M. Night Shyamalan Joins Twitter: What's The Twist?

Better late than never? Perhaps encouraged by his daughters, M. Night Shyamalan has finally taken a seat on the Twitter train (he?s now on Facebook, too). His first tweet, on November 25th, was a characteristic homage to his childhood hero:
I was thirteen years old when I tried to call Steven Spielberg. I made my mom [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2011/12/06/m-night-shyamalan-joins-twitter/

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Galaxy Nexus Shipments Begin Trickling Into Verizon Stores

Nearly everyone and their mother has pointed out that Verizon's LTE-friendly Galaxy Nexus should be launching any day now, but here's a new set of photos for those of you looking for something a little different to ogle. Courtesy of robertlawson225 on the xda-developers forums, we now have our first look at what may be the Galaxy Nexus in its retail finery.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ReCJM38lT20/

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Explaining Business Investment - NYTimes.com

December 3, 2011, 2:17 pm

One of the charts I prepared for my presentation at the G30 was intended to debunk the notion that we need some kind of special factor aside from the depressed economy to explain low business investment. On the x-axis of the figure below I show the ratio of actual GDP to the CBO estimate of potential GDP. On the vertical axis I show the ratio of nonresidential fixed investment ? basically, business investment ? to potential GDP. The blue dots show data from 1985 to 2007, during which there was a strong relationship: a depressed economy led to low business investment. The red dots show subsequent data; if anything, business investment has been stronger since the Great Recession began than you might have expected.

To pre-answer one possible objection, yes, the relationship is much weaker before 1985. I?d argue that this reflects the changed nature of the business cycle, which I?ve been writing about for years. Pre-1985, recessions were basically generated by the Fed to curb inflation; since the Fed could and would relax the reins as soon as it judged that we had suffered enough, deep recessions tended to be followed byrapid V-shaped recoveries, so it made sense for businesses to keep investing even in the face of a depressed economy. Subsequent recessions have reflected private-sector overreach, and have therefore tended to be followed by slower recoveries, giving businesses a good reason to postpone or cancel investments.

Also, no, the causation doesn?t run the other way, at least not in general. The Great Recession, in particular, was led by housing and consumption, with business investment clearly responding rather than leading.

Source: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/explaining-business-investment/

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Justin Bieber Rocks Disney Christmas Parade (PHOTOS)

Justin Bieber is a man about town these days. Just days after performing at the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony and debuting his new music video with Mariah Carey, The Biebs took off for the warmer weather in Disney World to perform at the 28th annual Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade.

Although the parade doesn't air on TV until Dec. 25, here are some photos of Bieber performing hits off his "Under The Mistletoe" album for the crowd of fans, and even a photo of the singer posing with a major celebrity -- Goofy!

PHOTOS:

?? BACK TO ARTICLE

Justin Bieber performs a medley of songs from his new holiday album on December 3, 2011, while taping a segment for the "Disney Parks Christmas Day Parade" TV special at the Magic Kingdom park at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. (Photo by Splash News)

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/03/justin-bieber-rocks-disney-parade_n_1127187.html

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Year of the Hunk: Can Clooney, Pitt save Oscars?

At 84, Oscar may no longer be a stud, but he still hangs out with a pretty studly crew. At least that could be the case this year if, as the bloggerati are predicting, a particularly handsome lineup of leading men is nominated for best actor. And that, in turn, could help the Oscar broadcast's efforts to fend off further ratings decline.

VIDEOS: THR's Awards Season Actors Roundtable

The contest is fluid -- nominations won't be announced until Jan. 24 -- but the consensus has George Clooney, for his beleaguered dad in "The Descendants," and Leonardo DiCaprio, for his embittered FBI director in "J. Edgar," at the top of the list. Brad Pitt is a strong contender for the casual ease with which he steps into the shoes of baseball GM Billy Beane in "Moneyball." And a couple of relative newcomers have become early favorites: Germany-born, London-based Michael Fassbender, who fearlessly lets it all hang out in the NC-17 "Shame," and French matinee idol Jean Dujardin, who pours on the charm as a fading star in the silent movie "The Artist."

