/dev/null/kevin

To all movie reviewers: you are not as clever as you think.

Yes, I hate spoilers [1 2], so I had to rant on yet another case of blatant spoilers contained in movie reviews from professionals who are supposed to know better.  If you haven't seen The Happening (and I hear, you shouldn't, because it's really bad) then I'll bet that you, like me now, already know the movie's plot twist.

Watching Ebert and Roeper: At the Movies, they made a little "clever" joke that gave it all away.  Roger Ebert himself (who isn't on the TV show anymore) gave it away in his printed review, as did the New York Times.  These are four top movie reviewers with huge audiences, not some punk blogger, so why are they just giving away this plot twist?  I'm no fan of M. Night Shyamalan, but even a bad movie doesn't deserve to be spoiled.

I had to laugh at this statement from the NY Times reviewer:

"I won’t say too much about the gimmick that Mr. Shyamalan has come up with this time around..."

Dude, too late!  Seriously, the last half of that sentence is a spoiler, as was the frigging title of your review.

I'm not putting any links here so if you track down their reviews then you're inflicting the spoiler damage on yourself.  Plus, they don't need the huge bump in traffic from being dev-null-kevin'ed.

Update: If you don't mind this particular movie being spoiled for you, then I recommend this "spoilerrific" review of The Happening.  via Molly Wood.

Catchy headlines are the surest way a newspaper can get people to read a story.  I use the exact method on this blog.  There should, however, still be some meat to the story/post, else you become The Boy who Blogged "Wolf."

Take this headline, for example:

Feinstein Gives Details On Secret Clinton-Obama Meeting

Wow!  Secret details!  I must read this story.

Here are the details:

Earth-shattering.

But the true irony is this line:

So in reality, Senator Diane Feinstein didn't give any details.

But that makes for a much less alluring headline.

Clinton and Obama Meet, Reporter Gets Nothing and Likes It!

I caught some heat for making fun of Led Zeppelin's recent tour.  Thus, it's only fair that I point out when older rockers do something noteworthy.

Checkout Shooting Star's singer crowd-surfing so he can play a timpani solo.  Take that, kids!  It's about 3:15 into the song.

It's finale season for reality shows, so that means tons of filler, and time to give your TiVo's fast forward a workout.  Who knew it took two hours to read one name off of a card?

Watching these shows really make me love my TiVo even more.  The joy of fast forwarding through commercials is nothing compared to the joy of fast forwarding over the Jonas Bothers or some enless montage o' crap.

Sadly, filler is not limited to reality shows.  Sports is now loaded with filler.  If the game "starts" at 7pm, that means I tune in at 7:45, skip the 15 minutes of pregame hype, and then gradually catch up as I skip the commercials, halftime (more hype) and other fluff.  If it's a hockey game, then I get to skip both intermissions!

The events with the most filler, however, are the big horse races.  They are nothing but hours of pure filler, followed by two minutes of actually racing, followed by another hour of follow-up filler and pictures of rich ladies in big hats.

The CSI armada of shows is sailing in shark-infested waters and each of the shows is jumping them.

CSI: Miami jumped years ago.  I stopped watching when I couldn't take the show, or David Caruso, seriously anymore.  The only time I see the show is on The Soup, when they make fun of David Caruso.

The original CSI is usually pretty good, but it had a potential shark moment with the episode written by the guys who write Two and a Half Men.  That idea doesn't even sound good on paper, so I can only assume it was some bizarre concession made to end the writers' strike.

And while CSI: NY as never been awesome, I watch it when I can.  That may change if the New Yorkers don't stop being so Web 2.0 savvy, or at least thinking that they're savvy.  It's bad enough when they try to solve crimes in Second Life, but the most recent episode actually featured the following line when tracking down a kidnapped blogger, who continued blog while captured:

I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic.  See if I can track an IP address.

-- Spoken by Agent Dumbass

Are you freaking kidding me?  That is just so wrong on so many levels.  I had flashbacks to the magical "Unix GUI" in Jurassic Park.  She might as well have said, "I'm going to draw a pretty picture with Crayola Brand crayons."

