At long last some official word has come out on the state of Batman 3, and as a bonus, also on a new Superman movie.

Nikki Finke is reporting that Warner Brothers has asked Christopher Nolan, the director of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, to step into a “godfather” role in regards to what is being dubbed Superman 3.0 (not an official name).  While it is unlikely that Mr. Nolan will direct, he will be taking on a supervisor role with the production to help possible steer it in a direction that will be more palatable to fans than 2006′s Superman Returns was.  (For the record, I enjoyed Superman Returns)  The new film is expected to be a complete reboot of the franchise, which means, yes, we will once again go though his ship crash landing in Kansas.

Warner Brothers is in a bit of a bind as they must start production on a new Superman film by 2011 to retain the rights to the character.  If the company should let them lapse, the heirs of Superman creators Siegel and Shuster can sue for damages for lost income.  And in 2013, all rights to Superman’s origin revert to the estates of the two creators, so both DC Comics and Warner Brothers will be in a position where they must license every aspect of Superman from the families of the original creators.

The other exciting bit of news is that Mr. Nolan’s brother, Jonah Nolan, and David Goyer who co-wrote Batman Begins and penned the story for The Dark Knight have begun scripting the third installment of the current Batman series of films. After the unfortunate death of Heath Ledger, rumors have swirled that Nolan was not interested in doing a third film as apparently his story hinged on the involvement of the Joker. After Ledger’s death, Nolan didn’t even want to think about recasting the part, which Ledger won an Oscar for, but apparently the story has been altered enough to not require the Joker.

Both films are far enough out from production that no possible story lines have yet been mentioned.  Official announcements of both productions are expected within the coming weeks.

If you can’t guess from the title and the show logo, CobWEBs and The Cynical Bastards have transitioned to a new name, and a new, more family friendly, podcast (i.e. we no longer swear).

Otherwise it is the same cynical thoughts on the world you’ve come to love, and Steven and I take a look at some real good examples of true braindead members of our society.  Like, you know, building turbines in Minnesota that use lubricants that could freeze in winter time.  That’s always bright.

Steven and I will be explaining the changes over the coming days.  And, yes, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins is still part of the team, the only changes are the name and the fact we’ve washed out mouthes out with soap.  (Links for this episode by Steven)

Minnesota’s frozen turbines raise new doubts about wind power – GreenBeat
Alexa Gonzalez Handcuffed For Doodling On A Desk – Sean P. Aune
Google Superbowl Ad Explains The Need for Search Privacy – EFF

It would seem that public schools have totally lost their minds.

Alexa Gonzalez, a 12-year-old girl from Queens, New York, was recently taken out of her school in handcuffs and walked over to a police prescient across from her school.  Once there she was detained for several hours until she was released to her mother.

Her crime?  She doodled on her school desk with erasable marker.

According to the New York Daily News, Ms. Gonzalez scribbled on her desk, again, in erasable marker, “I love my friends Abby and Faith” and “Lex was here. 2/1/10″ followed by a smiley face.  Upon discovery of the doodles, the police were called and that was when she was escorted from the school in handcuffs.

She is currently suspended from school and has gone to family court where her sentence was eight hours of community service, a book report and an essay about what she has learned from the experience.

Excuse me, but what in the heck is going on here?

Don’t get me wrong, the girl shouldn’t have doodled on her desk, but it was erasable.  Whatever happened to the teacher saying something like, “Ms. Gonzalez, you’re going to have to clean that up and you have after school detention”?  Since when was the proper procedure to handcuff a pre-teen causing her emotional anguish over some doodles? David Cantor, a spokesman for the Education Department, said, “We’re looking at the facts. Based on what we’ve seen so far, this shouldn’t have happened.”

Gee … you think?

What about the police, though? They are also coupable in this disgrace. “Even when we’re asked to make an arrest, common sense should prevail, and discretion used in deciding whether an arrest or handcuffs are really necessary,” said police spokesman Paul Browne.

Again … you think?

