Empty Bookshelf Reviews

Category: Reviews

  • Quiznos Steakhouse Roast Beef Dip

    Site note: We’ll be having our first night of live reviewing on Sunday, February 5 during the Superbowl. That’s right; we’ll be reviewing all aspects of the game while it’s still in progress: we’ll review plays, people, commercials, the foods we’re eating, you name it. Be part of our reviewing milestone starting at 6pm EST on Sunday Feb. 5.

    MINI-REVIEW!


    Quiznos? More like Quiz-MAYBES!!!

    I had this sandwich the other day, and I suppose while I can’t really claim to have expected there to be any more to it, it was very underwhelming. Having not lived under a rock for the past however many years, I realize that ads for food usually exaggerate (or “overrexaggerate” as friend of The Bookshelf Josh Calloway would say) the overwhelming deliciousness that said foods provide, and that Quiznos is a big purveyor of such underhanded tactics.

    First of all, and yet a side note, Quiznos likes to pretend that their prices are cheap when they’re anything but. When you hear them speak of just 2.99, you automatically jump to the mindset that Subway instilled in us about subs being 6-inch or footlong, however that’s not the case. It’s more along the lines of 4, 8, and 14 inches, or something like that, and so the 2.99 price is for the small. I’m willing to forgive the higher pricing as the sandwiches are mostly considerably more “gourmet” than subway, but the fact that they advertise them as cheap without saying the actual size, essentially preying on this mindset, really grills my flatbread.

    Back on topic. So the sandwich looks all big and stacked full of slow cooked roast beef and melted swiss cheese, when in reality, all it is is a regular roast beef sandwich (the beef hasn’t been specially cooked or anything), with swiss cheese, served with a cup of roast beef juice, known better by some french term that i’m not going to stoop to saying. The sandwich was hot, but I’m not giving them the special credit for that because they toast all of their subs. Basically this was a plain roast beef sandwich, made to look all important, and the price that the people paid for it probably wasn’t worth the letdown.

    Not saying that the sandwich wasn’t good (it was quite tasty), but I probably would’ve been better off with the Chicken Carbonara sandwich, the classic italian (minus the olives), or the more expensive black angus sandwich, but hey, I wasn’t paying for it, so nothing to lose.

    ***

    This sandwich gets three stars, due to the fact that while it was good, it was small, and didn’t even have the filler (lettuce, tomato, etc.) to make it more substantial a meal. Add to it that the roast beef was actually cold in spots, due to the hasty toasting of the sandwich, and the fact that the commercial makes it look substantially more overwhelming than it turned out to be, the sandwich leaves a good amount to be desired.

    Footnote: While I understand that I am again using the argument that a product did not live up to my prior expectations as a gauge by which to judge said product, this case is different from before in the sense that the company itself was inducing false presumptions, and not other noted reviewers.

  • Warm Winters

    Mini-Review!

    Not to get all Seinfeldian here, but really, what’s the deal with warm winters? Here it is, January and it’s feeling like mid-March. Everyone knows what winter is good for, so I won’t go into detail here, but still, I expect some snowy fun. Of course it did snow in December and it remained cold enough to make driving no fun for a solid two weeks or so, but spring time in January? I won’t have any of that. And for those of you who hate the cold weather, just remember there’s a whole month (then three weeks) for the weather to get back in sync. So at best, this warm spell serves only to get your hopes up as February prepares its icy wrath.

    robin
    Yes, this is a picture of a robin. Yes, I took it today. Yes, it’s January. No, I don’t expect a prize for seeing the first one. (Calvin and Hobbes joke, there)

    **

    Warm Winters receive two stars due to their disobeying of the natural order of things. I’ve not skied for a number of years BM, but if I were a skier, I wouldn’t be a happy camper. Is it too much to ask that the seasons be seasonal? The two stars are given for the fact that the car-based world is generally a safer place when roads aren’t slippery and the fact that my house is kept at the “meat locker” setting on the thermostat and warmer weather makes that much less of an issue. Regardless, I want my wintry rage!

  • The First Half of “The Rule of Four”

    Mini-review!

    So, maybe reviewing half of a book is not the most fair thing to do, but I’m about half of the way through The Rule of Four, probably the most notable of the non-Dan Brown authored so-called “it’s like The Da Vinci Code” books popular during the “great historical artifact mystery novel boom of the early-to-mid 2000’s.” It was popular enough to spawn a “the truth behind” sort of exposé into its central historical mystery.

    ruleof4.jpg
    My mysterious masterwork invokes something called “The Rule of Floors.” It has a prominent place in “The Dalrymple Freak-Out Factor.”

