Okay. This is going to sound a little bit weird, I’ll admit, but I’m a tad bit worked up after watching a movie about the efforts of two guys to set the world record on Donkey Kong. Yes, Donkey Kong, the video game from the 80s with the ape, the girl and Mario who went on to Super Mario Brothers fame. The movie, The King of Kong - A Fist Full of Quarters, is really engaging and well worth your time.

It starts out as what I thought would be a quirky documentary about people who take setting high scores in “classic” video games very seriously. We first meet Billy Mitchell, who set many records as a kid, including the first ever perfect game in Pac Man and a high score of 870,300 on Donkey Kong in 1982. His story is told in the context of an early gamer meet up in Iowa where he challenged another guy (who is named Steve Sanders and happens to look a lot like Steve Sanders) to a game and showed that Sanders was not as good as he had claimed by beating the pants off him. Sanders talks about Mitchell as making him a better, more honest person. They end up as close friends.

Okay. Well and good. I love a good quirky documentary and settled in.

Then we meet Steve Wiebe, a kinda dorky guy who lives in Redmond, Wash. One of the first things we learn about him is that he got into Donkey Kong later in life after being laid off. Next we find out from his wife, his best friend and even his parents, that he’s always tried really hard, and really had “it” but has never quite reached number one in anything. We see how hard it is on him and pretty soon, Wiebe is a protaginist as we watch him try to set a world record.

***SPOILER ALERT***

I don’t like putting spoilers out there, but I can’t write what I want to about this movie without them. This is your warning.

Wiebe does break that record on video and sends it in to Twin Galaxies, the people who keep track of such things. But because the organization prides itself on integrity (and, if you ask me, because it is partisan to Mitchell) they send people to his house to inspect his machine. While the two guys are they, they notice an envelope from another guy (he calls himself Mr. Awesome) who has a long running feud with Twin Galaxies. It turns out Mr. Awesome bought Wiebe his Donkey Kong board and now the organization thinks it could have been tinkered with.

From there, the movie becomes what I think is a solid piece of journalism about Wiebe’s effort to set a record that is recognized through an honest, head-tohead challenge with Mitchell, the shady dealings of Twin Galaxies and of Mitchell who talks a lot of smack about how video games are meant to be played head to head, live in front of people, but refuses to play, or even speak to Wiebe. Of course, as with all things described as “fact” and as “journalism,” there is room for interpertation and dispute. Regardless of what Mitchell or anyone else says about the fairness of the movie, it shows his actions and they can not be disputed. He may think he is in the right, but just what he did in this movie was wrong, if you ask me.

I don’t think it was the original intent of the filmmakers to do so, but they ended up in the middle of a sordid story and took it on as best they could. They did a very admirable job of showing the obvious conflict of interests and crappy actions of Twin Galaxies’ founder Walter Day and displayed the long shadow running across the organization itself. They did it with what seems like accuracy, fair play and honesty.

They also did it with a fair amount of drama and pathos. Not too much, to be sure, but enough to tell a great story and make you care about it. By the end of the movie I was on my feet cheering, hands up praying and finally whooping with glee. That’s not to mention my reactions during the movie screaming at Mitchell, calling him names and rooting on Wiebe with all of my heart, And all this for a documentary about high scores on Donkey Kong…a game I was never good at in the first place.

This story of efforts to reach the high score in Donkey Kong, it turns out, is gripping and the way it is told in The King of Kong is enfatuating and quite good as a piece of journalism.

Yes, this is really Billy Mitchell

It’s also an infuriating one because of how cocky and rude so many people are toward Wiebe in it. It becomes even more so when you watch the special feature called The Saga Continues on the DVD, which shows more shenaningans on the part of Day, Mitchell and Twin Galaxies. It’s a shame that Wiebe, who is such a good, sweet, honest guy, is getting screwed around like this. One can only hope Wiebe will one day have his day and Mitchell will be exposed for the fraud and sham and cocky ass that he is.

I hope to hear about it when it happens.

I didn't take this with my built in Web cam (which I love) but would have, if I could have.

I did it. I switched to a Mac. After a lifetime of working with PCs (and not really having a problem with it, thank you very much) I went and bought myself a new Macbook. I’ve had it for a week now and feel like I can adequately write in a somewhat interesting way about the experience so far.