PHOTOS: Oscar Legends on Oscar

It's a lineup straight out of the GQ Men of the Year Awards by way of People's Sexiest Man Alive cover -- Clooney and Pitt are two-time titleholders. (There's even an outside chance fellow SMA Matt Damon could join them for "We Bought a Zoo.") It's not a typical Academy roundup if only because the Oscars tend to underrate the work of a lot of the best-looking leading men. Big-screen smoothies, they can make it look too easy; they often appear in action films or romantic comedies that aren't considered awards-worthy and steer clear of the showy transformations the Academy favors. That's one reason DiCaprio, who was ignored for his clean-cut earnestness in "Titanic," is now being applauded for donning all that aging makeup in "J. Edgar." It's all the more impressive that Clooney and Pitt are being taken seriously this year because neither adopts a thick accent or funny mustache to play his part.

PHOTOS: Oscar Show Moments

Now all of that would just be something for fan sites to gush over if it also didn't have ratings implications.

The Academy might have breathed a sigh of relief when Billy Crystal agreed to emcee the show in the wake of Eddie Murphy's departure. But Crystal, who hasn't hosted since 2004, is 63, making him the second-oldest solo host since a 74-year-old Bob Hope fronted the show in 1978. And that's not going to make the young girls swoon.

There's also a question of how widespread the appeal of the movies nominated for best picture will be when the show is broadcast Feb. 26. When noms were announced last awards season, there were two mega-grossers: "Toy Story 3" ($415 million domestic) and "Inception" ($293 million). But this year, with only five nominees guaranteed, it's an open question whether 2011's top-grossing movie, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2," will make the cut. The closest thing to a popular nominee right now is the all-girl "The Help," which has collected $168 million domestically.

PHOTOS: Oscar Hosts Through the Years

But if the best-picture nominees are short on crowd-pleasers, a posse of hot actors could provide ratings insurance. Certainly, it would help the surrounding media industry that feeds into the Oscars. "It's an exciting possibility that George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, the men from the 'Ocean's' movies, could all be on the red carpet together competing for best actor," says Entertainment Tonight executive producer Linda Bell Blue. "And they all play strong men with backbone, which is what female moviegoers are looking for."

GOLDEN BOYS: Dishy leading men have to wait to get the gold

• Cary Grant: Two nominations before his Honorary Oscar in 1970
• Paul Newman: 10 noms, a win for The Color of Money, an Honorary in 1986
• Robert Redford: 1 acting nom, 1 directing win, then an Honorary in 2002
• Warren Beatty: 4 acting noms, 1 directing win, then the Thalberg in 2000

This story originally appeared in the Dec. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter.

Copyright 2011 The Hollywood Reporter

Source: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45524642/ns/today-entertainment/

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Obama pushes payroll tax cut extension

President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the White House Tribal Nations Conference, Friday, Dec. 2, 2011, at the Interior Department in Washington. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the White House Tribal Nations Conference, Friday, Dec. 2, 2011, at the Interior Department in Washington. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

President Barack Obama listens while touring a building under construction in Washington, Friday, Dec. 2, 2011, part of his Better Building Initiative to promote energy efficient buildings. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama wants voters to get involved in the debate over extending the reduced payroll tax and he's asking them to tell members of Congress to keep the cut in place.

"Let your members of Congress know where you stand," Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address. "Tell them not to vote to raise taxes on working Americans during the holidays. Tell them to put country before party. Put money back in the pockets of working Americans. Pass these tax cuts."

Obama's address directs listeners to the whitehouse.gov website, where an online calculator lets them determine how much money it's worth to them to continue the 2 percent reduction in the payroll tax that took effect this year. A family with income of $50,000 a year would pay $1,000 more in payroll taxes if Congress does not act by the end of this year to extend that reduction.

