Minnesota Comic Chad Daniels on the Tonight Show

On Tuesday night a man from Fergus Falls, MN was on Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show as the comedy guest. I always love when comedians are featured instead of bands.

This dude, Chad Daniels, was funny in a very generic way. He told jokes about his family in a cadence reminiscent of Jimmy Carr (who was also on Conan this summer, apparently), which worked. And while I laughed, this man has done nothing especially notable. He told jokes about how his children annoy him, how he wants to abandon them, and how they are idiots. Honestly, I liked it way better when Louis C.K. did it, like, ten years ago.

But, even so, it's definitely worth devoting five minutes to enjoying, if only for the fact that he is from Minnesota and he was on teevee:

In Defense of Jimmy Fallon

I would like to take a moment to pose a complaint about Jimmy Fallon on his television program, and then totally refute myself.

Have you seen Late Night with Jimmy Fallon? He sucks at interviewing! He doesn't even let his guests talk. He just jokes around.

YES BUT

Have you ever seen a guest on a late night talk show? They are all vapid actors (save for Brian Williams, Al Roker, Will Ferrel, and Harrison Ford). They suck! Who wants to hear about the cute thing their baby did? Nobody, that's who.

So when Jimmy Fallon takes over the interview--even if he is only mostly funny--and gets the three mentions of the movie or TV show in, I say good work. That is moving things forward in the late night talk show realm.

Surly Darkness: The Max Fischer of Beers

I had a glass of Surly Darkness for the second time last night. I had had it once before and been truly unimpressed. But when our waitress came around and told us the non-"domestic" (don't get me started) beer selection and we heard "Surly Darkness," we all jumped and said "Yes! That one!" Including me. Even though I remember not caring for it.

And, once again, I had it and did not care for it. Because it is the Max Fischer of beers.

Surly Darkness could be good, but it tries to do too many things at once. I don't even know what flavors I'm supposed to be looking for or experiencing. It has so many things going on that not one of them is done well by my tongue. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a hopstravaganza, if it's supposed to be like drinking a loaf of bread, or if it's supposed to have fruity/woody/spiced overtones. And I'm pretty sure the reason I can't tell is because it does all of these things at full tilt.

So, Max Fischer of beers, I'm not going to say you're bad. I'm just going to say I don't think you're good enough for me. But there are plenty of Margaret Yangs out there.

Let Me Explain Google Wave

Author's note: It's possible that you know all of this. I am writing this down in the hopes that people who didn't get it before might be enlightened by my thought process. Enjoy.

I sought out a Google Wave invitation, not exactly knowing what I was getting into. It was new and I wanted to add it to the list of new technologies I could claim myself as an early adopter of (the list, as I recall it, runs from mini disc to kindle--incidentally, neither lasted very long).

My invitation came on Friday night. I poked it a few times over the weekend, but it ran too slow and there was too much going on at once. I was a member of the Twin Cities Wave and pretty much no other waves. I was confused and I was bored.

(A wave is a message thread made up of individual messages called pings.)

Yesterday I was confused and bored again. But then I joined a few smaller waves with some friends.

Google Wave is the following existing technologies wrapped into one delicious web app burrito:

• Wiki - Anyone can edit any part of a wave and there is a full record of who has done what. This beats wikipedia (or any other wiki I've used) by about a thousand in terms of intuitiveness.
• Message board - A ping (a message within a wave) can be replied to much like a LiveJournal or I Can Has Cheeseburger-style post, with root replies and sub-replies.
• Instant message client - Wave lets you see who is online. It is actually most like the old ICQ, where you can see what another person is typing as they type it. If you open up a wave with one other person--bam. Instant message.
  
• Email - It's not exactly like email, but it really helps to think of it as email: every message is private and includes only the recipients you choose. You can send a wave to a person when they're offline and it will sit in their inbox until they return.
  

These technologies are all a decade old or older. But just because Google Wave hasn't really introduced any new technologies from an end-user standpoint doesn't mean the combination of existing technologies isn't potentially game shifting (but not really game changing, like email was).

It may be obvious how there is some overlap with the functions the items on this list fulfill. But what was not immediately obvious to me is why it's so interesting to slip them all together into one very browser-crashing web application. Here's what I can see so far.

What it will be good for:

• Collaboration - What I never could get wikis to do, Wave does almost effortlessly: one document with multiple editors. Google suggests you use Wave to have everyone at a meeting take notes; maybe smart, maybe dumb. The playback feature is key here--it totally trumps the edit history page on Wikipedia. Much more useful (to me) to see edits progress temporally than see them listed.
  
• Discussion - The problem with message boards is their public nature. The problem with email and Gmail is its linear nature. Wave lets you communicate privately in a message board setting. If you branch off into two topics, no more guessing what a person is replying to--you can create new waves based on old waves. Google Wave provides the sharpest, slickest format for private, lengthy online discussion so far.
  

Wave is important. Being better than a wiki and easier to use for lengthy conversations than email will allow us to have richer conversations more easily. Definite value added. Not a Segway.

There is one problem I can see: the necessity of ubiquity. Sort of like Twitter, there's a critical mass that must be reached before this will be useful to me. I can't collaborate by myself. But give it a year; this thing will be pretty popular but, as I said, I don't think it will change the game on the scale of email.

The New Star Trek Movie

Spoiler alert: I saw the new Star Trek movie.

I was at work when I refreshed Twitter. Right near the top of my feed I could see that @vita_mn had said

Vita.mn invites you to BOLDLY GO... tonight at its premiere party for STAR TREK. 2 pairs of tixx available now. Email christian@vita.mn!

And ten seconds later I was in gmail. I wrote

I want them! How do I get them?

and was subsequently informed that I had already done all that was necessary.

And that was it. I had tickets to an advanced screening of a movie I've been anticipating for approximately three years. But not just an advanced screening--eight days before it comes to theaters. Seven days before regular people who win tickets get to see the "advanced" screening. In fact, according to Vita.mn, I am a taste maker. And my taste says this movie was fuckin' boss.

Better than Iron Man. And, yes, Better than the Dark Knight. (Note: I will not compare individual performances. Heath Ledger's Joker was a villain for the ages and was--somehow--way above the rest of that film.)

I will not bore you with spoilers. Suffice it to say the film stays close enough to the spirit of Star Trek to satiate this canon-aware fan. No, that's not right. I'm not just canon aware, but canon expectant. Ok, fine, here's a minor spoiler: this movie breaks canon. But if you really care you probably already knew that, right? I won't bother reviewing something you haven't seen past saying it was even more badass and fun to watch than the ads make it look. I dare say it nearly surpasses both Star Trek VI and Star Trek: First Contact. Nearly. If you wanted to determine which was the best of the three, you'd probably have to toss all of them in the air and see which one landed closest to the center of a target that denotes quality. That is how good this movie was.

I'm going to hold off on full-on analysis of the movie until I see it again next week (and when everyone else has seen it). However, I would like to note the demographic makeup of the crowd who saw this movie with me. This screening was made up of people who were in the know (plus me, Emily, and the other two people who were fast enough to get tickets from Twitter) about this movie, according to Christian. The rest, apparently, was made up of people who know Christian and their plus-ones. This made for an interesting mix of people, broken out approximately as such:

55% obvious nerds

40% obvious hipsters (Seriously. Skinny jeans? Still?)

5% indistinguishable/me and Emily

All in all I am really happy to have won tickets to see this movie. I am a little rueful that I was unable to share the devirginization of this rebirth with my best friend and collaborator Donavon. However, I believe it was worth potential perceptions of betrayal to see one of the best, most exciting films I've seen in years.