• Here’s a hilarious April Fools post that I missed seeing on the first. Too funny.
• Against all odds, Michael Bay’s Transformers film continues to look more and more amazing. I think he may have finally found his true calling, where his specific talents can be best utilized. Two years ago, if somebody had told me that there would be a mega-budget Transformers live-action film, I wouldn’t have believed them. Then to find out that Michael Bay was directing was an initial mark against it - but I’ll be darned if the clips and photos like these continue to look like the total geek porn they are.
• COOL picture: San Francisco International Airport at night
• Whoops
• Symantec’s frickin’ licensing portal site sucks. Grrrrrrrr. Aaaaaargh.
• The big news over the last couple days is EMI dropping DRM. This falls under a mixed bag of “careful what you wish for” in my book. Yeah, it’s cool news (as is anything against DRM), but it’s just ANOTHER nail in the coffin for CDs (a bad thing).
• Kieth Richards - one of a kind
• ‘Bout the closest thing you’ll see to a sports related posting on my blog…
• Over the last few years, ABC has made the least sense of all the networks when it comes to schedules. Their choices in shelving the last handful of episodes from shows for their next season is rather odd. Well, they’ve done it again, this time with Men In Trees. Ah well, I’m just happy the show got a pickup for next year. Sad to see Six Degrees bite the dust, but it doesn’t come as a huge shock. ABC has been all over the map with their support of the show.
• Apparently Google stopped short of calling it “infinity and beyond.”
• Holy cow. For you fellow Buffy fans out there, check out this surreal news. Danny Strong (yes, Jonathan himself) has a script he’s written about the 2000 elections being directed by Sydney Pollack for HBO, titled Recount.
• Yippie! Aardman has a new distribution home.

Random Fact Of The Day: The word ‘denim’ comes from ‘de Nimes’, Nimes being the town the fabric was originally produced.

Dialog Of The Day: “I commit. I’m committed. I’m a committee!” (Buffy Summers, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy 7.07)

Video Of The Day: What We Call The News

I’m so far behind in posting movie reviews that I thought I’d add insult to injury and post a comic review. I’m not a big comic person (I read the occasional tie-in and collect a couple series of them, like Battlestar Galactica). I’ve got some of the various Buffy comics from years gone by, but haven’t been a collector of them or anything. It’s great to see Dark Horse releasing their new “Omnibus” collections of all their previous Buffy comics, btw. I figured I’d post this review today, seeing as the second issue is to be released tomorrow (the 4th).

At any rate, on to this comic. Us Buffy fans have been waiting for things like the attempted 3 TV movies to happen, but those have been all but permanently scrubbed. It looked like we’d never see a continuation of our beloved series. Thanks to Joss Whedon’s continued success in the world of comics, he decided to do an official, canonical continuation of the series in comic form, and thus was born the “Season 8″ comics. Issue 1 was released last month. It sold out the initial run of 100,000 darn fast (I didn’t get one in time), turning into Dark Horse Comics’ best selling initial pressing. A second printing was quickly put in motion, with a slightly revamped (sorry) and improved cover (as pictured in this post). I picked up a copy of the second print over the weekend and sat down to enjoy the start of the relaunched story line. I was not disappointed. These new comics are being written by a number of the show’s best writers (and a couple high profile comic writers as well). This first issue is written by the man himself, Joss Whedon. “Season 8″ will last anywhere from 25-50 issues (still an up-in-the-air figure), composed of a number of smaller, multi-issue story arcs (such as this first arc of four issues by Whedon), along with some stand-alone story issues. It’s fantastic to see some of the show’s best writers sign on to do issues, like the excellent Jane Espenson, the “Drews” (Goddard & Greenberg), Steve DeKnight and more.

The story in this initial issue is a lot of fun. We get to see where the characters have developed over the year and a half or so since the story ended on the series. Buffy is her typically strong and sharp-witted self. Xander has a new position of power, but is still the simplistic, nerd-oriented self he always was. Dawn is, well, I’ll leave that one for an amusing surprise. Other characters are as yet unseen, but are certain to appear soon (in fact, Whedon has said that most all the characters will appear in some way or another). The comic form for the story allows many things the show wouldn’t - primarily for budget/practicality reasons. Whedon’s writing is solid and witty, as one would expect. The artwork is gorgeous, and somewhat inventive (I love the 2 page, 4 frame sequence of Buffy walking around Dawn talking to her). The stunning cover by artist Jo Chen is outstanding (as are her following issue covers). Overall, a rousing success. I look forward to reading all the further comics in this series. It’s so great to have the show back. It’s in a different form, but there’s no denying that this is, in fact, the show reborn. Hurray!