Well Cloverfield is trying to keep up its mystery with a new viral campaign that seems to involve neatly chalking “What is Cloverfield” in quotation marks on sidewalks in white chalk along with its opening release date while demystifying the question by hanging a Cloverfield poster nearby. It’s not exactly the most brilliantly original tactic around but I sorta will admit to liking it. I think the Cloverfield hype is hollow at the center and the movie itself is basically Blair With Project meets Godzilla but at least the marketing campaign comes off as being more interesting than the movie, something JJ Abrams would certainly know something about after working with Damon Lindeloff on Lost, whose own marketing is a good deal more intriguing than the series itself has really been in quite a while. Of course it’s going to take more than chalk marks on sidewalks to make Cloverfield deliver especially since the movie is keeping its rather silly title and the explosions and devastation are a little too 9/11ish for my taste.

The original OOB browser, Netscape still has that familiar nostalgia with its wheel and stars logo, but Microsoft managed to successfully crushed it and past Netscape 3.0, the browser became increasingly unusable. Netscape managed to deal Microsoft’s monopolistic ways a serious blow with a Senate investigation that temporarily brought Bill Gates to heel but in the end it didn’t help and Netscape’s last stop was a baffling purchase by AOL even though AOL already had its own disastrous browser. By the time it was all said and done, Netscape was more bloated than ever while Mozilla had reemerged from Netscape’s origins to successfully battle the Microsoft Internet Explorer behemoth. I have fond memories of Netscape, it was my first graphic browser and the only browser I used for the longest time. Somehow I slipped into using Microsoft Internet Explorer until Firefox came along to stomp Bill Gates back into the dirt. Now Netscape like Prodigy and so many standbys of the early popularized days of the net are gone.

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These days everything seems to be copyrighted, companies are being brought down by patent trolls or big companies hoarding patents, senators are calling for jail terms for copyright violators, there are entire organizations dedicated to hunting down copyright violators, everything is simultaneously being copyrighted and patented from the sublime to the absurd, like using a laser pointed to amuse cats and yet copyright and ip has never been so disregarded as it is now and the two are of course connected, when you try to build an ip world, more and more people opt out of it. Now the loser countries of the third world seem determined to get on board with Egypt trying to copyright the pyramids apparently, let’s face it what else are they going to copyright, there isn’t exactly a huge market in pirated Egyptian movies or music or a lot of companies violating Egyptian patents. Egypt has pyramids and by glump, they’re gonna keep you from copying those pyramids.

The problem with Google’s Don’t Be Evil motto is that Google is a company that on a surface level provides free services to users and pays for it by exploiting their information, from ad sales to consumer profiles, Google parasitically lives off the information it indexes by indexing the information of those who access it. As such Google can no more avoid being evil than Columbian drug dealers can avoid being mean to people. Just as a loan shark’s business involves breaking people’s legs, Google’s business involves invading your privacy. The Google Reader dustup featured a Facebook style backlash against Google for a Facebook style move, not helped in the least by Google’s arrogance, but then Google is the company that thinks everyone’s information should be free for it to distribute, except for the personal information of its own executives. Don’t be evil is more like a memo that no one at Google ever paid attention to.

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The UN has major problems such as UN personnel sexually molesting little girls and trading food for sex with refugees in Sudan, widespread corruption and the fact that UN Human Rights Council is basically a bunch of brutal dictatorships who oppress their own people. Now the UN has closed its investigations into itself and intends to resolve all its problems by calling on Spider-Man. Yes, that Spider-Man. Sadly the UN has not been taken over by a crazy Marvel fan, which would at least make for some mild entertainment. Instead the UN will try to improve its image by commissioning comic books that show Spider-Man and other Marvel superheroes working together with the UN to make the world a better place. My overall impression would be that

A. This once again features Marvel sinking to new depths to pimp out their characters

B. This makes for the most boring comic book ever

Well that certainly didn’t take long, there’s already malware in the wild exploiting Bhutto’s assassination apparently which is pretty damn fast work for malware, at some point some particularly evily bright chap will just link his engine of computer death to Google News and churn out polluted videos and websites for any top story. Nude pictures of Rachel Nichols surface? 2 seconds later there’s a hundred sites offering video, stories and pictures complete with keyloggers and trojans. Mubarak sits on a tack? Get your Mubarak sitting on a tack videos and news stories complete with trojans? The King of Thailand has smelly feet? Yup you got it. It’s a fast media world and the bad guys work even faster. Of course Benazir Bhutto’s death is in a rather different category than the usual exploits focusing on naked pictures of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, but it just demonstrates that the baddies adapt.

