A seed has been planted. A seed that will grow and mature and take the world by storm. Chances are that it will eventually steal your job and probably your woman too.

Is this some miracle plant that can be cultivated in the most thirsty of rain-deprived lands? Is this some sentient robot created in my garage whose blinking LEDs will be the last thing you see before you perish at its hands...or claws? No. And no.

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Arrested Development - Season One

Would you be surprised if I told you that I don't blog about every movie I watch? That's right, I watch even more than I blog about. I just don't have the time to give a long review for each thing. But here's a review of things I've been watching lately.

First of all, I'm not sure if I've told all of you about (or if you've already discovered) Hulu.com. It's filled with streaming videos of movies and tv shows, from old to new, and has a pretty good selection. This past spring, I followed The Riches and New Amsterdam by watching their newest episodes each week on Hulu. Since I do a lot of data entry at work, my boss doesn't mind if I entertain myself while doing the monotonous work. I like Hulu because you can make a pop out window and shrink it to a very small size. I watch shows in a tiny box in the right-hand corner of my screen. Most of the time, I don't even look at it, but it's so nice to have some entertainment to make the hours go by quickly. I also like that the commercials are only about 10-15 seconds long.

I decided to start with the As in the TV section of Hulu, and have been wading my way through Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I'm almost done with season two. Wait a sec, I feel like I've already talked about this on my blog. Well, if I haven't, I'd like to say that Hitchcock is brilliant. His monologues in each show are wonderful, his stabs at advertisement are endless and hilarious, and the stories are all over the place. Sometimes a story can be filled with dark humor, but sometimes it is straight-out thriller material. I've enjoyed watching these a lot, although I've learned that any time a woman sees a dead body or a killer, I should turn down my volume immediately, because there are plenty of blood-curdling screams in this show.

I've also been catching up with all of my TiVoed episodes of Masterpiece (Theatre), which has been revamped this year. They just played many of Jane Austen's stories. A few were old productions by Masterpiece Theatre, but several were new, including Northinger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Sense and Sensibility. Northinger Abbey was a little bit odd in style, but I did end up enjoying it. Mansfield Park was a little more abrupt in its ending than I expected, but it somehow packed an unexpected punch. I really liked the casting of Sense and Sensibility, and thought the attention to setting was great as well. I also watched Masterpiece's production of A Room with a View, which was very good (some good casting there as well), but ultimately I think I prefer the Merchant Ivory version starring Helena Bonham Carter. Right now I am finishing up My Boy Jack, which stars Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) as Rudyard Kipling's son, who is determined to go fight in the War, despite a significant problem with his eyesight. I'm really enjoying it.

Some movies I watched without reviewing recently are The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the first three Indiana Jones movies, and Michaelangelo Antonioni's La Notte. Munchausen was a pleasant surprise. I had heard many mixed reviews, but I loved its breadth and insanity. Believe it or not, I only saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time a couple of years ago, and just in the past couple of months, I caught up with the other two original movies. Everyone told me I'd hate Temple of Doom. I only hated Kate Capshaw. I'm a fan of Jonathan Ke Quan, who played Short Round, so I was happy with it overall. The Last Crusade was surprisingly good-looking for how old it is. I might prefer that one the most out of the three. I think that because I watch a lot of old movies, this series settled in well with me, despite what some might call a camp factor. I haven't seen the new movie yet, but will catch it when it hits the cheap theater. La Notte was a hard sell for me. While I admired the structure of the film and what it was trying to accomplish, it made me feel as apathetic as its lead characters (who realize that their lives are meaningless and slowly lead themselves to break up with each other).

Besides that, Ric and I are going through Arrested Development again. I plan to start going through Twin Peaks soon as well, and when my Roku comes (yes, I ordered one - temptation was too great), I want Ric to watch the first couple seasons of 30 Rock.

That's all for now! Summer is filled with viewing opportunities, since there's no new TV shows on. I am following a couple, like So You Think You Can Dance and Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days. This week my back's been a lot of trouble, so I've been spending a lot of time on the couch watching TV. Hopefully I'll keep myself motivated to keep learning Italian and to finish reading Atlas Shrugged as well, so that my brain doesn't fry from staring at a screen all day and night!

I'm excited about the presidential election this year in a way that I've been excited about no other election before.

For one thing, I actually love one of the candidates. Usually I have to settle for whatever bland, middle-of-the-road choice the Democratic party makes, but this time I actually get to vote for a dynamic leader who I agree with on nearly every issue. I genuinely think Obama is exactly what the country needs right now.

I also think Obama is what voters want. After eight years of unnecessary war, government corruption, and a dismal economy, people are desperate for something new. Obama ought to be the winner on every single major issue. All that stands between him and the presidency is five months of misleading political ads, vacuous TV commentators, and inevitable character assassinations.

