FilteringCraig

Yesterday, if Opie and Anthony hadn’t already completely turned me away from Howard Stern, they did something to help their cause even further. They played directly into my superfan geekdom. They didn’t just have Kevin Smith on their show. He sat in and chatted for FOUR COMPLETE HOURS. He riffed with the boys from the beginning of the show all the way to 11:00 AM. He was not only a guest, but helped them conduct an interview with Dr. Smith and Gunnar Nelson from “Celebrity Fat Club.”

I am sorry to be gushing, but I love Kevin Smith. For those of you who don’t know him, he is a movie writer/director. Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jersey Girl, and coming soon, Clerks 2. Apparently, I am not the only superfan either. At the end of the show, yesterday, Anthony said, “Thanks Kevin. I tried not to gush, but I am a huge fan of all your stuff” or something to that effect.

(Kevin Smith an Lil Jimmy Norton)

Anyway, I just thought I would share some things I learned from the show yesterday.

• For movie screenings there is a company that will do market research by bringing in random people and interviewing them. For Clerks 2, Kevin thinks that is pretty stupid because he is making the movie specifically for the fanbase that loved the first flick. Many comedies get smashed by critics and then make millions from audiences. At least someone else sees this disconnect.

• Kevin wanted to make Clerks 2 in no small part due to the debacle of releasing “Jersey Girl in the post-Gigli environment.” Kevin still stands behind Jersey Girl as a movie, and he still likes Ben Affleck, but he can’t deny how difficult it was to deal with the whole Gigli and Bennifer thing after it blew out of proportion. And yes, he did call it the “post-Gigli environment.”

  

• There is a sequel to the stellar An Evening With Kevin Smith which chronicled Kevin’s college speaking tour where he does 4-6 hours of Q&A at every stop. It sounds like an awful and boring idea for a DVD, but if you are even the tiniest fan of the movies, you will laugh your head off at this. The DVD never gets slow, and Kevin Smith is hilarious when he is working a crowd.

• Kevin Smith lost 70 pounds on some liquid diet
• Kevin Smith hates Reality TV
• On the new version of The Bad News Bears - Kevin talked to Quentin Tarantino, who really liked The Bad News Bears and likened it to a really great cover song. Kevin thought that was interesting, but doesn’t really buy it. Why not just watch the original, which still holds up?
• Rosario Dawson is totally hot in Clerks 2. Hot women with Dante and Randall? There is a novel concept.
• Jason Mewes (Jay of Jay and Silent Bob) was an out-of-his-mind drug addict in between movies including one story after wrapping Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back when he apparently went face down in a big pile of heroin before taking a photo with some cops. (He is going on three years of being clean and sober.)

That’s all I can remember right now, but it was definitely my favorite Opie and Anthony show of all time. And by the way, this is one of the things that really makes them great. They have a show where they can really just put their egos aside and let someone else have the spotlight. They choose their spots and don’t disappear or anything, but it makes for a more interesting experience with celebrities as they sit and talk comfortably. On other shows, guests have to race against the clock to get their plugs in and their stories out. On Opie and Anthony, as long as you are interesting, you can just sit in on the flow of the show.

And if you want to listen to Opie and Anthony you need XM Satellite Radio. Or, if you can pony up $2.95 you can download the show from Audible.com.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t care all that much for the Winter Olympics. Have you seen the ratings smashing that “American Idol” gave the Winter Games? And what is crazier is that it doesn’t surprise me that some kids who wanna get rich doing karaoke are more compelling week in and week out than a bunch of the best athletes in the world who compete in really niche sports that can’t ever stand on their own two feet. Why do you think they all get lumped in together?

Obviously there are some sports that do stand on their own, but their audiences are niche. Women’s figure skating is popular, but Michelle Kwan didn’t intrigue me. Snowboarding is popular, and The Flying Tomato is fun, but why would I sit through all that other coverage to catch some snowboarding when they have the Winter X Games on ESPN a whole lot more than every four years? Insert your own funny little quip about curling here, but this is a niche sport with Canadian announcers. Even hockey was totally uninspired this entire Olympics. Maybe it is another example of the hangover from the lockout, but it wasn’t fun to watch.

So, goodbye to the Winter Olympics. Goodbye to NBC paying a quadrillion dollars for the right to broadcast it. Goodbye to Bodie Freaking Miller and his contrived marketing campaign on “60 Minutes.” Goodbye to Bob Costas, his melodramatic delivery, and his pussification of sports. And goodbye to speedskating relays where instead of handing off a baton, they give each other a push in the butt. Hear is a hint. Make the track bigger, put in railings and do a whip for an exchange. If you want to be roller derby that is all you have to do.

I would tell you, America, that you could go back to your regularly scheduled programs, but apparently you were watching “American Idol” the whole time anyway.

I guess, then, I am sorry for interrupting.

This is a new hosting account. I took the opportunity to do a slight re-design and this is it. I am sure that I will end up getting some more stuff built in, but for now this is it because the old site was loading so slowly.

For now, this site is forwarding to www.craiglyndall.com but as soon as the domain name propogates through the internet, FilteringCraig.com will be back. SO, THERE IS NO NEED TO CHANGE ANY LINKS TO ME (if you have any.)

