Well, the new Playstation 3 has a release date (November 17) and a pricetag: $499 for a base model (without HDMI inputs) and $599 for the “premium” package.

Call be crazy, but this sounds like a recipe for not-great longterm prospects. Sony will sell the first 6 million units in the States pretty quickly, but after that? As one AICN commenter puts it:

Hi-def output that 90% of gamers can’t even utilize, an expensive DVD format that may be obsolete in three years, a last-gen controller with a half-assed imitation of Nintendo’s motion sensitivty, an inevitably-inferior-to-Xbox-Live online service, and PSP connectivity (because it was such a massive success for GBA-GameCube) all bundled up in an aesthetically hideous console with the Spider-Man font slapped on the side. And that’s before you shell out $60 for an extra controller and $70 for the games. I own a PS2 and like it just fine, but I’d make a charitable donation to Al Qaeda before pissing my money away on this fuckin’ boondoggle. Fuck you Sony. Give me my faggoty Wii, let me download Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, Kis Icarus and Bionic Commando and I’m all set for next gen.

Much to everyone’s relief (and I know you were all worried sick about him!), master illusionist David Blaine is no longer in a fish tank in Lincoln Center. Last night, divers rescued Blaine, who had failed to free himself after holding his breath for some seven minutes (the record is 8 minutes 58 seconds). Associated Press described the magician as emerging from the tank “weak and wrinkly” and suffering “liver damage, pins and needles in his feet and hands, some loss of sensation and rashes….”

Well, it could have been worse. Remember that stunt Blaine tried to pull a few years ago, when he was entombed in a block of ice? A cleaning woman had been vacuuming around him when she accidentally ran over one of his vital cords. In the immortal words of the New York Post: Ouch! Snafu tugs iceman’s catheter

Yesterday I noted the huge sign Philly fans made special just for Barry Bonds. Galley Reader Z gives us the the link for the above image of it.

Just beautiful.

That was the not-very-subtle codename Microsoft gave to the first Xbox–and it wasn’t referring to the maker of Mortal Kombat. You learn that and other goodies in Sam Kennedy’s piece on Dean Takahashi’s new book on the making of the Xbox 360. There are also excerpts from the book. Some highlights:

* Microsoft’s third party team turned down Grand Theft Auto III for the original Xbox. Oops.

* Xbox 360 was codenamed Xenon.

* “Most of the executives who were in on the planning for Xenon didn’t want the hard disk drive in the system. It had been the boat anchor of the original Xbox. The hard disks had started out costing Microsoft about $50 each for every Xbox, a cost that neither Sony nor Nintendo had to carry. It was an albatross.”

* “Nintendo had the right to buy all of Rare, but it had to do so before an approaching deadline. The relationship with Nintendo wasn’t a good one. Speculation about a split was rife when Rare sent out a Christmas card in December, 2000. On the card was a green Christmas tree with a black box underneath it. On the box was a green X. Once the Microsoft team saw that, they decided that Rare might be worth going after.”

The overall picture is of a corporate structure which is incredibly inefficient. If Takahashi’s book is anything to go by, Microsoft is going to have a hard time succeeding in industries where they don’t have an insurmountable built-in advantage (or where they can simply bury a smaller competitor in money).

All of last week I spent on a cruise ship for my friend’s wedding. It was a destination wedding taking place in Bermuda but it also entailed being on a ship for the weeklong journey. We left from the beautiful Port of Philadelphia on Saturday and on Sunday hit some rough seas–going about 9 knots/hour and hitting 25-foot waves. Veteran seagoers (average age 75) told me it was the worst they’d ever experienced in all their years cruising. Great.

That Sunday, April 30, turned out to be the longest day of my life and certainly the most physically trying. It was like being on a plane undergoing turbulence for an entire day. Dishes were crashing, trays falling, cupboards opening–not to mention the barforama either in bags or on the floor. At 3am we hit a 35-footer that knocked our cabin’s TV right off the shelf. (A loud crash had woken me up and the thought of a real-life Poseidon Adventure. And, by the way, no one onboard Royal Caribbean’s Empress of the Seas even remotely resembled the cast from the remake.)

