Pop Culture Cuisinart

I must admit I was a bad movie fan in 2008, I saw nary a Best Picture nominee, and really only skirted the periphery of a number of the other categories as well. Consequently, I got less out of the Oscar ceremony than I just about ever had. I sat there most of the night thinking, wow, that actor/script/sound etc was fantastic... in that movie I didn't see. Nonetheless I, my friends, am opinionated(who didn't know that) and as a consequence I will share with you my 5 favorite movies from 2008(that I saw of course).

5. Iron Man- Personally I don't think anyone had a better year than Robert Downey Jr. He was terrific in the role of the ego maniacal genius industrialist Tony Stark. This was the rare movie that managed to balance the interplay of fantastical comic adventure with enough grit to make the movie feel real. When I saw it I thought this might be the best comic adaptation I've ever seen, and that was true for about 5 months.


4. In Bruges- I had no idea what to expect when I went in to this movie. The trailers painted it as some sort of crime caper buddy comedy, which frankly was stunningly misleading. Don't get me wrong there are plenty of funny moments, most of which are beautifully timed I might add, but I wouldn't call this film a comedy. If anything it's really a character study about people who are trapped by bad decisions. It's marvelously acted, fantastically written, eerily violent, wholly profane and just brilliantly paced. Do yourself a favor and rent it.


3. The Bank Job- Based on a true story this tale of some N. London lads who end up being handed one of the largest heists in history, by Her Majesty's Secret Service no less, is an excellent film. It has a gritty realism about it, with plenty of action and more brains than your typical let's see how many plot twists we can toss into a thriller movie. It's Jason Statham's best work, easily.


2. Tropic Thunder- This send up of Hollywood life, manages to be poignant and hysterical without going too inside baseball on the audience. I'm still trying to decide which made me laugh harder, fat hairy Tom Cruise dancing to Flo Rida's Low, or Robert Downey Jr.'s exclamation of "I'M A LEAD FARMER, MOTHER FUCKER!" It feels like a toss up.


1. The Dark Knight- Every other film last year was fighting for second once I saw this one. As fantastic as the action sequences were and they were marvelous, it was the acting that drove this film. Unlike most comic offerings these were fully formed characters, with all the passion and pathos that we mere mortals experience. This isn't merely an action movie. It's a film that explores literary themes of the hero and villain, as well as order and anarchy. If you haven't seen it go now to your video store... I mean NOW.

Jim Cramer should have walked away. Yes, Jon Stewart mocked him, but hell given his predilection for grandiose market predictions in the face of harsh economic reality, he deserved to be mocked. When a comedian sets his sites on you, do not respond, you will look foolish. Remember John McCain on Letterman? Emergency meeting in DC, ha, play fast and loose with the facts and your satirical comeuppance will arrive swiftly. Comics will rip you to shreds, you are best suited to walk away, take your medicine and STFU. But no, Cramer's ego had to be sated, he couldn't leave well enough alone. In to the lions' den he walked, and exposed he got.
What Stewart exposed is cringe-inducing now that we can all see it. The entire CNBC network was a parade of loud clowns and clucking suits who were little more than Music Man style boosters tossing candy and beads. A veritable market Mardi Gras that we were all invited to. Just trust the jolly hucksters with your nest egg, we have the power of the market! CNBC's viewers were mid-level market enthusiasts, people who make above, say, $200,000 a year and who made a significant market adjustment in their portfolio once a week or so. For them, listening to CNBC allowed them to imagine they were Warren Buffett. The entire network fluffed into existence a dreamscape of risk-taking courage, occupied by bold men who fancied themselves wielding their buy orders and their futures like swords--a place where the invisible hand was guided by the strong and large capped. But the reality was that they were just normal men checking their Fidelity accounts on their blackberrys while dreaming the big dreams of the sure to be rich soon set. Reality dealt a cruel blow to these aspirations.
And so the end has arrived to the boom time. The market overinflated to such a staggering degree that it make take a decade to burrow out from under the bad investments. All along the irresponsible reporting of CNBC, fed and fanned these flames. They are not interested in reporting on what's really happening on Wall Street because they are afraid that they will lose access to CEOs, the captains of industry. What will we do if we can't interview Stanford or Madoff? The sad part about all of this is that CNBC has also been played by these CEOs. These CEOs have had a platform, a sounding board to pump their companies up while dumping their stock for millions, leaving mom and pa 401k investor high and dry. That is the real ponzi scheme on Wall Street. And now these bold capitalists have turned into brave Sir Robin's running to the government for some corporate welfare. I say a pox on all their houses.