    Keeping up the mini-review theme, here’s a mini re-cap: the historical artifact is a book written in the late 1400’s, entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. If you’re familiar with The Da Vinci Code, replace “works of art” with “big book.” But, The Rule of Four, so far (of course), rises above whatever one would consider the Da Vinci Code to be in terms of quality with actual interesting writing with (what we so ambitiously learned in 7th grade) “voice,” not just the author writing “x,y,z, happened, Mr. Smith thought a,b,c, then said, ‘l,m,n.’” Maybe this is just the product of the first-person point-of-view, but it works.

    Oddly, the authors move between past tense (normal for adventure-fiction) and present tense depending on the (sometimes upcoming) action. It works for creating tension, but once you realize that they move between the two tenses, it’s easy to expect something dramatic to happen as soon as someone “sees” something instead of “saw” it. BUT, the book is enjoyable to read during the parts of “low action,” very unlike The Da Vinci Code, so their stylistic choices/risks work out well.

    ****

    The first half of The Rule of Four receives four stars (coincidentally) due to its setting up of a potentially solid second half. Because of the relative obscurity (compared to anything by Leonardo Da Vinci) of the historical artifact in question, there isn’t any built-in suspense. “There’s a murder clue in The Mona Lisa!!!” is interesting on its own, while “There are clues hidden about a 600 year old secret in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili!” gets more of the “huh?” response than intrigued readers. BUT, being that the authors are tasked with not only devising an interesting story, but making readers intrigued in an historical artifact they’ve never heard of, they’ve succeeded admirably on both fronts: making me curious about this 600 year old book and wondering how their book will end.

  • Weezer’s Make Believe

    I’m not sure if this is a copout, but it definitely is a lazy-man’s way to do it. This “review” was originally an e-mail I wrote in September, a good month+ before the concept of this very website existed. That doesn’t mean that the contents of the e-mail aren’t worthy of inclusion on this site. You’ll notice that it’s written more like an e-mail than a review (what with instances of a specific “you” and “me”). I’ve added some links and some popins, and the rating and conclusion are new for this review. This entire e-mail basically was a response to him saying, “As would be expected, the new Weezer album is quite excellent.” As always, don’t be afraid to post comments, it’s not like we’d write an extensive analysis of something that would be contrary to one sentence you wrote or anything.

    make believe
    Make Believe — How About Make…A Good Album. Buh-Zing!

    So, having gotten the new Weezer album just two days ago, and having given it two listens“”.I hate to say it, but I agree with the Pitchfork review. I don’t agree with giving it .4/10, as that would only be appropriate for the review of an album by someone who happened to be responsible for the rape of an immediate family member of the reviewer, but their reasoning for it being “bad” was spot-on. To be fair, I knew that it was reviewed poorly (the .4/10, specifically), but I had not read the contents of the review, so I had no pre-set opinion of the album before listening as Rolling Stone gave it a rather straight-forward 4 star review [the type of 4 star review given to bands that have a solid “sound” (like Cake and soon, the Strokes) that can’t be faulted and release albums that sort of sound alike, for better or worse””.remember that the most recent Cake album was rather poorly reviewed by Rolling Stone for sounding “

  • Sudoku


    The best Japanese import since…. ummm…. my DVD player?

    So recently (maybe a month ago?), the Morning Call let us all in on a supposedly huge new puzzle game trend that’s popping up everywhere. Called Sudoku, it’s a Japanese puzzle game in which a nine by nine grid is presented (sub-divided up into nine three-by-three square groups), with a select few of the squares filled with numbers from one to nine. The object is to fill in the entire grid with numbers from one to nine, so that no number is repeated in the same row, column, or sub-grid. The puzzles really don’t have much to do with numbers at all; they just serve as symbolic place-holders. You could use anything from letters, to roman numerals, to colors, to chinese symbols, it’s just that numbers 1 to 9 are a lot easier to recognize and see which ones are missing, etc.

    Rather than going into great detail on methods to solve the puzzles ( I usually use the process of elimination to determine which squares in a subgrid could possibly contain a certain number, or if there’s enough numbers filled in in a row or column, i’ll look into which numbers are missing from them and where each could go), i’ll just say that the wikipedia site on Sudoku has more than you’ll ever want to know on possible methods for solutions.

