• What was the trouble between Will and Elisabeth again? How come the British and Davy Jones work together? Why does everyone double-cross each other all the time? What was so special about that saber? You are expected to remember everything that happened in Dead Man's Chest, otherwise you will have no idea what is going on.
• The opening scene, while not bad at all, seems completely out of place, both in tone (very grim, with maybe even a political comment) and in content (is there any connection to the rest of the story?). The parts that try to channel Terry Gilliam and Braveheart do not work, either.
• The greatness of Johnny Depp does not particularly scale well when multiplying him.
• Norrington's part should have been bigger after he played such a central role in Dead Man's Chest.
• The final battle between the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman redeems the film somewhat, though one has to wonder why the rest of the two armadas were not doing anything at the time, why the commander of the East India Company chose to let himself blown to pieces like he did, and why Calypso just walked off.

5 points. And now you have to excuse me, because Curse of the Black Pearl is on TV.

05/31 Narita -> Charles de Gaulle -> Frankfurt -> Friedberg
06/02 Friedberg -> Dortmund
06/03 Dortmund -> Friedberg
06/05 Friedberg -> Frankfurt -> Charles de Gaulle -> Tours
06/06 Tours -> Paris
06/09 Paris -> Versailles
06/11 Versailles -> Charles de Gaulle -> Narita

One of the oldest (and potentially most useful) Mac features are text clippings (probably works with other types of content as well). Selecting some text in any application and dragging it to the desktop creates a text clip file there. You can then later drag this clip back into other applications, which will paste the text there. Double-clicking on the text clip will open it in the Finder, so that you can see the contents of the clip. Unfortunately, that is all you can do with it. It would be trivial to allow editing the contents of the clip, but you cannot. It would be even more trivial to allow selecting parts of the clip so that you can do selective pastes. I run into this problem every time I want to paste my postal code, or some password into a web form. Since I cannot directly paste only the postal code part of my address clipping, I have to either retype it (here it would be nice if the clipping window floated on top of everything else) or paste it into in intermediate text area and copy/paste from there again. Lame. And so easy to be fixed.

So my wish for the next OS upgrade would be this tiny improvement. But since it has not happened in the last ten years, and everyone will be working on Time Machine, or Expose, or iPhone integration, I do not have high hopes here. I'll probably install some freeware tool to help me out here.

Update: Oh my god, this is retarded. Apparently, from 10.3, you can select parts of the text clipping and Command-C them, but the text will never actually highlight. I am assuming that being able to covertly select from text areas that are declared noSelection is a bug, but I hope they do not fix this before they fix Text Clippings. You can also hack a Finder resource file to remove the noSelection property (which fixes the highlighting issue), and even remove the readOnly property to be able to edit the clipping (although the changes will not be saved).

Studio Ghibli (creators of popular animated movies such as My Neighbour Totoro, Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away) operate a fine museum in Mitaka, and it is a must-see for anyone remotely interested in their art. Tickets have to be bought online or at Lawson convenience stores well (weeks) in advance, but because of the restricted number of admissions it appears to be less packed than some other museums at weekends (though still far from empty), so overall this approach works out for everyone. You get to see an overview of the history and technology of animated films, not limited to Ghibli works. A main attraction is a spinning table with character models in different poses that when synchronized with stroboscopic flashes of light creates a very real illusion of movement. Other rooms show sketches, reference libraries, cameras, film frames, and other tools of the trade. The building is an attraction in itself, kind of like a Hundertwasser house with spiral staircases, low tunnels, and lots of greenery. Kids (only them, unfortunately) can climb into the Cat Bus, there is a cinema showing exclusive short films, a special exhibition about other artists (currently Tolstoy and the Three Bears), and of course a museum shop.

• Meikyu Conquest
• Die Baumeister von Arkadia
• Terra Nova

My main complaint with Spiderman 2 was that it did not have a satistifying ending, but just set the stage for the next one (not quite as blatant as Dead Man's Chest, though). Well, Spiderman 3 wraps up the trilogy nicely and brings closure to the Peter/Harry story arc. Special effects (especially the Sandman) are as great as you would expect for such a budget, and Kirsten Dunst is cute as ever.

On the negative side, there are probably too many characters at the expense of how much time each of them can be given for their stories, and one particular horrible scene that can only be excused as a Mask parody.

6 points

You can always depend on the compulsive geeks compiling comprehensive references about their particular field of interest and publishing them on the web. So thanks to the train otaku everyone can enjoy the sounds of (among many others) Yamanote Line and Sobu Line.

PS:I created my Wikipedia account today to link to this amazing resource. What was your first Wikipedia contribution?

After seeing many of the movies (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly... ) that brought Dick the posthumous fame and commercial success that eluded him in his lifetime, I finally got my hands on one of his books. Unfortunately, clearly not his best one.

Lies, Inc. starts out quite interesting: Over-crowded Planet Earth in the future. Rachmael Ben Applebaum is an inter-stellar shipping entrepreneur whose business is ruined when teleportation is invented. It now only takes fifteen minutes to reach the recently discovered Earth-like planet Whale's Mouth. People emigrate to Whale's Mouth by the millions, while almost no one is suspicious of the fact that the teleportation technology works only one way, and the only information about the new paradise are the shiny advertisements issued by the company that runs the teleporters. Applebaum figures that there must be some people wanting to a return trip and decides to set out on the eighteen year flight with his last remaining vessel. Since this is a Dick novel, he is also plagued by hallucinations about being a rat.

So far, so good. This first part of the book had been previously published, with the second part having being rejected by the editor at the time. Turns out, the editor made a good call. The extra material is very difficult to read, and probably not worth the effort. It describes Applebaum's (I think, even that is hard to tell, as the character names seem to change) experiences after being hit by an LSD dart, is very incoherent and not much related to the rest of the book. After this part is finished, the novel drops back into the original storyline and brings it to a rather sudden, unsatisfying end.

Part Two: The Banana Stand keeps the fruit within reach.

Armed with it's originality and swiftness, the mission of Excite is to create value and convey it ahead of the trend.
An impression of refinement and the excitement you feel when opening a jewelry box for the first time...
Sharing thrilling experiences which are not obtainable through a search-only internet service with trend-conscious, mode-sensitive sophisticated city-dwellers this is what Excite is proud of and enjoys most.

Oh my. State-owned. Has Hello Kitty and Doraemon, too.