November 10th, 2009 is still six months away, but it is never too early to start drooling over Modern Warfare 2 (AKA Call of Duty 6).
You know a video game is going to be huge when not only is there going to be a video footage premiere on May 24th on TNT during the NBA Eastern Conference finals, but when they release a teaser to the teaser. I definitely count myself amongst the most excited people on the face of the planet waiting for this game, but even I think this is going a bit far in the early hyperbole. For crying out loud, we already had the teaser for when they just announced it would only be called Modern Warfare 2!
With that being said, I’ve embedded the teaser footage below, and it strikes me to be made up of all cut-scene footage as opposed to in game play scenes. Sure, go ahead and get excited about the underwater diving and snowmobiles, but that doesn’t mean we’re actually going to get to play through those. There is one scene very reminsicent of one my favorite Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare levels, the AC-130 gunship, so I am hopeful we might see that return. Not holding my breath quite yet, though.
This is the first time Timberlake has returned to host since we got the infamous “Dick In A Box” sketch that caused such a stir. I really didn’t know if they would try to do a follow-up, but try they did, and they succeeded, albeit in a different way. For whatever reason, Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake seem to work together amazingly well, we’re just all lucky enough to enjoy the results.
Doing a direct follow-up probably would have been a disaster, but using the same characters in a totally different situation that is just as disturbing as the original turned out to be the way to go. It seems the two have been in jail for five months, and they get out just in time for Mother’s Day and realize they haven’t gotten any gifts for them. Well, they come up with a plan that is best left to the video.
Apparently no one at KFC, or even Oprah’s Harpo Productions, quite understands the power of Oprah.
If you were unaware, KFC has canceled the grilled chicken coupon promotion from earlier this week. Apparently you can take the unused coupons into restaurants and be issued a new one for a later date that will also include a free drink, but you won’t be getting any free chicken for right now. Demand has simply outstripped supply, and there is no way for the chain
As I said in the second post on the the promotion, why this whole thing was done prior to Mother’s Day makes no sense. It is one of the biggest days of the year for the chain, and to put extra strain on their supply chain at such a critical time of the year for them just made no sense. And to top all of this off, there are rumors circulating that the franchise locations were not warned of the pending promotion, and they are also supposedly not being reimbursed for the redeemed coupons.
Say what?
While this has not been made 100% official, apparently the deal is that Oprah is paying the corporations costs for the promotion, but somewhere along the line the franchisees got left out of this whole process are expected to just give the food away with no repayment. How can this even be feasible? This would also explain why so many locations were not accepting the coupons.
How can two companies of this size and reach have gotten this whole thing so horribly wrong? Was no one aware that Oprah’s legions of fans will do anything this woman says?
“Go print a coupon.”
-millions of women in unison- “Yes… we shall go print the coupon, my liege.”
How could they have not had any clue how successful this was going to be? With a snap of her fingers Oprah can sell millions of copies of a book, then add her viewers telling non-viewers about the promotion, and… reciepe for a complete disaster if it isn’t planned out correctly.
As for KFC’s part in this mess, this isn’t the first they’ve run a promotion, did they do no advance planning? Did they not think it might be a good idea to coordinate with their franchise locations? Did they not think that perhaps they should launch it after Mother’s Day? No, apparently they just totally did this thing by the seat of their pants and now they have egg all over their face.
For those of you who want to get the new coupons, make sure to visit a participating location (whichever ones those may be…) to get a rain check certificate. You will then need to mail that, along with your original coupon, in to the stated address and you will then receive a new one back in the mail that will also include a free drink. And, here’s a wacky idea, apparently the new coupons will have staggered redemption periods. Genius, guys… really… genius.
To add to the fun, enjoy this really overly euthasastic message from the president of KFC.
Ever since the week of September 28, 1987, there has been a question that has plagued this planet: Who is the best Star Trek captain?
The week of September 28,1987 was when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in syndication, and since that time there has been no more hotly debated topic amongst Star Trek fans who the best Captain is. The problem, as I see it, is everyone’s favorite has always come down to emotion. They base their love of a particular Captain on which one they grew up with, or that they know the best. I’ve always tried to approach it more as, “Which Captain would I actually follow into a battle?”, and that is exactly how I have put this list together.
