It’s official: Finn Jones is Ser Loras Tyrell, the Knight of Flowers. Looks the part. Keep the casting announcements coming!
Here’s a glorious 1920×1200 image of Sean Bean as Eddard Stark, holding the greatsword, Ice. I tell you it looks great on my dual 24-inch LCDs. Click for the full-size, wallpaper-ready image.
Arghhhhh…. 2011, get here already! Hearing Sean Bean utter the words “Winter is Coming” (with some dark laughter) just made the wait go nuclear. And I know they’re called teasers for a reason, but goddamn HBO! Show more!
I’m on an Inspector Lewis binge of late, courtesy of Netflix. I remember watching Inspector Morse a decade ago, starring the late, great John Thaw. Based on the Colin Dexter mystery novels, I liked to think of that show as Murder in Middle England(TM). Oh, Middle England, that idyllic, almost fictional place where Oxford dons indulge in murder while quoting Greek poetry. Lewis was Morse’s subordinate as well as his foil; a blue-collar detective trying to keep up with his classically-educated partner. Now, years later, Lewis has his own show, and this time he’s been given a Cambridge-educated subordinate. I prefer Inspector Lewis to the CSIs and NCISs of the world. You won’t find any zany high-tech detective work here (and, as a corollary, any obligatary nerdy characters who do all the fancy enhance-this-grainy-cell-phone-image-into-a-pristine-billboard-sized-color-photo fantasy tech). And on top of being a good show, Inspector Lewis makes lush use of the always beautiful Oxford as a setting. Having been there twice, I enjoy remembering wandering around the colleges and finding a nice English meadow to lay down in and stare up at the sky. It’s how I recharge my spiritual battery.
I don’t buy the idea of the iPhone as some kind of uber gaming platform. I’ve tried many a game and I’m just not impressed. Most of the stuff I’ve seen is gimmicky or just plain bad. However, there is one game that I’m hopelessly addicted to: Words With Friends, which is a Scrabble clone. It’s not fancy and it doesn’t have 3D graphics or motion control, but it’s absolutely perfect. I’ve been playing a friend and we’re on match #4. She barely beat me in Game 1, I came back to trounce her in Game 2, and then she destroyed me in Game 3. Now we’re on Game 4 and I’m mad and out for blood, as you can see above. See that? That’s me laying down a 57 point word to take a commanding 82 point lead! Oh, yes. This is the new Scrabblelicious. And did I mention that there’s a free version? It displays ads, but it’s fully functional! And if you don’t like ads, you can pay $1.99 for the ad-free version.
On another note, I bit the bullet on a 750GB Caviar Green hard drive today; I’m going to take advantage of Window 7′s revamped backup utility to finally maintain a proper backup archive. The big scare came yesterday when I thought I had lost hundreds of European photos I took in 2006. Thankfully, I found them on an otherwise discarded hard drive and imported them into my Lightroom catalog. Now I’m going to make sure that never happens again by just having a dedicated backup that’s updated regularly. However, I’ve encountered my first real disappointment with Windows 7 after a week of loving it; the backup utility is light years ahead of Vista, and it’s functional, but it still sucks, especially compared to Time Machine on my MacBook Pro.
Microsoft needs to be a lot more resources into the backup system. I’m not expecting them to copy Apple, but I am expecting more functionality and options.
A new season of television and nothing really tantalizing out there. Battlestar Galactica is over. House is back (yay), but totally underwhelmed by everything else. ABC is trying too hard with Flash Forward and Modern Family; I now have no real interest in watching them. Plus, in the case of Flash Forward, I’m not enamored of gimmicky premises. That’s one reason I don’t like Lost, but the other is that I think J.J. Abrams is a hack. Never liked Heroes, and from what I understand even its fans aren’t happy with it, either. Grey’s Anatomy was pure joy in the first three seasons, but it went downhill fast (plus, Addison should have never have left; Kate Walsh is a goddess wasted on the lameness that is Private Practice.) NBC’s Mercy debuted tonight and I gave it a try; lead Taylor Schilling is absolutely lovely and a fresh face, but I don’t buy her being an Iraq veteran and it felt just like another hospital procedural. Note to network executives: I really don’t need another police/hospital/legal procedural.
What’s the point of having a gleaming 50-inch plasma and HD service if there’s nothing good to watch? Argh.
Come on HBO, greenlight Game of Thrones already. Let’s show the world that fantasy can be for grown-ups.
