I don’t know. I just don’t know. I wouldn’t doubt it for a second, though.

Anyone who loves Mondays, raise your hand. Hmm… A grand total of zero. Although the week is looking to be quite easy, I’m already wishing it was over. It used to be that I didn’t mind spending time here at work, but that’s changed in the last couple of months. I think dating this great girl and having awesome weekends is probably the main culprit to my lack of enthusiasm for work.

Speaking of weekends, I caught Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind on Saturday at the Vista Theater in Hollywood. Nice theater but I think we had the 2 absolute worst seats in the house (first row, all the way to the left). As for the flick, quite trippy indeed. Very well acted and nicely edited. Definitely my favorite movie of 2004 so far. It will be interesting to see if Jim Carrey is recognized for it at the end of the year. My guess is he won’t, but he really should be.

I’ve started to take up tennis again. Last time I took it up was with my ex maybe 4 years ago and guess what? I’m taking it up again with the new girl. So the last couple of weekends we’ve been going out and hitting the ball around. I remember being a lot better than I am now, but I guess it will come back in time. No worries though. If I can’t beat ’em with my extreme game, then I’ll do it with my extreme tennis fashion (pics to come).

Back to work for now. Oh, by they way, someone buy this for me. Good luck to us all…

Lessig: “To clear the shelves, and to thank blog readers, I’ve got a few hardcover copies of my last book, The Future of Ideas, that I’ll happily send to anyone who makes a contribution of at least $5 to Creative Commons.”

Being the cheap bastard I am, I happily donated $10 and, hopefully, I’ll have my autographed copy soon enough. Also look for his new book, Free Culture, due out the 25th of this month.

Sorry. I was compelled to share.ul>

MacCentral: “Mac software developer LittleHJ has released BlogStudio for .Mac, a tool to help .Mac subscribers build their own Weblog (“blog”) pages on their .Mac Homepage.

Blog Studio integrates with iLife 04 and iSight, allowing you to mix text and images, create slide shows and music albums, movie albums and file sharing. Twenty templates are included along with 11 photo frames. Keyword searching is supported, RSS 2.0-compliant XML feeds can be generated, as well as calendar views.”

I was able to catch a late showing of The Passion of the Christ last night with a couple of friends. The movie deals with just the last 12 hours of Jesus’ life leading up to his crucifixion with a couple of short flashbacks in between. The way I see it, you can view the movie with 3 different eyes; the movie eye, the history eye, and the religious/spiritual eye.

As a stand alone movie, The Passion falls flat. I know the story. We all do. It’s been done many times over and it just gets worn out. I mean I wasn’t expecting to see some car chase and explosions break out in the middle of it, but they could have made the film look prettier or shot it somewhat more interesting. The first sequence with Jesus being captured is pretty nice. It’s dark and the camera moves in interesting ways, but that’s when it all stops and everything becomes just more bland. Oh and it is a very violent film. It’s so violent that you become numb to it after about 10 minutes of the same old thing. “Oh look. They’re beating him again and again and again…” It gets old very fast.

Historically, it’s a very accurate portrayal of what is written in the Bible. It can be argued that a lot of the Bible isn’t fact, but that’s another discussion all together. If you’ve read it, then you know the film is pretty accurate. Seeing as though I went through 8 years of Catholic school, I have a pretty decent understanding of the story and they nailed a lot of details that other short films and movies have left out. Even though I knew what was coming up, it was fun to see if it was really going to be addressed or not and I was always surprised when it was.

Spiritual eye time. This one is a lot harder. You have to understand that Catholicism was beaten into my head up into high school and since then, I’ve been pretty non-active with it. Mel Gibson has repeatedly said that he wants people to understand what Jesus went through in his final hours. The message that kept screaming in my head was, “Look at what he did for you! You owe him big time.” The priests and teachers in school basically did the same thing. “Living you life according to Jesus is the least you can do if you don’t want to go to hell.” The preachers scare you into believing what they wanted you to believe and this “vision” of Mel Gibson’s tries to do exactly the same thing. Keep the people in fear and they’ll consume what you want them to. If you really wanted to show the passion of Christ, why not show a little more about who he was and what he did during his life instead of how he was murdered?

As for the film being risky and controversial, I don’t see it. The anti-Semitism everyone’s been talking about, nonexistent in my eyes. I mean how risky is it really to release a pro-Christ film in pro-Christian America?

In the end, all I see is a unpolished, poorly produced flick created by another preacher trying to push his message across using the some of the most extreme fear tactics possible and the one thing it had going for it, the shock value, becomes completely muddled by the overabundant violence. This is a bad film, but everyone should take the time and go see just because it is a piece of art that will provoke both positive and negative thought.

Anyone else seen it? Thoughts?

See anything interesting at the 2004 Geneva Motor Show? I think you know what I’m gonna rave about already. Check out the BMW Concept M5.

I know I haven’t been updating too much lately and that it’s been a while since anything interesting has touched this site, but I’ve definitely updated a lot more than some people I know. I guess there’s just not that many interesting things to talk about lately. Just a quick observation.

I know. I know. I haven’t been updating. I really mean to. There’s a lot that’s been going on and it’s all good. Until I can find the time to give you a full on update, though, check out what’s inside the iPod mini.

The 2004 Photo Marketing Association show kicks off for the public in Las Vegas today and Digital Photography Review has a very nice show report that sums up most of the major releases. Some things I’m interested in… The Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro is looking to be just as bad ass as the S2 is (and I really love that S2). Konica Minolta’s Maxxum 7 Digital could be a nice budget D-SLR. Keep your fingers crossed and maybe Kodak’s DCS Pro SLR/n will be everything that the disappointing 14n promised to be (which is good). Canon’s EOS-1D Mark II is pure awesomeness. As far as I’m concerned, it’s easily going to be the “end all, be all” of D-SLRs right now.