These new sweatpants I just bought from jcrew

The chances of me wearing anything other than sweatpants when I am sitting around my apt just went from aboout 15-20% to 0%. I want a full body suit made of whatever heavenly material these suckers are made of.

Rating: a very comfortable 89%

NewsRadio

Much love to the benevolent employee who put NewsRadio on Hulu. This 90s sitcom about a NYC news radio station is just fantastic. It's funny and that Phil Hartman is a delight. It is a real shame about what happened to him. Watching hours and hours of this show really made having food poisoning today a lot less sucky.

Rating: 76+delightful%

Mass Effect 2

Ho. Lee. Shit.

RATING: 100%

Arabs

Arabs are pretty awesome, what can I say buddy? In general, we're a kind and generous people my main man. Sometimes a few Arabs go crazy and make everybody suspicious and angry, but that basically happens for every other people everywhere too (except white people). I hope that by writing a positive review of Arabs this blog doesn't get banned in Switzerland, but I didn't want any of their Nazi gold anyway.



RATING: 90%

Alternate Ending Here

iTunes Genius

If you have a large and diverse music collection, you may have noticed that using the iTunes party shuffle can be less than fulfilling. It's just not fun to hear say, Lil Wayne followed by Sufjan Stevens followed by one of the random reggae songs your ex boyfriend who is Jamaican left on your computer. If this sounds like you (and feel free to sub in one of your own ex's crappy music selections), you might want to stop ignoring that swirly little button down there in the corner of your iTunes window and finally check out the iTunes Genius feature. After scanning your entire music collection (this can take a while if you have a lot of music...I just set mine in motion and left it while I went out to run errands), the Genius will build playlists for you based a song of your choice. For example, my first playlist was based on the song All That I Need by Blind Melon. I clicked the song and then hit the Genius button. Then iTunes made a playlist that included stuff like Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins, Wilco, My Morning Jacket, Neutral Milk Hotel, The White Stripes, etc., etc. Then I tried one based on Beast of Burden and it generated a nice old skool Americana type playlist that had Neil Young, Bowie, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Tom Petty, etc. The interwebs tells me that there are some problem with it (for example, it doesn't work with Beatles songs or other bands that aren't in the iTunes store), but I'm still pretty damn pleased with it, and think you might be too.

Rating: 81%

BlackBerry Curve 8900

Yesterday I lost my beloved Blackberry Pearl, so today I went out and bought a BlackBerry Curve 8900 to replace it. There really is no easy way to say this, but the Curve 8900 makes the Pearl look like a piece of refried digital crap (sorry Pearl!). This thing is amazing. The Curve has all of the features of older BlackBerry models, but they are vastly improved. The internet is fast and looks like real internet, the camera takes surprisingly high quality photos, and it also plays very good quality videos (although I'm not exactly pleased with T-Mobile's choice to demonstrate this by selling the phone with a John Mayer video already on it). In short, it's amazing and I'm in love. And this time it is password protected.

Rating: 88%

Watchmen

To prep myself for the upcoming movie version I decided to reread this book to see if it was as good as I remember, and of course it was. The art is amazing, misogynist Alan Moore's writing is at it's most psychologically complex, and the social relevance to 1980s American jingoism and the reworking of the superhero genre as a whole is as intricate and emotionally powerful as any regular novel could hope to be (disclaimer: I don't read regular novels). One downfall is I'm reassured that it is unfilmable, and looking at Alan Moore's graphic novel-to-movie history, in addition to "visionary" Zack Snyder's resume, I'm doubtful this movie will be anything but a three hour mess. Oh well, the movie's existence doesn't negate the graphic novel's existence, and at least it will bring a whole new audience to what is the third best graphic novel of all time.

RATING: 98%

(As Bryan would say, alternate ending here.)

