Empire’s 50 Greatest Independent Movies. Some are surprising, like Passion of the Christ and The Terminator…

It seems like the Baseball season has barely finished, but this week could have a big, big impact on the Braves season next year…

Shortstop and lead off batter Rafael Furcal is a free agent, he and Marcus Giles were a potent force in batting as well as defence last year so losing him would be a big, big, big deal. Chipper Jones has already restructured his contract so the Braves front office could offer as much as possible to Furcal, but still it comes down to 3 teams…

Atlanta, Chicago Cubs and LA Dodgers.

The Braves need to make a move soon, as the NL East is only getting stronger with the Mets signing Carlos Delgado and Billy Wagner and the Phillies trading Jim Thome to the White Sox for Aaron Rowand. Of course resigning Furcal is the number 1 priority, but the Braves also need to look at the bullpen that failed so spectacularly in the closing month or so of the season and get rid of the likes of Dan Kolb and Chris Rietsma, not to mention overcoming the loss of Leo Mazzone to the Orioles. At least we’ll see a mature Jeff Francoeur, Ryan Langerhans, Kelly Johnson et al that surprised us this year.

It could be a tough time at Turner Field next year, but then they said that about the last two years…

Gollum, the Wikipedia Browser. For people to lazy to type “wikipedia.org” then press enter.

It looks like it’s a day to stay indoors…

Bleah! I’m glad I have no reason to leave home today…

As I have gained a new family, I was invited to spend my first family Thanksgiving at Jill and Ryan’s home outside Charlotte, NC.

Now I have spent a Thanksgiving in this country before, but that was at a friend of a friend’s and to be honest, I felt like a bit of an outsider at that family affair, though it was a hugely enjoyable day, but this time it would be a weekend…

We left Atlanta around 3:30pm Wednesday afternoon and as soon as we hit I-285 it was bumper to bumper traffic, but at least it was moving decently, and for some inexplicable reason when I-85 goes past the Mall of Georgia, even though it’s down to two lanes, traffic vanishes and it’s clear sailing all the way up through South Carolina and North Carolina into Charlotte. We arrived just in time to see Lost so it took about 5 and a quarter hours to get there, Robyn says it usually takes closer to 4…

So along came Turkey Day, Frank and Ryan worked a miracle to hook up an antenna to Ryan’s satellite dish to recieve local HDTV over the air without paying extra on the satellite provider… And it worked brilliantly, so while the Turkey’s (yes two turkeys) were being prepared, we watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in HD, and it was awesome!

I’d like to say I helped in the preperation of the turkeys, but alas that would be a lie, I watched and drank beer with Frank as Ryan filled up a huge stock pot full of peanut oil and deep fried the turkeys. This is the first time I had seen such a thing, but according to Frank it was the most popular way of cooking them down south, and they came out great. Nice and moist after 30 to 45 minutes at 350°F, as opposed to the dry turkey you get from blasting it in an oven for hours on end…

Well, I was stuffed after the meal and everyone eventually took a nap of some sort, we were then treated with the trail end of the Atlanta Falcons/Detroit Lions game (in HD) then the Denver Broncos/Dallas Cowboys games (also in HD) before relaxing with Survivor (yep, also in HD) and then a game of Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture 2 where I impressed with my knowledge of random pop culture, including but not limited to Charmed and Roger Corman but in the end the team of Frank and Jill won…

The following day was Black Friday, so Robyn and I went to the local Costco to buy a new flat screen TV, and then to Best Buy to get appropriate accessories, as well as window shopping in the villiage beside Jill and Ryans house. Then we just relaxed before heading home Saturday lunchtime.

All in all a great time, and now I’ll say one thing, HDTV rocks! So me + our new TV from Philips + Free HD programming from Comcast = Sweeeeeet!

Table Setting

Originally uploaded by FLC.

Users report Xbox 360’s are “crashing like mad.” Oh dear… Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear… Maybe this machine was rushed afterall?

AKA: Giggety Giggety!

Incase you didn’t already know, this is about Debra Lafave, (I mentioned her before so this is a follow up) the Tampa teacher who “molested” a 14 year old student and plea bargained her way out of jail.

While I do believe sex crimes are the worst kind of all, I cant help but think if I was that boy, at that age, I wouldn’t be complaining about a damn thing…

Here’s why.

Holy crap! Where was a teacher like that when I was in school? Blonde hair, striking bluey green eyes, hot damn! You can see why she gets top marks at RateMyTeachers.com.

Here’s where double standards kick in, if it was a male teacher “molesting” a 14 year old girl, I’d be asking for him to be hung from the highest tree, but since it’s her, all I can say is “damn! that lucky, lucky bastard!”

As I said, if it was me I’d be saying (throwing in some Scottish dialect for Robyn’s amusement here) “YES! You fucking dancer!”