When you think of tech advances in recent years most have involved computing. Computer power and speed has been roughly doubling every 2 years for about 2 decades now. This is why we now have phones and handhelds with the same memory and computing power that desktops had less than a decade ago, progress has been rapid.

Unfortunately, power supplies haven't really kept up. The average battery improvement has been about 8% a year, not bad, but certainly no quantum leap. When you consider a roughly 50% annual improvement in computing power and all that entails, it doesn't take too many years before the computing capacity is swamping battery power. This was the chief issue with the first generation 3G iphone, it couldn't hold enough power for you to do much with it before needing another charge. This was also irritating because charging lithium batteries takes a long time. If you have to keep a phone plugged in for 8 hours to use it for 2, it's not really freeing you for ultimate mobility.

Now we hear talk of electric cars, renewable energy storage and ever more techie computer developments all of which need as much juice as your average dilithium crystal to be successfully operated. But it appears MIT scientists may have the lengthy charging time problem solved.

Lithium-based batteries are in common usage for electronic devices, because they can hold a large charge for their weight (and size). However they are usually expected to provide a steady power rather than high surges of power, and recharging, which has improved considerably, is still typically half an hour or more. These guys however felt they could do better...
Ceder and Kang theorized that the lithium ions were having trouble finding their way to the crystal structure's express tunnels. The authors helped the ions by coating the surface of the cathode with a thin layer of lithium phosphate glass, which is known to be an excellent lithium conductor. Testing their newly-coated cathode, they found that they could charge and discharge it in as little as 9 seconds.

9 seconds! That's a lot of juice to dump or pick up, a hell of a surge. It's exactly what you need for vehicle acceleration and regenerative braking! And imagine if you will, a city with charging lanes so that electric vehicles could charge in ten seconds and keep going. Now there's a scheme to conjure with.

What else could we use this for? Think immediate future, because lithium iron phosphate, which these guys were using in place of lithium-cobalt, is already a well-established manufacturing material and these fast charge/discharge batteries could start rolling out in the very near future.

Now bring unto me, a new coach!

After watching the dysfunctional mess that was the 12-20 2008-09 UGA basketball team I'm ready for a reason to feel good. Now your mission Damon Evans is to do what has never even been attempted in Athens before, make Georgia hoops nationally relevant.
This will not be easy. Already many in the NCAA hoops pundit class are chattering away about Georgia's not a good job, low fan support, blah, blah.

To them I say... SHUT IT!

Georgia is potentially a HUGE bball power in the making. Consider what is in place already:
The facilities are first class, ok the arena is mediocre, but the practice facility is top of the line and the academic building for athletes is the best of it's kind anywhere.
The recruiting base is top 5 nationally. Athens is 60 miles NE. of Atlanta. Atlanta is arguably one of the top 3 cities in America for HS hoops. Nearly 10 percent of the 2009 Top 150 prospects in the nation hailed from Georgia. Dennis Felton signed none of them, the next coach could recruit a full class of top prospects without using anything more fancy than a QT gift card. If anyone ever manages to truly lock top Georgia hoopsters in state look out.
We can pay top dollar. Really. We haven't before, we've never really invested in hoops, but that doesn't mean we can't. Some 70% of division 1 athletic departments operate in the red. Georgia is over $20 million in the black, in short if we want to go big swinging dick on the college bball world and offer somebody $4 million a year we could. Money will not prevent us from getting a coach.
Fan support is a negative only because we haven't won. If you build it they will come. The Steg was full for Tubby and Harrick's best assemblages, and could easily be so again. Some 1+ million folks live within about 45 minutes of Athens, some of them will watch bball.

The time is right, comparatively speaking the SEC is down bball wise right now, which offers the perfect opening for the rise of a new power. If Florida can win 2 NCs in bball there is no reason UGA can't shoot for at least one. Get it done Damon, dazzle us with a hire so sparkling that recruits say woah, and rivals say, Shit. Do it now, for you may not get another shot.