had the chance to view the classic "More Cowbell" skit from SNL with Christopher Walken and Will Ferrell. I now understand all the pop culture references to this. "Guess what? I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!"

- Speaking of Christopher Walken (perhaps the unanimous creepiest guy out there?), I was reminded of this music video that was perhaps the most surreal thing I viewed in the early part of the millenium - Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim and really getting into it.

- The Playstation 3 got announced today, for sale in September. Lists for $500, with a 20 GB hard drive, motion-sensitive wireless controller, and blu-ray High-Def DVD player (for an additional $100, you can triple your hard drive space to 60 GB).

- The current gasoline crisis has people looking into alternative fuels, including ethanol manufactured from corn. The article raises some interesting priority questions over what percentage of crops ought to be used for food and what percentage for fuel. Perhaps we Americans just need to consume less energy?

- Want to check out the best websites on the WWW? Here's the list of winners from the Webbys, sometimes known as the Web Oscars.

- One website you won't see on the Webbys, but is still strangely gripping all the same, is one red paperclip. It's a blog chronicling the story of a man who started with a red paperclip and is seeking to eventually barter it into a house. So far, he's been able to trade for items including a jetski, a van, a recording contract, a year in Phoenix, and currently, a night with Alice Cooper.

- Does anyone have links to coupons from Foot Locker or something similar? I need to buy new basketball shoes, and I've kicked around the idea of getting running shoes as well.

Vacation
FYI, I'll be out of town Mon-Fri next week on a family trip. During the one week off between the end of my bro's second year of law school and the beginning of his internship in LA, we're going to drive down California and hit up Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks before reaching LA. Time to take lots of pictures. I'm slowly beginning to go through some of my old pics and post them up on my Yahoo Photos site, which I signed up for years ago but stopped using since I was tired of having to resize my pics manually due to the small storage space. Now that it's unlimited and it automatically resizes images, I'm planning to cull the best of each year and post them up.