Is this the end of the road for HD DVD?

These are the numbers for stand-alone player sales for the holiday season and, amazingly, Blu-Ray scored a crushing victory here. It’s pretty astounding.

Nathaniel Peters has a sterling post on the subject over at the First Things blog. Can’t recommend it enough.

Deep down inside I desperately want to write up a Super Bowl celebrity Pickkake starring Matt Damon. Or Barney Frank. Or maybe even Mary Kate Olsen.

But that’s obviously a no-go because KSK is writing at a level that’s just scary. I’ll say it again: Why can’t these guys have a show on HBO?

Here’s Michael Cera’s Super Bowl picks. Here’s Stephen Hawking. Here’s Obama.

So hot.

Galley Friend S.B. now has an iPhone and after tinkering with it for 10 minutes, I’ve been transformed from nauseated skeptic to total true believer. I want need one.

Not that you care, of course. But what you might very much care about is this outstanding Wired story on how the iPhone came to be. It’s filled with great stuff like this:

Through it all, Jobs maintained the highest level of secrecy. Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2 (the abandoned iPod phone was called Purple 1). Teams were split up and scattered across Apple’s Cupertino, California, campus. Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone’s transmitter. Even the iPhone’s hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes. By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.

I’d like to think that the CIA is capable of doing a project with such rigidly compartmentalized security.

Not to be a ninny (although using the word “ninny” automatically makes me one), but I’m a little struck by two recent examples of sex in advertising.

The first, from a series of Las Vegas billboards advertising the Asian-themed club/bar/restaurant Tao, was the slogan “A happy ending every time.”

The second, from a Prince sponsorship tagline on the Tennis Channel is “Show us your O-face.” In their defense, their “O” design that eliminates grommets is a big deal in racket technology right now.

But still. I’m all for sex in advertising so long as it’s a slinky Nick Lachey smirking, shirtless, at the camera.

But those sorts of slogans strike me as a bit over the line.

You probably already knew this, but it seems that Cloverfield is about The Freedom:

The movie begins by showing us that its heart is in the right place. The hero, when we first see him, has sex with his fantastically beautiful girlfriend in an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York. Then the story moves to a party where everyone is drinking in celebration of him getting a huge raise and a promotion.

It is from this that we know that economic success and fucking are at the core of this film. I believe this is what is meant when people refer to a “family values” movie. Certainly no one could deny that these are both integral to the promotion and experience of The Freedom.

As Ayn Rand herself explained, men can be like animals, both in the bedroom and in the boardroom (a phrase she actually invented). Unfortunately, none of the characters smoke or take heroin. This is a mistake that I am confident will be rectified in future editions, thanks to modern advances in CGI.

Speaking of Ayn Rand, it is upon her whom we rely to understand the rest of the film. Rand gave us instructions to love big cities, for collections of giant steel buildings in close proximity surrounded by trash and poor homeless wretches are not only beautiful, but great, inspiring, and powerful symbols of The Freedom.

Thanks to this knowledge, we can see that the entire city of New York is a metaphor for human greatness. In other words, The Freedom made physical, ie: economic success and fucking.

So when a monster, called Cloverfield, starts to destroy the city, it makes the viewer weep with sadness. The monster makes trouble and rubble, like Stalin but with green skin and a tail, and the entire time it is destroying, the tragedy is almost overwhelming.

When depressed HD DVD partisans ask me why I’m quixotically still open to the idea that HD DVD could last as a medium after the very bad Warner Bros. news, I point to stories like this which highlight Sony’s nearly limitless power to screw things up:

The PlayStation 3 is the only system currently available that can be upgraded to use all of the Blu-ray features planned for future release, leaving early adopters of other players in a no-win situation.

The future-proofed PS3, which is one of the cheapest existing Blu-ray players on the market, features inbuilt hardware and online access that enables users to upgrade the system’s Blu-ray capabilities as time goes by.

However, owners of other Blu-ray DVD players may find themselves unable to enjoy future developments in the technology because their machines are not upgradeable, reports the BBC.

The problem appears to have arisen because, unlike the HD-DVD camp, Blu-ray backers failed to devise a concrete standard relating to system requirements for the platform upon its launch. This meant that it wasn’t mandatory to include internet functionality in players which would allow users to download firmware upgrades and access newly released features.

Philips’ Frank Simonis, who is European chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association, acknowledges that it is “not an ideal situation”, although he suggested that high definition playback itself, as opposed to extra features, is the most important thing to Blu-ray shoppers.

Oops. I’m on my third generation of firmware for my HD DVD player and I’ve had it less than six months. The discs just come to me in the mail, although I could download them and burn a disc myself if I wanted to. Or just plug an ethernet cable into the machine. Couldn’t be easier.

I haven’t seen the Christmas sales numbers yet, but I’ll be interested to see what they look like.

Galley Brother B.J. has actually sat through the entire Tom Cruise Scientology tape and has a very astute observation:

I swear he lifted part of it from a Batman script:

“I’d like the world to be different. I’d like go on vacations, but I can’t.”

I take the Dark Knight over Xenu in a heartbeat.