    Anyway, it is important to know how addictive these puzzles are… if you’re into logic puzzles. Considering that simpler (probably story problem style) versions of this basic premise were the main subject of the logic problems that I had done in (say it with me) El’-e-men-AR”-y school, this is the sort of thing that I just can’t stop doing. Weekly you can find them in the Sunday comics section of the paper, or on Fridays in the little “Life” magazine inset (those puzzles tend to be easier, but the boxes are generally too small to make markings in, other than final answers). Also, occasionally you can come across an advertisement for the Sunday puzzle on a weekday. Those ads usually contain a full-size puzzle, but unfortunately don’t come with a solution.

    Websudoku.com is probably the best for online Sudoku “puzzling”, and it keeps your time and tells you how good you are compared to other people, provided you don’t make a mistake. There are difficulty levels ranging from easy to evil, although they don’t have any of the super-puzzles pictured on the wikipedia site, which I would like to try sometime.

    I used to have crossword puzzle thing, but I got to the point where I realized the same clues were being used over and over again. Not only that but you can get to a point in a crossword puzzle where you have no leads on where to go next, and you’re completely stumped, possibly because you’ve never heard of a word they’re using, and you don’t really feel like picking up a dictionary to look something up if you have the first letter. The thing about the puzzles is that there’s always a next step, it’s just a matter of figuring out where it is. Usually, that one breakthrough will create a sort of chain reaction that should lead to the end of the puzzle, and even if takes an hour, it feels extremely good to know that you just tackled something this challenging, even though you just wasted an hour that you could be spending eating, sleeping, or sitting at the computer.

    ****

    Sudoku gets four stars for being a rather addictive and rewarding waste of time. It is much more interesting and challenging than a game of Carmen Sandiego would ever be, and it’s portable. You can get stuck, but there’s always a way out, and even if it takes walking away from it for fifteen minutes and coming back to it, it’s worth it.

  • The Dyne:bolic Media Studio LiveCD

    I think this will be a mini-review, but often times, I start as a mini-review, but end up with more than enough for a full-on, double-quarter-pounder with cheese regular review. (Finished writing it: Well, so much for the mini-review…)

    Let me pre-apologize for the computer-centric nature of this, but the “product” was a big enough let-down that being that I write reviews for a reviews website, I might as well weigh-in. Also, the official name of the “product” isn’t “Dyne:bolic Media Studio LiveCD, it’s just Dyne:bolic, but that’s stupid so I’m including the rest of the name I assigned to it.

    First, for those that probably stopped reading when I said “computer-centric:” a LiveCD is a CD you put in your computer as it starts up. Instead of Windows or Apple OS X loading from the hard drive, an operating system loads from the CD drive. This might not mean much to the non-computer people out there, but it allows for a completely different operating system to run on the same computer without anything being deleted (you just eject the CD when you’re done), overwritten, copied, or modified (unless that was your goal). With a LiveCD, you can start a computer whose Windows installation has gone the way of the buffalo and have practically full access to the files. If Windows needs to be re-installed, you can copy the relevant files to a USB key or (in some of the fancier liveCDs) even burn them to a CD-R. People who use computers for more abstract purposes (i.e. Linux users) use LiveCDs to sample new flavors of Linux before installing them. Windows has to no official LiveCD version as few people would be compelled to buy the program if they could just copy it and take it to whichever computer they (or a friend of family member) would use. (Not that this isn’t rampant with regular Windows install CDs as it is).


    Yeah, I can make up words too, Mr. “Hacktive.” KOFTOFTIC!! Take that dyne:bolic people.

    In terms of troubleshooting, LiveCDs most useful aspect is that one can figure out if a problem is with the computer’s hardware or Windows. In fact, I troubleshooted the hell out of Adam’s computer when he was having network problems using a LiveCD version of Puppy Linux.

    Anyway, Dyne:bolic is a linux-based LiveCD that portrays itself as a completely free, complete multimedia solution on a CD. You don’t install anything; you just put the CD in, start the computer, then you’re in a dreamworld of magic desktop filled with free software for internet broadcasting, audio and video editing, print editing, vector graphics (think Adobe Illustrator), raster graphics (think Adobe Photoshop), and more. It’s sounds great in theory. In fact, it sounds revolutionary in theory. In theory. The user interface is simple enough to figure out (it’s probably simpler to use than Windows, especially because it’s so specialized).

