Thinking of getting back into the blogosphere. Now that everyone has stopped reading it, maybe I can be a tad bit more open.
Can't believe it's been nine months since I've posted anything here. Craziness -- I used to post on here like three times a day!
Some favorite scenes from LOST
Yes, I realize I haven't updated this thing in nearly three months. Strange to go from updating 3-4 times a day in 2006 to once every three months in 2010.
Nonetheless, LOST is coming to an end on Sunday. There's plenty more coming, but here are some of my favorite scenes from the show.
***Note** There are so many more to pick, this was hard.
Season 1, Episode 19 - Deus Ex Machina
Locke wants his kidney back
Season 1, Episode 25 - Exodus Part 2
"This is no ordinary place, you know that."
Season 2, Episode 20 - Two For the Road
Goodbye Ana Lucia and Libby
Season 2, Episode 16 - The Whole Truth
"You guys got any milk."
Season 3, Episode 22 -- Through the Looking Glass Part 2 (tie)
"We have to go back!"
Goodbye Charlie Pace
Season 4, Episode 5 -- The Constant
"Pennayyy, is that really you?"
Season 4, Episode 9 - The Shape of Things to Come
Goodbye Alex
Season 5, Episode 16 - The Incident
"I had her and I lost her."
Season 5, Episode 2 - The Lie
Hurley explains LOST in two minutes
Season 6, TBA
Nonetheless, LOST is coming to an end on Sunday. There's plenty more coming, but here are some of my favorite scenes from the show.
***Note** There are so many more to pick, this was hard.
Season 1, Episode 19 - Deus Ex Machina
Locke wants his kidney back
Season 1, Episode 25 - Exodus Part 2
"This is no ordinary place, you know that."
Season 2, Episode 20 - Two For the Road
Goodbye Ana Lucia and Libby
Season 2, Episode 16 - The Whole Truth
"You guys got any milk."
Season 3, Episode 22 -- Through the Looking Glass Part 2 (tie)
"We have to go back!"
Goodbye Charlie Pace
Season 4, Episode 5 -- The Constant
"Pennayyy, is that really you?"
Season 4, Episode 9 - The Shape of Things to Come
Goodbye Alex
Season 5, Episode 16 - The Incident
"I had her and I lost her."
Season 5, Episode 2 - The Lie
Hurley explains LOST in two minutes
Season 6, TBA
Toughness, passion define Carpenter
LINK
Excerpt:
Excerpt:
FAYETTEVILLE - Jamel Carpenter's biggest contribution in Fayetteville State's 65-58 win over Saint Paul's College on Jan. 4 wasn't in the scoring column.
With FSU up four with less than one minute remaining in the game, Carpenter's shot was blocked by SPC's Ibn-Saeed Rasoull.
Instead of sulking, Carpenter sprinted to the other end of the floor and knocked the ball away from the Tigers' Kwame Johnson giving FSU the ball and preserving its first CIAA win of the season.
The play was emblematic of Carpenter, a 6-foot-4 scoring machine who has taken the CIAA by storm in his first year at FSU.
"I have a big heart and I don't like to lose," said Carpenter. "All I know is to go hard. The area where I'm from, they breed people who believe in that mentality - just go hard."
Carpenter leads the conference in scoring, averaging 22.2 points per game. The Salisbury, N.C. native also ranks in the top six in the league in free-throw percentage (86.6 percent), rebounds per game (7.7) and three-point field goals made per game (2.2).
"One of my favorite players is LeBron James," Carpenter said. "He plays all across the board and I always have that mentality. I don't want to be a one-area guy. I like to do it all. Rebounding comes from the heart, free throws come from concentration and making shots comes from constantly working out."
Why conservatives hate 'Avatar'
If you haven't seen the movie yet, do yourself a favor.
Los Angeles Times LINK
Excerpt:It's no secret that "Avatar" has been stunningly successful on nearly every front. The James Cameron-directed sci-fi epic is already the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time, having earned more than $1 billion around the globe in less than three weeks of theatrical release.
But amid this avalanche of praise and popularity, guess who hates the movie? America's prickly cadre of political conservatives.
John Podhoretz, the Weekly Standard's film critic, called the film "blitheringly stupid; indeed, it's among the dumbest movies I've ever seen." He goes on to say: "You're going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks about the movie's politics -- about how it's a Green epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq.... The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism -- kind of. The thing is, one would be giving Jim Cameron too much credit to take 'Avatar' -- with its ... hatred of the military and American institutions and the notion that to be human is just way uncool -- at all seriously as a political document. It's more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard issue counterculture cliches in Hollywood have become by now."
A Crisis in Perspective
Much has been said and written about the decline of traditional journalism over the last decade.
Each day newspapers that have been around for decades fold, writers and editors lose their jobs and conglomerates sell off or close what once were a primary news sources for many citizens.
Regardless of why it happened (arrogance, smugness, lack of creativity, hubris) the fact that we're now to desensitized to it is sad and frightening.
