Well, I’ve got my pronunciation of “Chowdaaah” down pat, so I’m heading off to Cape Cod and Boston for the next couple of weeks. This means posting will be even patchier than usual around here. Providing my camera behaves (and I can find internet access in Cape Cod – the nearest Starbucks is 13 miles from where I’m staying), I’ll be updating my Flickr.

See yis soon!

H. pointed me to the awesome Cory Doctorow Visits a Radio Shack. It’s completely hilarious and very well written. My favourite bit:

(AWKWARD SILENCE)

CORY DOCTOROW: Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod.

EMPLOYEE: What?

CORY DOCTOROW: I didn’t say anything. Now, about this cell phone…

The phrase “Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod” has been adopted as a convenient shorthand for when I make a simple problem more complicated by adding layer upon layer of technology. Take last night, for example.

“So I’ll put our itinerary into my Google Calendar, subscribe to it in my iCal and then synchronize that to my phone with Bluetooth”

“Couldn’t you just put it on some paper?”

“Yes, but…”

“Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod”

The Xbox Live Gaming Centre up on South William Street will be running a competition to coincide with the European release of Dead Rising next month. Fittingly, the competition is to find the best-dressed zombie.

From their newsletter:

The Xbox Live Gaming Centre is running a best dressed zombie competition to celebrate the launch of Capcom’s Dead Rising (rated 18’s) which will be hitting the centre on Friday September 7th. On Saturday 8th September, at 3pm we will be holding the competition in-store. Prizes include €100 cash, “I Love Zombies” t-shirts and limited edition Dead Rising faceplates.

Note: their dates are a little funny – Saturday is actually the 9th of September.

The prizes aren’t awesome. Faceplates? No copies of the game? Still though, I’m happy with any excuse to dress like a zombie.

See also: Zombies Invade San Francisco!

In January, I wrote about Sheldon Turner, one of the writers of Snakes on a Plane, and talked about how one of his next movies is about a serial killer who only kills people in the eye of a storm. Awesome idea, and I can guarantee that this guy will go far in Hollywood.

Except when I went to see Snakes on a Plane last night, Sheldon Turner’s name was nowhere to be found. And, sure enough, the IMDB page for SoaP doesn’t list Sheldon Turner any more. His Wikipedia entry still lists him as a writer on SoaP, and googling “Sheldon Turner” “Snakes on a Plane” gives enough results to confirm I’m not making shit up.

Why was his credit removed for this movie? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Let me start this off by saying that Snakes on a Plane is a great movie. A full year since I first wrote about it, a full year of anticipation has done nothing to harm this movie, it’s still everything we expected. In fact, it’s more than we expected, since we were expecting a cheesy, so-bad-it’s-good movie and Snakes on a Plane is anything but – it’s an enjoyable, light-hearted action/comedy/disaster movie, and I recommend you go see it now before the only people left to see it are the boring sort that will not clap and whoop their way through the movie.

Now I’ve got that out of the way, let’s change gears.

I left the movie last night (7.30pm, Cineworld) wondering what it was about this movie that appealed to nerds. The nerd quotient of this movie was unreal. Sitting in Eddie Rockets before the movie, I spotted a group of people going past, and just by the look of them, I knew they had just been to Snakes on a Plane (it turns out that one of them was a Googler who knew the Googler in our group and indeed, he had just been to Snakes on a Plane).

The internet is abuzz with this movie in a way that only the internet knows how. Livejournal is unreadable right now because of it. There are multi-page threads about it on every forum I read. And NewsFire tells me I have a terrifying 50 articles about it in my RSS feeds.

So why this movie? What makes it better than other light-hearted action/comedy/disaster movies? Sure, SoaP has a guy getting bitten on the cock by a snake after pissing on it (oops, spoilers!), but Deep Blue Sea has Samuel L. Jackson being eaten by a flying shark (kinda). SoaP may be high-concept, but then, so is Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous, whose similarly endearing concept is stratospheric and too bizarre to properly summarize here.

So why Snakes on a Plane? Answers on a postcard, please.