Up North ~ Life in Minnesota

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.2 and now Wordpress 2.2.1 in the past week. If you notice any problems, I would appreciate an e-mail!

If you look closely at CNN.com you’ll find a link to their new beta website. Now I’m not sure what it is, perhaps it’s the lifeless gray background, or the individual boxes for each chunk of content, but I’m not a fan. With the completely disconnected horizontal bar at the top, it almost seems like two different competing pages.

While the content blocks offer clear visual divisions, and an overall “cleaner” look, the beta offers a lot less content (in terms of headlines). While I’m glad to see that CNN continues to refine its style, I’m not sure they’ve ever managed to concoct anything completely pleasing. With every redesign they manage to fixate on stuff that, to my eyes, already seems dated and bland. I’m usually one of the first to say “it’s the content, stupid,” but I have to admit that I find myself wishing they’d come up with something a little prettier.

I accidentally rented a horrible movie this weekend. I say “accidentally” in the sense that the description on the case didn’t indicate one of my most despised movie devices—the “dream” or “unreality” theme. This is the lazy screenwriter’s ticket to freedom. It opens up all possibilities because there are essentially no rules, and no point. You show 10 minutes of Character X living life normally, then suddenly he/she is plunged into this unbelievable nightmare where nothing is as it seems.

While the audience (me) is hoping, and praying, that this is building to some sort of revelation, Character X is plagued with a seemingly random assortment of strange happenings. It’s easy to find clues to Character X’s predicament where no clues exist. So while you’re pondering, piecing together your own much better ending, the filmmakers unveil that Character X is in a comatose state, lying in some hospital. Shortly after the first 10 minutes of reality, something bad happened, and Character X slipped into this never-ending nightmare. Yippee!

This same basic formula has been used countless times, with few variations, and little originality. It should have been retired long ago, however, every year some inspired hack gets crazy ideas for scenes and probably doesn’t have the creativity to piece them together without resorting to the dreaded “dream” bit. Since this is reality, all I can hope for is that they do a better job of writing the synopsis, so that I may gleefully avoid it.