After the mediocre X-Men Last Stand that wiped out most of the mutants for no good reason, leaving Magneto alive and recovering his powers– we’re apparently now destined or doomed to endure “Young Magneto: The Early Years”.

Hollywood executives who have all the originally or a mental defective with a three word vocabulary are apparently planning to capitalize on the utter lack of success of Young Hannibal or Hannibal Begins or whatever that abomination was called to produce Young Magneto.

[Ian] McKellen’s participation in “Magneto” will likely be limited, since the film is an origin story. In a storyline hinted at by the original “X-Men” films, Magneto comes to grips with his mutant ability to manipulate metal objects as he and his parents try to survive in Auschwitz. Magneto meets Professor Xavier (played as the wheelchair-bound mutant leader by Patrick Stewart) when Xavier is a soldier liberating the concentration camp.

Magneto hones his powers by hunting down and killing Nazi war criminals that tortured him, and his lust for vengeance turns Xavier and Magneto into enemies. Both characters will be played by actors in their 20s.

I could point out that this is the same concept as Young Hannibal but I’d be wasting precious breath. What was the definition of insanity again?

SponsoredReviews.com which allows you to Buy Reviews from bloggers has an article up entitled, 10 Rules for Responsible Blogging

The SponsoredReviews.com article first addresses the overall issue of blogger credibility in a time when bloggers are at once becoming a challenge to the mainstream media while at the same time the quality of blogging remains wildly uneven with no centralized standards to be maintained.

The article does not endorse a single set of rules as a standard, in no small part since no such standard can actually be maintained without a centralized authority. On an individual level however any outlet, whether it’s media or an individual blogger requires maintaining a level of credibility with their own individual readership. Failure to do so of course destroys the outlet by removing the readership.

Useful ground rules are listed, including checking your facts and controlling comments. Bloggers have been sued before over defamatory material which appeared within their comments. Other blogs have been delegitimized purely by quoting some of the incendiary comments quoted there. While this is troublesome, it requires understanding that a blog’s comments are a forum for which the blog administration serves as a forum administrator. Newspapers control and edit the letters that are printed in their Letters to the Editor section for good reason. The type of comments you receive, will fairly or unfairly, characterize your blog for visitors and encourage and discourage certain types of readers– not to mention advertisers.

Finally the article cautions against various methods of gaming the system, which eventually tend to backfire leading to things like the Google Death Penalty or the -30 penalty which will wind up undoing all your hard work. And ultimately it is hard work that builds a blog, both in terms of creating, maintaining and promoting it and that hard work is worth protecting through standards.

Electronics giant Sony has sparked a major row over animal cruelty and the ethics of the computer industry by using a freshly slaughtered goat to promote a violent video game. The corpse of the decapitated animal was the centrepiece of a party to celebrate the launch of the God Of War II game for the company’s PlayStation 2 console.

Critics condemned the entertainment giant, which produces scores of Hollywood blockbusters each year, for its “blood lust” and said the grotesque “sacrifice” highlighted increasing concerns over the content of video games and the lengths to which the industry will go to exploit youngsters.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare said it was “outrageous” that the animal’s death had been used “to sell a few computer games”.

Now first of all I really really doubt there were youngsters at a game release party– especially one with topless models. These are primarily industry parties intended to create media buzz. The gap between actual game players and party attendees is pretty broad.

Secondly if they’d had the goat broiled and served it in pieces on a platter no one besides PETA would be complaining about it. Millions of goats are served and eaten that way a day across Africa and the Middle East. Certainly tens of millions of dead cows are eaten that way. Yet somehow seeing the actual dead animal freshly killed sets off a wave of hysteria. People have no problems seeing meat, they just don’t like having their faces rubbed in it.