    BUT, like a lot of the Linux theories, it’s better as just that, a theory. As you turn the computer on, you’re greeted with a prompt that says “boot:” and has instructions for choosing video modes or entering debug mode. Well, I guess I’d consider myself a power user, so I want to set the resolution to the optimum setting for the LCD screen in front of me. Skipping the intermediate step, you choose your resolution and the screen says “Could not find kernel” then it boots into the desktop, running at 800×600. This isn’t enough for power users, and video editing at 800×600 is practically useless as video from a full-resolution DV source will fill most of the space. Aside from the fact that a non-linux user would be dumbfounded by that “kernel error,” as a reasonably experienced (unfortunately, even with Linux) computer user, it’s bad user interface design if you display a serious-looking error, then have the computer seemingly do something unrelated (such as boot into the desktop). Does this mean that the kernel error wasn’t very serious? That I’ll be able to change resolutions once it’s booted?(you can’t) Who knows.

    I’d give a a more thorough review, but trying it on various hardware,- I couldn’t get it to run higher than 800×600 and beyond that, the support for the CD was (dis)organized into a “cute” page with very little content, most focused on the individual included programs (which I could already find on the homepages of the included programs), but the not the actual CD itself.

    I’m not sure if Dyne:bolic is a one man project, but if it is, it’s quite the accomplishment (in theory) for one person, but as the Linux community is so often to say, “Use this! Windows would never be this good, and you’re stupid if you don’t use flavor of the week. If it doesn’t work for you, then fix it yourself. It’s open source!” I know enough about Linux to say that the kernel error when choosing a resolution probably has something to do with the detection of the video card’s applicable settings (or settings in general), but that doesn’t mean I have the means to fix it. If other Linux-based LiveCD’s can work, this one should too, especially if it’s supposed to be so “ultimate.” I tried it with both ATi and nVidia videocards and had the same error. Linux etiquette says that I’m supposed to go to the forums or wiki if I have a problem, but I’d prefer my “amazing” solution to just work.If it’s a one man project, it’ll probably work fine on his hardware, so he probably has an Intel video card/onboard chip. But, of course, lots of people don’t have his exact setup, so maybe it’s the ultimate setup on his computer. But that’s about it.

    *½

    The Dyne:bolic Media Studio LiveCD receives one-and-a-half stars due to it setting high expectations but failing to deliver on them. The concept (a standalone CD that turns any computer into a fully-featured media studio) is rock solid, but it’s unfortunately brought down by two of the pillars of Microsoft’s supposed FUD anti-Linux marketing: “questionable hardware support” and “lack of documentation”. Sure, it’s free, but that doesn’t make it better than commercial alternatives, even if they don’t come bundled on one standalone CD (that doesn’t completely work). Oh yeah, and the name stinks.

  • “The Internet”

    hmm, I didn’t have a solid plan when I started this review. I simultaneously wanted to do a running list of “‘the internet’ thinks this, ‘the internet’ thinks that” and a traditional intro, body, rating, conclusion review. Unfortunately I had neither enough entries for that running list or a fully fleshed out concept for the traditional review, so we get a questionably coherent mishmash of both.

    hmm #2…I scrapped the list I had when I realized how long the traditional part was. The list wasn’t very good anyway. Anyway, enough meta.

    Notice those quotes up there? The ones around The Internet? Those signify that we’re not talking about the actual internet. Nope, we’re not discussing millions of computers, countless low-level hardware thingies that are probably made by Cisco, nor little understood software and protocols that link all of it together. In fact, we’re not even talking about the 750ish million people that use the internet. We’re talking about those people, the one’s that both provide and fuel almost every stereotype about the modern “geek.”

    the internet
    The most famous parody/stereotype of “the internet.” It’s funny because it’s true.

    “The Internet” is almost a collective consciousness; the phrase “all your base are belong to us” means less than nothing to those not part of “the internet.” But those in that club thinks (or at least thought at one point in time) that it is hilarious. “The Internet” loves being first to know about something that’s become “pop-culture,” and isn’t afraid to hold that against you. In fact, here’s a disturbingly complete list of pieces of internet culture. Some of them never caught on with the general public, but some will look quite familiar.

    The anonymous nature of participation on the internet (no quotes) allows for those who care too much about something that is inconsequential to spend time (hours, days….years?) and defend their work because there’s someone else on “The Internet” that probably is working on something just like it. These two people will hate each other and will develop fanboys, the official animal of “The Internet.”

