Coffee snobbery: we’ve all experienced it. We’ve all been frustrated by encounters with our own personal Ravens. Few of us know how to respond with anything other than withholding a tip. But Jeff Simmermon’s epic “Hold that espresso between your knees” rant on the subject, following an encounter at Arlington’s Murky Coffee, is now the stuff of legend (bonus points for the Five Easy Pieces pull).

The fame of this isn’t because his post or his situation (Murky refused to serve him an iced espresso, and then castigated him when he ordered an espresso and a cup of ice) is unique - it’s because it inspired this vicious reaction from Murky’s owner. Enjoy, and then come back here (oh, and of course, since this is wifi central, the original conversation was overheard and immediately blogged at WeLoveDC).

Coffee snobs are everywhere these days, and Murky’s owner is just being honest about being one of them. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, my first job was as a Starbucks barista. I worked the morning shift almost exclusively - getting up before 5 AM, driving through the dark and dodging the backroad wildlife, downing a quad shot, setting up the store in time for the first arrivals, who stumbled in like clockwork. I actually chose mornings, because I liked the customers better: fewer snobs. If you worked in the afternoons, you’d get middle aged parents, kids in tow, who thought they knew everything about coffee. They’d ask for shots pulled to ridiculously specific seconds, and temperatures of milk as hot as the fire of the sun.

I remember one customer in particular, a middle aged woman who talked a great deal about her cat, who insisted on 12-13 second shots, and half-skim, half-2% milk heated to exactly 180 degrees in her latte. The first time I worked an afternoon, she came in when I was on bar. I couldn’t believe she would actually want this drink, but I made it anyway, to her specifications. She walked away, took a sip, and immediately turned around.

“You didn’t make this right,” she said. “The shots are wrong.”

“Okay, how about I make it again?”

“The milk tastes bad. I think you’re using bad milk. Throw out that batch and use something else.”

“I’ll make it again.”

I made it again - this time, I pulled the shots to a more normal 18 seconds (thankfully, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t crane her neck around the bar) to see. I heated the milk to 140. I gave her the drink. She tasted it with a scowl.

“Oh, this is much better!” she said. “Yes, I think it was the milk you used before - be careful to check the date!” Then she smiled at me: “You’re lucky you’re new, and I’m a good customer, or I’d be more mad about that.”

Milk, I knew, scalds at 180 degrees.

She would come back again and again, and next time requested that I make her that special drink, since I did it right. Everybody thinks their drink is unique. But she’d just ordered a very simple, standard latte.

I loved mornings because of the absence of this customer type. Nobody is awake enough to complain about seconds or ten degrees one way or the other. They want to wake up, and they want to wake up fast. You are the avenue to them waking up. And here, try a lemon knot. By the end of the first month, I knew everyone’s drinks from open to about 10 AM - I could run bar without asking for orders, making the same drinks before they even called them out. It was excellent. When I left Starbucks after a little more than a year to head off to college, customers brought me going away gifts - including one sweet woman who brought me a lovely book of stories by Turgenev.

These days, I still go back to that Starbucks on occasion - of all the megachains, I still prefer their unground beans the best - and I use French pressed coffee pretty much exclusively. I use this for espresso. But I’m not above stopping in a diner when I’m on the road - even that’s better than nothing.

But even I have limits. I have to confess, I don’t like Murky Coffee. I’ve been there twice - the Arlington shop has a good location, you’ve probably driven past it a hundred times if you’re local - and both times, I found the coffee to be … subpar. As in, filtered through sweaty handmade socks subpar. I get that some people like this stuff. But that’s the whole damn point: it’s okay for them to like it, and okay for me to not like it. This isn’t a debate about something serious, like faith, politics, or game consoles. It’s just coffee. It’s not wine, it’s not cheese, it’s not even bread. Baristas learn their trade in a week of trial and error, not a sommelier school.

The mistake Murky’s owner makes in his response to the customer is referring to what they create at his coffee shop as “art.” Wake up, people: it isn’t. Good coffee is beautiful because its taste is perfect, well-crafted, and memorable - because it reminds you of a place or a feeling, of a conversation with friends, of a time in your life. That’s not art. That’s just good food.

