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I talked about the XO Laptop "Give One, Get One" program in my N&R piece about cool tech gifts for the holidays.

The program, which allows you to buy one of the innovative stripped down laptops if you buy another for a child in a developing country, apparently had a great holiday season.

Engadget reports that 150,000 laptops were sold to the public and the program will likely be repeated next year.

Comedian David Cross (Arrested Development, Mr. Show) has been taking some flak for his appearance in the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie.

So, he decided to answer the "Why? God, Why?" question via this funny and brutally honest blog post.

Short answer: It's an effing kids movie, you're taking it too seriously and of course he did it for the money.

Next.

...and I have to say, I think it deserves the hype.

I read screenwriter Diablo Cody's book last year, and hoped Juno would be as funny, touching and cool. Done, done and done.

Cody and actress Ellen Page both richly deserve their Golden Globe nominations. I loved that quiet, almost zen-like hilarity Michael Cera brought to Arrested Development and it's back (along with Jason Bateman's on-the-edge placidity) in Juno. Also, The West Wing's Allison Janney and J. K. Simmons (a sociopathic white supremicist on Oz and J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man films)?

Sold.

Also, I have almost the entire soundtrack stuck in my head. Sonic Youth, The Kinks, The Moldy Peaches, Belle & Sebastian, The Velvet Underground and Cat Power. Yeah -- I'm going to actually go out and buy this one.

Saw Sweeney Todd this weekend, and enjoyed it much more than I'd expected to.

Here's my thing about musicals: I don't hate them. I just hate it when they take themselves too seriously. When there's dancing and singing involved it's very easy to go of the tracks of drama and into melodrama. And, though I know this makes me awful and closed-minded, I have a really hard time not laughing when people burst into a song in a way that I'm supposed to find moving rather than mirthful.

So -- Guys and Dolls I like. Les Miserable, not so much.

I dug Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Dreamgirls was too much.

Like Chicago, I feel like Sweeney Todd split the difference pretty well. I never saw the stage show, so I have to assume that most of the credit for the movie's tone should go to director Tim Burton, who has spent decades mixing the dramatic and the hilarious to great effect (Beetlejuice, Batman, Ed Wood).

The plot seems tailor-made for Burton -- a strange alchemy of Dickensian morality play and morbid, surreal storytelling worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. Which is a perfect playground for Johnny Depp (who seems almost preternaturally attracted to the weird), Helena Bonham Carter (who seems to have made a career of playing kind of creepy goth chicks) and Sacha Baron Cohen (who, with Borat under the belt, took to the sliminess and ambiguous nationality of his character like a fish to water).

I won't ruin any major plot points for you, but I will say this: if you're hoping for a happy ending, you might be better off seeing PS. I Love You.

Famous (infamous?) hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang bought one of the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop, picked it apart (literally and figuratively) and posted this review.

I've written a bit about the XO Laptop and recommended it as a holiday gadget gift in an N&R Life section centerpiece just before the holidays. It's fascinating to see someone get one and look at it with this kind of scrutiny.

According to the New York Daily News, he is:

"Will Smith has joined the ranks of Hollywood power players actively recruiting for the Church of Scientology.

"Big stars traditionally distribute "wrap presents" to crew members after completing a film. His recent gift after wrapping next summer's comedy "Hancock" was a card good for a personality test at your local Scientology center.

"Never mind that such tests are given free by the church anyway. The quiz is designed to convert people to the religion by identifying personality flaws that - surprise! - Scientology can fix right up for you."

The script for Juno is available for download from Fox Searchlight!

Wizard!

Actually, all the scripts they want considered for Oscars are available for download here -- and that includes The Darjeeling Limited, Waitress and The Savages.

Over at Miramax's award website, you can download the scripts for Gone Baby Gone, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Hoax and No Country For Old Men.

Maybe it's just because I'm a writer, but I love reading scripts of movies and television shows I enjoy. I know there's a danger in the magic being ruined by your seeing precisely how they did it, but I love seeing the words and how they accomplished what they did.