First of all, to those who say, “You’ll have no problem switching to a Mac. They’re so intuitive.” I’d like to switch you over to a brand new operating system that I’ve used for years and see how well you do. The Mac OS, near as I can tell, is no more intuitive than the PC is. It is different, yes. And it is simpler, yes. But more intuitive? No. It’s just differently intuitive. (And sometimes, it’s just dumb. Like for instance, can anyone tell me why the tab key in Firefox 3.0 moves the focus to some random new spot instead of to the next field and refuses to ever move from a text input field to a checkbox so I can check “remember me” after typing my log-in information?!?!?!?!?!)

Take Spaces for example (for those not familiar, Spaces is sort of like having more than one desktop with different things going on on each desktop). This is a really smart and useful feature that I’d wanted for years. When I went into the Mac store to look around, the salesperson showed it to me and I was completely impressed. But you know what, working with Spaces isn’t necessarily easy at first. One still has to figure a bunch of shit out (like why if Preview (PDF viewer) is open in one space and you download a PDF in another, does it open in the second space?) and finding the answer is NOT easy (the help sytem on my Mac does not deliver answers the way I’d like).

Next, workflows are very changed and that is very hard to get used to. So much of what I do on a computer is done through keyboard shortcuts. They’re just easier and more efficient than using the mouse to do everything. Shortcuts are not something I think about, my muscles just know them. But alas, over here in Mac world, they are different. This is not a fault of Mac design, it just is, but it does slow one down when switching. (Some are also just stupid. For instance, selecting word by word is Cmd-Shift-arrow. Selecting character by character is option-shift-arrow. Hello? shift-arrow for the latter would make much more sense rather than changing your entire finger configuration.)

That’s not all to say that I hate this new environment. I am starting to get the hang of things and starting to think more like a Mac (don’t tell me I’m overthinking though. When I look for the printer driver folder if I need to remove a printer, I am thinking differently.) and am seeing much that IS easier. I’m sure more of that will happen (I started checking out Expose tonight). But I am sure more frustrations are to come. (How to organize my pictures in Iphoto the way I want to is starting to become an issue here.)

Check back tomorrow and I’ll share with you some of the most useful guides and resources to switching to a Mac I’ve found so far.

I may be a Jew, but I knew Jesus Christ was no bigot. (I also knew that Neil Patrick Harris is awesome.)

(via Vanessa)

Did you hear? We really are in a recession. Have been for a year, actually. Worry not though, as an American, it is still your God-given right to spend your money when and how you want on whatever you want, even if you don’t have any money. For example, you can still take care of your health, or let a product do it for you with the One Click Butter Cutter!

Image taken by Mumbai resident Vinukumar Raganthan

Alexis came home from work and asked if I’d heard what was happening in Mumbai. We turned on the BBC feed on NPR and listened to the awful news coming in for a bit. Hours later, I checked back in via the NYTimes and got sucked into reading some of the eyewitness accounts on CNN, watching a live news feed from India and then, most moving and impressive of all, finding a Flickr feed from Mumbai resident Vinu of the horror. If you haven’t seen it, go look his pictures from last night. It is one of the most important works of journalism I’ve seen.

This should be in the list, but I needed an image for the post, so it all worked out in the end!

Vacations, as you all well know, generally mean coming back to a ton of backlogged work which invariably leaves you stressed out, overworked and in desperate need of a vacation. It’s fucked up if you think about it. Partly in an effort to keep that from happening and partly because I got a bit too distracted in the run up to the election and didn’t finish all the work I wanted to get done before I went to New York City, I ended up working a bit while I was there. The tactic worked somewhat, but not totally, and I still returned to a ton of emails waiting for me to do something with them and a big ol’ game of catchup to play.

I’m happy to report that I won that game and except for a few loose ends (Let’s face it, does anyone ever really have a completely empty inbox? No.) I am feeling like I am on top of things. One of the ways I got here was by setting aside a number of items I wanted to share with you gentle readers, and promising myself I would post on them later. But we know how that has gone in the past don’t we? I want to post all these items, but they just sit there in tabs on my Firefox taking up memory and making me feel like I have a ton of posts to get to. Then my blog sits fallow because I swear I am not going to post anything until I get those items out the way first. Invariably, I put them off “till I have time,” and finally, they become completely untimely or I forget what interested me about them in the first place.

Before we know it, weeks (or months) pass by and Zeke is my last reader (yet again) and he’s pestering me about being a quitter via email and IM.