    Because the internet is so unfathomably large, there’s stuff about everything. Without going into history, the type of people who were first using the civilian internet, were (standby as I stereotype and generalize)…well, let’s call them the type of people who had the technical background or interest to have the means and abilities to connect to the internet. Stereotypically (and accurately), these aren’t the people to have “mainstream” interests. I’m not necessarily judging what those interests might be, but needless to say, the population at large doesn’t share those interests. Being that college campuses were some of the first places people could experience what would become “the internet,” students with the interest and ability to participate in the internet made some of the first “home pages,” sites dedicated to whatever their left of mainstream interest happened to be. Combine that with the fact that much of the internet traffic was coming from other college campuses, a huge social network of young people who normally weren’t part of a huge social network developed. Before “the internet,” college campuses also served as larger-scale examples of the comic book store phenomenon, with numerous people with non-mainstream interests meeting enough people with those same interests to create a community where discussions could take place about those interests beyond the “Comic books, Dungeons & Dragons, and etc. suck and so do you” stereotypically presented by the “mainstream.” Members of “the internet” would indignantly mention that I skipped the discussion of BBSes, IRC, usenet, and other things that our readership wouldn’t care about.

    Oddly enough, “The Internet” doesn’t really have much to say about music. Sure, there are fansites, but if one were to list influential music websites that are just websites, pitchforkmedia.com will probably be the only he can think of. I’d guess that this is because the world of music is simply too huge and diverse; genres are so monolithic that there can’t be a general-purpose site serving all of it.

    Oddly enough, considering how similar members of “the internet” are, they have no central meeting point. That doesn’t mean there aren’t sites “they” frequent. Fark, sort of a weird news aggregator, serves as the general news-gathering device. To be fair to Fark, I know of no one, member of “the internet” or not, who didn’t get a kick out of it, at least during their first visit. If they want more scathing humor that specializes in topics of which “the internet” is conscious, there’s Something Awful. Both Something Awful and Fark have Photoshop contests; naturally the two subcommunities hate each other. Usually the Something Awful’s Photoshop efforts go over better with whatever we’d consider the mainstream internet user. Slashdot provides computer news and some of the most frustratingly inane arguing about each and every story without fail. The Internet Movie Database, originally “property” of “the internet” is very much a mainstream internet tool and continues to be “the internet’s” definitive source for movie info, while Roger Ebert, the unofficial official movie critic of “the internet”‘s already high profile has managed to rise since “the internet” adopted him. His stance on video games turned off many, but there’s no widely agreed upon second place critic for “the internet” to worship. Computer hardware is taken care of by Anandtech or Tom’s Hardware Guide (or any of the dozens of other hardware reviewing sites). Aint It Cool News continues to be “the internet’s” movie site and, like SlashDot is famous for its attracting of relentless fanboys of particular movie properties. TheForce.net provides Star Wars news (an interest/passion among much of “the internet”). I’m sure there’s an unofficial official site for every science fiction property (I’m condescendingly including LOST in there, Nate). Professional Wrestling is known for having one of the biggest divides between casual fans and “internet” fans. I’m not sure if I’ll do a full review of the mechanics of how the Internet Wrestling Community functions (I think it might be so messed-up that it would be somewhat interesting to those that don’t care one bit about wrestling.), but I’ll say that I will. Due to that messed-up-ed-ness, there’s no real universal destination, but 411mania and insidepulse are popular (though both have expanded to cover pop culture and more traditional “internet” interests). Simpsons fans have The Simpsons Archive where you can find “episode capsules” where you’ll learn more than every wanted to know about everything about each episode of the show. Wikipedia and Google had begun as jewels of “the internet,” but Google has long since become the standard for all users and Wikipedia, for better-or-worse, is in the process of becoming the standard for informal research (and formal research by those that don’t realize that an encyclopedia that has a more detailed entry for the Green Lantern than for the Watergate scandal might not be the best source of information).

    The above wasn’t an all-encompassing tour of the popular destinations, but that’s a lot of them; each category could have more added and I glossed over some categories (such as shock sites, so it’s your own fault if you see something in three clicks that you wish you hadn’t).

    **½

    “The Internet” receives two-and-a-half stars not due to its interests, but due to its attitudes. The ending of Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back really captured the whole concept, with two guys previously unfamiliar with the idea of the internet going after (and beating up) everyone that trash talked them on a movie website, not unlike Aint It Cool News. Aside from the fact that much of “the internet” has become used to anonymous, consequence-free trash talking, the significance is that the “mainstream” still doesn’t understand the whole community, why anyone would visit, much less create, comment, or contribute to a websites devoted to, of all things, Star Wars action figures or the intricacies behind how the episodes on the Simpsons DVDs aren’t 100% complete.

    The Something Awful “Photoshop Phriday” examples came from the Paintings of Light competition parts 1 and 2.

  • NES Games – Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego


    Doesn’t this look like as much fun as being forced to listen to Roseanne sing the national anthem?