Nobody told me Chief Magic Official was a career option.

So I ended up in journalism.

... and editors and other people to check behind them.

Joaquin Phoenix made a statement while accepting an award by using cards instead of speaking -- only problem is, he apparently doesn't know how to spell his own name.

It does sometimes seem to me that VH1 is playing "Best Week Ever" or "I Love New York" 24-hours a day.

But right now they're playing this great documentary (Rock Docs: Drug Years - Teenage Wasteland, The 70s) where Wayne Kramer of the MC5 just said the following thing about heroin, Vietnam and crime in the 1960s/1970s:

"When I was in jail there were a lot of my fellow inmates who were Vietnam veterans. They got hooked over there but when they came back, they found they couldn't support their habit as easily. So they reverted to what they knew -- weapons and tactics. They became bank robbers."

People participating in the documentary include famous drug smuggler Allen Long, Lou Reed, Henry Rollins, Richard Belzer, Country Joe McDonald, various famous photographers, DEA and former CIA agents. Fascinating. Among the fun facts I learned: apparently High Times magazine, which is now sort of quirky and quaint, was founded because drug smuggling friends of the publisher had tons of high grade golden marijuana and people didn't yet know what it was or how good it was. They decided to start a magazine to educate the market.

Like the Hip-Hop, Punk and Metal docs they did recently, this is what this channel does best.

I saw this anti-drug commercial starring Clint Eastwood (in character as Dirty Harry?) for the first time in a TV documentary tonight.

Some of my favorite actors, directors and comedians have filmed a number of spots in the "Speechless" campaign to support the striking Writer's Guild of America.

Here are two good ones, from Jason Bateman and Zach Braff:

Others in the series feature Woody Allen, Ed Asner, Sean Penn, Helen Hunt, David Schwimmer and Andre 3000.

Comedian Zach Galifianakis (The Comedians of Comedy) interviews Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Juno) in this clip from Cinematical.

Wizard!

Our new intern in the office today suggested there was "not enough Michael Cera" in Juno.

I agreed that he didn't get enough screen time, but given the size of those shorts, I think it's impossible to say there wasn't enough of him.

Today is National Milk Day.

No, really!

On this day in 1878 milk was first delivered in bottles.

Which is done today almost nowhere.

But that doesn't mean you can't learn fun facts about milk, take a virtual tour of a dairy farm, take the healthy weight pledge at www.whymilk.com and register to win a free year of milk.

Which is nothing to sneeze at. The stuff's more expensive than gas, and you can't even run a car on it. I've tried.

Right now I'm writing two stories while I listen to Phantom Planet's 2002 album The Guest.

I had forgotten how much I love this album -- and this band -- largely because I knew this really annoying hipster kid who used to play the single "California" on a loop all day and night when I was in college. Put me off it for a while.

Even if you're not a fan you do probably know the single, which was featured in the movie Orange County, which was featured in the Jack Black movie Orange County and became the theme for Fox's The O.C.

I'm not going to disparage the song by saying it's the worst thing on the album and you should really disregard it and listen to all the stuff you haven't heard. It's not, and I defy you not to get it stuck in your head. Good little tune, and I don't care where they've used it.

But there are a lot of other unapologetic power pop gems here, too -- "Always on My Mind," "Hey Now Girl" and "Nobody's Fault" to name just a few. I am a complete sucker for some great American power pop of the Big Star/Replacements/Posies/Gin Blossoms variety.

The band's drummer and one of its principal songwriters is actor Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited) -- which just leads me to conclude that they're definitely not handing out the talent equally on this planet.

North Carolina's own Clay Aiken, who has somehow turned being runner-up on American Idol into a career selling Christmas albums to your lonely aunt with all the cats, is set to take one of the lead roles in the Tony Award winning Broadway show "Monty Python's Spamalot."

The show is based on "Monty Python and The Holy Grail," which Aiken said he thought was "the stupidest thing I'd ever seen in my entire life," upon first viewing.

Which was apparently a recent thing.

In an AP story Aiken says, "I thought Monty Python was a person until three months ago."