Orville Redenbacher's Natural Buttery Garlic flavor popcorn

For some reason when I bought this I thought it was the Paul Newman brand, and I felt good about that because they give all of their profits to charity or something. But it turns out this popcorn is actually from Orville Redenbacher, a ConAgra brand. You might know ConAgra from their raping the earth, discriminating against cripples and black people, doing some pretty awful things to turkeys, totally fucking ruining peanut butter, and just being generally shitty. The problem is that this popcorn tastes fucking amazing. It is not garlic-y as the flavor description would lead you to believe, but is instead the perfect amount (that is to say, heavy but not too crazy) buttery and salty. And it comes in these tiny little bags that are great because they don't lead to me eating a huge bag of popcorn all by myself, but are also not enough if I want to do some serious popcorn eating (which is why I ate two bags while watching The Office and 30 Rock on Thursday). In conclusion, this tastes like popcorn perfection and it is a real shame that my liberal guilt will never allow me to buy it again.

Taste rating: 80%
Company rating: 0%
Overall rating: Confusedandguilty%
Laurie's ability to take the fun out of everything rating: 40%

Abaeté Fall 2009 Collection

It's about time that I added something to the V3 component of R3, so I've decided to review a few shows from fashion week. (Maybe someone with strong feelings about the Betsy Johnson show will follow suit, nudge, nudge.) On first look, I found the Abaeté show to be well crafted but a little boring, but looking at it again I just had the realization that it is about 76% the embodiment of my own personal style. Occasionally funky, but very clean and put together (sometimes to a fault), and with lots of short skirts. (I dress this way because I am an artist masquerading as a lawyer. And because I like short skirts.) My favorite piece is the dress over there on the left, which is completely my style because the lines are a little crazy, but it is devoid of color (I wear a LOT of grey.)

View the entire show here.

Rating: 76%

The Dark Knight Returns

Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns is the definitive Batman story, the best superhero book ever written, and the 2nd best graphic novel/comic of all time. Published in 1986, the pit of the Reagan era, DKR imagines a contemporary Batman in his fifties who has been retired for ten years. Gotham is overrun by mutants who dress like bizarre funhouse versions of 80s punk rockers, news reporters who get giddy at any hint of violence or devastation, and a president (Reagan) who pushes the country to the brink of war by using his charm and the American flag as a ruse. Batman comes back from retirement to ostensibly try to change the hopelessness society is feeling, but more likely because Bruce Wayne is psychotic. Anyway, Frank Miller himself has proven himself to be legitimately insane and a hack in the two decades since DKR was published, but this is still one of the most amazing reads you'll ever have in comic book form. I never cease to be surprised by it, and you owe it to yourself and your economy to go buy a copy of it brothers and sisters.

RATING: 100%

Ultimate Spider-man Vol. 3: Double Trouble

I just don't think it can be said enough times how consistently fun this series is. Bendis is terrific at capturing all the awkwardness and drama that is high school life while still managing to inject great superhero antics in as well. Peter Parker just feels like your average dorky kid, albeit with the proportionate strength and abilities of a spider. To think that this series has been going so strong for 129 issues now is amazing. And for the first hundred or so, Mark Bagley's blend of cartooniness and detail matched the writing style exactly. Perhaps part of the reason this book has seemed so effortless is that Bendis doesn't exactly have to create characters, but instead works from the groundwork laid by Stan Lee. This particular volume centers around Doc Ock trying to get revenge on some billionaire biological research dude while also Kraven the Hunter, an Australian reality TV host, decides to come to New York and hunt Spider-man for ratings. And scene.

RATING: 89%

Sandwiches

If somebody were to ask "Glenn, what's your favorite food?" I would respond by saying "Sandwiches!" which is totally cheating because there are a billion different kinds of sandwiches. Sandwiches are great because of this though, and a lot of them are very delicious. There's the ice cream sandwich, the tuna fish sandwich, the peanut butter and jam sandwich, the ham and rye, the ham and swiss, the ham and turkey, the roast beef, tongue, liverwurst, chicken salad, pimento, grilled cheese, salami, pastrami, turkey and brie, brie, turkey, etc etc etc. The only terrible sandwich is the nutella sandwich, colloquially known as the "shit sandwich," sorry to be crude dudes and dudettes call your local FCC office if you wish to log a complaint.