So I thought I’d try a new tactic. I have a few things here I’d like to share with you that I’ve been saving up until I got the paying work under control. Instead of giving them each their own post, I’m just going to put them all together in a handy list of items I thought were worth posting over the past few days. Then I will move on and try to keep up on this blog and paying work in a more productive and less catchall fashion.

I hear you scoffing (ZEKE!). But you watch thanks to the wonders of Remember The Milk, I am a new man. I actually do get things done on time now.

But now, to the list!

• First up is the last item I found. Actually, it was sent to me by Dayna so I didn’t find it, but it’s the most interesting and entertaining, so I thought I’d put it at the top. The blog of Mick Feeble (aka Bob, the new guitar player in The Purrs who doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall even though he’s in a band with Dayna’s boyfriend) is just good. I just read a bunch of posts and added it to my Google Reader. You should too. (Oh, in an effort to help him really take advantage of “an experiment to see if proper blog titling will get lots of traffic,” I want to give a special link to his post on French Press technique. It’s about words AND links Bob. Click on that last link and give him a little thrill.
• Next, I think it’s my duty to share with you interesting and unique Star Wars ephemera when I come across it so please, enjoy this autobiography of Carrie Fisher. Most of it is not Star Wars related, but all of it is amusing and enlightening for those of us who never read Postcards From the Edge (Apparently Carrie Fisher told the world about her bipolar disorder in that book, according to Alexis).
• I’m a sucker for cheesy commercials from the 70s. When they come from Japan, all the better. When it’s Sammy Davis, Jr. selling alcohol by humming a made-up ditty, it makes the blog.
• Last but not least, we have an homage to shameless consumerism. And sustainability! An  all-organic-wood docking station for your Ipod. OOOOO. Pretty. Did you know my birthday is coming up?

Wow. Now that all those tabs are closed, Firefox is just humming along. Whopee!

The big trip is done and I couldn’t be happier. New York is always a good time and all, but really, when it comes down to it, I just can’t spend too much time there anymore. It’s not the city in which I grew up at this point and it just tires me out.

First of all, it’s just massively more crowded than it ever was, and I don’t find that invigorating. Instead, I find it annoying when you can’t find any sense of space or peace.

Second, it’s god-awful expensive. ‘Nuff said.

Finally, it feels as if there is no light in the city and there is certainly no sky unless you happen to be high up in a buildiing or in Central Park. I found myself actively missing a sense of the natural world around me and on my first day home, I walked out of my building and was shocked for a moment at the open space around me.

That’s not to say we didn’t have a good time. We did. It was wonderful to meet Melissa’s new boyfriend Homer, to hook up with old friends I haven’t seen in years, to watch my cousin get married and to visit amazing museums such as The Whitney to see their Calder exhibit (superb and fun, BTW), and MOMA for the Van Gogh show (as always, his paintings get right to the source of the light and beauty and make it jump off his canvas). But I love my home city now and am relishing the difference between here and there (though, I will always miss the food in NYC. Although we have about 4 dozen H and H bagels in the freezer, I’m already trying to figure out when I can get back to buy more!)

I took some time to put together a Google Map of our trip. It includes some more information about the places we went and walks we took (kinda geeky I know). I thought I could add pictures to the placemarks, but something is not working UPDATE: I figured it out. Google has you add an extra step when putting a picture on a map that is stored in Picasa. Dumb!). I’ll try to fix it, but in the meantime, you can also look at the pictures on their own (there’s wedding pics too).

View Larger Map

So I am in New York City as I write this. Lex and I have been here a full day now and it’s pretty dam great. There are some things about it that are driving me crazy already but the joy and energy that I am getting by being surrounded by so many people using a city wisely and well is overwhelming that frustration.

I had to do some work today in the form of an interview (writing off this trip! yeah!) and then some writing so I spent a bit of time in a mid-town coffee shop. Besides watching a first date between a couple of people who had obviously met online (I think they hit it off. It was cute.), the coffee shop scene in Midtown is very 1995. There was wi-fi, but you had to sign on to it and it was wonky, the coffee was burnt and though I asked for it “for here,” it was given to me in a styrofoam cup.

Which leads me to my first real frustration: New York is completely not sustainable. I knew this, but it’s always shocking to re-discover and even more so now that I am so steeped in the subject everyday at work. It’s like the city just discovered recycling and still doesn’t quite get it. I mean, is it weird when I go to throw out something that I am taken aback to see wasted food, Styrofoam cups, glass bottles and discarded newspapers all mixed in the same bin together?