Clay Aiken's only a few years older than me -- and I thought my generation was issued a copy of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in high school, as a required thing. When I made it to my sophomore year of high school without seeing any Monty Python all my arty, band-geek friends (of whom Aiken had to have had plenty) nearly called an ambulance to rush me to the nearest VCR.

Songs from the new Magnetic Fields album Distortion are now streaming for free at their MySpace site.

Rolling Stone gives it four stars, and from what I've heard so far I'm inclined to agree.

According to this piece from the Las Vegas Sun Barack Obama's favorite television show is "The Wire."

I think it shows good taste -- but it may be only a matter of time before the Clinton campaign trots out upstanding billionaire Bob Johnson (who gave us that moral beacon of bikini and bling culture BET) to tell us Obama identifies with the drug addicts.

Hillary Clinton's favorite is, reportedly, Grey's Anatomy.

TMZ scooped everyone, as they seem to be doing a lot more lately in entertainment, with the news that Brad Renfro has died at 25.

From TMZ:

"The 25-year-old actor was found dead at his Los Angeles home this morning. The cause of death has not been determined, however, Renfro had a history of drug abuse."

I'm willing to go out on a limb here and agree with what TMZ is implying -- I'm betting we find out he overdosed on something. Which is a shame because Renfro was a pretty decent actor. I've followed him ever since I saw him in "The Client." Since then, he's turned out some good performances in movies such as "Sleepers," "Apt Pupil," "Bully" and "Ghost World."

LucasFilms released the following photo from the set of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

How excited am I about the new Indiana Jones flick? This is me at a movie theater recently, when I caught sight of the new Indiana Jones poster for the first time...

I'm listening to In the Future this morning -- the new album from bluesy psychedelic metal band Black Mountain.

Spin gave the album 3.5 stars, saying it "sounds like the man who fell to Earth -- only to land in the woods."

That's not far off.

Dig the opening "Stormy High" and "Lay Your Halo Down."

Rolling Stone gave the album 3.5 stars and featured the band in piece where they summed them up as "Black Sabbath + Flaming Lips + the munchies."

That's not a bad description either, but I think the band is less heavy and more boogie on this album than either review gives them credit for.

Greensboro blogger Ed Cone points to a story about a Virginia legislator trying to outlaw truck ornamants that resemble...well, bull testicles.

No, really.

I've yet to see these things on the road, but apparently a lot of guys (and gals, potentially) with pickup trucks like to hang them from their trailer hitches.

The offending pair:

The legislator says he doesn't want to have to explain to his granddaughter what these things are supposed to be. To which I say -- hope she doesn't have a dog at home, pal.

Absolutely in bad taste -- but if Virginia's going to begin outlawing that, the legislature is going to be mighty busy...

In this video, apparently a few years old, Tom Cruise talks about Scientology:

(The longer, uncut video has been removed from YouTube and various other sites due to nastygrams from the Church of Scientology.)

Among the gems:

"We are the authorities on getting people off drugs, we are the authorities on the mind, we are the authorities on improving conditions... we can rehabilitate criminals... we can bring peace and unite communities."

"Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident it's not like anyone else. As you drive past, you know you have to do something about it because you know you're the only one that can really help."

The craziest thing about these statements is that I think many mainstream Christians would make them about their church -- and some sects of Islam and Judaism, for that matter.

The most interesting thing about Scientology to me -- beyond the secrecy and how many celebrities they seem to have recruited -- is the way it seems to hold up a dark mirror to all other religions.

Guys who are half man/half god and rise from the dead after three days, wine that turns to blood, the Rapture and Judgement Day -- that's just, you know, religion. We have to respect that.

But space aliens and body thetans? That's CRAZY...

One of my favorite writers, Susannah Breslin, has an interview at her blog with Peter S. Conrad, a cartoonist who recently turned the stories of sex workers into comic strips.

The work is great - sad, funny, insightful.

Ditto the interview.

But neither is safe for work.

You've been warned.

Local son Chris Daughtry is taking a swipe at the show that made him famous.