However, I think the downfall of journalism (forgive me if that was a little Glenn Beckian)comes not from the destruction of a common medium, but from the lack of ability to say "this is important because" by a fresh crop of journalists (my age) who live a world where stories are rarely told.
Instead, today, opinions are repeated, regurgitated, spread and then reported as fact. A lot of writing is reactionary and doesn't take into account the larger scale.
For example, UNC lost to College of Charleston last night. In a typical gamer, a writer would talk about the lack of Will Graves and Marcus Ginyard playing for UNC. They'd discuss guard play, turnovers and freshmen.
That's fine, but anyone who follows or covers UNC knows these things are a problem already.
Instead, writers need to learn to find more concentrated angles that give information about UNC that the reader can't get anywhere else.
Why didn't Deon Thompson foul late in the game? What was the strategy on the last possession in regulation? Why schedule a road game just days before ACC play, against an opponent that isn't national known but is more than solid?
It may be tough to write all of this in 45 minutes with an 12:15 a.m., deadline but this is where writing -- and more generally sports writing -- needs to go.
Don't give me results, give me depth. To me, that's what's missing in Journalism. An ability to discern between a story with perspective and a story without one.
Each day newspapers that have been around for decades fold, writers and editors lose their jobs and conglomerates sell off or close what once were a primary news sources for many citizens.
Regardless of why it happened (arrogance, smugness, lack of creativity, hubris) the fact that we're now to desensitized to it is sad and frightening.
However, I think the downfall of journalism (forgive me if that was a little Glenn Beckian)comes not from the destruction of a common medium, but from the lack of ability to say "this is important because" by a fresh crop of journalists (my age) who live a world where stories are rarely told.
Instead, today, opinions are repeated, regurgitated, spread and then reported as fact. A lot of writing is reactionary and doesn't take into account the larger scale.
For example, UNC lost to College of Charleston last night. In a typical gamer, a writer would talk about the lack of Will Graves and Marcus Ginyard playing for UNC. They'd discuss guard play, turnovers and freshmen.
That's fine, but anyone who follows or covers UNC knows these things are a problem already.
Instead, writers need to learn to find more concentrated angles that give information about UNC that the reader can't get anywhere else.
Why didn't Deon Thompson foul late in the game? What was the strategy on the last possession in regulation? Why schedule a road game just days before ACC play, against an opponent that isn't national known but is more than solid?
It may be tough to write all of this in 45 minutes with an 12:15 a.m., deadline but this is where writing -- and more generally sports writing -- needs to go.
Don't give me results, give me depth. To me, that's what's missing in Journalism. An ability to discern between a story with perspective and a story without one.
Rell's Favorite/Top 25 Songs of the Decade
As we come to the end of 2009, we also end the first decade of the third millennium. So, instead of giving you the usual "top 25, top 10" lists of the year, we're going to give them for the decade.
Here are my top 25 songs of the decade.
Note: These are the top 25 in my opinion. Meaning, the genres most heavily represented will be the ones I like. It's not meant to be exhaustive and displayed as an authority -- though I would argue with you that these are in fact the top 25 regardless of genre.
1) Jill Scott – A Long Walk
2) James Morrison – You Give Me Something
3) Outkast – Bombs over Baghdad
4) Alicia Keys – You Don’t Know My Name
5) Musiq – Jus Friends (Sunny)
6) Talib Kweli – Get By
7) Justin Timberlake – Until The End of Time
8) Beyonce – Crazy In Love
9) UGK ft Outkast – International Players Anthem
10) Erykah Badu – Green Eyes
11) Adele – Chasing Pavements
12) Alicia Keys – If I Ain’t Got You
13) Eminem – Lose Yourself
14) Maroon 5 – Sunday Morning
15) John Mayer – Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
16) Solange Knowles – I Decided
17) Michael Jackson – Butterflies
18) T.I. – Just Doing My Job
19) Dr. Dre ft Eminem – Forgot About Dre
20) Kanye West ft Jay-Z – Never Let Me Down
21) Common – The People
22) Mary J. Blige – Be Without You
23) N’Sync – Gone (say what you want)
24) Corrine Bailey Rae – Trouble Sleeping
25) Lupe Fiasco – Kick, Push
Here are my top 25 songs of the decade.
Note: These are the top 25 in my opinion. Meaning, the genres most heavily represented will be the ones I like. It's not meant to be exhaustive and displayed as an authority -- though I would argue with you that these are in fact the top 25 regardless of genre.