But even in the dirty reality of political campaigns things look brighter for Obama than they did for previous Democratic candidates. I remembered recently something I learned from a college history professor. The recent trend in politics is for presidents to come from executive branches of government, rather than legislative.

It started with Jimmy Carter, who presented himself as a humble governor of Georgia and therefore a Washington outsider. He was followed by Ronald Reagan, former governor of California; George Bush I, Reagan's vice president; Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas; and of course George Bush II, governor of Texas. Not one of them was a senator before becoming president.

The reason for this trend is pretty simple. Candidates who come from Senate careers have long voting records to deal with. As we saw with John Kerry in 2004, pundits have all kinds of ways to use a voting record against a candidate: counting votes on bills, amendments, and even procedural movements to come up with inflated figures on how often someone voted for tax increases (or failed to vote for tax cuts). Numbers lie, and when you're dealing with something as complex as Senate procedure, the numbers can be made to lie in ways most of us can't even comprehend.

So what does this have to do with the 2008 election? For the first time in decades we have two candidates from the Senate, which means they are on equal footing. Neither one has the advantage that the governor-presidents have enjoyed for so long. But also, Obama is relatively new, and so does not carry as much of a voting record burden, especially when it comes to the crucial vote to invade Iraq, whereas John McCain has been a congressman since 1982.

So I essentially dropped $500 on a $60 game.

I hope this game sets my world on fire.

So last night I beat that mission in GTA IV I was stuck on. After I finished I decided to take a little GTA break and see if there was any new stuff on XBOX Live for me to try out. As I was perusing the new XBLA games I saw a new title called Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3. I was immediately curious since I loved the original Commando as a kid, playing it for many hours at the Boys and Girls Club when I was a young lad. In fact, it might have been the first arcade game I ever actually played. I also loved Bionic Commando, which is getting its own next-gen sequel and retro re-release sometime soon. Since I don't really have the money right now to go on an XBLA spending spree, I decided to just try out the demo version of the game. It's a ton of fun. It has the feel of the original game but with a little bit more cartoony graphics, kind of like Team Fortress 2 or something like that. The controls are a cinch and the firing controls work similar to those of SmashTV and Total Carnage. There is a new special attack feature as well as three playable characters, each with different attributes. The demo, while brief, gives you a good feel for the game. At 800 MS Points, it's definitely a buy for me.

After playing through the demo level of Commando three times I noticed the demo for Ninja Gaiden II had finished downloading. Having briefly played the first XBOX game and really digging it I knew I had to give this one a go. Yes, the game is more difficult than most, but it is a TON of fun. Imagine being a real ninja, jumping off walls, throwing ninja stars, and flipping out on people and you have the gist of this game. It's every child of the 80's dream come true. It's not your standard hack and slash game though. In order not to die a horrible death you have to learn various skills and blocking techniques. Button mashing will work for awhile, but as the game progresses it becomes a less viable tactic. I read many concerns about the camera in some reviews and I honestly didn't have a problem with it. I occasionally had to recenter the camera behind Ryu by pressing the right trigger but this wasn't a big deal at all.

Curtis (my new roommate) watched me play a bit and we talked about how awesome a Kill Bill game would be. It would be similar to Ninja Gaiden but probably a bit more cartoony as far as the violence went. A feature that would be cool would be if you could pause bullet time style and plan out your attacks. As you progressed through the game and leveled up the amount of attacks you could plan out would increase. Seriously, someone should do that.

The demo itself gives you a great taste for the game. I played for almost 20 minutes and haven't even finished yet. Thankfully there are save points throughout the level. I am definitely going to buy this once I finish GTA IV and a couple other games that have been sitting on my shelf feeling neglected. Sorry Mass Effect. I swear I'll finish you one day.

Fox News calls Michelle Obama "Obama's baby mama" - War Room - Salon.com

An alert reader wrote in just a little while ago to let us know about something he'd spotted on Fox News Wednesday afternoon. During a segment discussing conservative attacks against Michelle Obama, the wife of presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama, the network described the former as "Obama's baby mama."

First it was calling his fist bump a "terrorist fist jab" and now this. At least they had the sense to fire E.D. Hill, the woman who made the comment about the fist bump. Hopefully they'll do something about this. There's really no excuse. Someone probably thought they were being funny and had watched too much Chapelle's Show, I guess.

Since everyone is doing it and Flickr is neat, I thought I'd play along with a meme for once.

The concept:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.
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The Questions:
1. What is your first name? Brendan
2. What is your favorite food? California Burrito
3. What high school did you go to? Torrey Pines High School
4. What is your favorite color? Red
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Lauren Ambrose
6. Favorite drink? Diet Coke
7. Dream vacation? Ireland
8. Favorite dessert? Ben & Jerry's
9. What you want to be when you grow up? No clue
10. What do you love most in life? Family and friends
11. One Word to describe you. Goofy
12. Your flickr name. brendoman