Imagine being able to play backgammon online while helping to bring peace to the middle east. It may not seem likely and it may sound farfetched but it’s the unlikely things that usually turn out to be really true and this is certainly such a case. Heavyweight boxer Roman Greenberg and BackgammonMasters.com are helping to bring peace to the middle east by auctioning off his famous boxing trunks for one hundred thousand dollars with proceeds from the auction going to charitable programs for Arab and Jewish youth and promoting forms of backgammon like Tavla which can aid in cultural outreach and communication creating a bridge between former enemies through backgammon At only twenty four years old, the immigrant Roman Greenberg holds an undefeated heavyweight record of 25-0 and BackgammonMasters.com which has purchased his shorts in order to auction them off for charity will essentially be sponsoring his career and charitable work. Like Roman Greenberg, BackgammonMasters.com is an innovative games site that is always expanding its operations with high ambitions that aim for the top. Multilingual and multiplayer, BackgammonMasters.com is the heavyweight in the field of online backgammon, much as boxer Roman Greenberg is a heavyweight in the boxing arena. That makes this an alliance and a partnership of champions, both of which are sure to go all the way to the very top. And here is a picture of Roman Greenberg’s famous boxing trunks.

So who’s bright idea was it anyway to put up Vinnie Jones against Steve Austin in The Condemned? Vinnie Jones as usual looks like a real tough guy who can spit nails and Steve Austin looks like a gym rat way too smooth and polished, even when he’s down in the dirt. Look at the poster above of Steve Austin vs Vinnie Jones and the whole thing becomes laughable. Vinnie Jones comes as the kind of hard guy who works for some thug and will smash you for a lark. Steve Austin comes off looking like one of the wannabes who hang out in Confederate themed bars.

Well Disturbia is still Number One at the Box Office but that’s less a tribute to the movie itself and more a tribute to a movie release schedule that can’t seem to get anything right at the end of April.

Blades of Glory, which was supposed to be a major comedy hit, collected its take early and went home. It’s taken in over a hundred million now, but only 5 million in the weekend.

Then there’s Hot Fuzz which had a much talked about opening before diving down into the tank, having collected only 12 million total and only 4 million this weekend. That’s the basically inevitable result of being a movie with rather limited appeal to a rather limited fanbase in America. Of course Simon Pegg and all the rest have managed to get nearly 20 million in free publicity from that opening alone.

Meet the Robinsons has failed to go anywhere but pulled in a decent 88 million. Fracture, Vacancy and Invisible pulled in some dough but nothing special.

A Web Trends Analytics package can take a sizable bite out of your budget. So can WebSideStory’s Web Analytics package. All of them cater to large companies with large budgets. There should be a way for you, the smaller online business, to compete with the big boys without spending the big bucks. Well you don’t need to spend thousands with enterprise level web analytics vendors and their licensing fees. Google, which has already rolled out many of the important free services that can keep you going, including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Apps, also offers Google Analytics– which can match WebSideStory and Web Trends where it counts at a very affordable price. Free. And once you’re on board with Google Analytics, a good choice would be to consider Canalytics for your analytics consulting firm . Canalytics offers three tiers in Basic, E-Commerce and Advanced. It’s not the only analytics consulting firm out there, but it is a great fit for Google Analytics customers looking to cut costs without losing what they need to stay in business.

On the heels of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jim Crace, yet another award winning seriously literary writer coming out with The Pesthouse, a novel which like The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic future where all of civilization has come crashing down and refugees wander amidst the ruins of civilization.

These brilliantly original plots of course are Science Fiction, right? Wrong. Serious literary writers and critics don’t acknowledge they’re writing Science Fiction– even when they’re blatantly writing Science Fiction. Consider John Irving’s At The End of Time– yet another novel on a similar theme of the kind actual SF writers have been churning out non-stop for decades. Yet claim it as SF and get your nose bitten off as an uncivilized barbarian. It’s like the boy from the farming village who grows up, goes off to the city, becomes the Royal Astronomer and you had better not remind him that he’s not doing much more than what he did back home when he and the other boys were counting stars in the sky and naming the constellations after haystacks.

Because you see being taken seriously is all about reputation or all the reputation you can work on manufacturing for yourself. That in the end is what serious literature or serious film is. Pretentiousness. Of course there’s usually some talent and real work in there, but there’s talent and real work everywhere.