1) Jill Scott – A Long Walk
2) James Morrison – You Give Me Something
3) Outkast – Bombs over Baghdad
4) Alicia Keys – You Don’t Know My Name
5) Musiq – Jus Friends (Sunny)
6) Talib Kweli – Get By
7) Justin Timberlake – Until The End of Time
8) Beyonce – Crazy In Love
9) UGK ft Outkast – International Players Anthem
10) Erykah Badu – Green Eyes
11) Adele – Chasing Pavements
12) Alicia Keys – If I Ain’t Got You
13) Eminem – Lose Yourself
14) Maroon 5 – Sunday Morning
15) John Mayer – Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
16) Solange Knowles – I Decided
17) Michael Jackson – Butterflies
18) T.I. – Just Doing My Job
19) Dr. Dre ft Eminem – Forgot About Dre
20) Kanye West ft Jay-Z – Never Let Me Down
21) Common – The People
22) Mary J. Blige – Be Without You
23) N’Sync – Gone (say what you want)
24) Corrine Bailey Rae – Trouble Sleeping
25) Lupe Fiasco – Kick, Push
'Avatar' gets great reviews
I think I'll be seeing this either tonight or next week. James Cameron has done solid work and some are calling this his best film.
'Avatar' delivers
Excerpt:
Other Reviews:
Rotten Tomatoes
review database
'Avatar' delivers
Excerpt:
James Cameron has done it again.
For maybe the third time in his career, the immodest Canadian has made "the most expensive movie ever," confident that showmanship never goes out of style.
He was right about "Terminator 2," and he was right about "Titanic," and at this stage it looks more than likely he'll be proved right about "Avatar," too.
Already it feels like an epochal movie, a landmark fantasy film on par with "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Star Wars" and "The Lordof the Rings."
Like those (very different) movies, "Avatar" stretches the bounds of the cinematic imagination. It shows us something we've never seen before: an entire alien world, a new and complex ecosystem rendered in three dimensions with dazzling fluidity and detail.
Other Reviews:
Rotten Tomatoes
review database
Avatar is an entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level; it’s as close to a full-body experience as we’ll get until they invent the holo-suits. Cameron aims for sheer wonderment, and he delivers.
A.R. Watson's Top 25 of the 2000's
As we come to the end of 2009, we also end the first decade of the third millennium. So, instead of giving you the usual "top 25, top 10" lists of the year, we're going to give them for the decade.
Here are A.R. Watson's, a contributor to this blog, top 25 songs of the decade.
Note: These are the top 25 in his opinion. Meaning, the genres most heavily represented will be the ones he likes. It's not meant to be exhaustive and displayed as an authority -- though he would argue with you that these are in fact the top 25 regardless of genre.
25. Crazy- Gnarls Barkley
24. Ordinary People- John Legend
23. Breathe- Fabolous
22. If I Have My Way- Chrisette Michelle
21. Whoknows- Musiq Soulchild
20. Kick Push- Lupe Fiasco
19. The Light- Common
18. You Don’t Know- Jay-Z
17. Officially Missing You- Tamia
16. Fly Like a Bird- Mariah Carey
15. Bombs over Baghdad- Outkast
14. Throwback- Usher
13. Love- Musiq Soulchild
12. Mine Again- Mariah Carey
11. Long Walk- Jill Scott
10. International Players Anthem- UGK ft. Outkast
9. Song Cry- Jay-Z
8. Can’t Go To Sleep- Ghostface, RZA ft. Isaac Hayes
7. Lose Yourself- Eminem
6. Never Let Me Down- Kanye ft. Jay-Z, J-Ivy
5. You Don’t Know My Name- Alicia Keys
4. Untitled (how does it feel)- D’angelo
3. Get By- Talib Kweli
2. Crazy in Love- Beyonce ft. Jay-Z
1. Green Eyes- Erykah Badu
*** Watson's explanation for choosing "Green Eyes" No. 1 - Coming Soon
Here are A.R. Watson's, a contributor to this blog, top 25 songs of the decade.
Note: These are the top 25 in his opinion. Meaning, the genres most heavily represented will be the ones he likes. It's not meant to be exhaustive and displayed as an authority -- though he would argue with you that these are in fact the top 25 regardless of genre.
25. Crazy- Gnarls Barkley
24. Ordinary People- John Legend
23. Breathe- Fabolous
22. If I Have My Way- Chrisette Michelle
21. Whoknows- Musiq Soulchild
20. Kick Push- Lupe Fiasco
19. The Light- Common
18. You Don’t Know- Jay-Z
17. Officially Missing You- Tamia
16. Fly Like a Bird- Mariah Carey
15. Bombs over Baghdad- Outkast
14. Throwback- Usher
13. Love- Musiq Soulchild
12. Mine Again- Mariah Carey
11. Long Walk- Jill Scott
10. International Players Anthem- UGK ft. Outkast
9. Song Cry- Jay-Z
8. Can’t Go To Sleep- Ghostface, RZA ft. Isaac Hayes
7. Lose Yourself- Eminem
6. Never Let Me Down- Kanye ft. Jay-Z, J-Ivy
5. You Don’t Know My Name- Alicia Keys
4. Untitled (how does it feel)- D’angelo
3. Get By- Talib Kweli
2. Crazy in Love- Beyonce ft. Jay-Z
1. Green Eyes- Erykah Badu
*** Watson's explanation for choosing "Green Eyes" No. 1 - Coming Soon