First I will give you the Captains in chronological order by the show’s timeline, and then I’ll get down to the nitty gritty at the end. Enjoy!… and try not to kill me for my rankings!
Capt. Jonathan Archer, Enterprise
While Enterprise was the fifth, and final, Star Trek television series, it was actually the first in the timeline as it takes place towards the beginning of the United Federation of Planets (UFP).
Capt. Archer seemed very confused about what it meant to be a Captain through out the run of his series. He went from a wide-eyed explorer who loved the stars to a commanding officer who was willing to make morally questionable command decisions as the series went on.
Perhaps it could be chalked up to the fact the UFP was still in its infancy, and they hadn’t set down a lot of rules yet, such as “the prime directive”, but he just seemed to never fully understand what it meant to be a captain, and never had that “take no guff” air of command about him without swinging to the extreme ends of the pendulum.
Capt. James T. Kirk, Star Trek: The Original Series
Oh, Kirk. He was the first exposure so many people had to the world of Star Trek, and so they judge everything since by the standards he set. And oh what standards those were!
The problem with Capt. Kirk is that he was an adrenaline junkie. He never met an alien he didn’t want to shoot or sleep with. Diplomacy? What the heck is that?!? It’s hard to say how good he was as an actual officer, but there is no question that his crew was loyal to him, and would have followed him any where he went. Course, that may have lead them into an even worse problem, but who cared at that point?
Of all the Captains, Kirk was clearly the most ‘by the seat of his pants’ one in the history of the franchise. He seemed to luck into solutions to situations more than actually solving them, or he would end up leaving it to his crew which always seemed far more capable than him. He was clearly a product of the time frame this show was made in, but that carried over to the movie franchise, so I’m not sure that can even be used as a defense. He was a decent Captain, just probably not the best.
(Please note this is all based on William Shatner’s performance in the role, I have not seen the new movie yet, but from what I know, it would have to be almost considered a seperate character)
Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
If Capt. Kirk wasn’t your introduction to Star Trek, then it was Capt. Picard, and then he’s the one you judge everyone else by. However, unlike Kirk, he actually seemed like an actual Captain.
Unlike his predecessor (in the history of Star Trek, 70-some years separated Picard and Kirk, so I mean as characters), Picard was truly a commander. He was enough of a diplomat that he would be called upon to serve as the arbitrator in peace negotiations, but he was a man of action when needed, and at that he was a brilliant tactician.
One thing the UFP (yes, really the show’s writers) did between the original series and this one was to make the rule that the Captain of a starship couldn’t go on “away missions”. This eliminated a lot of the potential for Picard to go all Kirk on an alien race (“Should I sleep with it or kill it?!?”), and that was all left to his second in command, Cmdr. Riker.
I think Picard brought a certain elegance to the rank, and it wasn’t just Patrick Stewart’s Shakespearean training, it was that the writer’s realized a Captain shouldn’t be so much of a cowboy, but someone that people would actually want to follow into battle.
Capt. Benjamin Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Capt. Sisko is a tough one to talk about because he was in such a different situation than any other commanding officer in the history of the series.
While he did start off at the rank of Commander at the beginning of the series, he was promoted to Captain later in the series. No matter what his rank was, he was still the top ranked officer on Deep Space Nine and on the U.S.S. Defiant. While this was actually my personal favorite of the five series, I have to call it as it is, and Sisko was always more of a glorified dock manager than a “Captain”. Yes, there were moments that you could say were Captain like, especially when fighting the Dominion, his primary job was to keep the station running smoothly, which was essentially a seaport.
I think if he had been out running around the galaxy like all of the other Captains he would have proven himself a very capable Captain, but going simply by what we saw on screen, he just didn’t really have the opportunities the others did.
Capt. Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager
Voyager was the series I was personally most disappointed with because they missed an oppurtuinty to have the ship come home with pipes sticking out at odd angles in the hallways, plates missing from the hull and so on. Instead the ship came home looking like it had regular servicing at a Starbase, and a glorious oppurtunity to show a less than shiny Starfleet vessel was totally missed.