Sure, NYC residents have a smaller carbon footprint than most Americans thanks to their reliance on mass transit (which is phenomenal, natch), but when no one bats an eye at the fact that the bar (Volde Nuit) where we spent $120 on dinner (mussels, Beligan Frites and Belgian beer) uses plastic forks and plastic cups for the dips and everyone leaves lights on with wild abandon, they lose whatever green points they had scored. The vast majority of your electricity comes from coal people! Coal. Ever read anything by Dickens? Coal sucks!

On the other hand, NYC feels amazing to me right now. There’s two reasons for this. First, I love the energy that is ever present in this city that comes from the mass of humanity that is always everywhere on every street. I know that by the end of this trip I’ll feel a bit peopled out and will be craving some space from others, but I’ll still think it’s totally wonderful how the residents of this city use this city. My favorite part of it is how it’s all connected. Unlike Seattle, which is made up of discreet neighborhoods that one passes through, New York’s neighborhoods all melt together. That makes it okay, and even enjoyable, to interact with the city as you get from one area to another.

Also wonderful in this city right now (and this is new to me) is a burgeoning politeness going on. I know. It’s New York City. People are supposed to be rude and brusque and have no time for niceness. But it’s there nonetheless. Maybe it’s a high from the Obama win (I see many signs of joy about that, not just the one above.) For example, on the subway today, I saw a guy offer his seat to a woman. She wasn’t old or infirm or anything. She was just a woman and he was just being polite. Earlier in the day, someone actually said “Excuse me,” when she bumped into me! “Excuse me!” In New York. Something us up here. Don’t ask me what, but something is up.

Anyway, that’s my report from day one. I love the feel in the streets and soaking in the life that surrounds me at every step. Now, if it would just stop raining.

These three photos are of a guerilla installation at Melissa’s subway stop at Dyckman and 200th St. Totally awesome:

If you’re anything like me, trying to figure out exactly why the economy tanked is no easy task. That’s why I’ve been listening to Marketplace almost daily for the past few months and, more recently, Planet Money, an NPR podcast where they try to explain the situation to everyday people like you and me. I think they do an excellent job because they, like me, were complete neophytes on these issues when it all started. We’re learning together.

This morning I read an article in The New York Times about the government restructuring the bailout of AIG and it raised a question for me. I sent it in to Planet Money and hopefully they will answer it for me. But I also wanted to share it here, in case they don’t and someone who reads this can help me understad:

I was reading an article in The Times just now about the government restructuring its bailout of AIG so that now we’re buying $40 billion worth of preferred stock. Apparently, the CDOs that AIG owns will be purchased by a separate entity set up by AIG in order to get those toxic assets off the company’s balance sheet. According to The Times:

A.I.G. would contribute $5 billion to the entity, which would buy $70 billion of the securities at 50 cents on the dollar, or $35 billion. The remaining $30 billion of the purchase price would come from the government.
As I read that, it means that We the People will own the vast majority of a company created to hold insurance on bonds that, in this economy are more likely than not not to be paid back. So if I understand everything I’ve learned about CDOs on Planet Money, that means the new entity (ie: the federal government, ie: you and me) is going to be on the hook to pay back all the people/institutions that bought insurance via those CDOs. And, as I understand it, buying those CDOs and providing that insurance is what got us all into this mess in the first place (see: those poor Wisconsin schools and that German/Irish bank).

So, while I understand the need to prop up the economy by bailing out these massive instittuions that purchased all these CDOs and then had to start paying them back, how is it a good idea for the government to own these CDOs and now be on the hook to payback investors if the bonds included in them start to fail? If that risk is realized, doesn’t that just compund the problem, except now it’s the government that needs a bailout?

On top of that, at Planet Money, I read that people don’t want to buy these CDOs for 10 cents on the dollar, but in that Times article, it says the government is paying AIG 50 cents on the dollar for $30 billion worth of the CDOs or toxic assets. I don’t get that either.

As a news junky who still harbors dreams of working in a news room for a major national daily, I can’t resist posting this slide show of front pages from around the country today courtesy of HuffPo. I do recognize the irony of loving actual newspapers (I have a collection of historic front pages from my lifetime) juxtaposed with posting about them online.