Wired Cola

As promised. First, you may wish to read my post-contest malediction, which also usefully includes links to the most relevant pages regarding the contest and my efforts to win a Nissan Cube. Done?

The best marketer-side analysis is by Jesse Hirsh, and in particular his post-awards note explains that (quite sensibly) Nissan and its marketers saw Tuesday night as the beginning of their campaign, not the culmination.

My essay here is mostly contestant-side, and I'll explain what I did and why, what I think I should have done, and how I felt about the contest. Note of course that you're getting a perspective that is personal, possibly naïve, and that of a loser, not a winner.

Lots to say. So much so that this is not the promised contest post-mortem. This is a set of off-the-cuff recriminations coming almost immediately after hearing the contest results.
I did not win. Many others did, notably the seriously deserving Rannie Turingan.
Had I won, this post would have been filled with grateful thanks to the many friends who contributed to this mad project to prove that nerdiness could have a creative expression, and the beginning of making it up to those people.
Instead, I need to blame those people.

Look, we did it for booze money, okay?

Please behold the gaudy ad-badge to the right. It is there to give you an opportunity to enter to win a box set of the Trailer Park Boys TV series. This compelling piece of art has a place close to Wired Cola's heart for its powerful messages about how drugs will ruin your life and how trailer parks are such hopeless places that gentrification would be an unmitigated blessing. Also, Ricky makes Wired Cola laugh.

Wired Cola would like to thank the LIVEDRUNK foundation for their assistance with this project.

It's a well-crafted, serious movie about life, morality and death. It's a hitman comedy. And it has a coke-addled dwarf. I think it was as good as Up, though that should be taken with the grain of salt that I am prejudiced in favor of hitman comedies.
It is also an extended love-letter to Bruges, and the beer-drinking scenes are excellent.
There is much to dispute about the final act, but I think third acts, as a way of discussing movies, are overrated. Try this experiment: take a movie you know well, preferably one with a really dramatic climax, and imagine the entire movie with another plausible finale (rearrange which characters live and die, for example). Does that change what came before? Should it?
The film made me want to go to Bruges. It did not make me want to become a hitman. However, I am not yet bored of well-done talky gangster films. That was a bit of a surprise.

Up is overrated. It could hardly be otherwise: the average critic appears to be describing it as one of the best movies of the year, when in fact it is merely the movie which is guaranteed an Oscar, while DreamWorks provides the movie it beats in the "Best Animated Feature" category.
Up is a flawed masterpiece, and I say this about a movie that made me cry, that I will buy the moment it is released on DVD, and that I will surely watch and re-watch. Without spoiling anything, it is a movie that has set-pieces both large and small that make it mandatory viewing for any animation fan, and nearly mandatory for any film buff. And with that said, everything below this line is ridden with spoilers.

Good news: The cheapest most feature-laden (Firewire!) white MacBook is also faster than its $300-more aluminum brother. Oof!
On the other hand, after 18 months your white plastic case may look like mine:

Remember this? The contest and voting has now closed, and I thank you. Nissan sent me some email not too long ago: judging is completed, the winners have been chosen, and everyone gets to find out at a big event on June 23rd. I will know if I have won a car on that day.
There will also be a post-mortem post in my future.

I was amazed.

I've been to Syros two times before. We've gone through the same guidebook to the island quite often, including using it to plan previous excursions (ask TLO and I about our pointless death-march to see Feredikis' Cave! It's a laff riot).
Somehow, our guide book (Syros: today and yesterday; infuriatingly vague about directions, its only virtue is that it has decent photos and is in English; I recommend pairing it with the best map money can buy and a lot of patience) dedicates two and a half short sentences to describing Ayios Stephanos (St. Stephen's), the church shown above.

Since I wrote a semi-definitive summary of Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey's 2006 retirement from blogging, I think it's only reasonable to inform you that Jacqueline (who I believe has taken her new husband's name, but appears to be semi-obscure about what it is) has reverted to bloggery at a new URL.

Welcome back, Jacqueline.

[This is the first of what should be several notes about Greece; I'm doling them out in pieces because you people have short attention spans. Enjoy. -RjC]
This menu is atypical, but it has to be said:

Yes, you can get beer other than light lagers in Greece, including even some very nice Belgians if you're willing to pay the price (which looks bad, but that 17-Euro beer is a 750; compare this to prices at Stella's on Commercial drive, and they're not that bad, really.
No, wait, I just did the conversion in my head, and that's about a $27 beer. But their price for WiFi access was only 2 Euro/hour.