The Year’s Top 10 Culture Shakers (and What We Can Learn From Them)
To paraphrase Steve Martin circa the 1970s, it’s been a wild and crazy year. We’ve been through the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement. We’ve watched politicians bicker and our 401(k)’s sag. We marked the passing of a notorious North Korean dictator and celebrated the return of our troops from Iraq. But for […]
The Day My iPad Made a Break for It
My iPad cracked the other day. My wife and I had just gotten back from my parents’ house, and we were laden with food and packages and old magazines and newspaper clippings … and somewhere in the midst of all that stuff, the iPad was watching, waiting. Perhaps it got a glimpse of the front […]
Movie Tuesday: Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol
What did Santa Claus (or whatever treasured, commercialist holiday figure Scientologists eagerly await this time of year) bring Tom Cruise this Christmas? A box-office win for Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Granted, the payoff wasn’t massive: an estimated $29.5 million over the traditional three-day weekend (and $46.2 million if you’re counting Monday, which many of […]
Re-Gifting
A couple of weeks ago, part of the Plugged In staff gathered around the microphone and talked about our favorite television Christmas specials for the Official Plugged In Podcast (it’s episode #127, if you’re interested). My personal fave: A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has been aired every holiday season since 1965. I loved the special […]
Kim Jong Il Is Dead; His DVD Collection Lives On
Kim Jong Il, hereditary dictator of global wallflower North Korea, is gone now, allegedly after suffering a heart attack from overwork. While the world at large may not miss him, Hollywood will probably shed a tear or two at his passing—not because anyone in the entertainment industry loved the man, but rather because they loved […]
Sherlock Holmes and Sluggish Sequels
Consider: The original Sherlock Holmes earned more than $62 million its opening weekend two years ago when it debuted on approximately 3,600 screens. The sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, earned an estimated $40 million this weekend on 3,700 screens. What do you deduce from that? It’s elementary, my dear reader. Perhaps people are […]
Mabel, There’s a Cannonball Stuck in Our Minivan!
File this under the dangers of reality television: A homemade cannonball careened out of control during a taping of the popular Discovery show MythBusters a few days ago, wreaking havoc in a San Francisco-area neighborhood. No one was hurt, but from what Lisa de Moraes writes in The Washington Post, the projectile made quite the, […]
Movie Monday: New Year’s Eve
Don’t let the headline fool you: In an ugly, ugly weekend at the box office, New Year’s Eve didn’t so much win the week as it was just less revolting (monetarily speaking) than the rest. The star-studded rom-com took the box office crown with all the excitement and verve of a gray Tuesday in February, […]
The Mysterious Case of the Fibbing Fiat
If you have a television set and turn it on occasionally, you probably know that singer/actress/American Idol judge Jennifer Lopez is the new spokeswoman for Fiat. She’s been part of several commercials for the Italian car company, but the one I’ve seen the most takes place in the Bronx, where Lopez was born. “This is […]
King James Bible: Mass Media for the Elizabethan Age
This morning, I plowed through a National Geographic article titled “The Bible of King James,” which told the story of how this remarkable translation came about and the continuing influence it has today. It’s a fascinating tale—at least for a history geek like me. Turns out, Christians already had a couple of serviceable translations, the […]