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Apparently determined to exploit the full comic potential of white boys attempting hip-hop, Jamie Kennedy (”Malibu’s Most Wanted”) shows up in comedy about a 12-year-old boy who lapses into a coma in 1985, only to wake up a grown man 20 years later.

In other words Jamie Kennedy does Tom Hanks in Big meets a SNL routine from 1985.

Seriously, you have to wonder what Jamie Kennedy was thinking. Nobody wanted to see Malibu’s Most Wanted. Nobody could be paid to see Malibu’s Most Wanted. For a brief moment in the sun, Jamie Kennedy, who had basically risen to some sort of fame through a minor role in the first two Scream movies had actually managed to get a show “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment” which people actually recognized and began to show up as a catchphrase. Unfortunately Jamie Kennedy went on to beat it in the ground by doing the same routines over and over again till even WB viewers were sick of them.

Now with the Jamie Kennedy Experiment history– you have to wonder why Jamie Kennedy thought the way to go was by reviving his lamest and weakest character yet– a character whose routine had been beaten into the ground a thousand times over by 1996.

Behold one of the greatest epics of martial combat in human history, the great showdown between Harmony and Xander.

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayers” is full of more meditative stories on humanity and the slayer, by contras “Nikki Goes Down” is a refreshing romp in a 70’s blacksploitation style movie free of any moral ambiguities or complexities. Drawn in gritty artwork by Gene Colan, his work in “Nikki Goes Down” is a dead match for his artwork in the 1937 section of “Broken Bottle of Djinn”, capturing the brutal textures of urban life surrounded by grit and looming shapes of skyscrapers.

The progress of Nikki’s days in “Nikki Goes Down” gives us a clue of why she eventually gave up for a moment and allowed Spike to kill her. In “Nikki Goes Down”. Her boyfriend, a police officer named Li, is killed during an aborted raid and Nikki’s response is to pursue the mob boss responsible, Le Banc, who specializes in transporting and smuggling demons– fighting a monstrous bat demon along the way and eventually hunting down Le Banc himself in the Bahamas. This suggests that Nikki Wood, like Faith, had few problems killing humans. Nikki leaves an isolated life and in “Nikki Goes Down” loses the one human connection she has, replacing him with a son, who may or may not have been born from her time together with Li. She is the only Slayer we meet who is a mother, but a single mother all alone in a big city, which eventually swallows her whole.”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Tales of the Slayers - Sonnenblume, Nikki Goes Down, Tales

The fate of “30 Rock” looks dire. Alec Baldwin said on “The View” yesterday that he wanted to quit that NBC sitcom to write a book about “parental alienation.”

Great. In yet another of the kind of brilliant parenting decisions only a celebrity can make– apparently Alec Baldwin has decided that the best way to fix being an absentee father is to write a book about being an absentee father. A book that will no doubt itself be ghost written because let’s face reality here… what are the odds of a Baldwin actually being able to write - a book, or being able to write period.

It’s certainly in the best interest of the child. As bad as all the publicity over her father’s ranting voice-mail message must be for 11-year-old Ireland, she will have to live it all over again if her father quits show business. The book reviews — let alone the stand-up comedy routines — would surely inflict even more emotional damage.

As opposed to going on The View to proclaim how screwed up your custody situation is and announcing you’re going to write a book about it– that certainly won’t generate any stand up comedy routines. No way.

Mr. Baldwin’s long-winded, self-obsessed soliloquy on his usurped rights as a father and the fiendish acts of his ex-wife, Kim Basinger, was so impassioned that Ms. Walters had to remind him that his first concern should be his relationship with Ireland. (When he mentioned his daughter, it was to make a point about her mother’s perfidy.)

This being the same daughter, whom he couldn’t remember if she was 11 or 12 and apparently couldn’t spare the cell phone minutes to call, without having to rely on a landline.

As it’s turning out, McMahon and the WWE group is to filmmaking pretty much what their XFL project was to football, a miserable failure.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - In Hollywood, where hype so often seems to be the norm, pro wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s frank assessment of his own performance in his debut movie is, if nothing else, refreshing.