I don’t even agree with the suspension, and I certainly don’t agree with the sentence that family court handed down. All any of this has done is to make Ms. Gonzalez distrustful of the school and justice systems, and with good reason.  They were doodles, in erasable marker … make her clean them up, give her detention, end of story.

Admittedly we have not heard if Ms. Gonzalez had prior disciplinary problems, but it doesn’t sound as if she had, and even then, involving the police, let alone the handcuffs, are excessive unless she got violent and threw a fit.  Again, it does not sound like she did either of those things.

Where has common sense gone?  I can see one person failing in their thought process, but this took multiple people to act like idiots.  Did no one in this process not go, “Um … she doodled … that’s it.”  Nope, multiple people seem to have all lost sense of their faculties and gone along with this farce.

Someone stop the world, I wanna get off.

In what had to be the biggest, “What in the …” moment of Super Bowl XLIV, Jay Leno, David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey appeared together in a 15-second ad for The Late Show with David Letterman.  There is surreal, and then there is this ad.

The New York Times has a detailed account of how this whole thing came about, and it seems Mr. Letterman came up with it, they contacted Ms. Winfrey who said “yes” immediately and then Mr. Leno was contacted who had to get NBC’s permission, but was all for it.  Ms. Winfrey was snuck into the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Mr. Letterman tapes his show, during the filming of last Tuesday’s show, followed by Mr. Leno being snuck in in a hooded sweatshirt and wearing a fake mustache.  The two celebrities were hidden until the taping ended, and the building cleared.

Once set to go, Mr. Letterman and Mr. Leno spoke for the first time in years, but kept it all very cordial according to Rob Burnett, David Letterman’s producer.  The 15-second spot only took 20 to 30 minutes to film, they were done, and everyone went their separate ways.

This had to be the most unexpected ending to the Late Night Wars of ’10, and no one saw it coming, that’s for sure.  Letterman and Leno haven’t spoken in years, and have been bitter adversaries for quite a while now, including during the recent Conan O’Brien dust up.  What ever brought about the truce, it led to an awfully amusing advertisement.

Apparently Hollywood has fallen back in love with the musical film, but will they ever cast people known for their singing abilities?

News has come out this weekend that a new version of Damn Yankees is moving forward with Todd Graff directing.  This is the first big budget film for Mr. Graff, 50, and is a rather large gamble for a film studio.  While he has directed some smaller budget films to critical praise, gambling what is assumed to be tens of millions on this updated version of the 1955 Broadway musical seems a rather large risk for any studio.

There have been several films in the past few years that have revived the musical film, but while a few of them have gone on to financial success, not all of them have fared as well.  Here is a breakdown of five of the most notable musical films in order of release, and how each has done at the box office: (data from Box Office Mojo)

As you can see, when they hit, they hit well, but one mis-step and it’s a huge loss for a studio.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Damn Yankees tells the story of a middle-aged baseball fan who is tired of seeing his team lose to the New York Yankees.  He makes a Faustian pact with the Devil to make him into a young star ball player to take his team to the World Series.  Along the way, the Devil tries to tempt him with assistance of his top seductress, Lola, to break his contract which would allow him to collect the fan’s soul early.

The musical started on Broadway in 1955, received a film treatment in 1958, a television production in 1967 and a Broadway revival in 1994.  The new film is to have Jake Gyllenhaal in the role of the fan, and Jim Carrey as the Devil.  Lola has yet to be cast.

And that brings me back to my opening thought: Why do they keep casting people not known for their singing abilities?  You firing up a big budget film with a director who has not proven himself with a large budget, two actors that — while capable actors — are not known to be singers.  This production seems to have a lot of strikes against it before it even starts pre-production.

I hope I am proven wrong, but this is sounding a lot more like another Nine than another Mamma Mia!.

Only 53 posts this week … my posting frequency at TechnoBuffalo got increased this week, because I am clearly insane.