This is America. As Chef Gusteau would say: anyone can make coffee. And they can make it the way they like it. Even if they really do figure out that they want 180 degree lattes, god bless their scorched tastebuds. There are better things to be a snob about.

I am not supposed to be happy about what Josh Hamilton did the other night. At least, not if I read the sports blogs out there. I’m supposed to put on my shiny pretentiousness hat, given out with every .com purchase on GoDaddy, and approach Hamilton’s story with sarcasm and ridicule for the man’s faith. Maybe dismiss him as old news. Maybe put up an old mugshot from his crack-addicted days and mock him as a jackass. Maybe make some crack about how he’s going to give that worship up since he didn’t win the Home Run Derby, and that he’ll keep switching religions til he does. He just hit 35 homers, yeah, whatever.

But I’ll leave that to the commenters at Deadspin.

This article from 2006 wasn’t the first one I’d read about Josh Hamilton and his tragic tale of personal failure. Neither was this eerily similar one from 2007, or any of the other profiles out there. I can’t remember what it was. But I know it was a long time ago. Way before he never made it past A ball. Way before he ended up as one of the worst draft picks of all time (according to ESPN, number 35).

I remembered seeing a TV interview with Hamilton when he was drafted 1st overall in 1999, watching it in my college dorm and realizing he was my age - and that he looked like just a good, All-American kid - and I remember reading about how it all fell apart. How he made it all fall apart. How he blew all his money, got kicked out, driven down. How he disappeared.

I saw a picture of him in a magazine in 2003. This was the new Josh Hamilton, staring out of sullen, sunken eyes - a picture that said drug addict, bust, failure. He didn’t look like The Natural - he looked like any other Crown Royal-swilling crack addicted piece of white trash - covered in tattoos, garish and ornate, demons and patterns, his skin telling of late nights and drug fueled blackouts and lost memories. As Dave Sheinin wrote: The Devil and the Son of God, waging war.

There’s a plot twist to this one, though. The Devil lost.

It’s funny the way you start paying attention to an athlete - one who’s never played on any of my teams, or even in the same state. But for the past several years, every roto league I’ve been in, I’ve drafted Josh Hamilton. First it was just the last pick of each round - like he was a mascot or something. Then earlier. Then this year, I took him in the sixth round, knowing the eyebrows of others would rise…and at the halfway mark of the season, he’s ranked 4th in points among all Fantasy Baseball players.

He says he made the long road back out of the blackness thanks to his loving family and his Christian faith. He says it’s saved his life. And he’s not shy about it. He wants to tell everybody. He knows where he’s come from, and what a gift this second - or is it third, or fourth - chance is.

I get a lot of abuse in visiting cities, but it only bothers me when people are vulgar around kids. The rest I can handle. Some of it is even funny. In St. Louis, I was standing in rightfield when a fan yelled, “My name is Josh Hamilton, and I’m a drug addict!” I turned around and looked at him with my palms raised to the sky. “Tell me something I don’t know, dude,” I said. The whole section started laughing and cheering, and the heckler turned to them and said, “Did you hear that? He’s my new favorite player.” They cheered me from that point on.

So I’ll leave it to more jaded writers to mock how Hamilton said he’d dreamed of this moment - of stepping to the plate at Yankee Stadium, hitting in the Home Run Derby. How he’d dreamed it two years ago, when the whole thing seemed like just a fantasy, an impossibility for a former drug addict whose best hope was a minor league career and a steady paycheck. How his faith led him back from the brink - faith not in his own ability, but in something greater. They can mock. It’s what they do.

As for me, if I’d been in the park the other night, I would’ve been chanting his name with all the rest, realizing that, whatever Hamilton’s career in the big leagues turns out to be in the years ahead, for this night - in this moment - we were all witnesses to a resurrection.

>> Some people have the tendency to see politics in everything. It’s often there, yes - I’m sure you could dissect the politics of Dora the Explorer if you wanted to, and without Googling, I’m confident someone has - but it really does detract from just experiencing a work of pop art. [Not everything is politics politics politics - I recall hearing about the director of some piece of horror dreck, perhaps it was The Hills Have Eyes 2, arguing in a plea for relevance that his movie was a response to the Iraq War. Yeah, sure it was buddy.] Such is the case with the lovely Wall-E, which - while not the best thing Pixar has ever created (The Incredibles, Toy Story 2, and Ratatouille are better films - and Nemo is more beautiful) - is a lovely, excellent piece of cinema, and superior to just about anything else you’ll see this year from any studio.

