Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

... is to have cool people tell you so.

That said, I think this is cool. (Note, that's a big Quicktime Movie, if you want a different format or a smaller file, click here for the main site and take your pick from the links on the left-hand sidebar.)

Very cool in fact.

Enormously entertaining even.

It's a music group called OK Go, who shot themselves a music video in their backyard on the cheap. Cheap? Yes. Boring? Hell, no!

I leave to your own judgement how cool you think I am, but I recommend that you check it out regardless!

.

As regular readers will know, I'm a huge fan of HBO's original series, Deadwood, a fictionalized drama about a real frontier town back in the late 1800's.

If you're not already a fan, I highly recommend you check out the series on DVD. About the highest praise I can bestow on any form of entertainment is that it makes me want to write something like it. Deadwood makes me want to write a western.

Anyway, spotted some news about Season 3. Apparently Brian Cox...

is going to be joining the show for seven episodes in the upcoming season.

Cox will play Jack Langrishe, an eccentric producer and theater owner who strives to introduce a modicum of culture to the mean streets of the South Dakota town where the Western drama is set. Cox will appear in at least seven episodes of the Emmy-nominated series when it returns for its third season next year.

Cox's long list of film credits includes such recent highlights as "Adaptation," "The Ring," "25th Hour," "X2: X-Men United," "Troy" and "The Bourne Supremacy." He earned an Emmy nom in 2002 for his guest-star turn on "Frasier."

P.S. Some of you may be wondering about my take on HBO's new series, Rome. Short answer, I liked it but I think I'll like it better after a few more episodes. I'll post in more detail when that either does or doesn't happen.

.

If you head over to this link, CBS has got a bunch of movies up introducing the castaways from Survivor: Guatemala.

So, updated impressions...

First up, no mention whatsoever of the fact that three of the castaways are identical twins. Cindy is actually the only one who even mentions she has a twin, and she doesn't specify that her twin is identical. Will anything come of this? Again, I can't think what they would do with it, but I just can't imagine that it's coincidence.

So, my paranoid ravings aside...

The guys look a little better in motion then they did in those awful pictures on the main site. Still, there aren't any standouts from the male castaways that are as instantly appealing as Tom and Ian were last year. Judd could be fun, and Gary the NFL Quarterback will be one to watch because it looks like he's not planning to tell people about it. You know it'll come out anyway, so it might be interesting to see how that plays out.

For whatever reason, in past seasons I have generally found that my favorites were some of the men in the game, and I've not been quite as interested in the women. Stephanie from last season and Shii Ann from Survivor: All Stars are the most memorable female castaways that I can think of.

However, the most interesting of the current batch are the women. Brianna doesn't have a clip of her very own, but the bit of her in the first video, where she talks about selling wrinkle cream is pretty cool. Likewise, I think that Danni, Amy and Morgan all seem like they could do well and be fun to watch along the way.

So, what do you all think?

Note: Hannah in the comments for the last post mentioned she had heard a rumor that castaways from the last season might be coming back. The Entertainment Weekly rumor that I mentioned in the same post actually suggested that perhaps Stephanie and Bobby John would be showing up again, but I had assumed it was a joke. Maybe not.

The exact text was: "CBS previously announced that 18 people would compete in season 11, but the net has unveiled only 16. Rumor has it Palau's Bobby Jon and Stephanie will pop up - to extend their epic losing streak."

We'll just have to see, I guess.

.

Go on over to the Leaky Cauldron to have a look at the trailer for the newest Harry Potter movie. It was leaked from a French site so it has French subtitles but they don't block the picture at all, and the English sound is unchanged.

Now I feel in this trailer that Dumbledore's talk about the tournament borders on cheesy. That said, the trailer looks AMAZING! Check it out for yourselves!

.

That's right... SURVIVOR TIME!!



Okay, well technically, it doesn't premier until September 15th, but CBS has put up their Survivor: Guatemala web site.

Head on over there, and you can view pictures and bios of the 16 castaways. (Keep an eye on the site, because they'll probably put up the Intro videos soon! I've added a link to my sidebar!)

Some of my initial observations:

1. I have to say that there aren't really any particular standouts to me after reading the bios. Cindy the zookeeper could be interesting, but it also seems like we have a lot of young 20-somethings who think that they have mad skillz when it comes to "analyzing people." Now, I'm only 27, but I've already started to notice that a lot of young 20-somethings think that they are hot stuff when it comes to reading people, but they just don't have the life experience yet to really pull it off.

2. It may just be bad pictures, but it seems to me that there is a distinct lack of male eye-candy this season. In particular, a number of the guys all seem to have weird brow / eye regions. I'm talking about Blake, Brandon, Brian, Jamie and Rafe. But Jamie actually has a kind of Boone from Lost thing going on. Only a little though.

3. This may be the whitest group of castaways ever! Lydia is half Puerto Rican, but that seems to be it!

4. Does the older guy always have to be a fireman? Apparently, though this time we also have a 46year old ex-NFL quarterback.

5. Okay, this is the big one. Now I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but this seems like it can't just be coincidence. Not one, not two, but THREE of this year's castaways have an identical twin! Check out the Bios! Cindy, Jamie and Judd all have identical twins!

Now am I crazy here or does that seem odd to any of you? Frankly, I can't imagine what they could possibly do with that without making the game unfair for either the twins or the non-twins, but still! Three identical twins out of a total of 16 people? According to this website, the chances of giving birth to identical twins is 1 in 285. And that is including the increased incidence of multiple births due to modern fertility treatments, many of which would not have been in use when these twins were conceived.

So I'm going to do a little math here. Please, if anyone spots an error in my calculations, please let me know. Just using the number from above, any one random person has a one in 285 chance of being an identical twin. (Actually, it's a little fuzzy because 1 in 285 births results in two identical twins, but the other non-identical multiple births work the same way so I'm going to let them cancel each other out.)

So anyway, given the above assumtion of the odds, I used Microsoft Excel's Binomial Distribution Function to calculate the odds for this group. Now if the selection process was really random (as it relates to twins at any rate), then the odds of 1 out of 16 being an identical twin is approximately 5.3%.

The odds of 2 out of 16 being identical twins is approximately 0.14%.

The odds of 3 out of 16 being identical twins is approximately 0.002%.

Now before you say it, yes I am a huge geek.

But given the above, I can't believe that the three twins are a coincidence, but what has Mark Burnett got up his sleeve? Will it be significant, or was it just a random whim of the casting agent? Only time will tell.

Though it does remind me that this week's Entertainment Weekly had a "Rumor of the Week" pointing out that there are only 16 castaways this season, when they had previously announced 18. The last few seasons have had 18 castaways. Last season had 20, though two were cut immediately. This time, only 16, but three of them are twins... What's up with that, I wonder?

Discuss...