Democrats want to expand the reduction in addition to extending it. Republican leaders say they're committed to passing an extension, fearing political fallout if payroll taxes rise on Jan. 1 on 160 million wage-earners. The GOP rank-and-file appears divided, with many Republican senators voting against an extension supported by their leadership this week.

There's also disagreement about how or whether to pay for any extension. Democrats favor a new tax on millionaires; Republicans prefer to cut federal spending.

"We're going to keep pushing Congress to make this happen. They shouldn't go home for the holidays until they get this done," Obama said in his address. "And if you agree with me, I could use your help."

Obama also took note of a new monthly jobs report out Friday that showed the economy added 120,000 jobs in November, a positive number. "We need to keep this growth going and strengthen it," the president said.

Republicans devoted their weekly address to promoting a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, which is headed for a vote in the Senate after failing in the House last month.

Democratic leaders worked aggressively to defeat the measure in the House, saying that such a requirement could force Congress to cut billions from social programs during times of economic downturn and that disputes over what to cut could result in Congress ceding its power of the purse to the courts. The result was that the amendment got majority support but fell short of the two-thirds needed to advance a constitutional amendment.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said "the impending vote to amend the Constitution represents a choice between changing business as usual in Washington or embracing the status quo that we can no longer afford."

"The real reason many lawmakers don't want a balanced budget amendment is the exact reason why it's so essential," Snowe said. "They don't want their hands tied; they want to continue to spend without restraint."

Like Obama, she asked listeners to make their views known.

"Contact your senators and urge them to support our balanced budget amendment," Snowe said, "so that we finally seize the fiscal reins and reclaim our future for our children and our grandchildren."

___

Online:

Obama address: www.whitehouse.gov

GOP address: http://www.youtube.com/gopweeklyaddress

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2011-12-03-Obama/id-3b2a5be2387b48f88515e94eea927565

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Simplify blogging with DraftCraft for iPad

DraftCraft is a new blogging app for iPad. It supports WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal and aims to make blogging as simple as possible. Formatting the text is easy and there’s no need to not only know HTML, but you also don’t ever even see it. DraftCraft takes care it...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/nGb0359EBrg/story01.htm

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Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj: Such (Barbie) Dolls!

Barbie dolls are changing with the times.

Often criticized for promoting the ideal woman as blonde, unhealthily proportioned and materialistic, two special edition dolls will now personify ... party-loving celebrities with weird hairstyles and rampant sex appeal, who are also really rich and famous!

Yes, Mattel is planning to launch dolls for Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry.

The dolls are said to include striking similarities to the real pop princesses like the famous tattoo on Nicki Minaj's left arm, not to mention her trademark pink hair.

It does make sense in that Minaj has garnered a following of fans who refer to themselves as "Barbies" in honor of her fondness for crazy wigs and the color pink.

Both Minaj and Perry are known for breaking the mold when it comes to fashion, and while Barbie would probably not be caught dead in their getups, we'll allow it.

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/12/katy-perry-nicki-minaj-to-become-barbie-dolls/

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Orcs Must Die!

In Orcs Must Die! ($14.99 for PC and Xbox Live) you kill orcs. Shocking, huh? Okay, you also distribute a fair amount of vengeance to other monsters like kobolds and ogres. But it's the good-ol' traditional orc?bad teeth, complexion, odor, and all?that falls victim to most of the violence in this fascinating and fast-paced entry from Robot Entertainment (makers of Age of Empires Online, among other titles). It combines the first-person shooter and tower defense genres into a cohesive and frequently exciting medieval fantasy that tests both your strategic prowess and your hand-eye coordination. With tons of ways to maim the foul-smelling minions of the dark, Orcs Must Die! keeps you interested and keeps you guessing throughout.