But it seems like a lot of folks are getting stuck on the lecture underneath Wall-E, as opposed to just viewing it as a piece of film art that is incredibly ambitious and challenging. For my own part, I just recommend reading one review - Lileks’:

Pixar’s gift for deft, precise, economical character delineation might have hit its apogee with Eve. It’s all in the tilt of the head and the shape of the eyes – the latter defined by ten blue lines. At first they have two or three shapes; by the end they’ve adopted the shape of Wall-E’s own eyes, indicating her own progression towards awareness and empathy. She is a hard plastic cipher at the beginning; by the end, she is Princess Charming. Literally. (That’s another Disney throwback reference I haven’t seen anyone else note.)

…

Wall-E’s actions when he sits down, knocks his treads together and pats the seat next to him may, I suspect, have been vetted and discussed and considered at great length. (Or not.) It’s the most overtly human action he makes in the entire film – it’s not emulative of humans, it’s instinctive.

Eve’s vocalizations change here, if I recall correctly – there’s nothing in her previous utterances that reveal any emotion that’s not consistent with top-level programming. “No – no” is the moment that makes us see what Wall-E saw in her – and just to underscore the Pixar gift, the moment is understated. Prior to this she’s been an impatient professional.

Just scroll down in the Videos section, and watch the Space Walk.

Update: I noticed that more than a few online critics have taken the opportunity to rank the Pixar films now that there are enough of them to do so. Here’s my own Top Ten, FWIW - it clearly displays my Brad Bird bias:

10. Lifted (I know it’s a short)
9. A Bug’s Life
8. Cars
7. Toy Story
6. Finding Nemo
5. Wall-E
4. Monsters, Inc.
3. Ratatouille
2. Toy Story 2
1. The Incredibles

The second case, of which the Beltway population is very well aware, concerned the first decision in over a century that determines the scope of the Second Amendment´s protection for an individual right to keep and bear arms. On this matter, Sen. Obama had been equally definitive. Just this November, when asked by the Chicago Tribune about their candidate´s opinion, the campaign responded that “Sen. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.” In the Illinois State Senate, he voted to ban gun shows, supported limiting citizen´s right to purchase guns, opposed allowing retired police officers to have the right to concealed carry, and opposed protecting homeowners who fire upon an intruder in self defense from lawsuits. To this day, he supports overriding state laws with a nationwide federal ban on concealed carry permits.

On this matter as well, Sen. Obama evolved. In this case, the word the campaign chose to use was “inartful.” “That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator’s consistent position,” spokesman Bill Burton told ABC News.

Barack Obama, it appears, does not know the Barack Obama who believed the DC gun ban, the most extreme in the nation, to be constitutional.

The internet is flooded with movie lists. Search for virtually any variety, any theme, any mishmash of tags and qualities and plot twists, and you can find a top 10, top 20, or even top 100 list. The best Top Films list, by my measure, can be found over at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They – but one of the reasons it’s the best is that it can shift and adapt with time, based on the shifting opinions of critics, writers, and the internet populace. Of course, I fully expect that in the ever more wiki-friendly existence of the future, where everyone’s an equal critic, Battlefield Earth will champion all such lists. So here’s one more static one, purely subjective in every way, of what I consider Ten Beautiful Films You May Not Have Seen.

There are plenty of beautiful films that are quite popular and successful – from the old black and white classics to the Technicolor epics to the modern masterpieces. Many of them are found on lists like this one, from the French magazine Cahiers du cinema.

I thought it might be useful, though, to consider a few films that probably won’t make it high on any list like that one – whether it’s because even if they’re visually impressive, they’re flawed in some obvious way, or have a script that can’t match their cinematography, or they’ve got some unforgivably irritating element that overwhelms the good in them. For the record, I think this describes just about every movie Guy Pearce has ever made – he had a good six films that I considered but rejected for this list, none of them because of him.