RATING: 96%

Cutting One's Own Hair With A Pair Of Clippers One Bought For Thirty Bucks

With all the extra time and money that might save, you can probably take a photography course to learn how to frame a shot.

RATING: 78%

My Cat Thelonious

The only bad thing about Thelonious is that he has a tendency to sneeze on my roommate and guests. Otherwise he's quite adorable and friendly. And very cuddly. All the things a good cat needs to be.

Rating: 95% (5 off for the sneezing)

Journey (Live in Concert)

Do you like awesome? Because if you do, you already like Journey. In fact, Journey is so awesome, that they're all like "Hey, we have to replace Steve Perry...let's get a four-foot Filipino kid who runs around the stage like a crazy person." and THEY MAKE IT WORK.

In summation, this was a truly, truly great show. They did tend to play too many new songs (what happened to Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin'?), and also didn't play a keyboard on a wall, but that's slightly forgivable, since they're trying to plug a new album. They played all the Journey hits, and therefore, made an already great concert legendary.

RATING: 97% (Gold medal at ROCK'LYMPICS 2008)

(image courtesy of BestWeekEver.tv)

Cheap Trick (Live in Concert)

So yeah, we showed up late to the greatest concert ever, and damned if that doesn't mean we were late to see Cheap Trick. But not too late to hear some true classics, like Surrender (during which the guitarist threw a KISS record into the crowd), The Flame (awe-some), and the big finish, Dream Police...which is weird. I wouldn't have picked that as a finisher, but hey, I don't TOTALLY RULE AND PLAY A FIVE-GUITAR COMBO GUITAR FROM HELL, AS WELL AS A GUITAR THAT LOOKS LIKE MYSELF.

So yeah, it was basically as awesome as Live at the Budokan, only, y'know, Massachusetts-ier. And way older.

RATING: 81% (Bronze medal in ROCK'LYMPICS 2008)

(image courtesy of some imageshack thing)

Food

Food is a thing you might find at your local store, or maybe in somebody's picnic basket or sometimes even on the ground. It is often delicious and often terrible. Oh, and you need it to live. Here's what you do if you find some food: put it in your mouth and chew it and swallow it and then your body does magic and you won't die unless it's peanuts and you're allergic to peanuts in which case too bad for you because Reese's cups are awesome.

RATING: 91%

Third by Portishead

My first thought the other day when I heard Portishead had a new album was "why didn't anybody tell me there was a new Portishead album," my second thought was "well, that didn't take very long to download, technology is great," and my third thought was "Holy fuck, this was worth an eleven year wait." This is an amazing album in every way - if it was more trip hop beats with a piano and orchestra, well, who would care? But this is a much more minimalistic album that builds its tension and emotional direness using collage and sharp, sudden changes in tone. It's fucking fantastic, and (although I can't tell yet because I've only had it for a day and a half) probably better than any other Portishead album. I know I'm always saying this like all the time, but you will be doing yourself a huge favor if you pick it up, and if you don't then at least check out these tracks first.

RATING: 94%

Sonic Youth in Battery Park on July 4th

You might think that because some of the members of Sonic Youth are old enough to be your parents (or in the case of Kim Gordon, older than both MY parents), that all their good rockin days have passed, but if you thought that you would be wrong. They are actually still quite capable of rockin it out and putting on an awesome live show, which they did Friday at Battery Park. And it was free, so that's nice too.

Rating: 90%

ps - That's my blurry ass photo, so I credit myself for it.

Happy birthday to Glenn!

Here's a little belated birthday gift for everyone's favorite reviewer and poet, Glenn.