Three fun things:
1. I've developed a new film-geek game. It's like playing 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon by yourself.
Let's say that you just watched a film... say, Smokin' Aces. If you're like me - obviously, you're not, or you would've come up with this geeky game yourself - you want to go to IMDB and look up to see who's in the film, what other films they've been in, who wrote the film and what else they've written. "Why do I want to know that?" you ask. You just do. It's fun.
You arrive on the IMDB homepage. You could go up to the search field at the top to type in the name of the movie, but that would be cheating. Instead, you have to click a link somewhere on the main page to get started. You look around and there's no link to Smokin' Aces (there actually is, of course, since the movie just opened, but stick with me). So you're going to have to start clicking somewhere else.
What's this over here? There's a link to a story about Peter Jackson not getting to direct The Hobbit? You click on that, and then on Peter Jackson's profile. There it lists all the movies he's directed. You click on The Return of the King, which starred Dominic Monaghan as Merry. You click on Dom's profile. Monaghan is also on "Lost," starring Matthew Fox, who is in, you guessed, Smokin' Aces. There you are.
But you also watched Letters From Iwo Jima this week, did you? Well, you're going to need to click over to there, too. So you click on Jason Bateman's profile. Bateman's starring with Jamie Foxx in the upcoming The Kingdom, and Foxx was once co-starring with Tom Cruise in Collateral, who co-starred with Ken Watanabe in The Last Samurai, and Watanabe is the star of Letters From Iwo Jima. You are now free to poke around this page until you decide you want to go to another movie.
I've wasted a full two or three hours of work on this game this weekend, and I just made it up yesterday. Who knows what the coming week will hold?
And yes, I'm prepared to take commental abuse about this game.
2. I bought a Nerf basketball set, and I've created a game in which you have to hit two walls and roll the ball off top of the cabinet before sinking the basket. I've almost killed myself, the 13-year old son of my boss, and come close to destroying my G5 and an $8,000 camera. But I'm getting great at the shot.
3. gomusic.ru
Because of some loophole in the Russian copyright system, you can legally download any music you want here for fifteen cents a song. You can buy any album for about $1.50. I'm swearing off iTunes for life.