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Gifted with a genius for asking the stupid question, Forbes asks Will The iPod Kill Blockbuster? . The answer is obviously not because the average person won’t be watching Lord of the Rings Return of the King on a iPod, even with a 2.8 inch screen on the iPod Touch. Apple TV might conceivably kill Blockbuster Video if it ever became popular. Video offerings on iTunes just aren’t enough, people renting videos often do it to watch socially which a 19 inch screen just won’t do. Individually iTunes movies might add up a bit but people who aren’t anti-social 250 pound losers don’t really watch many movies on a computer monitor, even my 22 inch widescreen doesn’t quite do it for movies and spending 2 hours on that is a recipe for a backache.

Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman has been one of the more fascinating and frustrating series to date, from a first issue that was pretty much on fire to 2007 that saw the series drift further away from Superman’s mortality and Lex Luthor’s plots to getting bogged down in a 2 issue Bizarro world focus, when really even one issue of Bizarro world is too much, a closing issue that had two Kryptonians land on Earth with the usual “Humans are apes, we’ll rebuild Krypton over their bones” bit that is as much a cliche as anything else, so much so it could have been lifted from Smallville (bad enough that black kryptonite was) and now issue 10 that might hopefully redeem the soggy mess that Grant Morrison has dipped the once promising All-Star Superman into, is now delayed into February from January, that is definitely not promising. I’m sure plenty of people are still waiting for it but it’s not exactly promising.

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Right now it seems like anyone running for public office, particularly that shiny Presidential slot in the oval office, has a statement to make on the death of Benazir Bhutto. John Edwards has played fast and loose with the Logan Act by making a phone call or claiming to make a phone call to Perverz Musharaff telling him to keep going with the whole democracy thing, just what a dictator wants to hear from a second rate political candidate who can’t even win a party primary. That’s like Mario Biaggi calling Khaddafi to give him advice on elections.

Hillary Clinton is of course touting some sort of meeting with Benazir Bhutto she once had, which no one else seems to be able to verify. Frustrated Clinton haters will now have the chance to spend a decade hunting down absolute proof that Hillary Clinton never met with Benazir Bhutto but some Pakistani warlord who offered Bill Clinton 10 million dollars in exchange for an ounce of Uranium, by which point no one will care anymore.

Meanwhile not to be left out, America’s crazy senile uncle Ron Paul issued a statement claiming the whole thing could have been avoided if we all used the gold standard and stopped annoying those turbaned people or some equally ridiculous thing. Ron Paul commenting on international affairs does actually remind me of my senile uncle going on about politics, except that he usually made more sense than Ron Paul does at least when he let go of his obsession with the Freemasons and that he had less fans that Ron Paul.

Meanwhile Bhutto is still dead and the race still continues.

Just when you feel a need to proclaim the ever abiding spirit of Merchant-Ivory dead, comes yet another flat monotoned adaptation of a historical member of royalty engaging in torrid romances, the sort of thing the BBC churns out to appease the old folks at home and then shovels off on the CBC and PBS. Well Kiera Knightley who apparently got too bored to keep playing a corseted pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean, instead found better diversion delivering absurd romance novel lines like “You can’t ask me to fight nature and my own heart”, at least Domino was more entertaining that this, but as usual nothing says class like violin music and apparently lens flares on the The Duchess title. I’m assuming that at least The Duchess is Coming tag line is meant to be a pun or I’ll have lost all respect for the British film industry.

Well Kristin Kruek’s movie career seems to have maximized her ability to take advantage of her ambiguous ethnicity and since apparently Street Fighter producers couldn’t find a single Chinese actress in all of the United States, Kristin Kruek is up for playing Chun Li, a character best known for wearing traditional Chinese clothes while somehow doing upside down spin kicks balanced on top of her head. Of course College Humor has a far superior episode series on Street Fighter that any movie producer with a brain should have adapted. Instead I’m sure we’ll get another lame attempt at the latest version of Dead or Alive, minus any actual neat scenes and with a fraction of the eye candy actualized. After playing an Indian or is that Pakistani Muslim and a small town Caucasian girl, Kristin Kreuk is expanding her horizons by taking on a Chinese role. I’m sure blackface will be next for her role in Dreamgirls 2.