About 'American Idol,' from Rolling Stone:

"I feel like it's definitely lacking some credibility at this point," says Daughtry, who came in fourth place on the 2006 season but went on to sell 3.6 million copies of his debut record and be named one of Nielsen's top ten selling artists of 2007. "It's in a state of decline and if they don't do something about it, it's probably not gonna last too much longer. I'm sure that'll be used against me, but that's the truth, you know?"

He's right, though. Last season pretty much sucked, if you want my honest opinion. I didn't care who won, and I'm having a hard time even remembering many of the contestants. I watched the first episode or two of the season, but then I tuned out until they whittled it down to the top 24 or so -- there's only so many times you can watch someone screech Celine or Whitney, know what I mean? The occasional awful person is fine, but they just went overboard with the people who were clueless at auditions and the ones who were clearly there just to get on TV. Guess what, auditioners? It's no longer edgy to flip off the camera when you get the boot -- everyone does it.

I watched last night's 'Idol' this afternoon. (I never watch them live -- I have to be able to fast-forward through the recrap and pointless pauses for effect.) Maybe it's just me, but it was perceptibly better -- there were still some attention whores, but the guy who sang "No Sex Allowed" made up for that. As did the blond horse trainer at the end (I can't recall her name) who had a great voice.

But I agree with Daughtry -- I think it's on the way out. As soon as it veers back to people in Big Bird costumes and mocking people who are clearly handicapped (despite the pleas that they've changed), I'll tune out until the finals.

Yesterday Jeri Rowe dropped a package on my desk from the Independent Film Channel.

Inside were two DVDs of Japanese Anime.

Not usually my thing -- I think anime is an acquired taste that requires a very specific sensibility or a lot of acid (or both) -- but these caught my eye.

One of them is an anime version of the Top Cow comic Witchblade, which was already a failed live action series with talk of a movie in the works.

No surprise -- the Witchblade (a sentient alien artifact that bonds with human women making them into superheroes) of the anime also makes the female wielder dress like a stripper from space.

Some things remain, whatever the genre.

Am going to have to put this on and try not to have a seizure as the strangeness of the original witchblade concept melds with the weirdness of anime. I guess in way the two are made for each other -- the Japanese have a strange fetish for scantily clad women being persecuted by monsters and that's sort of what Witchblade is all about.

Got my Daughtry/Bon Jovi ticket! I'm excited -- I love Daughtry, and while I really only know Bon Jovi's early stuff, I'm looking forward to seeing him as well. Probably will download 'Lost Highway' today to listen to it before the show. Six of us News & Record ladies are going -- some for Chris, some for Bon Jovi, and at least one for Joey Barnes :-)

My girlfriend picked up the tickets yesterday at the presale, and I'm glad she did! I logged on five minutes before the regular sale started today to see if I could get better seats. (I was willing to take on the task of selling the other six once I googled "Bon Jovi sold out" if I could.) At 10:01, the best six seats together in the lower price range were behind the stage. At 10:10, I did a search for best 2 tickets in any price range for giggles -- row SS, floor level, way behind the first two sections of floor level. At 10:15, the best two available were behind the stage, in any price range. And they were the $80 tickets (really $95 once you add in fees) -- and who wants to pay that for behind the stage seats???

I read somewhere that the reason not many got floor level is that the first 15 rows or so were all $1,000 seats. You read that right -- I didn't add a zero by accident. I just did a search for two of those tickets -- good news, folks! You can still get fifth row tickets, front and center, if you have $2,000 (you can only buy them in blocks of two).

Daughtry, I love you, but you are not worth $2,000, no matter who the other act is. Unless it was Elvis. I might pay that to see the King rise from the dead. (If he's really dead, that is.)

The BBC is reporting that brothers Barney and Daniel Jones are continuing their quest to establish a UK Church of the Jedi. Worship will include meditation and spiritual sermons, of course -- but also light sabre courses!

From the story:

They plan to go to the official opening of a Surrey-based branch or "chapter" of the UK Church of the Jedi in April, and hope to hire an Anglesey venue for their own services.