    Like the Waldo craze and the whole Disney Afternoon semi-craze, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” was a huuuugee fad for a few years. Broderbund came up with this idea in the mid eighties (for a computer game), and of course it spun off into two TV shows in the nineties. Eventually, as the PBS show waned in interest, they decided to do a reformat of it and it became this really crappy third show (now history themed instead of geography themed) with probably the dumbest kids they could find. Luckily it only lasted one year.

    I think the video game series could probably boast about being the only video game to come with a desk encyclopedia. That’s right; the game comes in a 4 inch thick case with some crappy “encyclopedia” for use in solving the “crimes”. Basically the way you play this game is you’re racing a clock that arbitrarily counts down the “hours” you have left to solve a theft of a historical artifact. You go to a location in time (time jumping is the biggest use of “hours”) and ask people (a text box) about the crime and they give you clues to what the criminal looked like and where he/she was going. Then you look up the clue in your “encyclopedia” and head off there, where you do the whole thing again. Eventually you either run out of time, and do another case, or you solve the crime and do another case; there’s no difference between winning or losing, save the fact that in your fictional world, someone with an incredibly clever name like “Ella Vator”, “Jim Shorts”, or “Stu Pidname” will have managed to get away with a Stradivarius violin from 1730, and that even though you were hot on the trail, the case will never be solved. Each game only takes about 15 minutes, and the only thing that happens when you capture the criminal is you get “promoted”. There really isn’t any point to playing after the first 15 minutes because it gets really boring looking for 8th century Chinese vases.

    I understand that it was made in the early nineties and that the graphics aren’t better because of it. I understand that it’s supposed to be an educational game about history, but it seems to me that the only thing that this game actually teaches people is how to look up answers in an encyclopedia. It would be more educational if perhaps there was a recap test at the end of the game, where you had a certain amount of time to answer questions based on stuff that you “learned” earlier in the game. I would equate this scenario to the difference between an open notebook test vs. a regular test. An open notebook test only serves to determine how well you take notes, except in the case where there are way more questions than you could ever answer by looking up, or it’s an essay test in which you need to take points out of your notes and combine them to form a coherent essay. A regular test should make sure that you have an actual practical understanding of the knowledge, much like the final challenge on the TV game show. For those of you who weren’t even allowed to watch PBS when you were a kid, the final stage of the game involved locating 10 or so countries or states (depending on the continent that the map was of) on a large map on the floor, within a certain amount of time. The host would call out the place name and the person would have to put a marker on it, showing that the kid actually understood the geography of the continent and was not just reading it off of a map with labels and then going to place the marker.

    Granted, a game that had a quiz at the end of it wouldn’t be any fun at all. I can’t imagine a kid wanting to play something like that. I mean I played “number munchers” on the computer like all present twenty-somethings once did, before games had more than 3 colors to show, but those computer lab exercises that we’d have to do back in elementary school were just outright boring. I’d much rather have a teacher teaching me…. or be jumping on Goombas, or shooting bad guys, or even, putting puzzle piece-shaped blocks that fall from the sky into lines so they disappear. Video games need to be fun, and repeating the same process five times per game is not fun, especially when each game is so short. If you’ve played one “case”, you’ve played them all, but maybe the object that’s stolen and the thief are different. I’m not a game designer, but it seems to me that the people behind this game wanted to push a game as being “educational” without trying hard enough to actually be educational or interesting to kids. I wouldn’t put it out of the reach of the NES’s capabilities to be able to have a map with different countries and have the player have to identify them, but I guess no matter where it goes, it’s hard to mask the whole “teaching kids things outside of school” thing that the creators were going for.

    *½

    This game gets one and a half stars for putting forth an effort to create an educational game, and succeed at actually making it really popular. On the other hand, the game actually sucks, is incredibly repetitive, doesn’t teach anything that would stick longer than 5 minutes, is without a real goal to achieve, is incredibly repetitive, and is just plain boring. Also, the time usually runs out before you catch the crook (because of the amount of “time jumps” necessary to catch him/her) leaving you frustrated over something that you probably had no interest in playing in the first place, but thought would be cool because the box was so big.

  • George W. Bush’s January 6, 2006 Meeting with “The Old Guard”

    A reading note: The Daily Show addressed this same topic on January 11,2006. Needless to say, we were first.