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A sizable reason for the miserable failure of Apple TV was the lack of movie selection. Despite his Pixar presence, Steve Jobs was never into video the way he was into audio and so Apple has lagged significantly in selling video content. NBC’s opting out of iTunes in favor of Hulu and NBC Direct was a significant blow to Apple’s video plans because consumers are more likely to want to watch recurring episodes of TV shows on an iPod or Apple TV rather than movies. Now FOX is getting into bed with both Apple and NBC, partnering with Hulu and offering video rentals via iTunes. Meanwhile Wal-Mart’s own poorly thought out online video rental service has effectively collapsed. Ars Technica predictably blames DRM but Wal-Mart’s DRM free 88 cent music isn’t going anywhere either. The reality is that locationwise, Wal-Mart is just not the place for selling entertainment downloads and Wal-Mart would need to launch a separate service to change that.

First let’s revisit the Bizarro world where everything is backward and run by the reverse rules of this world. Now we’ll dismiss the usual objections that people in the Bizarro world should live underwater or upside down, after all right side up is just a matter of perspective and underwater is not the opposite of living above water, just a different state. The problem though is that Bizarro Superman has Superman’s powers when in reality he should have either no powers at all or the opposite of Superman’s powers, say complete blindness rather than the ability to see through solid objects, be in a wheelchair instead of flying and deaf instead of superhearing. That could still make him a superhero in a Bizarro world where weakness could be strength and helplessness, power. Instead Bizarro has Superman’s powers but lacks his brain or good looks. Now if you take the Kryptonite issue, that at least works backwards on Bizarros, e.g. Blue Kryptonite.

Unless you are in a primary state like Iowa or New Hampshire the odds of you getting the chance to get some face time with one of the Presidential candidates is a long shot and with a crowded field filled with candidates all headed for the nomination, your odds of interrogating more than one candidate on their position are a bit low. But the 2008 election is probably the most critical Presidential election in decades and that means a lot is on the line here, but if you are like most people then you don’t have the energy or the patience to pore your way through the candidates’ position papers to find out where they stand and after all we’re living in 21st century which means we shouldn’t have to sit through hours of debates just to get answers. Well now AskTheCandidates2008.com is here, if Hal from 2001 ran for public office and modeled each political candidate, the result might be something like this. And indeed AskTheCandidates2008.com uses UltraHal technology to duplicate the personalities of leading Presidential candidates and can answer your questions based on statements that the candidates have already made on just about any issue. AskTheCandidates2008.com - Talk with AI presidential candidates and learn about their positions in real time, bring the election to life by interacting with them using Zabaware’s Ultra Hal software. Zabaware has been a pioneer in AI technology creating software that can seem more human than human and making political candidates seem human is a real challenge as everyone knows. For now an A.I. program can’t run for public office but Zabaware’s AskTheCandidates2008.com is the next best thing to an AI president. So check out the future and tech the vote.

Quicksilver is one of those movies that not only couldn’t be made today but that you couldn’t even imagine anyone making today in the age of the remake, the sequel and the cartoon live action feature adaptation. Why not? Probably because it’s such a simple story. Kevin Bacon plays a stockbroker who loses a lot of money on a risky trade and losing his nerve instead embraces the freedom of being a bicycle messenger. Made in the 80’s, it is a perfect 80’s movie right down to the unnecessary dance numbers and the look of someone trying to make a movie by way of making a music video.

Quicksilver’s basic story has a lot of promise but this being the 80’s, it’s instead sideswiped by multiple musical and dance numbers, probably to cash in on Kevin Bacon’s popularity in Flashdance or because the director or producers were too coked up to know better. One of the odder scenes even involves Kevin Bacon’s girlfriend doing an exercise routine in a leotard to pounding rock music for no particular reason.

But when you get past the musical numbers and a Kevin Bacon performance he’s probably embarrassed to remember himself, there’s good stuff here including Laurence Fishburne as a thuggish black Muslim bicycle messenger who runs on the criminal side and a fantastic performance by Gerald S. O’Loughlin as Jack Casey’s (Kevin Bacon) father that hits you right in the gut every time. But of course the look at bicycle messengers and what should have been a great story is swamped by the bizarre stylistic effects of the 80’s and the attempts to turn Quicksilver into a kind of Flashdance on wheels. It’s still worth watching if only for the songs you can’t get anywhere else anymore and the gritty look at bicycle messengers in the city.