Already six followers regularly meet in north Wales to discuss setting up the "church"...

However, any congregation member drawn to the dark side of the Force, embodied in the film by Darth Vader, would be advised they are following the wrong path and could face expulsion.

Barney explained: "Obviously, if someone starts to try and use the good force for greed and power, they are going to bring negative interference into the meetings.

"We cannot have the Force disrupted by negative interference."

From the New York Times story:

The actor Heath Ledger was found dead this afternoon in an apartment building at 421 Broome Street in SoHo, according to the New York City police. Mr. Ledger was 28.

At 3:31 p.m., a masseuse arrived at Apartment 5A in the building for an appointment with Mr. Ledger, the police said. The masseuse was let in to the home by a housekeeper, who then knocked on the door of Mr. Ledger’s bedroom. When no one answered, the housekeeper and the masseuse opened the bedroom and found Mr. Ledger unconscious. They shook him, but he did not respond. They immediately called the authorities. The police said they did not suspect foul play and said they found pills near body.

---

Incredibly, horribly sad.

A very gifted young actor -- on the rise after a star making turn in Brokeback Mountain and having just portrayed The Joker in The Dark Knight. He's also the child of a lovely two year old daughter.

So sad. Heath Ledger was found dead in his apartment today, and PerezHilton is already calling it an overdose. Such a brilliant actor, even sadder when you think that he has a young kid. Wonder how they'll market Batman now?

Also, does this put a young celebrity OD trifecta in play, in the wake of Brad Renfro's death? AP already has an obit ready for Britney ...

ETA: I see Joe beat me to the punch ...

ETA2: The story is getting more interesting. From AFP:

"According to the newspaper, the apartment was inhabited by actor Mary-Kate Olsen."

NYT is backing off that, apparently:

ETA3: NYT just backed off that:

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information, initially said that the apartment was owned by the actress Mary-Kate Olsen, but later reversed himself and said that was not the case.

* Ellen Degeneres had what was probably the sweetest, most simple tribute paid to Heath Ledger this week.

* I'm a little disturbed by all of this speculation that Ledger was such a method guy that playing the Joker drove him insane. Apparently he did make some comments that the character got into his head, that he was having trouble sleeping while playing the role and had resorted to sleeping pills -- but that could be said of a lot of actors in a lot of parts. This cryptic comment from Jack Nicholson on the role seems to be fanning the flames.

* According to Warner Brothers Ledger completed work on The Dark Knight and it's still scheduled for release on July 18. But the marketing campaign, which is heavy on The Joker, may be tweaked a bit.

* How many of you knew Ledger started off as a TV star? Yeah, pre-10 Things I Hate About You, even. Check out this clips of Ledger in the fantasy TV show Roar in which he played a Celtic prince in 400 A.D. Ah, 1997.

Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing points out that one of the songs Hillary Clinton is using on the campaign trail is "When the Lady Smiles" by Dutch rock group Golden Earring.

In the video clip for the song (which, incidentally, has not aged well -- I can't imagine how they choose these songs. Ronald Reagan famously wanted to use "Born in the U.S.A." -- an anthem about how screwed up the country was -- because he thought it sounded patriotic) a nun is raped and a dog eats the attacker's brain. The video was banned from MTV in 1984.

The chances that Clinton knows this -- or is paying much attention at all to what's being played at her rallies and why -- are pretty slim. But it is none-the-less hilarious that Clinton, proud mommy of legislation such as the Family Entertainment Protection Act and constant cultural hall monitor of the "for our children" crusade, is blaring a song by a band whose video MTV thought was too much. In 1984. The same year they broadcast Madonna writhing on the floor in a wedding dress, moaning "Like A Virgin."

I've been meaning to get hold of Steve Martin's memoir Born Standing Up for a few weeks now.

A recent excerpt in Smithsonian magazine has made me resolve to go get it this weekend. From the excerpt, in which Martin begins to craft his own style of comedy by abandoning convention:

"What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.