That aside, Janeway was probably the Captain with the most weight put on her shoulders. 70,000 light years from home, a crew made up of Starfleet regulars and Marquis renegades, and yet she kept them together until they found an eventual way home. If this wasn’t a true example of someone acting like a Captain, being a true leader of people, I don’t know what is.
While the show may not have been the best, it was actually the best they ever did at showing a Captain under trying circumstances. It doesn’t mean she was the overall best, but it certainly shot her up my personal rankings.
Conclusion
So, what is my personal final list? Well, I’ll tell you this, I based it on command experience shown, and not on which series I liked the most, or which I watched first. Basically, I tried to remove all emotion from the list, so I know this will be a ranking that gets much disagreement, but it’s how I did it.
Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Capt. Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager
Capt. James T. Kirk, Star Trek: The Original Series
Capt. Benjamin Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Capt. Jonathan Archer, Enterprise
So, there you have it, probably not the way most people would rank them, but I explained how I reached my conclusions, and I truly doubt you could find any two Star Trek fans who agree 100% on the order.
- This year’s summer movies just aren’t exciting me for some reason.
Here’s
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This week Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself took on a lot of subjects, and we weren’t kind to any of them. It’s like we’re some sort of cynical bastards or sumthin’… oh… wait…
- The Kindle DX doesn’t excite us.
- Steve Gillmore is on another bender about the newest shiny thing to get his attention, and in the course of discussing this we invented a new verb.
- Why RSS readers are broken.
- Apple buying Twitter… Facebook buying Twitter… why we think Microsoft should buy Twitter.
- Or maybe CNN is buying Twitter? Someone just buy Twitter so we can stop thinking about it!
- YouTube has turned into the mafia.
I think there was more, but we were going so fast, who knows. I know I slaughtered pronouncing some words. All-in-all a really fun episode to record, and I hope you have at least half as much fun listening to it.
On Tuesday, Oprah announced a promotion in conjunction with KFC via their UnthinkKFC site to give away free grilled chicken meals to everyone who printed out a coupon for it. The coupons were available for only 36 hours, but it appears that power of free food was under estimated. According to Business Insider (thanks to The Inquisitr for first linking this) not only did the promotion crash the Coupon.com servers (they were the ones to handle handing them out), but it appears the Big O has caused KFC to run dangerously close to running out of chicken in the lead up to Mother’s Day.
As I noted in my original post, perhaps this promotion should have been run at a different time seeing as the coupons were good for May 6th – May 19th EXCEPT for May 10th, Mother’s Day. Well, since more coupons got printed than they expected, KFCs across the country are running out of chicken, and the entire supply chain may be drained by Saturday… the day before Mother’s Day. Well, here’s an idea… YOU SHOULD HAVE STARTED THE PROMOTION ON MONDAY, MAY 11TH! Seriously, how hard would this idea have been? Instead you have put one of your biggest days of the year in jeporady with a promotion where you give away your product. Ya know, I’m not a mathmatician, but… yeah.
Then there is the other situation where some KFC locations are not honoring the coupons (they are mostly franchise stores, so each those stores can opt out of promotions). Others simply ran out of chicken, and even a few more told people to come back the next day. So how did people react to this? Small riots and sit-ins. No… I am not kidding. Carmen Dixon of BlackVoices summed this up pretty nicely:
So is this what we’ve come to? Can’t get people to organize around the crisis of impoverished schools or our well funded, for-profit, out-of-control prison industrial complex, for example; but deprive people of their free two piece, or just delay it for a day, and all hell breaks loose.
They’re right. ”Hey, that has nothing to do with me, why should I bother protesting it? I mean I… what? They won’t give us free chicken?!? ATTICA! ATTICA! ATTICA!”
At the end of the day, even with all of the hiccups in the system, you can’t deny that KFC has gotten an amazing amout of publicity for their new grilled chicken product. Heck, they’ve gotten a lot of promotion, period. Not all of it has been positive, but who cares, it has people talking about them again.