I could not watch any more after that.  I should just delete that episode from my TiVo before those bits corrupt any of my other shows with their lameness.

Update: Look for CSI: Target soon. 

Dilbert.com was relaunched last week and it's terrible.  The pointy-haired boss has won.  They tried for Web 2.0 but ended up with Web 2.Oh No!

Now that I've gotten the one-liners out of the way, here are the specifics.  With a plethora of new features that might have sounded good on paper, the new site looks like a MySpace page with hemorrhoids.  It's loud, obnoxious, filled with Flash 9, and causes an itching sensation.  Tim Bray said it best:

Tim's not the only one who doesn't like the new site.   Venky also doesn't like the new site, but the most negative comments come from Dilbert's own readers: 

Today's Sunday strip was particularly bad as the Flash application didn't even display the entire strip all at once.  I needed to page through the Sunday strip to see it all.  Whatever humor there was in the strip was lost as I had to deal with the navigation.  I'm lucky that the Flash even worked for me since many of the comments show that Flash 9 doesn't work on many platforms, including Solaris and some PDAs.

Perhaps Scott Adams needs to buy his own copy of How To Make Webcomics from the guys at halfpixel.com [1 2 3 4] who really know how to make a web site for comics.

Update [04/25/2008]: Scott Adams has revealed the "secret" back door page with just the comic.

Since I complain about a lot of things I figured I should give credit to some good customer support from the Warner Brothers movie studio. 

I bought Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on DVD last week.  I noted that it included a free digital download of the movie.  Yes, it requires windows and WMP, but free is free (or at least I already paid for it).  I entered by key and watched the download start, but just a few minutes in the downloading software hung.

Experienced people can see where this story is going.  On my second attempt to download the software I was told that my access key had already been used.  D'oh!  Worst fears realized.

Checking the support site they said I could call them during regular business hours (I was doing this on a Sunday).  There was also an email submission form for problems.  I sent the email, expecting to hear nothing, but only a few minutes later I received what I thought was just an auto-responder message.  Turns out it was a real response and they had reset my key!

Take 3 of the download worked perfectly.  All of this on a Sunday afternoon!  So congratulations, Warner Brothers DVD people on an excellent job!

Since I am the source of all things Led Zeppelin, and because all Zeppelin fans love me, I feel it's my duty to inform you all that Led Zeppelin has finally taken the stage.

[photo from Getty Images]

The took the stage at 9pm London time at the O2 Arena.  Here is the song list as reported by the Billboard blog:

Ironically, this list isn't too different my my joke list.  They were supposed to perform in November but Jimmy Page broke his hip finger.

This review for the movie Bratz may still be on Yahoo, but in case it's been removed, here it is.  It really is the most helpful, and accurate, review.

Here it is, the movie poster for Star Trek XI.  And what an impressive poster it is.  It's got stars on it, and I think they're trekking somewhere.  Wow.  I think this poster cost $5,000,000 to make.  Move over Santa and Jesus!  Next (next!) Christmas I've got a date with a young Vulcan named Spock who cuts open people's brains and steals their hero powers.  Update: Nimoy, too!

I blogged previously about hating spoilers.  Thus, I avoided any and all references to the new Harry Potter book.  Now that I finished the seventh book I went looking to see what could have spoiled it for me.  As expected, there were lots of spoilers out there.

Note: while there are no spoilers in this blog, I do link to several sites that contain spoilers.  Use caution if you're like me and don't want details of HP7 revealed to you.

Professional book reviews, like movie reviews, are supposed to be free of spoilers.  The whole point is to read the review to see if you want to spend the money on the book or movie.  The New York Times got into some trouble for posting an early review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I read the NYT review and it does contain some minor spoilers (like what "Deathly Hallows" means) but nothing too bad.  Nothing like this horrible review from my own San Jose Mercury News.  Do not read that review if you don't want the book spoiled for you!!  The Seattle Times also made a similar blunder and gave away too much because they used "clever" hints that were too transparent.  Sometimes even opinions are spoilers.