FunJug.com

• “Up2 You + Me” Featuring Jim Parsons
• Wife Crying After Star Wars

Photo.BLORGE.com

• Fujifilm announces 13 new cameras all at the same time
• Fotolia adds stock photography plugin to WordPress blogs

RememberingChristmas.com

• National Geographic –  Celebrating Christmas: Xmas out of the Box

SeanPAune.com

• James Madison High School Gym Teacher Charged With Sexual Assault
• Avatar Becomes First Film To The $2 Billion Dollar Mark
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: Amazon, Macmillian and the game of bluff that never was
• Oscar Nominations 2010
• Phil Harris Of The Deadliest Catch Suffers A Stroke
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: Billion $ war chests, pissed off egos – this could get nasty
• Avatar Becomes Top Grossing Domestic Film
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: Six degrees of Twitter and burning bridges
• Michael Bay Earns $125 Million In 2009
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: The Forbes WebCeleb 25 – picked from a panhandler’s hat
• Scattercast Episode 81: And The Oscar Goes To …
• CobWEBs Daily Edition: Don’t you just love Techmeme Friday’s? We do
• NBC Erases Conan O’Brien From Its History As Fox Rumors Spread

StarterTech.com

• Firefox Mobile Launches For Nokia’s Maemo Platform
• Facebook COO Says 175 Million Users Log In Each Day
• Walmart And Best Buy Stop Video Game Trade-In Experiment
• Twitter Password Attack Teaches Us All A Lesson
• Sirius XM Launches Application For BlackBerry Phones
• Rumor: Facebook To Add E-Mail Service
• NFL Has An Official Super Bowl Twitter Hashtag, #SB44

Tech.BLORGE.com

• Steve Jobs has fighting words for Google and Adobe
• Top 10 best Google Chrome extensions
• Amazon caves to Macmillan over e-book pricing
• Netflix adds independent film studios to streaming service
• Rumor: Zune phone to debut at Mobile World Conference
• Companies see 70 percent jump in social networking spam in 2009
• Twitter forcing users to change passwords in wake of phishing attack
• Skype working on 3G iPhone App; Release “soon”
• The Wall Street Journal lowers its paywall for one day thanks to sponsor
• CEO of Sun Microsystems Tweets his resignation
• AT&T gives go ahead to Sling Media to stream content over 3G network
• Third major publisher to move away from the $9.99 e-book on Amazon’s Kindle
• Hubble Telescope detects seasonal changes in the surface of Pluto
• Redbox takes another blow as retailers limit purchases

TechnoBuffalo.com

• The Case For Waiting A Year For iPad Generation 2
• Steve Jobs’ Health Called Into Question Over A Video Clip
• It’s Lonely When You Play Foursquare By Yourself
• The Highway Robbery That Is Text Messaging Plans
• Motion Controls In Games Predate the Wii And Project Natal
• What The Amazon Kindle Scuffle With Macmillan Means To You
• How The iPad May Expand The Use Of Wi-Fi
• Apple Has Gone To War With Companies Before Google, The 1984 Commercial Shows That
• The Case Against IE6 Has Gained A Big Supporter
• Google Enables Multi-touch On The Nexus One; World Wonders “Why Now?”
• The Sega CD Was A Hunk of Garbage
• Say Good-Bye To The $9.99 E-Book
• Will Textbooks Be The Killer iPad App?
• How Twitter Stole Digg’s Thunder

It seems that NBC would just like to forget Conan O’Brien ever worked for them, and the network has set about scrubbing all remnants of his tenure with the company from its halls.

It’s been two weeks since Conan O’Brien signed off from The Tonight Show, and NBC would like to forget he was ever there apparently.  Pictures circulated earlier this week of Conan’s image being replace by Jay Leno’s all over Rockefeller Center in New York, the corporate headquarters of the network.

Aaron Bleyaert, a former researcher and blogger for The Tonight Show posted pictures of the offices on move out day this past Friday, as well as the state of the set.  Neither picture set is very uplifting to say the least.

What is good news, though, is that there is some news that Mr. O’Brien and Fox are in talks to do something together, but not quite in the format anyone anticipated.  While Fox has the right to take over the post-local news time slot on its affiliate stations, those slots are currently filled with lucrative syndicated programs.  The affiliates would be less than pleased to see those spots disappear, so what could Fox do to get Mr. O’Brien in to their network, but not upset the affiliates?