    Without explicitly saying so, we generally avoid discussing legitimately contentious issues here at emptybookshelf.com. That’s not to say we have topics that are off-limits, just that we recognize that there are issues are both too multi-faceted to be fully addressed in an “intro, picture, funny caption, body, rating, conclusion format” and evoke too emotional of a response in people. It’s doubtful that anyone will be posting a (serious) review of the continual mess in the Middle East, abortion, religion, politics, etc. In fact, these are topics for which even tangentially-related reviews or discussions are considered to be yet more propaganda in arguments that have gone on for years+. So, it’s with great hesitation that I begin my review of recent under-reported political news.

    Objectively, the war, liberation, struggle, uprising, etc. in Iraq isn’t going particularly well. That’s not fine, but that’s how it is. Most republicans admit it, democrats, even those that initially supported the whole thing, realize something needs to be done, figured out, and so on, while the apolitical agree on that same something. No, the political climate isn’t that simple, but reading between the lines, you’ll notice that “column C” was the “apolitical,” not the “independent”… ooh, the intrigue.

    cheese
    Unfortunately, The Honorable Mr. Cheese never received an invitation. Picture from http://cheesegod.com

    Anyway, George W. Bush realizes this too, and in the interest of maintaining his appeal among his initial/traditional supporters, he arranged one heck of a meeting at the White House to discuss Iraq. I’m not sure how long The Boston Globe keeps its archives free, but here’s the story detailing the meeting. Don’t worry on clicking on it yet, it’s not very substantive, and I’ll explain why in a bit. So, on Friday morning, George W. Bush had pretty much every living secretary of state and defense since Vietnam over for “discussion” at the White House. Yes, that includes former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, as well as Clinton’s Defense Secretaries. Granted those are mainly “look, I can play well with people that supposedly don’t like me anymore” and “I can also play with the older kids’ friends, too” picks, but that’s a lot of experience in the room. Beyond those more “recent” guests, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the beginning and worsening of Vietnam was also present.
    The Boston Globe‘s rundown of the guests:

    The eminent group included Robert S. McNamara, who at 89 was the senior statesman in attendance, having served under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; Melvin Laird and James Schlesinger, who served under Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford; Harold Brown, who was Jimmy Carter’s secretary of defense; Frank Carlucci, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary; and William Perry and William Cohen, Pentagon chiefs during the Clinton administration.

    The former top diplomats on hand were Colin L. Powell, Bush’s first secretary of state; Alexander Haig and George Shultz from the Reagan administration; Lawrence Eagleburger and James Baker from the administration of George H. W. Bush; and Madeleine K. Albright, secretary of state in the Clinton administration.

    Cynically, it sounds like that might be too many dignitaries, but in theory, it’s quite a crowd, and heck, people work best in groups. That’s 13, not counting the president and the unnamed advisors in Iraq. It sounds like they must have had quite a meeting. It was so enlightening that it even went over schedule by fifteen minutes.

    The whole thing was an hour and fifteen minutes. That’s…let’s see: about five minutes and forty-two seconds for each of the 13 guests. How substantive. No wonder the newspaper didn’t really have much to write about beyond, “He heard things he liked, he heard things he didn’t like.” I can’t imagine much more than that happened.

    Obviously, the meeting was held as a response to the critique/complaint that the president is too closed off from everyone but his top advisors. Well, then, he meet with people other than his top advisors for a whole 75 minutes. Who cares about 2008, let’s repeal #22 and re-elect him tomorrow! I mean, come on, how could we not vote for him? He did something to superficially appeal to his (apparently not that insightful) critics for an hour and fifteen minutes; he’s the next Lincoln!

    You can make me eat coconut for an hour, heck, you can even make it so the eating session goes fifteen minutes over schedule, but that doesn’t mean I’ll like it, and I’d hate to think people were so blindly trusting to think that I’d have changed my mind about coconut after an hour and fifteen minutes. I’ll still hate that awful satan fruit.

    **

    George W. Bush’s January 6, 2006 Meeting with “The Old Guard” receives two stars due to the fact that it was no more than a PR move. No, I’m not saying that most actions taken by any sitting president/politician aren’t PR moves or photo-ops, but this one was rather see-through. As I said before, I’m undecided as to whether it was under-reported, but the fact that anyone thinks that the hour and fifteen minute meeting accomplished anything other than “politics” is delusional, or more likely, answering with “politics” in mind, which really shouldn’t be surprising or shocking to anyone, but that doesn’t mean the status quo deserves positive reviews. And yes, if Bill Clinton were president now and had that same meeting, it would’ve been just as negatively reviewed.

  • The Episode of “The Simpsons” with Three Points of View

    Of course, after the long break between this and my previous review, I wrote it the same day that Dan wrote a rather important review, so check that one out. It should be just below this one.