There are other beautiful movies that I considered and rejected – usually because they’re too popular (see: Godfather, The), too CGI or effects-heavy (see: Lord of the Rings – it’s great, but this is animation, not reality), nothing that’s only noir (I love dark movies, but something like The Third Man or Thief may be intense and powerful, but since that’s all they do, they can’t really qualify as visual beauty for what they don’t show), or so iconic that anyone who’s a student of cinema has already seen them (hence why there’s no Hitchcock on this list, nor any of the other old classics). Films that missed the cut for the aforementioned reasons include Citizen Kane, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben Hur, Patton, The Natural, Night of the Hunter, The Big Sleep, Charade, Roman Holiday, Manhattan, Bullitt, The Getaway (Ali McGraw never looked better), Mystery of Rampo, Blade Runner, The Sand Pebbles, Chinatown, The Sting, Apocalypto, O Brother Where Art Thou, North by Northwest, Miller’s Crossing, Branagh’s Hamlet, The Abyss, Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Fountain, Sexy Beast, The Last Emperor, Empire of the Sun, George Washington, The Rules of the Game, Heat, Unforgiven, Dark City, The Painted Veil, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Breaker Morant, The Battle of Algiers, The Incredibles, The Mission, Layer Cake, La Roue, Napoleon, and Metropolis.

Oh, and of course, Commando.

I had a hard time with The Life Aquatic, this blog’s namesake and perhaps the last good Wes Anderson film we’re going to get now that he’s actively declared war on the concept of plot (here’s hoping that’s not the case), but ultimately decided it was too much of a picture book. Besides, everyone’s seen it.

I struggled with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America – but ultimately decided it’s too well known, you’d recognize all the people in it, and as wonderful as it is, there are so many other films that capture New York City.

And then there was the hardest one for me to cut of all, Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans – a gorgeous and underrated film which manages to be both the perfect chick flick AND the perfect guy movie all at once – I can see it now, the women walking out of the theater saying, “She threw herself over the edge – so sad, and so romantic!” as the guys say “Did you see that? He chopped that guy in half with that axe thing! It was awesome!” But it will make a prominent appearance on the next list I’m planning, and it was quite popular, so you’ve probably already seen it, too.

So that leaves us with these, in no particular order.

The New World

Just unbroken cinematic beauty, from the first note to the last. When they initially planned to film this movie, Terence Malick and his crew assumed they’d have to find somewhere remote, outside of the United States even – but on a lark, they decided to scout the Tidewater area, and took a trip up the Chickahominy. They ended up realizing that the location near Jamestown was largely unchanged. And so the forests you see are the forests they saw, give or take 300+ years.

Not everyone liked Malick’s film. But the people who liked it seemed to love it, too. I’m glad it has such a strong place in the heart of a few critics, like Jeffrey Overstreet, and I recall Ross Douthat loving it too (but his review, on the old American Scene blog appears lost to the sands of the unsearchable net). It reminds me, as it did him, of the old Robert Frost poem, The Gift Outright.

What’s more, I’ve felt on repeat viewings that the underlying story – the tale behind the gorgeously filmed surface of this movie (all natural light, almost all 65mm stock) – goes much deeper than you might think. The relationship with Pocahontas can be viewed as an allegory for the foundation of America. Bear with me now, it’s not as silly as it sounds: Comparing the personality types of the courageous risk-taking Discoverer in Colin Farrell’s John Smith and the steady, uninspiring, yet tough and reliable Farmer in Christian Bale’s John Rolfe, and you see the two personalities that made the nation possible – the explorer and the maker. Smith, the unreliable rascal whose fear and shady past motivated him to head toward the far reaches of the known sphere, discovers Pocahontas. But you cannot trust this man to build a country, to have the wherewithal to work the land, endure hardship, and make a life worth living in this new world – to be faithful, committed, and make something out of it all. Something like America.

The Searchers

I don’t think it’s all that pretentious to say that if you are an American film buff of any significant level, you’ll have seen The Searchers. Merely a modest commercial success in its time, the respect for this film, its influence and appeal have only grown, chiefly because of a change in understanding of a key relationship and plot point – never spoken of aloud, only implied.