The thing is, anytime there is a promotion online giving away free food of some type, the same thing happens, “we didn’t anticipate the demand.” Well, at what point is someone going to anticipate it? You simply think, “X number will do this… now lets plan for 5 times that… and 10 times that…” and so on. Demand will be high, and by golly you should have the servers in place to handle it. It will reach the point some day where people won’t put up with this type of promotion handling, and the backlash on your brand will be such that you simply can’t recover.
As for the public… show some patience folks, it is, afterall, free.
As someone who stays on top of Internet trends during the day, I had no clue what was going on when all of a sudden the Google Hot Trends page was taken over with every imaginable permeation of “Oprah”, “chicken” and “KFC”. Being a curious sort, it seems Oprah and Kentucky Fried Chicken (I bet they hate it when people still use their full name… tough) have teamed up to give away loads of their new “grilled” chicken. Sure they claim it’s grilled, but I can’t help it if it looks like someone painted stripes on a piece of chicken. Thanks Oprah for unleashing this on all of us!
To get your coupons, simply go to unthinkkfc.com, click the button that says “Print Coupon Now”… and then download the world’s most annoying coupon printer. Seriously, in this day and age I have to download a specialized program to print a coupon? Thanks KFC! It does work, though, and I will say this may actually get me to swing by KFC for the first time in 5+ years, but we’ll see. The coupons are printable up until 9:59 PM CST on May 6th, and they are redeemable through May 19th… except for Mother’s Day May 10th. Can’t have you cheaping out on mom and giving her free “grilled” chicken, now can we? (yes, yes, busy day in restaurants, I know… perhaps running this promo at a different time would have made more sense?)
Duncan Riley over at The Inquisitr makes a great point about how PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is sure to have an aneurysm over this promotion. At publishing time they haven’t said anything yet, which says to me they are taking a hit off the crazy pipe before they come out with their rant that makes no sense to anyone but them. At least they are always entertaining!
Meet Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yes, he is the one on the left.
It’s been quite a while since I talked about my dogs, and the only reason it is coming up today is that we are adding a fourth to our pack. Franklin, as he will be known, is a tri-parti mix, although his tan spots are not visible in the picture. He was born last night, and will be coming home around June 24th. He is another puppy from Classy Country Cockers, the same breeder we got Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt from.
And therein lies the reason I agreed to adding a fourth. This is actually something I have fought for quite a while, but this particular litter changed my mind slightly. Franklin is a half-brother to Teddy by way of their father, Hunter. The added twist is that he is also a nephew to Patrick Henry and Winston Churchill via Franklin’s mother, Jersey Girl, as she is a half-sister to them. Yes, we know such relationships don’t really matter in the world of dogs, but it amuses us, and all four of our boys will be connected now.
No word yet on how William McKinley, the cat, will feel about this… we, however, are excited to add him to our little group.
I’m a bad geek. Somehow I was not aware that May 4th is considered Star Wars Day. It wasn’t until Leslie Poston IMed me to wish me a happy Star Wars Day that I was even aware of it, and even then we couldn’t figure out why it was today. The biggest day of the year to Star Wars fans is May 25th, the anniversary of the first film being released in 1977. Finally someone let us in on the May the Force be with you/May the Fourth be with you joke, and we finally got it.
It’s hard to believe I have lived for 32 years with this film and its subsequent sequels and prequels. I can easily say the night I saw it in September 1977 (yes, I didn’t see it for four months) changed my life. I can remember sitting outside the theater with my parents as we waited to get in, and even with four months of showings out of the way, we still didn’t get in until the midnight showing. To entertain his 6-year-old son, my father went into the theater and bought a program book, which I still have, to let me flip through while we waited. I was immediately enraptured with the imagery of the film, and was all that more anxious to get inside and see what it held for me.
As my mother tells the story, she knew she was in trouble when she looked over at my father and I, and we were both sitting there through out the whole movie with our jaws dropped. There was something magical about what was on the screen, although I still can’t tell you exactly what it was. Sure, George Lucas just followed the ancient plot devices of the hero’s quest, but it didn’t matter… it was in space… with lightsabers! Who cared if we had seen the basic plotline before… IT HAD SWORDS MADE OF LIGHT!
