Xblog

I can’t believe anyone in the tech community is still covering the events at JavaOne, but sure enough, we-troll-for-hitsValleyWag was there to capture Neil Young’s appearance yesterday. Now, I remember when Douglas Adams showed up for the Keynote on the last day of the conference, and that made sense. It was the last day of the conference and everyone was fried –if they hadn’t left town already. Douglas, true to form, provided some great entertainment and geek cred to start off the last day push. But Neil Young is to Java as the Smurfs are to the Iraq War. Could Sun make a more profound statement about how JavaOne jumped the shark long ago than to have an aging rocker whose seminal moments occurred before Java was ever invented keynote on the second day of the event? Best quote from the whole experience goes to Dan Farber’s blog entry, where after carefully promoting BluRay, Java, the PS3, and most importantly his Archive project, we read: “…As an artist I try to remove myself from the business,” Young said. “I steer myself away from that…”.

The previous article captures how Mark Kirk has skillfully managed to create controversy in order to get media attention during an election year. “Online porn” doesn’t quite drag voters attention away from all the other election year theatrics, and “online child predator” is so yesterday’s news, but “rape rooms” is a sure fire hit. Is there any trick from Hussein’s regime that politicians won’t copy and/or trivialize?

So, normally I don’t talk about pop culture, because I don’t properly appreciate it, which makes me a lousy critic, but I’m making an exception for Studio 60, or as I like to call it: season three of The Sorkin and Schlamme Show. I finally got around to getting my TiVo to show me the pilot. If you can’t wait for the episodes of this show to come out, I suggest you find a friend with DVD’s for SportsNight (that’d be me) and ask to borrow them. The parallels are so numerous that upon seeing Felicity Huffman in an obvious guest star role, I didn’t register that she was a guest star until about five minutes after I started wondering why she hadn’t been on the screen for a while. Similarly, anyone who has been in mourning since the show was canceled can put on a happy face again. For all intents and purposes its back.

I’d do more of a write up on the show, but I trust that every TV critic on the planet has already gone over it in depth, so I’ll just hit some highlights: Sorkin’s politics are as usual not being held close to the vest, the show is so insanely autobiographical that if you read the Wikipedia page on Sorkin and the Show, you can get confused about which page you are on, Amanda Peet must be thanking her lucky stars for landing her part: she’s going to look great in it, and just how awesome is it to pilot a show with an homage to Network?