The upshot is: lots of smart people love it. This in itself has sparked a backlash, and a sequence of defenses and analyses, and a weirdly irritating essay by the otherwise wonderful Jonathan Lethem. But the fact that John Milius weeps at John Wayne’s performance should be enough to make you watch it.

Not the perfect western by any means – it plods and halts at points – this is nonetheless a movie of great, epic, expansive beauty. You must see this film, even if you skip all the others on this list.

City of God (Cidade de Deus)

You’ve probably heard of this one. City of God is tragic, ruthless, violent and unforgiving. Only one professional actor is in the whole thing – it’s all on the edge, and there’s no games in this thing. The youngsters that populate this tale are murderous and plotting, and you understand why they have the strength of will to run a profitable drug trade, if only for a few years.

Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, the tales in this story are continued in City of Men, at least in spirit. But the original film is still the piece of moviemaking that will haunt you for days after you view it.

The Red Violin (Le Violon Rouge)

This is not a particularly successful movie. It tries to do too much – using a violin, its music, and its ownership as the major pieces in an across-the-ages plotline that is a tad ludicrous. The bodice-ripping tendencies of the second act – with the usually superb Greta Scacchi (if you can, dig up her excellent little turn as Lady Macbeth) and the “he’s better as a funny guy” Jason Flemyng – are laugh inducing. And the whole thing seems overwrought and gimmicky, sort of what you’d expect from a director who made his name doing Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.

That said, the cinematography is flat out gorgeous at points. The use of color is brilliant, particularly in the flow of character-types through the ages, and the seamlessness of some scenes. The soundtrack, played by the brilliant Joshua Bell, will blow you away. Don’t think too hard about the story – just get swept away by the experience of a beautiful piece of modern cinema.

Barry Lyndon

I never really liked this as a movie – I confess, I don’t love post-black & white Kubrick as much as I should, I still feel like The Killing, Lolita, and Dr. Strangelove are just all-around more watchable and engaging films than 2001, Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket – but I swear, Barry Lyndon is just gorgeous to behold. John Alcott’s work on the film is the stuff of legend (as far as I know, this film still features the use of the biggest aperture in movie history).

It’s still kind of amusing that Ryan O’Neal got this part because he was considered a bigger star at the time than Robert Redford, so it’s the only way Kubrick could get the movie financed. Later, it would turn out that Kubrick offered the part to Redford anyway, only to be turned down. But O’Neal’s not the reason to see this. These beautiful scenes are.

While others may disagree, I truly believe this is the most visually appealing movie Kubrick ever made. And that’s something worth seeing.

Kagemusha

This had to be on here. Yeah, I know that Ran is a better movie – but the first time I saw Kagemusha is still clear as crystal. I’m still torn about which one deserves to be on this list, but I feel like Ran is more popular. Maybe I should just leave it at: see them both, and decide for yourself.

Ronin

Ah, a beautiful car chase movie – and not a stupid one, either. One of the best casts you’ll ever see onscreen at the same time: De Niro, Reno, Skarsgard, McElhone, and a total of three Bond villains – Bean, and Pryce. This movie has characters, yes – but it is all about the cars. Car chases in Bullitt are classic and American, car chases in The French Connection are blunt and urban, but car chases in Ronin are brilliantly varied and elegantly European.

The camera work in this film is excellent stuff, edgy but not overdone. Parisian cinematographer Robert Fraisse, who has a rather odd filmography, makes some excellent choices, elevating this piece far above the realm of the normal shoot-em up. And if this is the last adrenaline rush for De Niro, who hasn’t made a single good action film since (though I’ve got my hopes up about the Michael Mann-helmed Frankie Machine, due out in two years – that is, if he survives what looks like the very flop-worthy Righteous Kill), it’s a classic one.

This is Frankenheimer’s best cinematic work since The Train, and it’s got a pretty good story (albeit MacGuffin centered – but c’mon, even Hitchcock used that) with a great script, though I’m sure all the best parts are from the (uncredited) David Mamet edits. If you’re a guy, you’ve probably seen this already. If you haven’t: grow a pair and do it now.

A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles)

So let’s follow the car chase movie with snappy Mamet lines with a French romance war epic. But it absolutely deserves to be on this list. The trailer is here, but there’s a clip below that’s better for not having the “I’m the important voice trying to sell this to American audiences” voiceover.