    Linguo says “Wassamatta WITH Season 12?”

    So tonight on one of the Fox affiliates that we get here, either Fox 5 (NY) or Fox 29 (Philly), they were airing the one episode of “The Simpsons”, titled “Trilogy of Error“. This episode is one of two uniquely structured episodes that I know of, in that it doesn’t just follow one set chronology/plot thread. I guess you could make a case that other “theme episodes” might count towards this, but I suppose the gimmick for these two is different in that it’s not taking the characters and putting them in situations outside of their realities.

    The episode originally aired in April of 2001, (Season 12 for those of you who care about such things), amidst such “classics” as the one with Lisa and the Bully, the one where Homer starts a daycare; the one where Homer becomes Burns’ “Prank Monkey”; the one where the kids get snowed in at school (with some awkwardly raunchy humor, and one of the ten worst endings ever, in fact, one which was very similar to another that aired that season in which Homer started a website and ended up on a hallucinogenic island like on “The Prisoner”); the one titled “Worst. Episode. Ever.“; and the actual worst episode ever, the one where Homer and Marge build a tennis court in their backyard to start the actual plot, at about 15 minutes into a 22-minute episode.

    This episode, however, proved to be the strongest one not only of that season, but one of the best of the five seasons around it. The first third of the episode deals with Homer’s day, in which he meets Lisa’s Science Fair project, a grammar-correcting robot, after which he accidentally cuts off his thumb. He has various adventures attempting to get the thumb sewn back on, including a ride with Cletus, and an explosion at Dr. Nick’s. He’s eventually stranded, walking toward Shelbyville, when out of nowhere the head of Lisa’s robot falls out of the air in front of him. In the second segment, “Lisa’s Day”, Lisa struggles to get to school in time for the fair, since Marge has left to take Homer to the Doctor, and her bike is gone. She winds up at an exact replica of her school, but on the wrong end of town, eventually runs into Marge outside of Moe’s (where Homer’s been distracted while trying to get ice to put his thumb on), and the two speed away, only to almost hit Bart, as he comes out from under a man-hole cover. The third segment chronicles Bart’s day, as he and Milhouse (on Lisa’s bike) go in search of illegal fireworks underground and get tied up with the mob. Eventually all of these stories meet up, and Homer gets his thumb sewn back on by the mob doctor as Lisa’s science project. There are many overlaps in the three stories, with scenarios that have payoffs in earlier segments and setups in later segments, things deliberately left vague early on, so that they can be explained in later parts.

    The thing that really makes this episode work though, is the pacing. Right from the start it’s going at a breakneck speed with no pauses for character moments or throwaway jokes that have nothing to do with the main story. The reason for this is that there’s so much plot going on, at the same time as the other characters stories, that it’s essential to get through each person in under 7 minutes, and therefore is more like three short interlocking episodes than one big one that’s all over the place. Granted they have done episodes with three specific separate segments (The bible/literary stories episodes, the Halloween episodes, and this year’s Christmas one), but in those cases it seemed like “Hey, I have a good idea. Let’s make Lisa into Johnny Appleseed”, without thinking through how they would actually fill the time with story instead of just a collection of forced “jokes”. Season 12 is a prime example of the lack of story structure that has plagued the show for the last five years (at least). The story ideas for the episodes in this season aren’t developed enough to fill the amount of time for an episode, so they think of two or more story ideas and figure out how to connect them together, and try to pass it off as one story, usually pretty transparently, and often self-referrentially. But this episode was different. It was well-structured and plotted, and the humor came from having unfortunate things happen to the characters, instead of them causing stupid things to happen. The ending, while a bit rushed, made a lot more sense than nearly all of the other episodes that season, including the infamous “SURF’S UP” ending from “The Great Money Caper“. The 17 fanboys at the Simpsons episode archive gave this episode an average of an A, and I’m inclined to do so as well.

    ****½

    This episode, while nowhere near perfect is probably one of the best, if not most memorable episodes to come out of the series after season 11 (we’re currently in 17). Its use of non-linear storytelling, while gimmicky, allows for a change in the tired Simpsons formula that seemed to be dragging it down that year, and the incredibly fast pace and detailed plot structure keep it from getting sillier than anything in season 7 or 8 or just filled with dumb jokes. Even when it’s not funny, it’s engaging, not annoying, and it never feels like a chore to sit through, which is rare these days. It is nowhere near as good as episodes from six years before or so, but not much is, and with over 250 episodes prior, it’s hard to keep coming up with fresh ideas, something this episode does quite well.