Tree Battle

It wasn't long ago that Berkeley was home to near continuous protests again the Vietnam war, racial discrimination and human rights abuse. Today, the hot topic seems to be trees. Check out this local news article about protesters who have taken to the trees in hopes of preventing the University of California, Berkeley from expanding its athletic facilities, eliminating some rare Live Oaks in the process. The video on the same link is worth watching as well.

The gold medal for the city with the highest pollution goes to...

Athletes hoping to compete in next summer's Olympic Games in Beijing are already starting to strategerizer about how to deal with the tremendous pollution in Beijing. Read about it here:

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=ap-beijing-pollution&prov=ap&type=lgns

Adventures in Grape Stomping

Maybe you've already seen this video, but I just dicovered it yesterday. Its about a reporter who attempts to stomp grapes, an accident occurs and hilarity ensues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyFapbZuMGU

My favorite part is the female newcaster in the studio - she's doing everything she can to not laugh. Supposedly SNl did a pardoy of this video, so I'm guessing I was the last one to see it.

yummy bottled water

Bottled water - tastes good right? Better than tap water? It must be the plastice residue from the bottle, 'cause it turns out its just tap water, atleast in the case of Aquafina. Last week, reports revealed that Aquafina gets its water from the Missouri River after its treated by local municipal treatment plants near St. Louis. Read about it here:

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/columnists.nsf/savvyconsumer/story/B39978ADB45713A58625732C001175E7?OpenDocument

St. Louis has always had good tap water - some believe that Anheuser-Busch heavily lobbies the city to maintain good water so it doesn't have to pay separate treatment costs. Still, tap water in most communities is probably close enough in quality. The Aquafina folks don't make much of an effort to defend their product.

The Simpsons Movie

I saw the Simpsons Movie this week. Its been a long time coming - I remember people talking about them doing a movie over ten years ago. Maybe its best that they waited, since animation has improved dramatically since the mid-90s. Overall, I thought the movie was really funny and definitely worth seeing in the theaters. They really took advantage of CGI and other technical animation programs, as well as the big screen, to make a really slick animated movie. Its still the simpsons animation, but being on the big screen allowed the animators to do a lot that they could not have done on the show - huge crowd shots and wide angles that were used to make scenes more dramatic and interesting.

The movie was really funny, though it can't compete with an episode of the simpsons from the golden age (mid-1990s). The shows been on for almost 20 years, so may its remarkable that they can still do anything with it! The humour wasmore slap-sticky than the show usually is. Thats fine because it allowed the animators to take advantage of the production techniques available in the movies. Still, I was hoping for a little more of the satirical humour that's made the Simpsons so popular over the years. There were the usual satirical themes in the movie, but a little less of the really biting, intellectual humour that hard-core fans really like. More political humour would have been interesting, though it might have quickly dated the movie.

The movie feels like a long episode. Thats good and bad. Good that they stuck with a formula that works. Bad because it would have been interesting to see a more complicated plot than the one they came up with.

Most of the story focused on the Simpsons family. It would have been great to see more from the supporting characters like Professor Frink, Moe, Milhouse, and Groundskeeper Willie (perhaps these folks can be the focus of the next simpsons movie...). There were a lot of subtle references to past episodes (like when Moe calls Marge "midge" and other small things) that reward hard-core fans.

So it was great. See it on the big screen to get the full effect.