I can’t say anything about this movie that does justice to it as a work of art. Just – watch a few scenes. You’ll see it. Oh, and: eat your heart out, Atonement.

Road to Perdition

For being the most profitable film on the list, this is not a great movie. Tom Hanks is poorly cast in it, and uncomfortable with the part of father/heavy. The kid is an irritation. Daniel Craig is one dimensional. Sam Mendes’ directing is decent, but not really that imaginative. It’s based on a comic book and feels like it. It is a cold movie, and a wet, wet movie – dripping with rain. If you want an Irish mob movie, see Miller’s Crossing.

But let me tell you – visually, it’s like watching Edward Hopper brought to life. Conrad Hall won the Academy Award for Cinematography – his first came for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). He was a genius. And this is just masterful.

For that fact alone, if this is Paul Newman’s last on-screen part, he can be proud of it. “There are only murderers in this room, Michael. Open your eyes. This is the life we chose. The life we lead. And there is only one guarantee—none of us will see heaven.”

Before the Rain (Pred Dozhdot)

This was the film that started me thinking about this whole concept, when the alert came across my watchlist that Criterion was releasing a newly restored version of Before the Rain on DVD (at last). I saw it years ago in a screenwriting class, and it amazed me at the time. Unlike some of the other films on this list, all aspects of this effort make for a worthy achievement.

It’s hard to make a film about ethnic conflict in the Balkans that speaks to the unending, self-perpetuating, and convoluted nature of these deadly clashes. It seems like so many of the locale-centered movies that you see in America today are in the same places – New York, Los Angeles, the same backgrounds, the same forests, the same hills – to the point where you can go see an average flick like Mission: Impossible 3, and you’ll spot the same bridge setups and Euro backgrounds you’ve seen in a hundred other movies. It’s almost comforting, like seeing the same set week after week on your favorite sitcom, nothing disturbed or out of place, and all the furniture undisturbed.

In a movie like Before the Rain, you may recognize all of one setting or location, and probably only one actor: Rade Serbedzija, the figure at the heart of the sad story. But the performances are complemented by a sense of scale and land that is memorable and striking, and the camera work here – for an inexperienced writer/director in Milcho Manchevski – is just an amazingly well-crafted thing, giving the viewer the impression that they are caught in an ever-swirling trap of time and land and culture. In real life at least, there is always an opportunity to break out of this whirlwind – but not in this film.

If you couldn’t tell: I really like BBC Radio.

Video game ads can be, quite frankly, terrible. If you’ve watched any TV appealing to the nerd demographic, you’ve seen them. Horribly forgettable and captive of their genre, they use the same crunching music over and over again, the same jumpy cuts from one FPS kill to the next. Even good games can be made to look uninteresting and cliched - while great games, like the beautiful Shadow of the Colossus, just aren’t the sort of things that play well in the 30-second ad format. It’s similar to movie trailers that way - the more features, the more complexity, the less ability to simplify and sell - so a crappy and formulaic genre film paired with a recognizable drumbeat, an ominous voiceover, and a quick jump cut at the end is transformed into nicely motivational preview, while plot-heavy indie films can be harder to scale down. Sometimes impossible.

That said, after seeing the PS3 ad mashing up Shakespeare’s Henry V St. Crispin’s Day speech tonight, I was reminded that really is some quality ad work out there. So here’s a quick list of my personal Top 10 Video Game Ads.

The only rules: no fan made inclusions - otherwise Half Life Full Life Consequences or Half Life in 60 Seconds would take the cake, and no print media, even though that’s where some of the best work has been done (who can forget the impressive Divine Comedy PSP promotion).

10 - Water Balloons

A devious little ad promoting the online multiplayer capability of XBox Live, set to the creepy strains of “Teddy Bear Picnic.” Frank Budgen has done some great work on this front - he worked on at least three of the ads on this list, besides his work for Nike and other big names.

9 - Gears of War: Mad World

This is on here mostly as a contrast with the kind of FPS game ad I noted before. It’s similar in some respects to this ad for BioShock set to “Beyond the Sea”, but the Gears ad featuring Gary Jules’ Mad World has an enduring following, and hits the right note for Gears’ post-apocalyptic environment.

