weekly review roundup

I should probably just do these once a week. Anyhoo, stuff I liked this week:

• I loved Garden State. Fantastic soundtrack and great character study. The plot is a pretty basic love story, but the writing is terrific and the actors make it come to life. It reminded me of how much I loved The Station Agent for similarly strong characters amid a basic story.

• I'll admit that I kind of equate Greg Palast with Matt Drudge in terms of how often he is right, and how often he is blowing something minor out of proportion in order to gain publicity. When someone sent me his new documentary DVD Bush Family Fortunes, I didn't have too high of hopes for it. I finally watched it and although it re-tread over a few topics I've already heard plenty about (the 2000 election), it contained a number of choice bits I've seen nowhere else. Especially damning was a section on Bush getting into the Air National Guard. Several officers and military brass are shown in interviews explaining how insanely difficult it is to enter the air national guard. It requires lots of experience, an impecible record, and has a waiting list thousands of guys deep, but Bush got through it all. Since Bush insists he had no special treatment, hearing military personel explain how unlikely that was definitely drove the point home.
  

• Even though I recently had a crappy time at an American Apparel store, their shirts are still by far the best fitting and softest t-shirts I own. I'm constantly on the lookout for designers that use AA shirts, and Protoculture is on my list of places to watch (esp. the "Please mess with Texas" shirt). NerdNYC is another outfit printing most of their designs on AA that I own, as well as most of  the TV without pity stuff.
  

• I bought my first pre-assembled PC in about 8 years (I've always built my own) after my 18 month old workstation PC fried its nice ASUS motherboard. For $600 I got an HP with half a gig of ram, a processor that was twice as fast as my previous one, a DVD writer, and a 200Gb hard drive, all stock. It was an incredible bargain and aside from backing up my old disks for a few hours, the transfer to a new machine was smooth and painless. I love that all my browser bookmarks are at delicious instead of my local browser -- it made it that much easier to get back up and running.