Some recommend taking Dramamine or Bonine before setting sail. Others recommend consuming ginger, ginger ale, and crackers. Still others will focus on the horizon. My recommendation: blackjack. There’s nothing like the possibility of splitting aces to take your mind off of the whitecaps.

Here’s the thing about Mission: Impossible 3: It’s a pretty good movie. Well paced, good perfs, very taut, totally fun, and, like all good summer action movies, it shows you stuff you’ve never seen before. I mean come on, a helicopter chase through a wind farm? Paramount put $150M into this thing and every last cent is on the screen. This kind of movie, on a May weekend, does serious business, no matter who you put in it.

So if you cast a movie star and you open it on 4,054 screens, it should be a monster, right?

Well, maybe not. M:I3 opened to $48M over the weekend. Let’s put this is some perspective:

As Brandon Gray notes, the first M:I opened to $45.4M 10 years ago ($67M in today’s dollars); M:I2 opened to $57.8M ($70M adjusted). Look at the list of best May opening weekends and you see action movies like The Day After Tomorrow and The Mummy Returns and Van Helsing which starred, respectively, Dennis Quaid, Brendan Fraser, and Hugh Jackman.

I would suggest that if you plop just about any mid-level leading man into M:I3–think Josh Lucas or Matt Damon–it opens to about the same number. Place a different movie star in the Ethan Hunt role–maybe Will Smith or Russell Crowe–and it opens near the $68M that it should have grossed.

Which means this: Something has happened to Tom Cruise as a property.

Of course Cruise has been on a well-publicized crazy spree for the last year or so. But up until now it hadn’t hurt his box office potential. War of the Worlds and Collateral did well. But this M:I3 thud is something else altogether. It means that Cruise is, at least right now, a liability for a picture.

This sort of reversal doesn’t happen that often. Meg Ryan, Ben Affleck, and Jennifer Lopez are the only actors I can think of whose off-screen baggage has affected their commercial viability. There must be more.

It’ll be interesting to see whether or not people around the project throw Cruise under the bus. And just wait for Michael Mann’s The Few. Mann isn’t a super-commercial director, but Cruise and Paula Wagner will have to push all their chips to the center of the table.

I can’t find a picture of it on the web, but the Philadelphia Inquirer splashed it across the entire top half of the front page of the Sunday sports section: It’s a shot of Bonds standing in left field at Citizens Park on Saturday night. Behind him, Phillies fans have hung an enormous banner–it must be 50 feet long–which reads:

Ruth did it on hotdogs & Beer.

Had Bonds broken Babe’s record that night, this banner would have been in all of the pictures, for forever. It’s so hateful.

So perfect.

Update: Galley Friend J.E. emails this Bonds quote from the AP:

Bonds was peppered with insults from the Philadelphia fans during the weekend games.

Asked if it was hard to listen to the catcalls, Bonds said, “Dodgers Stadium is worse than here. This was nothing. LA beats them.”

Touché, Barry. He knows how to hit Philly fans where it hurts.

Bill Simmons gives us the first round wrap-up, and this gem:

Terrell Owens in the stands wearing a Kobe jersey. Too many jokes … too many jokes … head might explode …

Also, this one:

Dirk Nowitzki. Simply annihilated Pau Gasol in their head-to-head matchup to clinch “Best Foreign Big Man Alive” honors, capped off by a Bird-like 3 to send Game 3 into overtime and pave the way for an eventual Dallas sweep. I like how he added that sneering, Detlef-like German swagger this season; it’s pushed him to another level. You can almost imagine Hans Gruber yelling at him to go find John McLane in the Nakatomi building, followed by Dirk calmly saying, “I vill find him,” and reloading a massive machine gun.

And finally, this:

Which reminds me, if Kobe doesn’t completely eviscerate Bell in Game 7, everyone on the planet is banned from making any more Kobe-MJ comparisons. We all know that MJ would have dropped 55 on Bell, shut down Nash on the other end and disemboweled D’Antoni for good measure. Kobe, if you’re going to steal MJ’s fist clench/shake from Game 1 of the 1998 Finals without asking, you need to take this all the way. You cannot lose Game 7. You can’t. Even if you’re playing 4-on-5 and Jax keeps refusing to play Vujacic.