I can easily say that night ended up setting the direction of my life for years to come. I know it was led me to opening a comic book store, and it is also what led me to being considered an expert in 1970′s and 1980′s action figures. (it also led me to owning a painting that George Lucas wants for his personal collection, but I got it legally and I’m not letting go of it! Sorry, George, you were too slow!) It was my “geek birth” if you would. It didn’t help that my uncle on my dad’s side somehow obtained a bootleg video cassette copy of the first movie in late 1977 (to this day I have no clue how he did that), and I watched it until it wore out. I would watch it as much as three times a day, to the point I knew ever line of dialog, and could even act out the saber fights. I stopped counting how many times I had seen the movie at 485 times, although I can assure you I have seen it several hundred times since.
I think for just about anyone who was a child during that time period, Star Wars holds a place in our hearts, bit if you ask any two fans, each of us will tell you it means something different to us. It resonated with each person in its own way, and while many people say The Empire Strikes Back was the best of all six films (it was from a filmmaking perspective), it just can’t take the place in my heart where I hold that first movie.
So, whatever Star Wars Day means to you, or whatever your love for the movies is… May the Fourth be with you.
You know what this world was lacking? Shoes with a built-in bottle opener.
Hot Topic, the chain of mall stores that has turned legions of teenagers into wanna-be vampires, have solved one of the last great problems of life on Earth: never having a bottle opener when you need it. GENIUS! I want to meet the person who came up with this concept and shake their hand… and then check to see if they have some pre-existing history of mental illness.
These 4″ stilettos sell for $39.99 (a sure sign that only quality materials were used in their construction), which, while not a king’s ransom, is still too high for shoes… with a bottle opener in them. I mean, honestly, have you ever once thought, “You know, I wish I could find a way to get food containers closet to my shoes that have walked through who knows what?” True, the opener is rather high on the shoe, but still… ew.
Let us also not forget that just about everyone has experienced a bit of splash-out when opening a bottle, so enjoy your shoe getting sticky from your favorite beverage. Another interesting question is just how many bottles still come without a screw off lid? Not that many in my experience.
I would honestly love to know how they even came up with such a contraption. How do you honestly sit around and go, “You know, women’s lives would be so much simpler if they just had a bottle opener built into their shoe.” I mean, kudos to Hot Topic if this is some odd ball demographic I’ve never heard of, but in general, this really does fall into the “What in the hell were you smoking when you thought of it” category. All I can imagine is with this chain’s focus on goth/vampire apparel, they must have been expecting a run on people buying True Blood (although I believe it has a screw off top in the television series).
November 10th, 2009 is still six months away, but it is never too early to start drooling over Modern Warfare 2 (AKA Call of Duty 6).
Apparently no one at KFC, or even Oprah’s Harpo Productions, quite understands the power of Oprah.
Scattercast is 42… and it has all the answers!
CobWEBs episode 2 is in the can!
The power of Oprah is a truly frightening thing.
They’re right. ”Hey, that has nothing to do with me, why should I bother protesting it? I mean I… what? They won’t give us free chicken?!? 
Oprah, Oprah, Oprah.
I can easily say that night ended up setting the direction of my life for years to come. I know it was led me to opening a comic book store, and it is also what led me to being considered an expert in 1970′s and 1980′s action figures. (it also led me to owning a painting that George Lucas wants for his personal collection, but I got it legally and I’m not letting go of it! Sorry, George, you were too slow!) It was my “geek birth” if you would. It didn’t help that my uncle on my dad’s side somehow obtained a bootleg video cassette copy of the first movie in late 1977 (to this day I have no clue how he did that), and I watched it until it wore out. I would watch it as much as three times a day, to the point I knew ever line of dialog, and could even act out the saber fights. I stopped counting how many times I had seen the movie at 485 times, although I can assure you I have seen it several hundred times since.
You know what this world was lacking? Shoes with a built-in bottle opener.