Anyhoo…

Debra Lafave, 25, will serve three years of house arrest and seven years’ probation. She pleaded guilty to two counts of lewd and lascivious battery.

The former Greco Middle School reading teacher apologized during the hearing, saying “I accept full responsibility for my actions.”

The boy told investigators the two had sex in a classroom at the Greco school, located in Temple Terrace near Tampa, in her Riverview town house and once in a vehicle while his 15-year-old cousin drove them around Marion County.

Let’s see shall we… Firstly she’ll have to register as a sex offender, so her address will be public. Secondly, she’s on house arrest for 3 years, so she’ll be home quite often. Thirdly, she apparently likes young men, so guys, fish out that Angus Young halloween costume and head on down to Tampa…

Batman Concludes. Batman finally meets his end in this dramatic conclusion, but why didn’t anyone think of it before?

Add Elisha Cuthbert to the list of celebrity bloggers… She doesnt blog about movies or the latest goings on in 24 or anything like that, she blogs about hockey, on the NHL site, sweet…

Here’s some grade-a confusion for customers of Cingular, like me, who were also customers of AT&T, like me. But first a little history lesson…

In February of 2004, Cingular Wireless bought AT&T Wireless to create… Wait for it… Cingular Wireless.

Fair enough, but AT&T customers were duely screwed in the change over, we had a sweet deal with international call with AT&T (6c a minute to the UK), when we switched over to Cingular in July we were told we could keep that rate…

WRONG!

Cingular had us on their own plan, international calls to the UK became 19c a minute which pissed us off as they failed to tell us that at the switch over, and calling the UK became very important while planning the wedding, so we got screwed royally with calls for a period.

Now today it’s announced that with the SBC merger with AT&T, SBC, who with BellSouth, own Cingular, will be looking to sell the company off under the name AT&T…

Confused? you will be…

Apparently Cingular didn’t really take over AT&T as such, SBC/AT&T held 60% of the company, BellSouth the other 40%. So all us AT&T customers who got screwed in the Cingular “take over” were really screwed by AT&T under a different name (so to speak)… Thats a nice way to treat your customers, hike up the prices and blame it on another company.

The king is dead, long live the king it seems.

So now are we going to get screwed once again by the switch over to AT&T? Time will tell… But seriously, Is it Cingular Wireless or AT&T Wireless? Is it Sprint or Nextel? In the space of a few years cellphones in America became a helluva confusing, not just for customers…

Confused? As I said, you will be…

SAN ANTONIO-SBC Communications Inc. is reportedly planning to launch an AT&T branded wireless service that will use the network of SBC’s current wireless joint venture, Cingular Wireless L.L.C. SBC’s plans follow the closing last weekend of its $16 billion acquisition of AT&T Corp.

Contrary to published reports, Cingular said it is not changing its name to AT&T.

“We are continuing with the strong Cingular brand that we have spent the past five years building and promoting,” said Cingular spokesman Clay Owen.

SBC’s chairman and chief executive officer Ed Whitacre said in an interview over the weekend that Cingular would drop its brand name for the AT&T brand in most of its markets. BellSouth Corp., which controls the 40 percent of Cingular, said in the story that it did not have any objections to the name change.

Owen said Whitacre’s comments were related to SBC-which changed its name to AT&T following the purchase-and its plans to launch an AT&T branded wireless service that it would sell in select markets using Cingular’s network. Owen likened the set-up to Sprint Nextel Corp.’s extensive mobile virtual network operator agreements.

So there will be an AT&T Wireless (so to speak) using Cingular networks but NOT actually Cingular…

Digital video recorder maker TiVo Inc. on Monday said it will begin testing a feature to let subscribers transfer recorded television programming to Apple iPod digital music players or Sony’s PlayStation portable devices. TiVo + iPod = Daddy Wants!

The tale of Donovan McNabb and the curse of the Madden cover… Is the “honour” of gracing the cover for EA Sports Madden football games really a curse on your season? Ask Donovan McNabb, Michael Vick and Daunte Culpepper. WikiPedia has more on the “Madden Curse“

Celtic 3 – 0 Rangers. Same shit, different season… How long until Alex McLeish is canned, and who will replace him?

The Superman Returns trailer was released today. It’s pretty awesome with the original John Williams score and Marlon Brando’s voiceover… Also pretty sweet that they offer a trailer download for iPod and PSP

Chemical burns, ruined clothes, 11 years, half a million dollars – it’s not easy to improve the world’s most popular toy. Yet the success of one inventor’s quest to dye a simple soap bubble may change the way the world uses colour. Tim Kehoe’s quest to make “a holy grail”… A coloured bubble. No, not the shimmering rainbow effect you see when the light catches a clear soap bubble. Kehoe’s bubble would radiate a single, vibrant hue throughout the entire sphere – a green bubble, an orange bubble, a hot-pink bubble. It’s a bubble that can make CEOs giggle and stunned mothers tear up in awe.