8. George Plimpton doesn’t know Henry Thomas

This ad just gets more bizarre every time I see it. George Plimpton was the spokesman for Intellivision, and made a host of good ads for them, but the humor here is that Henry Thomas had just finished making E.T. - the idea that Plimpton wouldn’t recognize him was just ridiculous.

7. Pole Position

Turn your speakers down for another throwback. “Hey! You look like a real jerk!” “Well, I am a corporate executive…”

6. Mountain

Another multiplayer ad, with much the same feel as the XBox one, albeit for a different system. But I love this one more, not just for the soundtrack, but the perfect encapsulation of the exhilarating feeling you’ve experienced if you’ve ever broken into a national Top 100 list (I’ve only done this once - Warhawk, right when it came out) on a multiplayer game.

5. Ratchet and Clank

The Ratchet and Clank ads were ahead of their time in their Youtube-esque feel. I always liked the one with the gravity boots best. Also, Cloverfield is totally a ripoff of these ads.

4. Halo 3

These are all ads from the Halo 3 “Believe” campaign, which are just a phenomenal representation of the war documentary feel. I wish the game was as good as these ads - but I’ve always loved the initial teaser, which ran during the Super Bowl, even better:

3. PS9

Now this is a classic. There is still a minor cult around this ad - and a running joke that whatever console problems there are, they’ll be fixed at the PS9 stage - and the design in it is excellent. The only problem: at the rate we’re going technologically, I doubt we’ll have to wait til 2078.

2. “Banned” XBox Shooting ad

I still kind of doubt that this ad was actually “banned”, as opposed to just released as a bit of internet fodder. But it does take me back to the days of running around the backyard with fingers raised or nerf guns, and the inevitable arguments that would emerge about whether someone got hit or not.

1. Double Life

By far, the best ad ever done for any game system ever. And one of the few bizarre ads created for Sony (and there have been a lot of those, many of which are magnificent triumphs of awful) that actually works. This doesn’t just work: it speaks to anyone who’s ever played a game and loved it so much as to enjoy “a life of dubious virtue.”

Scarlett Johansson is surprised that Barack Obama responds to her emails. As the Politico reports:

Johansson is somewhat shocked that he keeps up their back-and-forth correspondence. “You’d imagine that someone like the senator who is constantly traveling and constantly ‘on’–how can he return these personal e-mails?” she asks.

The Weekly Standard’s Vic Matus suggests there must be many other things that shock Scarlett Johansson, and offers a list. A few friends offer their own suggestions:

- She never has a problem finding poolboys to help with the tanning oil. “Everyone’s just so kind about that, even if they can’t speak English they understand!”
- She’s always had more male friends than female friends. “Guys just get along with me better - I think I must be a tomboy!”
- People always ask her to be a maid for Halloween. “Do I give off a maid vibe?”
- You have to have a private photo shoot every time you want to renew your driver’s license. “They never use all the shots!”
- Airport Security’s new nude inspection regulation. “But I suppose it’s all for our safety!”
- Charlie Sheen is a bikini inspector. “And he’s, like, ALWAYS working!!”
- Woody Allen insists on bringing her along with him, even if they’re not on set. “He bought me an ice cream cone the other day, and he insisted on staying while I ate it. Woody’s so nice!”
- Bill Clinton asked Barack Obama for her e-mail address. “Can you imagine? A president - interested in ME!”

Mr. Kmiec and his small band of Obamacons are the new Lotophagi, the “Lotus Eaters” of Homer’s Odyssey. When landing on the territory of the cult-like Lotophagi, Ulysses’s crew was given a flower to eat “which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus Eaters without thinking further of their return.”

Mr. Kmiec and others like him can munch on the flowery prose of Mr. Obama for as long as they want, drifting along on the wafted air of Hope and Change, fooling themselves into forgetting the principles that they once professed to believe. Don’t mourn the Obamacons in their current state, fellow conservatives: We can safely leave them to their happy way which will only bring them heartbreak when they wake up to a world with Supreme Court Justice John Edwards and a whole mouth of grass-stained teeth.

>> “The difference between truth and confusion.”