That ends this administrative message.

We played on Sunday February 19th, and Heather was nice enough to take some pictures.

From the shameless plug department…

We are having a tough time getting folks to come out on Sunday night. If you live in the Cleveland area and want to go to a relatively early show, then come check us out on Sunday night. tickets are $5. The show is 16 years of age and over. All you kids with Washington’s birthday off should come on out to the Phantasy in Lakewood.

For more info, click over to Myspace.com

Hosted By: The Company Line
When: Sunday Feb 19, 2006
at 8:00 PM
Where: The Phantasy
11802 Detroit Avenue
Lakewood, OH 44107
US
Description:
The Company Line

Click Here To View Event

Last night I did a 30 minute spot for a radio show out of Las Vegas called Subject2Discussion. I was representing Blogcritics.org with some Pop Culture talk.

If you want to listen, you can download the show in MP3 format by clicking here.

Subject2Discussion for February 14, 2006

The topics that I discussed at length on the show:

• The new music scene on the Internet. Promoting your band on Myspace and Purevolume.

• The Satellite Radio Wars: XM vs. Sirius
• Scott Stapp on his most recent troubles
• Battlestar Galactica and why it isn’t just a SciFi show for geeks

Check it out. Let me know how you think I did. It was a lot of fun. Hopefully I can do it again sometime.

Montecore

Originally uploaded by FilteringCraig.

It is hard to see the tiger in the picture. I don’t really think this is Montecore, but at the same time, I was quite proud of myself for remembering the name of that tiger that mauled the Vegas show Diva, either Seigfried or Roy or whatever.

Image005.jpg

Originally uploaded by FilteringCraig.

Mark’s joke as we were passing Treasure Island?

“Did you hear about the new pirate movie that they are making?”

“It is rated ARRRRRR!”

Nothing like awful jokes to put me in hysterics.

Mark hooters

Originally uploaded by FilteringCraig.

Yesterday Mark and I decided to go to Hooters casino for some lunch. This was the picture message that I sent to Mark’s girlfriend while we were eating.

(She apparently was not threatened by Terilynn in the background.)

It is the soap opera of technology. The PC wars have been raging for years. Is it Mac or PC? Windows or OSX? Steve Jobs or Bill Gates? As computing converges with home entertainment, the trials get a lot more interesting.

The game has changed in recent years. Apple has once again become a formidable hardware company with the explosion of the iPod. Now they drop long-time partner, IBM, as a provider of chips, and switch the Mac platform to Intel. That makes Bill Gates a less sexy enemy for Apple until you consider that Apple is also poised to be the greatest thing to ever come to your living room with its iTunes TV deals. And we all know about Bill Gates and his desires for your living room. He had to spend enormous amounts of cash in developing the Xbox and Xbox 360 with the hopes of being the living room hub, only to potentially get beat out by a company that went for your living room from both sides with the Mac Mini AND a software application/store in iTunes.

Also, in bringing Intel into the fold for Apple, Dell is now in the sights of Steve Jobs. Their uneasy war of words has heated back up of late.

Nine years ago, Michael Dell said the following of Apple.

“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,” Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

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More recently Apple surpasses Dell’s market value in the stock market and Jobs claims that Michael Dell should eat his nine year-old words. Mac fanatics kneel before their god and giggle at their view from atop this new high.

Speaking of Dell, they are struggling with the fact that low-end PCs don’t offer enough profit margin to make the kinds of profit leaps that Dell shareholders are used to. Couple that with the fact that Apple might be poised to capture market-share in more of Dell’s markets since they moved to Intel chips, and you have a serious rivalry forming between the two companies.

It is all entertaining stuff really. But how funny would it be if you could follow me into this fake future scenario?

Apple makes a comeback in the PC biz following their blazing iPod trail. Microsoft is hurt for once in their entire lives because they lost out in your living room because they couldn’t beat out Apple, and are losing Windows market share to Apple’s latest and greatest. Dell is hurt even more by their loss of market share in the higher margin top-end home computing market and in your living room where they haven’t been able to develop a solid media center PC. Now, Microsoft and Dell are even larger enemies of Apple than they have been in the past.

But, don’t forget another player in this fake future scenario. IBM lost their biggest chip customer when Apple switched to Intel.

Intel is now in a position that they have never been in before. They are enemy number one for Microsoft and Dell. Intel allowed Apple to come back in the PC biz. They were the back-room dealer that gave Apple the real chance to capitalize on their iPod and iTunes success by providing the chips for Apple’s next generation of PC’s.

So, what do Michael Dell and Bill Gates do? They team up in a focused effort. Unfortunately, neither one of these companies make chips. They need someone else to help them engage Apple. Who is still bitter about losing Apple as their biggest customer? IBM anyone?

IBM has continued working on their chips and they are claiming to have a chip-making technology that will enable them to reach speeds of 4-5 GHz, or almost double the speed of their previous line of chips. While there are still concerns about this technology running cool enough to work, it opens up the possibility for my fake future scenario to come into fruition.

So, at the end of the day, we would have Microsoft, Dell and IBM teaming up against Apple, and Intel in a fake future battle royale.

And if I could convince AMD and Sony to team up and come down to the squared circle, it would be a three team race. What a wild future it could be!