Fox also owns the FX cable network, and the current rumor goes that Mr. O’Brien would have a show on the cable net four nights a week, and then have one episode a week on Fox on the weekends.  The problem is that comedienne Wanda Sykes already has a weekend show on Fox, and there is no word how this would be juggled as of yet.  The talks have thus far only been preliminary, but are expected to pick up speed over the next six weeks so the show could be prepped for a fall debut.  (Mr. O’Briens agreement with NBC states he must not host a new show before Sept. 1st of this year)

In other news, it seems that 50 Tonight Show staffers were somehow left with no severance pay in the show cancellation due to them just being stage hands.  According to TMZ, Mr. O’Brien has paid all 50 of the employees six weeks pay out of his own pocket to help them out until they find jobs.  This is not unheard of for the late night show host as he helped staffers out of his own pocket during the Writer’s Guild of America strike of 2007.

Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!

For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!

In this episode, Steven and I take our weekly look at what is happening over at TechMeme and Blippy, and for those that make it to the end of the episode, you’ll find a very important message about the future of this podcast … you may be surprised.

Push the big green button and have a listen in!

Scattercast is 81 … and I still mess up the episode number at the end.

- A run down of who I think will win the major Oscars this year based on the 2010 Oscar Nominations.

- Some thoughts on what is going on at James Madison High School, AKA as “Horndog High”.

Not much else this week … I think I’m blogged out.

Here’s

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for those who wish to download it, subscribe to Scattercast via iTunes.

Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!

For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!

In this episode, Steven and I take a look at the Forbes Web Celeb 25 list which … well … it’s beyond flawed.  It starts off with Perez Hilton for crying out loud!  Oh well, it’s an amusing read.

We follow this up with a discussion that Jeremy Schoemaker of the Shoemoney blog now chooses Bing over Google as his search engine of choice.  The two of us have different opinion, but that’s make all of this so much fun.

Push the big green button and have a listen in!

Welcome to another week of the daily edition of CobWEBs, the flagship podcast of The Cynical Bastards!

For those who don’t remember from the other episodes, this is a new format for the show as we are going to try giving you daily bite sized chunks of our patented brand of cynicism over everything in the tech universe. The show will have a rotating host schedule between Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself. You’ll always get two of us, you just never know which two!

In this episode, Steven and I take a look at the “shrining” market share of Internet Explorer (HA!), and the looming war.

What war?

The coming war between Apple and Google.  Mark my words folks, it’s coming, and considering the war chests these two ego-driven companies control, it could get very, very nasty.

Push the big green button and have a listen in!

It seems that if you’re a talentless hack in Hollywood, you too can earn $125 million in Hollywood.

According to Vanity Fair, the biggest money earning individual in Hollywood in 2009 was Michael Bay, director of Transformers Revenge of the Fallen.  His income apparently came from the following sources

• $75 million: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (back-end profit participation for directing and producing, based on worldwide box-office gross of $835 million)
• $28 million: Transformers: R.O.T.F. (share of estimated $280 million in DVD revenue)
• $12.5 million: Transformers: R.O.T.F. (share of toy and other licensing royalties)
• $4 million: Friday the 13th (back end for producing, based on worldwide gross of $90 million, and share of DVD)
• $2 million: The Unborn (back end for producing, based on worldwide gross of $77 million, and share of DVD)
• $2 million: A Nightmare on Elm Street (fee for producing inexplicable remake)
• $1.5 million: Royalties from older films, other income

While I think the whole thing is fairly silly, the part that is blowing me away is the fact he earned $12.5 million from a share of the toys and licensing … excuse me?

Michael Bay is brought in to make a movie based on characters he had nothing to do with.  He has to go to Hasbro, the makers of the toys, before each film to discuss with them what characters they will allow him to use.  So how in the world is he getting paid a cut of the toys, let alone licensing fees for the characters to be used elsewhere?  He didn’t create Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumblebee or any of the others, so why should he be getting paid a dime?

The other stuff he earned … oh well, whatever, when you have no talent beyond making things look pretty when they explode, I guess you have to play to your strengths, and if it makes you some money in the meantime, why not?