SSMRs Have Some New Digs

UPDATE 3/26/2008: Single Sentence Movie Reviews have moved once again. The new location is http://www.singlesentence.com.

Let’s be honest. Single Sentence Movie Reviews have taken over this blog. The idea that this is a personal blog is a farce. The movie reviews should have their own separate blog, and now they do. All future SSMRs can be found at SingleSentenceMovieReview.com. (RSS subscribers, you’ll want to head to my lovingly hand-crafted rss feed.

I haven’t moved all the old reviews over yet, but that’s where all the new ones are going up. You also have the opportunity to share your comic genius and beat me at my own game. In place of the traditional blog comments, you can now submit your own sentences to any of the movies that have been reviewed.

As for this blog, it’s free so I don’t see any reason to shut it down. Besides those of you who like to have a little extra reading material every 4-6 months, should not delete this blog from your book marks.

What the Trailer For a PG Version of 300 Would Look Like

If there’s something on earth funnier than this, I’ve never heard of it.

It’s Hard to Believe Some of These Are Truly “Unintentional”

Yeah, I know. This is one of those posts where I don’t really add anything of value. I just link to someone else’s page and hope that some of the goodness rubs off on me. It’s a personal blog; what are you expecting here?

The top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs

…With Responsibility and Justice For All

I discovered what I think is a very neat idea today. It’s a vision of a sister monument to the Statue of Liberty that would exist on the west coast. Take a look at the Statue of Responsibility.

I have to admit that I was a little shocked by the price tag for this project ($300 million). I don’t know the exact figures, but it seems like that might be more than the price tag of all our existing national monuments combined. One difference, I suppose, is it will be entirely dependent on private funding. (The site includes and an address for donations.) The $300 million figure also include all the marketing and publicity costs they plan at start up, as opposed to just construction.

The more I think about it, the more I think the budget is unreasonable. That’s a shame because I think the concept of dedicating a monument to responsibility as a complement to our monument to liberty is a very cool idea.

If You Treat People Like Children…

For most businesses, a set of policies grows over time.  Whenever something bad happens, you create a rule to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  By the time a business gets really big, it’s usually developed a byzantine list of policies to address things that probably weren’t going to happen again anyway.  The guys at 37signals suggest a different approach.

Some of the leases I signed in college were victims of this same phenomenon.  Because of a problem they had experienced with one tenant years ago, a lease I signed included a clause saying that I would never have any candles lit on the property for the entire year I lived there.  (Birthday cake, anyone?)  Everyone knew this was absurd.  The employee who handed me the lease even pointed out that they didn’t really expect us to never light a candle.  The fact that they included such a trivial (and largely unenforceable) clause in the contract made me question what else in the lease didn’t need to be taken seriously.  Sure they included legal gobbledygook stating that if one part of the lease turned out to be worthless, then everything else would still stand.  I’m not a judge, though.  So what I walked away from that lease signing thinking is that these people expect me to ignore some of the rules.  I know they had an expectation that I would instinctively know which rules belonged on the list to take seriously and which belonged on the list to only break behind closed doors.  I wonder if our lists were the same?

Grupsters: The New Adulthood

Because of the low barrier to entry to being a writer on the Internet, I guess I had just gotten used to amateur writing (including my own).  What a wake up call it was to read an article that benefits from an obviously well-trained and practiced author.  Here’s more on the pathology of the new yuppies.

There’s that tricky word again: passion. What’s with the Grups and passion? It’s all anyone wants to talk about. Passionate parents, passionate workers, passionate listeners to the new album by Wolf Parade… Under the skin of the iPods and the $400 ripped jeans, this is the spine of the Grup ethos: passion, and the fear of losing it.