Other web sites had actual photographs of the first 500 pages.  I'm not linking to them because they are piracy.  Some sites printed summaries of the book based on those 500 pages.  Still more web sites printed fake spoilers, sometimes mixed in with real spoilers.  It's hard to know if these are pro-Potter or anti-Potter sites.  The could be pro-Potter sites trying to fill the web with lies so even if you read a real spoiler it won't have the same impact.  When you have lots of lies mixed with lots of truths then you really have nothing more than the usual speculation that occurs before the release of a big title.

There was also one lunkhead, a participant in a hot dog eating contest shown on ESPN, who displayed a Harry Potter spoiler on the back of his sign as he was introduced.  I won't say if his spoiler was true or false, but his intent was cruel, so I hope he chokes on a hot dog someday and is then saved by a Harry Potter fan.  Here's the video.  Don't view if you don't want to read the spoiler, and definitely don't read the comments on that page.

I hate spoilers.  I don't like having movies, TV shows (or books, Harry Potter leakers) ruined for me and will do everything possible to avoid anything that could reveal major plot points.  Even in the way back days of USENET, I would avoid discussions of upcoming shows.  I also don't watch movie previews of movies I know I want to see.  The same goes for the "scenes from next week" at the end of some TV shows.  The people who make those teasers and trailers don't care about what they spoil; they're job is just to get you to watch it.  I won't even watch the beginning credits of the new Battlestar Galactica because it contains spoilers.

My problem is that almost anything can be a spoiler.  I have a pretty good memory, and a fairly logical mind, so it doesn't take much for me to connect things together.  Show me someone in a certain situation and I can pretty much guess how they're going to get into it.

With so many "web 2.0" feeds and instant communication, avoiding spoilers is harder than ever.  I am on the west coast, so huge plot details appear in my RSS reader before I even see some shows.  I found out who won the first season of Survivor while I was online years ago.  Recently, I actually deleted quite a few RSS feeds in anticipation for the inevitable Harry Potter leak that was to come (and it happened within hours of me doing so).

I had the season finale of Heroes spoiled for me due to a careless Twitter tweet.  The worst spoilers are the careless ones.  People who don't think before they speak (or tweet).

Sometimes people try to be clever and just give a little "hint" at a spoiler.  Don't.  Telling me that "you'll never see the surprise ending coming" means that I will.  Telling someone there is a surprise ending spoils the surprise.  Saying the ending made you happy or sad ruins the surprise.  Pretty much anything you say will spoil the ending.  So shut up! 

What really confuses me are people seek out spoilers!  People watch Entertainment Tonight, read TV Guide, or visit Ain't It Cool to get every piece of gossip and news about something coming out (TV Guide is really bad because they get advanced viewings of everything and then write articles like the shows have already aired).  Then people spread those spoilers carelessly because they assume everyone already know this stuff (bastards).  And then do you know what these spoiler-mongers do after the movie comes out or the TV show airs?  They will complain about it and say thing like "I could see the ending coming" or "it was too predictable."  Of course, dummy!  You read the script Harry Knowles posted!

So, in conclusion, seek out spoilers if you must, but don't assume that anyone else wants to know what you do.  I don't.

For this post only I am disabling comments just in case some jerk wants to put some spoilers in the comments.

While driving to work I heard back-to-back commercials for an Eddie Money concert and an Andrew "Dice" Clay show.

I'd attend, but I can't find my weight-lifter pants and thin tie with the piano key print.

Tags: 80s | eddie money | andrew dice clay

Yet another really bad example of lazy and inaccurate reporting.   Other examples: 1 2

Headline: Brosnan, wife helps Honolulu school kids

First Line: Pierce Brosnan and his wife Keely have donated $100,000 to help replace an unsafe playground at an elementary school on Kauai

Now, I don't expect everyone to be an expert on Hawaiian geography, but I would hope that someone who calls themselves a reporter would know that Honolulu, the capital of Hawaii, is on the island of Oahu, not Kauai.  This is like saying he helped kids in Sacramento when he lives in Los Angeles.