Last night after picking up Gavin from daycare, I took him over to Target to pick out one of the new Revenge of the Sith toys. He wasn't too interested in the action figures, and he reminded me he already has a lightsaber (though it's blue, because his mom picked it out, not red like I would've), and the sweet new clonetrooper blaster is too expensive (and I'm conflicted if a blaster qualifies as a toy gun, thus contradicting my Gavin-won't-play-with-toy-guns rule). Of all the options I gave him, the one he picked was the beanie clonetrooper. Not C-3PO, who he thinks is a hoot, or Yoda, with his cute little tufts of white hair that make him look like a troll in a bath robe. Nope, the clonetrooper.

But that's not why I'm writing. I stopped to look at the ROTS storybook on our way past the books to the toy section. I went right for the end, to see how it all plays out. It doesn't end the way I would've written it (with Yoda standing on Dagobah, watching Obi-Wan fly off with Luke, though at least Dagobah got a mention, and a pic), but I think as long as the dialogue isn't too cheesy and the acting too wooden, this is going to be the Star Wars movie to end all Star Wars movies. Wait, I guess it is anyway, isn't it? Oh, and remember how a few years ago Samuel L. Jackson said he didn't want to go out like a chump? He doesn't!

When I was a kid, I loved getting a new lunchbox every year. It allowed me to show off my tastes, both in food (okay, so it usually only housed a PB&J, milk, and some sort of fruit) and in entertainment. I remember having Superman II, The A-Team, and for some reason, Heathcliff.

Flash-forward many years later. I have a two-year-old little boy who loves Superman, Spider-man, and The Incredibles, yet I can't find a single B&M that carries lunchboxes of any of these. Okay, so it's the wrong time of year; that's fine, but I should be able to find them online. I can't find a single Incredibles lunchbox anywhere online, and the only Superman and Spider-man ones are the wimpy padded ones - I want at least plastic, if not a weapons-grade metal one. But, there does appear to be quite a market for lunchpails for 20- and 30-somethings. I found Kill Bill, Casablanca, Friday the 13th, Kurt Cobain, and Sex Pistols lunchboxes. Not quite good choices for the two-year-old, but I wouldn't mind having the poster art Nightmare on Elm Street one for myself.

After Judge Dozier's touching blog entry, "Sandra Dee," I feel compelled to share...

I will be positively elated the day Michael Jackson dies.

That's all.

Two wonderful things just happened at once. I was reading Judge Rankins's great post about May/December romances and Ashton Kutcher's suckitude and thinking, yeah, but it's Scarlett Johannsen they want to put into an Indy movie! What's to complain about? And then, I flipped over to my mail program where I had just received the latest Dictionary.com Word of the Day email, and it was their greatest word ever: fugacious. Means "fleeting." Like Ashton Kutcher's career.

Some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's slipping the word "fugacious" into a conversation.

Yup, me too...I taped The O.C. just to watch the trailer. What the hell do teenaged kids see in this show, anyway? I like Adam Brody (I much preferred him on Gilmore Girls), but not even an uber-geek on a teen show saves it from being a teen show. And not even a good one at that. Damn, I'm getting old.

Anyway, the Revenge of the Sith trailer rocked. Out loud. The part that made me the happiest? There was at least a teeny, tiny, in-action glimpse of General Grievous. He looks way different than his Clone Wars incarnation (of which I have the action figure staring at me right now), but looks like he'll be this movie's Darth Maul...and I mean that in a good way.

Hey, any idea if Palpatine's lightsaber is the same one Darth Vader used later? I didn't pay enough attention.

Okay, so while working the day job I was looking for something on how to improve a customer's store-finder page (it does a straight lookup of the first three digits of their ZIP code now...lame). I've found formulae before to find the distance between two sets of latitudes/longitudes (the haversine formula is the easiest to implement) but this one was an application I had never considered - matching up orders from infomercials to the TV station and broadcast that might have prompted their order.

A post in the Jury Room got me thinking. Is there really a dearth of good female roles, or is the definition of "good" just in need of readjustment? Does every "good" role need to come out of the Hollywood mainstream, or is it good enough to appear in a kick-ass role in smaller, independent films? Why don't women get more recognition for their roles in big-budget male-dominated films, like Samantha Morton in Minority Report, Emily Watson in Equilibrium, Carrie-Anne Moss in the Matrix films? And hey, where are all the female screenwriters to write more compelling roles for their actress sisters? Why doesn't anyone realize Halle Berry really isn't deserving of all the attention?

Geez, I wish I had answers.

When I haven't been working on getting this blog system written (more on that in another post), I've been playing with Yahoo's new search API. Yahoo has the Google-killing app here -- not only do they allow a sizable number of queries per day (5000, versus Google's 1000), it has quite a few features (video search, picture search, localized searches, not to mention your ordinary web search) and uses XML REST queries instead of SOAP. Developers seem to like SOAP, and for apps that need the security it's fine, but for ordinary results, you can't beat REST. It's what I use to get the Amazon info for DVD Verdict, and it's much easier to request something by URL, get an XML document back, and parse it appropriately than worry about encapsulating the query in SOAP, sending it as a POST request, getting back the SOAP-encapsulated XML, then parse it.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Yahoo. My first foray into their API was using the image search to write a spider to grab pictures. I used Perl's LWP module to download the picture, making sure I specified a non-obvious user agent and the referral URL as the request referer (since most sites don't allow off-site requests). Worked like a charm. With some more research, I should find a way to integrate it with DVD Verdict. Maybe something like this...

Welcome to DVD Verdict's brand-new judges' blog area! This area gives our staff the room to post their random musings outside the scope of the DVD reviews that they churn out on a daily basis. We hope that it gives you greater insight into the people who review for you.

Enjoy!