A Thousand Ways (for Orcs) to Die
You are one of the last of the War Mages, an apprentice conscripted (after your master's untimely death) into defending the magical rifts in various locations from the onslaughts of orcs that are trying to enter them and conquer your world. You do this in each new castle or keep by buying various tools and traps to attack the orcs as they march. Some work from below, such as pressure-sensitive spikes, tar pits that slow orcs down, or catapults that send them flying in the direction you specify. Others shoot arrows and blades from the walls, or drop swinging maces and giant pounders straight from the ceiling. If that's not enough for you, you can also hire "guardians" that will shoot the orcs from afar or cleave them at close range with broadswords, or choose special weapons enchanted with powers that give you control over fire, ice, and wind.

Every time you finish a level you're awarded skulls based on your performance that let you purchase permanent upgrades to the traps that make them even more powerful. Over the course of the game you'll also gain access to weavers, who make your blade or bow deadlier, by increasing the impact or decreasing the reset times of certain traps. Because their benefits are paid for from the same pool of funds you'll use to buy traps in the first place, you'll need to plan wisely so you can survive all the way through to the end of some surprisingly long and tense levels.

Regardless, the pattern for each level is the same. Time begins "frozen" while you decide which traps you want to buy and where you want to initially deploy them, and what weaver you want to engage (you can choose only one at a time). But once you start the orcs coming, you'll have to play through a few waves of them before you'll get another full-scale breather (though you have a few seconds between waves to make minor adjustments). You can, of course, place more traps and guardians during a wave, but that becomes increasingly difficult as things get more hectic and you're forced to plow down a green-skinned battalion yourself if they overwhelm a trap or succeed in destroying one of your barricades.

Both direct and indirect methods of dispatching with the baddies are enjoyable, though you get bigger bonuses (and unlock more impressive achievements) if you kill large numbers of them simultaneously. Some levels give you additional tools that make this easy to accomplish without spending a ton of money. You may find mammoth logs attached to walls that you can set rolling down a staircase, acid pots that you can overturn when a squadron dashes beneath an overpass, or outsized chandeliers you can shoot down on top of an unsuspecting army if you run out of money (or are too cheap) to buy a ceiling trap.

Boredom and Bugs
That kind of "environmental" game play is where Orcs Must Die! excels, but there's not enough of it. It doesn't take long for a suffocating sameness to creep into the level design, with only an acid bath here or a lava pit there distinguishing one stage from the next. A larger selection of tiles for walls and floors would go a long way toward making each new castle feel like a unique place. And though you're granted a new weapon, trap, guardian, or weaver on each level, most of the time there's little incentive to not stick with combinations you already know work?this also torpedoes variety after a while.

I ran into some bugs, too, that made levels more frustrating just when they should be easing up. Because no stage can end until all the monsters are either killed or escape into the rift, if one gets trapped in a place you can't access, you might not be able to win. A catapult trap aimed a lava pit launched a couple of ogres into a place where they couldn't be melted, but also couldn't escape or be touched by our weapons, forcing us to abandon and restart the level we were positive we had completed.

Worth the Impulse Buy
Luckily, these were only occasional occurrences, and most of the time Orcs Must Die! delivered exactly what its title promises: lots and lots of dead orcs. If the game's writing leaves something to be desired?the "plot" is hokey, and a lot of Duke Nukem?style one-liners from the brutish main character get tiresome quickly?and there's no multiplayer mode for sharing the fun with a friend, the overall effect is one of an addictive, visceral thrill ride that gives you just the action you crave with almost no excess. Combined with an excellent price, Orcs Must Die! is an impulse purchase you can feel good about. Tens of thousands of orcs, on the other hand, are likely to feel a lot less happy than you almost certainly will.

More Console and Computer Game Reviews:
??? Orcs Must Die!
??? Batman: Arkham City
??? Nintendo Wii (Fall 2008)
??? Xbox 360 (250GB)
??? The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/_0BZs5vGBqQ/0,2817,2397024,00.asp

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