Links of the Day

Conan, Richter Reunite for Tonight Show - After nine years, the team of will return when Conan takes over hosting duties in June. Richter left because he heard the call of Hollywood that resulted in usually good attempts and critical acclaim but no smash hits or megabucks. The return is likely helped that Conan is forced to move to LA for the hosting duties making it easy for Andy to continue to pursue Hollywood stuff and still announce the show.

Suntrust CEO Gets 75% Raise - Only on Wall Street. While everyone is getting pay cuts or outright layoffs, Wall Street continues to award its own for failure. It never ceases to amuse me how the rich are cheap in really stupid ways. They will argue until blue in the face about giving someone a five cents raise, but drop a few million on failure and they don't bat an eye.

CW Renews Six Shows - Good news to me anyway, Supernatural has got another reason to entertain and terrify. The show is often more entertaining the horror movies coming out in theatres. In additional, Smallville (way past its prime) gets a ninth season. The rest is America's Next Top Model, Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, and 90210.

Merrill Lynch Investigated - One of the casualties of the mortgage bust is under investigation because of $3.6 billion in bonuses given out to employees (mostly the upper echelon of the company). More specifically the investigation is into characters that then CEO John Thain moves up the payouts to co-inside with a tax payer infusion in the company. IE, the tax payers paid those bonuses to all those executives that ran the company into the ground and helped kick off the recession.

Heroes, Chuck On The Outs - New record lows where achieved for Chuck and Heroes in viewership despite repeats on the other networks. The likely cause is juggernaut House and NBC's cluelessness on how to schedule and promote their programs. Net result is these shows are probably on their last seasons.

Worker Killed, Macy's Rick-rolled, Lego Turkey, Weekend Box Office and Netbooks

Wal-Mart Worker Crushed - Humanity has its issues but it seems New Yorkers have them in spades. Despite thousands of stores opening for Black Friday without incident, it seems the crowd at a NY Wal-Mart just couldn't control themselves and the result is a dead 34 year old worker literally killed by the stampede of the crowd trying to get into the store (who also broke the doors). It’s something that should never happen and sadly those directly responsible will probably never be punished. I also have a feeling that store management is directly responsible either because too lazy or too stupid to manage the crowd and their expectations with the use of coupons and the like to distribute the more popular black Friday deals. Crowds tend to be more contained if they know the big items are already sold out before they even enter the store.

Macy's Parade Rick Rolled - In a cute joke on the crowd, the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade was Rick-rolled by the man himself.


Lego Mecha Turkey - Click the link for a gallery of a turkey built out of legos. This lego creation has a pilot and various weapons to defend the turkey motherland. Its actually much more complicated and cool then it sounds.

Box Office Weekend - Family fare ruled the box office with Four Christmases taking the top spot with $31.6M and Bolt second with $26.5M. Twilight took a 60% hit, not surprising considering female tweens are about the only group willing to see it considering the bad reviews and heavy romance angle. Not a slam on the business though as the movie cost $37M to make so profits are raining down on the company and that is before DVD sales add to the total. Quantum of Solace made $19.5M considering its slide in the US but that is more then made up by its foreign take. Australia sits at 5th with $14.8M, a horrible take considering the promotional blitz and talent in the movie. It was probably hurt by its 3 hour running time and overall bad reviews which essentially all called the movie boring.

Netbooks vs. Notebooks - If your in the market for a new notebook or netbook, a good read to help you make up your mind covering the areas of gaming, work and play. Overall, my advice is a netbook is good if you travel a lot and just need email, internet and basic word processing. A netbook is built for size and convenience not power so if your a user with many programs opened, tons of stuff installed or do stuff that is processor intensive (gaming, graphic editing, etc) netbooks will not meet your needs.