“I didn’t stink the place up,” Austin told Reuters about his role in his new big-screen action adventure “The Condemned,” which opened on Friday. “I think I have a feel for it, and I think I have some ability.”

What’s refreshing about it exactly? Austin claiming that he has acting ability and a feel for acting? What more could he have said exactly, “I’m the greatest actor that ever lived.” Actors in any case rarely do their own hyping on their own behalf, few of them can get away with it. Instead they usually pursue the false modesty that lets them praise themselves without seeming too vulgar about it. That’s pretty much what Steve Austin did.

In “The Condemned,” Austin portrays a character who uses his fists to do his talking. “It wasn’t a stretch because it’s closer to my regular persona,”

Yes especially when it involves using his fists to talk to his wife apparently.

n Hollywood, where movie executives often hawk their ideas as a blend of previous movies or television shows, “The Condemned” could be seen as a combination of “Rambo” and reality TV’s “Survivor.”

Or it could be seen as a ripoff of Battle Royale… except with wrestlers instead of High School students.

Austin, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 250 pounds (113 kg), played college football in Texas and afterward worked as a manual laborer. That changed when he started watching pro wrestlers and decided, “I can do that.”

Isn’t it always a great moment when an ex-football star looks at fake wrestling on television and dreams of being a fake athlete too.

So he began a roughly 15-year career that vaulted him to professional wrestling’s championship level. Now, looking for a less physically demanding way to make a living, he said becoming a movie action hero was another “natural step.”

So why exactly is fake punching people in the WWE more physically demanding than fake punching people in Condemned?

His fans want to see hard-core action, and he is going to work to please them, he said, adding that in the end the movie offers a message about the destructive nature of greed.

And who else is better qualified to lecture us about the destructive nature of greed than Hollywood? Now everyone go “aaaawwww.”

There’s a lot of free anti-virus programs out there but why settle for some basic featured freebie when you can get the big kahuna of all Anti-Virus software, Norton Antivirus. Norton Antivirus is the best known name in anti-virus software and if you want to know why, just take a look at these features Traditionally Norton Antivirus has been expensive to obtain, but you can download free Norton Antivirus here and through FreeAntiVirusInfo.com you can also obtain useful information about its features, which includes compatibility with the Windows Vista– a source of concern to anyone who has just bought a new computer and the ability to detective viruses, worms and trojans… as well as unlimited virus definition updates. And then there are reviews of Norton Antivirus from major publications, which include PC Advisor and Download.com so you know just what you’re getting. There’s no such thing as too much security and Norton Antivirus is as much security as you can possibly get and it can now be downloaded completely free of charge and unlike other copies, this one comes with unlimited virus definition updates so you don’t need to worry about your copy becoming useless after a month or two. Go to freeantivirusinfo.com and find out how you can download your own free copy today.

Stephen Hawking, famous Cambridge Professor and author of such books as “A Brief History of Time” and “How I Dumped My Wife for My Nurse” and “How to be a Sex Object Even When You’re Drooling” has finally achieved his dream of throwing up in space.

“I have been throwing up in a wheelchair for almost four decades, the chance to throw up in zero gravity and let flecks of my vomit float free in the low gravity of space will be wonderful,” Professor Hawking had said before boarding the flight at the runway usually used for space shuttle landings.

Zero Gravity Corporation, a private company, usually charges $US3500 ($A4200) for the flight, but the famed Cambridge professor got a free ride, with another eight seats auctioned off for charity. Specially trained pilots took the aircraft to 33,000 feet (10,000 metres) before plunging to 2500 metres to give the passengers about 30 seconds of gravity-free flying. The aircraft repeated the manoeuvre eight times. This allows the passengers enough time to eat something in between maneuvers, thus insuring that maximum vomiting capacity can be achieved.

“Professor Hawking reached for the sky and today his vomit touched the heavens,” said Peter Diamandis, who heads the flight company.

Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an ordinary man. Average to a fault. There is nothing interesting at all about Harold Crick. He lives his life by way of routine. Catalog illustrations in the style of “Fight Club” illustrate his apartment and his prefabricated and disposable life. He is a person, yet one living such a flat dimensionless life as to almost become a placeholder for a person. And this makes perfect sense because Harold Crick is a character, the main character, in an unfinished novel approaching completion, whose conclusion will also claim Harold Crock’s life.

Like some comedians, Will Ferrell has always excelled at projecting the angst of the ordinary man. In line with Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey, his comedy is rooted in bewilderment at the world and at himself. His role as Harold Crick sets him up as the ultimate everyman, so bland he barely exists and yet possessing a soul beneath the blandness that is on the surface of getting free. “Stranger than Fiction” is the story of Harold Crick discovering that he has a soul inside him, rather than a ledger book. It is the story of a man confronting the larger questions of life and existence and liberating himself from the routine of the mechanical way he had been living his life.

stranger than fiction - a fictional life on DVD

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Pretty much what you’d expect from Harry Turtledove who’s treated as the authority on alternative history when all he’s done is produce an incredibly tedious multibook epic on the subject. Alternate Generals III collects the usual Writer Meat, third rate writers seemingly willing to contribute to any anthology, along with a bunch of fourth rate writers no one has even heard of. A recipe for success? Umm not really.

Aside from an incredibly tedious 30 page story about the War of 1812 told entirely as an exchange of letters… which can make reliving the actual war seem like a better prospect, there’s Judith Tarr’s story Measureless to Man, which ignores the alternate general part in favor of a story about a Chinese conversion to Judaism, Esther Friesner’s First Catch Your Elephant, which is funny around the edges but goes on too long and with too many bad jokes, uncertain if it wants to by Monty Python or a Goodfellas parody, there’s two McArthur bashing stories (what, one wasn’t enough?) and a Vietnam story that has the absurd ending of Nixon and Westmoreland flying on a chopper to Ho Chi Min’s hiding place before being shot down.

Alternate Generals III isn’t so much bad, like a lot of the military school scifi it’s simply mediocre.

Jonathan was always a geek on the margins of Sunnydale High School, who occasionally came up in cases, but mostly was awkward and lonely. In “Earshot” Jonathan had even attempted to kill himself.

As a counterpoint to the struggle against the Post Communist Vampire mob is Jonathan’s own struggle with himself, his guilt over what he has done which dilutes his enjoyment of the fantasy life he has created for himself and most of all his loneliness, which has not abated with his new life. In his old life Jonathan had been marginalized as an outsider and ignored as a geek. In his new life Jonathan had gone all the way possible to the extreme opposite extreme and made himself over into such an incredible superhero that he was just as isolated. For all the admiration and adoration directed at him, Jonathan remains all alone. And it isn’t until he gathers Buffy and the rest of the Scooby Gang together for their venture does Jonathan feel good again because he has managed to approach what he wanted, what he really wanted, which is to have friends. His misguided attempts at achieving that had brought him to create an ultimately sterile world in which he was a musical genius, a technological and strategic whiz kid and the greatest fighter the world has ever known– and all the more alone for all that.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Jonathan: Codename Comrades

Too many dating websites pursue romance niches, segregating people by looks, by weight, by ethnicity or class, making their ideas of romance into a gated community which no one else is allowed to enter. But we’re all humans in the end. We laugh, we love and we feel. Romance should be and is for everyone. Dating sites that do their best to segregate people cheat their customers and feed into an idea of romance as something you can buy. That’s why RomanceForEveryone.com is such a refreshing read. It’s not a dating site looking to sell you a membership and then run up your credit card bills, instead it’s a look at romance through insightful articles and pieces, ranging from the old fashioned like its love notes section to advice for eHarmony and dating tips for the age of the new millennium. From approaching the process of dating for first timers just getting started to people in relationships working to keep the romance fires burning brights, RomanceForEveryone.com has something for everyone, including articles sections for both men and women. Anyone who is getting ready to launch into the dating world, online or offline or in a relationship they don’t want to permit to grow stale, would do themselves and their significant other, potential or present, by checking out RomanceForEveryone.com. It’s for everyone. It really is.