Weblog Sin Pies

By Charley Daniels

It’s a busy time at work, what with the Cannes Film Festival and broadcast upfronts, together at last.

The upfronts are the week when the five broadcast networks announce their fall schedules and show off their new series to advertisers in the hope that wheelbarrows of money will soon follow.

Speaking of, remember the ’90s? A time when neon was hot and there was plenty of Crystal Pepsi to go around? And the sighing, sideburned teens of Beverly Hills High entertained us on our bulky tube TVs? Nostalgia is like being drunk on memories, you know? So it’s just awesome that The CW has created a Beverly Hills, 90210 spinoff series that will include some of the original cast, most notably Jennie Garth. There’s also a rumor that Tori Spelling will be dropping in, and at the CW upfront yesterday it was reported that “the plan is for original 90210 characters to be popping in for a visit on the spinoff.”

Because the ’90s were awesome, you know? Especially the early ’90s.

In other news, sometime in the last few months or so Weblog Sin Pies passed another milestone, which I failed to note here because I don’t really note much here. We have received more than 100,000 spam comments. (Because I’m late getting to this, it’s actually more like 125,000.) Hooray for me! If nothing else I know that spambots are avid readers, so thanks to them.

By Charley Daniels

This week I partook of the sweet nectar that is “what everybody else is doing” (versus my usual activity of “mostly working and not much else”). Yes, I picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV: Lord of Illusions and I went and saw Iron Man on opening weekend.

Iron Man made eleventy-billion-ten dollars and seventy-five cents domestically, and five-twenty times that combined with its international numbers. (I know because I work in entertainment journalism, so don’t get too impressed.) Oh, and the $10.75 was from me, thank you very much. So you know it had to be a good movie, even if our particular screening didn’t show the secret scene after the credits.

Grand Theft Auto IV, on the other hand, lets you punch a bitch out for absolutely no reason. If you’re like me, you do this often enough that it actually gets in the way of your trying to do the missions in the game. Like, I’ll need to get from point A to point B — it’s simple really, just go there. But on the way a homeless man asks me for money, so I hit him with a brick. Then the cops come (since when do cops care about homeless people?) and I have to steal a car for a fast getaway, which makes them even more duty-bound to stop me, or whatever. So now I really need to escape, except I’m not very good at driving yet because I’ve spent most of my time hitting people with bricks. It doesn’t help that in my panic I inevitably grab some delivery van or airline luggage cart. So it takes a ton of time to lose the fuzz, and by then I have to go do something in real life, and I can’t finish the original mission: getting from point A to point B.

You learn a lot about yourself from playing this game, which means it’s educational, which means it’s good for kids.